All Shot Up (12 page)

This threw the motorcycle rider off his timing. He had planned to cut quickly between the two trucks and shoot ahead before the inside truck drew level with the truck it was passing. When he got them behind him the two tracks would block off the street, and he would make his getaway.

He was pulling up fast behind the car carrying sheet metal when the tire burst and the driver tamped his brakes. He wheeled sharply to the left, but not quickly enough.

The three thin sheets of stainless steel, six feet in width, with red flags flying from both corners, formed a blade less than a quarter of an inch thick. This blade caught the rider above his woolen-lined jacket, on the exposed part of his neck, which was stretched and taut from his physical exertion, as the motorcycle went underneath. He was hitting more than fifty-five miles an hour, and the blade severed his head from his body as though he had been guillotined.

His head rolled halfway up the sheets of metal while his body kept astride the seat and his hands gripped the handlebars. A stream of blood spurted from his severed jugular, but his body completed the maneuver which his head had ordered and went past the truck as planned.

The truck driver glanced from his window to watch the passing truck as he kept braking to a stop. But instead he saw a man without a head passing on a motorcycle with a sidecar and a stream of steaming red blood lowing back in the wind.

He gasped and passed out.

His lax feet released the pressure from the brake and clutch, and the truck kept on ahead.

The motorcycle, ridden by a man without a head, surged forward at a rapid clip.

The driver of the refrigerator truck that was passing the open truck didn’t believe what he saw. He switched on his bright lights, caught the headless motorcycle rider in their beam and quickly switched them off. He blinked his eyelids. It was the first time he had ever gone to sleep while driving, he thought; and my God, what a nightmare! He switched the lights back on, and there it still was. Man or hallucination, he was getting the hell away from there. He began flashing his blinkers as though he had gone crazy; he mashed the horn and stood on the throttle and looked to the other side.

The truck carrying the sheet metal turned gradually to the right from faulty steering mechanism. It climbed over the shallow curb and started up the wide stone step of a big fashionable Negro church.

In the lighted box out in front of the church was the announcement of the sermon for the day.

Beware! Death is closer than you think!

The head rolled off the slow-moving truck, dropped to the sidewalk and rolled out into the street. Grave Digger, closing up fast, saw something that looked like a football with a cap on it bouncing on the black asphalt. It was caught in his one bright light, but the top was turned to him when he saw it, and he didn’t recognize what it was. “What did he throw out?” he asked Coffin Ed. Coffin Ed was staring as though petrified. He gulped. “His head,” he said.

Grave Digger’s muscles jerked spasmodically. He hit the brake automatically.

A truck had closed in from behind unnoticed, and it couldn’t stop in time. It smacked the little sedan gently, but that was enough. Grave Digger sailed forward; the bottom rim of the steering wheel caught him in the solar plexus and snapped his head down; his mouth hit the top rim of the steering wheel, and he mashed his lips and chipped two front teeth.

Coffin Ed went headfirst into the safety-glass windshield and battered out a hole. But his hard head saved him from serious injury.

“Goddam,” Grave Digger lisped, straightening up and spitting out chipped enamel. “I’d have been better off with the Asiatic flu.”

“God knows, Digger, I would have, too,” Coffin Ed said.

Gradually the taut headless body on the motorcycle spewed out its blood and the muscles went limp. The motorcycle began to waver; it went to one side and then the other, crossed 125th Street, just missing a taxi, neatly circled around the big clock atop a post at the corner and crashed into the iron-barred door of the credit jewelry store, knocking down a sign that read:

We Will Give Credit to the Dead

Roman got up and fastened his belt.

“When is this joker coming?” He was all for business now.

Sassafras stood up and shook down her skirts. Her face was sweaty, and her eyes looked sleepy. Her dress was stretched out of shape.

“He ought to be here any time,” she said, but she sounded as though she didn’t care if he never came.

Roman began looking worried again. “You’re sure this joker can help us? I’ve got a notion we’re up against some rough studs, and I don’t want nobody messing around who’s going to get rattled.”

Sassafras ran a greasy bone comb through her short, tousled hair. “Don’t worry ’bout him,” she said. “He ain’t going to lose his head.”

“This waiting around is dragging me,” he said. “I wish we could do something.”

“You call what we been doing nothing?” she said coyly.

“I mean about my car,” he said. “It’s going to soon be daylight and ain’t nobody doing nothing.”

She went over, put some coal on the fire and adjusted the damper. Her dress was pulled out of shape and hung one-sided.

“I’m going to see if he got any whisky left,” she said, rummaging about the shoes on the floor of the curtained-off clothes corner.

He followed her and saw a green dress hanging with the men’s clothes.

“This looks like your dress,” he said suspiciously.

“Don’t start that stuff again,” she said. “You think they only made one dress when they made mine. Besides which, his girl friend is about the same size as me.”

“You’re sure she ain’t wearing the same skin?” he said.

She ignored him. Finally she came up with a bottle of cheap blended whisky, three-quarters full.

“Here, drink this and shut up,” she said, thrusting the bottle into his hands.

He uncorked it and let whisky gurgle down his throat. “It ain’t bad, but it’s mighty weak,” he appraised.

“How you going to know bad whisky?” she said scornfully. “You’re been drinking white mule all your life.”

He took another drink, bringing the level down below half. “Baby, I’m hungry enough to eat a horse off his hoof and leave the skeleton still hitched to the plow,” he said, flexing his muscles. “Why don’t you see if your girl friend’s boy friend has got anything to eat in this joint.”

“If I found something, it’d just make you more suspicious,” she said.

“Anyhow, it’d fill my belly.”

She found some salt meat, a half loaf of white bread in wax-paper wrapping and a bottle of molasses in the bottom drawer. Then she opened a back window and delved into a screened cold-box attached to the sill; she found a pot half-filled with congealed hominy grits and a frozen can of sliced California peaches.

“I don’t see no coffee,” she said.

“Who wants coffee?” he said, taking another swig from the bottle.

Shortly the room was filled with the delicious-smelling smoke of fried fat meat. She sliced the gelatinous hominy and browned it in the hot fat. He opened the can with his pocket knife but the contents were frozen solid, so he put the can on top of the stove.

She couldn’t find but one clean plate, so she used one slightly soiled. She polished a couple of forks with a dry cloth.

He filled his plate with fried hominy, covered it with fried meat and doused it with molasses. He stuffed his mouth full of dry bread, then packed meat, hominy and molasses on top of it.

She looked at him with disgust. “You can get the boy out the country, but you can’t get the country out the boy,” she philosophized, eating her meat daintily along with bites of bread and holding her fried hominy between the first finger and thumb, according to etiquette.

He was finished first. He got up and looked at the peaches. A core of ice still remained. He picked up the whisky bottle and measured it with his eye.

“You want some grog mixed with peach juice?” he asked.

She gave him a supercilious look. “I don’t mind if I do,” she said in a proper voice.

He looked about for a receptacle to hold the mixture, but not seeing any, he squeezed the rim of the can into a spout and poured the peach syrup into the whisky bottle. He shook it up and took a swallow and passed it to her. She took a swallow and passed it back.

Soon they were giggling and slapping at one another. The next thing they were on the bed again.

“I wish that man would hurry up and come on,” he said, making one last effort to be sensible.

“What you want to go looking for an old Cadillac in this weather for, when here you is got me?” she said.

“Let’s stop here and walk back,” Coffin Ed said.

Grave Digger coasted to a stop beside the entrance to the Alley. It was a dark gray morning, and not a soul was in sight.

They alighted slowly, like decrepit old men.

“This jalopy looks as though it’s been to the wars,” Grave Digger lisped.

His lips were swollen to such proportions it looked as though his face were turning wrong side out.

“You look like you’ve been with it,” Coffin Ed said.

“Yeah, let’s hope there’re no more jokers in this deck.”

He started to lock the car doors and then saw the naked front wheel, the battered rear end and the hole in the windshield, and he put the key into his pocket.

“We don’t have to worry about anybody stealing it,” he lisped.

“That’s for sure,” Coffin Ed agreed.

They picked their way along the uneven brick pavement, avoiding slick ice and stepping over frozen rats and cats. Garbage trucks couldn’t get into the Alley, and residents piled their garbage in the street the year around. Now it presented an uneven pile of mounds along the walls of the carriage houses, composed chiefly of hog bones, cabbage leaves and tin cans. They saw one lone black cat sitting on his haunches gnawing a piece of bacon rind frozen hard as a board.

“He must have stolen that,” Coffin Ed said. “Nobody living in here has thrown that much good meat away.”

“Let’s go easy now,” Grave Digger lisped.

When they came to the door, both took out their pistols and spun the cylinders. Brass bullets showed faintly against the gleaming nickel plate. Their shadowy figures had the silence of ghosts. They were mouth-breathing now, giving off soft puffs of vapor in the frigid air.

Grave Digger switched his pistol to his left hand and fished key from his right overcoat pocket. As he fitted the key into the lock, Coffin Ed pulled hard on the knob. The Yale lock opened without a sound. Coffin Ed pushed the door in three inches, and Grave Digger withdrew the key.

Both flattened against the outside wall and listened. From above came sounds like two people sawing wood; a man sawing dry pine boards with a bucksaw and a boy sawing shingles with a toy.

Coffin Ed reached out and slowly pushed the door open with his pistol barrel. The two kept on sawing. He put his head around the doorframe and looked.

There was no door at the head of the stairs. The opening was lit by a soft pink light, revealing the naked beams of a ceiling.

Coffin Ed went up first, stepping on the outside edge of the stairs, testing each before putting down his weight. Grave Digger let him get five steps ahead and followed in his footsteps.

At the top, Coffin Ed stepped quickly into the pink light, his gun barrel moving from left to right.

Then without turning, he beckoned to Grave Digger.

They stood side by side looking at the sleeping figures on the bed.

The man wore a plaid woolen shirt, open all the way down and the shirttail out, a heavy-ribbed T-shirt, army pants and stained white woolen socks. A leather jacket was piled on top of a pair of paratrooper boots on the floor beside the bed. He lay doubled up on one side, facing the woman, with an arm flung out across her stomach.

The woman wore a red knitted dress and black lace stockings. That seemed to be all. She lay half on her side, half on her back, with her legs outspread. Velvet black skin showed all the way up to her waist

A single dim pink-shaded lamp hanging from a nail above the head of the bed made the scene look cozy.

Their gazes roved over the room, lingered on the big rusty .45 lying on the coonskin cap, went on and came back.

Coffin Ed tiptoed over and picked it up. He sniffed at the muzzle, shook his head and slipped it into his pocket.

Grave Digger tiptoed over to the bed and poked the sleeping man in the ribs with the muzzle of his own pistol.

Afterwards he admitted he shouldn’t have done it.

Roman erupted from the bed like a scalded wildcat.

He came up all at once, all of him, as though released from a catapult. He struck a backhanded blow with his left hand while he was in the air, caught Grave Digger straight across his belly and knocked him on his rump.

Coffin Ed jumped over the top of Grave Digger’s head and slashed at Roman with his pistol barrel.

But, while he was flat in the air, Roman doubled up and spun over, taking the blow on the fat of his hams and kicking Coffin Ed in the face with both stockinged feet.

Then the screaming began. It was high, loud, keening screaming that dynamited the brain and poured acid on the teeth. Sassafras had reared up on all fours and was kneeling in the bed with her mouth wide open.

Coffin Ed went back into the table. The legs splintered, and he crashed to the floor.

Roman landed on the flat of his shoulders and the palms of his hands while his feet were still in the air.

Grave Digger came up on his left hand, his left foot jackknifed beneath him, and tapped Roman across the top of the head with his pistol butt. But his flopping overcoat impeded the blow, and Roman gave no sign that he felt it. He doubled his feet beneath him and came up straight, like an acrobat, turning at the instant he touched floor.

Grave Digger backhanded with the same motion that tapped Roman on the head and hit his right knee cap. Roman went down on one side, like the pier of a house giving way. Coffin Ed staggered in and kicked him solidly in the left calf.

Sassafras’s hair stood out like quills of a porcupine and her eyes were glazed, but the screaming kept on.