"indiscriminately" from white and Negro corpses... though naturally, indigent corpses being predominantly Negro, the body parts and organs were predominantly from Negroes.
On television, Dr. Pilcher denied acting out of profit. His reasons were "purely altruistic... in the service of medical science.
In his loud braying voice Bobo Ritchie says, "How they found em, some heads wrapped loose in some box, startin' to leak. Man, this is the post office! Some cat hadda open that box an' see what's inside!"
Blond Bonnie, coarse-skinned but good-looking Bonnie, sucks in smoke from her cigarette and exhales it contemplatively.
She says, shivering, "Jesus, is that weird! I mean... sick! You got to wonder," she says vehemently, "what kinda doctor's that."
Something about Bonnie's remark, delivered in such innocence, sets them all laughing. It's a moment of high hilarity.
Jinx Fairchild observes, face suddenly crinkled as if this is a thought that hurts, "Man, your head you give so much thought to your eyes you been studyin' in the mirror... winding up like that. And then all kinds of people don't know you and don't give no damn about you, smart-asses, making jokes."
Jinx's voice is an adult voice suddenly, shading off into an aggrieved silence.
The red minute hand of the Sealtest clock continues round and round.
Amid the talking and laughing-the white boy, Steve, is doing an imitation of something he's seen in a movie-Iris's gaze is drawn to it repeatedly, yet unseeingly. The clock face is bright-lit, and Chaney's is bright-lit, like a Christmas tree; which is why Iris Courtney is here.
Iris has been clutching her package of Chesterfields; she's forgotten to open it. Now, as if expertly, she tears the cellophane with her thumbnail.
She says, "Jinx, are there matches?"
Bobo Ritchie steps up, says, "I got some, honey, you wanna find 'em."
Bobo makes them all laugh by flopping his arms out, comically inviting Iris to go through his pockets, frisk him, and in the high spirits of the moment Iris hesitates, comes close to doing so. Bobo Ritchie is sixteen years old, built like a baby bull, saddlehued skin and nose that looks as if someone flattened it with the palm of a hand, wearing a stained white T-shirt that fits his big muscles snug as a fist in a tight glove. Iris knows that Bobo Ritchie's father was killed by police but she doesn't know why, exactly; he'd been beaten up and killed out of white-cop meanness or had he beaten up some white woman and brought his trouble on himself? Of Jinx Fairchild's friends Bobo is the loudest and the brawliest, and Iris has always shied away from something derisory in his manner. C'mon, girl," Bobo says, grinning, crowding Iris back against one of the stools, "I got lots of matches."
Jinx tosses Iris a matchbook. Says, "Why're you smoking, anyway? Just gets a habit."
Roosevelt leans in, smirking. "Jinx, he in trainin'. He a good boy."
"Yah," says Bobo, "he one of the best."
Iris lights her cigarette, her hands not quite steady. Out on the street there's the sound of a car backfiring, loud as gunfire.
Jivey Bobo clamps his arm around Jinx's neck as if in a wrestling hold and bawls, with a sniggering grin and a wink at Iris, "Yah, this nigger's one of the best. Gonna get him a basketball schol'ship someday-go to college." Like he a white boy! Shittin' in a gold-plate bucket."' Jinx wrestles him away, angry, laughing. "Fuck you.
Steve, whose last name Iris doesn't know, draws his comb out of his jeans pocket and in one fluid motion sifts it through his hair: dark-blond, oiled, serrated as a rooster's comb. He's a quiet boy a little older than the others, and for a moment Iris envies Bonnie that he's hers. However rough and loud the black boys get... flaring up like black boys seem to do.
As if she's only now noticed, Bonnie Haugen says to Iris, "Hey, I like your coat-that's cool. Is it new?"
Iris stares down at the midnight blue, the stiff waterproofed fabric, the cheap plastic buttons. She neither recognizes the coat nor knows what Bonnie has asked.
It must be the cigarette; she's beginning to cough. "I don't know," she says softly. Each word is a mysterious effort... as if sound and sense have cracked apart. "I guess so."
Bonnie looks at Iris strangely, doesn't ask anything more.
The bright moon clock with the perpetual-motion minute hand is showing 10:47 when Iris Courtney leaves Chaney's for home.
She walks quickly, head lowered. The air is cool, the wind from the river chill as March. In Hammond it's always wintryfeeling except in the deeps of summer when it's too hot... the fault of living too near the Great Lakes. Snow piled seven feet high bordering the streets in January. Snowstorms blinding the sun.
Iris thinks, I'll go live somewhere else; I'll be a photographer who travels.
The stores on Gowanda Street are darkened of course except for a tavern or two and a bright-lit Negro diner with a homemade sign RIBS... a few cars, some of them teenagers with noisy mufflers, blasting radios.
.. a city bus marked EAST AVENUE, only a few passengers aboard. But there are people on the street, young Negroes, couples, some children running loose: Negro children of the kind Iris instinctively shrinks from when they charge in her direction, as they are now, yipping and squealing at one another in a little pack, oblivious of others on the sidewalk. Not that they mean harm, they're just oblivious.
Though sometimes they snatch purses. Aunt Madelyn's, once.
Where was I? Oh, I was just... out. With some friends...
Well, I just didn't think to. You didn't leave a note, yourself Iris has been sucking at her cigarette out of stubbornness; now she tosses it into a gutter. She feels mildly sick. A few days before she'd overheard Persia speaking to Duke on the telephone, Duke at one of the downstate racetracks, Persia speaking with unaccustomed hesitation, sadness. "Not angry at all, honey, just brokenhearted.... Oh, Jesus, he is so beautiful.... But if Mr. Clay and the trainer think if that's how things are, an injury like that oh, honey, look: just don't tell me any details, please?
Don't tell me or Iris, please?"
And after a pause, "Probably won't ask, after a while. She's like that. Picks up on things... doesn't have to be told."
And after another pause, "Truly I don't blame you, honey; like I said, that's water under the bridge.. just feel so sad. He's so beautiful, or was."
Now Iris recalls this conversation, the half she'd heard and the half she hadn't needed to hear, and she swallows hard, thinks, He's so beautiful, or was.
In the unnamed weed-bordered alley behind the North Bridge Machine Works, which runs parallel with Gowanda Street to the west and Holland Street to the east, Iris can see fairly well by moonlight... isn't afraid to be walking here... though she walks quickly, half running, eyes scanning the shadows. She hears the ping." of a fat raindrop atop the brick wall beside her...
another ping."... the sound of rain in grass... but is it raining?
She stops, puzzled. Not quite alarmed, but puzzled. Holds out her hands, glances up at the sky, where there's a filmy halfmoon, a scattering of stars.
Iris has turned up the alley because she knows it by heart, the crumbling brick wall behind the North Bridge Machine Works, the acre of untended and seemingly unowned land strewn with trash and garbage where children play, the fire-damaged warehouse with its NO TRESPASSING signs-this is an alley that becomes, in another two blocks, the very alley behind 372 Holland Street. It's a shortcut home, a dark place but seemingly deserted, and she'd wanted to avoid the busy intersection of East Avenue and Holland where at this hour the local hillbilly tavern the Horseshoe Bar & Grill will be in full swing.
But she's stopped, now. Beginning to worry. That sinking sickening sensation that she has made a mistake: in the interstices of the brick wall, which stretches on and on and on, there are myste nous doorways and crevices, she knows; she has explored them herself.
It comes to her: Bobo Ritchie has run up to the next street, which is Girard, and he's doubled back down the alley to cut her off.
Iris has seen Bobo and his friends run when they want to run and she knows they are fast. But how would Bobo have known where Iris was going, for certain? She'd looked back several times leaving Chaney's and she hadn't seen anyone going in or coming out...
or looking after her from the doorway.
Her legs are strong too, if it comes to that.
Iris will run, run, run... until her heart bursts.
She's been standing motionless, head cocked shrewd as a listening animal's, and just when she decides there is nothing, no danger, another ping." sounds against the wall only a few feet away, beside her.
She takes a quick step backward. "Is someone there?"
Muffled laughter, laughter of crude childish glee... something familiar about it.
Not Bobo Ritchie. That isn't Bobo.
No black boy: the cadences are wrong.
Not far ahead are the rears, most of them lighted, of several row houses fronting on Holland Street, but Iris's way to them is cut off.
.. assuming she'd want to pound against someone s back door and scream for help.
Now a handful of gravel strikes Iris in the face and chest; she cries out more in surprise than pain.
There's a rustling ahead, in an overgrown stretch of scrub trees, bushes, weeds. Then the low, nearly inaudible croon: "Iiiiiiiiiris!"
Little Red Garlock.
It's known in the neighborhood that Little Red prowls the back alleys, peers in windows where he can, trespasses in back yards, the hallways of apartment and office buildings, sometimes walks off with things for which he has no need, or breaks things, no purpose to it except malicious pleasure. Once the janitor of the Courtneys' building discovered him sleeping in the basement; another time Little Red pushed his way into a woman's house, saying he wanted to use her bathroom, and urinated on her kitchen floor; he delights in behaving as he does and in eluding all attempts to guide or reform or punish him... this, Iris has thought, out of a deep animal spite for who he is and to what and whom he belongs.
Little Red has emerged out of the bushes, loose-limbed, grinning.
"Hiya, Iiiiiii-ris! Where ya going!"
He's advancing toward Iris as Iris retreats, stepping backward she doesn't want to turn and run clowning around as if this is a game and Iris really wants to play it; she's just pretending to be frightened and angry.
Iris says, "I see you too. I know who you are.
Iris says, trembling with hatred, "I'm going to tell my father he'll call the police on you.
Little Red laughs, jogging amiably forward. He's crooning obscene words in a singsong Iris doesn't want to hear and making ugly twisting gestures at his crotch she doesn't want to see.
In this awkward but seemingly coordinated fashion, the one in retreat, the other coming forward, Iris Courtney and Little Red Garlock emerge from the alley onto East Avenue at approximately P.M. of April 2, 1956.
Evidently no one sees them. Or will remember seeing them, afterward.
At East Avenue, Iris begins to run.
Little Red sings out, behind her, "Gonna hurt ya titties!"
Iris isn't panicked exactly; she's thinking he can't get her here, on the street: there are cars, there are people close by, she can scream.
She's frightened but not panicked, reasoning that she'll be safest running back to Chaney's; she can hide there, Little Red would never dare follow her inside; there's a pay phone, she can call home-and maybe by now someone is home-she can telephone the police.
Iris is a good runner, she's good at school sports, basketball, volleyball, elementary gymnastics, she knows how to run without sucking air through her mouth, lifting her knees, keeping to a gait-but she's running clumsily now, her elbows against her sides as, behind her, running too, that pig Little Red Garlock shouts out for anyone to hear who's within earshot, "Titties! titties! hey, titties!"
Persia's glamour raincoat isn't good for running in. Half sobbing, Iris thinks, I hate hate hate you all.
At Chaney's, it looks as if Jinx Fairchild is just closing up: no one else is in the store, only a single light is burning above the cash register, Jinx is pulling a green sweatshirt down over his head.
dark green, boastful white letter II. It's one of Jinx's basketball letters, awards for outstanding performance.
Uptown at Hammond Central High, the word is that Jinx Fairchild, Sugar Baby's younger brother, is even better than Sugar Baby... whom all but the youngest students remember not for himself, not as a presence at school, but as a great basketball player: best Negro player ever at Hammond.
Pulling the sweatshirt down over his head, running his big hands through his frizzy hair, Jinx Fairchild is maybe thinking of this, or of some of this, smiling that smile Iris knows... one side of his mouth dented in, as if something is sucking his smile back.
