The Angry Ones

by Williams, John A. ;

  I stood up, but Obie remained at the table, smiling for the first time. I sat down again. “Obie, you can’t go nowhere but up, man, and you know I’m with you all the way. Obie, I got to be with you, you know that. You know you’re my nigger, man.”

  He smiled again and dropped his head. “Knock it off, man.”

  “Look,” I said when we finally got outside. “I’ll take the afternoon off and pop to a show. What do you say?”

  His face had become set again. “Naw, I got a couple of things to do.”

  “Tonight then,” I insisted.

  “Date tonight,” he mumbled.

  “Obie—”

  “Leave me alone, for Christ’s sake!” he snarled at me, shaking off my arm. Then in a more normal tone he said, “I’ll be talking to you, man. Cool it.”

  He shuffled toward Fifth Avenue, bustling and jammed with people on the move. Riveting and clanging sounded from the magnificent new structures going up; the construction workers swarmed arrogantly and sure-footed along the steel beams and girders. Cabbies yelled, cops blew whistles. So many people, it seemed, and every damned one of them had something to do or someplace to go.

  That night I tried not to drink so much, and I managed pretty well. I was only a little high when I heard running down the hall and pounding at the door. I knew it was Lint.

  “Open the door, you sonovabitch!” he shouted. “I’m gonna kill you!”

  I heard him back off and then he slammed against the door. I heard him back off again and I unlocked the door and pulled it open as he rushed forward, past the open door clear to the other side of the room. I ignored him, turned my back to him and closed the door. I thought it would help cool him off.

  It didn’t.

  When I turned, he was there, grasping for my throat. He practically lifted me off the floor. I grabbed his wrists and hung on. He’d been drinking, but he wasn’t drunk. He had two days growth of beard and his eyes were red-rimmed and wild. I imagined he’d been running all over town trying to find Bobbie. She hadn’t returned then. His shouts banged and crashed into my ears. He clobbered me and lights began flashing all over the place, and I found myself trying to talk to him.

  “Lint, Jesus, wait a minute, will you? That wasn’t Bobbie here the other night, that was Lois. You said yourself they looked alike—”

  Splat! The floor came up to meet me.

  “I’da been here last night, black boy, only I didn’t figure you’d have the nerve to hang around with my wife here. I been running to the stations and the airports. Even up in Harlem, where you belong, nigger. You hear me, nigger? N-I-G-G-E-R!” He rushed at me again and I slipped, spun away from him. “What does she like, Sambo—your great big black dick? Is that it? You got one, I know. All niggers got ’em.”

  He reached in his pocket and slipped out the knife he’d used in his mock duel with Bart at the party. “I’m goin’ to get rid of that weight for you, nigger. I’m going to cut it off. But she’s going to see this, too. She’s going to know what I’m doing to you. Where the hell is she?”

  “Under the bed,” I said.

  He dropped to the floor and peered under the bed. “Come out of there, you bitch. I’m going to give you a present!”

  He waved his arm beneath the bed. Then he realized I had duped him. He turned and looked up at me quickly, and fright, for the first time, showed on his face. He looked at my hands. I lifted them and showed there was nothing in either of them.

  “Get up,” I said.

  If this was to be it, well, what the hell, it was just it, and I felt myself begin to tremble, the way I always did when the anger and fear collided. He looked at me and I could see his senses starting to come back.

  “Lint,” I said, and I wished I could make my voice stop shaking. I was so damned tense. I was going to kill me a white man within the next few minutes. I quivered from head to foot like a taut piano wire. “Get on your goddam feet.”

  His eyes flashed to the knife in his hand.

  “Keep it or throw it away,” I said. “It doesn’t make any difference.”

  He tossed it away and I saw in his eyes something wild and savage.

  He moved slowly, gathering his legs beneath him. I stepped back to give us room. For some reason Obie’s racked face flashed before me. I was almost crying now, the urge to get my hands on Lint and kill was so strong.

  “Get up, you bastard! C’mon, get up!”

  So it had all come down to this, then. All that I was and all that had happened to me—was it all to explode here in one wild minute in my room? All the way down to this—Lint Mason here in his crazy mind to castrate me and show his wife?

  “Lint?”

  He was up now, his eyes quick and feverish and some of the madness back in them. His shoulder moved up to protect his chin. His fists climbed upward.

  “I’ve swallowed your crap a long time, Lint, not because you’re white, as you seem to think now, but because I thought we were friends and, God, how I had need of friends.”

  “You black sonovabitch!” he screamed. “Fight!”

  Even then I could admire him for not coming apart at the seams before what he knew had to come. Unless maybe he wanted it to come.

  Anyway, I moved.

  I double-feinted, dropping my right shoulder, then my left. Then I drove in above his shoulder with my right, felt my knuckles dig cleanly into his jaw. His head bounced away. He swung back blindly, carrying his weight low and flashing the now unconcealed hatred in his eyes at me. He caught me just above the eye and I went down, near the knife. I didn’t want it. I wanted him with my hands and I almost laughed when he kicked it away, like in the movies.

  He caught me then, as I came up and bounced me off the wall. I came back and put both hands into that belly that had grown fat, the way I’d seen Sugar Ray do it—three, six, eight times, so fast you couldn’t count them. He humped his stomach in, bringing his chin down, and I reached way back and steamed in with the right, again and again and again. He went down, then started back up, but I put a foot beside his head and bounced him back to the floor.

  “Nigger!” he spat.

  I kicked him again. His head was bleeding, and his nose, too. I was cut up some, myself. There was blood above my eye and a salty taste in my mouth; a tooth was gone. Maybe I’d swallowed it. I stradled Lint and hooked rights and lefts into his face. He brought his arms up to cover his face, but I held them down with one hand and hit him with the other. Each time I hit him he called:

  “Nigger!”

  And I kept swinging. “You’re gonna die, white man,” I panted.

  “Nigger!”

  Splat!

  “Nigger!”

  “You’re gonna die, Lint. You know that?”

  “Nigger!”

  Splat! Splat!

  Then I couldn’t hit him anymore. I staggered up and he managed somehow to come after me, weaving and stumbling and falling. I pushed him away.

  “Go home, Lint. Go ’way.”

  The phone rang. We both stopped, bloody statues weaving in the wind.

  “Bobbie!” Lint said through his blood.

  It was Gloria, Obie’s girl, calling to tell me that Obie had shot himself with the little .25 he’d given her for protection. He’d showed it to me once in college—a Japanese gun.

  “Bobbie!” Lint shouted stupidly as he rushed for the phone.

  And I hit him, him and his goddam Bobbie. He sank to the floor, not out, but unable to move. I’d left the phone dangling and now I hung up and rushed to throw water on my face and put on a jacket. I took a final look at Lint.

  “Get the hell out before I get back,” I told him. “This is my week for throwing all of you the hell out of my place. And you’re getting your goddam Rocket job back too.”

  He began to struggle up and, to make sure he understood me, I kicked him one more time—a big one more—and then I rushed out as the neighbors were running to my apartment to see what the hell the noise was about.

  I me
t Gloria in the hall of the hospital. “Was Obie staying with you?” I asked.

  “No, he didn’t want to. I didn’t know where he was staying. He had been to my apartment. I found him in the hall with the gun and—and blood all over.”

  I went to emergency O.R. I wondered why they weren’t operating. Obie lay on a stretcher in the “ready” room. A big pad was thrust up between the sheet and his chest. The rubber lines from blood plasma were taped to his arm. An oxygen tent stood near-by. The lines of Obie’s face were deep and sharp; the color was gone. It was just gray. I felt somehow it was me lying there, but it seemed right for me to joke and say, “Man, get up from there—you owe me some lunch.”

  I could have sworn he smiled, that his lips formed the word. “Clown,” but I couldn’t be sure.

  They rolled him inside, then, but made no move to begin an operation. An intern wearing dark-rimmed glasses came out with a cop.

  “You his brother?” the cop asked. He looked at my beaten face quizzically as I thought, here we go again. All Negroes look alike.

  “No. Friend.”

  “Any family?”

  “Not in town,” Gloria said. “I’m his—we were going to get married.”

  “I’m sorry,” the intern said. “He lost too much blood. There’s not much more we can do for him. The plasma isn’t helping.”

  The cop stepped up again, pencil and pad ready. “Why did he do it?” he asked Gloria.

  A humanitarian, I thought. No, a statistician. Gloria began to cry and turned away from him.

  The cop looked at me. “You know?”

  “I think so.”

  “Well?”

  A young cop. A wife and kids and lives in Queens, I thought.

  “Got time to hear it?”

  He looked at the intern. “I gotta have it for my report,” he said, looking hard at me.

  “Never mind,” I said. How can you explain? “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “What do you mean, ‘Never mind’? Buddy, I told you I gotta have it.”

  “Not so loud,” the intern said.

  “Now,” said the cop, “was he sick?”

  “No.”

  “Money troubles?”

  “No.”

  The cop lowered his voice so Gloria wouldn’t hear him. “Woman trouble? Knock somebody up?”

  “No.”

  The cop’s mouth tightened into a thin line. “Depressed?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Look, Johnny,” the cop said with some exasperation, “I’m trying to help out.”

  “Thanks. The name’s Mr. Hill, not Johnny.”

  He closed his pad with a snap.

  I said, “I want to tell you why, but I can’t in one word. I can’t tell you in many words, and goddamit, I can’t tell you at all unless you know and it’s impossible for you to know why he did it.”

  “Forget it, Johnny,” the cop said, walking away. “Just another dead nigger, that’s all.”

  The intern followed him. I took Gloria out and put her in a cab. I didn’t want to go with her. I didn’t want anyone around to see me cry. I started walking through Central Park. The wind whipped the tears from my eyes. I cursed and damned into the wind. I wished I could squirm out of my skin, leave it to wither on the ground in the dark and grow a new one, like a snake.

  Maybe I could run out of it. I tried. I raced through the park, head up, snatching breaths of air, and the only thing that happened was that I saw the moon. It was high and white in the sky, and the naked black limbs of the trees stretched gnarled, thin fingers toward it, as if to rip it from its place.

  Lint was gone when I got home and it was a good thing, a damned good thing. I got drunk and I snotted and sniffled around quietly for one minute and screamed the next until the neighbors began pounding on the walls. They’d had enough from my place in one night to last them the next ten years. When I finally went to sleep I dreamed a large roach materialized out of the closet. It had Rollie’s face. It scooted along the wall, then down to the floor. I was filled with revulsion as it came toward me, lights glistening on its back. It kept coming and coming, and I couldn’t get out of the way. I trembled and collapsed with a groan just as it was about to touch me.

  Early in the morning, while it was still gray, I woke and thought of my future. I had to quit Rocket that morning in order to pay off my debt to Lint, and that left me with nothing else at the moment—probably for a helluva lot of moments. Maybe, I thought, it wouldn’t hurt to stay at Rocket for just one more week. I rubbed my eyes, then, and started to swing out of bed.

  My legs wouldn’t move.

  I thought perhaps my muscles were stiff from the fighting and running the night before. I rubbed them some more, but I still couldn’t get them to move. I became a little afraid and I started sobbing hoarsely. There was no one to help me, so I lay there calmly thinking, I must quit Rocket and I must do it today. For some reason I had connected my immobile legs with Rocket. I kept repeating it and soon I was able to move. I lighted a cigarette and thought about it. Yes, I would quit. What the hell was I thinking of, a compromise for a lousy week’s salary?

  I showered and felt better. I dressed slowly and carefully, and took the bus to the office. I saw I’d be late, but it didn’t matter; I would never again be late for Rocket. I waited for a light to change at Fifth and 42nd and my legs seemed to go stiff on me again, but I murmured, “I’m going in to quit,” and they seemed to be all right. The light changed and I crossed the street quickly, looking behind me at the Empire State Building, almost obscured by mist. I thought of Harriet then.

  “Little late,” the elevator operator observed.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “He looked at me, then turned back to the front of the car.

  Sarah looked up when I walked in, but she said nothing. Leah gave me the big what’s-the-matter-look and I winked at her. I draped my coat over my arm and walked into Rollie’s office, closing the door behind me. He looked up and smiled pleasantly.

  “How are you, Steve?”

  “All right.”

  He looked at the closed door and the coat over my arm and his smile faded. “What’s wrong, Steve?”

  “Rollie, I’m quitting.”

  He made a scoffing sound. “What will you do? Where will you go?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. Right now I’ve got to rest. I’m not going to worry about anything else.”

  “Few problems outside the office?”

  “Some problems in the office too, Rollie, as you know.” The bastard tried to blush.

  “Suppose,” he said, “we give you that raise as of now?”

  The offer shook me. “The bill a week?”

  “Yes.”

  “No damned strings attached?”

  “No strings,” he said, blushing again.

  “Haven’t you been interviewing people for my job?”

  “Yes, but I’ve decided none of them would work out.”

  “If I hadn’t come in here this morning, you’d have let me continue working at my miserable salary?”

  “I’m a business man, Steve.”

  “You’re a damned fairy, Rollie—that’s your business.”

  “Let’s get back to the raise. It would be effective as of the first of the week.”

  I shook my head. “At one time it was the money, but not now, Rollie. I’ve got to quit altogether.”

  “Jesus, have some consideration for us!” he shouted.

  “Consideration!” I said. I couldn’t believe I’d heard it right. “For you?”

  “Didn’t we take you in and—”

  “What!” I shouted. I felt myself getting hot. “What did you do? You underpaid me, tried to have me buy my raise by jumping over the sofa with you, and generally took advantage of me. That’s what you did. Now what do you think you did?”

  He flashed his dazzling smile and looked anxiously toward the door. “Don’t get upset, Steve. We like your work. Few flaws here and there, lately, but
we’d like you to stay.”

  “Rollie, you’re not trying to understand me. I’m quitting today. Now.”

  He snarled, “Without notice? With all the work piled up in your office?” He stood up and placed his hands on his hips. “For some time now, I’ve had the idea you disliked this business. What’s the matter with it? Not good enough for you?”

  He asked, I answered. “It stinks!”

  He waved a soft hand. “There was a future in it for you.”

  “Not for me.”

  “Business grows every year.”

  “One year it’ll explode. With things like Crispus happening, how long do you think you can continue to play with people’s dreams, wrap them up in a pretty jacket? People die for dreams, Rollie.” I laughed at him. “You screwed up Crispus and you almost died for his dream.”

  His face whitened.

  I put on my coat. “Can I get my check now?”

  “No,” he shouted, slamming things down on his desk. “You’ll have to come in next week.”

  “Mail it to me,” I said, starting for the door.

  He rushed from behind his desk. “Who do you think you are, pretending to have a conscience? Our money used to be good enough for you.”

  He was right, I could say nothing to that.

  “You’ve got to live like the rest of us,” he said. “You think it’s going to be better anywhere else for you? Do you think you’re going to find it easier?” His eyes became cold and he said softly, “You’re Negro—some people would call you a nigger, but not me. You’re Negro, and for you it’s always going to be tough.”

  The fear set off by the truth of what he said charged through me. I leaped forward, fear and anger again boiling, and grabbed him by the lapels of his jacket. He merely stood there, making no move to defend himself. That, and the look on his face, threw me for a moment.

  The rest happened quickly. I drew back—it seemed that lately I was always pulling back a fist; me, a guy who loves nothing more than working out a line of iambic pentameter—and started forward. I could feel hate pumping hotly through my arm and my brain tingled with anticipation of striking the blow. Here I was again, a mere twelve hours later in another stupid fight, but it had come to this; there would no longer be any compromise with the insults. As fast as they came, goddamit, that was as fast as I was going to try to handle them.