The Big Gold Dream

by Chester Himes

  With infinite caution he unlocked the inner door. The slight sound made by the clicking of the bolt was barely perceptible above the sound of the idling motor. The door opened soundlessly.

  He waited with his face pressed to the iron grille, looking and listening. There was still only the sound of the idling motor. The Jew figured it was a trap. But he didn’t know whether it was a legitimate burglar or some teenage hoodlums. He had a telephone in the ground floor cubbyhole office. He could have phoned for the police, but he didn’t want the police meddling into his business, poking about and asking questions.

  He decided to set a trap of his own. He unlocked the grille and pushed it back on its hinges until it formed a right angle, guarding the entrance from any attack from the left. Then he backed into the shadows and waited.

  Five minutes passed. The cat came up the stairs, looked outside, sniffed and walked in a dignified manner across the courtyard with its tail straight up, looking neither to the right nor the left. The Jew knew that was no indication; Sheba would simply ignore anyone she didn’t know.

  Ten minutes passed, then fifteen. The Jew began growing impatient. He wanted to get back to his money. It could have been some pranksters. No one in their right senses would want to steal his moving van. And had anyone wanted to get into the store, they would have made a move by now. He would wait another five minutes.

  He was guessing at the time; but the clock of his mind was fairly accurate. When the five minutes had ticked off in his brain, he put the revolver beneath his coat and cocked it to muffle the sound. Then, holding the heavy black flashlight extended in his left hand, thumb on the switch, and holding the heavy revolver extended in his right hand, finger on the trigger, he emerged slowly from the dark square of the doorway.

  To the right of the doorway, a man plastered to the brick wall stepped out. He had outwaited the Jew.

  The Jew saw the hammer descending and moved instinctively a fraction of an instant before it struck him on the bone point of his right shoulder. His gun arm went numb with the brackish taste of bone ache. The gun went off before it fell, clattering, to the pavement. Out of the roar the bullet drew a white line through the dark against the brick wall of the brewery and ricocheted upward in a series of arabesques.

  The man kicked at the gun with his left foot at the same time that he swung the hammer again with his right hand. The Jew had pressed the switch, and the light came on the instant the hammer smashed the reflector. It was as though a bolt of lightning had struck once, almost at the moment of the thunder, making the darkness blacker. The flashlight sailed from the Jew’s hand and rolled across the yard. His hand and forearm were filled with pins and needles up to his elbow.

  The Jew was blinded. Both arms were useless. But he kicked out viciously and caught his assailant on the shin. Grunting with pain, the assailant doubled over. The hammer blow aimed at the Jew’s head struck him in the ribs. The sound of a breaking rib came like a drum beat from under water. The Jew tried to scream but didn’t have the breath. His assailant swung back-handed from a one-footed stance. The blow caught the Jew over the right ear with the sound of a butcher cleaving a marrow bone. The Jew’s tightly stretched mouth went instantly slack; his taut muscles went limp. He fell in a flabby heap.

  The assailant bent over and rained blows on the prostrate figure. For a time there was only the rising and the falling of the hammer, the soft meaty sounds as it landed on the Jew’s face and head.

  Then suddenly it stopped.

  The assailant dropped the hammer to the pavement, sat down and put his face in his hands. Inhuman sounds spewed from his mouth. He sounded as though he were crying with uncontrollable terror.

  Suddenly the crying stopped.

  The assailant rose to a squatting position and snapped on a cigarette lighter. In the flickering light the Jew appeared to be a bundle of bloody rags. The light snapped off quickly.

  Quickly, in the dark, the assailant searched the Jew’s body. He found nothing, no money, no wallet, no papers.

  He had to go inside. His body shaking with terror, he couldn’t find the switch. By aid of his cigarette lighter, he descended the stairs. Suddenly a stair squeaked beneath his weight. The cigarette lighter fell from nerveless fingers, and he had to grope for it in the darkness. His breath made a wheezing sound. Finally he found the lighter. It didn’t work immediately. He groped his way to the bottom of the stairs and tried the lighter again. It burned, but the flame was more feeble than before.

  Time was running out.

  For a moment he stood in the door and looked over the room. Objects were barely discernible in the dim flickering light, but he made out the workbench where the Jew had last been seen standing. He crossed to it, put the lighter down and began snatching open drawers. He found it where the Jew had put it.

  He held the oiled silk pouch in his hand as though it were as fragile as hope of heaven. His body was bent forward. His eyes were focused. His face held an expression of savage greed.

  One hundred grand, he thought.

  Suddenly he heard the loose stair creak.

  His head was gripped in a vise of ice. It was the dead Jew coming for his money. Instinctively he whirled about, snatching up a wood chisel for a weapon. Only his stifled breathing was audible, but he could sense a presence on the stairs.

  He put the pouch into his hip pocket and buttoned the flap, then snapped on his lighter, held it in one hand and the chisel in the other and tiptoed cautiously toward the door.

  As he reached the door, he heard feet clatter down the stairs. His body collided with another. In the dark neither could see. He stabbed out with his chisel and heard a sharp cry of pain. At the same time he felt the cool, quick, almost painless slash of a knife across his cheek. Theirs was a brief but furious straggle. He stabbed out crazily, pumping the chisel with an insensate fury. He could feel the difference when it chopped into the wall and when he made contact with cloth and flesh. He couldn’t see the knife, but he knew it stabbed the air about him. He felt it enter his flesh countless times. He felt no pain, but he was crazed with terror.

  On both sides there were unintelligible grunts - no more. No words were spoken. No curses uttered. Two bodies weaved and ducked and stabbed blindly in the utter darkness. Then the first one broke free and ran.

  He thought he was running toward the stairs until he banged into a solid object in the dark. He bounced off, tripped over something else and fell full length onto something that felt like bed springs. He could hear the other in furious pursuit, banging into furniture and grunting like an animal.

  The springs seemed to have wrapped themselves about his legs. He fought them off as though they had hands, kicking and stomping. Other objects rose from the dark and struck him in all conceivable places. Something hooked into his ear and tore the lobe. Something else chopped him squarely in the mouth. Objects clutched his ankles. It was as though the broken and dilapidated furniture had taken on life to torture him like a mob of lynchers. His pursuer was undergoing the same torture but that was no consolation.

  By the time he had made a tour of the basement storeroom, he had been battered unmercifully. His breath came in sobs. He still clung to the chisel, but he scarcely had the strength to use it. Finally he encountered the stairs. He dragged himself up. He could hear his unseen assailant furiously fighting the treacherous furniture and grunting unintelligible curses in the dark.

  He came out in the dark courtyard sucking for breath. His mouth ballooned with vomit, and his teeth bit together. He found the body of the dead Jew where he had left it. He felt a crazy impulse to scream at the top of his voice. He knew he was bleeding from many stab wounds, but he couldn’t feel them.

  The sudden silence below alerted him again. He heard the loose stair squeak loudly as a foot leaped upon it. He ran toward the shed.

  The motor of the moving van was still running as he had left it. Without a loss of motion he leaped into the driver’s seat. He put the big old van into reverse, raced t
he motor and released the clutch. It backed into the gate like a battering ram. The gate broke from its hinges and sailed across the sidewalk into the middle of Third Avenue. The truck followed.

  He pulled the emergency brake from force of habit and was running before he hit the ground.

  6

  MORNINGSIDE PARK IS ONE of those rocky jungles on the uninhabitable eastern edge of the stone ridge forming the bluffs overlooking the Hudson River. For the most part it is overgrown with dense foliage and interlaced with steep winding stairways, upon which none but the simple-minded dare to venture after dark.

  Shortly after midnight, patrol cars converged on that area of the park near the bench where Sugar had met Rufus that afternoon.

  There had been an anonymous report to the precinct station that a man was heard screaming there.

  But by the time the first of the patrol cars arrived, the screaming had ceased. Drops of dark blood led from a flashy green sedan parked at the curb. There were blood splotches on the back of the driver’s seat and on the steering wheel. The drops grew into heavy blobs on the sidewalk leading toward the darkness of a public lavatory and the black-dark jungle of the park beyond. The lavatory was closed and locked for the night, and the trail of blood led around it into the overgrown foliage. Police flashlights stabbed the pools of darkness in the dense undergrowth.

  The usual Harlem crowd had collected on the sidewalk and the street, and the cops had difficulty keeping them back.

  “Here it is!” a cop announced.

  It was curled deep within a clump of shrubbery where it had crawled to hide.

  “Stand back! Get back!” a police corporal ordered.

  “I know him; I knows that man,” a big black man in working clothes said excitedly. “He be George Clayborne.”

  “And who be you?” the corporal asked.

  “I be the janitor of that there house across the street. That there is where George Clayborne lives.”

  “Take his name,” the corporal ordered; he seemed to have put himself in charge. “Get a statement; and the rest of you get some statements from these other people. We can’t do no more until the Medical Examiner and the Homicide men arrive.”

  “That be his car there,” the janitor informed the young cop who was taking his statement.

  The cop opened the front door and found what looked like bloodstains on the steering wheel and front seat.

  He shouted for the corporal.

  A skinny little black girl, with ribbon-tied braids sticking out from her head at all conceivable angles, looked about carefully until she found the biggest cop. She sidled up and tugged his sleeve.

  He gave a start and clawed at his pistol. All these wild-looking colored people had set his nerves on edge. When he saw who had touched him, he turned bright red.

  “What do you want?” he shouted angrily.

  The little girl looked up at him through big brown solemn eyes. “I seen who done it,” she said.

  The big cop gave another start. “What?” He wasn’t sure he had heard right.

  “It was a white lady. I seen her with the knife.”

  “White lady!” The big white cop rejected that. “Go home and go to bed; you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I seen her with the knife,” the little girl insisted. “It had blood all over it, and she was all in white like a ghost.”

  “What’s that?” the big slow-witted cop barked. “You mean dressed in white. Then she wasn’t no white lady.”

  “Nawsuh, she were just dressed in white, is all,” the little girl said stolidly. “I seen which way she went.”

  “Come on, we’ll get after her,” the big cop said, all for action. “We’ll go in the car and you show us which way she went.”

  He pushed his way through the crowd to his car, where his partner sat behind the wheel, smoking.

  “This little girl saw the murderer,” he said. “She’s going to show us where she went.”

  They put the little girl between them. She pointed down 112th Street toward Eighth Avenue.

  The car roared down the long block with the siren wide open and burst into Eighth Avenue at sixty miles an hour.

  The little girl craned her neck and pointed suddenly toward a white-clad figure walking rapidly down Eighth Avenue in the direction of 110th Street. “There is she!” she cried.

  The patrol car was half way across the avenue, traveling at the speed of one mile a minute. The driver stood on the brakes and wheeled the car at a sheer right angle as though piloting a supersonic jet plane in an open sky. The scream of tires blended with the scream of the siren, and a northbound car on Eighth Avenue sheered off to the left side of the street and crashed head on into a southbound car, which was sliding sidewise on locked brakes as a result of the patrol car crossing in front of it. The patrol car hit the curb broadside with the edges of its wheels, started turning over, scraped against an iron light post that knocked it back on four wheels, hit a row of garbage cans and knocked them across the wide sidewalk through the plate glass windows of a supermarket. The crash of metal on metal and tin against glass rended the night with ear-splitting sound, and people were seen to duck for cover as far away as Seventh Avenue.

  Across the street the white-clad figure started to run, but the patrol car hadn’t stopped moving. It slued across the street, the driver bleeding from a gash in his cheek caused by broken window glass, and shimmied to a shaky stop alongside the running woman.

  The cops were out and on the street before the car stopped, and the big cop made a running tackle and brought the woman down. She landed on her right thigh, kicking back with her left heel, and caught the cop smack in the mouth. By the time the other cop had rounded the car, she was getting to her feet, and she greeted him with a backhanded blow in the eye.

  She was a big strong woman, as quick as a cat, and she fought the two cops as though she had gone stark raving crazy.

  The quick crowd gathered as usual, and they saw a good fight.

  Finally the cops got her flat on her stomach with her hands crossed behind her. The big cop sat astride her legs and the driver knelt on her neck while they snapped on the handcuffs. Before letting her up, they searched her, to the delight of the spectators, and found two knives in her uniform pocket.

  One of the knives was sticky with coagulated blood.

  They released her and stood up, standing away at a respectful distance as she scrambled to her feet.

  “Why did you do it?” the big cop barked.

  “Do what?” she asked sullenly.

  If evil looks could have killed, both cops would have dropped dead in their tracks.

  “Kill him,” the big cop persisted.

  “Kill who?” she said.

  “This is the knife,” the driver stated.

  “What knife?” she said.

  “Give me the knife,” the big cop said to the driver. “You’re dripping your own blood on it.”

  The driver passed him the knife. He wrapped it in his handkerchief.

  Intense black faces watched this performance with profound interest.

  The big cop decided on a new tactic. “What did you run for, then?”

  “Everybody was running,” she said. “I thought the world was coming to an end.”

  “Resisting arrest,” the big cop went on. “Why did you do that if you’re not guilty? The police are your friends.”

  This got a well-deserved laugh from the appreciative audience, but both she and the cop were in dead earnest.

  “How did I know you was the cops?” she said. “I heard the noise and thought the judgment day was here; and somebody grabbed me by the legs. I thought it were the devil. You’d resist, too, if the devil had you by the legs on judgment day.”

  “You’re not that simple-minded,” the big cop said. “Come on, let’s take her in,” he said to the driver.

  By then the patrol cars had moved over from Morningside Drive, and screaming people were running down the streets towar
d the scene of the new excitement.

  “I doubt if this car will run,” the driver said.

  “Here comes the wagon, anyway,” the big cop announced, pointing toward the Black Maria pushing through the crowd.

  The drivers of the wrecked cars were complaining to the corporal.

  “Sue the city,” he advised them.

  Residents were helping themselves to provisions from the smashed showcase of the supermarket. The stone-blind cops didn’t see a thing.

  “Where’s that little girl who fingered this suspect?” the driver asked. “We need her as a witness.”

  The big cop looked about but didn’t see her. “Jesus Christ, why did you let her go?” he asked accusingly.

  “Me let her go!” the driver exclaimed indignantly. “You let her go as much as me.”

  “I was occupied subduing this suspect,” the big cop said.

  “Hell, what do you think I was doing?” the driver demanded. “Here, look at my eye.”

  “Okay, okay,” the big cop said.

  They searched among the crowd for the little girl and inquired for her, but without success. So they took the woman to the station without the little witness.

  Photographs had been taken of the body in the bush, and it had been dragged into the lavatory for further examination. Its clothes had been removed.

  “I find nineteen stab wounds about the head, neck, shoulders and back,” the Medical Examiner said. “We can more or less say that was the cause of death.”

  The sergeant from the Homicide Bureau looked at the grim object laid out on the tiled floor and felt slightly nauseated.

  “He looks as though he were beaten up, too,” he observed.

  The two plain-clothes men and the uniformed cops gathered about stared silently.

  The Medical Examiner wiped his hands with a cloth dampened with alcohol.

  “Yes, that’s the strange thing,” he admitted. “He was severely beaten with some sort of blunt instrument at least half an hour before he was killed. But notice - all of the bruises are on the front of the body, but are not concentrated in any one area like the stab wounds. There are bruises from the shins to the forehead, as though he were beaten while lying on his back.”