Blind Man with a Pistol

by Chester Himes

  People roared, shouted, applauded. “Hurrah! Olé! Bravo!”

  The door to the street was opened. Suddenly the loud urgent screams of police sirens poured into the room. Grave Digger and Coffin Ed jumped to their feet and looked around for their little friend. All they saw were people on the edge of panic. The happy music played by angry musicians suddenly ceased. The naked stripteaser screamed, “Pat! Pat!” From many throats came a wail like a cry of anxiety—a new sound. Even before they had reached the street, Grave Digger said, “Too late.”

  They knew. Everyone seemed to know. Pretty boy, John Babson, lay dead in the gutter, curled up like a foetus, cut to death by the lesbian, Pat, who had followed him into the street. He had been cut so many times he bore little resemblance to the exhibitionist pansy of a few minutes before.

  The woman was being put into an ambulance backed up to the curb. She had been cut too, about the arms and face. Blood leaked in streams over her black sweater and slacks. She was a big woman, darker than her sidekick, built like a truck driver who could double for a wet-nurse. But she had lost so much blood she was weak. She moved as though in a daze. Two ambulance attendants had clamped the major cuts and were laying her full-length atop the wheel stretcher inside the ambulance.

  Police cruisers were parked along the curb on Third Avenue and St Marks Place. People had come from everywhere; from within the houses, from the streets, from private cars stopping in the street. The intersection was jammed, traffic was stopped. Uniformed police screamed and cursed, frantically blew their whistles, trying to clear the way for the Medical Examiner, the DA’s assistant, the man from homicide, who had to come and record the scene, gather up the witnesses, and pronounce the body dead before it would be removed.

  Grave Digger and Coffin Ed followed the ambulance to Bellevue, but they weren’t permitted to interview the woman. Only a detective from the homicide bureau was allowed to speak to her. All she would say was, “I cut him.” The doctors took her away.

  The detectives went back to the Cooper Square precinct station on Lafayette Street. The body had been taken to the morgue but the witnesses were being questioned. When they offered themselves as witnesses, the precinct captain let them sit in on the questioning. The five young people they had noticed on their arrival, the two black boys and the three white girls who looked like spaceage witches, made the best witnesses. They had been returning up St Marks Place from Second Avenue when he came out of the rear of The Five Spot and set off down the street, switching his ass. They had known he was heading for The Arabian Baths. Where else? He walked like it. Then she came out the rear of The Five Spot too, running after him like an angry black mother bear, shouting, “Police fink … stool pigeon … sissy spy …” and other things they couldn’t repeat. What things? About his sex habits, his mother, his anatomy—they could guess. Nothing that shed more light. She had just run up behind him and cut him straight across the ass with all her might. His ass had popped wide open like a sliced frankfurter. Then she had slashed him as far as she could and by the time he had drawn his own knife and turned to fight her off, it was too late.

  “She turned him every way but loose,” one of the black boys said in awe.

  “Cut him two-way side and flat,” the other corroborated.

  “Why didn’t you two boys stop her?” the questioning lieutenant asked.

  Grave Digger looked at Coffin Ed but said nothing.

  “I was scared,” the black boy confessed guiltily.

  “You don’t have to feel ashamed,” his colored friend assured him. “Nobody runs betwixt a man and a woman knife-fighting.”

  The lieutenant looked at the other black boy.

  “It was funny,” he said simply. “She was chivving his ass like beating time and he was dancing about like an adagio dancer.”

  “What you boys do?” the lieutenant asked.

  “We go to school,” the black boy said.

  “NYU,” a white girl elaborated.

  “All of you?”

  “Sure. Why not?”

  “We called the police,” the other girl volunteered.

  The stripteaser was next, back in her mini-skirt. But she sat with her legs so close together they couldn’t tell if she had put her panties back on. She looked cold, even though it was hot. She gave her name as Mrs Catherine Little, and her address as the Clayton Apartments on Lenox Avenue. Her husband was in business. What kind of business? The meat-packing industry, like Cudahy and Swift. He made and packed country sausage for sale to retail stores.

  She and her friend, Patricia Davis, had come from a birthday party at the Dagger Club on upper Broadway and they’d stopped by The Five Spot to catch the Thelonius Monk and Leon Bibb show. Grave Digger and Coffin Ed knew the joint, in Harlem it was called the “Bulldaggers” Club; but they said nothing, they were there to observe. Nothing had happened there to shed any light on why her friend cut the man; there hadn’t been any men present; it had been a closed affair for the “Mainstreamers” — that was the name of their club. She had no idea why her friend had cut him, he must have assaulted her, or maybe he insulted her, she added, instantly realizing how silly the first had sounded. Her friend had a high temper and was quick to take offense. No, she didn’t know of any case where she had cut anyone before, but quite often she had seen her pull her knife on men who insulted her. Well, the kind of insults men usually threw at women who looked like her, as if she could help how she looked. It was her own business how she dressed, she didn’t have to dress to please men. No, you wouldn’t call her mannish, she was just independent. No, she personally didn’t know the victim, she didn’t remember ever having seen him before. She couldn’t imagine what exactly he had said or done to have started the fight, but she felt certain Pat hadn’t started it; Pat — Patricia — would flash her knife but she wouldn’t cut anybody unless they made her. Yes, she had known her for a long time; they had been friends before she was married. She’d been married nine years. How old she was? That’d be telling, besides, what difference did it make?

  The uptown detectives asked only one question. Grave Digger asked her, “Was he Jesus Baby?”

  She stared at him from wide, startled eyes. “Are you kidding? Is that a name? Jesus Baby?”

  He let it pass.

  The lieutenant said he’d have to hold her as a material witness. But before they had time to lock her up her husband appeared with a lawyer and a writ of habeas corpus. He was a short, fat, elderly black man with a night tan. His skin had grown lighter and become a shade of mottled brown from the absence of sunlight. He had a bald spot in the back of his skull, around which his kinky mixed gray hair was cut short. His dull brown eyes were glazed, like candied fruit, with thick wrinkled lids. He looked out at the world from these old, half-closed, expressionless eyes as though nothing would surprise him any more. His wide, thin-lipped, sloppy mouth connected with a sharp-angled jaw like a hog’s and stuck out like an ape’s. But some of his flabbiness was concealed by the very expensive-looking double-breasted suit he wore. He spoke in a low, blurred, Negroid voice. He sounded positive and uneducated; and his teeth were bad.

  18

  When Grave Digger and Coffin Ed arrived at Barbara Tyne’s apartment in the Amsterdam Apartments, they found she had been housecleaning. She had a green scarf tied about her head and was wearing a sweaty pink silk robe when she opened the door. She had a dishcloth in her hand.

  They were as startled at sight of her as she was at sight of them. Coffin Ed had said they could clean up at his wife’s cousin’s; he didn’t expect to find Barbara looking like a charwoman. And Crave Digger didn’t believe his wife had a cousin who lived in the Amsterdam Apartments, much less one who looked like this and smelled so unmistakably of her trade. She smelled of sweat, too, which was plastering her pink silk robe to her voluptuous brown body, and of a perfume that fitted both her trade and her sweat.

  Seemingly, her steaming femality had no effect on Coffin Ed. He was just startled to find her scrubb
ing in the middle of the night. But at sight of her, sexual urge went off in Grave Digger like an explosion.

  She had never seen Grave Digger and for the moment she didn’t recognize Coffin Ed. The acid-burnt, terrifying face, with its patchwork of grafted skin, was there, but it was out of context. It was beat up, bloody, bruised. It had a body with torn clothing. It was accompanied by another man who looked the same at first glance. Her eyes stretched in terror. Her mouth flew open, showing the screams gathering in her throat. But they didn’t get past her lips. Coffin Ed poked an uppercut through the crack in the door and caught her in the solar plexus. Air exploded from her mouth and she went down on her pratt. Her pink silk robe flew open and her legs flew apart as though it were her natural reaction to getting punched. Grave Digger noticed that the pubic hair in the seam of her crotch was the color of old iron rust, either from unrinsed soap or unwashed sweat.

  Coffin Ed snatched a half-filled bottle of whiskey from the cocktail table and held it to her lips. She strangled and blew a spray of whiskey into his face. But she didn’t see because her eyes had filled with tears and her glasses misted.

  Grave Digger entered the room and closed the door. He looked at his partner, shaking his head.

  At that moment, Barbara said, “You didn’t have to hit me.”

  “You were going to scream,” Coffin Ed said.

  “Well, Jesus Christ, what you expect? Y’all ought to see yourselves.”

  “We just want to clean up a little,” Grave Digger said, adding unnecessarily: “Ed said it’d be all right.”

  “It’s all right,” she said. “You just ought to warned me. ’Tween you and them pistols you don’t look like the Meek twins.” She didn’t show any inclination to get up from the floor; she seemed to like it there.

  “Anyway, no harm done,” Coffin Ed said, making the introductions. “My partner, Digger: my wife’s cousin, Barbara.”

  Grave Digger looked as though he’d been insulted. “Come on, man, let’s wash up and split. We ain’t on vacation.”

  “You know where the bathroom is,” Barbara said.

  Coffin Ed looked as though he’d like to deny it, but he just said, “Yeah, all right. Maybe you can loan us some clean shirts of your husband’s too.”

  Grave Digger gave him a sour look. “Cut out the bullshit, man; if this girl’s got a husband, so have I.”

  Coffin Ed looked like his feelings were hurt. “Why not? We ain’t customers.”

  Ignoring all their private talk, she said from her position on the floor, “You can have all his clothes you want. He’s gone.”

  Coffin Ed looked startled. “For good?”

  “It ain’t for bad,” she said.

  Grave Digger had stepped into the kitchen, looking for the bath. He noticed the black and white checked linoleum had been recently scrubbed. Beside the sink was a pail of dirty suds, and standing beside it a long-handled scrub brush wrapped in a towel that had been used for dry. But it didn’t strike him as strange in that kind of pad. A whore was subject to do anything, he thought.

  “This way,” he heard Coffin Ed call and found his way to the bath.

  Coffin Ed had hung his pistol on the doorknob and stripped to the waist and was washing noisily in the bowl, splashing dirty water all over the spotlessly clean floor.

  “You make more mess than a street sprinkler,” Grave Digger complained, stripping down himself.

  When they’d finished, Barbara led them to a built-in clothes closet in the bedroom. Each chose a sport shirt in candy-colored stripes and a sport coat in building-block checks. There weren’t any other kinds. But they were big enough to allow for the shoulder holsters and still have enough flare from the side vents to look like giant grasshoppers.

  “You look like a horse in that blanket,” Coffin Ed said.

  “No, I don’t,” Grave Digger contradicted. “No horse would stand still for this.”

  Barbara came back from the sitting-room. She had a dust cloth in her hand. “They look just fine,” she said, studying them critically.

  “Now I know why your old man left you,” Grave Digger said.

  She looked puzzled.

  “It’s a hot night to be housecleaning,” Coffin Ed said.

  “That’s why I’m cleaning.”

  It was his turn to look puzzled. “ ’Cause it’s hot?”

  “ ’Cause he gone.”

  Grave Digger chuckled. They had gravitated into the sitting-room and upon hearing a Negroid voice saying loudly, “Be calm —” they all turned and looked at the color television. A white man was shown standing on the platform of a police sound truck, exhorting his listeners: ‘Go home. It’s all over. Just a misunderstanding.…” At just that moment he was shown in closeup so all one could see were his sharp Caucasian features talking directly to the television audience. But suddenly the perspective changed, showing all of the intersection of 125th Street and Seventh Avenue with a sea of faces of different colors. Except for the prevalence of so many black faces and such bright clothes, and the cops in uniform, it might have been a crowd scene from any Hollywood film about the Bible. But there aren’t that many black people in the Bible. And no cops like those cops. It was a riot scene in Harlem. But no one was rioting. The only movement was of people trying to get before the cameras, get on television.

  The white man was saying, “… no way to protest in justice. We colored people must be the first to uphold law and order.”

  The cameras briefly showed the spectators booing, then switched quickly to other sound trucks, occupied by colored people who were no doubt race leaders, and various white men whom — Grave Digger and Coffin Ed recognized as the chief inspector of police, the Police Commissioner, the District Attorney, a Negro assistant police commissioner, a white congressman, and Captain Brice of the Harlem precinct, their boss. They didn’t see Lieutenant Anderson, their assistant boss. But they noticed three people in one truck who looked like types of Negroes in a wax museum. One was a black hare-lip man in a metallic-blue suit, another a narrow-headed young man who might have been demonstrating Negro youth lacking opportunity and the third, a well-dressed, handsome, whitehaired, prosperous-looking man who was certainly the successful type. All of them looked vaguely familiar, but they couldn’t place them just at the moment. Their thoughts were on other things.

  “Wonder the big boss ain’t beating up his chops about that ain’t-the-right-way and crime-don’t-pay shit,” Grave Digger said.

  “Ought to be,” Coffin Ed said. “He’ll never have as full a house again.”

  “I see they left little boss man to hold down the fort.”

  “Don’t they always?”

  “Let’s go down and buzz him.”

  “Naw, we’d better go in.”

  On their way down the stairs, Grave Digger asked, “Where’d you find that?”

  “In trouble. Where else?”

  “You been holding out on me.”

  “Hell, I don’t tell you everything.”

  “Sure don’t. What was the rap?”

  “Delinquency.”

  “Hell, Ed, that woman ain’t been a delinquent since you were a little boy.”

  “It was a long time ago. I straightened her out.”

  Grave Digger turned his head but it was too dark to see. “So I see,” he said.

  “You want her to scrub floors?” Coffin Ed demanded testily.

  “Ain’t that what she been doing?”

  Coffin Ed snorted. “You never know what a whore’ll do after midnight.”

  “I was thinking about you, Ed.”

  “Hell, Digger, I ain’t Chinese. I just saved her from a juvenile rap, ain’t responsible for the rest of her life.”

  They emerged on to the street looking like working stiffs trying to play pimps, filled with complaints about their broads.

  “Now to get back to the station before someone makes us,” Grave Digger said, as he walked around the car and climbed beneath the wheel.

  “Just
don’t go by the riot is all,” Coffin Ed said, sliding in beside him.

  Lieutenant Anderson came into the detective room as they were searching their lockers for a change of clothes. He looked startled.

  “Don’t say it,” Grave Digger said. “We’re the last of the end men.”

  Anderson grinned. “Be seated, gentlemen.”

  “We ain’t beat our bones yet,” Grave Digger added.

  “We lost our bones,” Coffin Ed elaborated.

  “All right, Doctor Bones and Doctor Jones, stop in the office when you’re ready.”

  “We’re ready now,” Grave Digger said and Coffin Ed echoed:

  “As we’re ever going to be.”

  Both had finished transferring the paraphernalia of their trade to the pockets of their own spare jackets. They followed Lieutenant Anderson into the Captain’s office. Grave Digger perched a ham on the edge of the big flat-top desk, and Coffin Ed propped his back against the wall in the darkest corner as though holding up the building.

  Anderson sat well back of the green-shaded desk lamp in the Captain’s chair, looking like a member of the green race.

  “All right, all right, out with it,” he said. “I take it from those smirks on your faces that you know something we don’t.”

  “We do,” Grave Digger said.

  “It’s just that we don’t know what is all,” Coffin Ed echoed.

  The brief dialogue about the prostitute had attuned their minds to one another, so sharply they could read each other’s minds as though they were their own.

  But Anderson was accustomed to it. “All joking aside —” he began, but Coffin Ed cut him off:

  “We ain’t joking.”

  “It ain’t funny,” Grave Digger added chuckling.

  “All right, all right! I take it you know who started the riot.”

  “Some folks call him by one name, some another,” Coffin Ed said.