Lonely Crusade

by Chester B Himes

  Now he would have to sleep, he thought, climbing to his room and dropping fully dressed across the bed. But he did not sleep. The ghosts of all his failures and of all his fears and trepidations and inadequacies began parading through his mind, until he lay trembling in the shell of what he once had been.

  Then suddenly be began seeing Ruth—Her coffee-colored nakedness and crown of curly hair; neck curved out to wide, full shoulders like a handstroke; breasts like twin hills in that golden haze before some sunsets. And a face like a pale brown Madonna’s with a ripely bursting mouth. Stepping slowly from the dirty wallpaper with those dark condemning eyes. “All I ever wanted was just to love you, Lee,” And the thought tore through his mind: “My God, baby doll, what have I done to you?”

  And for what? What had he expected—the woman to marry him? Love, honor, and obey him—and raise his nigger children on crumbs and love? Had he expected her to fight with his Negro wife and take him bodily? Or had he been looking for something he thought only a white woman could give him? And giving it to him would make her immortal—“Thy immortal woman will hold thy hand…”

  As the questions buffeted through his thoughts, his emotions became distorted and ran together like white-hot glass so that he could not differentiate among them. He could not tell whom he hated or whom he loved. And in this state his despondency intensified until it became solid to the touch.

  He began to cry—slowly at first, just a soft leak of tears from the river of his eyes, and then more rapidly, until his whole body shook with wracking sobs.

  If she had ever known—or even if he, himself had known—that underneath all of his resentment, all of the things he had thought of her, he had been proud of her achievement and proud of her. He had been proud of her femininity, of her fidelity, and how much it had always given him, even though he had always known that he was never worth it. And now there was this thing she should know that she would never know. She would never know about his crying out his heart because of what he had done to her. He was suffering his bitterest moment of regret for having destroyed in her what had meant so much to him, neither of them having ever known it until the time had passed.

  In the end he would dry his tears and rise and continue living, a dry and brittle shell of what he might have been, because he could not do this simple thing to bring their togetherness again—go to her and tell her that he had cried. He was restrained now by the Anglo-Saxon trait of emotional repression he had inherited. He was a Negro whom it did not fit, but he was bound by it as he was by all white traits he had inherited.

  Chapter 27

  SOMEONE knocked.

  Lee Gordon rolled over and sat up. “Who is it?”

  “Luther.”

  “Well—yes,” Lee Gordon thought. This would be in logical sequence. “Just a minute,” he called, going over to the corner basin to wash his face in cold water. Then he unlocked and opened the door.

  “What do you want?”

  “I don’t want to see you no more than you do me, buddy boy,” Luther muttered, his huge apelike body in tan slacks and a white T-shirt filling up the doorway, “but Foster sent me.”

  “So you’re still working for Foster?”

  “He still got money and I still ain’t. Are you coming?”

  “For what?”

  “For to see a man and get some money.”

  “What do I have to do?”

  “The man will tell you what to do.”

  For just a moment longer Lee hesitated, then he said: “Why not?”

  Luther turned without a word and led the way. Lee climbed into the car beside him, and without further conversation they drove out to Inglewood and turned into a driveway beside a small stucco bungalow. A man in his shirt sleeves opened the back door to admit them.

  “Come in, boys, come in.”

  As they entered a small, immaculate kitchen, Lee instantly recognized the man as Paul, one of the deputies who had beaten him, and felt suddenly trapped in a deep well of shame that he should come back begging this man for what he once had had the courage to refuse. In this upsurge of emotion he could not speak.

  But Luther began Uncle-Toming from the start. “How’s tricks, Mister Paul,” he said with a servile grin.

  “Tricks ain’t walking,” Paul replied, but gave his attention to Lee.

  “Aw, you got everything, Mister Paul,” Luther continued in a voice so ingratiating it was sickening to hear. “Why’oncha give a poor boy a break?”

  But Paul ignored him and addressed his questions to Lee. “All healed up eh, boy? No scars, no bad feelings, eh?”

  “No scars,” Lee replied finally, succumbing to the pressure of Paul’s stare.

  “No bad feelings, eh?” Paul said persistently.

  “No bad feelings,” Lee said stolidly.

  “Got a little sense now, eh?”

  “Got a little sense,” Lee mumbled.

  “That’s a good boy.” Paul laughed and clapped him on the back.

  Sick from the shame of submitting to this, Lee sat suddenly in the nearest chair.

  Now that this crisis was past, Luther went straight to the business. “Mister Foster said you got a little job for us, Mister Paul.”

  “I got a little dough for you boys,” Paul winked.

  “Aw, dough!” Luther rubbed his hands. “Now that’s my language. What’cha want us to do?”

  “I’m just going to give you boys a little dough. You’re good boys and I’m going to give you a little dough.”

  “How much you gonna give us, Mister Paul?” Luther’s smile remained white in his greasy black face but his eyes became small and cunning. “You know times is tight and things is high. Dough ain’t what it used to was.”

  “Sit down, goddammit!” Paul cried. “You make me nervous with all that nigger cringing. By God, I believe you’d kill your own mama for a little money.”

  Luther sat unsmiling and suddenly solemn. “Well, now, Mister Paul, you can’t blame a man for liking money.”

  “Now that’s better,” Paul said. “I’m getting tired of your niggering all the time. You tryna make a fool out of me?”

  “That’s just my way, Mister Paul,” Luther replied in a flat voice now. “You can’t coon a man for his way. That’s just my way to try to make everything fine and dandy. That’s the way I like things to go.”

  “By God, things will go like I want ‘em to go!” Paul said, sensing Luther’s resentment and challenging it. “You got anything to say about that?”

  “Me? Not me!” Luther said, ducking his head like an artful dodger. “Don’t get me wrong, Mister Paul. I’m happy ‘bout the whole thing.”

  “You’d better be!” Paul said, relaxing into his lordly manner now that Luther had begun to fawn again. Sitting at the head of the table, he took out his wallet. “Now I’m going to give you boys a little money and I want you boys to keep in touch with me. I’ll have a little job for you boys in a day or so.”

  Opening the wallet, he extracted a flat stack of hundred-dollar bills and looked from one to the other with a sly, taunting look.

  Luther gave a long, expressive whistle. “You gonna give us all that money, Mister Paul?”

  “What would you do for this much money, Luther?”

  “Ain’t no telling what I wouldn’t do!”

  Paul laughed, then looked at Lee. “How about you, boy?”

  “Well—it looks like quite a bit of money,” Lee forced himself to say, rapidly reaching the limit of his subservience.

  “Quite a bit of money, he says! Boy, this money would buy you all the gals on Central Avenue!”

  To that Lee made no reply, feeling the slow growth of heat in his brain.

  “How much of that we gonna get?” Luther asked into the pause.

  Paul slapped the bills against the table. “I’m going to give you boys one hundred dollars each.”

  “That all, Mister Paul?” Luther said, whining in his disappointment. “All that money and you just gonna give us a h
undred dollars!”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “You know, Mister Paul, that ain’t right. A hundred dollars ain’t no money at all. I bet you got a hundred of them bills in that stack.”

  Paul laughed. “Just fifty, Luther.”

  “Fifty! And you gonna give us one apiece! That ain’t right, Mister Paul. You oughta at least give us five apiece.”

  “I said one!”

  “One! You expect me to do all this dirty work for one lousy hundred bucks!” There was the subtle hint of danger in Luther’s changed voice.

  But Paul scorned it as he jumped to his feet, a hot flush reddening his features. “Don’t you argue with me!” he said warningly. Leafing two bills from the stack, he tossed them to the table. “Do you want it or don’t you?”

  Luther looked from Paul to the bills and slowly reached out and picked one up. “I suppose we gets some more when the job is done?”

  “That’s right. That’s when you get some more.”

  Luther turned the single bill between his fingers as his greasy black features settled into flatness. But he said no more and did not look up.

  Nor did Lee speak as he sat looking at the lone bill left on the table top, hoping with all his heart that Paul would not demand that he accept it or he would have to hit him.

  But Paul had gotten over his moment of irritation and grinned at them again. “You boys look hot and thirsty. How about a cold bottle of beer?”

  “Beer, did you say?” Luther began Uncle-Toming again, but now there was a difference.

  “How about you, Gordon?”

  “Well—thanks.”

  As Paul turned toward the icebox, Luther asked: “How’s the missus, Mister Paul? Hope we ain’t disturbing her.”

  “She’s out,” Paul replied shortly, bending over the open icebox to reach for the bottles of beer.

  The instant Paul’s back was turned, the curtain of submissiveness dropped from Luther’s face and malevolence stood out with the shock of sudden nakedness. His neck roped like a growth of blackened roots and his thick white-shirted torso knotted with muscles. Abruptly he was caught up, metamorphosed, embodied with a violence that shed evil like rays of light.

  Clutched in a presentiment of horror, Lee opened his mouth to cry a warning but it stuck in his throat like a rock. For before his startled vision, paralyzing his vocal cords, Luther rose like a great black monster, shook open a switch-blade knife, and stabbed Paul in the left side of the back, reaching for his heart. He saw Paul’s body snap taut. A vacuum-tight concentration sealed his mind. He saw Luther stab Paul twice rapidly, low down on the right side. He heard Paul grunt. He watched him put his hand flat against the icebox and strike back with the other as he tried to straighten up.

  Each stark detail poured into his consciousness to be forever etched in memory. But his mind would not take it, would not rationalize, would not perform.

  “Mother—I” he heard Luther curse with an animal sound as he stabbed Paul in the side of the neck. He saw the muscles of Paul’s neck tighten with the stab, saw the blood spurt in a geyser, saw his body strain to straighten and turn. He heard Paul’s last gasped words, half cursing, half begging: “You don’t have to kill me, you black son of a bitch!”

  The next time Luther stabbed, the blade snapped off against Paul’s spine, and Paul’s body, like some gory gargoyle, began slowly crumpling to the floor. As Lee watched him fall dying, he saw his tremendous effort to live, and from behind his wall of nausea, came an icy trickle of horror down into his soul.

  Then he saw only the blood—over and above all else the blood—surging down on reason in a gory flood. Blood welled through the white shirt, spurting from the white neck, over the floor and the icebox and on the side of the stove, splotching Luther’s white T-shirt and slacks, dripping from his arm, clotting on his black greasy skin. And the smell of blood—sickish, sweetish, cloying scent—rooted him, nailed him rigid to the spot.

  But when the body ceased to twitch and death came to what a few short moments before had been a man, it let him go. And now his mouth made chewing motions as he bit back the screams coming from his stomach.

  Luther turned to look at him, huge and black and bloody, his flat face enigmatical but his muddy eyes menacing. Panic exploded in Lee’s mind. He kicked back the chair, overturning it, and started toward the door.

  “If you touch that door I’ll kill you!”

  The flat voice reached out and halted him, chained him in abject terror. He jerked back his hand, turned, trembling, fighting for control.

  “Come over here and sit down!”

  Charmed by the menace in the muddy eyes, he gave up his will, came forward and sat down as if to his own death.

  “Now don’t lose your goddamn head!”

  In Luther’s eyes Lee saw his own life hanging in the balance. He wanted to beg for mercy but could not speak. Fear had paralyzed his vocal cords and turned his breath rock-hard. But his thoughts ran on, down the dark line of irrevocability, his own imminent murder no less an actuality than the dead man on the floor. He could see Luther advancing, stabbing him in the chest, the throat, the heart. He could see his own blood spurting out his life, and knew that in his absolute terror he could not move a muscle to protect himself. He did not want to die like this, mutilated, without defense, black in a gory pool in this alien atmosphere. But still he could not speak.

  And finally the murderous intent went from Luther’s muddy eyes and in its place came urgency. Hurried but not hasty, Luther began to move, his actions as calculated as an automaton. Washing his knife in the sink, he returned it to his pocket and let the faucet run, wetting a towel. Soaping the towel, he tossed it to Lee.

  “Wash the furniture, everything,” he commanded. “Don’t leave no fingerprints nowhere.”

  As Lee moved dumbly to obey, Luther squatted and took the wallet from Paul’s pocket. Attracted by Lee’s panicky haste, he glanced up and quickly cautioned, “Slow down! Slow down! Now’s the time to take it easy. Get all them prints washed off. This son of a bitch is dead.”

  Unemotional and undisturbed as a man without a soul, without senses, without a nervous system, moving through a world where there was no retribution, no right, no wrong, no God, he looked about for a mop, and finding none, went through the doorway into the next room.

  Out from underneath the domination of Luther’s muddy eyes, Lee’s flaccid subjection became panic again. He could not keep his eyes from Paul’s bloody body. From outside, each sound in the night plucked at him and sent cold tremors of terror down his spine. Steps on the sidewalk, the distant barking of a dog, the sound of a motor, and the short, sharp laugh from somewhere close raked him raw, exploding in his mind the driving impulse to run again. And then he was running blindly and cravenly—but only in his mind. His body had not yet begun to move when Luther returned, naked to the waist, his black torso washed clean of blood and his muscles roping in the light. Lee’s arm jerked with a reflex action and he struck himself in the mouth.

  “How you coming?” Luther asked, swinging a dripping bath towel from his hand.

  Finally, desperately, Lee found his voice. “All right.”

  “You get the chairs, the table, the door?”

  “I haven’t got the door yet.”

  “You get the walls?”

  Lee shook his head.

  “Get the walls too. And take it easy. Ain’t no hurry. ‘Cause what you do now gonna mean everything later on.”

  Lee nodded and went to work again. Fear had wired his mind so tight that now he was unaware of all his minor actions, and later was never able to recall what he did then. When he had finished washing down the walls, Luther said: “Take off your shoes.”

  Lee sat on the floor and took off his shoes.

  Along with his own, Luther placed them beside the door. “Now you stand here too,” he ordered Lee.

  As Lee moved to obey, Luther wiped the floor with the wet towel then stood for a moment scanning the room. “Now
get them shoes,” he told Lee, “and when I turn out the light you go set in the car and don’t move.”

  When the light went out, Lee did as directed while Luther washed the outside of the door, wiped the stoop, then backing to the car on his hands and knees, wiped off the entire sidewalk. He backed the car into the street, cut off the motor, got out, and went back and scoured the tire tracks from the pavement of the driveway.

  “Jesus Christ!” Lee was whispering over and over to himself when Luther climbed back beneath the wheel.

  “Shut up!” Luther said in a gritty voice. Unhurriedly he took his pistol from the glove compartment and stuck it in his waist band, then searched about until he found a soiled T-shirt, which he put on.

  Driving back into the city at a steady twenty-five, he turned east on Washington Boulevard and drew to a stop in the dark deserted stretch beyond Sante Fe. Standing in the dark beside the car, he changed his slacks to a pair of greasy overalls he found in the luggage compartment, then got in and drove to the burning dump a half mile ahead and tossed his blood-stained clothes into the smoldering fire. From there he drove out to Belvedere and parked in a dark alley in the densely populated Mexican community.

  “Now you can put on your shoes,” he said to Lee, putting on his own, and when they had finished, he said: “Get out.”

  With the blood-stained bath towel he had brought from Paul’s house, he wiped the instrument panel, steering wheel, and door handles, thoroughly and unhurriedly, and dropped the towel on the street.

  “So he thought I’d sell my mama out,” he said, showing his first sign of emotion.

  Lee had not spoken since Luther had ordered him to shut up; he did not speak now because his mind was a blank and words had no meaning to him.

  “Come on, let’s get back to Hollywood,” Luther said and turned to leave.

  Long since, Lee had ceased to have a will, and when Luther moved, he moved as though he were a puppet controlled by Luther’s will. Falling in beside Luther, he walked along in a daze, turning when Luther turned, stepping aside when Luther stepped aside. The fear was there within him, filling him, and outside him, encasing him. But with the stopping of thought, panic had gone. And as yet, as he moved automatically through the city night, thought had not begun again, and the panic lay dead.