For love of Imabelle

20

When Jackson turned into 125th Street from Madison Avenue, headed toward the station baggage-room, he was driving as cautiously as if the street were paved with eggs.

He was in a slow sweat from the crown of his burr head to the white soles of his black feet. Worrying about Imabelle, wondering if that woman of his was safe, worrying about her trunk full of gold ore, hoping nothing would go wrong now that he had rescued it from those thugs.

He was steering with one hand, crossing himself with the other.

One moment he was praying, “Lord, don’t quit me now.”

The next he was moaning the lowdown blues:

A patrol car passed him, headed toward the precinct station, going like a bat out of hell. It went by so fast he didn’t see Imabelle in the back seat. He thought they were taking some thug to jail. He hoped it was that bastard Slim.

An ambulance shot past. He skinned his eyes, his sweat turning cold, trying to see who was riding in it, and almost rammed into a taxi ahead. He caught a glimpse of the silhouette of a man and was relieved. Weren’t Imabelle, whoever it was.

He wondered where that woman of his could be. He was worrying so hard about her that he almost ran down a big fat black man doing the locomotive shuffle diagonally across the street.

Jackson eased the hearse past Big Fats as though he were picking his way through a brier patch. He didn’t open his mouth again. Couldn’t tell what a drunk might do next. He didn’t want any trouble until he got the trunk checked and safe from Goldy.

He had to drive past the front of the station, circle it on Park Avenue, and come down beside the baggage room entrance from the rear.

By the time he had pulled to the curb before the baggage-room door, behind the line of loading taxicabs, Big Fats had navigated the dangerous rapids of 125th Street traffic and was shuffling up the crowded sidewalk beside the lighted windows of the waiting room, heading up Park Avenue toward the Harlem River.

None of them said anything to Big Fats. No need to borrow trouble with an able-bodied colored drunk the size of Big Fats. Especially if his eyes were red. That’s the way race riots were started.

But it made Jackson nervous to have the police congregating in the vicinity while he was checking the trunk of gold ore. He was so nervous as it was he was jumping from his shadow. He left the motor running from habit. When he got out to go to the baggage room, Big Fats spied him.

“Little brother!” Big Fats shouted, shuffling up to Jackson and putting his big fat arm about Jackson’s short fat shoulders.

“Short-black-and-fat like me. You tell ’em, short and fatty. Can’t trust no fat man, can they?”

Jackson threw the arm off angrily and said, “Why don’t you behave yourself. You’re a disgrace to the race.”

Big Fats put the locomotive in reverse, let it idle on the track, building up steam.

“What race, Little Brother. You want to race?”

“I mean our race. You know what I mean.”

Big Fats bucked his red-veined eyes at Jackson in amazement.

“You mean to say you’d let ’em trust you with they women?” he shouted.

“Go get sober,” Jackson shouted back with uncontrollable irritation, went around Big Fats like skirting a mountain, hurried into the baggage room without looking back.

Big Fats forgot him instantly, began shuffling up the street again.

Jackson found a colored porter.

“I got a trunk I want to check.”

The porter looked at Jackson and became angry just because Jackson had spoken to him.

“Where you going to?” he asked gruffly.

“Chicago.”

“Where’s your ticket at?”

“I ain’t got my ticket yet. I just want to check my trunk until I get my ticket.”

The porter went into a raving fury.

“Can’t check no trunk nowhere if you ain’t got no ticket,” he shouted at the top of his voice. “Don’t you know that?”

“What are you getting so mad about? You act like we’re God’s angry people.”

The porter hunched his shoulders as though he were going to take a punch at Jackson.

“I ain’t mad. Does I look mad?”

Jackson backed away.

“Listen, I don’t want to check it nowhere. I just want to check it here until I come down tonight to get my ticket.”

“You don’t want to check it nowhere. Man, what’s the matter with you?”

“If you don’t want to check it I’ll go see the man,” Jackson threatened.

The man was the white baggage-master.

The porter didn’t want any trouble with the man.

“You means you want to check it,” he said, giving in grudgingly. “Why didn’t you say you just wanted to check it instead of coming in here talking ’bout going to Chicago?”

He snatched up a hand truck as though he’d take it and beat Jackson’s brains out with it.

“Where’s it at?”

“Outside.”

The porter wheeled the hand truck onto the sidewalk and looked up and down the street.

“I don’t see no trunk.”

“It’s in the hearse there.”

He looked through the windows of the hearse and saw the trunk on the coffin rack.

“What you doing carrying a trunk around in a hearse for?” he asked suspiciously.

“We use it to carry everything.”

“Well, get it out then,” the porter said, still suspicious. “I ain’t checking no trunk in no hearse where dead folks has been.”

“Aw, man, Lord in heaven. Don’t be so evil. The trunk’s heavy. Ain’t you going to help me lift it down?”

“I don’t get paid for unloading no trunks from no hearses. I checks ’em when they is on the street.”

“I’ll help you git it out,” a colored loiterer offered.

Jackson and the loiterer walked to the back of the hearse. The porter followed. Two white taxi drivers, taking a break, looked on curiously. From down the sidewalk a white cop eyed the group absently.

Big Fats came shuffling back down the street just as Jackson swung open the double doors of the hearse.

“Watch out!” he shouted. “Can’t trust no fat man!”

Jackson, the porter, and the third colored man stepped back from the hearse in unison as though they had suddenly looked upon the naked face of the devil.

Big Fats shuffled closer, looked over Jackson’s shoulder. The locomotive stopped dead on the tracks.

All four black men had turned putty-gray.

“Great Gawdamighty!” Big Fats shouted. “Look at that!”

Underneath the trunk black cloth was piled high. Artificial flowers were scattered about in garish disarray. A horseshoe wreath of artificial lilies had slipped to the back. Looking out from the arch of white lilies was a black face. The face was looking backward from a head-down position. resting on the back of the skull. A white bonnet sat atop a gray wig which had fallen askew. The face wore a horrible grimace of pure evil. White-walled eyes stared at the four gray men with a fixed, unblinking stare. Beneath the face was the huge purple-lipped wound of a cut throat.

Jackson felt his scalp ripple as he recognized the face of his brother Goldy. His mouth came half open and caught. His eyes stretched until he felt as though the eyeballs were hanging from the sockets. His jaws began to ache. A warm wet stream flowed suddenly down his pants leg.

“That’s a dead body, ain’t it?” the porter said in a cracked voice, as though his suspicions had suddenly come true. His own eyes were as white-walled and fixed as the eyes of the corpse.

“Where?” Jackson said.

His brain had gone numb with panic and fear. His whole fat body began to shake as though he had the ague.

“Where?” the porter shrilled in a high whining voice that sounded like a file scraping across a saw. “Right there, that’s where!”

The third colored man was still backing up the street.

“Cut sidewise to the bone,” Big Fats said in a hushed, awed voice.

The taxi drivers sauntered over and looked down at the gory black head.

“Jesus Christ!” one exclaimed.

“It’s a wig,” the other one said

“What is?”

“See, there’s short hair underneath. By God, it’s a man.”

The uniformed cop approached slowly like a forerunner of doom, nonchalantly twirling his white nightstick. He looked down into the hearse with the air of a man who had been washed with all waters. The next instant he drew back in pallid shock and sucked in his breath. This was the water he’d never seen.

“How did this get there? Who did this? Whose hearse is this?” he asked stupidly, trying to collect his wits and looking quickly about for help.

He caught the eye of one of the plainclothes detectives at the waiting-room entrance and beckoned to him.

The third colored man had kept backing up Park Avenue toward the dark until he considered it safe to turn around. Now he was running up the dark street as fast as his feet would carry him.

Big Fats had turned cold sober and was trying to inch away too when the cop said sharply, “Don’t anybody leave here.”

“I ain’t leaving,” Big Fats denied. “Just stretching my feet a little.”

The white taxicab drivers backed away and stood shoulder to shoulder against the baggage-room wall.

The white plainclothes detective pushed the porter aside, saying, “What’s this?”

He took a look into the hearse, turned pale. “What the hell is this?”

“A body,” the cop said.

“Who’s the driver?”

“Me, boss,” Jackson quavered.

The harness cop blew out his breath in a sighing sound, glad to let the plainclothes detective take over. A crowd had begun to gather and he was glad to find something he could do.

“Get back!” he ordered. “Stand back!”

The detective took out his notebook and pencil.

“What’s your name?” he asked Jackson.

“Jackson.”

“Who’s your boss?”

“Mr. H. Exodus Clay, on 134th Street.”

“Where’d you pick up this corpse?”

“I don’t know, boss. It was in there when I got in. I swear ’fore God.”

The detective suddenly stopped writing and stared at Jackson incredulously.

Everyone stared at him.

“He say he done found a stiff and don’t know where it come from,” someone in the crowd exclaimed.

Jackson was trembling so that his teeth were chattering like ratchets. He wasn’t scared now of losing his woman or losing her gold ore. He wasn’t thinking about his woman or her gold. He was thinking only of his brother lying there in death with his throat cut. This was the instinctive fear of the violently dead. Fear of the dead themselves. He hadn’t started yet thinking about what was going to happen to him. But the detective’s next question made him think about it.

“Do you mean to say you didn’t know this corpse was in the hearse when you took it out?”

“No sir. I swear ’fore God.”

The colored detective came up at that moment and said casually, “What’s the beef about?”

A patrol car turned in from 125th Street, driving on the wrong side, plowed a path through the crowd that was spreading across the street.

“He’s got a corpse in there and he says he doesn’t know how it got there,” the white detective replied.

“Couldn’t have walked, that’s for sure,” the colored detective said, pushing between Jackson and the porter to look at the corpse.

“I’ll be a mother-for-you!” he exclaimed, half choking, more repulsed by sight of the cut throat than shocked.

Then he looked more closely.

“That’s Sister Gabriel. And that son of a bitch was a man all this time!”

The white detective continued to question Jackson as though he were uninterested in the corpse’s sex.

“How did it happen that you took the hearse out without knowing there was a corpse in it?”

“Boss told me to bring this trunk to the station and check it.” He talked in gasps, scarcely able to breathe. “Swear ’fore God. I just brought the trunk down like he told me to do and put it there on the rack and drove on here to the station, like he told me to. Lord be my judge.”

“Check the trunk for what?”

Behind them the patrol-car cops were pushing back the crowd.

“Get back, get back!”

The gray had left Jackson’s face and he had begun to sweat again. He wiped the sweat from his face, dabbing at his red-veined eyes with the dirty handkerchief.

“I didn’t understand you, boss.”

Bums and prostitutes and working johns and loiterers and the night thieves and bindle stiffs and blind beggars and all the flotsam that floated on the edges of the station like dirty scum on bog water were jostling each other, drawn by the word of a cut-throat corpse, trying to get a look to see what they were missing.

“I said what does he want to check the trunk for?”

“For Chicago. He’s going to Chicago tonight and he wanted to check his trunk now so when he got his ticket he wouldn’t be bothered with it,” Jackson said gaspingly.

The white detective snapped shut his notebook.

“I don’t believe a God-damned word of that bullshit.”

“It could be true,” the colored detective said. “One driver might have brought in the corpse and left it in the hearse for a moment and this driver—”

“But God damnit, who’s checking a trunk at this time of night?”

The colored detective laughed. “This is Harlem. His boss might have the trunk stuffed with hundred-dollar bills.”

“Well, I’ll soon find out. You hold him. If he got the corpse legitimately, it was released by the homicide bureau.” He looked about, over the heads of the crowd. “Where the hell’s that patrol car? I’m going to contact the precinct station.”

Suddenly Jackson could see the electric chair and himself sitting in it. If they took him to the precinct station they’d find out about Slim and his gang. And they’d find out about Coffin Ed getting blinded and Grave Digger getting hurt, maybe killed. They’d find out about the gold ore and about Goldy, and about him stealing the five hundred dollars and stealing the hearse too. They’d find out that Goldy was his brother and they’d figure that Goldy was trying to steal his woman’s gold ore. And they’d figure he’d cut Goldy’s throat. And they’d burn his black ass to a cinder.

“I’ve seen the order,” he said, inching toward the sidewalk. “It was on the front seat, but I didn’t know who it was for.”

“Order?” the white detective snapped. “Order for what?”

“Order for the body. We get an order from the police to take the body. I saw it right there on the front seat.”

“Well, God damnit, why didn’t you say so? Let’s see it.”

Jackson went to the front of the hearse and opened the door. He looked on the bare seat.

“It was right here,” he said.

He crawled halfway into the driver’s compartment on his hands and knees, groping behind the seat, looking on the floor. He heard the old Cadillac motor turning over softly. He inched half of his rump onto the seat to lean over and look into the glove compartment. His elbow touched the gear lever and knocked it over to drive, but the motor purred softly and the car didn’t move.

“It was right here just a minute ago,” he repeated.

Now both detectives stood on the sidewalk by the door, eying him skeptically.

“Contact precinct and inquire about a recent homicide,” the white detective called to a patrol-car cop. “Colored man impersonating a nun got his throat slashed. See if the body was released. Get the name of the undertaker.”

“Right-o,” the cop said, hurrying off to his two-way radio.

Jackson got all of his rump onto the seat in order to search on top of the sunshades where a stack of papers were shelved.

“It was right here, I saw it.”

He put his right hand on the wheel to steady himself to get a better look. Suddenly, with his left hand he slammed the door shut; he put his whole weight down on the gas treadle.

The old Cadillac motor was the last of the ’47 models with the big cylinder-bore and had enough power to pull a loaded freight train.

The deep-throated roar of the big-bored cylinders sounded like a four-motor stratocruiser gaining altitude as the big black hearse took off.

Pedestrians were scattered in grotesque flight. A blind man jumped over a bicycle trying to get out of the way.

There was a nine-foot gap between a big trailer-truck going east toward the bridge and a taxi going west on 125th Street. Jackson put the hearse in a straight line across the street and it went through that nine-foot hole so fast it didn’t touch, straight down the narrow lane of Park Avenue beside the iron stanchions of the overhead trestle. The gearshift was clumping as it climbed into second, third, and hit the supercharger.

Pistols went off around the station like firecrackers on a Chinese New Year’s day.

The soft mewling yowl of the patrol car sounded and swelled swiftly into a raving scream as the first of the patrol cars leaped into pursuit. It headed straight toward the side of the big trailer-truck as the cop tried to calculate the speed; he calculated wrong and skidded as he tried to turn. The patrol car went into the big, high, corrugated-steel trailer broadside, tried to go underneath it, was flipped back into the street, and spun to a stop with the front wheels bent out of use.

The two other patrol cars were just beginning to whine. Over and above the din of noise was the big jubilant crowing of Big Fats.

“What did I tell you? Can’t trust no fat man! That little fat mother-raper done cut his own mama’s throat from ear to ear!”