The crazy kill

3

Someone began hammering loudly on the door.

The sound was scarcely heard above the din inside the room.

" Open the door! " a voice screamed.

It was so loud that even Dulcy and Mamie heard it through the locked bathroom door.

"Wonder who that can be," Mamie said.

"It sure ain't neither Johnny or Val making all that fuss," Dulcy replied.

"Probably some drunk."

One of the drunks already on the inside said in a minstrel man's voice, "Open de do', Richard."

That was the title of a popular song in Harlem that had originated with two blackface comedians on the Apollo theatre stage doing a skit about a colored brother coming home drunk and trying to get Richard to let him into the house.

The other drunks on the inside laughed.

Alamena had just stepped into the kitchen. "See who's at the door," she said to Baby Sis.

Baby Sis looked up from her chore of washing dishes and said sulkily, "All these drunks make me sick."

Alamena froze. Baby Sis was just a girl whom Mamie had taken in to help about the house, and had no right to criticize the guests.

"Girl, you're getting beside yourself," she said. "You'd better mind how you talk. Go open the door and then get this mess cleaned up in here."

Baby Sis looked sidewise about the disordered kitchen, her slant eyes looking evil in her greasy black face.

The table, sink, sidestands and most of the available floor space were strewn with empty and half-filled bottles-gin, whisky and rum bottles, pop bottles, condiment bottles; pots, pans and platters of food, a dishpan containmg leftover potato salad, deep iron pots with soggy pieces of fried chicken, fried fish, fried pork chops; baking pans with mashed and mangled biscuits, pie pans with single slices of runny pies; a washtub containing bits of ice floating about in trashy water; slices of cake and spongy white-bread sandwiches, half eaten, lying everywhere-on the tables, sink and floor.

"Ain't never gonna get this mess cleaned up nohow," she complained.

"Git, girl," Alamena said harshly.

Baby Sis shoved her way through the mob of crying drunks in the packed sitting room.

"Somebody open this door!" the voice yelled desperately from outside.

"I'm coming!" Baby Sis shouted from inside. "Keep your pants on."

"Hurry up then!" the voice shouted back. "Baby, it's cold outside," one of the drunks inside cracked.

Baby Sis stopped in front of the locked door and shouted, "Who is you who been beating on this door like you tryna bust it down?"

"I'm Reverend Short," the voice replied.

"I'm the Queen of Sheba," Baby Sis said, doubling over laughing and beating her big strong thighs. She turned to the guests to let them share the joke. "He say he's Reverend Short."

Several of the guests laughed as though they were stone, raving crazy.

Baby Sis turned around toward the closed door again and shouted, "Try again, Buster, and don't tell me you is Saint Peter coming for Big Joe."

The three musicians kept ruing away in dead-pan trances, their fixed eyes staring from petrified faces into the Promised Land across the river Jordan.

"I tell you I am Reverend Short," the voice said. Baby Sis's laughing expression went abruptly evil and malevolent.

"You want to know how I know you ain't Reverend Short?"

"That's exactly what I would like to know," the voice said exasperatedly.

"Cause Reverend Short is already inside of here," Baby Sis replied triumphantly. "And you can't be Reverend Short, 'cause you is out there."

"Merciful God in heaven," the voice said moaningly. "Give me patience."

But instead of being patient, the hammering commenced again.

Mamie Pullen unlocked the bathroom door and stuck out her head.

"What's happening out there?" she asked, then, seeing Baby Sis standing before the door, she called, "Who's that at the door?"

"Some drunk what claim's he's Reverend Short," Baby Sis replied.

"I'm Reverend Short!" the voice outside screamed.

"It can't be Reverend Short," Baby Sis argued.

"What's the matter with you, girl, you drunk?" Mamie said angrily, advancing across the room.

From the kitchen doorway Alamena said, "It's probably Johnny, pulling one of his gags."

Mamie reached the door, pushed Baby Sis aside and flung it inward.

Reverent Short stepped across the threshold, tottering as though barely able to stand. His parchment-colored bony face was knotted with an expression of extreme outrage, and his reddish eyes glinted furiously behind the polished, gold-rimmed spectacles.

"Hush my mouth!" Baby Sis exclaimed in an awed voice, her black greasy face graying and her bulging eyes whitening as though she'd seen a ghost. "It is Reverend Short."

Reverend Short's thin, black-clad body shook with fury like a sapling in a gale.

"I told you I was Reverend Short," he sputtered.

He had a mouth shaped like that of a catfish, and when he talked he sprayed spit over Dulcy, who had come over to stand with her arm about Mamie's shoulder.

She drew back angrily and wiped her face with the tiny black silk handkerchief that she held in her hand and that represented her dress of mourning.

"Quit spitting on me," she said harshly.

"He didn't mean to spit on you, honey," Mamie said soothingly.

" Po' sinner stands a-trembling…" Deep South shouted.

Reverend Short's body twitched convulsively, as though he were having a fit. Everyone stared at him curiously.

"… stands a-trembling, Daddy Joe," Susie Q. echoed.

"Mamie Pullen, if you don't stop those devils from jamming that sweet old spiritual, Steal Away, I swear before God I won't preach Big Joe's funeral," Reverend Short threatened in a rage-croaking voice.

"They're just trying to show their gratitude." Mamie shouted to make herself heard. "It was Big Joe who started them on their way to fame when they was just hustling tips in Eddy Price's joint, and now they're just trymg to send him on his way to heaven."

"That ain't no way to send a body to heaven," he said hoarsely, his voice giving out from shouting. "They're making enough noise to wake up the dead who're already there."

"Oh, all right, I'll stop' em," Mamie said, and went over and put her black wrinkled hand on Deep South's dripping wet shoulder. "That's been fine, boys, but you can rest a while now."

The music stopped so suddenly it caught Dulcy whispering angrily-"Why do you let that store-front preacher run your business, Aunt Mamie-" in a sudden pool of silence.

Reverent Short turned a look on her that glinted with malevolence.

"You'd better dust off your own skirts before criticizing me, Sister Perry," he croaked.

The silence became weighted.

Baby Sis chose that moment to say in a loud drunken voice, "What I want to know, Reverend Short, is how in the world did you get outside that door?"

The tension broke. Everyone laughed.

"I was pushed out of the bedroom window," Reverend Short said in a voice that was sticky with evil.

Baby Sis doubled over, started to laugh, caught sight of Reverend Short's face and chopped it off in the middle of the first guffaw.

The others who had started to laugh stopped abruptly. Dead silence dropped like a shroud over the revelry. The guests stared at the Reverend Short in pop-eyed wonder. Their faces wanted to continue laughing, but their minds pulled the reins. On the one hand, the expression of suppressed vindictiveness on Reverend Short's face could easily be that of a man who'd been pushed out of a window. But on the other hand, his body didn't show the effects of a three-story fall to the concrete sidewalk.

"Chink Charlie did it," Reverend Short croaked.

Mamie gasped. "What!"

"You kidding or joking?" Alamena said harshly.

Baby Sis was the first to recover. She laughed experimentally and gave Reverend Short an appreciative push.

"You takes the cake, Reverend," she said.

Reverend Short clutched her arm to keep from falling. She grinned the imbecilic admiration of one practical joker for another.

Mamie turned in a squall of fury and slapped her face.

"You get yourself right straight back to that kitchen," she said sternly. "And don't you dast drink another drop of likker tonight."

Baby Sis's face puckered up like a dried prune and she began blubbering. She was a big strong-bodied mulelike young woman, and crying gave her an expression of pure idiocy. She turned to run back to the kitchen but stumbled over a foot and fell drunkenly to the floor. No one paid her any attention because, with her support withdrawn, Reverend Short began to fall.

Mamie clutched him by the arm and helped him into an armchair. "You just set right there, Reverend, and tell me what happened," she said.

He clutched his left side as though in great pain and croaked in a breathless voice, "I went into the bedroom to get a breath of fresh air, and while I was standing in the window watching a policeman chasing a thief, Chink Charlie sneaked up behind me and pushed me out of the window."

"My God!" Mamie exclaimed. "Then he was trying to kill you."

"Of course he was."

Alamena looked down at the twitching bony face of Reverend Short and said in a reassuring tone, "Mamie, he's just drunk."

"I'm not the least bit drunk," he denied. "I've never drunk a drop of intoxicating liquor in my life."

"Where's Chink?" Mamie asked, looking about. "Chink!" she called. "Somebody get Chink in here."

"He's gone," Alamena said. "He left while you and Dulcy were in the crapper."

"Your preacher's just making that up, Aunt Mamie," Dulcy said. "Just 'cause him and Chink had an argument 'bout the guests you got here."

Mamie looked from her to Reverend Short. "What's wrong with 'em?"

She intended the question for Reverend Short, but Dulcy answered. "He said there shouldn't be nobody here but church members and Big Joe's lodge brothers, and Chink told him he was forgetting that Big Joe was a gambler himself."

"I'm not saying that Big Joe didn't sin," Reverend Short said in his loud pulpit voice, forgetting for the moment he was an invalid. "But Big Joe was a dining-car cook on the Pennsylvania Railroad for more than twenty years, and he was a member of The First Holy Roller Church of Harlem, and that's how God sees him."

"But these folks here is all his friends," Mamie protested with a look of bewilderment. "Folks who worked with him and saw him all the time."

Reverend Short pursed his lips. "That ain't the point. You can't surround his poor soul with all manner of sin and adultery and expect God to take it to his bosom."

"Jus' what do you mean by that?" Dulcy challenged hotly.

"Let him alone," Mamie said. "Everything has done gone bad enough without all this argument."

"If he don't stop picking at me with his dirty hints all the time I'm gonna have Johnny whip his ass," Dulcy said in a low grating voice intended only for Mamie, but everyone heard her.

Reverend Short gave her a look of triumphant malevolence.

"Threaten all you want, you Jezebel, but you can't hide it from the Lord that it was your own devilishness that drove Joe Pullen to an early death."

"That just ain't so," Mamie Pullen contradicted. "It was just his time. He's been taking naps like that, with his cigar in his mouth, for years, and it was just his time that he happened to swallow it and choke to death."

"If you want to put up with this chicken-season preacher's lying, you can," Dulcy said to Mamie. "But I'm going home, and you can just tell Johnny why when he gets here."

Silence followed her as she turned and walked from the apartment. She slammed the door behind her.

Mamie sighed. "Lord, I wish Val was here."

"This house is full of murderers!" Reverend Short exclaimed.

"You shouldn't say that just because you've got a grudge against Chink Charlie," Mamie said.

"For Christ's sake, Mamie!" Alamena exploded. "If he'd fallen from your bedroom window he'd be lying out there on the sidewalk dead."

Reverend Short stared at her through glazed eyes. A white froth had collected in the corners of his mouth.

"I see a terrible vision," he muttered.

"That ain't no lie," Alamena said disgustedly. "All you is seeing is visions."

"I see a dead man stabbed in the heart," he said. "Let me fix you a toddy and put you to bed," Mamie said soothingly. "And, Alamena-"

"He don't need no more to drink," Alamena cut her off.

"For Jesus Christ's sake, Alamena, stop it. Go phone Doctor Ramsey and tell him to come over here."

"He's not sick," Alamena said.

"I didn't say I was sick," Reverend Short said. "He's just trying to stir up trouble for some reason." "I'm hurt," Reverend Short stated. "You'd be hurt, too, if somebody had pushed you out of a window."

Mamie took Alamena by the arm and tried to pull her away. "Go now and telephone the doctor."

But Alamena pulled back. "Listen, Mamie Pullen, for God's sake be your age. If he fell out of that window it's a cinch he couldn't have walked back upstairs. I suppose he's going to tell you next that he fell into the lap of God."

"I fell into a basket of bread," Reverend Short declared. At last the guests laughed with relief. Now they knew the good reverend was joking. Even Mamie couldn't restrain herself.

"See what I mean?" Alamena said.

"Reverend Short, shame on you, pulling our leg like that," Mamie said indulgently.

"If you don't believe me, go look at the bread," Reverend Short challenged.

"What bread?"

"The basket of bread I fell into. It's on the sidewalk in front of the A amp;P store. God put it there to break my fall."

Mamie and Alamena exchanged glances.

"I'll go look, you go call the doctor," Mamie said.

"I want to look, too."

Everybody wanted to look.

Sighing loudly, as though indulging the whims of a lunatic against her better judgement, Mamie led the way.

The bedroom door was closed. When she opened it, she exclaimed, "Why, the light's on!"

With growing trepidation she crossed the lighted bedroom and leaned out of the open window. Alamena leaned out beside her. The others squeezed into the medium-sized room. As many as could peered over the two women's shoulders.

"Is it there?" someone in back asked.

"Does they see it?"

"There's a basket of some kind, sure enough," Alamena said.

"But it don't look like it's no bread in it," the man peering over her shoulder said.

"It don't even look like a bread basket," Mamie said, trying to penetrate the early morning shadows with her near-sighted gaze. "It looks like one of them wicker baskets they take away dead bodies in."

By then Alamena's sharp vision had become accustomed to the dark.

"It's a bread basket, all right. But there's a man already lying in it."

"A drunk," Mamie said in a voice of relief. "No doubt that's what Reverend Short saw that gave him the idea of fooling us."

"He don't look drunk to me," said the man who was leaning over her shoulder. "He's lying too straight, and drunks always lay crooked."

"My God!" Alamena exclaimed in a fear-stricken voice. "He's got a knife sticking in him."

Mamie let out a long moaning keen. "Lord, protect us, can you see his face, child? I'm getting so old I can't see a lick. Is it Chink?"

Alamena put her arm about Mamie's waist and slowly pulled her from the window.

"No, it ain't Chink," she said. "It looks to me like Val."