Lonely Crusade (44 page)

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 hundred 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.

In silence they walked down First Street to Rowan and stopped to await the streetcar. And in silence, sitting and standing side by side, they rode the long journey across town and climbed the stairs to Mollie’s.

Mollie let them in, laughing suddenly at sight of Lee. “My God, when have you eaten last?” she greeted him.

“Shut up,” Luther said and closed the door. Then he ordered her: “Call the police and report your car stolen sometime this afternoon.”

“What happened to it?” she asked, suddenly sober.

“Nothing,” Luther replied, then told Lee: “Sit down, sit down, you safe now, man.”

As he went into the kitchen and took down from the cupboard a bottle of brandy, drinking long and noisily from the bottle’s neck, Mollie followed him with her questioning gaze. Finally he came back into the room with the bottle in his hand and stood looking at her.

“I killed the son of a bitch,” he said.

At the sound of his words and the sight of Mollie’s red face growing bloodless white, Lee’s mind was freed and his panic returned, overwhelming him. The muscles of his face began to tremble, and then his hands and finally his entire body shook as with the ague.

“Here, take a drink of this,” Luther said, crossing with the bottle in his hand.

Lee reached for it, trembling, clutched the bottle, and tilted it, spilling brandy down his chin. As the fiery liquor struck his throat, he coughed and strangled. It was the sight of him that finally impressed Mollie with the enormity of Luther’s announcement and released her from the senseless shock. Now she began cursing as a woman gone insane.

“You dirty, vicious, depraved maniac! Foul, filthy beast! And a fool! You’ve always been a fool! You and your stinking comrades! Unwashed, thieving, lying, cheating, murdering scum! A Communist! Yes, you’re a Communist! All you vicious bastards! I’m tired of you! And all your nigger Communist mess! Pulling me down with you! With the rest of you self-befouling swinish degenerates! Black, filthy nigger! Get out! Get out of my house! Both of you! You murdering nigger beasts! You—”

It was not until her voice began rising on a hysterical note that Luther spoke. “Shut up!”

“Don’t you dare tell me to shut up!” she screamed. “Ill—”

“Do I have to cut your throat too, woman?”

The cold, flat deadliness of his voice hushed her and gripped her in a sinister fascination that became sexual in quality as the hot blood flushed through her abrupt rigidity. She was ready again to lose herself in sensuality, because what the coarse animal brutality of this nigger did to her was more than any drug. It intensified the perceptions of her five senses to a sexual grotesqueness, where the merest touch of his hand upon her body produced a sensation either acutely exciting or nauseating—an aphrodisiac stimulant either way. And at such times the warm ‘velvety surfaces of his arms could feel as delicious as silk against her fingers, and the rough texture of his kinky hair could leave the sensation of a bruise. The whiteness of his teeth, the yellowness of his eyes, the redness of his tongue, and the blackness of his skin became writhing hues in her frenetical ecstasy, and the animal sounds of his chewing exploded against her eardrums like the beating of tom-toms—building up this constant laugh of sexual bliss until at times she thought her guts would retch completely out. Now it was with an effort that she suppressed the laugh within her and prepared to face the emergency, as from the first she had known she must, as she had always known that there would be emergencies she would have to face, living with this physically dangerous nigger.