Stories of Erskine Caldwell (81 page)

There was a queer-looking expression on Dave’s face.

The driver stopped, and he walked back to where we were. By that time people had begun to gather from all directions, and we were surrounded on all sides.

“Are you hurt, Daver?” I asked him, getting down on the sidewalk with him.

The driver had pushed through the crowd, and when I looked up, he was standing at Dave’s feet looking down at us, scowling.

“Mike,” Dave said, turning his face towards me, “Mike, the half-dollar piece is in my right-hand pants pocket.”

His fingers were clutching my hand, and he held me tight, as though he were afraid he would fall.

“Forget the half, Dave,” I begged him. “Tell me if you’re hurt. If you are, I’ll get a doctor right away.”

Dave opened his eyes, looking straight up at me. His shoulders moved slightly, and he held me tighter.

“There’s nothing wrong with him,” the driver of the sedan said, pushing the crowd away from him with his elbows. “There’s nothing the matter with him. He’s faking.”

The man stood erect above us, looking down at Dave. His mouth was partly open, and his lips were rounded, appearing to be swollen. When he spoke, there was no motion on his lips; they looked like a bloodless growth on his mouth, curling outward.

“Mike,” Dave said, “I guess I’ll have to give up trying to get my job back. It’s too late now; I won’t have time enough.”

The man above us was talking to several persons in the crowd. His lips seemed to be too stiff to move when he spoke; they looked by that time like rolls of unbaked dough.

“He’s faking,” he said again. “He thinks he can get some money out of me, but I’m wise to the tricks of these bums. There’s nothing wrong with him. He’s no more hurt than I am.”

I could hear people all around us talking. There was one fellow in the crowd behind me talking loud enough for everyone to hear. I could not see his face, but no one could have failed to hear every word he said.

“Sure, he’s a bum. That’s why they don’t take him to the hospital. What in hell do they care about a bum? They wouldn’t give him a ride to the hospital, because it might cost them something. They might get the Goddam sedan bloody. They don’t want bum’s blood on the Goddam pretty upholstery.”

I unbuttoned Dave’s sweater and put my hand under his shirt, trying to find out if there were any bones broken in his shoulder. Dave had closed his eyes again, but his fingers were still gripped tightly around my wrist.

“He’s faking,” the driver said. “These bums try all kinds of tricks to get money. There’s nothing wrong with him. He’s not hurt. He’s faking.”

The fellow behind us in the crowd was talking again.

“Why don’t you take him to the hospital in your sedan, Dough-Face?”

The man looked the crowd over, but he made no reply.

I drew my hand out from under Dave’s shirt and saw blood on my fingers. It had not come from his shoulder. It came from the left side of his chest where he had struck the pavement when the sedan knocked him down and rolled over him. I put my hand inside again, feeling for broken bones. Dave’s body on that side was soft and wet, and I had felt his heart beating as though I had held it in the palm of my hand.

“How about taking him to the hospital?” I said to the driver looking down at us. “He’s been hurt.”

“That’s the way these bums fake,” the driver said, looking from face to face in the crowd. “There’s nothing wrong with him. He’s not hurt. If he was hurt, he’d yell about it. You don’t hear him yelling and groaning, do you? He’s just lying there waiting for me to throw him a ten or a twenty. If I did that and drove off, he’d jump up and beat it around the block before I could get out of sight. I know these bums; all they want is money. That one down there is faking just like all the rest of them do. He’s no more hurt than I am.”

I tried to get up and lift Dave in my arms. We could carry him to the hospital, even if the driver wouldn’t take him in the sedan.

The driver was facing the crowd again, trying to convince the people that Dave was attempting to hold him up for some money.

“He’s faking!” he said, shouting between his dead lips. “These bums think they can get money by jumping in front of an automobile and then yelping that they’re hurt. It’s a good lesson for them; maybe they’ll stop it now. I’m wise to them; I know when they’re faking.”

Dave opened his eyes and looked at me.

“Wait a minute, Mike,” he said. “Put me down. I want to tell you something.”

I laid him on the sidewalk as carefully as I could. He lay there looking up at me, his hand gripping my wrist.

“I just want to make sure you know where the half is, Mike,” he said. “The half is in my right-hand pants pocket.”

I was about to tell him again that it was all right about the fifty cents, and to forget it, when suddenly his grip on my wrist loosened and his eyes clouded.

During all the time I knelt there holding him in my arms I was trying to think of something to say to Dave before it was too late.

Before I could think of anything to tell him, the driver of the sedan elbowed closer and looked down at us.

“He’s faking,” he said. “The dirty bum’s faking.”

He elbowed his way out of the crowd and went toward his sedan. When he reached it, he shouted back over the heads of the people.

“There’s nothing wrong with him! He can’t put nothing over on me! I’m wise to these dirty bums. All they want is some money, and then they get well quick enough. The dirty bum’s faking!”

“Sure, he’s a bum,” the fellow behind me said, his voice ringing as clear as a bell. “He might get some bum’s blood on your Goddam pretty upholstery.”

Just then a policeman came running up, attracted by the crowd. He pushed the people away and poked me with his nightstick and asked what the trouble was. Before I could tell him, he struck me on the back with the billy.

“What the hell you guys blocking the street for?”

I told him Dave was dead.

He bent down and saw Dave for the first time.

“That’s different,” he said.

He turned around and walked half a block to a call box and rang up the city hospital for an ambulance. By the time he had come back, the man who was driving the sedan had left.

“Why didn’t you take him to the hospital in the car that knocked him down?” the policeman asked, whirling his nightstick and looking down the street at a woman in front of a show window.

“Hell, can’t you see he’s a bum?” the fellow behind me said. “We didn’t want to get bum’s blood all over the Goddam pretty upholstery.”

The policeman stopped and looked at the fellow and me. He took a step forward.

“On your way, bums,” he said, prodding us with his billy. “Clear out of here before I run you both in.”

I ran back beside Dave and stood over him, a foot on each side of his body. The policeman jumped at me, swinging his billy and cursing.

All at once the street lights went black, and when I could see again, the fellow who had stayed with me was dragging me down the street towards the freightyards. As we passed under the last street light, I looked up into his face gratefully. Neither of us said anything.

(First published in the
New Masses
)

A
FTER THE COLD
winter was over, most people stopped worrying about Hamrick’s polar bear. Just as soon as the sun began glowing warm again, and when the buds started swelling, people all over the country, both white and colored, laughed about Hamrick’s fooling everybody about the bear. It was no joking matter, though, during that cold winter. It got so cold that a polar bear was about the only animal that could stand being out of doors. It was the coldest winter that had ever struck Georgia.

“Hush!” Doc said. “Folks will believe anything if you tell it to them under the precise right circumstances, I’ve got a level head myself, and I don’t believe every fool story that comes down the road.”

Doc Barnard was like nearly everyone else after the winter had passed. Now that warm spring had come, he was telling one and all that he never had believed there was a big white polar bear over at Hamrick’s.

“Hush!” he said. “The first time I heard about that bear, I thought then that there was going to be a lot of folks fooled into believing that there was a polar bear over there.”

In April, Hamrick said the bear was still there, and if anybody did not want to take his word for it, then all he had to do was go down into the woods below his pasture and look.

Nobody paid much attention to Hamrick, because warm weather had started and people had forgotten how cold it had been the past winter. They were thinking about fox hunting then, and fishing.

During the early part of May, early one morning after breakfast, the bear stepped up on Mrs. Felix Howard’s kitchen porch. All the men had left the house to plow on the other side of the farm, and Mrs. Howard was alone. She was sweeping out her kitchen when the polar bear came up on her porch.

She said afterwards that she had a lot on her mind that morning and was busy at the time thinking about some new curtains for her parlor. She swept the litter out of the kitchen, through the door, and out on the porch. She had just about finished when she saw the big white polar bear.

“Scat!” she said, hitting the bear on the head with her broom. “Get off my porch!”

The bear jumped off the porch, cleared the fence, and ran out of sight around the house. He was a big animal, weighing close to three hundred pounds, but he was light on his feet.

Mrs. Howard went back into the kitchen and sat down to think about what she was going to cook for dinner. She had got as far as boiled onions, when it suddenly dawned upon her that the animal she had hit over the head a few minutes before was a bear.

“My heaven above!” she cried. “Hamrick’s polar bear!”

She began to scream at the top of her voice while she was running through the house and down the road to her brother’s filling station and store. She was breathless when she got there.

“What’s the matter with you, Emma?” her brother Ed asked her. “You act like you saw a ghost, or something.”

“Hamrick’s polar bear, Ed!” she yelled at him. “The creature came up on the kitchen porch while I was sweeping out, and I hit him over the head with the broom.”

“Doc Barnard says there ain’t no such thing as Hamrick’s polar bear, Emma.”

“You tell Doc Barnard that bear came to my kitchen door, and he was as big as a year-old calf.” Ed got a shotgun and some shells.

“You stay here at the store, Emma,” he said uneasily. “I’m going over to Hamrick’s.”

On the way to Hamrick’s he stopped and asked several Negroes if they had seen or heard anything of the polar bear. They had all heard about the bear, but none of them had seen a trace of the animal.

Walter Hamrick was sitting in his barn doorway shelling seed corn when Ed got there.

“Emma came running down to the store a little while ago, saying a big white bear was on her kitchen porch,” Ed told Hamrick. “It looks to me like she’s either seeing things, or else that polar bear you’ve been telling about all winter is running wild.”

“He ate a six-months-old calf in the pasture one night last week,” Hamrick said. “I didn’t say much about it because people still think I’m a liar for ever mentioning that durn bear. I wish you folks would quit calling me a liar, and join up with me to track him down and shoot him.”

Ed sat down, watching the shelled corn fall from Hamrick’s hand into the bucket.

“I’ll be dogged if I don’t believe you are right about that bear, after all,” Ed told him. “Emma must have seen him, because I’ve never seen her so excited before.”

“That durn bear is hungry,” Hamrick said. “He’s been mostly sleeping all winter. But now that it’s too warm for him to sleep, he’s wanting a lot to eat. He must have smelled chickens or something at your sister’s, to make him go up on her porch like that. Next thing, he’ll be killing cows and mules to eat, and humans.”

Ed got up to go back to the store.

“How do you figure a polar bear ever got to this part of the country?” he asked.

“I’ve been telling you folks all winter about that durn bear, but everybody thinks I’m a liar. Liar or not, I’d say that durn bear broke away from a circus or carnival last fall, and hid in the woods. He might have even broke loose two or three hundred miles from here, and traveled this far before settling down to sleep out the cold weather.”

“I’m going over after the Howards, and maybe Doc Barnard,” Ed said. “The thing for us to do is to put on a bear hunt, and stay on it till we track the animal down and shoot him.”

He left Hamrick shelling corn in the barn doorway. On the way back to the store, he saw Hunnicut Branch running across his cotton field. When Hunnicut saw Ed, he turned and ran to the road to meet him.

“What’s the matter, Hunnicut?” Ed asked him. “See a bear?”

“I sure did, Mr. Ed!” Hunnicut said, panting. “A great big white bear! A great big polar bear like Mr. Walter Hamrick’s been talking about all the past winter!”

“Where’s the bear now?”

“My old woman hit him over the head with a stick of stovewood, and that bear lit out for the woods.”

“It looks like the womenfolks will be the ones to beat that bear to death, after all.”

“I told my old woman she must have lost her mind to go hitting a bear on the head, but she said she was so mad at him for nibbling off her sweet-potato vines in the garden that she didn’t stop to be scared of him.”

“That bear killed one of Walter Hamrick’s young cows last week,” Ed said. “He would make short work of a human.”

“I reckon he would, Mr. Ed,” Hunnicut said, stepping back and looking around behind him. “I sure reckon he would.”

Ed hurried down the road to his store and filling station. His sister rushed out and met him in the middle of the road.

“Mrs. Barnard phoned down here just a minute ago and said Hamrick’s bear came up to her house. She said she had locked herself in the room and was scared to go out. She said something about her girls, but she was so excited I couldn’t make out what she was trying to tell about them.”

Ed did not wait to ask any questions. He ran down the road toward Doc Barnard’s place. It was about a quarter of a mile away. Once he stopped and broke open his shotgun to make certain both barrels were loaded.