Invisible Man (64 page)

“Say,” I began.

“Get the hell out the way!”

I leaped aside, into the street, and there was a sudden and brilliant suspension of time, like the interval between the last ax stroke and the felling of a tall tree, in which there had been a loud noise followed by a loud silence. Then I was aware of figures crouching in doorways and along the curb; then time burst and I was down in the street, conscious but unable to rise, struggling against the street and seeing the flashes as the guns went off back at the corner of the avenue, aware to my left of the men still speeding the rumbling safe along the walk as back up the street, behind me, two policemen, almost invisible in black shirts, thrust flaming pistols before them. One of the safe rollers pitched forward, and farther away, past the corner, a bullet struck an auto tire, the released air shrieking like a huge animal in agony. I rolled, flopping around, willing myself to crawl closer to the curb but unable, feeling a sudden wet warmth upon my face and seeing the safe shooting wildly into the intersection and the men rounding the corner into the dark, pounding, gone; gone now, as the skittering safe bounded off at a tangent, shot into the intersection and lodged in the third rail and sent up a curtain of sparks that lit up the block like a blue dream; a dream I was dreaming and through which I could see the cops braced as on a target range, feet forward, free arms akimbo, firing with deliberate aim.

“Get hold of Emergency!” one of them called, and I saw them turn and disappear where the dull glint of trolley rails faded off into the dark.

Suddenly the block leaped alive. Men who seemed to rise up out of the sidewalks were rushing into the store fronts above me, their voices rising excitedly. And now the blood was in my face and I could move, getting to my knees as someone out of the crowd was helping me to stand.

“You hurt, daddy?”

“Some—I don’t know—” I couldn’t quite see them.

“Damn! He’s got a hole in his head!” a voice said.

A light flashed in my face, came close. I felt a hard hand upon my skull and moved away.

“Hell, it’s just a nick,” a voice said. “One them forty-fives hit your little finger you got to go down!”

“Well, this one over here is gone down for the last time,” someone called from the walk. “They got him clean.”

I wiped my face, my head ringing. Something was missing.

“Here, buddy, this yours?”

It was my brief case, extended to me by its handles. I seized it with sudden panic, as though something infinitely precious had almost been lost to me.

“Thanks,” I said, peering into their dim, blue-tinted features. I looked at the dead man. He lay face forward, the crowd working around him. I realized suddenly that it might have been me huddled there, feeling too that I had seen him there before, in the bright light of noon, long ago … how long? Knew his name, I thought, and suddenly my knees flowed forward. I sat there, my fist that gripped the brief case bruising against the street, my head slumped forward. They were going around me.

“Get off my foot, man,” I heard. “Quit shoving. There’s plenty for everybody.”

There was something I had to do and I knew that my forgetfulness wasn’t real, as one knows that the forgotten details of certain dreams are not truly forgotten but evaded. I knew, and in my mind I was trying to reach through the gray veil that now seemed to hang behind my eyes as opaquely as the blue curtain that screened the street beyond the safe. The dizziness left and I managed to stand, holding onto my brief case, pressing a handkerchief to my head. Up the street there sounded the crashing of huge sheets of glass and through the blue mysteriousness of the dark the walks shimmered like shattered mirrors. All the street’s signs were dead, all the day sounds had lost their stable meaning. Somewhere a burglar alarm went off, a meaningless blangy sound, followed by the joyful shouts of looters.

“Come on,” someone called nearby.

“Let’s go, buddy,” the man who had helped me said. He took my arm, a thin man who carried a large cloth bag slung over his shoulder.

“The shape you in wouldn’t do to leave you round here,” he said. “You act like you drunk.”

“Go where?” I said.

“Where? Hell, man. Everywhere. We git to moving, no telling where we might go—Hey, Dupre!” he called.

“Say, man—Goddam! Don’t be calling my name so loud,” a voice answered. “Here, I am over here, gitting me some work shirts.”

“Git some for me, Du,” he said.

“All right, but don’t think I’m your papa,” the answer came.

I looked at the thin man, feeling a surge of friendship. He didn’t know me, his help was disinterested …

“Hey, Du,” he called, “we go’n do it?”

“Hell yes, soon as I git me these shirts.”

The crowd was working in and out of the stores like ants around spilled sugar. From time to time there came the crash of glass, shots; fire trucks in distant streets.

“How you feel?” the man said.

“Still fuzzy,” I said, “and weak.”

“Le’s see if it’s stopped bleeding. Yeah, you’ll be all right.”

I saw him vaguely though his voice came clear.

“Sure,” I said.

“Man, you lucky you ain’t dead. These sonsabitches is really shooting now,” he said. “Over on Lenox they was aiming up in the air. If I could find me a rifle, I’d show ’em! Here, take you a drink of this good Scotch,” he said, taking a quart bottle from a hip pocket. “I got me a whole case stashed what I got from a liquor store over there. Over there all you got to do is breathe, and you drunk, man. Drunk! Hundred proof bonded whiskey flowing all in the gutters.”

I took a drink, shuddering as the whiskey went down but thankful for the shock it gave me. There was a bursting, tearing movement of people around me, dark figures in a blue glow.

“Look at them take it away,” he said, looking into the dark action of the crowd. “Me, I’m tired. Was you over on Lenox?”

“No,” I said, seeing a woman moving slowly past with a row of about a dozen dressed chickens suspended by their necks from the handle of a new straw broom …

“Hell, you ought to see it, man. Everything is tore up. By now the womens is picking it clean. I saw one ole woman with a whole side of a cow on her back. Man, she was ’bout bent bowlegged trying to make it home—Here come Dupre now,” he said, breaking off.

I saw a little hard man come out of the crowd carrying several boxes. He wore three hats upon his head, and several pairs of suspenders flopped about his shoulders, and now as he came toward us I saw that he wore a pair of gleaming new rubber hip boots. His pockets bulged and over his shoulder he carried a cloth sack that swung heavily behind him.

“Damn, Dupre,” my friend said, pointing to his head, “you got one of them for me? What kind is they?”

Dupre stopped and looked at him. “With all them hats in there and I’m going to come out with anything but a
Dobbs?
Man, are you
mad?
All them new, pretty-colored
Dobbs?
Come on, let’s get going before the cops git back. Damn, look at that thing blaze!”

I looked toward the curtain of blue fire, through which vague figures toiled. Dupre called out and several men left the crowd and joined us in the street. We moved off, my friend (Scofield, the others called him) leading me along. My head throbbed, still bled.

“Look like you got you some loot too,” he said, pointing to my brief case.

“Not much,” I said, thinking, loot?
Loot?
And suddenly I knew why it was heavy, remembering Mary’s broken bank and the coins; and now I found myself opening the brief case and dropping all my papers—my Brotherhood identification, the anonymous letter, along with Clifton’s doll—into it.

“Fill it up, man. Don’t you be bashful. You wait till we tackle one of these pawnshops. That Du’s got him a cotton-picking sack fulla stuff.
He
could go into business.”

“Well, I’ll be damn,” a man on the other side of me said. “I
thought
that was a cotton sack. Where’d he get that thing?”

“He brought it with him when he come North,” Scofield said. “Du swears that when he goes back he’ll have it full of ten-dollar bills. Hell, after tonight he’ll need him a warehouse for all the stuff he’s got. You fill that brief case, buddy. Get yourself something!”

“No,” I said, “I’ve enough in it already.” And now I remembered very clearly where I’d started out for but could not leave them.

“Maybe you right,” Scofield said. “How I know, you might have it full of diamonds or something. A man oughtn’t to be greedy. Though it’s time something like this happened.”

We moved along. Should I leave, get on to the district? Where were they, at the birthday celebration?

“How did all this get started?” I said.

Scofield seemed surprised. “Damn if I know, man. A cop shot a woman or something.”

Another man moved close to us as somewhere a piece of heavy steel rang down.

“Hell, that wasn’t what started it,” he said. “It was that fellow, what’s his name … ?”

“Who?” I said. “What’s his name?”

“That young guy!”

“You know, everybody’s mad about it …”

Clifton, I thought. It’s for Clifton. A night for Clifton.

“Aw man, don’t tell me,” Scofield said. “Didn’t I see it with my own eyes? About eight o’clock down on Lenox and 123rd this paddy slapped a kid for grabbing a Baby Ruth and the kid’s mama took it up and then the paddy slapped her and that’s when hell broke loose.”

“You were there?” I said.

“Same’s I’m here. Some fellow said the kid made the paddy mad by grabbing a candy named after a white woman.”

“Damn if that’s the way I heard it,” another man said. “When I come up they said a white woman set it off by trying to take a black gal’s man.”

“Damn
who
started it,” Dupre said. “All I want is for it to last a while.”

“It was a white gal, all right, but that wasn’t the way it was. She was drunk—” another voice said.

But it couldn’t have been Sybil, I thought; it had already started.

“You wahn know who started it?” a man holding a pair of binoculars called from the window of a pawnshop. “You wahn really to know?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Well, you don’t need to go no further. It was started by that great leader, Ras the Destroyer!”

“That monkey-chaser?” someone said.

“Listen, bahstard!”

“Don’t nobody know how it started,” Dupre said.

“Somebody has to know,” I said.

Scofield held his whiskey toward me. I refused it.

“Hell, man, it just exploded. These is dog days,” he said.

“Dog
days?”

“Sho, this hot weather.”

“I tell you they mad over what happen to that young fellow, what’s-his-name …”

We were passing a building now and I heard a voice calling frantically, “Colored store! Colored store!”

“Then put up a sign, motherfouler,” a voice said. “You probably rotten as the others.”

“Listen at the bastard. For one time in his life he’s glad to be colored,” Scofield said.

“Colored store,” the voice went on automatically.

“Hey! You sho you ain’t got some white blood?”

“No,
sir!”
the voice said.

“Should I bust him, man?”

“For what? He ain’t got a damn thing. Let the mother-fouler alone.”

A few doors away we came to a hardware store. “This is the first stop, men,” Dupre said.

“What happens now?” I said.

“Who you?” he said, cocking his thrice-hatted head.

“Nobody, just one of the boys—” I began.

“You sho you ain’t somebody I know?”

“I’m pretty sure,” I said.

“He’s all right, Du,” said Scofield. “Them cops shot him.”

Dupre looked at me and kicked something—a pound of butter, sending it smearing across the hot street. “We fixing to do something what needs to be done,” he said. “First we gets a flashlight for everybody … And let’s have some organization, y’all. Don’t everybody be running over everybody else. Come on!”

“Come on in, buddy,” Scofield said.

I felt no need to lead or leave them; was glad to follow; was gripped by a need to see where and to what they would lead. And all the time the thought that I should go to the district was with me. We went inside the store, into the dark glinting with metal. They moved carefully, and I could hear them searching, sweeping objects to the floor. The cash register rang.

“Here some flashlights over here,” someone called.

“How many?” Dupre said.

“Plenty, man.”

“Okay, pass out one to everybody. They got batteries?”

“Naw, but there’s plenty them too, ’bout a dozen boxes.”

“Okay, give me one with batteries so I can find the buckets. Then every man get him a light.”

“Here some buckets over here,” Scofield said.

“Then all we got to find is where he keeps the oil.”

“Oil?” I said.

“Coal
oil, man. And hey, y’all,” he called, “don’t nobody be smoking in here.”

I stood beside Scofield listening to the noise as he took a stack of zinc buckets and passed them out. Now the store leaped alive with flashing lights and flickering shadows.

“Keep them lights down on the floor,” Dupre called. “No use letting folks see who we are. Now when you get your buckets line up and let me fill ’em.”

“Listen to ole Du lay it down—he’s a bitch, ain’t he, buddy? He always liked to lead things. And always leading me into trouble.”

“What are we getting ready to do?” I said.

“You’ll see,” Dupre said. “Hey, you over there. Come on from behind that counter and take this bucket. Don’t you see ain’t nothing in that cash register, that if it was I’d have it myself?”

Suddenly the banging of buckets ceased. We moved into the back room. By the light of a flash I could see a row of fuel drums mounted on racks. Dupre stood before them in his new hip boots and filled each bucket with oil. We moved in slow order. Our buckets filled, we filed out into the street. I stood there in the dark feeling a rising excitement as their voices played around me. What was the meaning of it all? What should I think of it,
do
about it?

“With this stuff,” Dupre said, “we better walk in the middle of the street. It’s just down around the corner.”