“Wait,” the cashier said.
He turned and looked at her. Two men and a woman were drinking coffee at a nearby table. The woman looked at him, then stared.
“Jesus, will you look at that,” the woman said.
“What is it?” he said to the cashier.
A large man wearing a dirty white shirt came from the back of the restaurant, walking fast, saying, “What is this? What is this?”
He looked at the man.
“Get out of here,” the man said.
He couldn’t think for a minute. Then he realized what it was. He’d made a mistake. He turned toward the door, but the man had caught up with him, saying it low and harsh into his ear.
“You lousy black! What the hell you reckon you’re doing, coming in here?”
“I was just—”
“Sure!” the man said, shoving him through the door. “You cockeyed black-faced bastard!”
The man followed him through the door. He turned and looked at the man. The man shook with rage and began to curse until he was out of breath. Chandler kept watching the man, the fat jiggling jowls, and the man stepped up close, still cursing, gasping for breath, his eyes popping a little.
Chandler turned away and started back down the street.
He recrossed the tracks, keeping his mind shut tight up.
He started along the empty street, walking more slowly now. Suddenly, up there a white man ran from an alley. He came running by, panting and staggering and grinning and, as he passed Chandler, Chandler smelled gin trailing on the air.
He walked on down toward the alley.
Three men were coming up the street, about a block away, and two cars went by, tires hissing. A window rattled up across the street.
He reached the alley and started past the entrance, looking in there. He saw a girl and half paused. She didn’t see him. She was struggling, trying to put on a red dress, but she was drunk and couldn’t keep her balance. She reeled around, trying to pull the dress on over her head. Then she laughed to herself, and tried stepping into the dress. She didn’t see Chandler at first. She was naked, except for rolled stockings with a hole in one knee, her full white body stark against the alley dirt, the charred walls. She was standing on a broken cardboard box that was spread like a pallet on the alley floor. A stack of boxes in front of the cardboard half-hid the little nook from view.
He started moving on. This was no place to be.
She saw him. She lifted her eyes and chuckled and let the dress fall away onto the ground. Her long blonde hair swung across her face. Her lipstick was smeared down on her chin.
“Hello, black boy,” she said softly. She took a step toward him, staggered back and leaned against the wall. She moved her body for him. “Wait,” she said. “Come here, black boy. Come and fix me. You want some? Huh?”
He turned away, going on down the street.
“Come on, black boy. Don’t be bashful.”
He continued walking and passed the three men he’d seen coming along before.
A woman screamed. Chandler stopped and turned and looked back there. The woman was at the alley entrance, on her hands and knees, with the red dress trailing from one ankle. She sprawled out on the sidewalk, then sat up and got on her knees and began crawling again.
Chandler looked at her, thinking about the restaurant, and he wondered how he could have been so dumb as to forget? Forgetting a simple thing like that! He was home! And he kept looking back there at the girl with a kind of numbness, standing perfectly still.
The three men began running toward the girl.
“Help,” she called. “Help me, for God’s sake!”
As she crawled on hands and knees, one knee left a spongy pattern of blood on the cement. Her breasts slung loose and large under her arms. Her blonde hair straggled down over her wailing face.
“It was him!” she yelled. “Get him!”
She fell on her back and lay there writhing and screaming it into the morning, yelling it at the open blue sky, and windows rattled up on both sides of the street. She kept banging her head back against the sidewalk. A car horn began to blat. The three men bent over her, staring.
“Help!” she yelled.
One of the men pointed back at Chandler.
“Yes!” she yelled. “Him. That black!”
Two of the men turned and started to run at Chandler and he heard the sound of tires shrieking on the street and the soft moan of a tripped siren.
“I called the cops, you black bastard!” a man yelled from across the street in an open window directly opposite the alley. “I seen you! I called the cops!”
She rolled on the sidewalk, rolling back and forth, slamming her naked white body against the cement. She lay still on her back and wailed it.
“That black boy!”
Chandler turned and ran. The two men were very close to him. He kept calling back over his shoulder, running as fast as he could, “No. It’s a mistake. I didn’t do it. She’s drunk. Can’t you see?”
He heard the wild gunning of a car’s engine. He turned into the first alley at hand and ran down that. At the far entrance, he looked back. The two men were in front of the car. It was a police car, for Jesus Christ, and they had got in its way. They stopped running and the police car stopped and they began talking, waving their arms.
He turned and ran again. He ran across the street and down the other side, and up another alley. He got out of that alley, and turned straight up the street. Then he saw this was the wrong way. That was the way toward the center of town. He turned back the other way. He crossed the street, feet pounding, running with the panic inside him, his lungs burning.
Why had he stopped to look? Why hadn’t he stayed home?
Why had he forgotten all the things?
He turned into another alley, completely out of breath and dodged and huddled by a cellar door, hunkered down. He began to tremble, then shake all over. His head, his legs, his arms. He looked at his hands, trying to get his breath, gasping, watching the way his hands shook with a kind of detached wonder.
They shouldn’t do this. He was studying to be a doctor. He was going to college. He was just home visiting for a week, and he’d forgotten certain things.
He hunkered shaking by the cellar door.
His mind was already taken up with a certainty.
That girl. For spite, she’d done that. Or was it because she’d been ashamed to be seen naked and like she was by three white men? What reason was there? No reason. What if he’d gone in there with her?
He clamped his eyes shut, fighting a kind of craziness that seeped up into him.
He thought of his school, but it wouldn’t hold in his mind.
Only this. The great big booming now.
He didn’t want to be afraid. But he was. And he knew he had to get away from this section of town. He got up and staggered and ran again. Maybe he could get home and get his clothes and take a train out. A plane. Go back where he belonged.
Where did he belong?
He made himself run hard, out and across the street and into another alley. He saw the gray police car coming down the street. Somebody yelled at him. He saw still another car pass the police car, careening.
Halfway down the alley, he turned wildly and looked back there. A car slammed into the alley, engine roaring.
He stood there, watching it.
It wasn’t the police. Everybody was after him; they all believed that girl, because they wanted to. The whole world believed her. Then he saw the police car enter the alley behind the other car.
He turned and ran. He couldn’t run very fast now.
The car speeded up and smashed into him from behind, crushing his back and he screamed and went down, whipped. The car passed over him and brakes squealed as it stopped a few yards beyond.