He turned right in front of the Majestic, roughed over a brown dandy with two painted crones, drew up at the corner, panting. The green sedan burnt rubber, pulled right through the red light in a whining, driving first.
But too late to keep Black Boy from catching a flash of the pretty, frightened face of Marie and the nervous profile of the driver bent low over the wheel. A yellow nigger. He turned and watched the red tail-light sink into the distant darkness, his body twisting on flatly planted feet. His lower lip went slack, hung down like a red smear on his black face. His bulging eyes turned a vein-laced red. Sweat popped out on his face, putting a sheen on its lumpy blackness, grew in beads on his shiny head, trickled in streams down his body.
He turned and ran for a cab, but his actions were dogged now instead of apprehensive. He’d already seen Marie with that yellow hotel nigger. He caught a cab pointing the right way, said: “Goose it, Speed,” before he swung through the open door.
Speed goosed it. The cab took sudden life, jumped ahead from the shove of eight protesting cylinders. Black Boy leaned tensely forward, let the speedometer needle hit fifty before he spoke. “Dar’s uh green sedan up front, uh fo’ do’ job. Latch on it ’n earn dis dime, big dime.”
The lank, loose-bodied brown boy driving threw him a careless, toothy grin, coiled around the wheel. He headed into the red light at Cedar Avenue doing a crisp seventy, didn’t slacken. He pulled inside the line of waiting cars, smashed into the green while the red still lingered in his eyes. The green turned to red at Carnegie, and the car in front stopped, but he burst the red wide open doing a sheer eighty-five, leaning on the horn.
“Ri’ at Euclid,” Black Boy directed through lips that hung so slack they seemed to be turned wrong side out. He was gambling on those yellow folk seeking the protection of their white folk where they worked, for they had lost the green sedan.
The driver braked for the turn, eyes roving for traffic cops. He didn’t see any and he turned at a slow fifty, not knowing whether the light was red, white or blue. The needle walked right up the street numbers, fifty-seven at 57th Street, seventy-one at 71st. It was hovering on eighty again when Black Boy said: “Turn ’round.”
Marie was just getting out of the green sedan in front of the Regis where she worked as a maid. When she heard that shrill cry of rubber on asphalt she broke into a craven run.
Black Boy hit the pavement in a flat-footed lope, caught her just as she was about to climb the lobby stairs. He never said a word, he just reached around from behind and smacked her in the face with the open palm of his right hand. She drew up short against the blow. Then he hit her under her right breast with a short left jab and chopped three rights into her face when she turned around with the edge of his fist like he was driving nails.
She wilted to her knees and he bumped her in the mouth with his knee, knocking her sprawling on her side. He kicked her in the body three rapid, vicious times, slobber drooling from his slack, red lips. His bloated face was a tar ball in the spill of sign light, his eyes too dull to notice. Somehow his Panama still clung on his eight ball head, whiter than ever, and his red lips were a split, bleeding incision in his black face.
Marie screamed for help. Then she whimpered. Then she begged. “Doan kill me, Black Boy, daddy deah, honey darlin’, daddy-daddy deah. Marie luvs yuh, daddy darlin’. Doan kill me, please, daddy. Doan kill yo’ lil’ honeybunch, Marie …”
The yellow boy, slowly following from the car, paused a moment in indecision as if he would get back in and drive away. But he couldn’t bear seeing Black Boy kick Marie. The growth of emotion was visible in his face before it pushed him forward.
After an instant he realized that that was where he worked as a bellhop, that those white folk would back him up against a strange nigger. He stepped quickly over to Black Boy, spoke in a cultural preëmptory voice: “Stop kicking that woman, you dirty black nigger.”
Black Boy turned his bloated face toward him. His dull eyes explored him, dogged. His voice was flatly telling him: “You keep outta dis, yellow niggah. Dis heah is mah woman an’ Ah doan lak you no way.”
The yellow boy was emboldened by the appearance of two white men in the hotel doorway. He stepped over and slung a weighted blow to Black Boy’s mouth. Black Boy shifted in quick rage, drew a spring-blade barlow chiv and slashed the yellow boy to death before the two white men could run down the stairs. He broke away from their restraining hands, made his way to the alley beside the theater in his shambling, flat-footed run before the police cruiser got there.
He heard Marie’s loud, fear-shrill voice crying: “He pulled a gun on Black Boy, he pulled a gun on Black Boy. Ah saw ’im do it—”
He broke into a laugh, satisfied. She was still his …
Three rapid shots behind him stopped his laugh, shattered his face into black fragments. The cops had begun shooting without calling halt. He knew that they knew he was a “dinge,” and he knew they wanted to kill him, so he stepped into the light behind a Clark’s Restaurant, stopped dead still with upraised hands, not turning around.
The cops took him down to the station and beat his head into an open, bloody wound from his bulging eyes clear around to the base of his skull—“You’d bring your nigger cuttings down on Euclid Avenue, would you, you black—”
They gave him the electric chair for that.
But if it is worrying him, he doesn’t show it during the slow drag of days in death row’s grilled enclosure. He knows that that high yellow gal with the ball-bearing hips is still his, heart, soul and body. All day long, you can hear his loud, crowing voice, kidding the other condemned men, jibing the guards, telling lies. He can tell some tall lies, too—“You know, me ’n Marie wuz in Noo Yawk dat wintah. Ah won leben grands in uh dice game ’n brought her uh sealskin—”
All day long, you can hear his noisy laugh.
Marie comes to see him as often as they let her, brings him fried chicken and hot, red lips; brings him a wide smile and tiny yellow specs in her big, brown, ever-loving eyes. You can hear his assured love-making all over the range, his casual “honeybunch,” his chuckling, contented laugh.
All day long …
It’s at night, when she’s gone and the cells are dark and death row is silent, that you’ll find Black Boy huddled in the corner of his cell, thinking of her, perhaps in some other nigger’s loving arms. Crying softly. Salty tears making glistening streaks down the blending blackness of his face.
PART II
AFTER THE WAR
FIND THE WOMAN
BY ROSS MACDONALD
Beverly Hills
(Originally published in 1946)
I sat in my brand-new office with the odor of paint in my nostrils and waited for something to happen. I had been back on the Boulevard for one day. This was the beginning of the second day. Below the window, flashing in the morning sun, the traffic raced and roared with a noise like battle. It made me nervous. It made me want to move. I was all dressed up in civilian clothes with no place to go and nobody to go with.
Till Millicent Dreen came in.
I had seen her before, on the Strip with various escorts, and knew who she was: publicity director for Tele-Pictures. Mrs. Dreen was over forty and looked it, but there was electricity in her, plugged in to a secret source that time could never wear out. Look how high and tight I carry my body, her movements said. My hair is hennaed but comely, said her coiffure, inviting not to conviction but to suspension of disbelief. Her eyes were green and inconstant like the sea. They said what the hell.