“You know something?” Boysie said. “You said fucking fifteen times just to tell me this story.”
“That’s my fucking business, you motherfucker!”
“Sixteen and a half times, now!”
“Ffff-fuck off!”
Boysie was going to say seventeen times but he thought better of it.
Henry said it happened all the time. Henry knew. Many more people knew about it, but they kept quiet, because they were not involved. And there was another fellow, a sailor in the Canadian navy. This man came down the stairs from his wedding party, the same night he got married; and the cops took him in for “being drunk” and “causing a disturbance.” And the licks again, it was licks again in that poor sailor’s backside, Henry said. “The cops in this place is criminals, savages, they’re worse than the fucking Nazzis, but godblindthem! let one of them touch me!” He had forgotten, in his anger, that he had already been touched, and not by one, but by two. As they were drinking in Henry’s room, with Henry lying on the bed, he said, “You want to know something? I feel like getting up outta this bed right now, and walking down Yonge Street and smashing every goddamn store window down there. Then, I’m heading for Queen’s Park, and I killing every blasted politician there. And when I finish doing that, I have my gun, and be-Jesus Christ, I am killing every fucking cop that pass, and …”
“One more!” Boysie said, counting and chuckling.
“That is the way I feel. Goddamn! No goddamn cop should hit a man. No fucking police should ever put his hands on a man. And when he hit a black man, godblindme! he should be killed instantly. Killed. Right on the fucking spot!”
“You’s a cruel bitch, Henry.”
“Cruel? You ain’ see me cruel, yet. All the time you see me laying-down here, drinking this rum, well this rum’s putting a blasted demon in my brains, and it telling me things, more cruel than the things I just say to you, things that I tell myself I intend to do. You think I making fun? You think I’m not serious? Well, wait. Wait, Boysie. You will see, you will be reading all about me in the fucking papers, godblindthem! one o’ these days. And on that day, they won’t forget to print me, this time.”
“You’re cruel as arse.”
“Have you ever heard about the Mafias? Well, since two or three days ago, I joined the Mafias. You can never know when a Mafia kill somebody. You never know that. It does be too clean a killing. Not until you read about it in the papers, the next year, and sometimes you never read about it at all. Boysie, there’s a lot o’ crime in this fucking city, and a lot o’ murders that nobody don’t know nothing about. And you telling me, godblindyou, Boysie, because you are talking like a fucking white man now … you’re telling me that it isn’t time for a black man to get some fun from killing people? Wait, you mean we so inferior? Everybody does it. Every day a white man does kill another white man and get away with it. And be-Christ, they never stopped killing black people. And nobody ever ask them about that corpse. Well, I am joining in that fun now. I’s a black Mafias!”
“Gorblummuh, you’s a black murderer.”
“Man, how the hell you expect me to feel? You think I could take this lying down?”
“I expect you to feel bad, that is the truth. But you must realize that you bring it on yourself. You know, you are so damn cruel and hateful that you forget to admit even to me and not counting-in Dots now (because we is mens and there is certain things a man can’t even express to his wife or his woman), but between men everything is usually in the open. And as I was saying, you haven’t even admit to me that there was two police who put them blows in your behind.”
“Two? Who tell you there was two, when I say there was three?”
“Bernice said two.”
“How the hell would Bernice know? Anyway, Bernice is nothing but a bitch.”
“Bernice admit to Dots
