right. I thought about the guy whose knee I had taken out for the lack of payment to the Headmaster. I didn’t really care about him. He was in bed with the skunks, so he got stink all over himself before I did anything to him. He had it coming. Maybe he didn’t have it coming from me, not really, but he had it coming, and I didn’t feel all the bad about him. I didn’t feel bad about any of the gang. I just wished I had killed them all.
I read the address in the wallet again. I knew where that was. I started walking.
· · ·
I STUCK THE AUTOMATIC under my shirt and went along the back streets as much as possible. When I got on a main street, people began to pull back from me, seeing all the blood, way my face looked. I saw it myself, reflected in a store window. I looked like a ghost who had seen a ghost. The shock was wearing off. I was really starting to hurt.
I probably didn’t have long before the police got me, before people on the street called about this blood covered guy.
I took a turn at the corner, and started walking as fast as I could. I felt as if most of what was left of me was turning to heat and going out the top of my head. I went along until I got to the back alleys, and then I darted in, and I went through them. I remembered these alleys like I had been here yesterday, though it had been a few years. I remembered them well because I had played here. I went down them and along them, and somewhere back behind me I heard sirens, wondered if they were for me.
I finally went down an alley so narrow I had to turn sideways to get down it. It opened up into a fairly well lit street. I got the girl’s wallet out again and looked at the address. I was on the right street, and I memorized the number and put the wallet away and walked along the street until I found the number that fit the one on her little card in the wallet.
There was a series of stone steps that went up to a landing and there was a door there, and above it was the number. I climbed up to the top step, and that was about it. I sat down suddenly and leaned back so that my ass was on the stoop and my legs were hanging off on the top step. I could hardly feel that step. My legs seemed to be coming loose of me and sinking into something like quicksand. I had to take a look at them to make sure they were still attached. When I saw they were, I sort of laughed, because I couldn’t feel them. I pulled myself up more with my hands and put my back at an angle against one of the concrete rails that lined the steps on both sides.
I took out the wallet and I put both my hands over it and put the wallet up against my stomach. I tried to put it some place where blood wouldn’t get on it, but there wasn’t any place. I realized now that the warm wetness I was feeling in the seat of my pants was blood running down from my wounds and into my underwear. I hated they would find me like that.
I sat there and thought about my dad and my brother and I thought about what my sensei had said about you can’t correct what’s done, and if you try, you won’t feel any better. He was right. You can’t correct what’s been done. But I did feel better. I felt bad about the girl though, but I felt good about all those dead fucks being dead. I felt real good.
I felt around in my shirt, and my hand was like a catcher’s mitt trying to pick up a needle. I finally found my ball point and I opened the girl’s wallet, which was bloody, and I pinched out the little card with her address on it, and I wrote the best I could: I’M SORRY. REALLY, I AM.
I laid the wallet on my knee, got out my own wallet. I had three hundred and twenty-five dollars in there. I put the money from my wallet in her wallet, along with her five. I turned and looked at the door. I didn’t know if I could make it. There was a mailbox by the door, a black metal thing, and I wanted to get up and put the wallet in that, but I didn’t know if I could.
I thought about it awhile, and finally I got some kind of strength, and pulled myself up along the concrete railing, and when I got up, it was like my legs and feet came back, and I made it to the mail box, opened it and put her wallet in there with the card I had written on.
Then that was it. I fell down along the wall and lay on my face. I thought about all manner of things. I thought of my brother and my father, but the funny thing was I began to think about my sensei. I was on the mat and I was moving along the mat. And I was practicing in the air. Not traditional kata, because we didn’t do that. But I was practicing, punching, kicking, swinging my elbows, jerking up my knees. It felt good, and I could see my sensei out of the corner of my eye. I couldn’t make out if he was pleased or angry, but I was glad he was there.
The sirens grew louder.
I thought of bullets and fire, and a deep pit full of darkness. I wished I could see the stars.
—
If you enjoyed “Bullets and Fire,” maybe you’ll like
The Big Blow
‘Lil’ Arthur ran down to the Sporting Club that night and stood in front of it, his hands in his pants pockets. The wind was brisk, and the air was just plain sour, like milk that had dried on a rag.
The Sporting Club was a huge building with many windows and great columns that held up a vast expanse of second floor, and all around grew manicured trees, and beyond the trees was a wrought iron fence where each spike of the fence was tipped like a spear head; beyond that there were more scattered trees, then the street and a staggering of glowing gas street lights.
There were no lights on in the building, and the tall windows that ringed the first and second floor were like a row of rectangular mouths, dark and foreboding, hungry, picking up occasional flickers of light from the gas lamps.
Unless he was fighting, unless he was invited and went in the back door at a prescribed time, he could not walk inside The Sporting Club. No niggers were to pass through the same door as the lily whites.
‘Lil’ Arthur closed his eyes and opened them slowly and imagined himself walking through the gate that led up to the club; walking through it and then the door, all dressed out in fine clothes with a bowler hat, and just to make it more amusing, a colored woman on one arm, a white woman on the other. Maybe, just to make things better, he could have one black hand on the white woman’s ass as he went through the door.
Hell, why not a finger up her ass?
‘Lil’ Arthur had heard his ancestors had been sold by their own people into slavery and that they were friends to the white slavers who bought his people.
It was rumored that one of his distant ancestors had been born in a grave in Mississippi. A pregnant colored woman named Ida had died after a Held accident, had been dumped in a ditch near the corn Held about dusk and covered.
A little later that night a muffled cry was heard, like a young panther screaming”.
Somehow, that woman, in death, a rigor spasm perhaps, or maybe she had been barely alive when buried, had given birth to a child and that child was alive and screaming to be noticed.
When Massa sent slaves to see what the wailing was about, they dug up a child, attached by his umbilical cord to his dead mother. They pulled the childout, a boy, a huge boy, cleaned him up, and he lived and was named Hercules by the plantation owner. He was Massa’s boxer, and he beat all comers. All blacks, that was. No white man would fight him.
‘Lil’ Arthur believed he was the descendent of that boy who became a man named Hercules, famous for his strength and his ability to work any man down. He didn’t know it for a fact, but it was the family story and one he wanted to believe.
But Hercules—born of a woman determined even in death to finish bringing him into the world—in spite of his strength, in spite of his pride, never walked through the front door of a white man’s building or fought a white man.
‘Lil’ Arthur was going to be the first of his ancestral line to do that, and this fight, he felt it in his bones, was his ticket of admission through that door, and others.
