“You don’t want to check it nowhere. Man, what’s the matter with you?”
“If you don’t want to check it I’ll go see the man,” Jackson threatened.
The man was the white baggage-master.
The porter didn’t want any trouble with the man.
“You means you want to check it,” he said, giving in grudgingly. “Why didn’t you say you just wanted to check it instead of coming in here talking ’bout going to Chicago?”
He snatched up a hand truck as though he’d take it and beat Jackson’s brains out with it.
“Where’s it at?”
“Outside.”
The porter wheeled the hand truck onto the sidewalk and looked up and down the street.
“I don’t see no trunk.”
“It’s in the hearse there.”
He looked through the windows of the hearse and saw the trunk on the coffin rack.
“What you doing carrying a trunk around in a hearse for?” he asked suspiciously.
“We use it to carry everything.”
“Well, get it out then,” the porter said, still suspicious. “I ain’t checking no trunk in no hearse where dead folks has been.”
“Aw, man, Lord in heaven. Don’t be so evil. The trunk’s heavy. Ain’t you going to help me lift it down?”
“I don’t get paid for unloading no trunks from no hearses. I checks ’em when they is on the street.”
“I’ll help you git it out,” a colored loiterer offered.
Jackson and the loiterer walked to the back of the hearse. The porter followed. Two white taxi drivers, taking a break, looked on curiously. From down the sidewalk a white cop eyed the group absently.
Big Fats came shuffling back down the street just as Jackson swung open the double doors of the hearse.
“Watch out!” he shouted. “Can’t trust no fat man!”
Jackson, the porter, and the third colored man stepped back from the hearse in unison as though they had suddenly looked upon the naked face of the devil.
Big Fats shuffled closer, looked over Jackson’s shoulder. The locomotive stopped dead on the tracks.
All four black men had turned putty-gray.
“Great Gawdamighty!” Big Fats shouted. “Look at that!”
Underneath the trunk black cloth was piled high. Artificial flowers were scattered about in garish disarray. A horseshoe wreath of artificial lilies had slipped to the back. Looking out from the arch of white lilies was a black face. The face was looking backward from a head-down position. resting on the back of the skull. A white bonnet sat atop a gray wig which had fallen askew. The face wore a horrible grimace of pure evil. White-walled eyes stared at the four gray men with a fixed, unblinking stare. Beneath the face was the huge purple-lipped wound of a cut throat.
Jackson felt his scalp ripple as he recognized the face of his brother Goldy. His mouth came half open and caught. His eyes stretched until he felt as though the eyeballs were hanging from the sockets. His jaws began to ache. A warm wet stream flowed suddenly down his pants leg.
“That’s a dead body, ain’t it?” the porter said in a cracked voice, as though his suspicions had suddenly come true. His own eyes were as white-walled and fixed as the eyes of the corpse.
“Where?” Jackson said.
His brain had gone numb with panic and fear. His whole fat body began to shake as though he had the ague.
“Where?” the porter shrilled in a high whining voice that sounded like a file scraping across a saw. “Right there, that’s where!”
The third colored man was still backing up the street.
“Cut sidewise to the bone,” Big Fats said in a hushed, awed voice.
The taxi drivers sauntered over and looked down at the gory black head.
“Jesus Christ!” one exclaimed.
“It’s a wig,” the other one said
“What is?”
“See, there’s short hair underneath. By God, it’s a man.”
The uniformed cop approached slowly like a forerunner of doom, nonchalantly twirling his white nightstick. He looked down into the hearse with the air of a man who had been washed with all waters. The next instant he drew back in pallid shock and sucked in his breath. This was the water he’d never seen.
“How did this get there? Who did this? Whose hearse is this?” he asked stupidly, trying to collect his wits and looking quickly about for help.
He caught the eye of one of the plainclothes detectives at the waiting-room entrance and beckoned to him.
The third colored man had kept backing up Park Avenue toward the dark until he considered it safe to turn around. Now he was running up the dark street as fast as his feet would carry him.
Big Fats had turned cold sober and was trying to inch away too when the cop said sharply, “Don’t anybody leave here.”
“I ain’t leaving,” Big Fats denied. “Just stretching my feet a little.”
The white taxicab drivers backed away and stood shoulder to shoulder against the baggage-room wall.
The white plainclothes detective pushed the porter aside, saying, “What’s this?”
He took a look into the hearse, turned pale. “What the hell is this?”
“A body,” the cop said.
“Who’s the driver?”
“Me, boss,” Jackson quavered.
The harness cop blew out his breath in a sighing sound, glad to let the plainclothes detective take over. A crowd had begun to gather and he was glad to find something he could do.
“Get back!” he ordered. “Stand back!”
The detective took out his notebook and pencil.
“What’s your name?” he asked Jackson.
“Jackson.”
“Who’s your boss?”
“Mr. H. Exodus Clay, on 134th Street.”
“Where’d you pick up this corpse?”
“I don’t know, boss. It was in there when I got in. I swear ’fore God.”
The detective suddenly stopped writing and stared at Jackson incredulously.
Everyone stared at him.
“He say he done found a stiff and don’t know where it come from,” someone in the crowd exclaimed.
Jackson was trembling so that his teeth were chattering like ratchets. He wasn’t scared now of losing his woman or losing her gold ore. He wasn’t thinking about his woman or her gold. He was thinking only of his brother lying there in death with his throat cut. This was the instinctive fear of the violently dead. Fear of the dead themselves. He hadn’t started yet thinking about what was going to happen to him. But the detective’s next question made him think about it.
“Do you mean to say you didn’t know this corpse was in the hearse when you took it out?”
“No sir. I swear ’fore God.”
The colored detective came up at that moment and said casually, “What’s the beef about?”
A patrol car turned in from 125th Street, driving on the wrong side, plowed a path through the crowd that was spreading across the street.
“He’s got a corpse in there and he says he doesn’t know how it got there,” the white detective replied.
“Couldn’t have walked, that’s for sure,” the colored detective said, pushing between Jackson and the porter to look at the corpse.
“I’ll be a mother-for-you!” he exclaimed, half choking, more repulsed by sight of the cut throat than shocked.
Then he looked more closely.
“That’s Sister Gabriel. And that son of a bitch was a man all this time!”
The white detective continued to question Jackson as though he were uninterested in the corpse’s sex.
“How did it happen that you took the hearse out without knowing there was a corpse in it?”
“Boss told me to bring this trunk to the station and check it.” He talked in gasps, scarcely able to breathe. “Swear ’fore God. I just brought the trunk down like he told me to do and put it there on the rack and drove on here to the station, like he told me to. Lord be my judge.”