Maria kicked him off of the bed and scrambled to her feet and stood there shaking. She still had on those tight-ass Levi’s cutoffs that would take industrial scissors to remove.
“He was too drunk to get them off,” Maria said.
“How is he?” Hope asked, unable to look at Manny twisted up in purple sheets.
Maria bent down next to him for a long moment, then straightened up. “He’s breathing.”
Hope sighed, “I guess that’s good.”
“Yeah, I think so.”
Now that she knew he was alive, she squatted next to him and fished keys out of his pants that were crumpled around his ankles.
“What now?” Maria asked.
Hope stood up with Manny’s wallet in hand and shrugged. “Visit my aunt. Figure it out.”
Maria nodded.
Chauncey started to cry.
Hope hurried into the bathroom and lifted him from the tub into her arms. “We’ll figure it out,” she said, as they ran for the hulking SUV outside of the motel room.
The Golden Coffin
by Emory Holmes II
Dunbar Hotel
1
September 24, 1935. Riverfront Substation, LAPD
I heard crowds outside the window. Every now and again, a shout would break out far off, down the way — and closer, in the hall outside. The colored folks that got rounded up with me was getting pushed around. Sound like they was pushing back, fighting, banging the walls.
The cop that arrested me would sometimes stare out the window. Like he was expectin’ to see another colored girl pulled out the river, dead. Wasn’t but one light turned on in the room and the room was dusk dark except for where I was sitting. His boots was so heavy, even when he was behind me I could follow him. And every time he came into view, clomping past, light came in the window, and I could make out the scars and wrinkles in his face.
There was a knock at the door. The cop went over. Laid his ear against it. Like he could tell who was knocking just from the sound. He cracked the door, “Whatd’ya want, officer?” he said.
A lady cop answered, “Detective Hanniday, the chief wants to know when you’ll be finished with the colored boy. The niggers are rioting. He needs to see you, pronto.”
“Tell the boss I’m ’bout done,” Detective Hanniday said.
He closed the door and, before I could track him, snuck up beside me. Bent close. “You kill that girl?” he said.
My throat clinched. “Naw, naw,” I finally told him.
“I ain’t got devilment enough to torment a fly. I was hiding near the river with some Oklahoma white boys and some Mexicans we fell in with when we jumped off the train. We was looking for something to eat. Some fellers from the camp tore past us shouting that a white girl been kilt. Colored boys did it, they said, and the cops was coming to kill us all. I took off. Tripped. On a stump I thought. In a slippery place, up from the water. I looked ’round. Seen that poor girl tangled in the weeds. She was a goner. Dent in her head. Blood ’round her neck. Dress pulled up. Her bloomers was gone. I like to died, seeing that.”
“And?” Detective Hanniday said.
“Cops drove up. One stepped out a long black Packard. His lights shined right on me. He was big as a mansion. Two guns on his hips.”
“Chief Hopalong,” Detective Hanniday said, talking to hisself. He walked to a picture on the wall. Pointed to a fat man — the one in the Packard.
“That him?” Detective Hanniday said.
I nodded.
“You’ve met our remarkable chief of police,” Detective Hanniday said. “Shirley ‘Buster’ Hemingway.” He looked back at me. “Then what?”
“The cop doors flew open. Dogs jumped out. The chief blew a whistle. Sicced ’em on us. They tore acrost the riverbank. Two ran up on me. They was biting the little girl too. Some cops pulled ’em off.”
The memory of the dead girl raised the hurt and scaredness I was trying to forget. Detective Hanniday had took off my handcuffs. I was grateful for that. My wrists was still stinging. I tried to mash the hurt down. Didn’t work. I touched my legs where the dead girl touched them. The blood was drying quick and hard.
“Go on,” Detective Hanniday said.
“‘Round up them niggers,’ Chief Hopalong said. And they did too, but not just coloreds. They beat on anybody they fount. That’s when Chief Hopalong came over and started to whup me. Accusing me of killing the white girl. He was whupping me good and proper, till a colored cop came over and stared at the dead girl. ‘This ain’t no white girl, Chief,’ the colored cop said. ‘She just a yella gal.’
“‘A yella gal?’ Chief Hopalong said. ‘We wasting all this time tending to a nigger?’
“He stomped back to his car, getting madder and madder just from saying that. That’s when he called you over. Remember?”
The detective didn’t say nothing. Staring out the window, smoking his cigarette, studying nothin’ but his own thoughts. Then he said, “Yeah, I remember, kid. I’m the resident nigger-lover ’round here. Pride of the LAPD.”
He kept quiet a spell, then looked at my naked feets. “Damn, boy, you got the biggest feet I ever saw on a child. How tall are you?”
“Five something,” I said.
“Five something? What was your name again?” the cop said.
“Theus,” I told him, like before.
“How old are you?”
“’Bout fourteen or fifteen, I ’spect.”
“And you say you came in last night with that gang of Okies camped on the river?”
“Nawsuh, I came in with some new Okies. And I didn’t meet up with them till I left out from home...”
“Home? Where’s home?”
“Jardin,” I told him. “Jardin, Mississippi.”
“Where are your folks?”
“My pa got kilt sassing a white lady back in ’29. Then ma got the nervous sickness. My big sister Paradise caught it too.”
“So, why here? This is a white man’s town. Why not run to Chicago or Detroit? Your people seem to be getting on there.”
“I’m huntin’ my Uncle Balthazar. ’Fore Ma quit talking right, she showed me his picture and said he a big pooh-bah in one of the colored hotels downtown. Figure if I throws in with him, I might can make it.”
“What hotel?”
“Can’t remember. It start with a D or a G.”
“You mean the Dunbar?”
“Yeah, that’s it. Dunbar. Ma said everybody that stays there’s rich. Pullman porters, movie stars. If I throws in with my Uncle Balthazar, I figure I can get somethin’ to eat. Get rich too, by and by. That’s why I had to come here.”
Detective Hanniday thought on that a minute then pressed a buzzer on his desk. A colored cop, Officer Kimbrow, came in. “Unlock the charity bin and find this boy some clothes. Forget shoes, he’ll have to get those clodhoppers shod elsewhere. Once he’s decent, drop him off at the Dunbar.”
2
We drove up from the river through some mean-looking streets. Officer Kimbrow didn’t say nothing. Then he looked at my feets. “Damn, son, those is some gigantic feets!”
Seem like he couldn’t decide when to look at the road and when to stare at my feets. It tickled him and he told me when he was ’round my age he had big feets too. “Nature evens it all out quite nicely as you grow.”