All Shot Up_ The Classic Crime Thriller - Chester Himes [40]
Coffin Ed went back into the table. The legs splintered, and he crashed to the floor.
Roman landed on the flat of his shoulders and the palms of his hands while his feet were still in the air.
Grave Digger came up on his left hand, his left foot jackknifed beneath him, and tapped Roman across the top of the head with his pistol butt. But his flopping overcoat impeded the blow, and Roman gave no sign that he felt it. He doubled his feet beneath him and came up straight, like an acrobat, turning at the instant he touched floor.
Grave Digger backhanded with the same motion that tapped Roman on the head and hit his right knee cap. Roman went down on one side, like the pier of a house giving way. Coffin Ed staggered in and kicked him solidly in the left calf.
Sassafras’s hair stood out like quills of a porcupine and her eyes were glazed, but the screaming kept on.
Roman fell into Grave Digger and clutched him by the leg, and, when Coffin Ed jumped forward to kick him away, he clutched his leg.
He got to his feet, holding each big man by a leg, and banged their heads into the ceiling beams.
“Run, Sassy, run!” he shouted. “This ain’t no time for a fit.”
She stopped screaming as suddenly as she had started. She jumped to her feet and started toward the door.
Grave Digger and Coffin Ed began raining pistol blows on Roman’s head.
He sank to his knees but held onto their legs.
“Run, Sassy!” he gasped.
But she stopped at the doorway to run back and snatch up her new fur coat.
Grave Digger grabbed at her but missed.
“Turn loose, tough mouth!” Coffin Ed grated as he kept pounding Roman on the head.
But Roman held on long enough for Sassafras to scamper down the stairs like a frightened alley cat. Then he relaxed his grip; he grinned foolishly and murmured, “Solid bone...” He fell forward and rolled over.
Coffin Ed leaped toward the doorway, but Grave Digger called to him, lisping painfully, “Let her go. Let her go. He earned it.”
Chapter 13.
It was eleven o’clock Sunday morning, and the good colored people of Harlem were on their way to church.
It was a gloomy, overcast day, miserable enough to make the most hardened sinner think twice about the hot, sunshiny streets of heaven before turning over and going back to sleep.
Grave Digger and Coffin Ed looked them over indifferently as they drove toward Harlem hospital. A typical Sunday morning sight, come sun or come rain.
Old white-haired sisters bundled up like bales of cotton against the bitter cold; their equally white-haired men, stumbling along in oversize galoshes like the last herd of Uncle Toms, toddling the last mile toward salvation on half-frozen feet.
Middle-aged couples and their broods, products of the postwar generation, the prosperous generation, looking sanctimonious in their good warm clothes, going to praise the Lord for the white folks’ blessings.
Young men who hadn’t yet made it, dressed in lightweight suits and topcoats sold by color instead of quality or weight in the credit stores, with enough brown wrapping paper underneath their pastel shirts to keep them warm, laughing at the strange words of God and making like Solomon at the pretty brownskin girls.
Young women who were sure as hell going to make it or drop dead in the attempt, ashy with cold, clad in the unbelievable colors of cheap American dyes, some at that very moment catching the pneumonia which would take them before that God they were on their way to worship.
From all over town they came.
To all over town they went.
The big churches and little churches, stone churches and store-front churches, to their own built churches and to hand-me-down churches.
To Baptist churches and African Methodist Episcopal churches and African Methodist Episcopal Zionist churches; to Holy Roller churches and Father Divine churches and Daddy Grace churches, Burning Bush churches, and churches of God and Christ.
To listen to their preachers preach the word of God: fat black preachers and tall