When he went out he bought a stack of newspapers to keep track of developments in the subway accident. He searched for a hotel, the cheaper and more disreputable the better. If there was the slightest doubt about his being dead, he would come forth with a story to square it all; but if all sailed smoothly, he was free.
He came finally to an eight-story hotel with tattered window shades and bare light bulbs burning in the lobby. The hotels in this district were so questionable that they rarely drew a color line. Next door was a liquor store in which he bought a bottle of whiskey. He entered the hotel and a short, fat white woman studied him appraisingly from behind a counter.
“I’m looking for a room,” he said. “A single.”
“For how long?”
“Maybe a week.”
“You got any luggage?”
“No’m. Not with me.”
“Then you have to pay in advance, you know.”
“Oh, yes’m. I can do that. How much is it?”
“One-fifty a night. I’ll put you on the top floor. But no noise in the room, see?”
“I don’t make any noise,” he told her.
“They all say that,” she commented, sliding him a sheet of paper. “Here; fill that out.”
He answered the questions, identifying himself as Charles Webb from Memphis. When he returned the form to her, she pointed to the bottle he had under his arm.
“Look,” she said. “I don’t care what you do in your room, but I don’t want any trouble, see? Some people get drunk and hurt others.”
“Lady, I never really hurt anybody in my life but myself,” he told her before he realized what he was saying.
The woman looked at him sharply; she opened her mouth to reply, but thought better of it. He knew that that had been a foolish thing to say; it was completely out of character. He had to be careful.
“Come on,” the woman said, leading him down a narrow hallway to a skinny Negro with a small, black face who stood in a tiny elevator and eyed Cross sullenly.
“Take this man up to room 89, Buck. Here’s the key,” the woman ordered.
“Yes’m,” Buck sang.
He rode up with Buck who weighed him with his eyes. Cross knew that a bundle of newspapers and a bottle of whiskey were not the normal accoutrements of a Negro migrant from Memphis. He would have to do better than this. Five minutes later he was settled in his garishly papered room which had the white lip of a stained sink jutting out. The floor was bare and dirty. He lay across the lumpy bed and sighed. His limbs ached from fatigue. The hard light of the bare electric bulb swinging from the smoky ceiling stung his eyes; he doubled a piece of newspaper and tied it about the bulb to reduce the glare. He opened the bottle and took a deep swig.
Undoubtedly Gladys had now heard about his being dead. How was she taking it? He was perversely curious to know if she was sorry. And, Good God, his poor old mother! She had always predicted that he would end up badly, but he had presented her with a morally clean way of dying, a way that would induce even in his enemies a feeling of forgiving compassion. And Dot…? She would find out through the newspapers or over the radio. He could almost hear Myrtle telling Dot that she had the worst luck of any girl in the whole round world…He was foolishly toying with the idea of trying to disguise his voice and calling Dot on the telephone when he fell asleep…
Late the next morning, Cross awakened with a pale winter sun falling full into his eyes. He lay without moving, staring dully. Was this his room? Around him was a low murmur of voices and the subdued music of radios coming from other rooms. His body felt weak and he could not quickly orientate himself. He swung his feet to the floor, kicking over the whiskey bottle. For a moment he watched the bubbling liquid flow; then he righted the bottle, corked it, and the action helped to bring back in his mind the events of last night. He had quit, run off; he was dead.
He yearned for just one more glimpse of his mother, his three sons; he hungered for just one last embrace with Dot…But this was crazy. Either he went through with this thing or he did not; it was all or nothing. He was being brought gradually to a comprehension of the force of habit in his and others’ lives. He had to break with others and, in breaking with them, he would break with himself. He must sever all ties of memory and sentimentality, blot out, above all, the insidious tug of longing. Only the future must loom before him so magnetically that it could condition his present and give him those hours and days out of which he could build a new past. Yes, it would help him greatly if he went to New York; other faces and circumstances would be a better setting out of which to forge himself anew. But first he had to make sure that he was dead…
He washed himself and mulled over his situation. When a man had been born and bred with other men, had shared and participated in their traditions, he was not required of himself to conceive the total meaning or direction of his life; broad, basic definitions of his existence were already contained implicitly in the general scope of other men’s hopes and fears; and, by living and acting with them—a living and acting he will have commenced long before he could have been able to give his real consent—,he will have assumed the responsibility for promises and pledges made for him and in his name by others. Now, depending only upon his lonely will, he saw that to map out his life entirely upon his own assumptions was a task that terrified him just to think of it, for he knew that he first had to know what he thought life was, had to know consciously all the multitude of assumptions which other men took for granted, and he did not know them and he knew that he did not know them. The question summed itself up: What’s a man? He had unknowingly set himself a project of no less magnitude than contained in that awful question.
He looked through the newspapers, finding only more extended accounts of what he had heard last night on the radio. For the latest news he would have to buy today’s papers. Yes; and the Negro weekly papers would be upon the newsstands in the Black Belt neighborhoods tonight or in the morning. They would tell the tale; they would carry detailed stories of all Negroes who had been involved in the accident.
He spent the morning shopping for an overcoat and other necessities in a poor West Side working class district where he was certain that he would not encounter any of his acquaintances. He prodded himself to be frugal, for he did not know what the coming days would bring. How would he spend his time? Yes; he would lay in a pile of good books…No. What the hell was he thinking of? Books? What he had before him was of far more interest than any book he would ever buy; it was out of realities such as this that books were made. He was full of excitement as he realized that eventually he would not only have to think and feel this out, but he would have to act and live it out.
The relationship of his consciousness to the world had become subtly altered in a way that nagged him uneasily because he could not define it. His break with the routine of his days had disturbed the tone and pitch of reality. His repudiation of his ties was as though his feelings had been water and those watery feelings had been projected by his desires out upon the surface of the world, like water upon pavements and roofs after a spring rain; and his loyalty to that world, like the sun, had brightened that world and made it glitter with meaning; and now, since last night, since he had broken all of the promises and pledges he had ever made, the water of meaning had begun to drain off the world, had begun to dry up and leave the look of things changed; and now he was seeing an alien and unjustifiable world completely different from him. It was no longer his world; it was just a world…
He bought a tiny radio and went back to his hotel room. He was so spent from yesterday’s exertions that he slept again. In the late afternoon there was a soft tapping upon his door and he awakened in terror. Who was it? Had somebody tracked him down? Ought he answer? He tiptoed to the door in his stockinged feet and stooped and peered through the keyhole. It was a woman; he could see the falling folds of a polka dot dress. The landlady? The knock came again and he saw a tiny patch of white skin as the woman’s hand fell to her side.
She was white…
He made sure that his gun was handy, then scampered back to bed and called out sleepily: “Who is it?”
“May I speak to you a moment?”
It was a woman’s voice. He hesitated, opened the door, and saw a young white girl of about eighteen standing before him.
“Gotta match?” she asked, lifting a cigarette to her mouth and keeping her eyes boldly on his face.
He caught on; she was selling herself. But was she safe? Was she stooling for the police?
“Sure,” he said, taking out his lighter and holding the flame for her.
“You’re new here,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said. “I got in last night.”
“So I heard,” she smiled.
“Seems like news travels pretty fast around here.”
“Pretty fast for those who wanna find out things,” she said.
She had black, curly hair, bluish-grey-green deep-set eyes, was about five feet two in height and seemed to weigh around a hundred and five or six pounds. Her breasts were ample, her legs large but shapely; her lips were full but over-rouged and she reeked of too much cheap perfume.
“Having fun in the city, Big Boy?” She arched her eyebrows as she spoke, then looked past him into the interior of his room.
Ought he bother with her? He wanted to, but his situation was too delicate for him to get mixed up with this fetching little tart. Yet he was suddenly hungry for her; she was woman as body of woman…
“I don’t know anybody around here yet,” he said.
“Are you stingy with that fire water?” she asked, nodding toward his whiskey bottle sitting on the night table.
“Naw,” he laughed, making up his mind.
She entered slowly, glancing at him out of the corner of her eyes as she went past; he followed the movements of her body as she walked to the center of the room and sat, crossing her legs and tossing back her hair and letting her breasts take a more prominent place on her body. He closed the door and placed the bottle between them.
“What do they call you?” he asked, pouring her a drink.
“Jenny,” she said. “You?”
“Charlie, just Good-Time Charlie,” he said, laughing.
He saw her looking appraisingly about the room. “Traveling light, hunh?”
“Just passing through,” he said. “Heading west.”
She sipped her drink, then rose and turned on his radio; dance music came and she stood moving rhythmically. He rose and made dance movements with her, holding her close to him, seeing in his mind the sloping curves of her body.
“Want to spend the afternoon with me?” he asked.
“Why not?”
“Look, baby, seeing this is not the Gold Coast, what do you want?”
“I got to pay my rent,” she said flatly.
“The hell with that,” he told her. “How much do you want? That’s all I asked you.”
“I want five,” she said at last.
“I’ll give you three,” he countered.
“I said five, you piker—”
“I said three, and you can take it or leave it; I don’t want to argue with you.”
“Okay,” she said, shrugging.
“Let’s drink some more.”
“Suits me.”
When the dance music stopped she turned off the radio, pulled down the window shade, and rolled back the covers of the bed. Wordlessly, she began to undress and he wondered what she was thinking of. Clad in nylon panties, she came to him and held out her hand. Her breasts were firm and the nipples were pink.
“I’ll take it now, baby,” she said.
“But why now?” he demanded.
“Listen, I’m selling; you’re buying. Pay now or nothing doing,” she said. “I know how men feel when they get through.”
Cross laughed; he liked her brassy manner. Nobody taught her that; sense of that order was derived only through experience. He handed her three one-dollar bills which she put into the pocket of her dress, looking at him solemnly as she did so. She pulled off her panties and climbed into bed and lay staring vacantly.
“They could paint this damn place,” she said matter-of-factly.
“What?” he asked, surprised, looking vaguely around the room.
“They could paint that ceiling sometime,” she repeated.
Cross studied her, then laughed. “Yes; I guess they could,” he admitted.
“You’re not from Memphis,” she said suddenly.
He whirled and glared at her, a sense of hot danger leaping into his throat. Did she know something or was she merely guessing? Was he that bad an actor? If he had thought that she was spying on him, he would have grabbed the whiskey bottle and whacked her across the head with it and knocked her cold and run…Naw, she’s just fishing, he told himself. But I got to be careful…So shaken were his feelings by sudden dread that he did not want to get into bed with her.
“How do you know?” he asked.
“You don’t talk like it,” she said, puffing at her cigarette.
He relaxed. It was true that his accent was not completely of the Deep South. He drew upon the bottle to stifle his anxiety and when he took her in his arms he did not recall the fear that had scalded him. She responded so mechanically and wearily that only sheer physical hunger kept him with her. The edge gone from his desire, he lay looking at her and wondering how a woman so young could have achieved so ravaged a sense of life. His loneliness was rekindled and he lit a cigarette and grumbled: “You could have at least tried a little.”
“You’re not from Memphis,” she said with finality.
“You’re dodging the point,” he reminded her with anger in his voice. “I said that you could at least pretend when you’re in bed.”
“You think it’s important?” She looked cynically at him. “What do you want for three dollars?”
“You agreed to the price,” he said brusquely.
“Hell, that’s nothing,” she said casually, squinting her eyes against the smoke of her cigarette. “I might’ve done it for nothing. Why didn’t you ask me?”
She was fishing around to know him and he did not want it. He washed and dressed while she still lolled in the nude on his bed, her eyes thoughtful. He should not act now with these girls as he used to; things were changed with him and he had to change too. And she was taking her own goddamn time about leaving. Resentment rose in him as he realized that he had made less impression on her physical feelings than if he had spat into the roaring waters of Niagara Falls…
“Haven’t you got something to do?” he asked her.
“I can take a hint,” she said pleasantly, rolling off the bed and getting into her panties.
“Be seeing you,” she said after she had dressed.
“Not if I see you first.”
“You’ll be glad to see me if you’re in a certain mood,” she said; she touched him under the chin with her finger and left.
He lay on the bed, feeling spiteful toward even the scent of her perfume that lingered on in the room. He rose, opened the window wide, let in a blast of freezing air, and peered over the edge of the sill, his sight plunging downward eight floors to the street where tiny men and women moved like little black beetles in the white snow. I wouldn’t like to fall down there, he thought aimlessly and turned back into the room, closing the window.
He went down for lunch and got the afternoon newspapers. The final list of the dead was over one hundred, making the accident the worst in Chicago’s history. The mayor had appointed a committee to launch an investigation, for the cause of the tragedy was still obscure. The Herald-Examiner carried two full pages of photographs of some of the dead and Cross was pricked by a sense of the bizarre when he saw his own face staring back at him. He knew at once that Gladys had given that photograph to the newspapers, for she alone possessed the batch of old snaps from which it had been taken. By God, she really believes it, he thought with wry glee.
Then anxiousness seized him. I
f Jenny saw that photograph, would she not recognize him? He studied the photograph again; it showed him wearing football togs, sporting a mustache, and his face was much thinner and younger…No; Jenny wouldn’t recognize him from that…
Early that evening the snow stopped falling and Chicago lay white and silent under huge drifts that made the streets almost impassable. Cross was glad, for it kept down the number of pedestrians and lessened his chances of being seen by anyone he knew. Near midnight he went to 35th Street and bought a batch of Negro weeklies and rushed back to his room, not daring to open them on the street or in the trolley. There, on the front pages, were big photographs of himself. His funeral had been set for Monday afternoon at 3 P.M. at the Church of the Good Shepherd. He laughed out loud. It was working like a charm! He wondered vaguely, while downing a drink, just how badly mangled his body was supposed to have been. Then he saw the answer; an odd item in the Chicago Defender reported:
Subway officials stated that the body of Cross Damon had been so completely mangled that his remains had to be scooped up and wrapped in heavy cellophane before they could be placed in a coffin.
He giggled so long that tears came into his eyes.
A little after two o’clock that morning, when the snow-drenched streets were almost empty, he took a trolley to the neighborhood of his wife. He was afraid to loiter, for he was well-known in this area. From a distance of half a block he observed his home: lights were blazing in every window. She’s got a plenty to do these days, he said to himself, repressing a desire to howl with laughter. But as the faces of his three sons rose before him, he sobered. He was never to see them again, except like this, from a distance. His eyes misted. They were his future self, and he had given up that future for a restricted but more intense future…
He went next to 37th and Indiana Avenue and crept into a snow-choked alleyway back of Dot’s apartment building and figured out where her window would be. Yes, it was there, on the third floor…A light burned behind the shade. Was Dot really sorry? Had she wept over him? Or had her weeping been over her own state of unexpected abandonment? The light in her window went out suddenly and he wondered if she was going to bed. He hurried around to the street, watching like a cat for passersby, and secreted himself in a dark doorway opposite the entrance of the building in which she lived. Half an hour later he saw Dot and Myrtle come out, moving slowly through the snow and darkness with their heads and shoulders bent as under a weight of bewildered sorrow. He noticed that Myrtle was carrying a suitcase. Yes, Dot was no doubt on her way to see a doctor about the abortion. Only that could account for their having a suitcase with them. He could not have arranged things so neatly if he had really tried dying for real!