The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories

The big guy wasn’t any of my business. He never was, then or later, least of all then.

I was over on Central, which is the Harlem of Los Angeles, on one of the “mixed” blocks, where there were still both white and colored establishments. I was looking for a little Greek barber named Tom Aleidis whose wife wanted him to come home and was willing to spend a little money to find him. It was a peaceful job. Tom Aleidis was not a crook.

I saw the big guy standing in front of Shamey’s, an all-colored drink and dice second-floor, not too savory. He was looking up at the broken stencils in the electric sign, with a sort of rapt expression, like a hunky immigrant looking at the Statue of Liberty, like a man who had waited a long time and come a long way.

He wasn’t just big. He was a giant. He looked seven feet high, and he wore the loudest clothes I ever saw on a really big man.

Pleated maroon pants, a rough grayish coat with white billiard balls for buttons, brown suede shoes with explosions in white kid on them, a brown shirt, a yellow tie, a large red carnation, and a front-door handkerchief the color of the Irish flag. It was neatly arranged in three points, under the red carnation. On Central Avenue, not the quietest-dressed street in the world, with that size and that make-up he looked about as unobtrusive as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.

He went over and swung back the doors into Shamey’s. The doors didn’t stop swinging before they exploded outward again. What sailed out and landed in the gutter and made a high, keening noise, like a wounded rat, was a slick-haired colored youth in a pinchback suit. A “brown,” the color of coffee with rather thin cream in it. His face, I mean.

It still wasn’t any of my business. I watched the colored boy creep away along the walls. Nothing more happened. So I made my mistake.

I moved along the sidewalk until I could push the swing door myself. Just enough to look in. Just too much.

A hand I could have sat in took hold of my shoulder and hurt and lifted me through the doors and up three steps.

A deep, soft voice said in my ear easily, “Smokes in here, pal. Can you tie that?”

I tried for a little elbow room to get to my sap. I wasn’t wearing a gun. The little Greek barber business hadn’t seemed to be that sort of job.

He took hold of my shoulder again.

“It’s that kind of place,” I said quickly.

“Don’t say that, pal. Beulah used to work here. Little Beulah.”

“Go on up and see for yourself.”

He lifted me up three more steps.

“I’m feeling good,” he said. “I wouldn’t want anybody to bother me. Let’s you and me go on up and maybe nibble a drink.”

“They won’t serve you,” I said.

“I ain’t seen Beulah in eight years, pal,” he said softly, tearing my shoulder to pieces without noticing what he was doing. “She ain’t even wrote in six. But she’ll have a reason. She used to work here. Let’s you and me go on up.”

“All right,” I said. “I’ll go up with you. Just let me walk. Don’t carry me. I’m fine. Carmady’s the name. I’m all grown up. I go to the bathroom alone and everything. Just don’t carry me.”

“Little Beulah used to work here,” he said softly. He wasn’t listening to me.

We went on up. He let me walk.

A crap table was in the far corner beyond the bar, and scattered tables and a few customers were here and there. The whiny voices chanting around the crap table stopped instantly. Eyes looked at us in that dead, alien silence of another race.

A large Negro was leaning against the bar in shirt-sleeves with pink garters on his arms. An ex-pug who had been hit by everything but a concrete bridge. He pried himself loose from the bar edge and came towards us in a loose fighter’s crouch.

He put a large brown hand against the big man’s gaudy chest. It looked like a stud there.

“No white folks, brother. Jes’ fo’ the colored people. I’se sorry.”

“Where’s Beulah?” the big man asked in his deep, soft voice that went with his big white face and his depthless black eyes.

The Negro didn’t quite laugh. “No Beulah, brother. No hooch, no gals, jes’ the scram, brother. Jes’ the scram.”

“Kind of take your goddam mitt off me,” the big man said.

The bouncer made a mistake, too. He hit him. I saw his shoulder drop, his body swing behind the punch. It was a good clean punch. The big man didn’t even try to block it.

He shook his head and took hold of the bouncer by the throat. He was quick for his size. The bouncer tried to knee him. The big man turned him and bent him, took hold of the back of his belt. That broke. So the big man just put his huge hand flat against the bouncer’s spine and threw him, clear across the narrow room. The bouncer hit the wall on the far side with a crash that must have been heard in Denver. Then he slid softly down the wall and lay there, motionless.

“Yeah,” the big man said. “Let’s you and me nibble one.”

We went over to the bar. The barman swabbed the bar hurriedly. The customers, by ones and twos and threes, drifted out, silent across the bare floor, silent down the dim uncarpeted stairs. Their departing feet scarcely rustled.