Rare Lansdale Read online

  "Yeah," McBride said. "Thought so. So, you’re the one."

  The man glared at him. "One what?"

  The other men stopped working, turned to look.

  "I just wanted to see you," McBride said. "Yeah, you fit the description. I just never thought there was a white man would stoop to such a thing. Fact is, hard to imagine any man stooping to such a thing."

  "What are you talkin’ about, fella?"

  "Well, word is, Warner Ketchum that works at the dock has been known to suck a little nigger dick in his time."

  Ketchum dropped the cottonseed bags. "Who the hell are you? Where you hear that?"

  McBride put his gloved hands behind his back and held them. "They say, on a good night, you can do more with a nigger’s dick than a cat can with a ball of twine."

  The man was fuming. "You got me mixed up with somebody else, you Yankee-talkin’ sonofabitch."

  "Naw, I ain’t got you mixed up. Your name’s Warner Ketchum. You look how you was described to me by the nigger whose stick you slicked."

  Warner stepped forward with his right foot and swung a right punch so looped it looked like a sickle blade. McBride ducked it without removing his hands from behind his back, slipped inside and twisted his hips as he brought a right uppercut into Warner’s midsection.

  Warner’s air exploded and he wobbled back and McBride was in again, a left hook to the ribs, a straight right to the solar plexus. Warner doubled and went to his knees.

  McBride leaned over and kissed him on the ear, said, "Tell me. Them nigger dicks taste like licorice?"

  Warner came up then, and he was wild. He threw a right, then a left. McBride bobbed beneath them. Warner kicked at him. McBride turned sideways, let the kick go by, unloaded a left hand that caught Warner on the jaw, followed it with a right that struck with a sound like the impact of an artillery shell.

  Warner dropped to one knee. McBride grabbed him by the head and swung his knee into Warner’s face, busting his nose all over the dock. Warner fell face forward, caught himself on his hands, almost got up. Then, very slowly, he collapsed, lay down, and didn’t move.

  McBride looked at the men who were watching him. He said, "He didn’t suck no nigger dicks. I made that up." He got out his paper pad and pencil and wrote: Owed me. Price of one sparring partner, FIVE DOLLARS.

  He put the pad and pencil away. Got five dollars out of his wallet, folded it, put it in the man’s back pocket. He turned to the other men who stood staring at him as if he were one of Jesus’ miracles.

  "Frankly, I think you’re all a bunch of sorry assholes, and I think, one at a time, I can lick every goddamn one of you Southern white trash pieces of shit. Any takers?"

  "Not likely," said a stocky man at the front of the crowd. "You’re a ringer." He picked up a sack of cottonseed he had put down, started toward the ship. The other men did the same.

  McBride said, "Okay," and walked away.

  He thought, maybe, on down the docks he might find another sparring partner.

  5:23 P.M.

  By the end of the day, near dark, McBride checked his notepad for expenses, saw the Sporting Club owed him forty-five dollars in sparring partners, and a new pair of gloves, as well as breakfast and dinner to come. He added money for a shoeshine. A clumsy sonofabitch had scuffed one of his shoes.

  He got the shoeshine and ate a steak, flexed his muscles as he arrived at the whorehouse. He felt loose still, like he could take on another two or three yokels.

  He went inside, got his goods out of the potted plant, and climbed the stairs.

  THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 6:00 P.M.

  Telegraphed Message from Washington, D.C., Weather Bureau, Central Office, to Issac Cline, Galveston, Texas, Weather Bureau:

  Storm center just northwest of Key West.

  7:30 P.M.

  "Lil" Arthur ran down to the Sporting Club that night and stood in front of it, his hands in his pants pockets. The wind was brisk, and the air was just plain sour.

  Saturday, he was going to fight a heavyweight crown contender, and though it would not be listed as an official bout, and McBride was just in it to pickup some money, "Lil" Arthur was glad to have the chance to fight a man who might fight for the championship someday. And if he could beat him, even if it didn’t affect McBride’s record, "Lil" Arthur knew he’d have that, he would have beaten a contender for the Heavyweight Championship of the World.

  It was a far cry from the Battle Royales he had first participated in. There was a time when he looked upon those degrading events with favor.

  He remembered his first Battle Royale. His friend Ernest had talked him into it. Once a month, sometimes more often, white "sporting men" liked to get a bunch of colored boys and men to come down to the club for a free-for-all. They’d put nine or ten of them in a ring, sometimes make them strip naked and wear Sambo masks. He’d done that once himself.

  While the coloreds fought, the whites would toss money and yell for them to kill one another. Sometimes they’d tie two coloreds together by the ankles, let them go at it. Blood flowed thick as molasses on flapjacks. Bones were broken. Muscles torn. For the whites, it was great fun, watching a couple of coons knock each other about.

  "Lil" Arthur found he was good at all that fighting, and even knocked Ernest out, effectively ending their friendship. He couldn’t help himself. He got in there, got the battling blood up, he would hit whoever came near him.

  He started boxing regularly, gained some skill. No more Battle Royales. He got a reputation with the colored boxers, and in time that spread to the whites.

  The Sporting Club, plumb out of new white contenders for their champion, Forrest Thomas, gave "Lil" Arthur twenty-five dollars to mix it up with their man, thinking a colored and a white would be a novelty, and the superiority of the white race would be proved in a match of skill and timing.

  Right before the fight, "Lil" Arthur said his prayers, and then considering he was going to be fighting in front of a bunch of angry, mean-spirited whites, and for the first time, white women–sporting women, but women–who wanted to see a black man knocked to jelly, he took gauze and wrapped his dick. He wrapped it so that it was as thick as a blackjack. He figured he’d give them white folks something to look at. The thing they feared the most. A black-as-coal stud nigger.

  He whipped Forrest Thomas like he was a redheaded stepchild; whipped him so badly, they stopped the fight so no one would see a colored man knock a white man out.

  Against their wishes, the Sporting Club was forced to hand the championship over to "Lil" Arthur John Johnson, and the fact that a colored now held the club’s precious boxing crown was like a chicken bone in the club’s throat. Primarily Beems’s throat. As the current president of the Sporting Club, the match had been Beems’s idea, and Forrest Thomas had been Beems’s man.

  Enter McBride. Beems, on the side, talked a couple of the Sporting Club’s more wealthy members into financing a fight. One where a true contender to the heavyweight crown would whip "Lil" Arthur and return the local championship to a white man, even if that white man relinquished the crown when he returned to Chicago, leaving it vacant. In that case, "Lil" Arthur was certain he’d never get another shot at the Sporting Club championship. They wanted him out, by hook or crook.

  "Lil" Arthur had never seen McBride. Didn’t know how he fought. He’d just heard he was as tough as stone and had balls like a brass monkey. He liked to think he was the same way. He didn’t intend to give the championship up. Saturday, he’d find out if he had to.

  9:00 P.M.

  The redhead, nursing a fat lip, two black eyes, and a bruise on her belly, rolled over gingerly and put her arm across McBride’s hairy chest. "You had enough?"

  "I’ll say when I’ve had enough."

  "I was just thinking, I might go downstairs and get something to eat. Come back in a few minutes."

  "You had time to eat before I got back. You didn’t eat, you just messed up. I’m paying for this. Or rather the Sportin’ Club
is."

  "An engine’s got to have coal, if you want that engine to go."

  "Yeah?"

  "Yeah." The redhead reached up and ran her fingers through McBride’s hair.

  McBride reached across his chest and slapped the redhead.

  "Don’t touch my hair. Stay out of my hair. And shut up. I don’t care you want to fuck or not. I want to fuck, we fuck. Got it?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Listen here, I’m gonna take a shit. I get back, I want you to wash that goddamn nasty hole of yours. You think I like stickin’ my wick in that, it not being clean? You got to get clean."

  "It’s so hot. I sweat. And you’re just gonna mess me up again."

  "I don’t care. You wash that thing. I went around with my johnson like that, it’d fall off. I get a disease, girl, I’ll come back here, kick your ass so hard your butthole will swap places with your cunt."

  "I ain’t got no disease, Mr. McBride."

  "Good."

  "Why you got to be so mean?" the redhead asked suddenly, then couldn’t believe it had come out of her mouth. She realized, not only would a remark like that anger McBride, but the question was stupid. It was like asking a chicken why it pecked shit. It just did. McBride was mean because he was, and that was that.

  But even as the redhead flinched, McBride turned philosophical. "It isn’t a matter of mean. It’s because I can do what I want, and others can’t. You got that, sister?"

  "Sure. I didn’t mean nothing by it."

  "Someone can do to me what I do to them, then all right, that’s how it is. Isn’t a man, woman, or animal on earth that’s worth a damn. You know that?"

  "Sure. You’re right."

  "You bet I am. Only thing pure in this world is a baby. Human or animal, a baby is born hungry and innocent. It can’t do a thing for itself. Then it grows up and gets just like everyone else. A baby is all right until it’s about two. Then, it ought to just be smothered and save the world the room. My sister, she was all right till she was about two, then it wasn’t nothing but her wanting stuff and my mother giving it to her. Later on, Mama didn’t have nothing to do with her either, same as me. She got over two years old, she was just trouble. Like I was. Like everybody else is."

  "Sure," the redhead said.

  "Oh, shut up, you don’t know your ass from a pig track."

  McBride got up and went to the john. He took his revolver and his wallet and his razor with him. He didn’t trust a whore–any woman for that matter–far as he could hurl one.

  While he was in the can trying out the new flush toilet, the redhead eased out of bed wearing only a sheet. She slipped out the door, went downstairs and outside, into the streets. She flagged down a man in a buggy, talked him into a ride, for a ride, then she was out of there, destination unimportant.

  9:49 P.M.

  Later, pissed at the redhead, McBride used the madam herself, blacked both her eyes when she suggested that a lot of sex before a fight might not be a good idea for an athlete.

  The madam, lying in bed with McBride’s muscular arm across her ample breasts, sighed and watched the glow of the gas streetlights play on the ceiling.

  Well, she thought, it’s a living.

  FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 10:35 A.M.

  Telegraphed Message from Washington, D.C., Weather Bureau, Central Office, to Issac Cline, Galveston, Texas, Weather Bureau:

  Storm warning. Galveston, Texas. Take precautions.

  Issac Cline, head of the Galveston Weather Bureau, sat at his desk on the third floor of the LevyBuilding and read the telegram. He went downstairs and outside for a look-see.

  The weather was certainly in a stormy mood, but it didn’t look like serious hurricane weather. He had been with the Weather Bureau for eight years, and he thought he ought to know a hurricane by now, and this wasn’t it. The sky wasn’t the right color.

  He walked until he got to the beach. By then the wind was picking up, and the sea was swelling. The clouds were like wads of duck down ripped from a pillow: He walked a little farther down the beach, found a turtle wrapped in seaweed, poked it with a stick. It was dead as a stone.

  Issac returned to the LevyBuilding, and by the time he made his way back, the wind had picked up considerably. He climbed the stairs to the. roof. The roof barometer was dropping quickly, and the wind was serious. He revised his opinion on how much he knew about storms. He estimated the wind to be blowing at twenty miles an hour, and growing. He pushed against it, made his way to the weather pole, hoisted two flags. The top flag was actually a white pennant. It whipped in the wind like a gossip’s tongue.

  Anyone who saw it knew it meant the wind was coming from the northwest. Beneath it was a red flag with a black center; this flag meant the wind was coming ass over teakettle, and that a seriously violent storm was expected within hours.

  The air smelled dank and fishy. For a moment, Cline thought perhaps he had actually touched the dead turtle and brought its stink back with him. But no, it was the wind.

  At about this same time, the steamship Pensacola, commanded by Captain James Slater, left the port of Galveston from Pier 34, destination Pensacola, Florida.

  Slater had read the hurricane reports of the day before, and though the wind was picking up and was oddly steamy, the sky failed to show what he was watching for: A dusty, brick red color, a sure sign of a hurricane. He felt the whole Weather Bureau business was about as much guess and luck as it was anything else. He figured he could do that and be as accurate.

  He gave orders to ease the Pensacola into the Gulf.

  1:06 P.M.

  The pigeons fluttered through the opening in the Johnson’s roof. Tar paper lifted, tore, blew away, tumbled through the sky as if they were little black pieces of the structure’s soul.

  "It’s them birds again," his mother said.

  "Lil" Arthur stopped doing push-ups, looked to the ceiling. Pigeons were thick on the rafters. So was pigeon shit. The sky was very visible through the roof. And very black. It looked venomous.

  "Shit," "Lil" Arthur said.

  "It’s okay," she said. "Leave ‘em be. They scared. So am I."

  "Lil" Arthur stood up, said, "Ain’t nothin’ be scared of. We been through all kinda storms. We’re on a rise here. Water don’t never get this high."

  "I ain’t never liked no storm. I be glad when yo daddy and the young’uns gets home."

  "Papa’s got an old tarp I might can put over that hole. Keep out the rain."

  "You think you can, go on."

  "I already should’ a," "Lil" Arthur said.

  "Lil" Arthur went outside, crawled under the upraised porch, and got hold of the old tarp. It was pretty rotten, but it might serve his purpose, at least temporarily. He dragged it into the yard, crawled back under, tugged out the creaking ladder and a rusty hammer. He was about to go inside and get the nails when he heard a kind of odd roaring. He stopped, listened, recognized it.

  It was the surf. He had certainly heard it before, but not this loud and this far from the beach. He got the nails and put the ladder against the side of the house and carried the tarp onto the roof. The tarp nearly took to the air when he spread it, almost carried him with it. With considerable effort he got it nailed over the hole, trapping what pigeons didn’t flee inside the house.

  2:30 P.M.

  Inside the whorehouse, the madam, a fat lip added to her black eyes, watched from the bed as McBride, naked, seated in a chair before the dresser mirror, carefully oiled and combed his hair over his bald spot. The windows were closed, and the wind rattled them like dice in a gambler’s fist. The air inside the whorehouse was as stuffy as a minister’s wife.

  "What’s that smell?" she asked.

  It was the tonic the Chinaman had given him. He said, "You don’t want your tits pinched, shut the fuck up."

  "All right," she said.

  The windows rattled again. Pops of rain flecked the glass.

  McBride went to the window, his limp dick resting on the windowsill, almost
touching the glass, like a large, wrinkled grub looking for a way out.

  "Storm coming," he said.

  The madam thought: No shit.

  McBride opened the window. The wind blew a comb and hairbrush off the dresser. A man, walking along the sandy street, one hand on his hat to save it from the wind, glanced up at McBride. McBride took hold of his dick and wagged it at him. The man turned his head and picked up his pace.

  McBride said, "Spread those fat legs, honey-ass, ‘cause I’m sailing into port, and I’m ready to drop anchor."

  Sighing, the madam rolled onto her back, and McBride mounted her. "Don’t mess up my hair this time," he said.