Standing at the Scratch Line (24 page)

King looked at the doctor and smiled. “You got one way to save yo’self! Get my friend some medical attention now!” King pressed the blade against the doctor’s neck to punctuate his words and then sheathed the blade.

“One last thing,” King said, continuing to stare at the nurses. “If my friend dies, I might think you people didn’t do yo’ best. I don’t think you all would like them consequences at all.” King turned without further word and returned to Professor’s bedside.

Professor lay on his back, propped up with pillows. He looked up into King’s eyes and there was a slight smile upon his trembling lips. “Was that you causing all the commotion out there?”

“I was just gettin’ some things straight with the folks who work here.”

“You asked me on Buscaglia’s roof if I was crazy. Do you remember that?” Professor asked weakly. King nodded. Professor continued wheezingly, “You’re the one that’s lost your mind! You can’t start fights in a hospital!” He started coughing. The reflex racked his body. Blood oozed out slowly beneath bandages.

“You got to save yo’ energy,” King advised, moving to his side.

“For what?” Professor asked sarcastically. “I’m not going to need it where I’m going.”

“Whatchoo sayin’, man?” demanded King. “That ain’t right! Where’s yo grit? You gon’ fight this with all you got, ain’t you?”

“Gut-shot, that’s what I am. How many men have we seen walk away from such a wound. Hell, they tried to sew me back together, but it’s beyond them. Man has no power over the miracle that God has wrought.”

“They gon’ move you to a private room and make sure you get first-class attention,” King said encouragingly. “But yo’ spirit is the most important! You got to believe you can.”

Professor let his eyes drift to the ceiling and stared for a moment at the bulb glowing overhead. It was a light that would preside over his death without giving any real illumination. “I’m ready, heaven or hell,” he said softly.

“I don’t understand you, Professor. This ain’t like you. What made you so ready for death?”

“You remember that conversation we had in the mountains above Côte d’Saar when you told me that story about everybody starting off with a blank page? Well, my page seems to be filled up. It’s funny, I thought I had a lot more blank space.”

“Pick up the pen yo’self! There’s always some space to write more if you got the spirit!” King asserted.

“Ever since I realized that I lived while others died, I knew I was destined to die by violence. Then after killing so many people, some who had nothing to do with the preservation of God and country or any other principle or redeeming trait, I figured that maybe I earned this way to die.”

“Nobody earns a way to die,” King corrected. “I seen plenty good people die young while bad ones live on and on. ‘What goes around comes around’ don’t happen exactly. There’s always a way, a chance, some way to air. You got to find that way before you drown in yo’ own doubt.”

“I’m worried about you. I’m not worried about me,” Professor wheezed. “Whatever my destiny, I can’t change it by worrying. You, on the other hand, are going to live. Perhaps my passing will help you learn the lesson that you must drop this war-against-the-world attitude that you carry around with you, or eventually you will be overwhelmed by sheer numbers. Eventually, if you keep on this path, your ending will not be as pleasant as mine.”

“You’s gettin’ all dramatic, Professor,” King said with a tone of dismissal. “I didn’t start any of the stuff that’s happened. I’m just standin’ at the scratch line, that’s all.”

“If you continue on, names will be scratched off the list of the living, but some of them will be your friends and they’ll die like me.”

“You sayin’ that I’m the cause you’s lyin’ here?” King asked. “You’s a man. You could of walked away anytime you wanted.”

Professor shook his head with an effort. “There’s no doubt, I am responsible for my decisions. As I said earlier, I earned this bed and this way out. I’m not blaming you. What I’m saying is that if you continue to live this kind of life, your friends will probably be involved in it as well. Over time, someone has to catch the bullets. There’s bound to be at least one good shot on the other side. People you care about will be falling all around you. Pretty soon there won’t be anybody around who’s known you for a long time. Think about Big Ed. He’ll follow you anywhere. Do you want to see him lying here like this?”

“Professor, I ain’t messed with no one who didn’t mess with me first. If people want to travel along with me, well, there’s some dangers. Sometimes that’s the cost. It’s part of life. I expect men to make their own decisions. I don’t know no other way to live.”

“That may be the most painful truth you’ve ever spoken,” Professor gasped. “You’re prisoner of your own ignorance, as each of us is before God.”

“You insultin’ me, Professor?”

“No, I’m not. You must receive love and nurturing in childhood in order to respect and nurture human life.”

“I was taught to hunt and shoot when I was a kid and that’s about it.”

“There are other ways to live, but since you don’t know them, you can’t try them.” Professor paused to get his breath.

“Let me get that doctor,” King stood up.

“No, I want to finish first,” Professor protested. “You are a natural born leader. With some education, you could help organize our people. You could be somebody other than just a dangerous man. You could be loved and respected, the highest award that humans can give.” Professor started to cough and gag.

King stepped out of the curtains and called for the doctor. The nurses came running and an elderly dark brown–skinned man with salt-and-pepper hair limped rapidly to the bedside. The man began checking over Professor quickly and thoroughly. “Let’s move him back to surgery,” the old man told the nurses. They began to get Professor ready for surgery. The man turned and faced King. “I’m Dr. Wilson. We’re going to have to go back in. He seems to have a lot of internal hemorrhaging. We’ll do the best we can for him.” The doctor turned away and began giving directions to the nurses. At one point he asked, “Why hasn’t this man been sedated? All his moving around probably caused the hemorrhaging.”

“Because I didn’t want my last hours all drugged up and distorted,” Professor hissed, barely able to speak. He rolled his head toward King, his eyes glazed with pain. When he spoke, each word was fainter and weaker than the one that preceded it. “Good-bye, my friend. I guess I’ve dropped the pen. There’ll be no more writing on my page—” His body was racked by coughing once more. His bed was rapidly rolled away to the operating room.

King watched as the bed disappeared through some double doors at the back of the ward. He wanted to scream or hit something hard with his fist, but he just stood staring at the light green double doors through which Professor had passed.

Big Ed arrived after Professor had been pronounced dead. King was sitting listlessly in the hallway, lost in thought, when Big Ed sat down by his side. “He’s gone” was all that King could say.

Big Ed put his face in his hands and started weeping. There was no sound. Tears streamed silently through his fingers and down his arms. He and King sat quietly in the hall, mourning Professor’s passage as occasional hospital personnel passed. “This one hurts,” Big Ed said, his voice partly muffled by his hands. “All the people we saw get it, this one hurts the most. It don’t seem right. It don’t seem fair. Professor was the one who shouldn’t have died this way. He was always talkin’ about how we shouldn’t think of human life as cheap.

“If God is up there, what must he be thinkin’?” Big Ed asked plaintively. “We ain’t gon’ never have another friend like Professor: full of book learnin’, but never ridin’ high and mighty, just shoulder to shoulder and down-to-earth as can be. Man, I loved that boy, big words and everything. He was like a brother to me. I just feels like I got hit right smack in my stomach. It’s hard to breathe.”

King stood up and started walking down the hall.

Big Ed got to his feet questioningly. “Where you goin’?” he called after King.

“I’m gon’ spill some blood for this,” King answered without inflection.

Big Ed hurried after him. “I wants to come too. I figures we owe them somethin’ big and I wants to be there to pay it!”

W
 E D N E S D A Y,  
A
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King perused several different daily papers while drinking his coffee in the restaurant of the Theresa Hotel, trying not to let his thoughts dwell on Professor’s death. But seeing no mention of the colored people who had been killed or hurt in the attack at the Rockland Palace drew his thoughts back to Professor like iron filings to a magnet. There had been no comment the day before of colored casualties when the story first hit the headlines. It seemed particularly disrespectful to have Professor die without public notice.

Big Ed hailed King from the door of the lobby and walked over to join him. “All’s set for Saturday morning,” Big Ed said quietly. “Where you at? You look like you’s letting yo’ thinkin’ drift like a lazy bird on the wind.”

“I was just thinkin’ about how Professor spent all that time in boot camp teaching us to read. I was rememberin’ how strict he was. How he used to say if’en we didn’t read every day, we wouldn’t never learn.”

Big Ed shook his head. “Yeah and, if whites can learn it, it should be easy for us, considerin’ how smart Negroes had to be to survive under slavery.”

“Professor was somethin’ else!”

“I didn’t even know what the word
thrive
meant until I met him.” Big Ed smiled. “Do you remember when we went up to Slick’s bar and bought a round for the house? And that drunk fool wanted to start a fight sayin’ Slick was a coward and a sneak. And how Professor started talkin’ about Slick dyin’ bravely for his country and that his death needed respect. Eventually, he won over everybody.”

“Sho’ did.” King chuckled. He glanced down at his pocket watch and asked, “What time did you say Smitty was gettin’ here?”

“Around ten this morning. He ain’t late yet. Oh, by the way, you seen the papers?”

“Yeah, looks like the Rockland Palace shooting is drawing all sorts of attention. And them Italians shouldn’t have shot the district attorney’s brother!”

Big Ed nodded his head in agreement. “The papers is sayin’ the Mafia did a hit on him to try and scare his brother into droppin’ his anticrime program. They even got senators from Washington, D.C., callin’ the mayor about ‘organized crime.’ ”

King smiled evilly. “Bet them Italians ain’t seen this much light since they got off the ship! This’ll put a cramp in their operations, but we got to be careful that all this light doesn’t cause them to sit down at a table to iron things out. They gon’ want to appear respectable.”

“They ain’t nothin’ but thugs! Maybe, next time, we let ’em know the Three hundred Sixty-ninth is home!”

“No, it ain’t smart for us to come out in the open,” King advised. “We gon’ do best if we runs under the enemy’s colors. Let the papers say whatever they want. If we gets the hits we’s workin’ on, it don’t matter who they give credit to.”

“It seems to me got to make these thugs know they can’t send their soldiers into Harlem.”

“Long as we can hit two or three of their collections houses, we can cripple ’em. They’ll spend two, three years fightin’ it out. We won’t even be on their mind.”

“That’ll give us more than enough to get Professor’s school off the ground. I’m thinkin’ about puttin’ some of my own money in now.”

“Don’t count yo’ eggs before they hatch,” King cautioned. “We gots to concentrate on hittin’ everythin’ on stroke Saturday. If we hits on stroke, then the next thing is for everybody to lay dead a couple of years ’til things cool down. After that, people can celebrate all they want.”

“A couple of years? That’s a long time to sit on money. Hell, everythin’s goin’ so smooth right now, they must think they got us! You know we wouldn’t have caught Tyrone just walkin’ around if he didn’t think they had us!”

“You can’t depend on that, ’cause you know Tyrone was a fool. If they is as well organized as people say, we gon’ have to sit on the money for a long piece. We don’t want to give no sign of big money. They’s waitin’ to see what gon’ shake out from the shootin’. They might just have set Tyrone up to throw us off. Ain’t nothin’ to be happy about except he’s dead and he died a fool’s death with no honor and no dignity.” King sucked his teeth dismissively. “The dog told everythin’ he knew with hardly any prodding. He was a big disappointment.”