Blind Man With a Pistol (6 page)

     
The teen-aged white girl stared at Doctor Mubuta as though she took it personally, and was even anxious to give it a try.

     
But not so with Mister Sam's chauffeur, Johnson X, the invisible man. He could hold it no longer. "Shit!" he cried. "Shit!" One couldn't tell whether it was an order or an exclamation. "Shit! Does anyone in their right state of mind, with all their pieces of gray matter assembled in the right way in they haid, with no fuses blowed in they brain, with they think-piece hitting on all cylinders -- you dig me? Anyone -- you -- me -- us -- they -- we -- them -- him or her-- anyone -- you dig me? believe that shittt?" His loose lips punctuated each word with a spray of spit, flapped up and down over white buck teeth like the shutter of a camera photographing missiles shot into space, curled and popped over the tonal effect of each sound, and pronounced the word "shit" as though he had tasted it and spat it out -- eloquent, logical and positive.

     
"I believe it," Mister Sam croaked, peeking atJohnson from his old furtive eyes.

     
"You!" Johnson exploded. It was an accusation.

     
Everyone stared at Mister Sam as though awaiting his confession.

     
"Niggers'll believe anything," Viola spluttered. No one contradicted.

     
Johnson X looked scornfully at Mister Sam from thick-lensed spectacles with heavy black frames. He was a tall angular man dressed in chauffeur's livery. His small shaved skull merging into his wide curved nose gave him the appearance of a snapping turtle, and with the spectacles he looked as though he were trying to pass himself off as human. He might have been disagreeable but he wasn't stupid. He was Mister Sam's friend.

     
"Mister Sam," he said, "I tells you right here and now to your face -- I think you is nuts. You has lost whatever sense you was born with."

     
Mister Sam's eyes closed to slits of milky blue in his shrunken face. "Folks don't know everything," he whispered.

     
"I helps the old and the sick," Doctor Mubuta jawed. "I rejuvenates the disrejuvenated."

     
"Shit! Get yo'self in hand, Mister Sam. Look yo' life in the face. Here you is ninety years old... ."

     
"More than that."

     
"More than ninety, with almost all of yo'self in the grave, been diddling all kinds of women for sixty-five years."

     
"Longer than that."

     
"Been pimping and running whore house ever since you learned the stuff would sell--"

     
"Jes business. Buy low and sell high. It's Jewish."

     
"Been surrounded with women all yo' life, and ain't satisfied yet; Here you is nearmost a hundred years old and wants to go against the ordained order of creation."

     
"Tain't dat!"

     
"Tain't dat!" Johnson X controlled himself. "Mister Sam, does you believe in God?"

     
"Dat's it. I been believing in God for sixty-nine years. That's 'fore you was born."

     
Johnson X looked stumped. "Come again, I don't dig you."

     
"God helps them who helps themselves."

     
Johnson X's eyes popped, his voice became outraged. "Old and wicked as you is, as much sin as you has sinned in yo' life, as many people as you has cheated, all the lies you has told, all the stuff you has stole, you means to lie there and say you is expecting some help from God?"

     
"Nothing takes the place of God," Doctor Mubuta said in his singsong voice, sounding as pious as possible, then added as an afterthought, as though he might have gone too far, "but money."

     
"Pick up that there Gladstone bag," Mister Sam croaked.

     
Doctor Mubuta lifted the Gladstone bag that sat on the floor beside his doctor's bag.

     
"Look in it," Mister Sam ordered.

     
Doctor Mubuta opened the bag dutifully and looked into it, and for the first time his expression changed and his eyes seemed about to pop from his head.

     
"What you see?" Mister Sam urged.

     
"Money," Doctor Mubuta whispered.

     
"You think that's enough money to take the place of God?"

     
"Looks like it. Looks like an awful lot to me."

     
"It's all I got."

     
Van Raff stood up. Viola turned bright red.

     
"And it's yours," Mister Sam informed Doctor Mubuta.

     
"No, it isn't," Van Raff shouted.

     
"I'se going for the police," Johnson X said.

     
"Sit down," Mister Sam croaked evilly. "Jes testing y'all. Ain't nothing but paper."

     
Doctor Mubuta's face closed like the Bible.

     
"Let me see it," Van Raff demanded.

     
"Is I is or is I ain't?" Doctor Mubuta demanded.

     
"I think someone ought to stop this," Anny said apologetically. "I don't think it's right."

     
"Tend to your own business," her husband snarled.

     
"Excuse me for living," she replied, giving him a furious look.

     
"He ought to be put in the 'sylum," Viola said. "He's crazy."

     
"I'm going to look at it," Van Raff declared, moving forward to take the bag.

     
"And I found y'all out," Mister Sam said.

     
"Now you've all had your say, can I proceed with the procedure?" Doctor Mubuta said.

     
"Leave it be," Johnson X said to Van Raff. "It ain't going nowhere."

     
"It sure ain't," Van Raff declared, sullenly returning to his seat.

     
Neither of the teen-age girls had spoken.

     
In the strained silence, Doctor Mubuta opened his bag and extracted a quart-size jar containing a nasty-looking liquid and placed it atop the bed table beside Mister Sam's bed. Everyone leaned forward to stare incredulously at the milky liquid.

     
Mister Sam stretched his neck and popped his old glazed eyes like a curious old rooster with a bare neck.

     
"Is that the stuff?"

     
"That's the stuff."

     
"Gonna make me young?"

     
"That's what it's for."

     
"What's that milky stuff floating around in it?"

     
"That's albumin. The same stuff as is the base for semen."

     
"What's semen?"

     
"What you ain't got."

     
All of a sudden the teen-aged white girl became hysterical. She doubled over laughing and choking and her face turned bright red. Everyone stared at her until she got over it, then turned their attention back to the jar of rejuvenating liquid.

     
"What's them black balls floating around?" Mister Sam asked.

     
"Just what they look like, black balls, only they is taken from a baboon, which is the most virile two-footed animal known."

     
Mister Sam's lids flickered. "You don't say. Taken from a live baboon?"

     
"Live when they was took, and rearing to go."

     
"Ain't that sompin. Bet he didn't like it."

     
"No more than you would'ave fifty years ago."

     
"Uhm! And what's them things that looks like feathers?"

     
"They is feathers. Rooster primaries. From a fighting rooster what could fertilize eggs from a distance of three feet."

     
"Reminds me of a man I knew what could look at womens and knock 'em up."

     
"He had a concupiscent eye. One of them is in there too."

     
"You ain't missed nothing, is you? Balls and feathers and eyes and summon. What's all them other strange-looking things?"

     
"All of them is mating organs of rabbits, eagles and shellfish."

     
Doctor Mubuta uttered these pronouncements without the flicker of an eyelash. His audience stared at him with their eyes popping out. Within the frame of reference -- light, heat and Harlem -- at some time during the recitation they had all passed the line of rational rejection. It wasn't hard. It wasn't any harder to believe in rejuvenation than to believe equality was coming.

     
"You sho' got some mixture there, if they all start working at the same time, I'll say that much," Mister Sam conceded admiringly. "But what's that black slimy stuff at the bottom?"

     
"That's the secret," Doctor Mubuta replied, as solemn as an owl.

     
"Oh, that's the secret, eh? Looks like hog shit to me."

     
"That's the stuff which invigorates the other stuff which charges the genital glands, like charging a rundown battery."

     
"Is that what it does?"

     
"That's what it does."

     
"What's it called?"

     
"Sperm elixir."

     
"Sounds mighty fancy. You sure it gonna work?"

     
Doctor Mubuta looked down at Mister Sam contemptuously. "If you didn't know this elixir would work, you wouldn't have me here giving you none, cheap and stingy as you is."

     
"All I know is what I've heard," Mister Sam admitted grudgingly.

     
"What you has heard," Doctor Mubuta said scornfully. "You has seen people it has worked on. You has been sneaking around asking questions and spying on my clients ever since I have been back from Africa."

     
Johnson X was indignant. "I'm ashamed of you, Mister Sam. Ashamed! You used to have the reputation of being a real big sport, you enjoyed your pleasure and didn't grudge nobody. And now here you is, sitting on a fortune you has made from the sinning of others, and you is so envious of the pleasures of others you is gonna give all yo' money to be able to sin again yo'self -- and it ain't really yo' own money, as old as you is."

     
"Ain't that," Mister Sam protested. "I wants to get married again."

     
"Ise his fiancy," the teen-aged white girl said. Her flat unemotional announcement, spoken in a jarring voice straight out of the cotton fields of the South, exploded in the room like a hand grenade, causing far more repercussions than the exposing of the rejuvenating elixir.

     
So much blood rushed to Viola's head it looked like a gorged bedbug. "You beast," she screamed. Which one she meant, no one knew.

     
"Don't worry, he can't do nothing," Van Raff consoled her, trying to shake down the blood in his own head.

     
But it was Anny who looked so ashamed. Noticing, Dick said harshly, "He gonna be young, ain't he? Don't go back on your race now!"

     
And for an instant the mask slipped from Doctor Mubuta's face and he looked mOre stupid than ever. "Huh! You going to marry this here, uh, young missy?"

     
"What's the matter with her?" Mister Sam asked challengingly.

     
"Matter with her! Ain't nothing the matter with her -- it's you I is thinking about. You is going to need more of this here elixir than I has figured."

     
"You think I ain't thought of that."

     
"And what is more," Doctor Mubuta went on. "If I heard you correctly, and if what is common knowledge all over Harlem is the truth, you already has one wife, who is here present in this here room and two wives is too many for this elixir at yo' age."

     
"Give her some too, so she be young as me, and can peddle her pussy.,'

     
The teen-age white girl became hysterical again.

     
Viola popped open a switchblade knife from her purse and charged the girl. Van Raff was caught by surprise and couldn't move. The white girl ran behind Mister Sam's bed as though he could help her. Viola changed directions and headed toward Mister Sam with the open blade. Doctor Mubuta clutched her about the waist. Johnson X started forward. Van Raff jumped to his feet. Viola was trying to stab Doctor Mubuta and his hand was getting slashed as he grabbed for the knife.

     
He was reaching for the Gladstone when Van Raff came up from behind, shouting, "Oh, no, you don't!" and snatched it out of his hand. Simultaneously Viola stabbed him in the back. It wasn't enough to hamper him and he wheeled on her in a red-eyed rage and clutched the blade with his bleeding hand as though it were an icicle, and jerked it from her hand. Her gray eyes were stretched in fear and outrage and her pink mouth opened for a scream, showing a lot of vein-laced throat. But she never got to scream. He stabbed her in the heart, and in the same motion turned and stabbed Van Raff in the head, breaking the knife blade on his skull. Van Raff looked a sudden hundred years old as his face fell apart in shock, and the Gladstone bag dropped from his nerveless fingers.

     
With blood coming out of his back and hand as though his arteries were leaking, Doctor Mubuta snatched up the bag and headed for the door. Dick and Anny had disappeared and Johnson X was standing in the door like a cross to keep anyone from entering. Doctor Mubuta ran up behind him and stabbed him in the back with the broken knife blade and Johnson X went out into the dining-room as though a rocket booster had gone off. Doctor Mubuta left the knife in his back and made for the kitchen door. The door opened from the outside and a short muscular black man in a red fez came in. The man had an open knife with a six-inch blade in his hand. Doctor Mubuta drew up short. But it didn't help him. The short muscular man handled his knife with authority and stabbed Doctor Mubuta to death before he could utter a sound.