Gyp Williams, who had engineered the break, took up a solid rifleman’s position, flat out on his belly with legs spread and toes pointed out, the machine rifle braced against right shoulder and the left elbow dug deep into the brown earth of the yard, supporting the tripod grip. His brown eyes set deep into his black face were roaming things as he covered the wide expanse of the yard, waiting for the first assault; it had to come; he was the readiest ever.
Lew Steiner and the kid they called Chocolate made up the rest of the skirmish team, and they were busily unloading the homemade grenades and black powder bombs from the cotton-batting of the insulated box…when the first assault broke out of cover around the far wall of the Administration Building.
They came as a wave of white-winged doves, the ivory of their uniforms blazing against the hard cold light of the early morning. First came the sprayers, pocking the ground with little upbursts of dirt, and shredding the morning silence with the noise of their grease guns. Then a row of riflemen, and behind them half a dozen longarms with grenades, if needed.
“Away, they comin’!” Gyp Williams snapped over his shoulder. “Dig, babies!” and he got off the first burst of the defense, into their middle. Three of the grease gunners went down, legs everywhichway and guns tossed off like refuse, clattering and still chattering on automatic fire, pelting the wall with wasted lead. The second wave faltered an instant, and in that snatch of time Nigger Joe fed the belts to Karpinsky, who swung the big weapon back and forth, in even arcs, cutting them down right across the bellies. None of the riflemen made it a fifth of the distance across the empty yard. One of them went down kicking, and Karpinsky took him out on the next, lowered, arc.
“I am,” Lew Steiner screamed, arching high to toss a black powder bomb, “home free!” It hit and exploded fifteen yards too short, but the effect was marvelous. The longarms caught up short and tried to turn.
“Bang
“Bang
“And bang,” Gyp Williams grinned and murmured as he snapped off three sharp, short bursts, ending it for a trio of grenade carriers. And it was over that quickly, as the remaining grease gunners and three longarms fell, clambered, tripped, sprinted, raced back around the building.
“We done that thing.” Gyp Williams rolled over on his back, aiming a thumb-and-finger pistol at his troops. “We sure enough, we done that thing.”
“Send those guards outta here.” Chocolate nodded his head at the hostages. Gyp agreed with a small movement of his massive head, and the three white-jacketed guards were shoved around the side of the enclosure, out into the open. For a moment they tensed, as though they expected to be shot down by the men in the tiny fort, but when no movement was made, they broke into a dead run, across the yard, arms waving, yelling to their compatriots that they were coming through.
The first burst of machinegun fire came from the North Tower and took one of them in mid-stride, making him miss his footing, leap and plunge in a half-somersault to crash finally onto the ground, sliding a foot and a half on the side of his face. The second burst cut down his partners. They tumbled almost into a loving embrace, piled atop one another.
Chocolate expelled breath through dry lips and asked, “Who’s got the cigarettes?” Simon Rubin tossed him the pack and for a while they just lay there, smoking, alert, watching the bodies of the dead white guards who had been shot by their own men.
“Well,” Gyp Williams commented philosophically, after a time, “everybody knows a white cat gets around niggers is gonna get contaminated. They just couldn’t be trust, man. Dirty. Dir-ty.”
“And kikes,” Lew Steiner added. “Ding ding.”
They settled down for the long wait, till the second group could blow the wall. They watched the shadows of the sun slither across the yard. Nothing moved. Warm, and nice, waiting. Quiet, too.
“How long you been in this prison?” Chocolate asked Simon Rubin. There was no answer for the space of time it took Rubin to draw in on the butt and expel smoke through his nostrils; then his long, horsey face drew down, character lines in the bony cheeks and around the deep-set eyes mapping new expressions. “As far back as I can remember,” he replied carefully, thinking about it, “I suppose all of my life.” Chocolate nodded lightly, turning back to the empty yard with a thin whistle of nervousness.
Something should happen. They all wanted it.
“When the hell they gonna blow that gate?” Nigger Joe murmured. He had been biting the inside of his full lower lip, chewing, biting again. “I thought they was gonna blow it soon’s we got a position here. What the hell they doin’ back in there?”
Gyp Williams motioned him to silence. “Quiet, willya. They’ll get on it, you take it easy.”
“I’m really scared.” Don Karpinsky added a footnote. “It’s like waiting for them to come and kill you. My old man told me about that at Belsen, how they came around and just looked at you, didn’t say a word, just walked up and down, gauging you, looking to see if there was meat on you, and then later, boy oh boy, later they came back and didn’t have any trouble picking you out, just walked up and down again, pointing, that one and that one and…”
“Can it.” Gyp Williams hushed him. “Boy, you sure can talk!” He was silent a second, scrutinizing the young man, too young to need a shave every day, but old enough to be here behind the wall with them. Then, “What you in for, boy?”
Don Karpinsky looked startled, his face rearranging itself to make explanations, excuses, reading itself for extenuating circumstances, amelioration. “I, I, uh, I hurt some people.”
Gyp Williams turned toward him more completely (yet kept a corner of his eye on the empty yard, where the bodies remained crumpled). “You what, you did what?”
“I just, uh, I hurt some people, with a, uh, with a bomb, see I made this bomb and when I tossed it I din’t know there was any—”
“Whoa back, boy!” Gyp Williams pulled the young man’s racethrough dialogue to a halt. “Go on back a bit. You made a what? A bomb?”
Karpinsky nodded dumbly; it was obvious he had never thought he would be censured here.
“Now what’n the hell you do that for, boy?”
Don Karpinsky turned to the belts of long slugs, neatly folded over themselves, ready for the maw of the machine gun. He would not, or could not, answer.
Simon Rubin spoke up. He had been listening to the interchange but had decided to let the young Karpinsky handle his own explanations. But now it needed ending, and since the young man had confided in him one rainy night in their cell, he felt the privileged communication might best be put to use here. “Gyp,” he called the big black man’s attention away from Karpinsky. It seemed to halt the next words from Gyp Williams’s mouth.
“He bombed a church, Gyp. Some little town in Iowa. The minister was apparently some kind of a monster, got the local Male White Protestants convinced Jews ate goyishe children for Passover. They made it hell on the kid and his family. He was a chemistry bug, made a bomb, and tossed it. Killed six people. They threw him in here.”
Gyp Williams seemed about to say something, merely clucked his tongue, and rolled over once more into a firing position. The only sound in the enclosure was the metallic sliding of the machine rifle’s bolt as Gyp Williams made unnecessary checks.
Lew Steiner was asleep against the wall, his back propped outward by a sandbag, a black powder bomb in each hand, as though in that instant of snapping awake, he might reflexively hurl one of the spheroids more accurately, more powerfully than he had in combat.
“Whaddaya think, Gyp?” Chocolate asked. “You think they gonna try an’ take us in daylight, or wait till t’night?” He was as young as Don Karpinsky, somewhere under twenty, but a reddish, ragged scar that split down his left cheek to the corner of his mouth made him seem—somehow—older, more experienced, more capable of violence than the boy who had bombed the small Iowa church.
Gyp Williams rose up on an elbow, gaining a better field of vision across the yard. He talked as mu
ch to himself as to Chocolate. “I don’t know. Might be they’d be careful about waiting till dark. That’s a good time for us as much as them. And when the other boys make the move to blow the gate, the dark’ll be on our side, we can shoot out them searchlights…”
He chuckled, lightly, almost naïvely.
“What’s so funny?” Nigger Joe asked, then turned as Simon Rubin asked, “Hey, Joe, I got a crick in my back, here, want to rub it out for me?” Nigger Joe acknowledged the request and slid across the dirt to Rubin, who turned his back, indicating the sore area. The Negro began thumbing it smooth with practiced hands, repeating, “Gyp, what’s so funny?”
Gyp Williams’s ruggedly handsome face went into a softer stage. “I remember the night they came for us, the caravan, about fifteen twenty cars, came on down to Littletown, all of them with the hoods, lookin’ for the one who’d grabbed a feel off the druggist’s wife. Man, they were sure pretty, all of them real black against the sky, just them white hoods showing them off like perfect targets.
“They’s about ten of us, see, about ten, all laid out like I am now, out there on a little hill in the tall grass, watching them cars move on down. Show-offs, that’s what they was. Show-offs, or they wouldn’t’ve sat up on the backs of them convertibles, where we could see ’em so plain. No lights on the cars, all silent, but the white hoods, as plain as moonlight.
“We got about thirteen or fourteen of them cats before they figured they’d been ruined. I was just thinkin’ ’bout it now, thinkin’ ’bout them searchlights when they come on. Those white uniforms gonna be might fine to shoot at, soon’s it gets dark.” Then, without a break in meter, his tone became frenzied, annoyed, “When the hell they gonna blow that goddam gate?”
As if in reply, a long, strident burst from a grease gun, sprayed from the roof of the Administration Building, pocked the wall behind them, chewing out irregular niches in the brick. They were spattered with brick chips and mortar, dirt and whizzing bits of stone. Lew Steiner came rigidly awake, grasped the situation and ducked in a dummy-up cover, imitating the other five defenders.
They were huddled over that way, when they heard the whispering, chuckling whirr of helicopter rotors chewing the air. “They’re coming over the wall in a ’copter!” Don Karpinsky shrieked.
Gyp Williams turned over, raising his sights on the machine rifle, bracing the barrel on an upright sheet of corrugated metal. “Lew! Get set, them bombs…they comin’ over…Lew!”
But Steiner was lost in fear. It was silence he heard, frozen in silence, not the commanding voice of Gyp Williams. Gyp cursed tightly, eyes directed at the wall, scanning, tracking back and forth for the first sight of the guard chopper, coming with the tear gas or the thermite or a ten-second shrapnel cannister. “Joe! Joe, dammit, do somethin’ about Lew, you, Joe!”
Nigger Joe slid across the ground, grasped Lew Steiner by the hair, and jerked him out of the snail-like fetal position he had assumed. Steiner still clutched the black smoke bombs, one in either fist, like thick, burnt rolls, snatched from an oven.
The colored man was unconcerned with niceties. He slapped Steiner heavily, the sound a counterpoint to the ’copter’s rising comments. Lew Steiner did not want to come back from wherever he had gone to find peace and security. But the black man’s palm would not be ignored. He bounced the work-pinkened flesh off Steiner’s cheeks until the milky-blue of sight unseen had faded, and Steiner was back with them.
“Them bombs, Lew,” Nigger Joe said, softly, with great kindness. “They comin’ over the wall right’cheer behind us.” Steiner’s defection was already forgotten.
No more was said as Steiner rolled over, ready to meet the helicopter with his bombs. Chocolate and Don Karpinsky stayed with the fixed machine gun, prepared for a rear-guard attack in the face of the aerial threat. Nigger Joe and Simon Rubin lay on their backs, rifles pointed at the sky.
The whirlybird came over the wall fifty feet down the line, and Gyp Williams quickly readjusted himself for its approach. The machine was perhaps twenty feet over their heads, and came churning toward them rapidly, as though intent on low-level strafing. Gyp Williams loosed his first burst before the others, and it missed the mark by two feet. The helicopter came on rapidly, steadily. The six men lay staring at it, readying themselves, trying at the same time to find places for their naked bodies in the earth.
When it was almost directly overhead, Lew Steiner rose to a kneeling position and hurled first one black powder bomb, then the other, with tremendous force. The first bomb went straight, directly up into the air, passed over the cockpit of the machine, and tumbled back wobbling, to hit the top of the wall, bounce and explode on the other side. The reverberation could be felt in the wall and the ground, but no rifts appeared in the brick. The second bomb crashed into the side of the machine and a deafening roar split up the even sussuration of the ’copter’s rotors. The machine tottered on its course, slipped sidewise and lost minor altitude, but was compensated, began to climb, and just as it hurled itself away in a slanting curve, a projectile tumbled dizzily, end-over-end from the machine.
Then the ’copter was gone, and they watched the projectile falling straight for them. Gyp Williams began screaming, “Fire, fire, hit it hit it hitithitithitit…” and they all poured flame into the sky, missing the tear gas bomb as it fell a few yards from their enclosure, exploded, and sent rolling clouds of tear gas straight toward them.
The vapors overwhelmed them; they felt the sting of the chemicals; their eyes went blood-red in an instant, and Don Karpinsky fell on his side, clutching his face, crying like an infant. Lew Steiner grabbed another bomb from somewhere, and hurled it at the empty yard, a motion of wanton fury and impotence that no one noticed, that had no effect. Gyp Williams refused to cry. He dug his broad face deep into the dirt.
The others recoiled, tried to protect themselves, but they knew the guards would attack in this moment of siege. They could hear them coming, rebel yells of victory and bloodlust shattering on the pane of the air. And over the battle cries, the malicious rattle of the machine gun as Chocolate sprayed the yard in steady, back-and-forth sweeps. Blind to everything, tears running out of his burning eyes, knowing only that he had the power to cut them down, the young man with the livid scar continued his barrage, building a wall of death the guards in their white uniforms could not penetrate.
And after a while, when the belts were exhausted, and the guards had gone back to cover, when the gas had blown away, stringers of mist on a late afternoon breeze some God had sent to prolong their passion, they all lay back with eyes crimson and streaming, knowing it had to be over soon, and hoping the second group would finally, please dear Lord, blow that frigging gate!
“Man, how long, how long,” Nigger Joe spoke to the advancing dusk. “How long this gotta go on. It seem like I been livin’ off misery all my life, you’d think it’d end sometime, not just keep goin’ on and on and on.”
Simon Rubin sat up and looked at him, and there was compassion in his lean, ascetic face.
“How many lives I gotta lead, steppin’ down into the gutter for some ’fay cat? How many times I gotta be called ‘Boy,’ an’ when’m I gonna get some memories I wanta put away to think back on, another time?” His eyes were lost in the twilight, set deep under bony eyebrow ridges, but his fierce voice was all around them, very soft but compelling.
“Even in here they makin’ me be somethin’ I ain’t. Even in here I’m tryin’ to get away, get some life, what’s left to me, and they got me down with my face in the dirt; they don’t know. Man, they’ll never know. I can remember every one them cats, makin’ jokes, pokin’ fun, sayin’ things, a man’s got to have pride, that’s what matters, just his goddamn pride. They can have all the rest of it, just gimme the pride. An’ when they come ’round takin’ that too, then you gotta raise up and split some sonofabitch’s head with a shovel…”
Simon Rubin’s voice came sliding in on the semi-darkness, a cool soft fabric covering tiny soun
ds of crickets and metal clanking on metal from somewhere out there.
“I know how you feel, Joe. There are a lot of us in that kind of ghetto.
“Only for some of us it gets worse, even when it gets better. You knew your kind of hate, but it was different for me.”
Gyp Williams snorted in disgust. “Sheet, man, when you Jewish cats gonna come off that kick? When you gonna stop lyin’ on yourself, man, that you been persecuted, so you know how a black man feels? Jeezus, you Jewish own most of the tenements up in Harlem. You as bad as any the rest of them cats.” He turned away in suppressed fury, turning his anger on the machine rifle, whose bolt he snapped back twice quickly.
Simon Rubin began speaking again, as though by the continuing stream of words he could negate what Gyp Williams had said. “I wanted to get into dental college, but they had a quota on Jews. I didn’t have the money or the name to be in that quota, so I went out for veterinary medicine. I got set back and set back so many times, I finally said to hell with it, and I changed my name, and had my nose fixed, and then I married a gentile.
“It even worked for a while.” He smiled thinly, remembering, out of his not-very-Semitic face. “And then one night we had a fight about something, I don’t remember what, and we went to bed angry, and in the middle of the night I turned to her and we started to make love, and when she was ready she began saying over and over in my ear, ‘Now, you dirty kike, now, you dirty kike…’”
Simon Rubin buried his face in his hands.
Don Karpinsky asked, “Simon…?”
“So…so I know how you feel Joe,” Simon finished. “I hated myself more than she could ever hate me; and when they sent me here for her, because of her, what I did to her, I gave them my name the way I came into the world with it. So I know, Joe, believe me, I know.”
Nigger Joe started to turn away, his thoughts turned inward. He paused and looked directly at Simon Rubin: “I’m sorry you feel bad, Simon,” he lamented, “it’s just I been in chains four hundred years, and all that clankin’ makes me hear not so good. I’m sorry you got troubles, man.”