"Hey! You sho you ain't got some white blood?"
"No, sir!" the voice said.
"Should I bust him, man?"
"For what? He ain't got a damn thing. Let the motherfouler alone."
A few doors away we came to a hardware store. "This is the first stop, men," Dupre said.
"What happens now?" I said.
"Who you?" he said, cocking his thrice-hatted head.
"Nobody, just one of the boys --" I began.
"You sho you ain't somebody I know?"
"I'm pretty sure," I said.
"He's all right, Du," said Scofield. "Them cops shot him."
Dupre looked at me and kicked something -- a pound of butter, sending it smearing across the hot street. "We fixing to do something what needs to be done," he said. "First we gets a flashlight for everybody . . . And let's have some organization, y'all. Don't everybody be running over everybody else. Come on!"
"Come on in, buddy," Scofield said.
I felt no need to lead or leave them; was glad to follow; was gripped by a need to see where and to what they would lead. And all the time the thought that I should go to the district was with me. We went inside the store, into the dark glinting with metal. They moved carefully, and I could hear them searching, sweeping objects to the floor. The cash register rang.
"Here some flashlights over here," someone called.
"How many?" Dupre said.
"Plenty, man."
"Okay, pass out one to everybody. They got batteries?"
"Naw, but there's plenty them too, 'bout a dozen boxes."
"Okay, give me one with batteries so I can find the buckets. Then every man get him a light."
"Here some buckets over here," Scofield said.
"Then all we got to find is where he keeps the oil."
"Oil?" I said.
"Coal oil, man. And hey, y'all," he called, '"don't nobody be smoking in here."
I stood beside Scofield listening to the noise as he took a stack of zinc buckets and passed them out. Now the store leaped alive with flashing lights and flickering shadows.
"Keep them lights down on the floor," Dupre called. "No use letting folks see who we are. Now when you get your buckets line up and let me fill 'em."
"Listen to ole Du lay it down -- he's a bitch, ain't he, buddy? He always liked to lead things. And always leading me into trouble."
"What are we getting ready to do?" I said.
"You'll see," Dupre said. "Hey, you over there. Come on from behind that counter and take this bucket. Don't you see ain't nothing in that cash register, that if it was I'd have it myself?"
Suddenly the banging of buckets ceased. We moved into the back room. By the light of a flash I could see a row of fuel drums mounted on racks. Dupre stood before them in his new hip boots and filled each bucket with oil. We moved in slow order. Our buckets filled, we filed out into the street. I stood there in the dark feeling a rising excitement as their voices played around me. What was the meaning of it all? What should I think of it, do about it?
"With this stuff," Dupre said, "we better walk in the middle of the street. It's just down around the corner."
Then as we moved off a group of boys ran among us and the men started using their lights, revealing darting figures in blonde wigs, the tails of their stolen dress coats flying. Behind them in hot pursuit came a gang armed with dummy rifles taken from an Army & Navy Store. I laughed with the others, thinking: A holy holiday for Clifton.
"Put out them lights!" Dupre commanded.
Behind us came the sound of screams, laughter; ahead the footfalls of the running boys, distant fire trucks, shooting, and in the quiet intervals, the steady filtering of shattered glass. I could smell the kerosene as it sloshed from the buckets and slapped against the street.
Suddenly Scofield grabbed my arm. "Good God, look-a-yonder!"
And I saw a crowd of men running up pulling a Borden's milk wagon, on top of which, surrounded by a row of railroad flares, a huge woman in a gingham pinafore sat drinking beer from a barrel which sat before her. The men would run furiously a few paces and stop, resting between the shafts, run a few paces and rest, shouting and laughing and drinking from a jug, as she on top threw back her head and shouted passionately in a full-throated voice of blues singer's timbre:
If it hadn't been for the referee,
Joe Louis woulda killed
Jim Jefferie
Free beer!!
-- sloshing the dipper of beer around.
We stepped aside, amazed, as she bowed graciously from side to side like a tipsy fat lady in a circus parade, the dipper like a gravy spoon in her enormous hand. Then she laughed and drank deeply while reaching over nonchalantly with her free hand to send quart after quart ot milk crashing into the street. And all the time the men running with the wagon over the debris. Around me there were shouts of laughter and disapproval.
"Somebody better stop them fools," Scofield said in outrage. "That's what I call taking things too far. Goddam, how the hell they going to get her down from there after she gits fulla beer? Somebody answer me that. How they going to get her down? 'Round here throwing away all that good milk!"
The big woman left me unnerved. Milk and beer -- I felt sad, watching the wagon careen dangerously as they went around a corner. We went on, avoiding the broken bottles as now the spilling kerosene splashed into the pale spilt milk. How much has happened? Why was I torn? We moved around a corner. My head still ached.
Scofield touched my arm. "Here we is," he said.
We had come to a huge tenement building.
"Where are we?" I said.
"This the place where most of us live," he said. "Come on."
So that was it, the meaning of the kerosene. I couldn't believe it, couldn't believe they had the nerve. All the windows seemed empty. They'd blacked it out themselves. I saw now only by flash or flame.