Stories: All-New Tales

A moment later the shotgun was pulled from his hand, and then Lobo was kneeling down next to him with the Winchester in one hand and the shotgun in the other.

“I done killed you, Deel.”

“No,” Deel said, spitting up blood. “I ain’t alive to kill.”

“I think I clipped a lung,” Lobo said, as if proud of his marksmanship. “You ought not done what you done. It’s good that boy got away. He ain’t no cause of nothin’.”

“He just ain’t had his turn.”

Deel’s chest was filling up with blood. It was as if someone had put a funnel in his mouth and poured it into him. He tried to say something more, but it wouldn’t come out. There was only a cough and some blood; it splattered warm on his chest. Lobo put the weapons down and picked up Deel’s head and laid it across one of his thighs so he wasn’t choking so much.

“You got a last words, Deel?”

“Look there,” Deel said.

Deel’s eyes had lifted to the heavens, and Lobo looked. What he saw was the night and the moon and the stars. “Look there. You see it?” Deel said. “The stars are fallin’.”

Lobo said, “Ain’t nothin’ fallin’, Deel,” but when he looked back down, Deel was gone.

JUVENAL NYX

Walter Mosley

1.

SHE NAMED ME JUVENAL NYX and made me a child of the night.

I was attending a Saturday-night meeting at Splinter—the Radical Faction Bookstore, presenting the Amalgamation of Black Student Unions’ stand on when and how we would agree to work with white radical organizations. For too long, we believed, had our systems, movements, and ultimate liberation been co-opted by white groups pretending, maybe even believing, that they were our friends and allies. But in the end we were saddled with goals outside our communities, diverted into pathways that abandoned our people’s needs and ends.

The speech went very well, and the people there, both black and white, seemed to take my words seriously. I felt that the articulation of our goals was in itself a victory, a line drawn in the quick-drying cement that had been poured into the frame of the coming revolution.

I was very young.

She approached me after the series of speakers had made their comments, pleas, pledges, and calls for solidarity. She was short and white, pale actually, wearing loose-fitting jeans and a faded blue T-shirt. She wasn’t pretty and didn’t do much in the way of makeup. Only her eyes were arresting. They were very dark, maybe even black, with a patina of silver glowing underneath now and then.

“I like what you had to say,” she told me. “Any man must stand on his own before relying on the help of others.”

Her use of the word man made me curious. I assumed, from the way she dressed, that she’d be a feminist.

“That’s right,” I said. “The black man doesn’t need Mr. Charlie to pave the way. It’s the white man who wants our power.”

“Everyone wants your strength,” she said.

With that she looked into my eyes and touched my left wrist. Her fingers were cold.

“Will you have coffee with me?” she asked.

No, was in my throat but “Yes” came out of my mouth. “Only for just a bit,” I added awkwardly. “I have to get back to my people and report.”

“I AM FROM RUMANIA,” she told me at the café across the street from the bookstore. “My parents have died and I am alone in the world. I work sometimes doing freelance copyediting and I go to meetings at night.”

“Political meetings?” I asked, wondering at the moonlight that emanated from behind her eyes.

“No kind in particular,” she said, dismissing all content with the shrug of a shoulder. “I go to readings and lectures, art openings and the like. I just want to be around people, to belong for a while.”

“You live alone?”

“Yes. I prefer it that way. Relationships seem to lose their meaning, and after a few weeks I crave solitude again.”

“How old are you?” I asked, wondering at the odd way in which she spoke.

“I am young,” she said, smiling as if there was a joke hidden among her words. “Come home with me for the night.”

“I don’t chase after white girls, Julia,” I said, because that was the name she’d given me.

“Come home with me,” she said again.

“I’ll walk you to your door,” I said, reluctantly, “but after that I have to get back to Central House.”

“What is Central House?”

“The officers and senior members of the BSUs around the city have rented a brownstone in Harlem. We live together and prepare for whatever’s coming.”

She smiled at my words and stood.

“JULIA,” A MAN SAID when we were halfway down the block from the café. “Wait up.”

He was tall and brawny, white and blond. He might have been a football player at some university, maybe the one I was attending.

“Martin,” she said by way of a tepid greeting.

“Where you going?” He had a thick gauze wad taped to his left forearm.

When she didn’t answer he gave me an evil look.

“This is my, my girlfriend, dude,” he said.

I didn’t reply. Instead I was preparing for a fight I didn’t think I could win. He was very big and I am, at best, a middleweight.

“Just walk away and you won’t get hurt,” the footballer added.

His tone had a pleading quality to it. This made him seem all the more dangerous.

“Hey, man,” I said. “I just met the lady, but you aren’t gonna make me go anywhere.”

He reached for me and I got ready to throw the hardest punch I could. I wasn’t about to let that white boy make me turn tail and run.

“Martin, stop,” Julia said. Each syllable was the sound of a hammer driving a nail.

Martin’s fingers splayed out like a fan and he drew the hand back as if it had been burned.

“Go away,” she said, “and don’t bother me again.”

Martin was well over six feet tall and weighed maybe two-forty, most of which was muscle. He shook like a man resisting a strong wind. The muscles of his neck bunched up and corded and he grimaced, exposing his teeth in a skull-like grin. After a minute or so of this strain, Martin turned his back to us and staggered from the sidewalk into the street and away. Cowering as he stumbled off, he gave the impression of a man reeling from a beating.

“You were ready to fight him,” Julia said.