Flying Home and Other Stories by John Callahan

Author:John Callahan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2016-06-01T16:00:00+00:00

Hymie’s Bull

We were just drifting; going no place in particular, having long ago given up hopes of finding jobs. We were just knocking around the country. [ Just drifting, ten black boys on an L & N freight.] From Birmingham we had swung up to the world’s fair at Chicago, where the bull had met us in the yards and turned us around and knocked a few lumps on our heads as souvenirs. If you’ve ever had a bull stand so close he can’t miss, and hit you across the rump as you crawled across the top of a boxcar and when you tried to get out of the way, because you knew he had a gun as well as a loaded stick, you’ve had him measure a tender spot on your head and let go with his loaded stick like a man cracking black walnuts with a hammer; and if when you started to climb down the side of the car because you didn’t want to jump from the moving train like he said, you’ve had him step on your fingers with his heavy boots and grind them with his heel like you’d do a cockroach and then if you didn’t let go, he beat you across the knuckles with his loaded stick till you did let go; and when you did, you hit the cinders and found yourself tumbling and sliding on your face away from the train faster than the telephone poles alongside the tracks, then you can understand why we were glad as hell we only had a few lumps on the head. Especially when you remember that the Chicago bulls hate black bums ’bout as much as Texas Slim, who’ll kill a Negro as quick as he’ll crack down on a blackbird sitting on a fence.

Bulls are pretty bad people to meet if you’re a bum. They have head-whipping down to a science and they’re always ready to go into action. They know all the places to hit to change a bone into jelly, and they seem to feel just the place to kick you to make your backbone feel like it’s going to fold up like the old collapsible drinking cups we used when we were kids. Once a bull hit me across the bridge of my nose and I felt like I was coming apart like a cigarette floating in a urinal. They can hit you on your head and bust your shoes.

But sometimes the bulls get the worst of it, and whenever a bull is missing at the end of a run and they find him all cut up and bleeding, they start taking all the black boys off the freights. Most of the time, they don’t care who did it, because the main thing is to make some black boy pay for it. Now when you hear that we’re the only bums that carry knives you can just put that down as bull talk because what I’m fixing to tell you about was done by an ofay bum named Hymie from Brooklyn.

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