Free A Piece of Mine by J. California Cooper

got sense enough to know how to be dishonest and rob somebody with something! Anyway, Della heard the noise and woke Smitty up. He lay there a moment then said, “Let’s go see what’s going on.” He hollered from the bed, “Who’s there! Who’s in this house?”
    They got up and went into the hall and there was this dope addict or something looking raggedy and holding a gun. Smitty ran past him, going to get his gun, I guess, and Della got scared and tried to follow him past the robber, who was then squashed against the wall with Della screaming at him to let her go! She must have hit him or something, he was really trying to get out of that tight spot with all that mouth wide open screaming in his ears, and probably hoping somebody would come in and save him from his victims, but their house stood all alone and the cafe-bar across the street made so much noise, nobody could hear them. The gun went off around that time and Della thought Smitty had saved her when Smitty came rushing around a corner hollering Della’s name, guess he thought she had been shot, and the robber slid down the wall at her feet, dead.
    Smitty hadn’t been able to find his gun. They grabbed each other and looked at the dead man; he had shot himself with Smitty’s gun … accidentally. Della said, “We gotta call the police!” Smitty said back, “Wait a minute! Let’s talk about this!” So they did. Smitty continued “Now listen … ifwe call them cops we gon have a lot of trouble! That’s my gun! And I ain’t got no license for it! And I can’t prove I didn’t pull that trigger and put that gun in his hand! All them cops look at TV and ain’t no tellin what they gon decide happened here!” Della’s eyes grew even wider. “Well, what else can we do? We can’t throw him outside in the street!” Smitty shot back, “Oh yes we can! That’s just what we got to do!”
    He ran to look out the window with Della following him, her large white flannel gown billowing around her. No one was in sight and the music blasting from the cafe. It was settled in Smitty’s mind … the dead man was going outside. Della started crying til Smitty slapped her into just whimpering and sniffling. She went to get her robe and a cap and Smitty went to get an old blanket out of his car. She noticed the blood that had flowed from the man’s wound and went to get a bandaid, Smitty came back and snatched it and stuck it in the man’s shirt pocket. In fact, they did all the wrong things you see on TV. They rolled the man up and when the cafe closed and all was dark they carried the corpse over to the empty lot and left it! Went home, cleaned up, wiped off the gun, put it back in the drawer and went to bed with Smitty explaining, “I didn’t kill him, you didn’t kill him, so we ain’t got nothing to do with it! He broke in our house, took our gun (everything was suddently “our”) and shot his own self! We didn’t know him before, we don’t know him now! So go to sleep and forget the whole thing!”… So they did. See, what I mean, something that’s big like death, they stepped over that like it was a broom!
    Anyway, the police found the body the next day, took it somewhere and did something and since the man was black the case was closed, even with all those clues, stamped “killed by person or persons unknown …  CLOSED! ” and that was that. Smitty and Della picked up their life and went on as usual. He felt real smart cause he had handled it real smart so he began to add, when they had arguments, “You ain’t gotno sense! If it wasn’t for me, a man in this house, ain’t no telling what would happen to you!” Della smiled at all that, she was used to it and she loved her Smitty!
    Then this thing happened that made me wonder at them because they had been through such big things and this seemed little to me, you might say.
    It was a day that Della had not been feeling well; maybe lost a baby or something almost as important;