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gentility.
    “You lookin’fit, C.K.”
    Sss-sst!
    “Well, thank you, Big Nail.” Sss-sst! “ I was about to remark the same of you.”
    “You got to stop it now!” shouted Old Wesley. “We done call the police!”
    “Somebody git a gun!”
    But they weren’t listening any more. They were moving slower now, each one sagging a little, and they had stopped talking. Once they almost stopped moving altogether, standing about seven feet apart, their arms lower than before, and it seemed at that moment that they might both collapse.
    “Reckon we might as well . . . do it up right,” said Big Nail.
    “Reckon we might as well,” C.K. said.
    So they came together, in the center of the room, for one last time, still smiling, and cut each other to ribbons.
    Blind Tom Ransom, sitting on a stool inside the door, only heard it, a kind of scuffling, whistling sound, followed by a heavy swaying silence. And he heard the clackety noise, as the razors dropped to the floor—first one, then the other—and finally the great sack-weight sound of the two men coming down, like monuments.
    “It’s all ovah now,” he said, “all ovah now.”
    But there was no one to hear him; all the others had turned away from it towards the end. And they didn’t come back—only Harold, and then Old Wesley to stand by the bar, his hands on his hips, shaking his head. He looked at Harold.
    “Boy, you bettah git on home now,” he said gently.
    But before Harold could leave, a patrol-car slid up in front of the place, and Old Wesley directed the boy in through a curtained door behind the bar, as two tall white men in wide-brimmed hats got out of the car, slamming the doors and came inside.
    “What the hell’s goin’ on here, Wesley?” asked one of them looking irately around the room and at the two bodies on the floor.
    “Nothin’ goin’ on now, Officer,” said Wesley, “. . . them two got into argument . . . there weren’t no trouble otherwise.”
    “How you doin’, Blind Tom?” asked the second policeman.
    “Awright suh . . . who is it, Mistuh Kennedy?”
    The first had gone over to the bodies.
    “Put on some more light, Wesley . . . darker’n a well-digger’s ass in here—no wonder you have so much goddamn trouble.”
    He turned one of the men over and put his flashlight on him.
    “Goddamn they sure did it up right, didn’t they?”
    The other came over and gave a low whistle.
    “Boy, I reckon they did ,” he said.
    “You know ’em, Wesley?”
    “Yessuh, I knows ’em.”
    One of the policemen crossed to the bar and took a small notebook out of his shirt-pocket. The other one went back out and sat in the car.
    The policeman at the bar looked up at the ceiling.
    “You still ain’t got any more light in here than that?”
    “Nosuh, waitin’ for my fixtures.”
    The policeman gave a humorless laugh as he looked for a blank page in the notebook.
    “You been waitin’ a long time now for them fixtures, ain’t you, Wesley?”
    “Yessuh.”
    “Okay, what’s their names?”
    “One of ’em name ‘C.K. Crow’ . . . and the other—”
    “Wait a minute. ‘C.K. Crow.’ Any address?”
    “Why I don’t rightly know they address. I think C.K. live out on the old Seth Stevens place, out near Indian River.”
    “You know how old he was?”
    “C.K.? Why, he was thuty-five, thuty-six year old I guess.”
    “How ’bout the other one?”
    “His name was Emmett—everybody call him ‘Big Nail.’ ”
    “Emmett what?”
    “Emmett Crow.”
    “They both named Crow?”
    “Yessuh, that’s right.”
    “What were they? Brothers?”
    “Yessuh, that’s right.”
    “Well, how old was he then?”
    “Why I don’t rightly know now which one of them was the oldest of the two. They was always sayin’ they was a year older than the other one, each one of ’em say that, that he a year older. Then Big Nail, Emmett, he was away, you see, up Nawth—in Chicago or New York City, I believe it was . . . but they was both