Then Short Body Got Shot
by Gary Clifton
Head cheerleader Delilah Davis swished up to George’s table, her magnificent physique the target of all male eyes in the North Central University Union coffee shop. “Hey, Georgie, thought you ate with your jock buddies over at the Palace.”
He chuckled. “Hadda taste for a burger. Prime rib and caviar get old.”
She laughed and turned to walk on.
“Uh, D., first-runs at the Rialto.”
“You still driving that old junker?”
“It’s a classic.”
“No A/C, Georgie.” She smiled and sat at another table.
* * *
George, a longtime resident of a sprawling African-American slum in Kansas City, had been passed over by the big universities as a result of surgical reconstruction of his right knee. Doctors had ruled out football permanently. A “one to watch” basketball player in high school, he reluctantly visited the coaching staff at North Central and was granted a basketball scholarship to the Division II school.
As a six-two point guard, he’d become a star, well known on the small campus. He did well with the ladies, except for Delilah. The daughter of a prominent St. Louis attorney and a connoisseuse of finer things, she had rebuffed his advances like the Battle of New Orleans.
Walking to practice, a cellular behind him blared news of the impending Presidential election. He realized that he’d paid little attention to the upcoming event, which was slated for the following Tuesday.
The next afternoon, Friday, he endured the bumpy one-hundred mile bus ride with the basketball team to Adams State University, where he scored twenty-seven points in a runaway pre-season victory.
On the sleepy ride home, a teammate asked him who he favored in the elections. “None of them,” he offered in a typical cop-out reply. Having passed his twenty-first birthday, he’d registered to vote during a campus drive at the beginning of the semester. He’d just coax his old Chevy the forty miles home on the following Tuesday. He could figure out a candidate in the meantime.
On Tuesday, as he was again having a cheeseburger, Delilah walked by. “Morning, Georgie, are you going to do anything important today?”
“Matter of fact, I’m gonna drive into the city and vote in the presidential election. Wanna go along?”
“No, thanks.” She walked away.
From the next table, a deep male voice asked, “Can we go? We’ve never been to Kansas City.” George realized the voice belonged to Charlie “Twister” Smith, the star North Central offensive right tackle. Smith, from Minnesota, was two-hundred-eighty pounds of campus bully. Sharing his table was his best friend, Jake Arbal, from Wisconsin, who was about the same size and disposition as Twister Smith.
None of that worried George, and having somebody to talk to on the drive would be good. “Sure, leaving around five. It’s about an hour one way. If my old junker doesn’t quit on us, we should be back by eight o’clock.”
* * *
At five p.m., they were on their way, George navigating the narrow highway as he had done many times before. A critical factor in the operation, which had not yet come to light, was that George, having lived in a slum from his earliest recollection, was white, as were his passengers. The rest of his old friends and neighbors were not.
For several years, he’d resided with his mother in a little frame house behind the Blue Blaze Tavern, an African-American establishment where Jimi Hendrix wanna-bes played ear-splitting but very good music with the back door open until 4:30 in the morning.
George and his mother, who rented from Mr. Grand, owner of the Blue Blaze, were part of the neighborhood. It never occurred to George that strangers would give a second thought to the debris and decay. It also never occurred to him that the voting precinct, which fronted East Wilcox, was two doors down from the Blue Blaze.
When he pulled to the curb, as many as eight burly African-American men stood around or sat on the curb. They were bundled in shabby clothes against the cold, most sipping from half-pint bottles of Jim Beam. What outsider would comprehend that it was election day, and whiskey was handed out freely? Six men surrounded the car, leaned down and peered in the windows.
Two doubters sat in George’s jalopy, shrieking like pregnant banshees. “Run, for God’s sake, they’re gonna kill us!” screamed Chief Bully Twister Smith.
“Get me the hell outa here!” yelled Snake Arbal.
George rolled down his window and said to Paul Davis, an auto mechanic, “Paul, would you lean in here and tell these fellas nobody’s gonna hurt ’em?”
Three or four more of the half-drunken crowd deputized themselves and tried to soothe the terrified young men. Davis said, “Guess these boys don’t get to our neighborhood very often.”
George nodded. “Prolly never, I’m thinkin’.”
George ran in, voted, and returned while his friends practiced psychiatric fear management.
A pimp called "Jingles" leaned in the car and said, “You hear Short Body got shot?”
George asked, “No, did somebody look in on his mama?”
“Yeah.”
As they drove back, Snake Arbal said, “Are you friends with people like that?”
“Like what?”
Smith said, “Somebody named Short Body really get shot?”
George, disgusted at his lapse in judgment, said, “Yeah, it happens.”
* * *
The following morning, George considered himself finished. The “Short Body” tale was all over campus. At least twenty people had asked him if the story was true. As he walked toward the coaches’ office to say he was dropping out of school, he met Delilah coming from the other direction.
“Georgie, do you really live in a ghetto where people get shot and stuff?”
“Yeah, ’fraid so. But, Delilah, it’s not really a bad place.”
“My goodness, that is so exciting! Suppose we could have a beer this afternoon and you could tell me about your life in the hood?”
George, dumfounded, stammered, “Uh, yeah, D., I prolly could.”
George never made it to the coaches’ office.
Copyright © 2025 by Gary Clifton
