Clockers (57 page)

The cop was sliding the stick and moving Strike’s arm for him. Strike felt his scalp creep, his head becoming lighter than air as it began to fill with visions of taking the cop’s stick and rapping his balls, smashing his skull.

The Hispanic cop put his arm around Buddha Hat’s shoulders, spoke intimately by his ear. “That’s really embarrassing innit? Makes you want to blow a gasket, seeing that, don’t it? Phew. Maybe you should tell us where the dope is.”

“Ain’t no dope,” Buddha Hat said.

“No, huh?” The cop stared at Buddha Hat’s license. “Where you work at? What you do?”

“In Dempsy for my uncle’s truck. Help on the truck.” Buddha Hat stared at the ground, and Strike saw his eyes go wide and icy.

“A trucker’s helper? How the fuck can you afford this car?”

“My grand—”

”
Fuck
your grandmother. Don’t give me this grandmother bullshit. This is a fucking dope-bought car and I don’t wanna hear about anything else.”

“I never sold dope in my life.” Buddha Hat’s eyes showed whites all around but his voice remained small.

“You know what I drive? I drive a five-year-old Honda Civic and I got two years of college, so who the
fuck
are you, tell me that.”

Buddha Hat said nothing.

“Trucker’s helper,” the cop hissed. “And don’t give me them King Kong eyes ‘cause I’ll put You through the fucking ground right here and now, Yo.”

“That’s it, man, I’m starting to get hard for
real.
“ Strike’s cop leaned back, his hand sliding obscenely between the cheeks of his own ass. “Anytime you feel like you wanna stop, alls you got to do is tell me where it is, brother.”

The cop started whistling, “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” to accompany the strokes, lit another cigarette with his free hand, and then Strike was gone, lost in a fantasy of violence, gripping the nightstick white-knuckled now, his neck aching from the way his chin was turned almost clear behind his shoulder so that he didn’t have to look at the cop. He started to make a noise no one could hear but himself.

“Whoa, there horsey!” the cop squawked. “Fred, check out
this
action.”

Strike snapped into focus. Looking down, he was shocked to see that while he was lost in his bloody visions he had started jerking on the nightstick so vigorously that the cop didn’t even have to hold it for him. Horrified, he let the stick go and watched it clatter to the ground.

“Did I tell you to stop?” The cop blew a cloud of smoke.

“I ay-ain’t do-doin’ it no more.” Strike stared intently at the cop’s shoes.

“Are you telling me to go fuck myself?”

“N-n-n-no. I ju-juh-juh…”

The cop hesitated, appraising the stammer. “Just tell me where the package is,” he said quietly, his voice suddenly sober.

“N-n-n-n…” Strike began thrashing his head, trying to physically whip out words that just wouldn’t shake loose. “N-n-n-n…” Something danced in his eyes as he clenched his teeth. “N-n-n-n …”

The cops exchanged a quick embarrassed look.

“Just take the
car,
man,” Buddha Hat almost shouted, sounding angry and pained. “You gonna take it, then just take it.”

Strike could see a spray of diamond chips hanging from his own eyelashes. “Gerr-gerr…” His nostrils filled with mucus, a wet ”
hoop
“ sound escaping his throat. “Guh-rrr…” Rooted to the ground, lost and blind with a dewy rage, he didn’t even try to shape words anymore, surrendering to the sounds as they came, pure fury, pure music.

“Easy, easy.” Strike’s cop put out a placating hand but kept his distance. “Easy there, Home.”

“Im
pound
the motherfucker,” Buddha Hat snapped, making a gun with his thumb and forefinger. ”
Please.
”

An hour after the cops had beat a wordless retreat, piling into their cruiser without threat or apology, Strike and Buddha Hat sat in silence, parked on the Jersey side of the river right on the water’s edge, staring out at the shut-down New York skyline.

Buddha Hat lit a cigarette and Strike rolled down his window for air. It was three o’clock in the morning. The only other life around them was a gray-haired white man in a soft gray sweater. Baby-faced, smiling, he paced rapidly back and forth along the river railing, talking to himself.

Buddha Hat squinted at the white man, then slowly turned to Strike. “When do you think you’re gonna die?”

Strike pressed a forearm across his gut, the pain like a vicious intelligence announcing a response to the question.

“I don’t know, I got some years. Twenty maybe? Yeah, I’d like twenty more if I can get it.” Strike nodded, completely exhausted from the night.

Buddha Hat tapped his ashes into the gap where an ashtray should have been. “Yeah, well, I don’t think I got much more to go myself.” He shook his head. “When it happens? I hope they put it right here.” He touched a hollow behind Strike’s left ear, his fingertip like iced wax. “‘Cause right there? You don’t feel
nothin’.
You go like …
crack.
”

“Um.” A soft sucking noise escaped Strike’s lips as he pressed his forearm so deep into his stomach that the bone of his arm locked in behind his lower ribs. He could feel a bit of something climb up his throat and into his mouth.

Buddha Hat sat quietly, as if taking his measure in the darkness. “You got your high school diploma?”

“Unh-uh,” Strike said, trying to unclench.

“Can I say something to you without disrespect?”

Strike waited.

“You should go back to school or something.”

Strike looked up at Buddha Hat in surprise. Buddha Hat winced apologetically, then gently added, “‘Cause you in the wrong line of work.”

PART IV

Thirty In

22

TUESDAY
was Rocco’s night off. He sat at the dinner table not listening to anybody, the liquor in his eye giving each glass rim, fork tine, and candle flame a slightly haloed gleam. He slouched at the head of the table, feeling like the Father; before him sat Patty and six friends of hers. They were all so young and bright, and in his slightly sullen stupor Rocco decided to label them the Quick and the Weak.

Patty had arranged the dinner in honor of their third wedding anniversary, and the guest list was all hers. He had thought about inviting Mazilli, but she was put off by his partner—she said he spooked her. In fact, Patty didn’t like cops as a rule. She thought of them as nerve-racking presences, heavy-handed charmers who addressed women that they had just been introduced to by half their first names—Lil, Vy, Jude, Deb—and who, at best, treated women like lovable baby animals in a petting zoo. By now, after three years of marriage, Rocco felt so self-conscious and defeated by Patty’s take on cops that he no longer wanted to invite anyone from the Job to the loft, imagining her polite smile when they would moo over the view, exclaim “Holy shit” or make some comment about how he had it “made in the shade.”

Rocco stared down at the remains of his wife’s offerings: soft-shell crab on a bed of Boston lettuce, baby shrimp, slices of avocado and yellow pepper. An old friend of Patty’s named Gerry, seated at the opposite end of the table and facing Rocco across the candles—overweight, bearded and bespectacled—laughed at something Patty said, the laugh a deep, stuttering jackhammer. Rocco heard Erin rustle in her crib behind the sliding rice-paper partition. Then someone held up a skimpy crab and launched into a droll lecture regarding the difference between good cholesterol and bad.

Rocco sipped his vodka, then cleared his throat. “In Dempsy?” he said loudly. “If we were eating in Dempsy, it would be crabs and spaghetti tonight.”

All other conversation came to an end, seven faces turned his way, attentive smiles all around.

“They fish the crabs out of the creeks,” Rocco continued. “I know what it sounds like, but it’s better than you think. I mean, not as good as
this
but…”

“Where do they get the spaghetti?” asked a slender young man dressed in black and white like a waiter, an ex-boyfriend of Patty’s from college.

“Well, you know, they have orchards outside Bayonne.” Rocco tossed off the rest of his drink.

“Oh God,” Patty said. “Did you ever see that old BBC clip where they did the thing on spaghetti harvesting in Italy? With the spaghetti hanging off the trees?”

A chorus of “yeahs” followed as Rocco withdrew into a paranoid sulk. Why did she want to shut him down? He wasn’t being unsociable or anything.

“Hey, Rocco?”

Rocco didn’t hear his name. He was debating with himself whether to simply stand up and start clearing the dishes or first signal Patty for permission.

“Rocco.”

It was Gerry, who tilted his head slightly to catch his eye out of the line of candles.

“Rocco … Is that your real name?”

“Why wouldn’t it be my real name?”

“Rocco
Klein?
“ Gerry took out a pipe and sucked air through the empty bowl.

“What are you, an anti-Semite?” Rocco said too quickly. He glanced at Patty as the words left his mouth. “I’m only kidding.” The table went quiet again. “Actually Rocco’s a nickname. My real name is Dave, David.”

The vodka bottle was on the sideboard, just out of his reach, and he didn’t want to get up and pour a refill in front of this crowd. In a burst of anxiety he began to talk.

“See, when my parents split up? I went to live with my mother’s parents. My father went back to live with
his
parents, and my mother took off, just took off.” Rocco shot a hand toward the window like an arrow.

The guests were all listening now, leaning over their empty plates. Patty began to peel tears of wax off a candle, Rocco thinking, Hey, I listen to
your
stories over and over.

“My grandfather, he was a teamster—you know, a truck driver—and the reason I became a cop was because he once beat a guy half to death, his
boss
in fact, and this cop, this detective, had fixed it with the judge so that when he was arraigned he wouldn’t go to jail. This cop told him that when he went before the judge he should plead guilty, that the judge would just pass some sentence for show, and then he should leave by this door, this particular door to the left of the bench. And that’s what he did. Went up before the judge, the judge mumbled some bogus sentence, and then my grandfather went out the door next to the bench. The door led to an alley, and right behind that door was the detective, who then booted him right in the ass, told him never to fuck up like that again. So my grandfather always talked about this detective Rocco Aiello that fixed it for him, kicked him in the ass. The guy was his hero, and when
I
came to live with him, well, he gave me the nickname Rocco. In fact, that was why I went into the police academy, hearing all my life about this guy, who I never actually met.”

Patty got up and started clearing dishes. Rocco still couldn’t read her face.

“Why’d he beat up his boss?” It was Gerry again. What was
with
this guy? But Rocco had a second wind now.

“Yeah, well it’s funny. I always heard that his boss had blacklisted him in the poultry business—my grandfather delivered poultry—and there had been a hijacking and this boss thought my grandfather was in on it. My mother, who was a little kid at this time, had pleurisy or something and my grandfather, he was so pissed off at being fired for no reason like that, that he just marched in on the guy at this poultry clearinghouse on Fourteenth Street, just marched in with blood in his eye because his daughter’s sick and he can’t even put food on the table. And then he beat this guy, his boss, half to death in front of everybody. And the colored guys, these guys that drove with him before he got shitcanned? He always got along with colored guys, and we’re talking 1935 now, and…”

Rocco saw Gerry wink at Patty, who stood at the dishwasher. What the hell did
that
mean? “And anyways these colored guys, they got him out of there, told him to go home, but the boss filed charges from the hospital so … I used to love to hear the stories of his life, you know? It was always him walking in somewheres and kicking ass because enough is enough…”

Rocco remembered his last visit with his grandfather: he’d stood over the comatose old man in a hospital bed, one hand on his chest as if to keep him from floating away, just stood there watching “Kojak” on the ceiling-mounted television. Lost in his thoughts, Rocco whistled absently through clenched teeth, then looked up to see Patty standing over him. With a reassuring nod she handed him a fresh vodka and he felt flushed with gratitude. Looking around the table, he sensed that his audience was still with him.

“Anyways, that’s the story I always heard, but one of the last times I talked to him? About four years ago, before he died? He was in the hospital already, going pretty fast, and I guess he was feeling sorry for himself dying and all, and he told me about the beating again, but this time he told me the truth of it, which was, well, his job was delivering chickens and ducks and sometimes eggs to restaurants, and this one day the eggs got mixed up and they hatched, you know,
peep peep
in the back of the truck, and he figured, what the hell, and put a couple in his pocket to take home to my mother, like a treat for a kid, baby chicks. The boss heard somehow that Sonny Marx had stole some chickens, so he—Moskowitz was his name—he’d had it with stealing, so he fired my grandfather and spread the word that Sonny Marx was a thief. It was a closed business and my grandfather just couldn’t get work anywhere and I guess he was really in a bad spot over these chicks, these two chicks for his daughter, and finally after two weeks when he couldn’t get hired he went to talk to this Moskowitz, to ask why, but to
ask,
to go hat in hand, Why are you taking the food out of my family’s mouth? What did I ever do to you? It was two chicks, baby chicks for my daughter, I’ll pay for them,
please
Mr. Moskowitz … And Moskowitz wouldn’t even look at him, he just, Get out of here, Marx. You’re a thief, a
gonif,
you’re finished, and my grandfather started to beg … He begged in this giant chicken hall surrounded by all these guys he worked with, Please Mr. Moskowitz, I swear, please, I never, and then he started to cry in front of … And then I guess he lost it and did what he did, fractured the guy’s skull, stove in half his ribs, and then the colored guys got him out of there. And I think this was the true story—I mean, I’m a detective, right? I should know the truth from the lie when I hear it right? But with your family You get You know the truth is a while in the coming ”