Dark Stain (3 page)

At the other end of the wire a voice said, “Yes?”

“Hello, Mrs. Buckles,” Sam said. “Is Suzy home?”

“No,” Suzy’s mother replied. “I expect her later, Sam. How are you?”

“Fine, thanks. Will you tell Suzy I’ll meet her tomorrow in her lunch hour. Tell her to wait for me in front of her building. Good night.” He hung up, thinking that he had forgotten to ask Suzy’s mother how she was; it was a hell of a thing to forget. Mrs. Buckles was worried about him anyway; besides being a Jew he was also a cop; Mrs. Buckles had her reservations about Jews and cops.

He left the drugstore and took the uptown subway at Seventy-Second Street and Broadway, collapsing into a seat under the blacked-out bulbs. He gaped sleepily at the subway faces. His eyes shuttered, opened at stations that weren’t his, numbers strung on the steel rails, the subway roaring through miles of tunnels. Ten minutes later, he climbed up to the street level. Men and girls were sitting on the benches on the traffic islands, the girls glimmering pale and white and silky. On the sidewalks, people walked home, reading the morning papers, absorbed in the black war headlines. He saw nothing, he felt nothing. The incessant whirring of his thoughts had stopped. Like a sleepwalker he hurried along Broadway, the upper Broadway of Washington Heights, of old-fashioned apartment houses once fashionable whose ground floors had long been converted into store fronts, markets, drugstores, appetizing, stores, kosher butchers, florists.

Sam turned into a sidestreet. Down below at the end of the block, the black land of New Jersey towered over the black river. He entered the lobby of his apartment house with its piece of faded imitation tapestry, marble bench and gilt-framed mirror. He strode to the automatic elevator and his image walked towards him in the mirror, hatless and wide-shouldered. He pushed the elevator button. The signal glass glowed ruby red. The elevator descended. He stepped inside, pressed the number of his floor. He wondered if his family would be waiting up for him. He got out in a marble-tiled corridor, lined with doors; over many of the doors the Jewish tenants had nailed
mezzuzahs
or miniature scrolls of the Bible; the
mezzuzahs
were supposed to bring good luck. There was one over Sam’s door. He inserted his key in the lock.

His family, his father, his mother, his older sister Rose, even his kid brother Mike, were waiting up for him. They crowded into the foyer from the living-room as he entered. Their voices, the intense eager voices of people with a hundred questions to ask, clapped against his ears. “Sam, my boy,” his mother cried at him. She clasped Sam in her arms, her brown eyes moist with tears. “Are you all right?”

“I’m all right, mom. Don’t worry.”

“Thank God. It must be terrible. Terrible. All the time the telephone’s ringing and all your friends they have to know. In all the papers — read the papers, I tell them. For shame to bother Sam at such a time.” She examined his face, wailed. “Sam, your jaw’s all broken.”

“No, it isn’t. It’s a little swollen, mom.” Gently, he pushed her away. She looked strange to him, a heavy woman with flabby arms and a face grey as her hair. “I feel bad, mom. But it’s not the jaw.” He heard his voice and it sounded flat and false. His father was waving a newspaper. Lean and grey as his mother was fat and grey, his father cursed.

“You got nothing to worry about, Sam. Feel bad for what? Such things happen in life, my son. It happens to you, to anybody. Another black lunatic, the lousy nigger. Wanted to kill you. And you feel bad. The lousy nigger choleria. It says so in the paper.”

His mother had again folded Sam to her as if he were a little boy in need of her protection. Enveloped in her arms, Sam didn’t recognize his father’s angry face, the twisted lips, the gold teeth gleaming like fangs.

“That’s what it gets you,” his father yelled. “Sticking up for them like you done, the lousy niggers. Oil and water. That’s how it is, my son. Now you know better. The papers all — How you try not to shoot. So the niggers, you they want to, to lynch. You. Now you know better. You see who is right. Your foolish old father.” He flaunted the newspaper at his son like a white flag.

Sam gazed at his father. Behind the fuming old man, his kid brother was hopping up and down; his sister Rose nodded at him and wiped her eyes. Father, mother, brother, sister, he stared at them. My family, he thought chokingly and resentfully. They didn’t understand how he felt and they never would. Mike squeezed between his father and the foyer wall, scuttling around his mother’s hips over to Sam. “Gee, Sam, you killed’m,” Mike said. “Where’d you hit the boogy? Gee, lemme see your gat. I’d like to hold it a minnit.” The flats of his feet were on the floor but his body was shaking; he was a small boy of twelve with a peanut face and big man-sized ears. “Where’d you hit’m, Sam? Lemme see your gat. Lemme hold it a minnit.”

“You go to bed,” Sam’s father whipped his paper down on Mike’s head.

“Let Mikey alone,” Sam’s mother cried. “Why blame him he’s so excited like all of us — his own big brother — Such a thing to happen to our own son. I can’t belief it, Sam, but all the time the telephone rings. News like that, God protect us, is quicker than light. You didn’t get stabbed, Sam. Not even a lil bit somewheres. What foolishness. Hitler should be stabbed, not you.”

“I’m all right,” Sam said. “I’m all right, all of you.”

“I thank you, God, for bringing our boy home to us,” Mrs. Miller prayed in Yiddish, her face lifting towards the ceiling as if speaking directly to God in the apartment above.

“All will be well yet,” Sam’s father announced piously.

“I’m glad you’re okay.” Rose dabbed at her reddened nose.

“Stop your blubbering, Rose,” Sam said. “Can’t you see I’m okay?” He glanced at her and saw a tall slender girl in a blue dress. She was almost as tall as himself with brown eyes like his own and she wore executive-type rimless glasses.

“I can’t help my feelings,” she said. “That’s how I feel. You should never have been a cop, Sam. I was always against it. Remember? You should’ve been a doctor like you wanted to be.”

“And who pays the doctor school?” Sam’s father bellowed.

“You, my fine lady. You with your Macy job selling ladies drawers — ”

“Let up on Rose, pop,” Sam said. “For God’s sake, let’s all calm down.”

“Sam, you’ll lemme hold the gat,” Mike wheedled.

“One God alone knows,” Mrs. Miller remarked vaguely. “There are those to live and nothing kills them. Even in the war, the bullets don’t know them.”

“I’m calm,” Sam’s father declared in a hurt voice. “Too calm. I always was. But I know that oil and water don’t mix. Who told you but me, Sam? Not your sister, the fine lady. A nigger and a white man is like oil and water — ”

Mike darted close to Sam and touched his brother’s right hand. Sam recoiled as if burned. “Go to sleep, you
momser
,” Sam’s father snatched at Mike’s arm.

“Let Mikey alone,” Mrs. Miller shrieked. “Such a thing to say to his own son,” she added bitterly. “Are you his father or not.” Her husband dashed into the living room.

“I wasn’t doing nothing,” Mike said. “The kids’ll read all about it and what’ll I say. I never even touched the hand that shot off the gat. My own brother — Boy, what a brother.”

Sam felt dizzy. They were all mad, he thought. He followed his father into the living room. The Chinese orange rug and the brocaded couch were littered with the morning newspapers. He recognized the big fat
Times
and
Herald-Tribune
, the compact tabloids, The
News
and The
Mirror
. His eyes burned and a devouring curiosity to read what they had reported seized him. But he held back. Why, he didn’t know exactly. Those newspapers held tomorrow in their columns. He stood in this living room with its glass bowls of artificial wax fruit and he contemplated the tomorrow that the newspapers had already thrust on him. He paced up and down, passing a photograph of himself in uniform on the coffee table. He would have to make decisions tomorrow. He would have to — He grabbed the nearest paper and read: COP KILLS KNIFE SLASHING NEGRO. NEAR RIOT IN HARLEM. He read the story under the headlines and then flung the paper from him. His family were staring at him in silence. Sam picked up the other papers and read their accounts. He laughed gratingly. “Not one of them has it straight,” he said.

“What do you mean?” Rose asked. “Do you mean they are written differently? I noticed that myself — ”

“I shot Randolph,” he said, impatient with her and all of them. They knew nothing of the world; they were Jews who hated Hitler but that was all. The volcano of fascism, to them, was far away in Europe. It was under their feet; he had come home to them from an eruption but they didn’t recognize it.

“Were you scared, Sam?” Mike said. “I’ve been scared but not my big brother Sam.” Sam’s eyes saddened. Mike was already bragging to the kids on the block. Tomorrow, Mike would boast to the kids in the tradition of cops-and-robbers with Sam as the Lone Ranger; his father would spout of oil and water to his Jewish customers in his grocery; his mother would inform her cronies of how Sam never liked to fight when he was a little boy; his sister would sigh between sales at Macy’s. That was how they would all act tomorrow. The great big broad shining tomorrow would be rendered meaningless and petty and cheap by their small actions.

“The papers say you done right,” Sam’s father said. “You saved that Irisher’s life. In his church he’ll pray to the Catholic priest for the Jewish boy.”

“I wonder what the Negro press’ll say,” Sam said to Rose.

“Also a press,” his father sneered. “Who reads their press but niggers. You’ll have to be careful, my son. Maybe you should go to a station house in the Bronx for a while. The niggers’ll be after you.”

“Pop,” Sam said slowly. “Stop calling them ‘niggers.’ I shouldn’t have come home tonight. I should have stayed at a hotel. But I never dreamed of those damn papers. Isn’t that funny? Cops are newspaper-conscious and I forgot all about them. Maybe I wanted to forget. Who knows?” He lit a cigarette.“Everyone of them says that I shot Randolph with my left hand. They made a southpaw out of me. I can’t do a thing with my left. But that’s not important. There’s something more important that they’ve missed. They’ve missed the meaning of it. Why am I a hero in the papers, a hero to the whites and a killer to the Negroes? That’s the real story. What’s going on in Harlem that makes me a hero to one side and a killer to the other? It’s wonderful. The Klan’ll send me a medal, the silver one. Not the gold one. I’m a Jew after all. The Christian Front’ll feel good, too. All the shirt outfits’ll feel good. But what about the truth? What’s behind the story of a guy like me killing Randolph? God knows, I’m just a little frog, another cop. But Pa, Ma, don’t you see? That crowd — you should’ve heard them. Every last Negro was against me because I was a white man. That’s the truth. That’s the terrible thing about it…. What’s going on that would make hundreds and hundreds of people see something that wasn’t so? The way I feel about those poor Negroes — that hasn’t changed. I tried to save Randolph and I couldn’t. It was his life or mine. His life or O’Riordan’s.”

“Sam,” his mother groaned. “Don’t get so upset — ”

“Can you imagine what Harlem’s going to be like tomorrow? Maybe we ought to drop bombs and kill them so they’ll stop complaining — ” He kicked at one of the newspapers. “The papers are all for me. Hooray. Rose, you understand what’s eating me? Nobody in that crowd tried to help me. They stopped the ambulance driver from helping me. I was just another bloody cop to them. But I’m not or am I? That’s what’s eating me. You said I should’ve been a doctor and if I was a doctor I would’ve been different, wouldn’t I? A man’s made up of what he does — ” Again, he laughed that grating laugh. “You should’ve seen the doctor who treated my jaw at the hospital. He thought I was crazy when I said something about police brutality. What a mess. If — What’s the good of iffing? If I could talk to Robeson, to Councilman Vincent, to some of the Negro leaders. If I could only square myself with them — ”

“Why can’t you?” Rose asked. “That seems to me like a very good idea.” She spoke like a school teacher and a sickening realization of how hard it would be to explain himself to the Negro people after what had happened choked Sam.

“The regulations,” he muttered hopelessly. “I can’t tell my side to anybody. Only the Department can issue a statement for me. But I want the truth. I want the real truth to come out — There’s brutality, there’s a thousand things wrong, that’s the truth. That’s the meaning of what happened today — Jim Crow. As long as there’s Jim Crow, there’ll be shootings and killings — ”

“Sam, God is my judge,” his mother said. “But I’m sorry for that
schwartzer’s
mother. For her I am sorry. A mother is a mother and for her I’m sorry but not for him. That murderer,” she cried, shaking her grey head violently.

“Mom, I killed him.”

Mrs. Miller shuddered, her lips twitching. “Never mind, never mind. I forgot to tell you. Your friends want you to call them back. Phil called.”

“What does he want?” His eyes strayed to the newspapers. “I came home on the subway,” he said. “Guys were selling papers in the aisle and I never thought — ” Every street corner in the city would be selling Randolph’s death. In every coffee pot they would be reading about the Negro with the knife and the cop with the gun; tens of thousands of people whom he had never seen would say that he had done a good thing; tens of other thousands would condemn him.

“I spoke to Phil,” Rose said. “He said you were no lefthander. He said when he played handball with you two summers ago at Indian Lodge, your left was so bad you had to run over to use your right when the balls came at your left. Oh, I’m tonguetied — ”

“And Bill called,” Mrs. Miller said. “And Charley.”

“Did Johnny Ellis call?” he asked.

“No,” Mrs. Miller replied. “He’s that colored friend of yours, Sam? That young
schwartzer
? Have you seen him?”

“No. I just figured he might call.”

Sam’s father cleared his throat. “You won’t be mad at me? —