The Devil's Own Rag Doll (13 page)

It was a bad time for everyone, when everything just seemed to dry up. Folks were poor enough and hungry enough to set aside some of the lessons they had learned in church. In the dark part of town, especially, it wasn't unusual to note a Blue Monday party on every block, where all the ladies gathered together and cooked a little something, hoping to scratch up enough dough to keep a neighbor from being thrown out onto the street. And it was a winter, a cold one, even for Detroit, and the boy was lifting some shoes for himself with a couple of his pals. Though the inquiry had cleared me of any wrongdoing—the department had closed ranks for me, as a matter of course—that one incident made it easy for people to think they knew me, knew what I was about.

I had fallen into it easily. Because of my size, my lack of easy words, and the set of my face, men and women had always been leery of me, but that one moment put me down forever as a heavy man, as someone best kept to the outside. Even before I lost the eye and the fingers, I was apart from things. I've got the kind of face that looks dark in photographs, like I've got a shadow following me around. After I killed the boy, my mother cut the pictures out of the newspaper like she was proud, like she couldn't understand how anyone could see her boy as anything but good. It was useful as a beat cop to have that weight behind me, though, and easier than trying to explain myself with words. After I shot the boy, I had seen it working: More than once I'd been grousing with a lippy punk when something made the punk realize who he was dealing with. The change would come like a bone stuck in the throat, and the bravado would fall away like a wave. In a town like Detroit, any number of two-bit hoodlums wouldn't get pale at the prospect of a beating from a particularly tough cop—a crack on the head, maybe a couple more teeth gone, in the worst case a broken arm or jaw. It also meant at least one warm night in the can, a full belly, and the added weight that such a thing might bring in the dark corners of the city. But it was another thing to come up against a man who had killed a boy for lifting a cheap pair of shoes in the dead of winter.

With the heat and the stupor brought on by the extended reminiscence, I might have dozed off if not for Bobby's chatter, which had started up again. I was glad that my left eye was missing because it made it easy not to look at him. The question of what to do about Walker stayed with me, and I worried at it like a piece of gristle stuck between my teeth. I wanted to smack him down to see if he'd come up swinging, as if that could settle things the way it had between me and my brother Tommy. I wanted to tell him that I was sorry I'd killed the boy, that I was older now and maybe I wouldn't do it again if the situation came up. I cared less about the law, less about keeping things in order that way. Nothing so clear-cut would happen, though; I knew it wouldn't be settled that easily.

“Whoa! Stop the car, Bobby.”

“Why?”

I thumped two heavy knuckles on Bobby's chest. “When I say stop, you stop.”

Bobby slammed on the brakes and squealed to a stop.

“Back it up to the alley there.” Though the street was thick with pedestrians, I thought I had caught something hinky in the corner of my eye: three men banked up against another in a way that jolted my attention.

Bobby cranked his head around and zigzagged the car in reverse until we had a view down the alley. Two big white men were working over a smaller colored man while a third white man, short and very slender, dressed in a suit and smoking a cigarette, watched with both hands in his pockets. The colored man was up against the wall, on his feet but crouched down with his back arched, his fanny sticking out to pull in and protect his privates. His arms were in front of his face, his fists and elbows tight together, making a shield. With the two gymnasium boys looping in punches from either side, it wasn't much use.

I fumbled with the door while Bobby let the clutch kill the engine. The smoking man looked down the alley at me, turned slightly, and then smiled as if in recognition. The look on his face made heat rise up in me, a flash of fury, as if the whole purpose of the altercation had been to bait us. But I quickly realized that there was no way in the world, with Bobby's aimless driving, that anyone could have expected us to stumble onto this scene.

“Bobby,” I said, “go for the runt!”

“I got you,” said Bobby, already out of the car and hotfooting it toward the fight. The two white boys lobbed a few more punches with their brass knucks and tore off down the alley. The runt trotted after. I made it out of the car and ran as well as I could after them. I knew it was useless. I was pretty fast with my hands, but my legs were thick and sturdy, good for standing, not running. So I let the big boys go and stopped to check the condition of the colored man while Bobby shagged the runt.

The Negro sat on the pavement, shaking his head and working his tongue in his mouth. “Man, I didn't even
know
those hunkies,” he said.

“How do you feel?” I stood over him, panting as if I had done some real running. “You busted up in the stomach? Broken bones you can say?” I glanced down the alley to see Bobby spreading the runt against the wall of a hat shop, almost down to the next street.

“This ain't right. I'm just tryin' get some lunch. Then these white boys…”

“Just keep quiet.” I pulled a handkerchief from my inside pocket and opened it carefully over my hand. I felt under the man's jaw and found it unbroken. His lips were smashed and bleeding, and the black skin over one cheekbone had been split open, but his eyes looked okay. I knew he'd look like a pile of guts after he'd had a little time to swell up. But if his ribs had been broken up, he'd be wheezing and maybe frothing up blood already. He was lucky in that regard—I could see that he was hard like a working man, and that was what kept the blows from tearing up the insides. He'd be feeling it in the morning, probably reaching for the whiskey to tide him over, but unless he started pissing red, it didn't look like any more damage than a typical smack-around.

“You're all right,” I said. I offered him the bloodied handkerchief. “Take it now. It's ruined anyway.”

“This is just not right.” The colored man took the handkerchief and pressed at the rip over his cheekbone, then dabbed softly at the blood that ran down his cheek and chin.

Still on one knee, I glanced up the alley to see the runt approaching with his hands cuffed in front of him. Bobby walked behind, slapping the runt occasionally on the back of the head. The face was not familiar. I watched carefully as they drew near, concentrating, trying to remember. The runt's face, though turned down and toward the wall, seemed lit up with something funny, as if I ought to know him and there was a joke in the making. But though my mind had lately been playing tricks, making every stranger's face seem somehow familiar, I could say that I had never seen the face of this oddly undersized man before. It was a face you'd remember if you had a reason to. He was sized like a boy, almost, with a thick and tousled mop of hair, and he moved with his head down and his shoulders loose and forward—a posture that might be taken for submission. The face, though, was clearly outside boyhood: The skin about the eyes and mouth had gone thin, the eyes were not clear, and he had a general blue cast to his puffy flesh. He was older than me, and showing it, on close examination.

They passed by me on the way to Bobby's car. I watched their backs as they went. Something about the way the runt shuffled down the alley, striking and stomach-turning like the sight of a big rat shambling along a wall in broad daylight, lit up my memory. Powerfully, the way that certain scents could do—the smell of coke dust worked into my hands, the smell of my sister's hair on her deathbed—that runt's walk opened a dusty back closet in my memory. Just a flash it was, like a scene from a movie I couldn't name. For a moment I wondered if I might be asleep in my bed, dreaming a pointless dream about alleys and flavored syrup and punks hammering a poor nigger for no reason. Or I might be dead, trapped in a never-ending bull's nightmare of dead-legged chase—a type of purgatory. But that runt's odd shuffle, the way he kept to the shadow along the brick wall instead of walking down the middle of the alley, struck me hard and went into me like the bits of gravel that now dug into my knee. Bobby looked back at me and grinned.

Then I remembered.

I remembered crying. It was eight years almost. I remembered that my first thought was that I was crying. But of course I was not crying. There was an image I could not shake, visiting me less often now in dreams than it had in those first days following the loss of my fingers and eye. Huffing down the side of the empty Clark Rubber factory in my beat-walking days, right down by the bridge to Belle Isle, chasing a little man who seemed to shamble like a rat down the alley.

I remembered the brightness of the day and the color of the sky. When the little man slipped through the jimmied steel door and into the rubber factory, I pulled out my revolver and hurried after him. But as I opened the door, time seemed to skip forward. I had been standing with my left hand on the door, peering into the darkened building—but then I was facedown in the street, thirty feet away. I remembered how quickly I jumped to my feet, as if embarrassed; the revolver had not stopped sliding over the pavement. And then I looked down at my hand: not quite right. I reached up with the good hand to feel the wetness dripping from my eye. Crying! But not tears. I did not know it then, but the explosion had driven a tiny sliver of metal through the cornea, the lens of my eye, and into the flesh inside the bony socket. And the humors dripped down like tears.

The little man, the little man, I thought then. What's become of him?

Bobby flipped me a thumbs-up, stepping proud, full of air and himself, as if the quick chase and capture had puffed a little life into him.

“Watch him, Bobby!” I felt my legs churning but could not make them quick. I fumbled to draw my piece from the shoulder rig as I stood up.

I could see a shadow move on Bobby's face. He turned back just as the runt wheeled around and plunged a short, broad blade into his stomach. A quick jerk dragged it a few inches upward. The runt's knife hand was free of the cuffs. Bobby grabbed for him and managed a grip on his lapel, but the runt shook free. Then he was gone, running with remarkable speed for the end of the alley. Bobby pulled the blade from his midsection and threw it after the man, fumbled with blood-slick fingers for the seldom-used revolver in his shoulder rig, failed.

By the time I made it over to him, Bobby was on his knees on the pavement and tearing at his shirt, which was already soaked with blood.

“Bobby, just stop moving for a minute.”

I pressed down on his shoulders and forced him to sit back against the wall. I tore open the shirt and saw blood and bile pouring from the wound and could think of nothing to do but press my good hand over it. I glanced back down the alley and saw that the colored man had run off the other way and was about to turn the corner onto the next street.

“Listen, Pete, make sure about Anna and the girl. Make sure they get some money. It's in the wall. Everything's in the wall.”

“What money?”

“Just promise me you'll watch out for them a little bit, okay? She needs somebody to watch out for her. She always has.”

My heart was like a quail in my chest. I hadn't ever thought that I might care so much about Bobby. “You're all right, Bobby. A little blood ain't gonna kill you.”

“You know,” Bobby said, “I never heard you lie until now.” He laughed, and the blood pushed through my fingers with the laughter. “You've always been a straight shooter. You can't help it. That's what I always liked about you.”

Bobby's warm blood streamed over my hand and ran down wet enough over his clothes to pool onto the pavement. I felt the wetness soaking the knee of my trousers. I felt like I should cry out for help like a woman might. But I could do nothing. After a moment, I felt Bobby begin to relax and heard the clatter as a bullet rolled from his palm onto the pavement, a bullet at the end of a little silver chain. With my mangled left hand I stroked Bobby's hair, murmuring, “You're all right. You're all right.”

CHAPTER 8

Tuesday, June 15

For once I was glad for the rain. It did not seem fitting to be buried on a sunny day. The soft rain pulled down the temperature and allowed me to survive the lengthy service in my heavy black wool dress uniform. The heat that rose from deep in my belly had washed down as well, so that, as a pallbearer, I stood at attention through the formal proceedings in a half-stupor. I hoped that the ceremony would lend Bobby more dignity in death than he ever cared about in life.
It's for the wife,
I thought,
and for the kid.

I could do nothing about the mob of reporters and photographers or the gawking civilians who braved the rain to witness the spectacle of a police funeral. If I had had concern to spare about it, I would have viewed the circus with more disgust. The morning papers had blared headlines.
HERO OFFICER'S FUNERAL TODAY: CAME TO AID OF NEGRO MAN.
I knew Bobby Swope wasn't well known in the city, though he had been mentioned in the papers several times. Crooks were far more interesting than the cops who nabbed them, it was commonly known. The everyday grind of police work was no more interesting to the average newspaper reader than an account of life on the assembly line. But now that Bobby had been killed, he could be seen as something like a fallen soldier. You could hook him up to the whole mess overseas and get weepy about it if you had a mind to. If I had wanted to be fair, I might have admitted to myself that such a ruckus over one officer's death might be a good sign. It was still a rare and disgraceful thing in Detroit for an officer to be killed in the line of duty.