The Devil's Own Rag Doll (36 page)

I slipped my bad hand gently under the boy's head and searched delicately for a caved-in place on the skull. Finding none, I slipped my hand down around his neck and far enough down his back to get a good grip. With my other arm I gathered up the spindly knees and brought them together. It was like lifting a bundle of cracked sticks, nothing but bones and a bit of soft, loose flesh holding it together. I could not tell if the boy was living or if he had a chance of making it. I looked around to find my bearings and sank with dismay as I realized how far it was to Receiving Hospital.

Some of the gang had moved on, and the rest kept a healthy distance from me, forming a ring around me, not threatening but momentarily shocked into inaction. I flipped the boy's limp arm inward and held him over my chest. Then I started to take a step onto the curb.

Staring out at me from the shadow of a doorway, I saw my only nephew, Alex, crouching with one hand braced on the ground. Though his body was closed tight on itself, his eyes glared so that he might have been a gargoyle. Anger, anger, and beyond it the pale blue terror of the world opening up under his feet. Alex's face began to twist up with the crush of old, old emotion; he seemed about to crack into a leering grimace, teeth gritting, lips quivering.

The colored boy's broken body felt warm against my bare chest. I felt my own bowels shake; I felt my lungs fighting against the still air and felt that I would never again draw an adequate breath. I could not let go of the colored boy, but I would have fallen to my knees, I would have gone down on my belly and pressed my forehead to the cold cement in front of Alex, if only my frozen legs would have let me. There before me was what I had been hoping for all along, the promise of home and family—but I could not attain it. No shred of pride left in me would have prevented me from sobbing and begging Alex to come home; but I could not choose to abandon the colored boy, who deserved his chance at life. I saw something break in Alex, saw it come over his whole body at once: His lips pressed desperately together and his chin twitched as he jerked upright and turned away. Finally I did fall to my knees as the strength in me gave out, and I watched Alex run away toward the black heart of Detroit, disappearing into the night and the smoke.

CHAPTER 20

Sunday, July 11

Someone had been by to cut my lawn, I noticed. Probably the boy next door. He hadn't raked, though, and three weeks' worth of grass lay dry and yellow over the neatly clipped lawn. It was hot, but not so rudely hot as it had been on spring's last day. Someone had brought my car over from the street where we had stopped Hardiman, though I knew the keys were probably at the bottom of the Detroit River. I told the cab driver to wait.

The front door was unlocked, as I had left it, and nothing in the interior seemed out of place except for the pile of letters and bills that had been pushed through the mail slot. Because the windows had been left open, the stale smell of the place had dissipated. Still the place felt strange to me, like I had only seen it before in a dream. I stepped through, feeling as if the house had grown smaller and less substantial. There was nothing in the house that I felt I needed to carry with me. On a shelf at the top of the closet in my room, the box that held my few important papers seemed untouched, as did the shoebox with my small collection of family photographs. When I had satisfied myself that Alex had not somehow hidden himself away there, I walked out of the house and ducked into the cab.

I felt clean in the light new jacket and the crisp shirt I wore. Fresh from the box; I looked down and pressed my hand over the creases on the white cloth. My feet felt smaller in my shoes. I got in the cab and liked it, liked the feel of it, liked the tattered upholstery and the smeared signature on the driver's license in its little case. I liked the crank that let me roll the window down.

I made the driver roll around the city for a while. Cadillac Square, the Campus Martius, where, I had heard, troops had lately been marching. Down Woodward, down Cass Avenue, past the big library, where the trampled lawn told the tale: tents and marches, bored National Guard reserves loafing and smoking. Everything else looked the same, more or less, in the white part of town. We drove down to Jefferson and up to the boulevard, past the bridge to Belle Isle. I saw no sign of the tipped cars, and the spilled blood had washed away or dried and turned to dust by now. The glaziers had been busy; almost all the broken windows I had seen had been replaced. I knew that the riot had been real but felt it might as well have been a nightmare, a common nightmare for everyone that night and into the days that followed. Outwardly everything was the same.

It was a different story in Black Bottom and Paradise Valley. I could see that many of the stores had been looted and trashed, the big windows busted out and covered with boards. Even the places that had heavy grates pulled across their fronts had been cleaned out. Bars, loan shops, hat shops, markets. Except for the liquor, I thought, all that stolen merchandise was probably still around the neighborhood, in closets and cellars. Fire had taken a few small buildings and had charred portions of others, but the riot had not taken everything. I could see how things could keep on going. If Sherrill had hoped to level the city with his fevered scheming, he had failed.

“You were here when it happened?” The cabbie glanced at me in the rearview.

“No,” I said.

“They say it started there, at the bridge to Belle Island. A big fight, they say. For what, I don't know. And then everybody was fighting. Just like that.”

“It doesn't look so bad now. Just the easy things get broken.”

“Oh, there was a lot of things, shooting, fire. Cars burning! It was a bad time. I stayed at home with my gun, that's what I did. My boy wanted to go out, but I kept him in.”

“Pull it up here and stop.”

“Boss, you don't want to get out around here.”

“Stop the cab.”

“Okay, you're the boss.”

I gave the cabbie a twenty-dollar bill and waved him away. I surveyed the front of the Sally Dee Shop at Illinois and Hastings and wondered if women had looted it or if the men had broken in to lift the dresses and underthings sold there. I walked two more blocks up Hastings and then up a flight of stairs at the side of an old boardinghouse. I recognized the fresh chips in the bricks as bullet holes. The windows had all been replaced with boards or sheets of metal, and the wood of the trim and the stairway had been ripped and splintered. I put my finger into the bright wood where a bullet had torn through and let my palm draw over the smooth gray wood on the top of the rail. When I reached the second floor, I began reading the numbers scratched into the doors. I moved across the narrow porch, removed my hat, and knocked at the third door.

A chain dropped down on the inside and swayed and scratched over the molding. A heavy bolt drew back and the door opened. “Yes?”

I found my voice stoppered by the clenching of my throat. I coughed and then said, “I'd like to see Officer Walker.”

The buxom colored woman eyed me, calm, considering. “Your business?”

“No business,” I said. I looked down at the two children who peeked around their mother's skirt. “I just wanted to catch up on old times.”

“May I tell him your name?”

“Let him in, Emily. I don't guess he means any harm.”

She stepped aside, and I walked into the narrow apartment. Past the entryway and the coat closet, the place opened somewhat to a room that barely held a sofa and two straight-backed chairs. Farther back, Walker stood, filling another narrow hallway. He waved to me to keep coming. We walked through the hallway, past the bathroom, straight through the kitchen, and through a door to the long bedroom. The whole apartment was one long, straight line, with no windows except one at the front and one at the head of the twin bed at the rear, and both of those had been boarded up. Two smaller beds crammed together and a dresser completed the room. Since there was no chair, or space for one, I sat on the edge of one of the small beds.

“Been on a holiday, it looks like, Detective. You picked up some color there.”

“I guess so,” I said. I rubbed my chin thoughtfully.

“Lost a little weight, maybe, too. Where'd you get that fancy eyeball?”

“Listen, Walker, I don't want to put you out. I know it isn't the time for a white man to come socializing around here.”

“Well, I don't plan on feeding you,” said Walker. “Say your piece.”

“Can you tell me what happened here?” I said. “How was it?”

“Well, you can see how it was. I don't know what you all were doing, but it came to us a little before midnight. I was up to Sunnie Wilson's place, you know, the Forest Club, because I figured that would be the place to be. I was keeping my ear to the ground, like you had asked me to do. Sooner or later, everybody in the Valley shows up there. You know a lot of white folks come in there, too. Then that bug-eyed fool Willie Tompkins came up on the stage, yelling about a riot. We didn't know anything about it. We were all just drinking, you know, folks was dancing and listening to music. Somehow it all just caught on. You could see it happening. It got from where you could see that they didn't want to believe it to where they couldn't help themselves. Willie come up, he grabbed the microphone and hollered out, ‘They done throwed a colored woman and her baby off the Belle Isle Bridge!' And that was what did it. Then they all ran out on the street breathing hellfire. You talk about some worried-looking white folks.”

“What did you do?”

“I came back here to look after my family, that's what I did.”

I looked at him for a long time, then dropped my head and studied the floor for a moment. I looked up at Walker and then realized that my eyes would be pointing in different directions. I lifted my head and said, “That's all right.”

“I guess it is,” said Walker. “But now there's some talk about my job being on the line. Dereliction of duty. I was here the whole time. How many days? Three days. They were looking for me to come to work. Some fool dropped a brick off the roof and caved in a woman's head down on the street. A woman from the neighborhood with three little ones. Then there was a story that got out, just a lie, that there was a sniper holed up in the building, so the Guard came down here and shot the whole place up to hell. We sat in the bathtub the whole night, all five of us.”

“It's a hell of a thing.”

“You know,” said Walker, “that colored boy of yours is still alive. But the way it is, maybe you'd have done better to let the Lord take him down on the street. If he ever comes to, he won't ever walk again, they say.”

“I hardly knew what I was doing,” I said.

“His grandfather was killed, you know that?”

“I didn't know.”

“So I guess that means you're responsible for that boy now, in a way, don't it? He doesn't have anybody else.”

I said nothing. I looked toward the closed-up window and imagined a similar shabby boardinghouse to the rear of Walker's building. My eye went out of focus as I thought things over. “You're a good man, Walker,” I said. “Better than me.”

“Each man's got to worry about his own life,” said Walker. “We're all the same in that way.”

I pulled out a folded wad of money from my pocket. I offered it to Walker. “It's a thousand dollars. I happened to come into it, and I figure you could use it as well as I can.”

Walker took the money and turned it over in his hand. “There's blood on everything in this world,” he said.

“If you can't use it—”

“I can use it,” he said. “We can use it.”

I stood up. “I'll see if I can put in a word for you with Mitchell.”

Walker just nodded and turned away, and I shuffled toward the front door. In the front room, the children and their mother watched me without expression as I passed by. I walked out the door thinking,
I guess I really did lose some weight. The glass eye fits a lot better.

I had to walk a number of blocks to catch another cab to take me to police headquarters. The place was almost empty, for some reason, as if the criminal element had eased off in honor of the riot or had decided to start honoring the Sabbath. Nobody said anything to me when I breezed in the front door.
It could be,
I thought,
that they don't even recognize me.
I knew that the days of sun had brought out a surprising burst of freckles over my nose and brow, and I had lost enough weight in my face so that the round arch of my teeth seemed to show through my lips and cheeks. I went right for the stairs and made it up to the third floor unaccosted. The door to Mitchell's office was locked and it was dark inside, so I dragged a chair over from the secretarial pool and waited against the wall. The chair wasn't comfortable. I sat straight with my hands on my knees, my new straw hat dangling from a finger. Though it was a Sunday, I knew he'd be in eventually.

A few ladies trickled in and whispered to themselves. They began to clack away at their typewriters and swirled about filing papers in cabinets. After half an hour of it, I heard heavy footsteps on the stairs. Mitchell and another officer rounded the corner and saw me. Mitchell's eyes narrowed a bit, but his mouth, his jaw, and his posture betrayed nothing.

“Sergeant,” he said, “I'll need a word with Detective Caudill.”

He looked older and smaller than I remembered. The weariness of his features gave him an air of dead calm. We went into the office, and I closed the door after us. I sat before Mitchell's desk and placed my hat carefully on the other chair.

“You've been taking some sun,” said Mitchell.

“A little,” I said, looking up at him.

“Took a little vacation, then?”

“I had some coming, I guess,” I said.

“Lost some weight, too, maybe.”