There was only two wagons, and they put half of the people in one of them, half in the other. They had benches along each wall inside, and tiny windows above them and in the doors. All the windows were locked shut and covered with wire, and the air inside was hot and close, just like it came out of the people’s lungs. Nobody spoke except when the wagon hit a bump or they slammed on the brakes or turned a sharp corner, and the caddies fell off their seats and cracked heads, and then they all were blaming each other for where they fell, like there was some established rules for riding around in the back of a paddy wagon.
Train was standing at one of the windows, holding on to the wire for balance, his feet spread a yard apart. He wasn’t surprised at what was happening; he heard before that the police liked to throw you around in the back of the wagon.
The siren was going— he noticed, though, that they didn’t turned it on until they was clear of Brentwood— and Train watched the street pass by outside, women with shopping bags who stopped what they were doing to stare. He imagined his mother, her expression when she found out they’d taken him to jail. And just at the moment that thought came into his mind, the driver slammed on the brakes and people flew everywhere. A person of some sort rolled into Train’s knees and he fell sideways, his feet suddenly where his head was a second before, and then he come down hard and his knee slammed into somebody’s face. It was soft and bony at the same time, reminded him of an eggshell. The wagon stopped dead and didn’t move.
Train lay on the floor and a man lay across his feet, and then he rolled off and looked for a while at the ceiling. Train saw it was Plural, and hoped he was unconscious, or at least didn’t see who he was in the dark. He tried to move farther away, but there were bodies behind him and no place to go. He went to stand up, but there was people leaning on him from above.
Plural reached up and touched his eyebrow. He was cut there, and the blood ran down the side of his nose and dripped off his ear. His mouth was cut too. The wagon started up again and then hit a pothole, and Plural’s head bounced against the floor. Presently, he wiped off the blood and sat up. Train could tell he didn’t know where he was.
Plural squinted up toward the light from the window and said, “It was a slip. Absolutely wasn’t no punch; it was a slip. . . .”
They unloaded the wagons in front of the police station, and the caddies went up the steps single file, most of them handcuffed and shackled. They’d run out of cuffs and shackles both just before they got to Train, and he was grateful for that, and not only because he didn’t get throwed around so bad in the back of the wagon. As long as he could remember, he always panicked at being closed in. He didn’t even like being hugged.
They squeezed the caddies into a single holding cell and took the cuffs and shackles off the ones who were cuffed and shackled. Plural made himself comfortable in a corner, blotted the blood off the cut on his eye with the sleeve of his shirt, and the rest of the caddies saw he was bleeding and was as scared of him as they were of the police. And stayed as far away as they could. When the deputy with the key got to him, Plural smiled up at him and said, “We ain’t gone steal your handcuffs, boss.”
A few minutes later, they came in and lifted Plural up by his shirt and took him away.
They kept the caddies in the holding cell most of the day, taking them out one at a time. Train didn’t speak to anyone, keeping himself still to fight off the trepidation. Fifteen, twenty minutes would pass and then the deputies would come unlock the big door, the banging noise echoing off the walls and ceiling, and pick out another prisoner and lead him away for questioning. Finally, late in the afternoon, they came and got Train.
Two deputies in uniforms walked him down a long hallway, nobody speaking, just the sounds of those hard shoes on the linoleum floor. They passed a room where a man was saying, “The mentality of the colored suspect is often childlike, which does not make him less dangerous. What has to be done in that case is visual communication. Show-and-tell. The young lady here, on the other hand, she might only need somebody to explain the situation. . . .”
Somebody said “yessir,” and Train saw there was a woman in the room with the men— loose-legged, chewing gum, and appeared to be in custody.
They pushed Train through the next door, into a small room with a large mirror set into one of the cement walls. There was a single wooden table against the opposite wall with a paper spike sitting on it, about half-loaded with spiked papers, and a radio, and a pile of folders. All that on one side. The other side was bare. There was chairs at both ends of the table, but Train didn’t try to sit down until the deputy in charge came in and pointed him into the one he wanted him to sit in. Train noticed the place smelled of Chinese food.
Train couldn’t say for sure, but the deputy in charge did not appear to be a correct shade of white. He come into the room with his face glazed and wet, resembled a doughnut you don’t want to eat, and dropped into his chair like everything weighted too much for him to hold it up anymore. His face was that morbid color, and there was also pink patches here and there, like somebody been swatting flies off his cheeks. He was carrying an open container of noodles of some kind, eating it with chopsticks, and after he sat down, he cleared some of the folders away with his elbow to make room for himself to eat. There were other containers on the cabinets, most of them left wide open, with dried rice and sauce on the sides and chopsticks laying in the corners.
“Name?”
Train recognized the voice, the man from the other room, talking about colored suspects. He could tell from the way the cop talked that there were people behind the mirror, watching. He had that old feeling that somebody was about to make an example of him for others to heed. That was one of the worse things they could do, make you an example for others to heed.
“Lionel Walk.”
“Age?”
“Seventeen, sir.”
“Address?”
Train gave him his mother’s address.
“Social Security number?”
“Excuse me?”
The policeman looked up at Train, and then quickly glanced past him at the mirror in the wall. “You got a Social Security card, Lionel?”
“No sir, I don’t believe I’m old enough for that.”
The cop posed in a certain way and shook his head, like this was a show for the people behind the mirror. “America’s just a free ride for you all, right?”
“No sir, it don’t seem like it so far.”
The deputy narrowed his eyes and stared at him a long time. Train felt his eyes, and he felt the eyes staring at him from behind. “You see that over there?” the deputy in charge said.
Train turned the direction he pointed. There was something spilled on the floor.
“You know what that is?”
“Look like something spilled. . . .”
“You goddamn right, something spilled. It spilled out of one of you people’s heads.”
Train sat still, looking at the spot. It was pink, maybe sweet-and-sour sauce.
“Now, I’m only going to tell you this once, my friend. I had it up to here with caddies. I heard more lies this afternoon than I could write down, and on top of that, of course, was one of you come in here, accused me of stealing his purse, his fucking purse. A full-grown man.” He waited a minute, glanced again at the mirror. “You can see how a person can run out of patience,” he said.
Train turned back to the deputy and waited, never considered explaining the kind of purse Plural meant.
“All right now,” he said, “let’s go through this slowly. How long you known Clarence Holmes?”
Train sat still, trying to remember where he’d heard the name. The cop stared at him, waiting. Train shook his head.
“You don’t know him?”
“No sir.”
“You work for him, and you don’t know him.”
“Who?”
“I told you, Clarence Holmes.”
“You mean Sweet?”
“Tell me the truth,” the deputy said, “are you-all this stupid around each other, or you just do it to fuck with white people’s sensibilities?”
“I never heard him called nothing but Sweet,” Train said.
The deputy noticed the difference in Train’s voice. “Did that make you angry, Lionel,” he said, “when I called you stupid?”
Train kept himself quiet. The deputy in charge held him there, staring, a minute longer, and then sighed and resumed to questioning.
“All right,” he said, “how long you been in Mr. Holmes’ employment?”
“I ain’t been in his employment,” Train said, and the deputy shook his head and laughed.
“Employment,” he said. “That means work.”
“I don’t work for Clarence Holmes,” Train said, “I work for Brookline Country Club.”
“So now all of a sudden you know his name.”
Train looked the deputy in the eye for the first time. He knew it was dangerous, like staring down a bad dog, but sometimes that would keep one off. “You just told me his name,” he said.
They sat still for a little while, and then the deputy in charge begun to hum, and Train seen he was pleased with the way things was going. Then he seem to forgot about Train a minute or two and fussed with his chopsticks and his noodles. He was a fussy fat man with saggy tits and his own habits. Looked like the kind of man that went into the bathroom for two hours at a time. He wrapped a load of the noodles around the sticks and bent down to meet it. Then he looked up, with noodles hanging down his chin, and spoke as he worked them into his mouth.
“Would you say you and Mr. Holmes was friends?”
“No sir.”
“But you associated with him socially. . . .”
“No sir, I ain’t associated with this at all.”
The deputy sat up suddenly and slammed his hand down on his desk, not far from the paper spike. “That isn’t what I’m hearing,” he said. “That isn’t what I’m hearing at all.” The noise startled Train, and he moved back in his chair.
Train stared at the spike, and the deputy noticed it and slammed his hand down in the same spot again, showing him he meant business. The folders jumped and settled, and Train jumped with them. The deputy pressed into him. “All right, then,” he said, “what about Arthur Tobin?”
Train tried to remember if Arthur’s last name was Tobin. He didn’t want to get any more questions wrong.
“You know him or not?”
“I know a boy name Arthur, but I don’t know it’s the same one.”
“Big buck?”
Train nodded.
“Black as a sewer . . .”
Train nodded again. The deputy picked up his chopsticks and moved the little carton of noodles. “You hang out with Arthur after work, do you?”
“No sir.”
The deputy nodded, as if he’d caught him in a lie. “You and Arthur and Clarence never drive that big Caddy down to Orange County, do you? Maybe down by the marina or some nice white neighborhood and see what you can find?”
“What caddy?” He thought for a moment that the deputy was asking about one of the Brookline caddies.
“Now you telling me you don’t know Clarence’s ride?”
“Sweet got a Cadillac, but I never been in it.”
The deputy wrote that down. “That’s your statement, your official statement, that you never been near that car?”
Nothing was clear now, yes or no. It was you been
in
it one minute and
near
it the next. Train didn’t want to make no official statement.
“You know what perjury is, my friend?” Playing again to the mirror.
“I been near Sweet’s car,” he said. “I just never been in it.”
“And so if we found your prints inside that car, that would mean you been lying.”
“My prints?”
“Fingerprints. You heard of fingerprints. . . .”
Train tried to imagine how his fingerprints could have got in Sweet’s car. And then he remembered the money, the twenty-dollar bills that were supposed to be for Florida’s wife, and he knew they had him. “They was some money, had my prints on it,” he said.
