The Devil's Only Friend

by Mitchell Bartoy

  “Maybe so, maybe no.”

  “Let me help you,” Federle said.

  “They strapped me to a board and put me under the water.”

  By this time he had finished his work on my back, and I could see him stalking restlessly out of the corner of my eye.

  “I’ve seen some of that,” he muttered. “Fucking Japs wouldn’t take a hint.”

  I was still straddling the chair with my arms crossed over the top of the ladder-back. Though I was dead tired, I couldn’t let myself slump because it pulled at the stitches.

  “What happened to you?” I asked him.

  The question made him squirm even more. He was at the window, checking the latches and peeking through the shade.

  “I got burned up,” he said, “by my own guys! Don’t that seem funny?”

  “Let me think on it a little while.”

  “You ever seen a guy burned up, Pete? I guess you must have.”

  “I’ve seen a little of everything. But mostly the burned ones were really burned down to charcoal.”

  “You and me—ain’t we a pair!”

  I had to get up from the chair. Federle skipped over and took my elbow to keep me from falling.

  “You’ll be all right, Pete. The whiskey will dry you up. I’ve seen plenty worse than this. I could open up a story that would make your hair stand up like a porcupine! Maybe sometime I’ll tell you.”

  He steadied me where I was and went over to the counter. With one hand he slid the clip off my money and spread the bills out. He picked up the bill he wanted and held it up for me.

  “This is what he’s asking,” he said. “But I haven’t had a look at it yet. And if the piece is on a no-payment loan from somebody, I can probably talk him down.”

  “I don’t care about the money,” I said. “Keep it for yourself.”

  “Ain’t we friends, Pete? You shouldn’t give me money.”

  “Suit yourself. I said I don’t care about it.”

  He picked up the key to the Chrysler. “Get some sleep,” he said. “That’s what you need. You should drain off before you lie down. You understand? Latch up this door when I leave.”

  Some part of my brain sparked with an idea.

  “Thanks for the whiskey,” I said.

  “It was lying up in the cupboard at my place. I figured sooner or later my wife would be at it.” He shook his head. “Not so good for me.”

  I was cold from standing shirtless, and it made my belly clench. Federle let the key and the bill fall into the pocket of his baggy work trousers. Slipping out the door, he glanced around my little place. “Drag something in front of the door here. In case anybody wants to pay you a visit tonight, it’ll make a racket for you.”

  “Sure,” I said, “but I think they’re done with me.”

  “Good night then.”

  “Thanks, Ray.”

  He pulled on the door until it clicked shut behind him. The last thing I saw of him was his eye. The white showed all around. Though I figured that Ray Federle probably knew how to walk without making any noise, I could feel him waiting on the other side of the door. I secured the dead bolt and pulled the bare telephone stand over to the door.

  Federle moved off down the hall. Though it was still early, it had gone dark outside, and I knew that soon the spiders would come to plague him. I was glad at least that he’d have the car so he could get away from things. Against advice and my own sense, I didn’t visit the toilet. I turned off all the lights in the place, stepped out of my trousers, and rolled into bed. My head throbbed but not notably, and soon numbness settled over me. As I burrowed into dreamland, I thought I heard the Chrysler’s engine jump to life and rumble away down the alley.

  CHAPTER 12

  Thursday, April 13

  It might have been around four in the morning when the pain in my bladder woke me up. My eye, adjusted to the dark, easily made out the way to the toilet. It took so long for me to produce anything that I finally had to sit down to piss like a woman. The chill in the air made me shiver the whole time, and when I finished, I pulled a blanket from the bed and wrapped it around me.

  It didn’t seem likely that I could make it through the window and up to my seat on the fire escape without a terrible ruckus—if I could manage it at all—so I pulled up the shade just a bit and dragged my living room chair near the window. Without the lights on, it was easy to see out. I didn’t have the view I would have had from my seat on the fire escape, but it was comforting to see my old alley.

  Federle had been right about the liquor. My hands felt less swollen, and my breathing was a little easier. I was all alone, really, and I realized that there wasn’t much keeping me alive. If things kept running toward misery, I figured I’d skip over to the other side some day soon, step in front of a streetcar or a truck or heave my carcass off the top of the Guardian Building. Not to botch it up, that was key. Certainly with a gun I’d have a way to do it reliably. In a second it could be over. In a second I could kill Federle or anyone. That’s what a gun’s good for. I could run up and kill Federle’s woman for the price of a slug or two.

  Maybe I had contracted a case of the spiders, too. I was trying to remember what the Catholics said about killing yourself. It wasn’t something you could work off with just a spell in Purgatory. Or was it Limbo? It seemed like a pretty good story, and I wondered how the old-timers had ever come to make up such a thing. What was there to live for, really, if you didn’t believe in heaven, if you knew that nothing could last forever? My face wasn’t whole anymore, and I couldn’t tell right then why anyone would want to have anything to do with me. Outside my window I could see how the few feeble lights were swallowed by inky blackness.

  Federle’s woman was upstairs somewhere with the children. It seemed a lifetime had gone by since she slapped me. Was she happy that her man stayed away at night? What sort of black scheming moved her sleep, her daydreams? Federle had gone off to war—and now at night he had to keep his hands at work or lose himself to the darkness. Though it was not my greatest talent, I tried to move myself to feel for all the poor souls who might be in the same boat as me or Federle. Millions of men had been sent off to war, and they didn’t have the luxury of sitting by a window and thinking. They were getting shot up or they were burning or killing someone else, all of them caught up and lost in a wave of darkness like the world had never seen.

  I had been in Detroit my whole life. I knew how fast, even in the best of times, I knew how easy it was, for any ordinary man to get shuffled to the bottom rung of the ladder, or to panic on the downward slide. When I was working as a police officer, I knew how many guns could be found under mattresses and in closets when we had to come in and haul some sorry bastard off to the pokey. Some men had to hock their iron to scrape up a few dollars for another week’s rent or a meal or to have their child’s tooth pulled. We got called over, too, whenever a gun got turned around backward. You don’t see it spelled out in the newspaper how many men put their brains out after they’ve come to the end of their rope, how many make the quick decision to take a hard rest after so many frustrating years. Even the newspaper men, with skin as thick as bark, however they might thrive on dirt and scandal, know they can’t print everything. Just as a way of getting things to keep working at all, it’s often necessary to put on a happy face and stay civil during the daytime hours.

  But for those who come awake at night, there is no way to escape the thought of it. The human world is a place crawling with fellows who could go bad at any moment, and it’s only the daily decision to stay civil that lets us paint our pretty pictures. I knew well what Federle was trying to tell me about the spiders. He had trusted me, on the first day he had ever spoken to me, to understand that he meant to do well but couldn’t ever be sure that he would. I played it glum and made no answer then; I kept what I thought to myself. Federle had been to hell, and now he had come back to a place that wasn’t much better. Federle wanted to show me, he wanted to let me in on something
, but I already knew enough about it, and I had already decided for myself: It’s best to keep such things quiet, not to let the words of despair come out of you.

  By the time Federle crept up to return the key to the Chrysler, I had put myself together. My tub was rigged with a shower ring and curtains, and I managed to rinse part of the stench off me and to wash my hair. In just the couple days I’d been away, my razor had gone dull, and I would have cut myself up if my cheeks and neck hadn’t been puffed out smooth. My clothes were wrinkled from the toss but still clean, and when I finished dressing and combing back my hair, I thought I knew the face looking back at me in the mirror. I threw out the glossy patch from the hospital and used one of my own. Despite myself I felt better, and I hoped that some movement might work away the stiffness and the tightness of my muscles. I was glad not to be hung over. My head seemed clear.

  Federle came up and knocked softly at the door, even though it was near ten in the morning. I came over quickly and cleared the door and opened it for him. Though his movement always seemed crabbed, he skipped in my door with the same agility and sense a cat might have coming in from the rain. He held a small paper box in his two hands like a football.

  “Pete, you look swell,” he said. “Are you heading out?”

  “I might step out for a bite,” I told him.

  “That car runs like a champ,” he said. “Don’t look like she’s ever been run much. You might’ve thought they kept her in a garage.”

  “You got something for me?”

  He seemed surprised by the question. With his two hands he pushed out the box to show me and then reflexively pulled it back to his belly.

  “You ever played with a gun much?”

  “Hand it over,” I said. “Don’t I seem like a serious guy?”

  “Sure,” he said, passing the box to me. “He wouldn’t take no less for it. But I put a couple gallons in the tank from the garage service pump.”

  There were a few rags wrapped around the piece to keep it from rattling. I pulled the whole mess from the box and began to peel it like a banana.

  “That’s like an officer’s weapon,” he said. “Generally we only carried the long stick.”

  I held the semiautomatic pistol in my hand and pointed it toward the floor. It was half again as heavy as my old Police Positive, and the grip felt too square in my palm. But from the action and the look of it, the gun had been cared for by someone. I wondered who it had been stolen from—and if it had been used in any other crime that would now track back to me.

  “This fella wouldn’t part with any rounds,” said Federle. “I figured you could pick them up somewhere. You know anybody?”

  “Don’t worry about the shells. He didn’t have a shoulder rig to go with it? I should put this in my pocket?”

  “You’d wear that on your hip—in a holster. I’m sorry, Pete. I can ask him about it.”

  “No, no. Don’t worry about it. I might have a rig somewhere.” I was thinking glumly that I’d have to dig through the standing forest of junk in my mother’s garage. I had not been inside it since I found my father’s stash of bills in the legs of the workbench.

  “So it’s all right?” Federle asked.

  I turned the gun over in my hand. It was too heavy, too long, and too loud for the job, and automatic guns required too much trust in complicated machinery.

  “It’s fine,” I said. “That’s one I owe you.”

  He smiled and seemed to slack down from his edgy stance a bit.

  “You should stay out of trouble,” he said.

  “I should, but I don’t ever listen to reason so well.”

  “Pete, let me tag along with you.”

  “Tag along where?”

  “Wherever you’re going. You’re on the case, right? I’m not asking for any favor. I can handle myself. They give me an education in the marines.”

  “You got a job already.”

  His deep brown eyes showed hurt. “They got me scrubbing out toilets, Pete. I’m the low man. They got me swabbing up after niggers, Pete, scraping up chewing gum from the floor.”

  I wrestled with it. He was pent up and quivering, a wiry retriever waiting for me to toss him a stick.

  “Come on,” he murmured.

  “You got a license to drive?”

  “Clean and healthy,” he said.

  “Go on and get cleaned up,” I told him. I pulled my lips together and ran the tip of my tongue over my broken teeth.

  “Ten minutes,” he said.

  He was out the door and down the hall before I could say anything to take back my offer. I kicked the oily rags and the box toward the closet where I kept the trash because I didn’t care to endure the pain of stooping to pick anything up. Since the gun was only a danger to me without bullets, I stashed it in the bare cupboard. I wondered if it would be possible to sneak into my mother’s garage without her noticing. I felt the dread that seeing my vile condition might bring up some motherly feeling in her. And I knew that the garage would reek with my father’s presence. My old cleaning kit had weathered a Michigan winter there, but I knew it would contain everything I needed to take care of the piece. It didn’t seem likely that the old shoulder rig would do for the bigger pistol, but I thought I might at least try it out—if I could find it at all.

  My plan was to go out to the Lloyd main plant just to see if I could actually get in with the pass badge. Beyond that, I thought I might have a look around to see if I could scare anything up by accident—I had that much of a plan. If Whitcomb Lloyd was there and if he would see me, he might be willing to talk. The Old Man had surely sent word to him if he was in town. Probably Jasper Lloyd couldn’t keep himself from sending a steady stream of notes and messages to his boy even though he was supposed to have given up control. I didn’t see how Whit Lloyd could possibly keep as tight a grip on things as the Old Man had been able to do with Frank Carter’s help. Accountants were running things these days.

  Federle came down and rapped at my door. He was dressed in a white shirt and gray flannel slacks. He had passed a dry razor over the thick beard that grew toward his chin. As I stepped out into the hallway, he offered me another bundle.

  “My wife Patty baked some bread for you,” he said.

  “Hell. I get my bread around the corner.” I took the package anyway.

  “She cooks good.”

  We struggled down the stairs to the street. I followed along as he continued to gab about his wife’s cooking, about the weather. The Chrysler was parked along Heidelberg, and as I squatted to get into it, I tried to see who might be watching. I didn’t have as much of the panic I had felt after running away from the hospital. The dope they had been feeding me had trickled away, and my head felt clear but for the railroad spike that had evidently been driven through it. Probably the new car on the block had pricked the interest of the neighbors, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that someone or other might try to put a tail on me. But I couldn’t actually see anything wrong. Even as a kid, I didn’t ever see so very well, and now with the one eye it was hard to pick things out in the bright light. Sensibly I might have picked up some specs to make the vision better in the one eye—or just one lens and a piece of frosted glass over the patch.

  Federle wanted to head west on Vernor, and I didn’t say anything about it. We drove by the cemetery and kept on Vernor for a time, even though it would have been faster to roll down Mack. But just as we crossed over Grand River, Federle forced the car into a veering left onto Third Street from the right-hand lane, and then turned east again on Cherry. He slowed down almost to a stop and kept his eyes on the rearview mirror.

  “I thought you told me you knew how to drive,” I said.

  “You said to keep an eye out,” he said. “I got spooked.”

  “Go on down to Michigan Avenue, it goes straight out. And don’t try any more trick moves. If somebody wants to put a tail on us—”

  The whine of a motorcycle cop’s siren made me clap my mouth shut. I tur
ned my whole body around so I could see.

  “Just the one thing I asked you to do, Federle. Just the one thing.”

  “The clutch is tight!”

  “Just stop the car,” I said.

  The officer pulled the cycle ahead of us and angled it toward the curb with its lights pulsing weakly in the bright sun. He put the stand down and swung his leg off the machine.

  “You didn’t lie to me about the operator’s license, did you?”

  “I got it with me.”

  The tall officer put his gloved hand at the corner of the windshield and bent low. I could only see his mouth but I thought I recognized his way of talking.

  “That’s a bad display of driving, sir. Can you explain what you wanted to do back there?”

  Before he was asked for it, Federle put out his operator’s license for the officer.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I missed a turn.”

  “Is this how they drive in California?”

  “No, sir. I did a wrong thing there. It won’t happen again. I’m just getting adjusted to the streets here.” Maybe Federle was worried that I had stuffed the piece under my jacket. The tendons on the back of his hand stood out white as he pressed on the steering wheel with his fingertips.

  The officer put a foot on the running board and bent down to have a look at me. Though the light was working against us, he could see me well enough. An easy smile came to him.

  “Pete Caudill,” he said. “I almost called you detective.”

  “Good to see you, Johnson. They got you down to traffic now?”

  “I like the outdoors.” He slipped the license card back to Federle. “Sewer gas and diesel fumes, just like back home in Kalkaska.”

  “You put on a few pounds, Johnson,” I said. “You got a girl cooking for you?”

  “I get a girl now and again. But listen, Pete, what’s with the mug? What happened to you?”

  “I got thrown from a horse.”

  He was talking right over Federle, who had his hands in his lap and his lips pursed.

  “That’s the story?” he said.