There wasn’t any reason at the front of my mind to keep me from hopping on a train to someplace cool, to the far north or up to some high mountains out west where the breeze was dry. But I steered the car toward Eileen’s house and let my head loll toward the open window as I drove, hoping for a breeze to cool my rattled head.
The house was dark as I pulled up, the front door closed. I had seen the dim glow from the kitchen light, though, so I trudged up the steps and thumped on the door. Hearing no footsteps inside the house, I thumped again just as Eileen pulled the door inward. We looked at each other for a moment, long enough for me to gather that she had been crying. She stepped back and motioned for me to follow. We sat together on a sofa in a little parlor just off the front room. Only a bit of light came in from the doorway and from the open windows, where lacy white curtains waved weakly and silently. The close walls of the parlor bounced my own heat back at me, or so it seemed, and left me sweating and short of breath. I pulled off my jacket and draped it over the arm of the sofa.
“He’s gone,” she said. “He packed up some things and left this morning after breakfast.” She sat primly at one end of the sofa with her ankles crossed and her hands limp in her lap and a folded white handkerchief smoothed over one knee. Though the heat seemed unbearable to me, she wore a white sweater over her dress, buttoned at the top.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I hoped she would not begin to cry again.
“I shouldn’t have started in on him again,” she said. “I should have just let him be.”
“You have to do something. You can’t just let things happen when you know it’s a bad way to go.”
“I could have let him cool down about it for a few days. I don’t know, Pete. I just wanted to know why. It seemed like all of a sudden he just turned so sullen. Just in the past few weeks. So I asked him about the picture again, ‘Honey, why did you want a picture like this?’
“‘It’s funny,’ he said. ‘It’s like a joke.’
“I guess I should have just kept my mouth shut. Pete, you can’t know how a mother feels. He’s my only child, and you know I almost died when he was born. I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t bear to feel so apart from him. It felt like he was going to become a stranger to me. How could I just let him go?”
“It’s all right,” I said, though I didn’t know how such a thing could come out of my mouth.
“So I said, ‘But it’s just such a hateful thing.’
“‘No,’ he said, ‘it’s the truth. Everybody knows that niggers are stupid and lazy. It’s a scientific fact. If they weren’t, how could white people make them into slaves so easy?’
“I hardly knew what to say. You’ve always been so strong, Pete. I had always thought I was strong, too. I thought I held up so well when Tommy died. I never let the housework go. I tried to be cheerful. And I thought things would be all right.”
I moved closer to her until our knees touched, and I took her hand. As my eye had adjusted to the dim light, I could see from the way her eyes were moving that she was working herself up for a good cry. Her pupils were open wide, her lips were pressed together, and her chin was beginning to pull up. She squeezed my hand and smoothed the handkerchief over her knee.
“So I said to him, ‘What would your father think?’
“‘Just shut up,’ he told me, ‘and don’t you talk about my father. You don’t have any right to talk about him.’”
I stood there like a dummy. Even with the family I had lost—my sister Eliza, Tommy, and my father—I couldn’t kid myself that I could really understand the depth of feeling and attachment she had for the boy. “You shouldn’t,” I said, “you shouldn’t have let him—”
“Pete,” said Eileen, “he’s bigger than me now. I told him, ‘I have every right to talk about Tommy. He was my husband.’
“He said, ‘What do you think he would say about you being such a roundheels now? You think nobody knows about you and Uncle Pete!’
“Well,” said Eileen, “you can imagine how that felt to me. I couldn’t believe he would say such a thing. I guess that made me angry.”
I said weakly, “You should stop apologizing.”
“He’s my child, Pete! I told him, ‘When you get to have a house of your own, and pay your own bills, and raise your own children, then maybe you can give me a lecture about what’s right and what’s wrong. Until then, you remember, I’m the mother and you’re the child.’
“He said, ‘I don’t need you to pay my way anymore. I can make it on my own.’ And then he pulled out a little wad of dollar bills and waved it in my face. ‘See?’ he said, ‘that’s real money. As much as you get in your little cookie jar from Uncle Pete. Or does he give you more now that he’s getting a little something?’”
I said, “You should have smacked him.”
“Oh, Pete,” said Eileen, “I tried to. I shouldn’t have—I never have before—but it just made me so angry. I wasn’t thinking. I just raised my hand to slap him across the cheek, and he put his arm up to stop me. Then I tried with the other hand, but he grabbed my wrist and pushed me away.”
I said nothing. It was like watching a wreck on the highway as it happened, or like a train wreck, and I was a part of it. I could see up ahead a little ways, and I knew that the whole weight of my life was crashing, or about to crash, and I could do nothing to step out of it. I was grateful, at least, that she seemed to have gone past the need for tears.
“You should have seen the look he gave me, Pete. It was like he was disappointed in me. He just turned away. He was just packing up his clothes in his father’s duffel, and all I could think was He needs a haircut.”
I felt something like a knife turning in my belly. All my mistakes, all the things I’d neglected to take care of in my life, came together inside me like a capsule of cyanide. “Okay,” I said. “Okay.”
“He’s gone,” she said. “He’s gone.”
I let go of her hand and put my arm behind her. I could see too well in the darkness that she was wrecked with emotion. With my hand at the back of her neck, I pulled her to me, I held her tight. She was shivering and small. I could feel how tightly she had closed herself up and how tight she kept her fists. But when I slipped my fingers through her hair and cupped the back of her skull gently, she softened and brought one hand up, still clutching the handkerchief, and laid it on my cheek. She let her head fall back on the support of my hand, and we slowly went over until she was reclining against the arm of the sofa and I was half on top of her. Our faces were close together, and the feeble breeze from the nearby window did little to brush away our shared breath. The auto shop across the alley was closed and dark, but some light from the streetlamps on Campau fell warmly over her.
The hammering of my heart in my chest seemed to sap my strength. I was shaking and barely able to keep myself from crushing her with my full weight. When I brought my mouth down to hers, she seemed willing, and so I kissed her. I continued to kiss her as gently as I knew how until my heart began to settle and I no longer feared that I might faint or simply pass away. It might have gone on; we might have pulled off our clothes and made love on the couch or on the floor or in the bedroom, but it didn’t seem right or necessary. In truth I had been afraid to touch her. I had been afraid or disinclined to touch anybody, and in the course of my normal life, this often continued until it seemed impossible for me to think of touching anyone ever again. But here with Eileen, after the first few panicky moments, it seemed—at least while it lasted—like it might be possible for me to accept a little comfort.
After the kissing petered out and the wild emotion settled somewhat, we lay for a time without speaking. I found a way to set my elbows so that I wasn’t crushing her, and I began to remember what a pleasure it could be to touch a woman’s soft skin with my fingertips. With the two long fingers left on my bad hand, I smoothed her hair along the top of her forehead, each individual hair, and the two faint wrinkles that had creased the skin between her eyebrows. It seemed to
soothe the both of us. Her breathing grew deep and steady, her eyes softened, and it seemed that she might at least be able to sleep. I sat up on the couch and drew her legs to a comfortable position. There was a dusty blanket along the back of the couch crocheted from scraps of yarn. I pulled it down as I stood up, and opened it over her.
“He’s still just a boy, Pete,” she whispered. She reached out to take my hand as I stood over her.
“I know,” I said.
“You’ll bring him back to me, won’t you?”
It seemed so late in the evening. I imagined that my eye looked as dark and droopy as hers did. “Okay,” I said. “Okay.” I bent down to lay one more kiss on her forehead, and with that I turned and stumbled out of the house.
The moon hung up in the sky like a nickel. Vaguely, I could make out a few bats fluttering silently across the tree line, pulling bugs from the air. Though the evening had brought cooling to the air, I felt that I could not escape the halo of heat surrounding my head. I walked slowly down to the car, fired it up, and drove off.
CHAPTER 13
Friday, June 18
Funny thing was, I slept pretty well that night.
When my eye found focus and began to send groggy pictures of the real world to my brain, I felt the weight of unfinished business come crashing, the desperate sense that crucial details were being lost and forgotten in my mind. It made me want to sleep, to shut off the worry for a few more hours. But I knew that the day would be full of something. It had to be.
Acid hunger burned in my stomach; I had not eaten since early the previous day. I had not thought to ask for anything to fill my stomach at Eileen’s house, where there would surely have been something. No food in my house—no clean clothes to wear, either. I ruffled through my set of five white shirts, stiff with dried sweat, all hung over the ladder-backed chair next to my bed. Then I walked to the closet and looked over the few older shirts I owned—all too small. Deciding I’d rather smell bad than be uncomfortable all day, I chose the cleanest of the dirty shirts and began to dress. I owned three pairs of decent trousers. From my trip to Lloyd’s yacht, the pair I had worn the previous day smelled of the briny water of the Detroit River, so I picked up the cleanest of the other two, whacked it against my leg a few times to shake the dust out, and tried to rejuvenate the crease with my thumb and forefinger.
The hunger was playing tricks with me. Though my mind seemed in a fog, my body felt thinner, leaner, sharper. Ready to do what I needed to do. Best not to eat too much, I thought. I can get a cup of coffee, maybe a little omelet. With my eye on the envelope of Lloyd’s bills atop my low dresser, I thought, Hell, I can have a kid bring me some breakfast over every day if I want. I can buy some new shirts, a dozen.
That’s right. Money buys things. Money can buy freedom, time. Maybe, with enough of it, money can buy more money. But the trick of it was, I thought, to know what you really needed and what was just a cushion against the same grating things that happened every day of your life. Dragging your ass into work every day. Dragging your ass over to look at every dead wino, every dead hophead plugged through the heart for a few nickels or just for a flash of anger, a fight over the last biscuit at dinner. No matter what kind of personality they might have had in life, the dead always looked the same. The earth pulled them down all the same. Whether they were on the floor of a ratty flat, dumped in a vacant lot, or in an alley somewhere, their baggy clothes always seemed to pour like liquid onto the ground.
And usually it wasn’t anyone who’d be missed, really. It was always the same—an old bag would come out in her housecoat and slippers, hair smelling of cigarette smoke and beer, screaming to Jesus that her man, poor Henry, who didn’t have an enemy in the world, had been taken from her. God! How could it be true? When the evening before she had probably locked him out for staying late at the beer garden, thrown his things out the window into the street. Or took her clothes off for the tamale peddler who pushed his cart up the street every night. And really, there wasn’t any shortage of people in the world, so what did it matter? In my experience, it was usually the ones that didn’t matter that bought it unexpectedly.
Except for Bobby, I thought. I was not young enough to believe anymore that the law was the best way or the only way to help keep things together. Sure, Bobby had a lot of wrongness in him, and he might have lifted a few things that weren’t his, but on the whole, I figured, he was always there, trying not to tear things apart but to get something going. He had gone so suddenly, and in such a drab place. That was just plain bad luck for him. Even if we had been followed, such a setup could not have been made so quickly. We had stumbled onto the men we were looking for all along but could not recognize it. Clearly it would stick bristling in my craw until this was over.
And now I knew that my own father had been murdered. For so many years I could not admit to myself the most obvious of answers: Of course my father had not been alone on the island. It came to me as if I had always known. Maybe in my hunger for a simple way of doing things I had never allowed the thought to form itself fully. It was another thing that would not rest, another tapeworm of regret gnawing at my gut. And Lloyd knew all along; of course he knew. There was the possibility, I thought, that I’d have to squeeze the head off that old mummy before this was over. How many others knew? I wondered if I was the only one who hadn’t figured it out for myself before now.
At least I could muster some good feeling now that I could hold Hardiman over a barrel. I guessed that Hardiman knew about the pictures, and I wondered again what Bobby needed them for. It was a dicey business at best. Hardiman clearly couldn’t afford to have such a thing out in the open—but neither could Bobby. It might be a good day to drop in on Hardiman and watch him squirm.
Images of Jane Hardiman crowded my mind. I had looked over the bodies of whores, half-decayed and rat-bitten, and found it easy to forget, but something about this society girl pulled at me, even while I slept. I dreamed about her being alive. I couldn’t keep from dreaming about what it would be like to put the sex to her, and even in the dream I knew how wrong it was, how it meant that there was indeed the shadow of a monster lurking inside my own brain. Bobby and I had been hired—though we had never seen a nickel—to find her, to bring her back over to the right side of things. Even though I had met the girl just the once, I had always known that the exercise was futile. Whatever made her act like she did, it wouldn’t go away just because Bobby and I threw a scare on her or her colored fellow. Something in her family life wasn’t right; she wasn’t getting what she needed. Maybe, like me, she had a bad mind. I wondered how a kid could manage at all with the Hardimans for parents. Still, I could not really say why I cared so much about her now. Maybe I was mixing her up with my dead sister Eliza somehow in the sleeping part of my mind.
I had dreamed again about my sister. She had simply been too weak to hang on to life, I thought. She had come out of our mother a step behind. It wasn’t until after she died that I began to feel the guilt, though. I had always been strong, even as a kid. The other kids called me Bull. I never knew the two older brothers I might have had, of course. Somehow, even though I had been only two years old, I thought I remembered when Tommy came along. And then, another two years later, little Eliza. Weak, pale, and thin from birth to death. It was not a surprise that she should die in 1920, after so many others fell from the flu. It was not a surprise, but I could never erase from my mind the one image that summed it all up for me: on her deathbed, Eliza clinging with her limp fingers to my big paw, already rough and strong and scarred up, though I was only twelve years old. I kept reliving that image in dreams. To me it meant that I had somehow robbed her of something, health or physical strength or grim determination, that she needed to survive. I had been given more than my share.
So. I lived in a world where my father could be strung up by a group of hateful rednecks. It was a world where a detective like Bobby could take a blade in the gut and spill out his life on a sunny day in an alley
as if it were just the luck of the draw. It was a world where a girl like Jane Hardiman could get ripped up and killed and the boys who did it could still walk around. There was malice enough in the world to make Alex a target—a boy without a father, a boy who shared the tie of blood with me. I had promised his widowed mother that I’d bring him back to her.
Enough, I thought. Enough thinking. While I’ve still got juice in me, while I can still squeeze a trigger, somebody’s going to pay for all of it. I won’t change the world any, but somebody’s going to pay.
* * *
I walked darkly into police headquarters, my head down, eye straight forward. I saw Johnson jump up from one of the steel chairs in the lobby.
“Detective!” said Johnson. “I guess you’re all right, then.”
“Keep your voice down, Johnson. This ain’t a swing joint.”
“Well, I have something for you, finally. It’s an actual break.”
“Johnson, goddamn it, spit it out,” I muttered. “You’re acting like a woman.”
“I’m sorry, I know I’m talking too much. The coffee does it to me. I’ve been here all night, haven’t slept.” He rubbed the sparse bit of stubble on his chin. “Yesterday after you left, I got back here and took a call for you—priest at the church said he’d been watching out for the boy, just like you said—and spotted him laying up in a tool shed on the grounds.”
“So?”
“So I went and picked him up. He’s in one of the cells downstairs.”
I looked around the lobby to see who might be listening. “Anybody else know about it yet?”
“Just Kibbie, watching the desk last night. Kibbie’s all right, I guess. And Walker’s down there with him now.”
“You talk to the boy?” I asked.
“No. He’s scared to death. Been moaning for his granddad all night.”
“Did you feed him anything?”
“No.”
“Good, good. See if you can find me some food around here. Bring it down.” I pulled at my lower lip. “How long has Walker been down there with him?”
The Devil's Own Rag Doll Page 17