Port City Black and White

by Gerry Boyle

  “Most old people read the obituaries first. See who they’ve outlasted.”

  “I figure, if she wants to watch old movies, so what?” Annie said. “After everything she’s been through in her life.”

  “Your dad’s accident, you mean,” Brandon said.

  “It left her very fragile.”

  “Must’ve been hard on you, too. Losing your dad.”

  “You can’t imagine,” Annie said.

  “Oh, I think maybe I can,” Brandon said.

  “I was fourteen. I look back now, I can see it cost me a big chunk of my life. I retreated, you know?”

  “I do know. You grow a pretty thick shell.”

  “You lost a parent, Officer Blake?” Annie said.

  “Something like that,” Brandon said.

  He paused, hand on the door.

  “You watched Chantelle and her friends. What do you think happened to the baby?”

  “If I had to guess?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I think they killed him. Could have been an accident. Dropped him or stepped on him or he suffocated in his bed or something equally awful.”

  “Huh.”

  “And then they got rid of him so they wouldn’t get in trouble. Afterwards the guilt was too much for her to bear, so—”

  “So she killed herself.”

  “Wouldn’t you?” Annie said.

  “Yes,” Brandon said. “I would.”

  “You’re shitting me,” Kat said as they got in the car.

  “Nope.”

  “Could be a coincidence.”

  “A ghost crying and a kid crying on the TV?”

  “Why not? Let’s bring Fatima there, have her listen, see if it’s the same baby. Maybe it’s two entirely different cries.”

  Brandon looked at her, put the cruiser in gear and pulled away. “Or we could tell Fatima it’s the twenty-first century and this is America. Drop the ghost crap.”

  “It’s not—”

  The radio spat: Dever calling in, two large groups squaring off outside the Circus Club on Exchange. “Probably watching through binoculars,” Kat said.

  Brandon looked at her, his FTO, for the go-ahead.

  “Okay, Blake,” Kat said. “Let’s rock and roll.”

  Brandon hit the siren and the lights and they swung onto State Street, the cruiser roaring. He eased through the intersection at Congress, horn sounding, hit the gas again.

  “Go a little easy,” Kat said. “Run somebody over, we’ll be filling out forms all night.”

  Brandon took Spring Street, a right at Center past Brian Boru’s. Two more cruisers were ahead of them, blue lights already at the scene. Brandon drove down the center line, cars squeezing over on both sides. There was a mass of people on the brick sidewalk outside the club, punches being thrown. Kat put on her latex gloves.

  As they got out, Brandon and Kat could see cops grappling, pepper spray out. “Fundamentals, Blake,” Kat called, running beside him. “Subdue and control.”

  As they waded in, Kat delivered the last bit of advice, hollering, “Stay on your feet, Blake!”

  A street fight was like an onion, Brandon thought, taking the first guy from behind, putting him on the ground, arm bent behind his back. You peeled enough layers away, you got to the core.

  “Get your fucking hands off me,” the guy was screaming, and then he was kicking back, until Brandon pinned his legs, too.

  A girl came out of the crowd of bystanders, snarling, “Leave him alone, you bastard,” and landed on Brandon’s back. She rode him as he snapped cuffs on the guy, wrist and ankle, then stood and spun, flashing back to another brawl, a woman clawing at his eyes. But then the girl was off of him, Kat picking her up from under the arms, whirling her around, and easing her to the ground, too. Cuffs went on, the girl, trussed up on the sidewalk, one high-heeled shoe gone, screaming, “You dyke bitch,” over and over.

  A kid—skinny, flannel shirt, bandanna headband—had fallen, and two guys were kicking him, grunting. Brandon ran one kicker back, shouting, “Enough. Stop now!”

  The guy smelled of alcohol and cigarettes and sweat, and he writhed loose, took a roundhouse swing. Brandon stepped inside the punch, got the other arm and yanked it back, and the guy bellowed, tried to punch with the free hand. Brandon tripped him, put him on the cobblestones, hard.

  He felt teeth brush his arm, yanked harder, and the guy bellowed, “You motherfucker!” Someone was shouting Kill the cops!, and then Brandon, crouched beside the guy, pressing him down, felt someone grabbing for his belt, his gun.

  Twisting away, he saw a young woman, small and lithe, blonde hair in her face, reaching in for his gun.

  Brandon fumbled, got his pepper spray out, gave her a blast, the guy under him, too. The girl screamed, stumbled back with her hands over her face. Brandon got up, turned as another kid, big and thick, face screwed up in a grimace, launched at him, took him down. Brandon was pinned, got his arm loose and sprayed the guy, but the guy’s hands clamped down on Brandon’s throat.

  “Get him off me!” Brandon shouted through clenched teeth. He saw blue trousers, black shoes, but they ran past. He looked up, saw Dever going to the edge of the crowd, telling them, “Get back.”

  “Kill him!” someone screamed.

  “Get him off!” Brandon shouted.

  He saw Dever turn and look at him, hesitate, then lunge away, into the crowd. Brandon was losing his grip on the guy’s wrist, the big hands clamping harder, slipping under Brandon’s chin. He jerked his legs up, got a knee into the guy’s groin, and the grip loosened. He felt hot breath and spittle as the guy grunted.

  Then an arm wrapped around the guy’s neck and Brandon sprayed him again, point blank, eyes and the open mouth. The weight lifted and Kat rolled the guy off, landed on his chest, and got one wrist cuffed. The guy swung with his free arm, and Kat raked the cuff chain across his face. Brandon grabbed the free arm and they rolled the guy over.

  Kat cuffed the other wrist, said in the cacophony of screams and shouts, “Pick a bigger one next time, Blake.”

  The layers had fallen away, cops at the core now, three guys on their faces, hands cuffed on their backs, cops—including Kat—hovering over them. A fourth guy was on his back, arms splayed up and out, head lolled back, face a mass of blood. Perry crouched beside him, turned to his shoulder mic.

  “We’ll need EMS, ASAP,” he said.

  The guy with Kat suddenly started to kick, rolled onto his side, screaming, “He stole my baby. He stole my fucking baby.”

  Kat dropped down, put a hand on his shoulder and pressed him still.

  “Easy there, Toby,” she said. “We’ll find him. I promise.”

  It was Lance on the ground. Brandon almost didn’t recognize him with both eyes swollen shut, lips puffed out, one eyebrow split wide open, blood smeared like ketchup over the whole mess.

  The EMTs looked him over, Lance muttering all the while, “Didn’t take no kid.”

  Brandon and Kat stepped away.

  “If he didn’t take him, he got a wicked beating for nothing,” Kat said. “Toby had the whole crew from the boat, looks like.”

  “If Lance didn’t take the kid, he didn’t help him out, either,” Brandon said.

  Kat glanced at him, as they followed the arrest wagon out of the Old Port. “Hard beyond your years, Blake. Hard beyond your freakin’ years.”

  They did the arrest reports back at the PD. Brandon had the guy with the flannel shirt and the girl who went for his gun. Kat wrote up the fat guy on Brandon’s back, a couple of others. Everybody was charged with failure to submit to arrest, assault on a police officer, disorderly conduct. The girl who grabbed for Brandon’s Glock got interfering with government administration, attempted possession of a firearm, possession of a scheduled drug—methamphetamine.

  “Maine,” Kat said, typing on her laptop. “The way life should be.”

  Toby, on Perry’s orders, got one count of disorderly conduct. Lance was treated at th
e ER at Maine Med and charged with a probation violation—no alcohol or drugs—and taken back to Cumberland County Jail.

  The reports took an hour. In the mirror in the locker room, Brandon inspected his face: a long scrape across his cheekbone, an eye starting to swell a bit, his right ear tender to the touch. He dabbed at the scrape with a towel, saw Dever come through the door. He saw Brandon and turned to go back out but Brandon whirled, kicked the door shut.

  They were alone. Dever turned.

  “Calm down there, Blake,” he said. “Little street brawl, you’re all wound up.”

  Brandon moved to him, backed him to the wall, got in his face.

  “Now you know and I know,” he said. “You’re a chickenshit.”

  “Strong words there, rookie,” Dever said.

  “He had me by the throat.”

  “I saw someone in the crowd with a knife. You looked like you had it under control.”

  “Bullshit. You’re a coward.”

  “Fuck off, Blake,” Dever said. “Get out of my face.”

  He started to shove Brandon away but Brandon caught his wrist, slowly pushed it back. “What goes around comes around,” he said.

  “Is that a threat, Blake?”

  “Fact of life,” Brandon said.

  Brandon still had Dever’s wrist, clenched in front of him like a bouquet. Dever yanked his arm away.

  “Tough guy, shoot somebody about to drop his gun,” Dever said.

  “What?”

  “What I heard, Mr. Hero. The guy says, ‘I’m dropping it,’ gun pointed at the floor, and you put a whole clip into him.”

  “Bullshit. Read the report.”

  “Just telling you what I heard,” Dever said, his smirk back, flexing his wrist.

  “A coward and a liar,” Brandon said.

  Dever smiled. “Just so we understand each other,” he said, and he turned and left the room. The door banged shut.

  Brandon was sitting in the truck on Granite Street, the end of the block. It was 12:45 and people were on the streets, the sidewalks, the stoops. He watched them pass: teenagers dressed as gangbangers, college kids lurching along on their way back from the bars. An old man with a cat on a leash. He was considering that, why you’d walk a cat—when she appeared.

  Fatima. Alone. She had come around the corner from Park Street, was hurrying in the direction of home. A car slowed and kids leaned out and said something and Fatima kept walking. The car rolled along beside her and then a girl inside said, “Stuck-up bitch,” and the others laughed and the car sped up, down the street.

  Up the block, under some trees, Fatima had stopped. She was loitering—waiting for them to pass out of sight?—like she was waiting for someone. Brandon watched the way she held her head high and proud. She didn’t need them. They were jerks anyway. He felt a tingle of déjà vu, fought the memory back but it slipped through.

  He was eight, maybe nine, the first year he’d started slipping off to the marina, rowing along the shore, leaving Nessa drunk, asleep in her chair.

  Two boat owners’ kids, he could picture them. About his age, the girl a little older than her brother. Blond, tanned, big smiles. The parents were rigging a sailboat in the yard; the kids approached him like butt-sniffing dogs. The girl asked which boat his parents owned. He said his parents didn’t have a boat there. He came in his own boat. They walked down to the floats, saw Brandon’s wooden pram tied up. Cracked oars held together with duct tape; water pooling in the stern from the leaks in the bottom, the bailing bucket floating.

  There was some click of recognition, that Brandon wasn’t like them, that he was somehow loose, that whoever his parents were, they weren’t like theirs.

  Brandon still remembered the sly look from the girl as she said, “Let’s play hide-and-seek. You count.”

  So he did, face in his hands against the cool, damp, muck-smelling piling. And then he turned and they were gone.

  Brandon searched the yard, peering under the boats and tarps. He searched the boat sheds, scary dark places filled with ropes and chains and faded hulls. He ran up and down the floats, looking behind the boat steps, into the boats.

  Then, coming back up the floats toward shore, he heard a motor start, saw a glimpse of a car leaving beyond the gate, the two kids in the backseat. And it came to him, like a pail of sea water slowly poured over his head, leaving him sopped in humiliation.

  They weren’t coming out. They were gone. They hadn’t wanted to play at all. It was a joke, and it was on him.

  So, like Fatima, Brandon grew another layer of calloused skin, stowed his smile away, pulling it out only for very special occasions.

  He watched as she approached, walking quickly in small, graceful steps, her mouth a thin dark line. Brandon got out of the truck, waited. Fatima didn’t acknowledge him until he stepped out, held up his hand.

  “Hi, there,” Brandon said.

  Fatima nodded, kept walking. He fell in beside her.

  “People in the car give you a hard time?” he said.

  “They’re from school,” Fatima said. “I don’t need them.”

  Her voice was low, the accent faintly musical.

  “I know the feeling,” Brandon said.

  They walked the last half-block in silence, Brandon aware of the swish of her jilbab, the smell of her shampoo, her pink-painted toenails, a gold toe ring on each foot. When they reached the house, Fatima looked up and down the block, then up at the windows of the apartment. No one showed, and she moved close to the building and stopped, back to the wall. Brandon followed and stood beside her, both of them facing out.

  “Do you like it here?” Brandon said.

  “Where?”

  “In Portland.”

  Fatima shrugged. “It’s where I am. It doesn’t matter if I like it.”

  “Better than before?”

  “The camp? Yeah. Before that, before the war, I barely remember that.”

  “Nothing?”

  Fatima paused, deciding whether to share more.

  “I remember our goats,” she said. “I gave them all names. And I remember that my parents smiled a lot.”

  “They don’t smile much now?”

  “No. They wear their brave faces. For us.”

  They stood. Brandon was about to ask her about school when she spoke first.

  “Are you working now?” Fatima said.

  “No,” Brandon said. “I go on at six.”

  “Why are you here?”

  He hesitated. “I was thinking about things, and this seemed like a good place to do it.”

  “You have a girlfriend?”

  Brandon nodded. “Yes.”

  “Why don’t you go home to her?”

  “I will.”

  “You’re fighting?”

  “I’d call it a rough patch,” Brandon said.

  “You talk like a book sometimes.”

  They stood some more, Brandon trying not to look at her feet.

  “Do you have a lot of friends?” Fatima said.

  “Not really. Not many.”

  “Why not? Because you’re a cop?”

  Brandon shrugged. “Maybe that. But I guess I just don’t.”

  They stood. A little boy rode by on a bicycle, circled, called out something in Arabic to kids at the end of the block. A guy in leather and chains and a hot-pink mohawk hurried by carrying a bag of groceries.

  “Did you grow up here?” Fatima said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Who are your parents?”

  “They’re gone. My mother died when I was three. My dad took off before I was born.”

  “So the State took you?”

  “My grandmother.”

  “Where’s she?”

  “Nursing home,” Brandon said. “Had a stroke.”

  “Where’s your grandfather?”

  “He’s dead. I never knew him.”

  Another long pause, but they were comfortable with it now. Fatima leaned against the wall, her hands claspe
d behind her. The kid on the bike rode by again, glanced at them.

  “So we’re kind of the same.”

  She glanced at him for the first time since they’d begun talking. Brandon took in the lovely shade of her skin, the elegant shape of her face. She looked out from under the pale blue hijab like a dark flower.

  “How’s that?” Brandon said.

  “We don’t really fit in anywhere,” Fatima said.

  Brandon smiled. “I suppose we don’t,” he said.

  “I knew it the first time you came to the house.”

  “You did?”

  “Yeah. I have a way of knowing these things.”

  “Is that why you don’t fit in? Hearing ghosts and all that?”

  “It’s all kinds of reasons,” Fatima said. “It’s being part of my old life and part of this life and not really part of either of them, you know? It’s my parents—like, they aren’t really here in the U.S., they just have to be. So it’s like we’re visiting but we’re staying, too. Because we’ve got no other place to go.”

  “Your brothers seem to fit in fine.”

  “Oh, them, they don’t care. Samir has his schoolwork. Edgard, he’s all into LeBron and rappers and rims and stuff.”

  “They found a home.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  Fatima shrugged. They moved away from the wall. She looked down at her feet and Brandon did, too. The pink nail polish and gold rings.

  “The baby crying. Could it just be a baby on television?”

  She shook her head.”

  “No way.”

  “It might sound realistic, through the floor.”

  “It was a baby. It was crying. It was real.”

  “As real as a ghost, you mean,”Brandon said.

  Fatima didn’t answer, looked away from him. “If you had to guess,” he said, “where would you say the baby is?”

  She looked up the street. Reached up and, under the cloth, fiddled with her hair, pulling out a long dark shock and twisting it.

  He waited.

  “I think—”

  A long pause.

  “You think what?”

  She twisted her hair, kept her gaze away, then suddenly turned to him.

  “I think the baby’s with somebody who really wanted one,” Fatima said. “I think they wanted one and they saw this one that nobody really wanted. So they took it. Like a kitten you find on the street.”