by Bobby Byrd
“Galveston Island. Beaches are nice and deserted at this hour.” Denny popped the cap off another beer.
So we drank and smoked—even though the cigarrettes made me dizzy, I had a few—and prowled up and down Galveston Beach our first night as Denny’s hoodlums. Sometime around three o’clock, we snuck up on a car parked on a shadowy stretch of beach. The windows were rolled down and we heard moaning and mumbled words coming from the backseat. I slow-crawled the car as close as we dared, then waited at the wheel with the engine humming while Denny and my buds crept out and surrounded the parkers.
“THIS IS THE POLICE!” they all hollered. Denny shined his flashlight on two college kids from the mainland, scared out of their wits, and I hit the headlights on bright. We all laughed, and Denny tossed an open beer can on the couple while they scrambled to get dressed.
As we pulled away, squealing the tires on the ramp from the beach to the seawall, Bobby said, “Man, I would hate to be those two!”
“Yeah,” said Charles. “Gonna be the last time they go parking on the beach.”
“Then we did ’em a favor,” said Denny. We all turned our eyes to him as he lifted a switchblade from his hip pocket and flipped it open. He held it out the window, twisting the steel in the streetlights and slicing the night air at fifty miles an hour. “They could’a got this.” We drove in silence to the base.
Other than that, and letting the air out the tires of a few cars parked on the seawall, the night was uneventful. I remember thinking Denny might have slashed a few.
Nothing much happened at the base on Sundays. The club closed at ten, and even though it was summer and we were high school students, somehow the pattern that Monday begins another hard workweek seemed ingrained from birth. Was certainly true for the grown-ups in our lives. This was blue-collar turf, Pasadena, South Houston, La Porte, Kemah. Less us versus the Russians and more beer versus the Baptists.
The Baptists reigned in Pasadena, keeping the city dry and free of alcohol, but the city limits were well defined in every direction. But just like the television comics said, “Wherever you find four Baptists, you’ll always find a fifth,” and sure enough, lingering just across the street from the city proper lay a steamy world of cheap fluorescent lights, private clubs and bars, pickup trucks, sleek Chevys and Pontiacs with darktinted windshields, and women in tight, tight skirts inside and outside the “beer joints,” as my mother and her friends called them in disgust. Even the Klan had an office, KKK Headquarters, on busy College Avenue in Pasadena, frequented by good Baptists and Methodists both, and conveniently located two doors down from the Veterans of Foreign Wars Private Club.
* * *
Denny showed up the next Tuesday, asking again for Sherry, but his pleas were half-hearted. He didn’t stay long. Come Friday, he caught me sneaking my nightly drink, this time the remains of an expensive whiskey from Sherry’s favorite customer, a major who always had “way too much to drink,” according to the club manager. The major had a way about him as smooth as the whiskey he drank. When he got real drunk he’d stroke his wife’s wrist with one hand and Sherry’s tight butt with the other. Sherry always smiled and put up with it, earning her tip.
But the club manager had another problem. Confronting an officer about his drinking was risky, so he and the waitresses had their ways of keeping order. A favorite ploy was letting him take a sip from the stout drink, then replacing it with a watered-down version while he wasn’t looking.
But they couldn’t watch the front and back doors at the same time, so if I wasn’t choosy and didn’t mind somebody else’s germs, I could always get my drink, in this case the stout one.
“You on for tonight?” Denny said.
“You bet. I’ll tell the guys.”
“You do that.”
We ponied up the bucks, and Denny stuffed the bills in his pocket and pulled away to blues music blaring from his car radio.
“I hate niggers,” Denny called to me out the car window, “but I love their music.”
I hated blues, and being a big Boston Celtics fan, I kind of liked Bill Russell and the Jones boys, so I didn’t go along with Denny on the racial score either. But questioning Denny’s taste in music or anything else, well … I and Velma ain’t stupid, my favorite line from West Side Story.
That night we stayed on base. Maybe Denny thought he might’ve rushed his boys into a little too much mischief, time to back off some. We climbed over the wire fence to the officers’ swimming pool, Olympic-sized with black lane strips on the bottom for competitions, and a three-tiered diving board. Even the dressing rooms were plush, with blue carpet and a drink bar.
The doors were locked, but that didn’t stop Denny. He jimmied the lock with a screwdriver while we dangled our feet in the deep end. He soon appeared poolside with two fifths, one of rum and one of vodka.
I must’ve thrown up a dozen times that night, mostly out the window—and I was the designated driver—and capped it off with a nice bubbly mouthful of sour shrimp, which covered my pillow in the morning.
Denny coasted for a few weeks. We drank some beers and flung the empties into the officers’ pool. Some evenings, once a week or so, we drove to the moneyed suburbs, and Denny cut his car across yards, destroying manicured flowerbeds and flattening hedges. “Small crimes,” he would say, laughing.
As for me and my buds, we were scared at first, real scared, but after a while we knew Denny was above it all. We would never get caught. He wouldn’t let us get caught. None of us ever questioned the logic of a forty-five-year-old man running around with teenagers. Bobby, Charles, Eddie, and me, we were cool teenagers, cool enough to be Denny’s buds, that was our reasoning. One Saturday morning, we drove over to the pawnshop on Red Bluff Boulevard and bought ourselves switchblades, flashy cheap ones with long thin blades. Cheap because we knew we’d get kicked out of school if we got caught carrying ’em.
Summer two-a-days were starting up for the football team. Me and Bobby and Eddie lived near the high school, and since we had afternoons off, we sometimes hung out around the field watching practice. We had some track stars, state champs in the sprints, and it was cool to see Freddy Randall, a coach’s kid and our quarterback, launch a spiral while the jackrabbits outran everybody and grabbed a long one.
Then one day a defensive back, fooled at first, somehow caught up with Jimmy Whitson, one of the sprinters, and swatted a pass away. Nobody said a word, not even the coaches, and for a minute I thought maybe we hadn’t seen what we just saw, someone outrun the state quarter-mile champion. That was only the beginning. When the guy took off his helmet and we saw that he was black, we all sucked air.
“Oh shit,” said Bobby. No school in Pasadena had ever had a black student, as far as we knew, and certainly no football player.
“Case,” a coach hollered, and the newcomer ran to the sideline. He didn’t play anymore, not for the rest of practice.
When we climbed into the car to go, Eddie said, “Don’t go yet. I want to see what he’s driving.”
Near the end of August, Denny turned impatient on us, getting jumpy and nervous. Waiting was over. His time had come. After all, we were headed back to school after Labor Day. Next-to-last Friday, Denny was waiting for us at the pool. “Beer’s in the car,” he said, no-nonsense. “We don’t have much time, that’s what you boys tell me, so we better get going.”
We piled in the car and he laid rubber. In twenty minutes we were on the Gulf Freeway heading north. Two, three beers apiece and we were back in the groove. When we reached the turnoff to Gulfgate, Houston’s first shopping mall, Denny turned east and pulled to the shoulder.
“You take the wheel,” he told me. “Let’s take a drive through the neighborhood.”
I turned into a ten-year-old suburb, or what was built to be a suburb but now skirted downtown, and drove slowly down the dark, paved corridors of homes too close together and overhanging Chinese tallow trees.
“Looks like trash pickup is tomorrow,” Denny s
aid, noting the cans lining every curb. “Pull over.”
He hopped out, grabbing the car keys on the way, and tossed a heavy metal container, brimming with refuse, into the trunk. He flipped me the keys.
“Okay, let’s go.”
“Where?”
“To the overpass.”
I drove the five minutes back to the freeway overpass. Though it was now almost three a.m., a steady flow of traffic sped below us, sixteen-wheelers avoiding city traffic, latenight revelers headed home.
“Stop!”
I crossed the overpass and pulled over.
“What are you doing? I told you to stop.”
“I did stop,” I said.
“On the overpass. Now back up so we’re on the overpass.”
A freeway is a freeway, and though this was Interstate 10 and not the heavily trafficked Gulf Freeway, it was still a freeway, and backing up on a freeway is asking to make the morning headlines.
“Do it!”
I did as I was told. I parked near the guardrails.
“Leave it running.” Denny moved with speed and purpose, lifting the trash can over the railing and flinging it to the freeway below.
To this day I don’t know what mayhem ensued—a metal garbage can crashing thirty feet onto four lanes of vehicles driving anywhere from fifty to ninety miles an hour. When I think of that night I see broken windshields, swerving cars, overturned trucks, and twenty-car pile ups. Or maybe nothing more than a single dead teenager, returning from his date in faraway Conroe.
Or maybe nothing happened.
Bullshit. Plenty happened. We were just getting started. We were Denny’s boys and we were on a roll, and with Denny, it was never enough. I have since met many people for whom it was never enough, but Denny set the standard.
By now we were too scared to speak, Charles, Eddie, and Bobby and me. Back in the burbs, we passed a block-long, two-story apartment unit. “To the curb,” he said.
I eased to a stop opposite the apartments. Denny had spotted an unattached U-Haul trailer parked near the sidewalk between two buildings.
“Come on, boys. Keep it running,” he told me.
The last I saw of the U-Haul, Denny and my buds were lifting the tongue of the trailer and dragging it down the sidewalk. A few minutes later the four emerged running from the apartments, scrambling into the car and hollering, everybody hollering, “Get gone! Go! Step on it!”
I gave it the gas. I didn’t have to ask what happened. I knew Bobby was good for it. Denny might flip out his blade and stick him in the ribs, but not before Bobby had his say. He didn’t even lower his voice, no pretense at cool, he just blurted it out.
“We shoved the trailer in the swimming pool. Man, it was heavy.”
He waited for my what’s-the-big-deal-with-that look and continued.
“When it hit the bottom, it cracked the foundation of the pool. We in big trouble now.” I looked hard at Bobby, but people like that never seem to catch the time-to-shut-up looks. “I guess we’re still minors, though, according to the courts.”
“Jeez, Bobby,” said Charles.
Nothing from Denny. He had us by the cajones and he knew it. But everything in our lives was about to change. The Houston police have a way of making that happen.
I was driving maybe thirty miles an hour, winding through Milby Park, half an hour from the busted swimming pool, when I first saw the red lights flashing. I stopped in the middle of the road. Two patrolmen, hands to their holstered hips, soon flanked the car.
“Get out, everybody. Out now.” We crawled out and the officers, billy clubs now drawn, prodded us to “Stand behind the vehicle.” By-the-book talk.
“Line up facing the car and put your hands behind your head.” We were shaking. The cops had to see that.
One officer told Denny, “Hands behind your back,” and handcuffed him. He then snatched Denny’s wallet from his back pocket and tossed it at the other cop, who radioed to police headquarters to see if Denny had a record.
During the wait, one officer stood guarding us while the other rummaged through the car. Several minutes passed, and when the cop in the car finished with the glove compartment and started poking around under the seats, Denny leaned to me, unseen by our guard, and whispered, “I have a loaded pistol under the driver’s seat. I’m on parole so they’ll take me to jail. But this has nothing to do with you. Don’t worry.”
I clenched my teeth. The cop standing just to the right of Denny must have heard or seen him whispering to me, about the time the other cop lifted the gun and said, “Look what we got here.”
What happened next went by in a blinding flash, too fast for my mind to register. The policeman didn’t lift his billy club, gave no warning, he simply swung it in a roundhouse arc and cracked Denny on the back of his head. Before he could hit the ground, the officer in the car took several long strides and planted his black leather shoe in Denny’s groin, standing him up just long enough for his knees to wobble and give way, sending Denny in a face-first freefall to the pavement.
Charles made a move to catch him, but the cop gave him a look and brandished the club. The other patted Denny down, searching him where he lay and emptying his pockets. He stood up, tossed the car keys at my feet, and said, “Get the hell outta here. I don’t ever want to see you again.”
The cops didn’t care that the car was Denny’s. They had their man.
I remember little else about that night, other than the closing image, a shadowplay of silhouettes from the rear window of the patrol car. One officer drove while the other sat in the backseat with Denny. As the car pulled away, Denny’s head lolled easily on his left shoulder, lifting and settling with the rise and fall of the pavement, seemingly napping. Meanwhile, the police officer, like an actor in the wrong play, continued to flail away, pounding Denny’s head with the billy club.
Eight days later I started high school, and on the few occasions when I saw my Ellington buddies, we either nodded when it couldn’t be avoided or pretended we didn’t see each other. We ran in different circles, simple as that. I feel certain they never mentioned Denny to their friends, nor did I to mine. The Ghost of Summer Last.
But still, school had a sour taste that somehow reminded me of Denny. It started off with old gray-haired Mrs. Montgomery, the government teacher, warning us away from downtown Houston late at night, where “only drunks and niggers are welcome.” And then a week or so later my biology instructor began improvising during his lecture on the flora and fauna of swamp country—“With all the trouble that Martin Luther King is stirring up, he needs to take a trip to Louisiana. He just might visit a swamp and never find his way out.” And remember that young man of African ancestry who wanted to play football? Well, he was removed from the football team after the first week of school, but not before his tires were slashed. Twice. Everyone knew who cut the tires. Eddie Serge. He still had his switchblade. Denny would have been proud. Me and my other buds—we didn’t say a word.
I and Velema ain’t stupid, and neither were they. Or like Denny used to tell us over and over again: “Too many words will cost you.”
So no action was taken. None was necessary. The problem and his family simply moved away.
That was the year they called the “Year of the Cougar” at the University of Houston. The Cougars were ranked number one in the nation after thumping Lew Alcindor’s UCLA Bruins at the Astrodome. Too much drinking going on for my family to give a damn, so I kept up with it all by reading the Houston Chronicle. But the Cougars never made the front-page headlines.
Denny occupied that spot, though nobody knew his name.
CAB KILLER STRIKES AGAIN!
Six times I read that headline, or one like it. Every article described details of his modus operandi, of the unknown assailant who lured cab drivers to the Officers’ Club at Ellington Air Force Base. The cabbies carried the killer to a deserted shore or unoccupied stretch of Gulf Coast prairie, where he slit their throats from behind. Every article con
cluded with a warning, but no mention of clues or possible suspects. Nobody in the Houston Police Department knew his name. But we knew. Charles and Bobby and Eddie and me, we knew.
In my mind I saw it as clear as if I were watching a movie. Denny giving the cab driver an address, a real address, no room for suspicions. Denny was too smart, had thought it all out, played it in his mind a hundred times before he did it, before he waited till the cab was speeding down a dark stretch of road, plenty to chose from in those days, then sticking the knife in the back of the cabbie’s neck.
“Pull over, slow and easy.” His voice was steady, his muscles taut, quivering.
When the cab slowed to a halt, Denny grabbed the man by the hair and jerked his head over the seat, and with one deep stroke of his blade, he sliced the man’s throat, severing his windpipe. Maybe the first time he cut two, even three times, to make sure the man was dead.
Blood. Oh yeah, lots of blood. Enough to fill a nightmare. Soaking into the seat, and his shirt, not Denny’s, no, the cabbie’s shirt, drenched in blood, bathed in blood, his hair swimming in blood, his body writhing and twitching and by the time the air emptied from his lungs through the hose of his windpipe, Denny was half a block a way, half a mile down the road, well into the warm night of another universe, one nobody knew, would ever know, but him. Denny.
Like a butcher cutting slabs of meat. No emotion, only the quick, clean cut.
But that’s a lie. Of course he felt something. Power, that’s what he felt. Power in the blood, that’s how we were raised back in those days. And those cops, their blood was begging to flow free.
You hit me, I cut you.
Cabbies, cops, they’re all the same in Denny’s world, radios and dispatchers, lights on the dashboard, uniforms with emblems, stiff caps, with one major difference. Cabbies had no billy clubs. No billy clubs, no power.
Now I have the power, and blade trumps billy club. Every time. Cuts deeper and its power is everlasting.
Hit me again. You can’t. You a dead man.