Streets of Fire

by Thomas H. Cook

  The Chief retreated before them, now silent, sullen, walking backward slowly as he motioned the troopers forward.

  Then he abruptly wheeled around. ‘You are under arrest,’ he shouted as he stepped briskly out of their line of march and strode angrily back into the park, where he stopped, let the megaphone drop from his hand, folded his arms over his chest and waited.

  The first line of troopers stiffened as the first wave of marchers approached it. Some of them began slapping their nightsticks into their hands, while others shifted uneasily from one foot to the next, as if preparing themselves to receive a burst of violent wind.

  Ben stood near the middle of the street, while Breedlove and Daniels took up positions at the far end of the line. Luther lingered near Ben for a moment, then moved to the left where he stood beside T. G. Hollis, his thumbs in his belt, his eyes fixed on the line of march.

  At the instant the first marchers reached the line, the troopers stepped forward, took them one by one by the arms and began rushing them double-time toward the paddy wagons and school buses which crowded the side streets and stretched out along the edges of the park. A great roar rose from the line of march as more and more of them were pushed and pulled forward, the troopers tugging wildly at their arms or shoving them along with the ends of their nightsticks.

  Ben stepped forward and looked helplessly toward the hill. The last of the marchers had crested it, and behind them there was nothing but the flat gray of the street. He could feel a terrible relief sweep over him at the knowledge that it would soon be over, and he allowed himself to relax a little, simply to stand and watch as the last of the demonstrators were hustled into the waiting vans and school buses. To his right, he could sec Breedlove and Daniels as they pushed and pulled at a skinny young girl. A few yards beyond them, Teddy Langley was shoving a tall, lanky boy, poking his nightstick into his kidneys to move him along.

  Ben flinched away, stepped back slightly and watched as the last of the line was broken by the troopers and hauled roughly across the park. He could hear the tumult in the distance as the marchers were tossed into the paddy wagons or shoved, half-stumbling, through the rubber-lined doors of the school buses. The air around him filled with the grinding engines of the vans and buses as they began to pull away, weaving slowly left and right, as if trying to throw off an intolerable burden. Everywhere, the troopers were laughing and joking as they gathered together in small gray knots. The Chief strode proudly among them, shaking their hands or slapping them affectionately on the back. In the background, the sounds of the engines and their accompanying sirens died away, and a sudden quietness drifted down over the park and the avenue, one that was broken only by the occasional clatter of a police radio or some muffled shout which seemed to come from far away.

  ‘Well, looks like we did it,’ Breedlove said as he trudged across the street toward him.

  Daniels walked along at his side, both men smiling broadly.

  Breedloves eyes shot up toward the hill. ‘Kids or no kids, we kicked their ass.’

  Daniels laughed happily. ‘Maybe we outsmarted them, Ben. What do you think?’

  Ben did not answer. Instead, he turned back toward the deserted hill and casually lit a cigarette. The smoke billowed up before him in a thick white cloud. He raised his hand and batted at it, clearing away the air. The white haze tore apart instantly, and as it did so, he saw two figures move slowly over the hill, very young, holding hands, and behind them two more a little older, and behind them, two more, perhaps the same age, and then two more and two more and two more.

  He snapped the cigarette from his mouth and dropped it on the street. He could hear the general talk and laughter of the troopers die away slowly, as one by one their attention was drawn toward the hill.

  ‘Form ranks!’ the Chief shouted.

  Daniels and Breedlove whirled around.

  Breedlove’s mouth dropped open. ‘What?’

  ‘They’re trying it again,’ Daniels said, his eyes now fixed on the line of march.

  Once again, the troopers formed themselves into two straight lines across the avenue.

  The Chief marched out in front of them, lifted his megaphone, then stopped and slowly lowered it. He turned back toward the troopers and grinned. ‘Forget it,’ he said. ‘They don’t know English, anyway.’

  The second wave hit only a few minutes later, and the troopers pulled and shoved them across the park and down the side streets. The sounds of near and distant sirens mingled with the shouts of the troopers, the singing of the marchers, the heavy wheeze of the engines as they started up again, pulled away, then returned again and again for yet another load.

  For a time Ben simply stood, frozen in place, and watched the swirling tumult around him. Sirens now wailed continually, and beneath them, like the murmur of a drum, the steady beat of the troopers’ boots as one line after another rushed forward into the unending stream of children.

  Then, suddenly, Luther was in his face, screaming wildly. ‘What the hell are you doing!’ His flabby jaws shook with rage and frustration. ‘Get going, goddammit!’ Then he raced away, almost falling over a small boy before he stopped himself, took the boy’s shoulder in his large beefy hand and pushed him into the park.

  Ben moved toward the thinning ranks of troopers, his eyes desperately scanning the line of marchers. He saw a tall, slender boy of about nine years old, walked over to him, dug his fingers into the soft flesh of his shoulder and tugged him toward the park.

  The boy moved forward without protest, clapping his hands and singing as he walked, his eyes straight ahead. At the school bus he turned, glanced at Ben, as if to record his face, then walked up the short steps and headed toward the rear of the bus.

  Ben returned immediately to the line of march, took another child, this time a teenage girl, and began walking her toward the bus. All around them, the troopers were driving other demonstrators forward at a breakneck pace, pushing and shoving, until they often fell together, demonstrators and exhausted troopers lying in a tangled mass in the swirling dust of the park. The noise of the melee built steadily as the arrests continued, so that the orders of the commanders could barely be heard above the sirens, the engines, the cries of the demonstrators and troopers.

  A third wave followed the second by only a few minutes, and the troopers formed ranks again, sweat now streaming down their faces, their uniforms wet beneath their arms and down their backs. The cries of the children rocked through the air, high and wailing, as the troopers stumbled forward, falling upon the demonstrators with a steadily building fury.

  Ben seized a teenage boy in one hand and a teenage girl in the other and led them briskly through the park. He could feel his shirt wet against his back and chest, and the dust which now tumbled in thick, suffocating clouds burned his eyes and choked his throat. He could feel his fingers growing numb at their tips, and his legs now seemed to drag behind him like heavy weights rather than propel him forward. But still he trudged back and forth from the line of inarch to the buses, back and forth from the street to the paddy wagons, and after a time he seemed to be moving will-lessly, as if his body were no longer a part of him, but something different, distant and estranged, so that it required nothing to perform the incessantly repeated actions which it had learned during the long pull of the afternoon, learned as the sun mounted toward noon then fell toward evening. And hour followed hour as he took them, large and small, hostile or compliant, took them with whatever force their resistance required, tugged them along or pushed them forcefully, stood in the sweltering air until he knew they were securely in the buses or paddy wagons, and then returned, again and again, until at last there were no more, and he walked out into the torn and battle-weary park, into the still blue air of the evening, and pressed his back against a tree and let his legs give way beneath him, so that he slumped down onto the ground and let his face drop slowly into his open hands.

  NINE

  ‘You look like hell,’ Patterson said grimly as Ben
walked into the Coroner’s Office. He eyed him closely. ‘I heard it was real bad today.’

  Ben nodded. ‘Bad enough.’

  Patterson shook his head despairingly. ‘You were in it?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Ben said weakly. Just beyond the entrance to the freezer room, he could see the old man sweeping a jagged line of grit and sawdust toward a large metal garbage can.

  ‘We’re in a world of trouble these days, Ben,’ Patterson said, ‘and nobody knows how to get out of it.’

  The old man bent forward, placed a rusty dustpan in front of the sweepings, then whisked them in.

  ‘The Chief knows exactly where he is in all this,’ Patterson added, his eyes watching Ben intently. ‘But others, they have some problems.’

  The old man winced with pain as he slowly straightened himself. He rubbed his back with a flat open hand. His eyes moved over to Ben, then darted away.

  ‘I hear there’s a lot of unhappy people in the department,’ Patterson said. And not just in the ranks. People in the front office.’ He looked at Ben quizzically. ‘Any truth in that, Ben?’

  Ben turned to him. ‘I don’t know.’

  Patterson shook his head. ‘My God, Ben, you look like the best part of you got flushed down the drain.’

  ‘Did you bury that girl yet?’ Ben asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘When are you planning to do that?’

  Patterson looked at the clock on the opposite wall. ‘Kelly should be here in about an hour.’

  ‘Kelly?’

  ‘Kelly Ryan. You know, from the Property Department,’ Patterson said matter-of-factly. ‘He does all the colored burials.’

  Ben placed a small paper bag on Patterson’s desk. ‘I bought this little dress,’ he said. ‘It’s not much. Just a little blue thing.’ He shrugged. ‘Hers looked too dirty to be buried in.’

  Patterson’s face softened almost imperceptibly. ‘I’ll put her in it for you.’ He reached for the bag and stood up. ‘I’ll be back in a second.’

  Ben lingered idly in the room outside the morgue. The dissecting tables were all empty, and their polished stainless-steel surfaces took on an icy coldness beneath the hard fluorescent lights. For a moment he thought about the dead woman from Red Mountain, the one whose insurance policy had hung like a bounty above her head. He had no doubt that her body was now nestled in the white satin lining of an expensive mahogany casket, that it was in a room decked with flowers and hung with thick red drapes, that somewhere in the background an organ was playing sonorously while the mourners filed by silently or whispered their farewells.

  ‘All done,’ Patterson said a few minutes later as he walked back into the outer office. ‘Would you like to see her?’

  Ben shook his head.

  ‘Well, I can tell you that she looks real nice,’ Patterson said as he strolled back over to his desk. ‘Real nice.’ He pulled out the top drawer and lifted a small plastic bag from it. ‘By the way, I got this back about an hour ago.’

  It was the ring which had been found on the girl’s body, and Ben could see the cheap glass stone shining pinkish purple in the light.

  ‘What’d they find?’ he asked.

  ‘One set of fingerprints,’ Patterson said. ‘I’m having them traced every way I can.’

  Ben walked over to the desk and took the bag from Patterson’s fingers. ‘Just one set?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And they weren’t the girl’s?’

  ‘No,’ Patterson said. ‘No trace of hers at all.’ He pulled a manila folder from the same drawer. ‘These are the prints.’

  Ben took them out and held them under the lamp on Patterson’s desk. ‘The ring – was it wiped?’

  ‘Not that I could tell’

  ‘So the girl never touched the ring?’

  ‘That would be my conclusion,’ Patterson told him. ‘And as far as the prints go, it looks like you were right.’

  Ben looked at him. ‘About what?’

  ‘Well, I remember yesterday, how you said that someone a whole lot bigger than the girl came up behind her and put that little pistol upside her head and shot her.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘Well, just that if the guy that owned this ring was the one that did it,’ Patterson said, ‘well, then you were right. Chances are he was a whole lot bigger than the girl.’ He smiled. ‘Probably a whole lot bigger than you or me, too.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘By the prints,’ Patterson said. ‘It works like a dog’s paw. Big hand, big man. At least most of the time.’ He glanced down at the prints. ‘And these were real big. Maybe the biggest I’ve ever seen.’

  Ben continued to look at the prints. Wide gray whorls spiraled upward from the black negative and finally formed a rounded nub at the apex of each finger.

  ‘He’s not exactly a giant,’ Patterson said, ‘but I wouldn’t want to bet my house that I could beat him arm-wrestling.’ His eyes darkened. ‘And I guess that’s why she was torn up so. You know, in her privates.’

  Ben returned the prints to the envelope.

  ‘And we found this, too,’ Patterson added. He handed him a rectangular microscope slide. ‘Some kind of sticky stuff was on the ring. I’m having it tested tomorrow.’

  Ben took the slide carefully between his thumb and index finger. He could make out a granular yellowish powder which had been smeared across the glass. ‘What do you think it is, Leon?’ he asked.

  Patterson shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Could be something like pine pollen. There’s plenty of that around in the summer.’ He smiled. It could be that yellow stuff that sticks to your fingers after you eat a bag of Korn Kurls.’ He shrugged again, this time more helplessly. ‘In other words, it could be just about anything.’

  Ben handed back the slide. ‘Well, let me know what you find out.’ He looked into the adjoining room. He could see the plain wooden box where the girl now lay, the little blue dress covering the thick black stitching which he knew ran in an upside-down Y formation from her throat to head to her abdomen.

  ‘What do you want to name her, Ben?’ Patterson asked suddenly.

  ‘Name her?’

  ‘For the record, I mean,’ Patterson said. ‘Unless you want me to just use a number. Plenty of times that’s what I do.’

  ‘No,’ Ben said. ‘A name.’

  Patterson sat down at his desk, picked up a pencil and held it poised an inch or so above a sheet of white paper. ‘Well, what’ll it be? Give me a name.’

  Ben looked at him wonderingly. ‘Me?’

  ‘Why not,’ Patterson said offhandedly. ‘Hell, Ben, you’re as close to being her daddy as anybody else right now.’

  For a moment he allowed a list of names to flow featurelessly through his mind. He thought of movie-star names, then those of the colored singers he’d heard of. Nothing seemed to fit the way he wanted it to, but he finally called her ‘Martha,’ after his own mother.

  ‘Okay,’ Patterson said, as he wrote it down. ‘And what about a last name?’

  He glanced back toward the small wooden box, then returned his eyes to Patterson. ‘Give her mine,’ he said.

  A large middle-aged white man walked into Patterson’s office a few minutes later. He was followed by two young blacks, both of whom were dressed in the uniforms of the city jail.

  ‘I’ve come to pick up a body,’ the white man said. He squinted hard at Ben and Patterson. ‘Who do I see about that?’

  ‘Me,’ Patterson said immediately. ‘Where’s Kelly?’

  ‘Kelly who?’

  ‘Kelly Ryan from the Property Department,’ Patterson told him. ‘He usually does the colored burying.’

  The man shrugged. ‘I don’t know nothing about that,’ he said. ‘I work with the Highway Department. I just got a call to pick up a couple of hands from the jail and then come on over here for a body.’

  ‘You know where the cemetery is?’

  ‘They got a place dug for it in Gracehill,’ the man sa
id.

  ‘They give you a plot number?’ Patterson asked.

  The man shook his head. ‘They didn’t say nothing but come over to Hillman and pick up a body.’

  ‘Okay,’ Patterson said wearily. He led the three men into the freezer room and stood beside the coffin. ‘This is it.’

  ‘A kid?’ the white man asked.

  ‘That’s right,’ Patterson told him. ‘And it’s a murder, too, so I want you to remember where you put her. Find a tree or a stump or something and remember where it is. I’ll get a plot number later.’

  Ben stepped up beside the two young men. ‘I’ll go, too,’ he said.

  The white man nodded quickly. ‘Well, with the four of us, we can do it the right way,’ he said, ‘one shoulder at each corner, just like they’d do it in church.’

  The four of them took their positions, one at each corner of the coffin, and lifted it up onto their shoulders.

  As he headed out toward the parking lot, Ben could feel the body shift slightly as they juggled the coffin awkwardly, and he could imagine the girl’s face jerking left and right inside, as if looking for a way out of the darkness.

  A dusty, mud-spattered pickup truck sat waiting for them in the parking lot, its battered front fenders sloping wearily toward the ground. The white man took down the tailgate with one hand while continuing to balance his corner of the coffin precariously on his shoulder.

  ‘Okay, just set it down real slow,’ he said, after he’d undone the gate. Then he turned cautiously and eased the coffin down onto the bed of the truck.

  ‘All right, let’s just shove it in now,’ he said. ‘But soft-like. We got a little child here.’

  When the coffin was in place, the two black youths hauled themselves into the back of the truck and sat silently on either side of it, their hands resting motionlessly on the top of the coffin.

  Ben and the other man crawled into the cab of the truck.