The shame of it drove lesser men than Derrick to suicide when they returned. Derrick, he just makes sure he doesn’t dream. Because he can’t handle knowing that he’ll never have that kind of freedom again. And that he’ll never again be able to unknow exactly what freedom is, and what it cost him.
Sitting in the bar, drinking, Derrick couldn’t even shake his head at his suspension from the Tac Squad. At the idiocy of the things he’s asked to do, and the restraints under which he’s then told to do them. There isn’t one of his superiors who wouldn’t gladly round up every black person in Over-The-Rhine, stick a burlap sack over each of their heads, and file them one by one down into the Ohio River.
“You don’t look so good.” Her voice startled him, and his bourbon glass twitched, a thin drip rippling over the side. She sat down next to him. Dark-skinned and darker-eyed, looking at him with her head cocked a little.
“I been better,” he said.
“Yeah.” She crossed her arms on the bar and laid her head down on them, looking up at him. She smiled, and there was a wide gap between her front teeth that Derrick stared straight into. “I can see that.”
Derrick laughed his harsh scraped-out laugh. Then he said the only thing he could think of to ask. “What’re you drinking?”
Derrick never had any trouble with girls in high school. It was a brooding intensity that broke their hearts, especially when he was sitting the other side of a bonfire with a beer in his hand after a football game. And it was that he never tried to explain his empty spaces. Every other boy in that small Kentucky town, they talked about nothing but their plans for escaping. It was a story that no one, not even themselves, believed. Derrick, though, knew exactly how he’d make his break. But he could no more explain why to those high school girls than he could explain the mind of a canebreak rattlesnake.
His silence intensified in Vietnam. And since he’s returned, he has nothing to say to women at all. It’s only when he gets so hollowed out and lonely that he has to have some kind of human contact that he makes a run on the local prostitutes. He can feel his ability to talk atrophying, the shutters being drawn on the kind of normal talk that keeps people normal. Like he’s pulling them shut on his own version of his father’s cabin.
But this woman, Lou was her name, she was so easy to talk to that he just kind of forgot to not know how to talk. Not the senseless pouring out of one’s big feelings so beloved by cops, motorcycle gang members, and housewives. Derrick can’t tolerate that for more than five minutes in anyone. It’s the deeper and lighter freeflow of conversation, by which you can, instead of being told who your conversant is, see them for yourself.
So they drank at the bar until it closed. And there’s nothing quite as heartful as walking out of a hopeless bar with someone, the hard lights kicking on full behind you. Then they drove to her apartment in Over-The-Rhine. And she rolled joints, she poured drinks. She had a wicked sense of humor and a soft sidling voice. And the gap in her teeth that Derrick couldn’t stop looking at. But every time he made a move in on her, she found somewhere else to be.
And slowly, through the booze and the smoke they’d created together, drifting through the apartment, he started to realize that he’d made a big mistake.
But it was too late. And after that Derrick doesn’t remember much of anything.
The kid returns and holds out a hand mirror for Derrick. On it, a pile of cocaine, a razor blade, a straw. Derrick chops the cocaine into two lines and snorts them. It dumps straight back into his brain, into his blood. “Get the rest of it and put it in something I can carry,” he says, hoarsely, tossing the hand mirror across the room onto the couch. “And I need something I can go outside in without getting killed.”
The kid’s eyes light up. “I’ve got just the thing.” He sweeps out of the room. When he returns, he drops a Confederate Army greatcoat and a slouch hat at Derrick’s feet. “Sometimes I get actors through here, too,” he says, returning to the couch and clasping his knee
“I’ve got half a mind to shoot you right now,” Derrick says. But he pulls on the coat and jams the slouch hat over his face.
“No one will know what it is,” the kid says. He hops off the couch and moves to dust off the gold braids on the shoulders of the coat. But Derrick puts the muzzle of the gun on his forehead and pushes him back onto the couch.
As ridiculous as Derrick feels in the getup, the kid is mostly right. At first, nobody even looks at him as he shambles down the sidewalk towards Lou’s apartment. Cars burn, men and women get stomped into the blacktop, and Derrick shuffles through the shadows like some apparition, holding the huge Colt revolver under the greatcoat with his thumb on the hammer.
But then he is spotted. It’s a big black man, somewhere in his fifties, the cataracts in his eyes reflecting back the riot fire in an eerie blue. He’s standing in the middle of the street with a sledge-hammer handle in his hands, chest heaving, when, of a sudden he lets out a roar and plows into the crowd at Derrick. Derrick sets his back against the wall and lifts the revolver out from under his greatcoat. “You’ve got me confused with someone else,” he says.
The man hurtles a discarded bicycle out of his way, his lips curled back from his teeth. “I know exactly who you are, you fucking pig,” the man says. “You put my son in prison on a bullshit weed rap.”
“Come another step and I’ll orphan him.”
“I’m gonna break your fucking skull.”
The streets are erupting in a series of minor explosions. Cars getting ripped apart bolt by bolt, rubber-fires detonating, the smoke from it all eddying out from the rage and commotion. The revolver’s gunshot cuts through the cacophony like its been fired off in a library, and some of the rioters hit the ground right where they stand, while most just gawk around for the truck bomb they’re pretty sure has just detonated. Even as furious as the old man is, it takes him a good twenty seconds to realize he’s uninjured and pick himself off the ground.
By which time Derrick has long since slid back into the smoke and shadows.
Another thing that Derrick didn’t realize until years after his mother’s funeral was that the Maltese hadn’t died with her. He figured that out when he found a newspaper clipping of the wreck in a copy of one of his father’s books, and there the Maltese stood, huddled against the rain-slickered leg of one of the state troopers on the scene.
Not that Derrick blames his father for putting the dog down. In that town of Labradors and Hounds, he wanted it put down, too. That sure as hell isn’t why he hates the old man, anyway. Nor can he blame the scraped out feeling he’s had most of his life on the death of his mother. He was never any closer to her than he was to his father. That’s not to say he didn’t grieve her when she died, but she was a fussy creature of headaches and random pains, all of which she could only cure with an evening’s drinks, and when she was drunk she was shrill and unpredictable. To the boy Derrick she was something to be avoided most of the time, tolerated the rest.
Some men are just less easily impressed than others, Derrick thinks, as he slides out of the smoke of the riot and into the cavernous darkness of an Over-The-Rhine alley. Besides the life in his own head, that which he culled out of his books, the rest of Derrick’s father’s existence was set in grocery stores, classrooms, and dining rooms. Derrick gets suicidal just trying to enumerate all the shit in his life he doesn’t care about. This riot, this tiny rampage, this is as close as he’s been to interested in anything since returning home from the war. And there were times during the war when he wasn’t bored at all. When he was filled with electricity, overflowing and alive.
He tries not to think about it.
Lou’s apartment has three rooms. Derrick kicks in the door and tosses it. Turning out the kitchen drawers, ripping books off the shelves. Nothing. Kicking through the beer bottles and paraphernalia they’d left in the sitting room. Nothing. The bedroom. He cuts open the mattress. He smashes the dresser. Then, in the nightstand, he finds a pack of cigarettes,
a book of matches, and car keys for a Lincoln Continental that look like they’ll fit the one parked down in the alley. He also finds cash, a paper sack of it, on a shelf in the closet.
He pockets the keys and the sack of cash. Then takes the cigarettes into the sitting room, and turns on the small black and white television. Riot footage, every channel. White announcers with heavy side-combed haircuts. Derrick sits down on the couch. Trashcans in the air, club-wielding police, chanting blacks. The camera cuts from the tumult of images to the officer on the scene for explanation. And Derrick laughs out loud.
It’s Cirillo doing the explaining. The Tac Squad raided an after-hours party at a local club, claiming dope and prostitution. It was a homecoming party for incoming veterans, sure, but it was also militant recruitment, and nothing makes a militant like a Vietnam veteran. Cirillo says one of the organizers by the name of Everette Anderson, also a Vietnam vet, took a swing at him.
Then the television cuts to an aerial shot of the club where the riot started, and Derrick stands involuntarily.
It’s the same club where he got himself suspended.
The television pans across the neighborhood, and Derrick realizes he’s only about two blocks away.
Derrick enters through the delivery door. It’s secured with an old-fashioned padlock, which Derrick hammers off with the butt of the cap and ball Colt. There’s only one person in the place, and it isn’t Lou. It’s a black boy of maybe fourteen, gripping a kitchen knife and hiding in the first place Derrick looks, behind the bar. The knife goes clattering on the floor when the boy sees his gun. “You work here?” Derrick asks.
The boy nods.
“Speak, boy,” Derrick says. He lifts a bottle of bourbon and a glass from behind the bar and then walks around and sits on one of the stools.
“I sweep up and clean the bathroom,” the boy says. “That kind of shit. Stuff. That kind of thing, sir.”
“You can cuss,” Derrick says. “It’s a free country.” He opens the bottle of bourbon and pours himself a drink. “I’m going to ask you one question. If you don’t answer me true, I’ll hurt you. Is that clear?”
The boy nods. Emphatically.
“Good,” Derrick says. “I’m a big believer in clarity.” He feels his pacemaker hollowing out the space in his chest where his heart should be. “The name she gave me was Lou. She’s tall, almost my height. Dark-skinned with an afro. No tits to speak of, and a gap between her teeth you could walk through, but hotter’n a two-dollar pistol. Your turn.”
Derrick watches the boy reach back for every lie he’s ever told in his sad fucked-up little life. And somewhere behind his scared brown eyes, he knows there’s not one that will work. So he just shakes his head.
“Find me a beer back there,” Derrick says. “In a glass bottle.”
The boy does as he’s told. Miller High Life.
“Take the cap off and drink it. The whole thing.”
The boy’s eyes are red and watery when he’s done. “I think I’m gonna puke,” he says, miserably.
“Take that bottle by the neck and give it a sharp rap on the edge of the bar,” Derrick says. “Just like you see in the movies. When you hit it just right, that rim’ll just pop off.”
The boy hits the bottle on the bar, but it doesn’t break. “I can’t,” he says.
“You gotta hit it harder,” Derrick says. “If you fuck up, it ain’t the end of the world, you’ll just have to drink another beer.”
The boy hits the bottle on the bar again and this time the end breaks off, the glass jagged and full of brown light.
“Now hand it to me,” Derrick says. “And don’t get cute. The gun I’m holding’ll put holes in you they couldn’t plug with a tree stump.”
The boy hands him the bottle. Carefully. “Mister, I don’t know what you’re doing, but it’s none of my business. I don’t want no part of it.”
Derrick holds the bottle. It’s like he’s watching a movie he’s watched a thousand times before, until its become entirely devoid of content from the watching. “Put your hand on the bar, son,” he says.
Tears leak down the boys cheeks. “I can’t, mister,” he says. “Don’t make me.”
“You can stop this right now,” Derrick says. “You just tell me everything you know about that gal. That’s all you have to do.”
For a second or two, Derrick thinks the boy will talk. But the skin on his face seems to harden, and he spits, “You’re a fucking pig. They’re right about you.” He slaps his hand down on the table.
Derrick doesn’t argue the point. He grips the boy’s wrist and raises the broken beer bottle above his hand. “Hold your breath,” Derrick says. “It’ll be over before you know it.”
“Pig,” the boy tries to say again, and fails. The skin around his mouth slackens, and drool slides out of the corner of his mouth.
Derrick reaches across the bar and takes him by the chin. “Don’t pass out,” he says. “If you pass out we have to start over.”
The boy swallows and his eyeballs roll up at the beer bottle. He sobs once.
And then talks.
Lou is a longtime Cincinnati activist. The militant kind, who reads Amilcar Cabral, carries a gun, and actually practices with it. She runs workshops and reading groups. She heads up armed self-defense training for Cincinnati women. She’s spent time in Palestine forging relationships.
Derrick had already figured all that. He’s pretty sure there’s no one in Over-The-Rhine he couldn’t have got it from. But when the boy adds that she’s usually seen with another activist named Everette Anderson, Derrick feels his heart kick like an electrified frog.
He sets the beer bottle on the bar and takes the boy by the back of the neck. “You done the right thing telling me, son,” he says.
“You should have done it, you motherfucker,” the boy sobs. “You should have done it.”
Derrick allows himself a few minutes to sit with the boy. This he knows from Vietnam, too, and he takes a strange comfort in it. Sitting in bars with boys sobbing about the things they’ve been made to do.
It takes Derrick a certain amount of wheeling and dealing to get Everette Anderson’s file. The one kept by the Tac Squad for every activist in Cincinnati, not the one available to the public. It takes more to get Anderson moved into a private cell in the Cincinnati Workhouse. While he’s being transferred, Derrick sits in one of the interrogation rooms and reads through his paperwork, looking for inspiration.
He finds it. When he was fifteen, Anderson was the number one suspect in a string of Over-The-Rhine rapes. According to the girls, he’d led them off the street, down into an abandoned lot, got them drunk on fortified wine, and fucked them behind a discarded washing machine. Three of the girls ID’d him, but all refused to testify in court.
Derrick closes the folder. He leans back in his chair and lights a cigarette. Then he opens the folder again and looks at the pictures of the little girls, post-rape. He looks at them until every facial bruise, black eye, and missing tooth is burnt into his corneas.
It takes more than just wheeling and dealing to get unrestricted access to Everette Anderson in that private cell. Luckily, Hamilton County Sheriff Deputies aren’t any more immune to the temptations of cocaine and cash than any other cops. Nor does anyone give a shit for the Confederate greatcoat and the cap and ball revolver when he walks in. Derrick’s got the reputation of showing up in worse shape, and there’s something fitting about it in the great winged nineteenth-century workhouse.
Anderson is sitting on his cot, staring at the wall. He’s a big sonofabitch, probably 260 pounds, with a wandering left eye and teeth that look like somebody’s made a pass over them with a chainsaw. “Get lost,” Derrick says to the deputy after the cell door clanks shut.
“It’s your head,” the deputy says, and leaves.
Anderson starts to laugh. “They issuing new uniforms?”
“You know how much I had to spend to get you alone in this cell?” Derrick asks.
> Anderson doesn’t say anything.
“It was your money. If I was you I’d hazard a guess.”
The muscles in Anderson’s jaw look like insects crawling under his skin.
Derrick pulls a pair of handcuffs out of his pocket and tosses them at Anderson. “Cuff your right hand to the post of the cot.” When he’s done, Derrick cuffs his other hand so that he has to sit in a childlike lean, both his hands cuffed on the same post. “You know, I’ve got a little sympathy for that fracas you started out in the streets,” Derrick says. “I never felt I got a proper welcome when I come home from Vietnam either.”
“If they didn’t cut your balls off and hang your ass from a telephone pole, you didn’t,” Anderson says. “Bet you killed a truckload.”
“I did all I could,” Derrick says.
“You did all you could,” Anderson repeats. “You’s a brutal fucking pig now, you was a brutal fucking pig then. The kind of pig you are can’t be learnt. It’s gotta come natural.”
“I need to know where Lou is,” Derrick says.
Anderson laughs out loud. “That’s all you’ve got?”
“Nobody ever accused me of being too bright,” Derrick says. “You gonna answer?”
“What time is it?”
Derrick looks at his wristwatch. “About eleven-thirty.”
Anderson nods. And then shakes his head. “No,” he says. “I ain’t telling you shit.”
“Good,” Derrick says. “I was hoping you’d say that.”
One of the nice things about the greatcoat is how much room there is in the pockets. Derrick draws out a sap and a pair of pliers and sets them on the cot next to Anderson. Then he pulls out the cocaine. “I figure I’ll have myself a quick snort,” he says. “And then we’ll get to work.”
Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail! Page 24