The minister, hardly bigger than the old great-grandmother, and as old, wrapped a wiry arm about her shoulders and directed her toward Kenyon’s mother. Patrick stood up quickly to make room for her and Kenyon’s mother held her in the chair firmly, powerfully.
“Now, grandma, they just funnin’ you,” she said. She winked at Patrick, included him in some small and personal conspiracy. “They just mean little bastards, grandma, but don’t you go giving them nothing to work with, you hear? You know and I know, our Kenyon, he never did go for your Jesus stuff. So if you’ll just knock it off, I’ll get them to knock it off, okay?”
As she spoke, she relaxed her grip, relented her strength carefully, once assured the old woman would stay put. The old woman’s bony hand poked and dug into the depths of her large, cracked black-leather pocketbook, then withdrew a small, worn, leather-covered Bible. The hand dove again, moved frantically, then emerged with smudged plastic-framed eyeglasses. She put them on, blinked hugely, then confronted Patrick
“Who this here?” she demanded brusquely. “Who this white boy standing here?”
Kenyon’s mother motioned him closer; she caught his sleeve and pulled him toward them. “Why this here is a soldier same as Kenyon was, come to pay his respects,”
Under the old woman’s accusing, angry glare, Patrick nodded awkwardly and took the small, cold, dry hand in his and was afraid his grip might crush the collection of fragile bird bones. “I’m sorry for your trouble, ma’am. Real sorry about your great-grandson.”
She stared with her roundly magnified eyes and pulled her hand free, then shoved the glasses up along her nose. “Gone home to Jesus. Lawd, yes, gone home. Oh, Sweet Lawd, but don’t I know trouble. You think I don’t know trouble, boy? I’ve known my troubles and that sweet lamb’s gone home to his Savior and his Lawd now. Amen.”
Kenyon’s mother stood up, spoke privately to the old minister who took her place and bent with the old woman over the Bible. The two of them chanted in thin-voiced unison over the small printed words as the old woman’s finger traced along needlessly. Both of them knew the words by rote, yet she pretended to pick them out.
“Well,” Kenyon’s mother said heavily, “you might as well meet Kenyon’s wife. That is, if you’ve a mind to.”
“Well, yes, I guess so.” He didn’t want to meet any of them. They sat sprawled or stood languidly among the wooden chairs and waited and he felt his intrusion and their resentment. He just wanted to get the hell out of there, but the touch of Kenyon’s mother, her hand on his arm, led him toward them.
The mass of color, the wild patterns, the shapeless garments, the rounded full heads, the dark faces, were indistinguishable one from the other. They seemed to him like toys, manufactured dolls in their studied, tight casualness.
She was tall but he couldn’t tell if she was heavy or thin beneath the hang of her brown-and-yellow garment. Her long hands seemed bony as they played with the edges of her sleeves, plucked and pinched as she confronted him. Her face, light brown, skin drawn tight against flat bones, wasn’t pretty. It was contorted, nostrils flared with quick-breathing anger, lips pulled back into a threatening smile.
“Who’s this?” she asked with a snap of her fingers toward him. “This what the Army sent to make it all come fine?”
“This is a soldier buddy of Kenyon’s,” Kenyon’s mother said and released his arm and stepped back and watched.
“Mrs. Kenyon, I’m very sorry. About your husband.”
She stared at his offered hand and slowly, deliberately slid her hands up along her arms, inside her wide sleeves. “Yes, you’re sorry. You’re sorry, shit. How come you standing here and he’s lyin’ in that box up there?”
Someone came beside her, a man dressed in a red-and-black robe. He had a neat round Afro and a small mustache and beard. He put an arm around the girl and she tried to shake him off.
“No, let him tell me. How come all these white boys come marching home on their two good legs and how come Kenyon’s up there in that damn box?”
There was absolutely no place to begin. He scanned the waiting faces and they blended into the embodiment of his own accusation. He murmured something, some words of regret, turned and left them without hearing what they said.
It had started to rain with a cold, hard intensity. He yanked his cap from his back pocket, jammed it low on his brow, bent into the wind. A street voice called out from the doorway of a tenement but he didn’t catch more than the sentiment: Get outta here, you.
He was almost at the subway entrance when he realized he had been hearing his name. He turned and waited as the bearded man in black and red came toward him.
“You got time for a drink?”
Patrick shrugged. “Sure. Why not?”
It was dark in the bar, which was filled with men hunched over drinks, whispering together, laughing, arguing in groups of two or three. Sudden bursts of sound punctured the air; the jukebox shrieked with jangling music. A few heads turned, eyes slid over him with mild curiosity as Patrick followed to a booth in the rear. The man slid in opposite, held up two fingers toward the bar.
“Scotch okay?”
“Fine.”
“I’m Kenyon’s brother.”
Patrick squinted in the bad light and the face did seem familiar, even seen in the dimness, but whether it was because it was the mother’s face or brought with it memory of the dead brother, it was hard to say. The drinks arrived and the waiter said, “How’s it goin’ down, Ed-boy?”
“Yeah, Charlie.”
He touched Patrick’s glass with his fingertips, moved it slightly toward him. “Look like you need this. Not used to the cold weather?”
Patrick shook his head. He felt the rawness down his spine. The cold wrapped around him and he shuddered, took a good swallow and grimaced. “Wow, that’ll kill the cold.”
“You in Nam long?”
“As long as Kenyon. Nearly a year. We were medics together. I saw him get it.” His fingers wrapped around the glass and he was silent for a moment, then raised his face in resolve. “Look, you want to hear about it? I mean, do you have a need to hear about it? Because if you do, I’ll tell you. But if you don’t, hell, let’s let it go at that, okay?”
Kenyon’s brother carefully lifted his glass and gestured for Patrick to do the same. He tapped their glasses together and said, “Cheers, baby.” He drank, eyes closed, sighed. “That’s what I needed. Look, reason I came after you was this. I wanted to thank you for coming. You didn’t have to and I wanted to thank you.”
“Goddamn it, I did have to and don’t you thank me.”
Ed Kenyon considered the pale blond kid for a long moment, studied him, searched him, then he nodded slowly and drank again.
“When’s the funeral?” Patrick asked.
The brother shrugged. “Well, there’s a bit of a to-do about that. Like about everything else in this whole thing. Kenyon’s wife wants one kind of funeral; his grandma wants a down-home-style Baptist service. They’re kind of pulling it between them. I guess when it gets right down to it, it don’t matter what the hell they do at this point.”
“It don’t matter shit what they do at this point,” Patrick said. He spoke in Kenyon’s voice with Kenyon’s inflection. Both men seemed slightly stunned, as though some communication had finally been accomplished without any effort, consciously, on their part.
Patrick emptied his glass and asked if Ed wanted another, but Ed shook his head. “You don’t want another drink now, baby. You go on home now.”
“Yeah. I guess so.” He leaned back and felt empty and directionless. “Jesus,” he said softly, “we were friends.”
“I’m glad you were, O’Malley. I’m glad you were.”
There was nothing left of it now. He wanted to tell Kenyon’s brother that there should be something left of it, that he wasn’t a stranger, that the black faces which regarded him with cold, hostile suspicion, which had declared him an intruder, had no right, didn’t know. He fe
lt tired and the Scotch hit him across the forehead. He reached out a hand toward Kenyon’s brother, palm upward. There was a slight, awkward hesitation, then Kenyon’s brother slapped his palm and turned his own hand for the ritual. With Kenyon it had been a warm and joyous and easy and natural contact. Now Patrick felt embarrassed and self-conscious. He eased himself from the booth.
“You take care now,” Kenyon’s brother told him.
“Yeah, right.”
They watched him leave, the curious, the disinterested. He heard laughter resume behind the door, more natural, relaxed with the intruder gone. He walked into the slashes of rain toward the subway entrance; sleet made long dark streaks on his uniform.
“Hey, whitey.”
He glanced up, saw a kid, about nine or ten. He was hanging out of a tenement window two stories up: dark face, round Afro, a dark indistinguishable presence. The kid disappeared for a second, then bounced up and heaved something out of the window. “Go fuck yourself, whitey.”
Patrick veered to avoid the rock, slammed into a row of overflowing garbage cans. Some unidentifiable soft matter, colorless, shapeless, squirted from a torn plastic bag and onto the leg of his pants. He stood in the rain scraping the stuff off his trousers with a scrap of torn cardboard. Then he glanced up, caught the kid grinning down at him.
“Hey, baby,” Patrick called out softly and without rancor, “you go fuck yourself.”
The kid stared for a minute, uncomprehending, then his face split into a wide grin and he disappeared from the window with a loud yelp of laughter.
THIRTY-THREE
PATROLMAN PATRICK O’MALLEY WAS assigned to the 25th Precinct in the northeastern portion of Manhattan just before the borough narrowed into a sliver of land which was separated from the Bronx by the dirty Harlem River. He was assigned to a patrol car and his partner was Patrolman Jimmy Hughes.
Patrolman Jimmy Hughes had been well built when he was in his twenties; he was showing signs of impending obesity at thirty and would be a fat slob by the time he was forty. He had six years on the job, a wife, three kids, and a house in Syosset, Long Island. He had quick-moving eyes which darted constantly on the alert.
“See that nigger over there? The one with the gimp leg? I busted him twice for indecent exposure. I mean, twice, and me in uniform, so how smart could the bastard be? Watch this now, he’ll wave to me like we was old friends. Hey, Gimp, you been behavin’ yourself?”
The crippled man turned toward the patrol car, squinted, leaned forward, recognized Hughes and nodded vigorously. “Ain’t been doin’ nothin’ at all, officer. No sir, stayin’ on the outside, that’s me.”
“Yeah? Well, watch yourself.”
Hughes rolled up the window and said to Patrick, “Ain’t that hot stuff? I busted that guy one good shot, almost knocked the balls offa him, the second time I took him in. And he smiles when he sees me like we’re old buddies. Yeah, and he better, all right, he fucking well better.”
For nearly two months, Hughes instructed him in the lay of the land and the customs and mores of the natives and it boiled down to a few basic, essential facts.
“Let ’em know who’s boss. Let ’em see you, ya know, increase your visibility at all times. Let ’em know you’re right on top, know what I mean? Christ, during the riots in ’64, we did some pretty damn good bustin’ up.”
Hughes adjusted his cap and leaned back, grinning over memory. “Jeez, I got some black mother-nigger sonuvabitch I been looking to get my hands on. Ya know, one a’ them fresh bastards with the wise-guy way of movin’. Jeez, they got a way of movin’ their asses, it says, ‘Fuck you, buster,’ as clear as you’d wanna hear it said. So I been looking to catch this mother fucker at anything. You know the type; you can just tell he’s N.G. but you can’t get ’im. And so, when the riots was on, I just started to walk toward the sergeant and Christa-mighty, beautiful! There’s this black-assed bastard just turning the corner and he walks smack into me and he’s carryin’ a tape recorder. And the TV and radio store is in the direction he’s comin’ from and there we are and he ain’t so smart-assed now, see, there’s just me and him and the sergeant’s back. He starts talkin’ real quick. ‘Hey look, officer, this here is mine. See, I just been tapin’ some of the things on the street, like to maybe sell it to the news people, you know?’ Oh, shit, I took him so fast it was pathetic. He didn’t know what the fuck hit him. Jeez, you wanna get a guy good, one quick one in the balls, then you come up with the end of the stick right in the mother’s throat and then he’s yours. I mean, then you do whatever the fuck you wanna do, you got dead meat at your feet. Funny thing about that nigger though. I don’t know what the hell it was between him and me but we both knew we’d have to meet up someday and have it out. I’m sure as shit glad it was me had the upper hand because he’d as soon cut my throat as look at me.” Hughes scratched along the back of his neck. “And for no good reason, you know?”
“Was there any possibility that the tape recorder was his?” Patrick asked.
Hughes looked blank. “What the fuck does that have to do with anything?”
Word had gone out on O’Malley, of course: son of a deputy chief inspector. But the kid seemed okay, didn’t invoke his father, in fact, rumor was around that they didn’t see much of each other. O’Malley had his own apartment and whatever the truth was the old man didn’t seem to interfere, and everyone practically forgot who his father was. The fact was, it was the kid they became a little wary of.
On the day that the P.B.A. delegate announced to the cheers of the men being turned out that they had not only been granted permission to wear the little enamel American flags over their shields as part of their uniforms, but that the President of the United States himself had congratulated the man who brought the matter to a court decision, O’Malley’s reaction was peculiar. The delegate noticed that he was the only guy on the shift without a flag pin. He figured maybe the kid was a little cautious, what the hell. In a gesture of good will and friendship, he approached the tall, quiet blond patrolman.
“Hey, Pat, I got something for you. Had an extra and I noticed you don’t have no flag,” Savonese, the delegate, said and handed him a flag pin.
Patrick held it in his hand for a minute, wordless, while Savonese waited for thanks. Finally, he said, “Tell you what, Savonese, let’s put it here, okay?” He pinned the flag to the sleeve of Savonese’s jacket.
“What are you doin’? Hey?”
It was hard to tell what the hell went on in the kid’s mind. He kept his voice soft and his face devoid of any expression. Patrick patted Savonese’s shoulder a few times, then said, “You’ve been wearing it on your sleeve for years, right? So that’s where it belongs.”
By the time Savonese got the insult, O’Malley was out of the ready room and standing for inspection, calm, detached, remote.
It wasn’t the first time he’d insulted the flag. Word had gone around that O’Malley considered it stupid to have a little flag attached to the patrol car.
“We’re an American police department in an American city in an American state. We’re all citizens or we couldn’t be on the job, so what’s the point?” O’Malley was reported as saying.
The men in the precinct began to watch him. If he couldn’t understand a thing as basic as displaying the flag, if that had to be explained to him, the guy needed straightening out. If it wasn’t for his old man, he’d have been straightened out by now.
The fact that he’d served in Viet Nam was all to his credit, but the fact that he never mentioned it, that they found out about his service only through his record, was puzzling. Another mark against.
Patrolman Jimmy Hughes didn’t have much to say about O’Malley; the kid seemed to be a good cop, backed him up the few times it was necessary, but he never really said anything, you know?
Actually, Patrolman Hughes talked enough for both men and never really seemed to notice that Patrick hardly ever answered him.
“Jeez, you know, I no sooner get t
he fuckin’ snow thrower paid for, the wife starts on me. Now I gotta get an electric lawn mower. I tell her, let the kid move his ass a little this summer, do him good, but her friend next door, she’s got an electric with one of them little seats on it, ya know? I’ll tell ya, it’s one helluva responsibility. Lucky thing I got this friend in the Twelfth Precinct. See, he kinda gets a break on all this here equipment. Jeez, he got me my snow thrower about fifty per cent off list price.” Hughes winked and grinned. “Know what I mean? Jeez, this guy got more business going for him. I gotta get after him for the mower.”
They were dispatched to the scene of a hit-and-run on 112th Street and Lenox Avenue. By the time they arrived, a small crowd stood clustered around an old woman who was bleeding from the mouth.
“Put in a call for an ambulance, O’Malley. I’ll have a look-see.”
By the time Patrick joined his partner, Hughes had determined that the woman was in serious condition. He leaned close to Patrick and whispered, “Jesus, watch out, O’Malley. She lost control of herself and crapped all over the place. Christ, just our luck.”
She was an elderly black woman dressed in a neat dark dress and an old black coat. Her legs, encased in heavy cotton stockings, stuck out beneath her dress and were shoeless. One of the two black men who squatted beside her held the shoes, which were bent and twisted to the shape of her feet. The other man held her head in his hands and kept whispering to her.
Patrick got to his knees, touched her face lightly with his fingertips and determined that she was conscious. He flipped out his clean handkerchief and applied pressure to the cut mouth. “You got something to rest her head on?” he asked without taking his eyes from the woman’s face. “Yeah, good, fold your jacket, that’s fine. Listen, I want you to let her head down real easy, yeah, yeah, good.” His face went close to the woman and she blinked at him and moaned softly. “Hey, you gonna be just fine, okay? You hear, we’re gonna get you all fixed up, okay?”
Hughes looked down at them, notebook in hand. “Hey, get her name, Pat, for the aided card. What’s your name lady? She conscious or what?”
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