by Lee Durkee
“You just saved his damn life,” he lied.
Kevin tried to speak, but Noel kicked him onto his tailbone, his long thin legs sprawled in front of him. Then Noel moved closer to Cecilia and lowered his head to whisper, “I’m sorry. I really am. You’ve never done nothing but be nice to me.” He started to leave, but stopped and walked back and handed the film container to her.
Outside, the sky was sharply blue, a low sun binding his eyes to the grass as he walked and walked. He was almost to Huff when he realized he had handed Cecilia the wrong film container, not the black one of her twirling naked but the gray one of Lily doing yoga and Noel on the couch. He turned a slow 360 degrees while still walking, but he knew he could not go back there. Cutting across the cafeteria lawn, he glanced up for quick bearings and saw, parked on the street in front of Huff, a small barricade of police cars, four cars long and parked end on end, their blue lights silently revolving or stuttering. He watched the blue reflect off the dormitory’s fluted white columns, which were lassoed with yellow police tape. Oddly, it did not occur to Noel that the barricade had anything to do with him. For once in his life he felt innocent.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
TWO OF THE POLICE CARS were local blue and whites, the third a green state police cruiser, and the fourth an unmarked white sedan with front windows rolled down and a blue cup rotating sluggishly on the dash. At least fifty people had gathered in the parking lot and were gazing up at the dormitory as if watching an invisible fire. A disarray of yellow police tape blockaded both entrances. Joining the crowd, Noel heard his various names shouted from a number of directions at once and turned to where a car was closing off the back of the posselike circle that had suddenly formed around him. “Hey, Wasted,” Hutch called out again. Shirtless in cuffed jeans, his muscular torso incredibly pale, Hutch was reclined against the hood and windshield of his green Camaro. “They searched that piece-of-shit Mustang of yours already.” He made a slurping noise. “Took a Hoover to her and everything.”
This news just served to make Noel more tired. He joined Hutch on the car hood. It was a beautiful day, at least, and Noel was in his element. He closed his eyes upon the spring sun and wondered if he could actually fall asleep here, waiting for the cops to come and take him away. It seemed possible.
“Got a friend spying on you,” Hutch warned. “Look yonder.”
A young hatless cop stood staring at him across the parking lot. Noel sat the rest of the way up and bummed a dip off Hutch’s Copenhagen. As he checked the expiration date on the can, he did wonder what he was going to be arrested for, but he was too weary to begin narrowing it all down and anyway he assumed it was something cumulative. He had forgotten how much he hated Copenhagen. The unsweetened tobacco stung at the canker sores in his mouth. He leaned back against the windshield and offered his neck to the sunlight and muttered, “That’s some nasty-ass shit.”
“Yeah,” Hutch agreed, as if Noel were commenting on the overall situation. “They gonna find anything interesting in your room, Wasted?”
“Hutch, I tell ya, I can’t even remember. Coupla machine guns maybe.”
Hutch’s laughter lured other Huffheads closer. Soon they had formed a horseshoe around the car hood and were all comparing notes on who might have what in his room. Noel did not open his eyes again until someone wondered out loud what was taking the cops so long. Then he stirred and suggested that the cops must have found Timmy-Tom’s stash of magazines.
“Hell, they’re all up there having themselves a big cop circle jerk.”
That about brought down the house. Guys were staggering away buckled over with laughter. Noel found himself remembering that distant afternoon walking to the dugout through waves of applause with Ross Altman splayed facedown over home plate.
Hutch sat up and said look and pointed across the street to where a cameraman from Channel 7 was setting up equipment so that he could get both the dormitory and the four police cars in the same shot. We’re famous, somebody commented, then somebody else said, You’re gonna be a star, Spoon, and somebody else added, Hey, ain’t that the good-looking news chick what’s-her-name inside that van?
Noel was still calculating the camera angle when a balding senior called Tank came forward and asked, “Hey, Wasted, you ain’t got any kinda little black book or nothing like that up there, you know, a list with our names on it, who you sell to, anything like that, do you?”
Noel glared at Tank then slid off the hood and stood too close to him and said, “Tank, if you think I’m gonna rat, just come out and say it—be a man about it—but don’t give me this chicken-assed little black book crap.”
“Whoa, whoa, Spoon. No problem, no problem,” Tank was saying as he backed away and bumped into the young cop, who had just come forward through the crowd.
“We got a problem here?” the cop asked.
“Yeah, obviously he musta mistook me for somebody from Myerson Hall,” Noel said as the cop stepped between him and Tank.
The cop told Tank to go stand over there, then he turned to Noel and asked if they could talk a moment. “Upstairs,” he indicated. “You are Noel Weatherspoon, correct?”
Noel leaned over to let the plug of tobacco fall from his mouth, then straightened himself so that it was evident he was much taller than the cop. Sticking out his right hand, he said, “My friends call me Spoon.”
Ignoring the hand, the cop replied, “Noel, how about you and me go upstairs and have a little chat?”
“I didn’t catch your name,” Noel said.
The cop frowned and tapped his nameplate twice. With an exaggerated squint, Noel leaned down and read the name out loud.
“Bedell. Now, that’s some kinda name, ain’t it?” he asked too loudly.
The cop did not reply; he just stared at Noel.
“Well, Officer Bedell, first off I want to thank y’all for cleaning out Mary Lou. I been meaning to get around to it myself, but—”
“Mary Lou?”
“My Mustang. That sweet ’66 classic?”
“Oh. That. Yeah, we cleaned her up pretty good for you. Fact is, if you’ll come along upstairs with me, quietly and all, we’ll discuss something Mary Lou whispered to me.”
“Y’all got a search warrant for all this, right? I mean, see, I watch a lot of TV, and the cops on TV—like Starsky and Hutch—they all have these search warrants. You ever watch Starsky and Hutch? This here’s Hutch himself right here in person.”
Once again his fellow Huffheads had to turn and stagger away.
“Let’s go—now!”
The cop jerked Noel forward then shoved him toward the side entrance. Noel complained, “Quit damn pushing me, I know how to walk,” then, as if to prove it, he sprinted up the cement stairs, ducked under the cage of yellow tape, and turned to face the crowd. He smiled and waved at the camera across the street, but the smile vanished the moment he spotted Cecilia and Kevin standing side by side on the cafeteria lawn. The cop reached the top of the stairs and started pushing Noel inside.
“I’m goin’, I’m goin’,” was the last thing his friends heard Noel say.
•••
A German shepherd-collie mix flopped on the second-floor hallway, sniffed Noel’s boots, then looked up at him with a sad expectancy. Next to the dog was a large pile of bed linens, pillows, men’s magazines, books, albums, clothing—some of the shirts still hangered. Inside Noel’s room two trollishly short police officers, both in their mid-fifties, were contributing to the pile. The one state cop, a rangy bespectacled man in an evergreen uniform, was waving a backward goodbye as he edged past Noel in the doorway.
“I was never here,” he called back into the room. “None of this ever happened, I ain’t never seen this boy, I never seen that sorry mutt either. Call me Tuesday, Buell, we’ll look her over’n decide whether’not take the boat out. Have a good day, g
entlemen.”
The shorter of the two short cops was wall-eyed and had horse teeth, which he was displaying now in what was either a grin or a squint. After delivering Noel upstairs into their custody, the tall young officer positioned himself in front of the window and stared down at the crowd outside with such intensity as to make himself absent from the room. The midget walleyed horsetoothed cop, who wore a badged cap with a plastic weather visor, toed the wooden desk chair and told Noel to have a seat. “Make yourself at home, son.”
As soon as Noel complied, this same cop came up behind him and began stuffing baggies of pot down Noel’s collar and up his sleeves.
“Looky here, Clyde,” he chimed to the second short cop. “We got us the marijuana scarecrow.”
Clyde, the taller of the two short cops, came over then and said, “Oh my word, Buell, what have we here?” He took a plastic bag containing two quaaludes and one vial of hash oil and shoved it into Noel’s shirt pocket. “Seems to be a controlled substance of some sort.”
Clyde had large brown eyes with wax-drip polyps beneath them, like tears made of skin, and he had a flesh-tone hearing aid lodged into his left ear, which he kept trained on Noel as he ordered, “Wipe that grin off your face, son, this ain’t Hee Haw.” He picked up a sheet of notebook paper, placed it on the desk, leaned over Noel, and drew a near perfect circle the size of a golf ball.
“That’s your asshole, son,” Clyde explained. “About the time you get outa Parchman prison.”
“It ain’t mine.”
“Not yet it ain’t.”
“The pot and all, whatever that stuff is, it’s not mine.”
Walleyed Buell speculated, “Well then, one might wonder what in the world it’s doing down your shirtfront, boy.”
“Y’all put it there.”
Tapping the contraption in his ear, Clyde remarked, “Thank Jesus I didn’t hear that. Sounded like the boy was accusing us of planting evidence.”
The horsetoothed cop Buell, who could not have stood more than five-foot-four, and whose name tag said O’COCHRAN, stopped rooting through Noel’s albums to note, “That’ll make for an interesting story. I’m sure Judge Hammersmith will be sympathetic. It’ll give us a lot to talk about next week while we’re out fishing.” He found a vial of Clear Eyes and tilted back his head to administer a drop into each eye. Batting his splayed eyes, the liquid streaming down his sunburned cheeks, he added, “Especially after we trot out a few of them high school kids to testify.” He unscrewed a bottle of Aramis he found on the sink. He sniffed it, made a disapproving face, but then rubbed some onto the back of his neck. While using Noel’s comb to groom himself, O’Cochran estimated, “Let’s see now . . . possession with intent . . . and selling narcotics to minors . . . quaaludes . . . hash . . . adding to the delinquency of . . . whew . . . Lord . . . class-A felonies both, if memory serves.” He whistled, not a regular whistle but a staggered birdcall. “Good for an extra four, five years each, something like that. Heck, they change them laws so often can’t expect no one man to keep up. You got a calculator anywhere in this room, son?”
Clyde leaned over again, reanchored the piece of paper, and widened the diameter of the circle accordingly.
“One thing’s for certain,” Clyde predicted, “he’ll never suffer greatly from constipation.”
Somewhere in the next few blurred minutes Noel demanded a lie-detector test. Officer Buell O’Cochran blew his nose into a Kleenex, examined it, then said to the young cop at the window, “Taylor, we got that new portable unit in the car or should we hook him up to that old beat-up ol’ lie detector down at the station and pray he don’t get electrocuted like that last boy did?”
The young cop with the thick lips and the short colorless hair, still entranced by the view, replied, “Let’s use the one downtown, it’s more ack’rut.”
Noel, who firmly believed he was going to be administered a lie-detector test, stood and let Taylor cuff him. O’Cochran went to work plucking the contraband from Noel’s shirt and then fitting it all back inside a shoe box.
“Hey, Taylor,” he asked while rubber-banding the box shut. “What was it that scarecrow had such a hankering after?”
“Scarecrow?” the young cop replied.
“The one in that movie with all them dwarfs running around that yella road.”
“Oh. That scarecrow. Wanted him a heart?”
“No, I believe that was the fella made outa sheet metal, the one that kept seizing up whenever it rained.”
“A brain,” Noel said.
“Darn tooten,” O’Cochran agreed. “’Twas a brain.”
•••
While the two other cops were parading Noel through the crowd, O’Cochran walked along whistling away on the if-I-only-had-a-brain theme. Taylor, the young cop, drove Noel downtown with the blue lights spinning. Twice Taylor honked and waved at people, as if proud to have a prisoner in custody, and once he pulled over and had a chat with an old farmer who kept glancing nervously at Noel through blue-flashing spectacles. The police cruiser passed the field outside of town that had been given over to the traveling evangelists, but in the hot daylight the field looked like a place you might be evacuated to or perhaps the dregs of some defeated army. The back of the courthouse had been adorned with the same indecipherable and arabesque graffiti that had appeared on all the highway overpasses. Taylor guided Noel down a corridor past six offices and then through a dingy yellow door that had police stn stenciled in black. After uncuffing Noel inside a large room barren save two large metal desks and a line of six wobbly school desks, he whirled the first school desk around so that it faced an empty cork bulletin board and told Noel to sit down.
Noel did. By the time the two other cops had arrived, dragging the mutt, Noel was hard at work practicing the truth inside his head, trying to stunt his heart whenever he approached another lie. The dog curled beneath Noel’s desk and her tail began to thump his boot. The smell of collie and flea collar tightened Noel’s lungs. Behind him the three cops were squabbling over how much trouble the suspect was in, how many years he would serve, and what awful things might happen to such a pretty white boy in prison. Every once in a while they would get distracted by the police-band radio.
“That old Ned in pursuit?”
“Pursuit? Ned ain’t seen pursuit since before you was born. At his age pursuit’s a bowel movement.”
When the radio fell silent, O’Cochran asked, “Hey, college boy, you bother to search our suspect there?”
“I thought y’all took care of that,” Taylor said.
O’Cochran shot back, “Great God, child, it’s a wonder he ain’t opened fire on the lot of us yet.”
Taylor, after commenting that Noel did not seem the open-firing type, stood Noel against the corkboard and began to frisk him.
“Don’t seem the type?” O’Cochran objected. “Hell, he’s about to spend the next ten years of his life being gang-banged blind by large black men in prison, what’s he got to lose by shooten me in the back, me with a family to feed?”
“What’s this doohickey?”
“That’s an asthma inhaler,” Noel told Taylor. “I gotta have that. I’m allergic to that dog.”
“Give me that thing,” Clyde ordered. “I’ll safekeep it.”
After Taylor had removed Noel’s wallet, jackknife, keys, change, the black film container, and also the yellow piece of stationery in his back pocket, O’Cochran began to gleefully sort through these belongings on his desk. Noel could see none of this. He was sitting again and facing the corkboard, but he could hear O’Cochran chuckling and calling Clyde over to come read this. Noel did not know what the note from Lily said. All he knew was that after reading it O’Cochran kept calling him “the child of immortality,” as in: The child of immortality there is looking a little green around the gills, or Hey, child’a immor
tality, ain’t it your brother plays third for the Hubcats?
Noel said yes sir it was, then he asked for his inhaler back. The snarling faces of animals had started to appear inside the pattern of cork. Clyde walked up behind Noel and clamped a hand to each shoulder and began a clawlike massage. While he did this, he spoke softly to Noel of the relationship in prison between big black cons and pretty white boys.
“Oh hell, don’t go bawling on us,” he pleaded.
“I’m not bawling, I can’t damn breathe, I need that inhaler.”
Clyde patted Noel’s head and assured him not to worry, that they were trying to arrange it with the higher-ups so that Noel could spend one last night here in a civilized white man’s jail before being shipped off to nigger central.
“Wouldn’t wish that on a dog,” he said. “Hey, speaking of which, where’d Esmerelda go off to? You kick her, boy?”
“She’s over here. Licken my shoe,” O’Cochran reported. “Musta spilt something on it.”
“Let’s practice her hide-and-seek.”
O’Cochran shoved aside Noel’s wallet and said, “Alright. I’ll cover her eyes, you do the hiding.”
“Where is it?”
“Back in the shoe box.”
“She looken?”
“I got her eyes covered. Don’t hide it there, I hid it there last time and if it had been a snake it’a bit her right on the nose. Hide it in the other room. Awright . . . ready? Here she goes. There you go, girl! Go on, Essie! Good girl. Where’s the pot, Essie, where’s the pot?”
“She’s gonna pee the floor again you keep that up.”
“Look at her, she’s worthless. We should stick her outside and let the devil worshipers have her.”
“There she goes.”
They followed the dog into the adjoining room and did not return. After ten minutes Noel called out that he needed to use the bathroom. Fifteen minutes later he yelled, “I gotta go real bad!” Nothing. Just the occasional burst of static from the radio. He stood and turned to face the empty office, the two desks side by side, the radio perched on the windowsill beneath uneven venetian blinds. He searched the room for the inhaler but did not see it. Finally he called out, “Anybody here?” then he walked into the next room, empty save for one desk near the door. He yelled again. He had just reached the door to the hallway when O’Cochran burst in. The door caught Noel on the brow. O’Cochran tackled him onto the desk and twisted Noel around and pressed his face down into a scattering of paper clips across the day calendar.