The Lightning Rule

by Brett Ellen Block

  Instead of walking out the police station’s front entrance, Emmett took the back. He cut through the boiler room to get to the building’s rear exit, which remained bolted for security. The key to the Records Room fit the back door too, allowing him to come and go as he pleased, unnoticed.

  Emmett stepped outside into the gauzy afternoon air and relocked the door behind him. He avoided other officers as much as they avoided him. He didn’t need to see them to know what they thought. He had overheard the whispers, guys saying he’d lost it, that he was a liability. Somebody left a note on his old desk that said “Quit, nigger lover. Quit.” The rumors were he shouldn’t be wearing a badge. He ignored them. But in the basement of his mind, Detective Emmett worried that the rumors might be true.

  TWO

  Evenings came later than usual that summer. The sky dimmed, buffing off the heat’s edge, and dusk lingered long beyond purpose, as if the day didn’t want to be forgotten. When night did fall, it dropped like stone. Emmett made sure he was home well before dark.

  “It’s just me,” he said, tossing his keys and badge onto a side table next to the telephone, his habit upon arrival. The lamps in the living room were off, the shades drawn. A baseball game was playing on the radio.

  Emmett lived in the house he grew up in, a two-story clapboard that was a cookie cutter copy of the others on his street. To distinguish their homes, owners varied the paint colors or the flower beds or the flagpoles, nothing especially radical. There was a certain safety in the similarity. His parents had moved to the Down Neck section of the East Ward for a different type of safety. The Down Neck neighborhoods were mixed with smatterings of Poles and Lithuanians, people from their part of the globe, and it didn’t hurt that the butcher’s shop that made the best kielbasa was only two blocks away. The name Down Neck referred to the narrow “neck” of land that ran along the lower Passaic River. On a map, it looked more like a fist, knuckling the river out of joint. The locals weren’t nearly as pushy. Their worlds revolved around church and family, so much so that whenever anyone asked where in Down Neck somebody was from, they would answer with the church they attended instead of the street. In the diocese of Newark, boundaries existed for each parish. The church a person named was shorthand not only for their religion and location, but also for their ethnicity and class. A single answer could tell a life story.

  Saint Casimir’s Roman Catholic Church was Emmett’s answer. It said more about him than he cared to recount. Casimir had been a fifteenth-century Polish prince who lived a severe, disciplined life, remaining celibate, spending his nights in prayer and sleeping on the ground rather than in a bed. When Hungarian nobles begged Casimir’s father to send his zealous, fifteen-year-old son to be their king, Casimir obeyed, taking the crown yet refusing to exercise power because it went against his principles. An ineffectual ruler, Casimir returned home to take up his true calling: dedicating himself to supporting the sick and all those who suffered. Canonized forty years after his death as the patron saint of the helpless and the poor, Saint Casimir was the embodiment of selflessness, a trait that was extolled to Emmett on a daily basis while attending parochial school and serving as an altar boy. He got an extra dose of virtue every Sunday at the 9 a.m. mass, which was said in Polish, as if to make the message more potent. A large chunk of Emmett’s childhood had been spent mastering the Decades of the Rosary in English and in Polish. He remembered the Polish version best. Over time, he had gotten rusty at the language, but to that day, he could pray as fluently as a native.

  Newark was a city of immigrants, banded together block by block, tight as rosary beads, each clinging to their traditions and mother tongues. Emmett’s parents were no exception. They preferred pierogi to baked potatoes, swore in Polish, not English, and never ate meat on Fridays, even though the pope, an Italian, had sanctioned it. To them, holding on to the past was a matter of pride. For Emmett, it occurred by default.

  His house hadn’t changed since his youth. The flocked wallpaper and reproduction furniture that aspired to give the impression of middle class were exactly the same, and getting further from middle class every year. His father’s lounge chair, now threadbare on the arms, still hunkered in the spot it had been in when he was alive. After a stroke took his mother, Emmett inherited the place, its contents, and more memories than he had room to store.

  The thwack of a baseball resounded from the radio, followed by cheers. Apart from the play-by-play, the house was conspicuously quiet. He lowered the volume on the game.

  “Edward. Edward? Edziu?” Emmett’s voice rose half a note when he called his brother’s Polish nickname.

  “I can hear you, Marty. You don’t have to holler. It’s not as if I ran away from home.” Edward rolled out of the kitchen in his wheelchair, a beer can wedged between his useless legs. “You sound like Ma when you do that.”

  Edward took a swig of beer, then mimicked him, calling his own name, a perfect impersonation of their mother shouting at him to stop playing stickball in the street and come in for supper. His tone was too bouncy to be sober. Every day Emmett gave thanks that his parents weren’t alive to see what had become of his younger brother. That would have been too much for them to bear. It was almost too much for him.

  “Who’s playing?” he asked, loosening his tie.

  “It’s the Mayor’s Trophy. Mets are up one over the Yanks,” Edward said sullenly. “A cryin’ shame.”

  “Have you eaten?”

  His brother shrugged and coasted closer to the radio to listen.

  “I’ll consider that a no.”

  Emmett took two TV dinners from the icebox and dropped them into the oven. Edward groaned from the other room at the familiar noise.

  “Why bother with the stove? Put ’em on the front stoop. They’ll cook in five minutes flat.”

  “Ain’t that the truth.” Emmett forced a laugh. Whenever Edward was drunk, Emmett did his best to humor him. Alcohol brought out the fight in his brother. Edward couldn’t hurt him. But he could hurt himself. He would throw books, break dishes, and make a general mess of whatever he could get his hands on. Once he had tried to knock over the television and nearly tumbled out of his wheelchair in the process.

  “Sure was a hot one today, huh? I hope tomorrow’s not another scorcher.”

  The small talk was camouflage so Emmett could open the squeaky cupboard above the sink where he hid a bottle of Jim Beam, placed purposefully out of Edward’s range. The bottle was exactly where he had left it. Next, he checked the refrigerator. The twelve-pack purchased a day ago, also to humor his brother, was gone. Emmett regretted buying the booze, but hated to deny Edward his sole pleasure. The thing that made his brother’s life tolerable made Emmett’s more burdensome sip by sip.

  “Say, when are you gonna take a day off and keep me company? I’m sick of playing solitaire, and I sure as hell can’t play gin rummy alone.”

  Edward’s question was timed with the closing of the refrigerator door, guilt to distract from the missing beer. Each had guessed the other’s game.

  “Soon,” Emmett replied. “Soon.”

  He had already used most of his vacation days when Edward first came home and was saving the remainder in case of an emergency. The ploy aside, his brother was genuinely lonely. Edward refused to let his friends visit and wouldn’t take calls from the women he had dated. He was too ashamed to see them. Though his seclusion was self-imposed, the confines of the house were grating on him. Emmett had built a plywood ramp up the steep pitch to the front door, seven feet above street level, however the slope was too precarious for Edward to manage. Stranded, he whiled away the hours sitting on the back porch in the shade under a tin awning, overlooking their small scrap of a yard. That was as far as he would or could go unaccompanied.

  “Soon ain’t soon enough, Marty, because lemme tell you, it’s a real ball of laughs being trapped here by myself when it’s a million degrees. I’m bored outta my skull. This isn’t Rear-friggin’-Window, my friend,” E
dward ranted, slurring. “There’s no Grace Kelly and there’s nobody murdering anybody across the alley. The murdering part, that’s your bag, man. Hell, I don’t even get the lousy little dog.” He hung his head, as though he had actually been deprived of a dog of his own. “This is abuse, man. Cruel and unusual punishment. Hey, you know what I should do? I should call the cops.”

  Emmett watched from the kitchen as his brother cracked up. Tipsy and giggling, a stray lock of hair fell onto his cheek. After leaving the VA hospital, Edward had let his beard grow in and his hair grow out. It skimmed his chin where a scraggly goatee struggled to gain ground. Emmett kept his hair cropped close in a flattop and shaved every morning, department regulations. He was four years older than Edward, yet they were the same height. Were it not for the wheelchair, they still would be. In their younger years, they had often been mistaken for twins. Now it was a stretch to see how they were related.

  Once the TV dinners were ready, they ate dinner off trays in front of the television, Edward’s balanced across the arms of his wheelchair. Emmett silently said grace over his food. He didn’t invite Edward to join him in prayer. That would have gotten another laugh or started a fight. Saying grace was something they had done every evening as a family when their parents were alive. Their mother had died a little over a year ago, their father the year before that. Emmett had boxed up his grief along with his parents’ possessions, which he carted off to Saint Casimir’s to be donated as per their wishes. Edward had no such closure, and Emmett believed the quick succession of their deaths was what had driven him to the army and to his eventual fate, confined to the wheelchair he despised more and more each day. Suggesting they say grace together would have rubbed salt in a wound that had yet to heal for his brother, so Emmett prayed by himself.

  As usual, he sat in his father’s old lounger, not the couch. That way Edward could pull next to him and they could sit side by side. The couch went untouched, a constant reminder of his brother’s new limitations. Their father’s chair had once been off limits as well. No one was allowed on it besides him, including their mother. A meager throne, the fabric was worn soft, the cushions molded to their father’s form. As comfortable as the chair was, Emmett couldn’t get comfortable in it.

  “This is a great show. I love this show,” Edward said, clapping in drunken encouragement when an episode of Gunsmoke climaxed with a barroom brawl. He lit a cigarette, finished the dregs of his beer, and lazily set the empty can beside his half-eaten meal. The beer can toppled to the floor. “Oops.”

  Emmett picked it up. “Are you finished with your food? You barely ate.”

  “I’m watching my figure. All this beer goes right to my hips.”

  Edward would goad him into an argument if he could. Emmett wouldn’t let him. “Your hips or your bladder? Do you need to…you know?”

  “Naw,” Edward waved him off. “I’m getting the hang of it.”

  His wheelchair was tough to maneuver through the house’s narrow doorways, especially the bathroom. If Edward didn’t align the chair accurately, he would smash his fingers between the wheels and the jamb. He had special gloves to prevent his palms from getting blistered, which he never wore, and a special seat that went over the toilet, which he was training himself to use. He had been home for a month. It seemed like more since Emmett cleared the dining room and moved Edward’s bed and dresser down from the room they shared as kids. Edward couldn’t get in or out of bed without help and he couldn’t feel if he wet the sheets. Emmett had to change them every morning.

  The nightly news came on, reporting troop movements and knitting in old footage from the anti-Vietnam march in Central Park. Hippies burnt draft cards in the foreground while police in riot gear stood in a rigid phalanx behind them. Edward let out an exaggerated sigh, as if the news was a rerun he had already seen. He had enlisted following his layoff from Westinghouse nine months earlier. Their father also worked at the plant and had the good fortune to die of a heart attack well in advance of the factory shutting its doors and moving to the suburbs, led away by tax cuts and lower wages. Had he been around, the closing would surely have killed him. A machinist, he cut parts for toasters and dryers for two decades, coming home with flat feet, a bad back, and a paycheck that couldn’t cover college tuition for one son, let alone both.

  “What else is on?”

  That was Emmett’s cue to get up and change the channel. He spun the TV dial until Edward said stop at an episode of The Andy Griffith Show. The warbling whistle of the theme song was inappropriately cheerful considering the heat.

  “Beggars can’t be choosers,” Edward said.

  It was a sentiment, one of a scarce few, upon which Emmett and his brother could agree. In a city that had seen its share of prosperity dwindle with each company that fled for cheaper pastures, with every ounce of water the breweries siphoned from the polluted Passaic—water the tanneries had poisoned to begin with—and with every tenement that crumbled under the weight of its owner’s disinterest, there were more beggars and fewer choices in Newark than ever. Emmett hadn’t been to mass in ages, but he was confident they still passed the collection plate. Begging wasn’t a sin. Wanting choices might as well have been. Becoming a cop was Emmett’s second choice. The decision to relinquish his first was a splinter in his conscience, forced deeper each time he looked at his brother.

  Edward eventually fell asleep in his wheelchair, and Emmett dozed off too. He later woke to the telephone ringing. Light from the television was flickering across Edward’s face. His cigarette smoldered in the aluminum TV dinner tray. Emmett snubbed it out and picked up the phone.

  “Detective Emmett?”

  The desk sergeant’s raspy voice was unmistakable. As a rookie, a drunk rousted from an American Legion bar had come at him with a screwdriver and nicked his larynx. The battle scar earned him respect that stuck through the ranks. On the force, reputations spoke louder than words or actions, and often outlived their owners. Emmett worried that his reputation wasn’t being permanently cemented in the Records Room like the mortar between the basement’s cinder block walls.

  “What can I do for you, Sarge?”

  “We’ve got a, um, problem here. Brass said to call everyone in. S’pose that means you too,” he said, unsure.

  Bursts of shouting and the pounding of feet bled through on the phone line. The normally stiff-lipped sergeant sounded tense. Emmett grabbed his keys and badge from the side table in one swipe.

  “I’m out the door. I’ll be there as fast as I can.”

  “Better make it faster than that.”

  THREE

  Emmett smelled the fire before he saw it. Smoke was billowing out of a burning abandoned car on Livingston Avenue, opposite the Fourth Precinct, a common sight in the Central Ward. The city wouldn’t pay to tow abandoned cars, rendering them fair game to be stripped for parts. Their skeletal hulls were left on the curb and often set alight, as this one was. Silhouetted in the glow of the flames, figures darted across the road. From somewhere far off, a fire truck was wailing. Close by, glass was breaking. None of it was uncommon for the neighborhood. What Emmett witnessed next was. As he drove closer, he saw packs of people hurling bottles, stones, and debris at the police station. Officers outside were dodging the onslaught, scrambling for the safety of the precinct.

  Adrenaline and disbelief churned in Emmett’s head. He had to get into the station house. The precinct’s lot would be prime pickings for vandals, so he circled and parked at a distance. His Dodge Coronet was almost ten years old and it blended in with the other automobiles on the streets. The sole benefit of his low civil service salary was that he couldn’t afford the kind of car that would catch a criminal’s eye.

  Since running might attract attention, Emmett moved in quick, measured steps toward the station. While he was safer dressed as a civilian, many in the ward would recognize him as a cop nonetheless. In the dark, in the confusion, Emmett would be a target either way.

  His key let him duck
in the station’s rear door, and he hurried to the entrance hall, where it was pandemonium. With its high ceiling and massive staircase, the hall was a grand space in an otherwise unremarkable building, and it was filled to the corners with jostling bodies, a blur of blue uniforms and black faces. Patrolmen were hustling men two at a time toward the holding cells, towing them by their handcuffed wrists. The din of voices and shuffling feet reverberated through the hall. Some of the station’s front windows were cracked, some broken, paper hastily taped over the missing panes. Emmett spotted Nolan rushing past and caught him by the shoulder.

  “What happened?”

  “It’s crazy. This is crazy.” The kid was panting, rambling, eyes frantic. “They all just showed up and starting shouting that they wanted to see him, that we had to let him go.”

  “Officer,” Emmett said sharply, snapping Nolan from a tailspin. “Who’s ‘him’?”

  “Ben White. The cabdriver. I thought it was a phony name. I thought this was some kinda joke, some kinda initiation. But I saw Tillet and Donolfo bring him in. Said they were double-parked on Fifteenth Street and this guy in a Safety Company cab cut around ’em. Said he was resisting arrest. Took four guys to carry him in here. One on each arm and leg. They brought him to a cell and they um….” Nolan couldn’t put what he had seen into words or didn’t want to. “The cabbie, he didn’t look too hot when they were finished. Get me?”