“I have them right here,” said Ferguson. He handed Robert a letter in an envelope.
Robert read the letter and suddenly, he didn’t need any morphine. It was a DD-214, a discharge letter. Robert looked at Ferguson with his mouth agape. He tried to speak but couldn’t.
“Congratulations, soldier,” Ferguson smiled. “There’s a note in there from the Commander. Unusual, but he is a General.”
Dear Sergeant Jackson,
Thank you for your service to your country.
God bless you and God bless America.
Sincerely,
General Wilford J. Gill
Robert folded the paper and brought it to his forehead. He fought tears and he thought of Detroit. Home. Denise, sex, life and home cooking. He pulled the paper down and heard himself saying some kind of thanks to God.
“Thank you, sir,” he said to Ferguson.
“You deserve it, Sergeant,” said Ferguson. “Hold on to that DD-214. Oh, by the way, your Tigers are doing just fine back home. You’ll probably be able to catch a few games.”
“Looking forward to it,” said Robert and now he felt the smile spreading across his face. “Sir, what’s going to happen to my platoon?”
“They’ll be broken up, sent to other squads. It’s looking ugly in the Central Highlands. We expect heavy fighting there.”
Robert’s look of sadness was obvious to Ferguson. A leader can’t be happy unless he knows all of his men are safe.
“Don’t worry. This thing’s going to be over by the end of the year. At least that’s what the Generals are saying.
“Yes, sir,” said Robert but with little joy.
Ferguson saluted and left the room. Robert pulled the discharge letter to his chest and sunk back into bed. A minute later, Foster and Percy came back in with wide grins on their faces.
“You sonofabitch!” said Foster.
“Goin’ home!” said Percy. “We heard some of the officers talking about it.”
“Yeah, how about that?” said Robert.
They hugged Robert and he didn’t mind the pain that was creeping back into his body.
“Send me some fried chicken, a case of Jack Daniels and three women with big, juicy asses,” said Percy, laughing.
“Big tits on mine,” said Foster, “the women I mean,” and he laughed as well.
Robert looked at the two men, their faces beaming with true happiness, the kind of happiness that can overcome the worse of memories and deed.
For a second, he didn’t want to leave. He wanted to stay in Vietnam and go to whatever destiny the War Gods had in mind for him. Surely, War Gods didn’t let anyone go home. But he quickly came to his senses. Going home only meant that he had beaten the War Gods at their crazy game.
Robert wanted to leave Foster and Percy with some words of wisdom, some magical talisman that would protect them and some day find them going home as well.
“Thanks fellas,” was all he managed to say.
Percy and Foster shared another look and then Foster pulled up three no-name beers from his jacket. They opened them and toasted Robert’s freedom and their fallen comrades.
Robert tipped the dark brown bottle and felt the liquid slide down his throat. It was warm but it tasted great.
He sighed and fought back the tears.
4
ROOKIE
Thomas could not stop the birds flying around in his stomach. It was his first night patrol and even though he had lived in Detroit his whole life, he was worried.
The streets now looked different to him, like a battleground. Stores where he once bought food now looked like innocent victims and the men who had once passed by his vision without thought now looked like the enemy. Also, night calls were often about Negroes and anything could happen when they were involved.
“Hit ‘em hard and often,” is what his grandfather Cahan used to say about the Coloreds as he called them. Sometimes he called them “Nigras” coconuts, spooks, splibs, darkies and such.
When Thomas was a boy, he wondered why the Colored people had so many different names. He never asked, so no one ever told him and so he used the names like everyone else he knew.
Now he knew that those words could hurt and get you into a lot of trouble if you used them unwisely. And among some in his generation, they were outright taboo.
And now the Colored people called themselves Black with a capital “B.” He didn’t much like that name either. There was something about it that intimidated him. Black was a color and it invoked images of fear and mystery. Darkness. Why would anyone want to be Black, he thought.
Sarah had made him pay for taking his father’s side at the graduation reception. She gave him the cold shoulder and cut him off in bed. For all her progressiveness, Sarah acted like any pretty girl when she was mad. “You don’t get to have me” was his punishment. But they had made up with a three-hour session that would go down in his personal history book. He smiled a little at the thought.
Thomas drove the police cruiser down Woodward Avenue and turned onto Grand Boulevard. He passed Hitsville and saw several well-dressed Negroes talking near the entrance. That was where they made much of the music he loved. That place was Motown.
What he didn’t know is that one of those Negroes was a man named Marvin who was having his first thoughts about doing a political rhythm and blues album that would change the musical landscape forever.
They soon neared Tiger Stadium. Thomas smiled. So many good memories were in that place, he thought.
“Who do you like, Lolich or McClain?” asked Ned Young. Ned was a vet of more than ten years. He had been Shaun’s partner before he went off to war.
“I like them both,” said Thomas.
“Pick one,” said Ned in that juvenile way a true baseball fan has.
“Why not ask me if Batman can kick Superman’s ass,” said Thomas.
“Batman?” said Ned. “Who the hell is that?”
Thomas laughed a little as he turned the cruiser back toward Woodward. “Well, Lolich is a hard worker. McClain is a pretty boy. So, I’ll go with Mickey.”
“Surprised to hear that. I thought you Mc’s all stuck together.”
“Only when we’re drinking,” said Thomas and they both laughed.
Ned had volunteered to ride with Thomas after his last partner started riding as one of the Big Four, a TAC squad consisting of two uniformed officers and two detectives. Their main purpose was to keep the peace in designated high-crime areas.
The department always wanted rookies to be partnered with a vet to bring them in slowly. There were no less than three cops who wanted to ride with Thomas. His brother Shaun was missed, and his father was still popular in the precinct house. His grandfather was a legend. It was nice to have an easy transition into the brotherhood, Thomas thought, but it was tough living in the shadow of greatness, especially his grandfather, whose name Cahan was Celtic for warrior.
“Not so fast,” said Ned. “We need to observe what’s going on. When the people see us moving slow they know they’re being watched.”
“Swing right up here and let’s cruise black bottom,” said Ned. “See what we can rustle up there.”
The majority of Detroit’s Blacks were locked into neighborhoods on the city’s eastside. Many of these areas were what people called ghettoes but generally speaking they were working class neighborhoods.
Ned’s designation of black bottom referred to the city’s old Paradise Valley area where the Blacks settled after the turn of the century.
Thomas headed for the east side in the shadow of downtown. As he did, his stomached turned as well. “Rustle up something” was code for offensive policing which was in itself a euphemism for busting Negro heads.
The cruiser rolled south then Thomas turned east toward their destination.
**********
Frank Riley was not present at the birth of his second son, Thomas James Riley in 1942. He was in Europe defeating Adolf Hitler or at least that’s th
e way Thomas would hear about it when he got older. His older brother, Shaun, the apple of his father’s eye, was a freckled faced twelve-year old at the time.
Frank Riley returned home the next year in time to see his newest son walking and to rejoin the Detroit Police Force with his father, a big, strapping giant of a man named Cahan.
Frank came home in January of that year and later witnessed Detroit’s first major race riot. It was a bloody affair that arose from the mistreatment of Blacks who were all forced to live in startlingly inhuman conditions. The forced integration of black and white workers at the auto plants to help the war effort also fueled the fire.
Frank worked side by side with Cahan during the riot of ’43. On the second night, the family got bad news. Their cousin Dennis and his nephew James had been chased by Negroes and trapped in an alley. Dennis had been killed, beaten with baseball bats by two men.
Cahan had called for blood but the men were never found. And from that day on, Thomas was often reminded that Black men had killed one of their own.
Young Shaun and later Thomas would look at their father and grandfather with the love and admiration you feel for someone who clothes and feeds you. In the eyes of the young boys, their fathers were men who were strong and spoke with conviction and so their words and sentiments were gospel.
On August 6, 1945, two years after the riots, President Truman gave the order to drop an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, Japan and ended the war.
Two months later, the Detroit Tigers won the World Series against the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field. Thomas was three years old and would never remember that he had sat on the lap of his grandpa as they listened to the game on the radio.
With the world at peace and the Tigers the champions of the world, Detroit and the country moved into an economic boom, which benefited both Blacks and Whites, and for a while, the simmering feud between the races fell into the shadow of prosperity.
Thomas was a typical teenager among his peers. He was handsome but didn’t know it and was deathly afraid of girls. He was never as popular as Shaun who was an all-state athlete and a notorious ladies’ man.
Shaun, the first born, was his father’s favorite, but Cahan favored the young Thomas who was named after Cahan’s father, Thomas Casey Riley, a steel worker and leader of a street gang in old New York.
Frank saw in his firstborn, Shaun all the things he felt in himself. Shaun had spirit. He was smart, strong and could hold his drink. Thomas was thin, often sick and was a light drinker. Shaun got into fights and often won. Thomas avoided violence and liked to read. But Shaun loved his little brother and protected him from all dangers in and out of the house. And so over the years, a gulf developed between Thomas and Frank that was bridged by Shaun.
Shaun got married to one of his many girlfriends and joined the police department, continuing the family tradition. He was tall and handsome in his uniform and the department had even used him in a recruiting poster once.
Cahan was retired but was as proud as a man could be at Shaun’s graduation. Thomas would never forget the three of them standing together in their uniforms taking a photograph. It was like he was watching a movie of someone else’s life. The men seemed foreign, like John Wayne or Gary Cooper, Real Men who fought and protected the weak and innocent. Thomas was only eight but he remembered thinking that he’d wanted to be in the picture with the men he saw before him.
Shaun went off to Korea soon thereafter. He was there less than a year when he was killed in fighting near Pusan. The Army sent what was left of him home in a bag nestled in a coffin with an American flag on it.
The funeral was the saddest day of Thomas’ life. It was filled with crying and screaming, drinking and singing. The entire police force seemed to come out for the burial.
Thomas stood next to Cahan, who was holding his hand and watched Frank try to keep his composure. When they lowered Shaun into the ground, Thomas felt that a part of his father went into the cold earth with his brother.
Cahan died a year later and that left Frank as the leader of the clan. Cahan’s funeral was in a word, grand. Men came from all over the country to send him off. An Army General even attended. It was quite a blow to the family so soon after the loss of young Shaun but like any family, they held fast to each other and tried to move on.
Frank and Esther immediately tried to have another child, a feat that took them four years to accomplish. When Katherine Abigail was born, Thomas could see the disappointment in his father’s eyes. He wanted another boy but God had said no.
Thomas didn’t know whether to be happy or sad about this. His father had never favored him and perhaps another Shaun was what he needed. On the other hand, Thomas didn’t like the idea of being replaced.
When Katie was born a girl and Esther knew she couldn’t have any more children, Frank finally turned his attentions to young Thomas. He set about the task of making the young boy a man. And he set about it in the old school way, with toughness and self-righteous paternal anger.
Thomas soon overcame his shyness with girls and started dating around the neighborhood. Unlike Shaun, he preferred to have one girl at a time; still he was on the list of every young lady in his neighborhood.
Frank took Thomas downtown on a Saturday afternoon once. Thomas and Frank were in Hudson’s department store. Hudson’s was a pricey joint and they were there trying to find a present for Esther’s birthday.
Thomas saw a particularly pretty girl and lingered on her as she passed by. She had hazel eyes and long black hair that cascaded down her back like a river or curls. She smiled at him and Thomas felt a heat in his belly that he had never experienced. It was sharp and a little painful but it felt good, too.
The smack to the side of his head was like a bullet as his father hit him. Thomas looked up, surprised, the pain already building in his eyes. Frank’s face was a visage of anger and shame.
“Don’t you know a darkie when you see one?” he asked the stunned boy.
“Huh?”
“She’s mud,” said Frank.
Thomas looked back at the young girl and only then did he see that the woman holding her hand was as dark as a Hershey Bar.
“Some White man has been with that woman and now she’s parading that fact all over town,” said Frank with anger in his voice.
“I didn’t... she looks White,” said Thomas.
“Come on,” said Frank and he stomped away.
Thomas followed but not before taking a last look at the girl, who despite his father’s anger and his stinging head still seemed like an angel.
As little Katie grew up, she turned into a bundle of energy and brought some joy back into the beleaguered Riley house. She was clearly the smartest of all the kids and made straight A’s in school.
Frank didn’t know what good a smart girl was. She’d only get married and have babies, he’d often mumble.
But Thomas secretly encouraged her to excel. He loved his little sister and tried to be the knight and protector Shaun had been for him.
Thomas graduated from high school and took a job as security at the local college while waiting for the Police Academy to accept him. This was a mere matter of time, he knew, because no one would dare turn down a Riley.
But Thomas was not really waiting for the academy as he told his father. He had decided that he didn’t want to be a police officer. He wanted to go to college and maybe open a business or something. He knew this would break Frank’s heart but he had a plan. He’d join the Army first.
After President Kennedy was killed, President Johnson, the Texan had escalated the military offensive in Vietnam.
Frank disliked the term military offensive, it was a war and one they needed to fight. Frank had never heard of Vietnam, but people like them had killed Shaun and so any excuse to go there and lay waste was okay with him.
Thomas understood more about the war than his father. He at least knew that the Russians and the threat of Communism were behind the war effort. And
he knew war suited his purpose right now.
As the last son in the family, Thomas could have gotten out of the draft, but this was the perfect way to change his life. He would serve a tour, come home and then go to college. His father’s macho legacy would be appeased and Thomas could finally own his destiny.
The brighter days that Thomas saw as he went into basic training soon turned to sorrow. A boy’s idea of the military was a fantasy forged by books, movies and noble heroism, but the reality of the soldier, the Marines in particular, was man as killing machine.
Thomas was subjected to rigorous training. The philosophy of killing, the necessity of it, was embedded into him each day.
“What are you?” was the daily question.
“I’m a killer, sir!” was the only correct response.
The only thing he looked forward to were the nights and sleep. He’d lay his aching body on the hard cot and let the blackness of slumber seep over him like thick water.
As the days progressed, his sleep was invaded. The corpse of his dead brother would stroll into the barracks, his bloody, torn-apart body hanging on to itself by sinewy flesh. Shaun crawled across Thomas’ mind like a demon, whittling away at his resolve and sanity.
Soon the specter didn’t end with the rising sun. Thomas saw flashes of the dead man behind trees and barracks, in the shadows and on the makeshift battlefields.
Thomas told no one about his apparitions. His hands shook when he assembled his rifle and the other men kidded him about yelling in his sleep.
The days passed and Thomas sensed the walls of his mind weaken. He saw failure and humiliation waiting like ravenous predators and he fought their existence. And then it all stopped. He no longer felt limits to the functioning of his mind and the tug of reason’s gravity.
So when he saw his brother on the rifle range, cadet Thomas Riley ran onto the course to save his brother Shaun from an assault. He galloped toward the ghost as bullets zipped around him and his instructor screamed and cursed to high heaven.
Dark Town Redemption Page 4