Darktown: A Novel

by Thomas Mullen

  “Step into my office.”

  The shed was surprisingly big on the inside. It seemed like a perfectly good place to work on home repair projects or slowly torture kidnap victims to death. Tools hung from pegs on one wall, a couple of wood horses leaning there amid piles of sawdust, a scent of paint or paint thinner or both. Faint light came in through a lone window, and Dunlow hit the switch on a small lamp atop a folding table that had perhaps hosted a few late-night poker games when the boys wanted to be free of women’s eyes. Nails rolled across the floor as Rake stepped, dead moths hung from industrious spiderwebs in the corners, and a few old yard signs from elections Rake dimly remembered lay in a pile. It was roughly two hundred degrees in there.

  “Have a seat.”

  Four old tree stumps had been arranged around the table as chairs. Dunlow lowered himself onto one and Rake sat opposite him.

  A bottle appeared on the table, along with two glasses. Dunlow poured.

  “No thanks,” Rake said. Was this the last drink before the firing squad? He hadn’t expected such hospitality.

  “Can it and drink.” Dunlow followed his own advice.

  “No. Thanks.”

  “Drink it.”

  “I don’t think you’ve had enough yet. You have mine and we can call it square.”

  He knew his rejection of the moonshine and the calmness he was trying very hard to project were enraging his partner. Dunlow stared at him and Rake maintained the stare. A platoon of very slow seconds marched by. Then Dunlow turned around to grab something from a shelf.

  Rake let his right hand slide into his pocket and he grasped the knife’s handle.

  But the object Dunlow retrieved from the shelf was not a gun or any other weapon. It was a mason jar of something liquid, something that may once have been transparent or yellowish but was now greenish. Tiny flakes of something darker floated in the viscosity. At the bottom, bobbing a bit from the motion as Dunlow placed the jar on the table, was an object the size and approximate shape of a very large acorn.

  “I’m sure as hell not drinking that,” Rake said.

  “It ain’t for drinking, you dumb shit. It’s for remembering. Know what that is?”

  “I hope I don’t.”

  Rake was beginning to form an idea just as Dunlow, ignoring Rake’s full glass, poured another for himself and drank it. If Rake played his cards right and waited this out, Dunlow might be unconscious eventually.

  “It’s a nigger toe.”

  Rake tried to adopt a dispassionate expression and waited for Dunlow to explain.

  “Uncle of mine got it, back in ’06. Year I was born, matter of fact. He gave it to me when I was, I don’t know, nine or ten.”

  “I got a baseball bat when I was ten.”

  “I believe he used a baseball bat to acquire this!” Dunlow guffawed. This was one of the funniest retorts he’d ever managed, apparently.

  Rake couldn’t resist the temptation to look at the toe again, even though he knew that was exactly what Dunlow wanted. It was hard to see if it was indeed a forty-two-year-gone toe, as whoever had mixed the formaldehyde had used too much of this or too little of that, and the chemicals were slowly degrading. Rake wondered how old the toe had been when it was cut off during those riots, when his ancestors had driven Negroes from downtown. He didn’t see a toenail. He also wondered whether Dunlow was lying and perhaps he had “acquired” this more recently.

  “What are we here to talk about, Dunlow?”

  “You are a goddamn disgrace of a cop. You bring shame on me as a partner.”

  “That’s funny. I’ve often been tempted to say the same thing about you.”

  “And what makes me sad, Rake, is that you remind me of me when I was younger.”

  “That certainly makes me sad. That’s the cruelest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

  Dunlow placed a .45 beside the two glasses. His right hand remained upon it.

  “The proverbial cards are on the table now,” Rake said.

  It was strange that he was so calm, but he was. He’d been waiting for this. He hadn’t panicked in Europe and he hadn’t panicked yet on his beat, and though this would have been a fine time to panic, his heart rate remained at its usual half-interested pace.

  Still, he realized he had waited too long. He should have taken out his knife before Dunlow had revealed his gun. He never should have walked into this shed. He never should have joined the force. A series of turning points at which he’d pivoted the wrong way presented themselves to him now, like maps whose proper routes were oh so obvious in retrospect.

  “Enough of your goddamn lip. I have something to say to you now and I should have said it a while ago, so you’ll shut the hell up and let me do it.”

  Rake tried to adopt a shutting-the-hell-up expression. Dunlow didn’t seem to notice or mind that Rake’s hand remained under the table.

  “You think I’m a bad cop, don’t you? You think I’m an evil man, you think I’m bull-headed. And you think I’m too hard on the niggers, right? An unreconstructed Confederate who won’t let those poor, good-hearted black folk be. That’s what you think ain’t it?”

  “I wouldn’t normally use a term like ‘unreconstructed.’ But yeah.”

  “Well, here’s what I think of you, young man. You think you’re a hero because you survived whatever the hell you survived over there and got your fancy medals to prove it. You think you’re cultured and wise and that you know more about life than the bumpkins you left behind, and now you’ve returned to rule over us with that shiny badge of yours. You think you got something on everyone around you, and that by the time we figure that out you’ll have moved on to some higher place above us and it’ll be too late for us to catch up.”

  Sweat was rolling down Rake’s cheeks. He should have drunk more water while doing the yard work, and now he was sitting in an oven facing a man with a gun and he didn’t dare wipe his face lest he goad Dunlow into shooting him.

  “Because I don’t take bribes and rough up Negro kids? Because I won’t put a hood over my head and firebomb that house down the block?”

  Dunlow drank again. Distressingly, he wasn’t yet acting terribly drunk. If Rake’s plan was to wait until the man passed out, those odds were seeming slimmer.

  “I was like you. You may not believe it. And I certainly wasn’t as irritating as you are. But I did think I was better than the men around me. Especially my old man. He was a cop, too. He goddamn ran his part of the city, boy. People saw big-man Dunlow coming down the road, that road emptied out fast. He was one of the last cops to still ride a stallion down the streets, just to make himself seem even bigger. You think I’m hard on the niggers? You don’t have a goddamn clue. One of my uncles gave me this toe, but don’t you think for a second I don’t know who really acquired it. The big man just wasn’t the type to brag. Wasn’t his style.”

  Rake was so hot he was getting dizzy. Unless it was nerves. Maybe he was only fooling himself about being calm.

  “He had three little girls and then he had me and damn if he didn’t put his heart and soul into making sure I knew how to be tough. I like to believe I learned most of those lessons eventually, but not all of them right away. Sometimes it takes us a while to learn the obvious stuff. See, the more he told me to steer clear of the niggers, the more curious I got. Even after that riot, there were still a few neighborhoods where the coloreds and us were on the same block, we’d cross paths, that sort of thing. And he always laid down the law good and thick on that.”

  Just keep him talking, Rake figured. The more Dunlow was talking, the more time Rake was not being shot.

  “I do see a lotta me in you. And here’s what I worry about, Officer Rakestraw. A good Christian man like you, with that pretty wife of yours.” The mention of Cassie was enough to get Rake to tighten his grip on the blade’s handle. “And those cute kids.
You got so much to worry about, but at the same time, ah, I bet the wife won’t stop complaining about the baby, and you can’t stand the little one’s crying at night, and life just doesn’t seem that much fun anymore, does it? Being a strong respectable white man is dad-gum difficult work, and though that’d be more than enough to inspire most men to take to this”—he nudged with his left hand the glass that Rake still hadn’t touched—“you’re better than that, you take that police oath seriously. But the home life is getting tougher and your paycheck ain’t going far enough and your job is taking its toll, and what’s a fellow got to do to relax?”

  Rake could push the table up and onto Dunlow, but it was so lightweight it would take Dunlow less than a second to knock it away and aim and fire. Or Rake could lunge over the table and hope Dunlow was too slowed by drink, then try to knock away the gun and at least it’s a fair fight. Beyond that he saw no other options save waiting.

  “So you decide to yourself, you’ll go down to Darktown and have you some fun. Show off how enlightened you are, mix with the coloreds, because they always know how to relax and be lighthearted even when their lot in life ain’t so good. So you hit those nightclubs even though you still ain’t drinking, and you play cards even though that’s illegal, too, but you ain’t really betting much money so what’s the harm?

  “And the women! Now that’s a whole ’nother story. You’ve heard the things they say about nigger women and damned if it don’t appear to be true. Curves that white ladies couldn’t even draw, and my Lord, they are free about it. Not free exactly, because at this one place you been frequenting, money is certainly exchanged with the ladies. But, you figure, money spent on that is a hell of a lot better spent than money at the tables, you get me? We coming to an understanding here?”

  “Sure.” He had no clue where this was going.

  “So now you even got a regular thing with one of ’em. She gives you just the best damned time, she’s wild and funny and the more you’re with her, damned if you don’t get to thinking. Thinking that she ain’t all that dumb after all. She’s got a brain on her shoulders. And you think maybe all this stuff they tell us about the coloreds and their women, maybe that’s just a bit of hokum. Jealousy. Maybe it’s just because us white folk are too stuck-up and hard up and we resent the way they can have so much damned fun despite having so little.

  “Time goes by and your wife has probably noticed you ain’t taking the family to church no more, but that’s all right, you’re busy with work and all and you got to sleep in the day. And you don’t need to be right with no God right now anyway. It’s the goddamn Depression and the things you see every day, Lord. You’d thought when you became a cop it’d be all hero stuff and saving lives and maybe busting heads and getting your rocks off like that, but no, it turns out you spend almost all your time trying to get good folks off the street, helping them find shelter, get a hot crumb somewhere. Hearing stories that just break your heart and seeing the looks in those little boys’ eyes, kids same age as yours and they got nothing and they’re skinny and their heads don’t look quite right and you’re just trying to get their parents a warm spot for the night. For one goddamn night. And then tomorrow it’s the same thing for ’em again. That’s your job, that’s your life, every day. You don’t unnerstand how no God could be doing things like this, and you ain’t right in the head and your wife don’t unnerstand you when you try to explain.”

  Dunlow had retreated within himself. His hand wasn’t even on the gun anymore, just beside it. If there was a moment for Rake to knock away the gun, it was now.

  Yet he wanted to hear the rest of the story.

  “So you’re going to that whorehouse more and more, and it’s a shame the way those colored gals live, but hell, that’s the hand life dealt ’em. You’re there at the off-hours on account of your job, and they’ll take you anytime and be happy about it, on account of your money. You eventually learn that more’n one of ’em has a kid there, these little boys who run around the halls when there ain’t no john in the building. Sad as hell. Your own brats are driving you crazy at home, of course, but there are times at the whorehouse where you get to talking to those little kids and roughhousing with ’em. One of ’em’s pretty damned smart, too, his name’s Duke because his mother says she’d fallen in love with a Duke Ellington record back when he was born, listened to it all the time. It gets so you leave a nickel for him sometimes, or even bring him a bag of candy now and again. He’s like your little mascot.

  “Makes you feel sorrier for those girls, the way you and that kid get on. He’s funny, and sometimes after you’ve had your roll in the hay with one of the girls, you bring him a book you brought from home, something your kids have outgrown. He ain’t going to any school but he picks up the words quick enough. And he can play piano! They got one in their parlor, sometimes one of the ladies plays it, and he’s picked it up just from watching her. One day he gets up on the bench and starts hammering away, and damned if he ain’t carrying a tune. Not the greatest tune you ever heard, but for a four-year-old? Actually knows what he’s doing. Sings, too, words he just done made up on the spot.

  “That little boy. Calls you ‘Mr. Down Low,’ and first you think it’s cause his pronunciation ain’t so good, but you come to realize it’s deliberate, it’s a joke, he’s a clever kid. So you’re Mr. Down Low to him. And it sounds crazy, but you can just tell that little boy is meant for better things. Has a way about him. He looks at you and you feel like he’s reading your mind, understanding you. Charisma in spades. No pun intended. And the more he plays that piano, you can just see him on a big stage, playing and maybe singing, charming folks in nice suits. Crazy, but maybe he is the next Duke Ellington. You read him these books at night, at an hour no kid that age should be up, let alone in a place like that, and you realize, this little kid has something, something truly special. You start wondering what you can do to really help him, not just reading him a book or buying him candy but getting him to a proper music instructor, something. Be like a secret sponsor to the boy, find a way to really make the most of that God-given talent he been given. Little ol’ Duke.”

  Dunlow’s hand was back on the gun. Not picking it up so much as ensuring it was near.

  “Then one day you drop by the whorehouse place and it’s all these other people there, some of them you know and others you never seen before, because you’ve been careful over the years to not be around when there’s too many other folks, course, you can’t have people realizing just how often you’re frequenting the place. There’s yelling and screaming and crying and you’re still fighting your way through a crowd when the ambulance shows up. You don’t see what happened yet, but folks are talking about it. Little boy ran out in the street. Hit by a car. Duke. And part of you wants to push that crowd out of the way and run up to the boy and see if maybe there’s something you can do, and even if there ain’t. . . . Comfort him that last time. But the other part of you knows who you are and where you are, and you can’t do that. You just stand there and wait and listen to the crowd and you hear her screaming now, just screaming in a way you’ve never heard, not even the times you’ve had to give the worst news to parents on the job. . . . You just . . .”

  Dunlow shook his head. His eyes were red and glassy and he tried to distract himself by pouring another drink. Half of it missed, spilling on the table. What made it into the glass he promptly swallowed.

  Rake was wondering if he sat there long enough, would Dunlow’s silence gradually turn into sleep? But good manners got the better of Rake, and he said, “I’m sorry, Dunlow.”

  “I didn’t ask for your goddamn sympathy. This is a lesson for you, boy, like it was a lesson for me. Mothers drinking all day while their toddler walks off into traffic? Women selling themselves? All that lighthearted music and partying and laying about while good white people are working their tails to the bone trying to put this goddamn country back together during the Depression and t
hen the war? I tricked myself into thinking they could be good as us, and then life showed me otherwise. Do not repeat that mistake. Do not be taking sides with these nigger cops. They ain’t cops. We let them run around with guns much longer, this city will be in flames.” The hand that wasn’t cradling the gun slammed the table. “We are the last line of defense. Boggs and Smith have already killed one man that we know of, and they’ll do worse soon enough. They’ll be emboldened. Once they see they can kill a nigger and get away with it, they’ll turn on white folks next. You want that, Officer Rakestraw? You want that on your conscience?”

  Rake let a few seconds pass, hoping that might defuse his adversary some. Then he asked, “How does this end, Dunlow? You shooting me here because I don’t see eye-to-eye with you? You building a case against Boggs and Smith, even though you’ve already passed on your so-called evidence to Homicide and we haven’t heard anything since? Or will it be you deciding to hunt Boggs and Smith down yourself, maybe with a hood over your head, and you’ll just assume no one in the Department will mind that two officers were killed?”

  “They ain’t officers.”

  “There was a time I may have actually wanted you to do something incredibly stupid, let yourself get fired or tossed in jail. But I don’t want Boggs’s or Smith’s deaths on my conscience, or that Negro down the block. I’ve actually changed my mind on this, and I wish, I really do wish you won’t do something incredibly stupid.”

  “Don’t get your hopes up.”

  “Who killed Lily Ellsworth?”

  “What?” The change of subject seemed dizzying to Dunlow.

  “Who killed her, if not your buddy Underhill?”

  “Hell if I know. He said he got paid to remove a body, not kill anybody.”