The Devil's Only Friend

by Mitchell Bartoy

  “I don’t think Sunnie is going to let the place go.”

  His face seemed haggard and gray, and his shoulders drooped. He was still built pretty well, but I could see how he was settling into an older man’s body, brought down by gravity and stiffening joints.

  “I ain’t gonna get you killed any faster than you’re killing yourself,” I said.

  Maybe he was too worn out to argue. “All right,” he said. “How do you think I can help you?”

  I grinned to show him the teeth. “I don’t know! Can you put on some nice clothes? I’ll swing over and pick you up in the morning.”

  “I’ve got a shift at four tonight with Charles the baker. I can’t leave him dry.”

  “Well?”

  “Those deliveries have to be done by nine o’clock.”

  “I’ll be back here at ten, then,” I said.

  “I’ll be ready. Just lay a tap on the horn and I’ll come down.”

  He turned away and angled across the street to the back entrance of the Forest Club. Already they were bowling inside. I could hear the cracking and rumbling of the pins like a faraway thunderstorm. It was a good long way from Sunnie Wilson’s club to the alley that ran behind the row of shops where I’d killed the young colored boy—so many years ago. Dead now, long time. He’d been pilfering a shoe store with his buddy. It dogged me still. The echo of that bad shot came back to me as I stood alone, a white man in the middle of the colored district. Not so much of a man anymore, either, after all.

  As Walker slipped into Sunnie’s place, I thought I heard him mumble, “Don’t get me killed.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Sometime after midnight I was lying in my bed. The soup and sandwich I had eaten for supper sat gurgling on my stomach, keeping me from sleep. The old pipes in the building clanged whenever the boiler let out a belch and bubbly water gurgled through the cast-iron drainpipes in the walls. Now and again the wind would brush hard enough over the treetops to make a sound like a waterfall. There were mice in the walls, too, but they didn’t plague me much because they knew I didn’t keep anything to make them fat. They scratched along their trails through the building’s skeleton, freed by darkness. In a pitch that was barely audible, the damage done to my skull tuned in and out like a station on the shortwave, and I was tempted to try to make out a message in the chatter.

  Out of that chorus I began to hear a tip-tapping that came in the rhythm of someone sneaking down a flight of stairs. This was followed directly by the click and rattle of a doorway being carefully opened and closed, and more steps, now creaking softly down the carpeted hall toward my door. Still, the low knock startled me when it came.

  The gun was close to the bed. I picked it up and rolled out and threw a robe over my shoulders. There was no bullet in the chamber, and I tried to decide quickly whether I should rack the action back to set the first slug. But then another low knock came at the door, and I decided against it. I went over and listened for a moment. There was no peephole in the door, but I had fastened the chain, and so I was able to open the door a crack. I expected to see Lloyd’s secretary with my penicillin, but there in a white gown with her hair tied up stood Federle’s wife.

  Because I had taken off my eye patch for the night, I had to keep the hole shut tight to keep it from gaping. I knew it made me look like I was winking furiously.

  “Can I come in?”

  “Why?”

  “I have to talk to you about Ray.”

  “Go on and talk.”

  “But I can’t stand here in the hall.”

  “Sure you can. You are.”

  “Please,” she said.

  I was afraid she’d make a ruckus if I closed her out. Or maybe my judgment was reliably bad. I let her in, stepped to the nightstand, and wrapped my patch quickly over my eye. I put the gun down and got all the way into the robe.

  “Well?”

  “I’m sorry I smacked you,” she said.

  “I been hurt worse.”

  “I can see,” she said. She wore a regular nightie that reached to her ankles and leather slippers on her tiny feet. Her hair was thick and almost black. She had brushed it out for the night and gathered it up in a pile that wanted to spill out from the back of her head.

  “Well?”

  She stood with her fingertips just touching together before her and kept her wide eyes on me. Her face had been wiped clean of any makeup, and I could see that she hadn’t a line on her pale skin. Her lips looked soft.

  “I’m worried about Ray,” she said.

  “Your man is out to work scrubbing toilets, and you’re down here in your nightie.”

  “You don’t think that I—my two girls—”

  “He ought to be worried about you.”

  She was looking at me too much with her awful eyes. I fixed my robe and tightened up the belt.

  “Can’t I sit down and tell you?”

  “No,” I said. “Make it short and get out.”

  “They’ve really worked you over.”

  “That’s all done with.”

  “Did you like the bread I made?”

  “I ate it.”

  “Don’t you want to talk about Ray?”

  “What about him?”

  “I don’t think he’s really going out to work at night. Sometimes he comes home and his clothes aren’t even dirty.”

  “So what? My clothes don’t get dirty if I can help it.”

  “He’s a janitor! He doesn’t sleep. I’m afraid he’s just out roaming the streets at night. He can’t stand to be cooped up.” She was stepping forward in such a way that I didn’t notice her feet moving.

  “Well, how’s his shoe leather?” I had my hands in the pockets of my robe and a scowl screwed down onto my face. “If he was out walking all night, sooner or later he’d get picked up.”

  “I don’t know what he’s doing.”

  “You think he’s with some woman?”

  “Oh, no,” she said. She looked like her eyes might get wet. “I don’t know what to think. When he wanted so much to move out here, I thought it would be different.”

  She was right next to me, so close that I could smell her hair and the light perfume of her skin. I didn’t move when her hand snaked inside my robe, didn’t even take my hands from my pockets. She found her way into my shorts and wrapped her slim fingers around my prick.

  “That’s nothing to play with,” I said.

  She tipped her head forward under my chin and brought her free hand over my heart.

  “So sad it all seems,” she breathed on my chest. “So sad.”

  She stroked gently until my prick was good and stiff and poking out the front of my robe. Her breathing was deep and hot on my chest. I knew it wasn’t right but I let her go on. It was a hell of a thing to get so stirred up so easily. At the back of my mind flashed a thought about the baby crying, the older girl lying awake and wondering where her mother and father had gone.

  I made fists in my pockets. I knew that soon Federle’s wife would coax the juice out of me if I let her go on. She brought her other hand down and cradled my balls with surprising warmth and gentleness. The stroking came in a deep rhythm, and I could feel her hips moving too, her thigh turned out and rubbing along my leg.

  “My name’s Patty,” she panted. Her forehead pressed hard into my chest.

  It brought up a flash of anger in me that was brushed aside by fatigue and the dreamy thrill of it. I wanted to put my fingers around her neck, to feel her pulse under my thumb. Despite the two children, she was young enough and small enough and pretty enough to dredge up the powerful memory of the backseat struggles of my teenaged years. It was sharply painful to think of how far I’d come, how much of a heel and a black spot I’d become. All the sore muscles, the torn skin, and the damaged joints of my body had blurred together into a generalized pain—but as I felt how close my balls were to riding up and letting go, I felt a growing pain deep in my bowels, too. I should have stayed at the hospital, I thought
. A pipe got knocked loose on the inside.

  Finally I pulled my hands from my pockets and took hold of her shoulders.

  “I hadn’t ought to do it,” I said.

  “But he’s no good to me!” She didn’t turn her face up to look at me. She grabbed my prick with both hands, squeezed hard, and slowed the stroking. She said again, “He’s no good to me.”

  “Neither am I. I know that much.”

  “I’m sorry, Pete,” she said, loosening her hands and rolling slowly away.

  At once I regretted it. What’s the difference? I thought. Why shouldn’t we? My prick felt the chill in an instant but stayed stubbornly alert. I looked sharply at Patty’s fine ear and the curve of her jaw, the nape of her neck. Her light gown flounced up as she hurried to the door, and I had a glimpse of her slender ankle.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Please don’t tell Ray.” She did not turn to look at me as the door closed behind her.

  Again it seemed I was made of trouble. There was a tickle in my throat that made me want to cough and the pain at the lower end of my spine throbbed horribly. My stitches, which had been healing well, now seemed to itch and burn. Heat rose up over my chest and from my scalp, making me think of infection. The only light in the place came from a bulb kept low with a rheostat. I made sure the door was latched and chained securely and then hobbled over to the toilet to finish the job Federle’s wife had started.

  CHAPTER 16

  Friday, April 14

  Though it wasn’t much of a night for sleeping, I got up early, put on some decent clothes, cleaned myself up, and went out for a quick bite. I bought a paper down on the street and opened it up on a bench along Mack with my collar up against the chill.

  It was too early for any of the retail places to be open, but everyone was in a rush to get somewhere. I was right along the street, and I got my toes stomped and my hat tipped by gangs getting on and off the streetcars and swarming back and forth across the wide avenue. The noise was incredible. Electricity snapped and popped from the grid as the downtown cars rolled by. Up and down Mack and Gratiot, and all across town, you could hear streetcar drivers ringing their gongs and fanning their air brakes at pushy motorists and tardy pedestrians. Everybody was gabbling—a turkey farm before Thanksgiving.

  I didn’t see anything more from Chew in the newspaper, but that only meant he was out scrounging for something else, something new. I folded my paper and left it on the bench, and then I ambled back to my place. The hash and the two cups of coffee I’d put in me felt light on my belly, and the weather seemed promising, so I wasn’t as worried as I might have been about seeing Federle. There was no telling what kind of life he had with his wife. She might have told him everything, blabbed it all as he shuffled in the door. He might not have cared about any of it either; or he might have. I didn’t have the gun with me since I didn’t yet have a good way to carry it.

  He wasn’t waiting at the car, at the front of the building, or at my door, so I went inside my room and turned on the radio. It was getting so you’d have to hear an announcer bleat out a pitch to buy war bonds after every number, which drove me buggy. I didn’t own any records or anything to play them on, so I sat waiting in my chair with my thumb on the tuning dial, changing to another station when I heard any kind of spiel start up. It was in the middle of a pretty Dinah Shore tune, “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To,” that Federle finally knocked on my door. I think it was already half past nine.

  Federle came in looking sheepish and tired, dressed in slacks that were almost white and a pale yellowish jacket. He held a white straw hat in his hand.

  “That’s how they dress out in Hollywood?”

  “I never was from Hollywood,” he said. “It’s the nicest suit of clothes I have.”

  “Don’t worry about it. We don’t make up the glamour squad exactly.”

  “I can get some other duds.”

  From the way he hung his head and avoided my eye, I could see that the wife had been talking.

  “You don’t want to go out?” I asked him.

  “Sure I do,” he said. “What’s the plan?”

  “Game for a ruckus?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “What sort of ruckus?”

  “Any kind of ruckus. I guess I’m feeling pretty good today.”

  “That’s good, Pete.” He didn’t show any smile. He worked the brim of his hat and kept his head down.

  “What’s eating you?”

  “Did my wife come down here last night?”

  “She was knocking, but I didn’t let her in.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  It didn’t seem likely that he was going to throw a poke at me, but I kept myself sideways anyway.

  “You’re always apologizing to me for what your woman does,” I said.

  He looked up and smiled thinly. “I can’t do anything about it, Pete. Next time she comes down, you might as well let her in.”

  “Like hell.”

  Federle was shifting back and forth. “Listen, Pete. Can I trust you?”

  “I wouldn’t if I was you.”

  He smiled more strangely, and his black eyes lit up. “When I got burned up over there, my pecker got fried like a sausage, too. Ain’t that funny? What good am I with half a prick?”

  “That seems funny to you?”

  “Not at first it didn’t! No sir! But after I worked it over for a while, it got to seem funny. Har-de-har funny, no, but you can see what I’m saying. You got that same type of humor like I do. I knew it the first time I saw that mug of yours.”

  “All right, Federle, I don’t want—”

  “It’s okay, Pete,” he said. He furrowed his brow and looked hard at me. “I don’t want to dump all this on you. But I want things to be straight between us. I want you to be able to trust me so we can get to work on this case.”

  The inside of my lip was raw from working it over my jagged teeth. He was standing between me and the door.

  “If you want me out,” he said, “just give me the word.”

  “Don’t try to pawn off your woman on me,” I said.

  “You can see how it is. She’s still a young woman. I can’t keep her chained up.”

  “You can keep some kind of a line on her.”

  “Sure.”

  “I got my own problems.”

  “Then we’re settled up?”

  He wasn’t going to quit until I gave him the word. Besides the lack of sleep, it didn’t seem that Federle had been taking any food either. The light seemed to sink right into the skin of his face, forming bags and blue shadows.

  “It don’t look like either one of us is ever going to be settled,” I said. “It’ll have to do. Let’s go, now, before we lose the whole day.”

  I picked up the gun and slipped it into my pocket, thinking to leave it in the car so it would be handy. We went down to the street and I tossed Federle the keys. It wasn’t a pleasure to do it, but I was able to tip the front seat forward and slink into the back without going to pieces. There was plenty of room to sit up straight, but it seemed more comfortable to angle my legs. It was a bit easier on my lower back.

  Federle eyed me in the rearview. “I’m a chauffeur now?”

  “We’re going to pick up a little help.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Just pull on out.”

  He kept glancing back to me. “Where to?”

  “Keep your eyes on the road.”

  “All right,” he said.

  “Head up McDougall to Forest,” I said. “You don’t need to keep looking at me. I told you I never let her in the door.”

  “It isn’t that,” he said. He looked back at me in the mirror again and then looked away. “The baby isn’t mine,” he muttered.

  “What?”

  “Sophia isn’t mine. She couldn’t be. When I came home, it was some surprise! But I treat her just fine, like she was my own. I change her diaper sometimes. I never had to do that with my first one, with Isabe
lle. What do you think of that?”

  I looked at his reflection grimly for a time. He was smiling a little, cruising slowly out toward the big street.

  “Head on over to Paradise Valley,” I said. “And don’t spill any more on me till I’m done thinking on all of this truck so far.”

  He seemed to like driving. Despite the streetcars and the foot traffic, it took just a few minutes to cut over from our place to the dark side of town.

  “You know Sunnie Wilson’s place?”

  “Sure.”

  “Head over that way.”

  “Who are we picking up, some nigger?”

  “You don’t like niggers?”

  “I got no preference,” he said. “But my wife goes a bad way just at the idea. She don’t like birds either—makes her blood run cold.” He shrugged. “I’ve known plenty of niggers.”

  “If it’s going to be a problem—”

  “Pete, I told you, I won’t let you down. You can count on me to watch your back no matter what happens.”

  “Don’t get sore,” I said, watching him closely in the mirror.

  “I’m not sore. I’m a little jumpy is all. You know I got a case of nerves.” He glanced sorrowfully at me in the mirror. “After I told you all that stuff.”

  “Ray, I never asked you—”

  “I know it,” he said quickly. “I’m just yanking your dick a little.” He turned to get a real look at me.

  I felt like I was on ice with him, and so I pursed my lips. I could taste blood in my mouth from the places where the jagged teeth were wearing down the inside of my cheek. I asked him, “You know this part of town?”

  “They don’t know me by name at any of these places, that’s for sure.”

  “You’re going to turn up here. There it is,” I said. “He’s up there waiting on the porch.”

  Walker stood on the narrow porch in front of his apartment. He wore a hat that kept the sun from his eyes and held his big hands over the bullet-chipped rail.

  “Lay on the horn,” I said. “He doesn’t know the car.”

  Federle tried the horn but there was no sound. He tried it again, and I noticed that the button had somehow thrown a latch in the panel opposite me in the back seat. There was a space made out of molded binderboard under the armrest where you might stash a gun or a sap, and Federle had opened it with the horn button. I thought with a smile that the old Chrysler must have been used by Frank Carter and his goons in the old days when they were still trying to bust up the unions. I moved my shoe to nudge the cover of the stash; it was held in place by two pegs that swiveled to let it open when the horn button was pressed. My eye scanned the rest of the interior, and I realized that there were a number of places where the parts were funny.