The Devil's Only Friend

by Mitchell Bartoy

  “Is it a white man here, Auntie?” he asked.

  “Joshua!”

  “I’m sorry, Auntie. But is it?”

  I knew him. A slicing pain across my chest and also in the lower part of my left leg throbbed together.

  “Is it a white man? Is it the police, Auntie?”

  Walker had brought me here so I could see what my work had done. I had rescued him from a mob of white boys during the riot of the previous year, and now he stood before me: as tall as I was, though slighter by sixty pounds; and spastic, and blind.

  “I don’t think Mr. Caudill is a policeman anymore, Joshua.”

  CHAPTER 20

  What could have made me want to abuse myself so thoroughly? I could not explain it because it made no actual sense. Was it the example of the boy, who was blind and a cripple, but who faced the world with good humor and optimism? Joshua had been beaten near to death, and I had managed to rescue him from a pack of white boys just as the riot broke out. It was also the last time I had seen my nephew Alex, crouched in the shadows with the Devil in his eyes. I had in one moment saved the Negro boy and lost the last bit of blood kin I had, save my mother.

  Joshua should have been bitter. He had lost more than I had, and might now live another sixty years as a cripple. But he never stopped smiling as we sat talking in Auntie Lu’s front room.

  He knew it was me even before Auntie Lu introduced me to him.

  “Mr. Caudill? I don’t believe I’ve ever been able to thank you properly.”

  He advanced across the room, keeping his balance on his back foot with each step. He nudged each foot forward in a practiced way, feeling his way across the floor, and held both arms before him like they were wrapped formally around a dance partner. It looked like he could map out the room by sensing where things were with the skin of his face.

  I grabbed his hand as he put it out to me.

  “I knew it was you as I came down,” he said. “Auntie thinks I’m being rude, but it’s true: I remember the smell of you from that night. And from the cell you kept me in at the station. Do you remember, Mr. Caudill?”

  “I remember everything.”

  “I only remember running,” he said. “I was never athletic that way! I’ve been told how you saved my life.”

  “I couldn’t help myself. It seemed—”

  “But I have to thank you! It would have been the end of my time here on earth.”

  “I’m sorry how it turned out for you,” I said.

  “You can’t blame yourself for any of it. Better to be alive than dead, sir!” He smiled openly as he spoke. In fact, he seemed much happier and more confident than he had been the year before, as if a burden had been taken from him.

  “Is that you, Mr. Walker?”

  “Yes, it is, son.”

  “Thank you for bringing Mr. Caudill to see me.”

  Walker said. “I thought it might do Mr. Caudill some good.”

  Joshua’s smile grew even broader. “Do you remember, Mr. Caudill, how you made me pee my pants down in that cell?”

  “Joshua!”

  “Beg pardon, Auntie.”

  “I remember, boy.”

  “I want you to know I don’t bear a grudge. You were doing what you thought best. I was so afraid! But what do I have to be afraid of now? Every extra moment I get to spend now is a gift. I want you to know I’ll always be grateful to you, sir.”

  “Well,” I said, “that’s all right.”

  Probably I was inside the house for only a few minutes. But when I did manage to quit the place, it was like I had been underwater. I couldn’t seem to get enough air. I left Walker to his family and walked away as fast as my legs could carry me toward a good drink. There wasn’t any good excuse for it.

  Joshua had grown like a sprout in the time since I had seen him last. If not for the crookedness, he would have been a bit taller than me, and he was still young, with a few more years to grow. He was a smart boy, I could see, and now he had some confidence. Despite the blindness, or because of it, he now had some sense of purpose. It made him better than me, and someday it would make him stronger than me. I could not really say if he counted me as an enemy or if he was truly grateful that I had put off his dying. Probably both things were true, which was too much to think through.

  All the people I had known—those who were still living—were changing and growing, making their way in the world. Hank Chew was out there somewhere in the city, scouting for dirt and playing the angles. I imagined that the Hardiman boys were together glowering over a map of the world in the smoky den of a big mansion somewhere. Federle—God knows what Federle was up to or where he was. Alex, in the months since he had disappeared, might have grown into a man. Would I recognize him if I saw him? Walker probably was bussing with his wife and laughing with his children, settling down to a good supper. Eileen and her new beau might have been walking into a movie palace downtown. Everyone in Detroit and across the whole world was wrangling to get ahead, to make a better life. Everyone but me. I was still struggling to figure out where I had gone wrong. Why didn’t I just run off?

  I put some grub down my sorry gullet and then found a quiet place to get filthy drunk. Over the course of the evening I put away twelve or fifteen shots of whiskey and a couple mugs of beer. I can’t say where else I might have gone that night or how I got around. Sometime during the long evening I picked up a little pint bottle of whiskey and put it in the pocket of my jacket.

  The city at night was a circus of lights. In the tall towers downtown, even toward midnight, I could see people moving inside the offices and in the hotel rooms, bustling in and out of lobbies and theaters and nightspots. I thought it must have been a Friday or Saturday night because of all the hollering and horn blowing. Teenagers packed ten to a car trolled up and down Woodward looking for thrills. There were a great many pretty women, too, or so it seemed to my drunken eye, with their hair done up, their teeth smiling and white, their hips pressed and nicely rounded in tight skirts. I must have been staggering, and I know I was ugly, but nobody seemed to notice me. Everything just flowed around me. The liquor blotted away all my aches, and for a time I just wandered, hopping streetcars back and forth, walking around Grand Circus Park and Campus Martius.

  That’s all I want to remember. Some time later in the night, after I had I dozed off for a moment on a bench in a park somewhere, a beat cop poked me in the ribs with his billy club.

  “Go on home,” he said.

  “I will,” I told him, and staggered off into the night.

  It must have been after midnight when I wandered off Joseph Campau and onto Dearing. Around the corner the theater lights were dark, and even the neighborhood dogs were asleep. A few stray cars came by on Campau, rumbling up and fading away now and then as I stood staring at Eileen’s dark house. For a long while I kept still, lost in a kind of drunken dream. My fingertips and toes were as cold as ice, and water dripped from my nose and my eye. I wanted to sleep with Eileen in her bed, to draw off some of her warmth. I needed it—I needed healing, and I knew I couldn’t find it in any other place. She was lost to me, though, and I could offer nothing but trouble. I should not have come.

  I was startled to attention by a slight rustle and the faint sound of chewing in the sprouting tulips next to Eileen’s porch steps. I walked a bit closer across the grass and saw a good-sized opossum crouched there like a primitive demon. When he saw me, he pulled in on himself, and then as I drew closer he tried to make himself bigger. He opened his mouth and hissed at me, showing the foul inside of his gaping mouth. I came close enough to kick at him with my shoe. He clamped down with his needle teeth on the leather and held on until I managed to shake him loose. I was taken by a great shudder as I watched him waddle away. He stopped behind the neighbor’s little shrub and watched me. His close-set eyes smoldered green.

  The opossum had been messing with something on the ground behind the tulips, up against the brick of the porch. I thought it might have been a badly
thrown newspaper. Then, too, I thought of Alex’s worn baseball glove, and I wondered if it might still be lying there forgotten. The way the streetlights cast shadows along the porch, it was impossible to see anything. So I got down to one knee and felt along the ground with my left hand. I grabbed something solid and brought it up to the light, knocking the heads off a few tulips.

  It was a severed human forearm.

  Drained of blood, the skin was like hairy wax. The fingers were curled to the palm like a dead spider’s legs. But I could see from the ink staining the thumb and forefinger that Hank Chew wouldn’t be stuffing any more notes into the pockets of his little vest.

  CHAPTER 21

  You can flounder through a dream sometimes when you know it’s a dream and you ought to wake up. You want to wake up, but your whole body is caught stiff, like a panther is on top of you, smothering the life out of you. You’re sure your heart is going to thrash itself loose from all the pipes and cords that hold it in place. That’s when you might let out a little groan—if you can catch enough breath for it. You want to swim up out of that underworld but you can’t. It’s a lot like drowning.

  Only I wasn’t inside any dream. I knew—as bad as things were—that it wasn’t so common to find sawed-off body parts lying about. Chew’s arm was heavier or lighter than I expected it to be, and I could not seem to manage it with the faulty grip of my bad hand. I turned it round until I saw the gristle and the round cap of the bone at the severed end. Years had gone by since I had misplaced my eye and my fingers. Where are they now? I thought. The liquor fog ran straight out of me.

  I leapt up onto Eileen’s porch, tossed Chew’s arm to the side, and tried the door. It was bolted, so I put the shoulder to it. Nothing doing. I slammed my forearm close to the bolt a few times, and I thought that thirty or forty more whacks might begin to splinter the oaken door or the reinforced frame I had put in. The window was too high in the door to let me reach down to the inside latch.

  I stepped back on the porch and had a run at it. I bounced back and into a heap on the planked porch, and in frustration rose up and stomped my foot near the door handle. By this time all the dogs in the neighborhood were yodeling, and a few lights began to pop on in the windows up and down the street.

  I ran around to the back door and found it unlocked. Armed only with my stupid rage, I stumbled in and blundered through the house. Eileen’s bed was made up primly, and, excepting what I had knocked over myself, nothing in the house seemed out of place. I went up the angling stairway to the attic and found nothing; the basement was quiet, too.

  All my strength had deserted me. I walked back out to the formal dining room, little used since Alex had gone, and slumped down in the chair in the corner next to the telephone. I picked up the handset and dialed the operator.

  “I’d like the police. The police. Yes, thank you.” I could hear blood squirting weakly inside my temples. “Yes—Kibbie, is that you? It’s Pete Caudill. I’d like to report a murder.”

  Through the lacy curtains over the front windows, I could see the scout car arriving before I hung up the phone. The neighbors had summoned them. I got up weakly to meet the officers at the front door.

  * * *

  They let me hang fire in cuffs in the back of the scout car while they staked out the scene. Despite the late hour, pretty soon a crowd of neighbors in their bedclothes gathered across the street, and all the houses had at least one light on. I kept myself slumped down out of sight on the long seat, and might have been able to sleep except for the acid vomit that threatened to come up if I relaxed my clenched throat.

  Two dicks from the homicide squad finally arrived in a long, gray, unmarked car and parked in front of the scout car so that their lamps lit up my hiding place. It was Dilley and Foulard, two old-timers who lived right next door to each other in identical houses right up close to the Sojourner Truth Homes, where a passel of Negroes had been moved in by the National Guard a couple years before.

  They knew me, and from the way they tipped their heads together toward the scout car after conferring with the patrolman, I could see they weren’t too happy about having to deal with me. They took charge of the scene, grunting and pointing. Two other patrolmen had arrived, and Dilley and Foulard sent them with their notepads to brace the onlookers and knock on doors.

  The detectives shuffled onto the porch with slack faces to have a look at Chew’s wing, their hats tipped back over their shiny foreheads. It was another half an hour before they turned their attention toward me. They came out together along the narrow walk that led to the backyard and leaned down to give me the hard eye through the window of the scout car.

  Right then a little coupe pulled in off Campau and slowed to a crawl when the driver saw the ruckus. Dilley and Foulard left me and strolled across the street. My hands had lost all feeling, and it pained me to push myself up in the seat. The driver was a small man with a thin mustache, a sparse head of hair, and round glasses. Dilley motioned for him to roll down the window.

  I could only see the lower part of her face as she leaned toward the open window of the auto. Her white chin and the bright red of her lower lip, but I knew it was Eileen, and I knew she was safe. All the air went out of me, and I let myself go against the door next to the curb. The glass felt cool on my forehead.

  Saturday, April 15

  “Well, why didn’t you say anything about these goons to us when they worked you over?” Dilley’s tiny eyes seemed cruel, but he was all right.

  “We might’ve picked ’em up,” Foulard said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I keep a tight lip.”

  “We heard you were in a state,” said Dilley. “But if you don’t talk, what can we do?”

  For effect, they had carted me all the way down to the headquarters on Beaubien. It didn’t look like they were planning to charge me with anything, but I wasn’t clear in my thinking.

  Dilley said, “Suppose you tell us where we can find the rest of Chew.”

  “You guys must know him better than I do.”

  “So you know him, then?” Foulard’s face was like a patty of ground meat, fat, with lines and creases where his jowls and lips hung down. His eyes were lost behind baggy folds of skin and heavy lids. But like Dilley, he was all right.

  “I wonder how you knew Chew,” said Foulard. “You were chummy?”

  “No,” I said. I knew I had to tell them something. “I only rang him up to ask a favor, and I regretted that right away.”

  “I wonder what kind of favor it was.”

  “A colored fella I know had a sister in Cleveland—”

  “You’re talking about Walker,” Dilley said.

  “Sure.”

  “So you called up Chew to see if he could dig anything up, is that so?” Dilley’s little eyes seemed very watery, and he had to press at them with the handkerchief he kept wrapped around his mitt. “Why you like Chew so much?”

  “I never liked Chew.”

  “Why not call us?” asked Dilley. “You don’t want to see us no more?”

  “You coulda come down to see us. We ain’t strangers,” said Foulard.

  “Well,” I said, “I get some bad ideas.”

  Dilley sat down and leaned his bulk on the table over a meaty forearm. “Your father liked to drink, Pete. But he never let it get the best of him.”

  “He was a good Joe,” Foulard said.

  “I know it.”

  “You don’t need to be as good as him,” Dilley said. “But you could at least stay out of the gutter.”

  I didn’t have any way to respond. There was a glass of water near me on the table, and I wanted it, but I knew how it would taste on my swollen tongue. My belly felt hard and stuffed.

  “What about this Lloyd business? What about this badge?” Foulard put his thumb in the corner of the box with my belongings and rattled it a bit.

  I couldn’t come up with any reason not to spill a little. Besides I was dead tired.

  “Chew got me
thinking about the Old Man. Walker’s sister was found outside the Lloyd plant—”

  “Inside, you mean,” said Dilley. “Right?”

  “Indiana, too,” Foulard said.

  “So I went to see Lloyd.”

  “You just went to see him, just like that?”

  Foulard chuckled. “You got some friends.”

  “A family friend, I guess,” Dilley said. “Your old man was chummy with Frank Carter, wasn’t he?”

  “That’s the story.” In some ways, these two knew more about my father than I did.

  “What’s Lloyd want with you?”

  I shrugged. “He wants me to poke around, I guess.”

  “So you didn’t have use anymore for Chew? How’d that sit with him? Was he getting on your nerve, making a pester?”

  “He came to see me in the hospital. I gave him the send-off.”

  “That’s another thing,” Foulard said. “You say these goons picked you up right after you saw Lloyd?”

  “They pulled me out of my bed late that night.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Dilley. “And they just dumped you over to the Hardiman place?”

  “Did they?”

  “You told us they did,” Foulard said.

  “I never told you that,” I said. “I might have told them at the hospital. I have to think. I wasn’t really in the picture then.”

  “The meat-wagon boys confirm they picked you up there,” said Dilley.

  “I wonder how the Hardimans might be involved in all this.”

  “Go on wondering,” I said. “I don’t know.”

  “You’d like to find out, though, wouldn’t you, Pete?” Dilley was leaning in on me now. “You’d like to kill those goons if you could get your mitts on them, wouldn’t you?”

  “I’d like to do a lot of things,” I said. “But I don’t seem to get anywhere.”