The Devil's Own Rag Doll

by Mitchell Bartoy

  I thought for a moment, then murmured, “Pease, you know he’s going to shoot you with that gun.”

  There was a moment of deep quiet, then the hiss of Pease’s pent-up breath being expelled through his clenched teeth. I heard a rustle and guessed Pease was going for a gun; but of course he wasn’t fast enough. Two quick shots sounded in the little room, followed by another, more studied one, and Pease let out a gurgling breath and slipped from his chair to the floor.

  “We’ve been keeping an eye on you, Detective. We took note of your stroll in the park with Reverend Jenkins this morning. Touching. And we note that you’ve taken up with your brother’s widow. That shows a surprising Old Testament flair, something I hadn’t expected from you, Mr. Caudill.”

  I tried to remember if I had heard a gun hit the floor when Pease dropped, tried to judge how far away it would be or if it was still inside Pease’s coat.

  “What is your feeling about all those good white men fighting each other over there while the Negroes are moving right into their houses and bedding down their women at home? Not talking? Your father found his tongue when we strung him up. Couldn’t stop talking, point of fact. He begged for his life like a woman. Shat in his pants, sorry to say, lost every shred of dignity he might have fancied toward the end.”

  I thought, At least it means they’re afraid of me, trussing me up like this.

  “It would be easy to think of me as a sort of monster, wouldn’t it, Mr. Caudill? It’s easy to fool yourself about things. That’s how we can tell the weaklings, the cowards, from the brave men we all hoped to be as boys. Weaklings and cowards always shy away from making difficult decisions. When something true stares you in the face, you want to run away, don’t you? You can think of me what you wish, but deep in that charcoal soul of yours, you are certain that I am right. You loathe the mud people just as I do. You’d like to do something about it, but you won’t. You’re a coward, simply. When was the last time you let yourself touch one? Have you ever touched a colored man, except in anger? That Hardiman girl was a Negro-loving whore. Your father was a Negro-loving whore for that pimp Lloyd. And I think you know why I’ll shed no tears for your partner’s misfortunate demise. Some things just aren’t done or even spoken of, no matter how crude the company.”

  I forced myself to take deep, slow breaths.

  “I have seen the way you feel about the Negroes, Caudill. Fool yourself if you will. Cowardice runs in the family, I suppose. I can’t imagine what that fool Mitchell was thinking when he sent Walker to work with you. Don’t you know he hates you as much as you hate him? And even now he’s planning something for you. He sees the way you shut him out, take Johnson into your confidence like a puppy dog. What do you think that does to a man? Even a black man?

  “I know you, Mr. Caudill. You can’t sleep at night because you know that in twenty years the whole city will be overrun with little darkies, the whole country. Simple arithmetic should tell you that if they continue to breed indiscriminately, like the godless animals they are, they’ll soon outnumber us. And you know as well as I do that it’s something deeper than just the color of the skin.”

  I gently tried to stretch the knot at the back of my neck. “When I’m as old as you, and my dick doesn’t work anymore, will I just want to talk all the time like you?”

  Frye’s quick heel struck my chest again, hard enough this time to knock me over backward in the chair. As I struck the floor, I rolled my eye up to try to see who was behind me. The man bent close and lifted me upright again without difficulty. Against the light from the window, I saw the flash of reddish hair: Rix.

  “Really, Willard, it’s hardly likely that Mr. Caudill could say anything intelligent enough to cut me to the quick.” Sherrill moved a few steps closer. “Many times we have heard such words from desperate men.”

  “If you’re going to shoot me, do it already.”

  “Surely, Mr. Caudill, you must be afraid of something, am I right?”

  The runt came close and grabbed my throat with a surprisingly strong hand. He put his face so near to mine that I could smell his grassy breath. It seemed my whole body wanted to heave with revulsion. Was it only fear? I thought that this Mr. Frye was a freak, a sideshow freak, and he lived only to make others as freakish as he was. Then I saw a glint of metal near my face and felt the needle-like point break the skin at the corner of my eye.

  I squeezed the eye shut but didn’t flinch. I said, “Piss off.”

  “Ha! You’re more spirited than your father, Mr. Caudill. But you needn’t worry. We’ll be on our way soon. Mr. Frye, step away from Mr. Caudill, please.”

  I tensed myself and lowered my head a bit to hide my neck from the shot I thought was coming.

  Sherrill stepped behind me, reached forward until the gun was just next to my cuffed hand, and fired another slug into Pease. Spark from the shot stung my palm, and I had a taste in my mouth like burning hair.

  “We’re not going to shoot you, Mr. Caudill. You see? You’ve just killed Mr. Pease for us. You’ve disrupted our timetable, but not irreparably so. And now, if his usual schedule holds, Mr. Noggle, who squats in this charming little shack—I believe you know Mr. Noggle from your little rendezvous with the Reverend this morning—should be home momentarily. I suppose if he were of a different mind he might be amused to find a white man, a known hater of the colored races, in his house, having killed another Negro it’s widely known he was searching for. Tied himself up afterward to make up some outlandish story about the Black Legion. Imagine it! Powder burns on his hand and the key to the cuffs just across the floor there. I’m afraid even Mr. Noggle, though addled by drink, isn’t so simple as that.”

  The whole thing is ridiculous, I thought. But I knew it didn’t matter to Sherrill. As the men left the house, I had only one thing in my mind: the image of the young colored boy I had killed so many years ago. I carried that picture with me like all the rest, in the back of my mind, covered up and festering. The boy, caught like a deer in the light of the big, head-thumping flashlight I carried in those days, would not remain still when my partner and I shouted out. The young boy made a move to his pocket, tried to pull something out, but he did not make it before my gun flared. We found a little identification card underneath him when we turned him over. He was trying to show me who he was. Now all my guilt had tied me to Sherrill’s scheme.

  Funny thing though, it’s not something that you can tell anyone about, the way it goes with things like that. You can’t try to explain. You just can’t. You can only go along with the boys who hurry in to cover things over. No one would have ever believed it, but I was aiming for his leg.

  CHAPTER 15

  The chair snapped to pieces like kindling. Before Sherrill and the rest were out the door, I had pulled the arm and the two front legs loose from the rest of the chair. I thrashed and tore at the pieces, which hung by tight cords to my wrist and ankles. The ladder-back and bottom of the chair were still attached by a thick cord around my waist. I stood and straightened myself until the back snapped loose from the bottom and the greater part of the chair dropped to the floor. With the arm of the chair like a splint on my lower arm, I reached up and tore the sack from my head, then whirled to see about freeing my other hand. I saw that they had cuffed me to an old gas jet, just a narrow pipe coming up from the floor and ending with a sharp bend about head high. I could have slipped free of it at any time, if I had known what it was. I slipped the cuff off of it and rid myself of the remaining pieces of the chair.

  First thing, I grabbed my gun and popped open the wheel—six shells, two shots left, the extras in my pocket gone. I slipped it into my shoulder rig. I kicked Pease over with the bottom of my shoe. One bullet had gone in below the eye, another smack in the middle of the chest, and a third had opened up Pease’s throat. The last shot probably went in the back, I thought, but there wasn’t any blood. There wasn’t any other gun to be found.

  I racked my head around wildly, trying to figure out where I was
and what I might use to get myself out. It was an old shack with weathered plank flooring and no curtains, furnished on the cheap with junk from flea markets and junk shops. Maybe a lot of the stuff had been bought during the time when folks were selling what they owned to put food on the table. Out the windows I could see nothing but trees. Good. Some distance from anybody else, maybe.

  Noggle would be coming, tipped off, maybe, by one of Sherrill’s men. Or maybe—my mind seemed too clear, like I was thinking with a sharper mind than I’d a right to—maybe Noggle and Jenkins would be tipped off by Mitchell, and I could expect a storm of officers coming to jump me. It wouldn’t do to trust anyone now. However it goes, I thought, so it goes. I won’t make it easy for them. I scanned the floor for the key to the cuffs and found it under the toe kick of the old cabinet under the sink.

  I took a strong grip on Pease’s collar and dragged the body through the house to the back door and tossed it in a heap outside. Then I wheeled and began ripping through the place. In a tin cabinet beside the sink, I found a bottle of bleach. I opened it and splashed away at the blood that had leaked out of Pease. The sudden rush of fumes burned at my eye and shocked my throat and lungs, so I heaved the bottle right through the kitchen window. To get some air in, I smashed out a few other windows until I began to think of the fingerprints I might be leaving and the bits of glass that might show up on me if there was an investigation. I’d got to the point where I wasn’t sure if I could ever wash myself clean.

  Matches. The house was a firetrap. With the backs of my hands, I brushed through Noggle’s collection of junk, worthless broken tools and radio parts, ashtrays lifted from various colored restaurants, stubby bits of pencils. Matches. I turned up the table and bulled my way to the cast-iron stove. There I found a box of Ohio Blue Tips, pulled one out, and pulled it along the ragged edge of the stove until it flared and sputtered to life.

  I blew it out and tossed it into the sink.

  Thinking, thinking. What will they expect me to do? What should I do?

  I hurried out the door to check Pease again for a gun. Nothing. Pease had spent more than a few nickels on the suit, more than I had ever been willing to spend. Ruined now, ventilated and bloody. Pease’s pomaded hair had flipped forward and reminded me of a cockatoo I had seen on a post at a farmer’s roadside stand once. I looked around. The setting sun told me that I was probably west or north of the city, and far enough out so that the grime blown up from the auto plants didn’t show up in the bright sunset. I decided I’d need a way to get back to town, a way to carry Pease until I could make him really disappear. Lighting the house up now would surely bring some official attention, even out here, and I was still on foot. I tossed Pease over a little hummock and into some tall weeds.

  With my ears pricked up, I trotted toward Noggle’s old garden shed, which was leaning badly and half gone back to nature. Shovels, rakes, a watering can. Noggle grew some food for himself. There, in the corner, sat a big can of kerosene. I took the can, carried it to the rear of the house, and left it there. Then I dragged Pease around the house and over the rutted drive and wondered if the spotty grass growing there meant that Noggle did not own a car. If not for the body, I figured I could make it away on foot. Burying it would take too much time. I could incinerate Pease in the house, but the slugs would still be there if they raked through the ashes. I could try to dig the slugs out of him, but even if I could do it, there was a chance that the shot in the neck had passed through and the dumdum had splattered somewhere in the kitchen. They could match up the slugs with my gun, maybe, if there was anything left of them. And I couldn’t really toss the gun.

  I made my way up the shadowed side of the drive to the road that I guessed to be beyond a short stand of trees to the south. As I waited to see what would come for me, the thumping of my heart finally slowed. Darkness fell, and the mosquitoes and deerflies swarmed around me.

  Some time later, headlights approached slowly, wavering and bobbing along the rutted road, from time to time swerving to one side, as if the driver could not find his own driveway in the darkness. I realized that the headlights would light me up where I squatted against a tree, so I quickly crossed to the other side of the drive. When the truck finally followed its bouncing beams of light through the scrub trees toward the house, I latched on and rode it out, crouching on the half-timber that had been bolted on as a rear bumper. As far as I could tell, Noggle was alone in the truck.

  We bounced to a halt, and the old motor blurted and died. I dropped from the bumper and crouched at the corner with my gun drawn, waiting for the glow of Noggle’s white shirt.

  He’s sizing things up, I thought. He knows something’s hinky.

  I set my course of action. Just turn and look at me, I thought. If you see me, even in this bad light, you’ve had it. To my knowledge, Noggle had done nothing to deserve a bullet. I knew that he had been arrested for pimping his wife and had done some time for breaking her arm. It would be wrong, then, by law and in a general sense, to kill Noggle. But not wrong enough to keep me from doing it. I needed the truck, and I already had one stiff to explain if I couldn’t make it away clean.

  A fumbling started inside the cab of the truck, then a frantic scratching; the door creaked open, and I tensed as a long leg slipped slowly toward the ground. I drew my bead where I figured Noggle’s heart would be if he came out shooting. Come on, you stupid bastard, I thought, save me a bullet.

  Noggle cleared the truck and stumbled in the dark, took a few tiny steps, and tripped over his own feet. He landed in a heap and grunted as the wind was knocked out of him. I was over him in a few quick steps and heard a hoarse, drunken, sniggering laugh. “Got-damn,” Noggle wheezed, just before the butt of my revolver crashed with the weight of a cinder block at the back of his head.

  * * *

  I felt my chest aching, felt that I had been breathing too heavy for too long. I was dangerously tired. At least they won’t find anything of Pease, I thought, feeling the unfamiliar pull of a smile on my cheeks. I glanced again at Noggle on the floor of the passenger side of the truck. I hoped he wasn’t dead. They say the brain can swell up. Noggle had not twitched or moved an inch during the whole trip. Bad day for you, I guess. You shouldn’t drink so much.

  I had driven the old truck around the area of the carpet mill until I thought I might have located the house at the end of the underground tunnel. Though I couldn’t be certain that it was the right house, I didn’t care much about it, so I just parked the truck where the shade of a big tree blocked the streetlamp. I looked around for a moment, then tossed Noggle’s big ring of keys on the seat beside me, leaned over, and pulled the burlap sack off Noggle’s head. Briskly, then, I stepped from the truck and walked to my own car. I hoped there would be no late strollers; my trousers were dark with splotches of dried blood, my own mingled with Pease’s. But I felt calm.

  My neck was a single swollen lump, almost impossible to turn. The pain seemed to push my head forward so that I felt hunched over the wheel as I drove. As I stared out the windshield, I wondered if maybe I was delirious or dreaming. I felt no anger, none at all. Things seemed too clear to be real. I knew that Sherrill had not warned Noggle or Jenkins to expect something, though it would have been easy to do so—and I knew that there was a reason for it. There was a reason for everything, but nobody ever bothered to tell me what it was. I wondered if I had not died somewhere earlier in the day, if this was only my last ride uptown to hell.

  Sherrill was not merely toying with me, he was using me. How should I react to it all? What was Sherrill trying to get me to do? I should be furious, murderous, a flare of rage. But I felt nothing. That old bastard wants me to come after him, I thought. And he wants me to be mad as hell.

  As I approached my house, air raid sirens began to moan. My headlamps carved a tunnel through darkness as the lights in every house blinked out for the drill. I was too tired to bear it. I trudged toward my door and did not care to check if anyone might be waiting in th
e dark for me. I flipped on the lights and let my hunger pull me through the kitchen and into the small pantry. Stooping down to the lower shelves, I saw a few cans of beans and a jar of preserved apricots from the old woman across the street. Something seemed unfamiliar far in the back corner, and an odd bit of hope came up that I might have forgotten something tasty back there, something worth heating up and eating. The jar was dark, and I thought that probably the seal had broken. But there was no smell. I leaned in until I felt the shelf cutting into my chest. With the tips of my fingers, I was able to drag the jar close. I held it up to the light, swirled it. Even with the exhausted dullness of my mind and the itch of my dry eye, there was no mistaking it: Hell if that ain’t a nigger’s dick, I thought. Balls, too. I know I didn’t get that down at Baker’s Market. With a sigh, I carried the jar of particulars and the jar of apricots to my table and sat down. I stared dreamily for a time at the hacked-off flesh turning slowly in the jar and had to guess that it had been stewing in the formaldehyde for many years. It was like a relic or an antique, something a proud hillbilly might pass down to his young’uns as a badge of family honor. Now somebody had put it into my cupboard, trying to make me look—I found I could not imagine anymore where all the stupid pranks might lead me.

  A sharp, cutting rap at the front door jerked me to attention and raised my anger. I bulled to the door and whipped it open.

  “What?”

  “It’s an air raid. Lights out.”

  I sized up the air patrol officer: short, fat, bloated and red in the face, his soft neck drooping over his tight collar. He wore a white helmet and slapped a white nightstick into the palm of his left hand.

  “Beat it, you pig, or I’ll shove that stick up your fat ass.”