The Devil's Own Rag Doll

by Mitchell Bartoy

  Sherrill raked his head back and forth between the stairs to the aft deck, Lloyd, and me, and you could see that his old mind wasn’t working so fast. He knew it would take time for Rix to get down from above, and I guess he also had to consider whether he had time to plug Lloyd and me properly before he had to step out to try to catch the dinghy rope. Maybe he even thought of dropping the satchel; but presently, with a crazy look in his eye and the wattles of his neck pulling at his collar, he lugged the satchel out the back to see what he could do.

  I heard the little boat splash behind the yacht. I must have sat there for a moment with my eyebrows raised, but then I got up and pulled Lloyd after me up the fore stairs. Out on the deck, I looked up and saw Rix glaring down. The shotgun was open, and Rix was snapping the last of two shells into the breach. He closed the gun.

  I lifted Lloyd up and tossed him over the rail. And then, as Rix leveled the gun at me, I dropped over the rail myself. The water of the Detroit River struck like a fastball low on the handle. Though the weather had been unbearably hot, it was still too early in the season for the water to be warm. The murky water frightened me more than the barrel of Rix’s gun; at least with the gun, you could see it coming. I did not swim well.

  I saw Lloyd’s head bobbing and guessed the old man was doing a breaststroke or a modified dog paddle, heading for the city, making for the naval station at the foot of the bridge. They mean for the navy boys to come out blasting niggers because of all this, I thought. I turned and swam as well as I could for the lights I took to be Belle Isle, still some distance downstream. I thrashed across the current, hoping to catch the island before I was swept downriver. I knew Hardiman’s little bullet had passed into my back and had settled at the edge of my shoulder blade because I could feel it tearing every time I stretched forward. I could not feel any pellets from Rix’s shot.

  From the yacht I heard shouting. I did not look back, but I guessed that Rix and Sherrill were arguing on the top deck. The engines cut back and rumbled and sputtered. Then they kicked up again, and I did not need to look to know that the yacht was headed my way. I veered left, more sharply toward the island, and sucked in a deep breath when I felt the craft drawing near. I dived under as well as I could, but still the hull knocked me deeper as it passed over. The blast from the inboards tore open my shirt and spun me around under the water. Though the big yacht could not have managed more than fifteen knots in such a short run, the weight of it in the shallow water churned up enough silt and pebbles to score my face.

  I flailed under the water for a moment in a panic and then forced myself to keep still until the stale air in my bursting lungs could show me the way to the surface. When I began to rise, I stroked my way to the open air, my lungs feeling brittle, about to crack like glass. I sucked in air and water and coughed and choked as I resumed my swimming to the island. The yacht had turned hard away and now came around for another pass. Once again, I let myself go under. The rush of the boat’s displacement pulled me more quickly along in the current, and I soon made the island. As I pulled myself through the cattails near the wrecked pier of the Yacht Club, I turned to see that Lloyd’s yacht now circled crazily on the water and appeared to be heading for the bridge. I reached more solid ground, found my feet, and crashed through the cattails onto the grassy slope. Hacking up water and mucus and algae and solid bits of something, I staggered toward the fenced-in parking lot of the Yacht Club and climbed over.

  Hardiman’s car was still there, surrounded now by a small crowd of well-dressed gawkers, wondering at the damage done to the pier by Lloyd’s yacht. They stared at me as I trotted past but said nothing and made no move to stop me. There was no sign of Johnson, so I ran through the lot and past the guardhouse. I made it out to the street, which was dense with tired picnickers. Struggling toward the bridge on jellied legs, I heard shouts of surprise and female screams ahead of me as the yacht came up to the bridge. It was too tall in the water, and I heard metal scraping as the high running lights and the glass windscreen broke off on the underside of the bridge. I pushed through the crowd frantically, bulling my way through throngs pushing back to Belle Isle; the panicked civilians ran crazily from the yacht, as if it might knock down the bridge.

  Hands clawed at me and slight fists smacked into me. But I kept on. Over the heads of the swirling crowd, I saw Sherrill come up suddenly over the rail of the bridge, clutching his satchel, pushed up roughly by Rix, who appeared soon after. Sherrill gained his feet and began to limp toward the land end of the bridge. Rix followed and bowled over a colored woman holding a bundled baby in her arms. She fell and fell hard, turning onto her back as she went to cushion the fall for the baby. As I passed her, she was groaning and stamping her feet in pain on the paved surface of the bridge, and the baby was squawking in alarm. The river’s strong, slow current and the yacht’s rumbling inboards pushed the craft screeching under the bridge, bobbing and crunching on its own wake until it came through to the other side. Then it cruised peacefully, slowly, down the river.

  I fought my way forward, careening between groups of blindly lashing young colored men with their dates and families. Over the hump of the bridge, I saw a lone mounted officer trying to control the tumult in the broad, open area along Jefferson at the foot of Grand Boulevard. As I drew closer, I could see the mare’s frantic eyes and the tightness of her neck, the bobbing, half-rearing panic. The officer had given up on the crowd and now tried just to calm the horse, to turn her toward the wide boulevard. Rix and the hobbling Sherrill reached the center of the crowd. They pulled the officer from the horse, and he disappeared from my view. A moment later, Sherrill came up onto the saddle, still clutching his satchel somehow, holding it between his legs, hunched over it. He whipped the mare’s flanks with his thin cane.

  By this time I had ripped off my jacket and my torn shirt, and I plowed bare-chested through the crowd, pale and hairy in the lights of the bridge. I found that people were beginning to get out of my way. Rix stood waiting for me with his feet planted, blood streaming over one side of his face from a gash on his forehead. When he saw me, he smiled and winked, drawing blood into his eye. Even in the riotous crowd, a circle cleared around him.

  Before I could reach him, though, a very large Negro came up on Rix’s blind side and brought down a big bear’s paw to the side of his head. Rix went down but sprang up and onto the larger man, looping wide blows to his head. I ran up and beyond them, wheezing now from the effort, buzzing from draining adrenaline. I saw Sherrill on the horse about fifty yards ahead and continued to plow through the crowd toward him.

  Sherrill might have made it past the thickest part of the crowd and out of the mess entirely. Instead he sat high in the saddle and looked around him. He spied a tight group of colored men gathered on the east corner of the boulevard and turned the mare toward them. With a quick twist, he opened the cane and drew out a slender blade and began to slash madly about him as he drove the horse into the group.

  Sherrill whipped the silvery blade into the group of colored men. They cringed at first but then drew close as they realized that Sherrill was doing little harm. The horse felt itself closed in and reared up; and as it did, Sherrill dropped from the saddle down into the furious gang. They parted to let the horse go but quickly came together over Sherrill, swinging wildly, kicking and tearing at the frail old man. In a moment, a roar went up as the satchel ripped open, sending a plume of bills into the air.

  I took a long look around me. Already, on every side of me, fistfights were breaking out, and small groups rushed past, some heading for the fights, some away. A number of white-suited navy men were rushing up the little hill toward the foot of the bridge, all white men spoiling for a fight. It seemed to happen all at once, flaming up in pockets along every angle of my vision. I bent over and put my hands on my knees and tried to suck in enough air to satisfy myself.

  Walking down Jefferson toward the heart of the city, I felt cool for the first time in weeks. I was bare to the waist, and t
he dirty water of the Detroit River had almost dried from my trousers. Gusts of rioting men and boys blew by me, scrambling in and out of alleys and doorways and racing down the middle of the roadway. None of it seemed to touch me. I wondered idly how a man might go about setting fire to such a great building as the Penobscot. It would take something to get it going.

  The only fires I saw burned in upended trashcans, splashing sparks whenever a car whipped by. Rioters seemed to spring up from everywhere and came from all directions. They threw or carried bricks, bats, chains, pipes, whatever they could pick up, like a cleaning crew gone mad, cut loose from everything. The stores and shops close to the street lost their windows, but only the ones at ground level, as if the cost of doing a thorough job meant missing too much action. A car now and then found an open stretch on Jefferson and squealed away, but for the most part the street was blocked by clogs of rioters. Groups of men and a few women huddled together as if to make one bigger animal, taunting and provoking other groups. Squealing, screaming, the low sobs of disbelief from the injured passing by me, blaring car horns, the occasional pop and splash of a shattered window, all of it came together like hissing in my ears.

  I was walking, strolling really, down the middle of the westbound side of Jefferson, heading generally toward the real downtown, where the tall buildings made it seem like you were in a kind of hard forest. I knew well that I was steering myself toward the tightest part of Black Bottom, where I surely did not want to be walking. But I kept on, and I began to feel a chill from the wind off the river. I realized that I had lost my eye patch somewhere along the way. I pictured it hooked onto the skull of some unlucky bootlegger at the bottom of the river, fallen through the ice on a winter run to Canada. I didn’t miss it, and the coolness made me feel as comfortable as I could ever remember feeling. The bottoms of my bare feet drew some warmth from the pavement.

  I thought with a sudden sinking of my heart that it would be good to have my brother Tommy walking along with me, as we had done as boys so long ago. It would be good to have something to lean against. There was so much I wanted to tell him. After a moment of thought, and with a shrug of resignation, I thought that it would be good to have our father along, too. All of us walking abreast down the middle of the street, our own little group; surely we’d pass with no trouble. Maybe Bobby could tag along as well, an overeager mascot, trotting on ahead. And curse me down to hell, I thought, if it wouldn’t be nice to have old Toby Thrumm along, too. That poor nigger saved my life.

  My watery chest heaved for breath as I thought of my two dead girls, little sister Eliza and Jane Hardiman. They could not have met in life, but now I pictured them walking hand in hand somewhere, in a world where babies and girls could grow up safe and healthy and happy. With all of us watching over them—my father, my brother, my friends … I wondered briefly if all that kind of thinking meant I was already dead, doomed to walk half-naked for eternity through the streets of the city I’d lived in all my life.

  Behind me a car revved and squealed, leaning on the horn so much that its sound had faded to a strangled squawk. When it drew close, I meandered toward the edge of the roadway to give it room to pass. I glanced at the old Negro driver clutching the wheel and then wandered back to my old path after it had passed. The sagging jalopy made it another block in fits and starts, stopping and threatening to stall every few feet. He doesn’t have the sense to turn up from Jefferson and onto a side street, I thought. Why doesn’t he just get out of this?

  A block ahead of me, the jalopy stopped for good when a swarm of white boys surrounded it and began hitting and kicking at the windows. When the windows were gone, I could see that the punks were trying to drag the colored occupants out the windows. They pulled one out the passenger side, but the old driver stuck tight. They began to rock the car, surging on one side until they could lift it up and over. In all the excitement, the passenger broke free and hightailed it up the street toward Black Bottom. As the car tipped all the way over onto its roof, part of the gang split off and chased after the colored boy.

  Though my legs felt numb, I picked up and started to trot after them. I kept to the balls of my feet to keep from slapping on the hard pavement. I passed the gang at the car and saw the runners far ahead of me, still holding to Jefferson. There was no hope of catching them, I knew, until they caught the poor nigger at the front. But I kept on, my legs warming somewhat, loosening up. The air I sucked into my lungs felt humid, heavy with river moisture.

  They caught up to the boy and brought him down like a pack of dogs, snarling around him and dragging him to the ground. To my bleary eye, it looked like a fizzy smear on the street. I drew closer, my chest heaving, sharply painful.

  I bowled through the boys at the edge of the fray, slamming them from behind with heavy forearms. Then I began to swat away the boys closer in, knocking them silly with quick pokes to the backs of their heads. As I made it to the tight ball of writhing boys at the center, I peeled them off one by one, spinning each away onto the sidewalk and street. Had they been men instead of boys, they might have regrouped and overwhelmed me from behind; but they picked themselves up and stood trembling in fright and anger and disbelief.

  When I worked my way down to the last white boy, I found him clutching the colored boy in a desperate hug, trying to ward off the hail of blows that had fallen on him, too. I sank my fingers sharply into the back of the white boy’s neck and grabbed one wrist, and then I pried him loose and lifted him, tossed him to one side. We’re like animals, there’s no denying it; when I had my hands on that last white boy, I knew that I was touching Alex. I knew without seeing his face that I was laying hands on someone who shared my own blood.

  The colored boy was battered beyond recognition, bloodied and torn up but not yet swollen. His front teeth had been pushed in and hung toward the back of his throat in his open mouth. His knees had been drawn up and now lay out on either side almost to the sidewalk, and his arms lay out from his body like a bird fallen from the nest. I could not tell, with the blood pounding in my temples and in my ears, if he drew breath. His eyes were rolled up in his head, showing just the whites under fluttering lids. A wide swath of blood glistened against the dark brown skin below his smashed-in nose, brilliant red under the streetlight.

  I slipped my bad hand gently under the boy’s head and searched delicately for a caved-in place on the skull. Finding none, I slipped my hand down around his neck and far enough down his back to get a good grip. With my other arm I gathered up the spindly knees and brought them together. It was like lifting a bundle of cracked sticks, nothing but bones and a bit of soft, loose flesh holding it together. I could not tell if the boy was living or if he had a chance of making it. I looked around to find my bearings and sank with dismay as I realized how far it was to Receiving Hospital.

  Some of the gang had moved on, and the rest kept a healthy distance from me, forming a ring around me, not threatening but momentarily shocked into inaction. I flipped the boy’s limp arm inward and held him over my chest. Then I started to take a step onto the curb.

  Staring out at me from the shadow of a doorway, I saw my only nephew, Alex, crouching with one hand braced on the ground. Though his body was closed tight on itself, his eyes glared so that he might have been a gargoyle. Anger, anger, and beyond it the pale blue terror of the world opening up under his feet. Alex’s face began to twist up with the crush of old, old emotion; he seemed about to crack into a leering grimace, teeth gritting, lips quivering.

  The colored boy’s broken body felt warm against my bare chest. I felt my own bowels shake; I felt my lungs fighting against the still air and felt that I would never again draw an adequate breath. I could not let go of the colored boy, but I would have fallen to my knees, I would have gone down on my belly and pressed my forehead to the cold cement in front of Alex, if only my frozen legs would have let me. There before me was what I had been hoping for all along, the promise of home and family—but I could not attain it. No shred of pri
de left in me would have prevented me from sobbing and begging Alex to come home; but I could not choose to abandon the colored boy, who deserved his chance at life. I saw something break in Alex, saw it come over his whole body at once: His lips pressed desperately together and his chin twitched as he jerked upright and turned away. Finally I did fall to my knees as the strength in me gave out, and I watched Alex run away toward the black heart of Detroit, disappearing into the night and the smoke.

  CHAPTER 20

  Sunday, July 11

  Someone had been by to cut my lawn, I noticed. Probably the boy next door. He hadn’t raked, though, and three weeks’ worth of grass lay dry and yellow over the neatly clipped lawn. It was hot, but not so rudely hot as it had been on spring’s last day. Someone had brought my car over from the street where we had stopped Hardiman, though I knew the keys were probably at the bottom of the Detroit River. I told the cab driver to wait.

  The front door was unlocked, as I had left it, and nothing in the interior seemed out of place except for the pile of letters and bills that had been pushed through the mail slot. Because the windows had been left open, the stale smell of the place had dissipated. Still the place felt strange to me, like I had only seen it before in a dream. I stepped through, feeling as if the house had grown smaller and less substantial. There was nothing in the house that I felt I needed to carry with me. On a shelf at the top of the closet in my room, the box that held my few important papers seemed untouched, as did the shoebox with my small collection of family photographs. When I had satisfied myself that Alex had not somehow hidden himself away there, I walked out of the house and ducked into the cab.

  I felt clean in the light new jacket and the crisp shirt I wore. Fresh from the box; I looked down and pressed my hand over the creases on the white cloth. My feet felt smaller in my shoes. I got in the cab and liked it, liked the feel of it, liked the tattered upholstery and the smeared signature on the driver’s license in its little case. I liked the crank that let me roll the window down.