Back to Blood: A Novel

by Tom Wolfe

  Nestor and the Sergeant were parked in an unmarked car, a three-year-old Ford Assist. It was hard to come up with an ugly design for a two-door car, but Ford had pulled it off. The Sergeant, Jorge Hernandez, was behind the wheel, and Nestor was in the passenger seat. The Sergeant was only six or seven years older than Nestor. He knew all about the man on the mast episode and thought Nestor had done great. So Nestor felt at ease with him. He could even joke with him a little. It was nothing like dealing with the americano sergeant, who had to remind you every other second that you were Cuban—and so alien to him he had a cute word, namely Canadian, he could use to talk to other rednecks about you people with impunity.

  The side and rear windows of the Assist were tinted black. That wasn’t good enough cover, however, if you were watching suspects through the windshield with binoculars. So they had put one of those big silvery sun reflectors across the entire windshield. They would pull the reflector down ever so slightly where it met the headliner and stick the binocular lenses through the gap.

  Both of them were in plainclothes. There was plainclothes, and there was undercover, and in the Crime Suppression Unit—called CST and not CSU, and only God knew why—you usually went on runs in one or the other. Nestor liked that. It made you a detective, although you didn’t really have that rank. In undercover you tried to look like your quarry, which usually meant looking like a comemierda roach with eight days’ worth of stubble, especially from under the chin, back to the neck, and above all a head of hair you hadn’t washed for at least a week. If you went around with clean hair, they’d spot you immediately. Compared to that, plainclothes was formal. Nestor and the Sergeant were wearing jeans, clean ones, with leather belts and blue T-shirts, tucked in… Tucked in!—these days, how much more formal could a young man get? Naturally, Nestor loved the T-shirts. Needless to say, he wore a size too small. On your belt, in the CST, you wore a holster with an evil-looking automatic revolver in it. In plainclothes, CST officers wore fine twisted-steel necklaces from which their golden badges hung down on the T-shirts squarely in the middle of the chest. You couldn’t miss them. The advantage of plainclothes was that you could call in an entire platoon of cops to a particular location in unmarked cars without setting off alarms all over the neighborhood. CST was a special unit, all right, an elite unit, and Nestor was investing his whole life in it. What other life did he have? He had been depressed for months now. His father and his whole family had declared him a non-person… well, not everybody… his mother still called him on the telephone from time to time and probably never even comprehended how profoundly irritated he was by her consolations. In her mind, sweet and tender consolation consisted of saying, in effect, “I know you have committed a terrible sin against your own people, my son, but I forgive you and will never forget you… even though nobody else in Hialeah can forget you fast enough.”

  “What are they doing now?” asked the Sergeant.

  “Nothing much, Sarge,” said Nestor, eyes still up against the binoculars. “Same old same old. The little guy is rocking on the back legs on his chair. The big guy is standing beside the door, and every now and then the little guy says something, and the big guy goes inside for maybe a minute and comes back out.”

  “And you can see their hands?”

  “Sure can, Sarge. You know the JenaStrahls”—pronounced YaynaStrahls. Somewhere along the way some learned member of the CST had pointed out that the German J was pronounced Y and the E was pronounced A.

  Just saying the name made Nestor acutely aware of how tiring it was to stare steadily through these triumphs of optical engineering. The image you got was so enlarged and at the same time so refined that moving the thing just a quarter of an inch made it feel as if the apparatus were ripping your eyeballs out. The Sergeant couldn’t take it for more than fifteen minutes at a time, and neither could he. They should have had some kind of tripod you could attach to the dashboard.

  Nestor always had a lot of new ideas about police work, and Magdalena used to like to listen to them… to his ideas and to his tales of the sea or Biscayne Bay at least, when he was in Marine Patrol. Or she acted like she did… which probably meant she actually did. One of the things he had always admired about her was that she was one girl who didn’t try to hide her feelings. Flattery was something she really hated. She treated it as the Eighth Deadly Sin. ::::::Oh, Manena! To this day you probably don’t realize what you did to me! You didn’t come to Yeya’s birthday party that day to see me. You weren’t even curious about what I had gone through. You came to throw me under the bus, and you gave me no warning. You had been a little distant for a couple of weeks, but I eagerly explained that away, didn’t I…. Did I ever tell you how I felt when I lay next to you? I didn’t want to just enter your body… I wanted to enter you so completely that my hide would wrap around yours, and they would become one… my rib cage would contain your rib cage… my pelvis would be conjoined with your pelvis… forever… my lungs would breathe your every breath… Manena! You and I were a universe! That other universe out there revolved about us… We were the sun! It’s pretty stupid of me not to be able to get you out of my mind. I’m sure I’m long gone from yours… me and Hialeah… I’m seeing someone else… From the moment you said that, I knew it was some americano. I’m still convinced of that… We all fooled ourselves in Hialeah, didn’t we—everyone but you. Hialeah is Cuba. It’s surrounded by more Cuba… all of Miami is ours, all of Greater Miami is ours. We occupy it. We’re Singapore or Taiwan or Hong Kong… But somewhere in our hearts we all know we’re really nothing but a sort of Cuban free port. All the real power, all the real money, all the real excitement, all the glamour, is the americanos’… and now I realize that you’ve always wanted in on that… with all that, what was to keep you from—::::::

  He was jerked alert by the appearance of a new figure in the eye-ripping JenaStrahl magnification of the world two blocks away.

  “Here comes somebody else,” Nestor said in a low voice, as if he were talking to himself. His eyes were pressed against the binoculars. “He’s just come from behind the house, Sarge. He’s heading for the guy in the chair.” Oh, Nestor had learned his lesson that day of the man on the mast. Never again! Never again would he go more than one sentence without throwing in a “Sarge” or a “Lieutenant” or whatever was required. He was one of the great “Sarge”-droppers on the entire force now. “It’s a… Christ, I can’t even tell you what color he is, Sarge, he’s such a mess”… never removing his eyes from the JenaStrahls.

  “Can you see his hands?” said the Sergeant in a rather urgent tone.

  “Sarge, I can see his hands… Guy looks like a real crackhead… he’s hunched over like he’s eighty years old… Hair looks like he combed it with glue and then slept on it… Christ, it’s filthy… itches all the way from here just looking at it… Guy looks like somebody hocked him up against the wall like a lunger, Sarge, and he’s just oozing down it…”

  “Never mind all that,” said the Sergeant. “Just keep your eye on his hands.” It was the Sergeant’s conviction that dope dealers didn’t have minds, especially the ones here in Overtown and the other big black slum, Liberty City. They just had hands. They sold dope, stashed dope, cached dope, smoked dope, snorted dope, fried dope on a sheet of Reynolds wrap so they could inhale the fumes… all with their hands, all with their hands.

  “Okay,” said Nestor, “he’s talking to the little guy on the chair.”

  The Sergeant was leaning so far toward him from the driver’s seat, Nestor could tell he was dying to take over the JenaStrahls himself. But he also knew he wouldn’t do it. During the handover they might miss something with the dirtbags’ hands.

  “He’s reaching in his pocket, Sarge. He’s pulling out… a… that’s a five-dollar bill, Sarge.”

  “You sure?”

  “I can see Abraham Lincoln’s eyebrows, Sarge. I’m not kidding! Guy’s got one hell of a set of eyebrows… Okay, now he’s handing it to the skinny guy… The s
kinny guy’s got it balled up in his fist… The big guy’s coming over from the door… he’s a big mean-looking sonofabitch… he’s giving the crackhead the evil eye… Now he’s bending over behind the skinny guy’s chair. The skinny guy’s putting both hands behind his back… and now I can’t see their hands at all.”

  “Pick up their goddamned hands, Nestor! Pick ’em up!”

  How the fuck’s he supposed to do that? Thank God, the skinny guy brings both hands around in front of him. “He’s handing the guy something, Sarge—”

  “Handing him what?! Handing him what?!”

  “He’s handing him this little cube thing, Sarge, wrapped in a little piece a Bounty paper towel. Looks like a rock to me.”

  “You sure? What makes you think it’s Bounty?”

  “I’m sure, Sarge. It’s the JenaStrahls. I know Bounty. How the hell did americanos ever get along in America before Bounty?”

  “Fuck Bounty, Nestor! Where’s the goddamned little thing now?”

  “The head’s stuffing it down into his pants pocket… He’s starting to walk away, Sarge. He’s heading back to the rear of the lot. You should see him. He’s got some baaaad locomotor problems.”

  “So it’s a buy—right? The whole thing.”

  “I saw Abraham Lincoln’s bushy eyebrows, Sarge.”

  “All right,” said the Sergeant. “We’re gonna need three cars.”

  The Sergeant got on the Department radio and called their CST captain and asked him to dispatch three cars, unmarked, two officers per car, same setup as the Sergeant and Nestor’s in the Ford Assist. One unit would drive by the dope house and park in a driveway between two houses nearby, and more than likely use a sun reflector disguise the same way the Sergeant and Nestor had been doing it. A second unit would drive into the alley behind the house to cover the rear—and see if they could spot the head who walked like he had a stroke and just made a buy at the house. A third unit would pull up on the other side—right behind the Sergeant and Nestor. The Sergeant and Nestor would be leading the raid. They would arrive right in front of the house as near to the porch and the two rhinestone-studded cucarachas as possible. All eight cops would hop out of the cars with the badges gleaming on their chests and the holsters fully visible on their belts in a show of force calculated to dissuade anyone with armed resistance on his mind.

  At this point, the cucarachas with the body piercings and jacklegged gaits became less amusing… Nestor would have sworn he could actually feel the adrenaline rising from above his kidneys and revving his heart up into the racing mode. If CST undercovers had spent a few days making buys at the place and scoping it out, a SWAT team would have probably been called in. But this looked like too rinky-dink a dope store to have to crank things up that high. That wasn’t precisely how Nestor looked at it, however, and probably not the Sergeant, either. After all, the Sergeant was no fool. Where there was dope, there was a good chance there were guns… and the two of them would be going in first… At this very moment, Nestor couldn’t help remembering something an astronaut had said in a documentary on TV: “Before every mission I told myself, ‘I’m gonna die doing this. I’m gonna die this time. But I’m dying for something bigger than myself. I’m about to die for my country, for my people, and for a righteous God.’ I always believed—and I still believe—that there is a righteous God and that we, we in America, are part of his righteous plan for the world. And so I, who am about to die, am determined to die honorably, fearing only one thing: not living up to, not dying for, the purpose for which God put me on this earth.” Nestor loved those lines and believed in their wisdom and remembered them in every moment of police work that involved danger… Did you do that before the ever-judging eyes of a righteous God… or was it the eyes of an americano sergeant? Now, be honest.

  Nestor still had the binoculars focused on the two black guys with the rhinestone ears. What was it—this place where dirt-bags like them lived? Overtown… trash everywhere. The buildings were small, and many were missing… burned down, demolished, or maybe they just fell down from lack of upkeep… wouldn’t be a surprise. And everywhere there was a vacant lot you had… trash… not piles of trash… after all, piles of trash might suggest that someone was coming back to haul it away… no, these were spills of trash. It looked like some unimaginably big giant had accidentally spilled some unimaginably big bucket of rubbish across Overtown and surveyed the unimaginably big mess and walked away muttering oh the hell with it. The trash was littered, strewn, whither and wherever. Trash accumulated against the fences, and the fences were… everywhere. If there was any honest money to be made in Overtown, it had to be in the cyclone fence business. Owners who had the money enclosed every square inch of their property in cyclone fencing. You had the feeling that if you took a tape measure and actually measured it, there would be a mile of it on every block. All over the place you’d see a bush growing sideways out from under a cyclone fence or through it… not a couple of bushes, not a clump, not a stand, but one bush, some stray left over from a long-gone era of what people used to call shrubbery… now just part of the rubbish strewn against the fences. When you saw rubbish actually stowed in those turd-brown vinyl garbage bags, likely as not they somehow ended up dumped out on the street. The raccoons ripped half of them open. Even here in the car Nestor got whiffs of the stench. Outside, boiling in a tropical sun, it was breathtaking. There were the fences—and there were the iron bars. In Overtown you didn’t see a ground-floor window without bars over it. Nestor could see them right now on the black guys’ hovel. There was trash strewn under the porch and up against the one side of it. After a while, the hovels began to seem like littered rubbish themselves. They were even smaller than casitas and in terrible condition. Almost all were painted white, and the white was by now grimy, cracked, chipped, peeling away.

  The Sergeant must have been thinking along the same lines, as they waited for the other units to arrive and get into position, because apropos of nothing, he said, “You know, the problem in Overtown is… Overtown. The fucking people here—they just don’t do right.”

  ::::::Oh, Sarge, oh, Sarge! You got nothing to worry about with me, but one day… one day… you’re gonna forget where you are and get yourself thrown off the force.::::::

  The radio came alive. The three other units were in the immediate area. The Sergeant gave them their instructions. Nestor could feel his entire nervous system revving up again, revving up revving up revving up.

  The Sergeant flipped up his sun visor, which held the big sun reflector in place on his side. “Okay, Nestor, take it off and throw it in the back.” Nestor flipped up the visor on his side and seized the big screen, compressed it into its accordion folds, and put it behind his seat.

  The Sergeant looked in his side mirror. “Okay, Nuñez and García are in the car behind us.” Nestor could feel his nervous system revving revving revving revving up to be ready to attack other human beings without hesitation. That wasn’t something you could decide to do when the moment came. You had to be—already decided… He couldn’t have explained that to a living soul.

  The Sergeant radioed to Command. Not even thirty seconds passed before Command responded with a Q, L, R. “Off we go, Nestor,” the Sergeant said matter-of-factly, “and we’re out fast. When we get there, the big guy is yours. Me and the little guy don’t exist. All you got to do is immobilize that big cózzucca.”

  Sergeant Hernandez drove the Assist slowly and quietly the two blocks to the dope den and the two black crack retailers. He stopped right in front of them, opened the car door suddenly and furiously, and vaulted the dope den’s cyclone fence and landed on his feet in front of the porch and the two black men—did it all so fast, Nestor had the impression that it was a gymnastic stunt he had practiced. ::::::What can I do?! He’s a foot taller than I am! But I must!:::::: There was no decision to make. Decision? Coming out of the passenger door and heading around the front of the car… three and a half, four steps to the fence. He took off the way
you would in a sprint, leaped for the top bar—got it—Rodriguez’s gym!—vaulted his five-foot-seven self over the fence—made it. He landed awkwardly but thank God he didn’t fall. Presence was everything in these confrontations. He gave the two black men the Cop Look. The Cop Look had a simple message: I rule… me and the golden badge gleaming against the dark blue of my T-shirt and the revolver in the holster on my belt… check it out… This is our style, the style of we who rule… all the while using the Cop Look like a ray.

  The two black men reacted the way small-timers at this, the bottom-most link in the drug chain, the neighborhood retailer, always reacted: If we move, they’ll think we’ve got something to hide. All we have to do is be cool. The skinny one slumped back slightly in his wooden chair, staring all the while at the Sergeant, who was right in front of him, no more than three feet away. The bigger one was still leaning back against the front wall. There was a barred window between him and the front door.

  The Sergeant was already talking to the one in the chair: “Whatta you guys doing out here?”

  Silence… Then the small man narrowed his eyes in what was no doubt intended as a cool expression in the face of a threat, and said, “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?” said the Sergeant. “You got a job?”

  Silence… narrowed eyes… “I got laid off.”

  “Laid off from what?”

  Silence… still more of a slump back into the chair… narrowed eyes… very cool… “From where I was working.”

  The Sergeant cocked his head slightly, stuck his tongue into his cheek for a moment, and indulged in a favorite form of cop mockery, namely, repeating some evasive roach’s own words, deadpan: “You got laid off from working… where you were working.” Now the Sergeant just stared at him with his head still cocked. Then he said, “We received some complaints…” He motioned with his head in a slight arc, as if to suggest the complaints came from the neighborhood. “They say you’re doing some work… here.”