Rope Burns - [SSC]

by F. X. Toole

  Mac tried to get to the door of his car so he and Puddin could leave, but Ruby blocked him. “It on tape what happen a Rodney King, why they need a trial, tell me that?”

  “You tell me.”

  “I tell you them po-lice go free after what they done a brothuh Rodney, they be a gang a white blood a pay.”

  Mac was madder than he wanted to be. “Yeah,” he said, “and if they’re found guilty, it’s still going to be white blood running red, right?”

  “‘At’s right, an’ we do it by any mean necessary, sucker!” said Ruby, the esses hissing like a broken gas line.

  “Right on, mama, but him gettin his black ass beat was the best thing that ever happened to Rodney King, right?”

  The spectators sucked air on that one, took that line hard, started to think that Mac was indeed a no-good white muhfuh who deserved a ass whippin. But they just as quickly realized that Mac was standing up, was telling Ruby to kiss his gray boy ass—and that Mac was talking about how much big money Rodney King was sure to score down the line. That made them laugh out loud, and when they did, it was clear they were laughing at Ruby, too. Inside the gym, Cannonball heard the laughter, but he’d heard laughter before and he went back to his racing form. But for Ruby, laughter was worse than a beating, and she touched her hair.

  “What you say, you muthuhfucka slave-tradin po-lice dick-suckin faggot piece a redneck dog shit? Huh? What you say, cracker? Fuck wit me ain’t like fuckin wit Rodney King. I cut you muthuh-fucka white ass from you dick to you nose!”

  Again Mac moved away, but as he did, Ruby started moving on long, quick strides straight at him.

  “I say you gimme you cripple-ass money, peckawood, gimme that money, hyuh?, or I’ma take it!”

  “Get back,” said Mac, his words barely audible off his dry tongue.

  “I git back, huh? Where I git back? Back a the bus?”

  “I’m saying I don’t need no more of your shit.”

  “Or what, honky? What you gonna do about it, huh? Look around you for some white skin’ll hep you, fool.” Intimidation had made Ruby a lot of money through the years, in jail and out, and had drained the fight out of most that she confronted. But it wasn’t working on this old white man, which made it imperative that she save face in front of a black crowd, obligatory that she become even more vicious in her attack against what she had figured for easy takings. “Just ‘cause you white and you got a swingin dick instead a woman cock, I suppose to kiss you pale ass?, that how it is, huh? Gimme you money, punk!” she said, pulling a straight razor from her pompadour, the silver blade pinging as it flashed free of its black handle.

  “Be good with that, bitch, or I’ll shove it down your nigger mouth!”

  Nigger made Ruby slow down, wonder what kind of white man would talk that shit surrounded by a gang of brothers. Nigger and the razor made the gawks back away, some of them shouting. People from across the street ran over. Now there were twenty people looking on. Cannonball heard the noise and started for the door. Puddin positioned himself for a try at Ruby’s razor hand. But she was too quick. She rushed with the razor, hacking with it in short little strokes. Ruby aimed at Mac’s face, but he was able to block the first slice with his forearm, pivoting to his right off his front foot. His jacket sleeve and sweatshirt saved him from serious injury, though his arm began to bleed and blood seeped down to his hand. Ruby didn’t want him dead, she wanted him cut so bad he’d remember her every time he saw his reflection: she wanted her face to be the last face his mind saw every night before he went to sleep.

  Mac knew what she was up to, knew the jailhouse mentality, and wanted to flat shoot the bitch and be done with it, but he also knew that he was the only marshmallow in the chocolate factory. He knew Puddin would cover his back, but that made two against twenty, and he didn’t want Puddin getting hurt.

  “Cut that white muthuhfucka’s ass, baby!” someone yelled. “Do it for Rodney! “

  “Dass right, ice da punk!”

  “Jesus a faggot white-man church!”

  “Cut him, baby, do you thang!”

  Ruby moved better than many fighters, despite the high heels. She stayed close to Mac, even though he slid off at angles to her and her popping razor. When Cannonball came through the door, he saw the blood running down Mac’s hand. Cannonball wanted to distract Ruby, but he didn’t want to get close to that razor.

  “Ruby Thigpen, I told you git!” Cannonball shouted. “That old white man gonna tear up you process ass.”

  “Shut you mouf, nigga! He call me a nigga, ‘n’ he gonna pay!”

  Cannonball called to Mac over the racket, “You want me a call the po-lice?”

  Mac didn’t want police cars jamming into the Not Long and waved off Cannonball’s offer.

  “Then put the bitch on the ground, man!”

  Mac knew Cannonball was right, though he had hoped for things otherwise. So Mac moved out of Ruby’s way again, then suddenly faked a stumble on the loose gravel. Ruby went for the fake, quickly closing the distance between them, and flicked out with the razor as Mac slid to his left. He pivoted and with his left hand he gave a little push to Ruby’s razor elbow, taking her balance and causing her to lunge forward, her neck stretching like a sprinter at the finish line. The razor nicked the side of Mac’s neck, but he didn’t feel it, though blood began to work into his sweatshirt. Onlookers saw it; some of them sighed.

  With his right hand Mac pulled the cocked Glock. He was careful to keep his finger off the trigger, but as he gripped the heavy black plastic handle tightly, he slipped behind Ruby and whacked her full force across the temple with the heavy meted barrel. People started whooping; some let off a high whine. Ruby’s head felt full of lightning. Semiconscious, and with her balance gone, she pitched forward on her face and dropped the razor, her eyes blinking as if flashbulbs had popped her in a dark room. Mac planted the heel of his shoe on the blade of the razor, then pulled full force up on the handle against the hinge and broke the razor in two. He threw the blade up on the low roof of the gym and turned to Ruby, who poured blood from the side of her head and rolled over twice before she could get up.

  He was relieved he’d been able to disarm her, because he’d been ready to shoot her in the head. When Ruby saw her own blood, all the fight went out of her. She started to howl and began running for the street, falling twice and ripping the skin on her knees and palms.

  “You goin see! You wait, honky! We git jus’us, we burn you ass up!”

  Her yelling aroused the onlookers even more, and slowly the circle began to shrink around Mac. Hands reached out, faces were like claws. Mac trained the Glock on them, his finger now on the trigger, blood running from his neck and dripping from his hand.

  “I say the motherfucking common-ass handkerchief-head ‘ nigga bitch ho got off easy. Anybody disagree?” said Mac.

  Malik hated seeing a white man beating on a black anything, but he also knew that Mac had saved his ass, knew that Ruby had started the shit. “Whoa!” he yelled, moving the others back. “Everthang cool here!, everthang be cool!”

  Cannonball yelled at the crowd to go back to their business and quickly got Mac inside the gym before any O.G.’s drove by.

  Cannonball washed Mac’s wounds with hydrogen peroxide and stopped the blood with pressure and adrenaline chloride 1:1000 mixed with alum, an illegal mixture he used to stop blood in the corner. Puddin looked on, fascinated by the inside colors of human flesh. The forearm was worse than the neck, but the neck bled more and it took Cannonball longer to stanch the neck blood than the arm. He closed both wounds with butterfly bandages that pulled the sliced meat together for quicker healing and to minimize scarring. He used sterile gauze and ring tape to cover the wounds, which he left dry, free from ointments and salves so scabs could immediately begin to form.

  “You goin emergency?” Cannonball asked.

  “Emergency’d bring in the black-and-whites.”

  Cannonball said, “You lucky to be alive, all that
Rodney King shit goin down.” He gave a little hoot. “But I like that little move you put on the bitch, baby, the one when you go to the elbow?”

  “I tried to talk, and then the pig-shit Irish in me took over, and I just about shot everyone out there.” He thought a moment and exhaled, squeezing down hard to purge himself of the residue gases and fumes of rage. “Listen, I want to apologize for calling the whore a handkerchief head and a nigger, okay?”

  “Nigga what she know,” said Cannonball, noticing Puddin’s smile, noticing how much these two cared for each other. “Hey, you one lucky-ass white boy you don’t get jump out there.”

  “I was one lucky-ass white boy to grab that razor, too.”

  “That Glock what save you ass,” said Puddin. “Got all the niggas’ attention.”

  Mac was surprised. “How come you know about Glocks?”

  “Who don’t know about Glock?”

  ~ * ~

  The sun was setting and Mac was driving Puddin to the señora’s for supper. The kid had earned it. Besides, the old man wanted a Mexican beer, a frosted Negra Modelo, dark and with a thick head and cold enough to hurt his eyes. Mac was exhausted. His cuts began to creep and sting.

  “Tell you what,” Mac said to Puddin. “I’m tired like I just went ten hard rounds.”

  Puddin smiled; he was proud of the way the old man stood up to the whore and backed down the crowd. “I say more like twenty.”

  “I’ll be too stiff and sore to work tomorrow,” said Mac, “so I’m taking off, okay?”

  “What I do?”

  “I want you to run in the morning and then again in the afternoon. That way we’ll still be on schedule for Colorado Springs.”

  “On top of that,” said Puddin, “I’ll do wind sprints bof times.”

  It was the way champions thought. If Mac could have chosen a son, Puddin was it. He thought of his little boy and his daughters and gagged back a sob.

  Traffic was light, and they made good time on streets that were usually crowded. Strangely, very few people were out, neither black nor Latino. The taco stands and the Chinese takeout joints were empty.

  Mac was depressed. Not because he’d retaliated against Ruby with nigger for honky but because he feared that by jumping on Ruby with nigger that he might have damaged something in Puddin, destroyed the kid’s trust. Mac was so tired he could hardly drive. Tomorrow would be a bitch.

  “Look here,” he said, “about that nigger business back there. It’s important to me you know I don’t feel that way about black folks, okay?, but that I had to get respect. That whore had to know I can talk that racist shit, too. Because if she thought I was a punk, she’da grown on me same as an opponent in the ring, and that bitch was big enough already.” Mac glanced at the kid. “What you need to know is that my talk out there ain’t what’s in this mean old white man’s heart.”

  Puddin said, “Mac, you don’t know you my daddy?”

  Mac swallowed hard. “So we’re square, right?”

  “Sheeuh, nigga’s what that Ruby is, man. Some nasty-ass white bitch talk nigga shit a me, pull a razor?, I call her honky trash in a minute and I shoot the bitch myself.”

  “My baby boy.”

  “But my mama say, what it is makin everybody crazy, is all this Rodney King mess. Say it a field a land mines, say all peoples end up cripple they don’t watch they step.”

  No doubt, thought Mac, but he also knew that there were people out there of every color who loved those land mines. The verdicts from the first Rodney King cop trial hadn’t come in yet, but Mac thought about the charges every day. All of Los Angeles did. From the Vedley to the Harbor, from the beaches to the mountains, the city was like a stretched womb, most people waiting silently, afraid of the monster that might be born. Black political rhetoric was ominous and loud.

  “No justice, no peace,” one black female politician repeatedly croaked into the cameras, the TV channels always ready to oblige her hate.

  Since the beating incident, Mac had seen that blacks were essentially of one mind, saw that most demanded a guilty verdict for an unmerciful and unwarranted beating by white racist cops of a helpless black man already on the ground. Blacks and whites both disregarded the 7.8-mile Highway Patrol pursuit prior to the incident, with King driving at speeds of 110 to 115 miles an hour on the freeway, 85 on surface streets. Instead, people focused on what happened after the chase. When Mac first saw the tape, he did the same. Who could not have experienced dread on seeing the awfulness of the tape? But being an ex-cop, he also knew that what was shown on TV wasn’t always the whole story. What troubled him most, once it was revealed at the trial, was that the tape shown by Los Angeles TV station KTLA had been edited down from eighty-one seconds to sixty-eight. KTLA’s explanation for the thirteen-second cut was that ten of the first thirteen were blurry. KTLA could not satisfactorily explain why the previous three seconds of the tape had been cut. It was during those crucial three seconds that Rodney King charged the officer who landed the first of many blows, in each case using a side-handled metal police baton. It was primarily this officer that viewers saw delivering the majority of the blows struck by the cops on that surrealistic night, blows delivered in an attempt to get King into a felony prone position. According to LAPD regulations, head blows were illegal—unless a suspect attacked an officer.

  What the tape didn’t show was King’s resistance to arrest, that he had, from the ground, flung officers off like pillows when they tried to swarm him, a technique developed by police precisely to do minimum harm to suspects resisting arrest.

  The media was quick to report that fifty-six blows had been thrown, but what the public didn’t know until the trial was that just over half the blows actually landed. Only three were power blows. Mac knew three power shots had to be true, otherwise there would have been significantly more damage to King than his fractured face and shinbone—he’d have been dead. As to blows to the head, only one could be verified, the first one, which was in response to King’s attack.

  The officers were accused of racist postarrest comments as well. But Mac had seen enough combat in the Pacific, on the streets, and in the ring to know that remarks made by victors as well as losers were generated by exhaustion and adrenaline overload, that jokes were attempts by the mind to relieve convulsed stomachs and twitching nerves and pissed pants. Hadn’t he himself just said and done things to Ruby he would never think of doing under normal circumstances? Mac was nonetheless unconditionally opposed to the use of excessive force. But that didn’t keep him from being furious with politicians, black and white, yammering for justice— justice being a code word for either white convictions or black violence.

  None of this had affected Mac’s relationship with his many black friends and acquaintances in the fight game, and despite the heightened racial tensions, he had been surprised by the absence of hostility he had experienced as he traveled daily through South Central Los Angeles prior to his incident with Ruby.

  ~ * ~

  The Acapulco was nearly empty as Mac and Puddin entered. Always before, the Señora would smile and wave them over, no matter how busy she was. Not this time. Four young male blacks, wearing oversized $400 leather team jackets and new $150 basketball shoes, stood talking quietly with her at the cash register. Mac had never seen them in the café before. He judged the oldest at twenty The youngest, nicknamed Fridge, looked sixteen. The two others were eighteen or so. Each was at least six feet tall. Fridge was thin, maybe 160 pounds, same as the twenty-year-old. The other two were 200-pounders. Each had his baggy pants slung halfway down around his ass, six inches of underwear showing. Their jackets hung on them like outsized cocoons.

  Aside from the four, the place was nearly empty; two tables were occupied with a total of five people, two of them black. Usually the place was full of people unashamedly stuffing themselves.

  Instead of flashing her big smile, the Señora glanced away. Dirty dishes hadn’t been cleared from three tables, one of which had been used b
y a party of four. Empty tables with dirty dishes were never seen at the Acapulco. It was clear to Mac that something was wrong, and he guided Puddin to the rear of the café, where both could sit with their backs to the wall.

  “How about some service?” Mac called out, acting like a stranger to the place.

  The señora excused herself and crossed to Mac and Puddin. She took their order without looking at them. She went back to the counter, said something Mac couldn’t hear, and turned to go to the kitchen. The oldest of the group stepped in front of Señora Cabrera, slightly raising a black cane with a brass duck’s-head handle to block her way. Mac drew the Glock, kept it hidden between his knees, and waited.

  The twenty-year-old leader pointed a finger at the Señora. He whispered something, and then he and the others ambled out of the café as if they were leaving a church. Three of them ranged from dark to very dark in color. The leader was close to albino white, except that he had a slight coppery hue to his pockmarked skin. He had green eyes. He wore his kinky auburn hair in lumpy dreadlocks and was ugly as a scab. His Negroid features were misshapen, parts of his face lumpy and looking like they didn’t belong. Mac made them all for criminals, but he also knew that the ugly brick-top would be so easy to finger in a lineup that he’d be spending most of his life in the joint.