Darktown

by Thomas Mullen

  Twenty blocks away from Boggs and Smith, Officer Denny Rakestraw was dividing himself in two again.

  Standing in an alley off Decatur Street, a colored section of town, though he and his partner were white. Staring up at the sliver of moon above him, perfectly framed between the tops of the two brick buildings. Listening to the sound of an approaching westbound freight train slowly, slowly trudge its way from the downtown yards. Then looking at his shiny cop shoes. Then turning to look behind him at the squad car they had left on the side of the road, lights not blinking because his partner, Lionel Dunlow, said he didn’t want the attention.

  Dunlow hit the Negro again. “I said, did you hear what I said, nigger?”

  The Negro was trying to say something, Rakestraw could tell, but Dunlow was holding him too tightly around the throat.

  Then the sound of soles scuffing, and Rakestraw’s attention was drawn to the mouth of the alley again. Two silhouettes were watching them.

  “Dammit, clear that out,” Dunlow instructed his young partner.

  Rakestraw took a step toward the two silhouettes. They were either young men or teenagers, tall but slight, hardly a threat. Drawn here by the sound of the beating, not any desire to intervene.

  “Beat it!” Rakestraw yelled in his lowest register, bass notes practically shaking dust from the mortar in the brick walls. The shadows beat it.

  Then another swing from Dunlow and the Negro was on the ground.

  “Thought we didn’t want attention,” Rakestraw said.

  This constituted a significant workout for Officer Dunlow. Sweat ran down his cheeks, and his cap was askew. His belt was strained by his forty-some-odd-year-old belly, and he was panting even though he’d thrown only five or six punches. Failed physicals were in his immediate future.

  Rakestraw hadn’t thrown a punch himself, had in fact barely moved, yet beneath his uniform his skin, too, was slick. Not from exertion but the opposite, the stress of holding himself back, the anxiety of watching this again.

  “You’re right,” Dunlow said, catching his breath. He stepped closer to the loudly breathing mound that, minutes ago, had been a Negro walking alone, a man Dunlow suspected of bootlegging moonshine. Dunlow looked down at the mound. “We come to an understanding, boy?”

  This was a phrase Rakestraw had heard his partner use so often now that it echoed in his sleep. Dunlow and perpetrators came to an understanding, Dunlow and witnesses came to an understanding, even Dunlow and the judges before whom he testified came to an understanding. The man seemed confident that he possessed a vast reservoir of knowledge, which he in his goodwill shared with those around him.

  “Yeah, yeah. I unnerstand.” It sounded funny because some teeth were missing.

  Rakestraw saw that flicker in his partner’s eyes, something he’d seen a few times now. It foretold very bad things indeed. So Rakestraw stepped forward and put a hand on his partner’s shoulder. Dunlow was taller by two inches; that and the age difference made this feel uncomfortably like a son trying to coax his drunk daddy back from the brink of slapping Ma around some.

  “Dunlow,” Rake said.

  Dunlow looked back at Rake like he barely recognized him for a second, like maybe he’d actually expected to see a son and not his partner. Dunlow did have sons, two of them, in their teens and by all accounts hell-raisers who lacked rap sheets only because of their father’s occupation. The veteran cop’s eyes were fiery and he appeared on the verge of taking a swing at this junior interloper, the way he probably had numerous times to his sons. Then he recognized Rake and returned to where he was.

  Rake said, “Made yourself clear, I think.”

  “Yeah.”

  But not before a final kick in the gut for emphasis, and the lump on the ground hissed a long inhalation, then silence, like he was afraid to let it out. By the time he exhaled, the two cops were gone from the alley.

  Rake chose to believe that his partner’s extreme response to the bootlegger was due to a passionate desire to enforce the city’s alcohol ordinances. He chose to believe a lot of things about Dunlow. Such believing took work, not unlike religious faith, the devout belief in things that could not be proven. Because in the case of the not-terribly-­godlike Dunlow, there often was strong evidence to the contrary. In the weeks since Rake had taken his oath, he had seen Dunlow beat at least a dozen men (usually Negroes) rather than arresting them, had seen him instruct a few men on what to say if and when they needed to stand witness at a trial, and had seen him take a handful of bribes from bootleggers and numbers runners and madams.

  There was a lot that Rake was learning about his new occupation. He had survived against steep odds for years in Europe as an advance scout, had been alone for long stretches and had wisely figured the difference between threats and opportunities, collaborators and spies. Back home in Atlanta, however, he was finding the moral territory more difficult to chart than he’d expected.

  Rake wondered if there was a particular reason Dunlow had beaten this Negro, a particular message he’d been sending, and, if so, was it any more nuanced than the message Rake’s own dog sent whenever he lifted his leg on the neighborhood walk. In such cases, Rake rationalized that his job was just to hold on to the leash, hold on to the leash.

  So Rake stood there and tried to divide himself in half. One half of him would hold tight to his moral compass, that small wobbly thing that prevented him from beating a stranger without cause. The other half of him would learn everything he could from Dunlow and his fellow officers, the surprising and often counterintuitive pieces of advice on how to survive in Darktown.

  “I’ll drive,” Rake said, opening the driver’s door before his elder could object.

  Dunlow sat in shotgun and peeled off his gloves, sucking in his breath.

  “Y’all right?” Rake asked.

  “Bastard had a hard head.”

  “Sounded like it.”

  “You know the average nigger skull is nearly two inches thicker’n ours?”

  Rake wasn’t the type to indulge such comments. But he didn’t feel he had much choice around Dunlow, so he went for the neutral, “I did not know that.”

  “Read it in a journal. Phrenologists.”

  “I’ve been reading the wrong journals, I guess.”

  “I ain’t surprised, college boy.” Dunlow called him that even though Rake hadn’t graduated, doing only two years before the war changed everything. Fluent in German thanks to an immigrant mother and two years of courses at UGA, his skill had been prized indeed. “Anyway, explains a lot, don’t it? Not just the lack of room for a fully evolved brain, but, you know, your basic hard-headedness and all.”

  “His skull looked plenty malleable to me.”

  Dunlow made a fist, then extended his fingers. He had double-­jointed thumbs. He could extend them all the way back to his wrists, a gruesome circus trick—he liked to surprise newcomers by doing that after opening a bottle of Co-Cola, crying in pain for a moment, receiving a horrified reaction from the witness, and then he’d bust a gut laughing. He bragged that he’d been the greatest thumb wrestler in his elementary school, which was exactly the sort of bizarre accomplishment only he would boast about.

  It also meant that, when wrapping his hands around someone’s throat, he had an extra couple of inches of grip, an advantage which he’d just employed.

  Dunlow made a fist again. Rake heard a tendon pop.

  “Ah, shit. That’s better.”

  Then Dispatch came over the radio, mentioning how Negro Officer Boggs was reporting a traffic violation, and did any real cops feel the need to assist? Dunlow picked up the mike and said he’d love to.

  After the white man had driven away, Boggs and Smith had walked to the nearest call box, requesting a squad car to make an arrest. Dispatch had mercifully refrained from commentary as he relayed the information over the wires, and a white
squad car, D-152, had immediately called in to say it was coming. Smith and Boggs were surprised—­usually the white cops took their sweet time responding to anything the colored officers requested. D-152 must have been mighty bored that night.

  Five minutes later, they were walking a few blocks south of Auburn, approaching the National Pencil Factory and its ever-present smell of wood shavings, when they saw the Buick again. It was actually stopped at the end of the next block, obeying a stop sign. It lingered there.

  “What’s he doing?” Boggs asked. “Circling around for something?”

  Boggs imagined himself shooting the Buick’s tires. Which of course would get him fired, or worse. No colored officer had yet discharged a firearm in the line of duty.

  “Maybe he’s given up?” Smith asked. He hurried toward it, not quite running but moving fast enough that his injured knee was very displeased.

  He and Boggs were only ten feet away when they saw the white man hit the girl. Even through the back windshield it was unmistakable, the white man’s gray sleeve lashing out, the passenger’s long hair flailing to the right. The whole car seemed to jump.

  Then the Buick drove on again.

  “Let’s keep after it,” Boggs said.

  The Buick was moving south, and in two blocks they would be near another call box. They could at least update Dispatch as to the car’s location, in case D-152 really was on its way.

  They ran. The Buick still wasn’t going a normal speed, as if it was on the prowl for something. Clearly the driver didn’t see the two cops giving chase.

  Smith’s knee was giving him a rather clear and unadulterated warning that this whole running business had best stop soon. After another block they reached the intersection with Decatur Street, just north of the train tracks. Again the Buick obeyed a stop sign.

  Then its passenger door opened. The woman darted out, her yellow sundress a tiny flame in the dark night until she vanished into an alley.

  The Buick stayed where it was, the door hanging open like an unanswered question. Then the white man leaned over, his pale hand appearing outside the car and grasping drunkenly for the handle. He closed the door and drove on.

  “Chase him or follow her?” Boggs wondered aloud as he and Smith stopped.

  They could have split up. Smith could have pursued the woman and Boggs could have continued his chase of the Buick. But Sergeant McInnis had warned them many times against separating themselves from each other. Apparently, the Department felt that a lone Negro officer was not terribly trustworthy, and that a second Negro officer somehow had a restraining influence on the first. Or something. It was difficult to discern white people’s reasoning.

  “I want to see the son of a bitch written up,” Smith said. “Or arrested.”

  “Me, too.”

  So although only one of them had seen her face, and that just for a second, they let her disappear into the night, which would never release her.

  Boggs sprinted east on Decatur. A half mile ahead of him, the downtown towers were dark. Nearby he could hear freight cars being hitched and unhitched, other behemoths wearily making their way through the night. Smith kept after the Buick, which was headed south now, driving into the short tunnel that cut beneath the tracks. He was losing it. Rats darted in either direction as the Buick splashed a stagnant puddle from that afternoon’s twenty-minute storm. Smith was just about to give up when he heard the familiar horn of a squad car.

  He ran through the tunnel and into a scene strobed by blue lights: the tracks curving away to his left, garbage loose on the street and sidewalk, and a squad car pulled sideways to block the path of the Buick, which had finally pulled over.

  The white cop who’d been driving jumped out of the car, left hand held high, right hand lingering on the butt of his holstered pistol.

  “It’s Dunlow,” Smith said when Boggs made it beside him.

  Dunlow ranked high on Boggs and Smith’s list of most hated white officers. Not that there was an actual list. And not that there were many white cops who did not rank high. Maybe it wasn’t so much that Dunlow was worse than the others; the trouble was that he was an ever-­present problem. The colored officers were only allowed to work the 6–2 shift, and there were only eight of them, so white officers still had occasion to visit what was now the colored officers’ turf. No white cops had ever had Auburn Avenue as a beat before, they’d simply dropped by the neighborhood when they needed a Negro to pin a crime on, or when they felt like taking out their aggressions on colored victims. Otherwise, white cops had avoided the colored neighborhoods. Dunlow, however, seemed to feel rather at home here, though the residents did not feel nearly so warmly toward him.

  “Let me handle him,” Boggs said. He was the more diplomatic of the two, a notion Smith did not like to acknowledge. Even if he knew it to be true.

  They adjusted their caps and ties, made sure their shirttails hadn’t come out, and straightened their postures as they slowly walked up to the white Buick.

  Dunlow arrived at the driver’s door, trailed by his young partner, Rakestraw. Dunlow seemed to look at the driver longer than necessary before speaking. Perhaps he thought this was intimidating. The days when his bulk had been mostly muscle were gone, but he was still a man accustomed to cutting quite a wake.

  “License and registration, please.”

  Boggs had spent his entire life giving such white men as wide a berth as possible. Now he had to work with them.

  So Boggs concentrated on Dunlow’s partner. He walked up beside Rakestraw and leaned into his ear. If Rakestraw was offended at the proximity, he did not show it. They didn’t have much opinion on Rakestraw, who tended to hide in his partner’s long shadow. He likely would prove to be as much of a bastard as Dunlow once they got to know him.

  “He had an adult Negro female in the car with him. She fled on foot, at the corner of Hilliard and Pittman. He’d hit her in the head a block earlier.”

  “You saw it?”

  “They’d been circling around. It just happened a minute ago.”

  Rakestraw offered a neutral expression and the slightest of nods, which could have meant Interesting and could have meant Who cares? and could have meant that he would recommend to the colored officers’ white sergeant that Boggs and Smith be reprimanded for not pursuing the woman.

  The driver handed Dunlow his papers and joked, “They got you babysitting the Africans?”

  “Understand you fled the scene of an accident,” Dunlow replied.

  “Wasn’t no accident. You hear any other car complaining ’bout an accident?”

  “It was a lamppost on Auburn Ave,” Boggs said.

  Dunlow glared at Boggs. He did not seem to appreciate the colored officer’s contribution to the conversation. He extended the paperwork to Rakestraw, who walked back to their car to call in the information. Then Dunlow said to the colored officers, “That’ll be all, boys.”

  Boggs glanced at his partner. Smith was dying to say something, Boggs could tell, but was holding himself back. They hadn’t yet told Dunlow about the assault they’d witnessed. The victim was gone, sure, but a crime is a crime.

  Boggs opened his mouth. He tried to choose his words carefully. But before he could do so, the driver chimed in again, in a drunken singsong, “Back to the jungle, monkeys!”

  Dunlow cracked a smile.

  That approval was all the driver needed: he launched into a rousing chorus of “Yes! We Have No Bananas!”

  Dunlow was grinning broadly at the performance as Boggs met his eyes. Boggs held the look for a moment, hoping that he was passing on silent messages but knowing, despite all his effort and anger, that those messages would not be received.

  The song was getting louder. Boggs couldn’t even look at his own partner, as he would see the rage there, would see the reflection of himself, and he could not abide that.

  Bogg
s and Smith walked away. The flashing blues painted the top of an eastbound freight train on the crossing.

  “Son of a bitch,” Smith cursed.

  Boggs spat on the ground. A cockroach half as long as his shoe scuttled across the sidewalk.

  “Two bucks says they don’t even ticket him,” Smith said.

  Boggs would not take that bet.

  A six-year-old boy named Horace was three blocks from his house when he saw the lady in the yellow dress running. She was pretty, he thought, even though he couldn’t much see her face. Then why did he think she was pretty? He would wonder that, later, when thinking back to this moment.

  He was walking alone late at night because his mother had woken him up and commanded him to. She was very sick and needed the doctor. She’d given Horace careful directions. He had to hurry, for her sake and because if he took too long, he might forget the directions.

  The lady was banging on someone’s front door.

  Horace watched her as he passed, and she must have heard him because she turned and looked at him. Looking at him and then not looking, the way adults do when they realize you’re just a kid and they can forget about you now.

  He walked on. She stopped knocking.

  At the next corner, he looked both ways to cross the street. Then he decided to turn around and see what that lady was up to. He saw her step off the front porch and walk around to the backyard, at which point he couldn’t see her anymore.

  He looked both ways to cross again. This time a car was coming, so he waited.

  The car pulled up to the curb, right where Horace was standing. The door opened on the opposite side, the engine still on, the headlights still too bright in Horace’s face.