Darktown

by Thomas Mullen

  One of the men who’d been clubbed was rubbing the back of his neck. “Y’all are supposed to yell ‘Police’ when you come up behind a man. Even the white cops know that.”

  “We did yell ‘Police,’ ” Boggs said. “You might not’ve heard it because you had that fellow’s arm wrapped around your head, but we said it.”

  Some of them, or perhaps all, smelled of drink.

  “You got your partners in there pouring it all down the drain, don’t you?” Boggs asked the cook.

  “Why you all troubling us like this?” the cook asked. “Fellows need a place where they can relax, and I provide it. I hardly ever have any trouble, and when I do, I make ’em take it outside.”

  One of the men started to snore.

  The chef leaned closer to Smith and whispered, “I done taken care of your boys.”

  Smith’s expression told the cook that getting this close was a mistake. As was his comment.

  “ ‘My boys’? Didn’t know I had any boys.”

  So the cook had paid off some white cops. At least, that’s what Smith and Boggs assumed. Surely none of the other Negro cops would have taken a cent from this man. Right?

  “You need something, just ask,” the cook said, looking sheepish now. “That’s how it works.”

  “I need you to go inside, sir,” Smith said. “Before one of us does something you’ll regret.”

  The cook finally obeyed, shaking his head.

  “Maybe I should go to college, too,” said the youngest of the fighters, his cheeks not just unshaven but probably never-been-shaven. “Then I can be a cop and boss other colored folk around.”

  Smith stepped closer and bent down in search of the kid’s eyes. “It’s always the one that ain’t been clubbed yet who’s still talking.”

  One of the men who had been clubbed muttered for the kid to shut his barn door.

  “How old are you, kid?” Boggs asked. “Y’all are getting a schoolboy drunk?”

  “He ain’t no schoolboy.”

  “Truancy, too, then,” Smith said. No one bothered to reply.

  “I’ll go to the call box,” Boggs said.

  Sighs and mutters and very quiet curses. They knew the call box meant the wagon, which meant arrest, which meant a night in the station, which meant white cops.

  “C’mon, man,” one of them whined. “Just let us go home.”

  “Call him ‘officer,’ ” another one recommended. “They like that.”

  “We also like it when the men of this neighborhood act like men and not a bunch of fools,” Boggs said. “It’s a Wednesday night, for God’s sake.”

  “Make the call,” Smith said.

  Neither of them wanted to involve any white cops tonight, especially after the stunt Dunlow had pulled the other night, but they needed a wagon to get this many men in jail. Boggs headed down the street—the nearest call box was a block away.

  More mutters and curses. One of them said, “Y’all ain’t no different from the white ones.”

  That such a remark could come only moments after they had demonstrated just how different they were—no bribes, no thank you, no way—enraged Smith. He held his club across his body, left hand gripping the end, and said, “Next one to open his mouth is gonna wake up in Grady with no teeth.”

  At least two of them were snoring now. The ones who were still awake stared at their shoes.

  Boggs and Smith stood for a full hour before the wagon finally appeared. Only two of the men they’d arrested were awake. As the wagon pulled up to the curb, Boggs spied a head in the back.

  The wagon didn’t turn off its engine, and the driver didn’t open his door. Boggs stood guard, annoyed to realize what was happening, while Smith walked over to the driver.

  “Sorry, boys,” the driver said. “Gonna have to wait on me to process this one.”

  In the back of the wagon was a white woman, long dark hair, late thirties. Drunk by the look of her dizzy eyes and unfortunate hair. She glanced at Smith and then back out the other window.

  Arrested black men could not be put in the same wagon as arrested white women. The law. Smith bit back what he wanted to say and merely nodded.

  “I’ll call in another one for you,” the driver said. Smith wasn’t sure if he believed him.

  The wagon drove off.

  “This mean we’re free men?” one of the waiting-to-be-jailed asked.

  Another said, “Ain’t no free men around here,” and someone else laughed.

  A minute of silence, Smith pacing angrily, Boggs stonily still.

  Then the young one informed the officers that he needed to use a bathroom, please.

  Another ninety minutes. All the fighters dead asleep.

  Boggs and Smith felt it like a dare from the white cops. Is it really worth your time? Wouldn’t it have been easier to let them just go home? Why bother? They felt that last unspoken line echoing in their heads. Why bother with any of this?

  Each passing minute made it harder for them to stand there. And each passing minute made them less likely to give in. Their shift would end in another hour, and neither wanted to think about what would happen if the wagon still hadn’t come. They’d endured long waits before, had been forced to stay hours past shift’s end more than once. They would do it again if they had to.

  Just that afternoon Boggs had given a pep talk to Xavier Little. I don’t know if I can take much more of this, Little had confessed. Seeing Dunlow kick that stabbed man the other night, playing with the man’s life so casually, had chilled him. The white cops keep doing things like that in front of me, daring me to stop them. What Dunlow did isn’t even the worst thing I’ve seen. Just the latest. Just the one I have on my mind right now.

  Boggs had resisted asking Little what the worst thing was. He’d told the fellow to buck up, stay strong, pray on it, all those clichés he hated voicing because he didn’t know what else to say. Many of them had confided in each other their fears, their second thoughts that perhaps this occupation wasn’t such a great idea after all. In such moments it was the other fellow’s role to remind his colleague that they were doing this for a reason, that they couldn’t afford to back down, that they would collectively lose so much if any of them put individual concerns first by quitting. Little was a bookish fellow, seemed more suited to working for his uncle’s newspaper. Boggs was worried he’d be the first to fold.

  And now it was Boggs whose spirits needed lifting. He stood in front of these fools he’d arrested and wondered if this was worthwhile.

  Two hours after he had called for a wagon, the thunder started. As if the rain had been awaiting the thunder’s permission, the skies opened, the shower pelting them hard enough that the unconscious men woke up, with no idea where they were.

  A full three hours after Boggs had made the call, another wagon finally arrived.

  The officers woke the men up, all of whom had fallen back asleep. Groggy and sore, some of them looked resigned to their fate, and some looked like they had only the vaguest understanding of what was happening. Then the wagon pulled away and the officers walked north.

  The rain had been intense but brief, gone in twenty minutes. Even with their ponchos, they were drenched. Boggs’s cut forehead was stinging worse than before. Every time they took a step they heard their soaked socks sloshing. They would have blisters in the morning, they knew from experience.

  All Boggs wanted to do was walk. Run, really, but he’d settle for walking. Walk across the entire city, exhaust himself, feel the sweat coat his body. Push himself to new limits, walk ’til he collapsed. Civil war soldiers on both sides had walked miles a day for weeks on end. Slaves walked even farther, no doubt, though usually not in a straight line but the same rows, over and over, endlessly. How far had his forbears walked? Could he make it to any state lines if he started now? But again, Why bother? As if thin
gs were any different in Alabama or North Carolina. Things were as good as they could be for a Southern Negro here, in Atlanta, blocks from Auburn Avenue. At least, that’s what he’d always been told.

  How long would it take to walk to Chicago, where so many people had ventured in search of a better life?

  He worried that maybe he was just weak. When he’d returned from the war, bitter and angry from his meaningless time spent at that army camp, soul afire from all the insults his white superiors had leveled at him, his father had told him that maybe Lucius’s relatively comfortable upbringing in the Sweet Auburn community had insulated him from the hatred the reverend had grown up with. Those sage words hadn’t been what Lucius wanted to hear, but he feared his father was right.

  Boggs and Smith walked on. The city had been so quiet before the storm but now it was like someone had adjusted the volume, water gushing from downspouts, water dripping from eaves, the random explosions of cars driving into puddles, the secondary showers of rainwater falling from heavy boughs.

  Then they heard new sounds: laughter, and the breaking of a bottle.

  “Wait,” Smith said.

  More laughter, and Smith turned into an alley. Boggs didn’t want to follow, wanted to just walk and walk. But follow he did.

  The alley snaked between two squat brick buildings that, by the looks of them, had been planned as housing for a nearby mill expansion that had never happened. It was home to an odd-jobs Negro named Andrews who they’d seen a few times while monitoring Chandler Poe, the bootlegger that Judge Gillespie had let off. Smith crept up to an open window and looked inside, Boggs just behind him.

  Three men sitting at a table, playing cards, chips and coins scattered between them. Glasses of yellowish liquid standing sentry by each pile. They saw Andrews, Poe, and a portly, balding man Boggs didn’t recognize.

  Smith saw a bottle near his feet. He picked it up and, without warning his partner, tossed it against the side of the building. A pop, glass shards chinking all over. Boggs jumped back.

  The laughter from inside stopped. Smith ducked his head below the window and crept farther into the back. Boggs flattened himself against the wall.

  From inside the voices were asking each other what it was and who was there, each of them sounding drunker and more confused than the one before him. One of them said they should check it out, exactly the bit of stupid bravery Smith had been counting on.

  The men stumbled out, down the three wooden steps and into the alley, nothing but silhouettes until they were close enough for their faces to be caught in the lamplight that shone through a window. None of them had thought to bring a flashlight or even a candle, and none of their eyes were as adjusted to the dark as the two cops’ they still couldn’t see.

  Smith wanted to use his fists, would have greatly preferred the sensation in his knuckles and up through his arm and shoulder, but he didn’t care to leave such evidence on his flesh. So it was with his billy club that he swung crosswise against Poe’s left cheek. The cracking bone was the only sound as the bootlegger fell.

  This is dumb, dumb, dumb, Boggs was thinking as Smith drove the butt of his club into Andrews’s stomach, doubling him over.

  Andrews was vomiting and hadn’t even fallen yet when Smith turned his attention to the third man, who was backing up as quickly as a drunk man could. “No no no, c’mon,” the man said, and he got his wish, as Smith chose to ignore him and instead picked Poe up off the ground.

  “Police!” Boggs shouted at the bald man. “This your house?”

  “No! No, sir!” the man said, backing up again until he’d tripped over the wooden steps.

  “Then get yourself back home.”

  The man ran off. A second later Boggs could hear him trip and fall again, then keep running.

  Poe was trying to break free of Smith, who pressed him against the wall and then jabbed his club into the bootlegger’s ribs. Poe wailed.

  Boggs kicked, not too hard, at the fallen Andrews. “Back in your house, now!”

  Andrews seemed only too happy to obey, moving faster than Boggs would have thought possible.

  Smith let Poe fall to the ground. He swung at the bootlegger again, and again.

  “Take your goddamn low-life self out of my goddamn neighborhood!” Each of Smith’s curses was accompanied by another swing. Poe enclosed his head in a protective ball of arms and hands, not that it helped.

  “Where your white boy at now, huh? Where’s your cracker cop now?” Again with the club, breaking fingers. “How much you paying him, you son of a bitch?”

  Boggs turned and looked out of the alley, hoping not to see any bedroom lights flicker on.

  “I’ll pay you more, I’ll pay you more!”

  Wrong answer. Smith swung again, harder than before. Saliva hanging from his chin.

  “This ain’t Dunlow’s neighborhood no more, you understand? It’s mine! It’s my goddamn neighborhood! Take your goddamn booze somewhere else!”

  “Okay!” Poe pleaded. “Okay!”

  Smith crouched down closer. “Oh, you’re so damned smart, ain’t you? You got the white cops and the judges behind you, huh? Well, you don’t have me, got it? You do not have me, and if I see you in this neighborhood again, this will all seem like a goddamn slap on the wrist, got it?”

  “I got it, I got it!”

  Smith stood again, the tension in his shoulders seeming to predict yet another swing, so Boggs stepped forward and clamped his hand on it. “Enough.”

  Smith didn’t reply, didn’t even move his head to acknowledge that, but he didn’t swing again either. Just stood there, recovering. He hoped Poe would be stupid enough to say something more, but Poe wasn’t.

  In twenty minutes their shift would be over, Boggs told himself. In sixty minutes he would try to forget this as he laid down his weary bones. Even though he knew he would never forget it, and he sensed like an added weight on his shoulders that this evening would haunt him and his partner in more ways than one.

  14

  MORE THAN ONCE Rake had imagined himself accidentally shooting his partner. Just imagined it. Not actually planned it. Not actually sketched it out or hidden a drop weapon. Not actually asked some random ex-con to do the job for him in exchange for lenience next time. Things weren’t quite that bad. But he had certainly imagined how nice it would be if his partner, by chance, accidentally died. Perhaps Dunlow might have a heart attack soon. Perhaps he would start bullying the wrong Negro, would pick on some strapping lad who had a nasty grudge and a weapon in his back pocket. Perhaps, if that happened, Rake would deliberately wait an extra second or two before intervening, just to make sure Dunlow was dead first.

  Dunlow had been a beat cop for twenty years, and though he seemed to think this made him a better beat cop, superior somehow, what it really meant was that he’d never been promoted. Given the increasing number of beatings and shakedowns Rake had seen the man perform in their first few weeks together, Rake couldn’t help but wonder what Dunlow might be holding back for later. What greater misdeeds he was concealing from Rake’s view. Was Dunlow testing Rake, hoping to see how far he would go to do things Dunlow’s way? Had Rake failed a test when he hadn’t taken part in a bribe? Had he failed by calling the ambulance and wagon the night Boggs had been injured?

  And what, if anything, did Dunlow have to do with the death of the Ellsworth girl?

  “Anybody looking into who killed that girl in the trash?” he asked from the passenger seat, the night after his midnight talk with Mr. Calvin.

  “I heard it was her old man.”

  “Didn’t he live out in the country somewhere?”

  “Yes, but they do have trains. I’m hearing he came back into the city and got in a fight with her, shot her dead.”

  That a father might shoot his daughter after a heated argument wasn’t as unlikely as some would prefer to believe, Rak
e knew. If you’re going to be killed, you probably know the person who’s going to do it, and you may even be related to them. Love and lust, pride and insult, heat of the moment, things instantly regretted. But to then throw your daughter’s corpse out like garbage? For Rake, that stretched the bounds of credulity, but for Dunlow, Negroes were capable of any atrocity.

  “Fight over what?”

  “She was sleeping with white men.”

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  “Around. Some of us actually talk to people when we walk our beat, rookie. Some of us actually get dirty, immerse ourselves in the life of the neighborhood. You’d be wise to do more of that yourself.”

  “What do you know about that fellow we pulled over a couple of weeks ago,” Rake asked, trying to sound casual. “Brian Underhill?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “That girl in the trash, Boggs says she was the girl they saw in Underhill’s car that night. Said he hit her, then she got out and ran.” And then you let the man go.

  “Boggs says?!” The car swerved from Dunlow’s reaction. He stared at his partner. Gritted teeth. If eyes could be gritted, they would have been, too. “You’re getting tips from the nigger cops? Are you goddamn crazy?”

  He pulled onto the side of the road. Rake stared out the front window for a moment to escape the heat radiating from his partner’s face.

  “What the fuck do you think you’re doing, consorting with them?”

  “Dunlow, Jesus, Boggs mentioned something about her that time he and I were waiting on an ambulance. That’s hardly consorting.” Later he would regret how quickly he had disavowed his talk with Boggs. But the force of Dunlow’s reaction had startled him, and he could sense his partner busily erecting mental barriers to the other questions Rake had wanted to ask.

  Dunlow nodded, realizing he’d gotten too worked up. He pulled them back onto the road.