The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  Then I called the Missouri Pacific baggage agent, to inquire if my suitcase might be retrieved. It might, he said.

  Then for a couple of hours I moped, pondered, and plotted. Finally I decided to go find Dall and have a talk with him. Perhaps he could help me help her. Or, if he was already trying to help her, perhaps I could help him help her. At any rate, I wanted to see him again. Whatever my reasons had been for avoiding him during my previous visits to Little Rock, I had a good reason now for cultivating him again. My watch said a quarter past three; I would get right on down there; from the phone book I learned that the police headquarters had been moved a block westward on Markham Street.

  But first I had a short letter to post. Borrowing a begrudged sheet of lined paper from Sybil’s Cary Grant letter pad, I sat down to write. The day was becoming sweltering; seemingly the temperature, like an oven preheated for a frozen pot pie, had risen steadily from the moment I first stepped off the train and now it was insufferably close to that of the human body’s natural degree. Globules of sweat congregated in the fringes of all my hairy places and, congregating, became heavy and fell, trickled, lathered me. In parody of that ubiquitous john-wall ditty which admonishes “No matter how much you shake your peg the last few drops go down your leg” I conceived an apt analogue for this occasion: “No matter how much you stir the breeze the last few drops get to your knees.” Blotting them up somewhat by tapping the baggy knees of my seersucker trousers, I recomposed my mind for the work at hand, and worked fast: “Darling Pamela, Your letter received and dully noted. Bermuda sounds nice, but the fact of the matter is I’m frightfully indisposed. Things are a bit hot here, and getting hotter. Get me? Anyway, my schedule is packed for the next two weeks, at the inside, and beyond then I cannot honestly foresee. If you should become too bored or restless in the meantime, let me suggest that you join some local little theater group. Experience on the stage, I have learned, can have several rewarding effects—particularly for taciturn females. Ta ta, Clifford.”

  I didn’t even use an air-mail stamp.

  Chapter seventeen

  After posting the letter at the corner mailbox, I took a bus down to the new police headquarters, a low, long, austerely modern edifice, where I learned that Dall was out on a call and would be back shortly. I sat down on a bench to wait. Sitting there I tried to pre-formulate what I would say to him, what I would ask him. I could not recall a single occasion when we had discussed anything more serious or intellectual than the relative merits of spinners and flies in the capturing of sunperch and bream. Our long and abiding friendship had been based almost entirely on a nearly maniacal love of physical sport and contact, through which our habitual greeting to each other was not a weak “Hiya!” nor a formal handshake, but instead a playful pummeling, with fists and elbows and the butting of heads and shoulders, until one or the other of us cried uncle.

  Now he was coming down the hallway, followed by a couple of his patrolmen, and he was beautiful. His light-gray epauleted short-sleeved shirt bore its gold badge and purple chevrons like magic heraldry ensigning his new power among men. From a heavy bullet-studded belt hung low around the hips of his dark-blue trousers he harnessed a formidable black-sheathed service revolver, whose demeanor suggested he knew how to use it, and had. Love of beer and spaghetti had made him a little less lean and lanky, but the face beneath the crushed-crown white cap was the same old Dall: the green lynx eyes below two heavy brown hedgerow brows growing toward each other in the center above the steep cliff of a craggy nose, the wide, colorless mouth which even immobile seems to mutter “crud,” the cudgel jaw cleft neatly by a dimple in the center of the chin. A gorgeously ugly old boy.

  I always wanted to slug a cop. All men, resentful of authority, have this yen; but few ever discharge it. I did.

  Rising from my bench to meet him, I caused him to halt and to study my face for the rapid moment necessary for recognition. Then, in the instant that his hard features softened at the sight of me, I let him have it, a swift short-arm smash to the pit of his muscle-bound gut. Then I stepped back, ready to parry his counter-blows.

  The ceiling descended. The floor ascended. Factory whistles celebrated New Year’s, and wedding bells tolled; for a while asteroids, meteors, and other luminaries flashed and flickered in the dark sky, but then even those were extinguished, and all was completely black and still.

  Much later, dawn came up out of the east accompanied by a waterfall, a roaring Niagara over which I had plunged, under which I was left spluttering. The light of that dawn revealed, hanging in the sky, a giant arm, the hand of which held an enormous Dixie cup upended, dripping the last drops of the cascade. So terrible was the spectacle that night returned for a while more, and then, when the timid dawn tried again, that same Brobdingnagian hand was slapping both of my cheeks in rapid, jolting succession.

  It was the old familiar voice, calling to me out of the lost past, which restored me, brought me back to life. “Nub? Hey, Nub? You all right?” I tried to come out of it, but every time I neared the surface, that flat palm would smash against the side of my face a couple of times and sink me under again. “Nub?” Bang, smack. “Say something, boy.” Smack, bang. “Come on, snap out of it.” Bang smack, smack bang.

  I gasped enough breath to say, “Goddammit, you dumb prick, quit slapping me and maybe I can get up.”

  He laughed. I raised my head, gyrating it achingly on my neck, and saw that I was sitting in a chair against the wall of a little room. The floor was rocking, and I thought we were on board ship, but through the window I could see the Health Center across the street, which was rocking too. “Please remain seated while the room is in motion,” I said drunkenly, then groaned loudly several times and asked, “What happened?”

  He pulled a chair up in front of me, and sat down backward on it. “Jack hit you with his billy,” he said, “then Curly got a double-nelson on you and threw you to the floor. They didn’t know you from Adam, and I had one hell of a time trying to tell em who you was.” He doubled his fists and made a few swinging motions at me and said, “But we’re alone now. You want to mix it up?”

  “No, thanks,” I moaned, and mopped my brow. “Could I have a glass of water?”

  “You just did,” he grinned, and pointed to the front of my shirt, which was soaked. “But I’ll get you one to drink, if that’s what you want.” And he left the room.

  I always do the wrong thing. Leave it to me to botch up something so simple as a pleasant greeting. My good intentions always, always backfire.

  He returned with another Dixie cup and a handful of paper towels. While I drank the water he wiped my wet hair and face and tried to mop up some of the water on my coat and shirt. Then he rubbed the back of my neck vigorously and pointed to the empty opposite corner of the room and said, “Okay, kid. Round two. Get in there and murder that sonofabitch!” So conditioned had I been to the sound of those words that I immediately rose groggily to my feet. He laughed, and the absurdity of my Pavlovian behavior dawned on me at the same instant that my head reeled in the sickening aftereffect of its ordeal. My legs gave way and I spun around as I fell, but he caught me and hugged me to him. We remained there thus, clenched in each other’s arms, for a long moment.

  “You old half-assed bastard,” he said.

  “You old rattleboned beanstalk,” I said.

  “You dinky little stinking turd,” he said.

  My eyes moistened in solemn rapture. “You worthless old egg-sucking polecat.”

  His voice choked with emotion, he replied, “You runty shit-eating dog.” Then he held me off at arm’s length and looked at me. “Where you been for the last goddamn two hundred years, anyway?”

  Then we sat down and I brought him up to date. He had difficulty understanding why I remained married to Pamela, after all the complaints I had once written to him about her. He also wanted to know why I had stopped writing him, and why I hadn’t been by to see him the last couple of times I had visited Little Rock. I sai
d the pressure of my work was the reason behind both shortcomings, but I hoped to make it up to him now. He said I seemed to have grown a bit since he saw me last. I told him I was rich enough now to buy elevator shoes. Then I expressed surprise that he had got himself promoted to sergeant, and I said I wondered how a dumb yokel like him could have accomplished It.

  His eyes narrowed at me and he said, “Listen, buster, I like to of got myself killed more times than you ever jacked off.”

  “Yeah, I read the papers,” I said, hinting at the appearance of his picture in Sunday’s Gazette. “No kidding, how long’ve you been wearing those stripes?”

  “Nigh on to five years, buddy,” he said. “If you read the papers, do you ever recall seeing something about a little trouble we had a few years back when they started stickin the niggers into the schools?”

  “Certainly,” I said, but flinching at the sound of his use of that word. For years I was properly careful to say nigro, until Pamela pointed out to me that it is nee-gro and should always be capitalized.

  “Okay, then,” he said. “Maybe you read about the second battle, not that first one in ’57 when the whole mess started, but the next one, in ’59, when a bunch of rednecks took a notion to see if they couldn’t put something over on us cops.”

  I think I read about that one, too,” I said. “Wasn’t that the one where the police got sued afterward by a bunch of innocent bystanders?”

  “Yeah, only they wasn’t all so innocent as you say. There was a bunch of real mean bastards in that mob. We call it the Battle of Fourteenth and Schiller because that’s the intersection where we stopped em. There was about three hundred of em comin up Fourteenth Street, headin for the high school, looked like a goddamn parade with flags and all, and there wasn’t but about two dozen of us out there with the Chief. The Chief stopped em and looked em right in the eye and he said, ‘We’re not going to stand for any foolishness.’ But they yelled ‘Nigger lover!’ and ‘Get the Chief!’ and then three of the biggest guys rushed toward him, with the whole damn mob backin em up. I got the first one and smeared him, and the Chief got the second one; and then the third guy, a mother-fuckin elephant must of weighed over three hundred pounds, he come rushin at us, and I tried that trick you showed me once where you slam your knee into his balls to double him and then clip him on the back of the neck, and that old boy went down so hard there’s still a dent in the asphalt out there, and by that time the other men had turned the rest of the tough ones back and we had the fire hoses goin on em. Next day the Chief give me these stripes.”

  “Did that experience improve your attitude toward the Negroes?” I asked, careful to give it a long e.

  “Hell,” he said and glowered at me. “One thing you Boston carpetbaggers aint never got straight yet is that we was just doin what we was told to do and not cause we wanted to. The only thing kept me from being on the other side was this here uniform on my back.”

  “All right,” I said, palms outward. “You would’ve made as good a redneck as any of those other racists or rabble-rousers.”

  “You damn right,” he said.

  “All right,” I said, wondering why a level-headed and usually compassionate fellow like Dall could have fallen victim to racist feelings. Then I asked, “Dall, you old flat-headed flatfoot, what you aim to do with yourself by and by?”

  “Boy, I’m gonna make chief one of these days, you wait and see. Come September I’m eligible for lieutenant, and then, by God, you watch my dust.”

  “That’s your ambition, is it, to be Lord of the Fuzz?”

  “You just wait.”

  “Then if I get a ticket for jaywalking, you’ll fix it for me, huh?”

  “Any old time.” He winked.

  “That’s good, because I’ve been thinking about moving back to this town.”

  “No shit?” His bushy eyebrows arched capward.

  “I’ve been thinking about it,” I said noncomittally. Then I told him of the yearning I’d had, that same paralysis of the intellect which chronically corrupts all the wandered sons of that town and makes them keep coming home, sometimes to stay, long after they have no further use for it. I did not tell him of my memory of oak-leafed tunnels down summer night streets, or of the fragrance of shortleaf pine and sweetgum on winter mornings, or of the baking of bread, or of the October winds and June clouds and the grass now of April. Instead I mentioned such things as going fishing or sitting on the front porch in one’s undershirt with a beer after supper in summer, or watching the Razorback football games. These are the things that may be mentioned between us, man to man. The others, the magnetic baits hidden deep in that dull city which draw us recurrently to it, are unutterably vague and unfathomable; it is useless to talk about them. Dall, having never left home, would have no conception of their poignant, piquant sway anyway.

  It’s a right nice old town,” he agreed, his eyes glued vacuously to some blank block of stone in the building across the street, and there followed a long silence, a lull, without any specific meaning, in the course of our talk. Somebody once told me that when a conversation lags, the time magically always is either twenty minutes past the hour, or twenty till it. I looked at my watch. It said four-forty.

  A minute passed, and then I asked, “How’s your wife, Dall?”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Well?” I said. “How’s the wife and kids?”

  He was still gazing out the window. “Aint got no wife,” he said. Then he swung his head to face me; his eyes refocused fiercely on me and suggested the scrutiny of a vicious cop about to administer the third degree to a hapless suspect. “Yeah, Nub, I aint got no wife nor kids no more.”

  “Well?” I waited politely. Had they been in a car wreck or something?

  “I’ve a mind not to tell you about it, but you’d worm it out of me sometime, wouldn’t you?”

  “I just might,” I said, returning his fierce glare.

  “That’s what I mean, you snoopin little creep.” His tone was not entirely hostile. “Okay, it was like this. You know she was a skittish gal, one of them Newton County jobs come from up toward Jasper, flighty as a humminbird, anyway she told me once she’d leave me if I ever hit her, and I sure had never hit her before nor even acted like I would, but I did then, just to see if she was givin me a bunch of junk, you know, just a light little smack, you wouldn’t never of felt it, and sure enough, she up and lit out for home with the two kids and I aint seen her since, last I heard tell she’d taken up with some bricklayer up around Jasper, you got any more questions?”

  I shook my head. We looked each other over for a while, both of us obviously trying to think of a better subject to talk about. It was still too soon, I felt, to mention Margaret. One of the other cops, the one he called Curly, stuck his head in the door and said, “Sergeant, there’s a call for you out here,” and Dall left me for a while.

  When he returned, I asked politely, “Am I keeping you from anything important?”

  “Naw, it’s pretty slow this time of day, unless there’s a bad wreck somewheres or somethin. Make yourself at home.”

  I shifted my weight in the chair. “Well, Dall—” I said.

  “What about your wife?” he asked. “Did she come with you?” I shook my head. “Good,” he said. “Me and you are both bachelors again, huh? We can have us a few good old times.” I said that would suit me fine.

  He was stuffing a pipe with tobacco. I suppose I had expected he would chew Day’s Work or roll himself a cigarette with Bull Durham or chomp on a fat King Edward, but then he stuck the pipe into his mouth and began lighting it, and I saw how well it seemed to fit his scraggy mountaineer’s face. I waited until he had his furnace puffing, and then without further ado I bluntly said to him, “Tell me about Margaret Austin.”

  “Who?” he said and made several rapid puffs—too rapid—on his pipe. “Oh,” he said. “That old girl you used to run around with back in the old days. Yeah. Sort of a black-haired girl with a nice figure, but kind
of a wallflower. Yeah, I remember old Marge. What about her?”

  “You tell me,” I said, giving him my old Stoney squint which, he damn well knew, meant: Come on, let’s not beat around the bush.

  “Me?” he said. “Why, son—”

  “Let’s start with the Slater play,” I suggested. “You advised her, for some reason, that she ought to—”

  The chair he was leaning back in snapped abruptly forward. “Goddamn,” he said, peering at me up close. “I should of knowed. You aint been home two days yet and already you got them big ears tuned in on everything in town. Most likely you know so much already, maybe you should tell me.”

  “I don’t know anything but what she told me, and that wasn’t much.”

  “You seen her?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “Last night. I met her at a movie.”

  His mouth fell open. Then he closed it and spoke: “Oh. It was you, then. I’ll be.” I gave him a puzzled expression, and he explained. “I had two or three of the boys out lookin for her most of the night. That crazy, screwed-up old—” he became red in the face, his neck muscles bulging; it took him a moment to get himself under control “—mother of hers, that…that bat, she wore herself plum near to death worrying about Margaret, and then she just called me a minute ago—matter of fact, that was her talkin to me on the phone just then—and she told me what happened. She said some man picked up Marge and brought her home and was fixin to take her upstairs to rape her or somethin, when she—the mother—come along just in time and run him off. So it was you, huh?” He paused, grinning and eying me narrowly. “Now of course I long since learned not to put no stock by what her mother says, so I figgered whoever it was didn’t really aim to rape her or nothing noways. But you might just tell me what you did happen to have in mind.”