Of Time and the River (62 page)

He had seen them standing idly on the corners of the little towns, huge and slovenly, swinging their thonged clubs in the great muttons of their hands, surveying with their great red faces and their wide thin mouths of fathomless cruelty and good nature the crowds that swarmed around them. He had heard their drawling howling accents of the country, that had all of the moisture and distance of the earth in them, and seen their slow minds wake to a mindless and murderous fury. Once as a child he had seen one of them, a ponderous giant so huge he lurched from side to side when he walked, and seemed to fill up the street with his size, beat a drunken old man—a little howling integument of bone and gristle— to death with his club, smashing the little old man across the skull until the blood rushed out in torrents through his sparse silvery hair, lacing its way in channels of brilliant red across his face and through his beard until it seemed incredible so small and old a man could have such fountains of bright blood in him.

And these huge creatures evoked for Eugene a whole history of this earth and people, monstrous, savage, and unutterable—a congruent and unspeakable legend which he knew, and all of them knew, down to the roots, and which he could not speak about and had to speak about, somehow, or die. For in these men there was evident not only the savage and mindless energy of the earth itself, with all that was wild, sensual, fecund, cruel and good-natured—the whole weather of life—but there was also evident the fear, the shame, the horror that had crushed them beneath its ocean weight of nameless and cowering dread and broken or destroyed their souls.

The two policemen who had clambered into the back seat of the car and now sat on each side of Eugene had these mountainous and fleshy figures, heavy, yet with a kind of solid and ugly softness, meaty, and without the muscular and sinewy leanness of young men. The back seat of the car was a narrow one—the car was a new “sports model” designed only for four people—and now the huge fleshy figures of these two policemen, wedged against Eugene, gave him a feeling of disgust and revulsion.

Nevertheless, the feeling of exultant and jubilant power had not yet worn off, and although he had understood at once, when he saw the men lined up across the street, that they were under arrest and would be taken to the city jail, this sordid prospect caused him no uneasiness whatever. Rather, the feeling of drunken joy was still so powerful in him that everything on earth seemed good, and everything that happened wonderful. He hailed the experience of being arrested and taken to jail exultantly as if some fortunate and glorious experience was in store for him, and his exuberant affection for the world was so great that he even liked the policemen.

Eugene howled with laughter, smote them on their broad backs, flung his arms out and around their shoulders, saying, “By God, you’re fine fellows, both of you, and you’ve got to have a drink!”

At this Robert laughed uneasily, saying to the policemen:

“Don’t pay any attention to him! We haven’t got anything to drink— I swear we haven’t.”

One of them had been rummaging around, however, and now triumphantly produced the jug from its hiding place beneath Blake’s legs.

“Here it is, boys,” he cried, as he displayed it. “I’ve got it.”

The glass jug was almost empty, but there was still perhaps an inch of the whisky at the bottom. Robert’s face had a worried look, for the law was such that a capture of this sort might also mean the confiscation of the owner’s car.

Blake, meanwhile, had been talking in a low, craftily persuasive tone of drunken insinuation and bribery to the policeman up front, saying:

“Now I know you boys don’t want to get us into any trouble. We weren’t doing anything wrong—just having a drink or two together and if you fellows will just forget about this thing, we’ll fix it up right with you—anything you say,” he whispered cunningly, “and get on out of town right now without anyone knowing a thing about it. What do you say, now? Come on! You can do it,” he said, with a leer of ingratiation.

The policeman to whom he spoke smiled good-naturedly, but said nothing. At this moment they drove up before the station-house, a shabby-looking little building of brick, with bars over the window, and which was situated on a side-street.

The shabby street looked warm, faded, sleepy, touched with the ghosts of autumn, but in an instant, as the police got out, opened the doors, and the gay men clambered down drunkenly among them, a rabble-rout of ragged negro boys, grinning, gape-mouthed countrymen with red faces, slouchy-looking barbers in their shirt-sleeves, and wormy-looking loafers, had gathered magically from nowhere, stood in a ring about them and snickered and shuffled about, pressed up to the barred windows and peered in curiously with shaded eyes as the policemen took them into the station.

As they started, Robert held back a little, and said hoarsely, and in a plaintive, troubled voice to the policeman who had him by the arm:

“What are you taking us in here for? We weren’t doing anything. Honest we weren’t. What are you going to do to us?”

The policeman smiled good-humouredly, and then said in a hearty reassuring voice:

“Aw, we’re not goin’ to do anything to you. We were just afraid you boys might run into something and hurt yourself, that’s all. We’re just goin’ to take you in here, and let you stay here a little while until you feel better,” he said, at the same time winking at his fellows.

“Well,” said Robert sullenly, casting a troubled and unwilling glance back at his shining car, “—I want to find my car here when I come out. Now if anything happens to that car, there’s going to be trouble,” he said ominously.

“That car will be right here when you come out the way you left it,” the policeman said heartily. “No one is goin’ to touch it. No, sir! I’ll look after that car myself!” he said, winking again at the others.

“All right, then,” said Robert. “That’s all I want to know.”

Then they marched all of them into the station-house.

The room they entered was a large one, and at first, because they had come into it out of the brightness of the sun, and the swimming confusion of drunkenness and arrest, it was so dark Eugene could not distinguish clearly any of its features. Then he saw that it was a square, rather high room with worn wooden floors, wainscoting of a dark varnished brown, and above that rude calcimined walls of white. In the wall along the street there were, besides the door, two barred windows which were very dirty and not very large, and did not give much light.

At one end of the room, as they came in, there was a row of dull green lockers, probably for the use of the police, and at the other end a high, square, somewhat majestical-looking desk, which was also of a dark maply-brown and which seemed to be built on an elevated rostrum or platform a few inches high. Over this desk a light with a green glass shade was burning, and behind it another large red-faced policeman was sitting. By his look of authority, and the military opulence of his slovenly uniform—for he had epaulets of thick gold braid upon his shoulders that would have glorified the uniform of a general in the Marine Corps—he seemed to be the superior in command.

As for the rest of the room, there was little decoration save for a row of worn and rickety-looking wooden chairs with rounded backs along the wall, and a liberal distribution of large brass spittoons which, to judge from the bare wooden boards around them, were used less frequently as receptacles than as targets, and obviously with uncertain success.

Finally, the whole place had the unforgettable look and smell that police-stations everywhere—and particularly those in little towns— have always had. Its stale dark air was impregnated with the odour of cheap cigars and tobacco-juice, of old worn varnished wood, of human sweat and urine and heavy wool, and with the strong tarry odour of a sanitary disinfectant. And somehow, in this stale, dark and weary odour, there was also a quality of terror, menace, and foreboding—as if the huge and dingy chronicle of human tragedy and error which this grim room had witnessed—all the brutal, shabby sinfulness of a little town—that swarming, hideous and tawdry fraternity of poverty, vice and error—dredged from its rat-holes in the dark depths of old brick buildings, hunted out of cheap hotels, pool rooms, greasy little lunch rooms, nigger shacks, and the rickety wooden brothels near the railroad tracks, with its vast brotherhood of scarred and battered men and women—chain-gang niggers, drunken country youths and cheap bootleggers, grimy prostitutes and all their furtive bawds and pimps, cutters, sluggers, slabbers, slashers, and brawlers—both those who live by vice and those who are its victims—this whole huge earth of pain and crime and misery had left the terrible imprint of its history so indelibly there that the weary air was impregnated with sorrow and fear, and the wood, walls, floors and ceilings were seasoned and ingrained with the substance of human wretchedness.

When they had come in, the police had lined up Eugene’s three companions before the imposing rostrum where the desk officer was sitting, but they had placed him carefully to one side against the wall, like an object too rare and precious for ordinary usage. Now, as the great man behind the desk glowered down gloomily and mistrustfully at them, one of the police spoke to the desk sergeant and, turning toward Eugene with a nod of the head, declared in a full countrified tone:

“This big ‘un here’s the drunkest of the lot.”

And the enthroned law bent his gloomy gaze upon him with a hostile and suspicious look which said as plain as words that it was no more than he had suspected.

Eugene had not realized, in fact, until he felt that wall against his shoulders, how very drunk he was; but he was drunker now than he had ever been in all his life before. He could feel his back slide down along the wall, and then his bending knees would straighten with a jerk, and he would solemnly begin to slide up the wall again. Meanwhile the room swam and rocked and then was still before his eyes: the shapes of things would melt into a smear, and then resolve into their proper selves once more.

And he was conscious that the police were searching him and his companions, patting their pockets to see if they carried weapons, examining wallets and letters for identifications, taking their watches from them, and arraigning them on a series of formal charges, some of which had no bearing on their case whatever. Drunk, assuredly, they were; disorderly they might have been— although it had not seemed so to them; of driving in a reckless manner they were guilty; but of resisting an officer in the performance of his duty they had been, up to that time, spotlessly innocent.

But such were the charges delivered against them in sonorous and countrified tones. And in the solemn voices of the policemen, the knowing and portentous way in which they searched the young men—as if they were a gang of armed desperadoes, and in a manner that smacked of correspondence-school detective methods—and finally in the solemn countrified tones of the one who had pointed to Eugene, saying: “This big ‘un here’s the drunkest of the lot,” there was something comical and ludicrous.

But in their sense of banded authority, in the stubborn almost conspiratorial way in which they had now hardened in a group against the young men, forsaking the good-humoured and jovial manners which had heretofore distinguished them, there was something ugly and revolting—something stupid, provincial, mob- like, and unreasoning, which told the young men plainly that “they had them” now, that they were “foreigners,” therefore suspect, and must bow their heads in silence to the obdurate and capricious tyrannies of a local and, for them, impregnable authority.

At length, the sonorous formalities of their arraignment having been completed, the sergeant having scrawled and written in his ledger, the man looked up and ordered sternly:

“All right, boys! Take ‘em back and lock ‘em up!”

Then the young men were marched back along a corridor into a large two-storeyed room, which had brick walls and cement floors, two rows of dirty barred windows, a grey and gelid light, and a general feel of raw and clammy dankness. This room, which had a harsh angular steel-and-cement newness that the other did not have, seemed to be of more recent construction, and to have been added on to the front part of the jail. In this room, also, there were several rows of cells, ascending in tiers up to the ceiling. When they entered, the place was quiet, but immediately a drunken negress in one of the cells began to bawl and rave and sob, smashing, hammering, and rattling the bars of her cell like a demented ape. There was everywhere a foul rank odour of undrained faecal matter, tempered with the odour of the tarry disinfectant, and cut more sharply with the acrid smell of some ammoniacal fluid.

At the first row of cells they paused, and the police in charge of Robert and Emmet Blake (for Eugene now discovered with a sense of shock that Kitchin was not with them) unlocked the doors of cells two and three and thrust Blake and Robert into them. The last, or end, cell in the row, Eugene now saw was intended for his occupancy and he stood waiting obediently, in the relaxed grip of one of the policemen, until his comrade should unlock the door.

Suddenly, as the door swung open, and Eugene stepped forward into the cell, his vision cleared somewhat, and he saw a young negro standing in the cell, beside the iron bed that projected from the wall, looking toward him with a startled expression on his face that suggested he had been asleep upon the cot, and had been rudely wakened by their entrance. Instantly, one fixed and all-obsessing belief began to burn in Eugene’s inflamed and drunken brain. He thought that he was being put here with this negro because the jail was crowded and the cell-space scanty, and further—and this was the thing that maddened him and that he found intolerable—because, as the policeman had said when they arraigned the young men, “this big ‘un here’s the drunkest of the lot,” and they thought he was too drunk to notice or to care about the advantage they were taking of him.

For this reason—and this reason only—he now acted as he did. As far as the negro himself was concerned, Eugene bore no grudge against him, and the feeling of shame and degradation which had swept over him in an overwhelming flood when he saw the cell and knew he was to be locked in it like an animal was so great that he would not have cared with whom he had to share that cell, if it had been the custom of the country so to share it. But the custom of the country was not so, he knew, and the belief that he was being put upon, his drunkenness taken advantage of, and that he was being dealt with less fairly than the others, now so stung his maddened pride that he turned and kicked the iron door back in the faces of the two policemen, just as they were closing it.