Strivers Row (24 page)

“So's this one,” the white detective said.

Malcolm recognized the man whose arm the other detective was gripping, though he couldn't remember his name. A small-time pimp who wandered into the bar sometimes, not one of the regulars. Dressed now in an immaculate, kelly green zoot, the hat lolling off over his shoulder. His face the only one of all the arrested men's in the bullpen that was as yet unmarked—handsome and dark brown, with long eyelashes that made him look slightly effeminate.

“Doubleheader,” the white cop said, and laughed as he pulled the man along—the pimp swallowing hard but his face studiously expressionless, eyes still turned toward the peeling linoleum floor.

“Where we goin'? What you gonna do to me?” Malcolm whispered urgently to Joe Baker, as he frog-marched him along, back toward the holding rooms in the back of the station. Remembering everything he had heard about what went on in the back pens of the precinct house.

“Shut up!” Baker told him loudly—then more quietly, out of the side of his mouth:

“You keep your goddamned mouth shut, you want to get through this. You understand me? Don't you be sayin' a
thing
to me!”

He nodded his head once—before Baker hit him in the back of his neck, hard, stunning him. The detective hauling him on down the hall to a tiny, high-ceilinged room that held nothing but a tall metal locker, a table, and a couple of wooden-arm chairs. There was a single, closed slit of a window, too small for anyone but a young child to crawl through, and a metal ceiling fan that made occasional, loping rotations, too lazy to dislodge any of the dust that encased it.

“You sit here, an' keep yourself
still,
” the detective warned him, shoving him down into one of the chairs, his dour, Iorian face glowering down at him.

“I didn't really run her. I was just tryna drop some hype on the country boy—” Malcolm pleaded, sure that Baker was about to leave him to the white cops.

“Please—”

“Shut up! I mean it, now. You don't do a thing, you don't sign a thing, you don't
say
a thing until I come back for you.
Nothing!
” Baker hissed in his face.

“You understand? No matter what they do.”

Malcolm nodded glumly, fighting down the impulse to cry out again as he watched the detective leave the room, and lock the door behind him. Wondering how long it would take the white cops to show up—most likely a pair of them from what he had heard.
They would balance a phone book on top of his head, then hit it with the baseball bat. Roll up three or four oranges in a towel, to work on the back and kidneys.

He sat in the chair, shaking, not wanting the leering white cops to see him this way but unable to help himself. Feeling his shirt sticking to his back with his own sweat. The little room redolent with the stink of fear, and submission; of urine and old vomit. All of it—the fearful smells, the institutional, pale green paint on the walls, the wire mesh in the window glass—all of it reminding him of the last place they had left
her
.

He heard a low grunt coming from the next room, then a sound like air being let out of a tire. Then there was a steady, rhythmic smacking sound, repeated over and over again—
Whop! Whop! Whop! Whop!
The same sound he remembered his mother making when she beat out their rugs outside on the porch.
Whop! Whop! Whop!
—coming from just the other side of the wall behind his chair. Then the sound of a man's slurred voice, pleading:

“Please! Please don't beat my face, tha's how I make my living—”

Malcolm recognized it at once as the pimp from Small's he had seen out in the bullpen, the effeminate-looking man whose name he couldn't remember.

“
That
face?
That
how you make yer livin'?”

Now he heard the detective he had seen outside offering Joe Baker his chair. Then another white man's voice, chuckling along with him, their laughter as hard as buckshot pellets.

“Please! Please! I'll pay—”

“Bet you will!”

The beating resumed, the sound of hard rubber hitting flesh repeated over and over, measured and slow. When they stopped again he could hear the men breathing heavily. Then another plea, almost a wailing sound this time—a pimp, begging for mercy:

“
Please! Not the face
—”

“Shut up!”

He heard a sharp crack then, like someone very deliberately breaking a bone. There was another crack, followed by a long moan, and more laughter, and then Malcolm was trying to pull himself free from the chair. The handcuffs cutting into his wrists the harder he pulled, not sure where he could even run to if he got himself free, but wanting to be out of there, that small, institutional locker room where he had to listen to a man being beaten. The smells and the sounds in the next room bringing it all back to him.

The orderlies had been beating someone with a rubber hose down the hall then, too—the last time he had gone to visit her. The sound of rubber hitting flesh over and over again, while they tried to talk to her, and she only repeating,
All the people have gone.

She had tried to fight it. He would have liked to have told them that, all the social-worker ladies, and especially Mr. Maynard Allen. Even after the incident following his Daddy's funeral, when she had taken the butcher's knife over to the Stohrers next door, telling Mrs. Stohrer how white people had killed her husband and that she was sorry but that she had to take a white life in return. She had recovered herself even with the knife in her hand, and prevailed on Mrs. Stohrer—a kindly, middle-aged woman with no children of her own—not only not to press charges but even to teach her how to drive their Daddy's old touring car.

His mother had insisted on keeping the car, though the ladies from the county Poor Commission demanded she give it up. Wanting her to spend her money on a new stove instead, because the one they had now was an aged, flat-topped, coal-and-wood burner, and every night when she made dinner some of the ashes or even a live coal would come tumbling out before she could pounce on it and scoop it up with her bare hands, tossing it back into the fire and slamming the hot grate door shut again.

“That car is our lifeline! As long as my back and my arms are strong enough, I will drive that automobile!” she railed at them, sure that the car was the only means she had of finding and keeping a job.

Still, it had not been easy. She had no feel for driving, became easily flustered in heavy traffic, or if anything went wrong. Malcolm was with her the afternoon she had stalled out at an intersection, and could not get it started again. His mother grinding the transmission ineffectually, while the white drivers behind her began to shout and honk their horns. Muttering frantically to herself,
Come on, come on,
stomping on the gas until the car was obviously flooded and Anna Stohrer put a hand on her arm and told her gently to lay off it, then stepped outside to wave the other cars around them.

Malcolm watching them as they passed. All the livid white faces peering angrily in at them, shaking their heads in disgust before they floored the accelerator and roared away. Louise sitting slumped down in the driver's seat, her head against the wheel, until all the white people's cars had passed and Mrs. Stohrer asked her if she didn't want to try the ignition again.

“You know, if I had been alone, those white people would have run me down,” his mother had told her when they were moving again. “They would have killed me right there, I know it.”

Yet she had been right about the car. Once she had learned to drive it, she was able to get work with a white family in Lansing, doing their sewing and cleaning before she came home to cook and clean and wash for them, too. Redoubling her usual tireless efforts around the house until she almost seemed possessed, scrubbing and polishing obsessively at the bare floors and furniture. Cleaning their clothes, and the aging drapes she hung over and over again, until they were no more than a yellow scrim the sun poured through in the morning, waking them all at first light.

But after a few months the white family claimed to have discovered that his mother wasn't actually part Indian, as she had told them—the obvious story that she told them, for the benefit of the neighbors. Firing her at the end of a full ten-hour's day cleaning their house, telling her that it was only because they were disappointed in her for having lied, and not because of anything to do with her race, or what the neighbors had found out. She had cried all through dinner that night, unable to stop herself. And soon afterward his Daddy's car had finally broken down once and for all, beyond the ability of Mr. Stohrer, or any of the other men on their block to fix it.

That was when the real hunger had started. Before another month passed they had exhausted their credit down at the Levandowskis' grocery, the little wooden store run by a grim, skeletal Polish couple from Hamtramck. Taking their meals down at the firehouse soup kitchen, or picking up the sacks of potatoes and cans of meat that were handed out at the relief depot, and always marked with the same stamp,
Not To Be Sold,
until Malcolm wondered if that was the name of the company that made them—Not To Be Sold Foods.

Still, she had fought them, insisting to the social ladies that she wasn't taking relief at all, but only a loan. Reminding them constantly, “Make sure you're keeping track of how much I owe so I can pay it back.” She refused the hand-me-down clothes they brought if they were so much as missing a button. Throwing a whole box of Fig Newtons one of them had brought for the children out to the chickens, adamant that they were all dried out and full of worm holes.

Twice a week she made Malcolm and his little brother Reginald walk the two miles to the Peter Pan bakery, where for a nickel they could buy as much day-old bread as they could carry home. Louisa would mold it into bread pudding, if they had any milk, or stew it with tomatoes or fry it into bread burgers. If there wasn't any leftover bread, or if some other relief family had gotten to it first, she would send them out to pick dandelions, boiling the greens down into a tasteless limp mass that Malcolm hated, and which made his stomach hurt.

The worst was on Saturday, though, when she made Malcolm go with Philbert to the slaughterhouse to catch lungs. The little knot of boys, gathered on the muddy ground underneath the slaughterhouse windows, down by the railyards. The same faces every week, white and colored—pacing warily back and forth, eyeing each other like stray dogs while the cattle were driven out of the stockyard pens, and into the concrete walls of the slaughterhouse.

He hated it all—the fearful looks on the other boys' faces. The terrified bleating of the cattle, the stench of their frightened pissing and shitting as they were herded up the narrow plankway. The desperate elbowing and wrestling of the boys that started beneath the narrow smoked-glass windows the moment they heard the saw go on inside.

“There it is!”

The first lung came through the window, and there was a wild surge forward. The boys concentrating first on trying to punch and shove each other into the mud. Philbert was good with his fists, and Malcolm was quick. It was his job to go for the lungs while his older brother ran interference, but he hated having to scoop them up from the mud. Grasping the enormous, gray, slimy cattle lungs against his chest like a football. Plowing through the younger, smaller boys with Philbert, while they clutched their meal and ran for home.

Even so, by the time the school week started, there was almost nothing left for their lunches. They would gather wild leeks from the side of the road on their way to the Pleasant Cove School, and stuff them between two stale slices of the Peter Pan bread. Malcolm would try to eat his as quickly and inconspicuously as he could, sitting alone at a table in a far corner of the cafeteria. But the odor was still such that one day the girl who sat next to him in class burst into tears from the smell of it in his desk.

Their teacher had ordered him to have the sandwich burned, and Malcolm had dutifully walked with it outside to where the janitor, a balding, taciturn Italian man, stood raking up the trash from the playground behind the school. There he had thrown his sandwich on the ground in front of the pile, looking on curiously as the janitor burned his lunch.

The other kids at Pleasant Cove taunted them for their Daddy being dead, or how they looked, or dressed. He and his brothers and sisters went barefoot in the summer, wore sneakers in the winter that were cracked and busted out around the toes, and jammed with rags and cardboard to keep them warm. They wore nothing but raggedy-ann clothes, and even the other colored kids said they looked like farmers.

Malcolm would only smile or shrug, or even laugh in their faces. He didn't like to fight, afraid that if he did he would start to bleed, and his whole life would slip out of his body, right there. If any boys insisted, he would pick up a bottle or a rock, or a board with a nail in it—anything at hand—and wave it around, shouting crazily until his antagonists backed off. The only exceptions were when he saw the bigger kids picking on someone else, or the time his older brother Philbert was getting whipped by Teddy Simmons, up on the railroad embankment above the school, that served as their fighting grounds. Malcolm had broken out of the circle of laughing, jeering boys and girls and flung himself onto Simmons's back. Grappling an arm around the older, taller boy's neck, punching and biting at the back of his head, until even Philbert had to intervene and help pull him off.

He preferred to be around the girls. He would pull their pigtails and squirt them with water at the drinking fountains. He would knock them off the swings and kick and pinch them, or snatch away their bikes and try to run them over. Or he would give them piggyback rides over puddles in the road, and wipe the mud off their shoes with a handkerchief, until the other boys howled with laughter, and ragged on him endlessly.