The Devil's Only Friend (2 page)

“My name's Ray Federle,” the smoking man said. “We moved into the building last week.”

“Pete Caudill,” I said.

“Got the wife and two girls,” he said. “Needed a cheap place.”

“Yah,” I said. “It's cheap all right.”

My eye started to see a little better in the dark, and I could see that Federle was still a young man. He lit up smoke after smoke, and each time he passed the fire from the old one to the new, he chucked the dead butt over the rail. It was impossible not to watch them as they fell and splashed sparks on the alley below.

“Good Friday tomorrow,” he said. “You follow that stuff?”

“No.” I had fallen out of caring what day it was. With no regular job to press me, I had no cause to mark the days.

“For the Catholics it's a big deal on Easter,” said Federle. “They get to eat again.”

Federle's talk made me think of my mother in her house all alone—of family meals and laughter, gone now. Easter—I knew I'd be eating alone again.

“I got a job rolling fenders at Chrysler,” he said. “How about you? You on the bum?”

“I get by,” I said. “I work when I need to.”

“Did you lose that eye—”

“I never went to the war,” I said. “But I got a couple fingers missing, too. You want a look-see?” I waved my bad hand for him.

“If I'm too fresh with you, I don't mean anything by it. I got a case of nerves.”

Federle was not quite as tall as me, and he gave up thirty pounds in the matchup. It made a question flicker through my mind: Were we high enough where a man would be killed if he fell from the landing, or would he only break his legs?

“You're lucky you didn't have to go,” he said, rubbing his thumb over the black stubble on his chin. He tapped a light cone of ash from his cigarette, and it tumbled like snow over the hairs of his forearm. “It ain't no picnic.”

“It's bad?”

“Let me tell you,” he muttered. He held out his cigarette in the dark, as if his arm gestured to a faraway place that he could somehow see before him. “Sometime I'll tell you about it. It'll make your hair stand up like a porcupine. The wife don't want to know.”

After that we were silent for a long time, as much as an hour. I could mark the time by the sounds of supper dishes being washed, children getting bathed, lights blinking out, the nails of mongrels clicking down the alley, rattling trash cans. Now and again a stumbling couple crept down the alley, taking the darker path toward the Alderton flophouse for an hour's entertainment. I thought I could hear a mystery play from someone's radio echoing down between the buildings.
Another day gone,
I thought.
How many more?
As much as the moon could make it stand out from the black sky, the smoke from Federle's cigarettes trailed away from us like silt kicked up in a slow-moving stream.

“Late at night,” said Ray Federle, “when it's quiet like this, and people are lying down to bed—kissing their babies and tucking them in and whispering to them that everything's going to be all right—you'd think it would be a peaceful time. How the darkness comes down to soothe all the bad business and set you down to rest…”

He broke off to pull one last long drag from his cigarette. The ash came close enough to burn his fingers, and he twitched the butt away. I could see that his eyes were wide and staring and empty and his jowls were slack.

“That's when the spiders come out,” he said.

My first thought was that it was still too cold, too early in the year, for spiders to be out spinning all night; but then I saw him bring two long fingers slowly up to tap his forehead, which was shining oddly with sweat. He stared out blankly into the night for a few moments more.

“Off to work,” he said finally. “Boneyard shift.”

He climbed stiffly up the steps toward his own window, hoisted it open, and went through with some difficulty. I made my way down to my own place and turned out the lights. Coming in from the night and then putting my face close to the lamp dazzled my eye. In the dark I stood for a time, trying to make out the solid parts of my paltry room. Filmy sheets of white bloomed and faded before me, and I turned to see them all around me. Gradually I became adjusted to the darkness again, and the ghosts left me alone. I sat at my little dinette table and wondered if sleep would come for me.

CHAPTER 2

Friday, April 7

A city like Detroit moves right along without you. If you don't have much to say or offer, people will just walk right around you like you were a lamppost or an old box somebody left on the sidewalk. For me it was a comfort. I had to guess that it was the same for any number of other men in the city—but how many of the million or so stories could I really know or care about? Some fella's wife cuts out with the kids, he takes to the bottle, he lets his place go to seed—that's regular life. In the papers every week you could still read about the debutantes in the Pointes coming out at balls. While the dogfaces went to rot in the mud overseas, a regular crop of socialites came out every year, and their pictures always made them seem pretty and untainted by guilt. You could always read about some big shooter at Chrysler's or at Lloyd Motors donating some chunk of money to a pet charity, to send a crate of cigarettes or a thousand decks of cards to the boys overseas. But most of the people in the city were just grinding themselves away at their work. They'd die soon or late, and that would be the end of them. They knew it damn well—and for the most part they'd step out of their own skins to keep from admitting it to themselves, to keep from saying it out loud.

I should have been set up by then. With the kind of time I'd had for thinking, I'd been over it a hundred times. If I had found a thing to put my hand to when I was young, if I could have settled on some line of work that suited me and kept my mind on getting ahead, maybe I'd have been somewhere. Money wasn't on my mind. However it had happened, I had skipped the track. I could have made more of all the days that had passed by me; I could have filled my life with living more than I had. It seemed that there was nothing that could stop my mind from dwelling on it, from gnawing at the memory. It made me want to cut things down to the bone.

It seemed like things might work out with Eileen—my dead brother's wife. I kept thinking it might still go along like it does in the movies, but with the cracked-up lives we'd both had, any pretty story we could spin would just go wheeling away. There was the nagging feeling that I had made a mess of things on purpose. I had intentionally fouled up every close feeling I stumbled into because I felt that my ugly face wasn't fit to show anyone up close. What was worse, I hadn't made anything out of all the extra chances I had been given. All along the road—I had mapped it out in my dreary moping a thousand times—everyone I had ever known had been nicer to me than I deserved, had thrown a break or a good word my way at every step. All of that had been wasted on me. I had always been a disappointment to my father, and it would kill him to see me now: a brooding, useless man.

Things started to get even messier when Walker turned up at my door. After the race riot of the previous year, folks became more keenly interested in who showed up in their neighborhood. Black Bottom, Paradise Valley, the colored west side: There were places in Detroit where Negroes could live, where they might buy houses or property without running into a mob. My own place wasn't far from the line, but when a colored man as dark as Walker came along in the neighborhood, tongues began to wag. Especially when he showed up so early in the morning that people were still in their nightshirts, still mopping up the egg yolk from their breakfast plates.

I was wiping out my one frying pan, letting the bacon fat drip into a tin can, when I heard boots clumping up the hall. Somehow I knew the boots were coming for me; I expected every day that one ghost or another from my past would come calling. And so I was not surprised to open the door to see Walker's passive mug. Half a year had gone by, but he seemed to have aged more than that. I guessed that he had worked through the night, and that he would go home to a wife and a bed after he could get away from the business that had pulled him to my door.

“Detective,” said Walker.

“No more,” I said. “You know that.”

“That's the name I have for you,” he said. “I can't think of you any other way now.”

A more ordinary man would not have answered the door in his shorts and a torn undershirt, but I didn't give it a thought. Walker didn't seem to mind, or at least he wasn't giving that much away with his face. He wore several shirts buttoned over an old turtleneck in place of a jacket, and kept the whole mess tucked into his work trousers, which had been patched at the knees and along the hem. Walker held a dusty knit cap with one hand at his side.

“I guess I ought to let you in,” I said.

“Thank you.”

I shifted out of the doorway, and Walker stepped in. With the tin can still in my hand, I waved him over to my chair at the little table. I had cleared away my plate and coffee mug, but greasy scraps from my breakfast still marked the surface.

“What's it all about, Walker?”

“You don't want to ask me about my health, or ask after my family?”

“The both of us know my manners don't work that way,” I told him. I hung up my frying pan on a wooden peg that came out of the wall near the sink and put the greasy can at the back of the counter.

“Well, I didn't come here to roist you, Detective. But you can see I've—”

“You shouldn't call me detective,” I said. “I've left all that behind me.”

“I'll need to call you something.”

“Only if your business here takes overlong to wrap itself up.”

Walker said nothing. He shifted in the chair and angled his fingertips together on the table. He would not have come, I knew, for some trifling thing. He was polite enough to keep from looking around my place. Still, it burned me to think of how filthy everything was, how hollowed-out and empty it seemed—no pictures on the walls, no food to offer a visitor, no books, my bed unmade, the floor unswept. I should have been glad to see him, as I knew him to be a good man, a sturdy man, even a friend. I should have gladly offered him my hand.

“Why don't you just call me Caudill?” I said. “I call you Walker, don't I?”

“I'd better call you Mr. Caudill,” he said.

I couldn't tell whether he was joshing me.

“I don't want to forget myself in this neighborhood.”

“Well,” I said, “I don't give a good goddamn how you call me. You don't have to call me anything.”

Walker pulled a curling photograph from his shirt pocket and smoothed it over a clean place on the tabletop. He turned it toward me. Because my only other chair was on the fire escape, I had to stand over him.

“My baby sister,” he said softly. “Felicia.”

I picked up the photo. Somebody long ago had put a thumb on the picture, and now the girl's face seemed fuzzy at the cheek with the imprint. She was not remarkable in any way for a Negro woman except for the little nurse's cap she wore and for the way she pulled her lips down over her protruding teeth.

I shrugged. “So?”

“She was killed about two weeks ago down toward Cleveland.”

“Listen, Walker, I—” I looked again at the picture. The woman's eyes seemed to look out more sharply now that I knew she was dead. “I can't do anything for you.”

“They found her at the marsh at the edge of the old Lloyd axle plant. I don't know what they build over there now. That whole place now is locked up tight for the war, just like all the plants. They have army guards patrolling along the fences.”

“Well, Walker, what did you think I could do about any of that?” My knees began to tremble at the sight of Walker's poor face. I wished that I had never put my other chair out on the fire escape.

“I don't know. You've spoken to Mr. Lloyd—”

“Old Man Lloyd would rather he'd never met me,” I said. “I haven't seen him or had any word from him since the first night of the riot, you know that. And I understand he's just about ready for the glue factory.” I had saved the Old Man's life that night, which must have been quite an inconvenience for such a wealthy man.

“Detective, I don't have anything to offer you. I have run around with the Cleveland police and it seems like they are over and done with anything to do with this case. Unless something jumps up and bites them on the rump, so to say, they won't ever find out who did this. Now, you know how I lost my job on the force—”

“All right, Walker. You know I did what I could with Captain Mitchell. What else could I have done? What sway did I have?”

“Detective, I—”

“Jesus Christ, Walker! Can't you stop calling me that?”

He put his head down like I had slapped him. The nap at the top of his head was going thin and flecked with curls of gray. He pulled a shop rag from his back pocket and used it to swab the grease from my table. He tipped back his head and looked up at me patiently.

“I don't try to lay any blame about everything that happened last summer,” he said. “I don't see how we could have dug ourselves out of that hole we were in. But Felicia left two little ones, and their daddy isn't reliable—so it looks like we may have to take them in. We're stretched a bit thin, but that doesn't bother me. I just … You can see how a thing like that can be important to a man. I mean, your family can be important.”

Walker did know how to cut into me. There wasn't any way for him to know that I still hadn't been able to locate my nephew Alex, that I had botched things up with my sister-in-law Eileen, that I had arrived at the end of my rope. Walker and I had not spoken since the previous summer, on that morning before I tossed my badge at Captain Mitchell. But Walker could see how I was living—that I had whittled myself down almost to nothing. The apartment was bare except for the few pieces of furniture I hadn't sold … and I had been talking to him all the while in my bare feet, unshaven, in just my shorts and a ratty shirt. I counted myself lucky that I had at least taken the trouble to put the patch over my eyehole that morning.