The Devil's Only Friend (20 page)

“Every man can do right or wrong,” Walker said.

“Some people get plumb crazy. They can't help what they do.”

“Do you believe that?”

“You know it's true.”

“Do you think Mr. Federle will fall onto that path?”

“Honestly, Walker, I'm not even sure about myself.”

“Heaven help us all, then.”

“You were starting to tell how Federle got fired from his work at Palmer's.”

“You want to hear that story?”

“Sure.”

“I was there on the dock, lifting and pulling with a hand jack, you know. They needed a forklift driver, and they couldn't see letting me do it, even though I had done some of that work in the past. So they hired Federle, though it was clear he hadn't ever learned to drive one. He hadn't been there even a week, I don't think. He was the type of man that wanted too much to be chummy right off.

“One of the drivers—a great big roly-poly one—came in every day at the same time with his rig and went into the bathroom while we loaded up the trailer. He used to shut himself up in the stall and smoke a cigar and read the paper. Every day it was like this.

“So the one day—probably it was a Friday, payday—Mr. Federle filled up a toy balloon with oxygen and acetylene—they do a bit of welding over to Palmer's. You can guess. He went into the bathroom and lofted the balloon into the stall, knowing that the driver would pop it with the cigar.”

“Popped it with the stogie!”

“Blew the door right off the stall. Shattered some of the lights in there. The driver came out with his pants around his ankles. He started crying after a while, like he just couldn't figure out what had gone on.”

“That's a good one,” I said.

“He wasn't hurt except for his hearing. But that was the end of Federle.”

Thinking it over, I started to laugh. Even Walker let loose a low chuckle. I coughed only a little.

“It doesn't seem so bad,” I said.

“It's a rough crowd. That sort of joshing can get ugly pretty quick.”

“Sure.” Walker meant that it could get especially ugly for a colored man when a joke turned bad. I was wondering if he'd found out anything while he was cooling his heels at the Lloyd plant, and I was about to ask him about it.

“I'm going to show you something, Detective,” he said.

We walked a couple blocks east without any talk between us. It was a pretty nice district, filled to the brim with colored families. Because of the war, everybody was either signed up or holding decent jobs, and some real money was working its way through the neighborhood. It wasn't anything like Indian Village or Boston-Edison or Palmer Park, but I could remember how the colored folks lived in past times. The children now had shoes and trousers in good repair, and the old ladies had cushioned chairs to rock in on their porches. Maybe some of them had lost their men, but it was funny to me to think how much good the war had brought to that neighborhood and to Detroit in general.

Walker led the way up to the porch of a nicely kept house on Russell. He rapped politely at the door and stood with his hands clasped behind his back.

“You're not carrying that weapon?” he whispered.

I had to pat myself down to check. “It's in the car.”

“All right then.”

The door opened inward and a tall Negro woman smiled out at us. She was very dark, almost black, and it was hard to tell how old she was.

“Jonah Walker! Why don't I see you on my doorstep more often than this? And why don't I see you in church on Sunday? I see that pretty wife of yours.”

“Auntie Lu,” said Walker. He took her two hands and leaned in to kiss her cheek. “Auntie Lu, I brought someone to see you. This is Mr. Caudill.”

She looked at me very seriously and appraised my ugly mug.

“I'm Lu Ella Marker, Mr. Caudill. I'm so pleased to meet you.”

She reached out her hand to me, and I clasped it for a moment, though not as easily as Walker had.

“Ma'am.” I couldn't think what Walker had in mind. I was sure I had never met the woman before. My mind raced to bring up a picture of all the dark faces I had seen years before when I had been through the trouble after killing the black boy as a patrolman. There had been so many faces over the years, dark and light.

“Come right in, now. I'm just in the middle of supper.”

Walker and I stepped through the door and into the small room at the front of the house.

“Set yourselves down while I check on my soup,” Auntie Lu said.

There were two chairs and a wooden bench with a cushion and carved rails at the back. I sat on the bench, and Walker continued to stand.

“What's it all about, Walker?”

“Auntie Lu can cook.”

“I can smell it. But I didn't mean in the car that I wanted you to set me up with any chow. I can feed myself.”

Walker looked down at me sadly. “Have a little patience, Detective.”

There was an enormous leather-covered Bible, worn to tatters with use, on the table next to the most frayed chair. The low light of evening angled in the front window and glinted in Auntie Lu's eyes as she stepped toward us again.

“Now, Jonah. We'll have to see about you missing the service every Sunday.”

“I've got to work, Auntie.”

“Work!”

“You know I have to feed my family.”

“We'll talk about this later, Jonah Walker. Now, Mr. Caudill, what can I do for you?”

“Ma'am, I don't know.”

“I think you know Mr. Caudill, Auntie. He used to be a detective with the police.”

“No,” she said. She peered more closely at me, wiping down her hands on her apron. There was a shrewdness to her that held back almost all the reaction that came when the light clicked on for her. She craned her head toward the staircase and barked, “Boy! Come down here!”

“Auntie?”

“Visitor!”

“All right, Auntie.”

I heard papers rustling and the sound of clumsy footsteps across the floor above us.

“Mr. Caudill, would you care for something to drink?”

“No. Thank you, ma'am.”

The boy's footsteps were wrong—one soft, one loud, a tap and then a quick thump. It was clear as his feet and legs appeared that he was gangly and spastic, and still I could not guess who it was. When his face came into view, I could see that he was smiling broadly—too broadly. He wore smoked glasses over his eyes.

“Is it a white man here, Auntie?” he asked.

“Joshua!”

“I'm sorry, Auntie. But is it?”

I knew him. A slicing pain across my chest and also in the lower part of my left leg throbbed together.

“Is it a white man? Is it the police, Auntie?”

Walker had brought me here so I could see what my work had done. I had rescued him from a mob of white boys during the riot of the previous year, and now he stood before me: as tall as I was, though slighter by sixty pounds; and spastic, and blind.

“I don't think Mr. Caudill is a policeman anymore, Joshua.”

CHAPTER 20

What could have made me want to abuse myself so thoroughly? I could not explain it because it made no actual sense. Was it the example of the boy, who was blind and a cripple, but who faced the world with good humor and optimism? Joshua had been beaten near to death, and I had managed to rescue him from a pack of white boys just as the riot broke out. It was also the last time I had seen my nephew Alex, crouched in the shadows with the Devil in his eyes. I had in one moment saved the Negro boy and lost the last bit of blood kin I had, save my mother.

Joshua should have been bitter. He had lost more than I had, and might now live another sixty years as a cripple. But he never stopped smiling as we sat talking in Auntie Lu's front room.

He knew it was me even before Auntie Lu introduced me to him.

“Mr. Caudill? I don't believe I've ever been able to thank you properly.”

He advanced across the room, keeping his balance on his back foot with each step. He nudged each foot forward in a practiced way, feeling his way across the floor, and held both arms before him like they were wrapped formally around a dance partner. It looked like he could map out the room by sensing where things were with the skin of his face.

I grabbed his hand as he put it out to me.

“I knew it was you as I came down,” he said. “Auntie thinks I'm being rude, but it's true: I remember the smell of you from that night. And from the cell you kept me in at the station. Do you remember, Mr. Caudill?”

“I remember everything.”

“I only remember running,” he said. “I was never athletic that way! I've been told how you saved my life.”

“I couldn't help myself. It seemed—”

“But I have to thank you! It would have been the end of my time here on earth.”

“I'm sorry how it turned out for you,” I said.

“You can't blame yourself for any of it. Better to be alive than dead, sir!” He smiled openly as he spoke. In fact, he seemed much happier and more confident than he had been the year before, as if a burden had been taken from him.

“Is that you, Mr. Walker?”

“Yes, it is, son.”

“Thank you for bringing Mr. Caudill to see me.”

Walker said. “I thought it might do Mr. Caudill some good.”

Joshua's smile grew even broader. “Do you remember, Mr. Caudill, how you made me pee my pants down in that cell?”

“Joshua!”

“Beg pardon, Auntie.”

“I remember, boy.”

“I want you to know I don't bear a grudge. You were doing what you thought best. I was so afraid! But what do I have to be afraid of now? Every extra moment I get to spend now is a gift. I want you to know I'll always be grateful to you, sir.”

“Well,” I said, “that's all right.”

Probably I was inside the house for only a few minutes. But when I did manage to quit the place, it was like I had been underwater. I couldn't seem to get enough air. I left Walker to his family and walked away as fast as my legs could carry me toward a good drink. There wasn't any good excuse for it.

Joshua had grown like a sprout in the time since I had seen him last. If not for the crookedness, he would have been a bit taller than me, and he was still young, with a few more years to grow. He was a smart boy, I could see, and now he had some confidence. Despite the blindness, or because of it, he now had some sense of purpose. It made him better than me, and someday it would make him stronger than me. I could not really say if he counted me as an enemy or if he was truly grateful that I had put off his dying. Probably both things were true, which was too much to think through.

All the people I had known—those who were still living—were changing and growing, making their way in the world. Hank Chew was out there somewhere in the city, scouting for dirt and playing the angles. I imagined that the Hardiman boys were together glowering over a map of the world in the smoky den of a big mansion somewhere. Federle—God knows what Federle was up to or where he was. Alex, in the months since he had disappeared, might have grown into a man. Would I recognize him if I saw him? Walker probably was bussing with his wife and laughing with his children, settling down to a good supper. Eileen and her new beau might have been walking into a movie palace downtown. Everyone in Detroit and across the whole world was wrangling to get ahead, to make a better life. Everyone but me. I was still struggling to figure out where I had gone wrong. Why didn't I just run off?

I put some grub down my sorry gullet and then found a quiet place to get filthy drunk. Over the course of the evening I put away twelve or fifteen shots of whiskey and a couple mugs of beer. I can't say where else I might have gone that night or how I got around. Sometime during the long evening I picked up a little pint bottle of whiskey and put it in the pocket of my jacket.

The city at night was a circus of lights. In the tall towers downtown, even toward midnight, I could see people moving inside the offices and in the hotel rooms, bustling in and out of lobbies and theaters and nightspots. I thought it must have been a Friday or Saturday night because of all the hollering and horn blowing. Teenagers packed ten to a car trolled up and down Woodward looking for thrills. There were a great many pretty women, too, or so it seemed to my drunken eye, with their hair done up, their teeth smiling and white, their hips pressed and nicely rounded in tight skirts. I must have been staggering, and I know I was ugly, but nobody seemed to notice me. Everything just flowed around me. The liquor blotted away all my aches, and for a time I just wandered, hopping streetcars back and forth, walking around Grand Circus Park and Campus Martius.

That's all I want to remember. Some time later in the night, after I had I dozed off for a moment on a bench in a park somewhere, a beat cop poked me in the ribs with his billy club.

“Go on home,” he said.

“I will,” I told him, and staggered off into the night.

It must have been after midnight when I wandered off Joseph Campau and onto Dearing. Around the corner the theater lights were dark, and even the neighborhood dogs were asleep. A few stray cars came by on Campau, rumbling up and fading away now and then as I stood staring at Eileen's dark house. For a long while I kept still, lost in a kind of drunken dream. My fingertips and toes were as cold as ice, and water dripped from my nose and my eye. I wanted to sleep with Eileen in her bed, to draw off some of her warmth. I needed it—I needed healing, and I knew I couldn't find it in any other place. She was lost to me, though, and I could offer nothing but trouble. I should not have come.

I was startled to attention by a slight rustle and the faint sound of chewing in the sprouting tulips next to Eileen's porch steps. I walked a bit closer across the grass and saw a good-sized opossum crouched there like a primitive demon. When he saw me, he pulled in on himself, and then as I drew closer he tried to make himself bigger. He opened his mouth and hissed at me, showing the foul inside of his gaping mouth. I came close enough to kick at him with my shoe. He clamped down with his needle teeth on the leather and held on until I managed to shake him loose. I was taken by a great shudder as I watched him waddle away. He stopped behind the neighbor's little shrub and watched me. His close-set eyes smoldered green.