Sam Niles wished a couple of unattached girls would come in and end Baxter’s stories.
“What I wasn’t prepared for were the other things.” Baxter’s speech was beginning to slur as he stared at the glass, for the first time failing to smile and thank the waitress who put a fresh one in front of him. “You should see what the generic term ‘unfit home’ can mean. The broken toilet so full of human excrement that it’s slopping over the top. And a kitten running through the crap and then up onto the table and across the dirty dishes. Brown footprints on the dishes which won’t even be washed.”
“Can’t we change the subject? I’ve literally smelled enough shit for one night.”
“And a boy who’s a man at nine years of age. And wants to bathe his filthy little brothers and sisters and tries to, except that he accidentally scalds the infant to death.”
“Baxter…”
“And a simple thing like a bike theft,” Baxter Slate continued, looking Sam Niles in the eyes now. “Do you know how sad a bike theft can be when there’s only one broken down bike in a family of eight children?”
“That kind of thing doesn’t faze me, Baxter, you know that?” Sam Niles said angrily and his speech was thick and boozy “I have only two words of advice for guys like you and Harold Bloomguard. Change jobs. If you can’t face the fact that the world is a garbage dump, you’ll jump off the City Hall Tower. Christ, when I was a kid we never had any bikes, broken or not. My brother and I made a tether ball out of a bag of rags and I tied it to a street sign. That’s the only toy I remember. Baxter, you can’t save the world.”
“But you see, Sam, I thought I could!” Baxter said, spilling some bourbon on his velvet shirt as he drank excitedly. “I thought it was possible to save the world-the world of the one specific child I was dealing with. Sometimes I would work as hard as I could to get a kid out of his environment and into a foster home. And he would run back to his degradation. Once I handled a case of child abuse at a county licensed foster home where I’d placed a little child. She’d been beaten up by the foster mother and I had the job of arresting the foster mother and taking the child out of the very home I had placed her in.”
“So what?”
“The child had marks on her stomach. Strange cuts, almost healed. She was only three years old, Sam, and she wouldn’t talk to me. She got hysterical around policewomen too. Finally I was the one to find out what the marks were. They were letters: L.D.B., which turned out to be the initials of an old boyfriend of the foster mother. She put them on the little girl with a paring knife. I’d placed the kid in that foster home to save the world of that one specific child. I was the worst Juvenile officer the department’s ever had!”
“Hey, miss,” yelled Sam and held up two fingers and sighed languorously as the waitress brought another round while Baxter Slate held his empty drink in both hands and stared at rings on the table.
“Listen, Baxter,” Sam said. “We have crime in direct proportion to freedom. Lots of freedom, lots of crime. All I know for sure is something I’ve believed all my life. And it was verified for me in Vietnam and certified in the four and a half years I’ve been a cop. It’s that people are never more pathetic than when they’re asking themselves that absurd, ridiculous, laughable question, ‘Who am I?’”
And then it was Sam’s turn to spill several drops as he tipped his glass. He paused, wiped off his moustache, pressed the nosepiece of his glasses and said, “If most people ever let themselves find the answer to that question they’d go into the toilet and slash their wrists. Because they’re nothing! The sooner you understand that, the sooner you can do police work without torturing yourself.”
“I wouldn’t be telling you this, Sam, if it weren’t for this,” Baxter Slate apologized, holding up the glass. “Sometimes I try to tell my partner but Spermwhale’s only interested in paying off his ex-wives.” And Baxter tried a broad Baxter Slate smile which did not work because there was fear in his bourbon-clouded green eyes. “After I left Juvenile I started experiencing strange flashes in the middle of the night. I could almost see glimpses of what it is not to be, to have life go on without you. It happens in a half sleep. It’s happened a lot since I killed that man. Have you ever experienced it?”
And then Sam Niles touched his moustache and said, “No.” And Baxter Slate, who always believed his friends, did not know that Sam Niles was lying. “I wish some broads’d come in. I wish the drinks weren’t so watered down,” Sam Niles said.
“Sam, I know you’re right about people being nothing. All my life, all my religious training in Dominican schools was built on an explicit belief in evil. But there is none. Man hasn’t the dignity for evil. And if there’s no evil there’s very likely no goodness! There’re only accidents!”
“Please, Baxter,” Sam Niles said, “I’m just a cop. I don’t… I’m not…”
“Sorry, Sam,” said Baxter Slate, draining the bourbon and turning green watery eyes to his friend. “I don’t always go on like this. I’m not usually such a silly pseudointellectual horse’s ass. Ask Spermwhale.”
And then he managed a real Baxter Slate grin, candid, disarming, and tried to make light of it. “It’s that I know you just got your degree in political science. I love to talk to someone who won’t get mad at me for using an adverb or two.”
Then Sam Niles managed an embarrassed chuckle because it was over. “Okay, Baxter, it is nice not having to move your lips when you read so as not to offend a Philistine like Roscoe Rules.”
Sam Niles was starting to like his friend Baxter Slate so much he never wanted to see him again.
And while Baxter and Sam were getting drunk and being horses’ asses, and while Baxter secretly thought of the ordinary guy he killed and the tortured child he let die, Harold Bloomguard finally found another whore.
The Cadillac Eldorado had not been there on his last pass, Harold was sure of it. Then he saw the white girl saunter out of the bar and head for the car. Harold tried to get over to the number two lane but the car behind him began hitting his headlight dimmer switch and blowing his horn. Harold drove two blocks east of Western Avenue, turned his Dodge around and came back. The white girl was gone. But in her place was a black girl who opened the door of the silver Eldorado, had an afterthought, turned and went into the bar.
Harold started to head for the vice car to ask Scuz if he could go in the bar. But he thought about it a moment and knew what the answer would be. Then he thought about getting a two-banger on his first night as a vice cop and he parked the car on Western Avenue, put his gun, handcuffs and badge under the seat, locked the car, wiped his moist hands on his handkerchief and entered.
The tavern was not a white man’s cocktail lounge. It poured an extraordinary amount of hard liquor and the bartender didn’t like to be troubled with fancy drinks. There was a jukebox playing Tina Turner, the volume turned five decibels higher than Harold could bear. There was a pool table on the side crowded with men playing nine ball at a dollar a ball and filling the room with blue tobacco smoke. There was a back room where nightly crap games attracted dozens of customers and occasional vice cops. As with most black men’s crap games there was always a set of crooked dice in use and sometimes two sets, with one crooked gambler using shaved cubes against another.
But there was a vitality in the bar and Harold was excited as well as frightened when he saw that aside from the white girl, he was the only paddy in the place. Then he got a good look at the brassy blonde in the open red satin coat who sat on a bar stool holding an eight month pregnancy against the vinyl-covered cushioned railing.
It was ambition and curiosity, but mostly youth, which drove Harold Bloomguard to one of the empty stools on the near side of the bar as several black men at the pool table stopped the game and slipped any money from the table into their pockets until they were satisfied that Harold was a trick and not a cop.