“On and on he goes: ‘Your mother blows sailors… Your wife fucks dogs… You’re all queers, every one of you.’ Like that. But I mean, really, it don’t end, it’s like he never gets tired.
“So the guy who locked him up gets him outa the cage and walks him across the room. Over in the corner they got one of these steam pipes, just a vertical pipe, no radiator or nothing. Hot as a motherfucker. So he cuffs the drunk’s hands around the pipe, so now the drunk’s gotta stand like this”—Frank formed a huge circle with his arms, as if he were hugging an invisible fat woman—“or else he gets burned. And just bein’ that close to the heat, I mean, it’s fuckin’ awful. So the uniform walks away, figuring that’ll shut the scumbag up, but it gets worse.
“Now, the bulls are all pissed at the uniform for not beatin’ the drunk senseless before he brought him in, like any guy with a year on the street would know to do. The poor fuck is still typing the paperwork at about a word an hour, and the asshole is still at it, ‘Your daughter fucks niggers. When I get out I’ll look your wife up—again.’ Then he looks straight at the uniform, and the uniform looks up. Their eyes lock for a minute. And the drunk says this: ‘What’s it feel like to know that every man in this room thinks you’re an asshole?’ Then the drunk is quiet and he smiles.”
Marty returned then, and though I felt I was barely hanging on, I didn’t dare speak to refuse the drink. Frank sat silently while Marty poured, and when he was done Frank stared at him until he walked away.
“After that,” he continued in a low voice, “it was like slow motion. Like everything was happening underwater. The uniform stands up, takes his gun out, and points it at the drunk. The drunk never stops smiling. And then the uniform pulls the trigger, shoots him right in the face. The drunk’s head like explodes, and he spins around the steam pipe—all the way—once, before he drops.
“For a second everything stops. It’s just the echo and the smoke and blood on the wall and back window. Then, time speeds up again. The sergeant of detectives, a little leprechaun from the other side—must’ve bribed his way past the height requirement—jumps over his desk and grabs up a billy club. He lands next to the uniform, who’s still holding the gun straight out, and he clubs him five or six times on the forearm, hard and fast, whap-whap-whap. The gun drops with the first hit but the leprechaun don’t stop till the bone breaks. We all hear it snap.
“The uniform pulls his arm in and howls, and the sergeant throws the billy club down and screams at him: ‘The next time… the next time, it’ll be your head that he breaks before you were able to shoot him. Now get him off the pipe before there’s burns on his body.’ And he storms out of the room.”
Frank drank the shot in front of him and finished his beer. I didn’t move. He looked at me and smiled. “The whole squad room,” he said, “jumped into action. Some guys uncuffed the drunk; I helped the uniform out. Got him to a hospital. Coupla guys got rags and a pail and started cleaning up.
“Now, think about that,” Frank said, leaning in toward me and lowering his voice yet again. “I’m the only spic there. The only other uniform. There had to be ten bulls. But the sergeant, he didn’t have to tell anybody what the plan was, or to keep their mouth shut, or any fucking thing. And there was no moment where anybody worried about me seeing it, being a spic. We all knew that coulda been any one of us. That’s the most on-the-inside I ever felt. Department now, it’s a fucking joke. Affirmative action, cultural-diversity training. And what’ve you got? Nobody trusts anybody. Guys afraid to trust their own partners.” He was whispering and starting to slur his words.
I began to feel nauseated. It’s a joke, I thought. A cop’s made-up war story. “Frank, did the guy die?”
“Who?”
“The drunk. The man that got shot.”
Frank looked confused, and a bit annoyed. “Of course he died.”
“Did he die right away?”
“How the fuck should I know? They dragged him outa the room in like a minute.”
“To a hospital?”
“Was a better world’s all I’m saying. A better world. And you always gotta stay on the inside, don’t drift, Danny. If you drift, nobody’ll stick up for you.”
Jesus, did he have a brogue? He certainly had picked up that lilt to his voice that my father’s generation possessed. That half-accent that the children of immigrants acquire in a ghetto. I had to get out of there. A few more minutes and I feared I’d start sounding like one of these tura-lura-lura motherfuckers myself.
I stood, probably too quickly, and took hold of the bar to steady myself. “What about the picture, Frank?”
He handed it to me. “Martin is right,” he said slowly, “let it lie. Why do you care who she was?”
“Who she was? I asked who she is. Is she dead, Frank? Is that what Marty meant by letting the dead rest?”
“Martin… Marty meant…”
“I’m right here, Francis,” Marty said, “and I can speak for myself.” He turned to me. “Francis has overindulged in a few jars,” he said. “He’ll nap in the back booth for a while and be right as rain for the ride home.”
“Is that the way it happened, Frank? Exactly that way?”
Frank was smiling at his drink, looking dreamily at his better world. “Who owns memory?” he said.
“Goodnight, Daniel,” Marty said. “It was good of you to stop in.”
I didn’t respond, just turned and slowly walked out. One or two guys gestured at me as I left, the rest seemed not to notice or care.
I removed the picture from my pocket again when I was outside, an action that had taken on a ritualistic feel, like making the sign of the cross. I did not look at it this time, but began tearing it in strips, lengthwise. Then I walked, and bent down at street corners, depositing each strip in a separate sewer along Fourth Avenue.
He’d told me that he’d broken his arm in a car accident, pursuing two black kids who had robbed a jewelry store.
As I released the strips of paper through the sewer gratings, I thought of the hand in the subway tunnel, and my father’s assertion that there were many body parts undoubtedly littering the less frequently traveled parts of the city. Arms, legs, heads, torsos; and perhaps all these bits of photo would find their way into disembodied hands. A dozen or more hands, each gripping a strip of photograph down in the wet slime under the street. Regaining a history, a past, that they lost when they were dismembered, making a connection that I never would.
CRAZY FOR YOU
by Barbara Demarco-Barrett
When I moved into Levi’s apartment in the converted motel on Placentia Avenue, the blue neon “i” of the Placent_a Arms sign was burned out. I worried it was an omen, a feng shui gaffe. It made me think too damn much of placenta, birthing, that whole entire mess—not a good thing when the sight of blood makes you faint. I’ve grown used to most things, and I figured I’d grow used to the sign, if I didn’t leave Levi or go crazy first. But I hadn’t grown used to it, and I was still here. It was going on three months and my feeling of foreboding had only increased.