As they break up to leave, Eddy Furlong feels a shy touch at his wrist, so light, so tentative, he'd almost not need to notice.
It's one of the high school girls. Or maybe she's younger.
About fourteen years old, with a delicately boned face, large eyes, a squinty slitted look to them like minnows darting in shallow water.
Furlong almost recognizes her... almost has the name. He could not say is she pretty, that fair pale lightly freckled skin with a waxy sheen, a look cold and stricken as if, so close to death, she's lost her creaturely warmth.
A scared little girl. Telling him something so faint and rushed Furlong can hardly hear.
"Hon? Speak up, please." Furlong is twenty-nine years old, not tall but broad in the shoulders, sandy wavy hair, married, a father, thinks well of himself... he knows this girl, or knows the parents, just can't say the name.
The girl's hair is whipping in the wind. She glances over her shoulder to where, up on the access road, her girlfriend is talking with some boys, dawdling, lighting cigarettes and tossing the matches in the air... it's a school morning and aren't those kids almost late for school? Or don't they give a damn? This being a special event, seeing some poor bastard hauled from the river, his face mashed like raw meat and bloody sockets where there'd been eyes. Furlong is waiting for those kids to laugh and clown around so he can tell them get on away from here, and fast.
He's prepared. He's a quick, angry man when it's needed.
'About what happened... I think I know... I mean, I have an idea.
.. how it might have.
"Yah? What? Speak up, lion."
He stares at her and sees those deep shadow crescents under her eyes.
A look that's adult and sad.
Anyone who can't sleep has time for a lot of thinking.
Officer Furlong is observed talking at the edge of the cordoned-off area with a girl who hugs her schoolbooks to her flat chest as if they're giving her warmth. She's telling him something earnest he has to stoop to hear, though he isn't writing anything down just listening.
The girl has a head of bushy frizzy hair her best feature, the women say that's so fair a brown it looks silver, ablaze in the sun, shot with atoms of fiery light. Her eyes are a strange green-gray, pellucid as glass marbles, with a look of transparency; she knows to stand tall and look an adult candidly in the face. As she speaks, her forehead is crisscrossed with tiny lines. She is wearing a thin cloth coat, navy blue, nothing on her head, no gloves, and her shoulders are high and narrow and taut as she hugs her books and a plastic purse against her chest. Furlong leans close, nodding, as she tells him what she knows: that the Garlock boy was in trouble with motorcyclists from out of town... those bikers who race on the dirt track at Oldwick and come into Hammond weekends, drinking, getting into fights in the east end, riding their big HarleyDavidsons up and down the hilly streets...
of course the Hammond police know these troublemakers well, and Furlong is grim and brisk and absorbed, nodding as the girl speaks. "I didn't know him and I don't know anyone in the family, it's just something I heard... he threw a rock at a motorcycle and almost caused an accident and ran off but they found out who he was and came back looking for him," she says. Her voice is shy and halting and comes to a stop altogether. Furlong asks when did this happen and she shakes her head; she doesn't know.
"I... I'd be happy if you didn't tell anyone I was the one who told you this," she says.
Right," says Furlong. "What's your name, miss?"
"Iris."
"Iris what?"
"Courtney."
"You related to Duke Courtney, maybe? Persia?"
"They're... my parents.
At this, Furlong smiles. Deep and wide. A smile so quick, like sun piercing cloud, you feel the force of being that engenders itabsence palpable as any presence.
From this, the girl backs off.
Furlong longs to ask her more questions but decides against it, she looks so frightened. He calls after her, "Tell your father and mother Eddy Furlong says hello, will you?" and she nods yes, she will.
He stands, hands on his hips, right hand resting lightly on the polished wooden grip of his pistol, and watches the girl hurry away to catch up with her friends. If they are her friends. As she climbs to the road she stumbles... or maybe she's overcome with a sudden spell of faint-headedness... but she recovers almost at once and keeps on. And doesn't look back.
By late morning the waterfront area at the foot of Pitt Street is deserted. Police have cordoned off a thirty-foot stretch of shore: DO NOT CROsS. I"t ORDER OF HAMMOND POLICE DEPT.
There are scattered fishermen on the far side of the river, most of them Negroes, sitting on their customary rocks, girders, slabs of concrete. But none on this side, within the range of all that's visible from the foot of Pitt Street.
The wide-winged gulls have returned, circling in the gusty air, dipping, dropping, picking in the debris, emitting their highpitched bugle cries. Out in the ship channel a barge with the smudged white letters UNION PACIFIC ORE moves slowly from east to west. The morning shifts to midday, and the ridge-rippled sky turns opaque, the color of lard. Against the pilings and the crumbling abutment and the ravaged shore the waves slap, slap, slap...
like the pulse of a dream that belongs to no one, no consciousness, thus can never yield its secrets.
Please, miss? Ma'am, help me."
Persia Courtney hasn't seen the woman cowering in the drugstore doorway at the corner of East Avenue and Holland until with no warning the woman steps out blindly into her path and there's the shock of a collision. And Persia is the one to cry, "Oh-I'm sorry!" and the one to feel, in her confusion, a moment's teethjarring pain.
But the woman hardly notices. She has her fingers closed tight around Persia's wrist. A hand like a chicken claw, or that's the way it feels; Persia stares and sees it's a normal hand, or nearly: a thin film of dirt, a scattering of scabs and sores, but a worn-smooth gold wedding band on the proper finger and bright crimson nail polish just beginning to chip. The woman's hair is stiff broom sage and she is wearing a soiled cotton housedress. "Please, miss, don't scorn me please help me," she begs. Her voice is a low hoarse scraping sound like steel wool scouring a pan, but Persia can recognize the accent: hillbilly.
It is Vernon Garlock's wife. Persia can't think of her name for a moment, then remembers: Vesta. "Vesta Garlock?"
"There's one of them following me, miss. I can't get home."
"What?"
'A nigra. Following me. I can't get home."
'A what?"
"Nigra."
The word is an exasperated half scream in Persia's ear.
Vesta Garlock is in her mid or late thirties so far as Persia knows, but the poor woman looks twenty years older. Her skin is tallow-colored, bruised and blotched. There's a fang-sized gap where one of her front teeth is missing from a blow as neighborhood rumor has it, of her hot-tempered husband's. And her eyes.
Those eyes. Wild as a horse's eyes that's snorting and pawing in his stall so that the groom is obliged to bring out the blindfold. I was scared to look into those eyes! Persia will say.
The woman is pleading, whining. "You're so beautiful, miss you go first. Please. You walk with me, huh? Then they won't pay no attention to me. Won't go after me, then."
"I don't see any 'nigra' that's following you," Persia says, looking up and down the street. "Maybe you're imagining things."
"Ma'am, just don't leave me!"
"I see some Negroes... who are not looking at us. I see that brown-skinned lady up ahead, with the baby stroller... she surely isn't looking at us." Persia speaks sharply, impatiently; she isn't the kind of person to suffer fools gladly. Nor is she the kind of person who feels much sympathy for crazy folk like Vernon Garlock's wife, whose people shouldn't let her wander around loose; Persia thinks maybe these crazy folk bring it all on themselves, their hard luck, even the way they look, blotched skin and missing teeth.
She'd walk oif, polite but stiif, but the woman's damp wild eyes are showing a rim of white above the iris, and she's gripping Persia's arm.
"Please, ma'am, for Jesus' sake, then don't leave me to the nigras."
Wouldn't it be comical if it wasn't so sad: this beat-up hag imagining any man in his right mind, black or white or whatever, would look with lust upon her.
Persia says with a sigh, "Oh, all right! Where do you want to go? Oh, I guess I know where you live: a ways down Gowanda Street? By the Loblaw's?"
Mrs. Garlock grunts an eager assent. She doesn't seem to know the name of her street; like the neighborhood dogs she makes her way around by unerring instinct. But Loblaw's Groceries is a landmark.
So they set off in that direction, no more than three blocks out of Persia's way, Persia conscious of people on the street staring at them.
Staring at Vesta Garlock, and staring at her Persia Courtney with her gorgeous red-blond hair, "strawberry" blond as it's called, her black and white polka-dot silk dress, her spike-heeled black patent leather pumps... the pretty outfit she wears in her position (Persia does not refer to it as a "job") as hostess at Lambert's Tea Room downtown.
Persia Courtney, wife of Duke Courtney, and the hillbilly Garlock woman, who is ranting in her ear about nigras: their animal ways, the "mark of Satan" on their foreheads. Why the other day, Mrs. Garlock says, this big black buck poked her toes in the park where she'd fallen asleep on the grass... another time, right upstairs in her bedroom, changing Dolly's baby's diaper, she looks up and sees in the mirror a wicked black face like the devil himself. And the way they send their thoughts to you... so its impossible you can't know what they're thinking. And what they'd like to do to you.
"Down home we don't hardly have them at all," Mrs. Garlock says excitedly, "or if we do, they keep to themselves. You can go for miles and miles, I swear, all the way across the state...
never see a nigra face. Not a one.
Persia says, "Me, I'm crazy for Billy Eckstine. I'd drive across the state, to hear him sing."
Mrs. Garlock isn't listening. She's hanging on to Persia like a child both scared and willful.
Persia sniffs and sighs. She is good-hearted enough to see the humor in all this. Such episodes can be transformed into one of her stories, to be told to Duke and their little girl that evening.
You won't believe what happened to me, on the way home! You won't believe, you two, how come I'm late!
And Duke Courtney will gaze at her with that look of... that melting prideful this-beautiful-girl-is-my-wife look of his.
Summer 1953. Persia hasn't yet asked Duke Courtney to move out of their Holland Street flat ("Just so I can think, not always just feel, like some sixteen-year-old girl doesn't know which end is up"); she has just begun her brief tenure at Lambert's Tea Room, that elegant place with its black marble floor like a glimmering pool and its Irish-crystal chandeliers aglow at all times in its churchly interior and its beautifully dressed and impeccably polite lady customers who smile so sweetly and pay Persia such compliments and leave behind such meager tips.
This summer, Duke Courtney is "in sales" (in the home appliances department at Montgomery Ward, that store's top department) and doing very well, though his work is several notches downward from his connection with Jacky Barrow, now ex-mayor of Hammond... who kept Duke Courtney on his payroll as speechwriter, political and budgetary consultant, friend and aide, jack-of all-trades... until it all came to an end. (The less said of that end, the better. As Persia observed, at least Duke's name appeared only a few times in the newspaper, in the most lengthy fact-filled articles.) And now Duke complements his income with speculation, as he calls it: shrewd bets at the racetrack, carefully plotted poker games.
"Speculation" is not the same as "gambling"; gambling is for fools.
Over the years, Duke has developed a complex theory of luck based upon laws (of averages) and factors (specific and concrete): for instance, a simple harness race can be broken down into a set of mathematical figures, arranged in columns, having to do with the horse's former performances of course but also with the quality of the driver, the condition of the track, the weather, and other miscellaneous factors, which in themselves are constantly being altered.
On the most basic level, if one always bets on the favorite, doubling the size of the bet with each subsequent race (regardless of whether any, all, or no bets have been won), the possibility of walking away with a sizable purse is considerable. One day in Cleveland, arriving with $40 in his pocket, he'd walked away with $6,000; another time, when Persia first visited a track with Duke, at Batavia Downs, he began with $50 and walked away with $8,300. It's the point at which laws and material factors come together, Duke says, that the human will can seize control of its destiny.
