White Shadow (23 page)

I was off, again, grabbing my straw hat and reporter’s notebook—yelling back to Wilton Martin—and hitting the streets in my Chevy.

I parked down by the tracks near the Tampa Theater—the flickering white lights and red-and-blue neon marquee advertising
The Gun That Won the West,
starring Dennis Morgan and Paula Raymond—and right by the Kress and Woolworth’s. The Floridan Hotel loomed over the squat buildings by the railroad tracks that rolled down to the old Switchyards, and I walked the rest of the way on a curving brick street to the little bend that marked the edge of civilized Tampa and the world that the cops called the Scrubs or Skid Row. This was the bad section of Franklin, away from the little old ladies and polite housewives, where the strip joints with burlesque dancers and boozy bands made their way with a tired, old beat. This was where Air Force boys spent their money on Friday nights or hocked a gold pocket watch their granddaddy had given them back in Omaha (there were at least fifteen pawnshops on the row) for a quick throw with a broke-back prostitute who made you feel loved for a few seconds.

There were four black-and-whites parked at weird angles on the street and cops with their guns drawn aiming right for the door, crouched down like they were cavalry scouts. A few of the B-girls and dancers wandered out on the street, that cool spring wind kicking up the black lace robes as they smoked and talked, not caring a thing about flying bullets. A group of shoeshine boys was smiling and watching intently with great hope that a little blood would be shed.

I kept back.

I wasn’t a hero. I’d wait till it was all done and then ask the fellas about it.

I could see the reflections of the red lights of the cop cars and men in white cop hats against the plate-glass windows of the pawnshops and dance halls. If we had any luck and Dan Fager got the word in time, we’d get pictures of the blood and the grit and the poor bastard that decided to hold up a pawnshop in broad daylight. I guess he now thought he could bluff his way out by holding the owner of the shop hostage, as if any of us really cared.

“Who does he have?” I asked a beat cop who recognized me from the station.

“The old man who runs the shop,” he said.

“You know his name?”

He pointed to the pawnshop sign.

“Oh.”

He smiled and leaned against his car, a safe distance from the parked black-and-whites flashing their red lights.

“Who’s got ’im?”

“Some nigger with a box cutter.”

The B-girls wandered back into their shows, the Celebrity and the Carnival Club, and a few of the men out on the street, a ragtag band of snare drums and sax, started playing a slow funeral dirge until the cops yelled back at them to knock it off.

“Catchy,” I said.

The unnamed cop shrugged.

At four fifteen, the robber threw out a cigar box with a note inside. I watched the cops read it and then call into the station. Maybe ten minutes later, an unmarked black sedan drove up with the All Stars—Mark Winchester and Sloan Holcomb—black-suited and Hawaiian-tied, with shoes made sharp by old hands at the new courthouse, a confident smile on their faces that made them A-boys with the papers.

I hated them. I thought they were rotten, arrogant pricks and hated that anytime there was something made for pictures Chief B. J. Roberts’s boys—young Crackers groomed by the man himself—took center stage.

Through the side alley to the pawnshop, I watched the sun grow softer on the old buildings and across the Hillsborough River. A few more black-and-whites showed up and corralled the street, Winchester smoking and talking and pointing, just back from Korea, and showing the older, fatter men where to take cover.

Holcomb spoke to another cop, and soon the cop opened the back of his unit and handed Holcomb a scoped rifle. Winchester had moved on to one of the girls, a little Cuban in a black negligee with roses in her hair the same color as her mouth. Winchester smiled at her, and she tucked her hair behind one ear and nodded and nodded. She braced the wall of the theater with her hand and couldn’t have been on this earth more than eighteen years.

The old cop next to me smiled: “Rock Fucking Hudson.”

I watched the girl go inside, her lacy wrap swatting against her large, firm ass.

I took some notes. The two remaining B-girls walked inside, too.

All but the sax players and the kids disappeared behind the marked units. I heard the squelch of police radios and the low rumble of a phosphate train pulling out of the Switchyards and heading east to Ybor and beyond.

The train horn sounded and the boxcar disappeared, while I stayed with the old cop. I glanced southward toward the shopping district and all the good people still walking in and out of the row of five-and-dimes and getting ready for an afternoon picture with the kiddies and not surprised at all about another gunfight down in the Scrubs, because as long as the corral was closed they had no worries.

“It’s always Friday,” the cop said.

“Yeah, because that’s when you need money.”

“Because that’s when you get the squeeze. I bet his old lady needs something awfully bad.”

I grinned.

We were leaning against his hood, watching the action. The pawnshop advertising a special on gold and silverware. Neon all the way down the row. Even in the daylight and sunshine, the street had a carnival quality. A midway of sex and vice and dark alleys and darker theaters where people came to disappear and forget or pretend.

“You’re with the
Times,
ain’t you?”

“Sure.”

“What’s going on with Charlie Wall?”

“Shouldn’t you know?”

“Two to one, it’s the wife. I heard she’s a real nut.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “She’s just an old lady. An old lady can’t do that.”

“I seen plenty of women and girls and old ladies capable of things you wouldn’t believe. Just last week, I saw a woman beat in her man’s skull with a frying pan. The guy comes in for, what, the hundredth time, complaining about her food, and so she said she’d just had enough and beat in his skull. Woman was at least fifty. That old man is still in the hospital, and his eyes won’t stop crossing.”

I looked up from the hood of the car and heard the shot. A couple of women screamed, and there was another shot and some yelling and then the door kicked open and Winchester was there, hat still on his head, pulling some skinny negro with a bloody shirt out into the street like a sack of potatoes.

The black man was holding his stomach and screaming for Jesus.

And then the pawnshop owner—a wiry little bald man—ran and shook Winchester’s hand, and the cameras clicked and clicked, and then the old man’s face changed and he ran over to the negro on that old, broken brick street and kicked him square in the gut.

I moved closer, the notebook out, watching Fager making the shot that would make tomorrow’s papers—maybe—and move toward Winchester in time for Sloan Holcomb to join him with the rifle in his hands and everyone leaving the black man wailing and thrashing in the road. “Help me, Jesus. Where are you, Jesus? Come to me, Jesus.”

I asked Winchester a question, and he showed me the box cutter, and then he looked back over his shoulder and said, “Jesus don’t come to the Scrubs, boy.”

And he and Holcomb laughed at that.

“What did he steal?” I asked.

Winchester smiled and shook his head: “He’d pocketed a pair of dice not worth a nickel. Ain’t that something?”

ED DODGE was home and eating a TV dinner on a TV tray and watching
The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin
with Janet and his set of kids, who lay on the floor absently eating cookies after dinner and kicking up their feet behind them. Dodge poured a little Jack Daniel’s into his Coke and cut into the Salisbury steak that had blended in with the buttered mashed potatoes. Janet was in a far corner in a plaid chair chain-smoking cigarettes and watching the window. He ate, watching her as she stared through that big bank of glass, trying to figure out where he’d seen that vacant look. The kids started wrestling around, and she stubbed out a cigarette and paddled his boy’s butt with the flat of her hand and sent him into the kitchen to wash the chocolate off his face. And then she grabbed his little girl by her arm and told her to go and pick up her filthy room, as the dog on the black-and-white television barked and barked, as if Rin Tin Tin could see through the screen and yell at Janet.

Dodge finished off another bite of the food and then pushed the whole tray away.

Janet resumed her place back in the great plaid chair under a picture of their wedding and his photo from the Corps.

She tucked another cigarette into the corner of her mouth and tried about a dozen times to light the thing until she grew frustrated and tromped into the bathroom, where she closed the door and ran the water. And Dodge nodded, watching Rin Tin Tin taking down the bad guys, feeling kind of good about the dog and thinking maybe he wished he had a dog like that, and trying not to think about the concoction of pills Janet was mixing in there with her rotgut whiskey that would make her glassy-eyed enough and smoothed over enough to stand her husband, who she knew would want to make love as soon as the kids were asleep.

He knew that look when she peered out their big bank of windows. It was the look she got as she turned her head away, with her knees pressed up on her sides as he made love inside her. Not repulsed, not making love. Just existing in that space and time with a man and kids who Dodge admitted a long time ago she did not love.

The water stopped and the toilet flushed, and
Ozzie and Harriet
came on, and the kids took up their places at their parents’ feet in their pajamas, with satellites and moons for the girl and Davy Crockett for the boy. Janet finally got that cigarette to light, and she would be fine there in her place until it was time for
Schlitz Playhouse of Stars,
and that was the signal for the kids to brush their teeth and for her to remove her clothes and lie in bed. Head on the pillow. Flat on her back. Her mouth tight and cold.

The TV dinner sat on the TV tray.

And it started to rain outside.

Dodge looked at his hat by the door and down the hall at his leather holster sitting on the bedroom nightstand under the reading light.

“I’ll be going out later,” he said. “We have some surveillance.”

Janet nodded, and perhaps smiled for escaping it again, and thinking about all those little pills that would give her what she needed, taking her far away from Alaska Drive in Seminole Heights.

Dodge raised his glass to Ozzie and Harriet and smiled.

No one saw it. Sometimes those little jokes were best shared with yourself.

I FILED MY story for tomorrow’s paper—too late for the Green Streak—ate an early dinner at Jake’s Silver Coach Diner (ham and eggs with black coffee), and finally found myself down at the Tampa Theater, watching a western and falling asleep between gunshots. The celluloid images washed across my face, which I kept propped up on a fist, a bag of half-eaten popcorn in my lap. A young couple sat directly in front of me, and in some ways I must’ve been invisible to them because of the way they were groping and moaning. When the girl bit the boy’s neck, I was pretty sure that his hand wasn’t in the popcorn box. I dozed off for a while, waiting for the normal people to get off work and file into the bars where I’d drink and talk until it was time to see Eleanor. I’d smile at her as she walked across the Stable Room with that confident look on her face, gazing right at me as if we were alone and in a movie, and Tony Kovach, the piano man, was playing our own personal soundtrack as if we all lived in a CinemaScope Dream.