“Yes.”
“Carolina. Bauxite. Yeah, see, that’s all different. Different part of the country. Different kind of job. And you know, I want to do more, to be honest with you. In our organization. And I feel like Barton was hearing you, but he wasn’t really hearing you, you know?”
He glanced over, and I gave him what he wanted. I nodded vigorously. I was still in the bed. Still had to piss and everything.
“But Barton, you know, he don’t listen to me. I could plan the whole thing, I could run it myself, but I’m not the one with the purse strings. He’s got the donors, he’s got the cash box, he’s the one running the show.” He puffed up his cheeks, blew out air. “Plus, you know, look at me, right? Look at us. The way he sees it, whites are the ones do the saving. Black folks best hang tight and wait on getting saved. He’s got what I call a Mockingbird mentality.”
He was talking about that novel: the Alabama runner hiding in a small Tennessee town, the courageous white lawyer who saves him from a vicious racist deputy marshal. That book was one of a hundred or more I read in a Chicago library basement, in the tender, terrified early months of my own freedom, trying to teach myself the world, and I remember how it moved me. The point, though, was that the hero of the book, the hero and the heart, is that good lawyer: the white man is the saver, the black man gets saved.
“So I’m thinking, I bring you back to the father, I push you on him a little bit. We’re gonna get your wife free and move me up the ranks a little. Show the man what a brother can do, you feel me?”
“I feel you,” I said. “I feel you, brother.”
For some reason that caught him by surprise, Jim Dirkson all nervous and confused, saying “I feel you” like that. The cop laughed loudly, and I saw the little pink glob of chewing gum moving around in the dark of his mouth.
I was startled by a red flash of last night’s dream, Castle’s hovering eyes, the reek of the pile. I shoved it all away with a violent act of mind. I thought instead of my poor, dear, imaginary Gentle, in headlamp and coveralls, shackled to the cart she pushed through the darkness of the mine.
“All right, so get up, man,” he said. “Let’s get moving.”
“Oh, my goodness,” I said. “Oh, my goodness, thank you.”
I came off the bed and clasped the cop’s hands in my hands, and he looked away still chuckling while I kept on saying “Thank you” and “My goodness” and “Thank you,” while I was thinking I’m sorry and then I’m sorry, Jackdaw, I’m sorry, and something was giving way inside me, and Mr. Dirkson and me, we couldn’t hold it in anymore, and out came tears, my face just collapsed into trembling.
“Aw, come on, now,” said the cop, shaking his head, lifting me up off my knees. “No need for all that. Let’s go.”
But I kept right on saying “Thank you,” I said it over and over while he waited by the door for me to gather myself together, get dressed, use the toilet, brush my teeth. His hand still resting on his gun belt, amused at Jim Dirkson’s puppy-dog earnestness.
“Now, wait,” I said when I was ready. “Now—I don’t even know your name. What is your name?”
“Cook,” he said, and pulled open the door. “I’m Willie Cook. Now, come on. We got a meeting to get to.”
11.
Officer Willie Cook drove us south in his IMPD cruiser, tapping his fingers lightly on the steering wheel and chewing on his gum. I sat in silence, uneasy in the shotgun seat, while his eyes danced back and forth between the road and the dashboard computer, where crimes in progress scrolled by in alphanumeric cop code. As we crossed Broad Ripple Avenue we passed a small knot of black kids, laughing and walking together on the narrow sidewalk; one of them, a short kid pushing a bike, wore a hoodie pulled low over his eyes. Cook slowed down and gave a blurp of the siren, gestured at the kid to make sure his face was showing. His friends laughed while the boy obeyed, slowly, muttering curses, pissed as hell.