Dobbs picked the whiskey bottle off the ground, threw it over the fence, and slid into the car beside me. He pressed the starter.
“This is going to cost you,” he said. “You hadn’t ought to have socked him.”
I said: “Just why not?”
“He’s a good guy,” Dobbs said. “A little loud.”
“But not funny,” I said. “Not at all funny.”
“Don’t tell him,” Dobbs said. The police car began to move. “You’d hurt his feelings.”
Cooney slammed into the Chrysler and started it and clashed the gears as if he was trying to strip them. Dobbs tooled the police car smoothly around and started north again along the brickyard.
“You’ll like our new jail,” he said.
“What will the charge be?”
He thought a moment, guiding the car with a gentle hand and watching in the mirror to see that Cooney followed along behind.
“Speeding,” he said. “Resisting arrest. H.B.D.” H.B.D. is police slang for “had been drinking.”
“How about being slammed in the belly, kicked in the shoulder, forced to drink liquor under threat of bodily harm, threatened with a gun and struck with a blackjack while unarmed? Couldn’t you make a little something more out of that?”
“Aw forget it,” he said wearily. “You think this sort of thing is my idea of a good time?”
“I thought they cleaned this town up,” I said. “I thought they had it so that a decent man could walk the streets at night without wearing a bullet proof vest.”
“They cleaned it up some,” he said. “They wouldn’t want it too clean. They might scare away a dirty dollar.”
“Better not talk like that,” I said. “You’ll lose your union card.”
He laughed. “The hell with them,” he said. “I’ll be in the army in two weeks.”
The incident was over for him. It meant nothing. He took it as a matter of course. He wasn’t even bitter about it.
26
The cellblock was almost brand new. The battleship gray paint on the steel walls and door still had the fresh gloss of newness disfigured in two or three places by squirted tobacco juice. The overhead light was sunk in the ceiling behind a heavy frosted panel. There were two bunks on one side of the cell and a man snored in the top bunk, with a dark gray blanket wrapped around him. Since he was asleep that early and didn’t smell of whiskey or gin and had chosen the top berth where he would be out of the way, I judged he was an old lodger.
I sat on the lower bunk. They had tapped me for a gun but they hadn’t stripped my pockets. I got out a cigarette and rubbed the hot swelling behind my knee. The pain radiated all the way to the ankle. The whiskey I had coughed on my coat front had a rank smell. I held the cloth up and breathed smoke into it. The smoke floated up around the flat square of lighted glass in the ceiling. The jail seemed very quiet. A woman was making a shrill racket somewhere very far off, in another part of the jail. My part was as peaceful as a church.
The woman was screaming, wherever she was. The screaming had a thin sharp unreal sound, something like the screaming of coyotes in the moonlight, but it didn’t have the rising keening note of the coyote. After a while the sound stopped.
I smoked two cigarettes through and dropped the butts into the small toilet in the corner. The man in the upper berth still snored. All I could see of him was damp greasy hair sticking out over the edge of the blanket. He slept on his stomach. He slept well. He was one of the best.
I sat down on the bunk again. It was made of flat steel slats with a thin hard mattress over them. Two dark gray blankets were folded on it quite neatly. It was a very nice jail. It was on the twelfth floor of the new city hall. It was a very nice city hall. Bay City was a very nice place. People lived there and thought so. If I lived there, I would probably think so. I would see the nice blue bay and the cliffs and the yacht harbor and the quiet streets of houses, old houses brooding under old trees and new houses with sharp green lawns and wire fences and staked saplings set into the parkway in front of them. I knew a girl who lived on Twenty-fifty Street. It was a nice street. She was a nice girl. She liked Bay City.
She wouldn’t think about the Mexican and Negro slums stretched out on the dismal flats south of the old interurban tracks. Nor of the waterfront dives along the flat shore south of the cliffs, the sweaty little dance halls on the pike, the marihuana joints, the narrow fox faces watching over the tops of newspapers in far too quiet hotel lobbies, nor the pickpockets and grifters and con men and drunk rollers and pimps and queens on the board walk.
I went over to stand by the door. There was nobody stirring across the way. The lights in the cell block were bleak and silent. Business in the jail was rotten.
I looked at my watch. Nine fifty-four. Time to go home and get your slippers on and play over a game of chess. Time for a tall cool drink and a long quiet pipe. Time to sit with your feet up and think of nothing. Time to start yawning over your magazine. Time to be a human being, a householder, a man with nothing to do but rest and suck in the night air and rebuild the brain for tomorrow.
A man in the blue-gray jail uniform came along between the cells reading numbers. He stopped in front of mine and unlocked the door and gave me the hard stare they think they have to wear on their pans forever and forever and forever. I’m a cop, brother, I’m tough, watch your step, brother, or we’ll fix you up so you’ll crawl on your hands and knees, brother, snap out of it, brother, let’s get a load of the truth, brother, let’s go, and let’s not forget we’re tough guys, we’re cops, and we do what we like with punks like you.
“Out,” he said.
I stepped out of the cell and he relocked the door and jerked his thumb and we went along to a wide steel gate and he unlocked that and we went through and he relocked it and the keys tinkled pleasantly on the big steel ring and after a while we went through a steel door that was painted like wood on the outside and battleship gray on
