Days earlier, King had led a six-thousand-strong march down Beale Street in support of an ongoing garbage workers’ strike in Memphis, where almost all the refuse men were black. Rioting and violence had ensued, ending in serious injuries, scores of arrests, and the death of a sixteen-year-old boy. Witnesses claimed the boy, Larry Payne, had been shot by a white policeman after putting his hands up in surrender. Subsequently, a prominent group of radicals had called for the annexation of five southern states with the intention of forming a separate black nation, warning that the country would have “no chance of surviving” if their demands were not met. A visibly worn down President Johnson stated that rioting could only serve to divide the people, while presidential candidate Richard Nixon declared that “the nation must be prepared to meet force with force if necessary.” King had pledged that the Memphis incident would not deter his plans to march in D.C. in April.
“ Troy?”
“What?”
“Think we could get through one afternoon without talkin’ about all this bullshit for a change?”
“It’s not important to you?”
“I hear enough about it in my world every day. I just don’t need to be discussin’ it all day at work.”
Discussing it with a white man, Strange might have added. But there wasn’t any need to say it aloud. Peters was smart enough to read between the lines.
Strange had been riding with Peters for a while now, but it had only taken one day to know his history. Peters was twenty-nine years old, a devout Christian married to his college sweetheart, Patty, who worked for an American Indian-rights group on Jefferson Place in Northwest and drove a VW Bug with a flower-shaped McCarthy sticker affixed to its hood. Peters had strong feelings on civil rights, women’s rights, organized labor, and the war in Vietnam. On all of these issues, Peters believed he was on the side of the angels.
Right or not, his opinions often came off as speeches, like he was up in front of one of those poli-sci classes he had taken back in school. Strange sometimes felt it was his duty to bring Peters back down to reality. Let him know in his own way that while all black people were looking for equality, few were looking to be accepted, or loved, by whites. It was, in fact, just about the furthest thing from black folks’ minds. This was something that many of these well-meaning types could not seem to understand.
One thing about Peters, he was different for sure from most of the cops Strange had come to know. A Carolina boy who’d graduated from Princeton, joined the Peace Corps, then signed up for the MPD, he was one of several high-profile recruits with similar backgrounds who’d come to the force with Ivy League degrees in hand, hoping to change the system from the inside. There had even been a New York Times article written on these men in which Peters had been quoted, and a Look magazine spread that featured a photograph of his freckly, blue-eyed face. He claimed to be embarrassed by all the attention, and Strange had no doubt that he was. Certainly his notoriety and well-heeled upbringing did not endear him to many of his fellow officers, black or white. To them he was just playing dress-up until he got bored and moved on to something else.
Not that Peters was soft. Boys tended to be built bigger and tougher in the South, and Peters was a southern boy all the way. From what Strange had seen so far, he was unafraid to enter into a conflict and had no physical problem subduing suspects on the street. More important, Strange was secure in the belief that Peters would have his back in the event of a situation.
So Peters was all right. He wasn’t Strange’s boy or anything like that, but he was fine. Strange just wished he didn’t try so hard to endear himself to his “black” partner all the time. It got tiring sometimes, listening to the beat of his pure heart.
“I wish I could have been there,” said Peters.
“Where?”
“The cathedral. I would’ve liked to have heard him speak.”
“Thought we were done with that,” said Strange.
“The radio said four thousand showed up to hear him,” said Peters, unable to give it up.
“Gonna be four hundred thousand,” said Strange, “he comes back in April.”
“First he’s gotta go back to Tennessee to try and put a Band-Aid on that situation they got down there.”
“Fine by me,” said Strange. “Let the Memphis police deal with it for a while. Leave us with some peace.”
He looked out the window of the squad car, saw a man washing his Cadillac curbside. A snatch of “Cold Sweat” came from its radio. Two kids were dancing on the sidewalk, one of them trying to do a JB split beside the man’s ride.
“Maceo,” said Strange under his breath.
Farther along, a woman in a gone-to-church outfit walked alone, swinging a handbag, her backside moving beautifully beneath her short skirt.
“What’d you say?” said Peters.
“I love this city,” said Strange.
NINE
BUZZ STEWART WALKED through an open bay door, stepped into the cool spring air, and lit himself a smoke. He had just finished changing the oil on a ’66 Dart, needed a break, and felt he was due. Behind him, from the garage radio, came that new one from the Temptations, “I Wish It Would Rain.” Now, that was a nice song.
“Day in, day out, my tear-stained face is pressed against the windowpane,” sang Stewart, soft and off-key, his eyes closed, the sun warming his face. David Ruffin on vocals, you couldn’t go wrong there. Course, Stewart couldn’t stand the sight of most niggers. But, boy,they could sing.
After Stewart’s discharge from the army, the manager of the Esso station at Georgia and Piney Branch had rehired him straightaway. Manager said he hoped the service had made a man out of him, and Stewart assured him that it had. Soon Stewart had been promoted to junior mechanic, a title that allowed him to do simple work: water pumps, belts, hoses, battery replacements, thermostats, and the like. No valve jobs, though, or even tune-ups, because the fat man still insisted he pass the certification course before he could take on those kinds of procedures. Stewart wouldn’t do it. He had long ago decided that he was never gonna sit in any kind of classroom again, have anyone laugh at him the way kids used to laugh at him back at St. Michael’s just because he couldn’t read the long words in those stupid books.
Manager said, “You take the class, you make full mechanic, it’s as simple as that.”
Stewart said, “Fuck a lot of class,” ending the discussion right there.
Stewart liked to work on cars, but he was no longer looking to make a career of it. There were easier ways to make money.
“Hey, Dom,” said Stewart, watching Dominic Martini scrape a rubber squeegee across the windshield of a ’64 Impala over by the pumps. “You missed a spot. How you gonna get employee of the month like that?”
“I dunno, Buzz,” said Martini without looking away from the chore at hand. He had to have known Stewart was cracking on him, but if it bothered him, he didn’t let it show.
“Just don’t want to see you get off that management track you’re on.”
“Thanks for lookin’ out for me, man.”
Stewart grunted. Martini was in his midtwenties, dark and pretty like Broadway Joe. He could have been a movie star, maybe, or one of them gigolos got paid to go on dates with old ladies, he wanted to. And here he was, a pump jockey, still cleaning windshields in the neighborhood he grew up in, a neighborhood gone half spade.
“Dumb ass,” said Stewart.
Dumb, maybe, but tough. Unlike Buzz Stewart, who had been stationed in the Philippines for the duration of his enlistment, Dominic Martini had seen Vietnam. Talk was his outfit had been involved in some real action, too. But Martini, who had been a cocky sonofabitch when he was a teenager, had lost something overseas. Funny how being in the middle of that shit storm had took the fire out of him. Or maybe it had something to do with his kid brother. The boy, Angelo, a weak tit if you asked Stewart, had always been his shadow when the two of them were growing up.