He found himself on the grounds of Park View Elementary. He limped across the weedy field. He found the last quarter of the joint they’d smoked in his pocket and lit it with a match. He had a seat on a swing that he barely fit into and hit the jay. He snorted up the smoke that was coming off its tip and held the whole draw in his lungs.
His parents had finished dinner by now. His mother had washed the dishes, taken her bath, and gone to bed. His father would still be up, nursing his one beer, watching television. What was it, around eleven? He would be into Wanted: Dead or Alive on channel 20. A rerun, but his father didn’t care. Long as it had horses and guns.
Dennis chuckled as he exhaled his smoke. He rubbed at the top of his head.
His father had listened to him the night before, when Dennis had told him about his plan. How he was gonna turn it all around, get a job, work hard like his brother, and get his own place like his brother had, because his eyes had opened up and he’d learned. His father had nodded patiently the whole time he was talking. Yeah, there was the usual flicker of doubt in his eyes, and his hands were opening and closing at his sides, the way they did when he was impatient. But he had listened.
That plan thing, it was all bullshit, anyway. Dennis had looked through the want ads in the morning but had made no calls. Basically, he’d done nothing all day. And here he was, sitting on a swing set late at night, no friends, no woman, no one to talk to and no one looking to talk to him. Just high. Sitting in the same swing he’d sat in over twenty years ago. Still a child, gone no further than a child.
His plan had felt electric last night. It felt like nothing now.
Derek’ll find me something, though, thought Dennis. My little brother will hook me up.
He wet his fingers and extinguished the roach, putting it into his pocket because there was a hit or two to be had later on. He got up and limped across the field.
Otis Place was up ahead. He could hear the bark of the dogs in its backyards. He cut into a short stretch of alley that joined the long common alley that ran between Otis and Princeton. Behind the corner house, he passed a mongrel named Betty who was growling with her face up against her owner’s fence. Betty knew him by sight and smell. Dennis said a few calm words, but Betty did not cease, and Dennis shrugged and moved on.
He knew every stone in this alley. Didn’t even have to look at his feet to mind the uneven parts. When he and his father had played catch back here in the late ’40s, around sundown on summer nights, his pop would throw him grounders along with flies. Got so he knew when the ball would take a hop, depending on where it got thrown. He could picture his father, the white sleeves of his work shirt rolled up on his strong forearms, the easy motion of his throws. Coming out here and playing ball with his boy, even though he was bone tired from his job.
I didn’t hug my father last night, thought Dennis. That’s what I forgot to do. I am high tonight and I might be high tomorrow, but I will hug my father when I get inside his place and I will tell him how good it felt for him to listen. What it meant, and how good it felt to me.
Halfway down the alley, a German shepherd mix ran back and forth behind the fence, baring his teeth and gums, barking rapidly. The shepherd’s name was Brave, and Dennis stopped to pet him every day. Dennis approached the fence and leaned forward, extending his hand so the dog could smell it through the links.
“Come here, boy. It’s me.”
Brave barked wildly, snatching at the air with his jaws. Saliva dripped from his mouth, and his eyes were feral and desperate. The dog snapped at Dennis’s hand.
Dennis drew back and stood straight.
“Smart nigger,” hissed a voice in his ear as the edge of a straight razor was pressed against his throat.
Pop, thought Dennis Strange.
TWENTY-TWO
ON WEDNESDAY, THE Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. arrived in Tennessee. The city of Memphis received a Federal Court Restraining Order against Friday’s planned march, claiming that officials there would be unable to “control” the participants.
On Wednesday, in New Haven, Connecticut, Senator Eugene McCarthy, energized by his primary victory in Wisconsin, appeared at a rally six thousand strong. A band played “When the Saints Go Marching In” as he entered the aisle of the meeting hall, some supporters running their hands through his hair as he passed. Later, McCarthy traveled to a north Hartford ghetto and spoke through a bullhorn to four hundred blacks, promising a “new set of civil rights,” detailing his proposals, but reminding them that the most important thing government should do is “find out what you think, what you want.” The reaction to his comments went unreported.
On Wednesday, in Washington, D.C., in the evening, five to ten thousand people attended a rally at the corner of 14th Street and Park Road, where Robert F. Kennedy arrived via convertible motorcade and stepped up onto a makeshift platform set on the back of a flatbed truck. Banners and signs reading “RFK, Blue-Eyed Soul Brother” could be seen in the crowd. A street party atmosphere ensued as Kennedy spoke of “Washington’s monuments to failure, to indifference, to neglect.” People stood in the street and on rooftops, telephone booths, and trash cans, cheering wildly. One blond woman fainted in front of Kennedy’s wife. Down the block, at a much smaller gathering, a couple of Black Nationalists spoke to their predominately black audience, urging them not to vote for “another whitey.” According to the Washington Post reporter on the scene, their comments drew “little attention.”
At the same time, in Memphis, Dr. King spoke to more than two thousand supporters. Friday’s march had been moved to Monday, but the city was still seeking an injunction against it, in part because of threats made to the reverend’s life.
“It really doesn’t matter what happens now,” said Dr. King. “I’ve been to the mountaintop.”
Very early that day, just around dawn, the body of Dennis Strange was discovered in the alley shared by Princeton Place and Otis Place, near the row house where he had lived with his parents, by a neighbor who was headed off to work. As the neighbor walked toward his Oldsmobile sedan, his tired eyes not yet focused, he saw starlings alighting on something heaped on the stones up ahead. The birds took flight as the man approached. He knew it was a dead body he was nearing, having seen much death in the Second World War. He recognized the victim immediately, though he looked very different in the grotesque freeze of violent death than he had in life. His head had been nearly severed from his shoulders; it rested at an unnatural angle to his body, as if hinged. His teeth, stained with blood, protruded from lips drawn upward, a grimace of agony common in slaughtered animals. His eyes were open, fixed, and bulging. And there was all that blood. The blood, a pond of it beneath him, had soaked into his clothing and turned much of it black.
“Lord,” said the man, his voice not much more than a whisper.
He went back to his house and phoned the police, then woke his wife and sat on the edge of their marriage bed.
“Poor Alethea,” said the wife.
“I know it,” said the man, shaking his head. Their words were minimal but mutually understood. He and his wife had grown children of their own.
“You think he was robbed?”
“Of what? Boy never had twin dimes.” The man squeezed his wife’s hand and got up off the bed. “I better get back out there. They’ll be wanting to talk to me, I expect.”
By the time the neighbor had returned to the scene, two squad cars had arrived, and soon thereafter came the meat wagon, photographer, and lab man. Last to arrive was a homicide detective named Bill Dolittle, who was working a double and had the bad luck to catch the case just an hour before break time. Dolittle was a slack-jawed alcoholic, prone to seersucker suits, whose stick never shifted past second gear. He had the lowest closure rate in his precinct. Other cops called him Do-nothing and laughed at the mention of his name. He didn’t mind. He was working for his pension and his next drink.