“That’s what I said-Arrowman.”
chapter 14
Someone had painted the interior walls here a lush medical pink in semigloss, a shade like Kaopectate, or the representation of a suffering brain before its relief by a headache pill. On this dirty, leak-warped surface was pinned bank-giveaway calendar, mimeographed schedule, yellowed fifties-vintage Alcoholics Anonymous recruitment flyer, not much else-nothing, say, like a placard reading YOU DON ’ T HAVE TO BE CRAZY TO WORK HERE BUT IT HELPS, certainly no snapshots of wives or pets or children. The wooden desk on either side of which the two men sat showed coffee-steam rings, paperclip scars, thirty years of gouges in its cherry-blond veneer: it had been reassigned from a nearby public school for its use here. On the side of the desk which faced the door of the pink office the desk bore a few nervous tags, graffiti or scratchiti accomplished with ballpoint or key tip or pocketknife at discreet knee level, where resentful hands could be hidden from their questioner’s view while an earnest listening expression was maintained on the face above.
A folder lay open on the desk between the two men.
It was July 1978. Each wore a tie: the thirtyish white man over a white, short-sleeve shirt with no jacket, the tie a fat powder-blue number, color like an inflamed nerve in the pink brain of the office. The elderly black man wore an unfashionably thin black tie, clipped neatly inside the vest of his newly thrift-store-purchased gray pinstripe three-piece, a banker’s suit except for clownishly wide lapels. The vest’s five buttons were done up, sealing thin torso like a sausage in casing. No air-conditioning here, so a lace-embroidered handkerchief got some use blotting brow, nose tip, and corded well of throat, visible just above the firm knot of the tie.
“I tell you, there’s goings-on in that house,” said Barrett Rude Senior.
“Why make it your business?”
“A man of God is duty bound.”
“This man of God ought to make three years clear of the girls on Pacific before he gets on anyone else’s ass,” said the man behind the desk. “Just because some rookie took pity and didn’t book you doesn’t mean the write-up didn’t find its way to my desk. Don’t play like you’re getting over, Barry, don’t think for a minute I don’t know what goes down.”
The man behind the desk might have seemed young to speak this way to the elder Rude, or to anyone: his hard-boiled tone a tad unearned, street dialect feigned. If so, explanation for his arrogance wasn’t in the pistol holstered on his ankle, evident as he hitched his pants to cross one leg over the other, nor in the handcuffs which dangled from his belt; really, these were all symptoms of one thing, all indicative of a type of person likely to fall to this particular line of work. An incarcerated man would call the type a cowboy. Like bail-bounty hunters or prison guards, cowboys were the type of men too sadistic or willful to make the conventional police force. Among parole officers the scattering of do-gooding Serpico types are a tiny minority; cowboys are the norm. To them busting your balls is daily static, nothing remarkable.
If the halfway house and rehab center and DMV weren’t sufficient to explain a certain thuggish vibe on Nevins between Flatbush and State, here’s the secret: a parole office carefully unadvertised on the second floor of a building on the corner of Schermerhorn Street, six offices off a waiting room, kitchen converted to a lab for on-the-spot urinalysis, windows of one back room heavily barred for use as an impromptu holding cell. Barrett Rude Senior had been making his weekly trudge to this place since the morning he first reported, the day after getting off the Greyhound at Port Authority, never less than impeccably decked out. His officer didn’t return the favor, dressing with his shirt untucked, beard stubble unshaved, with redolent sandwich wrappings unfurled on his desk.
“You misunderestimate an old man,” said Barrett Rude Senior. “I was attempting to bring those girls the blessings of Jesus.”
“You and Jesus keep your blessings off Pacific Street at one A. M., that’s my advice. You got a signature for me?”
Barrett Rude Senior was made to produce an autographed sheet, certifying hours of community service under supervision of Pastor Gib at the Myrtle Avenue Parlor of God Ministry. In lieu of employment a parolee needed some clock to punch; this was his, personally selected. He nonetheless felt it as a humiliation. Each week a bolt of rage split his countenance as he fished with skeletal fingers in his breast pocket for the required proof.
“I go out walking,” he said, rigid with damaged pride, not letting the point go. “Spend too much time in that house I got to air out my mind.”
“Take afternoon walks, not midnight. Feed the ducks.”
“Sounds come through the ceiling nobody should hear because nobody should be making.”
“What am I supposed to say, Barry? Wear earmuffs.” The parole officer glanced at the page and handed it back.
“I got to be relocated out of that house because the devil is making trouble in my mind. Knowing that boy’s getting warped up and not doing anything.”
“Terms of your transfer up from Carolina were habitation in your son’s apartment.” He spoke as though reciting some dull recipe: two parts water to one part rice. “We can talk about sending your file back to the Raleigh office and you with it, if that’s what you want. Your being in New York City where miniskirts walk the streets all night depends on maintaining current residence and you know it.”
“I’m going on the record as it’s not good for my rehabilitation to be around hard narcotics and funk music. Write it down.”
“C’mon, Barry. Be straight with me.”
“I regret to say my only son is courting Satan. Put it in your report. He and I will come to blows or worse. I’m asking a relocation for the good of everyone involved and you’re responsible. I’d take the child with me but he’s already half a man himself and will have to fight through it on his own. I pray nightly, when I can hear myself over the bellows and groans and the crackle of the pipe.”
“We’re concerned here with you keeping together what you need to keep together and you’re not talking to me. I’ve heard this stuff before, it’s old tunes. I’m not going to have your son arrested and I’m not a religious man, so far as I can hear you haven’t said a word yet.”
“I want to get a room in the Times Plaza and take the pressure off.”
“Who’s paying?”
“I believe the devil will pay to have me out of his hair.”
“That old fleabag hotel’s no better than a jail. Half the rooms are filled with cons killing time between bids.”
Barrett Rude Senior stiffened again as though he’d been misunderstood. “From the church I know a man there, a fine saintly man. He gazes out his window and he doesn’t see filth all around him.”
“The Birdman of Alcatraz, eh?”
Senior only returned a look of unshrouded disdain. In his glare he summoned for one moment the mummified eloquence of a legacy of chanting men in cotton fields, sweat-bathed parishioners, masked riders, galley ships from Africa, all the parole officer with his Dion and the Belmonts Bronx accent couldn’t pretend to fathom. For one moment it was as if Senior had ridden into this meeting on a mule, as if the baying of beagles as they crashed through swampland had leaked into the room.
Whatever grain of tenderhearted Serpico resided in the parole officer’s cowboy psyche was touched for just that moment. “It’s really shitty between you and your son, huh, Barry? I have to figure you’re not kidding me to want to move into that dive the Times Plaza.”
“I seen women on women and other counternatural things.”
“Enough already, you’re giving me hives. Let me see what I can do.”