On Canaan's Side (12 page)

Next morning right enough she asked permission from Mrs Bellow to use the telephone in the hallway, and made a call through to the station.

That afternoon a police car came in through the gates and parked under the flowering rhododendrons.

I was not in a good state of mind. I hadn’t wanted Cassie to ring and was more and more alarmed she had, thinking about it. I had fled the scene in Chicago. So I would be obliged merely to say a strange man had been acting strangely, which didn’t sound very urgent. If he really was an assassin, maybe the game was up anyway. He would surely be back again, and by the savage cut of him in Chicago I didn’t suppose any policeman was going to stop him.

All this was going round and round in my brain, and then the trooper walks in, in his policeman’s outfit.

I didn’t know he was Joe Kinderman just then, of course.

He took the whole thing very seriously, very. I gave an account of the man, on my own in the left-side sitting-room. I hadn’t wanted Cassie, I didn’t want her chiming in, because out of concern for me she might say too much.

‘You didn’t know this man,’ said the officer. He had a little notebook, and a carpenter’s pencil, with thick lead, and when he wrote something, he licked at the lead, quick, quick, snakelike. He had a full mouth with just a line of a moustache above his upper lip, like Cesar Romero. Me and Cassie had seen Cesar Romero at the Saturday picture house. If we had been two ice-creams we would have melted on the seats.

‘I couldn’t see his face,’ I said, suddenly feeling the force of childhood, when a lie was such a fearing sin. I was quite afraid of this man, in his tight-fitting clothes, and his punchy face. The strange man had had a gun, and this man had a gun. It was odd to be sitting in Mrs Bellow’s pink and green armchair, Joe Kinderman in a matching chair, trying to tell the truth and yet not to say anything about the past. I wanted to tell him my father was in the same profession, but of course I could not. And Tadg of course, a policeman of sorts. I didn’t think this man in front of me was Irish, but still I couldn’t chance it. Maybe he knew nothing of Ireland and her politics. I tried to be truthful but sparing. He was tickled pink that I was Irish, when he asked me, I didn’t know why, since there were a thousand Irish maids in Cleveland, tens of thousands.

He was heartened when I said I had seen the Tennessee licence plate.

‘If you remember the number, honey, we have a good chance to catch this guy.’

‘77170,’ I said. ‘1923 I think it might have been.’

‘I suppose you don’t know the make? Women don’t usually look at things like that.’

‘Model T,’ I said.

He let out a little whistle, or an almost-whistle, accompanied by an unintended comet of spit.

‘We had seven women killed these last two years, all over Cuyahoga county,’ he said, partly to recover himself I am sure. ‘So you look out for yourself.’

I was noticing something about his face then, it was slightly ash-coloured, like I had seen once in the steelworkers’ faces when they came up to see Mr Bellow. The furnaces baked dust into their pores. They were human pots being fired all day long, and it left a mark. But Joe Kinderman was no steelworker.

‘It’s usually quiet up here,’ I said. ‘Never a soul. That’s why he gave me a fright.’

‘Sure. And very nice up here it is too. The Heights. Yes, sir. I would sure love to live up here.’ And he laughed, like that was about as likely as iron turning to gold. ‘Salubrious,’ he said, giving the word a breeze of energy.

I found myself liking his fancy word. He might have borrowed it from my father. I liked him, even if I feared him. I smiled at him a little as he sat there, nodding his head, and patting his knees. I thought,
carefree
.

So then he got up and off he went, confident and ashenfaced.

His boot-shoes were so brightly polished I could see Mrs Bellow’s windows in them, curtains and all.

W
ell, Joe Kinderman got a name for the car’s owner, a Robert Doherty, but it was far far away in Tennessee, two states over. He was thinking now it was just a drifter, on the prowl for what he could get. America was full of uprooted men now, he said, whole families. Cleveland was filling up with them, a city he said that was never going to be an easy answer for anyone. But he had a name and he was going to make sure and certain that Robert Doherty wasn’t in Ohio any more.

I knew this because he came back one afternoon, easy as you like, and asked me out to Luna Park. He said I could bring Cassie with me if I liked. He had parked his car and sneaked in round the back to the kitchen, and checked Mrs Bellow wasn’t there, all in best policeman style.

We only had one day off a month, and we usually just went haunting the sidewalks round the various stores in Shaker Heights, and looking at the flowers in the parks, which Cassie especially loved. There were places that didn’t like Cassie coming in. But we always scrubbed ourselves, and put on whatever we had for finery, and sallied forth gamely.

This was something different, a man bringing us to Luna Park. I had to smile, because I realised properly only then that Cassie had never had a beau of any kind. Cassie was worried that she had been asked too. She didn’t want to make things difficult for Joe Kinderman. But he didn’t care about that. In his civvies he was all spark and tornado.

Nevertheless when we got on the streetcar all together, and were making to sit down at the front, so we could see everything as we went, the motorman had a word in Joe’s ear, and asked him if we wouldn’t be happier down the back.

‘Don’t you worry,’ said Joe, showing the man his police badge that he had in his breast pocket. ‘I am escorting these ladies. What you’re looking at here is out-and-out royalty. This here,’ he said, indicating poor Cassie, ‘is the Viceregal Consort of the Gold Coast. That’s her house,’ he said, indicating an anonymous mansion we were passing, ‘that’s her
palace
, right there.’

‘She don’t look like no queen to me,’ said the motorman, but he was also looking at Joe’s badge. ‘Just this once, I guess. But this in’t the Gold Coast, in general. Folk don’t like to see Negroes, all stuck in their faces, in general.’

There was no one else on the streetcar, for all that the motorman had said. Despite the seeming jollity, I knew Cassie so well, I could feel her distress. She was wishing herself twelve hundred miles from that motorman, maybe Cleveland itself. She was wishing maybe she was back in Norfolk, not knowing about the world, getting decked out in her First Holy Communion frock. I knew what that was like. Proud as the first day of creation. And beautiful and shining in the eyes of your father.

Catus Blake had gone living up along 55th Street, he had left the water for good and all. For something of the same reason. Things separating out in Cleveland, like a sauce that hasn’t mixed.

These thoughts were still brand new when Joe Kinderman went for that man’s neck. He literally went for that man’s neck. The sentence the motorman had said had had a much worse effect on him than anyone could foresee. He put his big hands around that scrawny man’s neck and he shook the motorman.

‘You piece of human excrement,’ he said, like reciting a line of poetry.

The motorman was just about to blow his emergency whistle then, and get some help, when Joe let his hands fall away. He smoothed at the man’s necktie, nodding his own head, muttering something.

‘No, sorry, buddy, but you just mustn’t got to say things like that in front of her majesty.’ And he smiled his useful Joe Kinderman smile, all nice teeth, and the clipped moustache buckling in an arc.

‘You get off this streetcar,’ said the man, ‘I don’t care if you are a police officer.’

So we got down at the next stop and walked our way to the lower part of the city. In the distance we could see the humped-up train tracks of the famous dipper.

Joe Kinderman was even lighter on his shoes now, all that muscle and hardness he had was put floating somewhat on the sea of the world, so at ease that I think not just me fell in love with him then, but every passing soul.

And indeed, a lot of Italians lived down that way, and Joe in his line of work tended to bump into the Italians, he said. The kings of corn sugar, mayhem and such, but also, he said, thousands of ordinary folk, who got into trouble in times past for keeping a still in their yard. Those times were passing, but they knew Joe’s face from the fact it had been inserted into a dozen homes there. And it didn’t seem unwelcome as he wended down Woodland Avenue. They were on different sides, but they didn’t scorn to greet him.

‘Hey, detective, now we have a lovely day.’

‘How do, Mr Sorello,’ says Joe, floating on this air of his own making. ‘Good to see you.’

I feel so happy writing this down, because it is about happiness, and here is the day where Cassie was happy.

Joe paid us through the entrance gates of Luna Park as if we were still his little gaggle of royalty. The morning now decided to be in cahoots with us, and the lid of thin mist, which until that moment did not seem able to lift itself away from the city, suddenly did so, and the generous American sky threw all its arms open above us, and above the brightened factories, and the stretching wilderness of the human streets. It was as if the possible paradise of America was revealed, something to replace the unhurt domain that the first white men had found, as Mr Dillinger had explained to me. Something to undo the hurts and terrors that had followed, that first little hut that Mrs Bellow claimed descent from, that first muddled village, then a town flooding its houses slowly across rough fields, and then the great shouting that the city was. Beyond the amusement park the Cuyahoga River, that sometimes had seemed to be like a broken creature slinking away, vast and stinking, abruptly and magically regained her ancient beauty, the filth and darkness of the water turned ever so slightly by the hand of the world, so that its filthiness had only been a humorous coat to hide its gemlike brilliance, its fantastical yellows, its gleaming greens, its browns as lovely as an Irish bogland. My heart lifted like a pheasant from scrub, as if utterly surprised and alarmed by this beauty, its wings utterly opened in fright and exulting.

We passed on in. Joe Kinderman said to me out of Cassie’s earshot that there were days when the ‘Negroes’ were not allowed in to the park, for fear of upsetting the good citizens. And he looked at me with his intense look that I was beginning to recognise. I was beginning to know him. It would have been difficult for me to say why Cassie, streaming along in her best clothes, her face ablaze with the surreal happiness of that day, could have done anything but delight a citizen, much less disturb them. She was the city, the citizen, and the gates of heaven all in one, as John Bunyan wrote in his ancient book. She was like a human person too good for any suitor like in a fairy story. Her tremendous arms, the shine and curve of her lower legs, her bosom that any old mariner would have chosen to grace the prow of his ship, to carry him miraculously through storms, all seemed to me like instances of never-to-be-repeated human grace.

Joe Kinderman’s only law that day was that we must ride the amusements, all of them, despiting all fear and reluctance. He bought a handful of tickets like a posy in his fist. He led us magisterially, knowing everything about them, from one to the other. We shied at coconuts like Amazons defeating mere men. We collected two teddy bears and carried them with us carefully like the new babies of our strange marriage. All the time, circling about and about, we were deviously approaching the great central attraction, which like a guilty thought hovered in all its twists and turns and complexity above our heads. Whether heaven or hell we did not know.

Then having tasted the mundane delights we were to endure the celestial.

‘Anyone ever fall off this thing?’ said Joe to the ticketman, just to further infuse me with dread. The ticketman had a long well-combed beard, which he had tied at the end with white string, and God had forgotten to pin his ears to his head properly.

‘We don’t have no one fall off this thing. You couldn’t fall off iffen unless you threw yourself.’

‘There, Joe,’ I said.

‘I heard of plenty people falling off rides just like this, all over America. That right, mister?’

‘Not in a regulated place like thissen. This the goddamn best-made fun park in all America.’

‘Where you from, mister,’ said Joe in his best friendly manner, not wishing to cause offence, ‘with your thissen and iffen?’

‘Blue Ridge Mountains. Ever been up there?’

‘I never been there,’ said Cassie, ‘but that’s Virginia. I come from Norfolk, Virginia.’

But whether the ticketman didn’t care for Norfolk, or some other reason, he didn’t say anything more. He put Cassie and me into the front of a car when it came clanking up the tracks, and Joe in the row behind us. The seats were made of some grainy metal, and we had an iron bar clanged down across our stomachs to protect us from Joe’s stories. Wonderful generous bits of Cassie settled against the bar. The world was made for lesser mortals generally.

‘Slipstream,’ said Joe enigmatically.

How pleasantly we drew away, some distant engine making mysterious clockwork move, this new beauty of the city uncovered more and more as we rose. The sunlight didn’t miss its chance, and as we approached the first high point of the ride, it moved in behind a brassy cloud high above the river, and then suddenly, like a very thunderstorm of light, dropped a cascade of brightness the size of Ireland down on the water, so that the river halved into blackness and brilliance, and you would half-suspect that there was a more mysterious ticketman somewhere, from the mountains of heaven, pulling heavenly switches.

We poised, three beating hearts, three souls with all their stories so far in the course of ordinary lives, three mere pilgrims, brilliantly unknown, brilliantly anonymous, above a Cleveland fun park, with the wonderful catastrophe of the sunlight on the river, the capricious engineering of the tracks, the sudden happiness of knowing Joe, his clever kindness to Cassie, his shoal of looks at me, I could see him, I could see him, glancing at my face, my body, wondering, wondering, his own eyes lit not only by the strange weather of that day, but something as strange within, Joe’s gathered stare, like a photograph of some old poetman, that you would see in a magazine, all balanced for a perfect moment, the past somehow mollified, the journey so far somehow justified, Tadg’s murder, my own faraway condition, fatherless and sisterless, all poised in the gentle under-singing of the wind, coming up through the filigree of the fun car, raised to heaven, almost to heaven, Joe’s face behind me when I looked beaming almost ecstatically, almost frightening, his head back, his eyes closed, his teeth bared, and maybe even laughing, if it wasn’t the mechanisms churning, bringing us to the tipping point, bringing us, bringing us, Cassie and me and Joe, here we are, so high, so high, oh paradise of Cleveland, oh suffering America, long story of suffering and glory, and our own little stories, without importance, all offered to heaven, to the sky and the river, to the stories of the houses, the streets, the passing decades, the worrisome future, then, oh, oh, gone beyond, thrown somewhat forward, our weight somehow in conspiracy with this matter of acceleration, our weight as if tearing us downward, as if we were for a moment forgiven by God, and then rejected, in some sort of extravagant humorousness, and cast down, instantly at speed, and then at worse speed and then worse, so that I saw Cassie’s cheeks dragged towards her ears, and flappy hollows bubble and boil there, and in the roar of our falling I heard Joe not laughing but calling out, screaming out, words I could not catch, words infected with wildness and happiness, and in me only terror and sickness, and stampeding thoughts, until, until, dropping sheer and sheer, suddenly down to the level we came, bottoming out, and Cassie weeping, weeping, and then holding on to me, her brave arms around me, and me trying to get my arms around her, not succeeding, but holding on, holding, my lovely Cassie, and she was weeping and then laughing, laughing and weeping, as if we had lived all our life in two minutes, two minutes of falling and weeping, and I knew everything that had happened to me was just, because it led to this, and this was my reward, the infinite friendship of my Cassie.