Cops and Robbers

Joe

The woman was all right coming down the stairs. She was bleeding from a long cut on her right arm, and she had blood all over her face and hands and clothes, some of it her own and some of it her husband’s and I guess she was still dazed by it all. But when we went out the front door and she looked down the tenement steps and saw the crowd of people standing around gaping at her, she flipped her lid. She started screaming and struggling and carrying on, and it was hell to get her down the steps to the sidewalk, particularly because all the blood made her slippery and tough to hold onto.

I didn’t like that situation at all. Two uniformed white cops dragging a bloody black woman down the steps into a crowd in Harlem. I didn’t like any part of it, and from the expression on Paul’s face he didn’t like it either.

The woman was yelling, “Let me go! Let me go! He cut me first, let me go! I got a right, I got a right, let me go!” And finally, as we neared the bottom of the stoop, I could hear over her yelling the sound of a siren coming. It was an ambulance, and I was glad to see it.

We got to the sidewalk just as the ambulance came to a stop at the curb. The crowd was keeping out of it so far, giving us a big open space on the sidewalk, moving out of the way of the ambulance. All I wanted was to get this over with and go away somewhere for a while. The woman was wriggling and squirming like an eel, a long black eel covered with blood and screaming with a voice like a fingernail on a blackboard.

It was one of those high-sided ambulances, a boxy van, and it carried four attendants, two in front and two in the back, all dressed in white. But not for long. The four of them climbed out and came running over to us and got hold of the woman. One of them said, “All right, we’ve got her.”

“About time you got here,” I said. I knew they’d been as fast as could be expected, but the situation had me scared, and when I’m scared I get mad, and when I’m mad I sound off.

They didn’t pay any attention to me, which was the right thing to do. One of them said to the woman, “Come on, honey, let’s fix the old arm.”

Their being dressed in white had made a connection with the woman, because now she started to yell, “I want my own doctor. You take me to my own doctor!”

The four attendants hustled the woman to the ambulance, having as much trouble with her as we’d had, and a second ambulance arrived, pulling in behind the first. Two guys came out of this one, both also dressed in white, and came over to us. One of them said, “Where’s the stiff?”

I couldn’t say anything; I was having trouble breathing. I just pointed at the building, and Paul said, “Third floor rear. In the kitchen. She really cut him to pieces.”

Two more had come out of the back of the second ambulance, carrying a rolled-up stretcher. The four of them went up the stoop and into the building. At the same time, the first four were getting the woman into the first ambulance, with some trouble. So much movement, so many flashing red lights, kept the crowd from deciding to join in; they’d just be spectators this time.

Paul and I were finished with this one, for right now. We still had to call in, and later on there’d be forms to do at the station, but for the next couple minutes the action had moved away from us. And it hadn’t happened any too soon.

Excitement carries you through the tense parts. It had been that way from the beginning, from the first time I was around at a violent situation, which was a ten-year-old kid hit by a cab on Central Park West. He was still alive, the kid, and when you looked at him you wished he wasn’t. But the excitement and noise and movement had carried me through the whole scene, and it wasn’t until we were driving away from it that I had Jerry, an older cop who was my first partner, pull the car over to the curb and stop so I could get out and up-chuck.

That’s never changed, from that day to this. I don’t upchuck anymore, but the run of emotions is still the same; the excitement carries me through the tense part or the ugly part or the violent part, and then there’s a sick queasy letdown that comes after it.

The patrol car was across the street where we’d left it, with its engine off and its flasher on. The two of us went over there, pushing our way through the crowd, ignoring the questions they were asking us and ignoring what was going on behind us. When we got to the car, we stood beside it a minute, not talking or moving or doing anything. I don’t know what Paul was looking at; I was looking at the car roof.

A siren started again. I looked around, and the first ambulance was leaving, taking the woman to Bellevue. I turned to look at Paul, and he had blood smeared all over his shirt-front, and dotted on his face and arms like measles. “You got blood on you,” I said.

“You, too,” he said.

I looked down at myself. When we’d come down from the third floor, I’d been on the side of the woman where her cut arm was, and I had even more blood on me than Paul did. My bare arms, from elbow to wrist, were soaked in blood, the hair all matted, like a cat that’s been run over. Now that I was looking at myself, with the sun beating down on me, I could feel the blood drying against my skin, shrinking up into a thin wrinkled layer of scab.

“Christ,” I said. I turned away from Paul and leaned my left side against the car and stretched my left arm away from me across the white car roof, where the flashing light kept changing the color of it. I couldn’t think about getting clean, I couldn’t think about what I was supposed to do next, all I could think was, I’ve got to get out of this. I’ve got to get out of this.