Streets of Fire

SEVENTEEN

The rain had finally subsided by early evening and the warm orange glow of a radiant summer sunset drifted down on the city. Ben sat at his desk, rethinking the slender threads of the case while he twisted the large purple ring in his fingers. In his mind, he could see Doreen as clearly as if she stood before him, bright and smiling in her clean white dress. But who had brought her to Bearmatch? How had she gotten home from Mountain Brook? And if it was Davenport who had taken her, why had he not brought her all the way home, as his driver always had? Why had she been let out? And where? Had someone seen her, perhaps for the first time, as she made her way home that afternoon, some gray figure watching her from one of the dark windows of the scores of shanties she must have passed on the way?

It was already night when the phone rang on Ben’s desk. It was Patterson, and he sounded very tired.

‘Well, I’ve put everybody through the wringer, Ben,’ he said. ‘I checked that fingerprint on the ring three ways from Sunday, and it’s absolutely clean as far as I can figure out.’ He drew in a long, exhausted breath and continued. ‘Which means that whoever had that ring had never been arrested or been in the armed forces or worked for a liquor company or done anything that would have required him to be fingerprinted.’

‘All right,’ Ben said.

‘A big zero,’ Patterson added. ‘Sorry.’

‘Thanks, Leon,’ Ben told him.

He hung up the phone and looked once again at the ring, then walked down to his car and headed home.

The streets were still slick with the long day’s rain, and the whole city seemed somehow refreshed, renewed, as if it had been washed clean of its accumulated grime. Huge pools of water lay placidly under the streetlamps of Kelly Ingram Park, and the shallow gullies which lined Fourth Avenue were empty of the scattered cans and bits of paper and cigarette butts which usually lined it from downtown to the outer reaches of the Negro district.

He stopped at a traffic signal, and suddenly Kelly Ryan’s face came into his mind. He saw the popped swollen eyes again and the thick, distended tongue, and it made him dread the thought of going home. For a moment he tried to think of some alternative, but nothing came to mind but redneck bars, which he didn’t like, or drive-in movies where, shoved in among carloads of necking teenagers, he’d feel like some kind of pathetic middle-aged bachelor leering hungrily at young love. There were always the sizzling all-night cafes of Bessemer, where the Dawn Patrol gathered for scrambled eggs and bacon, but even his little house cradled among the factories seemed more appealing than such bleak and lonely haunts, and for an instant he gave up the search and headed toward it. Then he thought of Esther, of the way she had sat quietly in his front room, and he made a hard right at the next corner and headed out toward Bearmatch.

*

She was in the tiny front yard when Ben pulled up in front of the house and she looked at him curiously as he got out of the car and walked toward her.

‘Evening,’ Ben said quietly.

Esther nodded. ‘My daddy told me that you came by today,’ she said. ‘I just got home from work myself.’

Ben smiled softly. ‘Me, too.’ He looked down at the green cuttings which she held in her hand. ‘Planting something?’

‘A rosebush,’ Esther said. ‘For Doreen, I guess.’ She hoed slowly at the unbroken earth, easily turning the wet ground. ‘Sort of like she’s buried here.’

Ben kept his eyes on the cuttings. ‘I like roses,’ he said. ‘I have a few bushes in my backyard. Red. What color will those be?’

‘Red,’ Esther said. She continued to dig at the ground, inching the blade deeper and deeper with each stroke.

‘My daddy planted them,’ Ben told her, ‘the red roses in the backyard. Most of the time you think it’s the woman. But I’m not sure flowers meant much to her.’

Esther leaned the hoe against the wobbly, chicken-wire fence that bordered the yard. ‘I don’t know if Doreen liked them,’ she said. Then she took the small spade that had been lying on the fencepost beside her and knelt down. ‘Could have been, she did,’ she said as she began to shape the small hole. ‘Could have been, she didn’t.’

Ben eased himself down beside her. ‘Need some help?’ he asked almost lightly.

Suddenly the spade stopped, and Esther looked at him insistently. ‘Why are you here?’

‘What?’

‘Did you come to tell me something?’

‘Nothing in particular,’ Ben said.

‘Just to talk, something like that?’

‘I guess,’ Ben said. He stood up immediately. ‘I didn’t mean to bother you.’

For a moment, Esther lingered on the ground, then she rose slowly and faced him. ‘You just can’t come over here like this,’ she said. ‘It worries people. It gets them to thinking.’

‘Thinking what?’

‘About what you’re up to.’

Something in him seemed to break a little. ‘Nobody has to be afraid of me, Esther,’ he said.

‘They think I’m letting you know things,’ Esther told him. ‘About the demonstrations and all. They believe you’re over here spying on us. They don’t believe you’re trying to find out about Doreen. Nobody believes that.’

Ben looked at her pointedly. ‘Do you?’

She did not answer.

‘Do you, Esther?’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t know.’

He started to take her shoulders in his hands, but stopped himself. He felt a deep longing sweep over him, dense, demanding, barely controllable. ‘I don’t mean any harm,’ he said helplessly.

‘It can’t look right, though,’ Esther said. ‘It just can’t look right.’

Ben could feel his longing giving way grudgingly, as if it were being driven from him like a hungry animal from the fire.

‘I won’t come again,’ he said, ‘unless it’s about Doreen.’ He nodded gently. ‘Good night, ma’am.’

He started to turn, but she reached out quickly and touched his arm.

‘Wait.’

He turned toward her.

‘What do you think about all this?’ she asked bluntly.

‘All what?’

‘All this trouble we’re having,’ Esther said. ‘All this business in the streets.’

‘I’m sorry about it.’

‘But us, the Negroes,’ Esther asked insistently. ‘What do you, yourself, think about us?’

He realized suddenly that he had never been asked, and for a moment he couldn’t find an answer. But he remembered how as a little boy he’d first noticed that the Negroes always took seats in the back of the trolley. He’d once asked his mother about it, and she’d only said, ‘ ‘’Cause they like it.’ But his father shot back, ‘No, they don’t. Nobody d like having to do that.’ Having to do that? It was the first and last exchange he’d ever heard about the matter, and yet in all the years that followed, he’d never glanced toward the back of a trolley to see the dark faces staring toward him without thinking of what his father said.

Now he looked at Esther. ‘Well, I think that people ought to have a chance to do something, or be something, that makes sense to them,’ he said. ‘I think everybody ought to have that chance.’ He could feel the hard, insistent quality of the belief rising in him. ‘Nobody should have to give them that in the first place. But if it comes down to it, they should just up and take it.’

She watched him with an odd intensity. ‘Good night, then,’ she said.

He drove directly home and slumped down in the little swing on his front porch. The long day’s rain had cooled the air and filled it with an aromatic lushness. He could smell the rich sweetness of the flowers which grew across the street in Mr Jeffries’ yard.

He pressed his feet to the floor and pushed himself back, then swung forward. The wind hit him lightly, ruffling his hair, and he thought of Ryan again, not dead, but living as he should have lived, with that girl he’d met and come to love, living far away, no matter how far, in the place he should have taken her, north toward the huge anonymous cities, or west into the islands of the Pacific, but somewhere far away from the little house in which he died. He could see the house in his mind, but it was the smell of it that lingered in his memory. Ryan’s smell, and only Ryan’s smell. How long, he wondered, did someone have to live alone before he sank his own isolated smell into everything around him? How long did it have to go on, such loneliness, before someone said, ‘Enough.’

He felt a sudden wrenching agitation cut through him like a strand of barbed wire, and his hand jerked up and took the purple ring from his shirt pocket. He lifted it slowly and let the gray light of the streetlamp sweep over it. It winked dully, like a dead eye, but he held on to it anyway, as if, in all the world, it was all he had.