The chrome bumper pulled even with him, then the green fender, then the white, smiling face.
"Hey, junk man," said the young officer in the passenger seat. Eddie said nothing.
"Wassaaaaap?" the officer wailed, his tongue sticking out, his partner grinning.
Eddie had heard the blatting before, followed by laughter. He wondered why only white people did it.
"I do not know," Eddie answered and stopped his pushing.
The prowl car stopped with him.
"What you got in the cart today, junk man? Anything in there you shouldn't have?"
Eddie had talked with the police before. Most of the time they left him alone. They never hurt him. The one time he'd been arrested was for burglary when they found a half dozen potted plants in his cart. He'd just picked them up out of someone's carport. He was planning to sell them but the police stopped him and said they were stolen. They took him in when he said he didn't know where the plants came from but promised to put them back. He had no money for bail, so he spent sixty days in the county jail.
Eddie didn't mind jail. The food was good and after a few days they put him on a special floor the guards called the forensic unit. That's where Eddie met the doctor. They'd had some good talks. The doc had taken care of him.
All the guards were good to him and he did whatever they told him. One day a prisoner had broken a toilet and a work crew came to bust up the porcelain and chip out some of the concrete. They filled a huge trash can and the guards laughed when two of the workers couldn't drag it away.
"Eddie," the guard called out. "Come carry this out into the hall for these gentlemen."
Eddie put down the mop he'd been using and walked over. He bent and gripped the sides of the can and hefted it up onto his chest and walked it to the hall while everyone stared. He'd lifted heavier things. The guards smiled and were even nicer to him.
Another day a prisoner started screaming in his cell, crazy like, threatening to burn up his mattress with a pack of matches. He was strong and wild. The guards told him to throw the matches out but he spit at them through the bars instead. Two of them looked at each other and then the one said:
"Eddie."
It was the guard that was always asking Eddie for help. "Go in there and get the matches, Eddie."
The guard sat at his desk and listened to the heavy thumping, the sound of bone against bars and thick muscle against concrete. Eddie came back out with the matches and put them on the desk.
"Thank you, Eddie."
"Yessir," he said. Eddie had crushed the bones of a strong man's hands before.
"You don't have anything in that cart from Sue and Lou's Restaurant, do you junk man?" The young white officer was still talking, but neither he nor his partner had gotten out of the car, and Eddie knew if they didn't get out of the car it was going to be alright.
"Because somebody helped themselves through the back door over there last night," the officer said.
Eddie knew. He'd been through that alley and saw the busted lock on the door but he had pushed on by. No need to get caught up in all that now.
"I do not know," Eddie said.
"You do not know, huh?" the young officer repeated. "That might be the truest statement I've heard today."
The officers looked at each other, proud for some reason of their words. "You be cool, junk man," said the partner as they pulled away.
Eddie watched until the taillights disappeared and then pushed on.
"I know lots of police," he whispered to himself. "I talks to them all the time."
Eddie reached deep into his pocket and fished out the watch that he never wore on his wrist. He checked the time. Now he was late.
He turned down Twenty-ninth and quickened his pace. The cart rattled over the rough macadam. At Sunrise Boulevard he scanned the busy street. Rush hour. Working people leaving downtown on the east side heading west to their nice homes out in the suburbs. They kept their eyes on the cars in front of them. They stopped only when the red lights held them. It was like a train moving through an ugly patch of landscape and no one on board cared about the view.
Eddie's eyes were on the Bromell's Liquor Store across the street. It had been there since he was a child, sitting back off the main road, a broad parking lot on two sides. Even when they repainted the outside of the building some new yellow or purple color, the walls always seemed dingy, the dirt and grease somehow seeping back through the fresh color like a weeping wound through a bandage. Its present color was an odd orange, like a Mexican cantina, Eddie had heard someone say.
The young ones were hanging in their usual spot next to the pay phones. Yapping. Calling each other nigger and laughing at whoever it was today that had to be picked on. The older men pulled up in their Buicks or the Cadillacs with the sprung bumpers, limped in and came out with bottles in paper bags. The working men arrived in pickups with the shiny toolboxes in the truck beds. Eddie remembered when white boys with a Confederate flag pasted in the rear window were the only ones who drove such trucks. The world had changed.
Finally Eddie let the front wheels of the cart down off the curb and pushed his way across four busy lanes of traffic. No one honked. No one jammed on their brakes or cussed out the window. Eddie was invisible.
At the far edge of the parking lot he stood in the shade of a sprawling willow and waited. Without looking up he saw everyone who entered and left, matched them with cars, noted their clothes, paid particular attention to their hands: big or fine boned, stuck down in pockets or dangling at their sides.
When the bronze-colored Chevy Caprice pulled in, Eddie watched the man get out, sweep the area without stopping his eyes at the willow, and then stride into the store. Once he was inside Eddie moved.
The Caprice was an old model but flawless. Not a rust spot or a dent. The paint was unblemished. The chrome sparkling. The whitewalls brilliant and unstained. The license plate was multicolored and decorated with stick figures of playing children and said, "Choose Life."
Eddie took up a position on the sidewalk in front of the car and leaned against Bromell's cantina wall. The young ones paid him no mind, an ol' trash man.
While he waited, Eddie watched another car pull in and park in the back of the lot, near his willow tree. The car looked like a cheap rental. The white man backed into the space, the way a cop might. Eddie kept his head down, peering up through his eyebrows. The ones at the phone nudged each other and under his breath, one hissed "Five-Oh." Eddie knew it meant they'd spotted a cop on the street. Their voices got softer but they didn't move. One of the pay phones rang and they let it jangle eight times before it stopped.
Eddie watched the new car. The outline of the man's head looked huge and Eddie thought he could almost see his eyes. Then he watched the man lift a bottle wrapped in a paper bag to his lips and take a long drink. It wasn't a cop. Just another drinking man.
Eddie's own man came out of the store. He was wearing a short- brimmed touring cap. A package was under his arm and as he passed, Eddie watched his hands. The fingers were pale and thin and cupped. Eddie unfolded his own massive palm and the man dropped a tightly rolled package into it and Eddie's hand snapped shut like a jaw. The man got into his car and only tried to make eye contact after he was behind the wheel. Eddie kept his brow down and pushed away as the Caprice backed out.
No one noticed the exchange or no one cared that a white man had dropped some change into an old black junk man's hand. Eddie jammed the roll down into his pocket next to the watch and moved north, across Sunrise, up Twenty-third and through an alley. He did not hurry, but he did not break stride until he reached the old warehouse where they used to park the city buses and where the mechanic crews had left the packed dirt black and flaky with spilled oil and engine fluids. Back behind a rusted dumpster, he stopped, swung his head north to south, and satisfied he was alone, dug out the roll and loosened it.