"Now Mildred," said Mr. Clark. "Now Mildred."
"Don't I have any protection at all," she cried angrily. "Are you all going to stand around and defend this murderer until I'm found some night with a broken neck? How do you know he doesn't have a knife. Has anyone searched him? Has anyone even asked him a question?"
"You got a knife, Sonny," one of the police asked.
"No," said Tony.
"You try to kill this lady?"
"No, sir," said Tony.
"You try to kill this lady?"
"No, sir. I got angry at her and said that I'd like to but I didn't touch her. I wouldn't ever touch her,"
"I want something done about this," Miss Hoe said. "I am entitled to some protection."
"You want to file charges against him lady? Felonious assault, I guess."
"I do," Miss Hoe said.
"All right. I'll take him down to the station and book him. Come on, Sonny."
The corridor was crowded by this time with teachers, secretaries and janitors, none of whom knew what had happened and all of whom were asking one another what it was. Tony and the police had gotten to the end of the corridor and were about to turn out of sight when Miss Hoe cried: "Officer, Officer." It was a frightened voice and they turned quickly.
"Could you take me home, will you drive me home?"
"Where do you live?"
" Warwick Gardens."
"Sure."
"I'll just be a minute."
She got her coat, turned off the lights and locked the door to her classroom. She came swiftly down the hall, through the crowd, to where they waited. She got into the back seat of the car and Tony sat in front between the two police. "It's very kind of you to take me home," Miss Hoe said. "I do appreciate it, but I'm terribly afraid of the dark. When I go into the cafetorium for my lunch the first thing I think of is that it will get dark in four hours. Oh, I wish it would never get dark-never. I suppose you know all about that lady who was mistreated and strangled on Maple Street last month. She was my age and we had the same first name. We had the same horoscope and they never found the murderer…"
One of the police walked her to the door of the Warwick Gardens and then they drove to the police station in the center of town. Tony explained that his mother was in the city but that his father usually came out on the 6:32. "Well, the judge won't be here until eight or later," one of the police said, "and we can't book you without the judge but you don't look very desperate to me and I'll remand you in the custody of your father as soon as he comes home. The lady seemed a little hysterical…"
It was, of course, the first time Tony had been in the police station. It was a new building, not in any way shabby, but definitely grim. Fluorescent tubing shed a soulful, grainy and searching light and an extraordinarily harsh and unnatural voice was coming from a radio. "Five foot eight," said the voice. "Blue eyes. Crooked teeth. A scar on the right side of the jaw. A birthmark at the back of the neck. Weight one hundred and sixty pounds. Wanted for murder…" They took down Tony's name and address and invited him to sit down. The only other civilian in the place was a shabbily dressed man who wore a stained, white silk scarf around his neck. His clothing was greasy and threadbare, his hands were black but the white silk scarf seemed like a declaration of self-esteem. "How long do I have to stay here," he asked the lieutenant at the desk.
"Until the judge comes in."
"What did I do wrong?"
"Vagrancy."
"I hitched a ride on Twenty-seven," the vagrant said. "I asked this guy to stop the car so I could take a piss and as soon as I got out of the car he drove away. Why would he do a thing like that?" The lieutenant coughed. "Well you don't have long for this world," the vagrant said. "You don't have long for this world with a cough like that. Ha. Ha. A doctor told me that twenty-eight years ago and you know where the doctor is now? Six feet under. Pushing up daisies. He died a year later. The secret of keeping young is to read children's books. You read the books they write for little children and you'll keep young. You read novels, philosophy, stuff like that and it makes you feel old. You fish in the river?"
"Some," said the lieutenant, putting as much disinterest into the sound as he could. The vagrant offended his nose, his sight and his sense of the fitness of things, not because of his manifest eccentricity but because he had heard the story so many times. They were all alike, the roadside vagrants, they suffered a sameness greater than the intellectual and sumptuary sameness of the businessmen who rode the 6:32. They all had theories, travels, diets, colorful pasts, studied conversational openings, and they usually wore some piece of soiled finery like the white silk scarf.
"Well, I hope you don't eat the fish," the vagrant said. "That river's nothing but an open toilet. All the shit from New York City comes up the river twice a day on the tides. You wouldn't eat the fish you found in a toilet, would you? Would you?"
Then he turned to Tony and asked: "What you here for, Sonny."
"Don't tell him," said the lieutenant. "He's not here to ask questions."
"Well, can't I be friendly," the vagrant asked. "Perhaps if we had a little conversation we might discover that we have some interests in common. For instance I've made a study of the customs and history of the Cherokee Indians and a great many people find this interesting. I once lived with them on a reservation in Oklahoma for three months. I wore their clothes, observed their customs and ate their food. They eat dogs, you know. Dogs are their favorite food. They boil them mostly although sometimes they roast them. They…"
"Shut up," said the lieutenant.
At quarter to seven they called Nailles, who answered and said that he would be right over. When he strode into the station and found his son there his first impulse was to embrace the young man but he restrained himself. "You can take him home," the lieutenant said. "I don't think anything much will come of this. He'll tell you what happened. The complainant seems to have been a little hysterical."
Tony told his father what had happened as they drove home. Nailles had no counsel, advice, censure, experience or any other paternal qualities to bring to that crazy hour. He understood the boy's deep feelings about being dropped from the squad and he seemed to have shared in his son's felonious threatening of Miss Hoe. A little wind was blowing and as they drove, leaves of all colors-but mostly yellow-blew through the shaft of their headlights and what he said was: "I love to see leaves blowing through the headlights. I don't know why. I mean they're just dead leaves, no good for anything, but I love to see them blowing through the light"
VII
It was an autumn afternoon. Saturday.
Below the house, near the grove of dead elms, there was a swamp where a flock of red-winged blackbirds nested each spring. According to the law of their species they should have turned south in the autumn but the number of bird-feeding appliances in the neighborhood, overflowing with provender, had rattled their migratory instincts and they now spent the autumn and winter in Bullet Park in utter confusion. Their song-two ascending notes and a harsh trill like a cicada-was inalienably associated with the first long nights of summer but now one heard it in the autumn, one heard it in the snow. To hear this summery music on one of the last clement days of the year was like some operatic reprise where the heroine, condemned to death, hears in her dark cell (Orrido Carcere) the lilting love music that was first sung at the beginning of Act II. The wind that day was westerly and after lunch one heard the thump-thump-thump of a bass drum from the football field where the band was warming up for a home game.