There are two men on the floor now.
Jocko is coming toward him.
Colley’s eyes go one, two, three: the man he shot, the other man lying on the floor some six feet from the cash register, and Jocko staggering toward him. He does not realize at first, he is very slow to grasp things in this fuckin movie, he does not realize that Jocko has been hit. Then he sees that Jocko has his left hand hooked like a claw, and he sees that blood is pouring from under the sleeve of the windbreaker and into Jocko’s cupped hand, and spilling from the hand onto the floor as he comes toward Colley. Jocko’s eyes are out of focus, it looks as if he is going to pass out. He has the gun in his right hand, and to steady himself he reaches out with the hand that’s running blood and clamps the hand onto Colley’s sleeve. The summer-weight fabric soaks up the blood, the blood spreads along the sleeve, Colley can feel it wetting his skin. He loops his arm around Jocko’s waist. Jocko’s gun clatters to the floor, and all at once he goes limp. Colley starts dragging him toward the door.
At the door, he stops and looks back at the man he shot.
The man is not moving.
There are suddenly too many things to think about. Where’s the car? — that’s the first thing; he can’t remember where Teddy parked the car. He has one arm wrapped around Jocko, his left hand clutched in Jocko’s belt, supporting him that way, Jocko’s left arm dripping blood onto Colley’s hand, he can feel the blood sticky and hot. In his right hand he’s still got the gun, but he can’t turn the doorknob without putting the gun away, and this suddenly becomes another problem that seems impossible to solve. He stands there supporting Jocko, and feeling the steady flow of Jocko’s blood, and behind him the counterman is yelling obscenities at him, yelling them in a steady monotonous senseless stream, and he cannot for the life of him figure out how to put away the gun and turn the doorknob.
The door opens magically.
He expects it will be an entire police precinct coming in the store here, but it’s only Teddy. Teddy’s face is all squinched up and sweaty, he looks as if he’s going to start bawling any second. But he loops Jocko’s right arm over his shoulder, and together they drag him out on the sidewalk. The heat out there comes up into Colley’s face like a puff of black smoke. He almost chokes on the heat. He begins to sweat profusely as they carry and drag and pull Jocko up the block — where’s the car, does Teddy know where the car is? — the sweat coming through his clothes, or is that Jocko’s blood? A lady stops in the middle of the sidewalk and looks at them. Colley yells at her, he doesn’t even know what he yells, and she backs off a pace. He yells again, and she moves away even further, and he remembers one time at the Bronx Zoo when a tiger in his cage began roaring and everybody backed away; the lady is backing away like that now.
Teddy opens the front door of the car, and Colley throws Jocko in on the seat, but Jocko’s front legs are hanging out on the sidewalk. This becomes another problem he doesn’t know how to solve. He can’t close the door with Jocko’s legs hanging out like that, but Teddy is already running around the front of the car, Teddy is already in the car, Teddy is slamming the door on his side, Teddy is starting the fuckin car, he yells at Teddy to hold it a fuckin minute! He keeps staring at Jocko’s legs hanging out of the car, trying to figure out how to get them inside. Teddy is hollering at him now Get in, Colley, for Christ’s sake, get in! but he keeps staring at Jocko’s legs until finally it occurs to him that all he has to do is swivel Jocko around on the seat, change the position of his body so that his legs are inside the car too. He puts both arms under the backs of Jocko’s knees, and he swivels him in that way, and then he steps back as though he has all the time in the world to examine what he’s just accomplished, even though Teddy is still yelling at him to get in the car.
He floats on sneakered feet to the back door of the car, and reaches out in slow motion for the handle, and opens the door and gets inside. He hears the solid thump of the door when it closes behind him, but he has no recollection of having pulled it closed. He is remembering instead the ridiculous gold and blue shield. He is remembering the red and white and yellow globules that exploded from the back of the man’s head. What he finally tells Teddy is close to the truth, but it is not the exact truth. He is unconsciously editing the memory, the way in confession when he was a kid he edited his sins so Jesus Christ our Lord wouldn’t have suffered in vain and so God Almighty wouldn’t send down a lightning bolt to strike him dead right there in St. Augustine’s.
“I shot a man,” he says.
He does not say, “I killed a cop.”
As Teddy runs the red light on the corner, Colley is thinking only that his grandmother wouldn’t go to her own brother’s funeral because it took place on the thirteenth day of the month.
Two
They were worried that the lady in the basement had seen the blood.
They had parked the car behind Jocko’s building, and then had come in through the back door, into the basement, carrying Jocko between them. There was a lady there near the washing machines, but she was busy putting in detergent and they went right by her, hoping she’d think it was some guys bringing home a drunken buddy. She hardly looked at them as they went past her to the elevator. But now they were worrying she had maybe seen the blood.
Jocko was still bleeding.
The blood had slowed to a steady seep, but it was still coming from under the sleeve of his windbreaker and dripping onto the floor of the elevator. There was no one in the elevator with them, they were grateful for that. They had driven past the front stoop of the building first, and had almost lost heart when they saw all those people sitting there on the steps talking; this was ten o’clock on a hot night in August, and nobody was eager to go upstairs to apartments like furnaces. It was Teddy who got the idea to drive around to the big open parking lot behind the building, then go in the door to the basement. The sleeve of Jocko’s poplin wind-breaker was covered with blood, and his pants were covered with blood, and there was almost as much blood on Teddy and Colley from carrying him.
“You think she seen the blood?” Teddy asked again.
“No,” Colley said, “she didn’t see it, stop worrying about it, will you?” But he was worried himself.
The elevator stopped on the fifth floor, and they eased Jocko out into the hallway, and then belatedly looked around to see if anybody was there. Without a word — they knew where the apartment was, they had both been here before — they turned to their right and started toward the end of the hall. Behind them, the elevator doors closed, and the elevator began whining down the shaft again. Outside apartment 5G, Colley rang the doorbell.
“Just like Jeanine to have gone to a movie,” Teddy said.