To this day I don’t know what mayhem ensued-a metal garbage can crashing thirty feet onto four lanes of vehicles driving anywhere from fifty to ninety miles an hour. When I think of that night I see broken windshields, swerving cars, overturned trucks, and twenty-car pile ups. Or maybe nothing more than a single dead teenager, returning from his date in faraway Conroe.
Or maybe nothing happened.
Bullshit. Plenty happened. We were just getting started. We were Denny’s boys and we were on a roll, and with Denny, it was never enough. I have since met many people for whom it was never enough, but Denny set the standard.
By now we were too scared to speak, Charles, Eddie, and Bobby and me. Back in the burbs, we passed a block-long, two-story apartment unit. “To the curb,” he said.
I eased to a stop opposite the apartments. Denny had spotted an unattached U-Haul trailer parked near the sidewalk between two buildings.
“Come on, boys. Keep it running,” he told me.
The last I saw of the U-Haul, Denny and my buds were lifting the tongue of the trailer and dragging it down the sidewalk. A few minutes later the four emerged running from the apartments, scrambling into the car and hollering, everybody hollering, “Get gone! Go! Step on it!”
I gave it the gas. I didn’t have to ask what happened. I knew Bobby was good for it. Denny might flip out his blade and stick him in the ribs, but not before Bobby had his say. He didn’t even lower his voice, no pretense at cool, he just blurted it out.
“We shoved the trailer in the swimming pool. Man, it was heavy.”
He waited for my what’s-the-big-deal-with-that look and continued.
“When it hit the bottom, it cracked the foundation of the pool. We in big trouble now.” I looked hard at Bobby, but people like that never seem to catch the time-to-shut-up looks. “I guess we’re still minors, though, according to the courts.”
“Jeez, Bobby,” said Charles.
Nothing from Denny. He had us by the cajones and he knew it. But everything in our lives was about to change. The Houston police have a way of making that happen.
I was driving maybe thirty miles an hour, winding through Milby Park, half an hour from the busted swimming pool, when I first saw the red lights flashing. I stopped in the middle of the road. Two patrolmen, hands to their holstered hips, soon flanked the car.
“Get out, everybody. Out now.” We crawled out and the officers, billy clubs now drawn, prodded us to “Stand behind the vehicle.” By-the-book talk.
“Line up facing the car and put your hands behind your head.” We were shaking. The cops had to see that.
One officer told Denny, “Hands behind your back,” and handcuffed him. He then snatched Denny’s wallet from his back pocket and tossed it at the other cop, who radioed to police headquarters to see if Denny had a record.
During the wait, one officer stood guarding us while the other rummaged through the car. Several minutes passed, and when the cop in the car finished with the glove compartment and started poking around under the seats, Denny leaned to me, unseen by our guard, and whispered, “I have a loaded pistol under the driver’s seat. I’m on parole so they’ll take me to jail. But this has nothing to do with you. Don’t worry.”
I clenched my teeth. The cop standing just to the right of Denny must have heard or seen him whispering to me, about the time the other cop lifted the gun and said, “Look what we got here.”
What happened next went by in a blinding flash, too fast for my mind to register. The policeman didn’t lift his billy club, gave no warning, he simply swung it in a roundhouse arc and cracked Denny on the back of his head. Before he could hit the ground, the officer in the car took several long strides and planted his black leather shoe in Denny’s groin, standing him up just long enough for his knees to wobble and give way, sending Denny in a face-first freefall to the pavement.
Charles made a move to catch him, but the cop gave him a look and brandished the club. The other patted Denny down, searching him where he lay and emptying his pockets. He stood up, tossed the car keys at my feet, and said, “Get the hell outta here. I don’t ever want to see you again.”
The cops didn’t care that the car was Denny’s. They had their man.
I remember little else about that night, other than the closing image, a shadowplay of silhouettes from the rear window of the patrol car. One officer drove while the other sat in the backseat with Denny. As the car pulled away, Denny’s head lolled easily on his left shoulder, lifting and settling with the rise and fall of the pavement, seemingly napping. Meanwhile, the police officer, like an actor in the wrong play, continued to flail away, pounding Denny’s head with the billy club.
Eight days later I started high school, and on the few occasions when I saw my Ellington buddies, we either nodded when it couldn’t be avoided or pretended we didn’t see each other. We ran in different circles, simple as that. I feel certain they never mentioned Denny to their friends, nor did I to mine. The Ghost of Summer Last.
But still, school had a sour taste that somehow reminded me of Denny. It started off with old gray-haired Mrs. Montgomery, the government teacher, warning us away from downtown Houston late at night, where “only drunks and niggers are welcome.” And then a week or so later my biology instructor began improvising during his lecture on the flora and fauna of swamp country-“With all the trouble that Martin Luther King is stirring up, he needs to take a trip to Louisiana. He just might visit a swamp and never find his way out.” And remember that young man of African ancestry who wanted to play football? Well, he was removed from the football team after the first week of school, but not before his tires were slashed. Twice. Everyone knew who cut the tires. Eddie Serge. He still had his switchblade. Denny would have been proud. Me and my other buds-we didn’t say a word.
I and Velema ain’t stupid, and neither were they. Or like Denny used to tell us over and over again: “Too many words will cost you.”
So no action was taken. None was necessary. The problem and his family simply moved away.
That was the year they called the “Year of the Cougar” at the University of Houston. The Cougars were ranked number one in the nation after thumping Lew Alcindor’s UCLA Bruins at the Astrodome. Too much drinking going on for my family to give a damn, so I kept up with it all by reading the Houston Chronicle. But the Cougars never made the front-page headlines.
Denny occupied that spot, though nobody knew his name.
CAB KILLER STRIKES AGAIN!
Six times I read that headline, or one like it. Every article described details of his modus operandi, of the unknown assailant who lured cab drivers to the Officers’ Club at Ellington Air Force Base. The cabbies carried the killer to a deserted shore or unoccupied stretch of Gulf Coast prairie, where he slit their throats from behind. Every article concluded with a warning, but no mention of clues or possible suspects. Nobody in the Houston Police Department knew his name. But we knew. Charles and Bobby and Eddie and me, we knew.
In my mind I saw it as clear as if I were watching a movie. Denny giving the cab driver an address, a real address, no room for suspicions. Denny was too smart, had thought it all out, played it in his mind a hundred times before he did it, before he waited till the cab was speeding down a dark stretch of road, plenty to chose from in those days, then sticking the knife in the back of the cabbie’s neck.
“Pull over, slow and easy.” His voice was steady, his muscles taut, quivering.
When the cab slowed to a halt, Denny grabbed the man by the hair and jerked his head over the seat, and with one deep stroke of his blade, he sliced the man’s throat, severing his windpipe. Maybe the first time he cut two, even three times, to make sure the man was dead.