Meanwhile Elder’s crew were behaving more like a flying wedge than members of a disciplined protest, shouldering people out of their way as they forged ahead. Elder himself looked a little troubled by their increasing aggression, though he nonetheless lurched forward with them, and I with him. Fact was, everyone was walking slightly too fast for a body of that size: people bumping into one another and tripping over each other’s heels. Did they mean to overtake the leaders they were drawing ever nearer to? We were practically in arm’s reach of the vanguard that included the standard-bearer himself, though surely nothing could go wrong on a march led by him, his very presence guaranteeing the nonviolence of his creed. Even so, there was more cause for distress than the brazenness of my companions.
Some of the kids had broken ranks to run onto the sidewalk and beat with sticks on the plate-glass windows of the pawnshops along the route. They swatted at the hanging brass balls like they would at piñatas. At first the shop windows shivered but resisted the battering, which may not even have been intended to break them; then one of them cracked, glass splinters showering the sidewalk, and that was all it took. The previously elated faces of the marchers in my vicinity changed instantly to expressions of agitation and dismay. There were mixed cries, mostly rebukes of the young vandals, though some, as if finally released from constraint, egged them on: “Smash them suckahs, chillen!” It was the signal for wholesale pandemonium. The police, whose presence had been reasonably measured in the early stage of the demonstration, swarmed from all quarters. They moved in to cordon off the street between the mass of the protesters and the vandals, some of whom had begun attempting to loot the shops. Nightsticks were produced and one young tomfool dragging a sousaphone out of Cohen’s Loans was clubbed to a jellied pulp. A line of cops in gas masks and full riot gear had appeared at either end of Beale between Main and Third Streets, thus corralling the procession. Now there was the sound of shattering glass all around us, as the police began shooting canisters of Mace into the crowd. Screams went up, as much (I thought) in desolation over the aborted march as in fear, while a squad of the faithful formed a circle around Dr. King and his party to escort them out of the fray. Ignoring the calls of the marshals to walk don’t run, people began to take off in every direction, some knocked down and trampled in their flight.
The wail of sirens filled the space in the brain where rational thought might have occurred. Seeing was no longer believing: the cops left off beating the marchers only to smash the cameras of journalists. Then I saw Sweet Weeyum give the nod to his cronies, who smirked like this was the moment they’d been waiting for, and pulled bandannas over their faces. With his gloved hand Sweet Weeyum drew from inside his jacket a cobalt-blue bottle with a muslin tassel protruding from its mouth. He struck a match as Elder (shouting “Nah-uh, homes!”) reached out too late to detain him, and hurled the lighted bottle in a lofty arc through the broken window of Schwab’s General Store — whose interior blossomed with a poof into petals of mandarin flame.
Straightaway the heat were all over him. “Like stink on a monkey,” I heard Elder say in a mournful valediction, before he set his jaw and jumped on the back of one of the cops. The cop hunched his shoulders and flailed to no effect with his baton in an effort to shake himself free of his attacker, his eyes bugging behind his plastic visor from Elder’s chokehold round his throat. Having laid out Sweet Weeyum, several of the other officers came to the aid of their comrade and made to pry the Negro from his back, but Elder hung on tenaciously. They commenced to pummel him, the whump whump of their truncheons on his buttocks and shoulder blades lending a sickening backbeat to the shrieks that filled the surrounding air. I looked about for the rest of the Invaders, who were nowhere in sight. The drifting smoke from the tear gas was beginning to scald my lungs, and, coughing convulsively, I pulled my collar over my nose; I wiped my streaming eyes with a shirtsleeve and waited to be convinced that what I witnessed was actually happening.
The cop had fallen to the pavement with Elder still on his back, his legs clinching the man’s utility-laden waist while his fellows continued their cudgeling. They pounded him, the “apeshit nigger!” with an abandon so indiscriminate that some of their blows struck the downed patrolman as well. Then, when it seemed that their battery was unavailing, that no amount of punishment could make Elder let go of his nearly asphyxiated victim, one of the cops — his angular jaw grinding gum — pulled out his semiautomatic. The gun went off with a hollow clap, a plume of rose-pink mist spouting from Elder’s head. It jerked, his head, as if he were trying to work a kink from his neck before he lay still on top of the cop, who rolled out from under him speckled in blood. Then I wish I could say I was compelled by impulse, catapulted into action by the gun’s report, but I fully understood the pointlessness of my action as I leapt astride the back of the cop who’d pulled the trigger. I rode him a few tottering steps of a heartsore piggyback before a chandelier burst in my skull.
Back before his Jenny had returned to the city, when he was still compiling his history, Muni Pinsker — remembering the future — described a skinny kid shelving books in a used book store on Main Street. The kid’s name was Lenny Sklarew and he was about to misplace a volume called The Pinch. Muni paused a moment in his writing, wondering if this nishtikeit character really existed, or would ever exist. “And what’s he doing in my book?” Then the scribe inhaled the tainted air of his room and proceeded to recount Lenny’s adventures without giving his claim to legitimacy a second thought. That was Muni’s method: what was drawn from life and what was imagined were consubstantial.
There were few details of Lenny’s biography worth documenting, the facts so sketchy that Lenny himself came to forget them in time. He grew up in a ranch house in an East Memphis suburb, so far from the river that the river was only a rumor. His parents were joiners, acquisitive types disappointed by the boy’s lack of ambition. (“Can he really be ours?” they sometimes mused.) He was a poor student, had few friends, and spent his waking hours reading novels and watching black-and-white movies on TV. Owing to a severe case of cystic acne during adolescence, he suffered from a shamefacedness for which he compensated with wisecracks and bluster. Often he felt he didn’t deserve to be loved. Conversely, due to inveterate dreaming, he conceived the notion that he was the hero of his own bootless life. Once, having called his own bluff, he joined a mass demonstration in support of striking sanitation workers. When the march disintegrated into chaos, Lenny, caught up in the melee, was hit over the head by a cop. He came to strapped to a gurney in the back of an ambulance attended by a pair of bantering paramedics.
“So Adell,” he heard one of them saying through the ringing in his ears and the crackling of a shortwave radio, “you know what happened to the nigger who looked up his family tree?”
“Wait, Ricky, don’t tell me; I believe I do know.” A grunt, presumably the sound of Adell thinking. “Okay, I give.”
“A gorilla shit on his face.”
There was a reciprocal wheezing and hooting that passed for laughter. Then Adelclass="underline" “I got one, Ricky. Wha’d the sheriff call the nigger that was shot fifteen times?”
Replied Ricky without missing a beat, “Worst case of suicide I ever seen.”
“Aw, Ricky, you anus.”
More wheezy laughter and Lenny opened an eye, the other swollen shut and sealed with dried blood. He saw the two paramedics seated on an aluminum bench alongside him in the joggling ambulance. One had a head like a royal-pink egg raddled with purple veins, the other an elongated equine face, though Lenny couldn’t tell whether his perceptions were accurate or the result of his murderous headache. They were wearing matching navy polos with EMS emblems.