Alternate Side(28)
Charlie shook his head.
“What did you do?” Nora screamed at Jack. “Are you insane? What did you do?” From behind Jack she saw Linda Lessman running out her front door and into the street, stopping at the curb opposite and looking up at the end of the block. Nora heard that terrible sound again in her head, the heavy thing hitting the softer thing, hard, and she turned back toward Ricky, who was sobbing, tears making tracks down either side of his face. “They’re coming,” she said. “They’re coming.” The sirens were louder.
“He gonna lose that leg,” yelled one of the men looking down from an open window of the SRO. “It’s all messed up, man. He gonna lose that leg, for sure.”
“Get up, Bun,” Charlie said, his voice shaking. He bent down to pull her to her feet and she saw the cherry lights strobing behind her from two patrol cars. Suddenly there were men in uniforms all around them. Nora stepped back next to Jack, who was arguing with two of the cops. “Calm down, sir,” one of them said.
“Him!” yelled the man from the SRO, and when Nora looked up at the window she saw that at least five of the residents were standing, staring down. “Police! He’s the one who hit him. He hit him real hard.”
“Give me a minute to get you a goddamn business card,” Jack was yelling at the cops. Charlie put a hand on Jack’s upper arm, talking first to him and then to the two police officers standing in front of them, their eyes narrowed. Linda and Nora had stepped back and were standing shoulder to shoulder, as though they were holding each other up. “Jesus Mary and Joseph,” Linda said, craning her neck to look toward Ricky. “Should I go get Sherry? Where is she? She should be here.”
Between the wintry air and all of them breathing hard, even the cops, the area around them was as foggy white as the train station in an old movie. An ambulance pulled up and two EMTs ran to Ricky. The one man at the window of the SRO kept repeating, “He hit him! He hit him hard! Officer! Officer! It was assault with a deadly weapon.”
“Shut up, you moron,” Jack shouted back. “It was a goddamn golf club!” The two cops, nearly as young as Nora’s own children, tried to speak, and one laid a hand on Jack’s arm. Jack wheeled, looked as though he was going to hit the young cop. Another police car came down the block fast.
“They letting him go,” the SRO guy yelled, leaning out so the others at their windows could hear him. “They letting him go because that guy that got hit, ’cause he’s black, and the other guy, he’s white. And rich.”
“He’s not black,” one yelled back. “He’s Puerto Rican.”
“You don’t know he’s Puerto Rican. Why, ’cause he’s brown? He could be a light black, like Lena Horne or what’s-his-name, the ballplayer.”
“He speaks Spanish, dude,” said the other man, leaning so far out his window to eyeball the other, one floor up and two windows across, that Nora thought he might fall out.
“That don’t make him Puerto Rican, man. He could be from Mexico, or maybe Panama, one of those other places.”
“Officer!” yelled a third man. “Officer!”
“What?” the younger cop yelled back.
“I was at Attica in seventy-one.”
“Ah, Jesus, Benny, not the Attica thing again,” one of the other SRO guys said.
“Don’t put your goddamn hands on me,” Jack suddenly yelled, and the next thing Nora knew, he was up against the patrol car, face against the window, the officers holding him flat and snapping on handcuffs. Linda grabbed Nora’s hand and whispered, “I’m going to get Sherry. Don’t leave. Don’t let Charlie get in the middle of this. Don’t let him say anything to the police.”
“They taking him now,” said the SRO guy, talking to the others. “White or no white, they taking him. He messed with the po-po.”
“He’ll get off, man, you know he will. These people, man, they pay the cops off, they get lawyers, they get out. The workingman, now, he goes to Rikers.”
“I was at Attica in seventy-one.”
“Shut up, Benny. You’re too young for Attica. You’re just a nut bar.”
It was amazing how quickly it was all over. The ambulance backed down the street fast, an EMT visible through the lit window bending over a gurney, and the police cars followed, two with the backseat empty and one with Jack bent over in the back. Nora could tell he was yelling even though she couldn’t hear him. The cords on his neck looked like trusses holding his head up. Linda ran back toward Nora. “There’s no one answering the door at their house.”
“I’ve got to go inside and sit down,” Nora said. “You didn’t see his leg. I feel nauseous.”
“Did you see what happened?” Linda said. Nora shook her head. Charlie nodded. “I’ll make some calls and then come over to your house,” Linda said. Nora looked down at her left hand. She was still holding the bagel, wrapped in white paper, but she had crushed it flat and her hand was slick with melted butter.
Charlie’s was the first version of the story Nora heard afterward, and then Jack’s via Sherry, who had been away at a professional conference and had to get on a train in Boston fast. Both of them went like this:
Jack was scheduled to meet a client at his weekend house in Bedford. The client was important. Jack was running late. Ricky’s van was parked in the entrance to the lot in its usual place, the one Ricky insisted put it far enough to one side so that anyone could get past it, the back half of the van just inside the lot line, the front half jutting onto the sidewalk.