The Choirboys Page 4

  “I think we can quiet them down,” Whaddayamean Dean said as Roscoe stood on one foot like a blue flamingo, rubbing his toe hopelessly on the calf of his left leg.

  “Can I talk to you?” Whaddayamean Dean asked the Mexican, walking him to the other end of the hall while Roscoe Rules hustled the silent black thirty feet down the stairway.

  “I don’t want no more trouble, outta you,” Roscoe whispered when he got the hod carrier to a private place.

  “I ain’t gonna give you no trouble, Officer,” the black man said, looking up at the mirthless blue eyes of Roscoe Rules which were difficult to see because like most hotdogs he wore his cap tipped forward until the brim almost touched his nose.

  “Don’t argue with me, man!” Roscoe said. His nostrils splayed as he sensed the fear on the man who stood hangdog before him.

  “What’s your name?” Roscoe then demanded.

  “Charles ar-uh Henderson,” the hod carrier answered, and then added impatiently, “Look, I wanna go back inside with my family I’m tired a all this and I just wanna go to bed. I worked hard…”

  But Roscoe became enraged at the latent impudence and snarled, “Look here, Charles ar-uh Henderson, don’t you be telling me what you’re gonna do. I’ll tell you when you can go back inside and maybe you won’t be going back inside at all. Maybe you’re gonna be going to the slam tonight!”

  “What for? I ain’t done nothin. What right you got…”

  “Right? Right?” Roscoe snarled, spraying the hod carrier with saliva. “Man, one more word and I’m gonna book your ass! I’ll personally lock you in the slammer! I’ll set your hair on fire!”

  Whaddayamean Dean called down to Roscoe and suggested that they switch hod carriers. As soon as they had, he tried in vain to calm the outraged black man.

  A few minutes later he heard Roscoe offer some advice to the Mexican hod carrier: “If that loudmouth bitch was my old lady I’d kick her in the cunt.”

  Twenty years ago the Mexican had broken a full bottle of beer over the head of a man for merely smiling at his woman. Twenty years ago, when she was a lithe young girl with a smooth sensuous belly he would have shot to death any man, cop or not, who would dare to refer to her as a bitch.

  Roscoe Rules knew nothing of machismo and did not even sense the slight almost imperceptible flickering of the left eyelid of the Mexican. Nor did he notice that those burning black eyes were no longer pointed somewhere between the shield and necktie of Roscoe Rules, but were fixed on his face, at the browless blue eyes of the tall policeman.

  “Now you two act like men and shake hands so we can leave,” Roscoe ordered.

  “Huh?” the Mexican said incredulously and even the black hod carrier looked up in disbelief.

  “I said shake hands. Let’s be men about this. The fight’s over and you’ll feel better if you shake hands.”

  “I’m forty-two years old,” the Mexican said softly, the eyelid flickering more noticeably “Almost old enough to be your father. I ain’t shaking hands like no kid on a playground.”

  “You’ll do what I say or sleep in the slammer,” Roscoe said, remembering how in school everyone felt better and even drank beer after a good fight.

  “What charge?” demanded the Mexican, his breathing erratic now. “What fuckin charge?”

  “You both been drinking,” Roscoe said, losing confidence in his constituted authority, but infuriated by the insolence which was quickly undermining what he thought was a controlled situation.

  Roscoe, like most black-glove cops, believed implicitly that if you ever backed down even for a moment in dealing with assholes and scrotes the entire structure of American law enforcement would crash to the ground in a mushroom cloud of dust.

  “We ain’t drunk,” the Mexican said. “I had a can of beer when I got home from work. One goddamn can!” He spoke in accented Cholo English: staccato, clipped, just as he did when he was a respected gang member.

  Then Roscoe Rules pushed him back into an alcove away from the eyes of those down the hall who had made their own peace by now and were preparing to go back into their apartments to fix dinner. Roscoe pulled his baton from the ring and hated this sullen Mexican and the glowering black man and even Whaddayamean Dean whose nervousness enraged Roscoe because if you ever let these scrotes think you were afraid…

  Then Roscoe looked around, guessing there were a dozen people between them and the radio car, and started to realize that this was not the time or place. But the Mexican made Roscoe Rules forget that it was the wrong time and place when he looked at the tall policeman with the harder crueler larger body and said, “I never let a man talk to me like this. You better book me or you better let me go but don’t you talk to me like this anymore or… or…”

  “Or? Or?” Roscoe said, his hairless brows throbbing as he touched the small man on the chest with the tip of his stick. “You Mexicans’re all alike. Think you’re tough, huh? Bantamweight champ a this garbage dump, huh? I oughtta tear that oily moustache off your face.”

  Then the flickering eyelid was still and the eyes glazed over. “Go ahead,” the Mexican barely whispered.

  And Roscoe Rules did. A second later the Mexican was standing there with a one inch piece of his right moustache and the skin surrounding it in Roscoe Rules’ left hand. The raw flesh began to spot at once with pinpoints of blood.

  Then the Mexican screamed and kicked Roscoe Rules in the balls.

  Suddenly Whaddayamean Dean found himself trying to get the Mexican’s neck in the crook of his arm, to squeeze off the oxygen to the brain, which would make him lose consciousness and flop convulsively on the ground, thus “doing the chicken.”

  The Mexican’s erstwhile black enemy was experiencing a deep sense of guilt and outrage at the Mexican’s plight.

  “You honky motherfucker!” the black hod carrier yelled when he finally exploded. He tossed a straight right at Whaddayamean Dean which caught him on the left temple and knocked him free of the Mexican and over the kneeling body of Roscoe Rules who was hoping desperately he wouldn’t puke from the kick in the balls.

  Roscoe aimed a spunky blow at the black hod carrier’s leg with his unauthorized, thirty-four ounce sap which pulled his pants down when he wasn’t careful to keep his Sam Browne buckled tightly.

  Hit em in the shins. They can’t take that, thought Roscoe, swinging the sap weakly, relying on folklore to save him now that he could not stand up.

  But the hod carrier did not seem to feel the sap bouncing off his legs as he and the Mexican took turns punching Whaddayamean Dean silly.

  The redhead had lost his baton and gun and was bouncing back and forth between the two men. “Partner! Partnerrrr!” Whaddayamean Dean yelled, but Roscoe Rules could only kneel there, look up in hatred and wish he could shoot the nigger, the spick and his puny partner.

  Then Roscoe fell over on his back, nursing his rapidly swelling testicles, spitting foam like a mad dog.

  It ended abruptly There had been men, women and children screaming, encouraging, cursing gleefully There had been bodies thudding off the walls, doors slamming. Then silence.

  Roscoe Rules and Whaddayamean Dean Pratt were alone in the hallway. Both on the floor, uniforms half torn off, batons, hats, flashlights, guns and notebooks scattered. Whaddayamean Dean lay moaning, draped across an overturned trash can. Roscoe Rules felt his strength returning as he struggled to his feet, keeping his balls in both hands for fear if he dropped them they’d burst like ripe tomatoes.

  Roscoe was finished for the evening. He was content to limp down the stairs to sit in the radio car and wait for the arrival of other units after his partner staggered to the car and put out the “officers need help” call. Roscoe could not return with Whaddayamean Dean when he went back into the building with some sixteen policemen and began breaking down doors in a vain search for the two hod carriers who had escaped and were not arrested for two weeks.

  “Give em a few licks for me, partner,” Roscoe had whispered to his part
ner as he shuffled slowly to the ambulance, walking bowlegged, holding the enflamed swollen testicles in both hands as though he had a double handful of heavy bullion or precious gems. Which indeed he did as far as he was concerned. He thought at that moment that he might lose them forever and nothing ever seemed as precious. He refused to release the handful of damaged flesh even to step up into the ambulance, and just stood there, bowlegged, holding himself while two ambulance attendants lifted him up in a seated carry.

  Before they closed the ambulance door, he called weakly to his battered partner, “Give em one for me, Dean! One for your partner! And get em in a wristlock! Bend em down! Make em bite their own balls! Then play catch-up with your stick! Then kneedrop them! Puncture their kidneys! Rupture their spleens! Make em do the chicken!”

  Five people went to jail that night for various charges ranging from resisting officers to plain drunk. The black man was picked up two weeks later at the Hod Carriers Local. After five court continuances he spent ten days in jail which he was permitted to serve on weekends because of his work and large family The Mexican hod carrier who also had a large family was given a longer jail term because of his youthful record of violence. All but fifteen days were suspended.

  Both men were heroes with their families and neighbors for some time to come, and the Mexican, who had been experiencing a diminished sex drive, discovered after his release from jail that he was like a young stallion. His wife said she never had it so good.

  After Roscoe Rules recovered from the beating at the hands of the hod carriers he was anxious to get back to the streets and make the citizenry of Wilshire Division pay for his wounds and humiliation. There was no shame in the injuries themselves. On the contrary Roscoe wore his scars as proudly as the Mexican wore the mementoes of his youthful gang fights. What humiliated Roscoe was that they got punched and stomped two on two. When he told the story to other officers the number of assailants grew in number until even Whaddayamean Dean wasn’t sure just how many people had a piece of him. Roscoe never did know. The entire experience was blurred in his mind what with vomiting and painful fearful days in the hospital when he erroneously thought his manhood would be forever compromised. He admitted to his partner that he had no clear recollection of what had happened and even after his total recovery referred to the experience grimly as The Day My Balls Blew Up.

  But from then on, Roscoe was more cautious than before. If a suspect even looked as though he might be anxious to cause trouble he would find himself wearing Roscoe’s unauthorized sap in his hair. During his one month convalescence Roscoe was unable to raise what Harold Bloomguard called a “diamond cutter” or even a “blue veiner” due to the shooting pains in his groin. His wife told a sympathetic neighbor she never had it so good.

  But Roscoe never lost his sense of humor. While he was off duty recuperating he invited Whaddayamean Dean to his ranch east of Chino for a down home pit barbecue.

  “Not like that nigger slop you see in all these greasy spoons in town,” he promised, but a real barbecue, worthy of the Middle American farmers Roscoe had sprung from.

  When Whaddayamean Dean asked Roscoe if he planned to return to the Midwest when he retired from police work, Roscoe said, fuck no, that those redneck maggots like to read their Bibles over you while they screwed you in the ass. Once when waxing philosophical he admitted that he had only truly been happy in Vietnam, and that if he hadn’t been dumb enough to knock up his old lady and get married young he’d have loved to have gone to Africa and hired out as a mercenary.

  “Imagine getting paid to kill niggers,” he mused.

  Then he proved that he hadn’t lost his sense of humor when his eight year old son Clyde came crying into the yard where Roscoe and Whaddayamean Dean sat drinking beer from the cans and working on a radio controlled airplane which Roscoe Rules had bought for his son’s birthday two years ago and not let him play with because he wasn’t old enough. Roscoe loved to sit in the yard and terrorize the pony by divebombing it with the roaring little airplane. It was a Messerschmitt with authentic German insignia and an added touch of a swastika on the tail.

  “Daddy!” said his son Clyde. “Look at Pookie!”

  “What’s wrong with him, son?” asked Roscoe solicitously as the boy held the little box turtle in his hands. The creature’s head drooped, obviously near death from some reptile malady.

  “It’s a goner, get rid of it,” Roscoe said without touching the turtle.

  “No, Daddy!” cried the boy “He’ll be okay! Pookie’s gonna be okay!”

  “Give him here,” Roscoe said, winking at Whaddayamean Dean. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Then he snatched the little turtle from the child’s hand and with the cutting pliers he was using to repair the gas engine of the Messerschmitt, snipped the head of the box turtle off at the base of the shell, the feet kicking frantically in death.

  “Now we can use him for a paperweight,” Roscoe said.

  He told the story all over Wilshire Station the next day, claiming it proved he was the meanest, baaaaadest motherfucker that ever wore a blue suit in Wilshire Station, while Whaddayamean Dean unknowingly used exactly the phrase which had been used by Roscoe’s last five partners. He whispered that Roscoe was an insufferable prick.

  Roscoe Rules continued pretty much as before despite his Waterloo at the hands of the hod carriers. He asked to return to 7-A-85 so he could be in the south end of Wilshire Division in the thick of the action. And since Roscoe arrested so many drunk drivers and wrote such an incredible number of traffic tickets he was still the darling of those police supervisors who believe that writing one moving traffic violation a day is tangible proof of good police work.

  Roscoe also arrested more drunk drivers than most traffic cars. Of course, he also went to court more than any traffic car because he booked the “borderline” drunk drivers. In fact, he wrote the “borderline” tickets.

  “All I see and some I don’t see,” as Roscoe put it.

  On the night that Roscoe Rules was to become a legend he and Whaddayamean Dean had been trying to catch a drunk driver by staking out a bar on West Jefferson frequented by hard drinking blacks who wasted no time with fancy drinks, but nightly consumed gallons of Scotch, gin and beer. Roscoe had hoped to find a drunk sleeping in his car in the parking lot at the rear and wake him gently, telling him that he had better go home and sleep it off. Then they would wait down the street in the darkness and arrest the grateful motorist for drunk driving as he passed by.

  Some policemen become legends by virtue of accumulated felony arrests which propel them into the category of instinctive policemen, who doglike smell or sense when something is wrong: when a suspect is lying, when a turn of the head or clicking of eyeballs means more than just another case of black and white fever. When one knows which cars to stop, which pedestrian to talk to, most importantly, which one to believe, since most policemen eventually conclude that in addition to being hopelessly weak the human race is composed of an incredible collection of liars who will lie even when the truth would save them, and more often than not haven’t the faintest idea of what the truth really is.

  But there are other ways to become police legends, that is, by a single action or reaction which is so outrageous that within twenty-four hours it is the subject of every rollcall in the city Roscoe Rules was about to become that kind of legend.

  That fateful night started pretty much as every other night with Roscoe driving and discussing the merits of fast cars, hotshot chase driving, devastating weapons and ammunition, and even women, since his wounded testicles were once more intact and functioning. As he talked, Roscoe as always unconsciously squeezed, kneaded and pulled at himself.

  The salmon smoggy sun had dropped suddenly that evening. They were driving through their district at dusk, looking for traffic tickets which Roscoe believed in writing at the beginning of the watch. Often, a motorist could blow a red light at eight miles an hour during the busy late hours and Roscoe would ignore
him or not even see him if he had already written his ticket for the night.

  They passed a construction crew building a new elementary school in a black neighborhood near Washington Boulevard, and Roscoe yelled “Building new cages, huh?” to a white man in a hard hat who grinned and raised a hammer.

  “The air’s quiet,” Roscoe remarked, lighting a Marlboro. “Not too many radio calls in Wilshire, but I got a feeling it’s gonna be a busy Thursday night. Animals got their welfare checks today Should be lots a action.”

  A battered Texas Chevrolet driven by a grim looking white man with faded eyes pulled up next to them at a red light. The woman passenger, gaunt and weak, had difficulty rolling down the window. She was holding a baby in her arms, and one of the four blond children in the back seat helped her.

  “Suh,” she said, “kin you tell us where the Gen’ral Hospital is?”

  “Sure,” Roscoe answered. “Just go straight on this street to the Harbor Freeway and turn right. Keep going ten miles. You can’t miss it.”

  “Thank ye,” she smiled, and again battled the window which was jammed in the bent frame.

  Whaddayamean Dean looked at his partner quizzically and Roscoe explained, “Fuck this white trash. They’re worse’n niggers, coming here and making us pay for their little milk-suckers. General Hospital, my ass. Wonder what they’ll say when they find themselves looking at the ocean?”

  Roscoe then spotted a black man in a business suit walking on Western Avenue with a young white woman in a green tailored jacket and skirt. She was obviously not one of the white prostitutes who worked the area so Roscoe kept his voice low when he drove by looked in their direction and said, “Price of pork what it is, and a spade can still buy a white pig for ten dollars?”

  “You know, I never drove in a pursuit,” Whaddayamean Dean observed as he saw an LAPD traffic car zooming past them to overtake a speeder on Olympic Boulevard.