Bridge of Sighs

Gabriel replied. “Same reason my boy ain’t allowed into the movies.”
    “That’s not true,” the bartender said. “That’s not what got your boy in trouble. A good dozen of your people were in that movie house, and nothing happened to any of them. So go on back to the Hill now.”
    “I ain’t goin’ nowhere,” Gabriel Mock assured him.
    “You better had, Junior. I mean it, too.”
    “Send him out here so I can cut out his gizzard,” Gabriel said. “Then I’ll go home.”
    “Who?”
    “Johnny Kozlowski. Who you think?”
    “Johnny Kozlowski didn’t do anything to your boy.”
    Gabriel Mock said he knew that. But what was he supposed to do—cut the gizzard out of a thirteen-year-old boy?
    “What you’re supposed to do is go home, before a bad thing turns into a worse thing.”
    “My boy’s lyin’ in the hospital,” Gabriel told him. “Can’t talk. Can’t even open his eyes. Just lays there like he ain’t even inside his own body no more. Only thing could be worse is if he dies. Somebody got to pay, so send the man out.”
    “Go home, Junior,” the bartender repeated. “I like you personally and I don’t want to call the cops after what just happened to your boy, but we can’t have this sort of behavior, so just go on home now.”
    “Send him out,” Gabriel insisted.
    An hour later the scene at Murdick’s had turned festive. Every time a patron entered or left, Gabriel Mock would be framed in the doorway, saying to send Johnny Kozlowski out. The sight of him out on the stoop, according to Uncle Dec, struck people as comical, so if ten minutes went by without anybody entering or leaving, somebody would go open the door to make sure he was still there. “
Send him out,
” Gabriel Mock would call in, which also struck people as comical, so when the next person entered or left, everyone at the bar swiveled on their stools and shouted, in a mocking chorus, “
Send him out?
” To which Gabriel, who seemed not to mind being a figure of fun, would answer “Send him on out. I’m waitin’.”
    Uncle Dec had actually been drinking in another gin mill until he heard about all the fun down at Murdick’s. “Hi, Mr. Mock,” he said to Gabriel, joining him on the top step. Not many men had a better rapport with Thomaston’s Negroes than Uncle Dec. “I’m sorry you’ve had such a bad day.”
    Perhaps because he’d been addressed with respect, Gabriel looked down at his shoes and spoke almost in a whisper. “Send the man out.” Uncle Dec said he appeared to be on the verge of tears.
    “Send who out?”
    “Johnny K.,” Gabriel told him.
    “He’s not even in there, Mr. Mock,” my uncle told him, though he couldn’t have known that, having not stepped foot inside. “How about I give you a lift home? My car’s right here.”
    “He’s sitting down there at the end of the bar,” Gabriel said. “You can see the man from here.”
    The door opened just then, allowing some inebriate to stagger out, and sure enough, there was Johnny Kozlowski, right where Gabriel had said. “
Send him out?
” came the chorus from inside.
    “That’s not Johnny K.,” my uncle said, apparently in earnest. “That’s his brother Jerry. You’ve had so much to drink you can’t tell ’em apart.”
    But Gabriel Mock was having none of this. “Jerry K. lives down to Atlanta. Moved there last year.”
    Uncle Dec had either forgotten this or never known it. “Really? He did?” It was disappointing and mildly embarrassing to have invented such a fine lie under duress, only to have it exploded so effortlessly by a tiny drunk Negro. He’d been confident of his ability to convince Gabriel that Johnny Kozlowski was his brother Jerry, since the two men did look a lot alike, but not if the latter now resided in Georgia.
    Apparently Gabriel didn’t hold this attempt to confuse him against my uncle. “What kind of place we livin’ in, where a Negro boy, all by himself, gets beat half to death and nobody does nothin’?”
    “People are no good,” my uncle conceded. “They
enjoy
shit like this.”
    Gabriel shook his head in wonder. “Enjoy seeing a Negro boy beat into a coma for goin’ to a movie?”
    My uncle nodded agreeably. “And in about five minutes, when the cops come and shoot you, those people in there will enjoy that, too.”
    “Let ’em come. I’ll cut their gizzard out.”
    Then he showed him the knife he was planning to use, and Uncle Dec pretended he’d never seen a