Thrown-away Child

Ruby bent over to pick them up, she became dizzy, lost her balance, and fell to the floor.
     

THIRTY

     
    Claude Bougart climbed into his car and waved at us. Joe Never Smile and me, that is, standing together just inside the front door of Joe’s house on Crozat Street.
    Joe waved back through the screen to the friend who had introduced him to a New York cop; had vouched for me, had said to old Joe, “Don’t mind them blue eyes, Joe. Hock, he’s all right. You tell him anything he want to know about how it really goes.” Joe sighed as he watched Officer Bougart drive off. Then he said, “Most of Claude type, I don’t be paying no mind to. Break my heart so.”
    “What’s his type?”
    “Black-in-blue.”
    “What’s heartbreaking about a black cop?”
    It was not true about Joe Never Smile, for now he smiled. It was one of those patient smiles that told me answers to any questions I asked were likely to come outside the usual sequence.
    “I was back to the kitchen drinking my coffee, son. You want to join me in a cup?”
    I said yes and followed the ancient hearse driver down a corridor that ran the length of his house. There was a parlor and two or three other little rooms off the corridor. These were darkened places that smelled unused, like mildewed trunks in an attic. The kitchen was where Joe Never Smile spent his time, lived his life. It was a room big enough for a round table surrounded by chairs, and full of sunlight from a wall of windows and a door that led to a back garden. There was a radio at low volume on one of two counters. Johnny Hartman was singing “Lush Life.” One of the chairs was pulled out from the table. This was the spot where Joe Never Smile had been sitting when the doorbell rang. A coffee mug rested in a damp ring on top of a newspaper.
    “You want to sit down over there?” Joe Never Smile motioned to a chair across from his own. I sat. My host went to the stove and put some heat under a glass coffee pot. “How you like your coffee?“
    “Black.”
    The old man turned around from the stove. He screwed his dark features into the same sour expression as the late and pink-faced Father Tim Kelly, a Holy Cross priest from my boyhood who likewise had no respect for black coffee. “Protestant coffee,” Father Tim always called it.
    “But I got me some very good farm-fresh cream, and nice raw sugar,” Joe Never Smile said. “Now, you still be telling me you want your coffee straight?“
    “Make it light with sugar.”
    “That’s better.”
    Joe Never Smile made a turn around his kitchen, going after the coffee things. He moved slowly, for fear he might slip and fall and break a bone. When we were both settled at the table with proper coffee, I reminded him, “You never answered me about black cops.”
    “I’m a old, old man.” He seemed to know I would return to this subject. “And I be dealing in the sorrow business all my life. You know what I’m saying?”
    Yes I did, I said.
    “I got to ask you a question of my own, son. Would you say it’s a dangerous occupation being a po-lice?”
    “I would.”
    “More dangerous now than when you first started?”
    “Yes.”
    “And would you also say there’s more Negro polices now than when you first started?”
    “I know for a fact there are.”
    “Ever strike you strange how just when it became more dangerous in a city they hire Negroes to deal with it?”
    Here I was expecting to interrogate a man on several matters: some no-name kid murdered and mutilated like Clete Tyler, the mystery of MOMS, the meaning of a shirtless kid on Crozat Street calling himself Maybe Richard. And here was Joe Never Smile, the kind of old man with answers that dwarf a younger man’s questions, and most certainly a younger man’s immediate concerns.
    “I never thought of it like that.”
    “No, I expect not.” Joe Never Smile wiped his dark forehead with a napkin. Not because he was warm, I thought, but to soothe something in his mind. “Whole world’s more dangerous than ever before in my long life. That’s how come it is you see most of the U.S. Army is black men nowadays. Yes sir, black men. Negroes all got us some great opportunities in these trouble times. We can be soldiers and we can be po-lices.“
    “Heartbreaking.”
    “Son, I don’t mean it to sound simple as that. The heartbreak come in imagining the terrible logic hiding just around the corner. Terrible logic of a black-in-blue world, you might