MIDDAY. THE SUN was not taking prisoners. Movement and sound were things of the past, even the birds hiding silent in shaded branches.
Dunlow drove slowly past the house of James Calvin, the Negro who had dared to invade the white community of Hanford Park. Bricks through the man’s windows had not yet convinced him that he’d made a horrible mistake in building that house, but it was early in the summer still, the nights sure to become darker and more miserable.
He had barely parked his car in his driveway when the eldest of his two sons, Knox, was asking to take the car off his hands. What the hell was it boys felt they needed the car for so much, anyways? When Dunlow had been their age he’d managed fine on foot, on the bus, on the streetcar. He’d seen the city and got himself into a fair amount of trouble, even with his own father and police legend Arthur Dunlow keeping his eye on him. Yet his own sons seemed unable to function if they didn’t have their hand on a gearshift.
“Why you need my car so badly?”
“Well, sir, I was hoping I could take Jenny-Beth to see the Crackers this afternoon.” Knox was seventeen and with a year of schooling to go. Buddy, two years his junior, was greasing the chain of his bike about ten feet away, pretending not to be listening. Buddy wasn’t yet legal to drive, but Dunlow knew the boy had taken the wheel for his brother a number of times, and was doubtless hoping to tag along to the game.
“She a baseball fan, is she?”
“Trying to make her one,” Knox said.
“Her father allow her out like that without an adult around?”
“In the afternoon, sir.”
Dunlow told Buddy to stop playing with the bike and come over here. The kid’s hands weren’t even greasy. As much as Knox’s bullheadedness grated on Dunlow, it was his younger son’s sneakiness that had him more concerned.
When both young men—and damned if that’s not what they seemed now, both of them as tall as Dunlow and Knox so muscled up that the football coach claimed he had a chance to make it on the Dawgs squad if he kept his focus—were right up beside him, Dunlow leveled with them.
“This here is my car. I work. I earn the money. It’s mine when I’m using it, and it’s mine when I ain’t using it. Knox, you can find another way to impress that gal. And Buddy, you quit hiding in the shadows like a little girl and say what you want next time.”
He walked past them toward the house. They knew better than to complain.
Then he stopped and turned. “And I thought I told you to do something about that nigger down the street. I don’t expect to have to ask more than once.”
Dunlow hadn’t been any older than they were back when he’d helped his father clear the neighborhood the last time things had looked this dicey. Back in the twenties. Like now, a postwar housing crunch had caused some of the local coloreds to move into parts of town they’d previously avoided. He’d been but a boy when the houses of a number of coloreds had burned down. His father had taken him along, even let him toss some gasoline on a porch, then watch from the safety of the car as the men—cops and firemen and other trusted sorts—dropped the matches.
Sadly, he couldn’t take his sons along for something like that. There were just enough spoilsports and pantywaists that, if word spread that a policeman had done anything extralegal, his job could be threatened. It was insane. First the crackdown on the numbers runners a few years back, then the crackdown on some Kluxers courtesy of the state BI, and now the worst insult of all, blacks donning the same uniform Dunlow proudly wore, the same uniform his father had worn. He knew that he and men like Helton and Peterson could easily run this Negro out of the neighborhood, but he figured it would be better to get his sons involved. Not only to keep his job safe but also because, if they were to be men, and if this was to be their neighborhood, they would damn well need to start defending it.
Inside, he saw that his wife was napping, thank goodness. He liked her at her quietest. He walked into the kitchen and picked up the phone, dialed Peterson to find out why the hell Smith and Boggs were still wearing badges.
“Word is, McInnis is shielding them,” Peterson said. “Won’t allow them to be questioned by detectives unless we can produce more evidence.”
“It’ll happen. He can’t protect them forever.”
“Well, the wheels of justice are turning a bit slowly right now.”
“Like you said, Bo, I’m about ready to stuff those badges so far down their throats we can cut their balls off with ’em. I’ll give the Department one more chance to do it straight, but if they can’t get their pencils out of their asses, then I’ll take care of it myself. I ain’t waiting around for the niggers to kill someone else.”
“Neither am I.”
“Once they realize they got away with it, you know what they’ll move on to, don’t you? They’ll take out a cop. Probably been their plan all along.”
“They want a war, we’ll give ’em a war.”
“This ain’t no time for burning crosses and hanging bodies in front yards,” Dunlow said, looking out the window at his sons, who were literally kicking stones, hands in their pockets. “What we do has got to be done carefully, and quiet as quiet can be.”
“You’re not the man I think of first when I hear that word.”
“Now there, Bo. You’re forgetting a few things about me, boy.”