Out of the Blues (10 page)

“That last set I was swinging—Bob practically swallowing the mic on vocals, flinging ourselves into James Brown's ‘Sex Machine,' everybody dancing with everybody, tables dripping spilled beer and sweating pitchers. Mike ambled in along the wall and stood in back, looking like all he cared about was our music—smiling. He gave me a ride home. And I'll never forget—about three blocks from the house he looked at me. ‘Man, you guys were brangin' it tonight, great, really great.' He said it twice, ‘Great,' with that quizzy smile he had. I clearly remember looking out at the passing streetlights, trying to memorize how I felt, to hold on to that moment when one of the most admired bluesmen in the world said I played great.”

The sole of Bailey's shoe smacked the floor in a chain-gang rhythm.

In the next photo the glare from the camera had made the windows of Mike's car opaque, obscuring the interior. Dan slid it from the top to the bottom and looked at the next photo, which had been taken from the open door on the driver's side. Mike's body leaned, his head against the window. Bathrobe, legs, uneven hair, closed eyes, blue lips in a slack oval. Dan covered the photo with both hands and looked out toward the rows of cars. He handed the photos back to
Salt, got up, and stood at the rail with his back to her. He used his heel to rake his ankle.

She waited again, then said, “God is in the details. I know this is hard, but I would like for you to look at them, at everything, pieces of paper, the folds of his robe, the floorboard, anything that might spark your memory. You've scratched at your ankles several times, you know.”

Dan looked down and brushed at the legs of his jeans. “I don't believe in dreams.”

“Will you try again?” She held out the awful photographs.

Bailey's voice had trailed off to a lonesome blues moan.

S
alt switched radio channels over to the central city frequency. “4133 raise any HOPE Team unit.”

“5582,” dispatch called.

“5582.”

“Can you name a location?” Salt requested, asking where she could meet the unit.

“Right now we're on the tracks under Piedmont.”

“Cross street?” Salt transmitted her willingness to meet them where they were.

“We'll be out at Ansley in about thirty,” replied the officer.

“Copy, thirty at Ansley,” repeated Salt, confirming the location and her intention to meet there.

“Radio, can you have an ambulance meet us there as well?” continued the HOPE unit. “For an eighteen-year-old white female, mentally ill. And start a sex crimes detective.”

—

HOPE
, Homeless Outreach and Proactive Enforcement, emerged over the rim of the railroad gulley. They rose from below, heads and chests upright, and, like almost always, together in a pack, rarely less than all four. They patrolled a citywide beat, mostly in places that most folks didn't know existed; wherever
their people
were found that's where they went. Treading the hill, over the rim, with heavy boots and the dark uniforms, they came up to the asphalt of the strip mall lot. An emaciated white girl was supported between them, a small blonde, hoisted by the two female team members, Leeksha Johnson and Joy Adams. Salt had a special regard and fondness for them. They taught classes at the academy on managing people with mental illness, skills for de-escalating those in crisis, often psychotic and off their prescribed medications. The last class she'd taken from them was an advanced, weeklong session led by the two HOPE guys, Swain Blackmon and Jackson Thornton.

Atlanta was an example of the “build it and they will come” consequence as concerned its history with homeless people. The largest city in the Southeast, it also had the largest homeless population in the region. Years ago the city had begun to provide services—shelters, food distribution, hygiene supplies—and the homeless came from all over. Some jurisdictions had finally admitted to dumping their homeless inside the city limits. The HOPE Team had documented and reported people sent from all over the country and the places that had paid people's way to Atlanta just to get rid of them.

Simultaneously with the team's emergence from the tracks behind the businesses, an ambulance and the detective from Special Victims arrived near where Salt had parked.

“We heard you made detective. Congratulations.” Leeksha hugged Salt.

“That's great.” Swain beamed at her.

“We were so glad to see one of the good guys get the promotion,” said Joy.

“This is Jennifer,” Blackmon said, touching the girl's shoulder. The girl's eyes were everywhere but on what was in front of her or the cops that led her out. “Come on, child.” They continued on over to the paramedics and the female SVU detective. The girl was silently compliant, getting her vital signs taken, blood pressure and heart rate and a preliminary exam for any obvious injuries, all while the detective talked quietly to her. The girl's hair was matted and clumped. She was wearing men's pants and a sweatshirt, so it was hard to determine how thin she might actually be. Her hands were brown from exposure to dirt and the elements, her nails rimmed with grime.

Joy came over to Salt, her back to the ambulance. “One of our regulars called us. Said men were using her down under one of the bridges.”

The ambulance stowed the girl on a gurney and took off. The team watched until the ambulance was out of sight, then let their shoulders fall, bowing their heads and giving a collective sigh. “Damn,” said Leeksha.

“Damn is right,” repeated Jackson.

“Does this ever get any easier for you guys?” Salt asked.

“When it does, we'll know it's time to go,” said Joy, all the rest nodding in agreement.

“Got to pay your dues if you wanna sing the blues,” added Swain.

“What he means is, like we tell folks in training, ‘empathize.' It hurts but it helps, if you know what I mean. If we get in their shoes, get what's going on with them, then we're better able to find a way to help, to make them feel safe.”

“And if they feel safe . . .”

“We're safer,” Salt finished with the words from the team's training.
“I brought you something.” She went to the trunk of her unmarked car, got out a box, and handed it to Leeksha. “It's the cedar stuff I told you about, organic. I buy it by the gallon for using around my place—on the sheep and on the dog. I use it on myself when the horseflies are bad. And it smells good. I put it in some recycled spray bottles.”

The team regularly came in contact with body lice, mosquitoes, fleas, red bugs, gnats, stinging insects. They sometimes wore surgical masks and gloves to protect themselves from HIV, hepatitis, TB, scabies, flu, even impetigo. They encountered feral dogs, snakes, rats, opossums, and rabid raccoons, and often were seen painted in calamine after climbing through poison ivy, oak, or sumac in a quest to reach someone, often in bad shape, homeless, mentally ill, addicted, ones who had slipped off society's grid.

And then they were scoffed at, called “social workers” by some officers. Until those officers, like Salt, would witness Leeksha, Joy, Jackson, or Swain manage a crisis where people who, terrified and out of their minds, would otherwise have injured themselves and probably officers. Salt had been there when Joy de-escalated a man who was bare-chested, bleeding from test cuts all over his upper body, holding a large shard of glass to his neck beneath a vein. When a woman blinded by rage, a gun to her elderly mother's head, had been talked into putting the gun down by Swain. There had been many others.

“Follow us back to our cat hole, Salt, so we can clean up a little. We've been out since five this morning, before the sun was up.” The team went out early and late, to make contact with the homeless before they left or after they came home to the camps and hidey-holes.

The team had the worst cars, as if working with the homeless warranted shabby vehicles. Salt followed their rattletrap van to a derelict office, a classroom in back of an elementary school that had been closed for years. “Nice digs,” Salt said, following them in.

“We don't mind it. Nobody bothers us here and our consumers don't bother anybody when we invite them over.”

Mug shots and missing-persons flyers hung from a blackboard and were tacked all around the large classroom. The small hard-plastic desk chairs were still in rows as if the children were expected back.

“I have another one to add to your gallery.” Salt motioned to the photos lining the room. She slid out copies of Pearl's mug shot from the envelope she was carrying. Like many of the homeless and mentally ill, Pearl had been arrested multiple times, mostly for petty charges and usually when officers had no other option for her care. In Georgia, if a person wasn't psychotic enough to qualify as being an immediate danger to themselves or others, then the law for involuntary hospitalization did not pertain.

Leeksha recognized her as soon as she had the photo in her hand. “Oh, I know her. She's over in Underground now.”

Jackson said, “She used to be around Little Five.”

“Yep, that's her,” Salt said. “I'm looking for her because she might be able to help me on an old case.”

“We'll be doing a detail on Friday with the outreach people from Grady and the railroad police. One of our target locations is the area around Underground, so we very well may run into Pearl. You wanna come along, meet us here at four-thirty a.m.”

—

T
HE
MOBILE
MEDICAL
BUS
from Grady Memorial Hospital, the public hospital known as “The Gradys” from the days of segregation when it was two hospitals, was arriving as Salt pulled up behind the HOPE Team office very, very early on Friday morning. Inside, the team had already distributed maps and water supplies, and the cedar spray was being applied liberally as folks entered, the scent
heavy in the room where twelve people were greeting one another and drinking box coffee from paper cups.

“God, Salt, I haven't seen you in too long.” Terrance Stewart put his cup down and wrapped his arms around her. Even at the early hour, his dark, pockmarked face was already shimmering with oil and sweat. He was the hospital's coordinator for both mental and physical health outreach services to the city's homeless. He'd started out in a faith-based organization without formal medical or psychological training and had become invaluable to all of the service agencies because of his tenure with and knowledge of the homeless community; he was a crucial instructor for those who had the formal training but lacked experience in the street. Salt knew him from his work on her old beat. He smelled strongly of cedar.

“I see you-all have taken advantage of the spray I brought the team.” She sniffed loudly at his shirt, pulled back, and then hugged him again. “I can never thank you enough, Terry, for all you and your group did for my people.”

“‘My people,' that's just like you. You're the only cop I know who called homeless folks on their beat ‘my people.' Worried me some but no doubt about it you knew that beat. What will they do without you?”

“Like they say, ‘The beat goes on.'”

“People, listen up.” Leeksha was at the front of the room with a clipboard. “Most of you guys know the drill, but for a couple of you new to these details, I'll go over the plan and give you your team and area assignments.”

Salt was going with Terrance's team, Jackson Thornton from HOPE, and a sergeant from the railroad police. Everyone in the room began to gather in their assigned groups, coordinating transportation and logistics according to the area they would be searching. A commonality among all the participants was that while they were different
shapes, sizes, colors, and ethnicities and from various agencies, they were all fit, some obviously more so than others, and able to stride the awkward crossties, trample through kudzu, and climb up and down the hard terrain of the hilly city. In the high humidity and in all kinds of weather they did their work; especially when it was very hot or very cold, their services were needed more than ever.

The team rode in the medical bus to the heart of downtown and into one of the city university's parking lots that abutted the rails. The attendant waved them through, and they parked under a viaduct where various medical personnel would meet up and man the bus in four-hour shifts. Salt tucked her jeans into the tops of an old pair of uniform boots and retied the laces. Their team of four started down the tracks, heading toward Underground, a mile or so from where they were now.

The Underground area had become a tourist attraction and entertainment district that had come and gone in popularity, and come and gone again. But Underground wasn't underground, it was more like a basement, where you could see the foundations of the city if you cared enough to look past the cheap trappings that were meant to sanitize the past and attract tourists. Attempts had been made to revitalize it, the last effort for the Olympics, but according to some, the place seemed to be snakebit and couldn't maintain.

There were many agencies nearby that served the homeless—Grady's satellite health centers, shelters, churches—and the population to be served camped near the tracks and under the viaducts.

Bessie Smith sang about that part of Atlanta.

Underneath the viaduct ev'ry day

Drinking corn and hollerin' hoo-ray

Pianos playin' till the break of day.

Salt alternated between walking on the rough gravel beside the ties and walking on the ties in an awkward stretch step. The air under the viaducts was damp and still cool from the night. Stained, dripping walls alternated with graffiti, layers of plaster, or brick—a century or more of building, rebuilding, tearing down, reconfiguring, covering up, and uncovering. They were headed in the direction of the government building where the old concrete Zero Milepost, which once designated the end of the Western & Atlantic railroad line, was on display. Atlanta's first name had been “Terminus.”

“Hear that?” Salt asked Jackson. She stopped to listen more carefully. Silence, then what sounded like a distant sledgehammer striking the rails with the same rhythm that a man might make driving a spike.

After Sherman burned the original depot during the Civil War, the Union Railroad Depot had been rebuilt during Reconstruction. Other businesses were built in proximity to the depot, through which a hundred trains or more ran: Kenny's Saloon, Gate City Harness Company, Planters Hotel, banks, law offices.

“Hear what?” Jackson answered.

Bridges had been built over the tracks and then joined by a concrete mall. First floors became basements, storage and service entrances, and then speakeasies and juke joints during Prohibition.

There were stretches under the shorter tunnels where light from the streets made its way down the tracks. In other places they had to switch on their heavy flashlights, shining the beams up and down the tracks and walls. In one dark spot they came up to a bundle, and as they approached it they announced themselves in order not to startle anyone who might be easily stressed by contact with people. It was why so many of the homeless with mental illness couldn't stay in the shelters—people.

Jackson stood next to the muddy sleeping bag. “Hey, friend,” he
said, holding the light at his side pointed down for a less intrusive ambient beam. There was a stirring inside the bag. “Hey, it's the poleese. We're checking to be sure you're okay. Okay?”

A scaly hand reached from the opening and a crusty-faced white man stuck his head out, blinking, then focused on Jackson as he untangled himself from his cocoon. “Samuels? Is it you, Samuels? Man, I thought you were a goner at Ia Drang.”