The Rat on Fire (9 page)

Alfred Davis and Walter Scott sat in the blue tweed chairs in front of the desk. Walter wore a dark blue blazer and tan slacks. Alfred wore a dark green tee-shirt with sweat stains at the armpits and dirty blue jeans. Alfred talked and Walter listened, looking at Wilfrid.

“I am
telling
you, Mister Mack,” Alfred said. “That is exactly what it is that I am doing. I
am
telling you. I am telling you that these guys are out doing a number on us, and that is exactly what they are doing and we all know it. Now if we can’t come in when this kind of thing starts going down and talk to you who is our elected representative and is always coming around the community center and stuff and telling the kids that he is on the job because he wants to help us
and that is why we should all get out and vote him back in the job because he wants to help us, then what good are you, huh? What good’s that do us, huh? You tell me that? You tell me to tell you things and I am doing that. How about, you tell me something?”

“Alfred,” Walter said, “Mister Mack isn’t arguing with you. He didn’t say that. He just said that it wasn’t doing anybody any good for you to just sit there and call people names. You’ve got to tell him what happened.”

“That’s right,” Mack said. “Alfred, maybe I can’t do anything for you. Maybe I can do something for you. I won’t know until you tell me exactly what it is that’s bothering you, and what you think ought to be done about it. Maybe I will tell you something else that I think I can do, and maybe I will tell you I can’t do anything. I don’t know. And I won’t know, either, unless you can stop hollering and yelling like a little baby and tell me what happened that’s bothering you.”

“Oh, shee-it,” Alfred said. He waved his hands. “You gonna try and give me that shit, man? You’re supposed to be our representative, right? We
elected
you. You’re supposed to help us, when somebody is doing this kind of thing to us. You’re supposed to give us all this here effective
leadership
thing. Isn’t that what you said?”

“That’s what I said,” Mack said, “and that’s what I want to do. But I can’t lead you any place if I don’t know where you’re coming from, and so far you haven’t told me.”

“All right,” Alfred said, “my sister, right? My sister Selene. Now my sister Selene, she is only seventeen years old, all right? She don’t hang out. She goes to school every day and she gets all A’s and B’s and she helps my mother and she works on the weekends and at nights down at the twenty-four-hour store. She comes home nights with that fuckin’ purple slush all over her uniform and she’s so tired she can’t hardly say anything, and she sits up there and she studies and next year she’s gonna go to Boston State and maybe
after that she’s gonna be a lawyer like you,
Mister
Mack. And this guy, this Peters guy, he is buggin’ her all the time and askin’ her to go out with him and he’s a married man. He won’t leave her alone.”

“Who’s this Peters?” Mack said.

“Peters is one of them,” Alfred said, “and the other one is his partner, Cole. Now those two guys, Cole shouldn’t let him do that, go in there and start giving Selene a whole ration shit. It’s late at night and there’s only one other person in there, Toby Florence, he’s usually drunk and he can’t do nothing to help her. Drunk or he’s smokin’ and he’s not interested. Now them guys, they shouldn’t be doing that. They should get transferred someplace else, if they are gonna be doing things like that. That’s what I mean.”

“Who is Peters and who is Cole?” Mack said.

“Peters is the guy that drives, all right?” Alfred said. “I already said something to him myself. I told him: ‘Look, you bastard,’ right? I said, ‘You been givin’ my sister a whole bunch of hard time and I don’t like it,’ right? And he just looks at me. And he calls me a shit and tells me I don’t get along, he is gonna take me in and arrest me for somethin’ and I can see how I like that, all right? And his partner, Cole? He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t do anything. He’s the guy that’s supposed to be in charge of the car, but he don’t say anything. Nothing. So here I am, and I’m talking to you and you don’t do nothing. You know something?
I
am gonna do something, if somebody doesn’t do something. Either that fuckin’ Peters starts leaving Selene alone or I am gonna do something to him.”

“Alfred,” Scott said.

“Don’t gimme that,” Alfred said. “She is a nice girl, my sister. They are bothering her all the time and nobody does anything about it.”

“Alfred,” Mack said, “you did five indeterminate at Concord for something that you did. Didn’t that satisfy you? You
really convinced that you would like to do something else?”

“I wouldn’t’ve,” Alfred said, “if you went at it the right way.”

“Alfred,” Mack said, “they had three eyewitnesses who saw you with the weapon before the attack, and five who saw you make the attack, and the victim lived and told everybody about how you hit him three times with a jack handle. Now let us be reasonable and realistic, Alfred. You cannot go around doing things like that if you really want to be on the street. Now, if you really want to be in jail, if that is actually what you want, you can go ahead and beat up another guy, a cop this time. Knowing you, why don’t you do it down in Quincy Market someday, some fine afternoon when Kevin White’s there with about three hundred people and two television cameras, announcing how he’s gonna run for reelection again, and that way everybody’ll be handy and they can just run some videotape of you doing it, huh? Then you can come in here again and tell me it’s a shit case and you don’t care about the moving pictures and three hundred witnesses, I should beat it easy.”

“This guy,” Alfred said, “this guy is kicking the shit out of my sister. You know how we live, Mister Mack? You got any idea with your house in Newton and your nice car that you use to come back in here every day and see how us poor niggers maybe get up some more money to give you, so the next time you don’t have to settle for an Oldsmobile, you own maybe a Cadillac, huh? You don’t live here no more. You say you do, but you really don’t. You got your kids in the private schools and your wife plays the tennis and her picture’s in the paper looking very fine and everything. And I see where you been playing some golf and getting your picture taken with a lot of the guys that play for the Patriots and also forgot how they used to be black, huh?

“You don’t know. You think you know, but you don’t. You made it. What you are is actual honky, except you’re kind of
dark for it. But the honkies like that, don’t they? They like havin’ a pet nigger around that they can show off when they all go down to the swimming pool, and they lie around and have all that good shit and talk about how they’re going down to Florida in a week or so but they’ll be back in time so they can go the Cape for the summer. Bullshit.”

“You know, Alfred,” Mack said, “a little of you goes a considerable distance. I think what you need is another lawyer. I sure don’t need you for a client.”

“No,” Alfred said, “
now
you don’t need me for a client. But back when I first came in and my mother came up with
three thousand dollars
that she gave you, that she hadda go and beg off of her sister, then you did. Then you had a little place that you didn’t even have a secretary and you used to run your business outta phone booths. You didn’t mind seeing me then. You did a shitty job for me of course, but you got your money and that was all, mattered to you. Now, now it’s different, because you got the money and you’re a big-ass state rep, even though you don’t live in the district, and people’re always having you around at cocktail parties and stuff and givin’ you lots of money and kissing your ass for you.”

“Okay, Alfred,” Scott said, “that’ll do it. Now why don’t you just go outside and sit down and read a magazine or something and I’ll talk to Mister Mack and see if I can make some sense out of your problem. And then if we need you again, we’ll just call you back in and we’ll ask you, all right?”

“I don’t have to leave,” Alfred said.

“No,” Scott said, “you don’t. And you don’t have to come to work tonight, or any other night. Not for me at least. And I don’t have to pay you. I had to ask Mister Mack as a special favor if he would see you on account of all the trouble that you gave him the last time, and he did me the favor and made time in his busy schedule so you could talk to him, and I took time out of mine so that I could come here with
you, and you are making me think that maybe I am wasting my time and certainly wasting his. Now get the hell out of here and go outside and sit down and shut up, because I am sick of listening to you and I know he is.”

“What’re you paying him an hour?” Mack said, after Alfred had slammed the door behind him.

“Wilfrid,” Scott said, “the minimum wage is two-ninety an hour. He isn’t worth that. But his mother works fifty hours a week trying to make a living, and she doesn’t get one, and his sister works and puts her share in the pot, and I pay Alfred four bucks an hour for eight hours a day and he usually doesn’t show up less than an hour and a half late and then he sits around reading comic books all night. But I know Mavis. I knew her before she got herself tied up with Roosevelt. She lived two houses down from me in Roxbury when I was growing up. She wasn’t a very pretty girl and she wasn’t very smart, or she never would’ve gotten herself tied up with Roosevelt, but she was a good kid then and she is now. When Roosevelt left I tried to help her out, and I guess I did, some, and when Alfred was coming up for parole and he needed a job to go to, I said I would give him one. That’s all.”

“Alfred,” Mack said, “Alfred is the most troublesome client I ever had. Bar none.”

“I know,” Scott said. “He’s the most unsatisfactory employee I ever had, too. You know how easy that job is? All he has to do is sit there and wait for the phone to ring at Boston City. When it does, he wakes up Herbert, who sleeps all the time, and they get in the wagon and go down there to the back door and ring the bell. The hospital people deliver the body to the door. Alfred and Herbert put it in the wagon and bring it back to my place. All they have to do is unload it and put it in the refrigerator. In the morning I come down, or Farber comes in. We do all the embalming work. Strictly
delivery boys. Nothing more. Herbert sleeps and Alfred reads comic books.

“For that I pay Herbert three-fifty and Alfred four bucks an hour. I pay my accountant to do their withholding. I pay the government unemployment compensation, which I guess is my punishment for giving those two jobs. I pay Blue Cross. I pay Blue Shield. I keep the refrigerator in the basement stocked with Coca-Cola and they keep it stocked with beer and God knows what else. I hire them to work nights so I can get some sleep, and when I come downstairs in the morning there is always this sort of sharp smell in the air, as though somebody had been smoking something. Herbert is twenty-three. If things go right, he will get his high school diploma next spring. Then he wants to go to embalming school so he can be an undertaker like me. Herbert can slam-dunk with either hand, but he couldn’t embalm a cockroach. I don’t know what Alfred wants to do, except hit Peters with a tire iron for being attentive to his sister. Who is probably encouraging it. And I only have two of them. I don’t know how you stand it.”

“Is Peters white?” Mack said.

“No,” Scott said, “he isn’t. He’s from North Carolina and he apparently likes the ladies pretty well, from everything I hear. And there is nothing wrong with that, I guess.”

“There’s a lot of it going around,” Mack said. “At least if some of the things I hear are true.”

“Yeah,” Scott said, “but, well, I broke up with her, you know.”

“No shit,” Mack said. “You broke up with Gail?”

“I had to,” Scott said. “She was bugging me all the time about leaving Crystal and gettin’ a divorce and us gettin’ married, and I can’t do that, for Christ sake.”

“Good-looking woman, though,” Mack said.

“Gorgeous,” Scott said. “Dumb as a rock, though. I dunno,
maybe she isn’t. Who the hell knew anything when they were twenty-four, huh? I didn’t. I
know
you didn’t. The hell’re you gonna do, you know? Crystal would’ve taken the house and the business and every fuckin’ penny I own, I did that. Shit, Gail’d last about a week with me, if I was broke. Gail likes money.”

“Yeah,” Mack said.

“Maybe that means she isn’t stupid,” Scott said. “Could be, I suppose. Anyway, I had to drop her. Crystal don’t make any stink, I fool around a little, sometimes I don’t come home. She knows what’s goin’ on. But if I tell her I want a divorce, that is gonna be a different thing, my friend. She will come after me with a lawyer who swims in the water and nobody else goes in when he’s taking a dip. They put bulletins on the radio. I don’t think so. I had a good time with Gail, but I’m not pushing my luck like that, pissing away everything I got. I worked too hard for it.”

“Too bad Alfred doesn’t try a little of that formula,” Mack said.

“Alfred,” Scott said, “ahh, shit. You know that stuff about his mother borrowing the money to pay you? From her sister? She didn’t. She told Alfred that, but she told me the truth.”

“I didn’t make a dime on that case,” Mack said. “I was lucky I came close to breaking even. That trial, all those hearings? Day after day I spend listening to Alfred lie to me and then going around and finding out he lied to me and going back to Alfred and having him tell me some more lies, so I can start the whole procedure again? Worst case I ever had. When he went in for sentencing and the judge asked me if I wanted to make a plea for him, I was going to ask for the death penalty. The only reason the judge gave Alfred five was because he knew me and he knew Alfred and he felt sorry for me. If it’d been somebody else representing Alfred,
Alfred would’ve gotten life. Jesus, what a kid. The jury loved him.”

“I can imagine,” Scott said. “But that really was all she could raise. She had a pension she built up working as a cleaning lady in the Roslindale post office, and she cashed it in. That was all she had.”

“That,” Mack said, “and one goddamned mean kid. What the hell is bothering him, anyway?”