Eleven
Bobby had lain dead on the sidewalk for 27 minutes before the police arrived. In the bluish light, his blood had looked like a thick, black cape spread out on the ground, attached somewhere above the nape of his neck and fanning downward over his shoulders, giving his yellow T-shirt black epaulets of stain.
The sirens had swelled up from their constant, never-too-far-off level of noise, then louder, above the threshold which meant the matter was quite close. Then the curtains had parted and doors where cracked open for peeping, and whomever was not already on the street and apprised of what had occurred, emerged and looked for the telling red and amber carousels of light.
The first police car had come, going the wrong way up the street, and a minute later, the ambulance moved in and stopped traffic utterly. For the very young children, those still too young for Detective, the ambulance, with its bright lights, attendant noises and flurry of activity, beckoned like an ice cream truck. It was only the solemn and repelled expressions on the adults which kept them back, tiny faces partly hidden by a parental skirt or pant leg.
Bobby had been rolled and prodded, his injury assessed, then finally lifted away by arms and legs. The back of his head seemed to stick slightly to the cement as he was lifted. Then in a great hurry, as if it were all being done under water with the breath held, the first police car backed out the way it had come in, behind it a second, and behind that, the ambulance. The sirens had wailed and the lights had blinked, and dead Bobby was whisked away, trailing after him a wake of unreality and a taunting insight that hung for a moment in the exhaust fumes and fading sirens. Then, he was gone.
Though Carmen Rivera had hurried her son inside, and locked doors against the troubles of the outer world, the inevitable knocking had come. And the plain-clothes policemen, who had by then been sufficiently informed by neighbors and friends, took Willie away as well.
Carmen Rivera had, at one moment of great delirium, there in the waiting room of the 115th police precinct, found it necessary to make a scream, and show everyone (who remarkably looked upon her only with amazement and forbearance) that she did not understand any of what was happening. She had tried, with a mad tossing of arms and black hair, to thrust herself into the unseen backroom, or interrogation room, or wherever it was that Willie was and had no reason to be. She wielded all the force and momentum that her sobbing and flailing could give a woman of her size in a bath robe. But the tall, columnar bluenesses, and those who wore only badges, but were clearly also members there, kept her back with restrained effort, and tight-lipped “Please Maam…” ’s. And when she had not responded in the desired way to the “Please Maam…” ’s and to the other vergingly physical communications, one particular un-uniformed officer, was forced to take her brusquely aside for a talking-to. His Irish, blue-eyed handsomeness was sufficient to stun her for an instant, so that some of what he said was able to penetrate, and be understood. Later, when the effect of the cleft chin and blue eyes had worn off, when she had finally taken a seat in the waiting room, through her sobbing, she could still hear him saying: “…because of your son another boy is dead…” And that much she knew already.
The detectives had taken Willie to a glass-walled inner office with the shades drawn. They had sat him there, under their fluorescent scrutiny. They had asked him at first questions that had simple enough answers, then later, questions that were supposed to make you think, and maybe make you want to answer some of the earlier questions. But nothing. Willie just sat there silently, roughly in the same position they had bent him into, so that he was able to sit, more or less. The steel office chair required a degree of rigidity from its occupant that Willie simply could not summon. And rather, like a crumpled sheet of paper, he tended to expand ever so slowly from the sitting shape, and therefore slide off.
There had been two detectives with Willie in the glass room. One had a moustache and a sort of avuncular kindness around the jowls. The other was younger, quite a bit thinner, and seemed to require a greater effort in smiling. After all their questioning, rhetorical and otherwise, and those ninety or so minutes of Willie just staring at the border of dry blood around one fingernail, the two officers had slipped together into a period of blank pensiveness, out of which the older officer was the first to emerge with a decided frown on his face. The younger officer followed a second later with a similar frown. Then they had that wordless concurring exchange of the eyes, and left Willie to continue unraveling in his chair. Mrs. Rivera was then been told by the officers how her son was not being arrested, not really, but rather that they were of the opinion that Willie was not quite right within himself, and should be examined by doctors of a particular variety that the younger officer attempted to describe by tapping his index finger timidly to one temple.
So right around two in the morning, Willie had been taken to Elmwood Hospital. Mrs. Rivera remained with him as long as it was possible to do so, but ultimately reassured and escorted all the way to the elevator and out. Please Maam.