Nelson Algren - The New Black Mask Quarterly (№ 1)

“They trying to set up an apprentice program?”

Hawk shrugged. “Beats me, baby, he got a long way to go though, don’t he.”

“It bother you that the cops are going to ask him what he was doing fighting with a tourist, and who the tourist was and who was the black stud in the funny outfit?”

Hawk shook his head. “He won’t say nothing. He dumb, but he ain’t that dumb.”

Between us on the front seat Susan Silverman said, “What are we doing?”

Hawk laughed. “A fair question, Susan. What in hell are we doing?”

“Let me see if I can guess,” I said. “I guess that Harv Shepard owes money to a man, probably King Powers, and Hawk has been asked to collect it. Or maybe just oversee the disbursement of funds, whatever, and that things are going the way they should.” I said to Susan, “Hawk does this stuff, quite well. And then surprise, I appear, and I’m working for Shepard. And Hawk and his employer, probably King Powers, wonder if Harv hired me to counteract Hawk. So Hawk has dropped by to inquire about my relationship with Harv Shepard, and to urge me to sever that relationship.”

The Caddie went almost soundless along the Mid-Cape Highway, down Cape, toward Provincetown. I said, “How close, Hawk?”

He shrugged. “I have explained to the people that employ me about how you are. I don’t expect to frighten you away, and I don’t expect to bribe you, but my employer would like to compensate you for any loss if you were to withdraw from the case.”

“Hawk,” I said. “All this time I’ve known you I never could figure out why sometimes you talk like an account exec from Merrill Lynch and sometimes you talk like Br’er Bear.”

“Ah is the product of a ghetto education.” He pronounced both t’s in ghetto. “Sometimes my heritage keep popping up.”

“Lawdy me, yes,” I said. “What part of the ghetto you living in now?”

Hawk grinned at Susan. “Beacon Hill,” he said. He U-turned the Caddie over the center strip and headed back up Cape toward Hyannis. “Anyway, I told the people you weren’t gonna do what they wanted, whatever I said, but they give me money to talk to you, so I’m talking. What your interest in Shepard?”

“He hired me to look for his wife.”

“That all?”

“That’s all.”

“You find her?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“I won’t say.”

“Don’t matter, Shepard’ll tell me. If I need to know.”

“No.” I shook my head. “He doesn’t know either.”

“You won’t tell him?”

“Nope.”

“Why not, man. That’s what you hired on for.”

“She doesn’t want to be found.”

Hawk shook his head again. “You complicate your life, Spenser. You think about things too much.”

“That’s one of the things that makes me not you, Hawk.”

“Maybe,” Hawk said, “and maybe you a lot more like me than you want to say. ’Cept you ain’t as good looking.”

“Yeah, but I dress better.”

Hawk snorted, “Shit. Excuse me, Susan. Anyway, my problem now is whether I believe you. It sounds right. Sounds just about your speed, Spenser. Course you ain’t just fell off the sugar-beet truck going through town, and if you was lying it would sound good. You still work for Shepard?”

“No, he canned me. He says he’s going to sue me.”

“Ah wouldn’t worry all that much about the suing,” Hawk said. “Harv’s kinda busy.”

“Is it Powers?” I said.

“Maybe it is, maybe it ain’t. You gonna stay out of this, Spenser?”

“Maybe I will, maybe I won’t.”

Hawk nodded. We drove a way in silence.

“Who’s King Powers?” Susan said.

“A thief,” I said. “Loan sharking, numbers, prostitution, laundromats, motels, trucking, produce, Boston, Brockton, Fall River, New Bedford.”

Hawk said, “Not Brockton anymore. Angie Degamo has got Brockton now.”

“Angie chase Powers out?”

“Naw, some kind of business deal. I wasn’t in it.”

“Anyway,” I said to Susan, “Powers is like that.”

“And you work for him,” she said to Hawk.

“Some.”

“Hawk’s a free-lance,” I said. “But Powers asks him early when he’s got Hawk’s kind of work.”

“And what is Hawk’s kind of work?” Susan said, still to Hawk.

“He does muscle and gun work.”

“Ah prefer the term soldier of fortune, honey,” Hawk said to me.

“Doesn’t it bother you,” Susan said, “to hurt people for money?”

“No more than it does him.” Hawk nodded to me.

“I don’t think he does it for money,” she said.

“Tha’s why Ah’m bopping down the Cape in a new Eldorado and he’s driving that eight-year-old hog with the gray tape on the upholstery.”

“But...” Susan looked for the right words. “But he does what he must, his aim is to help. Yours is to hurt.”

“Not right,” Hawk said. “Maybe he aiming to help. But he also like the work. You know? I mean he could be a social worker if he just want to help. I get nothing out of hurting people. Sometimes just happens that way. Just don’t be so sure me and old Spenser are so damn different, Susan.”

We pulled back into the parking lot at the motel. The blue and white was gone. I said, “You people through discussing me yet, I got a couple things to say, but I don’t want to interrupt. The subject is so goddamned fascinating.”

Susan just shook her head.

“Okay,” I said. “This is straight, Hawk. I’m not working for Shepard, or anybody, at the moment. But I can’t go home and let you and Powers do what you want. I’m gonna hang around, I think, and see if I can get you off Shepard’s back.”

Hawk looked at me without expression. “That’s what I told them,” he said. “I told them that’s what you’d say if I came around and talked. But they paying the money. I’ll tell them I was right. I don’t think it gonna scare them.”

“I didn’t suppose it would,” I said.

I opened the door and got out and held it open for Susan. She slid out, and then leaned back in and spoke to Hawk. “Goodby,” she said. “I’m not sure what to say. Glad to have met you wouldn’t do, exactly. But” — she shrugged — “thanks for the ride.”

Hawk smiled at her. “My pleasure, Susan. Maybe I’ll see you again.”

I closed the door and Hawk slid the car out of the parking lot, soundless and smooth, like a shark cruising in still water.

Promised Land , from which this excerpt came, is the first book in which Hawk appears. As I was writing Promised Land, it was not my conscious intention to make him a recurring character. He seemed merely a suitable antagonist for Spenser when I began. It is one of the cliches of the word business to say that a character takes over an author, or in some way acts as if he (or she) had a life of his (or her — liberation do get clumsy) own. This is, of course, tripe. As I have better reason to know than anyone, Hawk is a figment of my imagination and has no existence outside of it. No character does; to believe otherwise is to believe in some sort of literary voodoo. What did happen, however, is that Hawk offered a lot of artistic opportunity.

Hawk is, and the racial pun is intended, the dark side of Spenser. He is what Spenser might have been had he grown up black in a white culture. The hero of books like mine is often outside of the culture. It could be argued, and I’d be willing to so argue, that the hero of most American books is poised, if not in opposition to the official culture, at least in counterbalance to it. If such a hero is non-white, his poise will be more radically asocial, because his exclusion will be more complete. While Spenser is both in and out of the culture, Hawk displays no such uncertainty. His presence in the books provides me an opportunity to examine some aspects of the American Myth, and to comment, sometimes directly, sometimes obliquely, on racism.