Rodney Whitaker: The Main

In more than thirty years on this street of voluble and passionate people, a street on which poverty and greed and despair find expression in petty crime, LaPointe has fired his weapon only seven times. He is proud of that.

A harried child, her eyes down as she gnaws nervously at her lip, bumps into LaPointe and mutters “Excuse me” without looking up, her voice carrying a note of distress. She is late getting home. Her parents will be angry; they will scold her because they love her. The Lieutenant knows the girl and the parents. They want her to become a nurse, and they make her study long hours because she is not good at schoolwork. The girl tries, but she does not have the ability. For her training, for her future, her parents have suffered years of scrimping and self-denial. She is everything to them: their future, their pride, their excuse.

The girl spends a lot of time wishing she were dead.

As he passes Rue Guilbault, LaPointe glances down and sees two young men idling by the stoop of a brownstone. They wear black plastic jackets, and one swings back and forth from the railing. They chantent la pomme to a girl of fourteen who sits on the stoop, her elbows resting on the step above, her meager breasts pressed against a thin sweater. She taunts and laughs, and they sniff around like pubescent puppies. LaPointe knows the house. That would be the youngest Da Costa girl. Like her sisters, she will probably be selling ass on the street within two years. Mama Da Costa’s dream of the girls following their aunt into the convent is beginning to fade.

LaPointe is walking behind two men who speak a strained English. They are discussing business, and how it’s easy for the rich to get richer. One maintains that it’s a matter of percentages; if you know the percentages, you’re set. The other agrees, but he complains that you’ve got to be rich to find out what the percentages are.

They step apart gingerly to avoid colliding with the cripple who lurches toward them, his pipe smoke trailing a smear in the red neon of a two-for-one bar.

LaPointe stands in the middle of the sidewalk. The cripple stumbles to a stop and wavers before the policeman.

“Say-hey, Lieutenant. How’s it going?” The Gimp’s speech is blurred by the affliction that has damaged his centers of control. His mother was diseased at the time of his birth. He speaks with the alto, adenoidal whine of a boxer who has been hit on the windpipe too often.

LaPointe looks at the cripple with fatigued patience. “What are you doing at this end of the street, Gimp?”

“Nothing, Lieutenant. Say-hey, I’m just taking a walk, that’s all. Boy, you know, this pig weather is really hanging on, ain’t it, Lieutenant? I never seen anything like…”

LaPointe is shaking his head, so the Gimp gives up his attempt to hide in small talk. Taking one hand from his overcoat pocket, the Lieutenant points toward a narrow passage between two buildings, out of the flow of the crowd. The cripple grimaces, but follows him.

“All right, Gimp. What are you carrying?”

“Hey, nothin’, Lieutenant. Honest! I promised you, didn’t I?”

LaPointe reaches out; in his attempt to step back, the cripple stumbles against the brick wall. “Hey, please! We need the money! Mama’s going to be pissed at me if I don’t bring back any money!”

“Do you want to go back inside?”

“No! Hey, have a heart, Lieutenant!” the cripple whines. “Mama’ll be pissed. We need the money. What kind of work can a guy like me get? Eh?”

“Where’s it stashed?”

“I tol’ you! I ain’t carrying…” The Gimp’s eyes moisten with tears. His body slumps in defeat. “It’s in a tube,” he admits sullenly.

LaPointe sighs. “Go up the alley and get it out. Put it inside your glove and give it to me.” LaPointe has no intention of handling the tube.

The cripple moans and whimpers, but he turns and lurches up the alley a few steps until he is in the dark. LaPointe turns his back and watches the passing pedestrians. An old man steps toward the mouth of the recess to take a piss, then he sees LaPointe and changes his mind. The cripple comes back, clutching one glove in his withered hand. LaPointe takes it and puts it into his pocket. “All right, now where did this shit come from, and where were you bringing it?”

“Say-hey, I cant tell you that, Lieutenant! Mama’ll beat me up for sure! And those guys she knows, they’ll beat me up!” His eyes, bisected by the rims of his glasses, roll stupidly. LaPointe does not repeat his question. Following his habit in interrogation, he simply sighs and settles his melancholy eyes on the grotesque.

“Honest to God, Lieutenant, I can’t tell you! I don’t dare!”

“I’d better call for a car.”

“Hey, no! Don’t put me back inside. Those tough guys inside like to use me ‘cause I’m a cripple.”

LaPointe looks out over the crowd with weary patience. He gives the Gimp time to think it over.

“…Okay, Lieutenant…”

In a self-pitying whimper, the cripple explains that the stuff came from people his mother knows, tough guys from somewhere out on the east end of town. It was to be delivered to a pimp named Scheer. The Lieutenant knows this Scheer and has been waiting for a chance to run him off the Main. He has not been able to put a real case together, so he has had to content himself with maintaining constant harassing pressure. For a moment he considers going after Scheer with the Gimp’s testimony, then he abandons the thought, realizing what a glib defense lawyer would do to this half-wit in the witness box.

“All right,” LaPointe says. “Now listen to me. And tell your mother what I say. I don’t want you on my patch anymore. You have one month to find someplace to go. You understand?”

“But, say-hey, Lieutenant? Where’ll we go? All my friends are here!”

LaPointe shrugs. “Just tell your mother. One month.”

“Okay. I’ll tell her. But I hate to piss her off. I mean, after all… she’s my mother.”

LaPointe sits at the counter of a café, his shoulders slumped, his eyes indifferently scanning the passersby beyond the window.

A small white radio on a shelf by the counterman’s ear is insisting that

Everybody digs the Montreal Rock

Oh, yes! Oh, yes!

Oh, yes! O-o-h YES!

Everybody digs the Montreal Rock!

LaPointe sighs and digs into his pocket to pay for the coffee. As he rises he notices a sign above the counterman’s head. “That’s wrong,” he says. “It’s misspelled.”

The counterman gives a sizzling hamburger a definitive slap with his spatula and turns to examine the sign.

He shrugs. “Yeah, I know. I complained, and the painter cut his price.”

“Samuel?” LaPointe asks, referring to the old man who does most of the sign painting on this part of the Main.

“Yes.” The counterman uses the inhaled oui typical of Joual.

LaPointe smiles to himself. Old Samuel always makes fancy signs with underlinings and ornate swirls and exclamation points, all at no extra cost. He is given to setting things off with quotation marks, inadvertently raising doubts in the customer’s mind, as in:

He is also an independent artist who spells words the way he pronounces them. The counterman is lucky the sign doesn’t read: Epp’l Pie.

Not fifty paces off the Main, down Rue Napoléon, the bustle and press are gone and the noise is reduced to an ambient baritone rumble. The narrow old street is lit by widely spaced streetlamps and occasional dusty shopwindows. Children play around the stoops of three-story brick row houses. Above the roofline, diffused city-light glows in the damp, sooty air. Each house depends on the others for support. They have not collapsed because each wants to fall in a different direction, and there isn’t enough room.