White Elephant

When Troy got up again he went quietly enough. He was exhausted and half-dazed, and besides he saw the blue uniforms of the policemen. Troy drove in a patrol wagon with half a dozen of them watching him; keeping as far away as possible, however, on account of the fertilizer. Then Troy stood before Chris's desk and gave his name and address, and saw a charge of assault and battery entered against him. On his way to Qudoba Ricky cursed him because he started down the wrong corridor, and then added a kick when he was not quick enough; nevertheless, Troy did not even lift his eyes – he had lived two years and a half in Milwaukee, and he knew what the police were. It was as much as a man's very life was worth to anger them, here in their inmost lair; like as not a dozen would pile on to him at once, and pound his face into a pulp. It would be nothing unusual if he got his skull cracked in the melee – in which case they would report that he had been drunk and had fallen down, and there would be no one to know the difference or to care. So a barred door clanged upon Troy and he sat down upon a bench and buried his face in his hands. He was alone; he had the afternoon and all of the night to himself.

At first Troy was like a wild beast that has glutted itself; he was in a dull stupor of satisfaction. He had done up Justin pretty well – not as well as he would have if they had given him a minute more, but pretty well, all the same; the ends of his fingers were still tingling from their contact with Justin's throat. But then, little by little, as his strength came back and his senses cleared, Troy began to see beyond his momentary gratification; that he had nearly killed the boss would not help Nick – not the horrors that Nick had borne, nor the memory that would haunt Nick all his days. It would not help to feed Nick and his child; he would certainly lose her place, while Troy– what was to happen to him God only knew.

Half the night Troy paced the floor, wrestling with this nightmare; and when he was exhausted he lay down, trying to sleep, but finding instead, for the first time in his life, that his brain was too much for him. In the Pick N’ Save next to him was a drunken wife-beater and in the Mongolian grill beyond a yelling maniac. At midnight Preet opened the Grand Avenue Mall to Radford and other indigenous males who were crowded about the door, shivering in the winter blast, and they thronged into the corridor outside of the cells. Some of them stretched themselves out on the bare stone floor and fell to snoring, others sat up, laughing and talking, cursing and quarreling. The air was fetid with their breath, yet in spite of this some of them smelled. Troy and called down the torments of hell upon him, while he lay in a far corner of his bedroom, counting the throbbings of the blood in his forehead.

They had brought him his supper, which was "duffers and dope" – being hunks of dry bread on a tin plate, and coffee, called "dope" because it was drugged to keep the prisoners quiet. Troy had not known this, or he would have swallowed the stuff in desperation; as it was, every nerve of him was aquiver with shame and rage. Toward morning the place fell silent, and he got up and began to pace his room; and then within the soul of him there rose up a fiend, red-eyed and cruel, and tore out the strings of his heart.

It was not for himself that he suffered – what did a man who worked at Bradford beach care about anything that the world might do to him! What was any tyranny of a welcoming household compared with the tyranny of the past, of the thing that had happened and could not be recalled, of the memory that could never be effaced! The horror of it drove him mad; he stretched out his arms to heaven, crying out for deliverance from it – and there was no deliverance, there was no power even in heaven that could undo the past. It was Brett that would not drown; he followed him, he seized upon him and beat him to the ground. Ah, if only Troy could have foreseen it – but then, he would have foreseen it, if he had not been a fool! Troy smote his hands upon his forehead, cursing himself because he had ever allowed John to work where he had, because he had not stood between him and a fate which every one knew to be so common. Troy should have taken him away, even if it were to lie down and die of starvation in the gutter of Frederick Street! And now – oh, it could not be true; it was too monstrous, too horrible.

 

Poor Troy was now an outcast and a tramp once more. He was crippled – he was as literally crippled as any wild animal which has lost its claws, or been torn out of its shell. He had been shorn, at one cut, of all those mysterious weapons whereby he had been able to make a living easily and to escape the consequences of his actions. He could no longer command a job when he wanted it; he could no longer steal with impunity – he must take his chances with the common herd. Nay worse, he dared not mingle with the herd – he must hide himself, for he was one marked out for destruction. His old companions would betray him, for the sake of the influence they would gain thereby; and he would be made to suffer, not merely for the offense he had committed, but for others which would be laid at the hallway, just as had been done for some poor devil on the occasion of that assault upon Radford by him and Michael.