Dark Stain Read Online Free PDF Page B

You should never have been a cop, Sam. I was always against it. Remember? You should’ve been a doctor like you wanted to be.”
    “And who pays the doctor school?” Sam’s father bellowed.
    “You, my fine lady. You with your Macy job selling ladies drawers — ”
    “Let up on Rose, pop,” Sam said. “For God’s sake, let’s all calm down.”
    “Sam, you’ll lemme hold the gat,” Mike wheedled.
    “One God alone knows,” Mrs. Miller remarked vaguely. “There are those to live and nothing kills them. Even in the war, the bullets don’t know them.”
    “I’m calm,” Sam’s father declared in a hurt voice. “Too calm. I always was. But I know that oil and water don’t mix. Who told you but me, Sam? Not your sister, the fine lady. A nigger and a white man is like oil and water — ”
    Mike darted close to Sam and touched his brother’s right hand. Sam recoiled as if burned. “Go to sleep, you
momser
,” Sam’s father snatched at Mike’s arm.
    “Let Mikey alone,” Mrs. Miller shrieked. “Such a thing to say to his own son,” she added bitterly. “Are you his father or not.” Her husband dashed into the living room.
    “I wasn’t doing nothing,” Mike said. “The kids’ll read all about it and what’ll I say. I never even touched the hand that shot off the gat. My own brother — Boy, what a brother.”
    Sam felt dizzy. They were all mad, he thought. He followed his father into the living room. The Chinese orange rug and the brocaded couch were littered with the morning newspapers. He recognized the big fat
Times
and
Herald-Tribune
, the compact tabloids, The
News
and The
Mirror
. His eyes burned and a devouring curiosity to read what they had reported seized him. But he held back. Why, he didn’t know exactly. Those newspapers held tomorrow in their columns. He stood in this living room with its glass bowls of artificial wax fruit and he contemplated the tomorrow that the newspapers had already thrust on him. He paced up and down, passing a photograph of himself in uniform on the coffee table. He would have to make decisions tomorrow. He would have to — He grabbed the nearest paper and read: COP KILLS KNIFE SLASHING NEGRO. NEAR RIOT IN HARLEM. He read the story under the headlines and then flung the paper from him. His family were staring at him in silence. Sam picked up the other papers and read their accounts. He laughed gratingly. “Not one of them has it straight,” he said.
    “What do you mean?” Rose asked. “Do you mean they are written differently? I noticed that myself — ”
    “I shot Randolph,” he said, impatient with her and all of them. They knew nothing of the world; they were Jews who hated Hitler but that was all. The volcano of fascism, to them, was far away in Europe. It was under their feet; he had come home to them from an eruption but they didn’t recognize it.
    “Were you scared, Sam?” Mike said. “I’ve been scared but not my big brother Sam.” Sam’s eyes saddened. Mike was already bragging to the kids on the block. Tomorrow, Mike would boast to the kids in the tradition of cops-and-robbers with Sam as the Lone Ranger; his father would spout of oil and water to his Jewish customers in his grocery; his mother would inform her cronies of how Sam never liked to fight when he was a little boy; his sister would sigh between sales at Macy’s. That was how they would all act tomorrow. The great big broad shining tomorrow would be rendered meaningless and petty and cheap by their small actions.
    “The papers say you done right,” Sam’s father said. “You saved that Irisher’s life. In his church he’ll pray to the Catholic priest for the Jewish boy.”
    “I wonder what the Negro press’ll say,” Sam said to Rose.
    “Also a press,” his father sneered. “Who reads their press but niggers. You’ll have to be careful, my son. Maybe you should go to a station house in the Bronx for a while. The niggers’ll be after you.”
    “Pop,” Sam said