Editor’s Note: There is a lot swirling around this week. Some of it is quite amazing. I think, rather than going alarmist on you gentle readers, it is better to return to Marlow’s account of an adventure in a traveling life, one that makes worlds collide. There is a book building here.
– Vic
Author’s Note: Today’s offering is another installment to my earlier story entitled Going Native. This one is a corrected and expanded version of a previously shared tale.
-Marlow
Does anybody under the age of forty remember when telephones had to be taken off of the hook in the middle of long chains of one-after-the-other rings? There was no auto-switching to voicemails or missed call logging just unknown missed call after unknown missed call.
Let’s say that this story is intended to serve as several pseudo-voicemails from the past. Recovered memories, so to speak.
So, let’s click the receiver a few times and continue up and down this spiraling stone staircase.
As we descend older elevator pop music covers from the previous century continue faintly in the background, a voice is heard, and we see the shadow of a phone being placed back on its cradle.
A page is turned.
——
Gi-normous German police dogs, fangs bared, leap forward on their leashes, growling. The scent from a motionless man on the blood red sidewalk — two short blocks from our Park Avenue house — is given to these monsters. They are turned loose and tracked by their handlers in close pursuit. They race off directly towards a certain east side neighborhood.
If they find their quarry, their target’s forearms will be shredded at best or torn off if not their throat(s) torn apart. Two dogs won’t be denied despite active, laser-accurate, gun fire defense.
The dogs will instantly cease only upon hearing a silent dog whistle tone being blown and certain words being spoken.
A newly immigrated, businessman and aboriginal art gallery owner from down under has been gunned down with a tightly spaced grouping on his chest in front of his wife as they walked back home from dinner near Forsyth Park. He was a gang initiation ceremony target. Totally random.
These perps were never caught. The cops or the papers erred in releasing soon thereafter a detail of the gunmen that tagged one specific gang’s head bandana colors. Were this during the old days or had this man been or had local kin, the perps’ families would have given them up in self-defense as a Russian “ten for one” would have been implemented almost immediately.
That would have been old Savannah style.
The last time that such an initiation happened was when an US Army man stationed at Hunter Army Airfield was shot downtown in the middle of the night. This slaying occurred several decades ago, when local police were overwhelmed by drug-sales fueled gang violence and had little expertise and zero outside assistance, analytics, or snitches. That there were no suspects let alone charges and justice irritated the dead man’s Army brothers. They went full Russian on the suspected local gangs. After multiple accidents and unsolved disappearances, an OO-GEE walked into a station house with a lawyer and confessed. Short hairs were not messed with going forward. No one called them out to praise or thought to gilt them up as heroes. They simply faded away into the dark fields to the south of the city as black, cast iron Angels.
They never found the graves of the missing — no patrol cars were driven in or near these sites so their powerful headlights could stab across the crime scene, no rows of Coleman lanterns lined the areas around them, no crime scene tape was strung on stakes around to keep the locals from trampling the scenes, no exhumed bodies were laid under canvas, no GBI, Savannah city cops or Chatham County medical examiners took pictures of the scenes.
Reportedly, there was a perfect and absolute naturalness of these black clothed Angels of justice at all times when they were questioned off and on the record. They knew and saw nothing and said the same.
There would be no formal or informal commission or task force to pursue the punishment of these men.
A strong offshore wind came up and blew all these things into a memory hole.
These dark-clad Angel faces, formerly set in rigid lines with hard eyes, no longer needed such control and returned to their former softness allowing them to disappear back into their line of work.
Our gardens five years after our Aussie neighbor’s murder are now filled with flowers, and the spring sun warms them for brief midday growth. Locals draw their curtains to keep the sunshine out. These are their houses and city, and they want them drawn.
Seems as if old habits and instincts reasserted themselves however briefly long ago.
Old fireplaces are lit against cool afternoons while bottles of wine and plates of small sandwiches are passed around when we gather at dusk in each other’s outdoor spaces.
After the confessed perp’s trial and incarceration, a once again serene Hostess City was listening politely to the world’s prattling about her and her state and began looking forward to being a reborn icon of the old New South.
A thin wedge of moonlight stabs down from above onto the foot of a River Street staircase each anniversary evening of the more recent murder of an innocent.
The jiggling noise of the receiver hook ceased.
The town no longer needed to fear back then.
Somewhere on the Army airfield base a diary entry was made — “we didn’t fail . . . failing to act . . . you became part of the crime.”
How many were impaled upon these dark Angels’ swords remains to this day unknown.
Had the perp not turned himself in, the Angels would have gone full Carthage on the city’s east side.
Now, we’ve got lots of state and federal assistance and manpower, cameras-o-plenty, gunfire sensors and triangulation computer ShotSpotter programs that allow LEOs to flood a zone like close air support aircraft rolling in with snake and nape, and computer AI-directed patrolling. Even the bad guy hood folks are snitching on them. Murder rates are way down in most areas.
Still, years later, that silent, grotesque, sidewalk scene abides in me like a weak 20-watt bulb flickering in the back of my mind. Its fading brilliance radiates out from the loose corners of my memory sack more infrequently than back then.
Yup — sometimes justice means simple vengeance. Is that unspeakable pleasure so wrong? Maybe if today’s internetted and cabled social justice warriors say so.
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