“It ain’t exactly the Hyatt Regency, is it?” John Howard said grimly.
“For God’s sake, don’t pull back any shower curtains,” Luke muttered. He had the Leica to his face, shooting one empty, terrible room after another. I knew that we could make something of the accommodations these visitors were forced to occupy in our article, if we could find faces to go with them.
We turned a corner into another long, stifling, shadowy corridor and heard music, faraway and insistent, the percussion first. It sounded as if, in the farthest rooms, someone was playing jungle drums.
“Man is in the forest,” Luke said.
About halfway down the hall we pushed in a half-opened door and looked into the room. Grunts and squeals were coming from it, and a pounding, squeaking rhythm that I could not identify. Then I saw that a man and a woman were having sex half-on, half-off the sagging mattress, and that the sounds were coming from them and the mattress. Both were black and naked; she sat astraddle him, and at that moment they jackknifed off the bed and the woman shrieked and the man howled like a wolf.
I jerked my head out of the room and whirled away, face flaming.
“Whoa, ’scuse me, brother,” Luke said under his breath. He did not lift the camera; I would have slapped it out of his hand if he had.
“People will do it,” John Howard said. His face was calm and even a bit amused, but there was an involuntary lift to his upper lip, and a slight flaring of his nostrils, as if he could not disguise his disgust. I walked stiffly ahead of them both down the hall, the images of the sweat-slick black bodies contorting on the bed and John Howard’s rictus of fastidiousness burning behind my eyes. Both were disturbing. Neither should have been, really.
At the end of the hall two doors were flung wide open and a powerful barrage of sound boiled out into the hall. It was Motown, a big, prowling wail of sound from an obviously good sound system. I recognized Aretha Franklin hammering out the ending of “Respect,” and then, with no pause at all, the beginning of Otis Redding doing Fa-fa-fa-fa-fa. John Howard went into the nearest of the rooms, and Luke and I followed him.
It was completely dark; no lamps were lit, and the drapes were drawn tightly, but I don’t think we could have made out anything of substance if the room had been floodlit. The sweet, acrid smoke of marijuana cigarettes was too thick. I choked on it, and coughed until I had to back out of the room. When my eyes stopped tearing and I went back in, someone had switched on a dim lamp, and I saw that John and Luke were standing just inside the door talking to an impossibly thin, yellowish man in a gigantic Afro and a silver lame jumpsuit, who was lying on one of the beds smoking. Next to the man, in the crook of his arm, a heavyset black woman in only a loosely draped towel lay, smoking and drinking from a bottle of sweet wine. As my eyes grew accustomed to the murk, I saw that the other bed and the floor were occupied by couples in various stages of undress, all smoking and drinking, and that they had probably been at it for some time. Everyone had the stunned, loose-limbed beatific demeanor that I had come to associate with pot. Moreover, the bedside tables and floor corners were piled high with takeout food boxes, and half-eaten pizzas and gnawed chicken wings competed with empty wine bottles and overflowing ashtrays for floor space. Food and sweet smoke: no hard drugs here. I relaxed slightly.
The thin man uncoiled himself from the bed and stood, swaying slightly, to give me an exaggeratedly courtly bow. Behind him the woman stared levelly and insolently at us, and let the towel fall away from her great breasts. Luke grinned and raised the camera, and she pulled it up. The insolence gave way to dull anger.
“Allow me to present Lord Byron Playboy, from Scranton, Pennsylvania,” Luke said, and the thin yellow man said, in a perfect Liverpudlian accent, “Chawmed.”
“Likewise,” I said, smiling. Lord Byron smiled back, and I saw with simple disbelief that his front teeth had been filed to sharp points.
“The better to eat you with, my dear,” he said. I said nothing.
“I’ve explained to these folks what we’re about, and Lord Byron here says it’s okay by him if we take some shots,” Luke said. “Seems like the rest of the folks are either…napping or over at La Carrousel. Horace Silver’s in town. He also tells me that there’s a big barbecue tonight over by AU for the delegates, thrown by none other than our little friends the Panthers. So the pickings here are pretty slim as far as the story goes. No offense, my man.”
He nodded to Lord Byron Playboy, who had collapsed back on the bed. Lord Byron nodded back affably.
“’Fraid y’all stuck with jes’ us no-’count, spaced-out niggers,” he beamed. “Gon’ have to go to the bobbycue to git the in crowd. Ought to be worth it, though. Them Panthers look real pretty in them little Panther suits. Make good pitchers, they would.”
He looked over at John Howard, who stood leaning against a wall, studying him with courteous interest.
“You ain’t one of ’em, are you, brother? Seem to me like I know your face from somewhere.”
“I ain’t one of ’em, no, brother,” John said mildly.
“You with this magazine then?”
I knew that Lord Byron Playboy was parodying the rough dialect of the uneducated black man, and guessed that he meant it as a taunt to John Howard. But his smile was still brilliant and lazy and startling, with the vulpine pointed teeth.
“No,” John said. “I’m with SCLC when I’m with anything. These are friends of mine. I’m just along for the ride.”
“Whooee,” Lord Byron said. “SCLC, FBI, NBC—Lord Byron don’t know nothin’ ’bout no initials. You mean you along to ride shotgun, don’t you, brother? Keep this nice white girl and boy from gittin’ set upon by savages?”
“You don’t look too savage to me…brother,” John said lazily. “Despite the Secret Squirrel teeth. What did you have in mind?”
“Why, bro, no mind at all,” Lord Byron said, laughing mightily. “Go on and take your pictures, and then we give you a little somethin’ to puff, or sip, or maybe a snack, if you fancy chawin’ a bone.”
He waved his hand loosely at Luke, who grinned and lifted the camera and shot around the room at the bodies on the beds and floors. No one moved, except to follow the camera with bloodshot, half-lidded eyes. Otis Redding segued into Ben E. King: “Stand by me, ohhhhh stand by me…”
Someone began to giggle, and I looked around for the sound, a smile tugging at my lips. A giggle was better than nothing. The sound went on and on, and then I realized that it was not a giggle at all, but sobbing, that got louder and louder until it was a wail, sick and hopeless, dreadful to hear. It broke off into vomiting, and then the whining sobbing began again. I thought that it was coming from behind the closed bathroom door. I looked around at the people in the room, but no one was paying any attention. I looked at Luke and John, who were looking at each other. The sobbing began to rise again, and I went quickly across the littered floor, literally stepping over couples, and opened the door into the bathroom.
A woman lay on the floor, curled in a fetal position around the base of the toilet. The bathroom was indescribable, unspeakable, filthy, hideous smelling. The woman lay with her head buried in her thin arms, and I could not see her face, but I saw that she was white. The desk clerk had said that two white women had come into the motel earlier; this must be one of them. There had to be something terribly wrong with her. The room reeked of vomit, and there was vomit caked in her hair, and on her arms and legs. Why the hell wasn’t someone doing something for her? I took a deep breath and leaned over her.
It was not until I had gotten her turned over and half-propped against the wall and was squatting beside her, dabbing at her encrusted face with wet toilet paper, that I realized that she was Rachel Vaughn. I was so shocked that I rocked back on my heels and sat down heavily on the filthy floor.
She looked as if she were dying. Dying at that moment, of illness or starvation or perhaps physical abuse; she was so thin that I could almost see the bones through her slack, dirty
gray flesh, and she was all over yellowing bruises. Especially on her bare arms and legs; they were so discolored that they did not look as if they belonged to a living human. I did not think that they would, for long. I really did think, sitting there and staring at her, my head whirling, that she would die under my eyes.
Her little fox’s face, once sly and somehow charming, was edematous, swollen and discolored almost beyond recognition, but I knew her. The swelling did not seem to be that of physical abuse, but of illness. I could not define it. There were deep, near-black circles under her closed eyes, and her blazing fox’s brush of hair had faded to hacked, pinkish-dyed straw, tangled now with her vomit. She had stopped crying for the time being, but she was breathing in deep gasps, as if she would vomit again, and I got up off my buttocks and tilted her head back and wiped her face gently with wet toilet tissue. There were no towels or washcloths at hand. Perhaps, I thought furiously, the sated and stoned women in the bedrooms were wearing them all.
“Rachel,” I whispered. “Rachel. Can you open your eyes? Rachel, it’s Smoky. Smoky O’Donnell. You remember me, from Our Lady?”
She did not open her eyes, but her puffed lips made a silent shape: “Smoky.”
I found a filthy glass that had rolled under the washbasin and filled it, and held it to her lips, and she drank greedily, and then vomited it up, all over herself. The vomit was clear and thin; there was nothing left inside her. I turned for the roll of toilet paper, and when I turned back for her, her eyes were open and she was looking weakly at me.
“Smoky,” she whispered.
“Let me clean you up,” I said, dabbing furiously, “and then we’re going to take you out of here.”
She began to shake her head weakly, back and forth, no, no.
“Rachel, you’re sick, you can’t stay here. Oh, God, what on earth are you doing here, anyway?”
“What are you?” she said, and tried to smile. It was a terrible thing to see.
“I’m working,” I said distractedly, and she stretched her mouth farther.
“So am I,” she said, and all of a sudden I knew that she had come here as a prostitute, to make money. Sorrow and a terrible anger began, far down inside me.
She had never gone back to Our Lady, then.
“Well, you can’t stay here. You’re sicker than a dog. I’m going to get you to a doctor—”
“No.” Her voice was stronger.
“Rachel—”
“No, goddammit, Smoky! Shit, I haven’t even…scored yet. I got ahold of some bad stuff, and I’ve been puking ever since. I’ve still got my panties on.” She tried to laugh, and it turned into a retch.
“Bad stuff. You mean food? Liquor?”
She shut her eyes and rolled her head on her neck.
“Stuff, Smoky. Shit. H. Heroin. Guy in there said he had some of the absolute best, but it’s bad…. Oh, fuck it, you’re impossible. You always were. Just get on out of here and let me alone.”
“I’m not going to do that. You look like you could die—”
“I’m not going to die. I know the signs; I’ve had this before. It’s just bad stuff. It wears off. I’ve got to score. I’m broker than shit—”
“I have some money. We have some with us—”
“No.” Wearily.
“Well, then…Sister Joan. Let me call Sister Joan. You know she’ll help, and she’ll do it with no questions asked, not like those others…. Let me do that, Rachel.”
“No. Christ. What’s Sister Joan going to do, sing ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ to me? Go on, Smoky. Get out of here.”
She slumped back onto the floor and covered her face with her hands. I scrambled to my feet.
“I’m going to call her,” I said, and started out of the room.
“Noooooooooo!”
It was a great, animal howl of illness and despair. It froze me in my tracks.
The door burst open and the heavy black woman was on me like a wildcat before I could move, clawing and scratching and spitting, literally spitting. I could feel her spittle hitting my face along with her fists, feel her hands in my hair, pulling my head straight back.
“You get out of here and leave us and our people alone, you white cunt,” she screeched. “You got no business in there botherin’ that girl! She came in with us!”
She jerked sharply backward, off me, and I saw that John Howard had her from behind, pinioning her flailing arms. He was holding her up off the floor, and her black legs were kicking at him and me alike. She was stark naked, and as wild and furious as a captured animal.
“Fucking cunt!” she screamed into my face, her face contorted. I felt my own go out of control with rage.
“You were going to just let her lie here and die, you bitch!” I screamed back, my face inches from hers. I had never been so angry in my life.
Luke came in, then, and he and John wrestled the thrashing woman back into the bedroom. Lord Byron Playboy got lazily to his feet and gave her a smack across the face, so hard that she staggered with it, and fell back onto the bed. She did not make another sound, but lay there, naked and heaving, staring murderously at me.
“Might be y’all will want to mosey on, now,” Lord Byron said softly, and I saw that one or two of the men on the floor and the other bed were beginning to make as if to rise, slowly, and John said, “We’ll be doing that,” and before I could protest, he and Luke had marched me out of the room and were trotting me down the hall.
“But…Rachel…You don’t understand, that girl in the bathroom, she’s sick, she’s had bad heroin, I know her…. Luke, she was at the Church’s Home for Girls with me when I first got here. I just can’t go off and leave her, she could die—”
“You can’t help her, Smoky,” John Howard said sharply, and pulled me out into the lobby. “You stick around and you’ll get her hurt, as well as yourself. Lord, we never should have brought you—”
“I didn’t start that,” I said, wounded. My ears were still ringing, and my face stung from the black woman’s blows. I tasted something metallic, and knew that the inside of my mouth was cut.
“I didn’t say you did,” he said. “I just said we shouldn’t have brought you. You and Luke go on out to the car. I’ll make a call and get her some help.”
“Oh, John, not the police—”
“No. There’s a doctor in SCLC I know who’ll come.”
“But she’s white—”
“He’s a good doctor, Smoky,” John Howard said.
“I didn’t mean it that way,” I whispered.
“I know,” he said, and went off to phone. Luke and I walked slowly toward the Mustang. The parking lot was still deserted and hot, but lying in full darkness now. The moon was almost full, but it had not yet risen. I took deep gulps of the fetid air.
A fine trembling began in my arms and legs, and my knees wobbled. Luke slipped his arm around me. We sat down together on the Mustang’s hood.
“You okay?” he said. “Jesus, Matt was worried about race riots and drugs and what we get is rednecks with shotguns and one pissed black lady. It just goes to show you.”
“Show you what?” I said. My teeth were chattering.
“I don’t know. Wait, you’re drooling blood. Shit, Smoky, but you’re a mess,” he said, and pulled my head down on his shoulder. I leaned there, taking deep breaths. Presently the trembling slowed and stopped.
John Howard came out of the motel and walked across the parking lot to us. As he did, a neat, dark Chevrolet pulled up alongside him. He was near enough to us so that I could see that the driver was the pretty young black woman with the Afro who had been at the first day care center we had visited, on Pumphouse Hill. Juanita Hollings. The woman for whom John Howard had left his wife and son, or, perhaps, vice versa…. The lady Panther. Or so Lucas had said.
She stopped the car and leaned out, and we could hear what she said:
“Hello, John.”
“Juanita. We meet again.”
“We do. I came by to te
ll you that some of us are having a barbecue over at AU for the deejays, and we’d like it if you could join us. We’re going on to Paschal’s afterward. I left word with the desk clerk but I guess he didn’t tell you.”
“No,” John Howard said.
“So come on by.”
“I don’t think so, thanks,” John said. “I’ve got some folks with me.”
She looked in our direction.
“Luke,” she said.
“Juanita,” he said back.
As she had before, she nodded slightly to me, but did not speak. She turned back to John Howard.
“Lots of people there you haven’t seen in a long time. Paul is there. Terry’s there. Terry would like to see you, John.”
John Howard said nothing, and then he said, “Maybe I will, after a while. Tell Terry…Is Terry okay?”
“Terry’s fine. So…we’ll see you, then?”
Finally, he nodded.
She nodded, too, and put her head back into the car’s window, and then backed out.
“Keisha’s there, too, Luke,” she called.
Luke nodded, but he did not speak.
John got into the car and said, “Doctor’s on his way, Smoky. They’ll see she gets medical attention and a place to sleep tonight, and they’ll call this Sister Joan in the morning. Will that do?”
“Thanks, yes,” I said. “Sister Joan will get help for her. Oh, Jesus, poor Rachel. She was pretty once, she really was.”
“That’s bad stuff,” he said.
They were both silent on the drive back to the Commerce Building garage, and John Howard said only, when he dropped us off, “If you didn’t get anything tonight, Luke, we might try the rally on the capitol steps tomorrow. It’s not what you wanted, but it should be…colorful.”
Downtown Page 28
