Rock Island Line

by David Rhodes

  They never talked about it to Della, and seldom among themselves, because the shrieking cat howls cut deep into them, like the voice of hidden, repressed desires, fantasies not actualized, abandoned but not forgotten. Hearing her was like listening to the screams of your own imprisoned passions.

  Wilson had only one dog left—a fourteen-year-old beagle named Cindy, who still carried herself with dignity, though her legs were stiff and crooked and hardly held her up when she ate.

  THREE

  Eight men were in the garage. It was July, very hot, and cold sodas were pulled one after another out of the machine. It was no cooler in the garage except for the company and the absence of the pressing issues of field work. John moved at a snail’s pace, but never completely stopped, taking apart a chain saw and welding together an auger cracked away from the shaft. It seemed the sweltry air grudgingly made room for them when they moved, swirling thick around their arms and faces, wringing out beads of dark sweat.

  “You know, it’s where we’ve forced them. They had nothing to do with it. Could’ve been us if the situation was reversed.”

  “But they seem to excel in some fields, naturally. It comes from them coming from Africa—the drums and dances and all.”

  “I don’t recall ever hearing about basketball being played over there.”

  “Or football, or razor fighting.”

  “Or baseball.”

  “Wait a minute—they’re not better.”

  “Take the percentages. Take the percentages. What’s the total population of—”

  “It’s like the Jews. It’s being denied something, like they were denied complete freedom in business. So naturally they learned to be good.”

  “That’s something different. They could learn that. But I could never learn how to be more coordinated.”

  “They don’t seem to be too intelligent, and you could say they were denied good educations.”

  “Who?”

  “The Negroes.”

  “Even when they’re given a chance they don’t really try. Talk to anyone who ever taught in a mixed school. They don’t want to learn, and there’s nothing you can do about it. What do you do, call their parents in?”

  “Or parent. Usually the old man don’t live at home.”

  “They don’t respect authority.”

  “Jesus, how can you expect them to? Look at the—”

  “We know it ain’t their fault. But it’s true. They don’t respect authority. They live in the streets. They commit more crimes. They take drugs and all of ’em drink heavily. It’s a matriarchal society—”

  “A lot of ’em don’t work.”

  “It’s our fault.”

  “I know that. We all know that. Nobody’s proud of it. But what do you do now? They don’t respect the same things. If you let ’em in your school, the level of education’ll go down. If you let them live next to you, they’ll be trying to get at your wife. That’s fact.”

  “Bah.”

  “Bah nothing. Marion’s right. Why do you think people in cities hate them so much and keep them out of their neighborhood? Do you think they’re mean or stupid, all of them? No, they know more about it than you do.”

  “I heard some fellas one day yellin’, ‘You’re not human, you’re animals,’ at a bunch of school kids walking down the street in front of a Younkers store. It made me sick.”

  “There you go, see?”

  “I’m not defending anything. All I say is that there’s a reason. More rapes among coloreds.”

  “Look how tall they got by drinking orange soda and eating potato chips!”

  “Here comes Morley.”

  “Hi, Morley.”

  “Wasting time again,” said Morley, shaking his head from inside his car at the stop sign. Then on again.

  “He’s a good guy.”

  “Sure has tough luck, though, at least lately.”

  “It’s mostly his wife’s fault, though he won’t let on so.”

  “What I think is that you have to keep them separate from us. There’s no way either of us will get a real fair shake with them hating us the way they do.”

  “But they want what we got. They want all the things and money we got. They’d live right next door to you if you gave them a chance. There’s no way to separate them.”

  “Sure there is. Give them their own schools. Let them educate themselves in whatever way they want. Let them own their own businesses. Let them take care of themselves.”

  “Their own prisons, too.”

  “And their own police force.”

  “And their own traffic court.”

  “And garbage collection.”

  “And welfare state.”

  “They’d never do it. They like being where they are—living on welfare—taking what they can get from us and laying back.”

  “If you think it’s such a great life, why don’t you try it? Sell the farm, move into town, go on welfare and start living the good life.”

  “I didn’t say I’d want to live like that.”

  “Then it must not be so great, if you wouldn’t want to. Right, John?”

  “I don’t know,” said John, the first time he’d spoken. But he was listening to everything.

  “I think they’d be happy to take care of themselves.”

  “How they going to get any food?”

  “Well, there’d have to be some exchanges made between them and us.”

  “What are they going to give in return?”

  “Probably something from the arts. Music, I guess.”

  “That’d be pretty hard to trade. I wouldn’t give much for a song.”

  “You’re just like that. If they could get any kind of advertising and exposure. When we went to Chicago last fall, Clara’s cousin took us down to a colored bar and we heard a harmonica player who could bring tears to your eyes. His name was Little something. Little Walker . . . Little Wurther . . . something like that. His voice was beautiful.”

  “Music is natural to them.”

  “It comes from their coming from Afr—”

  “No it doesn’t. It has to do with feelings. They have more feelings than we do.”

  “That’s true. They’re not as smart, but they have more feelings, and are better at expressing them. It’s something that we’ve done to them as well. But it’s not all in our imagination.”

  “What?”

  “It comes from our original puritanical upbringing. We’ve been taught by one way or another—by the work ethic and so forth—to be ashamed of our feelings—sex especially. So what we do is throw all of them off on the blacks.”

  “Wait a minute—”

  “No,” said Sy, interrupting. “He’s right. That’s exactly what we do. We think of them as being sexual giants. We think of them crying easier than we do, of being more compassionate, loving their wives more, feeling more anger.”

  “Right! And in consequence they’ve been allowed the full range of those feelings, whereas we’ve been denied them. We also imagine them to be free from feelings of guilt—and they are!”

  “They live a more carefree emotional life.”

  “Just a minute,” said John. “Are you saying that they are more alive than we are?”

  “Of course they are,” said Marion, and his tone of voice added, Didn’t you know that? Everyone else agreed: John should have known that.

  “And we hate them for it.”

  “Even before they were slaves they had more feelings, and then we pushed all those we couldn’t use over onto them.”

  “But they know some of us don’t hate them, don’t they?” asked John.

  “Come on, John,” said Marion, “of course not. They hate us all, and think we all hate them. How could they think anything else?”

  “But I didn’t want any of what happened to have happened. And I don’t hate them.”

  “They don’t care about you. They’d kill you if they had the chance and wouldn’t get caught.”

  “And f
eel no guilt.”

  “None at all.”

  “They’d be glad to do it.”

  “If you were lying helpless on a deserted street in their neighborhood without a penny on you, one of ’em would go out of his way to run over and kill you, just because of the chance to do it.”

  “Sure they would, John. Didn’t you know that?”

  John went back to welding, and didn’t enter into the conversation again, though it changed course several times during the afternoon. As soon as everyone left, he closed the garage and went across the street and into his house. He was very troubled, and tried to get over it by immersing himself in his bird books. But even reading about the snowy owl, which he was sure he had seen several nights earlier, could not keep his troubles from spewing out. He felt as if he were drowning and had nothing to float up out of the water on except his worries. Finally, Sarah came home from shopping, and talking to her made him feel a little better. She was sympathetic, and even offered ways for him to forget about it; but it was a personal problem, and so had to be worked out by himself and in his own way. The difficulty wound itself around his religion and threatened to strangle it to death. How could the universe be as he imagined it if there were people in it who were fundamentally different from him?

  Can they be more alive? Regardless of the reasons, can they really be more alive? Are their senses better? He did not talk to Sarah about this. He did not expect ever to get an answer.

  Mrs. Pearson saw them first. Dusting off one of her seven-foot rubber plants by the window facing the street, looking out, she saw a green Ford moving at a walking pace in front of her house. She ran to the kitchen to keep its progress in view, saw it stop two houses away and three men get out. She ran out the back door and into her neighbor’s house. “Lois!” she yelled, coming through to the living room. “Blacks! They’re black!” Both of them went to the window and looked out.

  The men were looking up and down Sharon Center nervously as though they were lost and looking for a signpost to tell them where they were, but not quite. They also looked as though they had decided nothing should move them from that spot of street.

  “What are they doing?” asked Lois.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Look, they’re coming over here.”

  “They’ve seen us!”

  “What do they want?”

  “They’re coming over here!”

  “Get away from that window!”

  Emma Pearson jumped out of the view through the window to the safety of the wall.

  “Settle down. This is stupid. This is my house. They aren’t coming here. This is stupid.” Lois watched them walk across the front lawn.

  Emma Pearson went back to the window. “There’s still one in the car!”

  “Stop it, Emma.”

  Then the knocking started. Both women stopped breathing, and at each pound their hearts lurched. Then there was a pause.

  “Don’t answer it, Lois,” whispered Emma emphatically.

  “This is my house,” announced Lois, but without quite the conviction she had planned. She took a step toward the door.

  “Whatever you do,” said Emma, “don’t open that door.”

  “I will,” said Lois, and crossed to the door. Just as she was about to touch the handle, the knocking began again and she jumped backward.

  “No,” said Emma, nearly inaudibly. “They’ll go away.”

  Lois pulled the door open when the pounding stopped. Standing directly in the middle of the doorway as though preparing, if need be, to thrust them sprawling onto the lawn with a single body block if they tried to come in, she smiled and said hello very quickly.

  “Could you tell us where John Montgomery lives?”

  “Who?” she asked, not having comprehended enough of what they’d asked to say more. They looked at each other. Emma came over and stood behind Lois. One of the men handed a piece of torn newspaper to another one and he held it out. Lois stared at it momentarily as though it were a shrunken head, and then accepted it, and read it over seven or eight times (the part circled by a black pen) before she understood it. Then Emma snatched it from her. It was an advertisement in the confidential column of a newspaper in Burlington.

  TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:

  IT CANNOT BE POSSIBLE THAT YOUR FEELINGS ARE MORE INTENSE THAN MY OWN.

  John Montgomery

  Sharon Center

  “So what—what does that mean?” asked Emma.

  “He lives in that house on the corner. Down there.” Lois pointed, taking the piece of newspaper from Emma and giving it back to them.

  “The white one?”

  “Yes, that’s it. The white one.”

  “Thank you.” They turned to walk away.

  “Thank you. No, I mean, you’re welcome,” said Lois.

  “He works across the street,” sang out Emma. “You may have to look for him there.” They shut the door and went back to the window.

  “Look how they walk!” said Emma. “It’s indecent.”

  “It comes from their oppression,” said Lois, as though she understood and had compassion for the world and all its people. “They’re miserable people. It’s such a crime the way they’re treated—they are so frightened of us.”

  “You know what they say about them. The men, I mean—” “Emma!”

  John was alone when the three came into the garage.

  “You John Montgomery?” said the tallest, pushing the newspaper clipping toward him.

  John took it in his own hand and put it down. “Yes,” he said.

  Without talking, one of them left. The other two watched John and smiled when he looked directly at them and shuffled their feet with their hands in their pockets—making themselves out to be buffoons. John marveled at the subtlety with which they had learned to appear physically unthreatening, making themselves into clownish figures. But beneath that lay hate, maybe so far down that it would never come out, but, through John’s eyes, undeniably, irrevocably there. He felt the impasse—the barriers. The men had told him that two weeks ago, but he hadn’t believed them. They’d kill you just for the chance. He looked at them and wondered if it would be true. There was no way of telling. Too much hidden.

  These thoughts filled his mind. Then into the open doorway stepped the fourth—the one who had not come in with the other three—and in the first instant of looking at him John knew why they’d come. They’d brought a champion—someone whose feelings, they thought, could outstrip even a dying saint’s. John looked at him again and decided no, it had been his own idea to come. He was slightly bigger than a person needed to be and three inches blacker than any of his companions. John could see why they had wanted him to stay in the car. He was conspicuous—the kind of man a band of hooligans would love to tear apart and hang up in a tree—the kind of man who would never be safe outside his own neighborhood. As might be imagined, his hate was very close to the surface. Handsome and proud.

  “That’s him,” said his friend, coming in behind him.

  “I can see that,” he said, staring at John.

  He’s presumptuous, thought John. I didn’t really mean for them to come here. They should’ve written or something first.

  “How do you want to hol’ this here thing?”

  “What?” asked John, knowing at the same time what he meant. But before the champion could answer, five Sharon Centerites from a bigger crowd across the street came in and sat down and began pulling out sodas from the machine.

  “ ’Lo, John,” said Marion.

  “Sure is hot,” said Phil Jordan.

  “You ought to get a fan put in here,” said Sy.

  “And a swimming pool.”

  “I didn’t think you’d be working today, Marion,” said Henry Yoder, walking in and over to the machine. “ ’Lo, John.”

  All of this as if there were no one else for ten miles. Across the street was a group of men and women trying to look natural standing at the very edge of Mrs. Miller’s lawn
, next to the corner, nearest the garage door without being on the same side of the street.

  Ernie came in the side door without knowing, and had to walk in among the black men to get over to the others. “Excuse me,” he said. “Excuse me,” and passed through them looking at his hands, as though he were walking around four rain barrels which, after he got out of their area, were rolled away by four invisible barrel-rollers.

  “Afternoon, Ernie,” said Marion.

  “Afternoon,” said Ernie. “I see you’re not working today. That makes me feel better, because when a hard worker like you—”

  “Listen to that! Listen to that!” said Marion.

  John stuffed the advertisement into his back pocket, and blushed.

  Somehow he managed to get rid of his neighbors and close his garage door, sealing the building in a cloak of mystery. The champion sent his friends out to the car to wait for him, as a returned courtesy. They closed the side door and faced each other.

  “How you want to begin this here thing?”

  “I can lift that anvil,” said John. “I can pick it up by the horn.”