by Ben Winters
I took another turn around the square. There was a good film of sweat on me now: desperation, confusion, some sour combination of fury and fear. Martha Flowers was enjoying a slice of pie on the town square, and meanwhile where the fuck is this horse? Where the fuck is this lawyer?
I stumbled on an uneven patch of sidewalk and very nearly bumped into the broad back of a slow-walking white man with a cane. I breathed. I slowed my pace. Passed carefully beneath the oak trees and the black lampposts. Passed the general store, the movie house, the Internet café. I saw that, scattered across the lawn of the park, clustered together, were a dozen or more dark-skinned men and women lying about in small groups, dozing and talking and drinking out of paper bags.
And then, finally, for the third time, I walked around that stupid statue before I decided to read the plaque beneath it: HENRY SMITH, TOWN FATHER, AND HIS LOYAL COMPANION, HORSE.
Horse. A dog named Horse. Somewhere, Willie Cook was having a good long laugh on me.
I leaned against the fence that ran around the statue, then immediately thought better of it and straightened up. The clock on the courthouse said 11:35—was it too late? Had I messed this up already?
I rehearsed in my mind the call and response, the password and echo, that Maris had given me.
“Some fine day, ain’t it?” this mysterious lawyer would say when he spotted me, and I then would say: “Fine and dandy, like sugar candy.”
Three times we had practiced it. Maris: “Some fine day, ain’t it?”—the country slang made mildly comical by his African accent—and me: “Fine and dandy.”
The lawyer will spot you, Maris said. He will know you by where you stand and when. You will know him by what he says. Now say it again. We practiced it three times, simple as it was: “Some fine day, ain’t it?” “Fine and dandy, like sugar candy.”
I stood beside the statue and waited for the lawyer. I couldn’t see Martha from here. The diner was on the other side of the square. I thought of my future. I thought of a home in Canada, a small fairy-tale house, smoke coming up from a cookstove chimney. Snow on the eaves and on the branches of maple trees. A view across a frozen lake.
I did not try to calculate how close or far I was from Bell’s Farm, neither as the crow flies nor on the roadways that could be crossed by a transport van.
When I looked up again at the people of Green Hollow, going about their bustling midday business, shopping and eating and chatting, I did not see the white people, only the black: and as I watched I swore I could see fumes rising from their mouths—fumes rolling out of their mouths like exhaust, and I could see that every black person had the same small cloud of angry smoke coming out of his or her mouth and nose, a haze rolling up off the street like exhaust, filling the air, the white people breathing all that and not knowing it.
Someone tapped me on the shoulder, and I turned. He was black, wiry, wearing overalls, carrying a shovel.
“Some fine day, ain’t it?” said the man with the shovel, and I said, “Fine and—” and he caught me on the side with the handle of the shovel, a hard smash that knocked me right off my feet. I reeled back into the arms of a second man, a man I hadn’t seen, who caught me and held me tightly by the arms.
“What the fuck?” I said, or started to say, but the first man said, “Shut up, boy,” while he dropped the shovel and punched me in the stomach.
I would have doubled over, but I was held too tight. The fresh gash in my shoulder threw up a hot flash of pain, and my guts hurt where I’d been hammered. I kicked my legs out and wriggled like a bug in the air while the first man danced backwards, fists clenched, and the huge man holding me whispered, “Almost done.”
“What?” I said.
“Shut yo mouth, nigger,” the first one shouted and punched me on the side of the head.
Through a haze of pain I saw the Alabama patrolman, up on the roof, watching us impassively.
“Hey,” I said, but then they were all in on me, punching me again, throwing me down, landing their boots in my chest. I convulsed, moaning, closing in on myself like a fetus, and from the far corner of my eye I saw the merry beat cop on the other side of the square taking this all in with mild amusement, shaking his head as though I and the men beating me were rambunctious kids on a playground. I saw two white men in fedoras in front of the pharmacy, murmuring to each other and laughing. I saw all of them, all the good people of Green Hollow, the men and the women and the kids; all the fine folks had stopped to take in the show.
They kicked at me a few more times, though I writhed enough, wrenching my body this way and that, to take most of their shots in the shins or in the back, on the hard surfaces of my spine. I spat pink into the dirt and hauled up onto my haunches, steadying myself on my arms with my hands palm-planted in the scrabble grass. Above me the two men stood with fists balled, staring down.
I wondered if a rumor was flying around town. I wondered if it had reached Martha’s table at the Cotyledon. I hoped she’d have the sense to stay where she was. Not to give herself away, not to rush out and cry my name—Jim, or Brother, any name at all.
“Stay down,” the bigger of the two men hissed, and I did, I stayed down, and the two of them leaned over me glowering and godlike.
The one who hissed at me had a fierce, cold look about him, like he was wrought from iron. I let the strength of my arms go slack and fluttered my eyes shut and the two men heaved me bodily out of that dirt. I was carried between them like a bag of soil, aft and end, my head lolling back to one side. My ears were ringing, and a thick knot of pain was gathering in my stomach where the one man’s boot had first connected.
They bore me that way, body slack and head hanging backwards, across the patchy courthouse lawn toward a big car waiting, pulled up to the sidewalk. A woman fell into the pack, walking along with us, a pace or two behind. Her hair was wrapped in a tight-fitting orange cloth. She had thick arms, a powerful striding body. She scowled at me as we progressed across the lawn, her hands clenched into fists, her eyes like two stones deep in her head.
“Are you the lawyer?” I said to her.
“Do I look like a fucking lawyer to you?”
She stepped close to me. To me, being carried as I was with my head thrown back, she was upside down. With swift, precise movements, she took out a hypodermic needle and a small vial. I struggled, but there was nothing to be done—the men held me tight while she filled the needle and jabbed it into a vein in the side of my neck. My vision swayed. They dropped me into the trunk of the car.
“Welcome to the Hard Four,” said one of the voices, gruff and full of laughter, while the world slipped away from me. “It don’t get a lot better.”
3.
When the world and I found each other again I was swimming through some kind of pink-hued southern sea. I was a gone goose. I was flying, but I was underground, too. I was under the city of Indianapolis, back in Jackdaw’s miserable tunnel, surrounded by dripping clay walls, by darkness and illness and cold. I was in Bell’s Farm; I was in the shed buried underneath the earth, a Franklin’s black government boots just visible through the slit, and I had done something, but what had I done? And I was also at the Capital City Crossroads Hotel, in the basement, where the pool and the gym were, and I was on that planet that Castle used to murmur in my ear, the planet called the future.
I got up, and I fell down. First onto my knees, and then, after a moment’s consideration, the rest of the way, down onto my back. I felt something alien on my thigh and looked down and it was my dick, flopped over like a scrap of rope. I was bare-ass naked, which was hilarious, and some people were laughing, so I went ahead and laughed, too. My voice was a creepy giggle, unfamiliar to me, so I stopped.
“Get back up on the chair now,” said a woman’s voice, stern but not unkind. A little tremor of humor in the voice. “Go on. Come on.”
I obeyed instructions as best I could. First I put my forearms onto the seat of the chair, then I heaved myself up and twisted myself arou
nd. I had to stop halfway through and get a couple breaths in me, paused with my ass in the air, gulping the smell of basement—what the hell basement was I in?—and hearing more laughter swimming all around the corners of my brain.
The jab and the sting. That vial, that stubby little pot full of poison. Someone caught me with a shot of something. Whatever it was had me all cooked up for sure. I was out on the ice—I was out on the dance floor no question.
“Siddown, honey,” said the voice, then the face that belonged to it came into focus—it was the woman from the square there, the one who had poked me. The orange head wrap was gone: her hair was short dreadlocks, a bristle of corks. She was crouching now in front of me. She had cagey eyes and ruby lips and her skin was smooth. She lifted a red bath towel that had fallen off my lap and pooled at my feet. It must have been covering my nakedness while I dozed in the chair—I lifted it up and covered myself up again.
“Now, listen,” I began.
“Shush, man. You’re in no state.”
“Ah, he all right,” called someone else, a man, from the far side of the room, and someone else said, “He’s just fine,” and then a third voice, a woman’s voice: “Fine and dandy,” and then all the voices were laughing. Not me, not this time. “Now, look,” I said, and the woman told me to shush again, firmly, and I shushed again. The kitchen was crowded with people. A kitchen! I was in a kitchen, in a basement, unfinished and unfancy. One of the men was sitting on a counter, swinging his legs. Another was leaning against a refrigerator, with a girl wrapped up in his arms like they were old-time sweethearts.
Everybody was in black. Everybody was wearing overalls, with a logo at the breast. Everybody was either barefoot or in sandals.
There was music playing. It had taken a while to reach me, but now I could hear it, and it was like sugar. Horns. Trumpets. Saxophones? And drums: snares and cymbals. It was fast and sweet, and it rolled around the room. I tasted that music. It was like hard candy.
“Sorry about the violence out in the square,” said the woman with the dreads. “Two black folks slipping in a car together is a conspiracy. Couple black boys beating the shit out of another one, that ain’t nothing. That nobody cares about. Black folks scrapping, cops ain’t looking. Patrol, neither. They turning away.”
“Turning away?” said the man on the counter. “C’mon, Ada. Placing bets, more like.”
“Yeah,” said Ada. She reached forward, touched the side of my head, and I winced. My head hurt. “But anyway. It’s gotta look real. So. Sorry ’bout that.”
“So okay,” I said. Blinking my eyes and trying to get this lady to come into focus. “Are you the lawyer?”
“Damn. You all business, huh?”
“Are you?”
“No,” she said. “I am not.”
Ada stood up. She was a girl, really—twenty-two, maybe? Twenty-three? She was a slave. They were all slaves. Overalls, shoes or no shoes. House slaves. My body was lurching around inside me. The music was rushing, dazzling: high, squeaking horn lines and rat-a-tats on the drums.
“Who is the lawyer?” I said.
“Listen. Shut up,” she said. “That was a pretty heavy kiss of olanzapine I gave you. You in no state yet to be talking business, fella.”
I shook my head, insistent. I started to stand again and wobbled, and the woman called Ada placed me firmly back in the chair. Close up I saw the logo stitched on one strap of her overalls: a gavel wound with a snake. A peach dangling from a bow.
“Sit, all right?” She turned away. “Someone get the poor boy a glass of water.”
“I—”
“I got it, Ada.” One of the others. How many people were down here?
“Listen—”
“Sit.”
It was a party of sorts, down there in the basement, and I sat amid it for an hour, maybe for two hours, people walking past and around me, these beautiful black people in their overalls and sandals, grown-out scruffed-up Afros or dreadlocks, figures in a dream, while my head swam and swam. There were unlabeled boxes of wine stacked beside a tub full of cold water. A plate of cookies was being passed around, and there was a bucket full of peanuts in one corner, another bucket for shells.
I swayed to the music awhile, tried to catch up to its rhythm. Someone put a glass of water in my hand and I drank it and needed more and someone brought me more.
“You should try to relax,” said the girl who brought me the water, looking at me shyly. I laughed—just the idea, the idea of relaxing. It made me laugh. I tried to think of the last time I had done that: done nothing. Acted without purpose. Barton, Bridge, everybody waiting on me. Indianapolis; Gaithersburg. The whole world waiting.
But I did. I relaxed. I spent the next hour, or it might have been a few, trying to count how many other people were in the room. I had an impression of people coming and going, everybody friendly, laughing loud. Slapping palms. Punch lines hollered, good-natured, grooving laughter. Aw, man, you know that’s true. She ain’t say that! She ain’t say that!
It felt like I was among a huge crowd, a happy, bustling infinity of black folks, but it was only five of them in the room—or at least, only five by the time I got my head straight enough to count. Two women, besides Ada: Maryellen, short and puckish, with very long thick hair hanging in one big braid between her shoulder blades. She was the one who brought me the water. And Shai, a little older, narrow-eyed and observant. The bigger of the men was Otis, very dark, heavily muscled. The last of them was Marlon, who wore a scruffy kind of billy-goat beard. He was the one who had hit me, but he was also the one who came over now with a couple pieces of ice wrapped in a thin paper towel, held it tenderly to the bruise above my ear, hidden in my hair. “I’m a hard-hitting dude,” he said, adjusting the ice pack. “Can’t hardly help it.”
“You all don’t have service names?” I asked Marlon, but it was Maryellen who answered, from way over on the other side of the room, where I wouldn’t have thought she could hear. “Oh, we got ’em. We don’t use ’em is all.”
I smiled. I looked at Maryellen, and I found that my mind would not assign her skin a value. Wild honey, light tones, all that shit. I couldn’t even call it up in my mind, the pigmentation chart that had first been thrust before me in Arizona six years ago. If this didn’t work, all this adventuring, and I ended up back in Bridge’s command, I’d be in some difficulty, and to that I said, “Thank fucking God,” and Marlon said, “For what?”
“Nothing,” I said. Gingerly I removed the ice pack from my head and thanked him again.
“You straight?” he said, and I said, “I’m straight,” and he chunked the ice into the sink.
The music stopped, briefly, while someone flipped the tape, and when it came on it got bigger. Multiple voices singing, sometimes words and sometimes just sounds. Rough, uneven melodies with high harmonies, then fast overlapping chopping passages. Big drumbeats, hand claps, and whistles. I had been missing it forever, whatever music this was. I longed to have known it before—I longed to have known this music all my life.
I felt myself come back into myself, drop by drop, like a drained well filling back up. I stood up, and everybody clapped for me, then they died laughing when I offered an ironic bow. I think I may have done some dancing. I politely declined the fat rolled joint that Maryellen offered to me, not wanting to find out how cannabis would interact with olanzapine.
When I was sitting again it was at the kitchen table, and for the first time I noticed a very old white man. I could have sworn he hadn’t been there before, that I would have seen him, but on the other hand he looked like he’d been there forever, for centuries: pulled up close to the table in a wheelchair, dressed for a funeral, dark suit and thin black tie. Everybody else was drinking from cans and bottles, but his crooked fingers were splayed around a rocks glass containing only ice and the last clinging droplets of something dark and brown.
“Is that glass empty, son?”
“Sorry?” I had been looking out the wind
ow—the basement had a pair of high garden windows, letting in a peek of dirt-colored sky. I was wondering where exactly I was.
“It is rather dark in here, but I do believe my glass is empty.” His voice was a decayed whisper, still carrying its ancient and decorous southern accent. “I do believe that it is. Would you be so kind as to fill up that glass? You will find a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red in a cabinet beside the icebox.”
His watery eye was fixed on me. I found the whiskey and poured him out his glass.
“I appreciate it, young man. I do very much appreciate it.” The old white man sipped slowly and licked his thin, cracked lips. “I do not believe I have had the pleasure.”
“This man is named Elijah, sir.” It was Ada. She had materialized at my side, one hand on my shoulder. He craned his thin neck around to peer at her.
“Elijah?” he said, looking back at me slowly.
“That’s right, Counselor.” Ada looked at me carefully, and I said, “Yes, sir. Elijah.” And then, because it seemed like the thing to say, I said, “It’s an honor to meet you.”
“The honor…” He cleared his throat with effort. “The honor belongs entirely to me.”
His body had been incapacitated at some point, probably by a stroke. Half of him was slumped and slurred like a melting candle. He’s a hundred, I thought. He’s a thousand. He had the look of eternal old age, like he had been old forever, sitting pale and wraithlike in his old-fashioned wheelchair.
“Now, Elijah.” He gazed at me, licked the tips of his yellow teeth. “Now. You have embarked upon your journey. You are finding your way to freedom. The bad times are behind you, Elijah, but much uncertainty lies ahead. I cannot imagine…” Another pause, another elaborate throat clearing. “Cannot imagine how you must feel. But please know that here, boy, here in this home you are welcome. Here, there is…” He spread his arthritic fingers as wide as they would go. “Sanctuary.”
