Candlemoth

by R.J. Ellory

  I glanced at Nathan, he was looking straight ahead, oblivious it seemed. The thought struck me that he couldn't have seen the car, but we were fifteen yards away, only a glance to the left and they were there, and even as we levelled with them I knew the officer inside was watching us intently. He had stopped eating, his attention so fixed upon me he hadn't cared to wipe the smear of mayonnaise from his chin… and I knew we were done for.

  I knew it in my heart of darkened hearts.

  My knees were weak, my insides churning, and I anticipated the sound of his voice, the Hey you! that would come any second.

  I walked on.

  One foot after the other.

  One footstep for every three heartbeats it seemed, and I knew they would hear my heart, hear it clamoring inside my chest like a frightened crazy man beating at the door of a burning house.

  Any moment now the door would give and my heart would burst from my chest and land on the sidewalk like a handful of raw red guilt.

  I turned suddenly at the sound of someone laughing. A child. Then another. A single-file crocodile of children suddenly turning towards us at the junction.

  A man was at their head, tall and stern-looking, and as he passed he looked at us with an air of disdain.

  I glanced back at the squad car, and the officer who had been seated inside was even then rising to his feet, stepping out of the car, taking one, two, three steps in our direction.

  I thought to run.

  Hey!

  My heart froze.

  I didn't want to look back.

  Couldn't help myself.

  My eyes took on a life of their own, and even as I felt my head angle awkwardly to my left I could see the man at the head of the crocodile of children greeting the police officer warmly, shaking his hand, smiling. The line of kids came to a staggered halt as they realized it was now time to stop.

  I looked at Nathan. He looked back at me and smiled.

  He was oblivious.

  Once more it came home to me that we were running on Nathan's decision, not mine, and as it was his own uninfluenced decision he had shouldered the responsibility of any consequences that might unfold. Shouldered that responsibility along with his rucksack and meagre possessions.

  I, however, had not.

  I was alone in this despite Nathan's company.

  Thirty, forty yards from the motel, the squad car, the line of kids now out of view, I glanced back the way we'd come.

  I wasn't looking for the police; I was looking towards my home.

  It was summer and already brutally hot, and down along the piers and wharfs there were fishing boats coming in from the Atlantic. Unloading catches was not a trade that required any qualifications except the willingness to sweat, to smell of fish all day and night, and a backbreaking persistence.

  We earned barely enough to cover a room and food, but we were out there, we were unknown, and no-one asked questions. That, of all things, was predominant in our thoughts.

  It stayed that way through June and the best part of July, stayed that way until one night in the last week of the month when we decided we would go out and get drunk.

  We couldn't afford it, but we felt we deserved it. Six or seven weeks we had worked without a break, twelve, sometimes fourteen-hour shifts, and we had gotten into a groove, a tolerable groove, and we had forgotten why we were there, what we were escaping from.

  So we went into Jacksonville, found a small bar on Oak Street near the bus station, and there we sat and drank Budweiser and Crown Royal, listened to Willie Nelson and Chet Atkins on the juke, minding our own business and making small talk between ourselves.

  Which is the way it should have stayed, but I got it in mind that we should shoot a game or two of pool, and though Nathan was not interested I convinced him it was a good game to play.

  He had not played before, and though he gave it his best he was bad. The extent of his inability was commented on by some guy at the bar, an overweight dungaree'd redneck who smelled like he was rotting right where he stood and used the word fuck as many times as possible in each sentence. Like Fuck me, what the fuck is that fuckin'guy doin' on a fuckin' pool table for fuck's sake.

  Nathan took offence. Nathan was a preacher's boy, and when the bad-smelling guy said something about how blacks shouldn't be allowed to play pool, that pool was a white man's game, that a pool cue wasn't a spear and maybe he should just stick to running fast and screwing his sisters, Nathan got mad.

  It was ugly from the start.

  The bad-smelling guy wasn't alone. As if by magic three others appeared, equally stupid and bad-smelling, and when they rounded on Nathan he looked at me and realized a little of what he'd gotten himself into.

  He hit the first one and broke the cue.

  The guy didn't move. It was like hitting a tree. A bad- smelling tree.

  I took a cue ball from the table, and when I raised my hand to launch it someone grabbed me from behind and knocked me down with one punch. A kidney punch hurts, hurts like hell, and while I was trying to get up, clutching my side and feeling like I would puke most of my internal organs, Nathan was being kicked left and right and down the bar to the door.

  The man who'd hit me figured there was more fun to be had beating on a nigger and he went with them.

  I came up roaring, the man turned, and in some kind of instinctive moment, no thought, no regard for consequences, I grabbed the glass of Crown Royal and threw the contents in his face.

  The man screamed in agony as the spirit met his eyes. He clutched his face, couldn't see a thing, and I let go with the most almighty kick to his balls.

  The moment of connection brought the most amazing reaction.

  The man fell silent, dead silent, and then he went down like the proverbial plank.

  Like Marty Hooper in Benny's.

  As I ran past him I kicked him in the small of the back.

  Not a sound.

  I reached the back of the bar just as Nathan was being hurled headlong into the alleyway behind the building.

  I went limping down there, my side feeling like it had been opened up for surgery and then forgotten about.

  I could see them down there, three of them, Nathan kneeling and locking his arms over his head as they rained punches down on him.

  He wasn't screaming, and that was perhaps the most unnerving thing of all. He didn't make a sound.

  The men grunted with the exertion, they didn't hear me, didn't see me, and from the floor I grabbed the lid of a trash can. With all the strength I possessed I hurled it sideways like a frisbee. The sound of that thing connecting with the back of a man's head reminded me of church days in Greenleaf. Like a bell. A goddam bell!

  The sound reverberated down that alleyway.

  The middle man went down, his hands clutching the back of his damaged skull.

  The other two turned, shock evident on their red drunken faces, and then they came for me, hulking and menacing like cartoon villains.

  I thought this was it. This is the moment I die. This is when it goes really ugly and they kick the living crap out of me, and Oh Lord Jesus Christ Almighty, Mary Mother of Go…

  Nathan came up behind them like a shadow.

  He seemed overpowering, towering like a redwood, and I saw the bar in his hand, heavy like steel or iron, three, perhaps four feet in length, and when it came sweeping sideways towards the two men that approached me I knew that this was going to be something more than a knockdown drag-out fight in some alleyway somewhere. This was getting to be life and death.

  I knew the blow was crippling even as I heard it. The force drove the man on my left into the second man with such velocity that they both careened into the wall. The second man's head connected with the lower rungs of a suspended fire escape, and again that sound, the sound of a bell ringing, echoed clearly out into the darkness.

  They went down like collapsing buildings, one over the other, and even as they lay there, even as silence suddenly filled the alleyway, we kn
ew we were in the deepest shit imaginable.

  I wondered if the man on the left was dead.

  We moved then. Moved like lightning.

  Nathan went back the way he'd come to the end of the alleyway. With one leap he seemed to leave the ground and gain the top of the wall. He perched there like Spiderman, beckoned for me to get a move on, and then I could feel myself being dragged upwards and over the top. We dropped like thieves into the lee of the wall, and pausing there for no more than a few seconds I could only sense the pressure, the sweat that covered my body, my heart running away with itself. Though I would find a bruise the color of raw steak covering much of the lower half of my back when I woke the next day, in that moment I felt nothing. The panic had gone, the terror was a vague and distant memory, and all I felt was a sense of aliveness that was new.

  I looked at Nathan. His eyes were wide, his expression one of tense concentration, and then he was moving, me beside him, the pair of us hurrying back across Oak Street towards the room we shared.

  My naivete surprised Nathan.

  'Leave?' I'd asked him once we were inside.

  'Hell, Danny, you understand what happened here? That guy could be dead. Least of all he's gonna have half his head stitched up in the Emergency Room. You think they're gonna let such a thing lie?'

  I shook my head. I hesitated. 'I don't know I started.

  Nathan looked amazed, dumbstruck.

  'You don't know? You don't know what, Danny? You understand that we're in violation of a government Draft Notice. That's a felony at least, a goddam felony.'

  I realized then it was serious. Nathan never, never used God's name in vain.

  'We're committing an illegal act, and on top of that we've more than likely got aggravated assault, wounding, Lord only knows what… get wise, Danny, this isn't an adventure, this is real life, this is the most serious shit you ever got yourself into.'

  'So we're leaving?' I asked.

  Nathan threw up his hands in despair.

  'No, Danny, we're going back down Oak Street and see those good ol' boys and see if we can't share a drink and shake hands and let bygones be bygones. Of course we're leaving. Get your shit together. We're outta here in five minutes.'

  More panic…

  I was ready in four.

  We left together.

  I didn't ask any more questions.

  We followed the coast down through St. Augustine and Daytona Beach, and there we stayed for a day or two while we healed up. I was sure at least two of Nathan's ribs were snapped, but he said he wouldn't go to the hospital. If he went to the hospital they would require a name, some I.D., an explanation of how he'd gotten banged up so bad. We'd learned a lesson, that was all he said about it; we had learned a lesson.

  Though the bruise across my back looked close to fatal I was not in a great deal of pain. I'd held up, I had done something effective to deal with the situation that night, and I felt good. I had not backed down. I had not run. I was not a coward.

  'Well shit, Danny, you owed me for flooring Marty Hooper that time,' Nathan said.

  We laughed a little, not too much because Nathan's chest hurt bad and laughing made it worse.

  Daytona Beach was quiet, we took a room in a motel on the edge of town and no-one asked questions. We decided to stay there until Nathan was up to travelling again, and then we would go east towards Ocala and Gainesville.

  We kept ourselves to ourselves, we spoke only to those we had to, and when we needed tickets or provisions only one of us went. Even on the streets we walked a few feet apart. This was something we neither discussed nor planned. It just happened, a tacit understanding that this was the way it needed to be. There were certain places where the black- white division was evident, startlingly so, and we paid it no mind. We couldn't afford either the time or the attention to concern ourselves with this. We had more important things going on.

  The police seemed to be everywhere, as if special programs had been implemented in every town and suburb we entered to enlist all surrounding units in the search. Never once did I consider the sheer number of teenagers and young men across the nation who were doing just as we had done. Never once did I consider the possibility that my imagination was working overtime, that I was merely looking for the police, for the State Troopers, and therefore seeing them more and more. As has been so often said It isn't paranoia if they really are out to get you. It seemed that on every street corner and junction, in every store and parking lot, every 7-11 I entered, they were there, waiting, watching, saying nothing, just absorbing my presence. I felt like John Dillinger, like Babyface Nelson, and that after weeks of pursuit this would end with me seventy foot up, screaming Top of the world, Ma! from some gas tower along the freeway.

  We left Daytona Beach on September 14th. We'd been gone a little more than two months. I had not called my ma, I couldn't face hearing her voice and lying to her. I lied in a letter, said I'd headed up towards Winston-Salem, had considered carrying on up into Virginia, but we'd see what happened. I told her Nathan was with me, that we were doing just fine, and though I was sorry to have left in such a hurry I'd felt there was opportunity and means to do something bigger with my life. I'd told her I couldn't go on working in Karl Winterson's Radio Store for the rest of my years. I knew she'd understand that. Her husband, my father, had been a railroad man all his life, and everyone knew how he should have done something with his passion for making things, his skill with wood, his natural eye. He never did, never even mentioned it, but if you got close enough you could see it in his face.

  It was only later that I realized the letter would have a mark on it showing its point of origin.

  I didn't mention that to Nathan, didn't tell him that my letter, my inability to face my mother, had thus erased all possibility of people believing either of us had gone north.

  No, I figured telling Nathan that would do more harm than good.

  Another little thing for just me and God.

  I tried to speak to him of my concerns, my fears, the ever- present sense of foreboding that haunted me like my own shadow. Sometimes, when I thought those feelings were not there, I would turn and see them lingering beside me. It was not escaping the Draft that gave me these emotions, it was the sense of betrayal. I had never believed myself to be anything other than honest, straight as a die, implacable almost in my attention to those things that were right and just and equitable. Justifications and explanations aside, I believed that there was a sense to what was being done in Vietnam, but a sense in the principle, not the action. Perhaps it was nothing more than the result of some long- ingrained propaganda, but I believed in freedom, freedom of speech and action and belief, and the communist overthrow of territory and humanity struck me with such a sense of inequity. I did not believe for a moment that the communists would take the world, had not believed that even as the Bay of Pigs unfolded so many years before. But I did believe in a human being's right to be himself, to believe what he believed, to express his thoughts and emotions and words in whichever way he wished. It was the betrayal of this belief that hurt the most. And though I imagined that had I ever gone I would never have survived, I still felt that even those that went unwillingly, terror in their hearts, the blessings of their loved ones carried with them; even as they'd lain in some filthy ditch, their lives bleeding out from holes filled to bursting with fire and pain and hell; even as they'd grasped at some final breath… even then, they'd known that they did what they were asked to do, what they had been called upon to do, and there was some sense of justice and Tightness in that and that alone.

  I believed then, and believe now, that there is some universal balance present in all things.

  Perhaps I had cheated death, extended my life beyond its allotted time.

  I recalled a story my father had once told me. A Persian merchant, visiting a soothsayer, had been told that Death would find him that day. The merchant, terrified, asked where Death would find him, and the soothsayer said that such informa
tion could not be revealed. The merchant, a man of great method and predictability, knew that today was the day he always visited the market. He rushed home, and speaking with his servant, told him he would not be going to the market as was ordinarily the case, but he would head to Baghdad. He took his fastest horse and fled towards the city, hoping he would find some place to hide in the great capital. The servant, confused, distressed by his master's behavior, himself went to the market as usual. There he saw Death, and Death approached him. The servant, horrified and perplexed, asked Death why he was approaching him. Surely it was not his day to die? Death smiled coldly, and said that he was merely surprised to see the servant here without his master, the merchant. The servant asked why, and Death - leaning close, his cool breath against the servant's face - whispered that he had an appointment that very afternoon with the merchant in Baghdad.