Big Man, A Fast Man

by Appel, Benjamin

  I first heard the news at a picket station. Six strikers killed in Chicago by the cops. I didn’t believe it but when I believed it, I drove like hell to headquarters. Chicago, Chicago. It ran through my head. I couldn’t believe it. Chicago. That’s all you could hear at Stanislaw’s. I went into the rear room and it looked like I’d just come to a meeting with a lot of wild men. All of ‘em steamed up. Some crying. When Tim saw me he called me over and we got going. The home town boys were in a fit but we calmed ‘em down. Plans. Publicity. The whole works. It was me and Tim who went over a piece of copy Annabelle wrote. I don’t recall it exactly but it was all about Chicago. How the bullets of Cossacks couldn’t produce steel. And there was stuff about the blood of innocent workers. Tim, he studied it and he asked, “What Cossacks?” She couldn’t answer him for a while. She looked like a funeral. She’d been crying, and she wasn’t the only one that day. Tim felt just as bad but he was a hard rock. “What Cossacks?” he said. Then she answered him and he said Chicago wasn’t Russia. It was America and we had no Cossacks. And she said, “God save us from Americans like that.” Tim, he just looked at her. Then he gave her some typing to do. The copy we worked up was dynamite but we left the Cossacks out of it. Who the hell needed Cossacks? We wrote stuff, Is This How Federal Celebrates Memorial Day? This Chicago killing was on Memorial Day.

  When I got back to my room it was real late. I was dead beat. So when I opened the door and saw the lamp lit and her sleeping in the bed, I couldn’t believe it. I was that beat. But it was no pipedream. It was Annabelle. She was sleeping in her clothes. That was when I felt like crying. I pulled off my shoes and stretched out next to her. I’ll never forget that night, the curtains in the windows were waving. It was a spring night. And that girl. Who couldn’t stay away from me because she loved me. Who knows when I awoke? A half hour? Hours? She was still sleeping. I kissed her cheek. She was sleeping, the moonlight on her face. She looked dead in that moonlight but she was alive, and I was alive. Alive in the moonlight, alive in the dark of the room. There was the darkness and there was us. I looked at all the dark things in that room. The chairs, the table, the dresser, all the things that never moved and never breathed. Thinking how the world was full of dark things that never moved. Things dead like the dead men in Chicago. I thought of them and I thought of my own father killed in the mine. The dead gone forever. Gone all of it, Shenandoah and my father, and the strikers in Chicago, and I got that awful gone feeling that death is — Aw, that calls for a drink. What’s this? A wake?

  I kissed her and she woke up. She began to cry and shake. “Shot down like dogs but oh no they’re not Cossacks.” God Almighty, did she carry on about those Chicago cops. How they weren’t Cossacks, nobody was a Cossack. Only God was a Cossack to let it happen. I remember that in particular. I couldn’t get her to ease up. Crying the dead, she was. Her tears, their coffins. She said she didn’t believe in God. Only in the dead strikers, the working class of the world. “They’ll be avenged,” she screamed. “They’ll live again.” It made the hair stand up on my head. It made me think of the long tough fight it was in Youngstown. Everywhere the God damn cops with their guns and teargas and blacklists. One long uphill fight. And she with her, “They’ll live again.” Sobbing how she wouldn’t forget this day as long as she lived. Swearing to God she wouldn’t forget. She was going to be true to them. To the dead. “Billy,” she sobbed, “do you hear me, Billy? I’m going to be true to them, do you hear?” — “I hear,” I said and she tossed her arms up wild. “They’ll inherit the earth.”

  God, was she wild. How the dead hadn’t died in vain. And cursing the dogs in Chicago. The bloody Fascist dogs, she called them. It was too much for me, worn out like I was. A fellow can’t stay up on that cross forever. Got to be a Jesus to do that. I tried to calm her down, but go calm a fanatic. She had her religion even if it was a red one with a red Jesus. What I did was go for the bottle of rye. She wouldn’t take a drink, groaning and carrying on. But I coaxed her into it and she said, “Billy, I don’t blame you.” I asked her what this blame stuff was and she said, “We’ll have a few more drinks and then you’ll want to sleep with me and that’s what I want.” I asked her what was so wrong with that and she let out a groan to break your heart. But like I said I’d had it for that night. Think too much of what a world this is and you go nuts. Like Jim moaning and groaning on that God-forsaken island in the Aleutians about the fate of the world, the big bombs. Christ, it’s nuts.

  Like she was. She carried on for a long time how she was selfish. That’s why she’d come to my room, thinking it could happen to us before the strike was over. We could be shot down dead, too. “Selfish,” she cried. When I tried to comfort her she pushed me off, sobbing like mad, not wanting me but wanting me at the same time. I held her tight and she began to quiet. I kissed her and her arms folded warm and tight about me. I felt so good yet I had to smile. Because she was a woman like any other woman. Because no matter what happens we keep on loving. The craziest thing happened. With her so sweet in my arms what the hell do I think of but the “Internationale.” That song was a favorite of hers. It went through my head over and over. The “arise” part of it. The “arise ye prisoners of starvation.” That part of it. And with me so wound up and full of love for her and the feel of her body and my body, it went through me like a fire. That’s the flesh for you. The flesh that knows nothing about dying, only knowing its own life. Yeh arise, arise, the flesh, arise, and to hell with the dead, arise.

  After that night it happened. I mean the new feelings I had about her. After that night I loved that girl even when she wasn’t around. That night did it. She’d gotten into me. Into my heart. I was always reminded of her, thinking of her. I’d say her name to myself. Annabelle, Annabelle. When I drove up Poland Avenue on inspection, the smoke coming out of the stacks, scab smoke, bastard smoke. Sore as that smoke got me, it didn’t last. Before I knew it she was in my mind and I’d forget that smoke and the strike. The soft air coming into the car made me think of her. Her hair and the clean washed look of her. Her gray eyes and sweet body. Her goodness and sweet loving. Chrissake. Chrissake was right. Me the champion whorechaser, in love. Those women on the picket lines reminded me of her. Some of those women were fat and hefty, some thin. But with the wind blowing their skirts they were all Annabelle. When I got back to the room late at night she was there, all showered and fresh. Once she wore an orange band around her yellow hair and I said all she needed was an Indian feather. Always she had some kind of midnight snack. Cheese or sardines. Pumpernickel, beer. We’d eat and talk about the strike. Oh, she was smart, Annabelle was. She had everything. It was her who got the idea to organize the grandmothers for baby-sitters so the mothers could picket. That strike was nip and tuck. With the scabs sleeping in the mill, it was anybody’s strike. Nine hundred scabs were sleeping in the mill. They weren’t making steel but they were keeping the fires up. Maintaining the plant. Holding the fort for Federal, they were. And the cops were playing it funny. They let our boys block up the tunnels again. Leaned over backwards because the Chicago massacre’d given the company a bad name all over the country. Annabelle was sure there’d be no more Chicagos, but not me. “You’re the optimist now,” I used to tell her. And she laughed and said, “Love has made me an optimist, Billy.” Love. She had the strike won, Federal meek as a lamb. But there were nights I couldn’t sleep for worry. I’d look at her sleeping and kiss her hair soft. I didn’t want to wake her up.

  Don’t think I didn’t fight this feeling I had for her. Many a time I told myself she was fine, swell, but what was she but another piece? So why get steamed up? See where I’m from, a girl’s good or bad. Olga and Barbara, the girls I wanted to marry, they were good girls. That got me asking what made a good girl? That she kept her legs crossed? Was that all? Like hell it was. It went further. It was the feeling a girl gave you around the clock. This Annabelle. Always she wanted to know how I felt deep down. It could be anything. Olga Vanka or the union poli
ticking that’d pushed me out of McKeesport. Or Shenandoah or anything.

  We spoke the nights away. And when you speak like that to somebody you love even the pain it gets changed. Like when I told her about my father caught in the mine. Almost I could see the cage going down, and me in it. Me, a little kid holding on to my uncle’s hand. I could see it all. The shaftways, the light shining on the miners’ hats, the shine of the coal like cats’ eyes. And the place where the whole damn mine’d caved in. And all those rescue miners with their shovels and picks. Their faces like haunts in the glare of light. All jutting black noses and white eyeballs. And me digging with my shovel and carrying the dirt to the dump car. “Billy,” Annabelle’d say with tears in her eyes. And I said, “Yeh, that’s how it was.” And I told her what McClurg’d said about mining coal. How miners were always after the big black woman down there in the earth. A beauty and a terror, sleeping away quiet, sleeping quiet in a black sleep. And I said, “If she catches you, you’re dead. There was eight of them and they got caught.”

  I remember their names to this day. Ed Slansky and Frankie Zecho. Bill O’Toole, Nick Marka, George Melikoff. Artie Dombrowski, Pete Rambeau, and my father, John Lloyd. Aw, he was a sweet man, my father. And Annabelle she kissed me. She cried over me, and the pain it didn’t hurt so much. I told her everything. How after the funeral we took the train to McKeesport, and how I’d looked out of the window at the clouds, a lot of white clouds chasing the train, and I was sure my father was in one of them. I told her what I asked my mother. I wanted to know if angels carried you when you died. And my mother said, “They carried him all right.” My mother with the bitter tongue. My mother with the wonderful brave heart. I was the best son a mother ever had. I can say that anyway. And I can say I loved Annabelle. I tried to fight it. There were nights when she fell asleep, but I couldn’t sleep, worrying about the strike. And sometimes she moved towards me, and I’d feel her breasts against me, and I’d laugh at this love feeling I had. Love? What the hell was it but a pair of tits and all the rest that went with it? But the next day when I saw the smile she had for me, I knew I was sunk. Still I tried to break it down. Once I told her, “Annabelle, you think I’m some kind of a hero but all I am is a proud bastard. I want to win this strike and go back to McKeesport and spit in their eye. I’m so God damn proud you wouldn’t believe it.” She knew all about Johnny Mitchell the miners’ hero and the holiday for Johnny Mitchell. So I said, “What I want is a Billy Lloyd Day for the steel mills. Don’t that make you sick?” But she only laughed and said, “Billy, we imagine all kinds of things but what makes a man is the sum of his actions.”

  There’s truth in that. It’s the sum that counts. Counts in love, too. Maybe she was a fanatic, maybe she was a baby at heart but she was a fine sweet woman. There’s two kinds of women in this world. The women that eat you up like that underground woman. The biggest blackest woman in the world, as McClurg used to say. And there’s the kind like Annabelle, always giving herself. I don’t mean only the sex. That’s important. The biggest part. But it isn’t all or else any whore qualifies. Love’s something else. It’s a free giving and I loved her as much as she loved me. So why didn’t it last? I’ll tell you why. Wait. To tell you proper I have to tell you about the showdown.

  There had to be a showdown. There were cops in armored trucks now. The company spokesmen were talking tougher. Making speeches it was their duty to stick by the loyal workers besieged in the plant. Calling the strikers a mob led by CIO troublemakers and their red allies. There had to be a showdown. The company’d sat on its hands since Chicago because the whole country was watching Youngstown. But when it got to be the third week in June, the company figured it was time to act. Memorial Day in Chicago was under the bridge. The company was ready. The showdown was right there in the tunnels we’d blocked to keep out the food trucks. The company yacked night and day about those tunnels. How they were public, those tunnels. It got so, Tim Brannigan said we couldn’t stand in the way of the cops clearing the tunnels. I argued with him but he wouldn’t listen. He let the cops and deputies clean out the tunnels. It broke my heart to see it. And the rumors began to fly. The trucks were coming through this tunnel. Through that tunnel.

  What they did was decide on a public test. Picked Stop 3. The big tunnel, the same tunnel where I’d set off that strike. First, an armored truck pulled up and parked. That was in the late afternoon. That was their first move. I was ready with my move. The women. They went through the picket line carrying boxes to sit on. There were about fifteen of ‘em. Annabelle was with ‘em. When the cops saw ‘em sitting down on their boxes inside the tunnel, they were puzzled. Then some cops climbed down from their truck and told the women to get going. The women said they had a right to be there. It was a public place, the tunnel. That was the beginning. The cops and the women arguing, the pickets marching up and down. It was getting dark so I couldn’t see Annabelle on account of the pickets. Then I’d see her. She was wearing an armband with Women’s Brigade on it. All the women were wearing armbands. She was wearing a green summer dress. All that yelling, the cops with their orders and the women with their we-got-a-right-to-be-here, I got so damn worried for her I couldn’t breathe.

  Then Tim came out with what was in his mind. He said it was a bum idea. My idea, those women. So it was bum. Bum because he’d weakened under the pressure. He was standing right next to me in front of Stanislaw’s Café. The two of us and maybe thirty strike committeemen. Then the lights came on in the tunnel. Came on all over. The street lamps. Everywhere. And that was the signal for my next move. I’d told the picket captains to jam up the whole neighborhood so the cops wouldn’t be able to push a battleship through. Let alone a lousy truck. Jammed, was it jammed. Hundreds of strikers yelling at the women to encourage them, the pickets yelling. The cops piled out of the parked truck and hollered, “You can’t block the sidewalk.” Picketing was allowed. But not blocking the sidewalk. Some of the boys joined the picket line. Some drifted away with the cops after the lag-foots. They crossed the avenue, the cops after them. So far there was no trouble. Everything was peaceful which was my orders, too. Strikers were coming from all over town. Thousands of them. The crowd in front of Stanislaw’s got bigger and bigger. I began to get worried. It was getting too big. Too noisy. And those women in the tunnel arguing with the cops. And Annabelle.

  The next thing I knew, me and Tim were pushed into the doorway. “Billy,” he said, “I don’t like this.” He was wedged up against me. The hollering out on the avenue got louder and louder like it’d never stop. Fierce all of a sudden. Christ, I felt it in my bones. I felt it was coming off. Something I hadn’t planned and had no control. “Let’s stop this, Tim,” I said. He was cursing, “Of all the bum ideas.” We pushed out together to the sidewalk, and that crowd was no crowd I knew. “Keep your hands off the women,” they were hollering, mad as hell. What happened in the tunnel or if anything happened outside the backtalk between the women and the cops I don’t know. But one thing was sure. I’d lost control. The clock wasn’t mine to stop or start. What there was, was a riot in the making. Me and Tim tried to stop it but we weren’t fast enough. Nothing’s faster than a riot. It’s got a thousand feet and you got two. Can outyell you any day of the week. I tried to get the boys to listen but they hollered they’d been doublecrossed. I didn’t know what they were talking about. Then I heard the police cars coming. The wha-wha-wha. I didn’t want to believe I was hearing straight. I didn’t want to believe this strike I’d led for so many damn weeks was about to explode in my face. Then I knew only one thing and that was Annabelle.

  I shoved out into the gutter, and past the pickets I could see the cops nagging at the women. They were still sitting on their boxes. I didn’t see Annabelle. Then I saw her. Then I saw nothing. Pushed or something. All I saw was that great big embankment and the black stacks. The wha-wha-wha getting louder and louder. The noise. The awful noise of a riot. The women screaming, “You lousy cops.” The cops cursing. Maybe I
only imagined the women and the cops. Maybe I read it all later. But that wha-wha-wha I heard for sure. And for sure I saw a cop jumping down from the armored truck with a stick in his hand. It was a tear-gas grenade. It sizzled there on the ground like a firecracker. Everybody running. So in one second flat that whole crowd was gone from in front of the tunnel. That’s when I saw Annabelle again leading the women. They were singing. They were sitting on their boxes singing, “Rally round, hold your ground.” Christ, those women were singing. The crowd that’d run away was coming back. Cursing the cops, the smoke pouring out of that tear-gas stick. That was the second it happened. The women beginning to choke and cough, no longer singing. The cops hollering, “Disperse in the name of the law.” Choking and coughing, too, some of those cops with the tear-gas drifting everywhere. The rocks, where all those rocks came from I don’t know. They were flying everywhere. The glass breaking. There wasn’t a light left. It was dark, double dark with the tear-gas in your eyes. I wiped my eyes and bulled through that crowd. “Annabelle,” I yelled, trying to see. But all I saw were the headlights of the police cars. Yellow and wiggling. Crazy. My eyes hurting like hell, shapes fighting and wrestling and the hollering. A million voices about, it seemed. Then I heard the first pistol shots. “Annabelle,” I yelled and how long I was on my feet I don’t know. Blinded like I was, I must’ve been an easy mark for a cop’s club.

  Annabelle wasn’t hurt. Not a scratch but I never saw her again. It was this way. Tim came to see me at the hospital. Came to see me with a black band around his sleeve. Two strikers were killed, twenty-three wounded. The troops were in. He came to see me with the bad news. He was shifting me to Pittsburgh. I was too hot a potato. The company was claiming it was the women in the tunnel that had started the riot. My idea, those women. Anyway, Billy Lloyd was headlines. Billy Lloyd was the fall guy. Annabelle, he gave her walking papers because she was mixed up with me. Lucky the newspaper boys hadn’t found out about us. That’s what Tim said and he handed me a note from her. Yes, sir, just a li’l love note. The last will and testament of Billy Lloyd.