In the afternoon, a woman came into the clearing. An Indian woman, with her hair in braids. She had a bow in her hand. We all sat around while she practiced with the bow and arrows. She was good.
She came over to where I was sitting. Bent down and looked at me. Her eyes were black. Not just the little round part in the center. All black.
“You’re the one,” she said.
The Indian was next to me. “That’s him,” he said.
She kept looking at me. “My brother is in their prison,” she said. “My own brother. Hiram. From the white man’s Bible, they named him. They separated us, but Hiram came for me. He brought me to my people. Now you will help bring him to me.”
Nobody said anything. She held out her hand to me. I took it. Came to my feet, not letting my weight pull against her, but she felt strong enough to do it.
She handed me the bow. “Shall I show you?”
“Yes,” I told her. I don’t know why I said that.
We walked away from the others. She handed me an arrow. I held it in my hands. It didn’t feel right. I shook my head. She smiled, handed me another.
I put it in the bow. I could see how to do it from watching her. She walked away. Pulled a leaf from one of the trees. She licked the back of the leaf, pasted it right over the X the Indian had cut into the dead tree. Then she came back to where I was.
I pulled back the string. I made my left fist into a stone. I pulled all the weight out of my body, put it into my right hand. I could see down the length of the arrow. It was straight. I saw the tip of the arrow, saw the leaf, brought them together. In between my heartbeats, I let the string go.
It went through the middle of the leaf.
The woman bowed her head, like she was in church.
“My name is Ruth,” she said.
Then she took the bow from me and walked out of the clearing.
On the drive back to Chicago, the Indian told me how it would work.
“You keep the pistol,” he said. “It’s ice-cold. Came right off the production line at the factory, never been registered. The way they’ll work it, they’ll take it from you after the hit. Tell you they’re going to get rid of it for you. But they’ll keep it. Just in case. It’ll have your prints all over it, so they’ll always have something on you. You can’t wear surgeon’s gloves, can’t act like a pro around them. You’re supposed to be this white-trash nigger-hater, okay? Those kind, they never think things through. You’re joining the group ’cause you like to kill niggers, see? Hate’s their game. At least that’s the game for the troops. The generals, they always have something going on the side.”
“What do I do?”
“Do? You don’t do nothing. Not for them. You hit one of our contracts, see? That’s if it works. If they let you go cruising around, tell you to pick a target at random, we can make that work. But if they just bring one to you, you got to do it. Just do it. They’ll have your prints, so what? Fingerprints don’t have a clock on them. You’re dead, right? If they threaten you with the prints on the gun, just act scared.” He looked at me, watching close. “Can you do that?”
I thought back to the juvenile institution. The training school, they called it. “I think so,” I told him.
“From now on, you carry the gun. Don’t bother with a holster—just find a comfortable place to carry it. Walk around with it, so the weight goes inside your space, understand? So it don’t show …”
“Okay.”
“They have a joint in Uptown. Not far from us. Just a storefront. They hand out their leaflets, make speeches through bullhorns, crap like that. That’s gonna be the hard part for you.”
“What?”
“Talking. You watch television?”
“Sometimes.”
“Read books?”
“No.”
“Okay, no problem. We got a VCR over at the apartment. I’ll bring you some tapes. You watch the tapes, you’ll see how they talk, what they say. You don’t have to be no undercover expert for these boys … they got that acid test, like I told you.”
“How do I …?”
“You do the work. Probably on the street, it all goes down right. Sooner or later, probably sooner, they’ll take you inside. To the compound. Take some time, get you alone with the head man. Then you do him. We know where the compound is, but the head man never goes out on the grounds. We watched for a week, once. You get in, we’ll be watching. They got all these boys in their camouflage gear on the perimeter. We can go past them anytime we want—they’ll never see us. Soon as you do the work, you just step outside. Tie a rag around your head, like this.…” He took a red scarf out of his pocket, flipped it into a long, thin piece, tied it around his head. He looked even more like an Indian, the kind you see on TV. “You step out with something around your head, we start shooting. Just run for the perimeter … run out of the compound. We’ll be there, take you away.”
I nodded. I guessed they could just shoot me at the same time, but it didn’t feel like that.
“You got any questions for now?” He lit a cigarette, gave me one. I smoked it, thinking.
“That woman, Ruth. The guy who’s in Marion, she says that’s her brother. Is that her brother like he’s your brother, or …”
“You mean, did they have the same mother and father?”
“Yes.”
“They did. But we’re all… together. The same as blood. Okay?”
“Okay.”
We drove for a long time. It got dark out. They never stopped for gas—there was a pump on their farm. The driver kept right around the speed limit, staying with traffic.
“You need ID,” the Indian said to me.
“All right.”
“The crazy man, he can fix you up with a whole set. And you need a legend too.”
“Legend?”
“A history. Like where you came from. I figure, you were in prison, right?”
“Yeah. In Florida.”
“What for?”
“Manslaughter.”
“Good. Okay, tell them you killed a nigger down there. They’ll like that. Tell them as much truth as you can. Whatever name you were under, tell them it was a phony. Your new ID, that’ll be the real you. You never said your name.”
“My name?”
“What do people call you, friend?”
Monroe called me Ghost. Shella always called me John. Like a joke, her joke. Said I was the only John she ever had. Like I was a trick.
“John,” I told him. Thinking about something I saw on TV once. A man signing a motel register. “John Smith,” I told him.
One of the Indians in the front seat laughed. It was the first time I realized he’d been listening.
I didn’t know what he was laughing at, but it didn’t feel like it was me.
The Indian brought me a whole stack of cassettes for the VCR the next day. I watched them over and over again. With the sound on. It was mostly news stories, long ones sometimes. “The Face of Hate,” stuff like that. People showing off for cameras, wearing costumes. I’d heard all this stuff before. In prison, there were a couple of guys, in there for killing an old black man. Stomping him to death. Just to be doing it. They had a lot of tattoos. The only one I remember was a spider web on one guy’s elbow. When he made a muscle pose, you could see it.
They even had a tape of the head man—the one I was supposed to do my work on. He was giving a speech. Kept talking about race like it was everything. He used dog words. Mongrels, mutts. White people were pure and other people made them dirty, he said. Just being around them would make you dirty.
I heard all that before. Niggers will only fight if they’re in a crowd. One-on-one, they’re cowards. That’s what they told me, the first time I was locked up. I didn’t know if it was true. I didn’t want to fight anyone—I was afraid of them all. Never hit a nigger in the head—you can’t hurt them there. I found out that was a lie. Maybe it was all lies.
“Try and find something in there that’s you,�
� the Indian told me.
The Indian brought some more stuff one day, watched the tapes with me for a while. A bunch of college kids raped a black girl. They took turns, and they did it together too. They called her names while they were doing it. One of them made a videotape of it, and the cops found it when they searched the fraternity house. They showed some of it on the news, with pieces of it covered up with black patches, but you could tell what was going on. The girl was all messed up. Drunk, or high. Just sort of laying there.
The college boys said it was a party.
“They say they hate niggers so much, why would they want to have sex with them?” the Indian said. The way people say things when they don’t expect you to answer them.
Anyone who’s ever been in prison could have told him.
I kept watching the tapes. Watching and listening. One of the shows had interviews with kids. Skinheads. I watched the tape a lot. The older guys, the ones in the organizations, they talked about the skinheads like they were an army. But the skinheads seemed wild. They were mad at everybody, not just blacks.
Like nobody wanted them, and they knew it.
“What do you see? Just before you go to work on someone, you see anything?”
Nobody had ever asked me that before, not even Shella. I looked at the picture of the head man. The mug shot they gave me. I didn’t see anything.
“Not from a picture,” the Indian said. “When you’re right there.”
I closed my eyes, slowed everything down so I could see it. When it happens, it’s so fast. I slowed it down. Back to that first time. Duke. He was lying on his back. It was dark in there, but I could see him. I could see … his skeleton. Bones underneath his skin. His skull inside his head. “Little dots,” I told the Indian.
“Red dots? In front of your eyes? Like when you’re mad?”
“Black dots. Not in my eyes. On the body. Not like … measles. Just in different spots. All over.”
I closed my eyes again. Saw Duke. Touched my face. Between the eyes, the bridge of my nose, a spot on the neck.
“Laser dots,” the Indian said.
“You ready to go?” he asked me a few days later.
“Yes.”
“Tonight?”
“Sure.”
“Okay. I talked to the crazy man. Anybody checks, the guy who did time in Florida was John Smith. It’ll all match. We got a room for you. Once you move in, you’re on your own—you won’t see us again until you finish the work.”
He came back that night. I had everything in my duffel bag.
“Let me see the piece,” he said.
I handed him the gun. He opened the cylinder, looked down the barrel. “Dusty,” he said. He sounded disgusted. He took out a handkerchief, twisted up the corner, poked it through the barrel with a pencil, then pulled it back and forth. “Do that every day, okay?”
I said I would.
They drove me to the Greyhound station. I gave him my car keys. He gave me a ticket stub.
“You came from Atlanta,” he told me. “You left around eight in the morning. The trip took about eighteen hours, stopped once in Cincinnati. The ticket cost ninety-eight bucks and change. You got in around two in the morning—just about now. Tonight you stay at this place on Madison. Don’t hang around the station—you get picked up with the piece, it’s gonna waste a lot of time. Tomorrow, you start out for Uptown. Take the A Train to Sheridan and walk from there. Get a room on Wilson, just off Broadway. It’s a wood-frame house, blue front. Then you’re on your own.”
I stepped out of their car, the duffel bag in one hand. The Indian stepped out with me, watching my face.
“You have money?” he asked me.
I said I did. He held out his hand. I saw, people do that. I held his hand, squeezed when he squeezed.
The Indian shook his head. Sad, like he knew I wasn’t going to believe him. “We’ll be there when you come out,” he said.
I walked through the bus station once, then I came out on Randolph and walked over to the flophouse on Madison. The guy at the front desk looked at me too long—it was good I wouldn’t be there past tonight.
Before I went to sleep, I put my handkerchief through the gun barrel a few times.
The next morning, I found the train station, where the Indian said it would be. I took the A Train—it ran outside, above the street. I got off at Sheridan. It was a short walk to the blue house on Wilson. They gave me a room on the top floor. Seventy-five dollars a week.
The room was clean. Even the glass in the window. I looked out. There was an alley back there. An Indian was working on a car with the hood up.
“It’s better if you don’t just walk in,” the Indian had told me. “We’ll save that if nothing else works.”
When I tried to concentrate on all I had to say, my head hurt. I slept most of the day.
When I woke up, there was a note under my door. The name of a car wash was printed on it. Underneath it said: TOMORROW MORNING, GET A JOB.
First thing in the morning, I walked over to the car wash. An Indian was running it. I asked him for a job. He didn’t ask me anything, not even my name. He pointed to a black guy, said he was the foreman. I went over to him. He gave me some towels, told me to wipe down the cars when they came out of the chute.
I worked all morning. The foreman told me it was lunch-time. The black guys had a place for themselves in the back. They all sat down and started to play cards. They slapped the cards down hard, yelling at each other. They were playing for money—I saw it on the table. One of them had a long razor scar down the side of his face. He saw me looking at him. He looked back—a prison yard stare.
I walked away.
The white guys were by themselves too. Just talking and eating their food. They had a bottle of wine they were passing around.
I walked across the street to a deli, got a sandwich and a bottle of cold water. I sat down next to the car wash.
The Indian boss came by, squatted down next to me. He spoke without moving his lips.
“Bad enough working with niggers, huh? Having one for a fucking foreman, that’s real hard for a white man to swallow.”
He got up and walked away.
That afternoon, I was wiping down a red Thunderbird. When I finished, the woman got in her car, handed me something. It was two quarters. I put them in my pocket. One of the white guys shook his head, pointed toward a big barrel right next to where the cars came out, a sign on it said TIPS FOR THE MEN.
“We all throw in, split it up at the end of the day,” he said.
I threw my two quarters in there.
I finished the shift. We all walked around the back. The Indian came out, gave everyone their pay, in cash. I got twenty-five dollars. Then the black guy, the foreman, he dumped the barrel over. There were a few bills, mostly coins. The black guy counted it up. He split it into two piles, put one pile in his pocket. Then he dealt it out, one coin at a time. He dealt to everyone, all sitting around in a circle. A quarter for one guy, a quarter for the next guy. He started with the first guy to his left. When he came back around to himself, he dealt himself a quarter too. The black guy with the razor scar on his face watched. When he saw the foreman deal himself a share, he put his right hand in his pocket.
I knew what was going to happen. I just didn’t know when.
That night, I went to the bar they told me about. It was like all the others, except there was two different flags over the mirror behind the bartender. One was red, with a flat blue X, white stars inside the blue stripes. I saw this flag before, plenty of times, in the South. The Confederate flag, Shella told me it was. The other flag was green on the ends, with white in the middle. The white had a design with horses or something on each side and some other stuff too. I never saw that one before.
I drank the way I always do. Watched the girls. Smoked a few cigarettes. “If nobody comes up to you after a couple of nights, you have to start a talk,” the Indian said.
Nobody came near me.
The next night, I was there for a couple of hours when a guy sat next to me. The barmaid came right over, like she knew him, brought him a beer.
He tipped the glass of beer toward me, nodded his head. “Haven’t seen you in here before,” he said.
“I just got in,” I said.
“Where you from?” His accent was like most of the white men in Uptown. Not South, exactly. Harder.
“Florida.”
“Looking for work?”
“I got a job.”
“Around here?”
“Yeah. In a car wash.” I could see the guy didn’t know what I was. He wasn’t looking for somebody to do work. “Bad enough working with niggers,” I said. “Having one for a fucking foreman, that’s real hard for a white man to swallow.”
“Yeah, that’s the way it is now. The fucking apes don’t respect nothing. They’re out of control. It’s hard to be a white man today. They got all that Affirmative Action shit.”
“Yeah.” I didn’t know what he was talking about. But I felt good inside—I must of gotten it right. I wished the Indian could see me.
“They don’t come in here,” he said. “They know better.”
“Good.”
“See that flag?” he said, pointing to the green and white one over the bar. “It’s the Rhodesian flag—the true Rhodesian flag, after they kicked out the British. When it used to be a white man’s country. Before the nigger-loving UN gave it to the apes. It was a fucking jungle when they started. White men came from England, took it over. Cleared the land. It was a beautiful place. No race mixing, no fucking integration. It was a place for a white man to go, if he had the balls. No matter what your trouble was over here, that was the place to go. Paradise.”
“I wish I had known about it,” I said.
“You’d go there?”
“It would be better than prison.” Telling the truth as much as I could, the way the Indian said.
“You was in prison?”
Shella Page 10
