Trip Wire

by Charlotte Carter

  They all laughed, even Barry. “That’s okay,” he said, “I forgive youse. Here. Here’s some shit I brought you all. ’Cause I’m such a good king. You’re gonna miss me when I’m gone.”

  He threw an overstuffed plastic Baggie at the table. The “shit” was stemless, pristine, and the color of straw. I got a buzz just from looking at it.

  Barry was grinning at us.

  “We’ll kiss your ring some other time,” Wilton said.

  “Fuckin’ A, you will,” said Barry.

  I wasn’t joining in the laughter. And I wasn’t really hungry, either. Suddenly restless, I soon left the table. In my room I threw a few things into my knapsack. Then I pushed into my stained brown boots and peacoat, and headed out.

  2

  Gray snow was flung thigh high against the parked automobiles. The neighborhood porches and front yards were festooned with Christmas tree lights and those dumb plastic Santas. I bet Forest Street, in the haunted neighborhood where I’d lived with Grandma, looked this way, too, even though it was miles away, almost in another world. Ole Chicagotown was the most rigidly segregated city in the nation, but at Christmastime most neighborhoods, black or white, tended to look the same: gaudy and sad. I wondered if it was that way all over the world.

  Well, probably not in London. I bet Christmastime London was a tasteful wonderland of gaslit Victorian froufrou. That particular city was in and out of my thoughts a lot these days. I’d been a front-runner for a fellowship that would have taken me to England to study for a year. But I had pretty much blown that. So much for figgy pudding, whatever that was. For a while now, my studies have been limited to the fine distinctions between Panama Red and Acapulco Gold.

  Feeling the wrath of the wind, I quickened my pace. When I reached North Avenue, I turned into the little cul-de-sac of Vine Street. My guy, Nat Joffrey, wouldn’t be home yet, but I had the key to his place, the ground-floor apartment in a rickety two-flat that had probably been built about 1850, not unlike the pitiful housing thrown up around that time in another part of town to house the stockyard workers.

  Nat was one of the better people in the world. A Negro born and raised on the North Side, he was part troubadour, part philosopher, part oracle. He had a wonderful baritone voice that made him a charismatic speaker at rallies.

  Kindhearted Nat, when he wasn’t bagging granola and hosing down organic celery at the Food Coop, worked tirelessly for the peace movement, edited and published political broadsides, organized folk music festivals, volunteered at skid row soup kitchens. The list went on. He was fifty-one, more than thirty years my senior. He was also beginning to lose his woolly hair, and he had a body as formless as a sack of baking potatoes and a face just this side of homely. In other words, every bit of his beauty was on the inside.

  Naturally, he was madly in love with me.

  When he arrived, he was loaded down with groceries. Trying to help him, I reached for a couple of the earth-friendly Food Coop bags. He wouldn’t let me take them, though. All he wanted to do was kiss me. Grapefruits and lentils and unshelled peanuts went all over the floor while we stood there going at it. Five minutes later, we hit the bedroom.

  Seeing me shiver, he struck a wood match for the gas heater. “You go to school today?”

  Instead of answering, I sighed.

  “Uh-huh. What’d you do all day? Hang around and smoke grass?”

  “More or less.”

  “What are your folks going to say if you flunk out?”

  “I’m not going to flunk out, Nat.”

  “You will if you keep on hanging around with Wilton and them.”

  “Right. We ought to be more productive members of society. And if I moved in here and had you nagging me all the time, I would be.”

  He smiled in his ragged way; tooth broken in a fight during his stint in the segregated WWII army and never repaired. “You’d think that spoiled brat could find something better to put his mind to than staying high.”

  “I know, Nat. He’s just not your favorite pothead.”

  “He’s spoiled, I tell you. Lazy. Directionless. Talking that shit about offing the pigs . . . being militant. Huh. I’d like to see him handle it in the goddamn military, the way they drafting all these penniless, half-ignorant black boys and sticking them on the front lines over there.”

  “In case you don’t remember, Nat, we’re supposed to be against the military. Wilt doesn’t want to see anybody drafted and stuck on the front lines.”

  He was in his anti-Wilton groove now, unstoppable. “And if there’s anybody in the world got less business owning a gun, I’d like to know who.”

  I rolled my eyes. The gun thing was complicated. Even I thought it was a mistake for Wilt to have one. But he had bought it for protection, he said. There had recently been break-ins all over the neighborhood. As the rumor mill had it, gangs of white thugs had been raiding so-called hippie pads, ripping off whatever drugs were around, beating up on the guys, raping the girls.

  “I told you,” I said, “he got rid of that thing. Mia made him. She said she wouldn’t live with a gun in the house.”

  “Bad as things are for niggers in this city, there’s a hundred other things he could be doing,” Nat grumbled.

  “There’re things we could be doing, too,” I said, hoping it would shut him up. “Why don’t you put down that bag of brown rice. I didn’t come over to talk about Wilt. I came to see you, didn’t I?”

  Yes, I realized, that’s why I had left the lunch table. I’d suddenly felt in need of erotic comforting. Maybe it was Barry’s teasing that had set me off. I didn’t know. I just knew I wanted to be with someone who didn’t take my sexuality as a joke.

  Nat had that same faintly acrid odor about him as my very first lover. There was salt in it, and unsweetened cocoa. He was careful with me, too, the way Melvin had been. I liked being caressed in that delicate way and I liked all those kisses. But I wasn’t a virgin anymore; I was hungrier, bolder, and I wanted more. I wanted something I couldn’t name yet, or even imagine. And I could never quite help wondering how different it would be with a guy like Wilton, whose body was sleek and quick and who had been with so many other lovers. Wouldn’t I be utterly spent and out of my head with pleasure now if that were Wilton smiling down at me, rolling onto the other pillow?

  Wilt had a rude nickname for my lover—he called him De Lawd—taken from some creepy old musical about Negroes in heaven. I felt really guilty for laughing at Nat behind his back. But, laugh I did.

  Men. And their little jealousies. And their little hypocrisies. I wanted to understand them, not just sexually, but in all their confounding complexity. I didn’t, yet. Some women just get them right off the bat, instinctively. But women like that are always slinky. Which I certainly wasn’t. However, right after the holidays, I was going to lose fifteen pounds. I want to be an established slinky by the time I’m twenty-one.

  CHAPTER TWO

  TUESDAY

  1

  Nat woke me at 6 fucking a.m., and then made me eat oatmeal, the pebbly kind, from Ireland. After that, we walked to the corner together.

  “I don’t have any classes today,” I assured him. “I mean, even if I wanted to go, I don’t have classes on Tuesday. Honest.”

  He gave me a good-bye kiss on the forehead. Then he headed off for the el station, and I started walking back to Armitage.

  The weather was a little milder that morning. We’d had no overnight snowfall, for a change. It was my turn to buy paper goods for the house. I did the shopping at the Jewel, and before I headed home I indulged in a couple of doughnuts at the Dairy Queen on Clark Street.

  Barely 10 A.M., but the apartment was raucous when I arrived with my packages. Beth and Clea Benjamin, her friend and co-worker at the boutique on Lincoln Avenue, were dancing deliriously in the front room, warbling all out of tune with the Supremes.

  “Sandy!” Annabeth called out. “We got the place.”

  The place? What did she mean?

>   Oh, right. The place—upstairs. Our communal apartment was roomy by most standards. Still, we were beginning to trip over one another. Beth had come from money. Her parents didn’t much like the life she was living, and they kept threatening to cut off her allowance. But so far, those whopper checks were still a monthly cause for celebration. Beth had got wind of a vacancy on the floor above. “Far out!” she kept saying. “We’re going to have a fucking freak duplex. Upstairs and down. It’s gonna be great, guys.”

  “The place, Sandy. You wanna move up or stay down here?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess it depends.”

  Clea stopped spinning, turned her nose up at me. “Depends on whether Wilton and her move up. You do whatever they do, right?” Her—as far as Clea was concerned, Mia didn’t have an actual name—just her.

  Clea was small and pretty, with a beautiful figure. But I swear I don’t know why Annabeth liked her. Clea could be so mean. It was unfortunate that she didn’t like me much, either. I had tried to make friends with her, but to no avail. I was just happy she didn’t officially live at the commune.

  The way I saw it, Clea was attracted to Wilton but the feeling wasn’t mutual. Which must have stung her. She had had tons of boyfriends, I was told, and was accustomed to getting anybody she wanted. So her resentment of Mia was threefold: Mia had a man Clea felt ought to be hers, Mia was white and had a man Clea felt ought to be hers, and Mia was white and had a black man Clea felt ought to be hers.

  As to why she disliked me, I figured there was something old and visceral about her antagonism, probably dating back to her childhood, and mine: I was the kind of kid who drew the wrath of her kind of kid like iron filings to a horseshoe.

  I went to my room and tossed my bag on the bed. On the bureau was a beribboned chocolate Santa Claus propped up against my bottle of hand lotion.

  “It’s from Jordan and me,” Cliff said, suddenly at my shoulder.

  “Thanks. How come I rate this? It’s not Christmas yet.”

  Couldn’t hear his answer. Shy Cliff tended to mumble when he was embarrassed. I broke off a foot and handed it to him, popped the other one into my mouth.

  “So what do you think?” he asked. “You want to move up to the new place or stay here?”

  “I’m not sure. I’m just glad we’re getting some more space.”

  “Yeah. Beth’s picking up most of the new rent, but if Clea moves in, it’ll be even cheaper.”

  Clea?

  There it was again. Giveth and taketh away.

  “Is Clea moving in?”

  “She’s thinking about it.”

  Shit, shit, shit.

  Nobody was invited to move in unless the whole group agreed. We all ate together, did chores together, watched TV together. I’d be living with somebody constantly bad vibing or patronizing me. The thought of it was hideous. No, I’d have to turn thumbs down on her. But if I blackballed Clea, then Annabeth would be mad at me.

  Of course, there was another option: I could leave. It made me sick to think about it, but I just might have to be the one to leave.

  I started picking through the ashtray, looking for a roach. “Does Wilt know she might move in?” I asked.

  He shrugged.

  “Where is he, anyway? Him and Mia.”

  “I don’t know. Haven’t seen them since lunch yesterday. I figured they told you where they were going.”

  “No. You mean they didn’t sleep here last night?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  Taylor Simon, Wilton’s buddy from Antioch, had come into the room by then. He was on the short side, well-muscled, with an infectious grin. He and I often played Scrabble to the death.

  “Who didn’t sleep here last night?” Taylor asked. Between a new girlfriend and the job he had at Rising Tide, an alternative magazine that had started up last year, we hadn’t seen much of him lately.

  “Mia and Wilt,” I said. “Where could they be?”

  “Maybe Mom and Dad needed a break from us kids. I guess they could’ve gone with Dan on one of his psilocybin vacations in the forest primeval. They’ll all come home tripped out and smelling bad. Anyway, boys and girls, get your filthy clothes together. Me and Cliff have laundromat duty, and then I gotta get to work.”

  I closed my door and lit up as soon as they left.

  Bay-bay, everything is all right. Uptight! Out of sight.

  Beth and Clea’s little record hop was even louder now. I could still hear their merriment. I thought sourly, the only thing I have to celebrate is finding the butt of this abandoned joint.

  At the same moment I realized I’d left my book at Nat’s place, the Hawthorne I was supposed to be reading for American Lit, I heard a dull thud above my head. Funny, but I could also have sworn I heard an agonized moan. Double funny—the apartment upstairs was vacant. It was going to be the upper floor of our duplex.

  I opened my door and looked out to see Clea and Annabeth rushing out of the apartment. They were headed upstairs. I followed.

  A bucket of soapy water was overturned on the landing. Mr. Fish, the building superintendent, lay writhing in the doorway of the empty apartment, his mop clutched in his hand.

  Annabeth leaned down to pry the mop handle from his fingers. Must be a heart attack. “Get an ambulance, Sandy!”

  I was headed back down to our place when I heard another scream—Clea’s. I knew instantly she wasn’t wailing in grief over Mr. Fish. There was too much terror in that cry. I ran back up and shoved her aside.

  Oh, Lord. There was every reason to think that old man’s heart had exploded when he caught sight of this. Mia was facedown on the floor of the deserted apartment, dark blood clotting her hair. She was wearing her sweet white wool jumper with the embroidery around the neck and hem, tiny Dutch children in their wooden shoes.

  Across the room, Wilton was anchored with rope to a folding chair, eyes bugged, throat slit, his shirtfront soppy and black. Hard as I tried, I couldn’t turn away.

  I was standing in Mia’s blood. Her life all liquid under the soles of my boots. But I couldn’t move, couldn’t turn away from the stiff and swollen torso in that old chair. That thing turning to rancid meat had been my friend Wilton, who always had a joke for me, and whose quick mind and kind heart had been my delight in living. Soul brother. An expression I never used. But that was what he had been. How could I turn away?

  Uptight! Out of sight! said Stevie. I couldn’t hear what Beth was shouting, but I heard Little Stevie.

  “Shut up,” I cried.

  And if I couldn’t turn away now, couldn’t literally go, then I’d just have to escape to some other place in my own head.

  So I did that. I went somewhere else. I went back to the park, and I was there with Wilt.

  2

  That convention was the damnedest thing. From January through July, the pileup of terrible events was staggering, more evil than we ever dreamed we could endure. But then the Democrats came to town, and the violence turned psychedelic.

  It was bedlam in the Civic Center. Mayor Daley was really showing his ass, venting his murderous, red-faced rage. Ah, but there was a place where things were different, a spot where, as Mia might say, the vibe was mellow. Lincoln Park was drawing young people like so many ants to an abandoned wedding cake. I was no exception. I heard the music of youth all the way on the other side of town, and every day I’d climb on the Michigan Avenue bus to make the long trip north, not returning to Hyde Park until the small hours.

  Woody and Ivy questioned me about how I was spending my days. My answers were always polite, containing next to no solid information. The less they knew, the better.

  I had read somewhere that Bobby Seale and Jean Genet would be speaking in the park. I knew the former, of course, but wasn’t exactly sure who the latter was. It was my friend and onetime English Lit professor, Owen Kittridge, who told me.

  While I listened to Genet lecture in broken English, a tall, good-looking guy with a tangled ’fro took a seat
near me on the grass. About ten minutes later, the ripsaw snoring began. The same cute, nappy-haired young man was sprawled out, dead to the world, making so much racket that Genet had to cut his speech short.

  I remained there on the grass watching over the man I would soon come to know as Wilton Mobley as he slept like a baby. When he came to, an hour or so later, he rubbed his eyes very much as an infant would. “Got a smoke for me?” he asked.

  And there went my heart.

  We talked for hours, astonished to discover that his parents lived six blocks from Woody and Ivy in Hyde Park. But he had not lived with his folks since he’d come home from Antioch. They were furious that he’d dropped out. To escape their ire, he had taken a room in the same communal apartment on the North Side where an ex-classmate, Taylor Simon, lived.

  I had found this wonderful boy in the park, a sleepyhead black prince, like something out of a fairy tale, and we agreed on everything:

  What music did I listen to?

  Yeah, he liked them, too.

  Was I as sick of school as he was?

  Pretty much.

  Was I worried how I’d fit into the revolution, and was I equally as scared as I was excited?

  Oh, yes . . . yes.

  But had I had any of Owsley’s acid?

  Jesus, wasn’t it amazing!

  No end to the stuff we were solid on.

  Some nice old white ladies making a tour of the park with a huge picnic basket gave us egg salad sandwiches and tangerines. As darkness fell, we smoked a joint together. I looked up at the stars, happy. Imagine it. Somebody like this, and eight hours ago I didn’t know he existed. Friends for life now, I thought—hoped.

  Wilton said he had to take a leak and went off in search of one of those portable toilets. Before he could make his way back to me, people around me began to rise in waves. A wordless panic had taken hold of the masses. Then the tear gas settled over us like a cloak. I ran for it, blind, like a baby goat separated from its mother. The marathon conversation with my new best friend would have to wait for another day.