A Thin Bright Line

by Lucy Jane Bledsoe

  “I have to take a little detour before we head up to Evanston. It’s a longer run than I thought I’d be on.”

  “I said you can drop me at the train station.”

  “I won’t charge you for the detour.” Stella looked over her shoulder, as if she couldn’t believe what she saw in her rearview mirror, and exhaled a little laugh. “Or are you in a hurry? Even with the stop, you’ll get home faster with me.”

  Truth be told, Lucybelle could drive around all night in this plush car. The chrome trim gleamed and the leather seats smelled like quality. Stella drove expertly, taking the turns smoothly and coming to stops so gently Lucybelle didn’t hitch forward even a bit. It was relaxing, lounging back there on the cushioned bench. “It’s okay. Take your detour.”

  They rode in silence until Stella said, “South Side,” and then a few minutes later, “Wentworth.” When she pulled up in front of a plain boxy building with no signage, she turned in her seat and said, “Wait right here. Don’t get out of the car.” Stella disappeared inside the establishment, and a second later, a short, very fat, brown-skinned woman emerged, stood in front of the building’s one door, crossed her arms, and stared at Lucybelle. She rolled down her window and said hi, but the round woman didn’t answer. Fats Domino’s “Blueberry Hill” wafted out of what must have been a club, followed by Sam Cooke’s “You Send Me,” interfused with flashes of lightning and claps of thunder.

  Finally Stella bounded out the door, slapped the fat woman on the shoulder, and said, “Thanks, Tiny. You’re a pal.”

  “What took you so long?” Tiny asked with exaggerated irritation. “You said ten seconds. That was more like ten minutes.”

  “Had to dance that last one. You know women. My luck to step in the door just when the mushy one comes on.”

  “Who’s she?” Tiny pointed with her chin.

  “A fare. What’s with the questions?”

  “You bring a fare, a pale one, to my club, and I’m gonna ask questions.”

  “I didn’t bring her to your club. I’m parked in the street, which as a taxpayer, I own same as you.”

  Tiny bobbled her head, meaning maybe and maybe not, but smiled. “All right. Be safe. You coming back tonight?”

  “Sure. See you in a while.”

  Stella climbed back in the driver’s seat, turned the key in the ignition, and put the taxicab in gear. She pulled onto Wentworth. Lucybelle wished she could see her better.

  “What’d you have to do in there?” It was none of her business, but she’d waited patiently and so maybe deserved to know.

  Stella ignored the question. “So, Arkansas. Were you there in September?”

  “No. But I watched the coverage on television.”

  “What’d you think?”

  “It’s heartrending. They’re children.” Then thinking she should be very clear, Lucybelle added, “They have a right to an equal education.”

  Stella nodded. “Yeah, I’ve said a lot of nasty things about Arkansans in the past couple of months. I would have been shocked just yesterday had someone told me I’d be having a pleasant conversation with a white girl from the state.”

  “We don’t have to converse.” Damned if she wasn’t flirting with the taxicab driver.

  “You’re the one who started in with the questions.”

  “It’s a bad habit of mine.”

  Stella smiled. “No, that’s a good habit.”

  “Where are we now?”

  “See? Good question. Another detour. Thought we’d spin along the lake. Don’t worry. I’m not charging you extra. In fact, I’ll give you a deal.”

  “I’m not worried. But I probably should be.”

  “Yeah. You probably should be.” Stella glanced over her shoulder with another grin, and then threw her arm across the back of the seat and drove with one hand on the steering wheel. Lucybelle wanted to ask who she’d had to dance with on the Sam Cooke number.

  “I didn’t recognize you, with the, you know . . .” Stella circled the air in front of her face with her palm. “And don’t you wear glasses?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you see without them?”

  “No.”

  “You should have at least put them in your purse.”

  “That would have been a good idea, but I didn’t bring a purse either.”

  After a full pause, Stella said, “Don’t worry. I’ll get you home safely.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I’ll tell you what. However I feel about Arkansas, I do wish I’d been at Central High in September.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “To bear witness.”

  “With your camera.”

  “Yeah.” She looked in the rearview mirror, nodding. “Exactly.”

  Lucybelle wondered if Stella had developed the pictures of her on the bridge. She’d said it was too dark, that she hadn’t captured her image, but maybe she’d just said that to put Lucybelle at ease.

  “Just as well I wasn’t there. The reporters got it worse than the kids. I can’t afford to lose my camera.”

  “Are you also a reporter?”

  Stella didn’t answer for a long time. When she did, her voice had changed, become infused with resolve that she was overriding, as if she didn’t want to reveal so much but couldn’t stop herself. “I learned photography in the service. Not that they let me in the photography division. I was lucky to just get out of kitchen or laundry. I got motor transport because I already knew a lot about mechanics.” She laughed. “To this day Mama argues with Dad about teaching me.”

  “Why?”

  “She wanted me to go to college. I wanted that too. I thought I would after the war. But can you picture me in a girls’ dorm?” She took the fast breath of a narrow escape. “Anyway, what good would a college education do me? I could teach maybe. Dad was determined I’d become a doctor. Not just a doctor, but a surgeon. He said the automobile mechanics would be good training in connecting minute parts.” Her laughter tumbled a mix of humor, sagacity, and sadness. “Maybe if I’d done the eight to twelve years of extra schooling I could be making more money than I am now, but it’s questionable. Nope, I hopped right in the service, got training in motor transport, and after the war, the GI Bill bought me my cars, and I set up Acme Transport. I got a fleet of three vehicles, and I’m always making improvements. Just this year I fitted them all out with the new Motorola radios, and I’m looking to buy a couple more cars, probably one next year and another the year after. Would I have more prestige as a surgeon? Sure, in some small circles, but I’d likely take a lot more flack too. This way I do what I please and dress how I’m comfortable. All in all, the service wasn’t a bad deal, for me anyway.

  “But I did want photography, which wasn’t open to colored. What happened was this white fellow, from a real fancy family and everything, but good people, fair, he took me under his wing, taught me all about taking pictures.” Stella reached across the front seat and lifted her camera. “I go nowhere without it.”

  When they reached Lake Shore Drive, Stella stepped on the gas and they soared along Lake Michigan. Storm clouds puffed over the lake and wind splashed waves a good five feet in the air. The rain held off.

  “So what’s your line of business?” Stella asked.

  “I’m an editor.”

  “Time? Life?”

  “Nothing that glamorous.”

  “Storm coming in. Good thing you’re tucking in home,” Stella said as the biggest wave yet frothed into the air. “Not to be nosy, but I picked you up on a busy street corner. You’re in that . . . that costume. You left a party in a hurry, am I right? Why?”

  Lucybelle laughed. “I wish I had a good story to tell you, but I don’t.”

  “You’re not saying. I get it. Still, not fair. I just spilled a lot of beans. Here’s another question. An easier one. Who are you supposed to be?”

  “Djuna Barnes.”

  “Really? Hot diggity! I tried to read that book, but man oh man, doe
s she twist up the English language. So what’d you think of HOWL?”

  “Stupendous. But the Arkansas part unnerved me.”

  “What Arkansas part?”

  “‘Who passed through universities with radiant eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake—light tragedy . . .’”

  “Wow! You memorize the whole thing?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  “Do you suppose that part is about you?”

  “I don’t know. I did study Blake at Columbia.”

  “It is! It’s about you!”

  Lucybelle laughed, relishing Stella’s eagerness to connect her to Ginsberg’s poem. “Our time at Columbia overlapped only briefly. He left the program. I heard he went traveling.”

  Stella exhaled a long, reverential breath. “I’m going to San Francisco one day.”

  “I think about Paris.”

  “That too. That too.” Stella’s laugh rolled out, perfectly synchronized with another thunderclap. She stomped down harder on the accelerator and they shot through the night. The first splats of rain hit the windshield.

  “So it’s All Hallow’s Eve,” Stella said. “Do you know the history?”

  “Tell me.” Talk to me all night.

  “There’re a lot of interpretations.” All she could make of Stella’s face in the rearview mirror was mobile roundness. “I should probably do some fact-checking in the library before running my mouth.”

  “Run your mouth.”

  The smile, she could see that. “Okay, so it’s the one day of the year honoring demons and lost souls, the people society despises, which is the same thing as saying the people society fears. This is the day we get to gather, be free, spook everyone. This is our day. Well, my day, anyway.”

  “Mine too.”

  “Yeah. I thought so.”

  Lucybelle thought at first that it was an unusual flash of lightning, a red one, but she turned to see the lit and twirling cherry.

  “Damn.” Stella hit the brakes, but she’d probably taken it up to seventy miles an hour by then and there was no disguising the fact that she’d been speeding. When she got the taxicab pulled to the side of the road, she dropped her forehead onto the steering wheel and muttered, “Damn, damn, damn,” while the police officer called in her license plate number from his squad car.

  When he approached the driver’s side of the taxicab, she reached into her back pocket and withdrew her wallet, and the cop, undoubtedly seeing the color of her skin, pulled his gun. Stella rolled down her window and shouted, “I’m getting out my license.” The cop did not put away his gun. He aimed it at the hood of the car while he gave Stella a good looking over and then squatted down so he could examine her passenger.

  “Whoa,” he said, as if there were a dead body in the backseat. “Whadda we have here?”

  “Lady wants to go to Evanston. I’m taking her.”

  “Evanston? What are you doing on Lake Shore Drive?”

  “Taking her to Evanston.”

  “Don’t get smart. License.”

  Lucybelle couldn’t see what Stella handed over, but she saw him shuffling through what must have been a roll of cash. “Dunno,” he said after pushing it into his back pocket. Stella withdrew more bills from her wallet and flapped them out the window. It was her own threat: take the money or risk someone seeing the bribe. The cop snatched the cash.

  “Move aside,” he said, and Stella leaned toward the passenger side of the front seat. He put his head in the window so he could level his eyes at Lucybelle. “You look crazy enough,” he said. “So I guess you know what you’re doing. But next time why don’t you call a white taxicab company?” He waited for her to make some kind of response. When she didn’t, he said, “I get it. You’re one of the troublemakers.” He shook his head slowly. “Riding about town with a colored boy. You have no idea what you’re getting yourself into. Where’re you from, New York?”

  Finally he pulled his head out of the window and walked slowly back to his squad car. Stella waited, but he didn’t go anywhere, so she started the engine and pulled out. He followed them closely.

  “I’m sorry,” Lucybelle said. “Look, I know that went a lot worse than it might have because I was in the car.”

  “Don’t talk.”

  Driving well under the speed limit, they left the city limits of Chicago, and still the cop rode Stella’s bumper, so close that if she braked quickly, he’d ram into her.

  “For the love of god, stop turning around and looking at him. He’ll decide you’re a kidnapped heiress and pull me over again.”

  “Stella, I can pay you back for that. I’m sorry.”

  “Just keep quiet.”

  Lucybelle was hurt by Stella’s harsh reprimand, but she shut up. The cop finally made a squealing U-turn and headed off in the opposite direction. When they finally pulled in front of 814 Michigan Avenue in Evanston, Lucybelle reached into her pants’ pocket and took out all of the cash she had, which wouldn’t be nearly enough, and held it over the top of the front seat. “Take this and I’ll run upstairs and get the rest.”

  Stella didn’t turn around, didn’t look at her in the rearview mirror, just waved her hand at the handful of money. “Keep it and get out.”

  “Take it. I owe you a lot more.”

  “Would you please get out of my cab?”

  By now the rain slanted down, and it drenched Lucybelle as she ran down the walkway to her entrance. She went directly to her bedside table and put on her glasses, and then hurried to the window overlooking the street. Stella was gone.

  Monday–Friday, November 4–8, 1957

  “Luceee! Get in here!” Bader no longer bothered stopping by her desk when he wanted her. He just shouted.

  “Yes, sir.” She saluted, but he didn’t laugh. He didn’t even smile.

  “Sit down.”

  Sometimes, when facing a deadline, his depth of concentration wiped out his sense of humor. But she’d never seen this expression before: he looked murderously focused.

  “You’ve been here over a year,” he said. “We haven’t done any kind of evaluation. I’d say it’s time. What do you think?”

  “Of what?”

  “Your performance. I said, sit down.” He leaned across the table and lit her cigarette. “We’re not measuring the length of the Amazon here. We’re not calculating the amount of ore in a mountain. We’re not wondering how many dinosaurs walked on this continent a few years ago. Who cares how many inches the glaciers have advanced or retreated in the past decade, for fuck sake? We’re about to look at the history of the planet. The entire history. Forget Napoleon and Jesus Christ. They happened yesterday. When we reach bedrock, we’ll be able to give a picture of earth’s climate going back tens of thousands of years. It’s epic. It’s mankind’s biggest, most important story ever.”

  Bader stood and paced to his door and back. “God, these walls make me feel crazy. I can’t breathe in a box. Can we talk outside? No. There’s no time. I’ll just finish up fast.

  “It’s been a crazy year. By all accounts, the International Geophysical Year is a smashing success. We have fourteen countries on board—from both sides of the Iron Curtain—with 302 stations in the Arctic and forty-eight in Antarctica.”

  Lucybelle loved when he talked like this, how he seemed to draw passion from the very soles of his feet, the way he nearly vibrated with purpose. She nodded her agreement. What he’d accomplished this year, what they’d accomplished, was deeply satisfying.

  “We still have a lot to work out. The pilot drilling has been problematic. The ice cores have been disappointing.”

  “The ’57 core is fantastic,” she interrupted.

  “A lot better than the ’56, to be sure, but still, we’ve only got down to a thousand feet. I want bedrock. The hitch right now is the technology. We keep breaking the drills.”

  “Yes, I know, but—”

  “We expected that. We knew we’d have to figure it out as we went along. I have to convince the Army Corps
and the National Science Foundation that we can reach bedrock, and will, and soon, and that the results will be spectacular. I already have Hansen working on a new kind of drill. A thermal drill. Along with a souped-up electric transformer. We’ll melt our way to bedrock. We’re innovating the hell out of geology. They have to know, as I know, as you better well know, that the results we get are going to change our view of the planet.

  “That’s your job. Your words must convince them. It’s up to you to make sure our successes shine through so brightly they’ll be blinded into writing the biggest checks. They have to understand, and in this case, that means seeing how history illuminates the future. Your job. Do it. And do it brilliantly.”

  “The future of the planet in my hands,” Lucybelle said. “But no pressure.”

  It was the kind of comment that usually drew at least a smile from Bader, but he nodded, as if it were in fact completely true. She sat back and tried to relax. His intensity this morning wasn’t about her performance; it was about his nervous anticipation of the new thermal drill and the fickleness of their funders. He often used her for thinking out loud, stating the already known facts, so he could sort them, make a strategy for his next moves.

  “Your June report to the National Academy of Sciences carried the day,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  “But good writing isn’t enough. The point is, we’re all going to have to make sacrifices. Work long hours. Focus on our target like a goddamn Russian missile. We need to get this done.” Finally his wolfish smile broke rank with his lecture. “Then, sugar, I don’t care if you want to dance naked with Marilyn Monroe. Capiche?”

  What did that mean?

  “I’m leaving for Byrd Station on Friday. I need a complete report on the ’57 ice core before I leave.”

  “But Russell isn’t even half-finished. He told me—”

  “All the data. Organized, analyzed, charted, written up, on my desk. Thursday night—okay, fine, Friday morning by three o’clock should be okay.”

  Lucybelle worked sixteen-hour days the rest of the week. Two of the nights she slept under her desk. Half the time she spent in the cold lab with Russell, wearing her plum wool coat, taking down his data as he coaxed it from the ice, interpreting its meaning herself and then making corrections after the scientists read her words. All the scientists worked the same long hours, helping collect the raw data, but none of them could write, and unfortunately, she’d finally convinced them all to admit it.