by Caryl Rivers
“Kid, it takes two to tango,” old Marge said.
“She was crazy about me. I mean, she even — this was a nice girl, you know, a nice girl. But we had to get married, know what I mean. She was crazy about me.”
“You were pretty young, Harry,” Jim said.
“Yeah, we were. We made mistakes, but we were coming along. If it hadn’t been for him, we’d be back together by now. A family. What right does he have to just walk in and take what’s mine? What right?”
“Harry,” Sherri said, “sometimes things are cracked so bad they can’t be mended. Marriages.”
He shook his head. “No. If it hadn’t been for him, she’d still love me. I know that.”
“My husband and I tried getting back together,” Sherri told him. “But we’d said too much, done too much, hurt too much.”
“He has no right to take my life away. And he can do it, that’s what kills me. I said I wasn’t going to let her get a divorce, that I’d take my daughter. But how could I get her? I’m a drunk, I don’t count. How can I stop him?”
“Harry, you’re young. You’re smart. You’re — very attractive. Let the past go. Find someone who loves you for you. ‘Give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,’ remember?”
If there was a personal appeal in Sherri’s words, Harry did not hear it.
“I’m going to stop him. I don’t know how, but I will!”
When he drove home to his parents’ house, the lights were off and the house was empty; it was their bridge night with the Taggerts. His parents’ house. He was twenty-five years old, and he was living with his parents, like a boy.
He walked into his parents’ bedroom and opened the bottom drawer of the dresser. It was there, where it had been for years.
He picked up the revolver, hefted it. The clip of ammunition was beside it. He turned it over in his hand. He had fired it often enough, when he and his father used to go out in the woods and take target practice with beer cans they set up on the ground. He took the revolver and the clip and put them in his pocket.
He didn’t want to ask himself why he was getting the gun. It was something he felt like doing, that was all. It felt good in his hands, heavy, authoritative. He liked the feel of it.
He went into his own bedroom, took out the revolver and the clip and put them inside a pair of work boots, as far down as he could, towards the toe. Then he got undressed quickly and got into bed. He fell asleep, and for the first time in a very long while, he slept soundly and he did not dream.
He frowned as he read the newspaper account of the ditty that was popular among American soldiers, in Saigon, sung to the tune of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”:
We are winning, this we know.
General Harkins tells us so.
In the delta, things are rough.
In the mountains, mighty tough.
But we’re winning, this we know.
General Harkins tells us so.
If you doubt this is true,
McNamara says so too.
He drummed his fingers on the desk, repeatedly. It was a good idea to listen to the grunts, the guys out where the fighting was going on. They knew things their commanders did not want to pass on. He knew. He’d been there. This was not a good sign.
“The fucking generals,” he muttered. They always saw victory almost in their hands, even as they were getting their butts kicked. The Bay of Pigs taught him, don’t trust the brass. He should have known that, from the Navy. He cursed himself, afterwards, for not following his instincts. Don’t trust the brass.
He kept sending people over there. It was known now as the Saigon shuttle, people came and went so fast, and it was like the blind men and the elephant. They all got hold of a different piece of it, and when they came back they described different creatures entirely. He’d sent a general and a Foreign Service senior guy out there, and they’d held a joint briefing. The general said the war was going beautifully, and the Diem regime was beloved by the people. The Foreign Service officer said that South Vietnam was a mess and that the regime was on the verge of collapse. He had shaken his head and asked them, “Were you two gentlemen in the same country!”
His own people were kicking the shit out of each other. Governor Harriman, just off the Saigon shuttle, called one of his generals a fool, to his face. Guerrilla warfare was a tricky business, and its political side was at least as important as what happened on the battlefield. What did you do? Keep up “the long twilight struggle,” like the British did in Malaysia, and hope the lights didn’t go out! But how much patience would Americans have! And when did you cross over the invisible line that the French had crossed, to their sorrow, in which it became not an Asian conflict but a white man’s war! That was the mistake he had to avoid at all costs. When he had come into office, there were 2,000 men in Vietnam. Now there were 16,000. Vietnam could be the key to Southeast Asia, but it could also be a bog from which he would never escape. The French had poured so much money, so many men, so much blood into that bog, and they were beaten. A white man’s war couldn’t be won. Where was it, that point of no return, the fatal point! MacArthur had found it by bombing the bridges across the Yalu River, bringing the Red Chinese hordes pouring into Korea. No, you couldn’t trust the generals to see it. They loved the Charge of the Light Brigade, dashing madly off into disaster.
In the end, it was their war, the Vietnamese, and they had to want to win it. It was a balancing act for him, a delicate one. The main thing was to keep hanging on, but always looking for that line, the one that was so easy to miss. Careful, careful, he had to be careful.
We are winning, this we know.
General Harkins tell us so.
He drummed his fingers on the desk again.
Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
We’ll get fucked if we go too far,
he thought. He’d guess the guys in the field would like that one. It was a good line for him to remember. But for now, hang on. Hang on.
Sometimes everything came out all right.
Sam walked into the city room, improvising on Tom Lehrer:
The land of the WASP Babbitt
Where hating black folks is a habit
And the goyim are too dumb to make a dime…
Jay laughed. “Nothing like a little racial hatred and conflict to put you in a good mood.”
“Conflict we got,” Sam said. “Where’s Charlie?”
“In his office. You think you’re happy. He’s having multiple orgasms. This is a weird business, you know. We really get off on other people’s problems.”
“Good news is no news. There’s quite a crowd out there. I hear NBC is sending a camera crew. The wires are here already.”
“Is it true that Charlie sent a telegram to Martin Luther King saying that if he’d come to Belvedere, he’d get four fire hoses, Jules’s Labrador in full charge, and thirty-nine pages of coverage?”
“Yeah, but he sent a telegram back, THANKS BUT NO THANKS. PEOPLE IN BIRMINGHAM MUCH NICER.”
Mary walked in, shaking her head. ‘Too many people out there. Not enough cops. This could get out of hand.”
“How many do you think are out there?” Jay asked.
“If we had five thousand for the Veteran’s Day parade, then there must be ten thousand now. People are here from all over.”
“And we’ve got an hour until the march starts,” Sam said. Charlie came out of his office. ‘Are you people all set?’ They nodded.
“Sam, you and Mary will be in front of City Hall. Roger and Joe Rosenberg will be walking with the marchers. So will McChesney. Jay, you take City Hall.” He looked at Mary. “You’ve been over at Reverend Johnson’s house?”
“Yes.”
“How many marchers?”
“About two hundred. A lot from the city, about thirty from the county chapter of SANE, and kids from the community college. There’s Reverend Smilie from
the Episcopal church, Rabbi Gwertzman and that new young priest from St. Theresa’s, Father Heath. I hear Father Carmody is apeshit about his being there.”
“If Christ asked Father Carmody to help carry the cross, he’d say he had to do the bingo.” Jay snorted.
“What’s the mood at City Hall?” Charlie asked Sam.
“Well, Mayor Swarman has locked himself in the can. They are all shitting in their pants. They don’t know how to handle this.”
“That’s what I thought.” Charlie sighed. “How about the cops? What happens if things get out of hand?”
“They got the auxiliaries out, but those guys are meatheads. All they’ve ever done is football games.”
“No state troopers?”
“They’re supposed to be on call, at least that’s what Chief Grimes says. The city cops are pissed at the troopers, since it was the state police who got the line on the kids who set the fire.”
“The marchers are the best organized group around,” Mary told the editor. “Don says they’ve got forty of the students and some community people trained as marshals. Some of them have been in the South. And there’s some pretty big guys.”
“How about the crowd?”
“Right now it’s quiet. It’s hard to tell who’s supporting the march, who’s curious and who might make trouble. At least there are police barricades along the route. My worry is that somebody could get trampled, with that crowd out there.”
“All right, keep in touch. Rosenberg will have a walkie-talkie. Get to him if you need to contact us fast.”
Jay, Sam and Mary walked out of the Blade building and headed up Main Street towards City Hall. The building was a squat, three-story structure into which a WPA architect had incorporated a frieze cribbed from the Parthenon. The naked, sword-brandishing warriors had been a scandal when the building was new, but nobody paid them any attention now, except teenage boys who made crude remarks while the girls giggled.
Spectators were lined up eight to ten deep along the street, and the three had to elbow their way through knots of people to get to a clear spot on the sidewalk in front of City Hall. As they were standing and talking, an auxiliary policeman walked up to Jay.
“All photographers have to stay behind the barricades.”
“Says who?”
“Mayor’s orders.”
“I’ve got a police press pass. I’m staying here.”
“It’s the mayor’s orders.”
“This is not Red Square. If he wants me out of here, let him arrest me. Then he can answer to my editor.”
The policeman frowned and fingered the buttons on his jacket. “Wait a minute.” He disappeared into the building, and in a minute he was back again. “OK, you can stay.”
Jay shook his head. “Mayor Swarman could fuck up a free lunch.”
Sam looked at the departing policeman. “What do you expect from a part-time druggist, Nelson Rockefeller?”
“The power of the press,” Mary said.
“Yeah, power.” Jay sighed. “Swarman would piss in his pants if he saw a five-year-old with a crayon.”
Mary looked around at the crowd. The noise level was beginning to rise.
“A lot of men here. They must have taken off from work. I don’t like that.”
“Hey, now, would you look at that,” Sam said. “The fucking South shall rise again.”
A Confederate flag had sprouted among one knot of onlookers. It was a very small flag held by a pimpled adolescent, and it drooped forlornly against the stick. A woman standing next to him held a placard that announced in hand-lettered script, FIGHTING AMERICAN NATIONALISTS. She was heavyset with flesh stacked in rolls beneath a black jersey and a pair of slacks.
“Who the fuck are the Fighting American Nationalists?” Jay asked.
“Looks like one fat broad and three teenage punks,” Sam told him. “With poetic license, I will call them a racist mob.”
Mary walked over to the woman. “Excuse me, I’m from the Blade. Are you representing a local organization?”
The woman pointed to the sign she was holding. “Sure. We’re from FAN.”
“Is this a Belvedere group?”
“FAN’S a national organization. We got chapters all over the country. We’re from the Maryland chapter.”
“How many members does the chapter have?”
The woman smiled, coyly. “Lots, but we don’t reveal our membership.”
I just bet you don’t, Mary thought, but she said, “What’s the purpose of your organization?”
“To keep the niggers from taking over. We got to stop the niggers. This country was made great by white people.”
“Are you one of the officers?”
“Yeah, I’m the vice president.”
“What’s your name?”
The woman looked suspicious. “Why do you want to know?”
Mary smiled and said, politely, “We want to get the names of the officers of the local organizations that are here today.” One thing she had learned, you had to be polite with the nuts. The nuttier they were, the more seriously you had to treat them. Courtesy and rapt attention made them spill their guts. If you got hostile, they’d clam up.
“I’m Sandra Mitchell. With two L’s. Will our names be in the paper?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe a picture, too?”
“Possibly”
“A picture would be nice.”
Mary walked over to Jay. “Make her famous. She needs the publicity.”
Jay went over and took her picture, and Sandra Mitchell — two L’s — fluffed up her hair and smiled.
Mary scanned the faces of the crowd; one man stared back at her with a fierce glare. It occurred to her that she and the other members of the Blade staff could be targets if any trouble started. The newspaper’s stand on the plan — and Charlie’s call for vigorous prosecution of the kids who had set the fire — had angered more than a few people.
She kept looking into the crowd. Some people were obvious curiosity seekers, including housewives gripping the hands of children and kids from the high school. There was one group of young men in jeans and leather jackets who could spell trouble. With so many people, the problem was that if even a couple of troublemakers started something, it could cause a panic and people would be seriously hurt. At least some of the marshals were trained in crowd control.
In a few minutes, the sound of the approaching march could be heard, although the marchers had not yet turned the corner. The song was familiar, and intermittently melodic:
We’ll walk hand in hand, someday-ay-ay-ay-ay.
Oh, deep in my heart I do believe,
We shall overcome, someday.
Joe arrived at a trot in front of City Hall, carrying the walkie-talkie.
“Any trouble?” Mary asked him.
“A lot of yelling, but no real problems.”
The front line of the march came around the corner. Walking side by side, arms linked, were Father Heath, looking seventeen, the Reverend Raymond Johnson, Rabbi Gwertzman, cultivating what Sam called his Haganah expression, and Sister Eulah Hill, her white tunic gleaming in the sun like crusader’s armor.
Behind them came James Washington, Mrs. Wesley Darden, the president of Committee for Sane Nuclear Policy, Loretta Washington and the young woman who had spoken at the first meeting in the church, and several other clergymen. Don Johnson, wearing a green armband that said MARSHAL on it, was walking outside the line of march, his eyes darting every now and then to the crowd. Mary’s eyes followed his, scanning the spectators again. She picked out a few faces: a kid in a motorcycle jacket; a sullen, unshaven man who stood quietly, watching with hooded eyes; a middle-aged man in an Army jacket, watching the march with unusual intensity.
She looked back at the marchers. The front rows of the group had arrived at City Hall, and Don held up his hand for them to stop. The song came to an end, and in the silence a cry went
up from a lone voice, “Go back to Africa!”
A murmur of approval ran through the crowd, but no one else took up the cry. Mary looked to see who had yelled, but the voice had come from far back.
Don started to call out instructions to the marchers. “We’re going to walk in an oval on the sidewalk, two abreast. Stay three feet apart at all times. If anyone wants to enter or leave the building, let them do it. We are not blocking the entrance.”
Two other marshals started helping to ease the large group into the oval, which formed quickly, the marchers going two by two. The training had paid off. The marshals knew what they were about.
“Go home, niggers!”
“Niggers suck!”
The marchers ignored the catcalls, and the crowd did not ignite. The discipline of the marchers had infected the crowd, Mary thought. If it held, they might get away without trouble.
The marchers were moving smoothly now, in an oval in front of the building, and singing again:
Go tell it on the mountain,
Over the hills and everywhere;
Go tell it on the mountain,
Let my people go.
Don was walking outside the oval, pacing the marchers, keeping the line moving at the right speed and making sure there was a proper distance between them so that the police would not have the excuse that they were blocking the entry. He moved with a fluid grace that suggested quiet pride, competence. She looked again at the man with the hooded eyes, but they were opaque; she could read nothing in them. Mary recognized the kid in the motorcycle jacket, who had been ejected from the meeting. He concealed nothing; his features were distorted with pure hatred. The man in the Army jacket had moved closer to the front row, still staring at the march. But the one who worried Mary was the man with the hooded eyes; she sensed, rather than saw, violence there.
The marchers had come to the end of another song, and they kept walking, their voices trailing off. They had come for a reason. It was time for something to happen. The Reverend Johnson stepped out of line to talk to his nephew. Mary moved closer to hear them.
