Southern Cross

by Stephen Greenleaf

  “It pays to be connected,” I said, with what might have been a twist of jealousy.

  “How about cops?” Seth asked as we started back toward the bunker.

  “What about them?”

  “Do they need to know about this?”

  “Not as far as I’m concerned,” I said.

  “I’ve been going crazy down here,” Seth went on through labored breaths. “I saw Bedford with the gun, and I wanted to rush in and rescue you, but I was afraid I’d make things worse. What was going on up there? I heard gunfire, didn’t I? Colin didn’t shoot you, did he?”

  I’d been planning what to tell him, off and on, since he’d materialized out of the moonlight, but I still didn’t have a story that made sense. So I gave him the basics, most of which he knew already since he’d had me under surveillance, and concluded by saying that when I tried to wrestle his weapon away from him, Colin had fallen off the bunker. I didn’t mention murder, and I didn’t mention suicide; I hoped I never would have to.

  When we reached the front of the bunker, Seth bent over his son, muttering sounds of comfort and assurance, wanting to touch and cradle him but holding back when I warned him not to.

  “He’s so … pathetic,” Seth said when I knelt at his side. “Those fatigues, that haircut—he looks like the guy in Taxi Driver. He looks like a lunatic.”

  “If he were a lunatic, I’d be dead.”

  Seth’s weary face was rendered ghoulish by the sterile streetlight. “What’s wrong with him, Marsh? Why is he so angry with me?”

  “He’s not angry at you; he’s angry at himself.”

  “But why?”

  “For not being more like his dad.”

  “But I don’t want him to be like me. I want him to be better than me.”

  “Colin must have seen that as a pretty daunting task, I ought to know—I wanted to be better than you for quite a while myself.”

  Seth’s sigh was pained and prolonged. “But I never needed that from him. I may have wanted it, but I didn’t need it. He can be anything he wants; he can be a busboy for all I care. I just want him to be happy.”

  “He probably thought that when he didn’t turn out the way you expected, you divorced him. It’s a common reaction, but most of the time they come out of it. Of course, most of the time they don’t trade their families for guys like Bedford.”

  Seth scrubbed his face with his hand, as though to make himself as unsightly as his son. “What can I do now?”

  “He may have deeper problems than an inferiority complex, but it couldn’t hurt to spend enough time with him so he understands that you’re not perfect and he doesn’t need to be perfect, either. Hell, tell him about stealing cookies from the college kitchen and rolling over on your friend when you got caught at it. He’ll love it.”

  Seth laughed thinly and looked down at his son once more. “Did he try to kill you, Marsh?” he asked without looking at me.

  “No.”

  “Did you try to kill him?”

  “No.”

  “Did you find out who’s behind this ASP business?”

  “Not yet.”

  The sound of the air ambulance split the night. Seth dug a flashlight out of his pocket and began to wave it. In response, a light from the chopper shone down on us like proof of a higher power.

  We waited in the wind while the chopper set down in the street. When the medics were trotting toward us, Seth tossed me his keys. “I’m going back with them. I’ll probably spend the night at the hospital—bring the Lincoln to the office in the morning.”

  “Yours is still at the park, remember.”

  “I’ll send someone to pick it up tomorrow.”

  The medics strapped Colin to a board as Seth watched the process with fascination and foreboding. When they were on their way back to the chopper, I headed for the car. Halfway there, I remembered Colin’s weapon was still in the bunker. After the helicopter had taken off, I fetched it. When I got back to the car, I stashed the weapon beneath the seat, then found my way to Charleston, through streets as dark as drain pipes.

  When the telephone cried like a baby in the dark of night, I barely summoned the strength to deal with it.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  When it cried a second time, and kept crying for a dozen more, I stumbled out of bed and picked it up.

  “Marsh?”

  “Seth?”

  “Get dressed.”

  “What’s going on? How’s Colin?”

  “Colin’s fine. Well, not fine, but okay. Bad concussion; broken neck; fractured cheek; broken wrist and jaw. But he’ll survive.”

  “Is he conscious?”

  “Yes. But he couldn’t talk—his jaw’s wired shut. He doesn’t seem as hostile as he was. I think something you said scared him.”

  “Good.”

  “What was it?”

  “Probably that ASP is using him as a scapegoat.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I yawned. “Can’t we do this tomorrow? Why do I have to get dressed?”

  “Nothing to do with Colin. Pick me up at the hospital as soon as you can.”

  “Why? Where are we going?”

  “Alameda’s.”

  “What happened?”

  “ASP burned a cross in her yard tonight. I’ll be at the emergency entrance when you get here—the medical college on Jonathan Lucas Street, just north of Calhoun.”

  I was there in twenty minutes, listless with fatigue, shivering in the clammy night yet hot with the sweat of my rush. Seth came through the sliding doors before I’d come to a stop in the emergency drive-through, and climbed in the Lincoln without a word.

  “Where to?” I asked him.

  He pointed. “Across the bridge, then take the first left. She lives on Johns Island.”

  “Was anyone hurt?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  Seth directed me left off the Savannah Highway, then right after we crossed the intercoastal waterway. The signs said we were on the road to Kiawah Island. Since my impression was that Kiawah was an enclave of the rich, I asked Seth if Alameda lived there.

  “Not that far down—Johns Island is between here and there; lots of blacks live out this way. After the Civil War, the government split up some of the old plantations into sixty-acre parcels and doled them out to former slaves. A haphazard thing for the most part—land titles are still all screwed up—but there’s a substantial black population on the islands left from those times. There are some practical reasons for living down here, too—when they can’t get work, people can eke out a subsistence living by fishing and growing crops. Another attraction is that they don’t have to deal with white people every day.”

  The lesson lapsed. I turned on the heater. The too-warm air smelled of dust and dioxide. I drove through the night, leaving the lights of the city, plunging down the corridor formed by the huge live oaks that lined the roadway, a tunnel into the roots of the Southern past.

  “Do you know where we are?” I asked after a while; we seemed as removed from civilization as Apaches.

  “There’s a church coming up on the left. Take the first right after you pass it.”

  The sign in front of the church read A.M.E. I asked Seth what it meant.

  “African Methodist Episcopal. When the black Methodists split off from the white congregation in the early nineteenth century because whites wouldn’t let blacks share the graveyard, the A.M.E. was created to fill the void. It’s still a powerful force in black lives, politically and socially as well as spiritually, and not only in the South. After the Los Angeles riots, the A.M.E. Church was a healing presence out there as well.”

  Seth fell silent. The headlights made the trees seem carved from stone, the night seem solid and sacred, a shield from the depression and depravity that lurked beyond it.

  “I come out here on Sunday mornings sometimes,” Seth mused softly. “I like to see the black people dressed in their Sunday best, piling in their cars and going off to church,
joking with each other in the parking lots while they wait for the service to begin. The kids are cute and handsome, and the parents look happy and prosperous in the middle of a thousand reasons why they shouldn’t have been either. It’s the only thing that gives me hope sometimes,” he concluded softly.

  I took the next right turn, marveling at Seth’s theistic turn. Part of me thought it was apt, and part of me thought it was simplistic and maybe even condescending. There came the South again—no answers; only a store of timeless questions.

  Once we were off the highway, the road turned to dirt. We skipped across potholes for a hundred yards, tall pines and high grasses confining our vista to the oval patch defined by our headlights.

  Suddenly Seth pointed to his right. “There.”

  Set back from the road maybe twenty yards was a house, small and square, its roof peaked, its frame raised a foot off the ground by concrete blocks at each corner, its yard unmarked by grass or shrub or sidewalk. The full moon, supplemented by the light from a window, was enough to illuminate the forms but not the faces of the crowd that milled in the barren yard.

  They were mostly women, maybe a dozen of them, dressed in simple shifts or housecoats, grouped around one of their own whom I assumed was Mrs. Smallings. The men were less than half that number, separated from the women in a less kinetic cluster off by a clump of cars, hands shoved in their pockets, faces knotted with bottled rage, backs bent like staves under the burden of another insult.

  I pulled to a stop, and we got out of the car. When they saw we were white, the buzz of conversation ceased. A moment later, a woman separated herself from the others and came toward us.

  She was big and handsome, with padded features and heavy arms and dappled hair pulled back in a bun. “Mr. Hartman,” she said, offering a formal handshake.

  “Hello, Malavina.”

  “The Devil come out tonight, Mr. Hartman.” The voice was sorrowful and oddly apologetic.

  Seth bowed his head. “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “They kill her next, I expect.”

  “No, they won’t.”

  “They will if she keeps on.”

  “We’ll make sure she’s safe, Malavina.”

  “Can’t keep white folks from doin’ what they’ve a mind to.” She looked past the house toward the trees that swayed in the breeze like a line of oafish dancers. “Nothing out here in they way.”

  “I’ll find a place for Alameda to stay in town. Where we can keep watch on her. Where is she? Is she all right?”

  Her mother looked at the house. “She inside. Got burnt some trying to snuff it out. Harold across the way had some salve to put on her from the time his stove blew up. She supposed to keep still and rest herself.” A smile thinned her lips, a mixture of pride and despondency. “Don’t want me to bother you.”

  “I’m glad you did. Is she in pain?”

  “Not so she shows.”

  Seth looked around the yard, as if he expected it to speak to him. “What happened tonight, Malavina?”

  She shook her head to establish the lunacy of it. “I go to bed at sundown like usual. Alameda up with a book, like she do. Next thing I know, there’s commotion.”

  “What kind of commotion?” I asked.

  “Alameda fussing at someone. Men whistling and carrying on. Then a gun go off. I go to the parlor, but Alameda not there. I go on the porch, and there it is.”

  “What?”

  “Cross of the Lord Jesus, burning like the bush. Alameda throwing water on it from the rain bucket, but it don’t do no good so she knock it down and kick dirt on it. When that don’t do, she stomp it like a snake. I tell her to leave it be, it burn itself out, but she pay me no mind. She hurt herself when she shove it over.”

  “Did you see anyone but Alameda when you got out here?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “Not till Harold come over.”

  “Did Alameda see anyone?”

  “Says she was fixing to go to bed when she heard a car pull up. Then some scraping and pounding. Then come the fire.” Malavina shook her head. “I thought that Klan foolishness be done with, Mr. Hartman.”

  “Not yet, I’m afraid,” Seth said.

  “I reckon it’s to do with that fuss at the army school, don’t you?”

  “Probably.”

  Malavina crossed her pillowed arms. “I wish she’d let go that dream, Mr. Hartman. Some things ain’t meant to be.”

  Seth patted her shoulder. “Alameda’s a bulldog, Malavina. Just like her daddy.”

  Her eyes rose toward the silver globe high in the night sky. “Her daddy don’t want her dead.”

  “I don’t, either,” Seth said. “If she wants to stop, we’ll stop.”

  “Have you had any trouble like this before, Mrs. Smallings?” I asked.

  “Men drive down the road a time or two. Hollering like fools.”

  “Hollering what?”

  Her look branded me a dolt. “Expect you know.”

  “Did it get worse after Alameda filed her suit against the school?”

  Mrs. Smallings nodded.

  “How often did it happen?”

  “Saturday nights, mostly. Liquor talking.”

  “Any idea who they were?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t even look no more. Most nights I don’t even wake up.”

  “Do they ever do anything but yell? Leave signs, or pamphlets, or anything?”

  “Not that I seen.”

  “Any crosses before tonight?”

  She shook her head.

  “Can we go see Alameda?” Seth asked her.

  Mrs. Smallings glanced at the house. “In the bedroom. Likely asleep.”

  “If she is, we won’t wake her,” Seth promised.

  Mrs. Smallings stepped aside to let us pass, and we started for the house. To our right, the group of men parted so that one of them could emerge to challenge us. “You the lawyer?” he asked Seth.

  “That’s right.”

  “I’m Hitchens from ’cross the road. What you gonna do about all this?”

  “Call the sheriff.”

  “Already called him,” Hitchens said bluntly.

  “Good,” Seth said. “I’ll make sure Alameda has a safe place to stay for a while.”

  “Sheriff ain’t going to do nothing. Soldier boys too much to mess with.”

  “What else can I do?”

  “Call out the state police. National Guard, if need be. Only way to root these crackers out.”

  “I’ll see what I can do, but since no one was hurt, they probably won’t …” Seth shrugged to demonstrate his helplessness. “Is there anything else you can think of?”

  “Tell Alameda to let go this notion she got. Army ain’t no place for a black woman.”

  “If she tells me she wants to stop, we’ll stop.”

  “You got to tell her.”

  Seth shook his head. “I won’t do that.”

  “She keep on keeping on, she be dead, Mister Lawyer.”

  “I’ll do everything I can to keep that from happening.”

  “See that you do. Meantime, the motherfuckers come again, I take another shot at they military ass.”

  “Another shot?” I said.

  He pointed. “I’m on the porch with some sippin’ whiskey when I hear them rootin’ around over here, doin’ I don’t know what. Then when I see the fire go up, I fetch my bird gun and let fly when they drive off. The wife grab my arm so my aim drifts, but I hear that buckshot ding they fenders. Next time I pepper they ass.”

  “What kind of car was it?”

  “Nothin’ special. Chevy, maybe. Blue.”

  “How many men were there?”

  “Two. Maybe three.”

  “How were they dressed?”

  “Just regular.”

  “Were they shouting? Did they say anything about white power or southern pride?”

  He shook his head. “Quiet as snakes till they drive off, then they singing ‘Dixie.’ I wouldn�
��t have noticed, ’cept I don’t sleep good when I eat tripe.”

  “Did you see anything else that might help identify them?” I asked. “Either this time or the times before?”

  He shook his head. “These not the usual bunch. These more serious; serious as death. You get Alameda out of here, Mister Lawyer. ’Fore they lynch her.”

  We thanked the man for his help and went inside the house. It was small and tidy and surprisingly well furnished, with several upholstered pieces, a newish stereo and TV, and some rugs to soften the rasp of the rough-hewn floor. The pictures on the walls were of Christ, King, and Kennedy, as well as Sergeant Smallings, whose life insurance had presumably paid for the furnishings. Homage to men long dead, with no new heroes to replace them.

  We made our way to the bedroom in silence, but we could have blown a bugle. Alameda Smallings lay flat on her back in the center of a narrow bed, wearing cutoffs and a red halter, her arms and legs splayed to form a black angel on the white bedclothes. Staring at the ceiling, her eyes wet with pain or fear or both, she didn’t know we were there until Seth pronounced her name.

  She blinked and turned our way. “Evening, Mr. Hartman. Mr. …?”

  “Tanner. We met in Seth’s office.”

  She nodded. “I remember.”

  “How are you, Alameda?” Seth asked.

  “Fine.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “Some.”

  “Do you need a doctor?”

  She shook her head.

  “Have you been able to sleep?”

  “Don’t want to.”

  “Is there anything you need? Food. Medicine. Anything?”

  She shook her head. “I’m fine.”

  Seth dragged a chair beside the bed and sat on it. “We should talk for a minute.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” she said. Her small smile seemed to hurt her.

  “Maybe we should pull the plug on the Palisade business,” Seth said bluntly. “You’ve made your point. The issue is out there, and the courts in Virginia are dealing with it in the VMI case. Sooner or later, the Supreme Court will decide. Maybe we should let it pass.”

  Her eyes objected more loudly than her words: “If they scare me off, there’ll never be a black woman at that place doing anything but mopping floors.”