Dreamboat Dad

by Alan Duff

  And there his wife, in colour, as if a breeze blew under her carefully cut and groomed locks, brunette, straight white teeth, married to this man who had his life his destiny and every client's fate under control. With a bad news update to give Henry Takahe about his tribe's petition to government for the return of their seized acres.

  Had no standing in law, he hoped Henry understood that.

  When Henry didn't. Not with all the fees paid out to this point and Richard Upton still edging for the final account to be paid, asking of the tribe's financial position. Henry's thoughts anyway wavered between Lena leaving him and Upton, the man before him.

  Henry stood up.

  Richard, Henry said, a warrior tribe needs more robust legal representation than what you are offering. We are ceasing all use of your services forthwith. Goodbye.

  Driving home he was back to thoughts of Lena. Smiled, rueful, to think what in the past he would have done to unfaithful wife and lover: glad he was past that stage. What did violence ever achieve except in self-defence or to bring drunks under control as his job still occasionally required? The war he'd fought in, that was justified. But not belting his wife; slowly it had dawned on him this was wrong. Funny — it was contact with American hotel guests whose values had rubbed off, their horror of a man committing any act of violence against a female, that started to change him.

  Thinking of Americans, news had told of race riots in several American cities, Negroes up in arms at yet another act of police violence. He wondered how Yank was getting on. Not exactly feeling guilty but certainly a man could have done a lot better than completely ignoring the boy. That stupid pride thing again. Maybe a man could get to know him in adult years. Henry hoped so. Though not holding out for making up for those years.

  As for the mother, that name slut seemed a prophecy, if he wanted to take prophecy from it. She'd been sleeping with Barney, of all people. The slut confirmed — till he calmed down. Understood his own love-making efforts were selfish, for his own ends, that he had been a diligent husband in that way if no other. Realised war had taken away his ability to properly love a woman — any woman. Taken a lot of other things from a man too.

  But he was still here, wasn't he? Still standing, still doing right by his community, as the elders had groomed him to do? Maybe the war had taken Lena's ability to properly love too. Could be she kept seeking what could never be found.

  Still, a man couldn't dwell on stuff like that. Instead, he hoped young Yank was getting on all right. It was a tough country and Mississippi, as the world knew, one of the worst states with its prejudice against Negroes.

  Kid was never a fighter, but he has got something courageous in him. Won't deny him that. Takes guts to get up on stage and sing. People's worst fear is public appearance. Must have taken guts to put up with my attitude those years, too. Good on him. And good luck with meeting his real father.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  THE HOSTILE CROWD BECOMES A gauntlet we must walk. Of white faces in ugly contortions, citizens of this town yelling to go mind our own town's business, swearing and cursing, spitting, eyes veined red with hatred, glazed hard in the fires of bigotry. From children coached in prejudice to unknowing elderly who never asked a question of themselves in all their closed lives, they are screaming for our blood.

  Cops are spaced in front of them with their own glares and sneers at us. Nigger shits, nigger of every contemptuous name in the limited verbal repertoire of a species who have beaten, shot, locked up and framed a million times those of dark complexion and Negroid features.

  The police FORCE. Big, strapping, paunch-bellied, muscle-swollen, bristling with arms and hardwood and steel restraints, their badges showing membership of a gang with special powers and a list of exemptions from crimes they commit. Look at them: spilling over in frustration at no excuse, yet, to inflict their force upon these violators of their fixed assumptions.

  As we march on.

  My father has been dignified, all lifted head and set walking pace saying hardly a word in our march from the town outskirts, holding up placards demanding an end to every discriminating practice and act of injustice, singing We Shall Overcome, symbolic songs of protest unknown to me as likely the only foreigner.

  The mad courage of this public protest by a hated minority in a town infamous for being the bombing capital of the western world, a last bastion of Ku Klux Klan who have blown up Negro churches and the houses of civil rights protesters just like us, murdered Negroes at will, with the tacit backing of city hall and police.

  Like at Whitecave, I see church spires, crosses, constructions for folk to gather and pay homage to God. I see His true believers, bulging eyed, wanting unholy death for all of us who are not their own.

  We pass within touching, spitting range of the Klansmen who my father recognises and points out. They've got a certain look, he says, forced by the din to speak in my ear. Mirrors of a community, men who snarl and ooze hatred, women who spit venom and verbal missiles at us, who scream like banshees, shriek like witches let loose from the Dark Ages: Die, neeggahs — Die!

  Die, rot in he-ell, drown in your own sewers, burn in Satan's eternal inferno, a plague be upon you, you're monkeys not humans. On and on the insults and dire dark hopes spew forth, like some self-chosen exorcism of evil, except to them it feels like goodness and deepest desire for racial purity expressed.

  I need not ask what I am doing here. It is simple: I am one of these people, marching. They are of theirs, howling at us.

  Like molasses down the centre of creamy, frothing white, we pour into the town square. Our orderly column under instructions to remain passive, surrounded by a maelstrom of yelling, screaming, spitting whites closing in as if trying to crush us through greater mass and infinitely greater fury. Like God's avenging angels soon to wipe us off the face of His good earth.

  Now an expectant hush upon the crowd as we arrive. Then a great howling, cackling collective laughter breaks out, like let-loose patients of an insane asylum.

  And we on the inside soon see why: the statue of the confederate soldier on a marble plinth has live guards — in striped uniforms. Toting billy clubs. And black like near every one of us, excepting myself and a handful of whites come down from the north to join the good fight.

  Go on now, fight your own like y' always do, neegahs! Tear each other's throats out! Save us the trouble! Y'all soon be joinin 'em, if you ain't in your graves!

  Word races along to us that prisoners — Negro prisoners — have been brought in from the notorious Parchman Farm Prison to guard the symbol of white supremacy, that statue of proud Southern soldier fighting Negro liberation, prepared to die rather than see slavery abolished back when this country was torn in two over the issue. Knowing the marchers will not turn against their own, least not prisoners, yet hoping to see us break ranks, wage civil war against one another.

  A police van arrives and cops with large dogs on leashes spill out the back, changing the tone of the crowd to a throaty glee. Canines bark and strain as pale-complexioned humans bellow for them to tear us to bits, rip our throats out, gobble up our black balls, feast on nigger meat. As if especially trained to attack only dark-skinned flesh, the dogs froth, mad-eyed with want.

  When my father asked if I wished to join in a protest march I was afraid, of course I was. Not just afraid but embarrassed, at joining a cause when I'd not earned my stripes — the kind you get from flailing by whips.

  Marion Williams, the Piney Woods preacher's wife, started to sing up front at the feet of the statue. A Negro spiritual, a Christian song in praise of God, near drowned out and yet the singing could be discerned; I only had to stay fixed on the figure of the big woman on the stone steps and move my mouth to her silenced lips and know our voices were ringing from great soaring mountaintops. That's how it felt.

  How I felt, a Maori, here a white man in most folks' eyes. But son of this man beside me, putting arm over a son's shoulders. His voice was shouted down too, but I could f
eel the vibrations of his vocal cords enter my body, strengthen me. Lift me.

  They told me, too: this may be one of the last times, my son. So make it a time of true courage. True love, for each other, for suffering mankind.

  My every instinct sensed this, though mind refused to give it words.

  Not that we felt the mob would turn on us. Not with the national press here, with the heavily armed National Guard in large numbers, and supportive fellow whites down from the north acting at last on guilt and a sense of duty to fellow American citizens. Still I sensed something of a final process under way that, no different from any inevitable event, would take place.

  Might be why I had to keep wiping at my eyes, with no real reason to shed tears, while the rest were still singing and smiling and rocking gladly as they did.

  I looked at my daddy and it was as though he had moved a distance, even as he had got so close my arm reached partway round his waist.

  Even when he smiled down on me, from his loftier stature born of this Southern experience, by the war he fought for this nation, by the love experience with my mother. That too, all of it pouring out of him, this feeling of certainty he was saying goodbye. Not now, not this minute, nor this day. But sometime, soon.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  SHIT. THAT'S WHAT JESS SAYS looking in the rear vision where he's kept vigil from the first day we sat together in this car. Starts shaking his head.

  Tells me, don't be turning around. Moments later he says, motherfuckers. They trying to come alongside.

  Turns the mirror back to my ownership as I'm driving, at his earlier perplexing insistence. Here they drive on the opposite side to what I'm used to.

  Without being instructed, I speed up. The lights drop back, but not by much and they surge back at us again. I'm wondering again why my father has given me the wheel.

  He says, son? I never wished so much not be a nigger in the South with my only son not born and raised in this godforsaken state of Mississippi, this peculiar nation of men who claim us the most free on God's earth, when no black person is close to free.

  I ask, is it that bad?

  Jess says, worse than that. This is not a following, it's a mission.

  Right outside my window the headlight glare becomes a vehicle as it comes alongside. I see the outline of a person that turns into the face of a man lit from their interior light, I guess deliberately. His features are a white man's. Wearing expression only from the South. I know that already. He could have been in that gauntlet today of Negro-hating white folk.

  My father in urgent movement the other side, rustle of clothing, clack of metal against metal. Can feel the energy coming off him like heat rays.

  To my left the man looms up stabbing a finger, eyes bulging. Same as we've seen in daylight today, made worse by the tiny glow of eerie light in their vehicle. No sign of a gun — yet.

  Putting distance between us for however long it takes them to surge back at us, I get this thought: I am my mother's blood too: Maori. I am Maori. I am also Scots, a bit of Irish. They were warriors too. They knew oppression. Since when did they stop being warriors?

  You driving.

  I sure am.

  You driving.

  What I'm doing.

  Cross the centre line.

  What?

  Get into the other lane.

  You what?

  No one else but us and them on the road.

  And you'll be doing — what?

  You keep saying what. Please, just shift to the opposite lane.

  You for real?

  Please, Mark. Motherfucker rednecks not going to be popping off at my son. We got to get you back in one piece, same state you arrived. Your momma, son. The least I owe her is to get her son back alive. My son too.

  Just cross into the opposing lane?

  Yeah.

  And if someone's coming our way?

  Got a mile of straight out front. Be all over by then.

  What all over?

  He looks across, repeats himself. You driving.

  I accelerate and shift the wheel hard down to go other side of the road. Different feeling entirely on the wrong side of the road.

  Good. Now let them come again.

  You fucken crazy?

  Mark, we keep talking and my fear's going to take over. Let-them-come. I ease off the speed. Jess is turned away, though I know he has a gun.

  I had never seen a gun, not in anger, just hunters' rifles, till I came here. Never even had a dream I shot someone. Done everything else: flew, breathed and talked underwater, scaled tall buildings with bare hands, all the heroic impossible. But guns never figured.

  Suddenly my father disappears, diving over into the rear seat. Window winder far side going down at speed, letting in engine roar, our own tyre noise, the night, this life some have no choice but to lead.

  My father says fuckers! Now you got the man to deal with. He speaks it as wid. Adds, man and his son. Says it like the word sun. Like brightest light of all, lighting our way on this dark night.

  He utters other things, a stream of words in a language of here, his own, not mine. I am what I was raised as. I don't have to understand it. I am not Negro, coloured or black. I was raised a Maori.

  If I am not myself first, I can never be of and for my father.

  In the rear vision my father rises up like any ambusher. Like any runaway slave turned the tables on his pursuing white masters. Your turn now! Three hundred years long of waiting for this moment.

  The Maori warrior in me screams from one thousand years long. I yell, Klan motherfucker bitches! Like an angry black man would. Like any man with pride.

  In then out of their flood-lighting headlights we go. Air pulses and reverberates from the downed window where my father hunches looking just over the sill.

  Hit the brakes!

  So I do: hard enough to make an abrupt slowing and bring our pursuers into line with my father's readied weapon.

  Shoot them! Cut off their heads! I scream. We'll cook and eat the scum! The Maori warrior coming out.

  Everything gets crystal clear. As if I'm gazing into our deepest Waiwera boiling pool at every silica bump, like sponge growth in a boiling medium meant to make life impossible.

  As if the algae my mother says are miracles of life on the edges of boiling water have found ways to survive right inside the monster.

  That's where we are: inside a boiling hellhole still alive, still with intent and cunning and our manhood still intact.

  Gunshots, one-two-three.

  In the mirror the headlights wobble, veer violently. More shots from my father's gun. The vehicle shape lurches then disappears, headlights like a rearing, careering wild animal going down.

  Gun it!

  Down the highway we go, beams spreading the night, insects like tiny avengers sent to slow us, splattering the windscreen to make wet organic mud. Silence upon us. My ears echo the shots.

  Then the shaking starts. At the knees and spread up to my trembling hands.

  I think my daddy has just killed two men.

  I say in a throat-catching voice, Pops? What now?

  Don't know why I call him that, just can't say Dad or Daddy.

  He gives ghost of a satisfied smile — no, a righteous smile. Heaves a sigh with sob in it. My life — our lives — just changed. Soon be a wanted man — men.

  A wanted nigger, along with his nigger cohort father.

  I think maybe hell does exist: the living version. Yet feels like heaven, it surely does.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  WE PARTED NOT EXACTLY FRIENDS. He threatened me with violence at my saying I didn't want to return home, be running away like a coward. He told me I had no choice.

  Through contacts he had put different licence plates on his Chevy and he drove me to Atlanta, where we stayed a night in a modest hotel, went to a music club; I got drunk, he got stoned.

  We said our strained goodbye in the morning, nothing else to say, not when it was a
ll taken by the doing and Jess wanted me out of danger. I took a taxi to the bus station, so fearful of being nabbed. Though I would have been prepared to fight to the last alongside my father. Jail would have been a living hell.

  DOUBLE MURDER! newspaper headlines blared as I waited for my bus. Two known members of the notorious Ku Klux Klan shot dead by unknown assailants. Suspects believed to be driving a 1961 model Ford Chevy. The two bodies found in mangled wreck off Highway 54 to Whitecave suffered gunshot wounds to head and chest. Possible suspect believed by police to be involved with civil rights protests. No person or persons has yet been named.

  I waited for my bus to take me out of there, starting the long journey back to the safety of my homeland, my tiny country with its affairs so minor and petty as to be farcical in comparison. Yet when I got back there, was never more pleased to be home.

  I found ways to follow events back in my father's place of raising. Day after day, for two months, I read every newspaper end to end, occasionally finding mention of the crime and knowing they had a name: Jess Tobias Hines.

  Mrs Mac made telephone contact with a library in Jackson, Mississippi. I didn't say I drove the vehicle the night of that double murder, though maybe she guessed. The library in Jackson said the fugitive was still on the run. No mention made of a New Zealander.

  Things had changed at home — greatly, in my mother's case: she'd left Henry and gone to live with a wealthy Pakeha businessman. Told me she didn't know what living was till he opened her eyes, how it wasn't so much the higher quality of life money brought as much as the knowledge. Like his library, which she was coming to enjoy more and more.