Them

by Nathan McCall

  But times had changed, too much, if you asked Billy Spivey. Leaning forward in the chair now, he regarded Barlowe coldly and thought to himself: A man can take only so much abuse in life. Even a dog will bite if it gets pushed too far.

  Billy Spivey was nobody’s dog.

  “Tell ya what, Barlowe.” A thick vein throbbed in his temple now. “I’ll go and tawk to the big boss bout your raise and see what we can come up with.”

  “I’d preciate that.”

  Billy ground his teeth a little.

  Barlowe rose from his seat. In spite of himself, he glanced again at that flag and tugged his belt, hitching his pants up a bit.

  “I’d also preciate if you lemme know somethin soon as you can.”

  Billy spit hard in the cup and clenched his jaw. “Will do, Barlowe, m’boy. Will do.”

  That said, Barlowe left. Billy sat there swiveling in his chair. He swiveled and stared dreamily off into space, wishing he was back in Louisiana.

  Later, Barlowe sat on the back porch with a cold beer, listening to the pigeons coo. He sat there and pondered the meeting with Billy Spivey. Would Spivey do what he’d promised? Would he push for that raise like he said he would?

  Who was he kidding? Billy was no friend of his. Spivey was no friend at all.

  Barlowe pulled out a newspaper and began reading. The front page featured an article about the president, mouthing off again about democracy and war. Democracy and war. Huummmph. Barlowe felt so alone in his outrage sometimes.

  He crumpled the paper and tossed it in the trash.

  He took another swig and, out of the corner of one eye, picked up a movement in the yard. He turned and saw Viola stagger from around the side of the house. A dark, haggard woman with a cheap, fluffy wig and bloodshot eyes, she flung an irritated glance his way. She trod through the pathway and disappeared. Minutes later, The Hawk trailed behind, trying his best to catch up to his woman. He wore wrinkled pants and a sports jacket with one flap of the side pocket tucked in and the other hanging out. The jacket was snug and short at the sleeves. Its single split in the rear rode up his backside.

  The Hawk made it as far as the pathway and fell down near the house next door. He rolled over and stretched out on his back, resting on his elbows. The pigeons cooed. He stared in Barlowe’s direction, straining to track the sound of the birds. Exhausted from the short hike from Davenport’s house, The Hawk closed his eyes and keeled over in grass left damp from a recent rain. He fell into a deep sleep, right there between the two houses.

  Watching the drunk, Barlowe smiled, warmed by the thought of something his mama said years ago, when he was a child. Once, when she’d caught him throwing rocks at two staggering winos, she scolded him.

  “Boy, don’t do that.”

  “They just drunks, mama.”

  “No, baby. They not just drunks. They people, just like you and me.”

  “Then why they drink alla time?”

  “They drink cause they hurtin. They cryin inside.”

  Every time Barlowe saw drunk people after that, he looked for the tears. Then, when he grew older he learned better how to spot the pain. He searched for the sadness in the eyes, or the deep stress lines etched onto the faces.

  Now that he’d done some living himself, he understood how life could break a man down. He had seen enough in life to know: There was a thin line between them and him.

  He stared again at the man passed out on the ground. Though he never would admit it out loud, he envied The Hawk in a certain way. The Hawk had the courage—or whatever you wanted to call it—to live the way he damn well pleased, even if it meant doing nothing but staying tore-down-pissy-drunk. As wasteful as that life seemed, it carried a certain appeal. It seemed a kind of perverse liberty. That was it; a form of freedom. Barlowe didn’t feel anything close to that.

  Eventually, The Hawk woke up and rose to his feet. He brushed dirt and grass from his clothes, then unzipped his pants and leaned against the side of the house next door. Stretching a hand above his head to support himself, he peed against the wall.

  “Hey!” Barlowe barked. “Take that somewhere else!”

  The Hawk glanced nonchalantly over his shoulder and kept on peeing. When he was done, he zipped his pants and raked his fingers through his hair. Taking his sweet time, he stuffed his shirttail halfway inside his pants. He squared his broad shoulders and, with some ceremony, hocked up a glob of phlegm from his whisky throat.

  He spit, then turned on his scuffed heels and resumed his journey, staggering down the pathway toward home.

  Chapter 13

  A full month passed before Barlowe got word on his request for a raise. He was preparing to run another print job, when Billy Spivey appeared in the doorway to his office and waved him in. Barlowe got there and stood before Spivey, who sat half-sideways on top of his desk, that big bright flag hanging behind him like some hulking bodyguard.

  “Hey, Barlowe, m’boy.”

  “Billy.”

  “Got some good news for ya.”

  Barlowe waited.

  “I got you that raise you ast for.”

  Billy smiled. Barlowe waited.

  “Boss said they’ll give ya two percent.”

  Barlowe frowned. “Two percent? You serous, Billy?”

  Spivey nodded. “You know they been raisin hell tryin to cut costs round here. Nobody but you is gettin an extra raise.”

  “Two percent. That don’t seem like much, Billy.”

  “Hell, it’s better’n nothin. Right?”

  Barlowe tried to do the math in his head. After Caesar took his cut off the top, he figured, there wouldn’t be much to speak about. William Crawford had said that if he was inclined to sell he would require at least five thousand down. With a two percent raise it would take a million years to raise that much.

  When he got ready to sell, Crawford wouldn’t likely wait too long. When it came to his money William Crawford was not a patient man.

  Now Spivey spit in his cup and shrugged. “Best we can do, Barlowe. What can I tell ya?”

  Barlowe stared at Billy. Spivey had very close-set eyes, so that if you looked at them a long time, the two began to look like one great, big Cyclops eye. That’s what he looked like to Barlowe then. A Cyclops.

  Worse still was Billy’s facial expression. The expression was close to a smirk. Actually, it appeared he might bust out laughing any second now.

  “What can I tell ya?”

  Barlowe stared at the Cyclops. Again, the smirk. After a moment, Barlowe turned and walked away, thinking, This man from Lousana. What can you rightly expect from Lousana? Then: And I’m from Georgia. Same difference as Lousana.

  Barlowe went back to his press thinking about how much Billy Spivey reminded him of some of the white folks he’d come across in Milledgeville. It didn’t make him homesick any.

  Milledgeville was a small and small-minded town, a place where a dark man’s dreams—if he had managed to muster any—were best tucked away, lest they be stomped on, ground out like a cigarette butt, by men like Billy Spivey.

  For Barlowe it had been that way from the beginning. It had been that way since before the beginning, starting with his mama and daddy, and theirs before them, and running on up for several generations. In all that time, the only distinction his family achieved was a tragic footnote in the city’s dreadful history: His daddy’s oldest brother was the last man known to be lynched in those parts.

  “Had somethin to do wit a white gal is all I know.”

  Barlowe’s daddy recounted the sketchy details a thousand times, taking care to ensure due warning was stamped in his boys’ woolly heads: White girls, off limits. No eyeballin, greetin, embracin, shunnin, kissin, or otherwise touchin the fruit.

  “Seems is always a white gal,” his daddy would say.

  His daddy told them other things, too: about how his family were called sharecroppers but were driven like slaves; about how his days as a young boy felt happy, only because he didn’t k
now any better; about how the nicer white folks nearby, descendants of a plantation family (and likely undeclared kin to the Reeds), would stop in on their way to town and give his brothers and him a ride to the movies. They’d buy their tickets at separate windows, enter the theater through separate doors and watch the same film from separate sections.

  Afterward, they’d all meet up on Nigger Street. Officially listed as Mckintosh Road, Nigger Street marked the section in town where black folks cavorted. They played washboards and harmonicas on corners, sometimes with smiling white folks looking on; they sold chitlin dinners and ran numbers, round the clock.

  By the time Barlowe came along, the Jim Crow signs had been grudgingly removed. But since time stood still as daybreak in Milledgeville, Jim Crow’s ghost carried on.

  For decades, Nigger Street remained a vital nerve center, a place where furtive glances said more than spoken words; a place where white men searched out black flesh, undercover; a place where moonshine money was muscled out by crack cocaine.

  Among black folks, those who could find a way bailed out of Milledgeville. You didn’t leave as much as you fled that place. Those fortunate enough to muster the gumption to escape were considered a success in life, even if they moved no more than two counties away.

  When he came of a certain age, Barlowe weighed a future dangled between two options that ran jagged as the dirt road leading from his family’s house: He could leave, abandon that wretched town, or like so many others, remain and watch his spirit rot.

  For those who stayed there were ways to earn a subsistence living: backbreaking farm work or crushing labor down at the local chalk mines. People who shoveled chalk onto railroad cars stumbled home evenings, dead tired and flour-faced, smothered in the yellow dust. It blanketed their clothes, polluted their lungs, burned their eyes, clouded their brains.

  If not farming or chalk mining, there was sometimes work to be had at the state mental hospital. It appeared most patients at the crazy house had either fled, were fleeing or were plotting escape. They seemed to possess more get-up about them than many of the locals who spent whole lifetimes mired in the muck that was Milledgeville.

  Somehow, Barlowe always knew he would leave. Even as a child he’d sensed there was something horribly wrong with that town. He saw it in the stooped shoulders and rutted lives of the black people he knew. Saw it in the haughty air of well-doing whites. He saw the outline of something broad, amorphous, yet rigidly structured, that no one in Milledgeville could honestly justify or explain—not the shouting preachers who spread outrageous myths about a vengeful God; not the half-taught teachers who dispensed glorious Old South fabrications; and certainly not his parents, who were too busy living the wrongness, too steeped in it, to wrench free of its stubborn hold.

  Despite its power to grind ambition, Milledgeville lacked the force to contain Barlowe Reed. He possessed in him a spirit of dogged rebellion, passed down perhaps from dark cargo shipped from a continent he might never see.

  Besides, there were too many big questions churning in him. What sense would it make to seek answers to big questions in the same damned place that had dredged them up?

  Yes, Barlowe left Milledgeville long before his bags were packed. The actual going was merely ceremony. Having learned a printing trade, he worked at a small shop and saved his money. When he’d stashed enough to float for six months clean, he visited his mama’s grave, then trudged five miles to the bus station and caught the gray dog to Atlanta.

  In one month, he’d landed his first printing job. In three months, he moved from a rooming house to a small apartment. He bought used furniture and an old piece of car and scoured the big city on his days off work.

  He liked Atlanta for all it offered, though some of the well-doing black folks puzzled him. They seemed too contented, too busy celebrating a victory that was still incomplete. Some appeared deliriously relieved simply to have found a hell at least cooler than the ones they’d left behind—in Tuscaloosa, Alabama; in South Bend, Indiana; in Boston, Massachusetts—or wherever else they had fled.

  A cooler hell. Standing at his printing machine, Barlowe reminded himself that he had come to Atlanta seeking more than that. He thought again about what his boss had said. Two percent. Billy Spivey wanted—no, expected—him to make peace with a cooler hell.

  Barlowe cleaned the rollers and wiped a printing plate for the next run. He switched off his press lamp, wiped his hands and tossed the ink cloths into a nearby laundry box.

  A cooler hell. The thought of that was too unsettling. Barlowe left work early and went on home.

  As he stepped up the walkway leading to his place, a car crept slowly up Randolph Street and stopped in front of the house. A late-model Lexus, the car had a Coldwell Banker sign attached to the door. There were four white people inside. Barlowe stopped and waited to see what they wanted. The white folks peered past him and studied the house; his house. He could see them talking inside the car. A woman sitting behind the wheel appeared to be pointing. Barlowe guessed she was a real estate agent. While she spoke, the passengers, a man and a woman with a toddler in her lap, listened, nodding every now and then.

  The people eventually noticed Barlowe. The woman behind the steering wheel waved.

  Barlowe shot them a hostile glare.

  After a brief moment, the driver pulled slowly away.

  Chapter 14

  “Go home!”

  “What?!”

  “I gotta go to sleep. Go home!”

  “You go to hell, Davenport!”

  Nobody said Davenport’s name like Viola. She seemed to spit out the name, especially when she was drunk. Actually, his first name was Paschal. Paschal Davenport. But he had dropped the first part since his days in the navy, when his superiors called enlisted men by their last names. He had heard his last name barked so many times during the course of service to his country that he kept using it long after his military discharge.

  Davenport’s house had long been the neighborhood watering hole for a select few drunks that included Viola and The Hawk. It was Davenport’s house—and the promise of steady drink and social exchange—that kept them marching back and forth through the pathway next to Barlowe’s place.

  This latest visit had started the day before, a Saturday, and gone on through the entire night. The pints and quart bottles of liquor they’d consumed had taken their usual toll. Everybody was blind-high, paralyzed.

  Davenport could drink with the best of them, so he wasn’t the least bit ashamed when his body began shutting down after daybreak. The floor seemed to be rising up to meet him, which meant it was time to pack it in.

  “Y’all ain’t gotta go home, but you gotta get the hell outta here!” He had heard somebody say that somewhere once. He liked the way it sounded. “Y’all ain’t gotta go home, but you gotta get the hell outta here!”

  “I ain’t goin nowhere!” A sliver of drool ran down Viola’s lip. “Play Ray Charles!”

  Davenport wanted to cuss Viola, but he took care not to offend The Hawk. He and The Hawk had been fast friends since their navy days.

  He didn’t want to offend the other guests, either—two women and a man who had dropped in to visit. Slouched in worn-out chairs around the room, the visitors listened to the testy exchange. They wanted to hear Ray Charles, too, but as relative outsiders in the drinking clique, they weren’t qualified to make special requests.

  Besides, Davenport was a big man. He could get rough when he wanted. So the visitors kept quiet and waited patiently for the next round of drinks to flow.

  Still, Viola was in a nasty mood. She craved a sad song to match her spirit. “Dammit, play Ray Charles!”

  Only The Hawk seemed to hear her now. The others reclined in various states of semiconsciousness. The Hawk roused himself from a sunken chair with the stuffing busting out. He went to the old turntable and placed the needle on the record. The scratchy needle grated his peace, but Ray Charles calmed him down:

  It’s cryin ti
me again, you’re gonna leave me…

  The drunks all sat quiet, listening, thinking back to more coherent days. When the song ended, Viola waved to her man, signaling it was time to go on home. The Hawk got up and followed her to the door.

  The other visitors got up, too. They took Viola’s departure as a sign that the party was winding down. They all shuffled through the doorway and scattered across the yard.

  On the way out, nobody bothered to shout good-bye to the host. Dead tired and sick of Viola’s disrespect, Davenport had stumbled back to his bedroom and collapsed onto his bed.

  A few blocks away, Barlowe sat on the back porch, drinking his morning coffee and listening to the pigeons coo. He had the day’s newspaper and a bunch of books, along with a big dictionary, spread across a table.

  Lately, he had been thinking. He’d been thinking that his life didn’t reflect everything going on inside his head. So he had gone to the library and gotten some books. He thought he would read a few biographies this time, to learn about other people who might have stumbled through a chunk of their lives, then somehow come upon their intended path.

  He didn’t expect to get religious about it, but there was a religious aspect to his yearning, just the same. From time to time he went to the Ebenezer Baptist Church on Auburn Avenue. He went partly because the place was tied to Martin Luther King, and partly to see what the preacher had to say. The preacher seemed to talk a lot about purpose. Purpose and direction. From what Barlowe could gather it all came down to this: Whether God was your compass or whether you relied on your own internal lights, which, according to the preacher, was no more useful than a two-dollar street map from a foreign land.

  As for maps and life, Barlowe was disturbed by the notion that a man could lose his way and veer off his path. He was troubled by the idea that a man could spend a whole lifetime traveling down somebody else’s road.

  What a shame if he, Barlowe Reed, had taken a wrong turn somewhere and was one or two streets over from where he should be. Or what if he was in the wrong city, state or even country? It seemed a definite possibility that he had wound up in the wrong country. America didn’t seem a natural fit.