Albert laughed, “I didn’t know you were a philosopher.”
I closed my purse, straightening my back and head. “I’ve read Camus, in addition to Sigmund Freud.”
“My, my, you continue to surprise me. The French existentialist, no less.”
“I’ve made a few astute observations of my own.” I raised my head even higher.
“So what did you think of The Plague? Or did you read something lighter, such as The Stranger?”
I turned my head and stared into the depths of the San Francisco Bay, which I always found as profound and hypnotic as Camus’ literature. I couldn’t take my eyes off of it.
“I could never understand why he shot the Arab on the beach,” I said. Little did I know, Andronicus had just shot two men.
Albert kept his eyes on the road. He’d just spotted the car that passed him, a red Ferrari.
“And for no particular reason. That’s the core of existentialism. There’s no reason for anything we do,” Albert said.
“So why do I study so hard for my exams? Why am I in this car with you?” I rolled down my window a bit to feel the fresh bay breeze. “Why live?” I shook my head, my long hair flowing in the cold breeze.
“Beats dying,” laughed Albert.
“Plus, I’d never see you in a lavender wig again in a conga line.”
“You should write a book, Miss Inny. Now, roll that window back up. You’re giving me a chill!”
I gave a little snort of laughter. Then, I started going through my purse again. Before I could count my money, we arrived at the train station. I jumped out of the car. Albert grabbed my suitcase and jumped out with agility. He grabbed my hand. He couldn’t help but feel his heart strings flutter. I guess the emotion of the moment got the better of him. He grabbed me by the waist and kissed me on the mouth. “I’m going to miss you!”
“I’ll be back soon. But I’ll miss you more than you can imagine. My love!” I took my suitcase from him and ran towards the train. Albert ran after me, exhilarated by my latest declaration.
Andronicus ran right behind them, a bit off to the left, with a few other passengers in front of him. His face, bloodied and grotesque from his encounter with Crutches and Ira, caught the attention of an occasional passerby, but no one stopped him.
I kissed Albert goodbye, holding a history book Adrianne had given me in one hand and the suitcase in the other. I got on the train and sat down in the first empty row of seats I could find, so I could read without distraction. I was well into the Battle of Waterloo, a historical account of Napoleon and Lord Wellington fighting one of history’s most famous battles that would change the course of nineteenth century European history. Bloody limbs and disembodied heads flew through the air after cannons roared in this face-to-face, saber-to-saber tale of a battle that still connotes defeat, for Lord Wellington defeated the great Napoleon’s army against all odds and by a thread. It all had to do with timing and soldiers who would fight to the death.
Andronicus staggered along the aisles of the train until he spotted me in my seat, engrossed in the Battle of Waterloo. He laughed under his breath. Then, he sat in the empty seat next to me, waiting for me to acknowledge his presence. Napoleon’s elite cavalry, which included a few women passing for men, charged Lord Wellington’s line of battle-hardened soldiers, hidden just behind a rise in the terrain that would give them the upper hand and finally save the day for the British, Germans, and Belgians who fought tenaciously with one goal: to defeat the man who had almost conquered all of Europe and Russia. I caught my breath.
Andronicus’ emotions played havoc with his senses. Elated from having shot the miserable Crutches, whom he considered one of his many adversaries, he shifted his considerable weight in an attempt to get my attention. Annoyed that someone was interrupting my concentration, I turned away from him and read in an uncomfortable position, right under the reading light above me. Andronicus fumbled for a handkerchief to wipe the blood from the facial wound Crutches had given him. He elbowed me hard in the process. I turned even further away from him. Clearing my throat in annoyance, I kept on reading as Napoleon’s best cavalry lost its first line of horses and riders, whose fallen bodies created chaos. The second line tripped and fell over the downed horses and riders and were taken down themselves. No amount of heroism could change the course of this part of the battle. I read on, transfixed by mixture of valor and violence.
Meanwhile, Andronicus, the opposite of valor but quite definitely violent, sat within elbow-rubbing distance of another of his adversaries – Mrs. Johnson’s uncooperative daughter. He’d never forget, in his tiny mind, the night she’d told him she’d do it with him, then slid out from under his expectant body to… to the arms of Jim. He’d heard they’d dated for the rest of the summer and had even spent a week in Berkeley together. He was infuriated that she was currently ignoring him for a silly book… and had a black lover.
A porter made his way down the aisle, collecting tickets. When he got to me and Andronicus, I searched my purse and handed him my ticket with a polite ‘thank you.’ Andronicus had none, so he had to buy one.
“A ticket for Santa Barbara, please,” he growled. He searched for his wallet. “Could you come back in a minute, please? I can’t find my wallet.” The porter gave him a knowing look and moved on.
Shock ran through my brain. How could I help but recognize that curt voice? I lowered the Battle of Waterloo to look at the back of Andronicus Wyland’s head, hair tousled with dirt and blood in it. The incongruence of the valiant soldiers with the man who’d tried to rape me sent a chill down my spine.
The porter passed on to the next set of passengers, seated behind us, punching train tickets.
I swallowed hard as Andronicus leered at me with a slight snarl. He could’ve been a wild boar as far as I was concerned. I grabbed my book and purse and stood up. Andronicus grabbed me by the hips and pushed me back down.
“You… filthy… pig…” I breathed.
“Shut up!”
“Let me out of here!” I stood up, but he grabbed my book, teasing me with it.
“That’s my professor’s book!” I tried to grab it back, only to come close to his bloodied face. Disgust coursed through my body.
“Well, aren’t we the good little Berkeley student?” said Andronicus in a voice that dripped with sarcasm.
“I’m going to graduate,” I asserted, trying to wrest the book out of his hand behind his back.
“If you should live so long.”
Ire mounted in me, but I also felt cold, paralyzing fear. For a moment, I hesitated. That’s when Andronicus reached for his recently discharged gun, inside his jacket.
“Tickets, please,” said the porter, standing over us. He smiled until he saw the bloody gash on Andronicus’s forehead. “Do you need a doctor?” He drew back in surprise.
Andronicus fumbled for his gun. I saw it on the inside of his jacket. “He’s got a gun!” I screamed.
“Shut up, Bitch!” Andronicus put his hand over my mouth. I bit him. He yelled.
The passengers had already been watching the struggle, wondering if it were a lover’s spat. The porter turned and pulled the train’s emergency cord. Everyone was thrown forward as it screeched to a halt. Andronicus hit the seat in front of him. He dropped his gun. I scrambled for it. When the porter got there, I was pointing it at Andronicus.
“What… What’s this?” The porter turned pale as a ghost.
“He… He’s dangerous!”
Some of the passengers got out of their seats. When they saw a gun in my hand, they stopped dead in their tracks.
“Drop that gun!” An off-duty police officer who had been following the altercation pulled his own gun and pointed it at me. I dropped the gun, only to see Andronicus pick it up and fire at the police officer, who clutched his stomach and went down. The passengers screamed in panic.
Andronicus turned and faced the passengers. “Don’t move!” He grabbed me by the waist and forced me down th
e aisle. “This is where we get off, Cinderella!”
I took a deep breath, made a run for the doorway, and hurled myself onto the ground next to the train, praying I wouldn’t die. Rolling down the bank of dirt and brambles next to the train tracks, I ended up lying face down in some weeds. I knew I had to keep going, but my right arm hurt. Pain shot through it. I wondered if I’d broken it.
The thought that Andronicus would soon be behind me ran through my brain. I picked myself up and started to run, at a slow, nightmarish pace, panic-stricken.
Andronicus jumped off the train, rolled, and stood up. He looked both ways. He spotted me running through the underbrush and ran after me.
The porter jumped off and ran behind us. The safety of his passengers uppermost in his mind, he charged towards Andronicus.
Andronicus turned and fired his gun at the porter, who clutched his gut and pitched forward. I screamed and ran towards a highway in the distance. I ran as if the devil himself were chasing me, because Andronicus came as close to the Antichrist as anyone I’d ever known. I ran for dear life, invoking God, Jesus, and anyone who cared to save me.
Andronicus charged at full speed behind me, but the head wound sustained from Crutches’ metal rod was beginning to take its toll. Dizzy, he faltered, grabbing onto some weeds as he stumbled and fell. I ran on in sheer panic. I managed to reach the highway and started waving my arms at the cars.
Cars whizzed by me, the drivers leery of a woman waving her arms in the middle of the night on a highway. A Chevy sedan swerved off the road and came to a lurching halt. Two people were in it, a man and a woman. The woman opened the passenger door. I could see the outline of her form in the dark. She was wearing a thick woolen coat and a scarf. Her face was dark, but there was a look of concern of it.
“What’s wrong with you?” yelled the woman, frightened by the bizarre situation.
“Andronicus Wyland is trying to kill me!” I yelled back. I swept my long, matted hair off my face and tried to look more like a woman in jeopardy than a maniac waving her arms on the highway.
“Who?”
“This man… please help me!”
“Well, get in the car!”
The woman opened the back door for me. I jumped in and ducked down as if someone were about to grab me. My entire body was shaking from the trauma.
“Are you crazy?” asked the driver, a diminutive man wearing a Fedora.
“No. I’m in terrible trouble! This boy who tried to rape me got on my train and pulled a gun on me…”
At that instant, Andronicus appeared with the gun pointed directly at the car. “Let’s go!” I screamed.
The driver floored the accelerator and got back on the highway as fast as he could. I burst into tears from the ordeal.
“Now, now, tears won’t help. You need to go to a safe place,” said the woman.
“Could you take me to Berkeley?”
“That’s too far away. We’re from Richmond.”
“Could I call a friend when we get there?”
The man and women exchanged frightened looks. The woman shook her head. “I think you need to call the police, though, no telling what they’ll do!”
“Anything!” I began to sob.
The woman looked at me, now a mass of tangled dark blonde hair and tears. She tried to help me get the hair out of my face. “I don’t know. I just don’t know! How’d you get in this mess?”
“He pulled a gun on me on the train, so I jumped off and ran…”
The woman looked at the driver and shook her head. “Do you expect me to believe that?”
“It’s the truth!”
I sobbed in the backseat of the sedan, searching for words they’d believe. “He’s a maniac.”
The man nodded at his wife. “We’ll put you in a taxi and they’ll take you to the police.”
“But you saw him!”
“They won’t believe us,” he said. They looked at each other with varying degrees of solemn despair.
“Why not?”
“They never believe black folks.” He shook his head. “No telling what they’ll accuse us of, once a gun is involved.”
The scenery whizzed by as we drove on the freeway. I looked at the worn-out upholstery in the car and realized these were not spoiled brats from Montecito. The man wore a very old fedora, and the woman was dressed a lot like my grandmother, plain and simple, with no frills. I began to warm to them.
“You’re good Samaritans.” I held my arm where it hurt most, at my elbow. I didn’t think it was broken.
The woman turned her head toward me. I could see she was at least middle-aged, and that she wore her age well.
“We believe in doin’ unto others as we’d have them do unto us,” she said with a plain-spoken simplicity that moved my heart.
“I wish there were more people like you in the world.” I fingered my elbow. I felt a sharp pain shoot up to my shoulder.
“Are you hurt?” she asked.
“Not badly. Look, just take me back to the train station. I’m trying to get home for Christmas with my family.”
“Where’s they from?”
“Santa Barbara.” I decided not to say Montecito, for fear of sounding snobbish.
“That’s pretty far from here, but we’ll be happy to take you to the train.”
I thanked them profusely. I was overjoyed by their kindness. I knew I could catch another train to Santa Barbara and had just enough to give them something for their time and trouble.
When I got out of their car and turned to shake their hands, they smiled at me with warmth. “It’s not every day a white person is so nice,” the man said.
“I love black people!” I effused. “My, um, fiancé is black!”
“You got to be kidding!” said the woman, whose name turned out to be Mabel.
“He’s an English professor at Berkeley!”
The woman’s smile turned to disbelief. “They ain’t got no black professors at Berkeley! You telling the truth?”
“His name is Albert Curtis. You can look him up in the school’s directory! It’s true. I swear on a stack of Bibles.”
They looked me up and down and started to laugh. “Great day in the mornin’, child, you’re a miracle. You got to come to our church!”
Now I was taken aback. I stepped back, clutching my purse to my side, or what was left of it, as it was as battered as me. It still had my wallet inside.
“Church?”
“The Glide Church, on Market Street, in San Francisco! It’s interdenominational. You’d love it there!”
“I’ll go there after I get home from Christmas, but now I have to run!” I stuck out my hand again and shook theirs with enthusiasm, eliciting huge smiles.
The train had just pulled into the station, so I turned and made a run for it, catching it just in time.
The last I saw of them was their big, warm-hearted smiles.
Chapter 18
Opening presents under the tinsel-laden Christmas tree with my parents and younger sister wasn’t as much fun as last year. We were laughing and cooing over our gifts, getting ready to call Grandma, in Arlington, who would break down and bawl her head off because we were so far away. Eyeing our chintz sofa and shag rug, the large chimney that we could hear a mockingbird sing into, I felt reassured, but I was mistaken.
Nope. This year, my arm was in a sling, broken at the wrist, not the elbow, when I’d hit the ground next to the train. My mother gave me a disapproving look.
“Innocence, what have we done to deserve this? You came home looking like a ragamuffin with a broken wrist that we can’t afford to pay for.”
“Now, Iris,” interceded my father, with little success.
“You should be married by now! We sent you to college to find a husband, and this is how you come home. And what about your nigger friend?”
“Don’t you dare call Albert a nigger! He’s Berkeley’s first black English professor and better than all of you put together in a Christma
s stocking!”
“You can’t return to Berkeley!” said my mother, hitting a high C on Berkeley. She was at her white supremacist best. Her pink chenille bathrobe highlighted her brunette hair and brown eyes, her porcelain white skin and natural beauty. My sister and I hadn’t come out as beautiful as she was, but we were a lot nicer.
“I have exams to take!”
The phone rang. My sister jumped up and answered it.
“It’s for you, Inny!” she squealed. She was always high-spirited and fun.
I jumped up and took the pink receiver from my little sister. Albert was on the other end of the line. My mother scowled at me when I cooed, “I’m so glad to hear from you!” She knew who it was. I saw her get up and come at me like a mad cow. She grabbed the phone, but I wouldn’t let her have it. As we struggled for possession, I yelled, “My mother’s here!”
In his neatly arranged studio apartment living room, Albert smiled and said, “Merry Christmas, Inny!”
My injured arm gave way. My mother took the receiver and yelled, “Leave my daughter alone!” She was at her fuming best.
“Could I please speak to Inny?” asked Albert in dulcet tones.
“If you come near my daughter if she goes back to Berkeley, I’ll kill you!”
Albert’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. “Really? I’m not that black, Mrs. Johnson.”
I heard him and started to laugh. My mother kept yelling insults into the receiver. When she wore herself out, I took it from her.
“Are you still there, Albert?”
Albert held the phone about six inches from his ear. He’d never heard such insults in his entire life.
“I am, but my ear just fell off.”
“Don’t listen to her. She’s from the South. She doesn’t know any better.” I winced as my mother tried to grab the receiver again. “My grandmother loves black people!”
“She does NOT,” yelled Mother. “Goodbye!” She hung up the phone.
“Grandma loves everyone except the Catholic priests who withheld absolution from dying people who wouldn’t pay for it!” I yelled.
“Black people are inferior! They don’t have enough brains to become a… a professor!” She walked towards my father, who was doing his best to ignore the whole scene. “Aren’t they, Craig?”
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