Five Smooth Stones

by Ann Fairbairn

  The bar in Hank's Place was in a recessed area at one side, and the quiet, older people sat there, the ones who had come to drink and talk. He slid onto a stool beside a copper-skinned man, an old man who, in spite of the nappiness of snow-white hair, could have passed for a southern European in the North. David could not remember ever seeing him before. He tried the same opening gambit he had tried with others earlier in the evening.

  After he had ordered a drink he said, "I think we're acquainted." The man was obviously a Creole, and David chose a Creole name. "Aren't you Alcide Guesnon?"

  The copper-skinned man smiled. The Creole accent was so thick David had difficulty understanding the rapid-fire words. He was not Alcide Guesnon, he said; his name was Placide Lafitte Smith.

  "Got the name wrong," said David. (Placide Smith had been there the night Gramp died; Emma Jefferson had said so. Easy does it, David; take it slow and easy.) "Knew I'd seen you, though, with my grandaddy, Li'l Joe Champlin."

  Two men were sitting on the other side of Smith, and David felt rather than saw them stir. Smith smiled and said, "I knew Li'l Joe. Heard about you."

  A wrinkled black face like an aging crow's peered around the Creole's shoulder. "Lawd!" said the face's owner, "Li'l Joe's grandbaby. How you been, boy? Ain't seen you since one night on the ferry, long time ago. Had us a sing."

  "Sure," said David. "Sure!" He knew that his lips were smiling. When we get to Heaven gonna sing and shout— That was the night Gramp gave him the typewriter. "I remember it well. How you been?"

  "Fine. Fine. Getting older. Man's always getting older." He laughed a high, aged laugh. "You getting way up there. Li'l Joe told me about it." He turned the wrinkled blackness of his face to the man on the other side of him. "Was you acquainted with Li'l Joe Champlin?"

  "You getting old, you sure getting old. I was here the night he come in, last week. I remember Li'l Joe from when I was a kid." The man had skin the color of light chocolate, and his eyes were gray.

  David signaled the bartender, indicated the three men on his right. He did not want Placide Lafitte Smith to leave, but he knew he must not seem too anxious. A young Negro shouldered his way to the bar on David's left, jostling him, saying stridently, "The same identical only make it double."

  The bartender said, "You want two? That chick you come in with ain't here no more."

  "See a lot, don't you, Slats? See too damned much sometimes. Let her go and give me my drink. Whiskey one. Double. Now."

  The bartender reached for a bottle, looking at David apologetically.

  "It's O.K.," said David. "Fix it for him. It's on me."

  The boy looked down at him. "What the hell!" he said. "What the hell? Much obliged."

  David moved his shoulders uneasily under the light topcoat. There was a full awareness now in his mind and nerves, even his muscles, that every man and woman in that noisy room knew that he was Li'l Joe Champlin's grandson, come down from New York for his grandfather's funeral; knew how and why Li'l Joe had died. The youth did not take his drink back into the room, but stood at the bar nursing the glass in his hand, alone, isolated from the noise, the high-pitched, tearing laughter of the women, the loud voices of the men, the blaring of the jukebox.

  He talked with the three seated men of the trouble in the schools, the tension in the streets and homes throughout the city, even those as far as the outer reaches of Canal Boulevard, lined with the residences of prosperous New Orleanians. The wife of the gray-eyed man worked in one of those homes. "Dagos," he said, and David winced. "And scared," the man went on. "First-generation Dagos, born over the water, and made the most of their money out of colored. Started with a li'l grocery store right here in the French Quarter. Colored money put 'em in that house; now they don't want no colored going to school with their grand kids, can't no colored walk up their front steps."

  "The hell they can't." The boy standing beside David seemed to feel that he was part of the conversation, although David had turned from him rather pointedly. He was staring into his drink. "The hell they can't. If there was enough of 'em, and they had the guts, they could." He laughed. "A colored man could walk up 'em fast enough if he had a scrub brush and pail in his hands. Any Negro in New Olreans can walk up a white man's front steps if he's going to scrub 'em." Your Tant' Irene always said, Offer the work to God, son.' David started, almost spilling his drink, at the boy's next words. " 'A clean spittoon on the altar of the Lord. A clean bright spittoon all newly polished'—" The boy finished his drink in one swallow. "Shit!" he said. The glass made an ugly sound as he slammed it on the bar. "Tomorrow morning I'm going to get me a nice clean spittoon, all polished up, going to take it out to those white whores at the schoolhouse, going to give those ofay bastards something to spit at besides a little black kid."

  David spoke quickly, to distract the youth. He sensed the bartender's fear and uneasiness at the rising note in the boy's voice. "You read Langston Hughes?" he asked the boy.

  "Sure. Read 'em all. Wright, Hughes, Cullen, Baldwin. I like Wright. He's got blood in his mouth when he talks."

  "Hughes hasn't?"

  "Not exactly. It's like this, see. Hughes, now, he's got gall, like when you're cleaning a turkey and split the gallbaldder and don't know you've done it. The meat comes out of the oven as clean and nice looking as any meat you ever saw. You don't taste the gall till it gets on your tongue."

  David signaled to the bartender, indicated the three men on his right and the boy on his left. He looked at the boy closely. The men would keep, even Placide, as long as another drink was coming up. His inner tensions were easing.

  "You read a lot?" he asked the boy.

  The youth said that, yes, he read a lot. Whenever he had chance. "Read," he said. "Read and think and get drunk and find a piece of tail somewhere. What the hell? Why not?"

  Who was the boy like? David's eyes did not leave his face. Who was he like?

  "You have a name?" asked David. "Or isn't it any of my business?"

  "Sure, I've got a name." The boy turned and looked down at David, a quick smile consuming sullen bitterness in its warmth. "Luke. Luke Willis."

  "Willis t Wait now—you got relatives up New England way?"

  Luke shrugged. "Who knows? Maybe. One of my great-uncles went up that way, I heard. My grandfather's brother. Lucky bastard."

  "If it's the same family I'm thinking of, you've got a relative nearer than that. On your grandma's side of the family. Creole name. Right up in Baton Rouge. A real pale relative."

  Luke nodded. "It's the same. And pale's not the word. Lily-white, that's what the bastard likes to think he is, lily-white and working like hell to keep the colored kids out of white schools, and he's got black blood-kin going to want into those schools. Wonder would he know 'em?"

  "Not out loud," said David. "Would you like to meet one of your kin from New England? He's down this way now."

  "Not if he's like—"

  "He's not. He's a great guy. Give me your address and telephone number. I'll get in touch with you."

  David knew now who stood beside him. It was David Champlin at eighteen; David Champlin without Gramp, without the Prof, with only—he learned after a few minutes of talk—a drunken father, his mother long since gone, no one knew where. Luke had finished high school that year; his father had retained enough authority to make him do that, but now his father was so far gone in drink that what Luke could bring in from odd jobs went for liquor and fines. It need only be a little while, thought David, only a little while—months, maybe weeks—before the odd jobs became jobs that would put him in jail, only a little while before the liquor he drank so expertly now became the substitute for everything his life lacked. All my people, he thought, all of us are sick unto dying from a slow poison, a radiation sickness no scientist ever unleashed.

  "Thursday," said David to Luke. "I'll call you Thursday morning." Brad had said he would drive down early Thursday morning and go direct to ALEC headquarters; he'd call him there, arrange a meeting.
He turned again to Placide and the others. "Another drink?" he asked.

  Henry Clay cackled. "I'm buying, son. This time I'm buying."

  "Right," said David. "You're buying."

  "Ain't you drinking? Ain't that the same drink you set down with?"

  "Sure I'm drinking. You just haven't been noticing, that's all. Doesn't take long to drink a straight one."

  Behind them a fight broke out; a woman screamed shrilly. Slats ran around the end of the bar, and a jet-black man built like a fat inverted triangle, all shoulders and belly and no hips, appeared suddenly from the back. There was scuffling followed by loud hoarse obscenity and then comparative quiet, and Slats came back to his station. "Damn fools," he said. "Goddamned fools. Get in jail times like these, God know what'll happen to you."

  David picked up his glass and took the drink in one searing swallow, backing it up with cold, clear ice water.

  "Any of you fellows around when Li'l Joe took sick?" He asked the question casually.

  "Placide was," said the man with the gray eyes. "Placide was right around the corner. Came a-runnin'."

  "Too late to help any," said Placide. David had to strain to catch the words through the thick accent. "Ambrose had him when I got there."

  "Somebody told me those two ofay bastards who roughed him up hang around the Bourbon Street joints." He was lying, trying to do it without emphasis, twirling his empty shot glass between his fingers.

  "Wouldn't know about that." Henry Clay was equally casual, wiping foam from his lips with a thin, thick-veined hand. "Don't get around much."

  The gray-eyed man with the light skin did not speak. David felt Placide gathering himself together to leave, pushing his glass to the back of the bar, taking his foot from the rail to push back his stool, picking up a half-smoked cigar from the ashtray. David tried not to sound urgent.

  "They tell me one of 'em had a scar, bad scar, right across his forehead." (You're lying, Champlin, and leading the witness besides. Objection overruled!) "You notice the scar, Placide? Almost knocked you down, didn't they, running away?"

  "Couldn't tell," Placide said. "Too dark." He was standing, relighting his cigar, then turning to edge his way between his stool and Clay's.

  David spoke quickly, in Creole he thought he had forgotten: "The tongue has no bones, eh, old man?"

  Placide turned and looked down at the younger man. He spoke in French. "Go home," he said. "Joseph Champlin is gone and at peace. Leave him at peace, Go home and get your rest. The scales are God's. Joseph Champlin was my friend." He laid a hand on David's shoulder. "Because of that you are my friend, too, and young."

  David watched him leaving, a short, old man with heavy shoulders and white hair who had once been powerful and strong, was still powerful and strong enough to give a good day's work for a day's pay. He was lost for a moment in a group at the periphery of the crowd; then he was standing at the door. He turned and looked back at David, and David thought that with a toga and that head, that dignity, he could be a Roman senator. The old man smiled, and over the noise in the room David heard him call, "Au 'voir!"

  O Lord! thought David. Lord, Lord, let thy people go! He stood, looked into the faces of the two men at his right, and saw nothing to give him comfort. The gray-eyed man said, "Better let it alone, son."

  Henry Clay laughed his high, cackling laugh again, and this time it rasped along David's nerves like a fingernail on slate. "That's right, David. He's telling you right. Don't do no good. We got all the trouble we needs all the time; now we got more."

  Only the voice of Luke, from where he stood beside him, saying under his breath, "I hope to Christ you find 'em, Champlin; I hope to Jesus Christ you find 'em," seemed the voice of a friend.

  ***

  The words of the boy Luke were an echo in his ears as he walked, slowly now, toward Ambrose's taxi stand, an echo that sounded back and forth in the caverns of his mind as the echo of the laughter of a boy and girl had sounded back and forth across a lake years before. Echo. Hadn't Echo been a nymph who pined away for somebody until nothing was left but her voice? That was all that was left of his quest, the echo of the bitter voice of a friendly youth, wishing him well, wishing him success. He knew now that it was hopeless. Even his own people, those who had known and loved Joseph Champlin and had cause to hate that which had destroyed him, were lined against him; their fear was the wall from which the sound of Luke's voice rebounded, hollow and hopeless. Only Rudy might have been able to make that bitter "I hope to Jesus Christ you find them" come true, and Rudy, too, was hidden from him, buried beneath the fear and apathy of the silent ones.

  He was too tired to take a bus and then walk from the bus stop. Ambrose's night relief was there, in the cubbyhole office, a surly, ill-spoken man whose surliness David welcomed because it meant he would not be expected to talk. He leaned back in the cab, elbow on the armrest, his hand covering eyes that were tired and smarting from too much smoke in too many bars. Tomorrow—God, don't let me think. Just for a few minutes, God, don't let me think—

  He paid the driver before he got out of the cab, tipped him well, and was rewarded by something that could have been a smile, and the wheels of the car were turning before he got the door closed. When Ambrose drove, he always waited until he saw a fare enter the house after dark. "Can't never tell," he'd say. "Might be someone sneakin' around—" A car was parked just past the entrance to his yard, and he hoped wearily it wasn't company next door, and a loud party. When there was a sound on the porch, the sense of movement, a low voice, he froze, his hand still on the gate, heart pounding, his whole being mobilized for defense, wasting only the infinitely split second in which he thought that it was Gramp. God, he had realized within an hour after arriving in New Orleans, gives man no absolute acceptance of loss, of death —left for a while those poignant, infinitely split seconds when it wasn't true.

  He heard his name, softly, "David—" from the porch, and moved forward warily.

  "Who is it?" His voice was sharp with warning.

  "It's me, man. Relax. It's Rudy, you dope—"

  They met in midpath, and David's arm was around Rudy's shoulder as he unlocked the front door and they entered the house. "God damn, man, you have to scare a guy to death?"

  "What else could I do? Sit on the steps and sing?"

  "Man, am I glad to see you!"

  "Been looking for me, I hear," said Rudy. The banter had gone from his voice, and it was slow and quiet.

  David didn't answer, went to the kitchen, and Rudy followed, sitting at the old table in the center, low on his spine, hands in his pockets, watching David set out beer and glasses.

  "My phone's been disconnected. I guess you found that out."

  "Hell, I know."

  "Hear you've been doing the bars, looking for me." David sank into the chair opposite, heavily, like an old man, and Rudy said: "You're sure brought down, man. I'm sorry about Gramp. Guess I don't have to say it. I'd have been at the funeral but I got me a little job, first one in a long time—"

  "They tell you why I was looking?"

  "Yes." There was no elaboration. "They told me."

  David waited. There was no sound in the room except the ticking of the clock on the shelf above the drainboard, then, sounding incongruously loud in the silence, the soft thud of four cat feet hitting the floor in David's room as Chop-bone came awake.

  At last Rudy spoke. "Forget it."

  "You know what you're saying?"

  "I'm not saying anything that's not right. I'm saying it right. I'm not saying forget what happened. I sure as hell can't. I'm saying forget what you wanted me for."

  "You saw it."

  "Not all of it. Only the—well—"

  "Only the end. Gramp dying—"

  "Yes."

  "You saw the guys who did it. Who frightened him to death."

  "Only from the back. And the side for a minute. They were moving real fast, man."

  "There was a knife."

  "David, forget i
t."

  "What about the knife?"

  "It never came near Li'l Joe. One of the bastards threw it on the ground, I suppose to make it look as though Gramp had it. There's a few cops around would protect an old man, even if he was colored. They wanted to make it look as though Li'l Joe had pulled it on 'em, I guess. Hell! Not even the roughest French Quarter cop's going to believe Li'l Joe Champlin carried a switchblade."

  Rudy reached deep into a trouser pocket, came up with something in his hand, and tossed it on the table in front of them where it showed stark against the scrubbed old boards. "There it is. There's a million like it in Louisiana. Or anywhere. Jesus, man. You're a lawyer. You got to know you can't trace a thing like that. Even with the police helping. And you know Goddamned well that isn't going to happen."

  "I know that. It's why I was looking for you. But now—"

  "Now you're getting a little sense in that skull?"

  "You call it sense?"

  "When it happened I didn't see anyone around but

  Negroes. Supposing you'd found those two bastards, how many of those Negroes would rush up to the police station and tell about how they saw two white punks bullying a black man? You got any idea the kind of stuff been going on around here these last few days? You got any idea what's coming? The Citizens' Council's going to call for a mass march on the school board—I heard one of 'em say it was a 'total war.' And you think anyone's going to pay any attention to something like this? People likely to get dead around here next two, three days. How much help you think you're going to get, how many—even those that saw it—going to pop up and say what they saw? How many? Didn't you find out? Didn't you find out tonight?"