by Joe Derkacht
“Well, now that we’ve met each other, I suppose I should let you return to your duties and I should attend to my own.”
“Reverend Johnny,” Champion said, rising to extend his hand over the desk.
“Reverend Champion,” he answered, receiving his handshake. “You may as well call me John or Johnny. That Reverend stuff tends to be a bit unwieldy between ministers, I think.”
“Call me Cedric,” Rev. Champion said in response, pronouncing his name with a long e. “Let me see you out.”
They walked side-by-side through the sanctuary. “Some of our church members seem to be quite close,” Rev. Johnny commented.
“A few, and there’d be more, frankly, if there hadn’t been a good deal of preachin’ against it by your predecessors,” Rev. Champion said. “There’s no tellin’ what work the Holy Spirit might have done here, except for that and the fact no preacher ever seems willing to stay for long at Flowers, like it’s a bus stop on the way to some place else.”
Rev. Johnny nodded thoughtfully, and the two shook hands again at the church’s oak doors.
“If there’s ever anything you would like to borrow from my theological collection, let me know, Johnny.”
“Thank you, that would mean a lot to me, Cedric. And you let me know if there’s anything I can do for you, brother.”
Cedric watched as Johnny descended the church stairs and crossed to the other side of Flowers Avenue. He shook his head to himself as he closed the door and made his way back to his office. It seemed like white men couldn’t or wouldn’t pronounce his name correctly. They all wanted to say it with a short e, make him into an Anglo-Saxon, he guessed.
He picked up his Bible and flipped it open at random, as he sat down at his desk. The first verse his eyes fell upon was, Who hath despised the day of small things?
“Not me, Lord,” he said, acknowledging to himself that meeting with the new pastor of Flowers Baptist might seem like a small thing to a lot of observers. He prayed it was a step in the right direction. Calneh certainly needed healing. The churches on Flowers Avenue and the people on both sides of the street would be a good place to start.
“Brother,” the white minister had called him, as they said their goodbyes. That was a good start, too. Brother. One simple, two-syllable word. It surprised him, how such a seemingly minor utterance, totally without affectation, made him feel. No other white minister, at least not in the South, had ever called him Brother and sounded like he meant it. He smiled, as he resumed his prayers, and sensed God smiling with him. There was no other explanation he could think of for the joy he felt flooding the room.
****
Chapter 5
Calneh Police Beat
March 16, 1969. A male suspect was apprehended at about 1:30 a.m. after he crashed his car through the fence of a residence located at 1003 S. Flowers and allegedly broke into the house and assaulted the occupants. 19-yr-old Mark John Davies was booked into City Jail and awaits arraignment on reckless driving, breaking and entering, assault, and drug charges. Davies is a recent returnee from a tour of duty in Vietnam with the Army.
The intersection of Flowers Ave. and S. Bougainvillea was not fashionable enough for most newspapermen to disturb their sleep, especially not at 1:30 on a Sunday morning. What with the riots of ’68 so fresh on everyone’s minds, it was a miracle the police showed their faces at 1003 Flowers, (not S. Flowers, as the Calneh Southerner News had it). Their appearance on the scene, and subsequent actions, skated sufficiently closely to disaster that the night’s story might well have appeared, instead, in magazines like Time and Newsweek as the trigger to Calneh’s second series of riots since Rev. King’s assassination.
The noise of screeching tires and breaking glass brought Ioletta Brown from a sound sleep, the first such sleep she had known since recovering from a lung condition brought on by a winter cold that dragged on and dragged on, until she despaired of life itself. The crash had to be loud, to cut through the noise of her thunderous snores. To her own way of thinking, she bolted upright from bed. But to most anyone else watching it would have looked more like one of those Marlin Perkins’ films where some poor creature desperately struggles to extricate itself from quicksand. The living room couch (her bed for the last few years on account of her legs refusing to carry her up the steep, narrow stairs to her own bedroom on the second floor of her shotgun-style house), groaned pitiably under her 400 pounds, the heart long gone out of its springs.
“Lord-a mercy,” she muttered. “What now?” With heroic effort, she heaved herself to her feet and for once did not find herself sinking back, which would have required yet another, more heroic effort to rise. Flannel nightgown gathered around her to ward off the night chill, she trundled her way in the dark to a side window and hunkered over for a good view of the street.
“Why, it looks like some drunken fool has driven into Stella’s yard!” She exclaimed, squinting hard. It was difficult to tell, with Stella’s place several houses down the block, and light shining only from the corner streetlamp next to Flowers Baptist.
Without warning, the living room light clicked on. She was startled to find herself staring at her own reflection. Lamarr, her son, had stumbled his way down from the upstairs bedroom in the dark, and peered questioningly at her.
“What’s the matter, Momma?”
“Turn that light out, boy!” She shot back. “I cain’t see what’s happenin’!”
Instead of turning the light off, Lamarr went to the window and gave it one mighty pull. Paint split all the way up the frame and putty crumbled to the floor, but the window, unopened for perhaps decades, did not budge. His only other reward was that the painted handle, once polished brass, came free in his hand. Unfazed, Lamarr pressed his forehead against a glass pane.
“Hard tellin’, from here,” he mumbled, buttoning his jeans. “Looks like somebody probably done crashed into Stella’s house, Momma.”
“Oh God, oh God, no, help us Jesus!” She wailed. “What’s the world comin’ to? Do ya mean it?”
“Don’t worry, Momma,” he said. “I’ll go see what’s happenin’.”
“Would you?” She pleaded, with one hand to her heaving bosom. “I-I-I believe I feel faint.”
“You need help, Momma?” He asked, taking her elbow to steer her back to the couch.
She slapped his hand away. “No, no, boy,” she said. “You go see about Stella Jo and that boy of hers.”
“I’ll do that, but you sit yourself down first.”
She allowed him to help her to her loveseat, the only other chair in the house, besides the couch, generously wide enough to accommodate her girth. Once all the excitement died down, she’d be on her feet to see personally to Stella and her troubles.
“Git on with you boy, and God protect you,” she said gratefully. “Lord deliver us all.”
Lamarr left her side. Shirtless and shoeless, muscles rippling, he ran with the grace of a panther toward Stella’s. He only wished he had his service issue .45 auto in hand. But this was not Vietnam, and he wasn’t supposed to need a gun at home in his own neighborhood.
#
Stella Jo, asleep in her first floor back bedroom, slept the sleep of the righteous, especially of those righteous who knew how to brew a pot of strong chamomile-valerian root-passion flower tea. No drunk’s careering through her fence and into the porch could wake her.
“Momma!”
While a car crashing into her front porch had not wakened her, Angel’s voice cut like a knife through her righteous slumber, potent herbal tea notwithstanding. Was the world coming to an end? The whole place seemed to be rattling and shaking! Clutching a blanket around her shoulders, she heaved herself from bed, her mother-heart answering the distress call of her child. Like Ioletta a few houses down the block, Angel always slept on the living room sofa, which Stella had folded down for him every night for close to a dozen years. The kitchen was adjacent to the back bedro
om, and she had to pass through it and a hallway to reach the living room. On the way, she flipped on the lights and snatched her favorite 12-inch iron skillet from the gas stovetop, whose best Christian use was frying chicken for neighbors who dropped in Sundays from either side of the street.
Armed with her weapon, which in the hands of a 220-pound female would do formidable damage upon the head of any man fool enough to challenge her, she rushed into the living room. A single light bulb in the floor lamp beside the sofa was on, since Angel was in the habit of never sleeping in complete darkness. He didn’t look up as his mother arrived, his milky-blue eyes aimed instead in the general direction of the front door.
“God in heaven!” She cried, as a shadowy form launched itself at her door. Glass panes cracked at the impact and the door’s wood frame shrieked.
The shadow withdrew momentarily in preparation for another headlong rush. This time, as shoulder met door, there was a loud crash accompanied by splitting wood. The door burst inwards and a man stumbled over the threshold. He shook his close-cropped head as if to recover himself, stood to his full height and glanced around, seemingly surprised at having achieved his goal. His blue eyes swiftly took in Angel huddled on the couch and Stella draped in her blanket, skillet in hand.
He cursed softly, and Stella felt her heart freeze in her chest as his eyes met hers. In the background, Angel hummed one of his tunes, which she immediately recognized as Amazing Grace. At that moment, Lamarr burst upon the scene like an avenging angel. The intruder, yanking a knife from his belt, turned upon the newcomer with a curse, glanced up at the towering black figure, and charged madly.
For Lamarr, instantly recognizing the blade as a combat knife, one edge sharp, curving steel, the other deeply grooved and serrated, time seemed to have stopped in its flow. Even as eye, hand, and body responded perfectly, like well-oiled machinery instead of flesh and blood, the thought that he was about to die flashed through his mind.
Oh Jesus God, am I gonna die here on my own street, after a year in Nam?
No more than a distance of three or four feet had separated them from each other, but somehow he slipped aside and answered with ferocity of his own, the cool, uncalculating kind learned through countless hours of practice until it is automatic reflex. Snatching at wrist and shoulder, he used the man’s own impetus to swing them both around and to bodily throw him against a wall. With a sickening crunch, the assailant slid to the floor, knocked cold.
It was over that quickly. Lamarr saw time resume its flow, and moved to confirm whether the man was really out for the count. Blood ran from a swelling the size of a tennis ball over one eye, and white bones gleamed through the flesh of his wrist, which had evidently shattered, as it and the knife attempted oneness with a 2x4 wall stud. To be safe, Lamarr yanked the knife from the wall and hefted it. He had been right; he had seen all of these knives he would ever want to see in Vietnam.
Stella dropped both her skillet and her blanket, and grabbed at her chest. Her breath came in short gasps.
“I-I-I-ah--”
Lamarr was instantly at her side, helping her to lower herself to the couch. Knife in hand, he picked up her blanket and settled it around her shoulders.
“Everything’s all right, now, Miss Stella,” he said reassuringly. “It’s me, Lamarr, don’t you worry.” Patting Angel on the knee, he said, “It’s all right, isn’t it, bro? You’re fine too, ain’t you?”
Staring up with milky-blue eyes, Angel hummed, still Amazing Grace, which Lamarr knew from his childhood days at Rev. Champion’s Alliance Baptist Church.
Down on his knees before Stella and Angel, knife still in one hand for safekeeping, that was when two of Calneh’s finest appeared on the scene. Intent on Stella and Angel, Lamarr didn’t turn, knowing there would be other neighbors coming to the scene to satisfy their curiosity.
“Put down the knife and step away from the woman, boy.”
A chill ran down Lamarr’s spine as he heard a gun cocked. To their credit, the boys in blue had not used the n-word, but Lamarr knew he was in trouble.
“It ain’t what ya think,” he said, still on his knees. “This woman needs medical attention right now.”
“Drop the knife and step away,” the command came again. “Now!”
He dropped the knife, which hit the wood floor butt first with an awful, dead-sounding thud. Slowly, he turned and rose to his full height, putting his hands up at the same time. Like his momma, Lamarr was big. Unlike his momma, his features were fine and handsome, one of those beautiful miracles of creation that the geneticists think they understand but only God really does, or perhaps the nameless Classical Greek sculptors or someone like Michelangelo. His muscles gleamed like burnished hardwood in the lamplight.
But all the cops saw was a monster who’d broken into a white woman’s home and would have raped and killed her if they hadn’t arrived on the scene in the nick of time. One cop, a redhead nicknamed Irish (though his ancestors had never been south of Denmark before immigrating to the New World), followed Lamarr with his gun. The other cop, new to the force and younger than his partner by a dozen years, fumbled with his baton, struggling at the same time to pull his sidearm out of its holster.
“Tell ’em, Miss Stella. Tell ’em I wasn’t doin’ nothin’ wrong.”
Stella Jo was no help at all, her every breath interrupted by hiccups. Her eyes darted wildly between the cops and Lamarr and Angel, her hand still clutching her chest.
From the corner of the room, there was a loud groan.
“Who’s that?” Irish demanded excitedly. “Check it out, Billy, see if he’s gone and killed somebody!”
Like an idiot, Billy would have walked in front of Irish, between him and Lamarr, but Irish stopped him with a curse.
“Go around behind me!”
Burning with shame, Billy gingerly made his way behind Irish and past the end of the couch, where he saw a man lying in a crumpled heap. He bent over to take a closer look.
“He’ll live, I guess, but it don’t look too good,” Billy said. “Looks like he’d be the woman’s son.”
Lamarr’s blood ran cold. He hadn’t the luxury of examining the assailant closely as he flew past him, knife intent on taking his life, but as they say, the situation seemed ever more to be headed south.
“On your knees!” Irish shouted, brandishing his gun.
Lamarr’s eyes darted between the two cops, Billy moving to take up a position at his back, while Irish inched closer, aiming at his face. Could he somehow bolt for the door and actually make it? Or would a stray bullet strike Stella or Angel in all the excitement?
“Drop to your knees, I said, you murderin’--”
The rest of what the cop said was irrelevant, curses screamed in the heat of the moment, adrenaline running high. But still, Lamarr did not budge. He had decided that if he was to die, and he believed he was, he would rather it be standing up like a man, not like some animal with a gun behind its ear.
“I’ll blow your brains out!” Irish screamed. Behind Lamarr but separated by the couch where Stella and Angel sat, Billy was no less agitated, his gun jerking in his hand like the end of a fishing pole teased by a big catfish.
“Look fellas, he broke into the house,” Lamarr said, indicating the unconscious man in the corner. “I stopped him. I’m a M.P. myself and I ain’t droppin’ for you or nobody else--and you’d better be calling the ambulance for Miz McIlhenny here.”
There were footsteps on the porch. Irish, conscious of the street he was on and last year’s riots, which had almost spilled over into the white sections of town, expected curious neighbors, maybe even a few angry bystanders.
“Stay out!” He shouted, risking one quick glance behind him and edging around to keep the open doorway within his view and Lamarr under his gun.
“Stay out, folks,” a raspy but commanding voice said from the porch. “Everything’s under control.”
“It don’t
look like nothin’s under no control ta me,” retorted a different voice.
“For the last time, giddown!” Irish screamed.
First tossing away a glowing cigarette butt, the owner of the raspy voice entered, a silvery-haired man taller even than Lamarr, but thin as a rake, emphasized all the more by his rumpled gray suit and the black tie hanging loosely from the unbuttoned collar of his white shirt. He flashed his badge and walked straight to Lamarr, completely ignoring Irish and Billy.
“Semper fi, Sarge,” he said.
“Captain Odoms,” Lamarr answered weakly. Clarence “Chance” Odoms lived only four or five houses further down the street from Lamarr and his mother, but in all the years he’d known him, the man had never once said hello to him, not even as they walked to church on Sundays, with the Browns headed to Alliance Baptist on the one side of the street and the Odoms clan on their way to Flowers Baptist on the other. Some children were threatened with the bogeyman by their parents if they misbehaved. On Flowers Avenue, parents on both sides threatened their children with a visit from Captain Odoms, old bloody bones himself, whose face was the image of an eagle with steely gray eyes. It didn’t help that, once in a while, two guns could be seen sticking from inside his ill-fitting suit jacket.
“What’s the situation, Lamar?” He asked. Not waiting for an answer, he knelt beside Stella and took her wrist. Her pulse raced, her eyes wild.
“There was a commotion over here, sir, soze I ran over to check it out. The fella over there in the corner, he done broke the door down before I showed up. That’s his combat knife layin’ on the floor there.”
“And like a good soldier, you took care of the matter,” he said. He picked up the phone from the end table and dialed for an ambulance. To Lamarr, he added, “Excellent, excellent, put your hands down, why don’t you, son?”
Irish, his eyes flashing angrily, was ready to chew nails. “What the hell are you doin’, Odoms?” He demanded, waving his gun threateningly.
Lamarr vacillated between letting his hands down completely or only halfway. Odoms didn’t make eye contact with either of the cops, instead speaking swift instructions for an ambulance to rush to 1003 Flowers Street, near the intersection of S. Bougainvillea.
