A Cry of Angels (50 page)

He stepped closer and extended a fountain pen. Mr. Teague sat staring at the floor.

"Come now, Mr. Teague, I'm going to take you out of all this grief. You don't need this; a man your age needs to be relaxing, enjoying himself."

Mr. Teague looked up. "You need to be in hell, nigger."

Doc Bobo drew back and his hand smacked hard across the old man's face. "I've had enough of that, you damned old piece of white trash—and I'm through wasting time with you! Fay!"

Clyde Fay crossed the room and seized Tio by the throat and lifted him in the air like a puppy. He stood holding him at arm's length, watching him with his hands. I lunged forward and felt hands grip me.

Mr. Teague started up and Bobo shoved him back on the sofa and brandished the papers under his nose. "Sign 'em, or see his neck get wrung like a chicken!"

His face white, Mr. Teague fumbled the papers in his lap. He took the pen and scribbled his signature.

"All five copies." Doc Bobo smiled. He put his fists on his hips as he watched the old man sign. Tio was gagging, struggling for breath. "Don't know why I didn't see it before," said Bobo. "Could have saved everybody a whole lot of trouble. But it wasn't until I saw you buck up in defense of the boy that I saw the key to you, Mr. Teague."

Mr. Teague scribbled on the last page and shoved the papers back at Bobo. "Now, for God's sake, let him down!"

Doc Bobo checked the signatures. He turned to Fay and nodded, and the giant let Tio drop to the floor. Mr. Teague got up to go to him, and when he passed Doc Bobo, the undertaker looked at Fay and nodded.

I watched in shock as Fay's hands closed on the back of the old man's neck. Straining with the effort, the black man turned and lifted him off the floor and threw him full force headfirst into the wall.

Mr. Teague lay crumpled like a doll. A pool of blood slowly started to ooze from his head.

I couldn't move.

After a moment Tio went and knelt beside him. He lifted the bleeding head and cradled it in his lap and sat looking down into the small, drawn face. "Ah, little man," he whispered, "little man . . ."

"You didn't have to kill him!" I screamed at Bobo.

"Kill him? Why no, the old man simply fell down the stairs. It happens all the time. Just as boys tend to wander and their bones are sometimes found in creeks and abandoned wells. Bring them!" Tio and I were seized and dragged toward the door. Doc Bobo leaned over Jayell and Phaedra, struggling on the bed. "Don't worry, you won't be harmed. You and the old people will only be kept out of sight until our big weekend celebration is over, then you will be free to go where you wish, to tell any story you like."

The Ape Yard stood waiting in the smoky, brick-red dawn. There had been rain in the night, and when the first hazy slivers of sunlight began to worm their way through the trees beyond the river, heavy black clouds still lay banked to the south. Silent lightning licked at the distant earth.

Doc Bobo's voice rang through the quiet. "Get 'em out! Get 'em all out here!"

Tio and I stood beside him on the steps of the Rainbow Supper Club and watched the dog boys move from house to house, kicking in doors, snapping orders, herding people into the streets. We watched as they stumbled out, hesitant, frightened, dodging the swinging belts, moving along the ridges and clay paths toward us in the lower end of the hollow. The hillsides filled with them, hundreds of them, old people, sleepy children stepping tenderly with new-wakened feet, families clinging together, people swinging down from porches, pushing through weeds and around the little brown shacks, under clothes left on the line overnight, soot-grimed and speckled with rain. Slowly they gathered above us, lining the banks and ridges, and stood waiting in the earthen light and smoke of breakfast fires that rolled heavily over the rooftops and climbed along the hills.

They stood and watched and waited, in the smoky, brick-red dawn.

The dog boys came back to the supper club and stood in the yard and on the porch, about a dozen of them, vicious-looking, muscular men, some with shoulder holsters protruding from their expensively tailored jackets. On the hill across the road two more were coming down the slope, driving before them the boys from the job: Carlos, Skeeter, Jackie, Willie Daniels. Simon and Loomis struggled to carry Speck Turner between them, his head bleeding. The dog boys whipped them all to their knees on the bank and came to the porch.

Doc Bobo waited for silence.

I looked at Tio. He kept his eyes on the ground before him. He seemed oblivious to all that was happening.

Doc Bobo stepped to the center of the porch behind us and lifted his voice for distance.

"Did you think," he shouted, "that I could be stopped so easily? Did you think
any
man, black or white, could stand up to Doc Bobo? Let me show you, let me settle your minds this morning!" He pulled the sheaf of papers Mr. Teague had signed from his pocket and walked slowly the length of the porch, holding them aloft. "This is a signed bill of sale—for the property once owned by Alvah Teague." He waited for that to take effect in the hills, for the shifting, murmuring, repeating of his words to die down. "Later this morning I will take part in a momentous occasion for our town, the celebration of the one hundredth year of our granite industry, during which I will be presented to our distinguished guests as the first black member of the Quarrytown Granite Association."

"Because, Monday morning we will begin work on a brand-new quarry, right here in the Ape Yard only a short distance from the county's first quarry, and the first in the history of this granite industry to be owned by a black man!" Doc Bobo folded the papers back into his pocket. "Truly, a momentous occasion. And beginning Monday morning, that store will be removed, and those ridiculous structures"—he turned and pointed to Wolf Mountain—"will be pulled to the ground! There will be no more interference with our way of life in the Ape Yard. Doc Bobo is your friend here. Your only friend!"

"Let them pass their laws, let them make their promises, they will raise no more false hopes here. They supposedly set us free before there was a granite industry in this town." He ran his eyes along the hills. "Are we free? We have pulled ten thousand tombstones from under this ground, and if we set one at the grave of every broken promise to the black man there still would not be enough! White men's laws are for white men's purposes, not for you and me. We have survived in the Ape Yard because we make our own laws. We have looked after our own."

"The old ones know what I mean," said Doc Bobo. He turned and looked across the road at the shop boys kneeling on the bank, at Tio standing below him. "It's the young who don't remember."

"The old ones know what I mean. They know better than to lift their hearts in hope, and have them crushed again." He turned to look across the yard and road at the shop boys kneeling on the bank, down at Tio standing below him. "It's the young who buy the dream. Because they grew up in the
peace
Doc Bobo brought them! They don't remember the innocent black man who was burned on the square as I do. They don't know about the night riders who used to come through the Ape Yard on Saturday night shooting out windows for fun. They don't know those horrors because they don't happen anymore! Thanks to Doc Harley Bobo!"

"They are ready to mix and mingle, to turn a black man against his brothers—like these two right here. This is an example of the future if we let it continue . . . a black boy raised by a white man, spoiled and deceived by a white man's lies, a born troublemaker and a disgrace to his people . . . and a sorry, trashy white boy who thinks that lily-white skin is a badge of distinction giving him the right to attack and humiliate any man, no matter what his rank or position, so long as that man happens to be black!"

"
Their kind will not be tolerated in the Ape Yard
!"

"I will show you that now, young people." He motioned to the dog boys and they began filing up the steps and into the supper club, taking off their metal-studded belts as they came. "I will show you that once and for all, and when that is done we will climb those slopes to take part in the celebration of the town. I will expect to see every black face in this hollow on the square and cheering when Doc Bobo, on your behalf, accepts his place of honor. And if there are any among you who entertain notions of creating further trouble, I want you to look closely at these two, and those kneeling on the bank, when we are done with them. As they pass you in the streets in the future, look at them, and remember!"

Doc Bobo turned around to those in the supper club. "Open those windows and let them hear it, and take your time."

That was the way. Nothing in the sunlight for Bobo. Give them only screams to take with them as they climbed the hills to do his bidding, to take to their beds that night, to boil in their dreams and allow their imaginations to do Bobo's work. Later they could see the result. He was so careful in his staging, in his use of terror against ignorance. Bobo was a master.

"The black boy first," snapped Doc Bobo.

Clyde Fay took Tio's arm and Jed him through the door. Two dog boys walked to either end of the porch with pistols drawn, letting them hang loosely at their sides. A third stood at the door, waiting.

The Ape Yard waited, under the flares of sun that streaked through the morning shroud to the iron-rich clay of the slopes, bathing them all in a reflected red earthen light.

When he was ready, when there was not a movement in the hills, Doc Bobo turned to the dog boy in the door and nodded.

The dog boy relayed the signal inside.

A moment later screams began, starting low, then rising rapidly to shrill, piercing shrieks, the echoes bouncing off the silent ridges and ringing through the hollow.

Then, through the numbness of shock, I became aware that they were not coming from inside the supper club but arose from somewhere else. Heads were turning in the crowd. Arms lifted to point. Doc Bobo stepped to the edge of the porch, looking up toward the Ape Yard rim.

Beyond the last houses on the upper ridge, a blobby shadow was descending through the red earthen light. Down the terra-cotta slopes he came like a charging primeval beast, jumping, bouncing, clearing the rain-gutted trenches, howling that inhuman cry.

Heads poked out of the supper club's windows. The dog boy on that end of the porch, recovering, raised his gun and braced it against the post. Doc Bobo was on him. "No shooting! No shooting!"

On the Indian came, leaping from bank to bank, dead-on across the grassy knolls, sliding down the clay.

"Stop him!" Doc Bobo shouted to the frightened people clustered along the way. "You better stop him!"

Jojohn built his speed, dodging through the little brown yards and grappling hands, feeble hands, unwilling hands, brushed aside with exploding howls.

He burst through the plum thickets onto an apron slope, then off a high bank to the flat below, hit the ground rolling, then was up again, hatless and running, a flicker of khaki through the pines. He circled the marsh beside the supper club and could be heard smashing through the tall reed-thicket, straight on, roaring his coming.

Dog boys were crowding to the door of the supper club. Doc Bobo glanced around at them. He beckoned to the one at the other end of the porch.

"Cannie!''

When the man came, Doc Bobo had him drape his jacket over his pistol. He looked nervously up toward the fairgrounds. "One shot," he said, shaking a finger, "one shot."

The dog boy knelt and propped an elbow on one knee.

Em Jojohn broke the clearing, the dog boy lowered his chin, sighting, and when he did I whirled and threw myself straight on top of him. The gun exploded in the jacket.

The Indian came pounding down the clearing, white-eyed, bellowing. He cleared the low steps and dived, landing inside in a crash of men and furniture.

Scrambling to my feet, I ducked into the darkened supper club, watching for the furious dog boy to come after me and at the same time trying to stay out of the commotion inside. Through the window I could see Doc Bobo setting the two on the porch to guard the crowd.

The mill-house dance floor was a churning, tumbling pile of arms and legs, with Em in the middle and dog boys, struggling, diving over each other to get at him, making fierce, guttural sounds in their throats. They were rolling across the floor, smashing, tearing clothes, gouging; it was as though Em was being devoured by a many-armed, furious beast. He was fighting defensively, rolling away, trying to get out from under, and they were falling on him from all sides. The walls echoed with the struggle, tables toppling, faces flashing in the light streaks. It seemed the room could not contain the savagery.

Suddenly a man squawled like the hogs I had heard in the slaughterhouse, and the Indian rose to his feet.

And the sight of him was incredible. It was Jojohn in a fury I had never seen before, fighting as I had never seen before.

A head taller than his attackers, he stood against the bar and moved his powerful body in a continuous destructive rhythm, bobbing, weaving, fighting for footing, windmilling blows at the heads below him as though he were demolishing a wall. The mob lunged and dived in upon him, arms thrusting, making a shock of contact, falling away. Others jumped in over those broken, winded, trying to crawl away from the flying boots; they crowded in, bumping shoulders, working to get him, fighting not on orders now, not for fear of Bobo, but in the evangelism of the violence itself. The faceless mob converged upon the furious, battering giant at the bar in an exaltation of fury. Still he stood his ground. A dog boy in a checkered coat arose behind the bar and smashed a wooden ice bucket beside Jojohn's head. The Indian turned and drove a fist through the man's breastbone. A man with a misshapen jaw kept leaping and screaming dementedly, swinging in over the crowd. Jojohn found him and smashed his face. He hit the jukebox and toppled to the floor, amid a pile of blood and black flesh and bright-colored rags.