Dreamer (25 page)

What possible use could these Wise Guys have for the minister's double? I tore the tab off another beer, drained half its contents, and belched, remembering that leaders like Hitler and Stalin employed stand-ins, and it was rumored that Fidel Castro had a couple of look-alike actors always waiting in the wings to impersonate him. So we had envisioned Smith's role from the start. But what happened to doubles when the original became expendable, or a liability? I wondered: What if the Wise Guys really had no use for him? No more than they did for King. What if their assignment was to eliminate or discredit the minister—wouldn't they want to eliminate as well the one capable of standing in during his absence?

By midnight they still had not returned. My stomach felt sour. My thoughts kept twisting, torquing so I could not stay any longer on the porch, listening to the wind whirling leaves
and whistling in the treetops. I went inside the empty farmhouse, which seemed desolate and ghostlike, now that Amy was gone for good and, I feared, Smith was gone too. My aimless pacing took me through the front room where he'd devoted himself to studying minutiae of the minister's life, to the spot in the kitchen where I'd kissed Amy, and finally to the closed door of Smith's bedroom. I turned the knob, cracking open the door. I stepped inside, clicked on the ceiling light, and sat heavily down on his bed. There in one corner was his dented saxophone. I picked it up, plopped down again on the bed, wet the mouthpiece, and tried to play, producing not the mellow sound he'd conjured from his instrument but instead a
blaat!
that more resembled breaking wind than melody. No, I would never be a musician.

I returned the horn to its place in the corner, and as I turned around I saw something sticking out from under his bed, barely concealed by the blanket. I got down on one knee, peered under the mattress, and found a cardboard box filled with sketches, some in watercolor, others in charcoal. I spread them on the bed. It had been months since I'd seen his drawings, months in which his heart had subtly begun to change. His earlier pieces, I recalled, had seemed anguished and grotesque, some indebted to George Grosz's savage depictions of the German bourgeoisie during World War II, except that earlier Smith's targets were Negroes and American whites who betrayed the dream of the beloved community—race merchants who capitalized on their people's suffering for personal profit, black thieves who preyed upon the poor unable to escape them in an era of apartheid, and Caucasians so guilt-ridden by the sins of their forebears they lost all reason when blackmailing, professional Race Men accused them of every social crime imaginable; all these players fell beneath Smith's brutal pen and brushwork, the
opportunists, race pimps and profiteers, and bigots whom he always drew dragging their knuckles on the ground like Neanderthals. But these new pages he'd filled, showing them to no one, shoving them under his bed in a cardboard box, were astonishingly different. In some way he'd descended into hell in his earlier work, during his days of exile, facing without flinching the ugliest, most paralyzing features of color and caste and inequality, squeezing them for every drop of pus and corruption they contained. And then, sometime after taking the bullet intended for King (so the dates on his drawings suggested), he'd let that go, released it. His new sketches were simplicity itself: delicate, lovingly detailed studies of the landscape around the farmhouse in different gradations of light. There were at least two dozen wordless meditations on a single ramose tree in the front yard, as if that one object—seen clearly and through no eyes but his own—might reveal the world's mystery and wonder. He reveled in the play of colors, knowing they did not exist—colors, secondary qualities—outside the miracle of consciousness, which made every one of us (so his notebooks claimed) the magister ludi, the maestro of each moment of perception. I found drawings of Amy so real, so naturalistically rendered, it seemed she had appeared instantaneously, transported from Chicago to Carbondale like the spacemen in a TV series. There were several portraits of me, though I barely recognized myself. Me as he envisioned I might be in a decade, no longer the insecure, callow prop in the background of someone else's story (or the chronicles of a mass movement) but instead an individual inexhaustible and ineffable in his haecceitas and open-ended promise. I stared and stared at these portraits. I went through all his sketches, studying each carefully, and I came to see that in them Smith had decided that if the world our absent fathers made
was hideous, unfair, and unacceptable, a realm where we were condemned, then all right: he would reinvent it from scratch, if need be, in his art and actions.

His notebooks were no less revealing, the yellowed pages bearing his minute transcriptions of verse by Shinkichi Takahasi:

The wind blows hard among the pines
Toward the beginning
Of an endless past.
Listen: you've heard everything.

And from Shinsho:

Does one really have to fret
About Enlightenment?
No matter what road I travel,
I'm going home.

It was dawn before I finished reviewing his sketches and notebooks, and still the green Plymouth had not returned. Exhausted, I fell asleep on his bed, surrounded by drawings, and didn't wake until late afternoon. I stumbled to the front porch: nothing. No one. And then I began to suspect they had killed him. All day long I watched the road, emptied every bottle and beer can in the kitchen, and turned to the spiral-bound college notebook in which I kept a record of our covert project for the Revolution, catching up on my entries, trying to describe everything I remembered since the Wise Guys intervened with as much accuracy as I could muster, though even as I wrote and drank I heard Smith's caveat that words always disguised as much as they delivered, covered up as much as they clarified, and by twilight I doubted every event and experience I'd squeezed into that
ontological unit, the Procrustean bed of the English sentence. Come evening, I could stay at the Nest no longer. I climbed in the Chevelle and rode aimlessly for half an hour on the hills and backroads of Little Egypt, driving with my elbow out of the window, fingers curled on the roof. I stopped at a filling station, bought a newspaper, and read of a disaster in Memphis during a demonstration for striking sanitation workers. Sixty people injured. A sixteen-year-old black boy shot in the back. One hundred fifty-five stores damaged. I tossed the paper on the backseat, climbed behind the wheel, and drove for another hour until I realized my directionless wandering had brought me to Rev. Littlewood's church.

It was beginning to rain. The air was cool, turning to chill. A few fireflies drifted by. From the outside, Bethel was quiet as a tomb. There were no services on weekday evenings. I let myself in, soaking wet, switched on the lights, and immediately the sedate ambience of the church crept into me. Naturally, I first noticed our labor—our lives distilled, a kind of prayer itself—in the repairs to the entryway, pews, balustrades, and pulpit. All of it anonymous, of course. Unsigned. Nevertheless, I knew a twinge of satisfaction as I walked to the front row of benches, my footsteps echoing loudly; then I sat down and dripped. Wind battered the high stained-glass windows. Rain drummed on the roof. I looked at the new doors we'd installed on either side of the stage, and then my eyes came to rest on the two portraits of Jesus behind the podium. In one an angel comforted him in the Garden of Gethsemane; in the other, Simon the Cyrene, an African, carried to Golgotha the heavy wooden cross to which the bone-weary Nazarene would be nailed by his enemies. In the stillness of Bethel's sanctuary, I found myself falling toward that image, wondering how Simon, a man from the country, felt when the Roman soldiers conscripted
him to shoulder the rood: a black man from the most despised tribe on earth given the priceless gift of easing the suffering of a savior. In that scene, he was an extra. On stage for but a sentence in Matthew 27:32. He was given no speech. In Hollywood, he would have been paid the union minimum. Most likely he wouldn't be found in the credits. And after one magnificent moment of serendipity and contingency, of accident and chance (not unlike the young King's being in Montgomery at the right moment to merge with history), Simon blended anonymously—invisibly—back into the wailing crowd. Outside history. I felt I knew him. Was him. No man could equal the Nazarene. But Simon? I was thinking that here was a black man I might measure myself against, a standard I could attain, when behind me I heard a soft-breathing voice, one as firm and deep as an old country well.

“Matthew—”

Startled, I swung my head round and saw the minister sitting behind me. My jaw fell halfway. My breath went out of me. “Sir, I didn't know you were—”

“Uh-uh, it's me, buddy.”

“Chaym?”

I knuckled my eyes. I looked again. It
was
Smith, shaven, with his hair cropped short, wearing a blue suit and tie. There was a rain-dampened trenchcoat spread over his knees. He looked more like King than at any time before. “Where have you been?”

“You don't want to know.”

“Can I help?”

“I doubt it. Naw, I can't be saved …”

“What did they do to you?”

“Just talk. They got me a new place to stay and my wallet's fat.”

“You took it?”

“I don't have much choice, do I?” He let his shoulders relax and reached into a pocket of his suitcoat. “Maybe you don't understand. They've got me over a barrel. And I'm scared. I ain't ashamed to say that. The things they're talking about … what they want me to do to embarrass him … the shit they're up to in Memphis … I don't know what I'm gonna do. I don't want to go to prison. I'd die before I'd let anybody lock me up again, but I don't know if I want to live if I do what they're asking.” He closed his eyes, pressing the heel of his hand against his forehead. “They're outside in the car. They let me go to the farmhouse to pick up some of my things. When I didn't see you there, I figured maybe you'd be here. I told them I left some of my stuff at Bethel …” He withdrew a folded sheet of paper from his coat and handed it to me. “I found one of these. Thought I'd give it to you, just to tidy things up a bit.”

I opened the paper. It was the Commitment Blank. The decalogue of the Movement. Which he'd signed.

“Give that to the sister for me, all right?”

“Chaym—”

“It's over, Bishop.”

“Wait.” I tried to lighten things a little. “I thought you wanted to help with my salvation.”

He raised his shoulders in a shrug. “Sorry. You're on your own. But there is one thing you can do for me.”

Had it not been for the wink he gave me, I would have thought I was listening and talking to King, How could I refuse him anything? “What?”

“Pray for me. I can't do that for myself.”

“Of course. I will, but—”

“Do it
now
.”

He waited, fixing me so fiercely with his eyes I turned in my seat, bringing my hands together, the wrinkled Movement decalogue between my fingers. But as before, no words
came to me. My faith was frail. Payers had always failed me. Like millions of black men, I was a bastard who'd never known his father—the word used for people like me was “illegitimate.” Whoever my father was, he'd rejected me long ago. How could I pray to a Father? I squeezed my eyes tighter, thinking of Chaym's troubles, and those of the minister. Slowly I petitioned whatever powers that be, regardless of what they thought of me, to keep them from harm, praying not for myself as I'd always done, but instead or those I loved, and as the sense of their fragility and my own filled me, our lives of a few hours in a world of two minutes, the evil that waited outside our door, I felt something slam inside my chest, then hot tears were hopping down my cheeks, and instead of offering words I wept for my counterfeit, fatherless status, gave myself over to it shamelessly, and by the end of my halting, stumbling appeal I felt emptied, no longer trying to bring a distant God's grace to my finite desires as His cast-aside son, but only wishing
Thy will be done
.

I took out my handkerchief, cleaned my spectacles, and blew my nose. I turned in my seat. Smith was gone. The benches behind me, row after row, were unpeopled, and the front door of Bethel AME creaked open onto the unsearchable darkness, as if a djinn had passed into our lives and just as miraculously disappeared.

It was the greatest mistake of his life, and he had no one but himself to blame. Sitting with his arms folded across his knees beside an equally baffled and speechless Abernathy in the Rivermont Hotel, he stared, his face squeezed shut, at televised scenes of bloodshed and civil breakdown on the downtown streets of Memphis. He'd been out there just minutes before, leading a crowd of six thousand down Main Street from the Clayborn Temple to protest the city's blatantly racist treatment of black sanitation workers. They'd marched all of three blocks before he heard glass breaking in clothing stores behind him. Turning, he saw black teenagers, some wearing stocking caps to hold their processed hair in place, pillaging shoes and suitcoats priced at $89.95 through plate-glass windows, then the police moving toward them, and he'd cried out, “Stop this, I won't lead a violent march,” but it was too late. Evil was free. To save
his life aides pulled him into a passing car, sped through the police barricades, and delivered him, not back to the black-owned and -operated Lorraine Motel, but to a deluxe hotel in a white neighborhood overlooking the Mississippi.

“God Almighty, we waltzed right into this one,” Abernathy's eyes watered as he watched cops with butchwax crewcuts driving elderly black demonstrators in raincoats from the empty streets onto sidewalks, where they pinned them to the pavement, jamming their knees into the backs of anyone who resisted. “Why the devil didn't somebody do their homework before we got here?”