Sion Crossing (9 page)

“Convinced me?” The oven-heat battered Latimer.

“He can be very persuasive.” Her mouth smiled. “I guess that’s an essential political skill. Or would it count as a virtue?”

“Umm …” He took refuge behind the non-committal sound while he tried to think. “I don’t know that he convinced me of anything. He did interest me …” It was no good: there was sweat under his collar now—he was starting to melt. “Is it always as hot as this in America?”

She stared at him for a second. “Oh, Mr Latimer—I’m
sorry
—Kingston!”

“It’s probably snowing in England.” Mr Kingston of Kingston spring-heeled past Latimer, as cool as a cucumber—if there were such things as long black cucumbers. “Keys, Miss Lucy.”

Miss Lucy threw the keys rather inaccurately, but Kingston fielded them like a West Indian third slip, without apparent effort. And then, mercifully, he inserted them into an immaculate Volvo Estate parked next to the battered consumer durable, tossing Latimer’s case into the back and then opening the rear doors with a flourish and a melon-grin which revealed more teeth than Latimer had ever seen before in one human mouth. “If you white folks will kindly enter
de kay-ridge
it will be mah pleasure an’ mah privilege to transport y’ll to de ol’ plantation.”

Not a Zulu, thought Latimer. But definitely not an ordinary West Indian either, in addition to being definitely a liar: this was a black man as sure of himself and as confident in his tall blackness as Miss Lucy Hennebury Cookridge was in her name and her tall whiteness.

And she was a liar, too—or was he making too much of that false explanation, falling into his occupational hazard of searching for a deeper motive behind what was in reality no more than a social excuse?

Probably. But meanwhile, anyway, the inside of the car was even more swelteringly hellish, full of molten air, excluding all further thought. What he wouldn’t give for a pure shivering draught of English winter!

And the windows were closed tight, so that as they moved he reached instinctively to lower his, though more in faint hope than in certain expectation of relief.

Kingston twisted in his seat. “U-uh, Mister La
tee
mah! Doan you go lettin’ in that ol’
Gargah
ay-eer, now! This here car’ll cool you down, if’n you give her a chance.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, do shut up, Kingston!” snapped Lucy Cookridge. “I’m sorry, Mr Latimer—Oliver, can I call you? If I’m going to have to apologize all the time … Oliver—it isn’t just because you’re English—because you’re a foreigner …” She turned the huge dark circles on Latimer “… it’s because Kingston has this hang-up, you see.”

Hang-up? Latimer was experiencing his own hang-up, trying to assimilate his first encounter with America outside the airport, which he wanted to be a moment of truth delivered from preconception and prejudice. But … just as big airports were all the same, so the rushing motorways surrounding them must be all the same; and his images of Atlanta were confused by the only certain pictures he had seen of the place during the last twenty-four hours, which dated from Sherman’s wrath-of-God visitation in 1864, full of cannon and stiffly-posed Union soldiery, and trenches, and shell-blasted ruins in war-desolated scenery; and trenches, and this …
this
was as far, or even further, from Atlanta in ’65 as Berlin in ’83 was from Berlin in ’45, for a guess!

“Hang-up?” Now that he had raised the window, there was—there
distinctly
was—a breath of colder air on his legs … Cold, beautifully cold, air: God bless the Swedes! “What hang-up?”

“He thinks he’s inferior.” Miss Lucy’s certainty out-ranked Kingston’s. “South of the Mason and Dixon line he always gets like this … I think he probably
is
inferior.”

“You
raht
, Miz Lucy!” Kingston slapped the steering-wheel with one hand, then twisted it nonchalantly to overtake an enormous truck with the other. “Ah doan
think
ah’m inferior—ah
knows
it! Ah’m a
mo-tee
, is what ah am.”

The car shuddered as they overtook the truck, which seemed to go on forever beside them until they were at last free of it, its innumerable wheels screaming alongside Latimer for far too long for peace-of-mind.

“Mo-tee?” The statement invited another question, and if Kingston was in an answering mood so much the better. It was when people talked, seriously or not, that they imparted information. “What is a … motee?”

“Now yo’ is askin’, Mistah La
tee
mah!” Kingston was plainly delighted with the inquiry. “See, dere’s de
Motees
, an’ dere’s de
Doodas
. An’ dere’s de
Moanbacks
. An’ ah sho’ wish ah wuz a moanback … but ah’s not.” He shook his head. “Ah sho is not.”

“Do shut up, Kingston,” said Lucy Cookridge wearily.

“No, Miz Lucy! Better he should know he in G
ar
ga now … de motees, Mistah La
tee
mah—dey in de hotels, wid de white towel over de arm, an’ de teapot in de han’, an’ day sez ‘Anyone fo’ motee?’ An’ they pours motee for de white ladies’n’gempmums … But de doodas—dey is a heap smarter’n de motees, who jus’ down from de trees … Dey de ones stan’ by de bus-stop an’ sez ‘Hey man, dooda bus stop he-ah?’”

“Kingston—”

“But de moanbacks—dey is the smartest of all—dey like de ones Pres’ Abram Lincoln give de guns an’ de blue suits to. ’Cept mebbe dey a mite too smart, ’cause dey de ones de Confedrut gempmums done shot at Fort Pillow, when dey catches dem in de blue suits … But ah guesses you knows all ’bout Fort Pillow, Mister La
tee
mah, huh?” Kingston turned towards Latimer.

“Kingston!” Lucy Cookridge snapped into the pause, saving Latimer from the necessity of having to admit that he’d never heard of Fort Pillow, or from the temptation of flannelling a lie with the facts that Kingston had given him about what must have been a massacre of negro troops by the Confederates. “I wish you wouldn’t—
watch the road, for God’s sake!
”

Noise filled the car. It had been building up while Kingston had been speaking, Latimer realized, but his concern for Fort Pillow had somehow damped it down. But now there was an even more enormous truck beside them, with even more wheels—a great brute towering above them, its high cab ornamented with stainless-steel pipes belching diesel-exhaust like a steam-engine, a thing far bigger than any vehicle he had seen on any motorway, or autoroute or autobahn, a true juggernaut—

Then suddenly his examination of the monster ceased to be academic as it began to move inexorably out of its own lane into theirs, as though they weren’t beside it at all, crowding them on to a hard shoulder littered with pieces of tyre-tread.

Latimer opened his mouth, but no sound came out of it.

A piece of tyre-tread bumped underneath them and then banged frighteningly as it bounced up to hit the underside of the Volvo. The car swerved slightly, then straightened.

“Slow down, Kingston!” ordered Lucy.

The car didn’t slow. Instead it suddenly accelerated with a burst of blessed Swedish horse-power which pressed Latimer back in his seat. For a moment the noise enveloping them increased, then abruptly died away, reduced to that only of their own engine as they pulled ahead of the truck.

“Jee-
sus
!” Kingston was holding the steering-wheel with both hands. “That’s one cowboy in a hurry!”

“Fall back,” Lucy ordered. “Let him pass.”

“No way, lady.” Kingston shook his head. “I’m putting some road between us.”

“The highway patrol will get us.”

“Better them than him.” Kingston sniffed. “Besides, if he thinks he can hit seventy, then they probably don’t police this stretch much. And another ten-fifteen minutes and we’ll be off the inter-state.”

“At this speed we will. You’re not in England now, remember.”

Latimer wished he was in England now. For now he would be cool and quiet in his own soft bed, and asleep.

“What—” his voice croaked embarrassingly “—what on earth happened back there?”

Kingston chuckled. “Man—he jus’ done clean forgot we wuz they-ah!”

“What?” The negro’s return to
Gone With the Wind
language irritated Latimer.

Lucy Cookridge drew an equally irritated breath. “As I was saying … I wish you wouldn’t affect that ridiculous phoney accent, Kingston. It isn’t particularly accurate, and it certainly isn’t funny. And Oliver must find it both boring and incomprehensible.”

Latimer found himself warming to Lucy Cookridge. Or, since
warming
in this pestiferous climate was hardly a desirable condition, “cooling pleasantly” might be more accurate.

He looked at her gratefully. “I think I did almost understand, Miss Cookridge—”

“Lucy.” She smiled.

“Ah … Lucy. Yes … but not quite.” He smiled back, but decided that he didn’t want to antagonize Kingston altogether just yet. “He forgot about us, Mr Kingston?”

“Kingston … Oliver.” The black man accepted his olive branch with a suggestion of scorn. “In the old days it was the engine-drivers who were the romantic figures. The railroads ripped the people off, but there were songs about the trains and the drivers—Casey Jones and all that … but now it’s the truckers that make the running. Casey Jones would be behind the wheel of one of those big bastards now—‘King of the Road’, he’d be.”

Latimer frowned. Little boys had wanted to be engine-drivers, so it was said. But the only little boy he had ever known, in the distorted mirror of his own childhood memory of himself, had wanted the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine of a Spitfire to control, not a steam-engine. And who would want to drive an overgrown lorry in his dreams?

“But he nearly killed us. The lorry … the
truck
-driver.”

Kingston shrugged. “That’s kings for you, man! They don’t kill you, though. They’ve got bigger things to think about, with all the weight they’ve got behind them, and how high they are above you … They just forget all about you, is all.” Kingston raised his head to look in the car mirror, and the Volvo slowed perceptibly. “He didn’t try to kill us, back there … it was just, he was coming up, overtaking us, and we were down there beside him, under his mirror … and he’s got a lot of truck behind him … And he just plain forgot we were still there when he started to move back into the inside lane, that’s all.” He shrugged. “Nothing personal—kings aren’t personal, man … Why, he probably wouldn’t have felt a thing, just an itty-bitty shake way back behind him—that’s why I put my foot down … ’cause he’d have side-swiped us with his ass …” He paused, and then nodded towards the woods on the roadside “… and maybe he’d find a scratch or two when he got to Charleston, or wherever. But we’d have been in that old kudzu, and they’d maybe find us in a couple of months if no one spotted us go in.”

Latimer stared at the woods, which were so heavily blanketed with some sort of thick broad-leaved creeper that the trees on the edge of the road appeared only in vague outline: it would certainly be easy enough to be swallowed up there.

He turned to look back the way they had come. There was only one car in view, and that far behind, apart from the murderous juggernaut in the distance. They had left the built-up edge of Atlanta, with its forest of elevated signs which he had hardly noticed, oppressed as he had been by the heat at first, and then by the need to attend to the conversation. And with it they seemed to have left the traffic, too.

“Where are we going?” He realized as he spoke that he really hadn’t the faintest idea where he was, north, south, east or west of the old Gateway to the Confederacy. But the map in his head was over a hundred years old anyway: there might still be places called Decatur and Rough-and-Ready, and there must still be a Kennesaw Mountain and a Peachtree Creek where the Union and Confederate armies had mauled and mutilated each other. But he had seen no such names on any signs, only meaningless and unfamiliar names which hadn’t registered, and nothing that stirred his imagination. Yet, of course and to be fair, that was usually the trouble with places which were names out of childish history and romantic literature and legend, after they had been swallowed up by the twentieth century. Industrial smog shrouded the Acropolis, and Xanadu probably boasted a large power station; and
“Earth has not anything to show more fair”
certainly did not describe the view from Westminster Bridge in the carbon-monoxide-filled air; so he could hardly expect anything from the environs of Atlanta all these years after General Sherman and Scarlett O’Hara had passed this way—if they had.

“Where we going?” Kingston echoed him, almost derisively, and as though he could hear unspoken thoughts. “Not far.”

“How far?” There were trees as far as he could see, stretching endlessly and anonymously ahead of them now.

“Just a hoot and a holla, as they say.”

Still more trees, with more patches of all-engulfing creeper, which on second observation seemed rather sinister and alien in its conquests, as though it was just waiting for a chance to invade the road itself, to capture whatever tried to get past it.

He concentrated on Kingston. “A hoot … and a—what?”

“Holla.” Kingston massaged the steering-wheel. “Holla?”

Latimer frowned. “A … Holla? A …
shout
, would that be?”

“A what? Hell, no! Man—a holla—a holl
ow
, is what it means … ’a hoot and a
hollow
… like, the next valley, where we turn off the inter-state—okay?”

Not okay. Latimer could see no hill ahead, and therefore could envisage no ‘next valley’. There were still only trees, and occasionally the repulsive creeper—was that what Kingston had called ‘that old kudzu’?

“But where are we actually going, Mr. Kingston?” He persisted almost out of desperation.

“Didn’t he tell you—the Senator?” Kingston aggravated the question with deliberate cruelty. “Hell! He should have done tol’ you!” The black hands worked on the wheel again, relishing both Senator Cookridge’s failure and Kingston’s own play with it. “Now isn’t that something!”

“Not exactly.” Latimer was goaded into defending himself. “I suppose he was concerned to tell me more important things.”

Kingston stared at the road ahead for a moment, and then nodded agreement. “Yeah … that’ll be it! He jus’ plum forgot to tell you where you was goin’—that’s what he did!”