Three Days Before the Shooting ... (46 page)

“Was this recently?”

“Yeah, it was recent and it was still on my mind when Sunraider made his goddamn speech!”

“I see,” I said, “and what happened?”

“So when that little old lady gets the little girl over the curb, she looks around, and I could see a smile start to bloom on her face and then, man, she sees
me
behind the wheel—and after that, buddy, the weather took a sudden turn for the worst! The sun dropped down into a bottomless hole! Ice a foot thick frosted over the street! And all of a sudden that little old lady wrinkled up her face and something went SPLAT!”

“What?”

“Yeah, that’s right,” his voice dropped dolefully in the dark, “you got the message. Instead of thanking me, that … little … old … lady …
spits …
on … the … hood … of … my … nice … clean Cadillac!”

“That’s outrageous.”

“Yeah, and you can play that in brass. That hood of mine looked like sixteen seagulls suffering from the Georgia trots had got my range at the same time and the captain gull had yelled, ‘ATTACK!’ And after that, man, came the deluge! I was dumbfounded. I’d never witnessed such conduct in all my born days, man or boy, North or South. I just sat there with my mouth open, watching while she gives that little girl a jerk that lifts her clean off the walk and shoots her draw’s leg down around her little ankles and starts her to bawling like she’s got the blues long before her time. Man, in this country there’s truly no rest for the weary, no peace for the soul!”

In the quiet I could hear him swallow, the sound of a glass striking a tabletop, then his voice resumed, swollen with emotion.

“Mr. McIntyre, I just sat there and shook my head, too outdone to move. And then, when she’s a few steps away, the light turned red so that I couldn’t pull off, she turns and shakes her bony fist at me and screams so that all the people on the street could hear, ‘We’ll get you, Mister black Bogy-wah-zee! We’ll get you! Comes the revolution and we God-fearing, genuine Americans are going to put you back in your place. Just you wait and see! We’ll make the streets safe for democracy, and we’ll put you back in the cotton patch where you belong, and then we’ll raise the tariff to see that you stay there!’

“Did you ever hear anything like that, Mr. McIntyre?”

“No,” I said, “I haven’t.”

“Then you’re lucky, because that’s how far this Cadillac confusion had gone before Sunraider shot off his mouth. That little old lady—and she was
old—
she’s going to start a bloody revolution! She’s going to kill up a lot of people and take away their hard-earned property just so she can get
my
Cadillac! Never seen me before in her life, and she’s going to do all that, and all I did was to try to protect her while she’s breaking the traffic laws and risking that little girl’s life!

“Man, you should have seen her. She was holding on to that child’s arm with her eyes popping out and her face working, looking like she could’ve knocked out my teeth one by one with a ball-peen hammer! Hell, no wonder the kids are running wild. No wonder they’re smoking pot in the fourth grade and burning down houses! That old lady was broadcasting murder in front of that little child, and I haven’t even opened my mouth, much less raised my hand: All
I
did was to own a Cadillac. But now that little girl is well on the road to hating anybody who looks like me and drives an automobile….”

“She must have been cracked,” I said as his voice became silent. “There are bigots of all ages.”

“Yeah, that’s right,” he said, and I could hear the bed give as he lay down. “But don’t go putting that woman down for a crackpot, that would be a mistake, because there are plenty like her, and when I heard that Sunraider playing up to them, I knew I had to do something.”

“I think I’m beginning to understand you now,” I said, “but why, precisely, were you so angered by his remarks? After all, what he said seems tame after what you’ve told me about the reactions of other people.”

His feet scraped the floor. “Not tame, man; because being what he is made it much worse. I can take things like cops always coming up to me talking about, ‘Boy, what white man’s car is this you all being so reckless with?’ That’s right, and I’m parked at the goddamn curb. Or they see you on the highway and make you pull over to the side so they can examine your license, talking about, ‘Boy, you be more careful with that white man’s car, y’all hear?’ Sure, I’ve had to put up with a lot of that kind of bullshit, but I expect a senator to
act
like a
senator
, not like a clown. Something must be wrong with that cat, seriously wrong. Because he sounds frantic to me. No wonder somebody tried to kill him.”

“What do you mean by ‘frantic,’ Mr. Minifees?”

“I mean he sounds touched. Off his rocker, like what comes out isn’t what it started out to be. He reminds me of a barbershop quartet of nigger-hating crackers singing ‘Shortenin’ Bread’—which is one of the most frantic exhibitions a man could see. Those cats work themselves up into such a state singing about ‘Mammy’s li’l baby’ and the rest of that jive that by the time they reach the last chorus somebody has to run out on the stage with a bucket and mop to clean up the mess. That’s what I mean by frantic. Sunraider
gets to talking and his mouth runs away with him, especially when he gets to talking about us. No wonder somebody shot him.”

“Speaking of the shooting, Mr. Minifees, have you any idea of just who might have shot him?”

“No, I don’t, but a cat like that is liable to have folks coming out of the woodwork to get him.”

“Have you ever heard anyone
discussing the
possibility of shooting him?”

“No.”

“Have you ever discussed doing so yourself?”

“No, but I’ve thought about all the possible ways of kicking his butt.”

“Was that recently? I mean, was it after his speech or before?”

“Before. When I heard him coming through my radio talking that mess about Cadillacs, I didn’t take time to talk about it; I came after him.”

“And you decided to burn your own property instead of attacking him personally?”

“That’s right, because it was the logical thing to do. If I’d have shot him, or knocked a hole in his head, it would have been like getting mad when you’re playing the dozens. I would’ve lost the game.”

“I don’t get the point.”

“Well, in the dozens each player tries to say the worst things he can say about the other’s mother and father, their families, and the one who gets mad loses the game. So it was like Sunraider was playing the dozens with me, and I wasn’t going to lose by getting mad and blasting him. But while I had no trouble restraining myself from doing that, I also knew that he couldn’t afford to have folks like me giving up all the things Cadillacs have come to stand for. And, man, if enough of us give them up, it will hurt Sunraider a hell of a lot worse than a bullet. The point is to make him live with it, not to kill him. In fact, I’m sorry that the bastard got shot….”

Listening to his voice fade in the dark, I didn’t know whether to laugh or to throw up my hands before the incongruity between his act and his intention, between the Senator’s reckless joke and the old woman’s bigotry and Minifees’ extreme reaction to them. That such as they could produce such a sense of outrage and revolt as the car-burning expressed was too much for me. It had appeared that Minifees had allowed himself to become so provoked that he’d destroyed something that had meant far more to him than a simple—though expensive—apparatus of locomotion, and his answer to my next question gave indication of this.

“Mr. Minifees,” I said, “I get the impression that your automobile meant far more to you than cars do to most people.”

“Yeah? Well, I wouldn’t know about that,” he said, “but since I’ve been here, I’ve been thinking about what mine really meant, and now that I’ve thought about it, the difference between what cars mean to most folks and what mine meant to me is the difference between knowing only the melody
of a song and knowing the melody and the chords
and the
lyrics. Now I know what it meant to me from top to bottom.”

“Would you explain that?”

“Sure. I mean that now I dig the romance of owning something fine that costs a lot of cash. You know: A big car means a big man. Own a convertible and be hell with the women. Own a limousine and be a man of distinction. Hell, I know all of that bullshit which they put in the ads. And I also know about the engine and the suspension and all of the technical features—but after what I did, and since I’ve had time to think about it a bit, I realize that for me that Caddy wasn’t simply a car.”

I felt myself take an involuntary step forward.

“That’s what I’d like to understand,” I said. “Would you please spell it out? That’s precisely the kind of detail that my readers need to understand.”

“Well, for one thing, she was my boon companion….”

“Yes?”

“She was like a guaranteed freedom to move
—when
I wanted to and
where
I wanted to—you dig?”

“Yes, I think I do.”

“And she was my rolling hideaway and my thinking room.”

“In other words,” I said, “it was a mode of escape and a place of contemplation, is that it?”

“Right! All of that. And what’s more, she eased my nerves when the strain mounted up, and she gave me a lift when I was feeling low. Because that Cadillac got me further when I wanted to clear the territory, and she told me that good times were somewhere up the road. There’s many a cat who was saved from a busted jaw through my being able to climb into that Caddy and take off!”

Obviously
, I thought,
he used it as a means of controlling aggression: perhaps a device of sublimation. A mechanical compensation for powerlessness of a kind…
.

“Yes, sir,” he said, “if Sunraider hadn’t driven me into a corner, I’d still be rolling away from things that drag me.”

I said, “Mr. Minifees, in his speech the Senator referred to the design of American automobiles. He felt they were excellent; would you have anything to say along that line?”

“Well, there are some I wouldn’t use to haul hogs in, but that Cadillac was different. You have to give it to those people, when they say they make a fine automobile, then by God they make a
fine
automobile. Anyway, that Caddy of mine gave me pleasure whenever I looked at her because I knew that she was something that had been put together, as fine music written by a fine composer for fine musicians. Looking at her could work on me the same way as watching a speckled puppy playing with an India-rubber ball, or a young colt racing across a field of Kentucky bluegrass.”

“Very interestingly put,” I said. “Anything else?”

“Yes, to me that Cadillac was to other cars what good jazz is to noise. And to my own music she was what a curly-haired brown-skinned woman wearing gold earrings, red patent-leather sandals, and a blue gingham apron with a big bow tied behind is to the groovy blues. You know, they kind of naturally go together….”

“It was really quite important to you,” I said, “an aesthetic as well as a utilitarian value….”

“Yes, you’re right,” Minifees said. “It was all of that, but now it’s gone and I’m free.”

Free
, I thought,
free! What would M. Vannec think of that?
Minifees was too much for me. He’d allowed himself to destroy something precious in reaction to a deranged old woman and an irreverent and reckless senator, and now, sitting in a cell, he could speak in this darkness of freedom! I yearned to see his expression, wished that he’d turn on the light. Somehow he had rearranged reality in his mind in such a way that he could believe that Sunraider’s insult had set him free, and he was not complaining of the cost. I didn’t know how to continue the interview, for standing there, I felt in the presence of one taken over by the lucidity of madness. One who by a strange dislocation of values had come to see things, events, with an unreal clarity of vision. What would he do now? Where could he go, and what would happen to his music—or did his “far-out” jazz, as Charleston called it, actually foreshadow his present state of mind? I couldn’t stand it. I wasn’t prepared for it and wouldn’t have been even if I hadn’t been exhausted by all of the wild events which had exploded since he burned his Cadillac.

Nor was I helped when, now from across the room, I heard him sit up and say quite loudly, “Oh, Lord, there goes my boy Clyde again!”

I heard it then and turned, staring toward the door. From somewhere beyond the corridor a high, piercing tenor voice had begun to quaver of all things, the ballad of John Henry:

Oh, the hammer that John Hen-nery swung
It weighed over nine cold pound’
John Hen-nery broke a rib in his left-hand side
And his guts fell on the ground, Lord, Lord!

So they took John Hen-nery to the White House
,
And they buried him in the sand
And every locomotive that comes roaring by
,
Says there lays that steel-driving man
,
     
Lord, Lord!

Says there lays that steel-driving man!

It was a mocking, hallucinated voice which made the hair stand up on the back of my neck, and I knew that in a matter of minutes it would bring nurses and attendants to the floor and I’d be caught in Minifees’ cell.

“Man, you’d better cut out of here,” Minifees said, moving forward. Then the door was opening, and I was relieved to see the silhouette of Charleston standing before me.

“Goddamn, McIntyre,” he said, “I thought you’d be through in here and gone! Are you and LeeWillie trying to lose me my job?”

“No, I was just leaving,” I said, brushing past and hearing the voice clearly now as it sang,

Oh, I’ll tell you the story of Chickenshack Ernie
He painted a rooster on his Cadillac car
Was a grand entrepreneur, this Chickenshack Ernie
,
Whose chicken fried, was praised near and far…
.