Three Days Before the Shooting ... (83 page)

Across the way the old woman continued to rail, but now he was listening for the baritone timbre and voice-like phrasing of a muted trombone which would proclaim with broadly reverent mockery the lyrics of some ancient hymn; and looking back to the building entrance, he expected to see a crowd rush forth to shout down denunciations upon him, to shower him with stones…. But like the street, the entrance was empty and the door now mysteriously closed upon the brooding quiet…
.

Soon, the Senator thought, it will come. They’re beginning to stir so as the old trainer said, watch their hands. And as old fighters, he warned, watch hands, feet
, and
head. Yes, they’re moving out into the open and things are beginning to heave and the backwash is beginning. But Hickman here? Unlikely—though who knows who it was who came? Nine owls have squawked out the rules and the hawks will talk, so soon they’ll come marching out of the woodpile and the woodwork—sore-head, sore-foot, right up close, one-butt-shuffling into history but demanding praise and kind treatment for deeds undone, for lessons unlearned. But studying war once more…
.

Reaching the curb now, the Senator prepared to cross the boulevard when, sensing a rush of movement from his left, he spun instinctively and saw the car
.

Long, black and under-slung, it seemed to straighten the curving course of the street with the force of its momentum, bearing down upon him so relentlessly that his nerves screamed with tension as his entire body prepared itself for a supreme effort. An effort which, even as his muscles responded to the danger, was already anticipating itself in his reeling mind; projecting a long, curving, backwards-leaping motion through which his eyes were now recording in vivid detail of stone-steel-asphalt-chrome, damp leaves and whirling architectural stone as he saw himself sailing backwards and yet he was watching, still on his feet, the car approaching with such deliberate speed that now its fenders appeared to rise and fall with the heavy labored motion of some great bird flying, and the heaving of its black metallic sides like that of the barrel of a great bull charging. And now two gleaming, long-belled heralds’ trumpets which lay along the engine hood ripped the air with a blast of defiant sound and he saw a pair of red-tipped bullhorns appear atop the radiator, knifing toward him—while an American flag, which snapped and rippled like a regimental pinion brought to aggressive life by a headlong cavalry charge, streamed fiercely above…
.

Only now did his body catch up with his mind, beginning its backwards-sailing fling as the car, almost upon him now, veered suddenly and stopped with a night-piercing screaming of brakes. He was on his back then, feeling the pain of the impact exploding in his elbows and spine and in the endless, heart-pounding, head-jolting instant the car seemed to leave the roadway and hover above the curb, hanging there like a giant insect; and inside its wide front seat were three men
.

Dark-skinned and broad of face behind the murky window they peered down at him through dark glasses topped by the narrow brims of high-crowned, shaggy-knapped white hats, watching him with intense concentration as their mouths stretched wide in expressions of fierce, derisible gaiety. Whereupon the driver reached for a microphone and looking around his companions addressed him through the herald trumpets which lay along either side of the rakish hood
.

“Next time you better swing your booty faster, boy,” the voice said, “or by God we go’ lo-mo kick your nasty ass!”

Watching them, the Senator was speechless
.

“Don’t be laying there looking at us,” the voice said. “You heard me correctly; we’ll blast you and do everybody some service!”

The Senator started up, trying to answer, but now there came a jet-like blast, and seeing the machine leaping into furious motion he rolled, turning completely over as he tried to escape its path. But instead of crushing him, the machine was braking and surging backwards with a blast of red and white light erupting from its rear. And then thundering with a rapid shifting and re-shifting of gears it left the street once more and hovered above him like a hovercraft, the black passengers looking down upon him with grim satisfaction, awaiting his next move…
.

“Hey, Mister Motharider,” the voice called down to him. “How’s this for a goonguage?”

“Hey, Shep,” the man in the middle said, “don’t ask he not’ing! Let’s
show
Charlie how de car can curb. I don’t tink he believes you cawn drive dis bloody ting.”

“No, I don’t believe he does,” the driver said. “Okay, Charlie boy, watch me snatch the butter from the duck!”

Staring into the grinning faces, the Senator scrambled to his knees, thinking, Who are they? as the machine shot away and shattered the quiet of the street with the flatulent blasts from its dual exhaust. He watched it lunging up the boulevard at a forward slant, seeming to flatten out and become the more unreal the farther it receded into the distance. Techniques of intimidation, that’s what they’re using, the Senator thought. They were waiting for me; they were watching the building for the moment I started across the street so they could intimidate me. So they’ll be back and I’d better leave…. And even as he watched the car floating away he was aware that somehow it was beginning to flow backwards upon its own movement, dividing itself and becoming simultaneously both there in the distance and here before him, where now it throbbed and puttered, a mirage-like image of black metal agleam with chrome, and there up the boulevard, where it was resonating street and buildings with the thunder of its power. And it came to the Senator that he was watching no ordinary automobile. This was no Cadillac, no Lincoln, Oldsmobile, nor Buick—nor any other known make of machine; it was an arbitrary assemblage of chassis, wheels, engine, hood, horns, none of which had ever been part of a single car! It was a junkyard sculpture mechanized! An improvisation, a bastard creation of black bastards—and yet, it was no ordinary hot rod. It was an improvisation of vast arrogance and subversive and malicious defiance which they had designed to outrage and destroy everything in its path, a rolling time bomb launched in the streets…
.

And now the image of the machine gleamed and quivered and throbbed before him, glowing with flames of luminous red that had been painted along the sides of the threatening, shark-finned fenders which guarded its licenseless rear. Two slender antennae affixed to either side of the trunk lazily whipped the air, one flying an enormous and luxuriantly rippling coon’s tail and the other displaying in miniature the stars and bars of the Confederacy while across the broad expanse of its trunk he saw the enormous image of an open switchblade knife bearing the words:

we have seceded from the mother!
hooray for us!
to hell with charley!

They have constructed it themselves, the Senator’s mind went on, brought the parts together and gathered in conspiratorial secret like a group of guerrillas assembling the smuggled parts of a machine gun! And they’ve made the damn thing run! No single major part goes normally with the rest, yet even in their violation of the rigidities of mechanical tolerances and in their defiance of the laws of physics, property rights, patents—everything—they’ve forced part after part to mesh and made it run! It’s a mammy-made, junkyard construction, and yet those clowns have made it work, it runs!

And now the machine roared back, braking with a violent, stiffly sprung rocking of body and a skidding of tires, and again the men were looking out of the open window
.

“Listen, Sunrobber,” the nearest called, “What the hell was that you just said about our little heap?”

“Hell, mahn,” the middle man said, “don’t ask he no’ting! I done tole you the bahstard has low-rated our little load! The mahn done low-rated our pride and joy. So don’t ask the bahstard not’ing, just show he whadt de joecah kin do!

“And remembah us mah-toe, mahn:

Down Wid de Coon Cawdge,
Up WID DE JOE CAH!

“Then, mahn, I say, KICK HIM ASS!”

“Yeah, man; but not so fas’,” one of the others said. “Not before we give his butt a little ride….”

A blast of heat struck him then, followed by the opening of the door. And as a dark hand reached down he seemed to hear the sound of Hickman’s consoling voice, calling from somewhere above
.

So now I suppose that the medicine is taking him over again
, Hickman thought.
The needle has reached through his flesh into his mind. Those hypos into the vein then … The way he looks at me, still wanting to talk and his eyes dulling. But the hopeful thing is that he’s fighting to live, to stay alive. Regardless of what it will all have to mean if he does, he still wants to live. So my task is simply to help him to keep on fighting, to keep on wanting to live. What else is there, other than what a minister always tries to do to help? Comfort and consolation—no, not just that, because there’s still the mystery to be understood. Reverse the time. Lord, but I’m tired … cramped in muscle and confused in mind…. Maybe I ought to go out and stretch my legs, get a little fresh air in my lungs. No, you can’t risk it because it would be just like him to come to while I’m out and if he did, what would be the next move? Forget it; you’ve waited all this long time so you can afford to sit still and wait a while longer—tired or no tired…. Those hypos … He’s sleeping hard, quiet in his body if not in his mind. Hypos. I sure hope so, because the time has come when everything has to be understood and I mean to be here to try…
.

Just look at him, Hickman, there he is: Bliss at last. Out of all the time and racked and tiered-up circumstance, out of all the pomp and power-seeking—there’s ole Bliss. It makes you wonder all over again just what kind of being Man really is; makes you puzzle over the difference between who he is and what he does. But how do you separate it? Body and soul are all mixed together and yet are something different just the same. One grows in the way it’s destined to grow, flesh and bone, blood and nerves, skin and hair, from the beginning, while the other twists and turns and hides and seeks and makes up itself as it grows and moves along. So there he is and for whatever the world knows him to be, somehow he’s still Bliss…. It’s like hearing a firecracker go off at a parade and you
look up and see the great and bejeweled king of the Mardi Gras, sitting high on his throne in all his shiny majesty, and he starts to shake and tremble and there, before your eyes, a little ole boy looks out from behind his mask. Well, the child is father and somewhere back there in the past, back behind little Bliss’s face, this twitching, wounded man was waiting. No point of dreaming about it either. I was in the picture and a lot of other folks too, and we made a plan, or at least we dreamed a dream and worked for it but the world was simply too big for us and the dream got out of hand. So we held on to what we saw, us old ones, and finally it brought us here
.

But just look at him—who would have thought that it would come to this, that our little Bliss would come to this? But why, Master? Why did this have to be? Back there in our foolish way we took him as our young hope, as our living guarantee that in our dismal night You still spoke to us and stood behind Your promise, even when things were most hopeless. Now look at him, all ravaged by his denials, sapped by his running, drained and twitching like a coke fiend from all the twisting and turning that brought him here. All damaged in his substance by trying to make everything appear to be the truth and nothing really truthful, playing all the old lying, obscene games of denial and rejection of the poor and beaten down. And even at the very last moment, refusing to recognize us, refusing to even see us who could never forget the promise and who for years haven’t asked anything except that he remember and honor the days of his youth—or at least his baby days. Honor, oh yes; honor. But not to us but honor unto Thy dying lamb. We asked nothing for ourselves, only that he remember those days and what he had been at that time. Remember the promising babe that he was and the hope we placed in him and his obligation to the babes who come after. Maybe that was our mistake, we just couldn’t surrender everything, we just couldn’t manage to burn out the memory and cauterize the wound and deny that it had ever happened … that he had ever existed. Couldn’t treat all of that like a hobo walking along the tracks back of town who passes and looks up and sees your face and spits on the cinders and crunches on. Gone without a word…. After having been born so close to the time of whips and cold iron shackles we could fly up here in an airplane—which is like the promise of a miracle fulfilled … which is no longer miraculous—but still there on the bed lies the old abiding mystery in its latest form and still mysterious. Why’m I here, Master? Why? And how is it that a man like him, who was taught so much and gone so far never learned the simple fact that just as it takes two to make a bargain it takes two to bury a hatchet, or even to forget words uttered in dedication and taken deep into the heart and made sanctified by suffering? Blood spilled in violence doesn’t just dry and drift away in the wind, no! It cries out for restitution, redemption; and we (or at least I—because it was only me in the beginning), but we took the child and tried to seek the end of the old brutal dispensation in the hope that a little gifted child would speak for our condition from inside the only acceptable mask. That he would embody our spirit in the councils of our enemies. But, oh, what a foolish miscalculation! Way back there … I’m no wise man now, but then, Lord, how mixed-up and naive I was! There I was, riffing on Thy Word and not even sure whether I was conducting a con game or simply taking part and leading in a mysterious
prayer—forgive me my ignorance…. Yesterday after the shooting started…. Was it yesterday? It was, wasn’t it, Hickman? How long? Have you been sitting here all that time? How many hours in this hospital waiting and talking and talking and remembering and revealing and talking and not revealing? And all because I slipped up and was sitting there in that gallery looking on like a man watching a scene unfolding in a dream instead of acting on the facts already exploding in my face. I could have stepped in front of that boy—or at least have picked him out of the crowd and stopped and tried to talk some sense into his head. But my eyes, my old eyes failed me. So now this sitting and waiting. It was awful! Truly awful! But what’s a man to do, Hickman? So you try, you do your best as you see your best. Yes, but you realize that there’s no guarantee that it’s going to work. The best intentions have cracks in them, man, and that’ll never change. Not until somebody puts the Lord’s sun into a bushel basket—Ho now! So here we come all this way and after all these years and there was no stopping even a fraction of it. Talking about sending a boy to do a man’s work, this coiled spring has been stretched out so far that when it started to snap back I’d almost reached my second childhood. Talking to myself and belching in crowds and in the deep of night dreaming kindly of my wicked days and all against my duties and my soul’s need. Lucky my bladder’s still what it was years ago and I still have good breath control because my strong old slave-borne body has held up pretty well as bodies go…. Still you failed. You were in the right place but not enough in it. You saw what was coming because Janey had warned you. You knew something was going to happen but not its shape or its outrageous face. So I simply couldn’t stop it. Sometimes everything mocks a man—even his own tongue, his eyes and hands. Then babes judge him and fools ignorant of his strengths leap on his weaknesses like a mosquito finding the one tender spot at the back of his knee where it knows it can draw his blood
.