Rake still thought of this sometimes when he drove past Terminal Station, especially after dark. It no longer loomed above downtown the way it once had, as the skyscrapers had caught up, but it still felt magical, a portal to other worlds.
His squad car’s lights were flashing as he pulled directly in front of the station, gliding past the line of taxicabs and ignoring the complaints of taxi drivers upset that he’d claimed the best spot. His partner, Parker Hillis, radioed to Dispatch that they had arrived.
Half past eight in the evening. A few hours after one of the frequent, spectacularly beautiful fall afternoons that made Rake certain God was a Southerner. They hurried out of their squad car but didn’t run, ever mindful of looking in control, never panicked.
Inside, the marble-floored lobby was crowded enough to make a four-year-old cry. The announcer was noting that the 9:10 to Chattanooga was en route and due to appear on platform six as Rake and Parker dodged hurrying passengers who did not seem as concerned about bumping into police officers as they should have, because they had trains to catch, appointments to make, vacations to commence, trysts to consummate, children to give large teddy bears to as apologies for their absence. No one had time to make eye contact.
“I’ll deal with the Negroes,” Rake told Parker as they moved against the current, toward the double doors beneath the sign Waiting Room. “You focus on the white folks.”
The brightly lit waiting room contained two dozen rows of worn but well-maintained wooden pews. Luggage sat in piles, kids slept on parents’ shoulders, and the commotion was at the far end of the room.
“Thank God you’re here!” A man in a green Terminal Station uniform and cap intercepted the officers. “I was just about ready to take the law into my own hands.”
“That’s never a good idea, sir.”
“Well, I don’t mean me personally. But I been working here ten years and I never seen a nigger with the gumption to pull this kind of—”
“Excuse me, sir,” Rake cut him off not because he saw the Negroes but because he saw the crowd that was blocking his view of the Negroes. Most of them had their backs to Rake, but a few stood profile and were talking to each other, some shaking their heads, most of them looking very angry indeed. As he often did, he was walking into trouble.
“Police! Back away, please!” Rake didn’t want to sound so loud as to alarm anyone but he needed to raise his voice to be heard. The crowd parted for the two officers and as Rake walked forward he saw a Negro man sitting in one of the wooden chairs that lined the perimeter of the room. So at least he hadn’t been quite brazen enough to sit in one of the pews, where he would have been harder to remove. Yet it was plenty brazen. He sat there motionless, shoulders slightly slumped, almost as if he had thought no one would notice him, though he could not have been more visible here if he’d been in a spotlight, or on fire.
He wore a brown tweed jacket and blue trousers, with a light-yellow shirt and green tie. His porkpie hat lent him the air of some of those jazz musicians Rake had seen pictures of, the ones who didn’t want to look like formal bandleaders so much as idiosyncratic professors of some new and yet-to-be-explained subject. Beside him was who Rake assumed to be his wife, with straightened hair and a bright red coat that would have been attention-getting even if her skin hadn’t been drawing all the attention she needed.
On her lap sat a wide-eyed Negro boy who looked too old to be sitting like that but too young to be hearing what he was hearing.
The Negro saw Rake coming, then looked straight ahead again as if he could will this away. Parker held up his hands and told the gathered crowd to go sit down. Everyone in the room was watching.
Rake stood directly in front of the Negro. “Sir, the colored waiting room is on the other side of the building.”
“I know where it is.” A Northern accent, of course. His voice was shaking and it sounded almost like his teeth were gritted, but not quite. Rake had been a cop for two and a half years and he was well accustomed to speaking with people who were under stress. He had conversed with people who used voices they had never before employed, had consoled women who screamed in registers they’d never wanted to reach. People sounded all kinds of weird when talking to cops.
“Sir,” and the sir was deliberate, and perhaps enough to further anger some of the witnesses if they could overhear, which Rake hoped they couldn’t if Parker was doing his job, “this waiting room is for whites only. You need to go to the colored waiting room.”
“We went there when our train was delayed. But it is filthy, as I told the station attendant.” Hell, maybe he was a professor, his diction was so formal. “So we moved here.”
This close and Rake could see that the Negro also wore a black cardigan sweater beneath his jacket, a Northerner dressed far too warmly for a Southern autumn. That was hardly the only reason, Rake suspected, that sweat streaked the man’s cheeks.
Rake looked at the wife, who turned her eyes away, either respecting Southern decorum or just scared. More like terrified. The two were a bit portly, dark-skinned, and the lad on her lap was wearing short pants that showed off calves that hadn’t yet lost their baby fat. The kid was amazingly still. She had been holding him with both arms, but now one of her hands reached over and touched her husband’s elbow.
“Jonathan, please.”
Rake waited a beat, hoping the wife’s voice would do what the cop’s couldn’t. But still the Negro stared straight ahead.
“Get the damned niggers out of there!” someone shouted. Rake felt his body tense. He’d thought Parker was disarming that side of things, but apparently some of the angriest ones hadn’t been able to resist tossing a verbal grenade. More would come soon, or worse. Rake glanced briefly at the crowd, could see Parker talking to a trio of men in work clothes, local boys perhaps awaiting the next train to Norcross or Marietta, men who were about ready to see that justice was served if these cops weren’t up to it.
“Sir,” Rake said, harder than before. “You cannot stay here.”
“There was trash on the floor of the restroom,” the Negro said. “And it smelled of vomit. My little boy was in there with me. No one should have to put up with that.”
Rake hated this. Everything about it. The faces staring at him from all sides now, the hostility he could taste in the air like fires lit from fallen leaves. Hated the confines he had to impose on this man.
But also: hated the Negro’s superior tone, the Northern sense of horror at seeing what goes on down here in Dixie, the distaste for this foreign land and its customs.
“Sir, I can talk to the station manager about cleaning the colored section. But you need to head over there right now.”
“My family and I have as much right to wait here as any of these people do.”
“Not in the state of Georgia, you don’t.” Rake stood a bit to the man’s side, but still the man stared straight ahead. “What’s your name, sir?”
“Jonathan O’Higgins.”
The fact that this Negro had an Irish surname only seemed to add to the absurdity, the mixed-up madness of life in America, Atlanta, Rake’s beat.
“Mr. O’Higgins, where are you from?”
“Philadelphia. We’re en route to New Orleans for a speaking engagement. I’m a scientist. That may shock you. But I’m a human being and I won’t be held in that chattel pen of a waiting room.”
Rake saw the wife’s fingers tighten around her husband’s elbow.
O’Higgins was taking it too far. Rake didn’t like this situation either, but that didn’t give the Negro the right to take a condescending tone.
“That doesn’t shock me at all, sir. But someone with such impressive credentials should realize that there are penalties for breaking the law.”
Someone from the crowd called out that it was time for “you cops to haul that nigger to jail.”
“It’s my job to enforce the laws of the city of Atlanta. And our laws are different from the ones you’re used to up in Philadelphia.
I don’t expect you to like them. But they’re the law, and I do expect you to obey them. If you do not, you’ll spend the night in something that looks a lot more like a chattel pen than that waiting room does.”
“Jonathan,” the man’s wife said. “Enough.”
Rake counted to five in his head. He hated that the Negro was putting him in this position. You are so lucky that I am the white cop who took this call. His first partner, Dunlow, would have knocked the Negro unconscious by now. So would dozens of other cops.
“It will give me no pleasure to arrest you, but if you don’t comply with my orders, that’s what I’ll do. You will spend the night in jail, possibly longer. I don’t know what will happen to your family.”
At that, the kid started crying. He was about the same age as Denny Jr. and it was amazing how similar crying can be. Rake felt an inner hand clench something in his chest. He saw the wife tugging on her husband’s arm even as she looked at her son and shushed him, and with that O’Higgins said, quietly, and to his wife but not to this white cop, “Let’s go.”
Rake backed up as the family stood, the boy still in his mother’s arms, head buried in the crook of her neck. O’Higgins picked up his two large suitcases. Rake heard “about time” and other grumbling, and he walked a few steps behind them, partly to ensure that they would follow through and partly to discourage onlookers from throwing anything.
He followed them halfway through the lobby, where a white-haired Negro janitor mopped a recent spill.
“Night in jail would teach him a lesson,” admonished the station agent, who Rake hadn’t realized was trailing him.
“While we’re telling each other how to do their jobs, how ’bout you make sure the colored bathroom gets cleaned?”
The station agent scowled. “The colored bathroom? First, I gotta go clean the seats they were sitting on before white people sit there.”
“Is it just me, or is stuff like this happening more often?” Parker asked as they returned to their squad car.
“I haven’t kept track,” Rake said. He had noticed the same thing, in fact, but he was loath to engage in conversations like this. His first partner had been a violent bigot. Parker, in contrast, was someone he’d known all his life; they’d grown up together, and, after the war (where Rake served as an advance scout in France and then Germany), both had joined the force in ’48. They’d been partnered two years now, and Rake trusted him. Still, such conversations always made him uncomfortable.
He would have felt far worse had he known what his brother-in-law, Dale, was doing at that exact moment.
3
THE GIBBOUS MOON hung low in the black sky, intermittently veiled and then revealed again by the passing gossamer clouds, as if winking its approval as Dale drove north. They had left their urban neighborhood thirty minutes earlier and now all around them was country, the trees dense in patches and blocking out the night. It was a wonder they could go so far in so little time.
There were five of them, three in Dale’s coughing Buick and two trailing in a Ford pickup. In shotgun sat Mott, an old buddy who had joined Dale in many a scrap, though most had occurred back when they had a lot less mileage on them. Before wives and kids and boredom.
In the back sat their friend Irons, who could bench three-fifty and was rumored to have once worn a necklace of Jap ears, each of which he’d cut off himself. Dale had never been in a position to acquire such wild jewelry, having been ruled out for military service due to something funny about his heart, which he insisted the doctors had misdiagnosed, and in fact he’d tried enlisting not only with the army but also the navy and coast guard, hoping one of their physicians wouldn’t have such sensitive hearing or follow the rules regarding military checkups quite so strictly, but no luck, the pencil pushers had all ruled him out. Dale found it hard to imagine, actually cutting someone’s ear off. According to Irons, those ears had come off Japs who were already dead, which made it slightly more possible to imagine, but still. Damn. That was serious stuff, and Dale was thrilled to have the fellow in his backseat, honored, even. Irons was someone Dale wanted to learn from, and the fact that they were out together like this was Big.
They’d met at Sweetwater Mill a couple of years back but Irons had been let go—Dale heard a rumor Irons had gotten in a tussle with a coworker. He hadn’t heard the story from Irons, and in fact Irons was a difficult fellow to get to know. One of the things Irons was good at, which was further evidence of his overall impressiveness: being silent. Dale himself found it difficult to keep his mouth shut, especially during stressful moments, or after he’d done or said something wrong. Irons, on the other hand, was a master at not saying anything at all. His size helped. It said things words could not. Made words unnecessary. Dale wasn’t big like Irons, wasn’t a war hero like Irons, and he possessed instead a nervous energy, constantly folding or unfolding his arms, cracking his knuckles, making stupid jokes. Such habits pretty much ensured that people were not intimidated by Dale. Which he further resented. Which reinforced his need to make stupid comments again, and so the cycle spun.
Tonight, though. Tonight would be something. Dale had received the call that afternoon: his target would be in position by ten, and likely drunk, thus particularly easy to terrorize. Hopefully he would not be so inebriated as to not comprehend what they were doing to him, not remember it the next day. Dale would do his part to ensure the man remembered, and Irons would certainly help.
Irons had done this sort of thing before. Dale was almost positive. He’d heard stories. With the kinds of details one couldn’t make up. Some of which, honestly, he didn’t like dwelling on, yet he found himself thinking about them when he lay in bed at night, trying to fall asleep.
Which was why he was out here in the sticks, taking a stand, doing some good. Being a man of action. Someone his kids could look up to. Even though he would be wearing a hood, would get no credit. He would be the silent savior of his community.
He felt his nerves the farther he drove his fellow Klansmen north, so he joked with Mott and the still-silent Irons, talked about baseball and the news. The defending champion Yankees were up on the Phillies in the World Series. Dale didn’t care much for either team; mainly he was thankful the Phillies had unseated the Dodgers as NL champs, so people didn’t have to endure another year of Jackie Goddamn Robinson playing on baseball’s grandest stage.
“Doesn’t really matter that the Dodgers didn’t make it,” Dale admitted. “Gonna be even more niggers in the league next year.”
“Not necessarily.”
“Dam’s done broken, they’re flooding in.”
“Ye of little faith.” Mott shook his head. He’d always been a calming influence in Dale’s life, talking him out of rages, gently reining in some of Dale’s more outlandish plans. He was glad to have Mott along tonight, even if this was a proper occasion for rage and big plans.
There was so much bad news in the world right then, which they discussed as they drove north. Joe McCarthy was hammering away at his list of radicals in the US government, and a new book about the recent trial of red spy Alger Hiss implied that Communists had infiltrated every nook of the US government. It felt like they were in a strange, almost drugged moment in which America was going to get pulled into another world war. Truman had lost China, Mao topping Chiang-Kai-However-You-Say-It, and we were in Korea now, with Mao threatening to get involved, too, if our troops crossed the 38th parallel. Even in Indochina, Communist troops were gaining momentum against the French. America was damn encircled in Reds, seemed like.
Mott, shining a flashlight on the map that lay across his lap, told Dale to turn off the road. Dale’s contact had told them a nearby park would be a convenient place for them to don their robes and hoods. Dale drove down a narrow dirt path beneath low-hanging oak boughs gone spectral in the darkness.
From out of the Ford came Iggy and Pantleg. Iggy was another friend from way back—he’d grown up in Hanford Park along with Dale and Mott, lived a mere three
blocks from where he’d been raised. His parents lived in the same house where his lifetime of height intervals was marked on the pantry molding, yet now they had the privilege of living five doors down from a family of Negroes. Iggy was as anxious about doing something as Dale was. Pantleg was a relative stranger to Dale, some friend of Iggy’s from the rock quarry where they worked. They were both of average height, stocky, and toughened by their arduous labor. As Iggy exited the Ford he grinned mischievously, his mussed blond hair adding to the look of a kid out to cause trouble. A kid holding a fifth of bourbon.
“All right!” he shouted. “Beautiful night to be out amongst God’s creatures!”
A hearty swig and he passed it to Mott, who passed it to Dale without partaking. Mott had become a teetotaler, which was a shame. One of his kids had nearly died of measles a few years back, during which time Mott had made a deal with the Lord never to touch a drop again if He spared Mott’s boy. He was a man of his word.
Dale could see that Iggy and Pantleg, in contrast, had gotten quite the head start on drinking, could smell it from their pores, so he took a double snort himself.
Mott opened the trunk and they started donning their robes, shaking lint from the hoods.
Lightning Men Page 4