When John introduced me, both of them smiled. They were small smiles, but I thought that they were genuine.
“Good work with the Focus business,” Tony Willingham said. “I hear there’s some money about to shake loose because of it.”
“Good work with the pool, too,” Rosser Sellers said, and they both laughed, and I felt pleasure light my face like a lamp. There was no shade of patronization here, no polite indulgence. Reserve, certainly, but nothing else.
“I don’t know what felt better, maybe doing a little good for kids like Andre or beating Boy Slattery at pool,” I said, and everyone laughed again, except Juanita and Sonny Pickens. Somehow I did not think I was going to win smiles there.
“And who knows which will pay off bigger in the long run,” Tony Willingham said.
Only then did they acknowledge the two out-of-towners at the table.
“Sonny,” Rosser Sellers said neutrally, nodding to him. “Juanita. Long time.”
“It has been,” Juanita said, smiling slightly. Lord, but she was beautiful. In the dim, smoky room she looked like a priestess, like a carved deity.
“Seems like yesterday,” Sonny Pickens said. The sharklike smile widened. No one spoke for a moment.
“Sit with us,” Juanita said then, smiling, and they looked at her for another moment, and then dropped into vacant chairs. John raised a hand for the waitress, but they both shook their heads.
“Well,” Rosser Sellers said. “Y’all just catching up, or doing a little scouting?”
“Guess you might say some of both,” Sonny Pickens said, the strange parody of glee on his sharp face once more. I saw that there was no mirth behind it; he probably did it unconsciously. A smiling man whose smile promised nothing.
Juanita looked levelly at him, and then at the two newcomers.
“It’s a free country, brothers,” she said lazily. “But of course you know that.”
“Doin’ any good?”
Tony Willingham did not look at her when he spoke, but at John Howard. I saw John’s face tighten, though his expression did not change.
“I’m always willing to listen, brother,” he said, with an accent on the “brother.” “I remember when y’all were, too.”
“Oh,” Willingham said, rearing back against the wall and smiling a smile I did not like. “I think it depends entirely on what you’re being asked to listen to. Don’t you…brother?”
John Howard did not respond. Juanita laid a hand lightly on his arm and smiled at Tony Willingham.
“Be surprised what you can learn if you just listen…brother,” she said.
Beside her Sonny Pickens snorted, but he did not open his eyes. He seemed lost fathoms deep in the music.
What is going on here? I thought. Obviously they’re all old friends, or at least acquaintances. They know each other from earlier times; they’ve been through a lot together. But they’re beating each other over the head with this brother business. And all this cold, awful smiling. They’re like dogs, sniffing and circling. Who has betrayed who? If Sonny and Juanita are Panthers, what are they doing hanging out in the very backyard of everything they say they despise? I wish I’d never laid eyes on Juanita. I wish she’d go back to wherever they go and leave…
I realized that I was thinking, leave John alone. In the darkness I blushed as if I had thought something indecent.
“How you doing, Luke?” Tony Willingham said to Lucas. “I don’t think I’ve seen you to talk to you since the sit-in at Rich’s. Christ, you must have still been in school then; trying to grow a beard and mustache and not having much luck. What’s it been, six years? Seven?”
“About,” Luke grinned. “It’s taken me that long to grow the beard. I remember one of the first shots I ever got printed was that one of you I took that day, with that little old lady whacking you with her umbrella. I never could figure out if she was one of the sags, or she just didn’t like your style.”
Tony Willingham laughed hugely. “Those were some kind of days, weren’t they?” he said. “There must have been fifteen hundred folks on that picket line at one time. It circled all downtown Atlanta. God, there were shuttle buses to take people down there and back, and we had two-way radios and special signs that rain and spit and worse wouldn’t wash off, and special coats for the girls so they wouldn’t get spit on…and worse again. Man, we thought we were hot shit. And we were. We were.”
Everyone laughed but Juanita. Even Sonny Pickens cackled mirthlessly. Juanita sat carved and golden, still as an idol, her hand on John Howard’s arm.
“So, is the Lord here?” Sonny Pickens said. He still did not open his eyes.
“Sonny,” Juanita said softly, menacingly.
“The Lord?” I said.
“King. We heard he might be,” Sonny Pickens said.
“He’s in the dining room,” Rosser Sellers said, looking narrowly at Sonny Pickens.
“Good move,” Pickens said lazily. “Least he knows he can get served. That ain’t always true everywhere, you know, even in these enlightened days. It’s like John Lewis was telling—wasn’t it brother John? Talking about Nashville, I think. Somebody said, ‘Well, you know we don’t serve niggers here,’ and somebody else said, ‘That’s okay because we don’t eat ’em.’ Quick mind, brother John. Goin’ with the times, though maybe not far enough.”
There was a silence. Then Tony Willingham said, very softly, “Something on your mind, brother?”
“Just thinkin’; the good old days don’t look so good to me anymore,” Sonny Pickens said, and opened his eyes, and gave the table a smile stunning in its white ferality.
“And you got a better way,” Willingham said even more softly. It was not a question.
“Oh, yeah. We got a better way. I’d be glad to tell you all about it, but ol’ Juanita here is our designated spokeswoman, so best I shut up and let her spokes,” Pickens said. The smile did not falter. It did not reach his eyes, either. He thrust it around the table like a flung gauntlet.
“This is not the time, Sonny,” Juanita said, and her voice was not soft now. Neither was her face.
“It past time,” he said. He was not smiling now, either.
Rosser Sellers looked from Pickens and Juanita to John Howard. John met his eyes steadily, but I knew that he was disturbed. The scar that ran down into his eyebrow was livid, had whitened. The knuckles of his clasped hands were lighter than the skin around them.
“What do you think about all this, brother John?” Sellers said.
“I think there’s some things we need to look at again,” he said. “I think we’d be fools not to look at everything.”
The silence this time was freighted, seeming to beat with invisible wings. Sonny Pickens gave his high, cracked laugh, but no one else did. The music wove its separate strands around us. Tension crackled. My skin crawled with it. I wondered how soon we might leave, and where the ladies’ room was, and if I dared cross the charged room to find it. I could not feel Luke’s presence beside me and I did not know the taut stranger with John Howard’s face, and the others were as alien to me as if they came from another planet. I felt primally, abysmally alone.
Another figure was beside the table suddenly.
“Do your mamas know you boys are out?” said a voice that had a dream, had stirred a nation, preached love and gentleness from a hundred besieged pulpits and a score of jails. My breath seemed to stop. I looked up. He stood there wearing a cardigan sweater against the chill of the air-conditioning, and a white shirt with an open collar, and khaki slacks, looking as inevitable as a mountain, larger than any of us, preternaturally solid and focused, and there.
We were on our feet in an instant. I almost upset my chair as I scrambled out of it, and Luke reached out to steady me. So did Martin Luther King. I simply stood, feeling my mouth curve into a smile, staring at the dark moon of his face, the full lips, the slanted, faintly Mongolian eyes, the solid set of his shoulders, the good hands. He smiled back.
There
were introductions all around. He did not linger. His eyes rested as gently and knowingly on Juanita and Sonny Pickens as on his young lieutenants, not now so young. He nodded affably to Luke and patted John Howard briefly on the shoulder.
To me he said, “It was fine work you and Luke and John did on the day care piece, Smoky. It was maybe even finer work when you whipped ole Boy Slattery at pool,” and he chuckled and touched my arm softly, and then he was gone into the crowd. The trio broke gleefully into “You Been Talkin’ ’Bout Me, Baby,” and Luke pushed his chair back and said, “We need to get going, Smoky. I’ve got film to process.”
I stood, and picked up my nearly untouched beer, and drained it. I was dizzy with alcohol and the undercurrents at the table and above all the head-spinning exhilaration of meeting Dr. King. Me, I kept thinking to myself. That was me, talking to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who knows my name and likes my work. Me.
All of a sudden I wanted desperately to tell my father, and to have him understand. I knew that it wouldn’t happen. I hooked a full beer off the table and carried it with me as we left the room. Behind us, Tony Willingham and Rosser Sellers followed Dr. King into the sacrosanct back room of the club, and John Howard sat still at the table, his eyes fixed on something faraway that I could not see. Juanita sat beside him, tracing her long red nail over the back of his hand. It left white traceries on the bronze skin. Sonny Pickens leaned against his wall, eyes closed again, smiling, nodding in time to the music.
“Thanks for the evening,” I called softly back to John Howard, but he did not appear to have heard me.
Out on the hot, empty sidewalk, I realized suddenly that I was very drunk. I did not feel drunk; I felt wonderful, giddy and floating and chatty, aware with every atom of my being of the thick, soft air on my bare arms and the grit of the sidewalk under the thin soles of my shoes, of the somehow good, gasolinelike smell of vanished traffic hanging over the streets, of the weight of my hair on my neck and cheek.
But I knew that I must be drunk. I could not walk straight, even though I felt that I could have danced and sung my way down the street like Cyd Charisse. My knees kept buckling, and I kept listing into Luke. Halfway to the car he put his arm around me and half-carried me, and I leaned into him, liking the hardness of his arm around my waist and the way my head fit into the hollow of his shoulder, just where it joined his neck. His beard tickled the top of my head when he leaned down to talk to me, and I liked that, too. He was, I thought, a little taller than Brad. Somehow I did not bump awkwardly into Luke, but fit as though we were designed to walk in lockstep.
“We fit,” I said dreamily, burrowing my head into his neck. “Feel how good we fit.”
“We fit when you’re drunk as a skunk and I’m all but carrying you,” he said. “’Scuse me for not having noticed before.”
“I am not drunk,” I said. “I may be a little high, though. Oh, Luke, I don’t want it to be over. I loved that, I wanted it to last. You could just feel, in that room, what the movement was all about…the power. Didn’t you feel it?”
“I felt power, all right,” he said soberly from above my head. “I’m not sure where it was coming from, though.”
“Well, from Dr. King. John. Tony and Rosser. You know what they are better than most people—”
“I know what they were.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. I really don’t know what I mean exactly, Smoky. I didn’t much like that little scene. I don’t like those two…brothers. Brother and sister, rather. I know what they are, but I don’t know what they’re doing there. It’s not their scene. They don’t believe in mingling with the nonviolents anymore than they believe in fraternizing with whitey. Ordinarily they wouldn’t be caught dead anywhere near you and me, but there they were, making nice. Or at least, trying to. And I didn’t like seeing them with Dr. King. It reminded me somehow of…of hyenas circling a wounded lion, or something. Gave me the willies.”
I did indeed feel a small shiver pass through him, and pressed myself closer to him, as if to warm it away. I wanted suddenly to make things good for him. The thought was so ridiculous that I giggled.
“What are you laughing at?”
“I wanted to comfort you for a minute there. It’s the silliest idea I ever had.”
“You don’t think I ever need any comfort?”
I felt rather than heard him laugh.
“Let’s get you home,” he said.
Dull sadness descended so suddenly that I stumbled under its weight. Sadness, and the pain that had lain dormant since early evening. It waited. I knew then that it did. When he was gone and I was alone in my bed it would strike. I was silent until we had almost reached the Tenth Street exit of the freeway, and then I said, “Can I watch you develop film for a while? Teddy’s spending the night at her folks’, and I don’t feel like being by myself yet.”
He looked sidewise at me.
“You okay? You feeling sick or something? You had an awful lot to drink.”
“I’m not sick. I just…feel lonesome.”
“Ol’ YMOG ought to get himself back over here,” Luke said, but he turned the car onto Tenth Street, headed, I knew, for Ansley Park and his apartment. The pain receded a little, growling.
“He was here today,” I said. “I had lunch with him. He had to go back, though.”
“Ah,” he said. “Did you show him the Life thing?”
“Yeah.”
“And does he think you’re a foaming racist?”
“No. He doesn’t think that. I don’t think it even crossed his mind.”
“Well, I underestimated him, then. My apologies.”
“None needed,” I said. But I said no more about Brad. I was taking no chances with the pain.
“You got anything to drink at your house?” I said.
“Not for the likes of you, little Nell,” he replied. “I’ll give you coffee or some hot chocolate, but no more booze.”
“It’s Friday.”
“I don’t care. I don’t want you throwing up on my film. You really can’t drink worth shit, Smoky.”
“Well, it’s not like I do a lot of it,” I said, and gave a loud, completely involuntary hiccup.
“No it’s not. I wonder why you did tonight.”
I did not answer. As we bowled through the dark, quiet warren of leaf-hung streets in Ansley Park, a new and unpleasant sensation began in my midriff. I swallowed hard, but it did not go away.
He pulled to a stop at the curb, below the big old brick house whose carriage house he occupied, and came around to open the door for me. My head swam, and a horrid buzzing began in my wrists and fingers.
“I think I’m going to be sick,” I said, and was, violently, and repeatedly, in the gutter, while he held me around the waist from behind.
When I stopped, I was weak and wobbly-kneed, but much clearer-headed. I was also mortified. Tears of embarrassment stood in my eyes. I did not want to turn around and look at Lucas Geary.
“I’m so embarrassed,” I whispered. “Lord, how gross. I’m sorry, Luke. I’ve never been sick in public before in my life.”
“It’s not exactly public,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. You’ll feel better now. I threw up for two days the first time I got that drunk. You ought to try grass. It’s a lot easier on your system, and you don’t get sick. Come on, let’s walk a little.”
He slipped his arm around me and I leaned gratefully against him once more. I did not need the support now, but his body felt good, familiar somehow. With his other hand he reached over and smoothed the tangled hair off my face. It was a gentle touch, as if I had been a sick child.
Across from the sleeping houses there was a little park that ran the length of the short street, a deep-shadowed ravine now, where I could hear the sighing of a little wind in the tops of the old trees, and the silvery plink of running water. We crossed the street and went into it, and down a little rock path to the far end. A small creek ran over a man-made r
ock waterfall there, and into a deep little rock-lined pool. Ferns were thick around it, and the ground was carpeted with soft moss. We sat down at the edge of the pool and took off our shoes and dangled our feet into the water. It was surprisingly cool, almost cold. The air down here was sweet and heavy with damp, secret growing things, and the sense of isolation was magical. It was like being in a hidden glen out of some childhood fairy tale. Overhead, through the canopy of green leaves, I could see a faint silver peppering of stars.
I reached down into the water and splashed a handful on my hot face. It felt wonderful.
“It’s cold,” I said. “Where does it come from?”
“Underground spring, or artesian well, or something, my landlady says,” Luke said. “In the daytime this park’s full of kids and dogs and mommies and nannies, and some nights it’s full of heads and freaks doing whatever they can’t do on the street in broad daylight. Tight Squeeze isn’t far. Don’t look too close on the ground around you.”
I remembered the walk through Tight Squeeze on my first day in Atlanta, with Rachel Vaughn, and the used condoms on the streets. I did not look around me. This was too lovely, too perfect.
Luke took a loose, spilling white cigarette out of his shirt pocket and lit it, and the air turned sweet and pungent. I wrinkled my nose.
“Pot?” I said. I knew it was.
“Yep. It’s my vice of choice. I don’t do a lot of it, but there are definitely times it’s called for, like a good cigar and brandy after dinner.”
He passed it to me and I hesitated, then took it and inhaled deeply from it, feeling as if I had just leaped off a cliff into utter nothingness. I coughed from the acrid smoke, but felt nothing else.
“I don’t see what everybody thinks is so great,” I said, and passed it back to him.
We shared the cigarette. I felt curiously disappointed that it had no effect on me. If I was going to sin, I wanted to know that I had.
Finally he ground it out and flipped it into the darkness.
“No sense trying to save that one,” he said. “It’s a done deal. Come on. I’ll make you that coffee now. And I’ve got some lemon cheesecake my landlady brought me. You hungry?”
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