by R.J. Ellory
Death was out there looking, and he came with the faces of policemen and State Troopers, in the faces of old women watching us cross the street and pause there at the junction, in the faces of innocent children who seemed curious that a white man and a black man would walk so close together down here…
He came looking with all these things, and no matter how fast I could run I believed he would find me.
There appear to be brief moments during our lives when, despite all circumstance, the humanity of others shines through. It is as if the indomitability of the human spirit - at once oppressed and assaulted - nevertheless rises, a phoenix from the ashes, and we are reminded that people do care. They really do care.
There was one such time with Nathan. In itself it was perhaps of little significance, but it highlighted for me the fundamental difference between us. Later, many years later, I would weigh the burden of guilt I carried, and a moment such as this tipped the scales of justice so effortlessly towards Nathan Verney.
In all things I had considered myself first. In leaving Greenleaf I had so easily thought of what I wanted, what would become of me. Nathan would have left Greenleaf alone. I would not. I would not have left alone for fear of loneliness itself, but for fear of my own survival had someone else not been there to assist and protect me. This was how we differed.
I considered how events would affect me.
Nathan Verney considered the effects on others.
Where we were I cannot recall even now. There were so many places, so much traveling, and after a while the towns and suburbs blurred seamlessly, one into the other.
I remember a street however, nondescript, eminently forgettable. I recall the frontage of a grain store, that unmistakable rusty smell that emanates from the bales and bins within.
I remember standing talking to Nathan of something inconsequential.
'You wanna eat now or later?' he asked.
'Later's fine,' I replied.
He nodded, and then turned suddenly to the left as his attention was drawn to some commotion at the end of the street.
A child on a bicycle came into view, a young girl no more than eight or nine, and she was pedalling like fury, like the devil was on her heels. Behind her, snapping at the wheels of the bicycle, was a large and ugly dog, jaws slavering, teeth snapping. A man ran behind the dog, calling its name, hollering at it to Stay! Stay!
The girl was terrified, her face white and drawn, her every ounce of strength pummeling at the pedals as if her very life depended on it.
Nathan flew from the bench where we had been seated, flew like the wind, and before I knew it he had raced between the girl and the dog and was standing there, his fists raised, his shoulders hunched forward.
I was reminded vividly of the moment when Nathan had faced Larry James and Marty Hooper in Benny's Soda Shop a million years before.
With the dog no more than ten feet from him Nathan released an almighty roar and started pounding his chest.
The dog almost fell over its own front legs as it came to a dead stop.
It hunkered there in the street, at first confused, and then suddenly it was down on its haunches, teeth bared once more, a guttural growl emanating from the base of its wide and muscular throat.
'Come on you motherfucker,' I heard Nathan hiss. 'Come on you ugly motherfucker… come get me, come get a piece of me.'
Nathan lunged forward then, suddenly, unexpectedly, and the dog, shocked beyond belief, gave out some kind of desperate whimper. It backed up one step, whimpered again, and then it turned and hightailed it down the street.
In that instant I had a vision of Larry James and Marty Hooper turning and running from Eve Chantry so many years before.
I was speechless.
And it was only in the silence that followed that I realized the girl had fallen from her bike no more than fifteen feet from where I still sat, stone-still.
I came to my feet, started towards her, but Nathan was there before me, kneeling beside her, comforting her, brushing small chips of gravel from the graze on her knee.
I watched him without a word.
Words had escaped some minutes before, and however hard I looked I could not find them.
I opened my mouth and sheer silence floated out like organdy.
Nathan had acted before I'd had a chance to think of acting.
Again, just for a moment, I felt invisible beside him.
* * *
Chapter Fifteen
By mid-September we were on the west coast of Florida near Apalachee Bay. We figured we'd work on the boats again, the season would run for a little while longer and then we'd decide where to go next. For the first week we slept on the beach. It was still warm, people hung out down there, folks with guitars, folks smoking weed and drinking, folks living life the way they wanted to live it. Little did we know but those years, the late 1960s, would be years people would speak of in terms of revolution, a revolution of mind and spirit, a revolution of sexual freedom and peace on earth. The people we met down there seemed worldly, the same way Linny Goldbourne had seemed to me, and we listened to the stories they told of San Francisco, Haight-Ashbury, of acid and Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin.
Nathan was caught up in it, perhaps even more than I, for here he seemed to find release from the strictness and discipline of his father's world. His upbringing had not been harsh, he had never gone without, but the world from which he'd come was black and white, clean, reverential and temperate.
Nathan smoked weed with these people. I did too, but I didn't smoke like Nathan. We'd work all day, break our backs in the sun, our hands shovelling fish from nets into boxes packed with ice, loading those heavy boxes onto trucks and watching them drive out to Tallahassee and Orlando. There was an endless convoy of vehicles, and the drivers would get restless waiting for their maximum load to be stowed, and we worked like crazy people. Come the end of the day we would walk down to the beach, strip our clothes off and wash in the sea, and then we would sleep for a while, sleep until the evening grew cold, and then we would light fires and wait for the others to arrive. They drove down in pickups and Volkswagen vans, guys and girls, kids even, their long flowing hair, bright clothes, bottles of sourmash and wraps of weed and this old music player that hooked right into a generator in the trunk of someone's car. We gathered in circles, and the circles became wider, the fires became brighter and somewhere beyond the point where the light reached there were couples making out. You could hear them. They sounded like free people.
Nathan was enchanted and empowered by this stuff. He learned guitar down there, half a dozen chords that's all, but with his gospel-church trained voice he could sing above the sound of the sea. His voice carried, an unearthly sound, and he proved something I had figured many years ago at high school. It was neither your color nor your looks that counted, and not a great deal to do with your personality at first: it was all to do with attention. He got their attention, he really got their attention, and there was barely a night that Nathan wouldn't be one half of a couple out there where the light didn't reach.
For a time I felt I was losing him, but he always came back, always searched me out to see how I was doing, and it was he who brought the Devereau sisters, the Devereau twins, back to where I sat by the fire one night towards the end of the month.
Rosalind and Emily Devereau were from somewhere in Louisiana. I never knew exactly where; but you could tell from their looks, that wild-eyed, dark-haired, bold and confident spirit that there was something about these girls that wasn't anything close to what I'd experienced before. They were not identical, but they were close, and they possessed an uncanny ability to sense what the other was feeling. They completed each other's sentences, would stop mid-flight and suddenly leave to find one another. Later, in conference, Nathan and I would discover that though we had been three hundred yards apart down the beach the two of them had gotten up simultaneously and walked in each other's direction. They did things like this, and had it not be
en unnerving it would have been funny.
They seemed to gravitate towards us, and though I spent more time with Emily and Nathan spent more time with Rosalind, it was almost as if it wouldn't have mattered the other way around. They were so alike in everything, almost as if you could start a conversation with one, finish it with the other, and never notice the break in between.
We took an apartment, Nathan and I, right there overlooking the beach, and though it was small, though we shared a single room with two mattresses on the floor, we really felt that there was something special to be experienced in this place. Rosalind and Emily Devereau, for the months between October 1968 and the early part of 1969, became part of our family. That's the way it felt: that we were family.
I remember a night we spent in that apartment. Rosalind and Emily had come down to the beach as they always did, and after a little while Rosalind suggested we go home, take some Thunderbird wine and hang out for a while.
We went, all too eagerly we went, and by the time we arrived Nathan had drunk half of that bottle and was laughing as Rosalind tried to waltz him down the sidewalk.
Once inside they collapsed together on the mattresses, and I watched them, happy to see Nathan free of every vestige of North Carolina and his father's world.
'You guys want some of this?' Rosalind asked. She held the bottle out towards her sister.
Emily took it, asked me to get some cups from the kitchen, and when I returned the three of them were seated back to back in an outward-facing triangle on the floor. I joined them - seated there cross-legged, Rosalind behind me, Nathan to my right, Emily to my left. I felt at ease. I felt strong-willed. I felt like I was exactly where I wanted to be, sharing my time with people whom I had chosen.
'So how long you planning on staying here?' Emily asked.
'As long as it takes,' Nathan said.
'As long as what takes?'
'The war.'
For a moment there was silence.
'You jumped the Draft,' Rosalind said matter-of-factly.
'We jumped the Draft,' I said, and even as I said it I imagined it was possibly the hardest thing I had ever uttered.
No-one spoke, not a word, until Nathan sort of leaned forward to reach his cup, and then he said something that surprised me more than anything I might have guessed.
'Danny made it happen,' he said.
I frowned, turned to look at him, and he smiled at me.
'There was a time many years ago,' Nathan went on. 'We were in North Carolina, our home town. The whole black- white thing was really getting itself up to speed, and we were in this soda place where the kids hung out. Some kid grabbed this girl's ass or something, some girl that Danny was sweet on…'
There was a smile in Nathan's voice, an underlying element of humor that was hard to miss.
'Anyhows, this kid grabbed this girl's ass… what was her name, Danno?'
'Sheryl Rose Bogazzi,' I said.
'Right, Sheryl Rose Bogazzi -'
'Oh come on,' Emily interjected. 'No-one's called Sheryl Rose Bogazzi.'
'Go tell Sheryl Rose that,' I said.
Rosalind laughed. 'That's like Betty Sue Windmill or Mary Joe Plankboard.'
'One of those Southern places where you grow up only to find out that your mother's really your sister, and when you reach thirteen you have to marry your grandfather,' Emily added.
'Enough already,' Nathan said. 'Anyway, you pair of crazy witches can talk… you came straight up out of a swamp. Mad freakin' Appalachian mountain people with snakes in the house and learnin' the Bible by heart.'
'The story,' I said, wanting more than anyone present to know what Nathan was going to say.
'Right, the story… so this girl gets her ass grabbed by a guy called Marty Hooper, and he had this sidekick, Larry James -'
'You sure it wasn't Cletus Knackerback and Billy Bob Dickweed?' Rosalind asked.
'I'm sure it wasn't,' Nathan said. 'Now will you pair shut the fuck up and let me finish?'
'Sorry, Nathan,' Emily said.
'Me sorry too,' Rosalind echoed.
'So Danny fronts up to these guys, all ready to get the shit kicked out of him, and I yank him back and floor the asshole.'
Nathan started laughing.
'This kid goes down like a house of cards, Danny's standing there not knowing whether to be pissed off I hit the guy or relieved he didn't get his teeth knocked out through his ass, and then someone calls me a nigger… just like that. Nigger he says, and silence fills up the place to bursting.'
Nathan pauses, and there is a quiet tension in the room. Four of us seated together and there isn't a sound. Not even a breath.
'And then someone else says it,' Nathan goes on. 'And someone else… and we hightail it out of there like someone lit our fuses.'
'So what does that have to do with dodging the Draft?' Emily asked.
Nathan smiled as he looked at me. 'You have any idea what kind of guts it took to side with a black guy like that?'
Neither Emily nor Rosalind said a word.
'Twenty, thirty kids, crazy kids, all fired up, angry… and Danno takes off with the only black kid there. We ran out of there and they chased us, threw stones, ready to catch us and fucking lynch us… and Danno runs with me all the way.'
'And what happened?' Rosalind asked.
'We were saved by the witch,' I said. 'The witch who ate her husband.'
'You what?' Emily asked.
'The witch,' Nathan said.
'There was a witch?'
Nathan laughed. 'There was indeed a witch… but that is a totally different story. The point is that Danno did something that no-one else did. He stuck by me when everything told him he shouldn't have… and that taught me something. Taught me that you do what you think is right no matter what anyone thinks.'
Nathan turned and looked at me. He didn't smile; he just looked at me. I felt he could see right through me, right through to the lie that sat inside me like a tumor. Maybe that time I had done what I'd believed was right, perhaps out of fear, out of self-preservation, or just out of sheer terror. That time. But this time was different. This time I had come because I didn't have the courage to say no.
I would think back in years to come, think back on all that was said and done in Florida, and I would see that there I found my feet, my balance, my self.
The Devereau sisters were a special breed of person, they were wise and deep and at once passionate and irresponsible. Never in my life would I meet people so spontaneous and impulsive. They wrote poetry together, poetry for us, and then they would have Nathan play guitar while they sang love songs to us. Love songs to me and Nathan Verney. And sex. There was so much sex. We stayed with the same partners, always the same, but there were moments when the four of us would lie down on those mattresses, mattresses that had been pushed closer together by either Emily or Rosalind, and somewhere in the midst of our passion I would catch a glimpse of Nathan, and he would look upwards, and they were there, these sisters, and though we were there in body they were looking at one another. Like they were on the same spiritual wavelength, feeding off one another's arousal and intimacy, and we just happened to be there to appreciate the closeness these girls felt.
It was not perverse, it wasn't ugly or degraded. It was none of these things. It transcended the physical, it entered the realm of nirvana and the mountains of the moon. And though sometimes I would lie close to Emily and in some small way wish it had been Caroline, or Linny, I did my best not to think of such things. I did my best to live for that moment, and that moment alone. In my mind the past was like a collage of sounds and faces and colors, of the love I'd felt for Caroline and Linny, of betrayal and loss.
This, now, was a time I would never forget.
A time of learning, of self-discovery, and more than everything, of promise.
The Devereau sisters left in the latter part of January 1969. There were no tears, no regrets, no recriminations, no sense of loss even. They had come, they
had visited, they were leaving. They intended to return to Louisiana, their family, their previous lives perhaps, and Nathan and I felt nothing as we watched them go.
I remember turning towards him as the bus took a bend in the road and disappeared, and his face was blank, expressionless, neither happy nor sad nor anything else identifiable.
'Gone,' he said quietly.
'Gone,' I replied.
We turned together and walked back the way we'd come.