“What’s going on?”
“Everything’s under control, Captain.”
“What’s the charge?”
“He’s got no identification, no money. I imagine he’s a good candidate for vagrancy.”
“Is he intoxicated or impaired by drugs?”
“Well, look at him.”
“Okay, book him. Officer Duncan, do you understand what just happened in this city tonight?”
“Do you mean about King?”
“Yes. Don’t waste time on petty nonsense. We’re loading our jails with niggers tonight.”
Just then the two police radios burst into static, and I heard a garbled pronouncement about a fire and an ambulance.
The captain’s car screamed off.
One of the arresting officers slapped at his holster and adjusted his belt while the other hauled out a pair of handcuffs.
A green, beat-up Ford chugged around a near corner, came to a halt opposite where I stood, and suddenly the air was ripped open from a concussive blast. The windows of the police car blew inwards. My right hand was stung. I looked down at it, stunned by the sudden violence that had just erupted. The color red surrounded me. Blood on my hand, police light flashing, reflections of broken glass.
“Get down.”
“Shotgun. Goddamn.”
The Ford tore away. The two policemen yelled affirmations that they were unhurt, scrambled into their vehicle, and without giving me another glance, threw the damaged patrol car into a tight U-turn and roared off in pursuit of their attackers. I scrambled down an embankment, ran through a weed-choked parking lot, and came to a wide cement ditch filled with muddy sludge. A fat pipe surrounded by a rigging of metal supports crossed over the muck. Climbing onto the pipe, I gripped the rust-flaked frame for balance, and used it as a bridge to get to the other side. I made my way down a dirt alleyway, past a series of cylindrical tanks that stunk of gas, then through an unlocked chain-link gate. The sound of human voices speaking softly brought me to a cautious stop.
“Probably an easy shot.”
“Put him in his place.”
“Some good old boy is on the run right about now.”
“You think? Probably had help.”
“Yeah, well, something had to be done to stop that nigger.”
Spooky conversation.
I turned away quietly and headed towards the light of buildings and roadways.
I could hear police and fire sirens erupting with their distinct screams. Suddenly the air felt like hearts racing and anger and tears and broken souls. I heard exclamations of “They shot Martin.” A woman began to wail—a primordial grieving that silenced the heavens for a moment—then the entire city seemed to gasp and stumble. The cry ripped through me. It made me feel lost, aware only that my consciousness was a painful night sky filled with endless unreachable stars. Dimly, in a desperate blur, I tried to understand the mounting chaos of noise and movement on the street before me. Beyond my fog, something terrible was happening.
“Martin’s dead.”
“King was shot.”
“Oh god, no, no, no.”
“Those white fuckers going to die.”
I took a step towards the agonizing cries. Wicked, blinding strobes of red struck me like a constant chant of death, death, death.
The turmoil of cars, people, screams, and punctuating light began to shake the asphalt, shatter glass, and crumble brick near me. A toxic, burning chemical stench lingered dangerously, threatening each breath.
Too many people were yelling in outrage; moving in hordes of anger.
Three young black men ran towards me, each with boxes tucked under their arms. When they saw me, they stopped. Their looks of incredulous disbelief turned to sneers of hatred.
“What the fuck you doing here, white boy?”
“You wanna die tonight? Like you killed Doctor King?”
I held my fingers weakly up in a half-formed peace sign. “Man, we’re all screwed.”
“What you mean, we? You ain’t no brother.”
“I mean—”
The shortest of the three dropped his boxes and shoved me. I stumbled backwards and was pushed again, and then a fist slammed into the side of my head. The other two men had rid themselves of their loads and were circling closer to me. In one solid rush, each of them barreled into me, pushing and punching. A sock to my jaw, a yank on my shoulder, and a hammer landing in my stomach sent me to the ground. The little guy grabbed my beard and wrenched my head up. He reared his fist back.
“Hey, hey, what in God’s good name you boys doing? You leave that white child alone. You think you’re honoring Doctor King with your behavior?”
A gray-haired black woman pushed two of the men aside and slapped at my assailant’s cocked hand.
“That you, Rodney Sullivan? I know your mama. She goes to services, sits in the front pew every Sunday. Lord, what a voice your mama has when she sings. Now you let that man up, say you’re sorry. We all going to work for harmony like Doctor King preached.”
Rodney twisted my beard roughly as he let go. He lowered his clenched fist that had been about to slam into my face.
“Now you help that poor man up. Can’t you see he’s bleeding—like Jesus’s hands bled on the cross?” The woman poked at Rodney’s arm.
“I didn’t do that. I didn’t touch his hand.” Rodney picked up his boxes, scowled at everyone, and walked off.
The elderly woman scolded him loudly as he retreated. “Rodney, you be in church tomorrow until Sunday. Three days to wipe away your sin just don’t seem enough. The good lord’s sacrifice is truly a wonder.”
The other two men took a few steps back, waiting for the human spitfire to leave before they retrieved their loot. I stood and stuck close to the woman.
“You best come with me. Got to get you safe, fool boy. You either got the faith of Daniel in the den of lions or you’re a poor judge of when to take an evening stroll. Lord, have mercy.”
She hustled me down a side street, past staring eyes and promised threats.
“Mama, what you turn on us for?”
“Y’all touch this wanderer and the memory of Doctor King will be wiped from your mind. Your soul will shrivel in the same hellfire as Martin’s murderer, daring you touch this lost pilgrim.”
She directed me through a maze of alleys and secondary streets, leading me further from the turbulence of protest and riot.
“No decent woman should ever have to traverse streets like this. Whole world’s gone crazy.” She clucked to herself as she led me into a dilapidated building, the walls and doors of the entranceway and hall covered with puckered and peeling paint.
“The whole world’s gone crazy. Lord, have mercy. Got a fool tagging behind me, that’s what I got. A white fool.”
We entered a first-floor apartment to the astonished stares of three people sitting in the main room. Two plump middle-aged women sat on a vinyl couch, red-rimmed eyes chronicling a night of tears. Kleenex boxes and sandwiches sat on the coffee table that their knees pushed up against. A thin wreck of a woman, perhaps in her seventies, sat at a round, linoleum-covered dining table watching a small TV set. A half-empty bottle of scotch rested within reach in front of her. She was bleary-eyed and heartsore.
The older woman took a swig of her drink. “What’re you doing, Maisie? You finally decide to bring home a man after all these years, and you pick a white boy on a night like this?”
“Hush, Bertie, this young one needs tending to. Ann, Sarah—Doctor King appreciates your tears for him, but right now we got the Lord’s work to do.”
“What do you want us to do, Mama?”
“Ann, baby, you go find a phone that works and tell Reverend Rupert to bring his truck by here. We ain’t fixing this child up for him be to thrown back to the wolves. Go on now.”
“Yes, Mama. Where’d you find this boy?”
“Oh, it’s a terrible night out there. He just wandering around lost like Moses. Lord, have mercy. That Wilma Sullivan’s child and two of his outlaws was giving him a whacking. Sarah, show this young man where he can clean hisself up. I need to sit for a while. Lord, there’s some trouble going on.”
Sarah pointed me sullenly to a hallway.
Passing through a kitchen, I groped for a light switch in the hall until I blundered into a door.
The lights above me turned on, and Sarah scowled at me. “That’s not the bathroom. You’ve got no business in that room. Bathroom’s that door there.”
Man, she looks as mean and big as Nurse Pumpkin. Probably be a close fight.
She yelled at me as I shut the door behind me. “We don’t have no band-aids. And you clean your mess. You hear?”
“Okay, thanks.”
I looked in the mirror. Just dirt and grime from the truck ride. Rodney hadn’t left bruises. My hand had a gash that I wrapped in toilet paper and applied pressure to for about five minutes.
“What’re you doing in there?”
“I’m bleeding. I don’t want to drip blood all over the place.”
“Mama, he’s still bleeding.”
Mama Maisie took control again. She told me to get into the kitchen, poured some of Bertie’s whiskey on the wicked slice, cut a dish towel into strips, and wrapped my hand. “There, now what do you say?”
“Thank you very much, ma’am.”
Bertie handed me a glass of whiskey. “How’d you find yourself here?”
“I was passing through town, on my way west, and just stumbled into a riot.”
“The reverend will get you across the bridge if needs be.”
“I’d appreciate that.”
So, the night Doctor King died, I sat in a rundown apartment with four black women watching the news on a ten-inch TV, wiggling the tinfoil on the antennae, sharing sniffles, whiskey, and Kleenex, thinking about that conversation overheard near the gas works, wondering what does it matter if Pan’s blocked tunnel is never fixed. Doesn’t even seem like a real problem compared to the plight and anger of Negroes in America and the death of King.
But I kept my mouth shut, feeling I had no right to offer my opinion. Maisie told me to keep my fool head out of the clouds and watch where I walk, then I was off with the Reverend Rupert. He drove me across the Mississippi River to a neighborhood he thought I would be safe in.
I hung around a gas station looking across the river at flashing red lights moving through the shocked city.
And I just spent a winter in a warm mansion with eighty-three bottles of wine, a freezer full of food, and time forever to draw. Man, I just don’t understand the priorities of the gods. I mean, screw it, I never had the faith Maisie does.
Chapter 20
Every other car in Arkansas gave me the finger, and it seemed like I walked half-way across the state, but after figuring the blood-stained bandage on my hand didn’t help in hitching rides, I removed it and managed to catch a few westward.
The weather didn’t pose any problems, and my tuna and crackers sustained me, but continuing on, three memorable incidents happened that kept me guessing about life on the road.
The first occurred when, after hiking and being ignored by travelers for about three hours, a car finally pulled over. I was ecstatic. I climbed in, said “Hi” to the solo driver, who, thirty miles on, began rubbing his crotch as he tossed me a couple of pornographic magazines. With one look at the women spreading themselves directly at the camera and my peripheral vision telling me the driver’s hand was still going at it, I said, “You can let me out here. This is fine.” He pulled over, and I found myself standing on a stretch of road without a building, cowboy, Indian, horse, or car in sight. Just scraps of brush in a stone-filled patch of Oklahoma. Off to the north, I watched three spirals of dark dust about a hundred feet tall move eastwards across the prairie.
Much later, on some stretch of Route 66, I walked, thumb outstretched, passing the time by setting distance goals like “that old tree” or “that billboard.” I was a step or two away from a patch of yellow flowers I had had my eyes on for about a hundred feet when a piercing shriek split my brain. The hair on my arms sprang straight up and froze.
The flowers were screaming at me. Terrified, believing something was about to go horrifically wrong, I wrenched my head around in panic to look over my shoulder. A red pickup truck had swerved towards me and was accelerating along the shoulder of the highway. I dove away, rolling over my knapsack and off the pavement. A tire thumped inches from my head, spitting grainy pebble-crud into my eyes. With a threatening squeal, a dark rubber patch was tattooed across the asphalt.
“You goddamn hippie.”
The truck spun back into the driving lane and a beer bottle flew out the window, shattering nearby.
I lay there, blinking and tearing up until my eyes cleared, brushing brown glass from my jacket, and wondering about yellow flowers and jaguars and old ladies and how help arrived from the strangest places.
About four days out of Memphis, a woman picked me up in a red Mustang convertible, top down, just outside Albuquerque, New Mexico. She wore plastic, heart-shaped, pink Lolita glasses, had the reddest lipstick I’d ever seen, smelled like a raspberry, and her black mini skirt rode up high enough that my eyes kept flicking to between her thighs, hoping for a glimpse of treasure. She laughed a lot, drove fast, her long blonde hair flipped in the wind, and she couldn’t stop talking about France. She lit a cigarette and offered me one. Damn, it was a Kool. First one in four months.
I pulled out my drawing pad and worked on a picture of her. It gave me a good excuse to stare lasciviously at her for an hour or so.
She looked familiar, and, as she rambled on, I realized she was a famous actress, but I didn’t know her name or any of her movies. When we reached Gallup, she dropped me off in front of a turquoise jewelry store, said she wanted to buy the portrait, and counted out four hundred dollars for it.
“That’s fair, don’t you think? Your art is beautiful, Deets. Good luck. Look me up sometime.”
Sure, that was fun, but I have no idea who you are. I hope you’re an example of how Steel is going to test me from now on. Wow, a ton of cash and a Kool.
Chapter 21
Outside Flagstaff, Arizona, two heads in a rusty Ford station wagon picked me up, promising me they’d get me to Los Angeles. We smoked some weed, and I dozed on and off in the back seat. The desert heat and road exhaustion suffused my dreams with helplessness and defeat.
It’s so hard to live without my heart.
Teresa’s words drifted through a dream of jungle warfare and flaming cities, Einstein looking perplexed as a sand tower collapsed beneath him, and bloody red-splattered Rorschach tests that looked like Sheoblask and Steel.
She thinks I’m dead again.
A water-logged wreck of a red car being hoisted on a crane. Agent Orville making an official telephone call, questioning the owner of the vehicle while snow blocked my view of the world.
Ha, ha. You mean the gods would be your patrons.
A scorched pile of feathers, Teresa holding a perfectly formed black feather of an unknown material, Pigeon pointing towards an overwhelming ruin that I understood to be a realm of nothingness.
“Hey, man, you need a place to crash?” The driver, Jerry, held a joint over his shoulder, passing it to me.
“Yeah, that’d be cool.”
“We got a pad in Topanga.”
“Plenty of chicks.” Chuck, a blonde, kind-of dumb guy beamed at me as I handed the joint back up to the front seat.
“Yeah, but cool it with them until you get stratified.” Jerry stuck his arm straight out the window and waved his hand up and down, signaling a left turn.
“What do you
mean?”
“There’s ass galore, man, but don’t go trying to screw any of them without Freddie’s word of approval. Freddie don’t know you, won’t know where you fit until he meets you.”
“Fit? Sounds weird. Freddie a pimp or something?”
“No, man, Freddie’s a prophet, a visionary. You’ll see.”
“Man, these broads Freddie’s angels or what?”
“Hey, he’ll probably set you up with three or four of them.”
Chuck laughed. “Man, it’s like living in orgy land.”
“Utopia calls, and he’s leading the way to it. Sex, music, revolution, dope. Dig?”
Los Angeles was a haze of orange dust in the sunset as we climbed a dirt road through a maze of hills. I caught glimpses of ocean sparkling with the day’s final colors as the unpaved way wound through dense chaparral vegetation, skirted alongside walls of deeply eroded rock, and passed an occasional house. Tree branches hung tunnel-like on the approach to a rambling, patched-together building of wood, brick, and stone. There was a large red school bus, a green and tan VW van with scribbled slogans of peace all over it, four small motorcycles, and two cars parked in front of two garage sheds where the trail dead-ended. A few long-haired guys were sitting on the house’s porch, beers in hand, passing around a joint.
We all grunted and said, “Hey, man.” Then after taking a few hits of smoke, I went inside with Jerry.
Women were all over the place—draped on couches and chairs, laying on mattresses, walking down halls, cooking in the kitchen, sewing, braiding macramé, tapping on a big drum in the main room. In one room, six of them sat cross-legged around a water-pipe made from a large chemistry lab flask. Two were topless—one in cutoff jeans, the other, a pair of yellow panties. I could hear a guitar rocking hard from a doorway beyond them while all the hookah girls screamed out in crazed unison the chorus to Steppenwolf’s “Born to be Wild.”
Wild, yeah. This is some kind of commune.
I shared quick eye contact with the dark-haired girl in cutoffs before my eyes fell back to her nipples. She stuck a tube in her mouth and sucked in the smoke from the homemade hookah. Meeting a stranger while half-naked didn’t faze her.
Miracles (The Remarkable Adventures of Deets Parker Book 3) Page 12