The Intruder

by Charles Beaumont

  Tom nodded and the two of them went down the stairs.

  They called on the Simmonses first. Roger Simmons was at work, but his wife, Angie, was home. She said she didn’t think Joanne should go, but eventually she agreed to it. Joanne herself was willing, so long as she knew Joey would be along.

  They stopped at the Dupuys next.

  Then they woke up William Hubbs and called on the Andersons and the Frondels and the Joneses and the Treiberts.

  Wallace Treibert was the only one who absolutely refused, but Joey told Tom that was all right, because he never cared much for Wallace anyway.

  At seven minutes to eight, they gathered in front of The Huddle.

  From his window, Glad Owens watched them. He had oiled his guns and cleaned them, but he’d been unable to recruit an army; and he had decided to rest a while before going to war.

  He watched.

  “Everybody okay?” Joey asked.

  The kids nodded. Some seemed nervous; others smiled, happy with excitement.

  Tom said, “Let’s go.”

  They walked down the gravel path quietly, Tom in the lead; down the path and across the street of old houses and black cars and into the main section of Caxton.

  Heads turned slowly.

  People walking along the sidewalk stopped walking.

  Mabel Dodge very nearly dropped her bag of groceries. She squinted, saw Tom, and opened her mouth.

  “Thomas McDaniel!” she said, in soft amazement.

  Down the street, Mr. Higgins stepped out of his drugstore and smiled broadly. “Hi, Tom!” he yelled. “What’cha got there?”

  Tom waved.

  The tiny parade continued.

  Crowds were gathering now. Lucy Egan said something to Ella, but Ella did not answer. She watched her father and tried to understand, and could not.

  “That’s your father, Ell!”

  Tom stopped by a cleaner’s window and ripped loose a poorly pasted rectangle of paper.

  The paper read:

  James Wolfe is a nigger lover. He is a Devil’s Disciple and liar.

  These are Caxton nigger-lovers:

  Frank Grover: Grover’s Dairy

  Rolfe Higgins; Higgins drugstore

  James Wolfe: lawyer

  Mac Considine: Considine-­Millers

  Horace MacDonald: New York Cleaners

  Polecat Nelson: lawyer

  Sidney Arthur: lawyer

  Anthony Ferman; Jew policeman

  Jigs Leave Our Caxton High School, You Stink!

  KEEP OUR SCHOOLS WHITE

  The Caxton High underground is watching you . . .

  Abel Green is the N.A.A.C.P. nigger in Farragut County

  COONS GO HOME!

  HARLEY PATON GET OUT!

  WHITE NIGGER TEACHERS

  RESIGN . . .

  Attorney Wolfe is a nigger lover.

  COONS GO BACK TO LINCOLN HIGH.

  The courthouse Click is:

  Crook Lawyer James Wolfe

  Attempted murderer, Crook-

  lawyer Polecat Nelson Moron,

  Sidney Arthur, Crook-lawyer Fred Unser, City Judge Maxwell,

  Crook-lawyer Ollie Dodds

  The school Click is:

  Agnes Angoff, former whore,

  sleeping with Jew-Principal

  Harley Paton Behind His Wife’s back;

  Drunkard David Segrist’s Wife

  Crook-lawyer Fred Unser’s Wife

  Jew-Principal Paton and his Jew-Wife

  All nigger lovers

  The Skool-board Click is: Vicious

  Thief Carl Curtis

  Crook Frank Leroy

  Home-Wrecker Joel Nearing, Jr.

  Nigger-lover Harley Paton

  Preacher Samuel Ginther is a nigger-lover, a communist stooge, half Jew.

  He was caught by the river 5 years ago, with another man’s wife. Said, he was holding a “Prayer meeting.”

  Je’ge Silvuh!

  He our boss,

  Yessuib, he loves

  us nigguhs.

  Tom methodically tore the orange paper into several pieces and dropped the pieces onto the sidewalk.

  He continued walking.

  They crossed another street and proceeded through the crowd of young people on the wide school lawn. The children there were standing about in loose groups, watching.

  Some whispered or spoke softly.

  “I’ll be goddamned. It’s old man McDaniel.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Never thought we’d see them again!”

  “Me neither.”

  “Boy.”

  A half-block from the school, the Rev. Lorenzo Niesen and Bart Carey stepped out of the Sunshine Cafeteria, which fronted George Street.

  They stood on the sidewalk and watched, chewing their scrambled eggs slowly.

  Neither spoke.

  “I guess this is good enough,” Joey Green said when they had crossed the length of the lawn and reached the schoolhouse steps.

  “Okay,” Tom said.

  Joey nodded to Clarence Jones and the young Negroes went into the building.

  “Thanks,” Joey said, but he did not put out his hand. “I don’t think I could of swung it all by myself.”

  Tom took a cigarette from his shirt pocket, lit it and walked away. He knew that all eyes were on him, but it was over now and he felt fine. He had to be careful not to feel too fine, however. You’re no hero, he thought. A short walk down a hill with a bunch of scared kids doesn’t make you a hero.

  Still, the eyes followed him.

  He got halfway across the lawn when a group of boys walked up. Hank Kitchen was among them.

  “Hi, Mr. McDaniel,” Hank said.

  “Hello, Hank.”

  Suddenly a boy cried “Yay!” and others cried “Yay!” and soon a large group of children were shouting this word, and smiling.

  Tom gestured and did not, this once, try to fight the good feeling that had been coming upon him.

  He blushed and walked quickly away from the lawn, never looking back, into the streets, far from the crowds.

  And now what? he thought. Where do you go now?

  He cut diagonally across the street, walking vaguely in the direction of his automobile, which he had parked because there would not have been room inside for all the kids.

  He felt the weariness of hours spent awake last night, and thought—I’ll sleep a while; no, first I’ll call Jack; then I’ll sleep a while. Then, afterwards, I’ll phone up Verne and give him my resignation; then I’ll get in touch with Lubin. Lubin wants me, and probably I’ll do just fine with a paper like his; and—

  “McDaniel!”

  Tom blinked away the heavy, tired thoughts, and turned to face the stunted, shirt-sleeved, red and trembling figure of Lorenzo­ Niesen. Next to the Jumpin’ Preacher was Bart Carey.

  “Yes?” Tom said.

  “You got anythin’ to say?” Lorenzo Niesen glanced at Carey and cocked his head.

  “About what?”

  “You know what.”

  Tom flicked his cigarette away and started past the little man.

  Carey moved to block him.

  “We seen you, McDaniel,” he said. “And we want an explanation.

  Tom’s throat went dry: his heart began to throb. From the corners of his eyes, he could see other figures approaching. Mabel Dodge; he recognized her. Dongen. Simpson. Holliman. The bullnecked one in the grocery store, Manners, Manning—Ted Manning.

  “We’re a-waiting,” Carey said. He seemed to tower there beside Niesen. A giant of a man, with silly little spectacles perched on his nose, and a sweat-soaked nylon shirt.

  “Please get out of my way,” Tom said, ashamed at the sudden weakness that had come upon him.

  More people were closing in, he saw; moving slowly, tentatively, about him.

  Carey stepped aside. Tom walked past him and reached the car. He was about to open the door when a hand closed on his shoulder and pulled him around.

/>   “You just hold on.”

  Tom looked at the man, then at the fifteen others who had circled the area. Men, mostly, but also a few women. To the right was a pretty girl of twenty-five or so, someone he could not remember having seen before.

  Their eyes were filled with hatred. Perhaps it was this (he hoped it was!) that terrified him so: this concentrated hatred, turned directly onto him.

  “Look,” he said, “what is it you want, Carey?”

  “An explanation,” the large man said.

  Niesen’s shrill voice added: “Yes! Tell us, Mr. McDaniel, how come you walked that bunch of black niggers to our white school.”

  “I don’t see that what I do is any of your business,” Tom said.

  “Oh, you don’t!”

  “No, I don’t.” He reached again for the door handle, thinking, If I can just get inside, God, let me just get inside and get the thing started—

  Again, Carey’s huge hand stopped him.

  “We didn’t think you was a nigger-lover,” he said. “We figured you was against all this.”

  The people moved in closer. Tom could feel their breath, and he could feel the heat that came from their bodies.

  “When we seen you taking them jigs to school, we got kind of a surprise, see. That’s why we think you ought to do some talking.”

  Tom was horrified to hear himself say: “I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Right now, I’ve got to get home.”

  Carey smiled. “You wasn’t in such a hurry you couldn’t spend time with the jigs, Mr. McDaniel. Now surely you can give us white folks a couple of minutes. I’d hate to think we wasn’t good enough for you.”

  Tom was afraid. Afraid in a way he had not been since he was a child and (all the nightmare parts of life which are erased from memory!) would walk whole blocks out of his way to miss a fight. In these long, silent seconds he found himself, incredibly, observing such things as the split bone button on Phillip Dongen’s shirt; the deathly, powdered whiteness of Mrs. Mabel Dodge’s face, and the way her one good eye seemed to be shrieking; the crazy web of lines and wrinkles on Lorenzo Niesen’s flesh; the fact that almost all the shoes were brown; and he thought also, as the people moved in closer, that the whole thing was a dream, because he was in America, in his own town, Caxton.

  Then he remembered the Negroes in the car, and the faces he had seen on Simon’s Hill.

  They know this fear, he thought.

  They know it all the time. And they are fighting it.

  And suddenly he was not afraid. He looked at the hulking figure of Carey and felt, in addition to dislike, a touch of pity.

  “Well, mister,” somebody said, “you got anything to say for yourself?”

  Tom looked at Carey, then allowed his eyes to travel over all the faces. Some stared back; some glanced away.

  “Which one of them niggers paid you off?” Lorenzo Niesen asked.

  Bart Carey drew his fist back, drove it hard into Tom’s stomach. Tom wasn’t wholly unprepared, he’d tensed his muscles, but the pain was great. He stumbled back across the fender of his car and tried to keep from vomiting.

  “It ain’t polite not to answer a civil question,” Carey said. “The reverend here wants to know who paid you to betray your people.”

  Tom tried to speak, but could not.

  “Go on, teach him a lesson!” someone cried.

  He dragged air into his lungs, straightened, leaned against the fender. Perspiration gathered on his forehead. He fought the dizziness and the awful nausea. “Why don’t you get another fifteen or twenty people, Carey?” he said, in a choked voice. “Then you’d really be safe.”

  “Shut your mouth, nigger-lover.”

  “Oh, you’re tough!” Tom said. “With a mob to back you up, you’re tough as nails!”

  “I told you, shut your mouth!”

  “Teach him, Bart!”

  Tom stepped up to the big man. His blood was hot now, and the ache in his stomach had eased some. “You’re so full of questions,” he said, “let’s see how you are on answers. Where were you when that preacher was killed, Carey?”

  “You keep quiet,” a voice said, “or you’ll get the same thing!”

  “Where were you?”

  Bart Carey made a sound in his throat; then he lunged forward. Tom’s fist lashed out and caught the big man in the face. There was a tinkling sound as Carey’s glasses dropped to the pavement and shattered.

  “Get the nigger-lover!”

  Tom tried to open the door but he was not quick enough. Carey had grabbed his legs and was trying to throw him off balance. He attempted to pull free and so did not notice the man who had walked over.

  Phil Dongen’s knee came up. It crashed into Tom’s testicles and Tom screamed; but before he could fall, he felt another searing pain, in his jaw, and heard the dull interior crunch.

  Then he fell and lay there retching, and was only vaguely aware that Lorenzo Niesen had begun methodically to kick his head, his ribs, his stomach.

  Just before he fainted, he heard the people screaming—“Kill the nigger-lover! Kill him!”—and caught a glimpse of their excited faces.

  Then something sharp went into his right eye and Tom McDaniel twitched and lay still in the cold brightness of his blood.

  24

  In his dream, the girl’s flesh had just begun to fall when the knocking suddenly woke him. It was not Mrs. Lambert. He could tell that. Her knock would be short and solicitous. This sound was full of urgency.

  “Yes?”

  “Adam?”

  His head ached dully; as always, his throat was dry and he was not sure that he was not still asleep and dreaming.

  “Adam, let me in.”

  He got up and put on his trousers, then looked at the clock. It read: 9:16.

  “Just a minute.”

  He went to the sink and splashed cold water onto his face and drank some of the water also. He took a glass from the cabinet, poured a white cascade of Bromo-Seltzer into it, put it under the faucet.

  “Adam.”

  “All right.” He drank the foaming solution, which tasted sharp and cool, set the glass back down and walked to the door.

  “Who is it?”

  “Open the door!”

  The voice was familiar: he knew it well; and yet he could not place it. It wasn’t Shipman, it wasn’t Parkhouse. McDaniel? No.

  Wake up!

  He shook his head and walked to the door.

  He unlocked it.

  A short, stubby man was standing in the hall, neither frowning nor smiling. He might have been sixty; he looked sixty, except for the hair, which was black and long and curly. He wore hornrimmed glasses.

  Adam grinned in real surprise. “For Christ sake!” he said.

  “You keep poor hours,” Max Blake said. “May I come in?”

  “What? Well, of course. Of course! I’m sorry. I didn’t—well, I just can’t believe it, that’s all! What in the name of God are you doing here, anyway?”

  The stubby man walked inside. He was dressed in a sports coat and gray flannel slacks. His black shoes were highly polished. “On my way to New York,” he said, looking at Adam.

  “Sabbatical?”

  “No. Hookey.”

  Adam shook his head again and laughed. Much of the old nervousness was returning swiftly, and a certain embarrassment which he couldn’t understand at first, and then understood perfectly: it was that he’d never seen Max Blake except in the classroom or at his home, and he was finding it difficult to take the man out of context, to extricate him from those surroundings.

  “You’re kind of out of your way though, aren’t you?” he asked, stuffing his shirt into his trousers. “I wish I could offer you a drink—”

  Blake did not answer; it was a familiar characteristic. He glared about the room disdainfully, then again back at Adam.

  “You’re looking bad,” he said.

  “Well, I’ve been working hard.”

  “Yes.”

  “D
id you get my letters?”

  Blake’s eyes flicked across the empty gun that lay on the dresser. As was habitual with him, he muttered soft incoherences deep in his throat, and with his right thumb moved the large ruby ring he wore on the fourth finger of his right hand, up and down, up and down. He looked at the bed, then walked to the window and raised the shade and looked outside.

  It was the way the evenings in the past had always begun. A few meaningless remarks, then Blake gathering his thoughts, and Adam waiting for them to be stated. Instantly he was back in the large living room in Westwood, with its immense drapes closed, its thousand-volume bookcases, the books with all their jackets off, their titles rubbed two-thirds away (“There’s nothing so degrading to a library than books in ‘mint condition’; one can’t, after all, consume a turkey without damaging its feathers!”), and those mad cats, Aleister and Crowley, crawling over you and dropping hairs; and Max in the big leather chair that sat a little higher than the other chairs and had a thronelike quality so strong that once, when Max had gone to the bathroom, Adam had stolen quickly to it and sat down and felt as daring as Zorro; Max, making his usual inscrutable and surfacely fatuous statement (“It occurs to me that the principal trouble with the world today is that there’s entirely too much love in it!”), then developing the statement with enormous skill and zest, forcing you to argue, and demolishing you with a solitary sentence; and, too, the smells—the coffee perking in the silver pot, the exotically seasoned meats for nine o’clock sandwiches, the special lotion Max wore constantly, a bit like shaving lotion, but not masculine; yet Adam did not really think, as Preston did, that Blake was homosexual—if it were true, he’d certainly have known, for they had been alone together often. Still, it was a little strange, that lotion-smell, the cats, and Blake’s misogynous (“No, that isn’t quite correct; you mean misogamous!”) attitude, which came out strongly in the classroom when some girl would dare a question. “Oh, the hell it’s strange,” Pres said; “the guy’s a fruit, that’s all! I just can’t take him any more. I was impressed at first, like you, and I won’t argue that he’s smart—the word is brilliant, maybe—but here’s the thing: a lot of guys are brilliant. It isn’t such a rare commodity. Look, if he’s such a hot-dog nihilist, how come he isn’t rich, you know what I mean? Just why the hell is he hanging around this lousy university, teaching a course in political theory to future ad-men? Why isn’t he out showing the King of Sardinia how to take over the world? He’s phony, that’s why. And he’s got you snookered, good. And that’s the whole thing. You don’t look a bit upset.” “I’m not upset, Pres,” he had said. “I’m just a little sad, that’s all. The way I look at it, I haven’t lost a friend; I’ve gained an acquaintance.”—Instantly, in that quiet hesitation, Adam lived the time again.