“Christ almighty, you need to get lost, boy. You hear me?”
When I threatened to keep trying to help, he cocked his head at me. At my foot was the photograph of Lem’s parents. I picked it up and offered it to him.
“I ought to kill you,” he said.
The last I saw of Savannah, she was bending to retrieve a metal box. It was a simple box, a small square. She wiped the rain off the lid and opened it. She removed something from inside, turned it over in her hand. I couldn’t see what it was. She put everything into a brown paper bag she’d brought. And then she was gone.
PART
II
One
A brick wrapped in newspaper. Glass everywhere. No witnesses. Nothing inflammatory about the paper, nor, really, about the brick—no words written on it, no note attached, no Coloreds go home, no Not in my town, nigger, no This time a brick, next time a bullet. No protests outside. No sit-ins. No prior record of intimidation, threats, altercations. No complaints to the local police, the state troopers, no reports filed in Washington with DOJ. Nothing sinister, really, about the lease on the place, no kickbacks, no surplus taxes, no sweeteners, no handshakes out back of the town hall with the mayor—a man with a graveled voice, a whiskey nose, soft hands—no intimation of anything nefarious, really. No fire hoses here. No dogs. No photo spreads in Life magazine, no tributes in Ebony, nothing in the Wall Street Journal saying that those marching for their rights were asking for it, that they were communists, agitators, utopians. No midnight rallies on the town green, no torched crosses, no guys in white hoods just standing around on Main Street, trying to scare the shit out of you. Not here. No public proclamations from the steps of the YMCA, calling the black man a scourge, a cancer, a threat to their women, an instance of social leprosy; none of that. In fact, when the churches burned in South Carolina, in Georgia, in Alabama, in Mississippi, the school kids here raised money, cut a bank check, sent it to the NAACP, wrote cards in marker with cheery salutations like Peace and Love and Respect FOR ALL. After Dr. King’s murder, a vigil was struck up on the green, housewives and children and all the men, out with candles. In the groceries, on the baseball diamond, in line at Kruetzer the butcher’s, at the landfill, in the cornfields, not even any whispering. Just the brick—thrown, someone said, from a moving car, through the front plate window of the town’s only diner. Something about the speed of the brick and the serious amount of damage. Something about the way the brick landed. Something about the cut of the glass shards as they lay on the tile. You just can’t wreck a window like that standing still.
This was where I’d found Charles Ewing, in a town called Ebbington, Iowa. It was the fall of 1972. I saw him through a hole in the tarp that covered the broken window at Foreman’s Diner. He wore a black apron, a white work shirt, and red suspenders. From what I’d seen of Ebbington, it was little more than six stoplights, a crosshatch of avenues, a grocery with mums arrayed in the window, and a wasted, dust-dry baseball diamond called Gaithersburg Grounds. Of course, I thought. Charles would end up here, across from a ball field.
By the time I got there, a few days after the incident, police still had caution tape wrapped between the parking meters out front, and there was a stationary cruiser idling outside. Apparently, teenagers had tried to loot the place right afterward, steal Charles’s toasters, his stash of whipped cream canisters, for their nitrous gas. Someone on the street had told me this. The cruiser had its flashers going, muffler exhaust thick like wood smoke. It was midday, the sun white and weak. A wet banner hung across the street, advertising a parade for Halloween, still two weeks away. Children had painted ghosts and ghouls in yellow and orange. Come get spooked, it read. A poor choice of words, if only someone stopped to think about it. There was a Presbyterian church down the street, its wooden doors like the gateway to a castle, the steeple an upturned funnel. One officer was out in front of the diner, shivering. When he saw me, he came over.
“Hilton Wise,” I said, flashing my business card with aplomb, as if it were a serious credential, an FBI badge. “Boston Spectator. I’m a reporter.”
“You want to talk to him, then? Go talk to him, he won’t bite. He’s pretty ornery right now, but he won’t bite.”
Before I could answer, the cop had gone around to open the front door to the place, sounding a bell strung up on the hinge. Even though I knew otherwise, a part of me still doubted it was really him.
“Slim! Hey, Slim! Got a guy here from the paper. Some guy from Boston.”
“No,” I said, feeling a panicked sweat on my forehead. I thought to tell the cop that I’d seen what I needed to see, that I’d just turn around and head back home.
“I already talked to the paper,” I heard Charles say. “Tell the paper I’m busy.”
“Come on, Slim,” the cop said, smiling at me. “He looks harmless.”
A moment later, Charles was in the doorway, glaring at me. His clothes hung from him, his belt tightened and locked into place by what I could plainly see was a hand-punched hole. His grip on the broom whitened his knuckles.
“I got nothing more to say,” he said. He was exhausted, sweat on his upper lip in beads. “Really. I don’t want to be rude. But I got nothing to say.”
And apparently neither did I. Twenty years of worrying and repenting had made me mute in front of him. I cleared my throat, took a pencil from my shirt pocket. I decided I wanted a pen. Then I decided I wanted a different notebook, a clean one. I flipped some pages back, smoothed them down, straightened my hat. I cleared my throat again for good measure. For a moment I thought I saw some flickering of recognition in him. I wasn’t so different, I thought. Age had done to me what it did to everybody. But instead of recognition, what I saw on Charles’s face was a clear but polite trace of annoyance. He didn’t know who I was. He didn’t remember me.
“Listen,” he said, wiping his forehead, barely looking at me now, “I’m busy. Trying to get the place back open. We’ve been closed for a few days now. So—”
“Right,” I said. “I’ll come back.”
He managed a faint smile. “Should be open tomorrow. Maybe the day after.”
For five years now I’d worked as a reporter for a paper out of Boston, tracking down cases of racial intimidation, violence, voter suppression, anything that fit into what my editors liked to call the race beat. This was how I’d found Charles Ewing in Ebbington, Iowa. Part of my job was to scan the AP wire, the Reuters and McClatchy wires, the UPI dispatch, looking for incidents that might make a good story for my editors. I’d have been better served sticking around Boston. I knew this even then. We were two years away from the busing crisis, and already you could see the fault lines emerging, the heat building, animus bleeding out of the court queue, onto L Street. But there were better reporters doing that beat, and better papers. The Spectator was a decent daily, with a better-than-average sports section. That was what I’d started with at the paper. I had the job I’d always wanted—a ticket to every ball game at Fenway, a seat in the press box, permission to go into the dugout and interview anyone I felt like talking to. Eventually the games become boring. No matter how big a fan you are, no matter how much of a thrill it is to get to bump shoulders with, say, Joe Willie Namath minutes after Super Bowl III, when he’s still got blood on his elbow, when he’s only just booked it through the tunnel with his finger raised to the nosebleed seats, when you can still make out the imprint of the Baltimore Colts horseshoe on his leg, the initial boyish thrill of those games starts to fade. Part of the general contract of being a sportswriter, though, is the obligation to manufacture content whether the games demand it or not. When it got old and I felt like I was really losing my love for the games, I asked for a transfer to the national desk. To the race beat. Here I was.
At least once a week, I’d go through the big mess of dispatch papers and wire reports that piled up on my desk. This was four years after Dr. King had been murdered at the Lorraine Motel. The awful news kept coming. Occasionally you’d
stumble on a good story that hadn’t been picked up by any of the bigger outlets, and if you were lucky, you could earn yourself a decent byline for a few days. Of course, I was also looking for her. For Savannah. I was always looking. In twenty years, I hadn’t ever heard from her. Not one letter, not one telephone call. I didn’t really expect that she’d try to reach me. But I still wanted to find her—to see what had happened to her, to see if she’d turned out all right, to see if she might forgive me for everything I’d done.
When I saw the news about Charles, I put in a few calls to the paper in Cedar Rapids. Iowa seemed an unlikely place for him to be. And Charles Ewing seemed like a common enough name for it to be somebody else. I asked them if they had a picture they could send, and when it came, his photograph was right below the fold in the Gazette. This was big news in that part of the world. The picture showed the broken window, the brick like a mortar shell resting in the mess. Beside the window, Charles stood in a suit and a tie and a hat. This, the caption, reported, was his place, his window.
Ten minutes later I dropped everything, booked a flight, and went to Iowa.
Why would somebody like you want to do something like this?
When we first started dating, this was what my girlfriend, Jenny, said when I told her how I earned my money. I took her through the progression step-by-step: sports reporter with a hankering to get more serious; an open chair on the national desk; the arc of unending racial violence across the Bible Belt and the upper Midwest and New England, and in Reagan’s California, and really just about everywhere else; and, I guess, a certain predisposition I held against the general, flagrant idiocy of bigotry. Jenny was a fourth-generation Baltimore Catholic with three brothers in Vietnam, one of whom—Jerry, broad-shouldered, supposedly an ace shot—was her twin. They hadn’t waited to get drafted, didn’t stand around at the Harbor Armory, pissing themselves about what number they might pull. They’d just gone in and enlisted without much consternation as to what the Pentagon might do, something she was constantly telling me, and a fact she was plainly proud of. She was a woman of varied tastes—ethnic food, crude humor—a woman who detested the foreign cinema so fashionable then. (“Why would I want to sit through another Bergman film when the last one was so cold, and quiet, and so fucking dreadful!”) When it came to politics, she professed to be a fan of both Johnson and Nixon. Because of her brothers, she’d been hell-bent on supporting the mission, expanding into Cambodia, really just fucking torching the Vietcong, her logic being that expansion begat aggression, and the full weight of American aggression, had, as she kept telling me, no equal in the world. She would pound her fist into her palm to tell me this. Jenny had been the one to teach me that all politics isn’t local, as Tip O’Neill would have it a few years later, but personal, and that party affiliation or ideology is eventually bullshit when every potential enemy incursion is aimed at the head of your twin brother.
But when it came to race, she grew quiet. I understood this. Nobody really wanted to hear about it anymore. This was why she put the question to me: Why would somebody like you… By you, I suppose she meant to point out my meekness, my squeamishness around blood or stories that got too gory; or perhaps she meant to point out my whiteness, which during a Massachusetts winter became even more pronounced. And by something like this—well, I suppose that didn’t need much of an explanation. Nobody liked to talk about what Jenny called “all this terrible racial business,” the last word pronounced, in her weird Baltimore accent, as biz-niz. “Doesn’t it upset you?” she asked, flipping though photographs I’d taken of a desecrated black graveyard in South Carolina. They were Instamatic pictures, taken not for the paper but for my own research, and she handled each one carefully, as if they were bound to become evidence in a trial someday. When she was done, she pushed them across the table. “I mean… this is just disturbing, Hilly.”
I hadn’t ever told her about Savannah. What would I have said? That I’d kissed her twenty years ago, that we’d tried for a minute to go to sleep in the same car, that I’d gotten her uncle arrested and that he’d been murdered in jail, and that in my head, all of these things were connected: race and lust and death? And even then, if I’d somehow managed to say this with even a shard of dignity—what then? How do you explain to someone like Jenny that my thinking of Savannah for so long wasn’t a fetish? That I wasn’t just flexing my newfound liberal muscles or trying to prove that not every white American was complicit in some systemic prejudice? That I wasn’t collecting a stamp on the game board of female varieties: first a black girl then a Native American and then an Asian and then so on and so on? How does somebody explain something like that? I was always looking for Savannah’s name to pop up on the AP wire. Always. I was always looking for her. Did I tell Jenny this? Should I have mentioned that whenever my editors sent me to, say, Cleveland, to report on the Indians–Red Sox games, the first thing I did was search the telephone directory for her name? Did I admit that once, having stumbled across a listing for an S. Ewing outside of Tuscaloosa, I’d skipped the Auburn-Alabama game, sat outside some poor man’s house in a rented Cutlass Supreme, daring myself to ring his doorbell, and then, having fucked off and wasted a whole day, gone and filed a completely fabricated report on the Crimson Tide victory?
What I knew to be true was that I’d confused my curiosity for Savannah’s whereabouts, my concern for her condition, with affection. I knew this without any doubt. Her specter muddied every relation I had. Jenny constantly pleaded with me to tell her what was bothering me, even when I wasn’t sure that anything was bothering me at all. A typical interaction:
She: What is it?
Me: What are you talking about?
She: You were crying in your sleep.
Me: That’s ridiculous.
She: I was right next to you. I watched it happen.
Me: It was allergies. It’s allergy season.
She: Those are some sad allergies, Hilly.
The foolishness of all this, the sheer, pure, juvenile silliness of it, didn’t escape me. I’d been with Jenny now for two years—a lifetime, compared with the few moments I’d spent lying beside Savannah in Bluepoint. I knew Jenny’s family, what made her laugh, which movies she liked to quote, what her drink was, what her father had been like. I knew Jenny’s body, what made her excited, what disgusted her. I knew where to take her in Manhattan, which Italian places; what she ordered in a Chinese restaurant; how she liked her burger cooked. She’d moved in after nine months. On Sunday mornings we’d walk down the Esplanade to watch the rowers on the Charles. Or we’d take a car west of the city to shop at the farm stands in Lexington. I knew nothing about Savannah, not even what name she went under. But she’d become stuck in my memory, regardless. Just her. I certainly wouldn’t tell Jenny this, would I? Did I tell her that everyone else after Savannah lost her shape, became blurry; everyone else ran together? Come up with any metaphor—a filmstrip burning up in the projector; a paragraph I could not stop rereading; a record cracked and repeating—all of them fit. Did I admit I’d been thinking of her for so long that it seemed sensible—reasonable, even—to compare every new woman I met with Savannah? As if she were an ex-wife. As if she’d made me a widower. Even when I’d first met Jenny, there had been a moment when I’d thought to myself, She’s pretty, and she’s sharp, but isn’t Savannah better somehow? I kept thinking that love, or whatever it was that I felt for her—affection, addiction, adoration; or maybe it was just obsession, plain and simple obsession—possessed on its own an intrinsic half-life such that one day soon I’d wake forgetting who she was, or what she looked like, or what, at sixteen, her laughter, and then later her fear, had sounded like. To the series of therapists and analysts and social workers who had the misfortune of listening to me, I displayed simultaneously a pitch-perfect self-awareness and a desperate urge for self-sabotage. No amount of talk could dislodge this. Surely the effects of love on the heart diminish over time, I’d thought. Such a moment of nothingness—just a kiss
!—couldn’t hold someone like me hostage.
But it had, and here I was, in little Ebbington, Iowa, hoping that I might convince her father to talk to me. Of course I wanted his forgiveness. This was as true as anything in my life was true. But what I really wanted was her forgiveness. She’d loved Lem in a way that she could never love her father, and I’d taken him away.
I was fairly sure that murder had no half-life.
I stood on the sidewalk outside the diner. I’d imagined this reunion before, of course, but we always saw each other by accident when I thought of it, not because I’d seen his name come across the AP wire and flown four hours to see him. Not because some bigot had thrown a rock through his window. Whenever I’d picture him, I’d see him alone on a street somewhere—in Chicago, or in Philadelphia. I’d see him at the movies or at a New York Knicks game. I’d see him in the airport lounge, waiting for a flight from Miami to Houston. He’d be the guy two tables over from me at the Iridium while some hack played “In a Sentimental Mood” in the wrong key, mucking up the sax line. In my fantasies he’d be prosperous because I wanted him to be. The man who’d lived in that cabin with those buckets, the man trying to put back together a severed fishing rod—that guy would definitely have been erased by time, replaced by someone successful, diligent, responsible, someone healed and bighearted. Because so much time had passed, and because my sins and errors had been committed in my youth, when I knew nothing, and because I had done what I had done out of insecurity and fear, Charles would find it within himself to say simply, I forgive you, Hilly. That’s what I wanted. That’s what I needed.
Wise Men: A Novel Page 13