!Click Song

by John A. Williams

  “Yeah.”

  “See you.”

  15

  Armed with lists of the Ralph McGills, Hodding Carters, Judge Warings and Martin Luther Kings of the South, we slipped into the warm underbelly of America, a region that was quivering up out of the quagmire of its past. The Northern mills that had moved south half a century before to cheap labor, the dozens of military installations that had sprung up with the wars, the space centers, the flexing of Southern and Southwestern economic (political) muscle, made it a land in transition, restless among its oil fields and soybean and grain and peanut fields; it was quick-tempered, suspicious, uncertain. Alan Shepard might make his hotshot fifteen-minute suborbital space flight; there might be disaster at the Bay of Pigs; Kennedy and Khrushchev might argue in Vienna, but those were sideshows; the main event was race and it was enlivened by semantic acrobatics, political sleight-of-hand and brute force.

  Oddly, where Ted and Vernon often had seemed to be irritable, snappish, through the latter part of the Northern trip, now they were calm, watchful and patient. I had not been so nervous since I was based at Camp Lejeune. Then, I was vaguely aware that the South was a bad place. No knot grew in my stomach then as it did now; it rested there, heavy, clinching and unclinching itself, pulsing, heating up and freezing over by turns. I had not known such fear before; perhaps I hadn’t been old enough before. Perhaps I’d felt, foolishly, that my uniform provided dispensation. Even overseas, I didn’t have that fear of Southerners, for I carried a gun, too; was there to carry a gun and to kill with it.

  Now, what corpsman would come to rescue me? What general would declare the action over, at an end? What court here would acknowledge my citizenship by rendering justice?

  They don’t come by ones

  They don’t come by twos

  And they come by tens.

  The intervening eighteen years had imposed a hard learning on me, and it was made all the harder by my recognizing that I was feeling now just exactly the way many people wanted me to feel. Slashing through East Texas toward the Louisiana border, I felt sacrificed and as vulnerable as an ant crossing a summer sidewalk before a bunch of kids whose only entertainment was to crush it. It did not give me pleasure that the others shared the same feelings, no matter how they tried to conceal them. There were times when we were prowling through upcountry Louisiana and Mississippi that we looked at each other more closely than we ever had before; we seemed to draw together like the members of a squad sent out on an uncertain patrol. We laughed a bit too heartily at jokes; we made too big a point of not wiping off the mouth of whatever bottle of whiskey we were passing around.

  We stayed in Negro hotels, money having won out over the managers’ fear, and when we could not find them, we slept in the van, aping the impossible postures of the dead, though none of us ever slept soundly. We lived in the fear that gas stations would not fill us up, and underfoot in the van lay a carpet of bread, cracker, cookie, hamburger and hot dog bun crumbs. Even staying in contact with the producer and our friends and families, a matter we’d taken quite for granted, was a problem as we moved through great forests of pines or dry, hard hillsides or endless, poorly tended fields. New York did not have the market on busted and rifled public phone booths, and the places where we stayed, if not without phones altogether, usually had but one, located in the most public of places, which, always grudgingly, we were allowed to use one at a time, and at spaced intervals so that we would not tie up the line.

  The police tailed us, sitting on our rear for miles while Ted, grinning nervously, crept well within the speed limit, and then, one night, we hit Montgomery, where we were told we could find a good place to stay in Tuskegee. We bumbled our way out of town on Eighty-five, looking for Shorters, where we would turn off on Eighty. It was night and we were tired, having loaded and unloaded several times to shoot people and places and do interviews in the Cradle of the Confederacy.

  “We got a tail,” Vernon said. He was spelling Ted at the wheel.

  Ted said, “Want me to take it?”

  “No can do now,” Vernon said, and he mashed the accelerator.

  “Isn’t it a cop?” Mark said. He was tensed and turned around, looking out the rear window.

  “No. Wouldn’t be much better off, anyway,” Vernon said. “Here they come!”

  He gripped the wheel. We all turned backward and to the left, watching the headlights of the tailing car, high beams on, racing up.

  “Hang on!” Vernon cried, and he braked suddenly, kicking it into a lower gear when the van screamed almost to a halt. The other car flashed by; we saw a blur of white faces, heard rebel yells, heard thunka-thunka-thunka before the sound of shots.

  “They’re shooting at us!” Mark yelled. We could already feel the air streaming in from the bullet holes in the side of the van. I sensed movement up in front, where Vernon was, a movement both covert and angry. My gun was in my hand. “Anybody hit?” Ted asked. His voice was shaking. “Dolph?”

  “Naw.”

  “Mark? Cate? You okay, Vernon?”

  We were all okay.

  “They’re gonna be up ahead,” Vernon said. “Bet your bottom dollar on it.” He picked up speed. “Cate, you ready?”

  “Yeah.”

  I think Mark turned to look at me; if he was surprised, the darkness concealed it.

  “You guys got pieces?” Ted asked.

  We didn’t answer; we stared ahead. Vernon kicked on the high beams. I heard Dolph working at his camera case.

  “Aw, shit,” Mark said. “Aw, shit.”

  Now Dolph hung himself over the front seat between Vernon and Ted. I heard Vernon say: “Hey Dolph, what’s that—hey! This cat’s got him a cannon! A Luger!”

  Dolph said nothing. Was there no traffic on this goddamn road, I wondered. Would it make a difference?

  “There!” Vernon shouted. He jabbed his hand leftward. “That’s them! Off on that dirt road!” He quickly lowered his window and started firing at the car before we were abreast of it. Dolph leaned out behind him and I opened the side window. Vernon was flying and we were firing like hell. Dolph’s gun carried real authority: PA-BoOM! PA-BoOM! PA-BoOmbPABoOM! When we flashed by, we saw figures running and ducking. I thought I heard glass breaking. Vernon was so intent on firing backward that he almost ran off the road. Ted grabbed the wheel and veered us back. My hand had stopped jerking; clacka clacka clacka. Empty.

  We started laughing. “Hu-boy, man, shot the shit outa those redneck fuckers,” Vernon said. I couldn’t stop laughing. Even Mark was roaring. Dolph chuckled and looked back through the rear window.

  It was five minutes before Ted said, “We’d better forget Tussegee tonight—”

  “Tuskegee,” I said.

  “Whatever. We better keep on truckin’ till we get to Atlanta.”

  “Yeah,” Mark said. “Fuck Rick. He’s there in New York. No one’s shooting at him. We just won’t film anymore in Alabama.”

  “Pull over, Vernon,” Ted said. “I’ll take it.”

  “What if we hit one of them?” Mark asked.

  “Too bad,” Dolph said.

  “That’s just why we gotta keep goin’,” Ted said, scrambling into the driver’s seat. With the doors momentarily opened, the smell of the nighttime South whipped in. I thought of Toomer’s Kabnis and the fears that came with the night.

  Mark said, “How far is Atlanta?”

  “About a hundred and fifty miles,” I said. “A hundred fifty miles and a hundred dog-ass towns.”

  Dolph said, “Reload.”

  There was a pause. I reached for the box of shells. I heard Vernon reloading, and Dolph, and then the silence became deeper yet. Ted settled, cleared his throat, and we moved quickly through the night, almost catching up with the lighting provided by the headlights. The van ran smoothly. I found myself listening for a tire to blow, the axle to crack—for something bad to happen so that we couldn’t get out of that place. The dashed center line, like big tracer shells, rushed up throug
h the darkness to hit us head on without impact.

  We were vibrating between the deepest fatigue and the tensions of fear. I thought, quite consciously this time, of my foxhole and the smells and sounds that surrounded it. Why did I consider that to have been at war and this, my present condition, to be something less?

  Fool.

  Goddamn it, I thought. I still had so much to do: a child to help raise, another to find, another woman to wed (yes, yes, piss on her father) and so much writing to do, all the way out to the edge of the language. There were things I wished to see and do and feel and smell.

  But there I was, with the others, fleeing, scared shitless, through the night, as fearful that I might have killed someone as I was about being killed by him. More. What insanity!

  “God, I hope you guys didn’t hit one of them,” Mark said.

  The rest of us listened to the tires whisking over the road and listened to the echoes of what he’d really said. He too was more afraid of killing than being killed.

  Hours later, just outside Atlanta, in College Park, we found a public phone booth that was intact. Mark wanted to call the producer. As he scrambled out of the van, we heard the sound of jets. Mark paused, stuck his head back inside. “Pack up everything,” he said. “I’ve got an idea.”

  “What?” I asked.

  His smile seemed to float in the shadows. “I’m telling Rick that we’re gonna charter a private plane to New York. Now.” He turned to the sound of the jets. “That’s gotta be the airport, right, Ted?”

  Ted was already bent over his maps, steadying a flashlight. “Yeah. Atlanta Airport.”

  “Pack up, pack up,” Mark said and ran to the booth.

  “Those cheapskates at Ten Columbus’ll never okay it,” Ted said.

  We heard a siren back on the road and turned, holding our breath; it faded off in another direction. We focused on Mark’s silhouette in the booth. Through the open door, the jets sounded strangely sweet. The idea had quickly taken root among us. A plane! We could be out of there in an hour, two at the most, and if they were looking for us on the highways, they’d find nothing but the van. We would be at La Guardia by daybreak, back in New York. We’d be safe.

  Mark was shouting; his voice carried nearly to the van, and then he seemed to calm, as though he’d been mollified. Seconds later he held up his hand with his thumb and forefinger pressed together in an O. We hopped out of the van and ran to the booth.

  “Who’s got some dimes?” Mark asked, thumbing viciously through the phone book. “Ted, get those plates off the van and take all the papers out of the compartment. Here, here’s one.”

  He dialed three companies before he found a pilot willing to take us up right then.

  The dawn, lacking thunder, came up behind us on the starboard side. I felt as one with every escaped slave who had at last crossed into Ohio or a safe place in Pennsylvania. They had been on foot, of course, and I was flying high, comfortable at ten thousand feet and moving at better than two hundred miles an hour. Yet the cause behind their flight and mine was unchanged.

  On the plane, half-listening to Mark explain that we’d be met and dropped off in the city and gather at 10 Columbus Circle day after tomorrow to see all the U.S. dailies and make final plans for Africa, I’d been sure that after I collected my mail from Mr. Storto and went to my apartment, I would fall apart with fatigue.

  That did not happen. I was eager to stand at my window once again and look down into the street; I watched people, looked at things. I bathed myself in the safety of those ordinary acts. I was in my town, my neighborhood, my building, my apartment. I seemed to ache with the weariness of a year’s travel, but we’d been gone only a little over two months. I moved to the mail.

  Glenn’s cramped, careful writing. “Thanks for the check. Made our junior high school basketball team.” Christ, where was it all going? Making teams already.

  And the bills.

  Maxine Culp, Literary Agent. “Been trying to reach you. I’m set now and have some clients. My invitation still stands, if you tire of Alex.” She wrote about Jolene Bookbinder’s death and reported that Amos had disappeared for a few weeks. I had never met Jolene and she was not real to me. She was to Amos undoubtedly, now, the far side of reality. I felt relief before I felt sympathy. All combat soldiers do.

  More bills.

  Paul Cummings was, his letter informed me, “vanishing for a while. Traveling and thinking. ‘Woodshedding,’ I think you’d call it, Cate. Assessing my work, what direction I should take. And my personal life, too, chum. That’s a mess I mean to straighten out. The Goog will help me while I go on this self-shrink bit.

  “I may just pop in on my old man in San Francisco when I finally settle out there. I’ll be in touch—I can’t ever see us really being out of touch. [About his father: liar, fuckin’ liar!]

  “I may not be around when you and Allis do your thing, so here’s looking at you, kid. I hope it works like hell. There’s one thing, though: Leonard is worse than ever. Keep an eye out when you can, okay? When I get an address, I’ll send it on.”

  Royalty statements. As usual, I owed the publisher.

  I decided to call Allis later. And then I was hungry. I fixed a big drink and opened a can of corned beef hash. I ate furiously, and the warm food, the ambience of safety, converged on my fatigue. I crawled into the bed and slept. Slept while an insistent part of that machine, my mind, suggested, formed decisions:

  ¡Ay! ¡Jugemos, hijo mio, Let us play, my son,

  a la reina con el rey! at being king and queen.

  And when I woke, at an hour stilled in time by its darkness, I went to my bookshelf and pulled down the Spanish edition of Clarissa and hastily scribbled down the name of the publisher: Amaya, Barcelona. It would be a place from which to start.

  I went back to bed with a sense of accomplishment; the darkness had framed my plans. But tomorrow (today) there were still others; I had to call Allis.

  We lay once again nude in the aftermath. (For then our bodies were taut and young, unlined and resilient, and we were proud of them.) I had told her of the trip, of Mark, of Dolph and Vernon and Ted, of the escape. And after a while I said to her, “I think I may have a child living in Spain. I want to find it.”

  “Oh,” Allis said. “I see. You didn’t tell me.” She looked at me and waited.

  “I tried to find the mother before I left. Monica.”

  Allis’ expression was unchanged. “Why is it that you never said anything before?”

  “I wasn’t sure that I wanted to do anything about it. Anyway, what was there to say? It happens. Like weather. I guess I thought a lot about it on the trip.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I thought I’d stop in Barcelona on the way back from Africa.”

  “What about Monica?”

  “Monica? Nothing.”

  “Did you love her?”

  “No. I was lonely.”

  “What was she like?”

  “Quiet. A little sad. She had a kid already.”

  “Was she pretty?”

  “Sometimes—I mean, yeah, I guess she was.”

  Allis found a feather, picked it up and watched it drift to the floor. “What’ll you do if you find them?”

  “Try to help. Money, I guess. Maybe she’d let me bring him here.”

  Now her face was all question mark. “Here?”

  I just looked at her.

  She said with a sigh, “Yes, I guess you’d want that—”

  “Would you,” I’ said, “mind? Can you see a kid with us?”

  Her smile was wan. “I don’t know, frankly.”

  “I worry about him. More than Glenn. Monica was so poor, close to starving. I can’t let that happen to my kid, Allis.”

  She rubbed her eyes. “Funny, how the past comes dragging in behind you, like my father.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “That’s not quite the same though, is it?”

  “Not at all, except that that�
�s the way it is.”

  She said, “I can’t talk to him about it, Cate.”

  “Seen him?”

  It took a long time for her to answer. “He doesn’t want to see me.”

  “Monica,” I said, “had that problem with her father, too.” I held her tight. “Why don’t you meet me in Paris,” I said.

  “Shall I? Would you want me to?”

  “Yeah. Let’s do a week there and come on back home.”

  “What if you have the child with you?”

  “Then I’ll need some help. If I don’t, then we’ll party.”

  Now she was smiling. “And after?”

  “Mark was asking me when we would use Graenum Gordon—”

  “You told him we wouldn’t?”

  “Yeah. You should have seen his face. Until I told him we’d be using someone else.”

  People are pushing us out of the alcove. I am looking for Allis. Mark lingers by, obviously not in a hurry, obviously wanting to continue touching the base, and so, once outside, we stand again chatting emptily, until he says, “Let’s grab a coffee.” We head for the nearest shop. I cannot quite digest all the changes in the neighborhood. The old San Juan Hill is gone; Lincoln Center, Juilliard, etc., etc., are there now, surrounded by the space that is always absorbed by people.

  It is not that talking over the old times is an exercise that bores me; rather it is that certain untoward events, such as Paul’s funeral, seem always to provide the catalyst for these exercises. We must happen on them, then milk them back over the years to lend substance to what we are. We must forgive or pretend to have forgotten the awkward circumstances.

  The series had won the Best Educational Documentary the year it appeared on television. Mark, using my material, had finished two others, writing them himself. The first time, I called to complain about his bold theft and he said with a laugh, “Cate, the material was too good not to use again.” I didn’t bother to phone the second time. What was the use? Men more formidable than I had had their skills pilfered. When I think of the traffic lights that surround the world, haughtily stopping traffic or commanding it to go, I think of Garret Morgan, whose invention was neatly boosted by Big Business. The list, in every endeavor, is endless. I knew it then; I know it now. Yes, what was the use; given history, wasn’t it foreordained?