!Click Song

by John A. Williams

  “Gentlemen and ladies,” the president said, “it’s been nice.” He stalked out, followed by the officers.

  The guests and the honored didn’t know as they danced, as they ate, as they applauded the awards, that this was the end of it, of CBAL; that this, too, had been stifled, like so many other ventures.

  Like boycotts, prayer meetings and marches, like voter registration drives, like community action groups and community school boards; like writing or painting or playing music, like working to the tune of the Protestant ethic, like—

  The jungle has vanished. Still, I’m holding my M-1, and my fatigues are heavy with sweat. I am running down a dark corridor—another one—toward sunlight. I am running as fast as I can, faster, even, my canteen, belt and bush knife beating up blisters in my sides. I’m almost there, impelled by a nameless fear, and just as I reach the threshold, the sunlight vanishes and a darkness without dimension is suddenly there, like something solid and malevolent. I fire at whatever it is, and the bullets ricochet. I whirl and run to another slot of daylight and the same puzzling thing happens; it happens again and again and again. And then as I am racing once more toward yet another opening in what I now realize is a maze, I understand somehow that this is the last, the final, the ultimate opening. I am running with incredible speed. Grenade rings click like castanets on my belt. I sense on this dash that I’m racing against time. I am shouting and cursing as loud as I can; my shoes, barely touching the surface, make booming sounds.

  “Honey—honey! Wake up!” Allis said. She was crouched over the lower part of my body, holding my feet.

  At the same moment, Mack came running into the room, shouting, “What’s that noise? Mom, Dad?”

  “Dad had a bad dream.”

  I sat up and groaned.

  “It’s all right, Mack. Go back to bed,” Allis said.

  “No,” I said. “Come here, Mack.”

  He came to the bed and I embraced him, hard. “What’s the matter, Dad? Are you all right?”

  “Yeah. Go back to bed now, okay?”

  “When I grow up,” he said, “am I gonna have bad dreams, too? I don’t wanna grow up if I am.”

  “Anybody who can ride a bike the way you can won’t have bad dreams. Go to bed.”

  He kissed me and went out, looking backward.

  We lay then, face to face. She studied me while I watched her eyes move. “The nightmares you have,” she said.

  ENDINGS

  1

  Allis’ father died. He had hovered through our lives like a fog, with word of his health, or lack of it, seeping into our apartment: a hesitant call from Amy or some other relative, who always suggested that Allis not call him because it would make whatever illness he had at the time worse. Then nothing, until Amy called with word of his death.

  Allis had missed the holidays. She was pleased when we were invited to seders—ecstatic when they were first seders. And at Chanukah Mack received his presents, while Allis hummed A Partridge in a Pear Tree. Holidays just seemed to run together, Chanukah and Christmas, Easter and Passover. We threw Mack pellets of Blackness and Jewishness. They were his heritage, even if his society would undoubtedly make him the recipient of but one.

  Then Amy called.

  We went to the funeral and defiantly occupied the family pew. Allis did not cry, but Mack did. He sensed, I think, that something was terribly wrong. We hadn’t talked to him about Allis’ father; that was to come later, when he would understand such things. Yet there he was, Mack guessed correctly, there in that box. Something had passed through his small life and departed before he was even aware of it. That must have frightened him.

  Amy was married now and had three kids and was almost three times the size of the woman after whom I’d lusted on that summer afternoon so long ago. Allis carried her figure as though she were twenty—and the relatives must have hated her for that, too.

  We drove to the cemetery and Allis, who still had not cried, threw in the first dirt, this only child, and walked fiercely from the grave, Mack and I trailing, and got into the car. She now seemed angry enough to have slammed the door and popped the window, yet she closed it with the greatest care.

  “You okay?” I asked as we rode away.

  She nodded.

  Mack settled in the back seat to take a nap; that was easier than reading.

  My thoughts wandered over classroom lectures and piles of papers yet to be graded and The Pushkin Papers. That was the title of the novel I was now working on. Teaching does that to the writer, pulls him or her in twenty different directions while insisting that the writer remain superbly sane.

  Allis was still silent, and I didn’t talk. Grief is a personal thing; everyone who tries to edge into it is a stranger, an intruder.

  We were inching along in Long Island Expressway traffic and Allis said, “I’m going away, Cate.”

  “What?” I was sure I hadn’t heard what I’d heard very well.

  “I’m going away. I’ve got to.”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “Going away. That’s all.”

  I considered what she’d said. “Just like that, huh?”

  “Yes.” She didn’t look at me.

  “Did I do anything?” I said.

  “No. Not lately.”

  “Then, why, Allis? Whatever it is we can work it out, can’t we?”

  “I—want—to—go—a-way,” she said, bending toward the dashboard with each word.

  I think I sighed. Maybe, I thought, it was too much. All the fucking hate all the fucking curiosity all the fucking anxieties all the fucking energy protecting your wife from insults and all her energy protecting you from the same. Maybe she was right. Enough was fucking enough. We’d given it a goddamn good shot. There came that time when they had you backed up on the beach with ten thousand miles of ocean behind you, like that guy in the pocket magazine.

  “I wish you wouldn’t, honey.”

  “I’ve just got to.”

  “I’ll take care of Mack, then.”

  “Yes, I thought you would.”

  We drove on. Anger whipped at me, and my own grief and self-pity. She was deserting me! She had let them beat her. Shit, then maybe she should go. Mack woke as we drove down our block, woke up to a car filled with vibrating angers and sadnesses. Upstairs he watched her pack.

  “Where’re you going, Mom? Dad, where’s Mom going?”

  His eyes were haunted by the expectation of still another disaster.

  “Business trip,” she said.

  “Mom’s got to take care of some things for Grandpa.”

  “He’s dead.”

  “That’s why.”

  He said, “Well, when—” I led him from the room.

  Allis came out with two bags. She set them down and kissed Mack. “Back soon, honey.” She picked up the bags again. I moved to open the door for her. I raised her face; we kissed lightly, and she was through it, into the hall. I closed the door and went to the window, where, shortly, I saw her down on the street, hiking toward the corner, her back bent with the weight of the bags, but walking firmly.

  She really went, I thought. She’s gone.

  Mack sat rigidly before the television set. “When’s she coming back?”

  “It’s just a business trip, Mackie. In a couple of days—”

  “Then why’d she take two suitcases?”

  “Because—”

  “—and she didn’t even take her briefcase!”

  “Uh—”

  We struggled through what was left of the day, and I finally took refuge in my corner of the bedroom and pulled out Pushkin. Mack came in twice, interrupting me. I was up the night, working. I canceled my classes, told the department secretary I was ill. Could anyone cover the class for me? No, I told her; it was too late. I called Mrs. Lee to work something out for the next day and then got Mack ready for school, after a breakfast of cereal and toast. His face was somber when he left to walk the three blocks. His first days the
re I had slipped out of the building behind him—he had insisted on going alone—ducked in doorways, scanned traffic and every suspicious person who passed him, and sweated and shat until he was safely inside the school. And I did the same when school was out. For days I did that; for days. Now he did it truly on his own.

  Alone, I let the exhaustion come; with it came new thoughts. I hadn’t asked Allis where she was going. Maybe I should’ve pleaded more with her to stay. Could she have wanted or needed that? Why hadn’t I? Money; had she taken money? Well, she had her own and the plastic.

  There came the click of an afterthought: it wasn’t like her to just walk away from Mack … God! Why hadn’t I stopped her? I saw her morning face across the table, relaxed with sleep just broken, free of the little furrows and lines that came as the day wore on. I’d been involved with Pushkin, Paul’s triumphs, my own career, classes—why had I let her walk deeper into the pit into which she’d fallen with her father’s death?

  I fretted the day away and put on a Chico Marx grin when I heard Mack at the door, and assured him that she would be home in another day or so and that, yes, she had called. He watched “Sesame Street,” but he didn’t laugh as he usually did. By the time we’d had dinner and he’d bathed and I’d read to him, my face was stiff with the grin. When he was asleep I realized that the grin must have worried him, too.

  I worked that night, also, but not well, and I drank more and watched television. I thought of the “book things” I’d go to now, even though I hated them, and of the unending line of coeds I would entice to the apartment—that would show Allis!

  I returned to the typewriter, leaned on it and closed my eyes. I thought of Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin and his forebears who had been slaved out of Africa into Russia, and how his grandfather had become the pet of Peter the Great, and he himself a favorite of Czar Nicholas. The Blackamoor of Peter the Great. He’d never finished that novel; perhaps it was too painful. (“I am the ugly descendant of Negroes!”) What parallels! I imagined him in the waist-deep snow of a park near the Kamennostrovsky Prospect that morning, with pistol in hand facing Baron Georges-Charles D’Anthès in a duel. Georges Heckeren. Pushkin’s wife, Natalya. Indiscretions. Insults. I seemed to see and feel Natalya stroking Pushkin’s fevered head, the head that topped the runty body that D’Anthès’s ball had shattered. How gently she now stroked this father of the language! And he, in delirium, remembering how he had taken the ball, gone down and then, calling as D’Anthès walked away, “Wait! I feel strong enough to take my shot,” and firing, hit D’Anthès in the ribs and arm and was not sorry he had not killed him.

  A countervibration. I moved, then started up, bumping the machine and hearing the keys go click click clung, stuck, and the margin bell. I grabbed the hand as I whirled, the hand that had been stroking the back of my head, and saw Allis, drained and weak and her eyes brimming with tears.

  I held her and she cried as an old, wide stream flows, without sound except for a burble here and there. We stood and held on to each other for dear life, as though God in some ancient vengeance was zooming out of deep space to punish us: Pushkin lay every which way—on the floor, the desk. And the typewriter keys remained stuck in their clung.

  “Where you been?”

  “Israel.”

  “Where?”

  “Israel. As soon as I got there, I came right back. I heard you,” I thought I heard her say. She fell on the bed. I looked down at her and felt her exhaustion.

  “I shouldn’t have let you go,” I said.

  “No. But you couldn’t have stopped me either.”

  “You want to tell me why Israel?” Fleeing back, taking refuge in, I thought, suddenly pissed, Jewishness, whatever that was.

  “I can’t. I mean, I don’t know. I mean, I do, but it doesn’t really work that way for me. Is Mack all right?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’m tired, very tired, honey. I want to sleep. It’s so good to be home.” She closed her eyes. I stood, still looking down at her. “I’m sorry,” she said, her eyes closed. “Why did you think I went?”

  “Your father’s death. Our marriage. Maybe it’s all too much—”

  She tried to shake her head against the bed. “My father, maybe. Us, never. Never. I knew you’d think that as soon as the plane took off. I knew it. You were wrong. I love you very much. I hope you still love me.” Her eyes had not opened.

  “Yes, I do, kiddo. I’m glad you’re home.”

  I lay down beside her and felt the warmth of her body. It was a good feeling.

  Allis began to breathe deeply. I stood and watched her. Ordinarily when I moved in bed I could hear her breathing pattern change, as though some deeper part of her were listening, as though she felt invisible things in the atmosphere near her. Suddenly, her breathing became rapid and shallow. Was she stumbling along close to the edge of something in her darkness? Fascinated, I moved closer to the bed and watched her more closely through the muted light. I straightened and went into Mack’s room and saw him in the tendrils of streetlight that filtered in along the edges of his window shade, his arms thrown back above his head, his sheets wound across him. He seemed very trusting, very vulnerable. Softly, I unwound his sheets and pulled them up. I went out and fixed a long drink in the kitchen and tiptoed back into our room, treading upon Pushkin, whose pages were still scattered on the floor. Pushkin: an enemy of the aristocracy, some said, and God. How had he moved through the night, his last night as a whole human, a whole poet? I looked and listened again to Allis. Her body was in a curve, end suggested toward end, and her hands, clasped together, rested near her face.

  I slid through near-darkness from room to room, trampling Pushkin, feeling carpet and then slick oak-wood flooring underfoot. I felt both like a spy creeping around the edges of their consciousnesses and like a god—Morpheus—prowling carefully through their dreams, ordering them, and I was thinking this with still another drink in my hand, and had not noticed the precipitous break in Allis’ breathing, when she said, “Why are you staring at me?”

  There was fear in her voice. I quickly sat down beside her and stroked her hair. “No reason. I was just filled with wonder that you went so far and came back.”

  “How long did I sleep?”

  “Only an hour.”

  She turned. “I’m too tired to undress. Come to bed.”

  “I’m not sleepy.”

  She turned back to me. “Don’t be angry, honey.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “Well, why in the hell did you go?” It came out a snarl. She blinked in recoil.

  “Guilt—”

  “For our marriage?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “Not for the marriage—”

  “What then?”

  “For not being the way he wanted me to be—I’m tired, Cate—”

  I knew all the answers, yet I insisted on her speaking them.

  “Me, too.” We did not talk for a minute. “Sorry,” I said.

  “I wanted to do something for him,” Allis said. “Give him something; bear witness. I don’t suppose you do something like that without hurting someone.”

  Her hands fluttered wearily on my face. “Do you?”

  “No,” I said. I did not say that I also had been scared of my life, of Mack’s life, without her.

  “Can we fight in the morning?” She turned again. In a drifting voice she added, “Okay, Cate?”

  She took a very deep breath and it rushed down her throat and windpipe and fluted through her nose in a mighty, indelicate snore—PPPPSSSsssssszzzzzZZZZZaaaaaAAAAAAAAaaaaaaa!

  I picked up the sheets of Pushkin and under the desk light arranged them. I finished my drink and checked Mack once again and then, fully clothed except for my shoes, fell into the bed beside my wife.

  2

  A part of me went to my classes the next day, another part stayed with Mack and his delight at Allis’ return (we shar
ed this); and, strangely, her departure and return lent tone and new color to the novel through which Pushkin was moving. The difference between an Afro-Russian of the early nineteenth century and an Afro-Anything of historical time ultimately was very small. And still another part of me leaned out toward my students.

  These were unlike those at the private branch of the university. I had transferred to this, the public branch, feeling that my true allegiance was to these ethnically fragmented and blue-collared masses. The rich didn’t need me, in the correct sense of the word; the masses, I concluded, did.

  There was, of course, a trade-off in the transfer. For the administration of this branch, I was, except to a few, unequivocally the showpiece nigger; there was no question as to who is that nigger? The answer was everywhere in bulletins, notices, memos and the college paper. This is a nigger who writes! In exchange for making the administration look progressive and affirmatively correct, I was given a senior appointment and a neat schedule, which caused (how could it have been otherwise?) considerable antipathy toward me from the assistant and associate professors who were plodding or conniving toward promotion and tenure, which had been mine when I stepped through the door.

  At the private branch of the university, though the faculty well knew that I was a Token Negro, they accepted me with a modicum of equanimity, and even on occasion invited Allis and me to their homes. Some may even have felt that it was right for me to have been there, okay for me to insert, just by being present, a little pepper to the salt already on the table. What struck me as being most curious about the matter in both branches was that no one believed I understood what was going on; that I couldn’t read between the lines of memos or see around corners or correctly read their eyes or the tones of their voices.