Voyager

by Russell Banks

  Dale’s husband, Dave, had become a successful importer of luxury table linens, supplier to the White House, among other fine houses. Dave, too, had about fifteen years of his adult life that were nearly unaccounted for, years spent on a farm with Lucius up in Michigan, in Bolivia, on a commune in Arkansas, doing a turn in Africa in the Peace Corps, before he returned to New York and entered the family business. He was a reticent man who pursed his lips before he spoke, then spoke slowly and precisely. He still possessed all his sixties records, an amazing feat, and it was he who’d prepared the sound track for this trip, professionally engineered tapes of songs we all knew all the words to, even the harmonies, and we sang along joyously as the huge blond van careened down the highway, a family of aging hippies on a family outing, staving off mortality with battle songs we hadn’t sung in years. “How does it feeeeel, to be on your own, with no direction home, a complete unknown, like a rolling stone?”

  A few miles south of Harrisburg, we pulled over for gas. I remembered hanging out now and then at Merritt’s Shell Station, located on South Columbia Street just outside Chapel Hill, near where I lived in a small rented house with my wife Christine and our baby daughter. As often happened on a hot and humid fall night, Christine and I would quarrel—we could not know it, but we were then just starting the long, painful guerrilla war that would lead ten years later to divorce and partition—and I would head up the road to Merritt’s to cool down with a cold beer. The place was in fact a country beer-bar, only disguised as a filling station, and sometimes James Taylor, a local teenaged folksinger, who was a friend, or one or another of his brothers hung out—their parents, Ike and Trudy Taylor, and their musical brood lived nearby then—but the regulars at Merritt’s were good old boys, local workmen who sat around night after night watching Carolina basketball on the black-and-white TV set on the counter.

  On this particular night, none of the Taylors was there. I bought a Miller’s, leaned against a far wall, and took a look at the TV. A larger crowd than usual had gathered more intently than usual around the screen, and it was hard to see, but after a few seconds I realized they were watching James Meredith, the first African American to attend the University of Mississippi, walk from Memphis to Jackson to encourage voter registration by African Americans. It was called the “March Against Fear.”

  “Damn nigger,” someone growled. “Look at that damn struttin’ nigger.” The talk got tougher, tighter, and then I heard the sniper’s gunshot, and Meredith went down, and a cheer went up, a triumphant roar of joy, as if for a winning basket at the buzzer. “Kill that nigger! Shoot all them bastids!” There were calls for instant replay, and the network obliged, and then more cheers, as I edged silently toward the door and slipped into the humid North Carolina darkness.

  By late in the afternoon we were in Virginia, sailing down the Shenandoah Valley. The Blue Ridge Mountains—softly rounded humps running north and south in parallel waves—turned from deep green to slate blue as the sun drifted toward the horizon, and I was trying to remember clearly the night I first met Ray Kass, the man whose house in Christiansburg we were headed for.

  It was in September 1964, my first week in Chapel Hill, and my infant daughter and Christine were still up in Richmond staying with Christine’s parents, while I matriculated at college like the rest of the incoming freshmen, almost all of whom were six or seven years younger than I. I was also supposed to be renting a house and preparing it for us to live in. Someone from Harry’s, I can’t remember who, invited me to come along to a party in the country, and when I arrived, it looked like a lot of college parties I had been to back in Boston and even in New Hampshire—mostly white kids with a couple of black kids dancing and standing around and listening to records and smoking grass and drinking beer and cheap wine and joking and flirting with one another. We were crowded into a small cinder-block bungalow surrounded by brush and short, tangled trees with a scrawny woods of tall, skinny pines separating it from several similar houses, whose lights I could make out dimly through the trees.

  Around eleven o’clock the shooting started. I ended up under the kitchen table with a tall, skinny blond kid who, when I asked him what the hell was going on, explained with astonishing aplomb in a suburban Long Island accent that, because of the black kids at the party, we were being attacked by the Ku Klux Klan. He introduced himself as Ray Kass and told me he was an art student and started describing his paintings to me as if I owned a gallery.

  The paintings actually sounded pretty interesting, but I was getting a little anxious about the shotguns blasting away from the yard, smashing windows and blowing straight through the tiny house and out the other side. Soon it became clear that a couple of people from our side were firing back—handguns, from the sound of it—and under cover of the return fire lots of folks were leaving the party by the back door, squirting across the backyard to their cars, and roaring down the rutted driveway to the dirt road and away. Ray refused to move, fascinated by what was happening, as were a dozen or so others, me included, who didn’t believe yet in our own mortality or even that there were people who wanted to kill us. While the guns blasted over our heads, we went on talking about art.

  At Blacksburg, a few miles south of Roanoke, I took the exit off Route 81, and Ray drove down from his house in the hills to lead us back along a winding, quickly rising country road to his home and studio. At last, the van was still—ticking quietly as it cooled, dripping, sweating, squatting like a huge airliner parked outside Ray’s carefully terraced house that looked over a broad valley where an evening mist rose like golden breath from the trees.

  At dinner, sprawled around Ray’s living room with him and his companion and colleague Jerri Pike, a soft-spoken woman with the kind of skepticism and tolerance and good humor necessary for hanging around Ray for very long, we regressed, put on our faces and voices of long ago, and drifted backward in time in a fugue state that was as seductive as it was threatening. Besides Ray and Jerri there were two new additions to our crew, Chris Munger, who’d been a brooding actor at Chapel Hill and was now a brooding documentary film director about to take off for Cambodia, and Saundi Mercier, who’d been one of the first women admitted to UNC as a freshman in 1963 and worked now as a therapist in Baltimore.

  We were survivors, and after traveling circuitous routes to get here, we were comparing notes and maps, recalling turns we’d made at crucial junctures, companions we left behind or naming who turned right when we turned left, who turned further left when we went straight, friends who kept on diving when we came up for air, people who disappeared into the darkness beyond, just as we turned back. The list of the dead was long, much longer than actuarial tables say it should have been, and the causes of death over and over again were drug overdose and suicide.

  Someone recalled the night Chris Munger strolled into the Chapel Hill police station in his droopy, tattered drawers and torn T-shirt and arrogant, red-lipped snarl and with a bad check bailed out twelve friends arrested during a sit-in. “Now that was acting!” Kathy said, and we laughed, and Chris tried his old snarl on and got it just right. Because of his baldness and scruffy beard, he looked even more like Brando in One-Eyed Jacks now than he did in college. He probably hadn’t worn that face for a decade, not even as a joke.

  We were all balder and fatter and grayer and more careful than we were then, but tonight we seemed to have been yanked out of our forty- and forty-five-year-old bodies and poured back into the bodies and the faces we’d worn twenty years ago, as if to join our friends who died back then—Jim Rossman, Dave Snelling, Cliney Lea, Wyatt Hart, John Dunne. The list went on, and it was long, too long.

  I looked around the room, cluttered with empty wine bottles and overflowing ashtrays, and I saw on our faces the strain and the pain of remembering. It was long after midnight, early in the morning of the Fourth of July, 1986. In less than twenty-four hours, President Reagan would flip the switch, and Lady Liberty, our copper-clad national goddess, would glow red, white, an
d blue in New York Harbor. Let the celebrations begin.

  I was wakened by sunlight streaming through the van’s stateroom window and loud static hissing from somewhere in the front of the van. The static, evidently coming from the tape deck, abated, only to return, an irritating, nasty, electronic scratch. I sat up and yelled, “What the hell’s wrong with the tape deck?”

  Shirtless, showered, hair slicked back, and eyes bright, Carey performed a slow set of yoga exercises. “Isn’t that great?” he said.

  “What the fuck is it?”

  “It’s the surf off Dakar at dawn. I taped it last year.”

  “Jesus, Carey.” I got out of bed and realized I was hungover and stumbled toward the bathroom.

  “Wait till you hear the dog bark. Russ, it’s fucking awesome,” he said and went back to his yoga.

  Somewhere near Fancy Gap in the Blue Ridge Mountains, heading southwest into North Carolina, we pulled over at a filling station and country store for a pit stop. The RV gobbled gas like the Concorde, forty gallons a shot, and I stood there pumping gas and having flashes of trips I’d all but forgotten, when Christine and I owned a beige-and-aqua VW microbus, the ultimate sixties vehicle, and regularly packed together a bunch of friends and lit out for the territory—a Rolling Stones concert in Raleigh, the beach at Cape Hatteras, a long weekend at the Union Grove Old Time Fiddlers’ Convention in the mountains. I always drove; Christine was the navigator.

  I topped off the tank and paid the watchful attendant standing next to me at the pump, and one by one my passengers returned from the country store across the road lugging Cokes and beer and jars of honey and jam and potato chips and pretzels. Lucius carried a huge watermelon.

  “You can’t squeeze all that stuff into that little refrigerator,” I said. “Especially the watermelon.”

  “Relax, man,” Lucius said. “I’ll just rearrange the chardonnay.”

  It was a little after noon when we exited Route 15-501 onto South Columbia Street and rolled past Merritt’s Shell Station and entered Chapel Hill. In the last fifteen minutes everyone had gone silent, even Ray, who’d been unfolding his Roy Cohn theories—Cohn as thousand-year-old vampire, whose imminent death, Ray predicted, would only be Cohn’s usual way of getting out of trouble for a while. “Roy Cohn doesn’t die, he just lies low for a few years.”

  The streets were lined with live oaks and tall pines. Tulip poplar, wisteria, and magnolia trees surrounded sprawling homes in large, shaded yards where lawn sprinklers twirled slowly over grass green as mint. A few of the homes were antebellum white-painted brick with wide verandas and columns, but most were Craftsman faculty houses built in the early years of the century and maintained impeccably by residents who for generations had been consistently genteel, leisurely, intelligent, and tasteful. I realized all over again how truly, almost sexually, desirable the town was.

  The interior of the van looked and smelled like an airliner that had been hijacked by terrorists—food wrappers and watermelon rinds and empty wine and beer bottles and sleeping bags and newspapers and dirty clothes. The air conditioner had been busted since Winston-Salem, and it was as hot inside as the Beirut airport. Everyone was sweating uncomfortably and thinking shower, air conditioner, gin and tonic. We pulled into the parking lot of the Carolina Inn, a neo-Georgian brick hotel adjacent to the campus where the parents of UNC students used to stay.

  An hour later, we regathered in the hotel lobby, and almost grimly we marched across the west end of the old campus, past the Ackland Art Museum, toward Franklin Street and the Carolina Coffee Shop. Possibly for the first time since proposing this journey, we realized that it was not an impulsive casual jaunt, not just a spontaneous Fourth of July weekend party.

  The coffee shop was packed with people, all the booths filled. There was barely room for me to stand and signal the others to fight through the crowd and join me here in the middle. Their proximity had suddenly become important to me, since I didn’t think I knew any of the people who surrounded me. Except for my traveling companions, they were all strangers in early middle age, ordinary citizens who looked like they had ordinary problems. I didn’t know them, and I didn’t particularly want to. I wanted to go home.

  But then I recognized one man who at twenty had looked forty, and he still looked forty. It was Newt Smith—and there was his wife, June—and they were talking to Steve Hawthorne, who was next to Bob Bottomly and Nancy Sasser, who were at a table with Rick Doble and Bill Hicks, and suddenly I was swept up as if in a dream of faces, all of them smiling eagerly, whirling around me as I spun through the room like a gyre wobbling around a point that was located somewhere in my forgotten past, the point where . . . what? Where innocence ended? Where the dreams started to fade? Where divorce and disillusionment and the steady dying began?

  Years disappeared in seconds. Time collapsed. Faces were simultaneously youthful and middle-aged, smoothly naive and closed against suffering and pain. People came up to one another, stared into each other’s face for a few seconds, struggling to get the overlays right, to get rid of the double exposure that kept them from truly recognizing one another, and then one or the other said his own name, and the image suddenly came into focus. They fell into one another’s arms, hugged each other’s thickened bodies fiercely, their grins becoming painful grimaces. Many of them were weeping. We were like a group of Vietnam veterans at a memorial service, survivors recognizing others who’d lived through the same trauma, remembering those who didn’t make it and realizing all over again how close we ourselves came to not making it. For a moment there was a kind of intimacy among strangers, as when the family gathers and grief turns to joy and joy back to grief.

  Later that afternoon and into the final hours of the night, there was a party and barbecue at Bob Brown’s farm a few miles south of town—Robert V. N. Brown, rasp-voiced activist and former editor of the radical quarterly Reflections: The Free South Review and later The North Carolina Anvil, a tough, physically ugly, in-your-face kind of weekly paper that somehow kept afloat until 1983, then perished as its left-wing, counterculture, university-based readership drifted away.

  At the party Brown was, as always, an impresario, greeting people with embraces and old jokes as we ambled down his long dirt driveway from the field filled with parked cars. Brown steered us on toward barrels packed with ice and beer and soft drinks and the food spread over tables and grills, where dozens of groups of people, ten and twenty to a clot, stood around yakking intently at one another. Peacocks screamed from trees or stalked the pathways of the elaborately designed flower gardens, and beyond the flowers several blond horses sniffed the air and edged along the corral toward the gate as dusk settled and the light softened and tinted everything in pale amber. Children of various ages picked their way through the crowd to the food, then retreated to where they could watch the horses and talk about the funny-looking grown-ups, many of the men bearded, with long hair tied back in ponytails, and women in peasant blouses and granny dresses.

  It was a beer party, what you’d expect at a Lions picnic, except for the unusual abundance of soft drinks. Not exactly a heavy-drinking crowd. Not anymore. And there seemed to be no dope at all. No cocaine, certainly, but not once was a joint passed on to me. I couldn’t even pick up the sweet smell of it, which was somehow jarring, running against my visual sense of the event. The music, loud and endless, of course, was pure Woodstock—Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, the Doors, the Rolling Stones, Aretha, Dylan, the Band.

  Harry and Sibyl Macklin, the owners and proprietors of the old Harry’s Deli, had come up from their retirement home in Margate, Florida. Wearing Bermuda shorts and drip-dries, tanned and looking very much like the elderly retirees they had become, Harry and Sibyl smiled and greeted the middle-aged men and women who treated the couple like a favorite uncle and aunt. It was Harry and Sibyl who’d supported the kids who kept getting busted by local and state cops for trying to convince Chapel Hill businesses to serve blacks alongside whites, the only grown-ups who
would bail the kids out of jail, let them bus tables when they got broke, run a tab and work it off during the hours after midnight. Most parents were horrified by what was happening to their children over at Chapel Hill, and the university itself washed its hands of them, even though officials knew exactly what was happening, tracked every sit-in, every demonstration, every arrest, with the kind of diligence and surveillance that made the FBI of that period notorious later.

  Slowly, I started looking around for my fellow RV-riders. It was late, and I was exhausted, as much emotionally as physically, and I was starting to feel a strange, unexpected loneliness and frustration. The closer I got to this place, the more I realized that it was gone, it wasn’t here—all those young friends and all those rough farmhouses in the North Carolina pinewoods and those warm nights filled with music and delight and those bright flashes of moral clarity, all of it gone.

  Saturday morning at breakfast in the Carolina Inn dining room, I ran into Ben Jones, the actor-politician, who had arrived late the day before after a day kissing babies at Fourth of July picnics in his rural Georgia district.

  Ben looked good. In a way, he looked better than he did twenty years ago, before jogging, tanning salons, hair stylists, designer glasses, and stone-washed jeans, back when Jack Kennedy was the only politician who seemed to know how to look like an actor. Then as now Ben was tall, broad-shouldered, dark, and square-featured, but in college he had an off-center bulk and physical recklessness about him that made him seem strangely vulnerable. He’d lost that, which was no doubt to his cosmetic advantage—he probably looked better on TV now—but he was harder to reach in conversation, seemed distracted, as if looking for the camera, while we strolled down East Franklin Street onto the old campus.

  Soon, however, the familiar beauty of the place cast its spell, and we both found ourselves listening to each other describe himself twenty years ago as a naive country kid with luck and pluck who was essentially faking it in a world that intimidated him. Ben and I both had been bright, talented poor boys, he from western North Carolina, me from the hills of New Hampshire, who through marriage had the great good fortune to be picked up along the way by wealthy benefactors. His story matched mine. I hadn’t known that about him, had always thought of Ben as somehow well-off, and, of course, he had thought the same of me. We passed the famous Old Well and the half-dozen buildings dating back to the university’s founding in 1795, and strolled south across the wide Sargasso-green lawn toward Wilson Library, catching each other up on our marriages and divorces, our children, our failures and ambitions.