Roy could feel the change taking place in his blood. Alert, but calm, if such a condition was possible. There was no hurry, no rush. It was coming, it was inevitable; nothing he did either way could or would affect what was coming. But Roy also knew that with planning, some casualties might be avoided. Roy had been going through Trigg’s files late at night, but he had not decided what use to make of Mr. Trigg’s files. Roy had no plans for snitching or for blackmail either. Roy no longer had any use for the Bible or people who called themselves Christians. Roy trusted the feelings he had in his chest and throat; that was how God led a man, not by TV evangelists or puffed-up shitbag reverends and cardinals. Roy hated all churches and organized religion because they had sold out Jesus Christ for sure, and probably Muhammad and Buddha.
Most of Trigg’s corporations existed only in manila folders. Beyond naming and registering the corporations, Trigg had done nothing with them. He had conducted no business through Alpha-Bio Products, Alpha-Hemo-Science Limited, Biomat, Bio Mart, or Biological Industries. But for Alpha Healing, Amalgamated Hospices, and New Century Corporation, Roy had already made real estate purchases.
Part of his job was to listen to Trigg shoot off his mouth. Roy had known guys in wheelchairs who liked to talk a lot; Trigg’s was that same nervous chatter sending out secret signals—I’m-not-a-freak-I’m-not-a-cripple-I-am-all-right. Trigg had shifted into his “benevolent asshole” pose and touched Roy’s sleeve to prove his sincerity. Trigg thought his wheelchair made him a goddamn hero. Trigg had big plans. Big big plans. The cornerstones of his empire were real estate and the plasma donor centers. But the cornerstones had got boring. So now Trigg wanted to branch out, and he would have great opportunities and benefits for his employees.
Roy had merely nodded. He knew all about Trigg’s plasma center employees. They were all women, and from what Roy had seen, they all took pills or drank vodka out of lab beakers. Trigg had no favorites. He was careful never to call the same one into his private office twice in a row. He was against favoritism. Trigg spooned out little lines of “employee incentive” on the glass desk-top. At least Roy didn’t have to sit on Trigg’s face to get a shot of vodka from him.
Roy had got to know the women at all three centers. They called for Roy if they had trouble with crazy, stinking bums who wouldn’t take no for an answer: “No, we don’t want your blood.” Roy was always gentle with the crazies; he talked to them as he escorted them out to the street and told them they didn’t want to sell their blood anyway; they needed to keep their blood. Their blood made them strong. Their blood was what kept everything moving inside them—everything—their eyes, their lungs, their brains; blood even moved their cocks.
Roy had only meant to soothe the crazies when he told them to keep their blood for themselves; but as he had talked to the urine-stinking, wild-eyed drifters, Roy had realized that he was telling them the truth, or at least what he himself believed to be true. Later at one of the unit meetings Roy had warned the men about the habit of selling their plasma or whole blood. He promised very soon there would be alternatives that would provide shelter and food without the sale of blood.
Roy did not waste his time on the women at the plasma centers because they talked about money and marrying men with money. But after a few months Roy had got to know Peaches. Peaches had worked for Trigg the longest; the others said she had lasted because she was in charge of cold-storage inventory and never had to see that chairload of shit-for-brains they called the boss. Peaches had a purple birthmark around her left eye, but Roy thought she was beautiful. The others had warned Roy not to feel bad if Peaches ignored him. Except for Trigg, they did not think Peaches had ever said more than a dozen words to any of them in the seven years she had worked in the freezers.
The doors to the refrigeration units were always kept locked, and the alarms were always set. “No entry. Strict orders,” Peaches had said. She was not rude, but she stood firm. “Are plasma and whole blood that delicate, that perishable?” Roy had wanted to know. Peaches seemed to understand that Roy found her attractive. She had laughed so Roy could watch her round tits bounce in their prim bra cups; these were how she had got the name Peaches.
Roy sensed her suspicion of him. Peaches was not like the others. She was right. Curiosity was stupid. He was wasting his time in the basement. Roy had been about to turn and go back to the freight elevator when Peaches had rapidly punched in codes on the freezer-unit door. “See—there’s nothing; all the units are enclosed.”
“All this for plasma—”
But Peaches shook her head. Her mouth had slowly spread into a smirk. “No, all this isn’t just for plasma. Huh uh.”
The first time Roy and Peaches fuck, Roy gets her so good she tells him about the arrangement between Bio-Materials and the human organ transplant industry across the U.S. The Japanese had developed a saline gel that kept human organs fresh-frozen and viable for transplants for months, not hours. Peaches did not explain where or how Trigg had obtained the human hearts and lungs carefully packed and clearly labeled: Type A Positive—Adult Male.
Frozen human organs, less reliable, sold for a fraction of freshly harvested hearts and kidneys. Of course, fetal-brain tissue and cadaver skin were not affected by freezing. Peaches said Trigg bought a great deal in Mexico where recent unrest and civil strife had killed hundreds a week. Mexican hearts were lean and strong, but Trigg had found no market for dark cadaver skin.
FIRST BLACK INDIAN
CLINTON WAS THE BLACK VETERAN with one foot, but he wore the best, the top of the line, the best kind of prosthetic foot you could buy. Clinton had to wear his full Green Beret uniform every day. Otherwise there would just be trouble for him because Clinton didn’t bow and scrape for no Arizona honkie-trash crackers. Clinton had grown up outside Houston where the cops and Texas Rangers really hated African-American folks. Clinton lives alone in a Sears garden shed he bought for himself. Roy hears rumors Clinton has relatives in Tucson, but Roy doesn’t ask questions because that sets something off in Clinton’s head. Some days Clinton says he’s okay. Other days he warns you ahead of time you better steer clear. Roy is not afraid of Clint’s bad days; on Clint’s bad days, Roy is free to talk wild-talk right back at that crazy black fucker. They don’t talk to one another; they talk at each other, and neither of them bothers to listen to the other. What is important is Clinton’s outrage—Clinton’s pure, pure contempt for any authority but his own.
Clinton reads books when he goes to wash up at the downtown branch of the public library. What he can’t get off his mind is what man does to man over and over again. A slave was the first thing any man thought of; someone to do the dirty work. Clinton thought women were correct about being enslaved by men; otherwise, Clinton had no use for bitches because what at one time had been so good in them had been ruined by their enslavement. Clinton’s paranoia knows no boundaries. He has cousins and stepbrothers in the army, and the word gets around among the brothers and the sisters. The army has to have lab technicians; there are security guards; there must be cleaning crews. The word leaks out.
Clinton always prefaces his remarks. He says no black American would ever betray his country. But a black man’s country was different from the white man’s country, no matter they both called it the same thing: United States of America. Clinton says the AIDS virus was developed in a biowarfare laboratory by the U.S. government and was stolen by military personnel sympathetic to white supremacists in South Africa. Naturally they had been careful to set AIDS loose in the African-controlled states; whites in South Africa would never have risked setting loose the virus on their valuable labor force. Still, the growth of populations in all-African states had to be stopped. Somewhere the men who had paid for the stolen virus sat around a conference table brain-storming.
“Mad scientists?” Roy tried to interject, but Clinton had waved away Roy’s remarks; white man’s words were always being shoved in the black man’s mouth.
“Mad scientists, mad general
s, mad Church of God preachers—all of them want to see black folks disappear, but sort of gradually, you know.” Clinton says J. Edgar Hoover ordered the assassination of Martin Luther King. Right there Hoover’s wings got clipped. The old faggot was crazy. Assassination wasn’t “gradual,” and assassination had a way of creating folk myths and heroes. A secret bipartisan congressional panel had hastily concluded only a cover-up could save U.S. cities from burning and the outbreak of a race war. Clinton said J. Edgar had first practiced assassination on John F. Kennedy because Hoover hated the Kennedys. Kennedy supported civil rights, but John Kennedy hadn’t been the big fish. “Hell, no,” Clinton said, “all you whites can think about is ‘white.’ John Kennedy couldn’t lead no one; he couldn’t even lead the U.S. Congress.” Clinton had warmed up good on this topic. Later Clinton told Roy he was the first white man ever to listen through the whole rap to every last word Clinton said. Roy could see why Clinton pissed people off, even some black people. Because Clinton said Kennedy had only been used for target practice; J. Edgar’s dress rehearsal. Martin Luther King had been dangerous because he was a leader. He could lead all different kinds of people—more and more, white people had listened to and followed King. That was what had driven J. Edgar, the old butt-fucker, over the edge.
Clinton understood the cover-up; the whitewash. Clinton said young blacks would have burned down the United States that summer if the truth had come out. Clinton understood the need to be practical. He will be the only black unit leader, but he won’t have an all-black unit. Roy wants integrated units in this new army. They have more whites than blacks anyway. What Roy does not say is for now it is better to have whites outnumber blacks in integrated units. Otherwise whites feel uneasy. Roy and Clinton get along because neither man tries to argue good or bad, right or wrong, only what is necessary. Clinton likes to test Roy’s reactions.
“What if I get me an all-black unit?”
Roy shrugs. None of them are fortune-tellers, are they? For all they know, they may end on opposite sides, battling one another. Neither man rules out a race war, but both tend to agree, battle lines will be drawn according to color: green, the color of money, the only color that had ever mattered. The richest, whatever their color, had always escaped. Clinton has read about the wealth and greed of slave-dealing African tribes. The richest Jews had escaped Hitler’s ovens. Only poor Jews had died. Roy said he didn’t know if Clinton was right about that.
Clinton nodded his head. “The rich got the news; then the rich had the money to get away.”
Clinton had been curious about the tribes that had sold slaves on the African coast. But Clinton had not been fooled by the white man’s lies about African slave-holding tribes. To read the white man’s version, Africans were responsible for the plantation slavery in the New World. But African slaves only replaced the Native American slaves, who died by the thousands. Before the European slave-buyers had arrived, African coastal tribes had practiced only local war-hostage slavery. Prisoners of war worked until their ransoms were paid. Children born to war hostages were adopted and enjoyed all privileges. Where a tribe might capture fifty slaves in ten years, the demand for slave labor in Spanish and Portuguese colonies of the New World greatly increased tribal warfare for the procurement of slaves. Hundreds and finally thousands of slaves were needed in the gold mines and plantations that were worthless without slave labor.
Clinton had gone to Vietnam. It had been easy to see it was a white man’s war; the colored man was sent to do the dangerous, dirty work white men were too weak to perform.
On the GI Bill at the University of New Mexico, he had met a black woman, Reneé, who was reading about black history and black culture. Black studies had been a radical new subject for Clinton; the more he learned, the more angry he got as he realized how whites had had to scheme and manipulate day and night to keep blacks from realizing the power and beauty they had always possessed.
Clinton seldom talked about the two or three years he hung out at UNM in Albuquerque holding black power meetings in the basement of the student union building after midnight. They had had FBI influence in their group in those days, but the undercover FBI Toms all had to go home before midnight because they were flunking English. Clinton wasn’t sure now if the door whites offered America’s “colored” people was an opening or merely another trap. Vietnam had been a trap for people of color. White man expected the colored man to “lift himself” by killing little yellow people. Clinton had sat through all his classes the first semester, but his mind had always been on organizing the brothers and sisters on campus. Clinton didn’t expect to get grades when his real work on campus had been to try to warn his people, honest black folks who still believed all the lies fed to them about the United States of America. Clinton had seen how many dark American faces had been in the Asian war. Clinton had seen the white toads, Lyndon Johnson, and his generals smacking their lips at all the splattered brains and guts of black and brown men. Forces sent to destroy indigenous populations were themselves composed of “expendables.”
Roy generally had no problem following Clinton’s line of reasoning through the first bottle of wine. But halfway into the second wine bottle, Clinton tires of cursing the white man and begins to curse the black man and the brown man who sold their brothers down the river for the white man. Who was the blubber-bellied god of treachery, that god of snitchery and lies? Why did the brother betray the brother? Why did the mother call the police on her son?
Roy likes to get well into the second bottle of wine with Clinton before they start talking about rich people. Then Clinton starts sounding like a communist, something Roy has to caution Clinton about. According to Clinton, the entire war in Southeast Asia had been fabricated as a location and occasion for the slaughter of the strongest and most promising young men of black and brown and poor-white communities. Clinton swears he is no Marxist. African and other tribal people had shared food and wealth in common for thousands of years before the white man Marx came along and stole their ideas for his “communes” and collective farms.
“White man didn’t even invent communism on his own,” Clinton said, wiping his mouth on the sleeve of his shirt.
Black people called men like Clinton “crazy niggers” and blamed Vietnam for them. Everyone had the same thought: black people all knew deep down the Vietnam War had been aimed at them to stop black riots in U.S. cities. The war had destroyed some of their best young men. The war had destroyed two generations of hopefulness and cultural pride. A dangerous generation had emerged from the Korean War. Black warriors and warrior women who sat down at the lunch counters and refused to ride at the back of the bus had changed the face of America. Efficiently, the white man had sent sons and daughters to burn down Vietnam instead of Detroit, Miami, or Watts. Vietnam had been designed to stop the black man in America.
Roy nodded. The FBI probably had assassinated Martin Luther King. He did not agree with Clinton about the war in Southeast Asia. Roy thought it had been a war for the usual reasons. But Clinton’s conspiracy theories were his own business, and Roy didn’t worry about them; some of the other unit leaders whined about Clinton’s “racist theories.” All Roy would say was Clinton had a constitutional right to his views, the same as they had a right to their views. Southern whites nearly always agreed with Clinton. The FBI got rid of King, and Vietnam had been a war to eradicate gooks and niggers.
Clinton had “found” a good little mountain bike on the University of Arizona campus. Clinton and Roy rode together on the dirt roads between the vacant winter homes in the desert foothills. Clinton casually opened mailboxes.
“Rich folks really are different from the rest of us assholes,” Clinton said, “because they don’t care what happens to their mail.
“Everything we need is here,” Clinton had said, sipping some of the homeowner’s scotch as he reclined on a white leather couch. The rich were different all right. The Tucson vacation homes came complete with Tucson cars and Tucson bank account
s. Beside Clinton, on the pink-marble-top coffee table, were piles of letters he had opened. Everything they needed was there. Clinton had located a gold mine: gasoline credit cards, Tucson bank-machine cards, bank statements. In one instance, he had even found an Arizona chauffeur’s license among the piles of catalogues and junk mail flyers.
Roy helped Clinton finish the bottle of scotch. They had the giant-screen TV on with the volume down so they could talk. The setup with the vacant houses had great potential, but their timing would have to be right. “Timing is everything, timing will be everything,” Clinton said, happy and drunk. Until the appointed time, locations of the vacant houses, and the contents of the mailboxes, all were to be top secret, known only to Roy and Clinton.
Roy could not explain to himself why he confided in Clinton and not one of the other Green Berets. Roy thought it must have to do with Clinton’s color, but he didn’t know how. Maybe because Clinton was black, Roy could trust the man to know how to wait, how to lie low and wait. Roy had put himself in charge of recruiting. He beat the bushes in the city parks and in the mesquites along the interstate where homeless men slept. He was determined to find all the homeless Vietnam vets in Tucson, and Roy had started hitchhiking to Phoenix twice a month looking for guys around the free-cheese giveaway warehouse.
Late at night Clinton sometimes dropped by. Roy’s night-watchman’s job with Trigg came complete with an office. Clinton lit up the reefer and took a big hit before passing it to Roy. The basement “watchman’s office” was nothing but a janitor’s closet, with a mop sink at one end. But Roy had fixed up the closet with a light bulb so they felt cozy. While Roy sucked the joint, Clinton exhaled slowly and began to laugh softly, shaking his head. “You got keys to this place?” Roy was still holding the smoke in his lungs, so he only nodded.
The Almanac of the Dead Page 48