by Barry, Mike
“I’ve thought about that.”
“Truly the oppressor must die by his own sword, truly the oppressed must inherit the earth. But how are they to inherit the earth if they do not have the means to do so? The Lord counsels moderation and a benign spirit, the turning of the other cheek to the aggressor, and submission to the wicked. But the Lord has also counseled us to know thine enemy, to extract justice, to avenge the meek and mild, and to bring about the era of justice.”
“Yes,” Williams said quietly, fascinated. Father Justice’s eyes were round and luminous, his expression had shifted from the ecstatic to keen intelligence. Slowly Williams dug his hand into his pocket, slowly then he extracted the hundreds tightly rolled into one another like a deadly little grenade, and showed it to the father. The man began to rock back and forth on his heels, making little noises.
“An offering,” Father Justice said, “an offering to the All Souls and Divinity, to the mission itself, to the holy purposes.”
“Freely given,” Williams said.
“Freely given and from a generous spirit. Happy is he,” Father Justice said, “happy is he who gives kindly from a kind and benevolent nature for he shall be known and be celebrated by all the mingled angels of Heaven.” He backed away from Williams, moved to a small door against the other side of the room adjoining the altar, reached into his robes to extract a large key, and then with a flourish opened the door. He motioned to Williams. “Happy is he who walketh with the Lord,” he said, and Williams went to him, went under his beckoning arm and into a back room which looked like a munitions factory. Williams had never seen anything like this in his life.
Well, he had seen a lot of things he had never before seen in his life: he had seen men wounded, men killed, blood running through the streets of Harlem, a generation destroyed and dying, but still there was some place in the lexicon for the simple wonders of technology. On the walls hanging in racks were rifles of every size, of every description. Between the rifles, like flowers, hung pistols, on another wall were grenades and cartridge belts, a third wall was devoted to machine guns and clips, and then instead of a fourth wall ahead of him directly behind the altar, there was a long tunnel opening up into a musky abcess in which once again Williams could see the glinting of ordnance.
“It has to be cash on the line, and I’ll pay fifty percent for whatever you bring back,” Father Justice said in a different tone. “The stuff is mostly good, it can’t be traced that is, but I’m not letting any machine guns go out of here unless I get a lot better from you than ‘Michael sent me.’ ‘Michael sent me’ is all right for pistols and rifles; I might even give you a grenade or two on a ‘Michael sent me,’ but as far as machine guns that’s definitely out unless I know a hell of a lot more about you and right now I know dammed little. I know that you’re a cop or an ex-cop and that you want to ship the stuff out of town to do a job on some drug guys. That’s okay with me, I want to get the shit-takers as much as anyone around because they’re just cutting into everything here, but a ‘Michael sent me’ is not for machine guns.” Justice coughed hoarsely, wiped a hand across his mouth, heaved his shoulders. “This is more of a rental than a store as you can see,” he said. “I want to have as much of the stuff returned as possible; I don’t have an unlimited stock here and there’s more of a call for it all the time. If you return it in good condition I might be able to give you fifty-five, even sixty percent back, depending. For the unused stuff, stuff that’s just carried along for insurance, and I can tell if it’s unused, it might be seventy-five percent. Now tell me about yourself, if you want some machine guns and what else you want, and let’s get out of here.” Justice’s shoulders were twitching, seemingly out of control. “I tell you I don’t like it,” he said, “standing back here, looking at all that stuff, it gets me very, very nervous.” He lifted a finger, wiped some sweat off his forehead neatly, deposited it in an unfurled handkerchief. “It’s a goddamned violent trade,” he said.
It was a goddamned violent trade all right, but Williams was able to get out of it what he wanted with only a little haggling over the thousand dollars apiece that Justice wanted for machine guns and clips. That was too much if he was going to get the rest of the stuff, and when Williams explained in more detail than he originally intended who he was and who he was working with and what they had in mind, Justice came down to four hundred apiece and knocked the rifles down to two hundred dollars for the automatics and fifty for the old M-l’s, fully restored.
“I know about Wulff,” Justice said, “everybody knows about Wulff now and as far as I’m concerned I’ll risk a loss on him because he is on the right path.”
Still, it had eaten up far more of the ten thousand than Williams had expected it to, leaving the barest safety margin for the rental and expenses getting cross-country. God willing, Wulff had his own sources of cash out there. He already had the U-haul and the Ford, of course, and it was simple enough to back them straight up to the church. It turned out that that long hallway in the back room instead of the fourth wall led to a boarded-up wooden door around the corner near a vacant lot. No one was on the street at this hour at all and the U-haul was able to come in flush to the wall so the armaments were not exposed to sight for even an instant. Still, it was hard, heavy work, Justice helping, the two of them sweating freely in the dark, Harlem air and when they had finished Williams wanted nothing so much as to sink into one of those pew-benches in the Brother Divinity and just sweat for a while.
But Justice had become very nervous. “You must go, my son,” he said, adopting or readopting his ministerial manner the moment that they had come out of the street. “He who travels with the Lord travels as if with the wind; his feet are speedy and his heart is light but he that will tarry, yea, he that will tarry even in the name of the Lord will do so with a great burden because in His service there may be no delay.” That seemed to clinch the issue fairly well, at least from Brother Justice’s point of view.
He had given the reverend eight thousand three hundred and four dollars and had gotten into the Ford and gotten the hell out of there as quickly as a man could when he was leaving a place of the Lord. Driving south on St. Nicholas he had done so with the vague feeling that he might never see Harlem again, that he never would see Harlem again, but that was merely an illusion. The only way that he would fail to see Harlem again would be if the two of them got killed out there. (He could not think of Wulff dying and Williams lucking through alone.) Otherwise he would be in Harlem for the rest of his life. Any black man in America lived in Harlem no matter how far he journeyed, and that was the truth of it.
So he had the U-haul loaded and the next thing was to call his wife; at least tell her where the ten thousand was and that it was hers and he had to get out of town but he found that he simply could not do it. He could not face it; more than likely he would find if he called that she was giving, had given, birth and that double-connection, son (he knew it would be a boy) and wife, would have been too great. As far as he had gone, he would simply never make it all the way out of here if he learned that he had a son. So instead he simply wrote her a letter, a flat, businesslike delivering-the-message letter which he mailed to her in care of her sister, saying nothing about the way he felt or what it meant to leave her, saying that he would be back and this time, somehow, they would make it work. It was a lie, he knew it was, but at this time it was the best that he could give her, the only thing that he could give her.
And then, the letter mailed, the blinds drawn, the house locked up, the few items he thought he might need rolled into a suitcase and hurled into the back of the car, the armaments themselves under double-bolts which he spent half a day working on, Williams got out of there as quickly as he could. Staying there, staying in the little house in St. Albans with a U-haul full of ordnance in the neat, white garage would have been criminally stupid for anyone … but it was not only that. If he stayed in this house, even with the phone pulled out of the wall, which he did, the memories w
ere going to get him, the feelings composed of rage, loss, abandonment, disaster … and he might never move. He had to move. If he did not do it now he never would. He would stay in St. Albans with a healing knife wound in his gut and he would die slowly, thirty or forty years maybe, sinking into his own revulsion. What Wulff offered him was at least quicker and cleaner. It was a chance to confront the enemy whole, to seize and see the face of the nightmare.
He would take it.
So he got into the Ford and pulled the U-haul out, getting only one suspicious glance on the George Washington Bridge from a toll-taker who thought that he heard something rattling in the back. If he had been going east, where the toll booths were, they might even have stopped him but west the toll booths had long since been abandoned, double-fare, get you on the way back (he might never be back) and the toll-taker, peering down the line at the jouncing truck, obviously calculated and then decided that it was not worth it. Hs was not going to be any goddamned hero on ten thousand eight hundred dollars a year—Williams knew the feeling—and besides the U-haul would probably turn out to be full of pots and pans. Who the hell needed it?
Over the bridge and onto Route 80. Immediately, just three miles, less than that, out of Manhattan the road, the flat, dead spaces, and sensation of the interstate highway overtook him, a road that was everywhere and nowhere, the same ruined landscape that would confront him for three thousand miles already at Teaneck, Little Ferry, Hackensack, Paterson … and deeper then to the breakoff on 46 where 80, not yet completed, fed into the state highway for a while, fighting for space and air with trucks on all sides. Then another patch of 80 and the death of interstate again. He did not know which was worse, to choke and fume on a road with character or to be lost in the emptiness of the interstate … back on 46 again for a little while to figure it out, make a final decision (he never did). And then on 80 for real now, rolling toward the Delaware Water Gap, into Pennsylvania, on Pennsylvania sections, the night falling fast, cars passing him at a hundred and a hundred and ten miles an hour on these unpatrolled segments, the Ford stumbling and missing around seventy-five, the little trailer chattering behind him. On through Pennsylvania all night, poking on into Ohio by the dawn’s early light, his first stopover in a cheap motel in Ohio for a five-hour nap, uneasy dreams of the U-haul exploding tumbling through his mind. Then to the road again, Ohio the same as New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio the same as Illinois and swinging then outside Chicago, the hookup with 90 leading across the flat, dead plains states. Then the real interstate began: mile after mile, hundreds of miles of gray, empty space, sometimes the Ford surrounded as he picked up commuter traffic off the city belts, most of the time almost alone on the highway pushing it as close to seventy-five as he could, the motor cutting out thunderously once at seventy-eight, loss of power steering and the U-haul jackknifing, almost hurling him ass-end first, off the road, but he was able to save it. That was the only exciting thing that happened for twelve hours as he decided to get the best he could out of the five hours’ stopover and see if he could make it all the way into the far western states before the dawn. In and out of transmission belts, the radio flicking on and off, his mind submerged somewhere below attention, Williams kept the pace up, after a while almost locked out of the world, the perimeters of the Ford the perimeters of existence, everything happening only in the car.
Then he came up against the roadblock, locked into that hypnotic state, yanking the wheel, smashing the brakes almost at the last moment, coming to a rearing, terrified attention as he saw men pour from the sides of the road surrounding the wooden sawhorses. There were guns in their hands.
These were not cops.
Williams saw it all in one burst of attention, then, the car idling, he was already diving toward the floorboards. The first shot came high, too high, smashing the safety windshield, putting little plasticine pellets down around his shoulders. And then the second, more intense series followed, the shots skittering off the hood, dumped into the driver’s compartment. If he hadn’t hit the floor they would have had him. But even on the floor Williams was calculating, he was coming to attention, could feel himself beginning to function. Then he got the gun up and at a seated position raised his hand, pumped out two shots, then ducked again as response bullets tore their way again through the windshield, falling around him like ball-bearings.
Too much, too much; these guys had to be crazy. Who would set up a roadblock on an interstate highway and what did they think that it would profit them? Even if they were able to nail him in this trap, didn’t they understand that traffic was going to pile up rapidly behind him, even on a seemingly empty highway, three cars a minute passed a given point … and as if in confirmation far beyond Williams heard the dull pounding of a truck, the hiss of air brakes. The knowledge that traffic was then already beginning to form behind him, that he was not functioning in isolation, gave him the courage to rear all the way up and from this position, peering over the dash, he saw the situation in true perspective for the first time; everything had happened too fast before. There were just two of them, a Chevy van over on the side of the road, the sawhorse slung crudely across the two lanes as a block. Another bullet came, but Williams from this vantage point was already beginning to feel invulnerable. He got his gun up and out and put a clean shot into the near man, a shorter type holding a sawed-off shotgun. The man fell across the hood with a scream, the shotgun firing, the pellets misdirected, and the second man loomed behind him then. Williams saw a man in his forties wearing an odd, double-breasted, gray suit, some archaic aspect coming out of the fields of Interstate 90 to kill him, and in a slow and terrible calm he pointed the pistol at the man and shot him in the throat. The man had not even fired a shot; apparently the death of the man first in line had shocked him. He fell straight to the concrete, spread-eagled, little objects falling from his pockets scattering on the highway; pieces of paper, a few dollar bills, jolted loose by the impact. Breathing heavily, Williams leaned against the door of the Ford, got the handle up from memory, and went out onto the roadway.
Behind him a huge diesel, motor idling unevenly, had come to a stop just a few feet behind the Ford. The truckdriver, a thin man concealed behind enormous sunglasses and cap, was looking out the side. “What the fuck is this?” he said, pointing, taking in all of it; Williams, the roadblock, the two dead men lying on the concrete. “What the fuck is going on here?”
“I don’t know,” Williams said, “I don’t know.” And he meant it. Little knives of Nebraska heat filled with dust and light went through him. He put his pistol away and walked toward the sawhorse. The near corpse was bleeding thickly, dribbling blood into the concrete in a Rorschach pattern. Williams kicked it aside and put his hands on the sawhorse, bit his lips, heaved it upward. Surprisingly light, the contraption came up easily. He staggered to the side of the road, holding sixty pounds, dumped it on the shoulder, came back to the Ford noting abstractedly that there seemed to be bloodstains on the hood. Well, that was to be expected, wasn’t it? He had shot, let’s think about this now, the first man close on the hood, getting him in the throat, or was that the second man, but anyway it had been a bloody shot and of course at that proximity to the Ford he would have.
“I think we better get the cops, friend,” the truckdriver said, still leaning out the window. Another car was lumbering up, a black shape just coming over the horizon. Behind it Williams could see a few more like insects, slithering, stumbling along. There would be five or six cars here in a minute; behind them another five or six more. Traffic was sparse but not all that little; even in Nebraska people still got on the highway, if only to get out of Nebraska, of course. “Really,” the truckdriver said, “we ought to get some cops in here; find out—”
“Right,” Williams said, “right you are.” He got back behind the wheel of the Ford noting that his hands were shaking nicely. When you came right down to it these were his first two kills, weren’t they? The business near the methadone center didn’t count; that w
ent the other way. “Right you are again,” he said, turning, reaching for the doorhandle, slamming it, turning on the ignition. “I’ll just get down to one of these phone booths and call in,” he said and he slammed the door, locked it, floored the accelerator, and got out of there at sixty-eight miles an hour for the first quarter of a mile, a hundred flat for the first half. Yes, these Torinos, even with the emission devices, could accelerate, it seemed.
The hell with it, Williams thought, the hell with it and another thought on top of that: well he was really in for it now. Really in for it, yes sir, he was committed up to his black ass and beyond.
The scene behind him, perceived through the rear-view mirror, diminished, became miniscule, became inconsequential, vanished. He prowled on through Nebraska. He had no idea who the road-blocking guys were looking for. Maybe they had had him tracked all the way from New York.
And just maybe—this was the more frightening thought—just maybe they were looking for someone else entirely and had walked into something that they had never expected.
The hell with it.
The hell with all of this shit now.
He was really in for it.
IX
The ad in the personals that he had been looking for for a week was there that morning—ALL HECTOR LOPEZES: HECTOR LOPEZ CLUB FIRST ANNUAL MEETING SANTA ANITA RACE-TRACK, THIS AFTERNOON—was in and Wulff was there; in the grandstand at Santa, twenty minutes before the first race, pacing between the five and ten dollar win and show windows, checking the time as it came on the tote every minute. They were supposed to meet down at the finish line, that had been prearranged, just before the first race. All right then. Williams had made it; somehow the son of a bitch had gotten through and not a day too soon because Wulff did not know how much longer he could have held on. The Idle Hour trailer park was bad enough; it had turned out to be even worse than he had expected but the hell with the trailer park; he could have done that kind of duty standing on his head. What he could not take was the clear feeling now that they were closing in on him; that even this cover had run out its chances and that it was only a matter of time, very little time indeed, until Calabrese’s forces or the freelancers had him nailed to ground. There were too many strange people poking around the place. There was too much traffic moving in and out After five days he had pretty well mapped out the residents of the Idle Hour and there were people coming into the place now who had no trailers there. How much longer did he have? He had a huge bag of shit and light armaments, no way really of procuring more. How long could he have taken it? The net was tightening. But Williams had made it, somehow the son of a bitch had made it and put in the agreed-upon personal and maybe now he was at the end of this. Or at the beginning of something else. Wulff did not know. He simply did not know. It was the feeling of helplessness which he could not take, the rage, the slow feeling of entrapment. Somewhere, he knew, Calabrese was laughing at him.