Trip Wire

by Charlotte Carter

  “I know it. Inexcusable.”

  “I thought me and you were—”

  “We weren’t, Nat. That’s what you wanted, but we weren’t.”

  “Sure, you’re right. We couldn’t have much of anything together as long as Wilton was alive. Now he’d dead, you’re more in love with him than ever.”

  I knew for a fact now that wasn’t true. But I let it stand.

  “And the useless cops still haven’t found who did it?”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. “They know.”

  “So how come you’re still asking questions?”

  “It’s too hard to talk about now. I have to go soon,” I said. “Maybe we’ll get together sometime. As friends, I mean.”

  “Maybe.”

  “How are things going with the free school?”

  “Okay. Still got that picture of you one of the girls drew. It’s up in the coatroom.”

  I had helped Nat when he first organized the free school/preschool. Most of the children were needy and sweet, and some of them had already been plowed under at age four or five.

  “Thanks for the info,” I told him as I left.

  “Watch yourself, Cassandra.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Just watch it. You messing with something you have no business doing. Think I don’t know you at all?”

  On the way out, I called my thanks to Torvald, who told me to wait just a minute. He brought me a thin sheaf of papers wrapped in tissue. “Little present for you,” he said.

  I removed the wrapper, saw what he had given me: the new anarchist calendar for the year ahead. It was a little beauty featuring an exquisite line drawing for each month and noting the milestones in leftist history for every day of the year. Tor had been hand-lettering and reproducing calendars for years. Nat’s collection of them dated back to 1951. I thanked him for the gift as I flipped through it quickly. March 7, 1942—Lucy Parsons dies. April 6, 1931—the trial of the Scottsboro Boys begins.

  2

  I made out a little in the front seat with my chauffeur, then he drove me over to the Rising Tide office, where I figured one of Taylor’s co-workers could help me with some research on the August 4 Committee.

  The office was a mile-high mess of manuscripts, empty soda bottles, denim jackets, LPs, manila folders, ashtrays, books. I could smell traces of tacos and grass as I walked past the empty receptionist’s desk.

  Actually, just about all the cubicles were empty. On the one other occasion I’d visited Taylor on the job, the place was wild with activity. Where was everybody? I made my way back to the big space the staff used for meetings. I found them all watching television in a kind of group trance.

  An assassination. Another one. These days, that was the first thing you thought when you saw a crowd of people staring intently at a TV.

  But that wasn’t the explanation.

  A daytime TV series about vampires, called Dark Shadows, was hugely popular with heads. In fact, a lot of Debs College students who were hooked on it would flock to the Sears Roebuck just across Wabash Avenue to catch it every afternoon. Sometimes the electronics department in the store was so jammed with freaks, the straight people couldn’t even move.

  But no. The Rising Tide people weren’t grooving on that vampire soap opera, either. They were looking at the local news, and a few people were booing the face in close-up. Taylor grabbed me by the arm and pointed me toward the screen. The star of the show was our own vampire-torturer, Detective Jim Norris.

  He was announcing proudly the breakup by authorities of a dangerous cadre of radicals. The black man found shot to death several days ago, who had rented a transient apartment under the fictitious name of Larry Dean, had now been identified as one Alvin Flowers.

  Flowers, the ring leader of a group that aimed to foment revolution among black servicemen, had apparently been killed by another member of the group.

  “Bullshit,” Taylor said. “I bet the cops killed this Flowers guy in cold blood.”

  There was a chorus of right on’s from the staff.

  Two core members of this group, calling itself the August 4 Committee, had been apprehended as they attempted to leave town by bus, Norris said. The group was wanted by the feds on sedition charges. Moreover, they were responsible for a string of murders from Maine to Louisiana.

  Murder. The blade or the grenade, I thought. Whatever will kill. Turnabout. So this Alvin Flowers was Wilton’s hero, the authentic black man who was so outtasight.

  But Norris wasn’t finished.

  He took my breath away with the next part: This same Alvin Flowers, he said, was behind last week’s shocking hippie murders in a North Side apartment. Authorities had determined that Wilton Mobley, a member of the August 4 Committee, had defected from its ranks, so his colleagues had assassinated him to keep him from informing on them. Mobley’s female companion, Mia Boone, had been an innocent bystander.

  “That’s ridiculous. Wilt was in some outfit that was fucking killing people?” Taylor said. “What a load of crap.”

  He was vibrating with righteous indignation. I wasn’t. I was hollow, speechless.

  “I underestimated you, Sandy. You’re good.”

  I looked back at the television, saw a preening Norris. “So are they,” I said.

  “Who? The cops?”

  “Yeah. I wonder if they murdered Wilt, too.”

  3

  The newspapers had the story by now. All the details.

  No justice. No beauty. No truth.

  In my dirty room, I was affirming those words, droning them like a mantra. I was also trying to obliterate the reality of them with marijuana and music turned up so loud the jars on my bureau were dancing with the vibrations. But it wasn’t working.

  I was still fully aware that the police were pulling off an outrageous cover-up, and they were probably going to get away with it. They had tied things up so nice and neat: Wilton was part of August 4 and he wanted to pull out. So Alvin Flowers killed him . . . but oops . . . an innocent white girl got in the way, so she had to die, too.

  And who killed Alvin? One of his comrades. Why? They’d argued over money, that’s why. The white comrade, Paul Yancy, had over $100,000 in his duffel when he was apprehended at the Greyhound bus terminal.

  Yes, all of that would hold together when they railroaded this fall guy Yancy.

  Cliff had been knocking at the door to my room every five minutes for the last half hour, but I refused to answer. Finally he barged in and snatched the plug to my radio out of the wall.

  “Get your ass off the floor,” he screamed at me. And when I didn’t move, he took me by the shoulders and shook me.

  I had provoked another mild-mannered guy to near violence. Great. I might not be slinky, but I did have a certain power over men.

  “I’m getting out of here, Sandy. I’ve had it. I’m withdrawing from school and I’m splitting.”

  “So go.”

  “I want you to go with me.”

  “The only place I’m going is Hyde Park.”

  “You don’t have to, and you know it. Are you coming with or not?”

  “Fuck off.”

  His face crumpled.

  “I’m sorry, Cliff. But just leave me alone.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I love you. Why do you think?”

  Tears welled up inside me.

  He nearly crushed me. “Let go, Sandy. You have to let go. They’re gonna beat you if you try to take them on. You already proved how tough you are. Let Wilt’s people fight them.”

  “They’re not going to fight for him. They believe the cops. So do Woody and Ivy. ‘Cass, you’re being ridiculous. We haven’t come to the point where police come into our homes to murder us.’ That’s what my aunt said. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Everybody believes the fucking cops. You probably believe them, too.”

  “No. But what are we going to do about it?”

&n
bsp; I hung on to him. “I don’t know,” I said, and let the tears come.

  I didn’t know whether I loved Cliff, either. But when I had dried my eyes, I said, “You want me to go home with you? What’s your mother going to say?”

  “What do you mean, because you’re black?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “She’s not like that. We’re not like that.”

  Nobody—not even Nat—had ever held me that way and told me they loved me. What did you do when that happened? You said yes to them, didn’t you? Even if you weren’t sure you loved them back.

  “But why do we have to go to Connecticut?” I said. “Why can’t we get a place here?”

  He searched my face. “Is that what you want? You mean you’d live with me if I stayed in Chicago?”

  “I’d think about it. Yeah, I’d think about it seriously. And you wouldn’t have to leave Jordan, right?”

  He smiled then. “No, I wouldn’t have to leave Jordan.”

  “At least nobody’s got to be afraid anymore,” I said. “You know what I mean?”

  “Yes. Nothing else can happen now. Everything’s already happened.”

  We sat in the dark for a long time. “Cliff?” I said. “Put the radio back on. Low.”

  “Okay. But I want to know something first.”

  “What?”

  “That guy Sim is gone. And Taylor’s working all night.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Will you sleep with me tonight? I mean the whole night.”

  “Yes.”

  “Good, that’s what I want,” he said. “And call your aunt Ivy.”

  “What?”

  “She called you before. But you wouldn’t open up.”

  I shook my head. “That can wait. I know what she wants: When will I be coming home?”

  Cliff was so sweet, and apparently knew exactly what he was doing. We made love all night. He didn’t rock me to my foundation the way Sim had, but we made a good fit. Instead of hollering and sexy talk, we soothed each other.

  While we rested in each other’s arms, he made a lot of promises and asked a lot of questions. I felt like there was almost nothing I couldn’t tell him. He got the Book of Cassandra in installments; I’d talk, we’d make love again; talk, do it again.

  “I used to be so jealous of you and Wilt,” he confessed.

  “Really?”

  “Yes. I know it went against everything we were all supposed to be like. But I couldn’t help it.”

  “But Wilton was never in love with me. You knew that.”

  “Yeah. Maybe. But you had something with each other that you didn’t have with anybody else in the commune.”

  “Because we’re both—were both—black, Cliff. That’s not hard to understand, is it?”

  “I guess not. But I still hated it. I hate everything about being black or white that keeps us in these boxes, separate and ignorant. It’s poison, the race thing. If we don’t find a way to get over it, it’s gonna kill everybody.”

  “Amen to that,” I said.

  “We’re going to take one step toward solving the whole thing,” he said.

  “What step?”

  “Kids. You know. Children. Medium brown.”

  “Cliff,” I said in wonderment, “it takes you a while to make a move, but when you do, you don’t play.”

  “Who was the Bible guy you and Wilt used to talk about?”

  “Bible guy?”

  “Yeah. All you had to do was mention it, and the two of you would go apeshit laughing.”

  “Oh, him. The Read Your Bible guy. He was a nut who used to preach at the el stop at 63rd and South Park. ‘Read your Bible. Ask the Lord for the understanding. And he will give it to you.’ It was all he ever said. He was around when I was ten, and he’s there to this day. Wilt used to see him, too. The guy must be a hundred years old by now, and the last time I got off the el at that stop, he was still there.”

  “I want some secrets with you, too,” he said. “I want to have some things we can laugh about someday.”

  “Maybe we will, someday. We sure have enough to cry about, don’t we?”

  When I awoke at five in the morning, I was so foggy I could barely find the floor with my feet. I had smoked an awful lot of grass. And now I was ravenous.

  The linoleum floor icy cold under my bare feet, I dug around in the fridge until I found a yogurt, carried it into the front room. Sunrise. I remembered the morning I’d watched the sun come up at the Wisconsin farmhouse. We were having such a great weekend. Why had I felt so funny as I stood alone in the attic? Then I remembered. It had something to do with Wilton. But then, everything did. Let go, Cliff had said. Jesus God, when would I be ready to let go of Wilt?

  That weekend, he had been morose one minute and then hyper the next; angry, then calm, then jubilant. Somehow, I didn’t think it was the drugs.

  I’d never seen him dance so much. He and Clea were putting on a real show, teaching the others how to do the old dance step called the roach.

  “What’s got into you?” I said. “I thought you said all you wanted to do up here was sleep and eat gingerbread.”

  He was grinning from ear to ear. “I just worked out my Oedipal thing,” he said. “I figured out a way to castrate my pop. I’m going to slaughter that pompous prick. Squish . . . Squash . . . yeah, baby. Kill that roach!”

  The others screamed with laughter. In their cases, it definitely was the drugs.

  “What the hell are you talking about, Wretched?”

  “Oh, don’t worry, don’t worry, sweetheart. I just mean metaphorically. You know what brother Oscar say: Each man kill de thang he love.”

  I did have to chuckle at that line. “Brother Oscar” was Oscar Wilde. But Wilton’s dad was named Oscar, too. When I tried to question him again, he wouldn’t let me talk. “Get your ass in gear and dance, girl.”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Clea said, pressing herself against Wilt. “Get those big titties out here and show us what you got.”

  An hour or so later, I caught a glimpse of him in the bedroom he was sharing with Mia. They were on some old cushions on the floor, his head in her lap. She looked up at me and smiled, then pressed a finger to her lips. Shhhh. He was sleeping.

  Now, how do you castrate, kill a man like Oscar Mobley . . . metaphorically? He was rather small in stature, nothing to look at, but proud of his accomplishments and his place in the community. If you wanted to ruin him, what did you rob him of? His reputation, his dignity, his money? All of which he had in abundance.

  I was yearning for a cup of coffee, but I didn’t make any. I thought the aroma might wake Cliff, and I needed more time alone to think. Also, I knew how unhappy he’d be to find me still trying to unknot the facts surrounding Wilton’s death.

  Hope Mobley had told me that Wilt and his father were arguing bitterly the last few weeks. She’d hear snatches of the fights they were having behind closed doors. Wilton was doing something that threatened Mobley’s law practice. Isn’t that what she thought she heard?

  Position. Dignity. Money. Most things came down to money, didn’t they? That was what we abhorred as a generation. We hated living in a world where money came before human life, before principles, before loyalty, honor, law. Some people say the civil rights movement is being bought out with money. Some were saying—notably a Chicago PD detective named Norris—that money was at the root of the murder of Alvin Flowers, head of the rogue organization called the August 4 Committee.

  Money. Was it really that crude, that simple?

  I found that piece of cheap paper with the August 4 logo. I turned it over and began to sketch something from memory, a dim memory to be sure, almost like automatic writing: the shape of a thick, oddly shaped key.

  I dressed while I dialed the number at Woody and Ivy’s.

  “Cass, why are you calling so early? It’s barely six o’clock.”

  “I’m sorry to wake you. You know when I asked you to do something for me a few days ago?
You found out about the Riegels for me.”

  “Yes.”

  “I need you to follow through on the second part of that favor. Now.”

  I heard a sigh of exasperation. “Jesus Lord, Cassandra. You’re not still harping on that house in Kent, are you? And the stolen keys? I did everything you asked me to do, child. I went to the funeral and spoke to Hope Mobley. Now the truth has come out about her son. If she can accept it, why can’t you?”

  “I’m not going to bug her, Ivy. I just want to give her something.”

  “What?”

  “Something that belonged to Wilt. I’m sure she’d want to have it. I just need you to call and ask if she could see me for a second—without her husband knowing about it.”

  “Her husband?”

  “Yes. He wouldn’t appreciate me dropping in there again.”

  “Goddammit, Cassandra, why can’t you leave the poor woman alone?”

  “Will you do it? Please. I won’t ask for anything else.”

  “At six in the morning, girl?”

  “All right. Wait until seven.”

  “Cass, have you packed up—”

  “Thanks, Ivy. See you later.”

  I’m a terrible girl. Lie. Lie. Lie.

  CHAPTER NINE

  TUESDAY

  1

  I woke Sim up, too. I hadn’t figured on seeing him again this soon. But I needed him.

  He didn’t pick me up in the Lincoln this time. He was driving borrowed wheels. We stuffed our faces with sweet rolls and store-bought coffee while he drove south.

  Maybe it was the maid’s day off. Hope Mobley opened the door herself this time. And this time I could see Wilton in her more clearly. She had his eyes and forehead and his tawny coloring.

  “Cassandra,” she said. “You have a pretty name. I thought if I ever had a girl, I might name her that.”

  “I’m intruding again,” I said. “But I wouldn’t do it if this wasn’t important.”

  “I’m sure you think so. Your aunt told me how much you take things to heart. I like her.”

  She caught me peeping around the big entrance hall. “I understand you’re worried about seeing Oscar. Don’t be. He isn’t here.”