Fairbairn, Ann

by Five Smooth Stones

  He wasn't going to let it worry him now, and he stretched legs and arms and wriggled his body deeper into the worn upholstery of the familiar chair, groaning "Aa-a-ah—" at the sheer comfort of it. Luke, after he was released from jail, was scheduled to spend a few weeks with Brad. Pennoyer had suggested some courtroom shots, and Brad had a number of cases coming up. David hoped Luke had managed to get away with taking them. Chuck Martin was going to be with them part of the time, Luke said, and Chuck, under Luke's tutelage, had developed a knack with a camera and might have been able to take over if Luke got in trouble. He wouldn't put it beyond Luke by this time to risk taking a quick sneak shot in the U.S. Supreme Court itself. David decided it would be nice to have a picture of the Supreme Court while it reviewed a case against Champlin. It wasn't exactly what Suds Sutherland had meant when he had said, a long time ago, "The first Negro Justice of the Yew-nited States Soopreme Court," but it was closer to the Supreme Court than he would have been in Africa. Both cases had been considered newsworthy by press and wire services as well as broadcasters, and brought comment from columnists: "David Champlin, young Boston attorney who gave up a State Department career to join the civil rights struggle in the South—"

  And now—Gramp would have added "if God spares"—he was going north. There might be other all-night sessions in Klein's office like the first one when he had briefed Pennoyer's book, and the men and women who had peopled the shadows of the room that night might return. But this time it would be as friends, with no silent reproaches. There would be more of them, and the newcomers would have names— Obadiah Brown, for one—and he would not shrink from them, because he had shared their peril now, faced, and been spared, their fate.

  ***

  He forced both past and future out of his mind and tried to bring himself into the present and its practical problems. He would have to buy Luke a new camera, if Brad had not already done so. They had taken the one he was carrying when they arrested him that day in Heliopolis more than a month ago, and David would be amazed if they had returned it. It had not been, he was thankful, the miniature one; that one had been hidden in the car. There would probably be a letter from Luke in his mail at ALEC headquarters. He could see Luke now, the afternoon they threw him into the tank cell. He hadn't fallen; they were all packed in too solidly for anyone to fall. There were bruises on his face, blood on his forehead and trickling from nose and mouth, out he laughed when David and a sturdy fourteen-year-old steadied him. "Damned if it isn't the boss," he said. "What you doing in the nursery? You ain't even supposed to be in jail." David's laugh rang through the tank and turned every dark face toward him, and there was answering laughter; then a young voice in the background saying, "Man, what we laughing at? Man! We're in trouble and laughing! What the hell!"

  He had smelled trouble even before he got into the actual town of Heliopolis, and when he spotted a running child carrying a "Light for Freedom" placard, had known he was headed for the middle of a Young People's Committee for Freedom demonstration. The child, a nine-year-old girl, was running away from town, crying in fright. The demonstration was ending in chaos and uproar when he got within three blocks of the main street, and he began to worry about Luke, who had preceded him the day before. The demonstrators were spilling over into the street where he parked his car, and he left the car and worked his way toward the center of town. He spotted Luke on a sidewalk and waved at him and turned back to his car, then began to run, hoping his gimpy leg would get him there before the crowd of teen-agers who were rushing toward the car could do it any damage. He waded into the group, shouting, "Hey, kids—that's my car!"

  How in hell the police showed up so fast he'd never be able to figure out. He did not protest when they threw him roughly into a police wagon; he knew by then that it would be useless.

  That was what Luke had meant when he said, "You ain't even supposed to be in jail."

  "Can't you think of anything brighter to say, f'Christ's sake? Let's take a look at that face—what's left of it."

  "It'll be O.K. I've seen it worse. Jeez! It stinks so bad in here you can hear yourself twice. The sound bounces back from the stink—"

  David supposed he was thrown in the juvenile tank because all the other cells were full. Every time something happened, those four days that he was in it, the kids turned to him, and at night, squatting on the floor with his arms around his knees, he talked to them, and they sang together, there in the heat and the fetid air, the stench so strong they felt they had to raise their voices to cut through it. He helped them mop and clean up vomit from the skinny, frightened boy who crouched by himself in a corner, finally pulling the boy upright, cajoling, bullying, babying, almost forcing him into the circle with the others, keeping an arm around his shoulders until finally the lad joined their talk and song and the vomiting stopped.

  The voices started about the second or third week after he was sentenced and put in a cell by himself, charged with incitement to riot and disturbing the peace. They came after dark, after the lights had been put out. They were pitched low, uninflected, drawling. They were slow, reflective, reasonable, seeming to be without passion or subjective emotion, and they were the most foully obscene sounds David had ever heard. At first he did not realize they were directed at him, and thought that the opening murmurs he heard were the beginning of a conversation between two of the guards. From the sound, they were standing near the cell door, in the corridor. He had the impression of two men leaning against the wall, passing a dark night hour together.

  "Ain't no real reason for hatin' niggers." Those were the first words he distinguished. "Ain't never been hurt by no nigger. Main reason for keepin' clear of 'em is their habits—"

  The voices went on for the better part of an hour, bandying obscenities, each man trying to outdo the other, with silence now and then as though the men were waiting. Then there was a return to the slow, thought-out filth. David's flesh crawled under sweat that made it damp and clammy; saliva filled his mouth as he fought off active nausea, making him spit into his handkerchief silently, hoping they would think him asleep and not hearing them, yet knowing that his silence was useless, that they knew he was awake. He had never thought the white cracker mentality capable of this subtlety of method. One man had more to say than the other, describing the habits he deplored in niggers, while the second offered suggestions for overcoming those habits. They did not come every night; once there was a lapse of two nights, but on the third it was plain their inventive faculties had been sharpened by the layoff. Sleep was just as hard to come by on those silent nights; every sound that might be footsteps knotted David's stomach, brought the sweat out on his skin.

  It was their fifth night of talking before he answered them, involuntarily, unable to stop himself, his mind a whirlpool of heat from lack of sleep, his nerves stretched to breaking point. He did not answer them in kind; he was outpowered in the profanity department, outdistanced in obscenity. Instead, he heard himself making a bitten-off wisecrack, sophomoric, useless; something about their lousy grammar, their ignorance.

  And for his wit passed blood for three days.

  They sent a doctor to him—he'd give the day guards credit for that—when they saw the blood they sent a doctor, and when the doctor asked him how it had happened, David told him, "All very simple and trivial, isn't it, Doctor?"

  The doctor, spreading a white towel on the dirty blanket of a plank bed that let down from the wall on chains, did not look up. "We—all of us—must make allowances. For many things."

  High-sperrited. Emma Jefferson, dead a year now, had said that of the boys who had sent a small brown man named Joseph Champlin to his death, said it bitterly. High-sperrited. He could hear her now, see her standing in the doorway of her kitchen, dark hands dusty with flour.

  The doctor busied himself preparing two hypodermics, laying one on the towel, advancing with the other.

  "What?" asked David.

  The doctor laughed abruptly, without mirth. "Not cyanide. O
ne is an antibiotic, the other, vitamins."

  "My God, that's food. Don't tell the jailers."

  "I can't defend them. But you are all making it difficult for us to have much sympathy. I am leaving you two sleeping tablets, one for tonight, one for tomorrow night. You obviously need sleep. The balance I shall leave with Sheriff Giddings to be given to you at night."

  "Do you honestly think I'll ever get them?"

  "I shall leave instructions."

  Atta moderate! Atta fine, upstanding moderate! Give the poor Negro a sleeping pill so he won't hear the insults; give him morphia before you hang him, burn him, castrate him; let's keep our people happy, but never let them go. Leave instructions, oh, by all means leave instructions. There it was again, the thing he could not fight, the wall against which his people lunged until they fell, bleeding, wounded, dead: stupidity. The voices wouldn't miss a night. But don't reprimand the jailers, Doctor; they might think you were siding with the nigras.

  "Thank you, Doctor; you've been kind." The doctor turned, something close to warmth in his eyes, and David caught them with his own eyes, saw the warmth die, saw the cheeks flush to scarlet, and the scarlet recede, leaving the skin chalk white.

  The doctor did not say good bye, but left abruptly, and David heard his voice in the hall. "Harris, where is Sheriff Giddings? I want to leave medication for the prisoner with him." The voice did not quaver, but neither was it steady.

  ***

  David loosened his belt and stripped his shirt off without rising from the big chair, then took off shoes and socks. He was being a damn fool, he thought, just a plain damned fool, dwelling on a petty incident in the past, with a mind too tired for discipline. That was the hell of this kind of fatigue. It had its own peculiar, subtle toxicity, undermining the brain's will, the mind's power, just as a physical poison would undermine the body's strength. He remembered how he had thought, the first night he met Luke Willis, that his people were sick, sick unto death, of a radiation sickness no scientist ever unleashed. If he had done nothing else, if he and Brad had done nothing else worthwhile, they had taken Luke before that sickness destroyed him, mind and body, put into his young hands an antidote for that poison, given a young and sickening mind the healing of honorable battle.

  He wondered what Brad and Luke and Chuck were doing in the little city of Cainsville, scarcely legible on the map. In today's climate of violence the name itself was enough to give a man the horrors. There had been trouble there, before he had been jailed; demonstrations, blood and violence, but he had been busy elsewhere and had not found out much about it. "They've got something going there," the kids from Ohio had said. He would find out in the morning, when he talked to Brad.

  There was a sound from the kitchen, the soft slap of the cat door, and he leaned forward. "Chop-bone?" he said softly. He didn't hear the black-and-white cat enter the room; it materialized. He watched it while it ignored him, disciplined him, withheld welcome from a human who had absented himself for weeks.

  "You better be sweet to me, y'hear?"

  Each time he came home, thought David, he planned to make it the last time, yet never did. There was no point in coming back. He could reach Boston by plane from the South almost as quickly, use his apartment there, handle business with Isaiah by telephone. "You, too," he said to Chop-bone. "They have nice metal boxes for cats to travel in on planes. Give 'em tranquilizers and cream every five hundred miles. You could live with Peg while I'm away. Or board."

  This time. This time, after he was rested, he'd find a tenant or a buyer.

  He soaped and scrubbed and soaked for half an hour; then, still not feeling wholly clean, showered the last of the jail from his body. He looked at himself in the mirror on the bathroom door, said, "Mmmm... mmm. You ain't thin, man; yore skinny. Damned if you don't look like Gramp from the neck down."

  He found food in the refrigerator and suddenly was ravenous. His craving for milk was gone, his stomach quieter, and he brought out cold chicken, two cooked pork chops, rice, and food for Chop-bone, and blessed Miz Timmins silently. He and Chop-bone ate together companionably, and then, half blind with sleep, he stretched out on his bed and turned and sprawled on his belly, waiting for the voices to begin, but there was no sound except the soft fall of a diminishing rainstorm on roof and window and the low, sensuous purring of the cat beside him; then even those sounds were lost, and from a million miles away there was the sound of dark voices singing on a riverbank—"Pharaoh's army got drownded—" then oblivion.

  CHAPTER 65

  Before he had bathed the previous night he had filled the electric coffee maker and put it on the table beside his bed. When he woke early in the morning he turned it on, refusing to look at a gray world until the caffein's bite had bolstered his will to face it. Chop-bone asked to be let out, and he refused, explaining that there were the usual toilet facilities for cats behind a screen in the bathroom, glad to hear his own voice and glad that there was no answering voice except the cat's soft chirrup and, in a moment, urgent plea for breakfast.

  At seven thirty he put in a call to the Willis house, hoping to find out from Peg where Brad could be reached. He smiled with pleasure when he heard Brad's voice, sharp and demanding. "David! In God's name, where are you?"

  "New Orleans."

  "Why haven't you called before?"

  "How the hell could I, Brad? I've only been out four or five days, and some kids from Ohio State—"

  "Out of where?"

  "Jail, of course."

  "Wait. Wait a minute. The same jail you were in about a month ago?"

  "The very same. I was there thirty-four days. Didn't you know?"

  "They told me you'd been released a few days after you were arrested. I've called New York, Chicago, New Orleans, God knows where else. No one knew anything."

  "I was incommunicado. No mail, no visitors, no messages, no nothing. No outgoing mail, either. I wouldn't want to bet they didn't book me under a phony name just to keep me from being sprung."

  "One of the hazards of fame, I suppose. What were you jailed for?"

  "Breathing in and out. What else? Who told you I'd been released?"

  "Fellow named Garnett. In Cainsville."

  "Short, tubby, bald, brown-skin? Comes on with an accent like he'd just come out of the tall cotton?"

  "Know him?"

  "Yeah." He did not elaborate. Brad would get his meaning. "Like that?"

  "Yes. He keeps bobbing up."

  "David, are you coming up here?"

  "Hell, Brad, I'd like to stay put and rest a little while. And there are, well, there are things I want to do here at the house. Then I'll be up there. And I should get together with the ALEC people, tie up a lot of loose ends. How about you coming down here for a few days?"

  "I could. I have to go back to Cainsville. It won't be easy. I may have to sneak out in the middle of the night when Peg's asleep. After what happened she doesn't want me out of her sight."

  "What do you mean 'after what happened'? You make the bucket at last? It's high time, slacker—"

  "I'll come down. There's too damned much catching up to do to try it by telephone. I was shot."

  "Shot?"

  "Sorry if I sounded annoyed when you first called. I'd been wondering where the flowers and the calf's-foot jelly were."

  David tried to speak and could not, could not even make his voice sound like a voice. He was shaking with inner tremors like an alcoholic in the early morning, and he cursed the battered nervous system that could bring them on.

  "David?"

  He cleared his throat, said: "Yes, Chief. I'm here. How bad was it? For God's sake, those damfool starry-eyed kids didn't tell me—"

  "You know how it is. Shot on Monday, headlines Tuesday, forgotten Wednesday. Unless you die. Then it's headlines Tuesday and Wednesday, forgotten Thursday."

  "How bad was it? I mean are 'all your wounds in front, out there'?"

  "That's a stupid question if I ever heard one. Few of us have our
wounds in front, as you damned well know. It was a slug from a trooper's gun. I was trying to get out of the way of a demonstration in a town near Cainsville. I had a Federal Court case coming up in a few days; the Williams case, if you recall. I couldn't do Williams any good behind bars."

  "I asked you how bad it was—"

  "Stop worrying, grandmaw. It caught me across the rib cage, from back to front. The hospital in Cainsville, the nearest one, is Crow, so they got me to Capitol City. I played dead, and someone picked me up. Look, if you're paying for this call—"

  "I am, and it's O.K. Go on."

  "Well, they took me to Capitol City in the Cainsville doctor's special ambulance for colored. The doctor is colored, and the ambulance is a beat-up station wagon with an oxygen tank in it. The doctor, incidentally, is damned good. Anyhow, after a few days I signed myself out of the county hospital there, and went on up to Boston. Some infection developed; I wound up in the hospital in Boston for a few days and I've been out about ten days now. And I'm O.K., perfectly O.K. Stop worrying. I can hear you worrying clear up here. I'll be down day after tomorrow. I'll fly from Capitol City, and wire you the time."

  "Wait. Where's Luke?"

  "Cainsville. He just got out of jail."

  "Again! Where?"

  "Maryland. For taking pictures of cops using gas on demonstrators. I don't know what the charge was, but that's the reason. I was in the hospital here. He got ten days, which was mild, but the fine will build them a whole new county road system. Incidentally, he's been offered a roving assignment job by Today. Expenses, pay, no spec about it."

  "Great!" Things were working out, things were really working out, thought David. He had already begun to have a nagging worry about Luke. He wouldn't be able to keep an eye on him from Boston, and the kid wasn't quite seasoned enough, even yet, to go it alone.