by Guy Johnson
“At least we’ve moved from ‘you people’ to ‘brothers,’ ” Pres acknowledged.
Dan said with a big smile, “Bring her over. I’m sure we’d all like to meet her.”
Jackson laughed but did not attempt to respond. He simply headed to a spot where he could intercept her upon her return. He waited several minutes at the doorway of the hall leading out of the ladies’ room, trying to think of something imaginative to say. But when she exited the rest room all that he could muster was “Hello, Elizabeth, do you remember me?”
“How could I forget? You’re the Big Brother of the year,” she said in her husky contralto. Her big eyes took him in slowly. There was a trace of a smile on her lips.
Jackson felt giddy for a moment as he wondered whether she was being sarcastic. He asked, “Are you accessible to polite approaches? When we met you indicated that it would be all right if I called you. Has something changed?”
She put a hand on her hip and surveyed him coolly. “Only the circumstances. I am with a few friends. Another time would be more appropriate.”
Jackson retreated back a step and replied, “Whatever you say. I hope to talk with you when it is appropriate.” He bowed his head briefly. “Pardon me for bothering you.”
“My, that was formal,” Elizabeth observed, then an impish smile spread across her face. “Are you thin-skinned?”
Jackson replied, “Not really, but in parting, I’d like to reconfirm that I’m very interested in seeing you when it’s appropriate. Have a good evening.” With those words he turned and walked back to the table with a calm demeanor, but his heart was thumping loudly in his chest.
His friends greeted him with a few derisive comments concerning his lack of commitment to them, his inability to establish sound relationships with women in general, and whatever else they could think to say.
Jackson took the hazing in stride. These were his best friends, his inner circle. The years had proven that there was a strong love bond between the men. Theirs was a tight circle formed when the men were still boys, when trust was a simple concept, when sharing meant “everything that was in your pockets.” They called themselves the Alamo Square Rangers because they all lived around Alamo Square Park. Five boys, including Wesley, from diverse cultural backgrounds, who retained their bonds of brotherhood for over a quarter of a century. It was a relationship that grew and stretched and changed as its members grew and were metamorphosed by time, but the bonds that connected them never weakened. It was Jackson’s real family. The brothers that he never had. The folks that would always be on his side. Thus, there was no rancor for the ribbing he was taking. When one is being teased out of love, it is easy to abide.
The conversation turned to why people suddenly decide, after years of acquiescing, to stand up for their rights.
Lincoln said, “I think it’s indignation, but it’s an indignation fed by a high level of social anger and unhappiness. Patience gets used up, stubbornness sets in. It’s like adding more sugar to water that is already saturated with it. When you reach a critical mass, everything crystallizes.”
“You’re off base. All people yearn to be free!” Dan countered. “It’s intrinsic to human nature. Liberty, equality, brotherhood, these concepts are the basis of every holy book. Indignation is just a passing emotion. The desire for freedom is a constant.”
Pres turned to Jackson and asked with a smile, “Was it as simple as indignation, or was it your innate desire for freedom that stirred you to rise up?”
Jackson was in another world. He had been basking like an alligator underneath the warm, bantering conversation of his friends, intermittently rising to the surface to voice his opinion on the issues under discussion, but otherwise sipping his drink and lying submerged in meditative thought. A couple times during the discussion he had caught Elizabeth staring at him, but she averted her eyes. When Pres asked his question Jackson was once again exchanging looks with Elizabeth. This time she did not look away but held his eye for more than ten seconds. It was incomprehensible, yet energy seemed to be ricocheting between them. Jackson did not know whether it was good or bad. He was drawn to her like an iron filing to a magnet or a lemming to the sea; he didn’t know which, nor did he care.
“Earth to Jackson! Earth to Jackson!” Pres prodded, trying to get Jackson’s attention.
Regretfully breaking eye contact, Jackson turned toward Pres and said sarcastically, “Yes, my celestial fundament, how can I help you pursue the greater truth?”
Pres hesitated for a second then asked, “What does fundament mean?”
“It means ass or anus,” Dan volunteered.
“That’s a shame,” Lincoln chimed in. “It doesn’t appear that our Third World brother knows his fundament from a hole in the ground.” Everyone laughed.
Repressing his desire to join in the laughter of the others, Pres declared, “You fools are lucky that I know you need me. Otherwise, I’d have hit the trail long ago. I get all the abuse I need from the station where I work.”
The rest of Pres’s words were lost on Jackson; he had made eye contact again. Elizabeth was looking at him while idly sipping her drink. He was attracted by the smooth, dark, bittersweet-chocolate color of her skin, the dimples at the corners of her mouth, the large, dark eyes with the mischievous gleam. She lifted one hand and beckoned him with a finger. Initially, he was hesitant, but he decided to make another effort to talk to her. He stood up. The comments began again but Jackson ignored them and made his way over to Elizabeth and her friends. She was sitting with two other women. Her friends were engrossed in an intense conversation while she was left to her own devices. She watched him without a change of expression. When he arrived he said, “May I buy you and your friends a drink?”
Elizabeth said nothing, merely looked him up and down approvingly. She held up her glass. “Chilled Stoli with two olives, no ice.”
“A friend of mine drinks that,” Jackson said and caught the eye of the waitress and waved her over. One of Elizabeth’s friends turned and faced Jackson. There was a trail of tears down her brown face. Her eyes were still red and angry from crying. Jackson nodded to her out of politeness.
She demanded angrily, “What are you looking at? Why are you over here bothering us? Can’t you see that we want to be left alone?”
Surprised, Jackson mumbled, “Sorry to disturb you. I was just buying Elizabeth a drink. No harm meant.”
“Leave now!” the woman ordered in a loud voice. “You’re so damn arrogant. You think women want to meet you? Well, they don’t! We just want to have a drink in peace!” At this point the woman broke down in tears and turned away.
The waitress came up and asked bluntly, “You bothering these ladies?”
Jackson denied responsibility. “No, ma’am, it was all a misunderstanding. I’m returning to my table now, but I’d be happy to buy all these ladies a round of drinks should they desire it.” As he gave Elizabeth one long last look he saw her make a discreet calming gesture to him with one of her hands. He nodded in acknowledgment and returned to his table.
This time there were no teasing remarks. The woman’s outburst had been overheard and his friends understood Jackson’s disappointment. Lincoln put a brotherly hand on his shoulder as he sat down.
Dan raised his glass and made a toast: “To our brother, who yesterday stood up for freedom.” Then the conversation began anew and centered once again on why Jackson had chosen to confront Bedrosian. Pres pressed the subject. It was almost anticlimactic that after being placed in the spotlight, Jackson had no explanation. All he could think of was his grandfather and how the old man had always spoken his mind without concern for the consequences. He related his thoughts to his friends and Dan reacted immediately.
“The spirit of your grandfather must be speaking to you or through you,” he said emphatically, as if no other possibility existed.
“That’s an interesting thought,” Pres mused. “Do you really believe his grandfather has the ability to pro
ject his intentions?”
Jackson interjected, “That depends upon whether or not you think he is an instrument of evil.”
Dan responded, “I don’t know about that, but I’ll bet he’s part of the reason you reacted like you did yesterday.”
“Perhaps it’s the angst created by my memories of him,” Jackson replied. “He’s been strong on my mind these last few days. I’ve been reliving the summers that I spent with him. He had a lot of qualities that I now value. Qualities that I ignored because I let my hatred for him block out some of the good lessons he had to teach.”
There was silence at the table for several seconds. Jackson’s words had changed the mood. A breeze had swept the table, driving the light repartee before it like so many clouds.
“You had to grow up before you could really examine your relationship with your grandfather,” Pres said. “And finding out which lessons are the valuable ones can take some people their whole lives.”
Lincoln spoke, and there was no hint of sarcasm or cynicism in his words: “When we were kids, I envied you, Jax, because you had no parents. You see, I hated the store my family owned. It seemed to me that I spent the majority of my adolescent life in that damn store. My father and mother never wanted to modernize; they wanted to do business exactly as it was done in China. My father and I used to fight over my going to school. There were days when he wanted me to cut school to work in the store and I wouldn’t. School was one of my major links with the world outside the store. Yes, for a long time I particularly hated my father.”
“That’s not true!” Dan challenged. “I remember you cried at your dad’s funeral. How old were you then, seventeen?”
“I was seventeen, but I cried for different reasons than you think,” Lincoln answered.
“I remember that day because we got there late,” Pres mused. “Wesley’s rundown ’fifty-seven Chevy stalled.”
“We’ve heard this story a hundred times,” interjected Lincoln.
“It’s closer to a million,” Jackson corrected. He turned to Lincoln. “I’m interested in hearing why you envied me, Linc. I didn’t know your father well, but I thought your mother was pretty nice.”
“Yeah,” Dan said. “I want to hear the reasons you cried since you say they’re different than I think.”
“My folks were born in mainland China. They came here to Gold Mountain to make money and eventually return to China as conquering heroes. All my father wanted me to do is learn enough English to run the store. I didn’t want that. I wanted to be an American. I wanted to wear jeans and sneakers and drink Cokes and root beer floats and hang out with the Rangers. My father didn’t like me to spend time with you guys. He used to beat me for hanging out with you guys. He told me that I was trying to run away from my responsibilities. I didn’t see myself that way. My membership in the Rangers was an important element in my perception of myself. You remember when I was sixteen and I had that big fight with my father?”
“Yeah, I remember. You broke his arm with a lead pipe,” Dan confirmed.
“After that, he threw me out. My mother begged her brother to take me in and he did. My uncle was good to me. He was more modern-thinking than my father. He understood the value of education. When my father died, I hadn’t spoken to him since our fight. But I knew his death meant my return to that damned store. That’s why I cried. I knew my mother would need me. While my father was alive, I had escaped.”
“Oh, but we had some damn good times in that store,” Dan said.
“Yeah, Jackson practically lived there during our senior year,” Pres recalled. “Wasn’t that where he got dressed for the senior prom?”
“And tore his pants on the pork rind rack.” Dan began laughing.
“Do you ever wish that you had cleared up the problems between you and your father?” Jackson asked.
“No!” Lincoln’s answer was short and clipped. “His death was the best thing for our family. My sisters, my younger brother, and I all have professional careers. We never would have had that if my father had lived. He would have had us working in that damn store.”
A presence had entered the ring of conversation and caused it to lapse. Elizabeth had come to their table. Jackson rose immediately and greeted her.
“Hello.” Jackson extended his hand. Elizabeth let him take her hand and returned his brief squeeze with one of her own.
“Are these your friends?” she asked. Her contralto seemed to wrap itself around him. She smiled and looked around the table.
“No,” Dan blurted out. “We were all cellmates at Q.”
“Forgive him his friends,” Pres attempted to explain to Elizabeth. “Jackson is not as weird as they would have you believe.”
“I quite agree,” Lincoln said with mock seriousness. “The papers he received when he was released from that maximum-care facility indicated he was quite sane.”
“Would you like to step away from the table and talk?” Jackson asked, hoping to speak to her without the raillery of his friends.
“I don’t have time now,” she said as she looked Jackson directly in the eye. There was only a trace of a smile, but the look in her eyes, a look that was directed solely to him, conveyed her desire for more time to examine their differences and meetings. Without a change of expression, she explained, “My friends want to leave now. I just wanted to come over and apologize for Diane’s going off on you. She’s very upset.” Elizabeth paused and gave Jackson another impish look then said, “It might be fun to see you without your squad of Musketeers.” She pressed a card into his hand. “Call me.”
Lincoln said to Elizabeth without a hint of sarcasm, “You’ve made a good choice. He’s a good friend and brother.”
“He’s my brother too,” Dan chimed in. “But we have different mothers.”
“Don’t listen to them,” Pres interjected. “We’ve all been friends since the fourth grade.”
Elizabeth laughed and said to Jackson, “You have quite a rooting section.”
Jackson smiled. “Sorry for the promotion, but they’re my friends. They’re good people.”
“Don’t be sorry for the promotion,” Elizabeth returned. “Unsolicited, it says something about you, something good.”
“Either that, or we’re in a cult,” Lincoln observed.
“All right! Before you guys begin again,” Elizabeth declared, raising her hands to hold off the potential flood of badinage, “good night, gentlemen.” She turned to go and Dan lumbered to his feet.
He walked with her a few steps as he said, “If you still have any reservations about being alone with this man, I am available as an escort. However, I prefer dinner dates.”
Later, sipping a cognac in the darkness of his house, Jackson felt as if he had pulled out of a small, placid tributary to join the floodwaters of a rapidly changing river of events. Already, in his inner ear, he could hear the rumble of the rapids. He felt no regret, only puzzlement as to the direction his life would take as a result of the forces that had been unleashed.
His thoughts drifted to Elizabeth. It was strange to have a woman enter his life at this time, for it was a time of upheaval, a time for hardening the heart, not opening it. Yet there was something about her he could not deny; her voice had an echo in it, an echo that he remembered in moments of solitude. It wasn’t logical: They had not spent more than twenty minutes together, yet he knew this was serious. He pulled out her card and discovered that she had written her home number on it. Jackson decided on impulse to call her.
As he dialed her number, Jackson wondered what it would have been like to have had someone to love him without reservation; to have had someone sincerely concerned about his welfare; someone with whom he could confide his deepest secrets; someone who would never judge him too harshly. It was a fantasy and he knew it. The phone began to ring.
The ringing stopped and a woman’s husky contralto said, “Good evening.”
Thursday, June 24, 1982
It was seven-thirty in the mor
ning. Serena Baddeaux Tremain looked at her grandson Franklin and was not pleased. She stood behind a newly reupholstered 1930s vintage couch. Her grandson, sitting in an overstuffed chair of the same period, was sipping on what appeared to be a healthily poured drink. Serena wrinkled her nose; she did not like men who needed to drink alcohol in the morning just because they were confronted with problems. She walked slowly around the couch to the coffee table and picked up a polished brass bell, which she rang several times.
Franklin was unable to contain his impatience. He had spent several uncomfortable days worrying. He asked, “What do you think? Who’s he representing? Do you know?”
A middle-aged, brown-skinned woman entered the room in answer to the bell. “Yes, madam?” She spoke with a Hispanic accent. Her straight black hair was pinned up in a neat bun. She was the majordomo of the house staff and ensured that the organization functioned like clockwork. She had an attitude of quiet competence.
“Mrs. Marquez, may I please have a cup of chamomile tea? Very hot, please.” Serena always addressed everyone she employed by their last name and expected the same. She felt it gave them due respect and prevented any unnecessary crossing of social lines.
Mrs. Marquez nodded her head in understanding, and asked Franklin, “Mr. Tremain, would you care for something?”
Franklin waved his drink at her. “I’m fine, thanks.” He turned to face his grandmother. “Why are you making this a mystery?”
His grandmother waited until Mrs. Marquez left the sitting room before she said, “Some topics are best discussed in privacy.” She took a moment to seat herself comfortably on the couch. It irked her that Franklin did not have sufficient insight to see that Braxton was just using him.
“You realize that Braxton hated your grandfather, hated everything about him?”
“Who didn’t? Hell, I hated the man myself! I thought you hated him too.”
Serena took a deep breath. She had spent the better part of her life letting her emotions rather than reality dictate her actions. The irony of what she was about to say to Franklin was not lost on her. “Put aside your feelings for a moment and think of what is best for the family. Doesn’t that make you wonder about his motives? You don’t really think that if you helped him that would in any way mean that he would keep his word, do you?”