by Caryl Rivers
“My vote is aye. The motion carries. This meeting is adjourned.”
James Washington stood up again. “The public hearing was not held. This meeting is illegal.”
“Shut up, nigger!”
“Go home!”
“Shut your mouth!”
Tarbell was already walking from the podium, and he and the other council members vanished through a rear door. Jay looked around at the crowd. The mood was still volatile. He could sense the repressed violence that seemed to hang in the air with the haze of smoke. But he saw that two more uniformed policemen had entered the hall. Their presence, along with the disappearance of the councilors and the outcome of the vote, seemed to be taking the edge off the situation. The angry buzz began to quiet, and people started to drift out into the street. Don and his uncle, James and several others from the coordinating committee walked out together, engrossed in conversation. A few people cast angry looks at them, but no one approached or called out. Jay and Mary stood in front of the hall, watching as the people filed out.
“Round one to the Great White Hope,” Jay said.
“Round two starts tomorrow.”
He looked at his watch. “Do you have to write?”
“Yes. Then I’m going to meet James Washington at his house for a profile I’m doing.”
“Want pictures?”
“Yes. That’s a good idea.”
“He was good tonight. He could be one hell of a speaker, with his size, that deep voice. Funny, isn’t it, how this kind of a thing can bring out talents in people they never knew they had.”
“If a bus driver hadn’t refused a seat to Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King might just be another small-time minister.”
“I wonder if he ever wishes that’s all he was,” Jay said.
“Do you think so?”
“The time is out of joint; O cursed spite, That ever I was born to set it right!”
“Hamlet?”
He nodded. “We had to memorize the whole fucking soliloquy junior year.” He laughed. “I identified with Hamlet like crazy. He had a dead father, couldn’t get it on with girls and he sulked a lot. They called him a Dane, but I knew he was an Irish Catholic.”
“The melancholy mick? It loses something.”
“No, I like it.”
He drove back to the paper and went into the darkroom to print his pictures. He hummed, tunelessly, as he went about his work. He printed the pictures from the meeting and then went to work on a roll he had taken at the community center, when the famous violinist Nathan Rubenstein had given a concert the week before. He had thought he would be bored with the assignment, but once the violinist began to play, Jay was transfixed by him. He was a big, awkward man with truck driver’s hands, and the instrument seemed dwarfed by them. Jay had moved in on the hands with his telephoto lens, capturing the texture of them — the veins knotted and standing high, a contrast to the smooth and burnished wood. He did this sort of story well. Nobody on Life, he thought, did it better. He saw Hedley Donovan, in his office in the Time-Life Building, picking up the phone. “There’s this young guy, I saw his stuff on Rubenstein at a paper in Maryland. Get him. I want him.”
He had that daydream at least three times a week. He’d sent his stuff to Life, along with probably every other photographer in the United States. He sighed and pulled one of the prints out of the developer. He thought, as he often did, about what would have happened to him if he hadn’t been so desperately bored one day in the Army that he signed up for a photography course. It was the accident that changed his life.
Ever since he was a small child, he would look at things and see that they were beautiful — the curve of a leaf against the earth, an old rocking chair against a wall, a sunset. They stirred an emotion in him that lay somewhere between pain and pleasure, and left him edgy. Sometimes he would see something he thought was beautiful, and his eyes would fill with tears. But it was a secret he kept well hidden, especially as he grew older. A man, crying over something because it was beautiful? It made no sense.
His first assignment in the photography course was to shoot a roll of pictures at random. He wandered around, photographing things he liked: an aged, gnarled oak, a black cat against a white wall, the face of a drunk, the headlights of a sports car, a child, covered with mud and laughing. When the instructor taught them how to print and enlarge from their negatives, he stood and watched as the white sheet of paper floated in the pan of developer. The image formed, as if called by black magic from another world, and he trembled with an excitement he could not have named. He was no longer mute. He had found the language he was born to speak. But he had come so close to missing it, and he shivered when he thought how barren his life would be without it. His near miss only heightened his sense of how precarious life could be.
He finished the prints and went upstairs to the city room, amazed to find that two hours had passed; time seemed to stand still when he was printing. Mary had finished writing the meeting story. He picked up his Nikon, and they headed out towards the house where James lived. She explained that he had taken his truck to a friend’s house to pick up a crib for his daughter that the friend was giving him, but he should have returned by the time they arrived.
As Jay drove along the darkened road, he barely saw something coming at him, very fast. He swerved violently to the right, throwing Mary against the side door. Luckily, it was locked.
The car sped past them, its lights out. It disappeared quickly into the night.
“Fucking lunatics!” he swore.
“They almost hit us head-on! Probably tanked full of booze.”
Jay kept driving and in a few minutes pulled in front of James’s two-story, wood-shingled house. The pickup truck was not there.
“Let’s wait inside,” Mary said. “I want to talk to his wife anyhow.”
“As they got out of the car, Jay paused, sniffing the air. “Do you smell something?”
“Smoke. Somebody must be burning something.”
The acrid scent grew more pronounced. Jay looked around to see where it was coming from; then a flicker of light caught his eye.
“Jesus, the back of the house! It’s on fire!”
They both started to run towards the house, but they had taken only a few steps when an entire side of the house exploded in flames, the force of the blast spewing broken glass and pieces of wood and shingles out across the grass.
“Oh, my God!” Mary cried out. The left side of the house was aflame, but the right side had not yet ignited. The front door was on the right side, and Jay ran through it, followed a step behind by Mary. The interior was beginning to fill with smoke, and it was hard to see anything. Jay stood still for an instant, letting his smarting eyes adjust; then he heard a whimpering sound in one corner of the room.
“Over there, Jay!” Mary called out. The old woman was sitting in the wheelchair, coughing and sobbing as she tried to move her chair. Jay lifted her, and she gasped, “The baby. Nina!”
“Where?” Mary asked her.
“Upstairs. Please, upstairs!”
Jay made sure he had a firm grip on her frail body and carried her out the front door. Several of the neighbors had rushed up to the house, and he ran to a man and said, “Take her, she needs help!” and the man took the frail old woman in his arms and carried her towards a house across the street. Then Jay ran back through the door. The interior was completely filled with smoke now, and he looked for Mary. He couldn’t see her, and a wave of pure panic washed over him as he screamed her name.
Then he saw her. She had taken an afghan from the living room and tossed it over her head, and she was trying to go up the stairs, but a sheet of flame was advancing towards her. She took the afghan from her head and tried to beat back the flames, coughing and choking as she did so.
He ran to her and grabbed her shoulders. “You can’t go up there! You can’t!”
“The baby is up there. I have to get up the st
airs.”
She shook him off and tried once again to go up the stairs, but he put his arms around her and dragged her back.
“Karen, if it was Karen!” she said. The stairwell had become a wall of flame, but still she struggled with him. A piece of flaming plaster fell at his feet, and he was starting to choke and gag from the lack of air. He heard the wail of sirens from outside.
“We’re getting out of here!” he shouted, and he half-dragged, half-pulled her back out through the door. A crowd had gathered in front of the house, many of them screaming and sobbing. The firemen were dragging hoses across the lawn.
“A woman and a baby,” Jay gasped. “Upstairs.”
A fireman nodded, grimly. “We know.”
Mary had dropped to her knees on the ground, inhaling huge gulps of fresh air, and Jay ran after the fireman, raising his Nikon. He shot off two rolls of film in rapid fire. The frame house was burning fast now, and the hoses the firemen had trained on the flames seemed to have no effect at all. They had their ladders up to the second floor, but the flames were so intense that they could not get in. The hoses were also being aimed at the houses on either side, and the water sliding off the canted roofs caught the light and splintered it, giving the illusion of a moving, beaded curtain. The water streamed onto the ground, quickly turning the brown earth into mud that sucked at the firemen’s boots. Jay’s mind became an extension of his camera, sorting images, collecting them. For a time, nothing existed for him except the shapes that swam into view before his lens. He heard one of the firemen say that the blaze in the kitchen had ignited the gas line to the stove and that had caused the explosion.
Finally, he lowered his camera and turned around to look for Mary. Her eyes, he saw, were riveted on the upstairs window where the flames twisted and danced. He thought of what would happen to flesh and eyes and hair in that inferno. In an act of will, he forced the image from his mind. He looked at her and saw that a trickle of blood was running down her face.
“You’re hurt!” he said, alarmed, and he took out his handkerchief and wiped off the blood. There was a small gash on her forehead; a piece of flying glass had cut her, but she had not even been aware of it.
“Jay,” she said, seeming not to notice that he was wiping blood from her face, “the car. They set it. They set the fire.”
He had forgotten all about the car with its lights off.
“My God,” he said.
She kept looking at the window. “They were in the room right over the kitchen.”
“Are you all right?”
“I’m all right. It’s murder. Those people in the car, they killed them.”
Jay felt a hand on his arm, and he turned to see Don.
“James! Where’s James!”
“He’s not here.”
“Thank God! Nina? The baby?”
Jay said nothing. He looked at the house. He turned back to Don and saw the dawning horror in his eyes.
“Oh, God, no!”
“We tried. Mary tried to get up the stairs, it was all on fire. There was no chance.”
“I should have been here. If I’d been here!”
“You might be dead too. It exploded. It just exploded.”
Mary had been standing quiet, listening, but now she looked at Don and said, “A car almost hit us on the way. Going very fast, lights off.”
Jay suddenly remembered what Don had said: “When white people want to kill black people, they come fast and they come quiet.”
Don’s face was slack with pain as he looked at the burning house.
“He gave his address,” he said. “I didn’t know he was going to do that. Why didn’t I tell him?”
“Don’t,” Mary said.
“It was one of the things we never did in the South. Never let them know where you’re staying. I got careless. If I had known he was going to do it —”
Mary reached out and touched his shoulder. “It’s not your fault. Anyone could have found his address in the telephone book. It’s not your fault.”
“He’s here, Don,” said a voice, and Jay turned to see the Reverend Johnson, tugging at his nephew’s arm. The two men walked quickly across the yard, and Jay followed them, his camera raised. James ran towards the house, and he would have plunged into the burning structure if two firemen had not restrained him.
Jay was very close to James, but the man neither saw nor heard him. His face hung in the orange light, eyes wide in disbelief, jaw slack. Then the face stiffened, seemed to freeze and stretch taut, the eyes turning to slits. He tried to break free from the grip of the firemen, but they held him firmly. Finally he stopped struggling and let out a howl, a sound that sliced through Jay; he felt as if someone had hit him in the stomach with a hammer.
Abruptly, James turned away from the house, ran up to the fire engine and began to beat savagely on the hood, making no sound except for a rasping in his throat. His fist thumped again and again against the metal. Then his body went limp against the hood, and the minister and his nephew stepped up, put their arms around his shoulders and led him away.
Jay lowered the camera and once again turned to look for Mary. He found her talking to the fire chief. He waited for her to finish and then said, “I’ve got to get back.”
“I’ll go. I’ve got what I need.”
“They’ll remake page one. We’ll have to hurry.”
Back at the Blade, Jay went right to the darkroom and developed and printed the pictures. He took them to Milt, and the city editor asked him to lay out a centerfold spread of pictures of the fire. He did so, happy to occupy his mind with the mechanics of shape and size and cropping. It was only when it was done that he realized his hands were shaking.
Milt came over, looked at the layout and said, “Great pictures, Jay. I’m sending them out on the AP wire. This one wraps up Photographer of the Year for you, buddy.”
He realized, with a twinge of shame, that he had already thought of the state competition. Did James’s wife and child have to die so that he could have a little silver plaque? What were the ethics of profiting from someone else’s pain? What right did he have to invade the man’s private agony, to spread it over a newspaper page so a hundred thousand people could spill their morning coffee on it? Would that horror really let people see what hatred could do? He hoped so, for he knew if he had to do it again, he would not lower his camera. Even when he was so close to the man’s agony that he could feel it, he would keep on shooting.
He made a final check on the layout, and then he went into the city room, where Mary was finishing the last page of her copy. She wore a flesh-colored Band-Aid on her forehead. They walked out to the parking lot and got into his car.
“Just drive, Jay,” she said. “Anywhere.”
He drove along the back roads, while she rested her head against his shoulder, and then he pulled off on the side of a wooded road and took her in his arms. He wanted to blot out the images in his mind with the feel of her. He held her, not gently, and was surprised to find that her body answered his in kind. Her tongue explored him with a desperate ardor, while his hands found the warm flesh beneath her blouse. They spoke not a word but hurled their bodies at each other like gladiators. He carried her out of the car and laid her on the ground, pinning her beneath him, and she dug her nails into his back and bit his lip like a frenzied animal. The pain her teeth and nails inflicted seemed more like pleasure; the dividing line between them had vanished. He wanted to love her, hurt her, make her feel every sensation that existed in the world. He drove himself into her, battering her, feeling her answering movement, as violent as his own. He heard her cry out, and his own release was sharp and explosive. He rolled over onto his back, feeling the damp earth and leaves against his bare skin. She put her head on his bare chest, and they lay that way, not speaking, for a long time.
“We’re alive,” she said, finally.
“We’re going to live a long, long time,” he said. “I promise y
ou. I promise.” As he said it, with the feel of her against him and the smell of the damp earth, he believed it was true.
It was only later, sitting in his bed, sleepless, smoking a stale cigarette, that he was afraid. His hands were trembling again. He was not a coward. He was brave, reckless sometimes, in a physical sense. He’d broken an ankle in a parachute jump as an Army photographer, overcoming primal terror to hurl himself into the void; he’d cracked a rib photographing a stock car race from the front seat when they hit a wall. It was only with his secret, sheltered self that he was timid. That was where you could get clobbered.
He remembered how his father had looked in the months when he knew he was going to die, and he thought of the frozen horror on James’s face. He was familiar enough with pain to know it was not a searing flash that came and went. It was a gnawing presence, and every way you turned, around every corner, you confronted it. If you loved someone, you extended the coastline where pain could get at you. He thought of James’s face, and he groped for the words of a prayer. He had not prayed in a long time. “Dominus vobiscum. The Lord be with you. Et cum spiritu tuo. And with thy spirit.”
He lit another cigarette, inhaled, thought of how he’d felt when he went back into the house and couldn’t find her, for a minute. Even the memory started his hands shaking again.
I don’t want to love her.
If he ran away, he wouldn’t have to be afraid. If you had nothing to lose, no one could take anything away.
I don’t want to love her.
There was still time to turn away. He wasn’t committed, he’d made no pledge. It would be so easy, to turn away now, before things had gone too far. Pretty soon now, there would be a bridge he’d have to cross. They’d not spoken of it, but it was there. He’d have to either cross it or run like hell. He was good at running like hell. And she had a child. What did he know about raising kids? But if he wanted to cut out, he’d have to do it soon; it was getting so intense. It was wonderful — oh yes, it was still wonderful — but in the end, he’d go. He knew it. He always had.
Not loving enough isn’t a sin.