by Stan Hayes
“Right the first time! Remember me telling y’all about a guy who tried to shoot up the hotel cafe getting killed by a runaway truck?”
“Uh- yeah- had something to do with that horny little cook, didn’t it?”
“Right again!” The wagon took them up a slight hill and through a hundred-and-eighty degree turn past one of the golf course’s greens. “Now- see that nice sloping meadow behind the bathhouse?”
“Um-hmm.”
“That used to be the City of Bisque’s swimming pool.”
“Ooh, yeah. I remember now. Instead of integrating it, they filled it in and grassed it over.”
“Yup. Behind a very thin smokescreen of a deteriorating facility; a sanitation hazard that the city fathers just couldn’t find the money to replace with a new pool.”
“Damn! Where do the kids go to swim?”
“Well, they have a choice of the Elks Club or the country club. Members and guests, that is.”
“Which is to say, white people.”
“Some white people.”
“What about the blacks?”
“Whatever pond, lake or river that they don’t get run out of, is pretty much the story. See why I want to get the fuck outa here?”
“Yes,” she said, “I believe I do.”
“A lot of people in this little burg’re gonna have to die off before anybody with skin much darker’n mine’s gonna have more’n a snowball’s chance in hell of living a decent life here,” Jack grated as they drove past the park’s softball fields, glancing at the father-and-son pepper game that, besides golf, appeared to be the park’s sole activity that late afternoon. “Now, just hold on for a coupla minutes and I’ll show you where Ralph Williams lives.”
Returning to the intersection of the park’s entry and exit roads, Jack drove the Buick off the paved surface and onto the extension of the exit road, a reasonably well-graded dirt road that looked to Linda as though it had regular use. “Where’s this take us?”
“Among other places, past the county’s biggest employer, other than the textile mills. Hamm Foods. Ralph and his mother live right across the road from it.”
The road angled off slightly to the right as they topped a small rise, and Linda saw the corner post of a high cyclone fence, one side of which paralleled the road as it led down to the paved entry to a gatehouse. A collection of buildings, all but one of them one-story structures and some little more than sheds, stretched out for some distance beyond it. “That’s Hamm Foods,” Jack said with a wave of his hand in its direction, “And that’s Chez Williams over there on the left, fourth one down.” The house looked to be in somewhat better shape than its neighbors, with a fairly recent coat of white paint, bright green shutters and a walkway of a row of octagonal paving tiles, each cut into the bank to provide a level walkway up to a wider expanse of the same tiles that led to the front porch. Sparse fescue, awaiting spring’s greening cue, straggled down the bank toward the shallow ditch that separated it from the road. “That’s his car.” A shiny black 1957 Chevrolet BelAir hardtop sat gathering dust in front of the house.
“Want to stop in for a minute?” she asked him.
“Naah, not a good idea. The neighbors’d give his mama hell for weeks if Whitey paid a visit.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Unfortunately not. Like a lot of other things, segregation works both ways.”
“Well that just sucks,” she fumed.
“Yes it does. If the young ones, the good ones anyway, get a chance to get out of here, they take it and never come back. Like Ralph’s little brother, Ziggy.”
“The ex-Marine,” she said.
“That’s the one. The only Korean War vet from Bisque to win the Silver Star. Hell. Far as I know, he’s the only Bisque vet, from any war, to win one. And nobody ever won anything more important, that I know of. But you’ll never hear anyone of the white persuasion say a word about it.”
“I remember you and Mose talking about him when you first showed up down in Coconut Grove. Mose liked him a lot.”
“Me too. You might say we grew up together. Sort of. He’s three-four years older than me. We oughta run over to Atlanta one day and look his ass up.”
“D’you suppose his neighbors’ll give him hell if we do?”
“Could be, if, as Ralph says, ‘he hangin’ out wif dem uppity black power niggas.’ Be nice to see him, anyway, him bein’ a budding recording artist and all.”
“That would be interesting,” she said. “Think we could do it without gettin’ into trouble?”
Jack glanced over at her, grinning. “Well, most anything interesting’s bound to involve a little trouble. I’ll ask Ralph to get hold of him and see how he wants to handle it.”
“If he wants to handle it.”
“Oh, hell. It’s Ziggy. And we’re homefolks. At least I am. It’s goin’ on three years since we’ve seen each other. We’ll work sump’m out.”
“Hey, here’s an idea,” she said.
“What?”
“Tell ’im you’re hangin’ out with a Yankee bitch. That might pique his interest.”
“It might very well do that. You pique interest like nobody’s business.”
A series of lefts and rights that took them past a public housing project and a mixture of light commercial and scrub residential properties ended with a left turn into Don’s Dog House. Don had prospered, at least enough to have built onto the place and paved the parking lot, leaving patrons in Jack’s age group with a fast-fading memory of the bumpy, graveled onetime corner of a cow pasture that preceded it. The lot, now more than double its former size, was relatively empty, and would be for several hours if, as Jack suspected, Bisque High was playing basketball at home. The dozen or so patrons’ cars that were there at the moment clustered in twos and threes in various spots, the afternoon having warmed sufficiently so that over half of them sported curb-service trays on driver’s-side windows that were slid down to a greater or lesser degree. Jack nosed the Buick into a spot next to the broad concrete porch that had been a major feature of the remodeling job. “No point in making ’em walk any farther than necessary,” said Jack, “Unless you want to park over there under the big tree and make out.”
“This’ll be fine, Romeo,” she said as Jack toot-tooted the horn for service. Within seconds, a white-coated figure in a high-walled cardboard cap emblazoned with “Tom’s Potato Chips” on each side exited from the right of the building, turned left and walked quickly down the stairs that were used primarily by the “curb boys”. Jack eased his window down as the young white-clad black man approached him from behind the car. “How ’bout it, James?”
“Ain’ nothin’ hap’nin’, Jack,” James said with a broad grin. “Where you been so long?”
“Florida. Sold that old Buick to a guy in Miami.”
“Mm-mm. Wisht I coulda bought it. You done got that thang lookin’ good.”
Jack laughed. “Yeah, it did look good, but I spent way too much gettin’ it that way. It’us all I could do to get my money out of it. You’da looked good in it, too.”
“You ain’t wrong. Well, whachu an’ the lady gonna have?”
“Just a setup right now. Club soda. An’ James, this’s Linda Green. Met her down there, and caught a ride back with ’er. Linda, this’s the famous James.”
Bending down through the window, James shot a bashful “Hey” in Linda’s direction.
“Hey yourself, James. What’re you famous for?”
Still looking at Linda, James cocked his head in her direction. “He ain’ tole you?”
“No.”
Jack laughed. “You know that Harley sidecar rig in the barn? I had the sidecar off of it three-four years ago, ridin’ the bike around by itself. Stopped in here one evenin’; James’d been pesterin’ me for awhile to take him for a ride, so when I saw him in the lot I said “Hop on, James!” and off we went.”
James, getting into the spirit of the moment, said, “He useta ride by he
anh standin’ straight up on that damn mo’sickle. People be sayin’ ‘looka dat fool,’ and evva time he do it he make me wanta do it too. A lil’ bit, anyway. Den he ride up dat day and say ‘git on,’ an’ fo’ I know it I be on de damn thang and we be roarin’ down de highway lak a bat outa hell. Los’ my hat fo’ we’us outa de lot.”
“Just a nice little air-it-out ride,” Jack said with a broad grin. “Tell her about the big finish.”
“I holler at him, ‘take my ass back,’” James said, his eyes bugging out as they must have on the night in question, “I done had all th’ ride I could stand. Den he wheel back in d’pokkin’ lot, TOO fas’, and de damn thing get away from ’im. I goes one way, he go anudder way, an’ dat dam mo’sickle go any damn way it want to. Peoples jumpin’ all over d’place gettin’ out de way.”
“It was just a little ‘low-side,’” Jack said, still grinning, “But it made you The Famous James. Hell, they even named a motorcycle after you.”
James looked at Linda, his face suddenly solemn. “Den try ta fool a po’ nigga, bringin’ dat damn lil’ ol’ motahbike out heanh t’show me. Say ‘looka heanh, James, it be done got De Famous James on de gas tank.’ I been seein’ dem damn thangs roun’ town a LONG time. Dey from Angland er someplace. Cain’ fool DIS nigga lak dat.”
“But you ARE famous, James.”
“Shoot. I be back with dat set-up.”
As they approached the bottom of their second round of Turkish tobacco-tinted scotch and sodas, a couple appeared at the head of the concrete steps. “Well I’ll be damned,” Jack said in a voice that he’d use to acknowledge a flat tire.
“What?”
“Terry Marsh.”
“Oh. The one you had such a hard time getting to suck your dick.”
“Shit. Forgot I told you about that. Well, here she comes.” he pushed the button to lower the passenger-side window. “Hey, Terry.”
Tossing the smallest of smiles at Linda, Terry said, “Hello, Jack. How are you?”
“Fine, thanks. Say hi to Linda Green.”
“Linda. Hi. Both of you, say hi to John Richardson.”
Following the “hi” chorus, Jack asked, “Still in school?”
“Oh, yes, for a little while yet. I’ll finish my masters in June. The same time as John finishes law school. You coming back?”
“Still thinking about it.”
“You better, or they’ll draft your butt,” she said, sounding as though that prospect didn’t displease her at all. “Well, we’ve gotta run. Nice to meet you,” she said in Linda’s general direction. Taking her by the elbow, the lawyer-to-be steered her to a dark green Ford Skyliner and tucked her inside.
“Hm,” mused Jack.
“What is it?”
“Looks like one of those hardtop convertibles. The one where the hardtop actually goes down.”
“Is that a big deal?”
“Naah, unless you like a trunk full of top. I was just wondering if it ’us her daddy’s.”
“Looks new,” she said as the car rolled out of the lot to their left. “The only law student with a new car that I ever knew had a U.S. Senator for a daddy.”
“Yeah. And Terry’s daddy’s a big Ford guy. The first time I got her to blow me was in his ’53 Merc hardtop.”
“You sly devil. Fix me a fresh one; we’ll toast your success.”
“Comin’ up, but we’re drinkin’ to you. If you hadn’t done me when I was a little nipper, I wouldn’ta known how nice it was.”
“So high school wasn’t the sexual desert for you that it was for me. Glad I could help you out. And the two of you carried on into college, right?”
“About halfway. She did her junior year in Europe, and that pretty well closed us out. We didn’t see each other much after that; she had to get caught up with her sorority socializin’ and I didn’t buy into that program at all. Occasionally, one or the other of us’d get loaded and make the late night phone call.”
“Uh, listen. Could we skip Don’s haute cuisine tonight?”
“I guess so. Whacha wanta eat?”
The question drew an ironic, pitying smile. “Now I’m gonna make you beg.”
4 SUNDAY RIDE
Leaving Linda to sleep in, Jack made coffee and walked up the hill to Chez Jock. Switching on the lights, he saw Nick Charles sitting astride the old Harley sidecar rig, greeting him with a jaunty wave. “Mornin’, Jack,” he said, bouncing gently on the saddle. “Just couldn’t resist sitting on this thing; never had the chance to ride one. This is a lot like the one that Pat Flaherty rode when he pulled Mrs. Charles and me over on the Golden Gate Bridge in the first Thin Man. Without the sidecar, of course. Remember?”
Speechless, Jack stared at the faultlessly-tailored Thin Man, who had selected a Homburg, dark grey pinstriped suit, grey gloves and matching spats for the occasion. A crimson cravat, shot through with tiny yellow polka-dots, mitigated the outfit’s potential somberness.
Taking a deep breath and exhaling, Jack tried his voice. “Flx?”
“Call me Nick, willya? I told ya, the bird’s history. We’ve gotta move on, old chum. Besides, I went to no small amount of trouble to achieve Nick-ness. I hazarded the guess that when you said William Powell, you were really thinking about Nick Charles. You even said ‘You know, the Thin Man.’, when I said ‘William Powell?’. Even though the murder victim, not he, was the eponymous character. Anyway, whad’dya think?”
“Hell, I can’t think. This is too much. This is way too much.”
“Oh, you’ll get used to it. I’ve gotten very comfortable in here already. This act needed a touch of class.”
“Act? You’re calling what you do with me an ACT? What the hell do you mean by that?”
“Well, that’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about. What would you call looking, and sounding, like something other than what you really are? Seems to me that’s an act. What else would you call it?”
“Shit. Hell. I don’t know. ‘Other than what you really are’? What the hell are you, really, then? Don’t you fuck with me like this, Flx.”
“Nick. And I’m not fucking with you, buster. Actually, I showed up this morning to clear some things up with you that’re a wee bit overdue.”
Walking over to the Vincent, Jack threw a leg over it and sat. Now, instead of looking all this nattiness squarely in the eye, he could glance over at this new factor in his life at intervals, just as he would if they’d been riding somewhere. “Like what?”
“Like leveling with you about who I am, where I came from and why I’m here. Little things like that.”
This Broadway patter, Jack thought, absently moving the Vincent’s ignition advance and choke levers back and forth, is gonna take some getting used to. To say nothing of the spats. “Glad I’ve got a comfortable seat,” he said. “Press on, old boy, by all means.”
“Thank you.” Letting a brief, ironic smile escape from under the pencil-line moustache, Nick continued. “First, I’m sure you’ve wondered what I’ve meant when I’ve told you now and then that I’m as human as you are. You’ve accepted that in good humor, along with the feathers and trans-dimensionality that makes it hard to believe. I’ve never had the trouble with you that I’ve had with some other ah, people, trying to get their hands on me, asking a lot of damn fool questions, hell, even throwing things at me, instead of just calmly listening to what I have to say, as you’ve always done. And because you’ve taken me ‘on faith,’ as it were, I allowed myself to put off telling you my little story. That, however, can’t go on any longer. Forgive me if I sound like a bad novelist, but serious challenges await you over the horizon, and you should have no doubts, subconscious or otherwise, concerning why I’ve been with you all these years.” He held up a grey-gloved hand as Jack started to speak. “Hold it for just a minute, pal. Let me get to the first turn; which is to say- forgive the cliché- that I come to you from a time far into the future.”
Jack took a long pause before he said, “Can�
��t say it surprises me all that much.” He noticed for the first time that a miniature of the Flx figure that Flx/Nick had given him was perched in the buttonhole of Nick’s lapel. “There weren’t that many explanations for all that flying through walls. The first one I decided to throw out was that I was crazy as hell; the next was the standard ‘ghost’ theory, since moaning and chain-rattling weren’t part of the- excuse the expression- ‘act.’ I remembered something Mose told me a long time ago; ‘Forget ghosts, holy or otherwise. You hear “ghost,” it means you’re listenin’ to an idiot, or to somebody who wants to put his hand in your pocket.’ Besides, you were way too real from day one, even though I never felt like I ought to try to touch you.”
“Spoken like the bright boy you are, but let me get into this ‘realness’ a little deeper with you. Remember how, in a couple of those Republic movie serials that you loved so much, the villain would sometimes sit in a special chair and be changed into someone else? Or how someone would get into a ‘chamber’ and be transported from one place to another?”
“Sure. Remember in The Black Widow, when the head bad guy demands to see Hitomu for himself, because he’d always been zapped into the daughter’s lair and was seen only by her. He said, ‘You’re asking us to believe in a Supreme Leader who’s brought here from the other side of the world by some super-scientific Rube Goldberg device?’ Then Hitomu materializes, and the henchman doesn’t know whether to shit or go blind. Finally, when he tries to shake hands and says ‘How you do, Mr. Hitomu? My name’s –whatever it was-.’ And Hitomu stiffs him; he says something like ‘I am already aware of your existence,’ and the bad guy’s seriously pissed off; I’ll never forget how the look on his face went from ‘may I please kiss your ass?’ to ‘if only I had the upper hand...’”
Nick grinned. “Tony Warde. He was Killer Kane in Buck Rogers, too; his big moment. Well, you’ll be seeing more of that; today’s movies and television’ll be able to make it seem a lot more real than those old shows did. What I’m getting at is that, by the time I came along, doing it- for real- had gotten to be sort of old hat.”