by M. J. Bosse
Henry shook his head ruefully and smiled. “Man, you’re good, you really are.”
They sat in silence again, and I returned to the kitchen, not wanting to look at them. I mean, I never had liked Henry, but he was close to Virgil, and it was awful seeing them the way they were at that table, not knowing what to do, what to say, how to handle this thing. From the kitchen, I listened to the silence and waited. Then I heard Virgil say, “You killed a good man,” in a voice that didn’t seem to have any emotion.
“I didn’t hate him, except for those few moments.”
“That was all it took.”
“All right, then. So what happens now? You going to turn me over to white justice?”
I waited through the long silence, like, holding my breath. I heard Virgil again, only this time his voice was low, gentle, full of emotion. “We’ve been close,” he said. “What was I? About seventeen? And you twelve? I’d seen you around the block, already a big kid.”
“And mean.” And I heard Henry laugh slightly.
“I think I was reading on the stoop that day.”
“That’s right. Sitting on the stoop with your nose in a book. I was jiving around, curious about you, why nobody ever leaned on you for being so weird, man. It took a long time before I swallowed my pride and walked up and said, ‘You dumb or somethin’, what you readin’ that book for, man?’ That was the beginning.”
“You would have done better not to listen to me.”
“Maybe you’re right. You don’t accept reality. You’re a dreamer, man, and you got me to dreaming too; and now you’re thinking of turning me in.”
“I’m thinking of it. He was my brother too, and you wiped him out, Henry. Can I forget that?”
“That’s what you decide. It’s your thing. Do you turn me in or don’t you? Decide for both of us.”
I looked in from the kitchen to where they sat at the table. They were looking right at each other, absolutely motionless like a frieze. I mean, it was incredible, because there sat Henry, who could sweep Virgil away with one blow of that lethal hand and who was waiting for Virgil to say whether or not he would go to prison for murder. Everything that Henry had ever learned in Harlem about survival suddenly didn’t count. He was living in Virgil’s world, going by its laws. Under this spell he was ready to abide by rules of justice and honor that maybe even Virgil didn’t fully understand. I mean, incredible, but that was the way it was. As long as Virgil held him in this spell, Henry would do exactly what Virgil told him. “Go to prison, Henry.” Henry would go to prison. “Forget it ever happened, Henry.” Henry would forget. But how long would the spell last? If Henry shook it off, what would happen between them then? I wanted to shout at Virgil, “Quick! Decide!” And I thought crazily of the Magic Coin.
There was a loud knock at the door.
We all turned at the loud knocking, and for the three of us the spell was broken. I went to the door and opened it, never thinking of the safety chain, possibly because the two men were with me, so I just flung it wide open, and Mr. Ray Hack walked in, brushed past me, and stood blinking in the middle of the room. In spite of the heat, he was wearing a trench coat. “Lieutenant Jefferson,” he said.
Virgil sat there rigidly; so did Henry—the manuscript between them, its pages stirred a little by a breeze coming in the window.
“Corporal Hodapp,” Virgil said.
“You remember me, Lieutenant?”
“You were my point man a couple of times on patrol.”
“I sure was.” Ray Hack or Corporal Hodapp began grinning and glanced at me. “A cute chick, Lieutenant. And she’s smart. Didn’t tell me nothing.”
Virgil didn’t reply.
“I been talking lately to one of those CIA guys.”
“I imagine so,” Virgil said.
“Who’s he?” Ray Hack gestured with his hand in his coat pocket at Henry.
“Only a friend.”
“What’s that?” Hack was looking at the manuscript.
“Some schoolwork.”
“Yeah?” Ray Hack’s grin got very broad. He was sweating profusely in the trench coat, and I almost asked like a good hostess from Omaha, whether he wanted to take it off.
“This CIA guy,” the ex-soldier said, “he told me a lot of things.”
“I imagine he did,” Virgil said icily.
“Told me you weren’t playing fair.”
“What does that mean?”
“You’re trying to blackmail guys.”
“Well, Mr. Smith is wrong.”
“Yeah?” Hack took his left hand out of the trench coat and wiped the sweat from his brow. “What I wanta know is what a guy’s supposed to do if you try to blackmail him and he hasn’t got any money.”
“Corporal, I’m not trying to blackmail anybody.”
“So then you gone patriotic, huh? Going to turn guys in just to please Uncle Sam, huh?”
“Dong Nai means nothing to me anymore.”
“I didn’t say nothing about Dong Nai.” Hack grinned triumphantly, as if he had caught Virgil in a lie. “I didn’t mention Dong Nai. You did!” He pointed accusingly at Virgil. Henry slid his chair back as if to get up. “Stay where you are, black boy,” Hack said. And then he brought his right hand out of the trench coat. He was holding some kind of ugly-looking gun.
“I don’t have money, Lieutenant,” Hack said, “and if I did, you niggers wouldn’t get it.”
“I told—”
“Shut your fucking mouth.” Hack pointed the gun steadily at Virgil. I mean, the way he pointed it made the thing seem like another finger, part of his hand, an extension of his whole arm.
But then instead of watching Hack’s gun, I found myself watching Henry. I was watching him get bigger there at the table. His shoulders seemed to grow, and his hands too, where they lay on the tabletop like two big lumps of coal. His head, however, sort of got smaller, hunching back into his neck like a turtle drawing back into its shell. Henry looked bunched, tight, coiled, and energized. He looked more and more like a projectile, aimed and ready. Don’t, I thought; don’t, Henry. Let Virgil handle it.
“Shove over that thing,” Hack ordered, and with his free hand he pointed to the manuscript. Virgil pushed it to the edge of the dining table, and Hack stepped toward it, moving slowly, his eyes shifting from Virgil to Henry as coldly and unblinkingly as a snake’s. I guess it’s what they learn in Vietnam. He bent slightly over the pages and quickly squinted at them. He started flipping pages without failing to keep Virgil and Henry in sight. I don’t know how long this went on, but I remember hearing through an open window somewhere the soft sweet voices of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young.
“What is this, some code?” Hack said finally, bending lower, and the word “code” hardly left his mouth before things began to happen. Henry was up and moving through the short distance that separated them, a blur of motion, a big dark object hurtling through the air, and the gun, that extension of Ray Hack’s arm and brain, smoothly turned as if on an invisible greased track, and jumped only when it fired.
The impact sent Henry in the opposite direction. Only a terrific force could have stopped such a big man in midair and sent him back, but the bullet did; it hit him like a truck, entered him when he couldn’t have been more than a foot from the gun’s barrel, pushing him back over the chair he had been sitting in and hard against the wall. Then the gun moved slightly and smoothly to point at Virgil, and for a moment I was sure the man was going to shoot again.
The great noise of the shot was still ringing in my ears when I heard Virgil say, in a voice of astonishing calm, “Corporal, you win.” That probably stopped Ray Hack from firing again. If Virgil hadn’t said something, and I mean something absolutely right, something that would arrest Hack’s attention, I am sure that the ex-soldier would have shot again—first Virgil and then me.
“You win,” Virgil repeated, his hands on the table, absolutely motionless. “It’s in code.”
The gun pointed at him
as if it were fixed in space. I think I was too scared to faint.
“We can go partners,” Virgil said. “There’s real money in it.”
“Not for you, you black bastard.”
“Enough to make us both a fortune.”
I thought I heard sounds on the staircase outside, but the gunshot was still ringing and echoing in my ears.
“I knew I was right,” Ray Hack said grimly. “Blackmail.” His head turned slightly, as if he too heard noises. He gathered up the manuscript in one hand.
“Somebody’s coming,” Virgil said. “Get out the window and contact me later.”
“I’m going to give it to you,” Hack said, but then the sound on the stairs was unmistakable. Footsteps coming fast.
“Corporal!” Virgil said. “Get out the window!”
Again I was sure Hack would fire. But maybe the response to Virgil’s tone of command and the sharp “Corporal!” was too deeply ingrained in Hack’s consciousness for him to do anything but obey. He moved toward the window, and at that moment I heard someone at the door; turning, I saw the doorknob move; and when I looked at Hack again he was climbing through the window onto the fire escape, one hand holding the gun and the other the manuscript.
Just as he disappeared up the fire escape, two men burst into the room—one of them Mr. Smith, who went right past us to glance cautiously out the window. Then he climbed onto the fire escape. Virgil and the other man knelt beside Henry for a moment, and then the man followed Mr. Smith out the window.
In Henry’s red shirt, the hole didn’t look very big or ugly. There was only a little blood oozing through the torn fabric, which was dark at the edges, as if burned. But Henry’s eyes were open, staring out at us in a strange way that reminded me of Mr. Purdy’s kewpie dolls. Henry was kind of propped up against the wall, next to the overturned chair, and looked as if he were thinking intently about something. He looked tired, as if after a hot walk in the sun. I watched Virgil reach out with an expertly practiced motion and close Henry’s eyes. How many times Virgil must have done a thing like that. Sweat had broken out on Virgil’s face; it seemed actually to spurt, and I felt myself wet through.
Suddenly from above there were gunshots. I don’t know how many—maybe a half dozen in quick succession—and then, looking up from Henry to the window, I saw a flapping shape go by, flashing past the window too quickly for me to see who it was.
Virgil and I rushed to the window and leaned out, and together we watched sheets of manuscript go zigzagging down, some of them, and others scud like leaves in the stiff wind across the rooftops of Manhattan, carried along as if God or Fate or something had chosen a brisk day for this to happen, the delicate pages turning and slipping through the air, whipped up in funnels to fan out the way piles of leaves do in October. And four flights beneath us, below the swirling papers, where a crowd was already gathering, lay Ray Hack in his trench coat, everything about him all bent at wrong angles. Suddenly I heard a tiny mournful sound behind me, like a soft whewwwwwww, from Henry’s direction.
“He’s still alive!” I cried, turning to see Henry’s shirt running blood now.
“No,” Virgil said. “It’s the air going out of the wound.”
I fainted.
*
As Virgil says, all there was to show for two men killed was the loss of an important historical document. Sure, the CIA managed to collect stray pages; but most of the manuscript was on the rooftops and in the alleyways of Manhattan, blown into the East River and beyond to Queens and Brooklyn.
Maybe no one will ever know what actually took place at that secret meeting of American and Russian a hundred years ago. What had Perry had in mind? Had he and his Russian counterpart been trying to mastermind some kind of military control of the Pacific? And without the knowledge of Washington? If that seems farfetched, nothing ever really is in diplomacy, especially military diplomacy, Virgil says.
At any rate, the CIA found enough of the manuscript to support Virgil’s claim that Lieutenant Stuart’s package had been of value to historians, not to secret agents. The case was closed. Lieutenant Stuart was cleared of suspicion of attempting to blackmail members of Alpha Company. Had the CIA taken Ray Hack—that is, Corporal Hodapp—alive, they might have got what they were looking for, an account of things that had happened at Dong Nai. I bet Mr. Smith was demoted or something for having lost his cool on the fire escape, for having shot the man in self-defense. Very bad form, defending yourself.
We had cleared Donald Stuart’s name, Virgil points out, and that had been our bag. Defending Don’s honor had been something I had never really understood. I mean, I had followed Virgil, that was all. But looking back on it now, I am proud of what I did.
The newspapers worked up a few columns about a Greenwich Village shooting, but the facts were obviously doctored by the CIA. Smith and his colleague were called “plainclothesmen,” which implied that they were city cops; I bet that made them wince. Henry was merely an “innocent bystander” who just happened to get shot, and of course Ray Hack was a “dope addict” on the rampage. It all fitted neatly, and Virgil made no effort to set the facts straight. That way, Henry was never implicated in Don Stuart’s murder.
According to Virgil’s own lights, perhaps his failure to clarify Henry’s part in that murder was against law and order. But I’m glad he didn’t do anything. I mean, wouldn’t it have been a little frustrating for Virgil to confront those secret agents and city cops and judges and all and patiently try to explain to them how Henry had acted upon an impulse of anger that had started filling inside him ever since he could take two steps down a Harlem street? How would Virgil look to those people if he then suggested that what had finally set Henry off was a nineteenth-century diary kept by an insubordinate naval officer from Boston? I think of Don Stuart turning over in his grave and yelling out, “For Christssake, Virg, let it be!”
Anyway, all the Mr. Smiths wanted was swift public dismissal of the whole affair. They had handled the thing pretty badly: uncovered nothing about Dong Nai, and shot up a neighborhood. They were happy to see it all forgotten.
Of course, Virgil will never forget. According to his own like strict code of ethics, he had been responsible for both deaths. Sometimes when he is especially silent, when he lights up a pipe and gloomily watches the smoke rise from it, I figure he is thinking of his two brothers and how he had somehow led them to that terrible Sunday through the not-so-innocent means of scholarship.
Sometimes I wonder how Virgil would have finally decided—I mean, just before Ray Hack came into the apartment in a trench coat. Would Virgil have turned Henry in? I wonder if Virgil knows yet, because I have never asked him. It isn’t time. I figure that Virgil’s mind is filled with Dons and Henrys and Amos Browns of Lynchburg, Virginia, and Bostonian men of conscience, and fourteenth-century English power struggles, and nineteenth-century American militarism, and his own Harlem boyhood, and somehow these things all mix together. It must be difficult to be an idealistic black scholar.
But Virgil is a Taurus, stubborn as hell, and he just goes on. One day recently he talked of a new project now that he has finished his dissertation. He is going to switch from English to American history for a while and pursue a full-length study of the history of minority military service. This will occupy five or ten years, he figures, and cover the military experiences of blacks, Latins, and Orientals during three centuries of American warfare.
That is one thing I told my parents: how stubborn and idealistic he is. I told them in a long phone call that I paid for myself. I spent twenty dollars to tell them I was living with this black guy I dearly loved, that I didn’t know what to expect in the future, but that I had learned a lot about courage and perseverance and tenderness from him. And they listened, and my mother never once called me “Judith.”
All she really said was, “At least, I know where you are now.” I guess I don’t give her credit.
For some reason, I cried after the phone call. When Virgil
got home I was still crying, and I told him that I had called my parents. He liked that, I could tell from his expression, but he said nothing.
I got out the wine jug and poured us two glasses. Raising mine, I proposed a toast. “To us,” I said and added, “and to Martin and Linda.”
“What?”
“It just occurred to me. Martin and Linda. You know like getting them together.”
“That would be a combination,” Virgil said with a laugh.
“Wouldn’t it be, though. And she could help him with his writing. Think of her contribution to Braless in Gaza.”
“I never thought of you as a matchmaker.”
“Maybe a woman becomes one when she’s happy. We ought to celebrate tonight.”
“Why?”
“Just to celebrate. We can go to the Club and hear the Feeler. He’s absolutely fantastic, but who knows for how long?” And suddenly I had these images of the Feeler and Thing, of Henry and Don.
“What’s wrong?” Virgil asked, because I was beginning to cry again.
“It’s just that awful things happen to people.”
“True,” Virgil said, “but then there’s always the Bostonian.” He raised his glass for a toast, and I understood.
“Yes,” I said, raising my own.
“To our Bostonian,” Virgil said.
“To our Bostonian,” I said.
Our glasses clinked, and we smiled at each other as we drank.
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