Open Grave

by C. J. Lyons

  “Why aren’t you helping out at the protests?” she asked as they drove down the narrow road leading back to the highway. “Karlan said there’d be trouble either way the grand jury ruled.”

  “My dad thought it might look bad if I helped with crowd control. At least with that particular crowd. Not politically expedient is how he put it.”

  “What do you mean ‘that crowd’?”

  In answer, he unbuttoned the collar of his shirt and pulled it back. At the base of his neck was a tattooed eagle, its wings spread wide, stretching up onto his collarbones. Clutched in its talons was a globe. Covering the globe was a blood red swastika.

  Chapter Thirteen

  May 17, 1954

  * * *

  Samuel focused on the boy with the same intensity he’d give any patient in his brightly lit hospital operating theatre. Breathing stabilized, airway clear, pulse fast but steady. As long as his makeshift chest tube didn’t clog and none of those broken ribs moved to lacerate the lung, the kid had a chance.

  As he took all this in, he finally realized that the shouting beyond the break room had grown louder. He glanced up, startled for a moment to find Jo there, staring at him, waiting for him to tell her what he needed. Then he looked past her and saw Maybelle standing in the doorway, clutching the white girl’s hand.

  This wasn’t his hospital. This war zone might be more dangerous than any he’d seen in Italy, North Africa, or Korea. Fear clenched his bowels—fear he’d never dreamed he’d feel here, back on home soil. “Jo, take Maybelle and bring the car to the back door.”

  Jo snapped his bag shut, nodded—the tight-lipped chin jerk that meant no more than yes—and turned. The boy, Henry, the policeman had called him, grabbed at Samuel’s shirt.

  “He’ll kill her. Leave me. You gotta get Winnie outta here.” Each word drew a grimace of pain but the boy never let go.

  “Don’t worry, son. No one’s getting killed. Not here, not today.”

  Even as Samuel said the words in his most reassuring tone, Jo turned to frown at him. She had Maybelle by the hand, the white girl shuffling away to give them room to leave.

  He raised an eyebrow at her and she reluctantly nodded to the white girl, a tacit invitation to join them. The girl’s eyes widened in surprise but she quickly recovered, taking Maybelle’s other hand.

  Once they were gone, Samuel bent over to help Henry sit up. The boy’s eyes welled with tears, but he only made a soft groan, even as he trembled with pain.

  “Our car’s out back. Think you can walk that far if I help?”

  Henry nodded. He braced both hands against the edge of the table. Samuel held him under his armpits, gingerly placing him on his feet. Before he could take even a half step, he cried out in pain and collapsed back against the table.

  “Let me pass,” an angry man’s voice thundered from the front of the building. “Goddamn it, she’s my daughter! I’ve got rights!”

  “Come on, now,” Samuel urged. The boy was too big for him to carry alone, not without risking the chest tube—move it the wrong way, and it could puncture the lung or worse, the heart. “We don’t have much time.”

  To his credit, the boy—Samuel adjusted his estimate of his age down, the kid was maybe only twelve or thirteen at most—tried, lurching forward, most of his weight on Samuel. But even that was too much. He had to stop to catch his breath before trying another step. At this rate, they’d make it to the car by Christmas.

  “Leave me,” Henry gasped. “Take Winnie and your family. I’ll be fine.”

  “Stop wasting breath on talking,” Samuel snapped.

  The sudden sound of a shotgun being chambered stopped them both.

  Henry looked at Samuel, fear widening his eyes until every red capillary shone bright. Samuel leaned Henry’s good side against the wall. The boy promptly slumped down to the floor, groaning with pain.

  Samuel crept out into the hallway. Before he got far enough to see the front room, the sounds of scuffling, fists pounding, and a man swearing came.

  He took another step. A woman screamed—not Jo, maybe that white woman? Glass broke. Something thudded to the ground. Then a door slammed shut, followed by the clang of a heavy lock being bolted. Samuel froze, preparing himself for battle.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “Looks like thirsty work.” Grayson reached behind TK to pull a bottle of water from the rear seat. As she drank, he drove them down the rutted two-lane road leading away from the quarry, staying far enough back that the dust from the ambulance had time to settle.

  “You’re a Nazi?” No wonder Karlan had been so anxious to separate Grayson from Franklin and his crew this morning.

  “I’m a patriot.” He glanced at her, his smile never diminishing. “I stand for the Constitution and the freedom of the American people. Just like my father did when he served. Just like you do, Marine.”

  “Nothing like what I did as a Marine,” she snapped.

  He shrugged. “The way Franklin and his thugs threatened you this morning, you don’t think that had anything to do with the color of your skin?”

  “I think it had to do with the fact that I’m a woman. And they weren’t threatening anyone, they’re just kids being kids.”

  “Boys too ignorant to know any better. How to treat a woman right. Act with civility.”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  “It’s what you meant.” They came to a red light. He held his hands up in surrender. “I know, you think I’m awful, but I’m not. I’m just honest. Most people are hypocrites, denying how they feel about people of color. They’re the real racists, the dangerous ones. Me, I let everyone know the truth about how I feel. Besides, I’m not a racist. I don’t hate the blacks. Our problems aren’t going to be solved by hate. In fact, I want the very same thing the Black Lives Matter organizers want.”

  “How so?”

  “Like I said, I’m not a racist. I’m a separatist. Which is exactly what they want as well. They want their communities to be policed by their own people and not white outsiders. I agree. In fact, I say let them have it all.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  He made the turn. They had been driving past the college, but with that turn, they were back in the neighborhood Karlan had driven her through this morning. The one where resignation filled the air thicker and more stifling than the July humidity.

  “Look around. What I’m talking about is what is already happening in every city on the planet. You were a Marine. You’ve traveled. Have you ever lived anywhere where people didn’t self-segregate? Think about it. It’s not socio-economic status that determines neighborhood boundaries—in fact, many well-to-do blacks choose to live in lower socio-economic communities to be with their own kind.” He shrugged. “Guess they like being a big fish in a small pond. Or they feel more comfortable there. With other people who identify more as Africans than Americans.”

  “Yeah, you’re definitely not racist,” she scoffed. She hated to admit it, but he sounded exactly like her father and grandfather back in West Virginia.

  “Realist,” he corrected. “When you ask African-Americans what they want, they say the same thing: police who understand them more than white police can, schools where their children fit in, self-government, a say in decisions about their communities.”

  He swept one hand out wide, gesturing to the stoop-sitters who followed them with their glares. Even the kids playing in the streets edged away, recognizing Grayson’s vehicle as off-limits. “I say, give it to them. They’re already isolating themselves, why not draw the boundaries, make it official? Let them run the show, divide their resources like any other city.”

  “Your people already tried that with the Jews. This is America; you can’t round people up in train cars and herd them behind barbed wire.”

  “No barbed wire. No rounding up. If you build it, they will come. Believe me, everyone will be happier.”

  She shook her head at his delusion. How had this country come to
this? Where a self-proclaimed Nazi acted as if he was the voice of reason? “You’re crazy.”

  “Really? I just graduated from Princeton with my degree in public policy. That was my honors thesis. The university is going to publish it in the fall.”

  It was difficult to resist slapping the smug smirk from his face. His gaze swept across the street and the people they drove past as if he owned the whole damn world. A world gone mad if they listened to people like Grayson.

  “So,” she challenged him, “after you put the blacks in their place, in their ghettos—”

  “Communities,” he corrected. “Asians and Hispanics as well.”

  “Whatever. Then you have a problem. Because now just about everyone’s who’s left is white. So who do you target next? Homosexuals? Jews? The Irish or Italian or the handicapped or…who? Where does this self-segregation end? And who decides where the lines get drawn?”

  “It’s Darwin at his finest. Well, Social Darwinism. The beauty of it is that no one has to decide anything. People sort themselves out. Always have, always will. It’s basic psychology: joining a tribe that shares your values and protects each other.”

  “Fine. So no laws, you just give each of these communities the right to self-govern? Like the Amish do here in Pennsylvania.”

  “Good example, the Amish. Although if you want to meet real racists, talk to a few of them some time.”

  “My point is, we are a democracy.”

  “None of that would change. Unless politicians decide to redraw voting districts, which they no doubt will. But if they didn’t, if they let things be, it would make for more challenging political races and force politicians to answer to a more diverse electorate, maybe even keep them honest and intent on actual governing for the people rather than grandstanding for themselves and their party. How is that a bad thing?”

  She wished David were here. He could find the right questions to ask, arguments to make that would shoot down Grayson’s crazy ideas.

  Crazy because they represented everything she despised—the idea that judging a person based on their appearance was okay.

  She wasn’t stupid; she knew it happened all the time, every day…she was as guilty of it as anyone. She thought of her encounters with Iraqi and Afghan civilians while she was deployed. Decisions made in the heat of fear and battle fury, some of which she regretted. These were the moments she couldn’t let go of, especially deep in the night when sleep was a distant memory.

  Somehow Grayson made those snap judgments sound so damned reasonable. Was that because she really was racist? Maybe his words felt tempting because part of her agreed with him, Eve tasting the apple and finding it so very sweet and irresistible. That’s how her granddad would have put it.

  He would have had no problem with any of Grayson’s ideas. It pained her to admit it, but neither would her father. Could Grayson somehow know the truth of who she really was, a truth she was too afraid to admit? Not even to herself?

  No. She wasn’t racist. She was an objective observer. Collecting facts, analyzing them. Whatever the situation. Like this morning with Franklin and his friends. Or working alongside a neo-Nazi.

  Actions, not words. That was where the truth lay.

  “Anyway,” Grayson continued. “Tell me about the police officer killed. Whose body you found.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if he was really a Greer police officer, then I might know how to find out who he was.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  May 17, 1954

  * * *

  Jo stepped out onto the steps leading down from the back exit of the jailhouse. Her shoe skimmed against a splatter of the boy’s blood, still wet on the concrete. What was Samuel thinking, dragging them into this? It was no business of theirs who that boy was or why he’d ended up in trouble. From the looks of the white girl, it had to do with her. Figured. Boys always chasing after the ones they couldn’t have, even when they should know better.

  “Wait here,” she told Maybelle and the girl. “I’ll be right back.”

  Maybelle nodded, clutching the white girl’s hand. Another problem they were suddenly saddled with, thanks to Samuel’s Good Samaritan complex.

  Jo started down the concrete steps, avoiding touching the soot-stained brick baluster. Dirty town. She glanced at the Woolworth’s across the street. Its Colored entrance stood alongside the trash bins. Faster they were out of here the better.

  Her heels clacked against the broken pavement as she skirted the police car parked haphazardly at the bottom of the steps. Surgery in a jailhouse. On the table the white folks ate off. The last made her smile, but it was quickly dimmed by the hollow echo of her footsteps against the alley walls. Place was too quiet. And yet, she couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was watching her.

  She glanced back at Maybelle, but her head was invisible below the brick balustrade, all Jo could see was the white girl, her face twisted with fear. What did white girls know about fear anyway? She nodded to the girl and turned back to continue to their car at the mouth of the alley. She couldn’t keep Samuel waiting.

  That man. He’d be the death of her for sure. When was he going to learn that he had nothing left to prove to anyone? But she knew why he’d done it, helped that white girl with her pathetic sobs and dirty clothes, helped that boy they didn’t even know. It wasn’t pride. It was something far more dangerous: hope.

  Despite everything he’d seen in the wars, Samuel still dared to hope that this world and the people in it were good. He’d done what he’d done not for Jo, but for Maybelle. To show her what a good man was, how a good person lived his life.

  Jo believed in a better future but she knew it would come at a cost. A cost their daughter would pay. She knew better than to fill Maybelle’s head with fantasies about what her life could be. Not Samuel. He was a dreamer.

  Her own fault. That was what had attracted her to the handsome but too-quiet, too-serious medical student he’d been when they met. Not his talent or intellect. His ability to still dream, despite everything.

  She’d just never imagined it might end with them stranded in a dirty little town with dirty white men screaming and threatening to kill them.

  Her steps quickened down the alley. The bright blue car filled her vision. The car. An impossible dream on its own.

  Maybelle hadn’t even been crawling yet when the Army drafted Samuel back into service with plans to send him halfway around the world. They’d bought their house because it was close to his hospital; she was meant to quit teaching, at least for a while, stay home and watch over Maybelle. But then the Army sent that letter and all their plans went to ash. If they wanted to keep their home, she’d have to go back to work teaching. Which meant getting up before the crack of dawn and taking three buses across the city.

  She’d argued for leaving their home, renting it, taking Maybelle with her back to Cleveland where she could live with her family. Samuel had seen that as a defeat.

  The day before he left for the Army, he’d come home with the car. A gift from a rich patient he’d saved when the man’s gall bladder ruptured. It was against the rules to take gifts—definitely against Samuel’s pride, as well. But he’d sacrificed his pride, working out a deal to pay off the car once he returned from the war. A promise that he would return, safe and sound.

  He might be the death of her, with his silly dreams of a world where color made no difference and their little girl could grow up to be President, but he was the best man she’d ever met. Not even war could take that away from him.

  A stray piece of pavement almost tripped her as she rummaged in her bag for her car keys. She grabbed them and looked up, only a few feet away from the car and their escape out of this hellhole of a town.

  That’s when she saw the man. A white man. Leaning against her car as if he owned it. As if he owned the world.

  Jo stopped, her stomach clenching tight. Where had he come from? He wore a business suit. And a smile that chilled with its row of ic
icle teeth gleaming in the afternoon sun.

  She glanced over her shoulder. The girls were out of sight, probably hiding below the bricks that lined the police station’s steps. She prayed that that white girl had the good sense to keep quiet, to keep Maybelle safe.

  “Excuse me,” she said. It never boded well, speaking first to a white man, but he hadn’t said anything, and she needed to keep his focus on her, away from the girls. “That’s my car.”

  His gaze slid over her like a drunk’s greasy palms. “Is it, now?”

  From the corner of her eye, she saw two more men, also in suits, but not ones as nice as their leader’s, approach her from the far side of the alley. She wanted to run, was desperate to scream, but she knew that would only whet their appetite for blood.

  Instead, she stood tall, dared to meet his gaze. She was no kitchen Negro; she knew her rights. Most importantly, she had a family to protect. Best way to do that was to deal with whatever this white man wanted or at the very least draw him and his friends away from the police station, give Samuel time. “Yes, sir. That’s my car. Now, if you could please move away? I’m afraid I’m running late.”

  “And I’m afraid, this is now my car. You see, it’s been abandoned. Illegally. I’m mayor of this town. We’ll be impounding this vehicle. Immediately.”

  The two men sidled up to stand on either side of her. Not touching her, but their intent was clear.

  Jo swallowed hard. Men like Samuel got to play hero for their daughters. But it was the women who couldn’t afford heroics. Not with men like this. Men like this, they wouldn’t give up, not until their pride was assuaged, paid for with Jo’s dignity. She lowered her gaze, fear trumping her rage.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, despite the fact that she had nothing to apologize for. “If there’s a fine, I’ll pay it.”