“That’s Velma’s boy. The one with the papers.”
“You mean the one with the feet. I know. And ain’t that Tommy Jeeter’s boy?” Ruby was waving a tattered napkin at the back of the speed demon with his mouth on fire.
“Gail says yes. Jeeter says no.”
“Jeeter must be crazy. Could’ve spit that kid right out of his mouth. Looks more like Jeeter than Jeeter. He better claim that boy. This is a small town and Jeeter got lots of daughters growing up all over Claybourne. But what he care, what a man care about—”
“I hear where this conversation is headed, Ruby. And I do not want to hear no niggerman shit this afternoon. Can it.”
“That kiln big enough for Short Cakes and his daddy?” Ruby mumbled it, dropping her head down on her arms.
“What’s the matter with you here lately, Ruby?”
“Nate’s on the road,” she muttered into her arms, trying to pull herself up. “Or maybe it’s something in the air. Maybe it’s Velma. She’s a for real drag lately. I think we need to ask her to step down, she’s wearing everybody to a frazzle and taking on more work than she or anyone else can handle. Driven. Compulsive. Or maybe …” She flopped back in the chair and stared out at the gray, purple clouds. “I dunno. Malcolm gone, King gone, Fanni Lou gone, Angela quiet, the movement splintered, enclaves unconnected. Everybody off into the Maharaji This and the Right Reverend That. If it isn’t some far-off religious nuttery, it’s some otherworldly stuff. And check that out.”
Jan turned, trying to follow Ruby’s gaze. Past the microwave oven and the espresso machine was the makeshift stage where the musicians were climbing down for a break. The one brother in the band was wearing a Blues Brothers T-shirt.
“And Nate and the guys can’t find a gig in town. It’s enough to make you scream, ain’t it? Next thing you know, some white boy in top hat and tails, or maybe a dreads wig, will come along and pied pipe all the folks to the lobotomy wards.”
“Don’t start, Ruby. You always wind up getting things all mixed up and maudlin too.” Jan picked among the remains of the salad they’d shared for one last shred of red cabbage. Ruby had asked her a serious question a moment ago but then their favorite waitress had stopped by their table to say goodbye, stuffing her apron in her bag, and Jan hadn’t answered. Who, Ruby wanted to know, who could effectively pull together the folks—the campus forces, the street forces, the prison forces, workers, women, the aged, the gay. And Jan had thought Doc Serge but didn’t get to say it, even after the waitress left. The thundering of ball bearings had interrupted them. And just as well, for she’d been idly shuffling the Tarot deck, forgetting how scathing Ruby could get about “that stuff,” and The Magician had slipped from the pack. Lately each time the team had sat down—Daisy Moultrie on the Ouida board, Mrs. Heywood’s protégé on the energy maps, Bertha with the cowries, La Vita with the charts—The Magician had fallen from the deck. She wished to discuss her misgivings about Doc but in her own terms, wanted to discuss how a people turned around might not read the difference between the figure straight up and the figure reversed. Ruby was looking at her sideways and Jan wanted a peaceful lunch. She plopped the deck in the top of her bag, the cards immediately spilling between her eyeglass case and her cosmetic sack. She snapped her bag shut.
The two women leaned back while the waiter cleared away the salad plate, noted their clean forks and missing napkins, and offered each a corner of his apron to wipe their hands.
“Those your kids?”
“Some of them used to be in my class.” Jan looked up. “Some take classes with me at the—”
“Academy,” Campbell said. He couldn’t help it. Had been meaning to make some contact with the woman for weeks. She was always on the run and rarely ate on his shift. “I’ll get you a damp towel.”
“Ya know,” Ruby leaned forward. “I don’t want to press anything on you, but getting back to this leadership question. You and Serge are the only—”
“Ruby?”
“Okay, Jan, but the truth is, I’m glad you got fired. I mean it. Murder-mouthed in the yard, jumped on the stairs, ripped open at recess and still you wanted to go right on trying to teach hardened crap shooters the beauty of train A leaving the station two hours before train B, traveling at X minus miles per foot.”
“Ruby?”
“And I know, Jan, things are great for you at the Academy, but it’s a waste of your talent. The Academy’s nonfunctional in the broad sense, too inbred. You can’t leave the heavy business of running this city to the fools like Jay Patterson and the like. Now, you know I don’t believe in all this ‘fate’ stuff you characters be into up there in your little study group, but doesn’t it occur to you that you were relieved of duty, so to speak, so that you’d be freed up to take on some serious work?”
“Ruby, do me a favor?”
“I know, I know. I’m being a drag.”
“Is anyone on the grill? I don’t trust that microwave.”
Campbell had quickly slid a plate of steamed washcloths onto the table and now glanced around toward the service-counter window to the kitchen. She would want toasted banana nut bread, he knew that. First break in traffic and he would do it himself. He nodded. She smiled. She was a serious sister and good-looking too in an offbeat sort of way—a pointy Dick Tracy face, plucked eyebrows, braids piled high and held in place by a tie-dye scarf, always a tie dye of brilliant colors, so that it looked like she carried a basket of snakes on her head. Did the books at the Academy and taught sculpture at night and ceramics in the afternoon. Odd combination. He hoped she’d be around when he got off. Maybe he could ply her with toasted cake for the next two hours.
“Leave it to me,” he said, just in case she hadn’t read him. “Banana nut bread, toasted.” He set down the cups, a larger pot of Red Zinger tea than they’d ordered, two plates of spinach quiche, and a plastic bear with a yellow hat where the honey came out of. The women looked at the bear, looked at each other, looked at him. “I just work here, yawl,” he shrugged.
A reeling drunk was doing the rope-a-dope number against the railing for the benefit of Bow Tie and the youth, but they were engrossed in a discussion of the Honorable Elijah’s heir: Wallace, Farrakhan, a yet-to-be-known? Campbell stepped away from the table to urge the drunk on his way.
“I wanna talk to teacher lady. Hey.” He was hailing Jan, who did not recognize him. “Ain’t you the schoolteacher from up the way?” His finger pointed toward a VW station wagon parked at the curb, toward the chemical-plant smokestacks in the distance, toward the sidewalk he stood on as he fell along the railing again. He approached their table as if he too were on a skateboard. “I support education,” he announced to diners looking away from him or through him. He pulled a pint bottle from one of his uniform’s many pockets and examined it carefully for damage. “I pay my taxes. See.” It was show-and-tell time, the seal ragged and dirty. “See how much taxes I pay each hour on the hour to educate the children? Such dedication deserves applause, don’t it?” Six men at the round table under the awning toasted him and he bowed and drank. Bow Tie bowed too and continued talking about messengers.
“Who are you?” She stared at him as at a long-forgotten object of historical importance, heard about, finally encountered. An ancient piece of pottery. The Rosetta Stone. A scroll from a pharaoh’s tomb. She held her breath. He seemed to be holding his too, pulling himself up out of the fumes to stand before her steady, revealed at last. She tried to memorize the lines, the planes, the puffiness here, the broken capillaries there, as though instructed she’d have but one chance to bone up for the exam, one chance in a lifetime to know it. He was somebody. That was as far as she could get. She might get Bertha to throw the cowries on it; she might spread the Tarot on it. He was no Fool, and not the Joker—a Fool who’s been around—either. But he was somebody in her kin and she would know it. “What’s your name?” She asked it quietly, the way you would a child suddenly appearing out of nowhere on your front stoop in th
e middle of the night half dressed and scared, or an alley cat who insists its presence on you and will not drop its stare and gets you hypnotized into believing it’s come straight from Egypt with the word.
“They call me one thing or another.” He had grabbed hold of the railing just below Ruby’s elbow and was teetering back and forth. “Good luck, teacher lady,” bowing deeply from the waist. “Take care.” He strolled off.
“What was that about?” Ruby shivered.
“I dunno. Eerie. I get the feeling …” But she hadn’t isolated any of the feelings well enough to put a name to. She shrugged, troubled.
Ruby tipped her chair back to get a good look at the drunk crossing now between a mail truck and a milk truck. He seemed to be heading toward the lot that swings down toward the park. “He’s made a remarkable recovery, seems to me. Not so much reeling and rocking as bopping and strutting. Isn’t he one of Doc Serge’s cut buddies?” Her chair was dangerously tipping now and but for a disturbed diner at the next table, she would have fallen backward. “A regular Scarlet Pimpernel, he’s disappeared. Change that to the Green Hornet. Was that a hospital orderly outfit or garage attendant uniform or green beret or what? I get my greens mixed.”
Green. Jan strained to recall a conversation half heard. She’d been loading the kiln with the masks Obie had asked for for the Parade and trying to meet Ruby on time. Behind the utility rack, on the other side of the wall, a meeting was going on. The Brotherhood most likely. Several had come into the hall, stood behind her door, almost closed it locking her in, and then appeared to be suspicious at finding her there. Something about a man in green giving the signal for things to start.
“Velma coming? Or can I gobble up everything?”
“I dunno. We were supposed to meet this morning. She didn’t show.”
“No telling where she is,” Ruby was saying, attacking the quiche. “She blew the second executive committee meeting in a row last night. Probably another one of those out-of-town jobs. How she ever got clearance to do government work with her background is past my brain. Big-time computer jobs for civil service and so forth.”
“I thought she was working at the plant.”
“Transchemical? Velma? How’d she manage to juggle that contradiction, working for De Enamee? Either she’s lifting info or sabotaging the works. Ahh! I’ve hit on something?”
Jan sat still, feeling Ruby waiting, waiting and not chewing, knowing she’d stumbled onto something.
“Well, Jan, if it’s such a big secret, then pass me that squeezable bear. I need to squeeze me something. Ohh ohh ohh for a stationary man. Stay shun nary maa ah an. You know that Nathan Hardge has been on the road more days this month than he’s been at home?”
“He coming home for the festival?”
“I’m so sick of all this festival crap. Couldn’t get any business done at all at the meeting last night, everybody talking about the festival. But check this. Me and Bertha did get this done. And this is what I was getting ready to talk about when you thought I was going off about Jeeter and man shit. A Manhood conference. Velma worked on it a bit last week.” Ruby was diving under the table, wrassling with her ubiquitous tote bag. “Cause let’s face it,” she said from under the table, “Women for Action is taking on entirely too much: drugs, prisons, alcohol, the schools, rape, battered women, abused children. And now Velma’s talked the group into tackling the nuclear power issue. And the Brotherhood ain’t doing shit about organizing.”
“Oh I dunno. The Brotherhood has—”
“Bullshit. They’ve gotten so insulated and inbred up there in the cozy corner of the Academy’s east wing having their id ego illogical debates, no one even sees them anymore. And you know it. So quit the understanding, standing-by-the-men, good-supportive-sister crap. Cause you the one that started it. Yeh you. Weren’t you telling Velma just last week that half the shit that goes down between men and women is leftover nonsense between brothers and brothers?”
“What?” Couples and business gatherings at the various tables were turning their way, watching Ruby drag the bag up into her lap to wrassle with its contents. The Academy. Jan was tired of hearing the Academy applauded or lambasted whether because of the Brotherhood or the programs or the kids or now this rumor of guns. It was like Mrs. Heywood said: Keep the focus on the action not the institution; don’t confuse the vehicle with the objective; all cocoons are temporary and disappear.
“Ruby, What’s that song Sun Ra does about this planet being a cocoon or a railway station or some kind of temporary … a spaceship?”
“Because men jive around with each other instead of dealing for real and later for all the beating-on-the-chest raw gorilla shit, all the unresolved stuff slops over into man/woman relationships.”
“Give me an example, Ruby. Or better yet, shut up.”
“Sistuh, please. Give yourself an example. You were brilliantly expounding on the subject just last Tuesday. I got my own troubles,” yanking at a spiral notebook that was caught in the straps of the bag. “We designed a questionnaire. A thing that could be sent out to get ideas for workshops, panels, speakers, films and stuff like that. Mostly”—flopping the notebook on the table and shoving the teacups out of the way—“the questionnaire is designed to provoke some thought about paternity and rape and misogyny and what have you.” Ruby flipped furiously, yanked out a bunch of papers and handed them across the table. “See what you think. Here, take a pencil and edit away.”
“In other words, Ruby, you want my ‘input.’ ”
“Don’t be difficult. We worked round the clock on this thing. Besides, we need you. I’m a ball-busting bitchy so-and-so. Velma’s a dogmatic hard-liner thus and such. And Daisy’s big and fat and still lives with her parents. You, on the other hand, are above reproach. So sign on. I want to hand it to Velma to pass on to Obie, assuming they’re speaking these days. He’s the only one up there likely to get them brothers off their big fat rusty dusters and—”
“Ruby?”
“Okay, okay. I will be cool.”
It sounded like thunder in the distance at first and people paused, forks poised, glasses halted, heads turned this way or that as people sniffed the air, studied the sky or otherwise attempted to discover whether a storm was coming. Drums, only drums. From somewhere near the corner of Gaylord and Tenth came the pittitt tibaka bata of small drums, echoed by the rada rada booming from the park. Then the jukebox from inside the café drowned it all out with the strains of a recent release of Dexter Gordon’s “Tower of Power.” The tinkle of glasses and metal against plates resumed and the hubbub of the outdoor diners rose.
Ruby twisted round in her chair, frowning at the musicians streaming by the dessert cart to a special table in the corner. She hoisted herself up two inches, pressing down on the fragile wire arms of the chair to do it, and cleared her throat.
“When the Europeans stopped killing Christians and became Christians, that was the end of Christianity and the beginning of Christendom and Christidolatry. And when the white boy quit lynching niggers and became a nigger, that was the beginning of the Wild Bill Dogget revival and the beginning of Bloods wearing Blues Brothers emblems. When O when will confusion end, my sistuh. Tell us, O Janus-faced Janice, what’s the deal?”
“They’re drummers in the park, Ruby. Why don’t we go now? Dancers and incense and fresh fruit. Don’t you have a booth?”
“Too much confusion down there. No, I don’t have a booth. I’m sick of all this pagan spring celebration shit. And everybody handing out flyers about this rally and that meeting. Scattered, fragmented, uncoordinated mess. I’m so sick of leaflets and T-shirts and moufy causes and nothing changing. All I want is a good blowtorch and some paying customers for a change. And if one more rat-tooth muthafucker strolls into my shop asking to trade some cockeyed painting looking like a portable toilet for one of my masterpiece bracelets I’m gonna run amuck in the streets, I swear. Let’s go have a drink somewhere. Or are we waiting for Velma?”
Jan put the wad of papers under her elbow. She was in no mood for the cagey questions and printed confrontations.
“I’m not sure Velma’s coming. We were supposed to meet at the lawyer’s.”
“Oh? Tell it.”
“Well … She’s probably sick. And no wonder. The plant is not a healthy place to work, even in the office wing. Do you know that all the workers have to report for a medical once a month to the company infirmary, plus they can’t see their own records?”
“Never mind that.” Ruby had reached across the table and tapped Jan’s arm. “Tell it.”
Jan exhaled noisily and frowned. “It seems somebody at the plant wiped out the entire records.”
“How does ‘somebody’ do that?”
“By moving low values to first byte and then propagating it through the entire data base.”
Ruby patted Jan’s arm and let the cigarette dangle for a minute before she puffed, letting it out through half-opened mouth and nostrils. “You wanna break that down, teacher, to some basic Ronald McDonald-type English.”
“This ‘somebody’ fouled up the entire computer bank. Erased all the records. All gone. Total blank. Empty.”
“Beautiful. And they think it was our very own Friday Foster? But you said ‘lawyer’?”
“She was called in and questioned.”
The Salt Eaters Page 19