We Are All Good People Here

by Susan Rebecca White

  He had gone to Detroit last minute to help out the Army of Brothers, a black nationalist group known for its militancy. The Brothers had been planning a direct action for months when their driver—a white guy—had bailed. They needed someone to drive the getaway car, and the driver had to be white because white guys didn’t arouse the suspicion of the police the way black guys did. And so they contacted Warren.

  After he had successfully made the transfer, he was taken back to the safe house where he had left his truck. He stayed there for a few hours, smoking a little weed with two of the Brothers, an honor that, as a white man, he did not take lightly. It was a little after midnight when he started the long drive back to Atlanta; he popped some bennies to keep from falling asleep at the wheel. He spent the drive thinking about what he and Eve might do next now that Smash was breaking up, now that Eve was souring on the movement, was beginning to grumble that at twenty-eight she should not still be living in such squalor, was beginning to question whether or not any of their actions had done any good. She had gotten it into her head that they should either commit to one grand gesture that “really counted” or walk away. Hell, he could get on board with stepping away from things for a while. Things had started to feel stale, redundant, even boring. Which, if he was honest with himself, was probably why he was volunteering to do things like drive a getaway van for an armed robbery.

  Maybe it really was time to take a break. Throw away the paper, move to the country, eat a lot of peaches—just like the John Prine song. Hell, they could leave the goddamn country if Eve wanted. They could move to Algiers, get brown as berries under the Mediterranean sun.

  What he wasn’t willing to do was turn himself in, act contrite, maybe serve a little time, and then sign up for the great American sleepwalk. Eve didn’t want that, either; he knew it.

  • • •

  He was a little south of Lexington when he realized his gas tank was almost empty. He spotted a single self-service pump attached to a small restaurant. He couldn’t make out the name of the place because the rising sun was in his eyes. He filled his tank and then stepped inside to pay. Jesus. The place was a goddamn tribute to the Confederacy. A Rebel flag flew from the corner behind the cash register. A sheath of uncut Confederate dollars was hung on the wall, framed behind Plexiglas. A portrait of Robert E. Lee was displayed above one of the two booths. A bumper sticker on the cash register read: “If I’d known it would be like this I would have picked my own damn cotton.”

  He should have just turned around and walked out. But he had already filled his tank, and he didn’t want a cop chasing after him for nine dollars’ worth of gas. There was no one at the register, but when he walked over to the food counter he saw a heavyset white man kneeling to stock the refrigerator near the grill.

  “Help ya?” the man asked, standing. He grabbed a laminated menu from the counter and handed it to Warren.

  “This your place?” Warren asked.

  “That it is,” the guy said. “Best dang burger in Kentucky.”

  “I don’t eat meat,” Warren said, which was only half-true—he ate anything when necessary—but he wanted to fuck with the guy.

  “Guess this ain’t your place then, is it?”

  “Guess not. I got $8.67 worth of gas.”

  “Alrighty.” The man walked slowly to the register, rang in the amount, took Warren’s ten-dollar bill, and handed Warren the change. Only then did he give Warren an obvious once-over, his eyes lingering on his long wavy hair, which he had pulled into a low ponytail.

  “You ain’t from round here, is you?”

  “Nope.”

  “Why don’t you get on then,” the guy said. “Before someone shows up and asks why I’m doing business with a commie fag.”

  “Right on one count,” said Warren.

  The two men stared at each other across the register, as if they were in a Western and were about to draw their guns. Indeed, Warren had a gun on him, a handy little Smith & Wesson 9mm, tucked into his waistband. He was willing to bet Big Boy was armed, too. Armed to the teeth, most likely. Neither said a word, the only sound the radio, which sat behind the cash register and was playing gospel music—and not black gospel, either, but that insipid, warbling, white shit his grandmother used to listen to on Saturday nights. Both men remained quiet while the gospel quartet sang, “I’m learning to lean, learning to lean on Jesus,” and then without even thinking about it, Warren whipped out his pistol and held it to Big Boy’s head, told him to put his hands on the counter and not move an inch.

  The man’s hands were surprisingly small, his fingers plump as little Vienna sausages. Warren noticed he wore a gold wedding band. “I want you to open your register and give me what’s in there,” said Warren. “And if you pull any shit I swear to God I will blow your fucking head off.”

  The man had just started moving his hand toward the register when Warren struck him with the butt of his gun. It landed with a dull thud against the side of his head. The man slumped over on top of the register. Oh fuck. Warren hadn’t meant to do that, but when he saw the man move his hand, it had occurred to him that maybe he was reaching for his gun, or tear gas, or, hell, some kind of panic button that alerted the redneck posse.

  Warren was contemplating trying to get into the register himself when he was interrupted by a high, sweet voice: “Hey, Dad, I got the—”

  He turned around and saw a young boy, seven or eight years old, standing in the doorframe of the kitchen holding a carton of hamburger buns, eyes wide, mouth shaped into the proverbial O of shock.

  Fuck. There was a fucking witness. A kid. A fucking kid. Warren saw Big Boy’s chest rise and fall. He was still breathing. He would be okay. He turned to the kid, pointed the gun at him, and told him to get down on the floor and close his eyes.

  “Start counting,” Warren said. “Count slow. And you better count to five hundred before you get up or I’ll come back and blow your old man’s brains out.”

  And then he ran to the truck, started it up. On instinct he headed back toward Lexington—the opposite direction of where he needed to go. Once he had driven a few miles north he pulled off the highway onto a deserted road, changed the license plate (he kept spares under the seat), changed his shirt, then hit the road again. Just outside Lexington, he pulled into a big truck stop with a convenience store and private showers. Why the fuck didn’t he stop there for gas in the first place? He bought shaving cream and a razor, along with a pair of scissors. In the shower he shaved off his beard and chopped his hair so close to his scalp that you could barely tell he had curls. He toweled off, and then wrapped the shorn locks in a bunch of toilet paper before stuffing them into a trash receptacle. After asking around for the nearest Greyhound station, he managed to hitch a ride there with a guy in a rig heading for California later that afternoon. He abandoned the truck in the parking lot of the truck stop, a bummer, but there were always casualties in war.

  It was dawn when the Greyhound finally pulled into the downtown Atlanta station. He had hitched his way back to the house on Linwood Avenue, shorn as a plebe. When Eve woke up he told her he’d been threatened at gunpoint when he stopped for gas in Kentucky and had fought back and as a result he had to change his look and ditch the truck. Warren thought she might be excited by the danger of it all, but Eve was less sympathetic than he would have liked. Her lack of sympathy only heightened his anxiety about the whole thing, and for the next few days he kept expecting to hear the police knocking at his door, child witness in tow, still holding that carton of hamburger buns.

  • • •

  He kept trying to make plans with Eve about how they were going to slip off the grid for good. They needed to work on securing airtight IDs. They needed to secure money, of course, and they needed to figure out where to live. Warren thought somewhere in Mendocino County might work, away from the more obvious hot spots of Berkeley and San Francisco. He had stayed in the town of Mendocino one summer; often the fog was so thick it obscured everything
in its view, making it the perfect place for a fugitive.

  Whenever he introduced the subject of Plan D—Plan Disappear—the name they had coined years ago, knowing that eventually that time might come, Eve was dodgy. That night she had dropped her bombshell. She was pregnant.

  They were sitting on the back steps of the house they were renting, off Ponce de Leon, where they had moved just a few months ago after returning to Atlanta, just the two of them this time. Warren was smoking a joint, but Eve had waved it away. They watched as skinny old J.T., who rented the efficiency unit in the basement, made his way out his door wearing jeans and a Hampton Grease Band T-shirt. J.T. worked the graveyard shift at the Mead distribution center and therefore never complained about noise—usually loud music but sometimes the occasional fight—coming from their place in the middle of the night.

  J.T. looked ill, his shoulders hunched as he hacked into his fist.

  “Are you okay?” asked Eve. If they were still eating meat she would probably offer to fix him chicken noodle soup.

  “Got me this cough that won’t go away,” said J.T. “But it ain’t nothin’ a drink won’t fix.” He flashed a crooked smile at Eve before heading down Linwood. When he hit Ponce he turned, and was soon out of sight.

  “So whose is it?” Warren asked.

  “Yours, you ass. You and J.T. are the only people I ever see.”

  “Oh, is the deb too proper to fuck poor white trash?”

  She stared at him for so long he started to feel uncomfortable. “You’re a fucking elitist,” she said, but it was more like she was saying it to herself. “After all this, you’re still a fucking elitist.”

  “Oh, did I offend you? Is a lady never supposed to mention that there’s a class system in America?”

  “I want to keep it,” Eve said, steely.

  “You know that’s impossible,” said Warren. “So just get that thought out of your head.”

  “I want to keep this baby and I want us to do whatever we need to do to give it a normal life.”

  “Babe, you opted out of a normal life a long time ago.”

  “You act like we’re these mighty revolutionaries, but all we do is play games. We’ve done nothing to put a stick in the wheel of the war machine. You realize that, don’t you? Sure, we’ll have group sex and lug around a box of dynamite from hovel to hovel, but none of it matters. We never actually do anything—we haven’t done anything that matters since The Children’s Place.”

  Warren opened his mouth to object, but Eve, who was on a roll, wouldn’t let him talk. “Acting like ‘crazy motherfuckers’ doesn’t count. It didn’t stop My Lai. It didn’t stop Fred Hampton from being murdered in his bed. It didn’t stop Nixon from invading Cambodia. It didn’t even stop Calley from having his sentence reduced and being allowed to serve it from his fucking apartment at Fort Benning instead of Leavenworth where he belongs!”

  She was back to Calley again. She was obsessed with Lieutenant Calley. Even though Eve knew that the slaughter he led of more than five hundred villagers in My Lai was just one of many war crimes committed by American troops in Vietnam, she was fixated on it. Probably because she had memorized the pictures printed by Life magazine in 1969, showing toddlers clinging to their mothers before they were shot, showing the corpses of villagers, from infant to elderly, piled in a ditch, showing the roar of fire as every home and hut was burned to the ground. A few weeks ago, he had idly joked that the two of them should bomb Calley’s apartment at Fort Benning, and Eve had jumped all over the idea, had said that making Calley pay would actually amount to something, would actually make a difference. To which Warren had replied that she was a fucking idiot if she thought they could bomb an Army base, a Fort, for fuck’s sake, and get away with it.

  Warren reached over and put his hand on top of Eve’s. They had spent so many years claiming they weren’t a couple, and now it was just the two of them, the two of them in it together, the two of them against the world.

  “Think about it, babe,” he said gently. “No one would have even paid attention to My Lai if it weren’t for us. Do you think a mainstream rag like Life magazine would have printed those photos if we hadn’t been resisting the war for so many years? Fuck, no. We were the vanguard. We forced the mainstream, kicking and screaming, to see the truth.”

  “So our whole point was to help other Americans become outraged, too? Terrific. I’m so glad I gave up my life for that.”

  He stared at her. Did she really think that was all Smash added up to?

  “They didn’t even press charges against Jane when she turned herself in. She just paid a fine for failure to show up in court and was free to go.”

  “Jesus, Eve! You shouldn’t be in contact with her. You need to be careful about who you communicate with.”

  Eve startled them both by opening her mouth and screaming as loud as she could, screaming for so long that surely her throat hurt afterward. And then she was crying, crying and hiccupping. But still she spoke, her words interrupted every few seconds by little gasps for air. “God, I am so tired of all of this, Warren. I am just . . . so tired . . . of all the bullshit. I don’t even care if I have to go to jail. I just cannot . . . I will not . . . continue living this way with a baby. You can disappear into some stolen identity if you want, but if all we are going to do is to keep dicking around, I’m done.”

  Did Eve not realize that he, Abby, and Jane were behind five—five!—bombings that took place around Atlanta in 1970? They had become so proficient at building explosives that none of their actions resulted in casualties, including the bombing of the lobby of the Georgia State Capitol that had shut down the place for two weeks for repairs. (Jane, whose mathematical brain made her a bomb-building wizard, had convinced him and Abby that symbolic bombings were just as effective as ones that might rack up collateral damage.) Did Eve really consider such forceful protests dicking around? As a matter of self-protection, none of them had shared any details of their direct actions with the rest of the group, going so far as to rent a motel room, away from their Euclid Avenue headquarters, every time they built a bomb—but wasn’t it obvious that they were the merry pranksters behind such glorious displays of chaos? And hadn’t they all celebrated the news of the Capitol bombing with stolen steaks, Champagne, and an orgy?

  And what of the funding for the Army of Brothers? Wasn’t funneling more than $5,000 into their coffers doing something? The omitted details of the gas station debacle in Lexington would upset her, of course, but she sure as shit couldn’t write them off as toothless. He considered, for a moment, telling her everything but deemed it too great a risk. Eve seemed ready to bolt. He would not give her information she might use as a bargaining chip were she to surrender to the police.

  Instead, Warren held the joint to his lips, took a hit. “You’re done?”

  “I am done.”

  “Welp,” said Warren. “It’s been nice knowing ya.”

  • • •

  Of course, it hadn’t ended that easily. Eve had started sobbing, had begged him again to surface with her and help her raise the baby. “The cops don’t have anything on us, just little stuff, and I seriously doubt they’ll press any charges,” she pleaded. “And we’ll figure out a way to keep fighting, just aboveground.”

  He held her for as long as seemed necessary and then told her that he needed to get out of the house for a bit and think things over. She had nodded, agreed that it was a good idea for him to clear his head, said she might drive over to Jane’s and see if she might crash with her. “Clear my head, too, you know?” He didn’t try to talk her out of it, even though he knew it was stupid to show up at a former comrade’s house. What if the house was being watched? Unlikely, but still.

  • • •

  Warren hadn’t been at Manuel’s long when Oscar lurched in, dragging his sack of resentments along with him. Oscar was almost always at the bar, though occasionally he got so drunk and belligerent that he was kicked out for the night. Why Manuel Maloof did
n’t ban Oscar for good was a mystery, but he supposed the old lefty had a soft spot for losers. Oscar had served two tours in Vietnam and had clearly left most of his brain behind in the jungles of Southeast Asia. Or maybe he had always been an idiot. When he wasn’t bitching about his rotten family in Cleveland who wouldn’t even give a guy a bed to sleep in, he was bragging about how many “gooks” he had killed.

  “You sure picked a funny bar to come to,” Warren would say.

  Oscar would answer, “Beer’s beer, man.”

  Warren didn’t like the crowd at Manuel’s any more than Oscar did, though for different reasons. Manuel’s was the watering hole for Atlanta’s Democratic establishment. Jimmy Carter had announced his decision to run for governor at Manuel’s, and pretty much every local Democratic politician met there to drink and bitch. Warren considered them all chickenshits, with their tepid ideas about reform and their squeamishness around revolution. The piggy businessmen at the Driving Club—where Eve’s dad belonged—probably had more balls than these losers, but beer’s beer, man, and Manuel’s was a short walk from their house. Better yet, since Eve wouldn’t go inside the place if you put a gun to her head (she said her father knew too many of Carter’s people and she would be recognized), it served as a retreat when they weren’t getting along. Plus, he enjoyed baiting Oscar.

  Normally Oscar sat at the corner barstool, but it was taken, so Warren waved him over to sit by him.

  “I don’t sit next to hippies unless they buy,” whined Oscar, and Warren resisted the urge to tell him that he wasn’t a hippie, was nothing like a hippie. Instead, he motioned the bartender over and ordered two whiskies.

  “Look who’s buying you a drink, Oscar,” said Warren. “It sure as shit ain’t Uncle Sam.”

  The whiskies were placed in front of them. “To the flag,” Oscar toasted, and Warren clicked glasses with him, all the while picturing the Vietcong flag in his head.