by John Lawton
‘Mind if I sit in the driver’s seat?’
‘Sure.’ I waited to see what this guy’s game was. Was he going to go through the glove compartment hoping to turn up a lid of dope? Was he getting ready to plant a lid of dope?
‘Your car?’ he asked.
‘Yeah. I got the papers right . . .’
He waved the idea away.
‘Y’know. First car I ever owned was a ’49 Buick Roadmaster. Last year in high school, 1956. Year Elvis went big. Boy this sure brings back memories. Riding along with the top down and ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ on the radio. Goin’ t’the drive-in. Makin’ out on the back seat. Hot damn, makes me feel like a teenager again. Y’don’t have any Elvis for th’ eight-track, do ya?’
I could scarcely believe it. He’d pulled me over for the nostalgia trip. I realized—Mississippi plates, my accent—he couldn’t see me as I saw me at all. I’d never been quite so glad that I’d got that haircut before I set out for Chicago. I didn’t look like a hippie, I looked like a . . . civilian. I wasn’t a big city New Yorker, I was just another reb. Thank God for that. As every Southern cop knows, all New Yorkers are Comm’nists and the only reason a New Yorker would be driving across Texas would be for purposes of subversion.
‘No. I’m sorry. I don’t.’
‘Weeeell—y’ cain’t have everythin’.’
‘You want to try her out?’
‘You mean that?’
‘Sure.’
‘How d’you know I’ll bring her back?’
‘Then I’ll just keep your Harley.’
He roared with laughter, turned the key and pulled away faster than I would have dared, leaving me in a cloud of dust, the most reluctant and bewildered ambassador the Yippies ever sent South. He was back in less than ten minutes. Clapped me on the back, wished me well and said if anyone tried to give me ticket while I was still in the county I was just to tell ’em to call Ray Bigsby at Huntsville and things would be ‘taken care of ’. Don’t you just love Texas?
§
I skirted Austin, cut a route through the Hill Country, aiming to pick up the interstate west of Fredericksburg. I ran through the tapes, played the ones I’d liked almost to death—Buffalo Springfield depressed the hell out of me, that damn song had turned into my generation’s obituary—flirted with the new stuff—Rotary Connection turned out to be a psychedelic mess, but I kept reversing the tape and replaying just to hear Minnie Riperton hit the highs, wondering how a human being could produce such a sound—and had one untried album left. Simon and Garfunkel had always been a little too folksy for me. They left me craving electric guitars and a little bamalama bamaloo—they gave me parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme, when what I really wanted was liver and onions and a root beer. What the heck, I stuck Bookends into the eight-track. Big mistake, and by the time I realized it I could not turn off the memory it tapped. ‘America’—not a song I’d heard before—two kids on the road hitchhiking their way out of New York. Can’t remember where they were headed but it took the boy four days to get to New York from Saginaw—must have been doing something wrong—and then they stand on the New Jersey Turnpike, counting the cars, all come to look for America. Well, after a fashion I’d done that myself.
1961. While I lay in hospital in Washington, Bobby Kennedy asked representatives of SNCC to meet with him. Mel went, as one of our $10 a week legal eagles. Like might speak unto like. And Althea went too—I assumed as one of our leading theoreticians on non-violence her presence and argument were meant to reassure the little man. No way.
I heard about it from Mel. Kennedy made it plain that he and his brother considered the Freedom Rides to be a pain. They were doing all they could, and what we were doing wasn’t helping—it was, inevitably, furthering the violence. This went down well with nobody. But it had to be Althea who flung the man’s record in his face. Mel sat at my bedside almost choking on giggles as he told me how she’d rounded on him with ‘Joe McCarthy’s been dead more’n three years. How come you still got your head up his ass?’
It had, by his own admission, been Mel—a man I had spent most of my adult life restraining—who got between Kennedy (‘the man yaps like a terrier’) and Althea (‘Turner, I’ll swear her biceps are bigger than his’) and steered the meeting back to the issues. The upshot of this was that we horse-traded. We’d switch our efforts to voter registration. In return we, an organization habitually broke, got tax-exempt status. We’d moved, said Mel, into the next phase.
‘It’s what we came to do,’ I said. ‘To get people registered and voting.’
‘I know,’ he said flatly.
As ever, he and Althea passed at the bedside, he leaving, she arriving, like two wooden figures in a German weatherhouse, as though they could not inhabit the same space at the same time.
Her version was the same as Mel’s. And at the end of it, she added, ‘Your li’l buddy is not a happy man.’
‘It’s what we joined to do,’ I said again.
‘T’ain’t what will be done, it’s what has been done. That is one troubled little white man.’
I suppose the blow to the head had fogged me. I certainly found I had double vision that came and went, and print could swim on the page like characters dancing in Fantasia. But it had fogged my judgment too. I had picked up on none of what she was pointing out to me. Maybe that’s the effect of self-pity—you see only yourself?
About ten days later they discharged me. I found Mel and Althea outside, each with a cab waiting.
‘Let’s all go in one,’ I said.
They looked at each other, a little like two women who’ve turned up at the party in identical dresses. Then Mel stuck his hand in his pocket, paid off his driver, and I found myself book-ended between the two of them in the back of a cramped cab.
At that time Mel and I shared a large apartment in Adams-Morgan. Two flights up. Mel lugged my stuff up the stairs. Althea extended an arm to me. An affectionate, if ludicrous gesture. Strong as she was I was head and shoulders taller and twice her weight. If I fell she’d never be able to hold me. As things turned out that became the metaphor. I fell, and I could not hold her. Mel made coffee, she strolled around, poking her nose into everything and at last said, ‘You boys seem to be set up very nicely.’ The meaning was not wasted on Mel. That night after she’d gone he said, ‘Woman means to have you.’
‘I know,’ I said.
‘You going to let her?’
‘I can’t figure out a way to stop her.’
‘Is she what you want?’
Mel and I had told each other everything from about three weeks after we met at Georgetown. There wasn’t a girlfriend I’d had in all that time that he hadn’t met and expressed an opinion on and vice versa. I’d even been there when he’d lost his virginity. He wasn’t for mine—that had happened when I was fifteen back in Texas. Mel was a late beginner, a virgin at twenty, and, truth to tell, not a hit with women. Whatever Althea Burke’s intentions towards me, he would have his say. That was the way it had always been. House rules.
I answered honestly, ‘Hell, I don’t know. Everything’s a blur. Last thing I remember is stepping off that bus in Mississippi . . . then wham . . . here I am.’
Did he wince at my mention of Mississippi? Did I imagine that tiny physical recoil from the memory I had prompted in him?
‘Could be you need someone around.’
‘What?’
‘Maybe it’ll all take longer than you think. You nearly died. Maybe getting back together is longer than they’re all saying. Maybe somebody should be here.’
‘Are you telling me to move this woman in?’
‘No,’ and he paused, for a second or two would not look me in the eye. ‘No, I’m telling you I’m leaving.’
He woke me the next morning. I’d slept fitfully. He’d banged around all ni
ght, doing God knows what. He stuck a cup of strong black coffee in my hand, threw the cat on the bed.
‘I’m packed. And all my stuff is in the large closet in the corridor. You can let the room if you want. Take care of Liberace.’
No—I did not know the piano player. Liberace was the cat’s name.
‘When will you be back?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘California, Mexico . . .’
‘Why now? The Movement needs us more than ever. After what you told me yesterday it sounds to me like we’re going to be at the heart of things.’
‘We are. Or you are. It’s what you wanted to do. But, I can’t do it.’
‘Is it money?’ He shook his head. ‘Is it Althea?’
‘Hell no. The woman’s battery acid on legs, but she may be what’s good for you. You want her, you have her.’
I stopped arguing. He was not simply leaving, he was running away. Running away not from what had happened to him, but from what had happened to me. I could articulate it but I couldn’t understand it.
He hoisted his backpack, kissed me on the top of the head, picked up his portable typewriter, and told me he’d be seeing me.
Later that day a banging on the door shook me out of a daydream and I opened up to see Althea, backpack strapped on, typewriter in hand. I had swapped a short, dark man with backpack and typewriter for a shorter, darker woman with backpack and typewriter. And I knew that the two of them had cooked this up between them. Somewhere in the natural hostility that served as communication they had found time and space to truss me up. I could have shut the door in her face then and there. I didn’t. I fell. I fell and I could not hold her.
I made love to a woman well out of focus. Altheas swirled about me—two, now three, all grinning at me. I had to assume they were all happy Altheas. She clung to me so hard the muscles in my arms ached, she straddled me so hard I thought I’d break a rib before she was through.
I woke to find her looking me, big orb eyes like Dinah Washington, in that little face. One hand tracing patterns on my chest, the nail scoring a fine red line in my skin.
‘Mr Raines.’
‘Miss Burke.’
‘You can call me Althea.’
‘Althea.’
I rolled the word around a while. It was the first time I had called her by her Christian name.
‘Althea. I know nothing about you.’
‘What would you like to know?’
‘Well . . . what do you do?’
‘Do? I’m a student at Howard.’
Howard was the all-Black university in Washington.
‘Aha. And what do you study?’
‘Divinity.’
‘Jesus!’
‘That’s the feller.’
In this fashion I pieced together a biography of the lover who had moved in on me. The conversations we might have had over coffee, after a movie, we had stark naked as she padded about the apartment looking into everything again, looking for a space to rest her typewriter.
She settled on Mel’s room. Blew the dust off his desk and set her Olivetti down.
‘You weren’t really going to let the room, were you?’
Of course I wasn’t. I was still expecting Mel to be back in a week or a month. Or more. In the meantime I found I had set up home with a twenty-two-year-old grad student, orphaned at twelve, native of Little Rock, who had been politicised in her last year in high school when Ike sent in the troops in an effort to stop open warfare between the state and its desegregationists.
‘Had to be a better way,’ she told me. ‘That’s when I learnt about civil disobedience and non-violence.’
And so for a while, a long while, well over a year, we lived. Exchanging snippets of our narratives. Althea moved in her books, box upon box, ancient Bible commentaries, tattered old hardbacks of Thoreau, Walden, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, the paperbacked works of the latest thinkers, Sartre, On Being and Nothingness, Cruden’s Concordance forever propped open on the desk. I went back to my work, turning over obscure state laws from the 1870s looking for cause to drag Alabama or Mississippi governments into their own courts, occasionally venturing out, into Georgia, down to Albany to campaign and to picket, to run the gauntlet of spit, abuse and billy clubs. Never, but never, to Mississippi—and no one ever suggested that I should. My head healed and my heart overflowed.
In the fall, the October of 1962, things changed forever. After Cuba the world was not the same place and Althea was not the same woman.
We were watching the Khrushchev–Kennedy stand-off on TV, just like Mostoftherestofamerica. It had reached the point, the only such I can honestly remember in my lifetime, when it seemed the world might just vanish in a nuclear puff. Those of the Restofamerica that had dug shelters took to them to spend nine days living off canned food, burning up flashlight batteries and pissing in chemical latrines—some that hadn’t wept aloud, strangers spoke to each other in bars and diners for no better reason than that they were all damned together, and in Mississippi as the apocalypse dawned men prepared to die equal but separate and go to individual hells in individual hues—but mostly we watched TV. Dying as we had lived, in thrall to the tube.
A few minutes after yet another of JFK’s addresses to the nation the phone rang. Althea picked it up.
‘I think it’s your old man.’
‘Dad?’
‘Johnnie, this is your daddy speakin’.’
I knew he was drunk. Drunk and miserable and pathetic. There was always that side to his character, the sublime sentimentality of a man who doesn’t drink often enough to be an habitual, happy drunk. What better reason to get sentimental than the imminent apocalypse?
‘Son, I think we should all be together at a time like this. Come on home.’
I had a court case in Atlanta less than ten days away.
‘Dad, I can’t just drop everything . . .’
‘Son, drop everythin’ afore everythin’ drops on us! I’d like all my boys around me. C’mon home.’
‘You’ve got Huey, Dad.’
‘And I want you. I want all my boys here. You, Huey, Billy. All my boys. A family should be t’gether at the end of the world.’
He hadn’t mentioned Billy by name in over ten years. Either he was more drunk than I had ever seen him or he really did think the world was about to end.
‘Dad, is Lois there?’
Lois came on the line.
‘You know. It would be good if you came. You and your young lady.’
‘Even if the world doesn’t end?’
‘Especially if the world doesn’t end.’
I stalled, got Atlanta out of the way and put it to Althea.
‘Meet the folks, huh? What do you think they’ll have to say about me?’
‘They know about you.’
‘It’s one thing you tellin’ ’em you’re shacked up with a nigger. Another to meet miscegenation face to face.’
‘My father never called anyone “nigger” in his life. And he’d probably think Miss Egenation was your name.’
‘You telling me he’s pleased about it? Wasn’t him invited us as I recall. It was your stepmother.’
‘Then come and meet her. She’s great.’
‘Do I press you to meet my family?’
‘You have no family. You lost your family.’
‘No—they lost me. And I don’t see any reason to get mixed up with another.’
All the same, we got on the plane to Lubbock.
It seems to me that I have fewer recollections of Althea’s reactions that first day than I do of my father’s. He was overjoyed to see me. That was obvious. He’d driven out to the airport with Lois—a task he usuall
y left her to do alone. He was still caught up in that ‘we-ain’t-dead-after-all’ euphoria that gripped America, and for all I know the rest of the world as well, for days after the crisis. Althea was, more than a little, bog-eyed at everything she saw. Sam insisted on the tour, the whole shebang, with narrative, from Great-Granddaddy’s log cabin—the wood stove tarnished now there was no adolescent to be set to polish it (Huey was not yet adolescent and rich kids don’t polish stoves)—to the cotton fields—old, back home and so on—to the range, where buffalo had not roamed in my lifetime but where the old man’s herd of longhorns placidly grazed with no thought of roaming, to the endless skyline of derricks that spelled out Raines wealth to the world. Cotton, oil and cattle—a world bound in leather and smelling of grease. Occasionally I got backslapped or one of those soft punches to the shoulder that carried the unspoken line that all this oil, all these cottonfields, all these Texas longhorns would one day be mine. Whereas yesterday they’d been set to be dust and ashes or Comm’nist, dead or red. Sam could say a lot with a punch.
We got through dinner. Beef, predictably. Althea ate about two ounces, predictably. My father, predictably, got sentimentally drunk and steered to an early bed by his wife. When Lois got back I said it had been a long day and that maybe Althea and I would just turn in too.
‘Sure,’ said Lois. ‘You’re in your old room. Miss Burke’s in the end suite.’
I looked at Althea, Althea looked at me. Twenty-four years old and I’d never brought a girl home before. I’d not expected anything. I’d just assumed.
‘Only kidding,’ Lois said.
We settled into bed. Sheets pulled up, looking out across the plains through one of the great glass walls that wrapped around the house. Sex seemed impossible. I never had had sex in my father’s house, and Althea seemed to understand this. For a while it seemed as though neither of us had anything to say. Two pretend virgins taking in the night landscape and the big sky.
Then she said, ‘Your daddy’s rich.’
‘And my momma’s good-lookin’.’
She giggled.
‘Hush little baby, don’t you . . .’
‘I meant rich beyond.’