Adler, Warren - Banquet Before Dawn

by Banquet Before Dawn [lit]

  The crowd moved past them on all sides. Some faltered and fell, unable to rise again, ignored by the crowd.

  "You can have it now," Sully shouted. "I pass to you."

  "Congressman, please," Perlmutter pleaded.

  "Come on, Sully," April sobbed. She gripped him with both hands on his upper arms.

  "Do you think they understood?" Sully whispered in Perlmutter's ear.

  "What difference does it make?" he shouted.

  "Maybe some of them heard me. Maybe some will forgive."

  For a few moments the crowd was almost immobilized by countering forces, but then the outgoing movement gained strength, moved toward the ballroom entrance.

  "The stage door. The stage door," someone shouted behind Sully, and those of the crowd who had swa rmed onto the stage began to press toward the exit through which the Pinkerton men had fled. "Stuck. It's stuck," voices began to yell.

  ———— *22* THE crowd on the stage sensed it was trapped and mindlessly began to shove and claw its way off the stage and toward the entrance to the ballroom. Others in the ballroom were less distressed and panicked by the situation than simply caught up in a frenzied sense of Armageddon. One young man climbed onto another's shoulders and ripped down the huge photograph of Sully. It fell in large scraps of paper on the heads of the crowd. Bodies pushed against Sully, and he felt himself teeter on the edge of the stage, with April still clinging to him. They lost balance, toppled, and fell. The bodies below them cushioned the fall. Sully struggled up, turned, and pulled April to her feet. Tears gushed from her eyes.

  They found themselves in the mainstream of the crowd again, a mass that now moved steadily out of the ballroom. Sully fought to remain upright and keep himself and April from falling beneath the feet of the crowd. Young boys sat belligerently on window ledges of the baroom, above the crowd, laughing at the chaos.

  "I found Fitz. I found Fitz." It was Perlmutter, who had pushed through to them. His thin face was covered with sweat, and his glasses

  had disappeared. He gripped Sully's arm and, elbowing people mercilessly, began slicing a path through the throng. Fitz was propped up against a wall, like an overstuffed rag doll. Blood gushed from his mouth and nose and rolled down his cheeks and onto his suit. Miraculously, his white carnation had remained in its place, although it was now speckled with red and partially crushed.

  "It's old Sully, Fitz. Old Sully is here."

  April kneeled down and looked around her for something to stanch the blood. Her pocketbook was gone. Gripping the hem of her dress, she tore off a strip of cloth and tried to clean his face. But the crowd came in on them again, engulfing them. With all his strength Sully attempted to hold back the tide. He flung his arms out blindly, angrily, striking whatever flesh moved near him. Cries of pain rang out. A knee caught him in the groin, almost doubling him up in pain. April turned from Fitz and reached out for Sully. Perlmutter, who had knelt beside her, held Fitz's wrist. His fingers reached for a pulse; then he shook his head. Gently he edged Fitz's body higher against the wall. But it kept slipping back down, and soon he gave up.

  Sully felt the pain recede, but before he could regain his presence, the crowd moved them farther from Fitz's body.

  "Take good care of the sweet old Irish bastard, God," Sully whispered, watching the body recede. "It's the end of the world anyway, Fitz. Fuck them all."

  April still clung to him, but Perlmutter had become separated from them. They could only surrender to the crowd now. It was futile to fight the tide of screaming, sweating, panicked humans. Some, hemmed in on all sides, seemed to have lost all will to move and remained upright only because they could not be supine. Voices cried out in frustration and pain.

  "We've gotta get out of here."

  "We're all gonna get crushed."

  Some of the boys still perched on the window ledges began to spit down into the crowd, laughing when the spittle hit its mark.

  Finally they arrived at the entrance of the ballroom, but the crowd suddenly lurched to the side, pushing them into a corridor. They managed to reach a wall and leaned against it. A panicked face loomed close to Sully's, the dark eyes burning with fear, then suddenly there was a flicker of recognition. It was Annabelle Rose. Recognizing Sully, she fought to straighten her huge bulk and stay beside him.

  "Ah got to get home," she pleaded. Then she paused. "Ah come to see you make a speech."

  Sully tried to give her more space, but her bulk was making it doubly difficult. He gripped her hand.

  "These are bad people," she said.

  "It's not their fault," Sully said.

  "Ah got to get home," she said again.

  The crowd moved them ahead again, and Sully found himself near an exit door. Surprisingly, it gave way, and they were in the stairwell again. Even here, people were still pushing in both directions, up and down, in a frantic search for space. Sully held tightly to both Annabelle and April as he moved them against the railing and began maneuvering them up a step at a time.

  The climb seemed endless, every step a major effort, but the air in the stairwell seemed better, and Sully's head began to clear. A separate tide of people strained and puffed downward, many of them carrying small pieces of furniture, lamps, mattresses — whatever they had been able to get their hands on. Some even carted off large old-fashioned television sets. Still, Sully's group edged upward, at times using the down-coming people and objects for leverage.

  They attempted to move out of the stairwell on the first level above the ballroom, but the exit there was blocked with people and objects.

  "We'll go up another floor," Sully said to April and Annabelle. The black woman looked atim, her face glistening with sweat.

  "Ah can't," she said, leaning against the wall and puffing, a large hand on her chest. Sully gripped the hand and started up again. His mind had emptied itself of everything except the blind will to free himself and Annabelle and April from the crush of the crowd. All else was irrelevant.

  Below them, two men were carrying a TV set. Suddenly, one slipped and lurched forward, and the heavy set slipped from their arms and fell with a bone-crushing impact on the people below. There were screams of pain, and Sully looked down at a chaos of flesh as the unscathed people strained away from the injured. He pushed Annabelle in front of him, shoving against her huge buttocks with one hand and pulling April up with the other.

  Someone grabbed Sully's tie for balance, and he felt his neck strain against the pressure. He tried to force the fingers of his own hand inside his collar. Annabelle, feeling Sully's hand leave her buttocks, turned, saw his gasping red face and immediately attacked the hand gripping his tie. She reached out for it, lost her balance, then somehow managed to brace herself against the stair rail. Her teeth found the hand and bit down hard, and Sully watched the fingers suddenly loosen. The hand dropped into the downward avalanche of people, and Sully immediately began pushing up again.

  As they rose, the crowd at last began to thin, but they continued to move up, now groping on hands and knees in the dim light. Downward movement continued beside them, swifter as they moved up, and Sully wanted to warn the people moving down that it was futile, that below was only hell. Instead, he just climbed up doggedly, each step an obsession. Above him, the enormous bulk of Annabelle continued to move, her thighs exposed and luminous with sweat.

  At the landing on the tenth floor they propped themselves against the wall and flopped against each other like cast-off puppets, gasping for the last vestiges of their strength.

  Four men struggled at the exit door, trying to move a large bed through it. They worked slowly, with all the concentration of mathematicians solving a geometric problem, too absorbed in their effort to notice the three exhausted figures.

  "Move it sideways."

  "I can't."

  "Then try up. Ready? One, two, three, up."

  Sully watched them, smiling thinly, as he perceived their futility. _Dumb bastards,_ he thought. _Poor dumb bastards_.


  He could still hear sounds from below, like the canned howls of a television show. The bed had become stuck in the door, jammed tight, leaving only minimal crawl space.

  Sully shook the women.

  "Come on," he said, and they followed him on hands and knees through the crawl space and into the hotel corridor.

  The four men crawled through after them and sat down on the floor in the corridor. They passed around a bottle.

  Sully, April, and Annabelle rested against the opposite wall.

  "Shee-it," one of the men said, noticing them. Sully reached out toward the bottle, pleading with his fingers.

  "Sure, man." He handed him the bottle. "We found a whole case." Sully drank greedily, feeling the shock of the booze reviving him. He reached over to April and, cupping a hand under her chin, poured a drink into her mouth. She gagged, shook her head, then managed to swallow.

  "Better?"

  She swallowed again and waved the bottle away. "Better," she whispered.

  He handed the bottle to Annabelle, who upended it. She swallowed

  several times, deeply. Then wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, she handed the bottle back to the men. Her eyes searched their faces as they sat staring at them from across the corridor. Another bottle emerged from behind one of the men, and he began to pass it around.

  "All the speechifying over down there?" one of them asked.

  "All over," Sully answered.

  "Sheeet."

  They all sat silently for a time, as the bottle made its rounds. Sounds persisted from below. Soun of festivity, reveling, Sully thought, knowing better.

  "They're sure havin' one good time down there," one of the men said, watching them.

  Perhaps it was the phrase "good time" or the expression on the man's face, but Sully felt Annabelle stiffen beside him. He watched her smooth down her dress to cover her exposed thighs, a reflex action on her part, but it telescoped to Sully a sense of impending danger. He saw Annabelle look at April, who in her exhaustion sat indifferently, her legs askew, the large rents in her dress an d panty hose revealing white flesh. Annabelle tugged at Sully's sleeve. He slid upward, steadying himself against the wall, and drew April up with him. Annabelle, too, used the wall to edge up but kept her eyes fixed on the four men.

  "Don't you want to have a good time, you big-assed nigger woman?" one of the men said. He lurched forward in the corridor, grappling at Annabelle's foot and causing her to fall in a crumpled heap across him.

  "Damn near broke my leg," he moaned, grinning, and lifting his hand, smacked it against Annabelle's buttocks.

  Deeply offended, Annabelle, with some effort at dignity, climbed to her feet again. She strained to reach her full height, panting with anger.

  "You should show respect," she hissed at the man while looking at Sully from the corner of her eye.

  "Respeck," the man howled with laughter. He fell back to his place against the wall and butted both elbows into the sides of his companions.

  "You know who this is?" Annabelle shouted, pointing toward Sully.

  "Please," Sully whispered. But Annabelle refused to be daunted.

  "This is Congressman Sullivan." She repeated it, emphasizing the title. "Congressman Sullivan."

  "That honky there?" the man who had tripped Annabelle said. "No sheet." He turned his glance toward Sully. April tightened her grip on Sully's hand. Sully had no frame of reference for handling the situation. Annabelle's belligerence had deflected the men's interest from her to him, and to April beside him. Sully took a step forward in front of April. It was a reflexive, protective action, and he knew that the men sensed it.

  One of the men began to rise, sliding himself upward along the wall. "Looka here, we got the man himself." His two companions also rose.

  "You leave them be," Annabelle shouted.

  Sully knew he should be registering fear. Instead he felt an odd tranquillity, as though awaiting a logical, just, and long expected confrontation that would take him over the abyss. A glowing lucidity swept over him, the vision of the Emerald Isle his father must have seen in the frame of the window as life ebbed.

  The mindless words of the speech he had tried to deliver in the ballroom came back to him, and he regretted that his own vanity had betrayed the clarity of what he wanted to say. His warning had been lost not only in the chaos of the crowd, but also in his personal need for confession, for forgiveness. There was justice in that, too, he realized. He was just another drunken Irishman, pissing into the wind, drunk on booze and words, vomiting wisdom at the back of a pub.

  The eyes of the three black men assailed him with their focused anger,

  and he prepared himself mentally for the infliction of physical pain, waiting for the impact of its cleansing action.

  Suddenly the looming bulk of Annabelle blocked his view as she pressed herself against the men, her arms reaching out to envelope them.

  "We've no quarrel with _you,_ sister," Sully heard one of the men say. He could feel April trembling behind him.

  "Leave them be," Annabelle demanded again.

  Sully imagined her heavy eyes, facing them down, invoking the iron will of the black woman's soul. For a moment he sensed her pressure pushing back their tide of vengeance.

  "It's all right," Sully whispered gently.

  "They's turning mean," she said over her shoulder. Then to the men: "You stay away. They done you no harm."

  Sully could feeer desperation then and realized her efforts were useless. He felt his eyes moisten, then a burning sensation.

  "Smoke," one of the men said. Then he heard a slap of flesh as the force of a punch knocked Annabelle against the corridor wall. He saw the backs of the men as they ran toward the exit door, and then the smoke curling. The men began to crawl beneath the jammed bed frame that still partially blocked the exit to the stairwell.

  "They just become a little mean with liquor," Annabelle said, the side of her face swelling. April started to cough as more smoke drifted into the hallway. From far away the sound of sirens grew louder.

  "The old Dutchman," Sully said. "She's burning."

  He reached for Annabelle's hand and pulled her to her feet. "Start moving," he ordered. They moved quickly to the exit door, hearing the rumble of hurrying feet echoing up the stairwell. The two women crawled beneath the bed frame.

  Sully hesitated, one hand on the metal surface of the doorjamb, and looked sadly back along the corridor as though saying farewell.

  "Sully, please," he heard April scream from the stairs.

  _The Dutchman's going down with old Sully,_ he thought, letting go of the doorjamb and at last beginning to crawl through the exit.

  ———— *23* ARAM had been listening to Norman for half an hour.

  The air in the storefront campaign headquarters was stifling. Pictures of Aram lined both sides of the room and a huge REACH TO DIGNITY WITH YOMARIAN banner dominated it. He had been here only once before. It was a big, gloomy place, and now it was filled with more than fifty people.

  Norman was explaining Operation Drive. They had agreed to give each campaign worker fifty dollars for gas and the use of his car, plus two dollars for every voter he drove to the polls. Norman stood before a big map that designated the drop-off points near the polling stations, just enough distance from the polls to prevent accusations of illegal electioneering.

  "You get five dollars for each trip, to a maximum of ten trips, plus the two dollars a head — payable on delivery for each trip," Norman explained.

  "And how do we identify the pickups?"

  "They'll all be carrying little paper American flags like this." Norman held up a paper flag. "We've got another team handing out the flags and offering to baby-sit for mothers who can't leave the house without someone to watch the kids."

  Aram listened perfunctorily, fighting sleep. His hand ached. His feet felt swollen and heavy, too big for his shoes. Sandra sat behind a bridge table with a pile of pink coupons in front of her. Norman explained that th
e workers would each get ten pink coupons on which to write the names of his passengers. The coupons would be redeemable for cash at the drop-off point. It was ingenious planning, Aram thought, hearing it for the first time, wondering vaguely whether it was legal. He did not question whether it would work. Alby sat next to him writing on a yellow pad with a ball-point pen.

  Finally, Norman was finished, and the workers lined up at the bridge table and received their pink coupons.

  "Frosting on the cake," Norman said after the workers left. "Years ago they used to pay the voters." Norman laughed, showing white, even teeth. "Used to be a big day for drunks."

  Sandra stood up behind the bridge table and came over to them. In the harsh light she looked tired. The edges of her face sagged.