Black Alice

by Thomas M. ; Sladek Disch; Sladek Disch

  It was the Creole girl. She was naked, her ankles tied to the lower bed-posts, while Clara, the black homely girl that no one really cared for, stood at the head of the bed holding her wrists. Clara's face was a mask of indifference. When she saw Roderick come into the room the Creole girl stopped screaming. Her skin was so light, with her hair dyed and straightened, she might have passed for white—north of Norfolk, at least.

  Bogan folded up his bloody penknife and pocketed it. Roderick's gaze returned again to the girl's smooth belly, where dark blood welled from the cuts. It was just possible, through the mess of blood, to make out the letters that Bogan had carved there: KKK.

  Tt was an accident,' Bogan said. 'Honest. My hand slipped.' He pouted.

  'My God!' Roderick said, holding to the door frame for support (and, incidentally, to bar the others who had followed him up the stairs from the room). 'You beast! Bogan, you beast!'

  'It was an accident,' Bogan repeated idiotically. 'I'll pay for any damage I done, but it was an accident. You'll back me up on that, won't you, Hot Rod? You'll say it was an accident?'

  'You better get out of here before Bessy comes up and sees what you done. Damn it all, Bogan, you must be a raving lunatic to think you can pull off a stunt like this.'

  'It was an accident. You'll back me up. You'll stand by your brother.' Bogan prepared to leave the room, but stopped, consideringly, before the dresser. He picked the ashtray from the glass top with drunken over-preciseness. 'We'd better cauterise that wound, or it'll get infected.' He turned the ashtray upside down over her belly. She began to scream again, though not with the same hysterical intensity. Roderick hit Bogan a glancing blow on the back of his head, and then Bogan was out of the door and into the hall, doubled with laughter.

  'Get him out of here,' Roderick commanded the other fraternity brothers. 'Take him out to the car. This year's Howl is over, as of now. And keep Bessy calmed down till I can get things straightened with this girl in here.'

  He returned to the Creole girl. Clara was still holding her wrists as though she sensed that all was not over.

  'Are you conscious? Can you understand me?' he asked the girl. She nodded. Her face was wet with tears and sweat.

  Awkwardly he began to wipe away the filth of butts and ashes from the still bleeding wound. He was uncomfortably aware of the warmth growing in his loins. 'Does it still hurt?' he asked.

  She nodded and began sobbing with relief.

  Roderick looked into Clara's eyes, and there was a spark of mutual understanding before she resumed her customary mask of inexpressivity. He did not even need to tell her to continue holding the girl's wrists.

  Roderick was still making love to the unconscious girl when the police arrived. They took her to the coloured hospital, where she was two days coming out of a coma. For those two days Roderick and Bogan were held in prison. When they were released, Roderick learned that he had been expelled from the University. He had been just days short of graduation! Bogan, whose father was in the Virginia State Judiciary, received his degree though he was barred from graduation ceremonies. Roderick knew then that if such things could happen, there was no justice in this world, and thereafter he had planned his life accordingly.

  Again there was a knocking at the front door, and thirty heartbeats later it was repeated. Bessy must have left the house, for no one came to answer the door. The question was —had Alice left with her? Or was she up in the bath, or under a bed, dead? Whichever were the case, Roderick could think of no better strategy than silence, and he eased back into his nest of winter coats. He could hear the front door opening, and a man's voice called out: 'Bessy? Bessy McKay, are you here?'

  A client perhaps? No, it was too early for that sort of thing. This time it probably was, as Clara had pretended before, the F.B.L agent.

  Roderick followed him about the house in his imagination: up the stairs, in and out of each bedroom. Downstairs: in the kitchen; along the corridor out-of-use rooms; then, across to the living-room window. Roderick, kneeling at the keyhole again, saw him stoop to pick up the phonograph from the floor. Across his back, in red script, was scrawled the trademark, SPENGLER'S BEER.

  Again! The shock he felt exceeded simple fear and passed almost into the realm of the supernatural, a sort of terrorised reverence or reverential terror. His fists, his guts, his glands, all were suffused by it.

  The Spengler's Beer insignia left Roderick's small range of vision. The man wearing the overalls (if only Roderick could have seen his face!) came and stood in front of the closet. He jiggled the door handle. Roderick reached into his pocket and gripped the handle of the revolver.

  His faceless antagonist muttered an obscenity and strode out of the front door, slamming it behind him. A moment later Roderick heard him start up his truck and drive off.

  He was afraid to shoot through the lock, and he had no idea how to set about picking it. He braced his back against the upper wood panel of the door and pushed with the full force of his arms and legs against the wall of the closet. He ripped the back of his suit and strained a shoulder muscle, but he got out. He lay on the floor of the foyer, crying and drinking in the cool, delicious morning air. It was so good to be alive!

  He would have to kill Bessy now, of course. Probably the two whores as well. He could see now that this had always been the most logical plan of action, but he had not had the courage, or the honesty, till now to admit it to himself.

  Before he left Green Pastures, he ran upstairs just to make sure that Alice's body wasn't somewhere about. He found her dirty red check dress lying beside the clothes hamper in the

  bathroom. She must have been changed into the turquoise-blue dress she'd been kidnapped in.

  Somehow the cast-off dress made him feel sad.

  He smiled, remembering his Nietzsche: Your killing, O judges, shall be pity and not revenge. And as you kill, be sure that you yourselves justify life! It is not enough to make peace with the man you kill. Your sadness shall be love of the overman: Thus you shall justify your living on.

  And Roderick did definitely feel sad.

  And justified.

  Chapter 19

  'Hold on tight,' Bessy said, gripping Alice by her right and Fay by her left hand, while she tried to forge a path through the jostling crowd around the news-and-tobacco counter at the front of the station. 'Did you ever see such a crowd! Where they all going on the 4th July?'

  'Where's my baby?' Fay demanded petulantly.

  'Dinah's got your baby, honey. You ain't got no cause to fret.'

  'I want it!'

  'Soon as we sit down you can have it, but Dinah ain't big enough to carry that suitcase, and you are.'

  'Why can't Clara carry the old suitcase?'

  ' 'Cause Clara's already carrying three suitcases, honey-bunch. Now try and behave.'

  In the crowd of grown-ups Alice could see very little but midriffs and behinds. Even so, it seemed to her that there were a lot more coloured people here than one usually found in a crowd this size. And it wasn't like the crowd on the street yesterday. That crowd, with its hymn-singing and bright costumes, had had something of a holiday mood about it, while today everyone, white and black, wore tense expressions and talked in whispers. At the back of the station, in front of a glass door with a plastic number 1 above it, was someone she recognised—the policeman who had made her spill her milk into the gutter. In the press of bodies she was quite unnoticeable, so she stuck her tongue out at him.

  There were long lines in front of the ticket windows. Even so, no one was being waited on. Behind the counter, the ticket sellers—three middle-aged men in shirt sleeves—were discussing something with a younger man in a black suit. The man in the black suit said something very loud and definite, and the three ticket sellers returned to their windows, and each of them hung a small plastic sign across the round speaking-hole in the glass: this window closed, please use next window. The people waiting in line groaned.

  The man in the black suit (the manager
of the station?) came forward and very earnestly requested that everyone go home. They would all be much happier at home. The bus station was nowhere to carry on violent quarrels, and in any case all bus services were cancelled for the day. The effect of his speech was vitiated somewhat by the arrival at just that moment of a bus. The heavy engine sputtered to silence, followed by the hiss and thud of its door opening. The policeman standing at number 1 entrance twirled his night stick nervously.

  A few people, blacks and whites, straggled in through the door, looking up in surprise at the mob. (Actually, Alice could see now, there were two mobs: one almost entirely black; the other unexceptionably white.) And the mobs, in turn, looked surprised and, almost in unison, sighed. Everyone stayed where they were, except those who'd just dismounted from the bus, who bore their children and luggage out of the station through the side doors.

  'What's everybody waiting around here for?' Bessy asked of the man ahead of her in the line.

  'You mean to say you ain't heard! Them ministers and all them other CORE people are coming down here from Washington, just like they said they was.'

  Outside the station Alice could see the bus driver changing the sign on the bus. Norfolk was wound back till it became Baltimore. She tugged at Bessy's hand.

  'What is it now, child?'

  'Where are you getting tickets to, Bessy? Have you decided yet?'

  'Lord knows. I got some friends in Atlanta that should put us up for a few days. Leastways, they'll take Fay and Clara off my hands. After that, 1 just don't know. But don't you worry, sweety-pie—I'm going to look after you.'

  'Because, you see, that bus is returning to Baltimore.'

  'Dear God, I ain't taking you up North! I might just as well go hand myself over to that policeman there. You don't want Bessy going to prison, do you, darling? Course not.'

  'But you don't have to go with me. Just get me a ticket and put me on the bus and when I get there I can call up my uncle, and it's all perfectly safe and sure, and I promise that no matter what I won't tell on you. Criss-cross my heart. But as for Daddy...'

  Bessy nodded grimly. On that subject nothing more needed to be said between them. 'I'd feel safer if you was with me, but I s'pose that don't necessarily mean you'd be safer. So if that man'll open the ticket window, I'll just get you a ticket to Baltimore, but it looks like we picked just about the worst time we could to come here.'

  'Oh, look!' said Fay, beside herself with excitement. 'Here's some of the clowns from the circus!'

  It was the Klan. They pushed in through the side doors (the front of the station was one solid wall of waiting mob now), the majority in white robes with red crosses, a few in red, and a single Klansman in lime green. This last figure, as though to make up for the general scarcity of green, was far and away the largest of them all. For sheer bulk he rivalled Bessy.

  None wore masks, though they did have on their pointy witch-hats.

  The green Klansman walked to Gate 1 and talked to the policeman there, who seemed almost to be relieved at their arrival, though he should have known that they would bring nothing but trouble. After all, he'd seen what they'd done yesterday. After they'd talked, the policeman left the bus station through the door the Klansmen had come in at.

  The green Klansman was helped to stand on one of the benches, from which he addressed everyone in the bus station. 'All right! Shut up and listen to me. We warned you dumb niggers—Shut up, I said!—yesterday, and we've been warning you right along, to stay home today. Some of you have got pretty thick heads, and don't remember so well. Well, that's a damned shame. Because now it's too late, Nobody's leaving this bus station now until we've welcomed the nigger ministers to our fair city. Is that understood?'

  Somebody from the crowd shouted out, 'No!'

  'Then this will make it understood,' the Klansman said, puckering fat lips into a smile that looked like a cluster of grapes. From underneath his green robes he took a shotgun; several of the attendant Klansmen took out shotguns or rifles as well.

  There had been something about the green Klansman's voice, or his manner, that made Alice think of her father. On those rare occasions when he had undertaken to punish her he had spoken in just that way.

  'Come on, children,' Bessy said, grabbing hold of Alice's and Fay's hands. 'We better get out of here. We'll get us a bus later on.'

  But the Klansmen had moved in front of all the side doors. The mob at the front of the station was a mob of white men, who blocked the way to any coloured person trying to push through it.

  Clara chuckled and set down the three suitcases. 'Well, that's that. At least we can be sure Ole Roderick is gonna have just as much trouble getting in here as we'll have getting out.'

  If we're going to wait, we might as well wait sitting down,' Bessy said, heaving a sigh. She led her three charges to a bench at the periphery of the crowd of Negroes.

  'Just a minute!' exploded the Klansman in green. 'Just a god-damned minute! Is that a white woman sitting down there in the middle of all those niggers? Is she going to let them niggers feel her up? What is this?'

  A Klansman in candy-apple red pushed his way forward to speak to the lime-green Klansman. Alice recognised him: it was Farron Stroud. 'No cause to be alarmed. Grand Dragon, sir,' Farron said. 'She's just a hoor, and sort of simple besides. She don't know no better.'

  But the Grand Dragon paid Farron no heed. 'You! White woman! Come here! Yes, you!'

  Trembling but smiling prettily (Hadn't Bessy always told her she had to smile no matter what the men told her to do?) Fay stepped forward.

  'Just what the hell do you think you're doing here with ail these niggers?'

  'I don't know,' Fay confessed. 'But I think you're nice.'

  The Grand Dragon blushed brilliantly. As he regarded Fay in her snug, peppermint-stripe party-dress, sucking on a strand of her own blonde hair, he seemed to be choking on something. At least, he found speech difficult.

  'Can I go now?' Fay asked, when his colour seemed to have subsided.

  'Back to them niggers? A pretty girl like you shouldn't be running with a bunch of dirty niggers and Commies and I don't know what-all!'

  'But I have to! I have to get my baby and feed her, and it's time for her nap. Oh, it's way past time for her nap already, and she's very sleepy.'

  The green Klansman looked from Fay to the person he supposed to be her baby—Alice, black Alice. 'She's your baby?' he gasped. Then, with full explosive force: 'Your baby?'

  The colour returned to his face more richly than before. Like a ripening plum, it seemed to be passing from red to the violet band of the spectrum. With his shimmering regalia and funny hat, he had taken on an altogether clownish appearance.

  Fay giggled. 'Are you one of the clowns?' she asked, believing sincerely that he was.

  The Grand Dragon snorted wrathfully, and raised an arm to strike Fay but the blow was never to fall. A thin black shadow materialised suddenly into the air before him, slammed into his fat body, toppling him. It was Ku Klux Klara. Her knee came up against the Grand Dragon's groin, her nails raked his face, her voice whispered obscene endearments.

  White silk robes closed in around Clara, and Alice could see nothing then but a rush and tumble of midriffs and behinds, as the crowd broke for the unguarded doors. A bus was pulling into the station, and somewhere a policeman was blowing his whistle.

  Owen Gann was getting into his truck having searched the house on North Tidewater Road to no purpose, when someone hailed his name, and a car pulled over to the opposite kerb.

  'Gann, it's a damned good thing I found you.' It was Jenks, the Knight-Hawk, a pox-faced man with bad teeth and extreme halitosis. Even at a distance of several feet Owen was sure he could catch a whiff of him.'I been at your rooming house. I been at the Spengler's loading docks but they was shut down for the 4th. And where do I find you? In Niggertown! You ain't forgotten where we're all supposed to be this morning, have you?'

  'We're going to the African Church tonight? Owe
n protested, feigning not to understand.

  'I'm talking about the bus station, not the church. Jesus Kee-rist, you got a head as thick as...' He looked up and down North Tidewater Road for a metaphor. '... as thick as thieves. You drive this truck to somewhere you can park it—behind Farron's Bar would be a good idea—and then you can drive on to the bus station with me.'

  Gann would have demurred, but he could think of no convincing reason for not doing as Jenks said. Today of all days he should not miss out on the Klan's activities. He began to wonder if it were possible that his whole brainstorm about the Negro girl he'd seen yesterday being Alice Raleigh might not have been a devious tactic of his subconscious seeking to avoid an unwelcome task.

  He drove behind Jenks for the three miles to Stroud's Bar and Grill, where a Klansman (though not in regalia) stopped him as he pulled the truck into the driveway.

  'Ayak?' asked Owen.

  'Akia,' responded the man, ritually. 'What is the Oath of Allegiance?'

  'Obedience, Secrecy, Fidelity, and Nishness,' said Owen, completing the time-honoured formula. The man waved him past.

  Peter Boggs, wearing a white robe, was alone in the parking lot. He explained to Jenks that everyone else had left already for the bus station: could he come along in Jenks' car? For some reason Jenks seemed reluctant, but it was impossible to refuse so reasonable a request.

  'Where's your own car?' Jenks asked.

  'Sold it,' Boggs said laconically. He darted a look at Gann, as though there were something he was about to say to himself —but then, why didn't he?

  Probably, Gann thought, he wants to apologise for having sold the car without giving me another chance at it.

  The nearest parking space to the bus station that they could find was four blocks off. While Boggs rolled down the car windows, Jenks took out a sawed-off shotgun and a bundle wrapped in newspapers from under the car's front seat. The bundle contained two robes. Jenks tossed one of them to Gann.