Black Alice
Page 23
Now Bessy and Alice were resting in the park, Bessy incongruously fitted into a swing. Alice's head was turned away from Roderick, so it was Bessy who saw him first, in the robes of the Grand Dragon, approaching.
'We ain't making no trouble, believe me!' she protested at once. 'We'se just dumb black folk minding our own business, an'...'
Roderick acted with decision. No last minute qualms could prevent his finger closing over the trigger, nor could his aim, so close as this, err. The child's corpse tumbled boodily to the ground, half her head shot away.
Bessy lurched forward to prevent what had already happened, but she took no account of how unsteadily she was perched in the swing. She found herself falling backward. Roderick repressed a snicker at the absurd spectacle of her fall. 'I'm afraid, Bessy, that I shall have to use the other cartridge on you.'
Bessy, flat on her back, her legs projecting into the air, began to pray.
'Oh, really now! You don't believe in that sort of nonsense, do you? Only weak people need a god to believe in. It shows a slave-mentality. Try to face death with dignity. You, of all people!'
'For Christ's sake, Roderick, shut your mouth and do...'
She stopped speaking abruptly as though the words had been wrested from her mouth. Her eyes widened with horror, then lowered with thankfulness as she felt the last heavy drop of pain fall from the faucet and splash into the dark pool beneath.
She'd always somewhat blamed the Lord for giving her a bad heart. Not till this moment had she known it was meant to be a blessing, not till the moment it stopped.
Roderick pressed his hand into Bessy's immense bosom, searching for a heartbeat. 'Dead,' he announced to the night air.
Overhead, as though in honour of the deed, the fireworks began to explode, not serially as at an ordinary Fourth of July exhibition, but hordes of them in the space of one minute—red, white, blue, green, gold—cannoning, illuminating the night for that moment more brightly than even the fire.
A pity, he thought, that Alice can't see this. Fireworks are meant for children.
He regarded the child bleeding at his feet with some tenderness. She had collapsed into an awkward position, and Roderick bent down to dispose her limbs more becomingly. She seemed oddly larger dead than she had been alive. Ordinarily Roderick would have expected the reverse to be true: that a dead person would seem smaller.
He crossed the two hands upon the never-to-ripen breasts, realising with some solemnity the enormity of the thing he had done. He had gone beyond—oh, well beyond! —mere good and evil, transcended the human, all-too-human limitations, of other men. Human? It was a word that scarcely could be said to apply to Roderick Raleigh. To him humanity was no more than an object that he could use as he saw fit—an object no more innately significant than the bauble he toyed with in his fingers, the identification bracelet on the girl's wrist.
Alice had never had an identity bracelet.
He read the name engraved on it by the light of the blazing church: Matilda James. As the suspicion of his error grew, Roderick became distinctly upset. Then, persuading himself that this had been part of Alice's 'disguise', he relaxed. A clever idea—cleverer than Roderick would have given Bessy credit for. It showed a sort of Germanic perfectionism not at all like the old woman.
Now he seemed to see everything about the child askew: her clothes, her face, even the size of her body seemed wrong. He pulled her into a sitting position by the braid across the top of her head. The dead girl's mouth gaped open and Roderick saw the braces on her teeth. With a cry almost of horror Roderick stood up. The hand that had held the braid came away sticky with blood, which he wiped on the silk of the robe.
Had Bessy deliberately tricked him? Had she, during the panic in the church, caught up the wrong child by accident or on purpose? Had she meant this child to be a scapegoat for Alice? Had she been ready, in her anxiety to save Alice, to sacrifice one of her own people? Roderick cursed the dead woman for having once again made a fool of him—and for having fled so far beyond retort.
An alternative explanation occurred: Roderick saw, coming around from the side of the church, a Klansman in a white robe that was ripped down the back. The Klansman ran to the top of the steps and stared down the fiery aisle. Through the tear in his robe were visible most of the letters composing the trademark of Spengler's Beer. Madness? Hallucination? Certainly it was too much to suppose that the F.B.I, man pursuing Roderick was a member of the Ku Klux Klan?
But when this utterly improbable phantasm came bounding across the street into the park Roderick ignored the improbability, ignored the demands of an heroic morality, ignored everything but the adrenal fear that overwhelmed him, and, stumbling over Matilda James, he turned on his heel and ran towards his car.
It was the most terrible thing, terrible beyond belief. Burning down a church and killing people. Because they were black. For no other reason than that. They had done no one harm. They had all been in church. To set a church on fire! And killing people, children, me.
She tried to think, to make sense of the madness going on about her, but the madness was too extreme. It scattered distinct thought like a hammer shattering a looking-glass: afterwards nothing could be made out in it but the pattern of the fractures.
The old man who had taken her by the hand when the panic started in the church had paused beside the car to catch his breath. He had been hurt where the Klansman had clubbed him, and though he told her to be brave there were tears in his eyes. Despite his blackness, he reminded Alice of her uncle. He was even older and more wrinkled than Jason, even more infirm, but beneath the weakness that came of age there was a strength that was also the product of age, though not so invariably.
Another Klansman came out of the park. Alice wanted to run from him, but she did not wish to leave the old man who had been so good to her all by himself. This Klansman's robe was darker than the others', though in the murky glow from the fire, it was hard to see what colour exactly...
Green! Then was this the terrible man who had tried to hit Fay at the bus station? He seemed to have become smaller, to have shrivelled like a green grape that has been put in the oven.
Silently (and it did not seem quite right, somehow, for a Klansman to be so long silent) the green Klansman wrested Alice away from the old Negro, who had very little strength left for any sort of battle. The Klansman's hand circled Alice's upper arm, and he dragged her away from the car and out of the park. She screamed, but among so many other screams hers was inaudible.
She knew him now, this green Klansman. She knew the soft-skinned hand with its onyx ring; she knew the pointy-toed shoes with perforated patterns that tripped on the hem of the over-size robe; she knew the hasty stride that forced her to run along at his side, taking three steps for every two of his. They had been through this same scene already, in another place and context: he had dragged her home once in just this way from a birthday party at her dearest friend's house. She remembered how, on the former occasion, he kept muttering, 'You just wait. Just wait till we get home!' She remembered the incredible injustice of it.
They stopped. They were on a street of ramshackle houses. The windows were dark and the Klan had shot out the streetlight at the corner. Alice tried to squirm free but her father kept a firm grip on her arm. It was quieter here so she began screaming again. He slapped her across the face.
Then he let go of her. It happened so suddenly that she was mistrustful. Why would he let her go so easily unless, for some reason, it suited him? She did not notice the ring of men who'd gathered around them until she bumped into one of them and even then she continued to scream, unable to grasp the fact that she was no more in danger.
'Raping little girls now, Mister Dragon?' one of the men said. He took away Roderick's shotgun. He ripped off the hoodwink from his head, and the toupee came with it. Roderick tried to retrieve, the hairpiece, but when he bent over one of the Negroes hit him in the face and another kicked him from behind. 'So that's what a dragon l
ooks like, is it?' the first man went on. 'I hope I got your title right—you're the Grand
Dragon, aren't you? Of the Invisible Empire?' 'No, I.. .'
'He calls himself a Grand Dragon, but I call him a child-rapist, a gangster, a goddam mother ...
'I'm not a Klansman. For heaven's sake, I wish you'd give a person a chance to explain. Don't judge by appearances.'
'Sure enough, and we're not niggers. It's just appearances that are against us. Oh, I'd like to kick in your clean white face. Instead, I'm just going to blow if off your neck with this shotgun, the way you blew out the brains of that little girl in the park.'
'No. Listen to me ...'
'I'll bet you didn't think anyone was watching you there? Well, that's one advantage of being a nigger, Mister Dragon. Niggers are hard to see in the dark.'
'Oh, pow'ful haahd tuh see,' mocked another of the men.
'Stop making jokes,' a third said gruffly. 'Shoot the bastard, Tommy, and let's get out of here.'
'I'm not the Grand Dragon. Really, you boys are making a tragic mistake. And as for your notion that I'm a child-rapist, well, I must say! That girl there—she's my daughter'
Silence could be the only response to so stupendous a lie.
'Ask her! Alice, tell them you're my daughter.'
The Negroes looked at Alice. 'Yeah, tell us that!' one said mockingly.
She lowered her eyes. 'My name ain't Alice,' she said. 'It's Dinah.'
'Alice!'
'And my father's back there by the car. The old man that he pushed down. My father's a black man.'
'Got anything else you'd like to say, Grand Dragon?' the man called Tommy asked, raising the shotgun he'd taken from Roderick.
'Alice! Alice, have pity on me! I'm your father!' She looked up, smiling at Roderick's mistake.
'Hold it!' A white man in overalls that advertised Spengler's Beer stepped into the circle of men gathered around Roderick. National Guardsmen followed at a distance. 'Congratulations, men, on capturing this man. He's a killer wanted by the F.B.I., and as I am the F.B.I, that winds things up for tonight. If you'll disperse at once, we'll forget that you were threatening this man when I arrived. As a matter of fact, I don't much blame you. He's a son of a bitch.'
Alice waved good-bye to the black men. The soldiers put handcuffs on Roderick. The Spengler's Beer man was talking to her about something, but since she knew she was safe at last she didn't really have to listen.
'Miss Raleigh, try to understand. You're going home now— to Baltimore.'
'Oh no, you don't understand. The very first thing I must do is to find Bessy. To thank her for saving my life.'
'Bessy's dead,' Roderick said. 'I killed her.'
'No! That isn't true. She was in church with me, just minutes ago. Please, you'll say it isn't true?'
But the man in the Spengler's Beer overalls would only say, to her father: 'Raleigh, you are a slimy monster.'
The soldiers began to lead Roderick away. He said, 'I'm glad of one thing at least.'
'What?' Gann asked.
'That the kid I killed was only a nigger, after all. I won't be convicted by any jury in this state on a charge of killing a nigger.'
Gann's fist came down solidly at the base of Roderick's skull. Roderick collapsed in a swirl of green silk. 'I'm sorry, Miss Raleigh. Please forgive me—you've been witness to too much violence already this evening.'
Alice shook her head. She took his hand and, smoothed out the clenched fist, then put her small hand into his confidingly. 'It's quite all right,' she assured him. 'He was a slimy monster.'
Epilogue
Alice was sitting just as Miss Godwin had left her, leaning her head on her hand, watching the setting sun through the branches of the little willow.
'It's really time for us to be getting back, mademoiselle. It's a long drive, and we've stayed later than we intended.'
Alice stood up, with a queer little toss of her head to keep back the wandering golden hair that would always get into her eyes. 'Oh, not yet! Just five more minutes? Because this is the very nicest time to be here.'
'Five minutes, then. But you know how your mother worries.'
'Oh, Mother!' Alice replied loftily. (She had been reading Oscar Wilde today.) 'Mother wouldn't be happy unless she could worry.'
'Five minutes,' Miss Godwin repeated, ignoring the epigram with iron sternness. She walked up the gravel path, punctuating her steps with little jabs of her parasol. Lately she had had to trade upon her delegated authority more and more often; Alice was coming to look upon her almost in the light of a parent, which was from Alice's point of view not the best of lights. Mrs. Raleigh, on the other hand, seemed quite pleased with this development, finding an ally rather than a rival now in Miss Godwin. There was a deeper motive behind this entente, of course: since Roderick's confinement to the asylum, she had had to find, as she put it, 'Someone to lean on.' Miss Godwin's shoulder had been conveniently at hand, and it had proved in the long run to support Delphinia's weight more firmly than any other.
At the crest of the hill she turned round to look at Alice. She was shocked anew at how tall the child had grown. She was within four inches of being as tall as herself, and already at twelve and a half her breasts were beginning to form—not, to Alice's immense distress, quite simultaneously. She stood at just that stage of life represented by the young willow at the foot of the hill, uncertain whether it was a tree or a shrub.
To think that if had been only a year ago ...
To think, Alice thought, that it was only a year!
A year exactly—since this was July the 8th. Already a few of the details of that day a year ago were beginning to fade from memory. What song, for instance, had the organist played at the end? Ah yes—Bringing in the Sheaves. Alice knew what sheaves were by now, of course (How naive one would have to be not to know a simple thing like that!), but why harvesting should be considered a suitable subject for a hymn was something she could not understand. It was a symbol perhaps. She had to find out what Symbolism was all about. She made a mental note to ask Miss Godwin to recommend a book on the subject.
Though it was quite possible that Miss Godwin wouldn't know of any. Alice had discovered only this summer that there were some things of which Miss Godwin knew nothing at all. Dutch painting, for instance. Alice knew far more about Dutch painting (after having read a book about it) than Miss Godwin.
'Come along,' Miss Godwin called out. 'They'll lock us up inside if we don't get back to the gate.'
'Just one last visit,' Alice promised. She broke into a graceless, tomboy spring along the path back to the stone. It was just round the bend of the little stream. The stone cross, which had been so bright and pink and Italian all that afternoon, had fallen into the lengthened shadow of a poplar and looked rather gloomy now.
A year! She remembered, with a smile, how at the ceremony Fay had broken out suddenly into such a cataclysm of tears that her husband, the old man with the spiky white hair, had had to take her outside. The idea of Bessy's death had not reached Fay until just that moment.
It hasn't reached me yet, Alice thought. Death was such an impossible thing to understand at her age. She looked forward impatiently to being eighteen and understanding death. Even at sixteen one would undoubtedly possess much deeper insights into things.
'Come along! This is the last time I'll ask you.' And Alice could tell by her tone that she meant it.
She returned to look at the stone. 'It was a nice funeral, wasn't it?' she whispered. 'It was very expensive, and everything was the way you said you'd want it. I had to go into hysterics with my uncle and again with my mother before they agreed to pay for it. So I hope it's what you wanted.
But the stone cross had nothing to say in reply, unless the inscription on its base were to be construed as in some way an answer: O Lord, I am not worthy!
Then I don't know who is!' Alice remarked.
She kissed the cross, which was still warm from standing all day in the su
n, and climbed up the hill towards her impatient governess. They left the cemetery holding hands.
Table of Contents
Black Alice
by Thomas M. Disch & John Sladek
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Epilogue