Читать книгу Eden Rise - Robert Jeff Norrell - Страница 9

The tire noise on the rough pavement roared in our ears as I raced the Galaxie through the darkness. I kept looking to hit Highway 80, the big road to Montgomery, but we had gone farther down the county road than I remembered. As time slipped away, panic crept up the back of my neck. My naked back, sweaty from heat and fear and bloody from broken glass, stuck to the leather seat.

“Hang in there, Jackie.” I glanced over my shoulder but it was too dark to see them. “Can you hear me, buddy?” I waited a moment. “Is he moving?”

“He moaned a minute ago. He’s really hurt.” At last she sounded scared.

“Are you keeping that shirt pressed on his neck?”

“It’s soaked through now.”

The smell of Jackie’s blood and Alma’s urine now overpowered the odor of the chemicals lately put on nearby fields. We had to stanch the bleeding. I slammed on the brakes, rushed to the trunk of the car, and rifled in my bag until I found two clean tee shirts. In the dim light of the car’s dome bulb, I could see how sodden the shirt was. Jackie’s eyes were half closed, and he wasn’t moving. His right hand lay open on his thigh. A jagged smear of blood marked the white palm. Those beautiful hands.

I shoved one of the clean shirts at her. “Hold him up!” Panic filled my every membrane.

The shotgun lay propped against the front passenger seat. I had been taught to admire the beauty of shotguns. This one had been the object of loving kindness. It gleamed, its pewter-colored barrels bearing just the right sheen and odor from the recent caress of a chamois cloth lightly coated with gun oil, its cherry stock waxed and buffed. Its presence suddenly made my heart thump in my ear and my right hand shake uncontrollably.

I jumped out and slung the weapon as far as I could into the blackness.

I finally came to Highway 80, turned east, and pushed the accelerator to the floor. I held the car steady at 100 miles per hour, whizzing so fast by other cars that I could hardly make out their shape or color. My window was rolled down just far enough to create a loud whistle from the air rushing in. I had never driven so fast before, but the danger suited my panic. I felt like I was floating above the ground—and indeed the car did bounce at times on the uneven pavement. When the lights refocused their gaze on the highway, three times they caught the reflections of the eyes of possums and a skunk. Their tiny twin points of red glare made me think I wasn’t the only scared creature on Highway 80.

Nothing slowed the big Ford until I got to the outskirts of Montgomery. I smelled the big stockyard, and as I approached a red light in front of it, I could see nothing coming from the other directions so I pinned the accelerator to the floor and ran it. At the next intersection, I got a green light and made a tire-squealing right turn onto Fairview Avenue. I ran another light and flew past the signs for dry cleaners and funeral parlors and package beer stores, all just smears of red and green and white. Jackie was making no sound that I could hear.

Finally ahead on the left was St. Jude’s Hospital. I cut in front of a truck that braked hard not to hit me. When I shouted “emergency,” a guard pointed me around to the side. I fell out of the car and scrambled inside, then stopped a short woman in a white uniform, and begged for help. She shouted over her shoulder toward the back of the emergency room as I rushed her to Jackie. Two orderlies appeared and lifted his limp body onto a gurney. She hurried them back through the door shouting.

“Type this blood now!”

The smells of Ajax and ether hit my face as I entered the hospital. Before I cold see where they were taking Jackie, I was hustled to little room lighted by a bright bulb hanging from a wire in the high ceiling. A nurse began to inspect my heaving chest and shoulders. Beatrice, she said her name was; she looked about my age. I studied the way her thick, black hair fell in long, shiny, clumpy strands and wondered what they felt like to touch.

For the first time my body started to hurt. “I’m cold.”

“I’m going to get you a gown and a blanket in just a minute, honey, just soon as I get these little wounds dressed.”

“He mostly missed me,” I said. She nodded, smiling, but kept her focus on my injuries. She asked my name and how the accident had happened, if my family knew I was there. “Why did you come to St. Jude’s?” she said.

“Because this is a colored hospital and my friend is colored. I’ve been here before. Sister Carol is a friend of my grandmother.” Sister Carol was the nun who headed the hospital.

I lay back on the examining table and closed my eyes, wondering where Jackie was, what the doctors were doing to him. Maybe he would need surgery to get the shot out. Beatrice covered me with a blanket and I soon fell into an edgy sleep. I awakened to the soft voices of two people, one of them Sister Carol, the other a black male doctor in a long white coat. The doctor began to pick out pieces of glass. I asked about Jackie.

The doctor glanced at Sister Carol. “Tom, Jackie’s lost a lot of blood,” she said.

“We tried to stop the bleeding, but it wouldn’t stop. We really tried.”

She took my trembling right hand. “We know that, dear.” She smiled. “Your grandmother is on her way here.”

“Bebe shouldn’t come. She’s sick.”

When they left, I drifted back into the strange sleep. I awakened when I felt someone stroking my arm. As I sat up on the examining table, I saw my grandmother’s pale, shocked face. She cast her eyes from my bloody face to the smears across my chest. “Look at you, Tommy,” she said. She turned away and found a cloth, which she wet and used to wash my face.

“Does anything hurt you, dear?”

“You’re so thin, Bebe. How you feeling?”

The worry on her face deepened the hollows of her cheeks, framed by the thin strands of white hair that had fallen out of the bun at the back of her neck. “Do you hurt badly?” she said again.

“No. I’m just so tired. What time is it?”

“Almost midnight.”

“Where’s Jackie?”

William Addison, Bebe’s house man and driver, slipped into the room, his broad face creased with concern. “Here, son.” He handed me a Coca-Cola. “Your mama and daddy are on their way.”

Sister Carol appeared at the door and asked me to go with her to another room, and she nodded at Bebe to come along. I followed warily, and saw Alma sitting on a straight-backed chair. Her arms were covered with small bandages, and her bloodshot eyes were locked on the black doctor beside her. Sister Carol told us to sit down. Her eyes swept from Alma to me.

“I’m afraid I’ve got bad news. Jackie has died.”

There was a long moment of silence. “Are you sure?” Alma said the very words on my tongue. They were sure. The wounds were so bad, and he lost so much blood.

I looked at Bebe, who held my shaking hand and gazed at me. Her eyes had become sunken into her head by disease. Her dry lips quivered slightly, perhaps in preparation to offering me words of comfort, but she was interrupted.

I turned to Alma. “You made this happen.” I hadn’t been thinking that—it just came out. I had stopped breathing. My heart thumped loudly in my ears. The fringes of my vision turned red, and little white stars floated in and around my line of sight. I doubled both fists. She needed to pay for this. “We didn’t have to stop there. We didn’t have to stay there, except you made us.”

I rose. I wanted to hit her again, but harder.

But then I felt Bebe wrap her bony hand, its livid veins barely obscured by her translucent skin, around my wrist and stroke the forearm above with her other hand. I breathed.

Alma gasped and then sobbed. “I want to go home!” She told Sister Carol she came from California, and the nun said she would try to arrange to get her there.

“We have to tell Jackie’s mother,” I said. Sister Carol nodded. “We’ll take care of that. You need not worry.” Bebe took my hand. “Come on, precious, let’s go home.”

But standing outside were two tall men in gray uniforms, black jackboots, and wide-brimmed gray felt hats bearing the Confederate battle flag on their crowns. In my experience, no men of martial authority were more impressively turned out than Alabama State Troopers. “Are you a family member?” one said to Bebe. He nodded at her reply and turned back to me. “Mr. McKee, you’re under arrest. We’re going to detain you until the Yancey County sheriff gets here to take you to his jail.”

I lost whatever breath I had left. “Oh, please, no,” Bebe said.

“I’m sorry, ma’am, but that’s what they’re going to do.”

“What is the charge against my grandson?”

“Assault with intent to kill, ma’am.”

“And whom do you say he assaulted?”

“He shot a man named Buford Kyle at a store in Yancey County.”

She stared at the trooper. I had no words. The silence had extended at least a half minute when William Addison stepped forward. William was short and light brown, heavy around the middle, though his girth was disguised somewhat by charcoal wool pants worn high. His countenance, as usual, was sober.

“Miss Brigid, we’ve got to get Tommy cleaned up before he can go anywhere. And, Miss Brigid, we’ve got to find him some clothes.”

Being addressed as “Miss Brigid” apparently had William’s desired effect of shaking Bebe out of her shock. He usually did not show her such deference.

Her shoulders rose. “Officer, give us a while to get my grandson cleaned up and dressed.”

The trooper frowned. He studied her, looked at me, and said he would wait a few minutes. They withdrew to the entrance at the end of the hall where they could watch us.

William led us into the examining room. “Missy, we need Joe Black down here—now.” He walked her to the pay phone in the hall and gave her a dime. Hearing her words made the nightmare more real to me. She stepped back into the room and leaned close to me. “Tommy, you must say absolutely nothing to these police.”

Exactly twelve minutes later, after I had donned a green surgical shirt and again lay on the examining table, a man I had never seen before suddenly appeared in the room. He wore khaki pants, a golf shirt, deck shoes, and a crimson-colored cap with an insignia “A” on it. He was not quite five feet, six inches tall, weighed less than 140 pounds, with a horseshoe-shaped fringe of white hair wrapped around his otherwise bald head. He smelled of Old Spice and cigars. He only raised his bushy white eyebrows at me, but when he looked at my grandmother, a smile of sweet love spread across his wrinkled old face. “There’s my beautiful Brigid McCarthy.” His voice was rich and gravelly.

“Oh, Joe.” She stood unsteadily, and they hugged. “Will you help Tommy?”

“Absolutely. Son, I’m Joe Black Pell.” His eyes flicked to the open door to the hallway and then returned to me. “I need to know what happened, and I’m going to ask you a few questions. You answer ‘yes,’ ‘no,’ or ‘I don’t know.’ Once I’ve finished, some police”—he pronounced it PO-leese—“are going to ask lotta questions. Don’t say anything, not one word, ’cept for yo’ name and home address, unless I say you can answer. You follow me, son?”

I tensed and nodded.

“Did you shoot first at this man?”

I shook my head.

“So, he shot at you and you fired back in self-defense, ain’t that right? Answer out loud.”

“Yes, sir.” But Jackie was still dead even though I tried to defend him.

“Is it yo’ gun, son?”

“Well, it was Granddaddy’s gun.” He had died suddenly last August, and Bebe had given me his car to drive back to school after Christmas. After Beth and I had a passionate reunion in the backseat, she whispered to me she hadn’t found her panties. Looking for them later, I groped granddaddy’s holstered pistol strapped to the underwire of the driver’s seat. The race troubles in 1963 and 1964 must have made him think he needed a gun in his car.

“Son, that’s more than yes or no. It was in your possession, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then it was yo’ gun. Did you take that gun in that store to try to start some trouble?”

“No!”

“Did you git that gun after this fella starting shootin’ at you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Son, did you drive into Yancey County trying to stir up some trouble over civil rights?”

“No, we were just—”

Joe Black Pell was holding up both hands, palms facing me. “Yes or no, son.”

“No.”

“Brigid, I’m going to go out here and talk to these troopers. Y’all stay put till I get back, and do not answer any questions if they sneak their way past me.”

Joe Black had been gone only a minute when Mama and Daddy rushed into the examining room. She took one look at me and hugged me, pressing my face into the graying blonde of her hair. I could smell her perfume and taste her tears. “Oh, thank God. Thank God.” Then she pushed me to arms’ length and inspected my shoulder and chest. “How bad are you hurt?”

“Not much. But Jackie, my friend—he died.”

Mama pulled me tight for at least a minute. I could feel her crying.

Daddy then moved close to me. I smelled the cigarettes that Mama had been trying to get him to quit. He had aged since Christmas—his hair was grayer and there were pouches under his eyes. He was six-three, almost as tall as I was, but his shoulders looked weighted toward the ground. He was massaging the knuckles of his right hand as he studied me, his brow knotted. “You all right, Tommy?” I nodded. He gave a relieved half-smile.

He looked at Bebe. “Why is Joe Black Pell out in the waiting room?”

“Tommy needed a lawyer, and Joe Black was johnny-on-the-spot. Did you see the state troopers?”

“Mama, you know Daddy hated Pell. I’m going to call Harv Foster and get him over here.”

She shook her head and gave him a hard look. “Buddy, your daddy is dead. It doesn’t matter now what he thinks, or thought. Joe is a smart and tough lawyer, and he’s here.”

My father grimaced. “Oh, Mama, Pell is just an ambulance chaser. You know that.”

She shook her head. “I know no such thing. He’s always been a great friend to me. Tommy needs help now. It would take hours to get Harv Foster over here—that is, if he took his fat rear end to bed sober, which I doubt.” She lowered her voice. “They say the Yancey County sheriff is on his way.”

Joe Black reentered. “Hey, Buddy, how you doin’, son?” he said to my father, who only nodded as Joe Black shook his hand. The lawyer turned to Bebe and reported he had been on the phone to the state attorney general. “Richmond Flowers is calling the judge down there to ask him to release Tommy to you, Buddy, so he won’t have to spend any time in their jail. ’Course, you’ll have to make bond.”

Bebe gave Daddy an I-told-you-so nod.

The little man looked up at Daddy. “I’ll go down there with you.” He read my father’s chilly reaction. “If you want me to.”

Daddy shook his head at Bebe, who was looking at him rather than at the lawyer when she said, “Joe Black, that would be very kind. We need you to do that.”

At 4 a.m. two Yancey County deputies appeared at the hospital. When they put my hands behind my back, I felt myself step away from my own body again. They put me in the back of a patrol car. With my hands shackled behind, I had to sit leaning forward for the forty-five minute ride to the jail. The only break from the panic of losing the use of my arms was the pain shooting up my cramping back. In the Yancey County sheriff’s office, time dragged. Mama, Daddy, and I were too exhausted to talk. A clerk took my fingerprints. As dawn broke, a parade of people traipsed through, and it took a while for me to realize they were coming by to look at the boy who had shot one of their neighbors.

Buford Kyle, I overheard, was in the hospital, shot up but surviving. Maybe when he was bandaged up they would haul him in for killing Jackie, and his neighbors would have someone else to stare at. I locked my eyes on the floor.

The justice of the peace read the charge against me: assault with a deadly weapon. When I heard him say, “including the possibility of ten years in jail,” I started to shake all over. Joe Black put his hand on my shoulder.

“Ain’t no way you going to get the maximum, son,” he said in a voice only I could hear. “Listen here, don’t even think about that. We going to do ever’ damn thing to make this trouble go away.” Then he stuck his right index finger into Daddy’s chest. “They ain’t going to be pushin’ us around down here, I guaran-damn-tee you that, Buddy.” Daddy just looked at him.

On the way to Eden Rise, Mama sat between Daddy and me and held my hand. “It wasn’t anything you did, Tommy. Just a tragic accident.”

I saw the clenched muscles on Daddy’s forehead. He didn’t wait long to get to the point. “Tommy, why were you driving these people down here anyway?”

“I just wanted company for the long drive, and he was my really good friend.”

He kept his eyes on the highway. “Son, don’t you know that was just asking for trouble? These counties are just crawling with nigger agitators, and people are really upset about it.”

Mama turned sideways in her seat. “Buddy—”

I interrupted her. “Jackie is not a ‘nigger agitator.’”

Daddy plunged ahead. “Tommy, ever since all the trouble at Selma, these damn people have been going around stirring up the colored to try to register to vote. The Klan has been meeting all around the Black Belt and threatening to hurt these agitators.”

“Daddy, I was just trying to get my friend where he wanted to go. We were almost there and this girl had to go to the bathroom and we stopped at this store.”

“You shoulda known better than to stop with an integrated group at a country store in the Black Belt.” His voice and mouth were tight.

“I’ve been going into stores with colored people all my life. I didn’t think about this being different. I was tired and just trying to get where we needed go.”

“Well, you shoulda known it was different with agitators from up North.”

“Daddy, Jackie was not an agitator—”

“Why didn’t you just give ’em bus fare? It woulda ended up costing a lot less.”

Mama’s face reddened. “Buddy! You shut up, you hear? It’s not Tommy’s fault.”

Daddy was blaming me. But racist though he was, he was right. I didn’t think about the danger, and I should have known. Jackie was dead because of my stupidity.

Suddenly I was choking. The warm wind that came through the window of Mama’s station wagon drove my breath back down my throat. Sweat oozed from every pore of my body, which itched. I stank from thirty hours of sweat. The sky should have been blue but the mid-day sun had washed out nearly all color, leaving it a dirty white. On the right, rows of young cotton plants wilted in the furnace. On the left, a herd of cows huddled in a thicket of willows by a stagnant stream. I caught the stench of decaying flesh just at that moment and saw two buzzards picking at carrion—it was a baby calf—outside the cluster of cows.

Then I looked forward and realized we were approaching the old store ahead on the left. I raised an index finger and pointed. Mama looked at me and then jerked her head forward.

“That’s the place?” Daddy said.

I nodded and he slowed the car as we went past. The bleached walls and the faded signs and the shattered gas pumps were now scorched by a sun that felt like it hovered only a few hundred feet above ground at noon. I trembled all over. I saw the man aiming the shotgun. I saw Jackie lying bloody in the gravel.

“Stop.”

Both my parents frowned and shook their heads.

“Stop!”

Daddy eased to the side of the road a hundred yards past the store. I opened the door before the car came fully to a stop and rushed into the weeds that lay between the pavement and a cotton field. I bent over and puked.

I stood up, and the sunlight blinded me. Then the gag reflex jerked much harder and I fell on all fours. Bile burned my throat from the bottom up like a garden hose was spewing acid from my guts. The sun scalded the back of my neck. I thought I was through after the third time, but my stomach kept wrenching my insides. My torso convulsed. I began to sob. By the time Mama got me to my feet and back in the car, by the time she wiped my greasy, stinking face with Daddy’s handkerchief and pulled my trembling head down to her shoulder, I didn’t think I would live through this torture. Nor was I sure I wanted to.