Five Smooth Stones (101 page)

David, listening, was watching Luke. The boy had taken the suitcase off the chair and was sitting, elbows on knees, eyes on Brad. And that was good. He wasn't looking at the floor in sullen stubbornness. He was listening.

"Luke," said Brad. "You've taken part in a lot of demonstrations. Of all the damned fine pictures you've taken this year, the best one was the one you took of the woman with tears running down her cheeks, trying to patch up her boy's face after it had been laid open by a chain in that last freedom-rider melee. It's worth fifty bullets in fifty white bastards. I'll be damned if I can see Luke Willis kneeling in prayer with a cop dog's fangs an inch from his face. I'd rather see you kneeling to get a better focus of that dog's fangs and jaws with that camera under your shirt. You could caption it 'A Black Boy's View of the South.' "

That had done it. Luke's eyes had widened, he'd said, "He-e-ey—Mr. Willis! You got something there. You really got something. I'll bet I could do it—"

Les spoke up, interrupting: "Look, I don't want to seem nervous or anything like that. All that those red-necks in that big world out yonder want is an excuse to kill us. Nothing mean or petty. And if a gang of bastard cops with Confederate flags on their hats come busting in here—and they see that gun—you know how it is. They've got to defend themselves, haven't they?"

David laughed. "You chicken?"

"Man, yes! I'm so chicken I'd lay eggs if I was built right. Let's get the damned hell rid of this gun!"

"You've been quivering for the past hour, haven't you?" said Winters. "Anyone have a fresh idea about how to get rid of a stolen gun? Shall we advertise?"

"I'll go round back and bury it."

"The hell you will! It's past midnight. I've been hearing cars go by on the road, real slow. You can't beat these crackers when it comes to rifle shooting—"

The bomb had landed then, the explosion rocking the room so that David, in front of the window, was thrown across the bed, and Winters was knocked to the floor. When the sound was gone there was the smell of burning on the damp breeze that came through the shattered window and billowed the sleazy draperies that hung beside it. Somewhere close at hand a woman screamed, not once but again and again, a series of insensate noises, and then there were running feet and the sound of a car's motor racing, then driving away, wide open, on the dark roadway that ran past the motel.

The force of the explosion had jammed the locked door, and Luke and David kicked and knocked glass out of the window so they could get outside. Les, David learned later, had dropped the gun in the toilet tank before he joined them. The manager of the motel, a heavy-set man, very dark, walleyed, and with patches of white on forehead and cheeks where the skin was losing its pigment, was running around aimlessly, punctuating his curses with, "Anybody hurt? Anybody hurt?"

The other guests were outside now, and flames were licking up the side of a cypress tree growing close to the front of the building. "Hose, man! Hose!" yelled Luke, and when the manager dragged garden hose over and turned it on he played the stream up and down the tree trunk, through the branches and over the roof and front of the building. The woman who had screamed was sitting on the ground in front of her room, wearing a transparent black nightgown. She was dull with shock now, and a man clad only in Roman-striped shorts was standing over her, holding a bottle of liquor to her mouth.

The manager, whose little office had been almost annihilated by the bomb, was still chanting, "Anybody hurt? Anybody hurt?" and David snapped irritably, "No! For God's sake, no! See if the phone's working. Call the police."

"What you saying man!" His voice was high and squeaky. "We ain't even in the city. You want the troopers? You want the sheriffs? Ain't a bomb enough? Say, man, you're hurt— man, you're bleeding—"

"Who? Me?" David put his hand on the back of his neck and shoulder, conscious of discomfort there now. When he drew the hand away he saw that it was covered with blood. He looked at it stupidly. "Be damned—"

Les ran over, stripped David's shirt from his shoulders, then whistled. "Looks like a razor job. Long, and"—he poked —"deep. Gotta be sewed up, pal. Must have been that window. Maybe there was a jagged piece left and you ripped yourself open—man, I mean
open
—getting through."

When the commotion died down and the few guests had been moved to undamaged rooms, Les announced that he was going to suture David's wound. David roared loudly. "The hell you are!"

"Sure am, sonny. My first love was medicine before I decided to save the human race. That's us. I took premed.... Luke, press that towel on there hard. Don't be afraid. It's not your neck.... I worked two summers and part-time winters in the emergency ward of a Harlem hospital. Rode the ambulance, too. Saw a lot like this, pal. You want to drive fifty miles to the nearest place where they'll put a stitch in brown skin?"

"What you think you're going to do this with, you bastard? Sewing needles?"

"Certainly, dad. Shut up, will you. Back in a few minutes. Stay with it, Luke."

Tired as he was now, and safe at home, he could still smile, remembering the scene in that shabby room, Les coming back from the kitchen of the motel carrying a small porcelain pie plate in which lay sterilized scissors, needles, and thread. In his other hand he carried the first-aid kit from his car. He was whistling the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" through his teeth. David said, "Look, you guys—Fred, Brad, Luke—get that bloodthirsty sadist the hell out of here! I'll get it fixed tomorrow."

"Now. Tonight. Immediately, baby. You can toss that towel on the floor of the can now, Luke. Somebody in Shakespeare said something about who'd have known someone had so much blood in 'em—"

"I'll die of staphylococcus—streptococcus—septicemia—"

"Not a chance, dad. After this a shot of penicillin. You allergic to it? No? O.K. I carry it as standard equipment, like a flashlight. Head forward a little more. Damn it, man, keep that hard head down—"

David let out exaggerated howls of pain at each stitch and broke down laughing in between them, addressing himself chiefly to a fascinated, if shaken, Luke, who was assisting.

"Luke, you sonofabitch, you're enjoying this—Ouch! How many more?"

"Two more should do it," said Les judiciously.

"Remind me to seduce those six sisters of yours next time I get north—one for each stitch—"

CHAPTER 64

The bombing of the motel had been first blood. After that night his apparent immunity to reprisal and persecution vanished. Les Forsyte's neat sutures had still been in the flesh of neck and shoulder when he was picked up and jailed in the next town. His luck had not deserted him entirely, because a glancing blow from a policeman's club fell on the shoulder where there weren't any stitches. He could not remember now what the charge had been that first time. Two of many subsequent charges were in Brad's hands and, he supposed, would eventually work their way to the Supreme Court.

One circumstance he hadn't foreseen was the inevitable one of becoming known in the whole region, of having his picture sent from town to town, his activities watched with hostile eyes by police and state troopers, his plans spotted ahead of time through tapped telephone lines. It hadn't helped any when a national news magazine had run his picture in connection with a story about ALEC. After a while he insisted that workers in the various communities make all but the most trivial personal calls from pay telephones, and a different one whenever possible. Nowadays he planned to arrive in town at night when he could arrange it, and to keep out of sight during the day if it could be done, as much for the safety of the workers as for his own. And he was never without the knowledge, when he walked the southern streets and roads, that the companion who hadn't quite caught up with him yet was death.

He wasn't going to let it worry him now, and he stretched legs and arms and wriggled his body deeper into the worn upholstery of the familiar chair, groaning "Aa-a-ah—" at the sheer comfort of it. Luke, after he was released from jail, was scheduled to spend a few weeks with Brad. Pennoyer had suggested some courtroom shots, and Brad had a number of cases coming up. David hoped Luke had managed to get away with taking them. Chuck Martin was going to be with them part of the time, Luke said, and Chuck, under Luke's tutelage, had developed a knack with a camera and might have been able to take over if Luke got in trouble. He wouldn't put it beyond Luke by this time to risk taking a quick sneak shot in the U.S. Supreme Court itself. David decided it would be nice to have a picture of the Supreme Court while it reviewed a case against Champlin. It wasn't exactly what Suds Sutherland had meant when he had said, a long time ago, "The first Negro Justice of the Yew-nited States Soopreme Court," but it was closer to the Supreme Court than he would have been in Africa. Both cases had been considered newsworthy by press and wire services as well as broadcasters, and brought comment from columnists: "David Champlin, young Boston attorney who gave up a State Department career to join the civil rights struggle in the South—"

And now—Gramp would have added "if God spares"—he was going north. There might be other all-night sessions in Klein's office like the first one when he had briefed Pennoyer's book, and the men and women who had peopled the shadows of the room that night might return. But this time it would be as friends, with no silent reproaches. There would be more of them, and the newcomers would have names— Obadiah Brown, for one—and he would not shrink from them, because he had shared their peril now, faced, and been spared, their fate.

***

He forced both past and future out of his mind and tried to bring himself into the present and its practical problems. He would have to buy Luke a new camera, if Brad had not already done so. They had taken the one he was carrying when they arrested him that day in Heliopolis more than a month ago, and David would be amazed if they had returned it. It had not been, he was thankful, the miniature one; that one had been hidden in the car. There would probably be a letter from Luke in his mail at ALEC headquarters. He could see Luke now, the afternoon they threw him into the tank cell. He hadn't fallen; they were all packed in too solidly for anyone to fall. There were bruises on his face, blood on his forehead and trickling from nose and mouth, out he laughed when David and a sturdy fourteen-year-old steadied him. "Damned if it isn't the boss," he said. "What you doing in the nursery? You ain't even supposed to be in jail." David's laugh rang through the tank and turned every dark face toward him, and there was answering laughter; then a young voice in the background saying, "Man, what we laughing at? Man! We're in trouble and laughing! What the hell!"

He had smelled trouble even before he got into the actual town of Heliopolis, and when he spotted a running child carrying a "Light for Freedom" placard, had known he was headed for the middle of a Young People's Committee for Freedom demonstration. The child, a nine-year-old girl, was running away from town, crying in fright. The demonstration was ending in chaos and uproar when he got within three blocks of the main street, and he began to worry about Luke, who had preceded him the day before. The demonstrators were spilling over into the street where he parked his car, and he left the car and worked his way toward the center of town. He spotted Luke on a sidewalk and waved at him and turned back to his car, then began to run, hoping his gimpy leg would get him there before the crowd of teen-agers who were rushing toward the car could do it any damage. He waded into the group, shouting, "Hey, kids—that's my car!"

How in hell the police showed up so fast he'd never be able to figure out. He did not protest when they threw him roughly into a police wagon; he knew by then that it would be useless.

That was what Luke had meant when he said, "You ain't even supposed to be in jail."

"Can't you think of anything brighter to say, f'Christ's sake? Let's take a look at that face—what's left of it."

"It'll be O.K. I've seen it worse. Jeez! It stinks so bad in here you can hear yourself twice. The sound bounces back from the stink—"

David supposed he was thrown in the juvenile tank because all the other cells were full. Every time something happened, those four days that he was in it, the kids turned to him, and at night, squatting on the floor with his arms around his knees, he talked to them, and they sang together, there in the heat and the fetid air, the stench so strong they felt they had to raise their voices to cut through it. He helped them mop and clean up vomit from the skinny, frightened boy who crouched by himself in a corner, finally pulling the boy upright, cajoling, bullying, babying, almost forcing him into the circle with the others, keeping an arm around his shoulders until finally the lad joined their talk and song and the vomiting stopped.

The voices started about the second or third week after he was sentenced and put in a cell by himself, charged with incitement to riot and disturbing the peace. They came after dark, after the lights had been put out. They were pitched low, uninflected, drawling. They were slow, reflective, reasonable, seeming to be without passion or subjective emotion, and they were the most foully obscene sounds David had ever heard. At first he did not realize they were directed at him, and thought that the opening murmurs he heard were the beginning of a conversation between two of the guards. From the sound, they were standing near the cell door, in the corridor. He had the impression of two men leaning against the wall, passing a dark night hour together.

"Ain't no real reason for hatin' niggers." Those were the first words he distinguished. "Ain't never been hurt by no nigger. Main reason for keepin' clear of 'em is their habits—"

The voices went on for the better part of an hour, bandying obscenities, each man trying to outdo the other, with silence now and then as though the men were waiting. Then there was a return to the slow, thought-out filth. David's flesh crawled under sweat that made it damp and clammy; saliva filled his mouth as he fought off active nausea, making him spit into his handkerchief silently, hoping they would think him asleep and not hearing them, yet knowing that his silence was useless, that they knew he was awake. He had never thought the white cracker mentality capable of this subtlety of method. One man had more to say than the other, describing the habits he deplored in niggers, while the second offered suggestions for overcoming those habits. They did not come every night; once there was a lapse of two nights, but on the third it was plain their inventive faculties had been sharpened by the layoff. Sleep was just as hard to come by on those silent nights; every sound that might be footsteps knotted David's stomach, brought the sweat out on his skin.