Five Smooth Stones (102 page)

It was their fifth night of talking before he answered them, involuntarily, unable to stop himself, his mind a whirlpool of heat from lack of sleep, his nerves stretched to breaking point. He did not answer them in kind; he was outpowered in the profanity department, outdistanced in obscenity. Instead, he heard himself making a bitten-off wisecrack, sophomoric, useless; something about their lousy grammar, their ignorance.

And for his wit passed blood for three days.

They sent a doctor to him—he'd give the day guards credit for that—when they saw the blood they sent a doctor, and when the doctor asked him how it had happened, David told him, "All very simple and trivial, isn't it, Doctor?"

The doctor, spreading a white towel on the dirty blanket of a plank bed that let down from the wall on chains, did not look up. "We—all of us—must make allowances. For many things."

High-sperrited.
Emma Jefferson, dead a year now, had said that of the boys who had sent a small brown man named Joseph Champlin to his death, said it bitterly.
High-sperrited.
He could hear her now, see her standing in the doorway of her kitchen, dark hands dusty with flour.

The doctor busied himself preparing two hypodermics, laying one on the towel, advancing with the other.

"What?" asked David.

The doctor laughed abruptly, without mirth. "Not cyanide. One is an antibiotic, the other, vitamins."

"My God, that's food. Don't tell the jailers."

"I can't defend them. But you are all making it difficult for us to have much sympathy. I am leaving you two sleeping tablets, one for tonight, one for tomorrow night. You obviously need sleep. The balance I shall leave with Sheriff Giddings to be given to you at night."

"Do you honestly think I'll ever get them?"

"I shall leave instructions."

Atta moderate! Atta fine, upstanding moderate! Give the poor Negro a sleeping pill so he won't hear the insults; give him morphia before you hang him, burn him, castrate him; let's keep our people happy, but never let them go. Leave instructions, oh, by all means leave instructions. There it was again, the thing he could not fight, the wall against which his people lunged until they fell, bleeding, wounded, dead: stupidity. The voices wouldn't miss a night. But don't reprimand the jailers, Doctor; they might think you were siding with the nigras.

"Thank you, Doctor; you've been kind." The doctor turned, something close to warmth in his eyes, and David caught them with his own eyes, saw the warmth die, saw the cheeks flush to scarlet, and the scarlet recede, leaving the skin chalk white.

The doctor did not say good bye, but left abruptly, and David heard his voice in the hall. "Harris, where is Sheriff Giddings? I want to leave medication for the prisoner with him." The voice did not quaver, but neither was it steady.

***

David loosened his belt and stripped his shirt off without rising from the big chair, then took off shoes and socks. He was being a damn fool, he thought, just a plain damned fool, dwelling on a petty incident in the past, with a mind too tired for discipline. That was the hell of this kind of fatigue. It had its own peculiar, subtle toxicity, undermining the brain's will, the mind's power, just as a physical poison would undermine the body's strength. He remembered how he had thought, the first night he met Luke Willis, that his people were sick, sick unto death, of a radiation sickness no scientist ever unleashed. If he had done nothing else, if he and Brad had done nothing else worthwhile, they had taken Luke before that sickness destroyed him, mind and body, put into his young hands an antidote for that poison, given a young and sickening mind the healing of honorable battle.

He wondered what Brad and Luke and Chuck were doing in the little city of Cainsville, scarcely legible on the map. In today's climate of violence the name itself was enough to give a man the horrors. There had been trouble there, before he had been jailed; demonstrations, blood and violence, but he had been busy elsewhere and had not found out much about it. "They've got something going there," the kids from Ohio had said. He would find out in the morning, when he talked to Brad.

There was a sound from the kitchen, the soft slap of the cat door, and he leaned forward. "Chop-bone?" he said softly. He didn't hear the black-and-white cat enter the room; it materialized. He watched it while it ignored him, disciplined him, withheld welcome from a human who had absented himself for weeks.

"You better be sweet to me, y'hear?"

Each time he came home, thought David, he planned to make it the last time, yet never did. There was no point in coming back. He could reach Boston by plane from the South almost as quickly, use his apartment there, handle business with Isaiah by telephone. "You, too," he said to Chop-bone. "They have nice metal boxes for cats to travel in on planes. Give 'em tranquilizers and cream every five hundred miles. You could live with Peg while I'm away. Or board."

This time. This time, after he was rested, he'd find a tenant or a buyer.

He soaped and scrubbed and soaked for half an hour; then, still not feeling wholly clean, showered the last of the jail from his body. He looked at himself in the mirror on the bathroom door, said, "Mmmm...
mmm.
You ain't thin, man; yore skinny. Damned if you don't look like Gramp from the neck down."

He found food in the refrigerator and suddenly was ravenous. His craving for milk was gone, his stomach quieter, and he brought out cold chicken, two cooked pork chops, rice, and food for Chop-bone, and blessed Miz Timmins silently. He and Chop-bone ate together companionably, and then, half blind with sleep, he stretched out on his bed and turned and sprawled on his belly, waiting for the voices to begin, but there was no sound except the soft fall of a diminishing rainstorm on roof and window and the low, sensuous purring of the cat beside him; then even those sounds were lost, and from a million miles away there was the sound of dark voices singing on a riverbank—"Pharaoh's army got drownded—" then oblivion.

CHAPTER 65

Before he had bathed the previous night he had filled the electric coffee maker and put it on the table beside his bed. When he woke early in the morning he turned it on, refusing to look at a gray world until the caffein's bite had bolstered his will to face it. Chop-bone asked to be let out, and he refused, explaining that there were the usual toilet facilities for cats behind a screen in the bathroom, glad to hear his own voice and glad that there was no answering voice except the cat's soft chirrup and, in a moment, urgent plea for breakfast.

At seven thirty he put in a call to the Willis house, hoping to find out from Peg where Brad could be reached. He smiled with pleasure when he heard Brad's voice, sharp and demanding. "David! In God's name, where are you?"

"New Orleans."

"Why haven't you called before?"

"How the hell could I, Brad? I've only been out four or five days, and some kids from Ohio State—"

"Out of where?"

"Jail, of course."

"Wait. Wait a minute. The same jail you were in about a month ago?"

"The very same. I was there thirty-four days. Didn't you know?"

"They told me you'd been released a few days after you were arrested. I've called New York, Chicago, New Orleans, God knows where else. No one knew anything."

"I was incommunicado. No mail, no visitors, no messages, no nothing. No outgoing mail, either. I wouldn't want to bet they didn't book me under a phony name just to keep me from being sprung."

"One of the hazards of fame, I suppose. What were you jailed for?"

"Breathing in and out. What else? Who told you I'd been released?"

"Fellow named Garnett. In Cainsville."

"Short, tubby, bald, brown-skin? Comes on with an accent like he'd just come out of the tall cotton?"

"Know him?"

"Yeah." He did not elaborate. Brad would get his meaning. "Like that?"

"Yes. He keeps bobbing up."

"David, are you coming up here?"

"Hell, Brad, I'd like to stay put and rest a little while. And there are, well, there are things I want to do here at the house. Then I'll be up there. And I should get together with the ALEC people, tie up a lot of loose ends. How about you coming down here for a few days?"

"I could. I have to go back to Cainsville. It won't be easy. I may have to sneak out in the middle of the night when Peg's asleep. After what happened she doesn't want me out of her sight."

"What do you mean 'after what happened'? You make the bucket at last? It's high time, slacker—"

"I'll come down. There's too damned much catching up to do to try it by telephone. I was shot."

"Shot?"

"Sorry if I sounded annoyed when you first called. I'd been wondering where the flowers and the calf's-foot jelly were."

David tried to speak and could not, could not even make his voice sound like a voice. He was shaking with inner tremors like an alcoholic in the early morning, and he cursed the battered nervous system that could bring them on.

"David?"

He cleared his throat, said: "Yes, Chief. I'm here. How bad was it? For God's sake, those damfool starry-eyed kids didn't tell me—"

"You know how it is. Shot on Monday, headlines Tuesday, forgotten Wednesday. Unless you die. Then it's headlines Tuesday and Wednesday, forgotten Thursday."

"How bad was it? I mean are 'all your wounds in front, out there'?"

"That's a stupid question if I ever heard one. Few of us have our wounds in front, as you damned well know. It was a slug from a trooper's gun. I was trying to get out of the way of a demonstration in a town near Cainsville. I had a Federal Court case coming up in a few days; the Williams case, if you recall. I couldn't do Williams any good behind bars."

"I asked you how bad it was—"

"Stop worrying, grandmaw. It caught me across the rib cage, from back to front. The hospital in Cainsville, the nearest one, is Crow, so they got me to Capitol City. I played dead, and someone picked me up. Look, if you're paying for this call—"

"I am, and it's O.K. Go on."

"Well, they took me to Capitol City in the Cainsville doctor's special ambulance for colored. The doctor is colored, and the ambulance is a beat-up station wagon with an oxygen tank in it. The doctor, incidentally, is damned good. Anyhow, after a few days I signed myself out of the county hospital there, and went on up to Boston. Some infection developed; I wound up in the hospital in Boston for a few days and I've been out about ten days now. And I'm O.K., perfectly O.K. Stop worrying. I can hear you worrying clear up here. I'll be down day after tomorrow. I'll fly from Capitol City, and wire you the time."

"Wait. Where's Luke?"

"Cainsville. He just got out of jail."

"Again! Where?"

"Maryland. For taking pictures of cops using gas on demonstrators. I don't know what the charge was, but that's the reason. I was in the hospital here. He got ten days, which was mild, but the fine will build them a whole new county road system. Incidentally, he's been offered a roving assignment job by
Today.
Expenses, pay, no spec about it."

"Great!" Things were working out, things were really working out, thought David. He had already begun to have a nagging worry about Luke. He wouldn't be able to keep an eye on him from Boston, and the kid wasn't quite seasoned enough, even yet, to go it alone.

"He won't take it if he thinks we need him."

"I know. I'll take care of it."

After Brad hung up, David sat, yogi-fashion, so long, so without motion, that the black-and-white cat gave up its bid for attention and settled on the rug in front of the door, eyes slitted in an alert doze, opening, round and yellow, at the sound of a voice from the bed.

"They shot a good man," the voice said. "A trooper's gun. It had to be a .45. You know what a .45 slug through the liver would do, Chop-bone? Through the lungs? Through the heart? That's what's under your rib cage, pal; your liver and your lights and your heart and some of your guts." The cat closed its eyes; there was nothing of interest to him in the words. "Death," said the voice.

The inner shakes had quieted, and David was glad to see that his hand was not shaking when he poured another cup of coffee. If Brad had been hit by a truck, died in a plane crash, succumbed to disease, there would have been grief, but it would have been clean grief. But if Brad had been ripped open by a slug from a red-neck trooper's gun— The thought of the nearness of that death, of the fraction of an inch of skin and bone that had stood between Brad and that shattering, gut-tearing impact brought the inner weakness back, turned the tremors loose again. "It didn't happen. God damn it, David Champlin, pull yourself together. It didn't happen. It's not the first narrow escape. It won't be the last. You're getting mental." He stretched out in bed, trying to gather his forces, to get his mind and body working as a unit again, understanding the alcoholic who, in fear and dread, starts his day with liquor to assure forgetfulness of nameless unknown things yet to happen.

CHAPTER 66

If he lay there a little longer, stretching, forcing himself to relax, he knew he'd eventually overcome the dread of what a new day would bring. It was not fear of the events of the day that brought that urge to bury himself somewhere where no one could find him; it was a new fear of his own reactions, a doubting of the wisdom of his own judgments. Once he had been able to assess a situation, judge its potentials, and act. He acknowledged that he hadn't always acted wisely, but there had been no such indecision as occasionally had plagued him lately. And that was sheer fatigue.

He and Luke had established a private routine. Each time one of them was released from jail he stayed in bed an extra hour the next morning. "Pampering ourselves," growled David. Luke said: "It ain't that, boss. When you stay in bed an extra hour you just lie there and worry and think up more trouble. Me, I sleep."

Luke had been right. Damned if he didn't feel guilty now if he wasn't worrying. There were a number of things to worry about this morning. Klein's two-months-old letter, still unanswered, received before he was jailed, outlining ALEC's financial troubles now that they had embarked on a program of demonstrations and fines were becoming a major problem; the knowledge that he must go to Washington soon and talk to officials there and the frustrated feeling that always gave him; the disorganized chaos in a number of communities and the realization that there must be others in the same situation, and the further realization that leadership had to be provided or gains would become losses overnight.