Five Smooth Stones (103 page)

There was even, he reflected ruefully, a damned suspicious knock in the motor of the car that had once been Chuck's. It was entitled to a knock after the beating it had taken for two and a half years. He'd get rid of the car before he went north. That was a nice, comfortable worry, not calculated to bring on stomach cramps or knots in his belly. Maybe if he concentrated on that small worry he could manage to doze off again.

Or perhaps if he concentrated on the fact that there was one worry, unconcerned with his work, that he had not known for two and a half years—the worry over Brad and his difficulties with Peg's drinking. He was convinced, even more than Brad was, that Peg had at last found the key —rather, that the key had been handed to her when Brad made his decision and came to New Orleans. She had gone over the edge into alcoholism long ago, but David now had met too many alcoholics who could look back on a decade or more of sobriety not to believe that Peg would make it.

"I've got to be a little scared," Brad had said. "But I'm growing less so with time."

"I'm telling you, Chief, she'll make it. All the way. Wait and see. She's got something to be proud of. Like you."

"Yes. I was damned shortsighted for a long time. I suppose that's it."

David doubted that Brad could have carried the double burden of his work in the South, and the worry over the woman who had been Peg Willis for so many years. Now a few days at home and his nervous tension melted away and he came back refreshed and clearheaded. He was, reflected David, a lucky guy—after a hell of a long and patient wait. And Mike Shea, bless his Irishness, was probably calling it faith. And Mike Shea could just be right.

His immediate worry about Brad was the reference made to the man named Garnett. Whatever Brad was working on, he might run into trouble if Garnett was around. He was pretty certain Brad's instinct about people, his skill in handling them, would help him out if the woman named Sue-Ellen Moore was also around. Brad had a genius for slowing down and instilling forethought and reason into the minds of the overly impulsive. David did not have as much confidence in the older man's ability to spot at first glance, as he usually could, one of his people whose own neck was of greater importance than the collective neck of the Negroes.

Even without Isaiah Watkins's prior warning David would have recognized in Garnett an opportunist whose loyalty was bounded on all sides by his own interests. That Sue-Ellen Moore trusted him wasn't strange. For all her bitterness and apparent disillusionment she was, like many others of that temperament, inclined to judge quickly, on face values.

He had met Garnett before he met Sue-Ellen. It was early morning when he entered the office-lobby of the small motel on the outskirts of a medium-sized southern city, grateful for these oases that were springing up in the desert of the South, offering shelter to traveling Negroes who otherwise might drive hundreds of miles before finding a place to sleep. This one was modern, well appointed, and with a restaurant-coffee shop. He was in the city for a series of conferences and to lay the groundwork for a later ALEC campaign—classes, demonstrations, a probable boycott. The morning of his arrival he was alone, Luke following with a group of ALEC volunteers from New Orleans.

Garnett had been turning away from the desk in the motel office, a battered Gladstone in one hand, a room key in the other. Instead of leaving the lobby, he lingered in the background while David registered, a short, tubby figure, bald and managing to look to David somehow damp, although the morning was dry and cool. The clerk behind the desk, in contrast, was tall and bony and, even at five o'clock in the morning, quick. He raised his eyebrows at David's signature and held out his hand. "Proud to meet you, Mr. Champlin. Been hearing 'bout you. Lemme bring you some coffee after you get to your room—"

"I'd sure appreciate it. Thanks. Say, has a young fellow named Willis checked in yet?"

"Ain't seen him."

"When he comes put him in another room and put it on my bill. O.K.?"

"Sure thing. You get along down there now. I'll be along with the coffee."

The motel parking lot was at the front of the building, and David had brought his suitcase in with him. His vague distaste for the chubby man became more positive as Garnett hurried across the lobby and held out his hand. David took the hand reluctantly, and, when the other man spoke, could not stop himself from drawing away. The accent was a mixture of urban North and cotton-field Deep South, as phony as a red-neck smile.

"Y'all David Champlin? Reckon all of us been hearin' 'bout you. Lemme make myse'f acquainted. Garnett's the name. Alonzo Garnett. Y'all jes fergit about the Alonzo. I tries to. Here, man, let me he'p you with that suitcase. I'll tote it—"

David had never been able to overcome an unreasonable irritation whenever he ran into anyone insensitive enough to offer to carry something for him because of his lameness. He knew he was overreacting but he couldn't help it. "I carry my own bags," he said.

Later the clerk who had been at the desk brought coffee and a warmed fried pie he'd "scrounged 'round for," and said, "You-all never met that fella was in the lobby? That fella Garnett?"

"No. Just call me lucky."

"He's with this here Young People's Committee for Freedom. Travels round most of the time with a woman named Moore. Sue-Ellen Moore. She's here now; he just j'ined up with her. They been all around these parts, organizing children and young folks for demonstrations. I ain't made up my mind 'bout that. Comes to kids I ain't so sure. Don't make no difference to the whites if it's jes a chile causin' trouble, if he's black. Got a few young uns myself."

"There are a couple of ways of looking at it."

David finished the last crumb of the fried pie, the last drop of coffee, and got into bed. He remembered most of what Isaiah Watkins had said to him about Sue-Ellen Moore, one day a few months before in Isaiah's office.

"She means well. Sure does. But she don't use what anyone could call good judgment. She ain't got what a lot of folks down here has got—mother wit. Down here we has to think ahead of ourselves. She ain't a patient woman and she don't know what the score is once she gets into the South. But she's in there pitchin,' just the same. Heads up that new Young People's Committee for Freedom. Biggest trouble with her is she goes off half cocked a lot of the time, louses the other guy's plans up. 'Course, sometimes she don't louse 'em up— she helps 'em out, them as were dragging their asses and needed someone to come along and give 'em a kick in the pants. But she ain't got much use—ain't got much respeck—for the older folks down here. Lot of the northern colored feels like that. She comes from San Francisco. Helluva fine-looking woman, I'll say that."

"I remember the name now. Luke was around in one city when she was staging some demonstrations. Said she had those kids really trained."

"Lawd! She does. Be better if a lot more of that was done. She's a nut on physical fitness. Trains them kids in classes like she was a Army drill sergeant. They loves it. But she don't seem to realize you can't lead the South to the Kingdom with just kids. The older folks down here been round a long time. Gonna be round a long time. The kids? Who knows. Most of them'll be cutting out. Besides, going to be a heap of time before some of them kids can vote, even when we gets the vote—"

When David was leaving the office, Isaiah had said, "Speaking of Sue-Ellen. There's a fellow hooked up with her group that'd bear watching. Name of Garnett. We had him in ALEC for a while 'fore you come down here; eased him out. Beats me why he's in the movement at all. My guess is he likes fame and thinks he's going to get fortune."

"I'll watch out—"

***

He slept until ten thirty, then showered and shaved and headed for the motel office to see if the coffee shop off the lobby was still open for breakfast. He didn't like to go too long without eating because when he did his stomach began cramping with pain. On every trip now he carried milk and sandwiches in the car. He'd noticed, though, that in spite of these in-between meal snacks he was having difficulty with clothes that were gradually becoming too big for him—coats hanging baggily from thinner shoulders, shorts too big around the waist, belts he sometimes had to put another notch in. When he came within two pounds of Luke, who was two inches shorter and naturally slender, he stopped weighing himself. If his trips North lasted more than a couple of days, he always started putting weight back on again.

He stopped at the desk to see if Luke had checked in, was told he'd arrived a half hour before. He delayed a moment to light a cigarette, glancing toward the glass doors of the coffee shop as he did so. What he saw made him purse his lips in a silent whistle. A young woman was standing in the doorway, evidently waiting for someone still inside. She wore tight-fitting blue Capri pants and a white silk blouse. What had Isaiah said—"Helluva fine-looking woman"? He'd understated it. He stood quietly, watching her. "Handsome" wasn't the word —she hadn't the height to carry "handsome." Neither was "beautiful" fitting, although "pretty" was unthinkable, and he was damned if he'd fall back on the shopworn "glamorous." Isaiah's word—"fine"—covered it nicely, and so did an expression of Tom Evans's that he remembered. Tom would have designated her as an "omigodder."

It wasn't her figure. His eye was as good as the next for figures, and hers lacked the curves necessary to call forth superlatives. Yet it was good; better than most: flat-stomached, long-legged, straight, whip-thin and supple, with small breasts that she disdained to augment artificially, and skin—what the hell was it like? Coffee-colored whipped cream? She wore her hair sleek and close on top, brushed up at the ends, so that it circled her head like a gleaming black half-halo.

She moved forward impatiently, letting the door close sharply behind her, tired of waiting, and turned toward the desk. Seen directly and not from an angle, her face was that of an Egyptian statue, full-lidded eyes and full lips of such perfection a sculptor would go out of his mind with delight in them. The planes of her face sloped sharply from high, well-defined cheekbones, and David wanted to tell her to band her hair back, draw it away from those bones, from a face that needed no embellishment.

She started toward him, and when she drew close, she smiled and her hand was outstretched. "I know you," she said. "You're David Champlin. I heard that you were here." Her grip was quick, firm.

"And you're Sue-Ellen Moore."

"Come now! You couldn't know. After all, I've seen pictures of you."

"I have friends with good powers of description."

"I hope they said pretty things—"

"What else could they say?"

He was conscious now that someone had come up behind her from the coffee shop, and saw Garnett standing a few feet away. She turned her head and said, "What kept you?" then turned back without waiting for an answer. She said to David, "I hope we'll meet again." She was as straightforward as a man, without apparent coquetry.

"I hope so. I'd hate to think we wouldn't."

She walked away then, toward the main door and he went into the coffee shop and picked a table by the window. Before the coffee came Luke strode into the room, grinning. He sat down opposite David, rubbing his palms together briskly. "Hi, boss! Man, what I just saw!"

"I think I know. Quit twitching."

"Who could help it!"

"Lay off, Luke," he said, then was annoyed at himself for being self-righteous and preachy again with the kid. He'd been riding the boy with a pretty tight rein.

"Yeah, I know. Man, you been telling me for two years— two years, man—if I hadda have a woman to pick a chick outside the movement. Don't mess with workers, white
or
black, you said. And that ain't been easy. But I made out, man, I made out. But if I'd of known we'd run into something like what I just saw I might of come up with what you maybe could call a case of galloping insubordination."

David grinned across the table. He had reason to suspect Luke wasn't being entirely truthful about never having anything to do with his female fellow workers. Still, considering his youth and temperament, Luke had been everything David could ask for, and maybe a bit more. His own biological urges had been more quiescent than at any time since adolescence. He supposed this could be attributed partly to physical fatigue, partly to unhealed emotional wounds, and partly to his ability to use horse sense and run like hell from a potential involvement. Only when he had been sure that no such involvement threatened had he slipped out from under the unrelenting drive and pressure he had imposed upon himself. And couldn't remember being particularly happy about it afterward.

"You know who she is?" asked Luke now.

"Yes. Her name's Sue-Ellen Moore. I thought you said you'd run across her. You said you were around once when she was heading up a demonstration."

"I didn't get to see her personally. Cop got in the way. Jeez, I thought she'd be an old battle-ax—or a young battle-ax, maybe. You know, all muscles and might. Who's the little fat character trails around after her?"

"Man named Garnett. Isaiah warned me to watch out for him. She seems to treat him like an errand boy. Can't say I spotted any evidence of any close relationship."

"Hell, that guy couldn't do a woman like her any good." Luke was smiling broadly. "Whyn't you make a try for it, boss?" When David returned the smile and shook his head, Luke said: "I dunno. Sometimes I get real worried about you, boss. I think mebbe if you were getting more you'd get rid of them cramps in your stomach."

David laughed. "Worry about your own self. I'll worry about me. And take it easy. It's only sex."

"Man, that's not
enough?"

***

The next evening he met her again in the lobby, and suggested that they have dinner together. In the back of his mind was the thought that ALEC's own momentum could benefit by the help and cooperation of Sue-Ellen's committee, with its tie-ins with youth groups. There were several places he could think of where the local leadership troubled him by its lack of any dynamic drive. A Sue-Ellen might bring it to life.