Going Down Fast (16 page)

“When it comes down to brass tacks, these black blocks scare them. They can't see past that. They've all got a piece of something they want, and they're hanging on. The black bourgeoisie shoulder to shoulder with the white bourgeoisie. And this guy Asher who's on their planning committee gives this rap about how they've finally got good channels into the mayor's office, and they have to give and take now. What they're set to give is us, baby.”

“Asher. He used to always be screaming about machine politics and municipal corruption.”

“Oh, he was putting down Lederman as a crook. They all put Lederman down. I got so mad finally I said to them that he was more honest than them because at least he bargained, he recognized he was screwing us and was willing to offer a little piece of the action in return.”

“This case we're putting together.” Rowley waved at the papers and papers all over the table. “It's iron.”

“Got to be. But oh my, this thing sure separates the sheep from the goats. Feels like we're taking on everybody. They got all the good words and they believe them somehow. I feel like ten miles of rough road. Already I'm getting sick and tired of talking. Talking a foreign language that they made up.”

Saturday, November 15–Sunday, November 30

Black Jack's sister Lucille filled the overstuffed chair like a ton of medium brown lard. If he had expected anything, it had been that she would resemble his image of the man who sang: lean, bone dry, with leather muscles. Lucille Thompson's round face was propped on layers of chins, her arms overwhelmed the wide plush arms of the chair. Yet the slenderness of her wrists and ankles, a shapeliness in her bulk was feminine and she preserved the manners of a pretty woman. She served his coffee and cake about the time she began to talk instead of poking sentences at him on a pointed stick.

“Now what you expect from a man like that, no good from the word go? True they lay him off, no excuse, just goodbye one afternoon.” She forked her cake daintily, separating the layers from the icing to eat that last. Her slightly clouded maple eyes watched him shrewdly. “Another man go look for work in the Yards or for the city. Not him. Jack too mad. Since he was a bitty thing he got a temper like a shotgun. He want too much and he don't get nothing.” She shook her head. “What you aiming to do if you find him? What you want him for?”

He had explained and he explained again, feeling foolish. The room depressed him: essence of childhood visiting rooms. He felt the wrong size and half asleep. The air was hot and thick, the house creaked to itself. In an upstairs apartment a baby cried persistently as a squeezed bulbhorn: waaa, pause, waaa, pause, waaa. In the bay window plants reared from china spaniels, burro with pannikins, curtseying ballerinas, wishing wells. Plants with glossy leaves, with purple tongues, with fuzzy throats and spiny antlers, with waxen white flowers. An upright piano gloomed against one wall, a fringed shawl hung over the top. The past could open its hippopotamus throat and swallow him whole. If the people want a real architecture, Sullivan had said, let them become real themselves. But Lucille was all there, rooted in her stifling house.

From rickrack tables a garden of faces pushed up toward the light. Among them he could follow the slowly swelling Lucille through her annual rings. Once she had been only a buxom girl, sweet and melony, but always she had faced the camera jaw first looking it square in the lens. Nobody had got her to say Cheese.

“Do you have a photo of your brother?”

Politely she eased herself from the chair and rummaged in the next room, brought back a shoebox. She set it in her bulging lap and as she talked put the photographs down one by one on the coffee table, stopping in midsentence to smile at one or tap it. “Now the police, they had it in for Jack but they couldn't touch him for the numbers. He even cut him a couple race records.” She shrugged. “On account of the numbers he made money hand over fist. He live with this girl Teena Lewis, nothing but a cheap hustler. A user. I told him one hundred times leave that hooker alone. We wasn't brought up that way. But hardheaded, good Lord, Jack was a great big old rock! That girl twelve years younger but she lay it on like she think he made of sugar.”

She pointed to the tables of photographs. “We were raising three boys grow out of their clothes every time you turn around. Then the police got him for possession. Sure as shooting it was her stuff. Mr. Thompson been saying, you keep that brother of yours away from the boys. This time he put his foot down. Jack out I know … but …” with a slight flourish she held out a picture.

Two men and two women stood in front of a late forties Dodge. One he could tell following the receding Lucille was her merely plump stage squeezed into a long broomstick skirt. Lucille put her thumb next to the man on the left. “This here my brother.” She chuckled, down under her third chin.

For all his staring he could tell nothing from the broad brimmed hat, swishy trousers flapping in the wind, jacket wide as a playing field. The dark face squeezed among the clothes evaded him.

“You going to find him all right,” Lucille said wading to the door to let him out. “My boys all big now. you tell him Lucille ready to see him. With me so big and fat, you think he can tell his own sister?”

Vera had left town for vacation. Thanksgiving he worked, but in the evening he drove out to Gary. Sam was in Midland: Mrs. Eugene Warwick meeting the Warwicks who would probably piss all over her.

Sam, Sam, Railroad Sam
,

washed her face in a frying pan

he used to sing her, curly on his lap. The wind slashed through chinks of the frame house. The television uttered scraps of the day's football. The set was working badly, the picture blurred and gray as his father's skin. The old man had been ruddy, maybe as much from booze as naturally, but it caught at Rowley to see him looking like something soaked in water too long. The flesh had come loose from his big bones. He sat drinking beer and cursing the teams that had let him down, for he had dozens of small bets going.

The TV showed carefully chosen clips of a demonstration and that started the old man. “Some movement you got there. We worked hard to clean the reds out so we could run our own union. You nincompoops invite them in.”

“You wasted yourselves redbaiting. Used them organizing and tossed them out, and your brains with them. Wanted to be more American than the Legion.”

“Think you'll get somewhere with a bunch of students? Always the first scabs. Queers with whiskers waving signs.”

The old man yelled at him, but he was almost as alien from the kids. Gino and Sam out there somewheres. His father was seven feet high to a kid. His father had been to jail for the union. His father had taken on two thugs and beat them with their own tire iron. When had he first seen that his father was also a bigot and a loudmouth and a smalltime tyrant? Always ready to knock them around, including their mother. At times the old man had enjoyed his kids in a direct hearty way their mother never could, but more often they'd been burdens piled on his hardworking back. Always trying to pick his pocket, leeching away money he needed for things that made a show with the boys, a new Chevy, a good rifle, a fancy spinning reel. An old prairie radical with a mistrust of anything he couldn't heft. A man who made trouble as often as he healed it, twitchy under discipline—not unlike himself. Yet the old man delivered what he promised and took shit from no one, there were things he had enjoyed and he had done them, and now a cancer was eating his body out in slow progression from organ to organ.

The old man snapped suddenly, “Let the dog in.”

Rowley got up and opened the door for the bleary-eyed retriever. “Hi Rumpus, old boy.” The dog rose to paw at him perfunctorily, then plumped down with a loud sigh. “How'd you know he was out there?”

“If you got as good ears at my age, you'll have something to swell about. Those kids, the kids going to school right here, don't have a notion in their thick heads what it was like in the mills before we got the union. They don't know what sweat is. They don't know what they got to thank us for. Makes my blood boil. This was a tough town. Named for a hanging judge—Gary of U.S. Steel who hung the Haymarket stiffs and proud of it.” The old man glared at the dog, who thumped his tail and drooled on Rowley's shoe. “Students marching,” he snorted. “They got a new sport. They're too chicken to play football any more. They get their degrees and four years later they'll be voting Republican and saying what the state needs is a good right to sweat law.”

His mother came into the livingroom to call them the way she always did, a little diffidently. If you wanted to talk to her, you had to go to the kitchen. The kids used to hang around leaning on the icebox to tell her their troubles.

At the foot of the table she propped her chin wearily on her hand. “I don't understand Sandra not coming home for a family holiday. Putting some boy's family ahead of her own.” Her iron hair was pulled into a tight bun on her nape, emphasizing her cheekbones. Harry across the turkey had the same dark eyes, but their father's bones. Harry's wife and two girls, all more or less blond and made of chewed bubblegum.

“She has reasons. Pass the stuffing,” Rowley said.

“Just foolishness,” she muttered. “Don't you like the turnips? You always stick by her, no matter what she does.”

“She's crazy about that punk,” Harry whined. “You should have told her she couldn't go, Dad.”

Rowley tried to keep the edge from his voice. “You couldn't. She's married to him.”

He was sorry at once when the old man's face went sick and grayer than ever. Then anger brought the color in. “What kind of daughter did you raise?” he shouted down the table in his old form. “Runs off with a weirdo without telling her family. What kind of sneaky lying slut did you bring up?”

That was Thanksgiving. He shoveled the walks front and back and fixed the mangle. He stood on a ladder to look at the kitchen fluorescent light and told his mother that she must buy a new starter. He promised to install it the next time out.

“I bet that won't be till Christmas,” his mother said, brushing at his jacket arm. “You ought to come more often. He's going back in the hospital next week. You're not going to have your father long.”

As if he and the old man did not affront each other. As if the old man wanted to be seen shriveling. As he was leaving his mother whispered he should find out what Sam wanted for a present. It was a sour tribute that they all assumed he had connived at the marriage. “Keep your chin up,” he said to his mother and plunged into the cold with relief. Oh Lord, going down slow.

The babysitter was late coming and by the time Harlan, Shirley and he got loaded into the car and on their way, Harlan was tense with worrying they would be late.

“Sure there's a black vote now, but how long will it last?” Rowley was arguing as much to keep Harlan's mind off the clock as to continue supper's conversation. “There was a Socialist vote once—I mean on the local level like city councils and mayors. The millennium ain't come yet—we have all the problems we had in 1890 and the permanent poor, the elite incorporating itself, inequality in the courts, jails and schools, and a foreign policy of blood-and-guts rightwing meddling. What happened to that vote?”

“Just protest voting. Issues got swiped. There wasn't enough force from the outside. We got no cause to complain about that, ourselves.”

“Every group rising in radical protest has been coopted by the power structure after bloody skirmishes. A few leaders go to jail, the organization men get incorporated into the middle-class and the others are squeezed out to stagnate at the bottom with the other losers. You win a few special demands but lose the will to justice. Get to be a proper pressure group with your own lobby and piety and belief there's no more room for change.”

“If you get some of what you need, what do the members care if the founders' goals get lost? People join movements for ninety different reasons—like to meet girls, to help their business, to up somebody else. Don't bug me, Rowley. You don't know how to change a damn thing either. It's hard enough to keep my head clear. I don't even know where I stand on compromising with them. Like I feel they've got so much money and they own so many buildings, they don't have the right to touch one house that my people need. But I got to face the fact that probably at that hearing we will have to compromise. And that makes me feel sick.”

“That's too abstract. Every house they don't tear down is a victory.”

“No, baby, that is too abstract. A victory to hold on to what you got, which is so little? A house you paid too much for to begin with, with cops on the streets who are just waiting to lay their clubs on you, with mediocre schools for your kids instead of plain rotten ones? We are still just a defense committee. Park anyplace.” Harlan made a face of anguish. “Jesus, I hate to speak. I get pains in the belly every time.”

“You'll do a good job,” Shirley said from the backseat. “You always do.”

“Yeah? In a way it takes a lot of brass to come to a black group and try to stir them up about us. Because we made it out of the ghetto. Asking them to help us save what they can't even get. Come on.”

But when they were in the hall on folding chairs and Harlan was introduced, his face was different. He had begun to have a public manner. Rowley still experienced the shock of how well Harlan spoke, that magic of voice and manner that changed the air in a room. He spoke fast, his voice sometimes faltered, but he was learning. He had special appeal in the ghetto, but he worked for some white audiences too. The great pressure Harlan was feeling to save his home, his community, what he called his ordinary life, that was a commodity that could be sold. Rowley had written some songs for the Defense Committee, none of them good but all of them good enough. The money they raised hired a lawyer to help them prepare for the hearings which would start Monday, December eighth. Ten days, That was all.