War at Home: A Smokey Dalton Novel (26 page)

TWENTY-THREE

When we got back to the hotel, I called Grace.
This time, she was home.

“Did you find him?” she asked.

“I have some leads.”
I wasn’t sure how to broach the topic of Daniel’s violence.
I didn’t want Grace to get angry at me, but I needed some questions answered.

“Good ones?”

“Ones I’m not sure I believe,” I said.

Malcolm and Jimmy, who were sitting on the edge of one of the beds, looked at me questioningly.
I hadn’t yet told them about my day.

“What did you hear?” Grace asked.

“I’ve heard twice now that Daniel’s violent.
Has he ever hit something when he lost his temper or gotten into fights?”

“Daniel?” Grace laughed.
“He’s always said that anyone who can’t talk his way out of a fight is stupider than he looks.”

That was my sense of Daniel as well.

“Has he ever condoned violence?”

She didn’t answer me.
I wished I could see her.
I didn’t know if she was thinking or if the question had disturbed her.

“After the convention,” she said slowly, “he said something about how this country only understands violence.
But it didn’t sound like he was condoning it.”

“Did he buy a gun then?”

“Daniel?” She sounded shocked.
“No, of course not.”

I sighed, but not loudly.
I didn’t want her to hear me.
“If you remember anything, would you let me know?”

“What’s he done?” she asked.

I had no answer for her. So I told her the truth.
“I don’t know yet, but I’
m
do
ing
my best to find out.”

* * *

When I hung up, Malcolm wanted to know what I had learned.

“Let’s get some dinner,” I said, “and I’ll tell you.”

We ended up having pizza in the park, sitting outside because I didn’t want to talk about Daniel anyplace we could be overheard.
I had to relay part of what happened the day before, because I hadn’t had a chance after the concert.
As I told them about the first apartment, I mentioned the
reference to weather.

“Oh, man,” Malcolm said, “we’re getting in way over our heads.”

I looked at him.
The sun was going down, casting shadows through the trees that surrounded us.
The three of us were sitting on the merry-go-round.
Jimmy was the farthest back, leaning on the very center.
Malcolm and I sat in opposite slices of the metal pie, cross-legged and facing each other.
The pizza — or what remained of it — was on Jimmy’s section, sitting uneasily on the bumpy metal top.

“This weather reference means something to you?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah,” Malcolm said. “I
saw
the damn document.”

“What document?”

“
‘You Don’t Have to be a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind is Blowing.’
” He said that with great contempt.

Those were the words Barry had used the day before.

“Should this mean something to me?” I asked.

“Probably not. I didn’t tell you about it because I didn’t think it was important.” Malcolm rested his slice of pizza on his right leg, and reached for his can of root beer.
“Remember that stupid SDS convention?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“That’s where the document was. I told you everybody at the convention was fighting? They’d split into factions.
One was the National Organizers, the other was the Progressive Labor people.
They fought, then it looked like the Progressive Labor people were going to win, and they didn’t want a lot of black involvement, which they called militant, which might not have been wrong, since I seemed to be the only person of color there who wasn’t a Panther.”

I froze.
“You didn’t tell me that the Panthers were there.”

“Because it wasn’t really important.
It was just a lot of stupid speeches, and then these
N
ational
O
rganizers wrote this paper about how important it was to be militant, and how they wanted to bring down the government, and how they wanted to revolutionize the United States, and how the only way to take on the
E
stablishment was through violence, and all that crap.
I thought it was really stupid, especially when a bunch of them stayed up all night and wrote their thoughts down in this mimeographed document they expected everybody to read.”

“How did that reach New Haven so quickly?” I asked.

“
The split
was already here
. T
hat’s the point. This was just the first time the splits were visible nationally, at least so
far as
I can tell.” He set his root beer down.

Jimmy leaned forward, grabbed it
,
and took a sip.

“Hey!” Malcolm said.

“I’m out,” Jimmy said.

“Next time, ask first, Jim. Don’t presume,” I said absently.

“Sorry,” he mumbled.

“Anyway,” Malcolm said, “at the convention, everyone started calling the militants the Weathermen and the Progressive Labor people
,
and everyone else who didn’t like want to bomb the entire planet
,
the Running Dogs.
And the names kinda stuck.”

A chill ran down my back.
“Do you actually think Daniel’s joined the militants?”

“That’s what it sounds like, right?
And they might not have called themselves Weathermen until this week.
Maybe they don’t even call themselves that.
Maybe everyone else does.
I mean, that’s all anyone talked about on campus this week, right, Jim? The bust-up of the SDS.”

“I thought it was some rock group.” Jimmy picked the anchovies off his pizza and tossed them onto the concrete playground.

Malcolm watched him for a moment, then sighed.
“All I’m saying is that if Daniel’s actually using guns and buying drugs and making bombs, why’re we looking for him?”

“What if he’s not?” I asked quietly.
“If I talked to anyone about you last summer, they would have told me you had been in a gang all fall, that you were a lost cause, and that I should give up.”

Malcolm flushed.
“This is different.”

“Is it?” I asked.
“You were with that gang because they gave you a place to sleep.
You hadn’t gotten completely co-opted. You were too smart for that.”

“But Daniel’s always been political,” Malcolm said.
“Even you said you could hardly talk to him last summer.
He was clearly SDS then.
He’s involved now.”

Malcolm was probably right.
I knew that.
I also knew that I wanted to believe, for Grace, that Daniel had flirted with the violent faction of the SDS and moved on.

If he hadn’t, I wasn’t sure what I would do.

“What if he is a Weatherman?” Malcolm obviously wasn’t willing to let this go
“What’ll you tell Grace then?”

“He’ll say there’s nothing you can do and that sometimes you have to take care of yourself and hope he’ll grow out of it, right, Smoke?” Jimmy had plucked an entire lump of cheese off his pizza.
The cheese dripped tomato sauce onto the merry-go-round.

Malcolm stared at Jim as if he’d never seen him before, but I recognized those words. I didn’t know how many times I’d said them to him about his brother Joe.
Joe had been dealing drugs, lost in a gang, and willing to let his little brother go instead of clean
ing
up his own act.

“Yeah,” I said.
“That’s probably what I’ll tell her.”

But that wasn’t all I would do.
If Daniel was involved in something illegal, something that could hurt innocent people, I would have
to
go after him — or make sure someone else did.

“We got to be real careful here, Bill,” Malcolm said. “These guys, they’re on some whacked-out mission to save the world, and they don’t care who they hurt.
This isn’t the place for Jimmy.”

“It doesn’t sound like the place for any of us,” I said.
“But if my information is right, all we have to do is find that barn.
Daniel will probably be there, I can check him out for myself, and then we can leave.
Will that work for you?”

Malcolm unfolded himself and pushed off the merry-go-round, sending it on a
slow
spin.
He walked to the edge of the concrete. As the merry-go-round came back toward him, his gaze caught mine.

“You know,” he said, “sometimes it just gets me.
Daniel gets the scholarship, Daniel gets the good family, Daniel gets all the opportunities, and what does he do? He tries to blow up the fucking world.
Me, I got to fight for every goddamn crumb.
I finally get a break and what do I get? Drafted.
It’s not fucking fair.”

He walked off into the park.
Jimmy stuck out a foot and stopped the merry-go-round from spinning.
“We got to go after him, Smoke.”

I shook my head.
“What do we say?
He’s right.
He would have taken everything Daniel got, used it, and made even more of himself.
It’s
not fair, and lying to him and telling him it’ll be all better isn’t going to comfort him.”

Jimmy glared at me, then jumped off the merry-go-round.
He ran after Malcolm, catching up to him near the swings.
Malcolm kept walking, and Jimmy remained at his side, like a determined little brother.

I dug my feet into the concrete holding the merry-go-round in place.
Was that what I had set up? Another brother
for Jimmy to look up to and then be abandoned by him
?
I hadn’t meant it.
All I’d meant to do was bring Malcolm along so that we could find a better place to live.

New Haven certainly wasn’t it. And, as Malcolm pointed out to me, neither was Philadelphia or Cleveland.
Nor, I noticed from yesterday’s paper, was Kokomo
,
Indiana, where another riot had broken out in the black community, or Omaha, or Cairo
,
Illinois.
All filled with violence, and rioting, and the deaths of countless innocent people.

The entire summer seemed like it was going to rage forward.
And there was little I could do to stop it.

TWENTY-FOUR

We decided that I would care for Jimmy the next morning, while Malcolm went back to Yale to see if he could find the local SDS chapter.
He figured he might be able to sweet-talk them into telling him where the Barn was.

Jimmy seemed excited by the prospect of having me around all day.
Since it was Sunday, he asked if we could go to church. Apparently he had promised Althea he’d keep up with his religious work.

I didn’t want to sit in some stuffy New England church, rising and singing with inhibited white people who had no idea how to properly conduct a church service.
But Jimmy pressured me and, after we had dropped Malcolm at the gates of Yale, we ended up on Dixwell, in the United Church of Christ, whose bulletin said that this church was the descendent of the first black church in New Haven.

After church, Jimmy and I returned to the motel to change out of our Sunday best.
I took a minute to use the phone, trying the phone numbers that Grace gave me one more time.
Still no answer at any of those, but when I called René Whickam, I was startled to hear someone pick up the phone.

I asked for Professor Whickam.

“This is
he
,” a deep
,
slightly accented male voice said.

“Professor Whickam,” I said, “my name is Bill Grimshaw and I’m an investigator from Chicago.
I’m working for Grace Kirkland, Daniel Kirkland’s mother.
She hasn’t heard from him in more than six months, and she’s worried.
I’ve been asking around, and I understand he spent some time with your daughter, and that there was an incident.
I was wondering if I could speak to you about it.”

Whickam was silent for so long after I spoke that I began to wonder if he had hung up.
Then he said, “Where are you?”

“I’m in New Haven,” I said. “I’m staying near the Yale Bowl.”