Gentleman Junkie and Other Stories of the Hung-Up Generation Page 6

  Deliberately, he wiped the corners of his mouth where little sticky clots of saliva-dirt had gathered. “Del Matthews,” he answered, coolly. It seemed to fit.

  “You don’t look like you need this gig too bad,” I made small talk. “Who’ve you played with?”

  He made a small wave in the general direction of nowheresville. “Around,” he said. “Nobody you’d know. A few rhythm-and-blues outfits. I been in the city a couple months, haven’t been able to make too much of a connection.”

  That sounded bad. If the kid had been any good, with the shortage the way it was, he’d have been bound to pick up at least something. “You, uh, you got a card?” He nodded, reached into his hip pocket, and brought up an empty, weathered wallet. He flashed the card. It was current. It looked bad.

  “What’d’ya blow?” I inquired, as politely as I could, trying not to let him know I was spooked.

  “Anything, mostly. Makes no difference. You call ’em, I can play it. Just as long as I can blow, that’s all I’m looking for. Just work.”

  There was something peculiar in his eyes. I’d have laughed at myself if I’d recognized that look at the time, but I didn’t. It was only lots later that I dug it was the same expression I’d seen in paintings of the big man, Christ. Strange how things like that hang with you. I didn’t dig, then, but later it came to me.

  All he seemed to want to do, apparently, was work.

  So I was game to try. We had to work that night, and I was backed to the wall. We needed the gig bad.

  About that time Dreiser came out of the KINGS room and hopped up onto the stand. He sat down behind the traps and gave me the nod. I heaved a sigh, stood up (wondering which number I should ring up for a horn when this kid blew out), and moved to the piano. The kid took his horn.

  I figured we ought to give him every possible, so I asked him if he knew the Giuffre “Four Brothers.” He said he did, without hesitation, so I gave it a three-bar intro, and Rog came on with the bass the way we’d rehearsed it; Dreiser hit the drums down soft and Frilly Epperson joined at the same instant with his sax. We were all swinging, and waiting for that first note, when the kid came on.

  Now I want to tell this just so. He could blow, that was the first thing. I don’t mean he copied: he wasn’t Farmer, and he wasn’t Miles; he wasn’t Nat Adderley or Diz, either. He was all himself.

  He was fingering a Selmer that looked as though it had seen a few hock shops, and hadn’t been shined very often, but he could blow. He came on like the west wind and for a second we all stumbled, listening to him.

  Then when we hit the solo spot where Cookie’d usually ride out—“Four Brothers” was a virtuoso piece any time—the kid went on ahead like Hurricane Hilda. He caught the repetitive riffs and whanged on each one till it said “Uncle!” Frankly, I was impressed as hell.

  The kid wasn’t any finger-poppin’ Daddy, either. He knew his sounds. There was—what was it?—there was like truth in what he blew. It was really, honest to God, saying something. I looked over and Frilly was staring at the kid with eyes like pizzas. I heard Arville Dreiser drop the beat for a second, which he never, so I knew they were all pretty high on the kid.

  When he had expended his conversation, we went into a restatement of the theme and finished it up faster than even Cookie had been able to gun it. I didn’t say anything for a minute, then said, “Let’s try ‘Laura.’”

  He nodded, and Frilly opened it so quick I gave him a long look. But he didn’t give a damn; he wanted to hear more of that horn, he couldn’t wait.

  Well.

  He blew “Laura” like it would have made Gene Tierney bawl. And this time I was sure. The kid was blowing the truth. It was the kind of sound Monk has in his piano, the kind of thing Bird had, and the thing Bix had right up to the end. It was the kind of thing Louis had for a while till he found the tomming routine paid better. It was simply the truth.

  “Laura” finished and the sound still hung. When it had gone to its velvet rest, I realized the kid had finished the piece alone, we’d sunk to silence digging.

  The kid didn’t say anything. He just banged out the spittle and settled onto one hip, waiting for the word.

  I swung around on the stool and pulled out a butt. I lit it, and didn’t look at him as I said, “Sorry, kid, don’t think you’re exactly what we want. We play a little too hard bop for you, I guess. Maybe some other time. No hard—”

  He cut me off with a flat sweep of his hand. He’d heard it all before. He holstered the Selmer and mumbled a cool, “Thanks. Yeah, later,” and was gone.

  Nobody said anything to me.

  But nobody argued with me—either.

  Hell, it was obvious. I got up and dropped off the stand, making for the phone booth. I didn’t feel so good. But it was obvious:

  Nobody likes to hear the truth. Makes you realize how not-so-good you really are. The truth hurts.

  That was when I recognized the look in the kid’s eyes.

  I finally got my hornman, that night.

  He sounded like hell.

  Daniel White for the Greater Good

  Begin with absolute blackness. The sort of absolute blackness that does not exist in reality. A black as deep and profound as the space directly under a heel pressed to the ground; a black as all-encompassing as blindness from birth; a black that black. The black of a hallway devoid of light, and a black—advancing down that hallway—going away from you. At the end of a hallway so black as this, a square of light painfully white. A doorway through which can be seen a window, pouring dawn sunlight in a torrent into the room, through the doorway, and causing a sunspot of light at the end of the pitch-black hallway.

  If this were a motion picture, it would be starkly impressive, the black so deep, and the body moving away from the camera, down the hall toward the square of superhuman white. The body clinging to the right-hand wall, moving down the tunnel of ebony, slowly, painstakingly, almost spastically. The body is a form, merely a form, not quite as black as the hallway mouth that contains it, but still without sufficient contrast to break what would be superlative camera work, were this a motion picture. But it is not a motion picture. It is a story of some truth.

  It is a story, and for that reason, the effect of superlative cinematography must be broken as the body pulls itself to the door, lurches through, and stumbles to grasp at the edge of a chest-high wooden counter. The camera angles (were this a motion picture) would suddenly shift and alter, bringing into immediate focus the soft yet hard face of a police desk sergeant, his collar open and sweat beading his neck and upper lip. We might study the raised bushy eyebrows and the quickly horrified expression just before the lips go rigid. Then the camera would track around the squad room, we would see the Georgia sunrise outside that streaming window, and finally our gaze would settle on the face of a girl.

  A white girl.

  With a smear of blood at the edge of her mouth, with one eye swollen shut and blue-black, with her hair disarrayed and matted with blood, leaves and dirt…and an expression of pain that says one thing:

  “Help…me…”

  The camera would follow that face as it sinks slowly to the floor.

  Then, if this were a movie and not reality, in a town without a name in central Georgia, the camera would cut to black. Sharp cut, and wait for the next scene.

  It might have been simpler, had he been a good man. At least underneath; but he wasn’t. He was, very simply, a dirty nigger. When he could not cadge a free meal by intimidation, he stole. He smelled bad, he had the morals of a swamp pig, and as if that were not enough to exclude him from practically every strata of society, he had bad teeth, worse breath, and a foul mouth. Fittingly, his name was Daniel White.

  They had no difficulty arresting him, and even less difficulty proving he was the man who had raped and beaten Marion Gore. He was found sleeping exhausted in a corner of the hobo jungle at the side of the railroad tracks on the verge of the town. There was blood on his hands and hair u
nder his fingernails. Police lab analysis confirmed that the blood type and follicles of hair matched those of Marion Gore.

  Far from circumstantial, these facts merely verified the confession Daniel White made when arrested. He was not even granted the saving grace of having been drunk. He was surly, obscene, and thoroughly pleased with what he had done. The fact that Marion Gore had been sixteen, a virgin, and had gone into a coma after making her way from the field where she had been attacked to the police station, seemed to make no impression on Daniel White.

  The local papers tagged him—and they were conservative at best—a conscienceless beast. He was that. At least.

  It was not unexpected, then, to find a growing wave of mass hatred in the town. A hatred that continually emerged in the words “Lynch the bastard.”

  At first, the word black was not even inserted between the and bastard. It wasn’t needed. It came later, when the concept of lynching gave way to a peculiar itch in the palms of many white hands. An itch that might well be scratched by a length of hemp rope.

  It had to happen quickly, or it would not happen at all. The chief of police would call the mayor, the mayor would get in touch with the governor, and in a matter of hours the National Guard would be in. So it had to happen quickly, or not at all.

  And it was bound to happen. There was no doubt of that. There had been seeds planted—the school trouble, darkie rabble-rousers from New Jersey and Illinois down talking to the nigras in Littletown, that business at the Woolworth’s counter—and now the crop was coming in.

  Daniel White was safe behind bars, but outside, it was getting bad:

  …the big-mouth crowd that hung out in Peerson’s Bowling and Billiard Center caught Phil the clean-up boy, and badgered him into a fight. They took him out back and worked him over with eight-inch lengths of bicycle chain; the diagnosis was double concussion and internal hemorrhaging.

  …a caravan of heavies from the new development near the furniture factory motored down into Littletown and set fire to The Place, where thirty-five or forty of the town’s more responsible Negro leaders had gathered for a few drinks and a discussion of what their position might be in this matter. Result: fifteen burned, and the bar scorched to the ground.

  …Willa Ambrose, who washed and kept house for the Porters, was fired after a slight misunderstanding with Diane Porter; Willa had admitted to once taking in a movie with Daniel White.

  …the Jesus Baptist Church was bombed the same night Daniel White made his confession. The remains of the building gave up evidence that the job had been done with homemade Molotov cocktails and sticks of dynamite stolen from the road construction shed on the highway. Pastor Neville lost the use of his right eye: a piece of flying glass from the imported stained glass windows.

  So the chief of police called the mayor, and the mayor called the governor, and the governor alerted his staff, and they discussed it, and decided to wait till morning to mobilize the National Guard (which was made up of Georgia boys who didn’t much care for the idea of Daniel White, in any case). At best, ten hours.

  A long, hot, dangerous ten hours.

  Daniel White slept peacefully. He knew he wasn’t going to be lynched. He also knew he was going to become a cause célèbre and might easily get off with a light sentence, this being an election year, and the eyes of the world on his little central Georgia town.

  After all, the NAACP hadn’t even made an appearance yet. Daniel White slept peacefully.

  He knew he didn’t deserve to die for Marion Gore.

  She hadn’t really been a virgin.

  The NAACP man’s name was U. J. Peregrin and he was out of the Savannah office. He was tall, and exceedingly slim in his tailored Ivy League suit. He was nut-brown and had deep-set eyes that seemed veiled like a cobra’s. He spoke in a soft, cultivated voice totally free of drawl and slur. He had been born in Tenafly, New Jersey, had attended college at the University of Chicago, and had gone into social work out of a mixture of emotions. This assignment had come to him chiefly because of his native familiarity with the sort of culture that spawned Daniel White—and a lynch mob.

  He sat across from Henry Roblee (who had been picked by the terror-stricken Negro residents of that little central Georgia town as their spokesman) and conversed in three A.M. tones. Seven hours until the National Guard might come, seven hours in which anything might happen, seven hours that had forced the inhabitants of Littletown to douse their lights and crouch behind windows with 12-gauges ready.

  “We’ve never had anything like this here,” Henry Roblee admitted, his square face cut with worry. He rubbed his blocky hands over the moist glass. A thin film of whiskey colored the bottom of the glass. A bottle stood between them on the table.

  Peregrin drew deeply on his cigarette and stared into Roblee’s frightened eyes. “Mr. Roblee,” he said softly, “you may never have had anything like this before, but you’ve certainly got it now, and the question is, ‘What do we intend to do about it?’” He waited. Not so much for an answer as for a realization on the other man’s part of just what the situation meant.

  “It’s not White we’re worried about,” Roblee added hastily. “That jail is strong enough, and I don’t suppose the Chief is going to let them come by without doing something to stop them. It’s what’s happening all over town that’s got us frightened. We never seen the people round here act this way. Why, they in a killing frame of mind!”

  Peregrin nodded slowly.

  “How is your Pastor?” he asked.

  Roblee shrugged. “He’s gone be blind in the one eye, maybe both, but that’s what I mean. That man was respected by everybody ’round here. They thought most highly of him. We got to protect ourselves.”

  “What do you propose?” Peregrin asked.

  Roblee looked up from the empty glass suddenly. “What do we propose? Why, man, that’s why we asked for help from the N-double A-CP. Don’t you understand? Something terrible’s gone happen in this town unless we decide what to do to stop it. Even the sensible folks ’round here are crazy mad with wanting to lynch that Daniel White.”

  “I can only make suggestions; that’s my job. I can’t tell you what to do.”

  Roblee fondled the glass, then filled it half full with uneven movements. He tipped it up and drank heavily. “What about if we just all moved on out for a few days?”

  Peregrin shook his head.

  Roblee looked away, said softly, ironically, “I didn’t think so.” He moved his tongue over his thick, moist lips. “Man, I am scared!”

  Peregrin said, “Do you think the Chief would let me in to speak to White tonight?”

  The other man shrugged. “You can try. Want me to give him a call?” Peregrin nodded agreement, and added, “Let me speak to him. The organization might carry a little weight.”

  It was decided, after the call, that Peregrin and Roblee would both go to see Daniel White. The chief of police advised them to come by way of the police emergency alley, where the chance of their being seen and stopped would be less.

  In the cell block, Peregrin stood for several minutes watching Daniel White through the bars. He studied the face, the attitude of relaxation, the clothing the man wore.

  He mumbled something lightly. Roblee moved up next to him, asked, “What did you say?”

  Peregrin repeated the words, only slightly louder, yet distinctly. “Sometimes I wonder if it’s worth it. Sometimes I think there are too many fifth columnists.”

  Roblee shook his head without understanding what Peregrin had said.

  “Should we talk to him?” the Georgia Negro said to the Ivy-tailored visitor.

  Peregrin nodded resignedly. “Not much bother, but we might as well. We’re here.”

  Roblee stepped up to the bars. He called in to Daniel White. The man woke suddenly, but without apprehension. He sat up on the striped tick mattress and looked at his two callers. He smiled, a gap-toothed grin that was at once charming, disarming, frightful, and painful. “Hey there
, y’all.” He stood up and walked to the bars with a lazy, rolling strut.

  “You the man from the N-double A-CP I bet,” he said, the words twisted Georgia-style. Peregrin nodded.

  “Glad t’meetcha. You gone keep them sonofabitches from hangin’ me?” He continued to grin, a self-assured, cocky grin that rankled Peregrin.

  The tall Negro moved his face very close to the bars. “You think I should?”

  Daniel White made a wry face. “Why, man, you and me is brothers. We the same, fellah. You can’t let them string up no brother of yours. Got to show them damn ofay we as good as them any day.”

  Peregrin’s face momentarily wrenched with distaste. “Are we the same, White? You and me. You and Mr. Roblee here? Are we all the same.” He paused, and leaned his forehead against the bars.

  “Perhaps we are, perhaps we are,” he murmured.

  Daniel White stared at him for some time, without speaking. But he grinned. Finally, “I gone beat this thing, Mister NAACP, you just wait an’ see. I gone get outta this.”

  Peregrin raised his eyes slowly. “You don’t even feel any remorse, do you?”

  White stared at him uncomprehending. “Whatch’ou mean?”

  Peregrin’s face raised to the ceiling, helplessly, as though drawn on invisible wires. “You really don’t know, do you?” he said to himself.

  Daniel White grunted and bared rotten teeth. “Listen to me, Mister NAACP you. I gone tell you somethin’. That little white bitch, that Gore child, she a bum from a long way back: man, I seen her in the woods with half a dozen boys from time on time. She not such a hot piece, I tell you that.”

  Peregrin turned to Roblee. “Let’s go,” he said, slowly. “We’ve done all we can here.”

  They moved back down the cell block: the empty cell block from which the three drunks and the vag had been removed when the first rumors of lynch had begun circulating.