A Cry of Angels (24 page)

Wouldn't there?

I stood on the square and gazed along the rows of empty store fronts. Overhead the automatic streetlights were fading on, rising to the darkness as the sun comes to morning, lighting whoever may be standing there, casting the same light when he is gone.

There was a vagrant sitting on a park bench nearby. A man with a curl of red hair stuck to his pasty white forehead. He sat with one shoe off pulling a sock luxuriously through his toes, his yellowed eyes watching me.

I turned and walked away.

Late in the night, after hours of walking, I found myself back in the Ape Yard, in front of the Starlite Cafe in Cabbage Alley. The Starlite was run by Gus Mayfair, who was a porter at the Marble City Hotel uptown until the new manager fired him for drinking. I stopped and tapped on the glass. Gus came from behind the counter with a rag in his hand and squinted through the window, and unlocked the door. "Just closing up," he said.

"I, uh—I was just leaving town and thought I'd get one more of your good hamburgers, Gus."

"I done turned off the grill," he said. Gus was sleepy and didn't like working at the cafe anyway. Gus had enjoyed working at the hotel, where he got to wear a uniform and rich white people tipped him and joked with him. But the new manager had let him go. It had been all right with the old manager if he took a drink on the job; the old manager drank himself, and surprised a man in one of the rooms now and then. But the new manager had let Gus go, even though he only took an occasional drink.

"That's okay," I said, "maybe I'll stop by the bus station diner."

Gus waited with the key in the lock. There was a long crack across the glass door where a drunk had tried to kick it in and Gus had reinforced the crack with a spine and ribs of tape.

"I'm going up to North Carolina," I said. "I don't guess I'll be coming back."

"Yeah—well, good luck to you."

"Right," I said. "Well, goodbye, Gus."

The door closed and a moment later the neon sign went out and bugs plunged and dived and fluttered about helplessly in the dark.

I climbed the hills to the garage and I knew, long before I was close enough to look for a light, that there would be none.

There was no need to strike a light, I knew every splinter of the place. Finding Em's cot, I tumbled on it and lay in the dark and listened to the high whine of the gulley crickets and the muffled, faraway drone of the Ape Yard. The loft, still smelling of warm day-dust, cracked and popped as the old garage settled itself in the cooling air of the night.

By noon the next day the moving van had left, the station wagon was loaded, and the hired ambulance had arrived for Miss Esther. Vance had howled in protest over the extravagance until a hurried call to the insurance agent reassured him that it was covered by her major medical. But when the men arrived with a stretcher she shooed them out of her room and came down carrying her bag. She further flabbergasted her son by ordering one of the attendants into the back and crawling in beside the driver. "But, Mama," spluttered Vance, "what's the good of having an ambulance if you're going to ride up front?"

"I'll lay down if I get tired," she said. "First I want to see how this gentleman drives. You all up there"—she adjusted her hat and looked along the line of boarders at the porch balustrade—"you better write to me, now." There were to be no hand-wringing goodbyes, she had made sure of that. She was up before daylight, visiting each of them in their rooms. Now she just looked at them, her old soldiers lined stiffly at the rail, and they at her, etching in, I supposed, those last details of face and feature, the turn of a mouth, the slope of a shoulder, as I had painted in my trees, my bend in the river. When at last she was done, Miss Esther nodded, cranked up her window and ordered her driver on.

The boarders turned and filed past me into the house, still dry eyed, though Mrs. Metcalf was straining hard, and as they passed, each one touched me in a brief goodbye, a squeeze of the arm, a clap on the head, and walked on, none of us trying to speak in a moment too tight, too full for the rattle of empty words.

Vance worked my suitcase under the straps of the luggage carrier, and I crawled into the station wagon between the twins, each of whom had claimed family rights to a window seat. Vance and Lucille were making a last check of the house when suddenly Victor rolled down the window and yelled:

"You get out of this yard, nigger!"

Tio leaned his bike against the steps and came over to the car. Victor shook his fist in Tio's face. "You want to fight, nigger?"

"Be still," I said, "he's a friend of mine."

Tio handed me a sack through the window. "Mr. Teague sent you some apples."

"Don't you touch this car," warned Victor. Vanessa giggled.

"Tell him thank you for me."

Tio nodded. He tried to say something else but kept getting interrupted by Victor, who had devised a new game. Watching Tio closely, he carefully managed to keep his head in our line of sight. Tio moved around to the back window and lifted his voice. "You seen Em?"

"No, I was about to ask you . . ."

Tio shook his head. He looked at me and shrugged.

"Well, when you see him, tell him . . ." Tio had to cup his ear, Victor and Vanessa were rapping their knuckles on the glass, making faces at him.

"Tell him what . . . ?" Tio was straining to hear.

"Nothing," I said. "Never mind."

Tio adjusted his hat. The nervous tic was starting under his eye. The twins had their faces pressed against the back window, their tongues madly licking the glass. "Well, if I don't see you again"—he looked down at the noses pressed flat, the pink tongues lapping large wet circles—"take care." And, snatching a brick out of the flower bed, he slammed it against the window with such a bone-jarring smack that both twins' foreheads bounced off the glass. They thrashed about in the seat with such howls that eventually Vance ran waddling out of the house, but by that time Tio was pedaling far down the street.

Finally we got under way. The car rolled north through the scrub pine and rabbit country, swaying heavily in the dips and turns, the U-Haul tugging on the bumper. Vance cursed under his breath as his push-button settings failed to turn up any country music stations. He fiddled with the dial. Lucille sat tense and silent, one hand covering her eyes, cringing as far as she could from the blaring speaker.

The air in the back was stifling. The twins twisted the knobs of the window handles and eyed me maliciously, the sweat standing out on their fat faces. It was as if they could see their odors attacking me.

I knew they were sizing me up, resenting this intrusion into their family, and unsure yet as to how to turn it to their own advantage. As we rode I stopped feeling sorry for poor Spider cramped in the overloaded U-Haul. He had by far the better deal.

We crossed Broad River into South Carolina. Vance, having found his bluegrass, now puffed his cigar contentedly, his wrist hung over the wheel, snapping his fingers to Flatt and Scruggs.

Presently the disc jockey, an energetic teenager, segued a chattering teletype over his music and fearlessly attempted a news cast, forcing his voice down an octave for the occasion.

"Repeating an earlier news bulletin—the Supreme Court ruled to day that the states of the nation do not have the right to separate Negro and white pupils in different public schools. By a unanimous 9 to 0 vote, the High Court held that such segregation of the races is unconstitutional."

"
What
! Good God-a-mighty!" Vance lunged forward and whipped up the volume. "Quiet, everybody!"

"The most violent reaction came from Georgia Governor Herman Talmadge, who has repeatedly vowed that there will never be mixed schools while he is governor. In a prepared statement the governor said, and I quote, 'The United States Supreme Court by its decision today has reduced our Constitution to a mere scrap of paper. It (the court) has blatantly ignored all law and precedent and usurped from the Congress and the people the power to amend the Constitution and from the Congress the authority to make the laws of the land.' Governor James F. Byrnes of South Carolina, a former Supreme Court justice, said because it has been held many times the separate-but-equal doctrine, and I quote again, 'was not violative of the Constitution, I am shocked to learn that the Court has reversed itself.' For further developments, stay tuned to—" The announcer gave the station's call letters, the time, and played a jingle that launched the next half-hour of his show.

"By damn, did you hear that?" Vance was purple. "Have they gone slap crazy? Did he say
all
the schools, or
when
they had to be mixed? Did you hear him say when?" Lucille shook her head, or perhaps she only trembled.

"I'm gonna stop and call that station," said Vance. "That kid didn't give enough to tell what the hell's going on!"

"Oh, Van," whined Lucille, "let's please don't stop. We'll find out when we get home. I want to get on home."

"No, sir!" bellowed Vance, rising to the hint of opposition, "I'm gonna get the straight dope, and while I'm at it I might just give 'em a little hell for lettin' a damn kid give out such an important item as that." Vance hooked an elbow over the back of the seat and addressed himself to me, glancing only occasionally at the road. "You take, I don't care who it is, when they get on the radio or the
TV
they got a responsibility to the public, and when they screw up I for one let 'em know about it! I call up the stations around home all the time. There was one last week, had a preacher on that didn't know as much about the Bible as that kid there"—indicating Vanessa, who, looking faint, had her nose pressed to a private half-inch crack in the glass—"and there he was spoutin' off about the Garden of Eden bein' a symbol, and all that stuff. You know, college preacher. Well, I got the station manager on the phone and didn't I tell him a thing! He was real nice about it. Damn, there oughta be a gas station around here somewhere. You seen one, honey?"

Lucille shook her head, or trembled, again.

Vance grinned in the mirror. "You can't fool me about my Bible," he continued. "I keep up with my preaching. I've heard the best of 'em. I used to like Billy Graham till he got surrounded by all them sharkskin suits. I still like Oral Roberts, though, he's all right. I seen him in person once," Vance bragged, "he healed a pregnant woman."

Lucille raised her head and looked at him. "She had a crippled laig," she explained.

"Yeah. Well, when old Oral got done with her she didn't have it. She just throwed down her crutches and danced up and down that aisle. They had to carry her out of there."

"On account of she was so happy," appended Lucille.

"Right. Hey, look, there's a station just over that next rise. Anybody got to go?"

Vance pulled in to the side of the station and went in to the pay phone. Victor and Vanessa grabbed the paddle-key from the attendant and raced around the corner to the ladies' room, their mother tottering along behind with a bottle of Lysol, calling for them to wait.

I pushed open the door and jumped out and stood leaning on the burning car in the clean, fresh air. Vance's back was to me. He gestured wildly to the party on the phone.

There was no time for reasoning. Sometimes desperation relieves us of that civilized faculty and throws us directly on our instincts, where things get done. And in that moment I acted on instinct as surely, as unhesitatingly as if Jojohn had been shouting in my ear. I clawed my suitcase out of the luggage carrier and broke for the nearby woods as hard as my feet could run.

At the edge of the trees I threw my bag over a barbed-wire fence and dived after it and rolled in the grass like a dog. Families, like houses, sometimes have a distinctive smell, and theirs was clinging to me like pond scum.

After a while they reassembled at the car and noticed my absence.

Vance went to the men's room and came back shaking his head. They held a conference. Vance honked the horn a few times, then circled the station calling me and looked into the men's room again. Then Victor noticed my suitcase missing. He and Vanessa ran out and looked up and down the highway and Vance went back to question the station attendant. There was an anxious moment when it occurred to me that he might call the police, but presently he came stomping back to the car, ordered them all in, and a moment later the station wagon was bumping out onto the highway.

I stood up from behind the fence and watched it grow small in the distance, the white moon faces of Victor and Vanessa still looking out the back window. A cool breeze washed through the pasture, bringing the sweet smell of the grass and trees. The sun burned cleanly through the sweep of the land. I stood at the edge of the trees and said goodbye to the last remnants of that strange institution: my family. I supposed it would be the last I would see of Miss Esther, and I would miss her. I knew for a fact it was the last I would see of the Vance Cahills.

And, as it turned out later, it was the last I was to see of my bone handled hunting knife that cousin Victor had seen me packing, and so admired.

I spent the rest of the day and part of the night hitchhiking my way back home, finally catching a ride the last leg from Little Holland with a man who worked a coffee route. It was against company rules to pick up hitchhikers, he said, but I had an honest face. He was so friendly it flashed through my mind that I might have found myself another sharpshooter. But I was wrong, and later felt ashamed about it. He was just a nice man who wanted to do me a favor. We chatted along and he told me about his hobby, which was making piggy banks out of discarded coffee cans. He let me have one for half price.

Coming across the railroad trestle by moonlight, shaking a pebble in the coffee-can bank, and catching sight of the boardinghouse with its hall light burning, it was as though I had been away a thousand years.

I ran through the front door and climbed through the house, shouting everyone awake. "Mr. Rampey! Mr. Burroughs! Mrs. Bell! I'm home . . . Mrs. Cline!" They piled into the hall in their night clothes, shouting, grabbing me, calling to wake the others. It was a carrying on sufficient to rouse the neighborhood. They were all asking questions at once, interrupting each other, re-asking things I'd just answered, Mr. Rampey loudly echoing every word for Mr. Woodall. "To the dinin' room!" shouted Farette, elbowing her way through, "I swear to goodness!"