Sons (11 page)

“I can be more useful in the South.”

“Your friend can be more useful there.”

“No, I think it’s important that some
while
people go down there.”

“Why?”

“To show them we’re interested. I mean, Pop, this isn’t just
their
problem, it’s
our
problem, too. If we care enough about what the hell’s going
on
in this country.”

“All right, don’t get excited,” my father said.

“Well, this means a lot to me.”

“Did I say no?”

“You’re
going
to say no, I can tell.”

“I didn’t know you were a mind reader.”

“Anyway, I think I ought to tell you I’ll be eighteen in October...”

“July isn’t October. When did you say? You said July, didn’t you?”

“Well, when school ends.”

“That’s not October.”

“I
know
it’s not October. Anyway, I may not even
need
your 7 0 permission. I haven’t really looked into the requirements yet, but I think...”

“I would imagine you’d have to be eighteen,” my father said.

“Maybe and maybe not,” I said. “Larry has all the information, I’ll have to check...”

“If you’re so serious about this, why haven’t you checked already?”

“I am serious about it. I didn’t think I was going to get such static here, that’s all.”

“I wasn’t aware...”

“I’m not asking for your permission because I
need
it, Pop.”

“No? Then why are you asking?”

“As a goddamn courtesy.”

“This isn’t a locker room,” my father said.

“Okay, it isn’t a locker room.”

“I’m sure your mother wouldn’t want you traipsing all over the South where you can possibly get your head busted by some rednecked farmer!”

“The reason I
want
to go traipsing all over the South is so that people
can
traipse all over the South without getting their heads busted.”

“And if you run into trouble?”

“I won’t.”

“Suppose you do?”

“I can take care of myself.”

“That’s another country down there.”

“Is that supposed to be a pun?”

“What?” he said. “I’m telling you that’s a foreign country down there. I was there during the war, and it’s worse now. You’ll need a passport to get in, it’s a foreign country.”

“It’s America,” I said.

“Don’t give me any of that patriotic bullshit,” my father said.

“This isn’t a locker room,” I said, and tried a smile.

My father picked up his cigar and began puffing on it. He didn’t say anything. One of De Gaulle’s pictures caught his eye, and he moved it over next to another lovely shot of the general.

“Well,” I said, “how about it?”

“The answer is no,” he said flatly.

“I figured.”

“You figured correctly.”

“Why?”

“Because voter registration in the South is a dangerous occupation for a seventeen-year-old boy.”

“I’ll be eighteen in October.”

“Then go in October.”

“Pop, I have to be in New Haven on September fourteenth, you know that.”

“Right. So spend your summer on the beach, take it easy. You think Yale’s going to be a lark?”

“What about Larry?”

“Who the hell is Larry?”

“Larry, Larry, my friend. How can I spend the summer sitting on my ass when I know he’ll be down South fighting for his
life!”

“Invite him to the beach.”

“Pop!”

“It’s not your battle,” my father said.

“Will you at least think about it?”

“I’ve already thought about it.”

“I’ll go without your permission, you know. If I have to be eighteen, I’ll lie about my age, I’ll get a phony draft card, there’re millions of them around.”

“Then why’d you ask me in the first place?” my father said. “Because I thought you’d be proud to say yes.”

I went out of his office and down the corridor to the elevator, angry as hell. Mrs. Green came from behind her desk and fluttered up to me.

“Oh, Wat,” she said, “your father told me about your being accepted at Yale, that’s just wonderful.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I guess you’re all excited about graduation.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Do you have something in mind?” she asked.

“Huh?”

“Something special?”

“What do you mean?”

“For graduation. A present.”

“Oh,” I said, and suddenly realized she was here on a specific mission, she had been told earlier that I’d be coming up, and had been instructed by my father to find out what I wanted as a graduation gift. In what she had doubtlessly considered a subtle manner, she had led the conversation to the point where she could pop the big question, and now she stood studying my face eagerly, hoping against hope that I would reveal my desire before the elevator arrived. I did not want to disappoint her. and yet I could not think of a single thing I wanted or needed. I began wishing that something extravagant would occur to me, but nothing did, and I stood in mute embarrassment as the approaching elevator whined up the shaft, feeling terribly sorry for Mrs. Green, but feeling even sorrier for my father, who could not
personally
ask his own son what he wanted most for graduation.

“There
is
something I want,” I said.

“Yes?” Mrs. Green said, nervously fingering the purple stone on her bosom. “What is it?”

“Get him to say yes,” I told her. “Get him to say I can go to Mississippi.”

My father said yes at the beginning of June, but Michael and I did not celebrate until the night before he left for Keesler Field, when we both went over to the colored section in Douglas. It was one of those rare Chicago nights, with a full moon hanging over the lake, and people swimming off the sand beach at Oak Street, portable radios going everywhere along the shore.

I don’t know what led us over to Douglas. I don’t think we intentionally
started
to go there, and we certainly weren’t looking for any trouble. There was rioting in Detroit that Sunday, we had heard all about it on the radio. But the trouble there was understandable because Negro sharecroppers had been coming up north by the hundreds of thousands, lured by the higher wages being paid by the wartime automobile industry, and the city just didn’t know how to cope with its new mixed population of two million people. A white man and a Negro had begun hitting each other, and before you knew it whites and Negroes were battling it out all over the city, and a cop got shot six times with his own gun, and dozens of other people, Negro and white, had been killed. I kept expecting it to spread to Chicago — we were only two hundred and seventy miles or so from Detroit, and we had a colored population of more than 275,000, most of which was clustered in Grand Boulevard, Washington Park, or Douglas. But nothing had happened. Nothing
ever
happened in Chicago.

The whole point of that Sunday, June twentieth, nineteen hundred and forty-three, was that I had been accepted by the United States Air Force, hallelujah! Moreover, it seemed likely that I’d be inducted sooner than I’d expected, in which case I might somewhere along the line just possibly catch up with Michael, who was set to leave Chicago tomorrow morning for five weeks of basic training in Mississippi. We had every reason to celebrate, and we began celebrating early that afternoon, there being three of us at the beginning of the spree that eventually led us into Douglas. Ronny Booth was a pain in the ass, but he was twenty-one years old and therefore entitled to buy alcoholic beverages in our antiquated state. Here were two red-blooded American boys, Michael and myself, who had already been accepted by the Air Force, but we weren’t permitted to drink in Illinois, right? On the other hand, Ronny Booth, who was 4-F because of a heart murmur (but who also happened to be twenty-one) was permitted to buy all the whiskey he wanted; which he had done the day before, and which the three of us now consumed happily on the edge of the lake while someone in a rowboat on the water strummed a guitar and lazily sang, “I’ll Be with You in Apple Blossom Time.”

Ronny Booth kept saying, “Men, we are getting drunk.”

He was a tall skinny guy with straight black hair and brown eyes that looked enormously offended. He had begun growing a mustache, doubtless to assert his manhood in defiance of his 4-F classification, but it was coming in patchy and sparse, and it gave him the appearance of a skinny, comic Hitler.

“Ja,
Adolf,” Michael said, “ve are getting plastered.”

“Please don’t call me Adolf,” Ronny said.

“Jawohl,
Adolf,” Michael said.

“I have seen more hair on a strip of bacon,” I said, and Michael laughed.

“Men,” Ronny said, “I tell you we are getting drunk.”

“Let’s go find some pussy,” Michael said.

“Shhh,” Ronny said. “There’re ladies present.”

“Where?” I said.

“Out there on the water plucking their guitars.”

“Let’s find some pretty pussy to pluck,” Michael said, and laughed and threw his arms around me. “You know what I’m going to do, Will?” he asked.

“What’re you going to do?”

“Pee in the water,” Michael said.

“Men,” Ronny said, “we are getting drunk.”

Michael had, with considerable difficulty, already unzipped his fly, but he judiciously allowed me to lead him away from the water’s edge and into one of the underpasses where he urinated against a wall that had been chalked with the legend slap the jap!

“Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat,” Michael said, drilling the wall with a steady stream of urine. “Rat-tat-tat-tat.”

“Behold the yellow menace,” I said.

“The yellow
peril,”
Michael corrected. “I am going to tell you something about this war,” he said, slopping onto his trouser leg as he tried to maneuver himself back into his pants, “Will Tyler, here’s the thing about this war.” He put a scholarly finger alongside his nose, tilted his head to one side, blond wood shavings spilling around his ears, grinned cherubically, and said, “This war will soon be over because two brave and stalwarts are going over there to
zap
them!” and triumphantly zipped up his fly.

“Men,” Ronny said, and slid down the sloping concrete wall and passed out. chin on his chest.

“Men,” I said, “Ronny Booth is unconscious.”

“Fuck him,” Michael said. He threw his arm around my shoulder, and we crossed under the Drive at Division Street, and began walking downtown, away from Ronny and the lake, singing “Jingle Bells” because it was clever in June, and “Over There” because it was corny at
any
time, and “Mairzy Doats” because it was crazy like us, and then trying to hum “Holiday for Strings” because it was difficult especially when intoxicated. The Loop had never been too terribly exciting on a Sunday night, but ever since the war began and the lights were dimmed, it had become positively ghostly, with servicemen milling around the streets as if searching for a party that had somehow been canceled. In defense against the gloom, Michael and I began singing the Army Air Force song, mindful of the unamused glares of the servicemen all around us, but marching bravely along anyway, arm in arm, as we belted out the lyrics.

Douglas was four and a half miles from downtown Chicago, and nobody in his right mind would have chosen it as a nighttime destination. We were not precisely in our right minds that Sunday, though, nor were we consciously heading for Douglas. We were, instead, heading into the skies above where brave fighter pilots plunged their war machines into fat billowing clouds, Or, to be more precise, we were heading for Wentworth Avenue, which was the main street of Chinatown, where we hoped to get some egg rolls and chow mein. Carried along by the spirit of our rousing song,
off we go,
we marched past Marshall Field,
into the wild blue yonder,
grabbing a subway train at State and Randolph,
climbing high,
all the way to Cermak Road where we disembarked and staggered into the Sun Shu Chinese Restaurant, in which establishment we consumed four egg rolls apiece and two orders of chow mein, not to mention huge quantities of Chinese tea, none of which made us any soberer than we’d been at the start of our journey. Mistily shrouded by the warm Chicago night and the alcohol fumes that blurred our vision, we lurched out of the restaurant and instead of turning back toward Cermak and the subway station, turned in the opposite direction instead and, singing, misgaited, giggling, and bellowing, made our way into the colored section of Douglas.

As we came into Douglas, we felt at once, Michael and I, and communicated it without speaking to each other, that we had been shot down by Messerschmitts or worse and must now through courage and guile, through wile, women, and song somehow find our way back to our own friendly lines, which were either the Douglas or the Jackson Park lines of the Rapid Transit.

“Shhh,” I said.

“Shhh,” Michael said.

There was in this contorted drunken landscape a conglomerate architecture sprung from poverty, rooted in need, that had transformed a once-affluent residential area into a congested slum within the space of forty years. Tarpaper shacks squatted check by jowl with barracks-like structures, spindly wooden staircases rising to rickety second- and third-story porches. Rusted parts of washing machines, sewing machines, bedsprings, tricycles, bicycles, abandoned automobiles sprouted everywhere, a jagged, disintegrating crop. Monumental heaps of moldering garbage rose like undisputed bunkers against soot-streaked crumbling brick buildings — Fuck You painted on a wall in shrieking white, sheets and bloomers and blouses and skirts flapping on clotheslines, trying to escape the backyards below, a dog squatting and shitting outside the entrance doorway to a shack, a little girl idly dragging her doll through the mud. We had come down Wentworth, I guess it was, and then State, and then turned east on Thirty-first, and now we threaded our way with fallen-pilot care through a populace sullen in blackface, men in undershirts and trousers throwing sidelong slitted glances as we passed, women in flowered housedresses, hair up in pieces of rag, remnants of the Old South only four and a half miles from downtown Chicago, only a hundred years away on the underground railway. A group of men sat playing dominoes outside a ramshackle tottering structure, one of them wearing only patterned Bermuda shorts, another drinking beer from a pitcher,
Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room,
you could hear that towering Illinois voice reverberating through this crouching slum as the breeze from the lake ahead, blowing fresh and clean onto the Drive five miles north, here brought in a stench as strong as that of Michael’s piss in the underpass.