Terraplane (21 page)

"What's his role at the fair?"

Taking a sausage-sized glass hypo, affixing a clean needle to its
end, with it puncturing the cap of a squat brown bottle, Doc drew
in fluid that he then injected into the blood sample. "He worked on
the Futurama," Doc said. "For GM. That's the best exhibit out
there. Shows what the country'll be like in 1960. Being from the
future, of course, it's bound to be old hat to you. Writes articles predicting things, too. Scientifically, of course; it's fascinating
stuff."

"What's foreseen?" I asked.

"You've got to ask? You don't know?" he laughed. `All kinds of
things. Superhighways where you can go eighty miles an hour right
through town. Ever'one living in these skyscrapers surrounded by
parks. Cars and planes and trains'll all run on atom power." I
smiled; wished not to say that his world as it evidenced appeared to
be growing into an adulthood not unlike ours, and maturing much
more quickly. "Machines that control the weather. You know all
about it, I'm sure. You were flying an atom-powered plane, weren't
you?"

I shook my head. "If so, the swamp would still be burning and
half of New York would be irradiated."

He lifted gaze from the eyepiece. "Irradiated? Like with X rays?"

"Worse," I said. "We employ more traditional techniques for
transport. "

"Guess it's like gambling," said Doc. "Can't be guessing right all
the time. I'll admit I've always been a sucker for those world-oftomorrow stories, though-"

"Let the future show as it comes," I said. "It always disappoints."

"If you all are any example, I suppose it does." His stone face
cracked with sudden laughter. "I still don't know how's I believe
you all. Guess I'm just waiting for you to make a slip."

"I'm grateful for your help," I said, knowing we'd make no such
slip. "We'd be lost without."

"You all seem like good people," said Doc. "Even Jake, considering. "

"He's very set in his ways," I said. "Sometimes he frightens
without intent-"

"I mean considering that he's white," said Doc, taking the slide
from its slot. "You're clean, Luther."

"What's meant-?" I began; didn't finish.

"That fellow, Bill, one I was talking about," said Doc, seeming
thoughtful. "He's better than most, but even so ... whenever I
read his articles or he shows me something he says is just around
the corner, it always seems to me something's missing. One time I asked him, I said, `Bill, you mean colored people'll be living like
this too?' Cause I started thinking, if they're not, then where're
they going to be?"

With the rest, in the valley; under the rocks, between the bricks
and lost amidst plenty. "He responds how?"

"He shrugs, he says, `Of course they will. Ever'body'll live the
same way.' Like I say, he is a Red so you got to take ever'thing he
says like that with a grain of salt." Doc stood, walked over to a
wooden chair set atop a wheeled pivot. "Don't think the thought
ever really occurred to him. Don't guess I should be surprised. He's
still not like most whites though, just the same."

"Doc," I said, "had I been white would the police have still
trounced?"

"Yeah, under the circumstances," he said. "You were smarting
off, to their mind, and so they'd have beat you up anyway unless
you made it clear you had connections somewhere. Point is, if
you'd been white nobody down there'd have bugged you to begin
with. "

"It's unreasoned," I said, stepping down from my seat at tabletop, reshirting myself with careful gesture, to lessen stab and ache.
He'd replaced my old turban with smaller gauze so I wouldn't show
so disabled. "I'd read about it but had no idea-"

"You said it," he laughed. "Tell me something I'm having a hard
time with, though. You and Jake. I mean he acts like you're
white-"

"Jake responds equally to all."

"It seems so natural, though. In your time whites really get
along with the Negro people, or have they just finally got used to
em?"

"Our day has many hates," I said. "More diffuse. No less painful, much more reasoned. Generalized and nonspecific but for
those regarding government or class or alien."

"It just seems unbelievable," said Doc, leaning hack; his chair
squeaked in pain beneath his weight. "They got new laws or
something that make 'em give equal rights?"

All have equal right to suffer. "It's not something that comes up.
Money and merit decide-"

"Money," he laughed. "If that was the case, ever'body'd be equal
here. Nobody's got any money." With thick fingers he tapped his
chairarm, as if awaiting word from someone distant. "Still find it
hard to believe. 'fell me something, Luther. I don't care how well
you say ever'body gets along, somebody's got to slip sometime.
When was the first time you remember somebody calling you a
nigger?"

Twenty-odd years ago, I thought, on Long Island's smooth
beach. "Last night," I said.

"All right, tell me this then. There must have been some time
some day some white person must have done something and let you
know you was different somehow. There must have been. When
was it?"

Delving more deeply than I'd allowed previous, desired previous, I drew rotten meat from the broth's pure surface: remembered my white roommates at Andover disbelieving my preference
for Nielsen's Fourth or Tallis's Spem in Alium over the blues-not
Robert Johnson's blues-they so continually played and too often
sang along with, claiming that they had to introduce me to my
own culture, guardians of it that they felt themselves; recalled how,
as a teen, boarding the elevator in our building on East Eightysixth, the way older white tenants simultaneously rising seemed
instinctively to draw themselves deeper cornerways, their eyes
black as Jake's; recalled Skuratov's specification of negritanski in his
reference to me; thought of the Happy Golliwogs we'd seen at
Detsky Mir. While armied I'd never experienced such, never in the
field; in the field, when 1 controlled many men, in Long Island,
most still were black or Hispanic themselves, excepting Sergeant
Johnson. I'd known no comment at Dryco where, granted, I was
the only black topender but for Ms. Glastonbury. They'd hired me
deliberate, true. But had I not been an army success-

"Uncertain," I said, my paranoia brimming as his interrogation's
lead settled. "What about you?"

"Early 1905," he said, after second's thought. `After they sold
me." His words passed with so little tone that he might have been
describing his travels between bed and breakfast.

"Sold?" I repeated. "I'm unclear."

"I'd barely even seen white people before then. See, I grew up on
Reynolds's burley tobacco lands down in North Carolina. They'd
bought the plantation that owned my folks, back after things got
worked out, and, having northern money to spare, used it to buy up
more land. Reynolds was better than most companies, like you've
probably read. It's true, to a degree. By the time I was growing up
we had our own little towns on the land itself. Our own stores run
by our own people. Time I reached school age we had all colored
teachers. Good teachers. In the summer we kids all had to work in
the fields pulling hugs, cutting, but soon as school started that's
where we were sent. Went home to nice little houses and small
plots of land. The overseers was all colored. Lived the way it
seemed right to live-" He stopped; gripped the chairarms as if to
throttle nostalgia. Doc knew when rage essentialled to tear apart
false dreams. "But they still owned us, body and soul."

"That brand," I said, thinking of his back's unerasable insignia.
"They sold you-"

"To the only company still did that." He nodded. "They always
did what they wanted to do, up till the end. What we'd heard was
that Reynolds was getting too much heat from the foreign markets,
for one thing. For another, old man Duke wanted to get better
teachers and more students for his university but couldn't till the
company switched over to paid labor. They needed money to pay
paid labor so they sold us and that made everybody happy. CocaCola picked us up dirt cheap. Only place that was still buying by
then; most were already phasing it out-"

"This was in 1905," I repeated; perhaps I'd heard wrong. I
hadn't.

"That's right. I was fifteen. Reynolds had about eight thousand at
the place where I was. Coca-Cola sent up these trains from Atlanta.
We got loaded on, packed in shoulder to shoulder like we was in
goddamn cattle cars. Able to keep just what we could carry. My
train carried about nine hundred, went out at night, unloaded at
night once we got down there. They'd built a new plant just outside
of town. Damn white crackers with shotguns ever'where you
looked. They took us off the train six at a time to control us better.
First thing they did was bring out the brandin' iron. Then they took us to where we was going to he living. Cheap barracks across from
the factory. Dirt ground. Outhouses. Barbwire ran all around the
camp. We was ready to run that first night."

"Did you?"

He shook his head. "They shot you if you tried. See, I don't
think they thought they was going to have their hands so full with
us. Hell, ever' week there'd be trouble. They tried to keep us
working the bottling line sixteen hours a day. Fall behind, you'd be
whipped good." He laughed. "Ever'body fell behind. After a while
it must have sunk in their heads that they were going to have to kill
off their investment one by one so they stopped doing that, came
up with new ways to deal with troublemakers. I was a troublemaker. Organized a sit-down one day. Ever'hody in my part of the
line just stopped, sat down, wouldn't budge. Finally had to send in
the state militia to get us out."

"They punished, after?"

"Of course," he said, staring windowways. "After the initial steps
they sent Wanda and me down south. This was not long after
they'd hitched us-"

"A fixed wed, then," I said.

"Any other kind?" he asked, leaning back, bringing fresh cries
from his chair. "I didn't mind. Hell, I was a sixteen-year-old kid
and Wanda was a fine-lookin' girl back then. They wanted to get rid
of her, too. She grew up with 'em and so she was even more trouble
to 'em in sneakier ways. They married ever'body they had while
they had 'em if they could, see, cause in the future they knew
they'd be needing a lot more workers and wanted ones that were
homegrown. Just the same they didn't want a bunch of babies
growing up like wood-colts. Wanted children of theirs to be
brought up by a mother and father, in a Christian home." He
cleared his throat of its accumulations; lit up a new one. "Wanda
and me was troublemakers, though, and they sent us to Cuba."

"Cuba?" I said. "They had some sort of diplomatic arrangement-"

"Diplomatic?" Doc said. "With another state? Cuba's been the
fiftieth state ever since the war with Spain, almost. Still a territory
while we was down there, but-"

I didn't inquire as to the forty-ninth; it might have been the
Philippines, for all I knew, or even Nicaragua.

"I always heard Havana's something, but it was hell where we
were. Bugs, spiders, centipedes. Poison snakes. Poison frogs. Hurricanes. Kept the men all chained. I still got a big scar on my ankle.
We worked in the cane fields, bringing in the sugar. Woke us at
dawn, kept us working till nightfall."

"How long were you there?"

"Not long. Lots of people, they think old Teddy was the greatest
man on earth for outlawing slavery but I think he had reasons
didn't have anything to do with us. There was a stock market panic
that year, a bad one. What I've read since says that J. P. Morgan
helped save the country by keeping it funded. Now Europe'd been
giving the U. S. all kind of hell for years for still having slaves but I
think that's when they knew they could pull their trump card. Lot
of Morgans money was tied up in Europe and I have a hunch they
said over there, all right, you can get your money out in time if you
tell Teddy he's got to do something. Morgan also probably thought
that if the big southern companies suddenly had trouble holding
on to their workforce then it'd be easier for big northern companies
to swallow 'em up, which is just what they did later on. I got a
feeling it all got worked out behind the curtain. Bill and I've done
some talking about this sometime, and he feels the same way of
course. Anyhow, one day in 1907 old Teddy said he decided the
time had come to outlaw slavery and he did. One day we went to
bed dirt and woke up earth."

He sat silently for a time, sunlight's strips throwing shadow bars
across us. "How'd you return from Cuba?"

"Wasn't easy-" The phone rang in the other room, a loud,
sparkling alarm. "Excuse me." Stepping out, he answered before
the third ring. I looked more closely over the pennies in his blue
glass jar. While a few Indian heads showed within, upon the
predominant thousands was the grinning, spectacled face of Theodore Roosevelt. Though my feet were firmly floored, below me I
felt only air.

"That was Sydenham," he said, returning. "They confirmed
what I sent over."

"Why the pennies, Doc?" I asked.

"Christmas presents for the little ones," he said. "In the neighborhood. There's something else we got to talk about, Luther."

"What?"

"I'd guess that in your time," he said, facing me, his dark eyes
agleam, "they got cures for just about every disease."

"Why?"

"Can they cure DS?"

"What's DS?"

"You don't know?" His brow rippled like water into which a
stone had been dropped. From a nearby shelf he pulled a thick
volume hound, seemingly, in el car's varnished rattan. "Maybe
they got rid of it by your time." After a moment he'd found the
entry sought. "Read this."

Taking the book, I read from the opening:

Dovlatov's Syndrome, commonly known as DS, Brainbuster, or
Siberian Plague, was first described at Irkutsk, Russian Empire,
in February 1909.... By the close of the following decade it
had spread worldwide, its progress assisted by mass movements
during and after the Great War.... The virus is of influenzal
origin, though apparently of a mutated variety.... In America,
House Speaker Joe Cannon, baseball player Christy Mathewson, author William Dean Howells and film star Charlie Chaplin; in Great Britain, Queen Mother Alexandra; in France,
Premier Clemenceau, composer Claude Debussy, poet
Guillaume Apollinaire and painter Amedeo Modigliani all succumbed to DS's effects-