By Roger Owens
Lester knew they couldn’t stay in any of the white hotels or cabins, but the bad part was, they couldn’t stay at any of the black places either. He couldn’t believe what was happening to him. He was a white man, he could tell any nigger what to do, but if he stayed in a black establishment he knew damn well they would both wake up dead. And there wasn’t nothing he could do about it. He couldn’t call the sheriff, he’d be put in jail his ownself for causing a ruckus, and if there wasn’t a charge on the books for living in sin with a black woman, they would just make one up. Prob’ly get hisself hung before it was over. They had come across south Florida on Alligator Alley, and they had sure seen some. Fat black monsters that lay across the miserable excuse for a road and sometimes wouldn’t move for all the arm-waving and horn-blowing a man could do. God, he hated Florida.
They were now, as far as he could tell, somewhere south of Palm Beach on Federal Highway One. The roadway was slabs of coquina rock cemented together, and the joints between the slabs sounded like a train. Bump-bump, bump-bump, bump-bump. It made him want to scream. He found a dirt track down towards the Atlantic shore. As he drove carefully through the mangroves, he considered how they couldn’t even afford to get caught “car-camping,” as so many folks had taken to since the Depression. White men would kill him and rape her; black men would kill him and rape her. And no one would give a damn. He felt like a rat in a trap, and he thought of the black men he had helped to “chase down and beat up.” It was a joke in Birdswood. Nigger equals chase down, beat up. How had those men felt? Those boys, in some cases. Punched, kicked, and spit on until they bled and cried. He didn’t think he had ever participated in the killing of a black man, but God help him, he could not say for sure. Was it any wonder they hated us? He shook his head. We sure as hell gave them cause.
He found a spot where he thought they might be safe, and pulled the car down by the water where the wind would blow some of the mosquitos away. Only there wasn’t much wind at all, and he knew they would have a hot night. When he killed the engine she gave him that look, the one that had stabbed him in the heart the first night he met her, and he knew that tonight he wouldn’t mind the heat.
He awoke with dreams of love on his lips. He had been talking, telling her how much he adored her, his words so romantic and refined even he was surprised. Poetry spilled from him like stars on a midnight beach at Charleston. Porcelain lay back against the door, looking like a million, but her eyes were wide in fear. He realized with a shock what had awakened him. There were men outside the car.
He peered between the steering wheel and the dashboard, trying to make out who it was. White men. There was a boat pulled up at the end of the dirt where the road ended in the water. It was plain as day in the light of a half-full moon. Great. He had managed to block their boat ramp. He thought about backing up but now he saw lights from a ways behind them. Shit. Must be their ride, coming to pick them up. He and Porcelain couldn’t escape. They were in it now. He would have to bluff them somehow, talk their way out of it. “Honey, don’t listen to nothin’ I have to say out there. I love you, but I might need to say some bad things.” She just nodded, her face so twisted in terror it made his heart want to break. He got out of the car.
“Howdy,” he said to the first man, a heavy fisherman in overhauls and clammer boots whose head came only to Lester’s shoulder. His undershirt was more like a rag than a garment. “We’ll get right on out of your way, if you’ll tell your friends to let us by.” The man’s round face, dumber than a cow, twisted in puzzlement. He spat what must have been a wad of chaw tabacca on the sand and seemed about to say something. One of his compadres spoke first.
“Well, what do we have here,” said a young voice from the other side of the car, and Lester’s heart fell to his knees. He knew a snake by its rattle, and he knew exactly what kind of reptile he was dealing with now. He had been one just like that. It even sounded like him. He couldn’t play dumb with this boy. He would have to tough him out, or they would surely die. And oh, it would go bad on Porcelain, very bad indeed. He shook in fear for a second then clenched his teeth and called upon all the hatred and revulsion of a lifetime spent despising folks, and marched around the back of the car. What he saw was pretty much what he had expected, a young tough in a white undershirt. He was shining one of those bent green flashlights everyone was getting from Army Navy in the side window. Its bleak yellow light revealed Porcelain, hugging her shoulders and turning her face away.
“What the hell do ya think you’re doing? Get away from my girl!” Lester roared at him. For just a heartbeat he thought he might have won right there. The boy backed up a bit, like a kid caught doing something nasty. But he found his smart mouth and turned it right back. He laughed and turned to his buddies.
“That there’s a nigger girl! She’s yeller as yesterdy’s cornbread! Hey boys, we got us a nigger lover!” Lester knew there was only one thing to do. He belted the little son of a bitch as hard as he could. He hated to admit it, but it did his soul a world of good to feel that punk’s mouth and nose squash under his big knobby knuckles, feel the teeth coming loose, the blood spattering out like you was stepping on a fat worm. He’d felt it before beating black men, and now just like that he was on the other side. He wondered what in the hell he’d ever thought he had in common with a sorry piece of shit like this.
The third man fell to crying. He wore dungarees and a plaid shirt and was clearly drunk as an Indian. “Adrian! Adrian? What you done, mister? That’s my sister’s boy, wha’d you do to ’im?” He came at Lester but when Lester stepped aside he staggered past him to the boy laid out cold on the sand. Next thing Lester knew he was faced with old Overhauls, an engine-block of a man who now appeared seriously pissed off. He stepped up to Lester and shoved his face in close.
“What the fuck’d you hit Adrian for, you sumbitch?” Lester knew he had to make his best play right now. He screwed his own face up tight and glared right back.
“He called my girl a nigger. Where I come from them there’s fightin’ words, or are you Florida boys just pussies, let any piece of shit talk down on your women? Ain’t my fault he got a crappy little flashlight makes ever thing look yeller.” He pulled his wallet from his back pocket. He hoped with all his heart, prayed to Jesus in fact, that Porcelain couldn’t hear him just now. Sweat poured down his face.
“This here,” he handed a card to Overhauls, “is my membership card in the South Carolina KKK, and I don’t cotton to no niggers. So when that little fucker wakes up you can tell him he done insulted a White Christian Knight of the Ku Klux Klan and got what he deserved, and he can go fuck himself.” Overhauls didn’t look at the card. He dropped it on the sand. Lester’s blood went cold. Behind him Plaid Shirt spoke.
“Looks like a nigger to me.” Lester had just started to turn when Overhaul’s fist slammed into his gut like a drive shaft. Plaid Shirt came from behind him and the two of them began working Lester over. He was throwing punches, he was hurting them, but he knew they would get him down and kick him to death. The car that had blocked his path now pulled up a little ways away with the lights on, and in the glare of the headlamps he caught a motion in the edge of his eye as an oar smacked him in the side of the head. He went down on his hands and knees and had time to think that you really did see stars when you took a lick to the skull like that, and then a second shot bounced his head off the sand. Adrian was back in the fight and Lester figured two or three more hits with the oar like that and he would be dead. This sick little pile of dog shit would beat his head to jelly and be the first to rape Porcelain, and he wouldn’t quit until she was dead too. Lester tried to roll away, but the two older men were kicking him from either side and his ribs felt like they were cracking. He heard a car door slam and a voice shout out.
“Hold up! Stop!” Lester fell on his side and saw the heavy oar raised up in Adrian’s hands, harbinger of an overhead stroke that would surely spill his brains. “I said stop, God dammit!” Lester held his hands over his face in a futile attempt at defense, and then a gunshot cracked across the night. He saw Adrian’s face in the flare of the gun, blood pouring from his broken nose, turning from murderous triumph to deadly surprise. He fell, coughing blood, at Lester’s feet. Plaid Shirt and Overhauls jerked in amazement, then the gunman opened fire on them. They tore for the boat and Lester was gratified to see a bullet dust the rear of the ragged blue overhauls. Hot damn! Right in that big fat ass! He hoped it hurt, and by the way that bastard was yelling and clutching his butt he figured it did. Three men and a woman gathered around him, looking down, or was it two men and two women? The little one was awful ugly if that was a broad, Lester thought, then he vomited on the sand and passed out.
Well, hell’s bells, I never saw anything like Blackie that night, shooting that fellow dead and all, and ready to kill them others too. He was like that, pulling a gun out from nowhere. Blackie, I mean – hell, I never even knew he carried a gun. We had come across to the east coast by the Alligator Alley, right through the Everglades, which was the only way to do it back then. The road really wasn’t so bad, tarmac and coquina, but from time to time the alligators surely did delay us. That and the herds of deer, and turkeys by the hundreds feeding alongside the highway like yard hens. That road is straight and long and flat, and most of the time you are rolling between vertical stands of cypress trees, like driving through a narrow gorge fifty feet deep, with the tops of the trees looming overhead and water on either side. Either that or grass as high as a man as far as you can see on both sides.
Anyway, Blackie shot that fisherman, because he was sure as hell about to kill this other character they all had down on the ground. Blackie told him to stop, but he wouldn’t listen and was about to brain this guy, without a doubt. Then the others – there was two of them, and sorry looking sacks they were – took to running, and Blackie just let them have it. He was kicking up sand and shells around their pounding bare feet with a big silver pistol, looking like he knew just how to use it too, and one of them yelped and grabbed his rear end. I’d have been glad at the time to see them dead, but I was younger and meaner then. I wouldn’t wish death on anybody now if I could help it. I don’t think Blackie meant to kill them, but I could tell he didn’t care if he did, either. Hell he told them to stop.
Lottie Jane thought for sure Blackie would shake off killing that poor kid like he did everything else, but when he walked slowly to the body he didn’t look the same. She felt sorry he was dead, but he would have killed the man on the ground if Blackie had hesitated for even a second. Her lover stared at the gun hanging from his own white-knuckled fist like it was a rattlesnake. For the first time Lottie saw him hesitate, clearly wondering if he had done the right thing. He’d never lacked confidence before. It was like he usually didn’t care about anything or anybody but himself. She was surprised to find herself thinking about him this way, thinking about anyone this way. She wanted him to be a good man, and she was sure he was. She also did not want him to despair over doing what he had to do, but she also saw how bad it would be if he really didn’t care about killing someone. She wasn’t sure she would want to live with a man who could do that and think nothing of it, and if there was one thing she had ever wanted in her whole life, it was to live to the end of her natural days with Blackie Wainwright.
Jackson Lee and Joe Hook were bending over the fellow on the sandy road. The hot breeze off the water didn’t cool her sweaty face very much but helped blow away the clouds of mosquitos and what she had learned were called sand flies or “no see-ums,” tiny specks of evil which, while damn near invisible, bit like the devil and raised little round dots that itched like crazy. She knew Blackie needed help. The man on the ground had help from Jackson and Joe and would live or die on his own. It was up to her to make something happen.
“Winnie,” she said, and put her hand on Blackie’s arm. He turned to her, his eyes wide, like he didn’t know if he should cry or shout at her. She had waited to use his childhood name, revealed by Joe Hook in an intimate moment, and she thought now was the right time. “Winnie. You had no choice. He was gonna kill that man. Now put that gun away. We have to get rid of this carcass and get the hell out of here.” Blackie started to shake a little, and for just a heartbeat she thought he would put his head on her shoulder. His face was so sad and lost-child looking, and she was sure a good cry would help him no end. Fix him up good as new. He didn’t, though, and she was sure her own heart would have broken a little less, if he had.
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[Editor’s Note: The novella of which this installment is a part can be ordered from Amazon.]
| Copyright © 2017 by Roger Owens |
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