Beyond This Time: A Time-Travel Suspense Novel (23 page)

Taxi hurried down the sidewalk. “You all right?”

“It’s a heck of a lot safer in the car than it is inside,” Mitch grumbled. He’d never met anyone as irritating or judgmental as Dreama. He found it hard to equate the furious whirlwind he’d just sparred with, and the woman he saw every day at the station. He got along fine with the
other
Dreama. He liked her. Liked her a lot.

And she liked him.

“No doubt about it, Dreama’s got a sharp tongue at times.” Taxi shoved his skinny brimmed pork pie hat to the back of his head and scratched his forehead. “Been cut up myself on occasion. Most usually she don’t mean half what she says.”

“Half is more than adequate for me.”

“Aww, don’t pay her no mind, Mitch.”

“It’s not in my best interest to keep making enemies, I need all the friends and help I can get. And that includes her.”

“Well, now I wouldn’t be counting on her help just yet. She got strong opinions when it comes to white folks.”

“I’d take another shot at changing her mind about me, except I’m on a tight schedule. We need to get back home because Kat’s father had a heart attack yesterday. They’re not sure he’ll pull through.”

“So you been looking so hard for that girl cause her daddy’s sick?”

“Yep. She needs to be with him, not on some crusade.” And she’d be at the hospital, right now if I’d stuck to my guns, he thought. I should have done something two days ago instead of spouting theories and what-ifs. Now that those predictions had become reality, he felt more like crying than throwing an ‘I told you so’ party.

“I’ll do my best to smooth things out,” Taxi was saying. “Oh, if you reach in my glove box I got somethin’ belonging to you.”

Mitch popped the catch and saw Kat’s boot pin. He picked it up and squeezed it. “Guess you never got a chance to return it to her.”

“She’ll like it better if it comes back to her through you. Now come on inside, Lettie Ruth got breakfast ready.”

Mitch sat up so fast his head hit the roof of the car. “Who?”

“Lettie Ruth Rayson works here at the clinic with Dr. Tim and she fixed us breakfast.”

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” Mitch whispered. As if things weren’t already messed up enough, somehow Kat had ended up in the same house with her mysterious aunt.

“You be acting mighty peculiar, Mitch. Something wrong?”

He opened the door and climbed out of the car. “Taxi, so many things are wrong I can’t begin to list them all.”

“Well then, I say we get us some breakfast and do a little talking ‘bout that list of yours.”

* * *

The four people seated around the table ate in silence. Mitch kept his eyes on his plate and fervently wished someone would say something. As the minutes crawled by, other than the tinny clink of a fork against a plate or a slurp when one of them took a sip of coffee, the room might well be inhabited by ghosts.

“This is foolishness,” Lettie Ruth said, breaking the sound barrier. “It’s high time to speak our minds.”

Mitch cleared his throat and three pair of dark eyes jumped to his face. “Let me start by thanking Miss Simms and Taxi for bringing Kat to the clinic. And you, Miss Rayson, for taking such good care of her.” Lettie inclined her head, acknowledging his gratitude. “If you don’t mind, would you please tell me what happened to her?” he asked.

“Why you want to know?” Dreama asked, her tone sharp.

“Because I’m worried, Miss Simms. I’ve heard talk and I want to sort the truth from the fiction.”

Lettie Ruth studied his face, after a few seconds she appeared to have reached a decision. “She was beat and raped, Mr. Mitch,” she said quietly.

“White men treated her no better than an animal, then tossed her aside,” Dreama said. Undisguised anger radiated from her words.

Mitch’s chin dropped to his chest and he closed his eyes. Everything Floyd and his pals had bragged about was the gospel truth. Once again guilt reared up and pawed the air. If he’d only reacted to her pronouncement about returning to Park Street, rather than passively sitting on his butt she wouldn’t have ended up in this time. He may have failed her once, but not a second time. He’d do everything in his power to right this wrong.

“Will she be all right?” he asked without looking up.

“In time she will get better,” Lettie Ruth answered. “But she won’t ever be all right again, Mr. Mitch. A woman can’t endure this much violence and not come out changed.”

He raised his head and looked at the three people at the table. “Is there some way to make it easier for her? I’ll do whatever you tell me.”

“I don’t think she wants your help, Mr. Mitch,” Lettie Ruth said.

“Because I’m a man?”

“Because you’re a
white
man,” Dreama Simms declared.

“That’s a load of bull shit,” he said heatedly. He took a deep breath and slowly released it. He couldn’t let her get under his skin. His number one priority was to find Kat and take her home before it was too late. He didn’t know how Pop Rayson was doing, but in the worst scenario he couldn’t hold on much longer.

“It’s the way things is around here,” Dreama said. “Your kind ain’t all that welcome. And you wait and see, Kat will be tellin’ the same once you two hook up.”

He chewed the angry words filling his mouth into bits and pieces before they ricocheted all over the kitchen. Focus, he told himself. When it didn’t work, Mitch pushed away from the table and left the kitchen.

As he stared out the waiting room window Dreama’s comments replayed in his head.
Because you’re a white man
. Would her cruel words prove prophetic? Would Kat refuse his help based on his color?

“Mitch?” Taxi stood in the doorway. “I’m sorry Dreama answered you so mean, but it’s probably the truth. Your friend don’t want nothing to do with white folks right now.”

“I’m not white folks,” Mitch snapped. “We’ve spent twelve hours a day, five days a week together for the past five years. That ought to count for something. But now I’m beginning to wonder if I should even try.”

“Of course you should. Just gotta give her some space for a little while. Your Kat’s trapped with one foot half in and one foot half out of hell right now. Soon enough she’ll be wanting a good friend to help show the way out.”

“It will take a better man than I am to show her the way.”

“Women got lots of peculiarities, Mitch, and one is being able to see the good and see bad in a man. It’s like they can x-ray right through your skin, into your heart. I reckon Kat seen the good in you. And between us men,” Taxi glanced at the kitchen door then lowered his voice. “I bet it don’t matter to her if you be colored or white.”

More than anything Mitch wanted to believe color didn’t matter. But could she emerge from this unscathed? Taxi could talk from sun up to sun down about how Mitch differed from Floyd, but at the end of the day he still had ginger-red hair, blue eyes, and freckles. He couldn’t get much whiter than that.

If their situations were reversed, and he’d been the one attacked, his perceptions and attitudes toward blacks would probably be forever altered. Right or wrong, that’s how it worked. Humans hauled around cart loads of prejudicial bull shit for lesser reasons.

Segregation was a prime example. It provided a method for uneducated white Southerners like his father to cope with the emerging Black-Awareness. Those from the east Hollow had worked hard to improve themselves and their community and welcomed the changes. In the opposite corner, men like Billy Lee swaggered and threw threats around in a desperate attempt to hold on to their self perceived superiority.

But they were scared and maybe a little jealous of any changes in their narrow strip of the world. Scared because they’d never dared to dream of a better life. Those boys didn’t want anything except what they already had—a six pack of beer on Saturday night, welfare checks each month, and a woman to bed or beat when the mood struck.

The crux of the matter was respect. The bigots didn’t respect themselves, and the only way they could feel worth anything was to shove their frustration down a black throat. Forcing strong men like Taxi to bow and scrape proved to all the Billy Lees and Floyds that they were still better than the dumb ass nigger with a high school education and a full-time job.

White Only. Colored Only. How much longer before it dawned on people that white was a color too? Mitch brushed the hair off his forehead, embarrassed by his mental speech making. Judas Priest, he’d been preaching to an audience of one. He thought he kept his mouth shut, but from the strange look on Taxi’s face, he wondered how much he’d spoken out loud.

=SEVENTEEN=

“
If you ask me
, this relationship between her and
that
gentleman
shines a whole new light on everything,” Dreama said, as she vigorously wiped down the kitchen counter.

“What are you hinting around, Dreama Simms?” Lettie Ruth asked.

“Maybe Kat didn’t get dragged out to no field. Could be she wanted to be with those boys.”

Lettie Ruth shook her head. “You ought to be shamed. You and Taxi found her, and you know she didn’t look like she’d gone out there to have fun.”

“It’s true I found her, but I also got ears. That white man seems mighty fond of a Negro woman. Nothing good
ever
comes from that.”

“Why do you act this way, Dreama?”

Dreama pulled down the high collar on her green dress. The scars across her throat looked shiny in the morning light. “You know how I got these … and why. So don’t be lecturing me on
good
white folks.” She turned away and looked out the window, her eyes glistening with angry tears. Last year a group of
good
white folks had tied a rope around her neck, then hauled her up a tree because her manager was their color. Not hers
…

…
She’d warned Harvey that coming down South would be a mistake and they ought to stay in Detroit. Record the new album in a studio. But he pushed so hard for the concert tour she finally gave in.

Their long bus was filled from front to back with musicians and equipment. The boys partied all the way from Detroit, while Dreama sat in the back and chewed her fingernails. None of them understood the rules, but once they crossed the Tennessee state line they had learned. Slashed tires, rocks thrown through the windows. The Klan disrupted almost every concert.

When Harvey asked her why this happened, she pointed to her band. Her white band. “This sort of thing don’t work down here,” she said. “Negro and white live in different worlds.”

Harvey dismissed her explanation, pooh-poohing her concerns as total nonsense.

And the bus rolled into the Heart of Dixie.

Dreama Simms ended her concert tour just outside Birmingham, hanging from a tree. Her larynx crushed. Her singing career over.

“What they did to you was wrong,” Lettie Ruth said. “But’s that’s only a tiny handful of folks out of the whole big world. You can’t mistrust all whites on account of them.”

Dreama wiped her eyes with the dish towel. “Name three of those pale ghost people you trust.”

“I trust Timothy.”

“And?”

Lettie Ruth shook her head. “And you got me so worked up I can’t think straight.”