That
was the only way I could describe it.
As if
things now had some meaning, and thus everything else could be aligned and
given its rightful importance.
For
now, Linny Goldbourne was the most important thing in my life.
Throughout
May of 1968 I cannot recall a day I did not see Linny.
Looking
back at it now I can so clearly see how I pushed Nathan aside. Hindsight, our
cruellest and most astute adviser, so easily illuminates our errors of
judgement, and yet in the middle of life one seizes upon things that seem to
mean so much. Looking back, they could never have meant as much as those things
that came before or after. If they had, well, if they had they would still be
present.
Had I
known that my involvement with Linny Goldbourne would last less than a month, and
had I known how and why it would so abruptly end, I would have kept my
distance, but - as ever, the moth to a flame - I found her whirlwind of passion
and enthusiasm so addictive I could not withdraw.
Throughout
that month I drank tequila and Crown Royal, red wine and beer; I smoked
Colombian hashish and opiated marijuana; I read books by William Burroughs and
Jack Kerouac, I listened to 'Subterranean Homesick Blues' a thousand times and
believed that all the answers of life were somewhere contained within the
spaces between the words… and all for Linny Goldbourne, ex-Congressman's
daughter, my Svengali, my savior, my nemesis.
I did
love her, I know I did, and in return she loved me. Linny enclosed everything
within her own self-created world, and for that time I was the center of her
focus, the fulcrum. I saw this in the way she smiled when she saw me, the way
she reached and held my hand as we walked, and there was something so strong in
the way she felt that my memory of Caroline faded. Faded gently, but faded
nonetheless. I had loved Caroline, yes, but as a teenager with a teenager's
heart and mind and soul. When I loved Linny I had become a man. Or so I thought
then. Different, not necessarily better, but different. My feelings for
Caroline were now tinged with a sense of betrayal, as if she had somehow cast
me aside for something that should not have meant so much. She was my first.
That meant something special, and yet I had recalled her leaving with a sense
of bitterness and pain. Those emotions - my passion alongside my loss - had
felt like a bruise that would always ache and never heal. Linny somehow healed
it, at least from within, so although the bruise still colored my skin it did
not gnaw at me as it had once done.
Linny
swept me up inside everything that she was, and she became a part of me that I
would, and could, never lose.
Had I
never lost Caroline, perhaps what now happened would not have affected me so.
But I
had
lost her, and that earlier sense of betrayal grew all the more
relevant and pressing and real. That was how it felt, and time would not change
that… for in the years to come I would begin to see them both in the same
light, as if each - though necessarily and remarkably different - had been born
to punish me in the same way. It would only be later, much later, that I
understood the import of what might have taken place within Linny's family, and
thus gained some sense of closure on why she did what she did, but in that
moment she had become everything, and then suddenly nothing.
The
last time I saw Linny Goldbourne was the day Bobby Kennedy was killed in Los
Angeles.
Kennedy
had just won the California primary and was speaking at the Ambassador Hotel.
Someone
called Sirhan Sirhan, who later said he couldn't even remember shooting the
presidential candidate, walked towards him in the crowd and killed him.
Shot
him five times.
How
do you shoot someone five times and not remember?
They
did him, just like
they
did his brother.
And
who were
they
? Same folks who bet a dollar we could win in Vietnam.
I was
with Linny when we heard. I had just closed the Radio Store for the afternoon,
and we were planning to drive down to Orangeburg and see one of her
girlfriends.
Linny
started the car, the radio was already on, and we heard.
She
stopped the car. She looked at me with an expression I had never seen before,
would never see again.
She
looked at me and there was nothing.
She
was hollow.
She
shook her head, looked down, and when she looked up her eyes were filled with
tears.
'I
have to go home,' she said quietly. 'I have to go home now, Danny. You
understand, don't you?'
I
looked back at her with nothing to say.
She leaned
across me and lifted the door lever.
The
door swung open.
'I
love you, Danny,' she said, but she did not look at me as she said it. 'I love
you… but I have to go now.'
She
started the car. She sat there looking right ahead. She was waiting for me to
get out.
I
wanted to say something, anything, but when I opened my mouth I felt hollow
also.
Never
so hollow.
I
edged sideways. My foot was on the sidewalk. I levered myself up and stood
there for a moment, the car door open, Linny sitting stock-still, looking right
ahead through the windscreen at the road, and then I closed the door.
She
revved the engine, eased the handbrake, depressed the accelerator, and she was
gone.
She
drove more slowly than was usual, and even as I watched her go I knew she would
turn back, raise her hand perhaps, anything to indicate that she had changed
her mind, her plans,
our
plans. Even though Bobby Kennedy was dead, it
still meant something that I was left there on the sidewalk watching Linny disappear.
But
she did not look back.
She
did not raise her hand.
I
felt the same as I had at that moment when she'd walked out of the sea towards
me at Port Royal Sound.
Invisible.
I
stayed there for some minutes.
I saw
Caroline's face for one fleeting moment, the way her head tilted, the way her
hair tumbled across her face. I felt nineteen again. I felt ashamed and
confused and naive.
My
heart was beating slowly, I remember that, but what else may have occurred in
my mind is no longer there.
And
then I turned and walked towards Lake Marion to find Nathan Verney.
Somehow,
for some unknown reason, something had changed.
I did
not suspect for one moment that I would not see her again.
The
connection,
for now, was gone.
We
never got drunk again. We did not smoke weed or listen to Dylan or read
sections from Albert Camus or
Tortilla Flats.
We did not drive out to
Myrtle Beach in the Buick Skylark and watch the sunset naked.
And had
there been more time I perhaps would have stayed to learn what had happened.
Had events not spiralled so quickly out of control, beyond anything I could
have imagined, I perhaps would have allowed myself time to grieve, to ask
myself why, to beg some understanding of Linny's motives.
But
time had run out - so quick, so sudden, and yet in some way so
expected.
To live, to love, to lose: these things are just human, and perhaps say
something of the way the world is. To do them twice says something about you.
June
8th 1968 was a Saturday.
Had
it been a weekday I would have been at Karl Winterson's Radio Store when Nathan
Verney came down.
But I
was asleep, and when Nathan came he carried a burden the like of which would
crush a man.
The
burden weighed three grams. It was a pale manila color, and within it a single
sheet of white paper with an official seal at the top and a printed signature
at the bottom. It weighed more than heat tabs and Kool Aid and C-Rations and
steel helmets and liners and camouflage covers, more than compress bandages and
steel brushes and gun oil and fragmentation grenades, more than the weight of
all our mothers' broken hearts, our fathers' vanished hopes…
It
came in the disguise of a letter, and upon the letter was printed Nathan
Verney's name.
It
called upon his duty and his honor. It called upon his national allegiance. It
called upon his sense of rightness and equity. It called upon his belief in the
Constitution and the American way of life.
It
called upon
him.
More
than anything, the burden called upon his fear.
And
Nathan came prepared. He carried a shoulder-sack and a holdall. He carried a
polythene bag within which he'd stowed clean socks and a bar of soap, a
toothbrush, a shaving razor and a kitchen knife. In his coat pockets he carried
a packet of Kools, a Zippo lighter, a comb, loose change and a small roll of
one and five-dollar bills which couldn't have amounted to more than thirty or
forty bucks all told. In his heart he carried guilt and fear and an
indescribable sense of loss and disassociation.
And
in his hand he carried the burden.
My ma
was out fetching provisions.
The
sound of his feet on the path below woke me, and I leaned from the window to
see who was there.
As I
looked out he looked up, and with that one glance, that one image of his
upturned face, I read everything that could be said.
My
body became cold, and yet I twitched as if with a fever.
My
palms sweated so much I couldn't tighten my belt, and as I went downstairs I
almost tripped and fell.
As I
reached the front door Nathan was walking up the front steps towards the
screen. He paused there, and in that second he glanced back over his shoulder
towards the road, towards Lake Marion beyond, and in that glance I recognized
his deep sense of longing, his heartache.
In
that glance was perhaps the belief that he would never see this place again.
'You
okay?' I asked. A stupid and thoughtless question.
Nathan
didn't reply, couldn't reply. What was there that anyone could have said?
He
passed by me and walked down the hall to the kitchen. He hesitated in the
doorway, and then he crossed the room and sat down. He sat where he always sat,
back to the window, his hands in his lap, his eyes downcast to the floor.
We
were six years old when we met, sixteen years before, and Nathan had perhaps
sat right there two or three times a week in every week since, but never, never
in all those thousands of times, had he looked like this.
He
placed the burden on the table.
I
believed the table would buckle with the weight.
'My
folks don't know,' he started. 'My folks believe I am going north to find work.
I have been talking about it for six months. I knew the time would come and I
wanted to be ready.'
I sat
down opposite Nathan. Even then I could picture my ma turning from the stove
with fresh corn and potatoes, Nathan's round cherubic face grinning up at her
as she spooned more food onto his plate than he could possibly eat.
I saw
us sitting there playing cards, the sun going down through the window behind
him and, as it touched the horizon, the last brief burst of orange that would
throw a halo of gold through his short wiry hair.
I saw
Nathan sitting there nursing a bleeding elbow, tears in his eyes, the
temptation to touch it growing ever stronger as he looked.
I saw
myself laughing as we tried to chase a bird out through the back door and into
the yard.
I saw
all these things.
And
then I looked at Nathan once more.
'And
you?' he asked.