'No,
Danny, we're going back down Oak Street and see those good ol' boys and see if
we can't share a drink and shake hands and let bygones be bygones. Of course
we're leaving. Get your shit together. We're outta here in five minutes.'
More
panic…
I was
ready in four.
We
left together.
I
didn't ask any more questions.
We
followed the coast down through St. Augustine and Daytona Beach, and there we
stayed for a day or two while we healed up. I was sure at least two of Nathan's
ribs were snapped, but he said he wouldn't go to the hospital. If he went to
the hospital they would require a name, some I.D., an explanation of how he'd
gotten banged up so bad. We'd learned a lesson, that was all he said about it;
we had learned a lesson.
Though
the bruise across my back looked close to fatal I was not in a great deal of
pain. I'd held up, I had done something effective to deal with the situation
that night, and I felt good. I had not backed down. I had not run. I was not a
coward.
'Well
shit, Danny, you owed me for flooring Marty Hooper that time,' Nathan said.
We
laughed a little, not too much because Nathan's chest hurt bad and laughing
made it worse.
Daytona
Beach was quiet, we took a room in a motel on the edge of town and no-one asked
questions. We decided to stay there until Nathan was up to travelling again,
and then we would go east towards Ocala and Gainesville.
We
kept ourselves to ourselves, we spoke only to those we had to, and when we
needed tickets or provisions only one of us went. Even on the streets we walked
a few feet apart. This was something we neither discussed nor planned. It just
happened, a tacit understanding that this was the way it needed to be. There
were certain places where the black- white division was evident, startlingly
so, and we paid it no mind. We couldn't afford either the time or the attention
to concern ourselves with this. We had more important things going on.
The
police seemed to be everywhere, as if special programs had been implemented in
every town and suburb we entered to enlist all surrounding units in the search.
Never once did I consider the sheer number of teenagers and young men across
the nation who were doing just as we had done. Never once did I consider the
possibility that my imagination was working overtime, that I was merely
looking
for the police, for the State Troopers, and therefore seeing them more and
more. As has been so often said
It isn't paranoia if they really are out to
get you.
It seemed that on every street corner and junction, in every store
and parking lot, every 7-11 I entered, they were there, waiting, watching,
saying nothing, just
absorbing
my presence. I felt like John Dillinger,
like Babyface Nelson, and that after weeks of pursuit this would end with me
seventy foot up, screaming
Top of the world, Ma!
from some gas tower
along the freeway.
We
left Daytona Beach on September 14th. We'd been gone a little more than two
months. I had not called my ma, I couldn't face hearing her voice and lying to her.
I lied in a letter, said I'd headed up towards Winston-Salem, had considered
carrying on up into Virginia, but we'd see what happened. I told her Nathan was
with me, that we were doing just fine, and though I was sorry to have left in
such a hurry I'd felt there was opportunity and means to do something bigger
with my life. I'd told her I couldn't go on working in Karl Winterson's Radio
Store for the rest of my years. I knew she'd understand that. Her husband, my
father, had been a railroad man all his life, and everyone knew how he should
have done something with his passion for making things, his skill with wood,
his natural eye. He never did, never even mentioned it, but if you got close
enough you could see it in his face.
It
was only later that I realized the letter would have a mark on it showing its
point of origin.
I
didn't mention that to Nathan, didn't tell him that my letter, my inability to
face my mother, had thus erased all possibility of people believing either of
us had gone north.
No, I
figured telling Nathan that would do more harm than good.
Another
little thing for just me and God.
I
tried to speak to him of my concerns, my fears, the ever- present sense of
foreboding that haunted me like my own shadow. Sometimes, when I thought those
feelings were not there, I would turn and see them lingering beside me. It was
not escaping the Draft that gave me these emotions, it was the sense of
betrayal. I had never believed myself to be anything other than honest,
straight as a die, implacable almost in my attention to those things that were
right and just and equitable. Justifications and explanations aside, I believed
that there was a
sense
to what was being done in Vietnam, but a sense in
the principle, not the action. Perhaps it was nothing more than the result of
some long- ingrained propaganda, but I believed in freedom, freedom of speech
and action and belief, and the communist overthrow of territory and humanity
struck me with such a sense of inequity. I did not believe for a moment that
the communists would take the world, had not believed that even as the Bay of
Pigs unfolded so many years before. But I did believe in a human being's right
to be himself, to believe what he believed, to express his thoughts and
emotions and words in whichever way he wished. It was the betrayal of this
belief that hurt the most. And though I imagined that had I ever gone I would
never have survived, I still felt that even those that went unwillingly, terror
in their hearts, the blessings of their loved ones carried with them; even as
they'd lain in some filthy ditch, their lives bleeding out from holes filled to
bursting with fire and pain and hell; even as they'd grasped at some final
breath… even then, they'd known that they did what they were asked to do, what
they had been called upon to do, and there was some sense of justice and
Tightness in that and that alone.
I
believed then, and believe now, that there is some universal balance present in
all things.
Perhaps
I had cheated death, extended my life beyond its allotted time.
I
recalled a story my father had once told me. A Persian merchant, visiting a
soothsayer, had been told that Death would find him that day. The merchant,
terrified, asked where Death would find him, and the soothsayer said that such
information could not be revealed. The merchant, a man of great method and
predictability, knew that today was the day he always visited the market. He
rushed home, and speaking with his servant, told him he would not be going to
the market as was ordinarily the case, but he would head to Baghdad. He took
his fastest horse and fled towards the city, hoping he would find some place to
hide in the great capital. The servant, confused, distressed by his master's
behavior, himself went to the market as usual. There he saw Death, and Death
approached him. The servant, horrified and perplexed, asked Death why he was
approaching him. Surely it was not his day to die? Death smiled coldly, and
said that he was merely surprised to see the servant here without his master,
the merchant. The servant asked why, and Death - leaning close, his cool breath
against the servant's face - whispered that he had an appointment that very
afternoon with the merchant in Baghdad.
Death
was out there looking, and he came with the faces of policemen and State
Troopers, in the faces of old women watching us cross the street and pause
there at the junction, in the faces of innocent children who seemed curious
that a white man and a black man would walk so close together down here…
He
came looking with all these things, and no matter how fast I could run I
believed he would find me.
There
appear to be brief moments during our lives when, despite all circumstance, the
humanity of others shines through. It is as if the indomitability of the human
spirit - at once oppressed and assaulted - nevertheless rises, a phoenix from
the ashes, and we are reminded that people do care. They
really
do care.
There
was one such time with Nathan. In itself it was perhaps of little significance,
but it highlighted for me the fundamental difference between us. Later, many
years later, I would weigh the burden of guilt I carried, and a moment such as
this tipped the scales of justice so effortlessly towards Nathan Verney.
In
all things I had considered myself first. In leaving Greenleaf I had so easily
thought of what I wanted, what would become of
me.
Nathan would have
left Greenleaf alone. I would not. I would not have left alone for fear of
loneliness itself, but for fear of my own survival had someone else not been
there to assist and protect me. This was how we differed.
I
considered how events would affect me.
Nathan
Verney considered the effects on others.
Where
we were I cannot recall even now. There were so many places, so much traveling,
and after a while the towns and suburbs blurred seamlessly, one into the other.
I
remember a street however, nondescript, eminently forgettable. I recall the
frontage of a grain store, that unmistakable rusty smell that emanates from the
bales and bins within.
I
remember standing talking to Nathan of something inconsequential.
'You
wanna eat now or later?' he asked.
'Later's
fine,' I replied.
He
nodded, and then turned suddenly to the left as his attention was drawn to some
commotion at the end of the street.
A
child on a bicycle came into view, a young girl no more than eight or nine, and
she was pedalling like fury, like the devil was on her heels. Behind her,
snapping at the wheels of the bicycle, was a large and ugly dog, jaws
slavering, teeth snapping. A man ran behind the dog, calling its name,
hollering at it to
Stay! Stay!
The
girl was terrified, her face white and drawn, her every ounce of strength
pummeling at the pedals as if her very life depended on it.
Nathan
flew from the bench where we had been seated, flew like the wind, and before I
knew it he had raced between the girl and the dog and was standing there, his
fists raised, his shoulders hunched forward.
I was
reminded vividly of the moment when Nathan had faced Larry James and Marty
Hooper in Benny's Soda Shop a million years before.
With
the dog no more than ten feet from him Nathan released an almighty roar and
started pounding his chest.
The
dog almost fell over its own front legs as it came to a dead stop.
It
hunkered there in the street, at first confused, and then suddenly it was down
on its haunches, teeth bared once more, a guttural growl emanating from the
base of its wide and muscular throat.
'Come
on you motherfucker,' I heard Nathan hiss. 'Come on you ugly motherfucker… come
get me, come get a piece of me.'
Nathan
lunged forward then, suddenly, unexpectedly, and the dog, shocked beyond
belief, gave out some kind of desperate whimper. It backed up one step,
whimpered again, and then it turned and hightailed it down the street.
In
that instant I had a vision of Larry James and Marty Hooper turning and running
from Eve Chantry so many years before.
I was
speechless.
And
it was only in the silence that followed that I realized the girl had fallen
from her bike no more than fifteen feet from where I still sat, stone-still.
I came
to my feet, started towards her, but Nathan was there before me, kneeling
beside her, comforting her, brushing small chips of gravel from the graze on
her knee.
I
watched him without a word.
Words
had escaped some minutes before, and however hard I looked I could not find
them.
I
opened my mouth and sheer silence floated out like organdy.
Nathan
had acted before I'd had a chance to think of acting.
Again,
just for a moment, I felt invisible beside him.
By
mid-September we were on the west coast of Florida near Apalachee Bay. We
figured we'd work on the boats again, the season would run for a little while
longer and then we'd decide where to go next. For the first week we slept on
the beach. It was still warm, people hung out down there, folks with guitars,
folks smoking weed and drinking, folks living life the way they wanted to live
it. Little did we know but those years, the late 1960s, would be years people
would speak of in terms of revolution, a revolution of mind and spirit, a
revolution of sexual freedom and peace on earth. The people we met down there
seemed worldly, the same way Linny Goldbourne had seemed to me, and we listened
to the stories they told of San Francisco, Haight-Ashbury, of acid and Jimi
Hendrix and Janis Joplin.