I
agreed, but there was a condition.
'No
playing pool, right Danny, no playing pool… whatever you say.'
Linny
asked about it, Nathan told her: that the two times we'd played pool were the
two times we'd had ten shades of shit kicked out of us.
Linny
found this hysterical, either that or the weed she was smoking.
'Hurled
the lid of a trash can into the back of some guy's head,' Nathan told her.
'Danny came up out of the alleyway like a freakin' tornado. Had he not been
there, had he not done that, I think those motherfuckers would have kicked me
to death.'
Linny
looked at me. There was no smile, no expression of surprise, just this cool and
measured sense of being impressed. I felt for a second I had turned her
thoughts back, that now I was the one who would hold her interest, and then she
looked back at Nathan. And there it was again, that flow of emotional and
physical energy that passed between them. Almost tangible. She was thanking me,
I later felt. Thanking me perhaps for saving Nathan's life. Thanking me for
ensuring that he came home safely to Greenleaf so she could own him for a
while. Maybe my imagination. Jealousy is a powerfully narcotic drug. I was
addicted, for in each such moment I read everything there was to read, and when
there was nothing to read I made it up as I went along.
Later,
so much later, when they took her, when they finally closed down her life, I
would ask myself if she hadn't deserved it. Deserved everything she got.
Perhaps it was who she was, perhaps she couldn't help but be that way. I
watched her then, I thought of her later, and I asked myself if I could forgive
her for being that way. I could not. Perhaps
would
not. Wanted to
believe that she had engineered everything in some subtle Machiavellian fashion
to gain everything she wanted, whatever the cost. She paid for her sins, as I
did, and forgiveness was not something I felt was a natural right for anyone. I
had not been forgiven, and thus everyone else involved was as guilty as I.
Nathan
told his stories, and every other word he mentioned my name, what
Danny
had done, what
Danny
had said, almost as if he was forcing her to think
of me. Like he knew how I felt and was making an effort to balance things
backwards. He had taken her, he must have known that, but by speaking of me, by
telling her how resolute and courageous I had been, he was paying his dues.
Perhaps. Perhaps not.
And
later we did go. We went down to Savannah on the Georgia state line. It was two
days before Christmas. People were drunk wherever we went. No-one was paying
much of a mind to anything except what they themselves were involved in. That
was fine by me. I felt I passed through those bars like a ghost.
I drank
like a ghost too - a short here, a beer there - but Linny and Nathan drank like
they'd seen the sign
Drink Canada Dry,
and taken it as an instruction.
They'd start in Georgia and work their way north until they reached the St.
Lawrence Seaway and Montreal.
They
were loud, they sang together, and when we left some place called The Watering
Hole a little before 1 a.m. they appeared incapable of standing without one
another's assistance.
I
steered them like new-born heifers to the car, their legs giving way beneath
them, all elastic knees and rubber feet.
They
lay across one another on the back seat of Linny's car, side by side, their
faces touching, and in the cool light cast by the streetlamps they appeared to
be one entity, two- headed and multi-limbed.
I
drove us back. My head was clear. I smoked a couple of cigarettes, I watched
the world unfold through each window - the Christmas lights, the trees, the
fields that seemed to gather along the edges of the highway to guard my return.
Like they'd been waiting. Like they wanted to make sure I got home safely
before they slept.
I
felt insubstantial against all of this. I felt I could have been anyone, anyone
at all. Tonight I was the chauffeur, the help, nothing more than that, and when
we arrived back at my house I was almost tempted to leave them out there in the
car.
There
was a color to my thoughts that had not been present for many years. Perhaps
the last time I had really felt this way was a Summer Dance when Caroline
Lanafeuille reputedly lost her virginity to Larry James. It should have been
me. That was my thought then.
It should have been me.
Then it was Larry
James, Marty Hooper's sidekick, and now it was Nathan, Nathan Verney, my
brother, my blood, the man I had left Greenleaf for eighteen months earlier.
But I
was strong, and I cast such thoughts aside. I hadn't left Greenleaf for no
reason. I had left because I believed my own
burden
would arrive
imminently, but most of all because of the friendship between me and Nathan - I
would have expected him to come with me had I gone first, and thus felt I
should afford him the same. I convinced myself that I felt nothing for Linny
Goldbourne, and that night - sitting in her car smoking a cigarette and turning
recent events over in my mind for a few minutes before I hauled them out the
back and helped them to their beds - I forced myself to believe that I couldn't
care less what happened between them.
'But
you did care?'
I nodded.
I reached forward and ground the end of my cigarette into the ash tray.
'How
much?' Father John asked.
'How
much did I care?'
Father
John nodded.
'More
than I realized. I wanted to be part of everything that was going on. I didn't
want to feel on the outside, even on the edge. I wanted to be right in the
middle of everything.'
'And
what happened between Nathan and Linny was an exclusion?'
I
smiled. 'I don't know how they could have made me feel
more
excluded
than that.'
'When
did it happen?'
'The
day after.'
'The
day after you drove back from Savannah?'
'Right,'
I said. 'The day after I drove back from Savannah.'
'Tell
me what happened.'
I
arched my back. The muscles in my shoulders and neck were tense. There was that
unmistakable taste in my mouth from too many cigarettes.
'You
think there's any way to get a drink, a cup of coffee or something?'
'Sure,'
Father John said.
He
reached behind him and pushed the buzzer set just beneath the one-way window.
It
was less than a minute before the door was unlocked and a guard stepped in.
'Any
hope of some coffee?' Father John asked.
'You
can use the machine down the corridor by Incoming Administration,' the guard
said.
'Would
you wait here while I go down and get some?'
'Sure,
Mister Rousseau,' the guard said.
Father
John smiled, stood up. He took a step towards the guard and pointed at his own
collar. 'Father Rousseau,' he said. 'Father Rousseau.'
The
guard looked awkward for a second. 'I'm sorry, Father… I'm so used to Mister
this and Mister that -'
Father
John slapped him on the shoulder as he stepped out through the door. 'Should
attend your church a little more often perhaps,' he said. 'Now keep an eye on
him, son… I'll be back in five.'
And
he was, less than five even, and with him came two styrofoam cups of coffee,
and after the guard had left he produced a packet of Orio Cookies from his
jacket.
The
coffee was good, machine or otherwise, and out of four cookies Father John ate
only one. I ate three, barely tasted them, but hell they were good, as good as
anything I'd tasted in months.
'So
tell me what happened after you came back from Savannah,' Father John said.
I
smiled. These memories had so long been folded neatly in some drawer at the
back of my mind. Now, as I unfolded them, held them up, aired them to the
breeze of my words, I was so aware of their tone and smell, their colors and
sounds and feelings. It was amazing to me that I could close my eyes, close my
eyes and almost reach out and touch these things. They were
that
real.
I
wondered what would happen to these memories when I was dead.
'After
Savannah,' I said, and for a moment my voice sounded like someone else's. 'After
Savannah things went strange…'
'The
Invisible Empire,' Robert Schembri whispered across a plastic tray of boiled
chicken pieces and dry mashed potato. It was our third meeting in August of
1972, and I was filled to bursting with questions.
'That's
what they considered they possessed… an Invisible Empire.'
I
glanced over my shoulder. Someone was arguing on the other side of the mess
hall. Apparently someone-or-other was
gonna get themselves bitch-slapped if
they didn't mind their fucking mouth.
Schembri
was oblivious to all distractions.
'After
the Civil War six Confederate officers got together in Pulaski, Tennessee,
December 24th 1865 it was, and they formed this society. The name was based on
the Greek word
kuklos
which meant circle. They were opposed to the
Republican representatives of the Reconstruction governments that came into
power in 1867. They regarded the Reconstruction governments as hostile and
oppressive, and they believed in the innate inferiority of the blacks. They saw
their own former slaves rising to positions of civil equality and political
influence and this galled them. They committed themselves to destroying the
Reconstruction from the Carolinas to Arkansas. They all dressed in white cloaks
and hoods, terrorized people, doing everything they could to prevent
undesirables from voting and holding office. They burned crosses near the homes
of those they wanted to scare up. They started flogging people, mutilating
them, killing them sometimes; anything that would produce the desired degree of
fear to prevent a continuation of the black-white integration and equalization
that was building momentum.
'In
Nashville in 1867 they adopted a declaration which upheld their belief in the
Constitution, and their determination to "protect the weak, the innocent
and defenseless, to relieve the injured and oppressed, and to succor the
suffering". They called themselves the Invisible Empire and elected a
senior official called the Grand Wizard of the Empire. He carried almost
autocratic power and back of him were ten lieutenants called the Genii. They
also elected the Grand Dragon of the Realm who was assisted by eight Hydras,
the Grand Titan of the Dominion who had six Furies, and the Grand Cyclops of
the Den who had two Nighthawks.'
Schembri
smiled. 'Fuckin' nuts, eh?'
I
smiled and nodded, but once again felt that I could have been anyone, could
have been anywhere. Schembri was going to talk any which way as long as he
considered someone was listening.
'Anyways,
from 1868 to 1870, as the Federal occupation troops were being withdrawn from
the Southern states and Democratic administrations were being established, the
Klan was infiltrated by elements which the Klan themselves considered
distasteful and dangerous. The local organizations, the klaverns, became so out
of control that the Grand Wizard, Confederate General Nathan Forrest,
officially disbanded the Klan in 1869. The klaverns operated independently
then, and in 1871 Congress passed the Force Bill to implement the Fourteenth
Amendment to the U.S. Constitution which guaranteed rights to all citizens.
President Grant made a request to all illegal organizations to disarm and
disband, and hundreds of Klansmen were arrested.
'In
1915 a new organization appeared in Georgia. A preacher and soldier, Colonel
William Simmons, established the Invisible Empire, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
Membership requirements were simple. The new Klan was open to native-born,
white Protestant males, sixteen years old and above. Roman Catholics and Jews
were excluded, and these people joined the ranks of the blacks and themselves
became targets of defamation and attack. They sort of existed somewhere in the
background until about 1920, and after World War One, the whole financial and
economic slide that occurred in the '20s, the Klan expanded rapidly and
appeared strong in Oregon, Kansas, Texas, and down through the South, across
Georgia, into Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania… all over the country. They
opposed the Roman Catholic Church heavily, said that the Catholics actively threatened
the American way of life. They attacked liberals, trade unions, any
non-nationals; even striking workers were labeled subversives and targeted for
terrorism and hate campaigns.'