The fear makers, p.5
The Fear Makers, page 5
All the way, the sidewalk was jammed. These people seemed to be strangers here. They were in for the evening or a week or a lifetime. They’d come in from Ashland, Oregon, and Des Moines, Iowa, and Fall River, Massachusetts, and other cities and other towns and I assume they all understood they were doing the nation a favor to be here.
Please don’t misunderstand. Probably they were. But they didn’t seem to be people going home, to some shelter that meant a home to them. There wasn’t any relief in their faces, the kind of relief and pleasure and sort of light one sees in the faces of crowds leaving work to go home no matter whether it is Ashland, Oregon, or Peoria, Illinois. What I’m saying is, all the distance to the Mayflower, I didn’t see one person, not even a girl, who was smiling, who was feeling pleased about something and allowing it to show. I was right in there with them. I belonged. I wasn’t feeling pleased about anything, either.
These people here, they’d dropped in to Washington to help fight a war or get one of those essential jobs and ended up fighting a special war, the war with the guy at the next desk who was getting a higher civil service rating, or with the girl who smeared her lipstick on the wash towel. In the papers they could read about the big war in Europe folding up—but that was remote, far away from them, compared to their own special important wars right here.
In the Mayflower all these strangers were here, too. Maybe they’d followed me. Maybe they poured out of Connecticut Avenue into the two bars just before I arrived. The faces were the same, even when they were talking. They talked and they drank; and, under the faces the elbows straightened, arms appeared. Those arms waved and gesticulated when they didn’t extend for the drinks.
I edged in; I stood. By and by my leg wanted to go off somewhere by itself. It was near six o’clock. I stopped at the desk. The idea of driving miles through the rain to try a strange house didn’t appear too appealing. That Brown person whom I’d met on the train might have forgotten to wire.
All the clerk did at the desk was to laugh.
He informed me if I wished, I could place a reservation for next May. He wouldn’t guarantee it, though.
It was growing darker as I headed out, into rain again. That was wet rain. I wished now I hadn’t cared about using gasoline. I wished I hadn’t left the convertible up at Florida Avenue. As soon as I was on Connecticut Avenue, the same crowd must have plowed free from the Mayflower to follow me. They all had the same blank faces. The elbow technic was identical. They were still strangers, too.
I drove to 13th and F, parked again, opposite the Earl Theater, leaving the sheets in the car. I felt the rain soak through as I walked to the Willard. I let the eggnog ride. I was hungry. Again the people on Connecticut Avenue had beaten me. All of them were jammed around the Crystal Room, odor of wet cloth hanging heavy and damp in the big hall. A fat, sour-faced waiter was irritably stating there weren’t any vacant tables.
He didn’t say he was sorry. He probably wasn’t. I had an idea it pleased him to tell those weary, blank-faced people he didn’t have any place for them to eat. This was his time.
His personal war—he was winning it at last. For forty years, probably, people had been shoving him around. Now he was winning. He was important. Waiters were important. Customers weren’t.
So I tried the Occidental. The crowd was there, too.
I watched people eating at the Occidental. As their jaws moved, one could watch these people thinking while they were eating. I suppose they were all thinking about their own special wars. Every now and then one would stop eating and lean across the table and say something in an angry voice to the other person and this other person would go on eating and nod, perhaps, so occupied thinking out the next tactical move in his own individual special war that everything else flowed over him.
By 2100 hours I managed to wedge to the counter of the cafeteria next to the National Theater. By 2100 hours they were mostly out of what the menu said they had; that was all right. I was tired enough not to care. I found a small table that was empty. I ate. I drank the milk. At the table to my left an old gent with sideburns was insisting the only force to save the world was Moral Rearmament because it brought all classes together. Eating opposite him, the guy with wavy hair and eager eyes said every two minutes, “That’s true, Mr. Merton. How very true.”
I emptied the rest of the milk. To my left was another couple, intent on another discussion. In Washington, D. C., nobody talks about pretty girls or dances or the way the sky looks at evening after a rainy day; everything is serious, with the social content. The girl was one of those plain, nearly ugly girls who somehow manage to be attractive. I took a couple of quick looks at her. Her guy had the professional bureaucrat air, wise and sharp and smug and at the same time humorously resigned. Never too definite on anything. He wouldn’t make a martyr. He said, “Gladys, my love, you’re nuts. I heard yesterday from one of our men that the Negroes were deliberately—”
The girl angrily said, “You poor dope. In the first place the army takes them with V.D. except the few incurables, as you ought to know if you’d read the facts. In the second place, the percentage of Negroes in the services is slightly higher than the percentage of Negroes in the population. That vicious rumor stuff comes to us in the Women’s University Foundation, and I’m damned tired hearing it.”
“Gladys,” warned the guy—and he glanced at me.
The girl went right on, “There are a couple of rumor factories going full blast in Washington, D. C. Somebody ought to do something. Somebody—” The guy said something in a low voice. The girl stopped. She sighted at me.
I walked by and said I was for somebody doing something about it, myself, although nobody ever did anything about rumors; and, evidently, it was too unexpected. For a minute, seeing that plain, ugly, attractive girl and hearing her become angry and acting like a civilized human being instead of just someone in Washington, D. C., was like finding a person who could be a friend in the strange land away from home.
I walked away in a hurry, wondering why I’d butted in. It was like talking to that kid in the park and having him run. It couldn’t have been just the cane. Maybe something showed on my face. Anyway.
= 2 =
To the Willard I returned. Here I asked for a room. Next, I tried for a room at the Washington Hotel and at four or five smaller hotels near the parking lot at 13th and F. The answer was the same. At the smaller hotels the desk clerks didn’t laugh.
One clerk, even, hauled out a telephone directory and was going down the list of hotels, to telephone for a room. He used his left hand. His right hand was close to his side, unbending. I looked at the right arm. I looked at him. I saw the lines around his eyes, the deep creases around his mouth. I said where was it?
He looked at me and he looked harder. He asked, “Haven’t I seen you somewhere?”
I replied that might be.
He scrubbed his fist across the telephone directory. “I was mostly in the South Pacific, with three months in Australia. It wasn’t too tough. At that, I was luckier than some.”
I asked, “Nobody without a reservation can get a room in a Washington hotel?”
He stared down at the telephone book. “If I had a room, I’d give it to you. I’m not going to try to kid you. There’s not much use to telephone.”
I thanked him and explained at least I had a room staked for me, or thought I had, quite a piece in the country. Only, with the rain it had seemed a trifle too far to drive tonight.
Again he regarded me. “I got a room upstairs for myself. I can get a cot in it if that would help.” He ground his good fist across the book. Hesitantly, he said, “This is a hell of a night for driving—” and there was that short pause before he added, “Captain Eaton.” He turned around, and placed the telephone book on the shelf.
I said I’d drop in some evening and maybe we could have a quick one together just to remind each other how it was, and walked out.
After I climbed into the convertible, I sat there about ten minutes. I struck a match. I stared into the reflecting mirror. Thousands of people must have about the same kind of face. The match burned my fingers, and I blew on it. I was all right. I was fine. Nobody needed to put cots in their rooms for me. Finally a shine walked through the rain, asking if I was having trouble with the motor. Wouldn’t the car start?
I said that was it. But the car would go now. I started the motor, tooling out of the parking lot, heading toward the Capitol, vaguely remembering the streets out toward Hyattsville.
At the next stop light I opened my wallet to get the piece of paper with the address of that house on West Amherst Road. I was concerned to find the paper wasn’t in my wallet. I couldn’t recall what I’d done with it. I don’t mean I was too worried. I knew West Amherst Road was one of those short streets in College Park, in the hills near the University. I’d find the white house, all right. But at the moment I couldn’t remember the name of the people that Brown fellow on the train had recommended.
I drove along North Capitol and turned right on Michigan, going in a big, slow circle away from the city. After the city limits came that long stretch of road through the hills and scrub forests of Maryland country estates.
Under the headlights the macadam road shone. Rain splashed against the windshield. Tires sang. I began to feel a little better, again. It wasn’t true, of course, but sitting behind that wheel, hearing the rain and the big, even drone of the motor and the tires singing, it was as though I was driving away from Washington, D. C., going somewhere to some place that was home. It was like leaving Boston. I could forget Megassum. I couldn’t forget that Clark had died, though. That stuck. It hurt.
When the headlights picked up a man walking, I slowed down. Because the leg had grown stiffer, I had trouble with the brake. I wasn’t able to stop until I was ten or fifteen feet past this man marching along through that cold spring rain.
I opened the door, feeling the bite of rain against my face. It wasn’t a night I’d choose for a walk in this kind of water. The long-coated figure of the man came by me, halted. I called for him to jump in. He paused. With that darkness and rain, he wasn’t very distinct. Again I said for him to get in quick before we both drowned.
He moved close to the door. Once more he paused. I don’t believe that wet rain bothered him. He didn’t move like a man who was wet. He moved slowly and deliberately. I could almost believe he was enjoying having the rain sweep in and wet me.
He had a big, deep voice, the way a bass oboe sounds when the player is barrel-housing it. He shoved his head through the door. It might have been the darkness, but I’d have bet his shoulders were so wide they blocked the door. Deliberately, slowly, he asked, “You sure you want me to come in? It’s mighty dark outside. Maybe you’d like to look at me in the light?”
In the light from the dashboard I looked at him.
It was his voice, I believe. It was the first voice I’d heard in Washington, D. C., from anyone who was having a joke. It was deep and rich. It let the words come easy. I could take his private joke he was having even if he thought it was on me. I replied I’d looked; and, would he please get in so I could shut the door?
I think I spoiled his private joke. He didn’t expect it. I think he was all set for me to wriggle and try to get out of his private joke and then he would have started laughing.
I shoved the clutch in, swinging out gently so the wheels wouldn’t skid on wet pavement. He moved. I could sense him, sitting there, plenty of space between us. All of him was doubled up and compressed inside the convertible, his head dropped low on that wide chest of his to escape hitting the cloth roof.
He just sat there. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t say where he wanted to be dropped. I drove along through rain, thinking about Clark.
So we drove in silence in that black wet night, the big fellow thinking his own thoughts. The windshield wiper slicked back and forth, whining. At last to the big fellow I remarked this was a tough night for walking.
He said, “After I get through workin’ at the laundry, I spend time with a frien’ down the pike. I’m leamin’ to write music.”
I thought that one over. I asked was his friend teaching him?
The big fellow replied, “I’m Goodspeed. George Good-speed,” as if that should ring a bell. “Before the war you maybe heard me on the phonograph?” Sullenly, he added, “If you had a phonograph.”
I still didn’t understand what I was missing. His big, rich voice became deeper, more resentful. “I used to play the slide-horn. A year or so, and nobody can remember.”
Something stirred in me. Clark had owned quite a record collection. I said, “Not—”
“Bugle-mouth,” he said. “That’s me. Now I can’t play no more bekaz of what happened to my stomick in England, last November.”
We reached the crossroads. Here I would turn north to strike toward West Amherst. The only thing about driving the convertible, I discovered, was working the foot brake. That wasn’t too easy. I slowed, asking which way he went, telling him I was for the Baltimore Pike.
He said my road was his road for another mile, where he’d get off to walk on into Burksville. I remembered Burks-ville. It was shanty town.
Into the left crossroad I wheeled the convertible. George Goodspeed moved restlessly in his seat. Even more obscurely rain held the night. He picked up from where he’d said “November” as if there hadn’t been a break.
“I got to be top sargint before they sent me back bekaz of gettin’ a rowboat-bomb fragment in my stomick. I can’t eat natural, no more. Or play a slide-horn. I’m leamin’ how to write down the music I can’t play no more, for somebody else to play.”
I told him I’d spent half a year in England before going across the channel on D-Day. He asked, “What were you?” and I said what I’d been. Somehow it was all right between us. Maybe he knew a good top sergeant was worth at least two captains, any day.
At the next branch, again I wheeled left, instead of stopping. It was too wet for anyone with a bum stomach to be walking in this rain.
George Goodspeed said, “You don’ have to go this way. I walk this road every night, nearly.”
I replied it wasn’t out of my way. I’d picked up some of his guys when I had a jeep in England.
He said, “In England we always got lifts, from civilians, too. We’d get lifts in daytime well as night. They treats us nice, those English.”
Now the road narrowed. I shifted up the hill and said perhaps the English hadn’t heard the one I’d heard since I came back. That all the colored boys were escaping the draft by getting themselves a dose of syphilis.
Next to me, George Goodspeed exhaled, like a man that has been hit in the belly. The road twisted downward. Rain slanted in the headlights. It was more than two minutes before he said, “That one, I didn’t hear yet. I heard others, though.”
I said he must like hearing them, after he’d been away? It ought to encourage him.
Slowly he said, “Before goin’ over, I heard one. I heard Hitler goes ’roun’ preachin’ all colored folks are bom half apes. I was mad hearin’ that one.”
I said I suppose it depended on how many people believed Hitler.
George Goodspeed moved a cramped leg. “Used to be, I think enough colored boys get mad and go over ’long with white boys and it’d be different cornin’ back. Those English,” he said, reflectively. “They treat everybody nice. Maybe bekaz they’re foreigners they didn’t know better?”
Ahead, in the stream of lighted rain, were the shanties. They were fixed in the slow whirl of the convertible’s headlights. It was like briefly turning a spotlight on each leaning structure, each house and sagging shed, on the old brick building at the main corner, on a wide, bleached store front drooping in the middle. Only a few of these shanties had curtains. Tremulous funnels of yellow exuded from the naked windows.
Way down deep was his voice when he suddenly demanded, “Why you ask me that? You see those colored boys fightin’, don’ you? You don’ believe any of ’em’s stayin’ home, gettin’ doses, are you?” The tires squashed through water. Afterwards, in a flat voice, George Goodspeed stated, “I get out here.”
Near the old store, I stopped. He opened the convertible’s door, stepping into rain. I was leaning to the right, with one hand holding the cane, waiting to pull shut the door. He held it open. He looked square at me. He said, “Cap’n, you been there. Nobody cornin’ back is ever believin’ that trash. Isn’t that true?”
I said I didn’t know. I said maybe the men coming back would believe what the people staying here wanted them to believe. I reached for the door.
His hand still held the door. Rain wet him. He said, “Cap’n, I know you don’ believe that. You aren’t feelin’ right to talk that way. Cap’n,” he asked, “have you got trouble cornin’ back, too? Does ever’body have trouble cornin’ back, sir?” That “sir” must have slipped in by accident.
Was it true? Was it coming back and wanting to find a home and finding there isn’t a home any more? Was it learning one’s best friend was smashed to death nearly eight months ago and wouldn’t ever be around again? I told George Goodspeed all I knew was we weren’t in the army. We weren’t anywhere, neither of us. He ought to know. He didn’t have to call me “Captain” or say “Sir.” Even though everything else might continue, at least that was finished forever for both him and me. That much only was strictly definite for us.
I said that and I closed the door, quickly releasing the clutch. I turned in the middle of the street. As the headlights spun their bright circle, first they illuminated the store front; next, a shanty by the store. The door of that shanty was open. In the doorway a woman was waiting. She was watching George Goodspeed shuffle toward her, putting her hand to shade her eyes against the headlight glare. I couldn’t see her face but her bare arm was the color of amber. For an arm, it was graceful, and beautiful.
