War at Home: A Smokey Dalton Novel Page 10

  I leaned back. I’d heard that argument before, but I knew it had several sides. “You’re saying they should turn their backs on who they are so that they get into the power networks?”

  “Not at all,” he said. “But change comes from above. You got to get above before you can make the changes. Only Yale alumni are on the admissions teams sent out to pick the new students. And mostly it’s Yale grads who form the various committees at the university. You’re never really inside here unless you came from here. So it’s important that they don’t rock the boat.”

  I studied him for a moment. “You believe that.”

  He nodded.

  I stood. “Militants frighten you, don’t they? They make the rest of us visible. Any kind of protest, it makes you nervous.”

  “I didn’t say that.” The good humor had left his face.

  “Yes, you did. You a Yale grad?”

  “You think I’d be sitting here if I was?”

  I gave him a half smile. I wondered if he knew how bitter that sounded. “No, I don’t suppose you would be.”

  “Look,” he said. “If I find out anything, I’ll let you know. Leave me your number.”

  He was doing me a favor, as best he could. I had to remember that. Even if we didn’t have the same approach to the world.

  “I’ll contact you in a day or so,” I said. “One more question. The bailiff at the courthouse, he mentioned a Teen-Inn on Washington. Do you know about this place?”

  “I doubt your boy would be there,” Freeman said. “It’s for hippie kids, you know, the dopers and the ones who think they know everything about the war.”

  “Do you have an address for this place?” I asked.

  “It’s in a bad part of town.”

  I gave him a sideways look. “That doesn’t bother me.”

  He shook his head slightly, but wrote the address on a piece of paper. As he handed it to me, he stood. “You realize this kid is probably just pushing his mom’s buttons.”

  “I thought so at first,” I said. “But I’m beginning to wonder if I might be wrong.”

  TWELVE

  The address Freeman had given me was in the four hundred block of Washington, in a neighborhood that the receptionist at the Crow called the Hill.

  As I drove into the Hill, I noticed that several buildings had condemned signs on them, and even more appeared abandoned. Near the empty buildings were development signs, explaining how wonderful the area would be when construction was finished.

  The house wasn’t too hard to find. It was a two-story frame house in the middle of a group of intact buildings. No signs here; it almost looked like this part of the neighborhood had been forgotten by the redevelopment committee.

  Two yellow VW microbuses were parked on the street, along with an old Ford truck that someone had painted neon green. The back of the truck was painted with red flowers, and in the truck’s bed were open boxes filled with tie-dye shirts.

  A bunch of white kids sat on the lawn. Most of them had stringy long hair that fell to the middle of their backs. If it weren’t for the clothing, I wouldn’t have been able to tell the sexes apart.

  The girls wore skimpy T-shirts over long skirts, and the boys wore the same shirts with blue jeans. The group was passing a pipe around, and I knew before I smelled it that they were smoking marijuana.

  As I got out of my van, one of the kids looked up at me. “You here about the sink, man?”

  I felt color flush my cheeks. He thought I was a plumber. I couldn’t tell if the assumption came from my skin color, the panel van, or both.

  “No, actually,” I said. “I’m looking for someone.”

  “Second floor, back bedroom,” he said. “Don’t be surprised, though, if you catch him having a hairburger.”

  I almost asked what he meant, and then my brain caught up with the slang. “Thanks,” I said, and went into the house.

  The smell of pot clung to the walls. It was mixed with patchouli oil and incense. Candles burned despite the remaining heat of the day. Kids were scattered everywhere, in various states of undress. I couldn’t determine ages, partly because all I saw were white limbs tangled together.

  The kids weren’t moving. Most of them were in some sort of drugged state. A hi-fi played Country Joe and the Fish, a group I’d become familiar with thanks to Malcolm on the drive over. I still didn’t know the name of the song, but I recognized it.

  The stairs looked treacherous. They were made of wood and hadn’t been shored up in a long time. The wood was thin in some places, scarred in others, and looked like it might collapse under my weight.

  I debated whether I should talk to some of the kids on the ground floor, but they didn’t look all that rational. The kid outside had sent me upstairs for a reason. He had no idea who I was looking for, but he made an assumption—and I had a good guess why.

  I made it to the landing, which was remarkably people-free, but did have a table in the middle with more candles, burning next to an open window. Curtains blew inward from a breeze I hadn’t even noticed. My innate caution made me pinch the candles out.

  More music came from up here, a variety of types, all clashing so badly that I couldn’t recognize anything. All the doors on the second floor were shut.

  I knocked on the first door, didn’t get an answer, and pushed it open. No one was inside. Just more candles, some incense burning beneath a picture of an Indian god, and a blackout curtain on the window.

  I pulled the door closed and went to the next room, finding no one, and then the next.

  Finally, I reached the last room. Remembering the kid downstairs’s comment, I knocked first.

  “Fuck off, man,” came a male voice from inside.

  I knocked again.

  “Shit-fuck, man. We’re busy.”

  I knocked a third time.

  More swearing, but it was mostly inaudible. Then the door pulled open and I found myself facing a young man, naked and in full arousal. A naked girl lay on the bed, her body open to me. She was white. He was as dark as I was.

  The room smelled of sex.

  “Yeah?” he said, not seeming to care that he didn’t know me.

  “The guys downstairs directed me up here,” I said. “I was looking for Daniel Kirkland.”

  “That pussy? Fuck.” He shook his head. “He hasn’t been here in a hundred years, man.”

  My heart rose. This was the first real lead I had.

  “How long has it been really?” I asked.

  The kid extended his hand toward the makeshift bed. It appeared to be several mattresses on the floor, covered with batik sheets. The girl sat up, keeping her legs spread.

  “Like I care,” he said. “I’m busy, man.”

  “I already interrupted you,” I said. “You may as well take a minute and answer my question.”

  “You can come in if you want,” the girl said. “But you gotta get naked.”

  I hadn’t really been embarrassed until then. “Thanks,” I said. “But I’m just here to find Daniel.”

  “I don’t know where he is,” the boy said.

  “I didn’t ask where he was,” I said, although I really wanted to know. “I asked when he was last here.”

  “Fuck me, man, I don’t keep him.”

  “Christmas,” the girl said. “Him and Rhondelle. They got the tree.”

  I looked at her. Her eyes were wide and blue and bloodshot. Her black hair was tangled over her face.

  “You’re sure?” I asked, mostly because I couldn’t believe someone in her state would know what they were talking about.

  “Oh, yeah. They were gonna make it a special Christmas no matter what, but then Jax brought some smack and they got all pissed. Said they were going to find a place where people used their brains instead of fucking them up. Fucking losers.” She flopped back down.

  “You sure you haven’t seen them since Christmas?” I asked.

  The kid sighed. He didn’t look as out of it as his girlfriend. “They
got their own place near here for a while. Shared it with some other heavy types, you know?”

  “No, actually.”

  “Activists, you know. They didn’t belong here. We’re more into the make-love side of things, you know.” He looked over his shoulder at the girl.

  “That seems obvious, although if he was with a girl—”

  “Fuck me, man, you’re even straighter than he is. He was getting that warrior vibe, you know?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Bringing the war home, baby,” he said. “Stupidest thing I ever heard. We don’t need any stinking war. If everybody just loved each other, we wouldn’t be so fucking fucked up, you know?”

  I wished Malcolm was here to interpret for me.

  “You’re not coming in, right? I mean you can get your own downstairs, if you want it. We’re kinda into our own thing.” He was still talking to me.

  The girl smiled at me. “I don’t mind a three-way. Never done it with two black guys.”

  “Um, no, thanks,” I said. “I’m just—”

  “Looking for Daniel, I know.” The kid shook his head. “Too bad, man. Wouldn’t surprise me if he was dead by now, you know?”

  Then he slammed the door in my face. I thought about knocking again, but wasn’t sure what it would accomplish.

  The girl laughed from inside the room, and then squealed. I turned around and headed back down the stairs.

  I tried to ask a few other people questions, but no one seemed sober enough to speak to me. I felt a little off myself, and wondered if it was from the pot smoke in the air or from my rather surreal encounter with the couple upstairs.

  I had a hunch it was from both.

  THIRTEEN

  The next morning had a damp chill in the air. The weather forecast said we’d get up to eighty degrees, just like the day before, but for now, the temperature hovered in the low sixties, making my wool suit bearable.

  The night before, Malcolm had teased me about coming back to the motel smelling like pot, which I deserved. I told him and Jimmy about my afternoon — leaving out the racier parts — and Malcolm grew serious.

  “Sounds like Daniel might be in trouble,” he said.

  I agreed. I felt a growing sense of urgency to find Daniel and, at the same time, concern that I might be too late.

  When we finished breakfast, I took Jimmy with me to Yale for my meeting with Dean Sidbury. We dropped Malcolm at a Laundromat along the way.

  Yale’s campus was lively at seven-forty-five on a summer morning. I hadn’t expected it. A number of students carried books against their hips, heading to class. All of them looked clean-cut, especially compared with the young people I had seen the day before. All those white shirts, black trousers, and short hair made me realize that the group I had seen the day before wasn’t the norm. Kids still tried to get ahead. Only a handful of them rebelled in one way or another.

  Dean Sidbury’s office was in the main part of Daniel’s college. Instead of going in a side door and up a tower, Jimmy and I went into the main double doors that led into a stone hallway. To our right was a door marked PRIVATE and straight ahead was a typical office setup, with a secretary in a reception area, lots of brown leather chairs, newspapers for those who waited, and a door with the words JONATHON LYON SIDBURY, DEAN across the center in hand-carved wooden letters.

  The secretary looked up as we walked in. She had the same look as the secretary at the Crow, right down to the beehive hairdo, only this woman was white and much older.

  Jimmy stayed behind with the secretary because she insisted that the dean would want to see me alone. Apparently she felt that the dean wouldn’t want to discuss confidential matters in front of a child.

  As I pushed the door open, I heard her ask Jim, “Do you color?” and I was glad I wasn’t there for his response.

  Dean Sidbury’s office was as different from Robinson’s as could be. A wall of windows had a view of the quad, and plants the size of trees stood in front of them on the inside. More plants hung off his desk, their leaves trailing to the blue shag carpet.

  Sidbury was a slender man with a bony aesthetic face. Black hair covered the tips of his ears and touched the back of his collar. He stood when he saw me, and offered me his hand.

  I took it, sensing no hesitation in him. “Darrel Kirkland.”

  “Jonathon Sidbury.” He shook my hand once, then let go, indicating the chair beside his desk.

  “Sorry I don’t have more time,” he said. “We’re having all sorts of difficulties with the accelerated schedule for making Yale coeducational. Finding homes for the young women — safe homes — while still giving them the Yale experience is proving quite the challenge.”

  I nodded politely, not really caring. “I was told you could help me find Daniel.”

  “Yes, well.” Sidbury cleared his throat. “Find him, no. Tell you his history, yes. I can’t let you see the files, but I can tell you what’s in them and what happened last fall.”

  “All right.” I folded my hands in my lap and waited.

  “I had high hopes for Daniel,” Sidbury said. “He came in here like a ball of fire, ready to work, ready to conquer the world.”

  I could see that. That fit with the young man I had met last summer.

  “He got straight A’s in some of our more difficult freshman courses, although he struggled toward the end of the year. Skipping classes, that sort of thing. He blamed it on the political climate, and frankly, I could understand that. Dr. King’s death shook up many of our students.”

  I nodded.

  “Your son believed that Yale needed to be changed,” Sidbury said. “We had many discussions. I agreed with him, in part at least. Our academics are geared toward a certain kind of student. Daniel believed that black history, black literature, and black achievements should be taught in all of the schools. He showed me black studies curriculum from various colleges, most of them out west, and insisted that Yale start training black leaders.”

  “It doesn’t sound unreasonable,” I said. “Especially since this school supposedly creates the future leaders of America.”

  Sidbury sighed. “That was Daniel’s argument.”

  “And you kicked him out because he wanted you to examine your own cultural elitism.”

  “Um, no.” And this time, Sidbury let his tone rise to that patrician level which I loathed. “First, let me tell you that we kick no one out. Yale does not expel students. And secondly, Daniel did not leave because of his academic complaints.”

  “So why did he leave?” I asked. “No one will tell me.”

  “It’s not a pleasant story, Mr. Kirkland.”

  “How can I find the boy if I don’t know what happened to him? We lost him after Yale. He’s vanished.”

  “He is an adult—”

  “I am quite aware of that,” I snapped.

  “Your son was asked to leave because he nearly beat a boy to death.”

  I froze. Daniel Kirkland struck me as misguided, but not violent. “Are you certain?”

  “Quite.” Sidbury clutched the file tightly, as if he were afraid I was going to grab it and read it. “I’ll be as clear as I can. Daniel came to me at the beginning of the fall semester, representing some splinter group in BSAY—the black students’ organization at Yale. They were angry about the war, claiming that it was people like us, people trained in the Ivy League, who were behind it, and that our ‘cultural imperatives’ led us to repress minorities worldwide. The war was just one manifestation of this repression.”

  Sidbury couldn’t keep the sarcasm from his voice. I could almost hear Daniel making this argument, his fist shaking in defiance.

  “Daniel said he believed in changing the system, but he preferred to do so from within. The first step would be to teach black studies at Yale as well as courses in communism and third world history. He had an entire list, from the history of Vietnam — with reminders that Ho Chi Minh had been our ally for nearly twenty years — to a list of bl
ack writers whom he felt we should study.”

  Sidbury shoved the file aside. He was clearly telling me his own opinions now, his own memories.

  “I told him that his arguments had merit, but I was not the person to implement them. He wanted advice on who to speak to, and I told him that I would handle things with the curriculum committee. He didn’t like that, but agreed to let me try.”

  “Did you?” I asked.

  “I was consulting with others when Daniel came back, accused me of doing nothing, and decided to take matters into his own hands. He led campus-wide protests, talked to the curriculum committee himself, enlisted some of our more liberal professors in this quest, and seemed to be gaining a bit of ground.”

  “This sounds like leadership behavior to me,” I said.

  “It was disruptive, and your son was not polite about the way he handled things,” Sidbury said. “Diplomacy requires politeness and patience. Daniel became well known on campus for being a troublemaker. By the time the incident occurred, he had few friends in the administration. That, more than anything, was his problem.”

  Sidbury seemed like he was on a roll. I didn’t interrupt.

  “Coeducation Week,” Sidbury said. “November fourth to the eleventh. Seven hundred girls from twenty-two Northeast schools came to Yale for one week to see if our four thousand boys could deal with them. You have to understand, Mr. Kirkland, one mistake, one problem, and Yale would have been all over the national press. Coeducation wouldn’t have happened here, and we would have been the laughingstock of the entire country.”

  As if that were the most important thing that happened in November of 1968. It seemed to me a lot of other things happened that month that the nation had focused on, not the least of which was the election of Richard Nixon and some failed Vietnam peace conferences.

  “We were on eggshells here, and the boys knew it. Many of them gave up their rooms so that these girls could be scattered throughout the colleges. The security was intense. We did our very best, and so did the girls, going to classes, staying in the dorms, handling these young men who were used to being kings of their own hills, as it were.”