A Dangerous Road: A Smokey Dalton Novel Read online

  “Well,” I said. “You know you’re always welcome to come to me, for anything.”

  “I know.” Joe mumbled that last, as if he were ashamed of it, ashamed of me.

  I stood up and nodded at the others. They were no longer looking at me. Apparently, if they couldn’t defeat me with words, they’d pretend that I didn’t exist.

  I wanted to haul Joe out of there, but I had no right to do that. He was a fifteen-year-old boy, but he wasn’t mine, and they weren’t doing anything illegal, at least not in the restaurant.

  So I left the table and let myself out into the growing dark. Beale was nearly empty, in its transition between a daylight workaday street, and its nighttime party street. I stood beside Pape’s window and took a deep breath of cold evening air. I was shaking, and it wasn’t from the conversations. Or maybe it was. I had a feeling of foreboding so deep that I half expected someone to come out of the shadows and grab me.

  But no one did. And after a moment, I stepped away from the window and walked down the street, hands in my pockets, listening to my footsteps on the concrete, and knew I was alone.

  SEVEN

  ON THE WAY HOME, I stopped at Jimmy’s apartment building. Two of the street lights were out and one was fading, making the entire area dark. The cold air smelled of garbage. The piles weren’t neat here like they were downtown. They looked as if people had simply thrown their waste on the curb instead of bagging it. Dogs rooted in a heap near the alley. The strays looked healthy this year; the garbage was giving them enough to eat.

  I put the pea coat over my arm, crossed the threshold, and went inside. The hallway was dark. Someone had smashed the light above me and no one had bothered to fix it. The stairs were still lit, the fixture so high above them that it would take sheer cussedness to break it.

  I climbed them, ignoring the toys and discarded cans that littered the hallway. It smelled of urine and beer. The railing was crusty, so I let it go.

  Jimmy’s apartment was on the third floor. The building had deteriorated since the last time I had been here. I wondered if his mother would take my help finding a new home. Probably not; a new home would mean giving up her profession and she seemed loath to do that. She said there was nothing else that paid her as well—at least nothing she could get.

  The hell of it was that she was probably right.

  The third floor hallway was relatively clean. All the fixtures worked here. I could hear children crying in the nearest apartment and B.B. King blaring from the next apartment over. I stopped in front of Jimmy’s door. No light filtered under the threshold, but I knocked anyway.

  The sound reverberated inside. You could always tell when no one was home. A slip of paper was stuck in the space between the door and the frame just above the cheap lock. I pulled it out. It was a hand-written notice from the super about the overdue rent.

  I knocked again.

  “It’s Smokey,” I called, just in case they were hiding from the manager.

  Still no answer, and I doubted I’d get one. I knocked a few more times for good measure, hard enough to get the blues fan to open his door.

  Finally, I gave up. I wondered where Jimmy was. Joe was at the Little Hot House, and his mother was who knew where, but Jimmy needed somewhere to go. I hoped he had it.

  I debated leaving the coat hanging from the doorknob, but knew that wouldn’t be wise. Someone else would get it, and Jimmy would go through Memphis’s winter chill wearing a coat several sizes too small.

  I’d give it to him in the morning. As I went down the stairs, I cursed myself for failing to arrange to take him to school the following day.

  By the time I got home, I felt both tired and a bit dirty. My house was small, essentially three rooms on one level, but it had a large porch, a basement that I used for storage, and an even larger yard. The living room was square and arranged badly for company, just one easy chair and a couch big enough for me to stretch out on. A bookshelf ran along one wall, with paperbacks and some bookclub hardcovers, some science fiction, but mostly black authors, from Ralph Ellison to Langston Hughes to James Baldwin. I was half done with William Melvin Kelly’s Dem, but it didn’t appeal to me that night, not after the conversation with Joe’s friends. I picked up the second volume in Samuel R. Delany’s Fall of the Towers trilogy, but that didn’t hold me either, so I turned on the television.

  I tuned in CBS, and watched until ten. I was sprawled on the couch, almost dozing, when Who, What, When, Where, and Why flashed on the screen, followed by a subtitle: Report from Vietnam by Walter Cronkite. It started with images of Saigon, a ruined city, and reviewed the past month. Cronkite had promised a personal review of the Tet Offensive, and this was it.

  This was the program Doc had warned me about.

  Cronkite called his conclusions “speculative, personal, and subjective.” But they were blunt and captured what I was feeling—probably what the country was feeling. He called the war a stalemate, and said, essentially, that winning would require an impossible price—“cosmic disaster.” He called for a negotiated peace—“not as victors,” he said, but as “honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy and did the best they could.”

  In other words, people who had failed.

  Walter Cronkite, the most trusted man in America, was telling us to throw in the towel on Vietnam, just like Martin had done a year before. I wondered what Martin thought. Was he declaring a personal victory tonight or did he even know? I knew Doc Shann would be disappointed—or maybe he wouldn’t be. Cronkite might have given him a way to speak about the war without tarnishing the memory of his son.

  And me, I tried to ignore Vietnam, but it was hard, when I knew that boys like Joe were the ones on the front lines. I had tried to warn him once, but it wasn’t real to him yet. Playing revolutionary with his little friends was. He wasn’t draft age. When he was, maybe he would learn the meaning of the rhetoric he was using. I only hoped he survived it.

  It took me a long time to get to sleep after that program, and when I finally did sleep, I had the dream.

  I am ten years old, lanky and too thin, nearly asleep under a quilt my momma made, my head cushioned against a feather pillow that had just been repacked. It smelled of chicken—a smell that Momma promised would go away in a few weeks, but which I knew would stay for longer than that, invading my sleep and making me sneeze.

  The front door bangs open, starting me awake. My momma’s voice rises, sharp with fear. My daddy goes into the hall. I can see him in the thin electric light, nightshirt unbuttoned, tying the string on his pajama bottoms. He leans over the railing, cries, “Who down there?” and when he gets no answer, tells my momma to call the police.

  I get up and walk to my door, and he whispers, “Hide, son.” I stand there for a moment, and he makes an impatient movement with his hand. I know that movement. If I don’t do as he says, I’ll get that whupping I’ve been deserving, the one he don’t know about.

  I grab my stuffed dog off my bedstand, where I’d been keeping it since I turned ten—a big boy now—and I ease myself into the closet. There’s a crawl space in the back that no one knows about but me, a space that I used to fit in a lot better than I do now. I squinch myself inside, wrap my arms around the dog, and listen.

  My daddy’s made me hide at night before, and it has turned out fine. When I was eight, men came, shouting and yelling and demanding my daddy. The police came too, and everything died down. My daddy had a shotgun he kept near the door, and he took it out whenever he expected trouble.

  I just guess he didn’t expect trouble tonight.

  The door opens, and I hear voices. No yelling. Just voices. Then my momma’s voice joins them, and she shouts, It ain’t so! It ain’t so! She screams once, and my daddy hushes her. Then the door closes, and the house is quiet.

  It’s hot in the crawl space, and my legs fall asleep. I clutch the dog to my stomach and close my eyes, hoping my daddy’ll come for me soon. But the house is really quiet. Too
quiet. All I can hear is my own heart, pounding, pounding, pounding, and my breathing, harsh and raggedy.

  I started awake, sitting up in bed, sweat pouring down my back. My heart was pounding, my breath coming hard, just as it always did when I had that dream.

  I threw the covers back and put my feet on the thin carpet, noting the differences between this place—my home—and that house in Atlanta. That was the last time I saw my parents. The Grand came for me and told me nothing. No one said anything to me about what happened to my parents. Conversations would cease when I entered the room.

  Later, I learned that they had been lynched that night, and I realized that my father’s whispered, “Hide!” had probably saved my life.

  I made my way into the kitchen, fumbled for the light switch, and clicked it on. The bulb was yellow, and the light looked thin. I had white curtains on the window, made for me by a girlfriend who was now married to someone else, and they provided poor cover against the darkness outside. I glanced at the clock on the stove. It read 4:25 A.M. I sighed. I would never get back to sleep, not after the dream, and it was too early to get much done.

  Maybe if I calmed myself. Only one thing worked, and it was something that my mother used to do for me when I was very young. I heated up some milk on the stove, added butter and honey, and poured it into a ceramic mug. Then I sipped, slowly, closing my eyes, letting myself return to a time before that awful night, a time when I believed that things like a mother’s touch and a sweet night-time glass of milk could make anything better.

  I took the mug back to my bedroom and finished drinking. The trick worked: I slept a deep dreamless sleep of the innocent, or perhaps of the man who wanted nothing more than escape.

  * * *

  I was tired the next morning. I got a call from Henry asking me to meet him at Wilson Drug for breakfast. On my way, I drove by the apartment to see if I could see Jimmy, but he wasn’t there. The slip of paper was gone from the door, though, so someone had come home.

  Wilson’s was full that morning, but Henry had gotten there first and found a table. He was already eating his eggs, covered in Tabasco, and sopping up the whole mess with a slice of toast. I ordered my eggs scrambled, and then I sat down.

  I didn’t really want to talk about the strike, which I knew was foremost on Henry’s mind. But I did want to talk about Jimmy. I was beginning to think it was time to see what my options were.

  “You aren’t going to like this, Smokey,” Henry said after we’d gotten past the pleasantries.

  I leaned back in the metal chair. It groaned. “I knew that when you called.”

  “Mayor Loeb and the city aren’t budging.”

  I nodded.

  “We been thinking we need national support.”

  Martha brought me my eggs and a newspaper. I hadn’t even seen her when I had come in. That showed how distracted I was. I thanked her, poured catsup on my hash browns, and started to eat.

  “You got the local AFL-CIO,” I said. “The national will probably get involved.”

  Henry shook his head. “They’re seeing it as a black issue, Smokey, and they aren’t that far from wrong.”

  I knew the arguments. Most of the sanitation workers were black. They barely earned more than minimum wage and they had no workers’ compensation. To make things worse, the city operated on the “plantation system” where the mayor and the city council oversaw the work of thousands of municipal employees. Since Loeb, a longtime segregationist, had declared the strike illegal and ordered workers back to their jobs or be fired, things had escalated into an issue that was more about race than fair pay.

  “A black issue means they won’t get involved?” I asked.

  “Not without sanction and even then maybe not,” Henry said. “We need some national attention, Smokey, and we won’t get it from the unions.”

  I shoved my eggs aside. Suddenly they didn’t look that good any more. Martha came by with the coffee pot and I had her pour some more. I had a hunch it was going to be a long day.

  “You’ve got Reverend Lawson and a lot of other people who have national connections,” I said. Reverend James Lawson was one of the founders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He had worked side by side with Martin in the most important decade of his life. If he couldn’t get Martin here, no one could.

  “That’s not the issue,” Henry said. “Between COME and the NAACP, we have enough connections to bring in the right people. The key is security, Smokey. We don’t want another incident like we had a week ago.”

  Incident. What a great word for that disaster. “Who’re you bringing in?” I asked.

  “We’re talking about Roy Wilkins, and Bayard Rustin. And of course, Dr. King.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  Henry put his plate aside. Martha picked it up immediately. I wondered if she was listening. “I’m asking you to provide security.”

  “Those men have their own teams.”

  “We could use other eyes.”

  The eggs weren’t sitting well in my stomach. “I can’t guarantee anything.”

  “Just stand in the back,” he said. “Watch for trouble during the speeches. Maybe make sure the buildings are clear.”

  “You need a professional security team for that.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Where are we going to find that here, Smokey?”

  He had a point. I sighed. “Let me know where and when the speeches happen. I’ll take them on a case-by-case. If I’m busy, you’ll have to find someone else.”

  He grinned. “I knew I could count on you.”

  “I haven’t done anything yet,” I said.

  He grabbed the check. I tried to pull it from his hand, but he wouldn’t let me. He was out the door before I remembered that I wanted to talk with him about Jimmy.

  I wasn’t too happy as I went to my office. I didn’t want to be involved in any way. If something bad happened at those meetings, people would see it as my fault. And one man, even an observant one, couldn’t stop a group like the Panthers if they wanted to create trouble.

  I’d see if I could put together a group and put someone like Roscoe Miller in charge. That would have to be good enough for Henry.

  With that decision, I turned my attention to the rest of the morning. Laura Hathaway was coming to my office. Hers was the only case—such as it was—that was completely active right now. Before it went any further, I had to tell her about the money. I had demanded that she be honest with me. I had to be honest with her.

  I just wasn’t sure how to do it.

  She arrived promptly at ten. She knocked, not because I had asked her to, but because she was carrying a small box. I opened the door, and she grinned up at me. Her makeup was perfect except for a microscopic dot of eyeliner beside her left eye. Her hair flipped out as if she had spent the entire evening in curlers, and she was again wearing the pearls on her ears.

  I took the box from her and set it on a pile of papers, then helped her off with her coat—she glanced over her shoulder at me with some surprise—and hung it on the coat rack.

  She was wearing a white cashmere sweater over a pink turtleneck, a matching pink skirt, and a different pair of ankle boots. She had changed her nail polish to match the outfit. The entire effect was perfect for the Peabody and so out of place here that I wondered why I hadn’t said anything until now.

  “Miss Hathaway,” I started and then stopped, unsure how to finish. We had just reached a comfortable truce. Did I break it by commenting on her clothing?

  “I brought some of the records you wanted,” she said. “I called the attorneys and they weren’t happy, but I insisted. I reminded them that I was the employer and they were the employees and if they had a problem with that, well.” She grinned. “You know.”

  I did know. I had seen that side of Laura Hathaway myself. I grinned in return. Then I let my smile fade.

  “Miss Hathaway,” I said.

  “Laura.”

  “Laura.” I too
k a deep breath. “That first day, when you came here, I warned you about the walk from the Peabody to Beale—”

  “Yes?”

  I sighed. “There’s a group of professional thieves that work this street. The cops call them the Beale Street Professionals, and you—”

  “Look like a target, I’ll bet.” She laughed. “You’re telling me to dress down.”

  “If that’s possible.”

  Her grin widened. She was beautiful when she smiled. “I have been known to go into a Woolworth’s from time to time.”

  I smiled back, relieved, then went to the box. “Now, what did you bring?”

  She joined me. She was wearing a light perfume, so faint that I wouldn’t have noticed it if her movement hadn’t made the scent drift between us. “What I had. Pictures. Financial records from the last year. My stuff.”

  “Is your birth certificate here?”

  “In my purse. Why?”

  I didn’t answer her. I wasn’t going to tell her anything, yet. “May I see it?”

  She opened the clasp on the purse, pulling out another small envelope. The inside of her purse was incredibly neat: a thin wallet, a checkbook with gold pen attached to the leather cover, lipstick, eyeliner, rouge, and a comb. Every woman’s purse I had ever seen had been filled with receipts, tattered paper, ancient gum, pens that no longer worked, and makeup that had caked shut. That seemed normal to me. Laura’s seemed obsessively tidy.

  I took the envelope, opened it, and saw all her important identification. I was about to say something, when she said, “I know. I was trying to be cautious,” so I left it at that.

  I took the certificate and handed the envelope back to her. Then I walked to my crusted windows. Thin morning light filtered in through the grime and dirt. I held the certificate up to it.

  “Is this the original?”

  She frowned. She was still standing near the box, clutching the envelope, watching me. “I don’t know. It’s the one I’ve used my whole life.”

  It didn’t look like an original. A retyped copy would have all the pertinent information, but would be missing the baby prints that hospitals often took, foot and hand prints. But my certificate didn’t have the prints, and it was an original. I didn’t know what the customs were in Alabama.