By selective breeding, right? Like livestock, right?
Fuck you, I said.
Fuck
you,
Larry said. You’re a bigot like all the rest. You’re just a smarter bigot, is all.
Okay, I said.
You don’t
want
me to be your equal, Larry said.
I
want
you to be my fuckin’ equal, I said.
Then get me a date with a white girl, he said.
Get
yourself
a date with a white girl, I answered.
He didn’t tell me until much later, when we trusted each other enough to talk openly about girls (and I honestly believed
that
was the last barricade) that he had taken my advice and got himself a date with a white girl named Patricia Converse from Stamford, who was no prize, but who had sucked him out of his mind. I felt an initial flaring of anger, don’t tell
me
prejudice doesn’t die hard. Don’t tell
me
my aversion to the color of
Indian
Indians (not
American
Indians, mind you) had nothing to do with Negroes. I visualized Patricia Converse as a very fair blonde with blue eyes, I saw Larry’s ugly black cock in her mouth, and I felt violently protective of
all
my women, big white massa standin in de doorway guardin Missy Annabelle home fum Atlanta, don’t tell
me,
man. Don’t tell me I didn’t have to step on something inside me and crush it that day, smashing what I thought was the final barricade, and seeing a small flash of triumph in Larry’s eyes, knowing he savored the image of White Womanhood Defiled that flitted through my mind, and wanting this time to punch
him
in the mouth because he
was
my equal now or at least I thought he was. What I didn’t understand was that I was not yet
his
equal.
To become his equal (and I didn’t learn this until we arrived in Mississippi), I would have to stand with him on a red clay dam, and be shot to death by white men to whom my color meant nothing, shadowed as it was by my Negro friend beside me.
I was not willing to die for Larry Peters.
I sat opposite him in a very clean cell in a very clean jail, both of us tired and depressed, neither of us speaking. From the far end of the corridor, we recognized Lyndon Johnson’s voice coming from the television set, and Larry said, “What’s that?” and I said, “Shhh.”
“My fellow Americans,” Johnson said, “as President and Commander-in-Chief, it is my duty to report that renewed hostile actions against United States ships on the high seas in the Gulf of Tonkin have today required me to order the military forces of the United States to take action in reply...”
“What does he mean?” I asked Larry.
“Those PT-boats a few days ago,” Larry said. “The ones that attacked our destroyer.”
“That reply,” Johnson said, “is being given as I speak to you tonight. Air action is now in execution against gunboats and certain supporting facilities in North Vietnam which have been used in these hostile operations.”
“There it is,” Larry said. “The son of a bitch is declaring war!”
“How can he do that without an act of Congress?” I asked.
“He’s doing it, isn’t he?” Larry answered.
“Our response for the present,” Johnson said, “will be limited and fitting. We Americans know, although others appear to forget, the risks of spreading conflict. We still seek no wider war.”
The turnkey, apparently bored by these events in Southeast Asia, clicked the set to another channel. Robert Mitchum’s unmistakable voice superseded Johnson’s in the jailhouse corridor as he urged his men into combat against the Japanese.
“Maybe they’re just testing us,” I said.
“Maybe,” Larry said.
“Like...”
“Like what?”
“Like... I don’t know... when they put those missiles in Cuba.”
“Testing our resolve, huh?”
“Yeah, our resolve.”
“Yeah,” Larry said. He sighed deeply. “You think we’ll ever get out of this joint?”
“Sure,” I said. “My father should have got the telegram by now, don’t you think?”
“Oh sure,” Larry said. A troubled look crossed his face. He hesitated a moment, as though not certain he wished to reveal what he was thinking. Even when he started to speak, he said only, “Jesus, I hope...” and then shook his head.
“What?” I said.
“I don’t want to go to war, do you?” he said.
“No,” I said.
It was not my father who came down to bail us out.
The man who stepped through the doorway at the far end of the corridor the next morning, ducking his head under the lintel, rising to his full height again as he followed the turnkey to my cell, tall and powerful-looking for all his sixty-four years, was my grandfather.
“Hello, Walter,” he said.
“Hello, Grandpa,” I said, and smiled.
“Have they been treating you well?” he asked.
“I guess so,” I said. “Grandpa, these are my friends, Luke Foulds and Larry Peters.”
“How do you do, boys?” my grandfather said.
“And there’re some more in the next cell,” I said.
“How many all together?” my grandfather asked.
“Well, the three girls and us,” I said.
“I’ll make out a check for six hundred dollars,” my grandfather said to the turnkey.
“I got nothing to do with money,” the turnkey said. “You see them upstairs about that.”
“I will,” my grandfather said.
“Sir,” Luke said, “this is very kind of you, but I’ve sent home for money and...”
“My grandson’s wire indicated you were all in a hurry to get somewhere.”
“Yes, sir, we are. But...”
“Well, you can reimburse me later,” my grandfather said. “Meanwhile, let me get you out of this place.”
“Grandpa?” I said.
“Yes, Walter?”
“Couldn’t my father come?”
My grandfather looked at me for what seemed like a very long time. At last, he said, “No, Wat, I’m sorry, he couldn’t.” He hesitated only an instant. “He has an important business meeting in New York tomorrow morning.” And then, before I could read the truth in his eyes and be hurt by it, he turned swiftly and walked down the corridor.
September
My mother died on the second Sunday in September, four days after Italy surrendered to the Allies. The Air Force gave me an emergency furlough and a lift on a C-47 to the Orchard Place Airport in Park Ridge. From there, I took a train and arrived in Chicago shortly after dusk. I did not want to go home. I was certain there would be a black wreath on the door, and I did not want to see it.
The chaplain had called me into his office at ten o’clock that morning and said, “Cadet Tyler, I’m afraid I’ve got bad news for you. We got a call from Chicago just a few minutes ago. Your mother had a heart attack and passed away last night.”
I looked at him and hated him instantly, the gold-rimmed eyeglasses and the echoing gold cross on his collar, the harsh grating sound of his Bronx speech as he told me my mother was dead — no, “passed away,” he had said, “passed away last night,” the euphemism somehow making the fact more intolerable. I nodded and fastened my eyes on a bayonet letter opener on his desk, refusing to look into his face, afraid that I would begin crying here in the presence of this goddamned pious fool from Baychester Avenue.
“I’m sorry, Cadet Tyler,” he said.
“Thank you, sir.”
“I’ve already spoken to the C.O. about leave.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“He’d like a few words with you when we’re through here.”
“Yes, sir.”
“My own mother died in childbirth,” he said, as if somehow that exonerated him.
The barracks was empty as I packed my duffle and tried to sort out in my mind what I would need for my four-day furlough to Chicago. They would be burying her on Wednesday, and this was Sunday — no, that was only three days, I was due back by formation Thursday morning. The C.O. had told me he’d have to put me back a class unless I returned in time. As it was, I would have to make up two hours of code, two hours of sea-air recognition, and an hour each of math and physics, the C.O. telling me all this as though the possibility of washing out was the foremost thing in my mind on that Sunday my mother died. I told him I would be sure to be back by formation Thursday, sir, and he said I had better, because whereas it was permissible for me to miss three days of my intensive and arduous ten-week training program (though I
would
have to make up those lost hours, I understood that, didn’t I? Yes, sir, I said, I understand that), it was inconceivable that I could miss anything more than that without getting chased into the class behind mine. It’s for your own good, Tyler, he told me, we can’t put a man in the air without the training he needs to survive, all of this while the knowledge of my mother’s death sat behind my eyes and I wanted to cry but could not.
I could not cry on the transport, either, because there were twenty-five other guys in the plane, all headed for the Chicago Army Air Base. The train into the city was packed with civilians and soldiers, and I sat stiffly erect by the window and listened to the wheels and thought of movies I had seen where a guy is sitting by a train window and the wheels are clacking and the sound triggers a flashback, but there seemed to be nothing I could remember. I could not remember what my mother looked like, I could not remember a single one of her homespun sayings. And, of course, I could not cry because a member of the United States Army Air Force does not cry on a public conveyance, not when he is wearing on his garrison cap that winged propeller, no.
I could not cry in the taxicab, either. The driver, watching me in the rear view mirror as we worked our way east down Washington Street from the station, said, “Well, it looks like the Cards and the Yankees again, huh?”
“I guess so,” I said.
“Same as last year.”
“Yes.”
“Probably be a lousy series.”
“Mmm.”
“Well, how can you have a good series when half the guys are already in the service? You know where Di Maggio is? In Santa Ana. Where’s that, that Santa Ana?”
“California.”
“Yeah, California. Remember the pitching Johnny Beasley done for the Cards in last year’s series? You know where he is this year? In the Air Force, that’s where he is. It’s gonna be lousy, how can it be good? You think it’ll be good?”
“I don’t know.”
“Naw, it can’t be good,” the driver said, and fell silent until we pulled up in front of the old house I loved on East Scott Street. Then all he said was, “That’s seventy cents, soldier.” I paid him and tipped him and got out of the cab and hesitated on the sidewalk because I suddenly felt like a stranger here. I had left Chicago on June 27, and had spent five weeks in basic military training in Nashville, Tennessee, proceeding at the end of July, directly and without furlough, to Maxwell Field in Montgomery, Alabama, for pre-flight schooling — a stranger here now, and more a stranger because my mother was dead.
There was no wreath on the door.
I thought at first that someone had made a mistake, perhaps that cockeyed preacher from the Bronx had given me a message intended for a Cadet Taylor or Wylie or some other unlucky bastard, but
not
for me, Will Tyler, whose mother could surely not be dead, she was only forty-two years old. The brass doorknobs were polished, the twin spruces climbed into the blue stained-glass sky, everything seemed the way it always had. And then the door opened, and I looked at my sister Linda’s face, and knew there had been no mistake. My mother was dead.
They had placed the coffin in the living room, and I thought at once they had put it in the wrong room. It should have been in the kitchen, with the radio going, and with “Just Plain Bill” filling my mother’s calm universe with fictitious turmoil. There were wooden folding chairs arranged in rows before the coffin, and my father sat on one of them beside my Aunt Kate and her Apache husband, Oscar, who looked more and more like an Indian the older he got. There were banks of flowers heaped beside the open coffin; I suddenly wondered if I should have sent some. My father’s eyes were red-rimmed.
I had not yet looked at my mother.
I went to my father, and he embraced me and kissed me on the cheek, and said only, “Will,” and my Aunt Kate turned to Oscar and said, “Oscar, it’s Will,” and Oscar nodded, his seamed and wrinkled face impassive. There were other relatives in the room, they came slowly into focus, my father’s younger brother John, who now lived in Milwaukee, and my mother’s two sisters, who still lived in Freshwater, and cousins I had never seen, hordes of relatives, how had they managed to assemble so quickly? I had the strangest feeling they were all waiting for me to go to the coffin, that this was the part in the movie where someone would turn to someone else and say, “It’s her son,” the way Aunt Kate had said, “Oscar, it’s Will,” and then their eyes would follow me, and they would carefully gauge my reactions when I saw my mother dead, calculating my grief, sympathizing with my loss, and yet somehow detached, as though denying the presence of death by forcing only the immediate family to become its reluctant hosts. Perversely, I would not go to the coffin, not while their eyes were upon me. I saw the question on my father’s face,
Aren’t you going to pay your respects, Will?
and I ignored it and chatted with my Aunt Clara, who was my mother’s oldest sister, and whose son was with the Marines somewhere in the Pacific. Do you think you’ll be heading out that way, Will? she asked, and I said I didn’t know, I still had almost seven months of training ahead of me, and my aunt said, Maybe it’ll be over before you get there, and I said I certainly hope so, Aunt Clara, not meaning it.
I did not go to the coffin until I was alone in the room.
My sister had made sandwiches and coffee, and everyone had gone into the kitchen, Oscar asking my father if there was anything to drink in the house, the old Injun seeking the white man’s firewater, and my father took him into the dining room where the locked liquor cabinet stood against one wood-paneled wall. I listened to the voices floating through the corridors of the house that could never seem home to me again, drifting toward the kitchen (the image of my mother, head tilted to one side, favoring her good ear as she listened to the radio, peas as green as her eyes tumbling into the sink colander), and I was alone with her, and she was dead.