Save Johanna! (5 page)

The screech of the screen door and the sound of Avrum’s boots made louder by his angry step woke the two sleeping people and caused the large-boned woman at the stove to stop stirring and turn toward him.

“Those fuckin’ niggers,” he exploded, “I can’t wait till they wipe ’em all out!” Avrum threw himself down on a big, worn armchair that leaked white stuffing through its bursting seams. “Does this place have to look like midnight all the time? Open the fuckin’ shutters, will you!” This was directed to Frank Helmet, the man on the cushions, who was by now sitting up and wide awake.

“Hey, man, we were only trying to keep it a little cool in here.” His tone was vaguely annoyed, reflecting the abruptness of his awakening.

“Open it,” Avrum snapped back.

“Come off it, Avrum, it gets like a fuckin’ oven with the sun baking in.”

Without a word Avrum got up, walked over to Frank, jerked the slim young man up by his shoulders, and rapped him once, hard, across the chin with the side of his hand, karate-style. Frank’s head snapped back against the blow, his body tightened and his arms shot up to shove his aggressor away, but at the first contact with Avrum’s body, his hands froze and, an instant later, fell to his sides. The room was still.

“I told you, Frank, you got to let it go. All of it.”

Frank was struggling to swallow his fury. Avrum went on talking, his face only inches from Frank’s. As his voice lost its sharpness, it took on a deeper and more soothing quality. “Ease the tightness,” he said, “unlock it and let everything flow free. Let me into your head, Frank, let me in there so I can drive out all that ego and fill the space with love. Hey, man,” Avrum said, grabbing Frank into him with a sudden hard hug, “come on, don’t fight it, let me in.” Avrum held him close in a strong grip of love until he could feel Frank’s body loosen and begin to respond. And that response seemed to trigger something in the others, and strong vibrations started to build in the room and focus on Avrum. He absorbed their love, catching its zenith and holding it for one long, powerful moment, and then abruptly cut the mood, dropped the embrace, and stepped away from Frank. He pointed to the shutters and waited. Without a word, Frank went to the windows and pushed them open. Yellow sunlight flooded the room, changing the mysterious into an ordinary, ugly seediness. Stained, striped mattresses strewn with faded Indian spreads covered much of the floor. A cheap, wooden picnic table with attached benches stood alongside an old, deep, four-legged sink that was just this side of the stove where Swat was cooking the chili.

The triumphant Avrum sat down again in the armchair, and then he remembered his earlier anger and spoke, stoking his fury as he recounted an incident he’d had a half hour earlier with the state highway police. It seemed they had pulled him over for not wearing his helmet.

“I play it cool,” he told them. “I figure they’re gonna hit me with a ticket no matter what, so I dummy up. Now I’m sitting there, just waiting for them to write it up, but they’re taking their sweet time; then finally the white guy starts to pull out his pad, but the nigger stops him. I get the picture right away. I know this fuckin’ black bastard is looking to give me pain. He wants my blood, but he’s going to have to get it all by himself. I don’t lick his ass, but I don’t give him anything to work with either. He’s looking at me, spitting abuse and saliva in my face, knocking in every insult with a hard slam at my shoulder, but I don’t move an inch. I can see the white guy’s getting jittery, he keeps telling him to take it easy, but this son of a bitch is getting his rocks off, and it looks like nothing’s gonna stop him.

“Meanwhile, I’m staring into that big, ugly gorilla face and watching those swollen pink lips sliding up and down over his white teeth shoving foamy spit into the corners, and I don’t even hear what he’s saying. All I’m thinking is how come so many niggers have mustaches and why the whites of their eyes are always stained yellow and red and how they’re the ugliest, stupidest cocksucking pricks around and how beautiful it’s gonna be when the whole thing explodes and we wipe out every fuckin’ nigger in this country.

“I can see his partner’s starting to get really scared because he gets my vibrations, and he knows where the nigger’s heading and he doesn’t want any part of that shit so he steps in and pretends to take over, but we both know nothing’s gonna happen except now he gives his partner a way out. They lay two tickets on me, and the black guy says how he’s going to be watching out for me.”

The very pregnant Nellie nodded her head yes, she knew. “Those pigs are all the same,” she said.

“Wrong, baby,” Avrum said, “it’s the black pigs. Those are the ones we gotta watch. They got big plans, but they’re not ready yet.”

“What kind of big plans could they have?” Frank asked.

“Only the world,” Avrum told him. “Is that big enough for you?”

“Niggers scare me,” Imogene told Avrum.

Swat put the plate of chili down on the table and looked disgustedly at Imogene. “You’re full of shit. What about what’s his name . . . Arnold? He scare you too?”

“Cool it,” Avrum said, and Swat stopped instantly.

“Hey, Avrum,” Frank said, “they only got about fifteen or twenty million people in this country. How are they going to do it? Take over, I mean?”

“Easier than you think. There’s a lot going on that you don’t know about.”

“Like what?”

“Like that the blacks have been arming since the late sixties. Did you know that?”

“Uh uh.”

“Well, you’re not supposed to know. It’s a secret underground movement. In every city and any small town where they’ve got a dozen blacks they’ve got guns, and they know how to use them. The first time I heard about it was in prison about six years ago. Some guys were blowing off about how it was going to be after the uprising. Nobody took them seriously, but I began to listen. And the more I listened, the more I heard. I heard numbers and weapons, attack plans, finances, everything, and it struck me—this is too organized for bullshit. That’s when I started formulating my own plans.”

Now Frank was fascinated. He wanted to know what kind of plans, but Avrum was cautious and all he would say was, “Against them first and then against everyone opposed to us.”

But Frank wasn’t satisfied. “How are we going to do that?” he wanted to know. “We’re nobody.”

“Right. And that’s our big advantage. They won’t be watching us.”

That was confusing. Frank wanted to ask, who won’t be watching us, but everyone else seemed to know, and he was afraid to antagonize Avrum again. He was new to the group. Born and brought up just outside Salt Lake City, the oldest son of a druggist, he’d spent the first eighteen years of his life imprisoned within the thick-walled cocoon of small-town, middle-class living, doubly protected by his perfectly middle-class Mormon religion. Frank always seemed the ideal young man, perhaps a touch too quiet and obedient. The summer after his graduation from high school, he took off for what was to be a last carefree adventure before leaving for college. He never came back. For five years, Frank traveled the country before settling down for two more years in a commune in western Pennsylvania. But whatever he was searching for still eluded him, and then he’d heard about Avrum and was intrigued enough to seek him out. That was in May, and now, two months later, he had found his own Joseph Smith, his own private prophet. But this one had imagination, passion, and danger. His search was over.

Avrum had come into his life. Night after night, he worked at Frank, peeling away the layers of his secrets like the skin of an onion, and finally he reached the center. And, with his exquisite, unerring aim for the soft parts, moved in and took over. Avrum sensed what Frank needed was total release from the middle-class moralities of his background. And he gave it to him, carefully orchestrating the necessary freedom with a tight control.
 

“The first part of my plan,” Avrum confided to the room, “is to expose their uprising before they’re ready.”

Amazingly enough, no one questioned how so momentous a venture could possibly be accomplished by this small and powerless group. It was Avrum’s strength that, with him, not one of them felt that powerlessness.

For Swat no questions were ever necessary. Her trust in Avrum was complete. All he had to do was to point the way.

But Avrum told them they hadn’t arrived at their own readiness yet. Then he told Nellie to get the Oxycontin.

“I can feel your frustration,” he said to Frank, “a holding back, a discomfort. You want to ask me things, but your ego is restraining you.”

Frank shrugged his shoulders and tried to apologize. “I guess it just takes me a while to get comfortable with people.”

“You never will unless you can learn to trust me and rid yourself of that ego.”

“You gotta do it, Frankie,” said Nellie, flipping two Oxycontin to everyone. “I did, and that’s when I got all my shit together and the whole world came into place. Listen to Avrum, he knows everything.”

“I’m trying,” Frank said, and then he popped the two white pills far back on his tongue.

Everyone except Swat took the “downs.” Swat never took drugs or drank or even smoked weed. She sat in on all the sessions but was always totally clean and silent, just waiting.

In less than fifteen minutes the drug had taken effect, and a loose, easy glaze had settled upon the small group.

“Hey, baby,” Avrum said to Frank, “come over here and let me show you how to give some good head.”

“Sure, man,” Frank said and moved over to the cushions where Avrum was lying.

“Swat?” Avrum said, and she moved to him instantly. “That’s OK, just close those things, huh?” Her entire body registered disappointment as she went to close the shutters. Again the room was dark except for the eerie stripes of sunlight across the floor.

Now Avrum called Imogene and she came over to the two men, and he told her to get naked and lie back on the cushions. Without a word she took off her shorts and underpants, kicked her sandals in the corner, and slid down on the cushions. Avrum pressed her legs open and buried his head between them. There was quiet in the room as they all listened to him sucking at her. She moaned and squirmed and moved down closer into his face and her hands reached out and grabbed at the air.

For Swat it seemed an endless time until finally Avrum moved away from Imogene. She watched it all, never taking her eyes from him.

Now Avrum gave his place to Frank, and Nellie came over and joined them. She took off her own clothes and then lovingly peeled off Avrum’s.

Now, in the semidarkness, the four naked bodies slid under and over and into each other with no discernible pattern. They seemed to Swat like wet, shiny, white snakes all connected together in constant motion.

She hungered to be with them, to try to meld into their rhythm, but she couldn’t move. She knew she wasn’t wanted, and that knowledge froze her. She sat at the table, alone, still, and in pain.

Always in pain.

It’s Thursday night, and David and I have just gotten out of the theater on Fiftieth and Broadway. It’s a perfect spring night; even the air smells good. No easy trick in midtown Manhattan.

I suggest we walk back to my apartment on Sixty-fifth Street. David always likes a good walk and so do I, but tonight I have an ulterior motive. Somehow in the four weeks since I first told David about my book I’ve managed to avoid talking about the Swat and Imogene interviews. Actually it wasn’t that difficult. The subject didn’t come up because I think David was under the impression I had done all the legwork. Not that I ever told him that. He just assumed it, and I let him. Ethically I’m probably guilty of a lie by omission, but practically speaking it was a necessity. I needed the extra time to get him used to the project, relax about it, and finally accept it, which is exactly what seems to have happened. Unfortunately now I have to tell him because I’ve scheduled both interviews for next week out in San Francisco.

An added complication is David’s parents, surely the nicest, most generous people in the world, who just happen to be planning a small dinner party in our honor for—you guessed it—next Wednesday, and there’s no way I can be back in time. Swat has refused to reschedule the interviews, so I’ll be stuck in San Francisco until at least Friday. I’ve given myself from Fiftieth Street to Sixty-fifth Street to break the news.

“Do you want to stop for something to eat?” David asks me.

“No thanks, darling,” I say, “I have some cold chicken and salad for us at home. Is that OK?”

“Sure thing.”

We’re heading north on Broadway, just passing Fifty-first Street, trying to hold hands in the busy after-theater crowds.

I love to watch the transformation that overcomes Broadway when the theatergoers, still clutching their playbills, pour out into the streets and, for the brief time it takes them to get their cars out of the parking lots or themselves into a restaurant, outnumber the dudes two to one and make the white way almost great again.

By the time we reach Fifty-fifth Street it’s all starting to slip back into raunchy pumpkin once more. David stops to look in the window of the Regency Travel Agency. We still haven’t made a decision about our honeymoon. We’re torn between Ireland and the south of France, leaning toward Ireland.

“I’m going to check into that deal,” David says, pointing to a poster advertising a European vacation with a free stop in Ireland.

“That would be perfect,” I say; “we could limit Ireland to a couple of days in Dublin and then a few days in Groom with the McGuires. I’m really looking forward to seeing Helen and Seamus again.” Helen Singer McGuire is an old college roommate of mine, a passionate Zionist from Brooklyn who fell in love with the Irish cause, an easy slideover, and in her senior year took off with Seamus McGuire, a fund raiser-cum-gunrunner for the IRA. They’ve been living in this little town called Groom, about an hour outside of Shannon, doing whatever revolutionaries do from nine to five.

I’ve always been fascinated by Helen’s courage. So unlike me with my cautious, careful, well-paced life. I’ve managed not to appear quite as dull as that sounds by developing the facade of a light and merry madcap who will leap at a moment’s notice into the most foolish madness, nothing too seriously foolish, of course, because about an inch beneath all that gossamer, cast in stone, are the unyielding strictures of a minister’s daughter. Anyway, I’d love to see Helen and Seamus for a few days, drink a little Guinness with them, overdose on Irish salmon, and, if we have the time, maybe even listen to them tell about “the troubles.”

I can see that David likes the idea of stopping in Ireland. What with his Irish mother and an early, indelible romance with Joyce, he’d gotten along famously with the McGuires the last time they were in New York.

“It sounds good,” he says, “and it’ll put us in Cannes in September when the crowds are gone and the weather is perfect every day. I’ll check into it tomorrow.”

“I can’t wait,” I say, and we squeeze close together, looking, I suspect, from the back a lot like lovers planning their honeymoon. Oh, gosh, how lovely it all is.

After law school, David spent a year in Europe, a good part of the time just eating his way through the south of France. The best year of his life, he claims, until he met me. Now it’s his grand desire to combine both highs and go back to all those glorious places, this time with me and enough money to order the bouillabaisse.

Though I’ve never been that far south in France I can practically recite the entire menus of La Réserve, le Moulin de Mougins, and L’Oasis, I’ve heard them so often, and I can almost see the narrow cobblestone streets of the medieval city of Saint Paul de Vence and smell the open markets early in the morning. Sometimes my good fortune frightens me. I’m experienced enough to know that you always have to pay for it somehow. I just hope an orphaned childhood and a lousy first marriage are enough credits to carry me awhile.

Right this minute is a perfect example of the pay-as-you-go plan. In the midst of all this delicious honeymoon planning I’m still lugging around that disturbing San Francisco news, waiting for the least conspicuous moment to spring it on him. We’re on Sixtieth Street already, and I promised myself I’d deal with it before we got home.

“Jo,” David says, smiling down at me, “I think we’re coming into the best time of our lives, and the remarkable thing is we’re actually ready for it. I feel I am anyway.”

“Me too, definitely.” Well, I’m certainly not going to tell him about San Francisco now and spoil all this.

Quietly, hand in hand, feeling content and comfortable, we stroll up Central Park West, the stolid, old apartment buildings, well kept and elegant with age, lining one side, while on the other, Central Park stretches out in its most pristine glory, in full spring bloom of pinks and whites and new greens.

“See,” I say, “I told you this was better than the East Side.”

“What about Carl Schurz Park?”

“Better.”

“You may be right.”

“I am. But then again, on a night like this New York could probably take on Paris.”

“Damn it!” David says, stopping.

“What’s wrong?”

“One of your many West Side attractions, that’s what.” And he starts scraping the bottom of his shoe furiously on the curb, with curses and groans and strong condemnations of every dog owner on the planet.

“David,” I say in the middle of his scraping, “I have to go out to San Francisco next week to do some interviews. We have to postpone the party. Sorry, honey.” It did seem like the perfect moment.

“What interviews?” I can see he’s only half-listening.

“The ones with Swat and Imogene. I told you I had a little more legwork left to do. Don’t you remember?”

“Christ almighty! It must have been a cow.” Then to me with an edge, “No, I don’t remember you saying you had to go out to San Francisco.”

“Well, how did you think I was going to get the interviews?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t think.”

“But you knew those people were in prison, so how was I going to talk to them unless I went out there?”

“Can you get me that piece of cardboard sticking out of the garbage?”

“It’s only going to take about three days. I’ll be home before the weekend,” I say, handing him the top of an old shoebox.

“Can’t you do it the following week? Everything’s all set with the party, and you know how my mother is about . . .”

“I talked to your mother already.”

“You did? What did she say?”

“She said OK, she’d change it to the following Thursday.”

“I don’t know, Johanna, I think you misled me. I was under the distinct impression that you were finished with those people and all you had to do now was sit home and write. Am I wrong?”

“OK, so I did go a little light on the interview stuff. It seemed to disturb you so much.”

“Well, it does.”

“It shouldn’t.”

David doesn’t answer. He’s still working on his shoe but with less concentration. It’s the old argument, and I know he doesn’t want us to fall into the same untenable positions again, but it’s tough for him. This project is always going to give him trouble, but, damn it, he’s going to have to deal with that himself. I stand there watching, waiting for my David to conquer his David, and finally it happens. “You really don’t have a choice, do you?”

“No.”

“Then you have to go.” He stops what he’s doing. “Look, Jo, maybe I can help you. Is there any legal work I can research?”

“Nothing right now, but I know it’s going to come up.”

“Do you want me to go out to San Francisco with you? I don’t know what I can do out there, but it’s fairly slow this week. I could get away.”

“That’s OK, I can handle San Francisco. It’s sort of cut-and-dried, two interviews and I come right home, but I love you for offering.” By now two teenage boys and an elderly woman walking her Pekingese have stopped to watch David. In New York, if you pause to sneeze you can pick up a crowd.

“You’re terrific! I’m mad about you.” And right in front of everyone I hug his arm and kiss his shoulder. He smiles, I smile, and the old lady smiles. The kids laugh.

“Hey, lady, watch where you’re stepping!”

“Oh no . . .”