Freshwater Road Read online

  "I said, turn round, less you want some of this!" His lips were drawn up into hard lines making his teeth look big. His arm muscles pressed against the fabric of his shirt. He cracked his billy club against the side of the car. It sounded like a gunshot. Celeste's spine jolted like a steel rod had been shoved through her body. Ain't gonna let nobody turn me round, turn me round, turn me round. She sang softly, her breath coming in frightened pants. Fear deadened her memory so that she could only recall two lines of the song. Matt said it didn't work out here, but there wasn't anything else. The words drifted in and out of her mind like a ghost echo as if they weren't really coming from her at all.

  A thud and the car lurched. She had to be still, be quiet. They had guns, billy clubs. Cattle prods. Margo always said if you got stopped like this, hold onto your training, pray and sing, otherwise you'll only make it worse. You can't win by fighting here. They have all the guns. Celeste kept singing. Gonna keep on walking, keep on talking, on my way to freedom's land.

  "Bet you got them three boys right here in this car, nigger." The trooper spat the words out, his accent chopping off the consonants.

  An excuse to open the trunk. Sweat poured into Celeste's eyes. Her hands gripped in tight fists in her lap. She sneaked a look back. The trooper stood to the side of the car. Matt and the other, the one holding him, were hidden by the opened trunk. She hoped they wouldn't take the freedom school books or her suitcase. The trunk slammed shut, rocking the car. Then the sound of punches, and a sharp crack. Matt moaned. His nonresistance didn't stop the blows that followed. Now she didn't want to turn around, didn't want to see what they were doing; she set her eyes on a black-barked shade tree marking the turn into a dusty side road. Beyond it stretched rows of crops, peanuts maybe or beans. Neat. No dark people cranked over at the waist between the rows.

  "Nigger. Go back where you came from."

  She'd love to be gone. Far off in the tranquil blue sky, rain clouds began to pile up like scoops of vanilla ice cream. There was the sound of air expelled in a moan. They must have hit him in the stomach. She didn't know which trooper was talking now. One of them snarled at Matt about niggers chasing white women. If they got on that, Matt was doomed and so was she. Better to be anything else, to have horns even, than to be accused of chasing, whistling, winking, even looking at a white woman. For a moment she thought of J.D.-those last times together, when a kind of desperation perverted their lovemaking, changing it from the joyous connection of two people clamped together by a fierce electrical charge into something dark and painful that they both identified as the falling away of love and attraction. She had hardly believed they could go from one to the other so fast. In the end, there had been silence. J.D. went back to his studio and she cowered in the apartment on North Oak Street, depleted and sad. Celeste felt pitiful and weak now again, sitting there by the side of the road listening to two white Mississippi troopers beat the shit out of a black man. Her head down, she prayed they wouldn't kill him.

  "You just a bunch of communist outsider agitators. Come down here to stir up our nigras. Everything was fine til y'all got here." After each phrase, Celeste felt the car rock.

  There might not be anything left of Matt to drive her to Pineyville. If he needed a doctor, what could she do? Drive to the next town and call Jackson, or just turn the car around and go back the way they'd come? She knew how to drive. And where was the traffic? It was midday. There should be cars driving by. The troopers must have stopped traffic in both directions so no one would see. Had they been followed all the way from Jackson?

  The troopers shoved Matt back into the driver's seat. His shirt was missing two buttons and one of his overall straps was hanging off his shoulder. "Git in that car and you niggers git going. Next time, it'll go harder for you."

  They slammed the door, then swung their billy clubs like bats, smashing the front and back driver's-side windows. Celeste turned her face away from the shards of flying glass and covered her face with her hands. Crystals landed in her hair, pricked her legs, hit the seat, bounced off the dashboard. They were booby-trapped in glass. The troopers got in their own car and pulled alongside. The trooper in the passenger seat slowly raised his gun and pointed it at Matt's head. She opened her mouth to scream before tearing her eyes away from the awful black hole of the barrel. Across the fields she saw a quiet tree, heard the whistling of a errant bird. She grabbed at the door handle, ready to crawl out of the car, roll onto the ground, and run for the tree's shelter. But Matt pulled her down on the seat under his arm so fast it took all the air out of her body. He held her underneath him, her snot and tears spreading across her cheek, little pieces of glass sticking into her arms and scraping her face.

  "We know y'all hiding them boys. Trying to make us look bad."

  She heard the cops laugh, and then the loud blast of the gun firing. Celeste expected Matt's warm blood to come streaming down over her. The troopers sped away, the acrid smell of burning rubber wafting into the car.

  Matt sat up slowly, releasing Celeste. She looked up at him expecting the worst, but there was no gush of blood. A thin line of it meandered down her forearm, about to round the curve there and drip onto the car seat. There were shallow scratches in crazy patterns on both of her arms. She sat still, afraid any movement meant another cut. She touched her face for more blood, then climbed out of the car to shake out her clothes and hair. The troopers might turn onto a side road and come at them again or call ahead to the next town, tell the local police to stop them this time. they needed to call Jackson, call the FBI, call somebody to let them know they were in danger on the road to Pineyville.

  Matt tossed glass out of the front seat of the car, making quick glances ahead, behind, furtive takes, fear all over him. She wanted to tell him it was okay that he was afraid, he didn't have to be a hero for her.

  "Welcome to Mississippi." His voice hollowed over cracked lips. His breath came in quick pants. A knot glistened on his forehead.

  "You need some ice for your head." She reached in to throw more of the broken glass out of the car then climbed back in.

  "No stops until Pineyville. Be all right." Matt bumped the car onto the road. No smart lip now. His mask-still face stared at the highway ahead.

  Celeste wanted mercurochrome for her scratches, a drink of cold water, an aspirin, a gin and tonic. She pressed Kleenex on her cuts, smelling Matt's aroma encasing her, drowning out her own. Animal as prey. She smelled her own stink beneath his, all anger and fear. Her mouth tasted dry, her tongue like a salt cake.

  "Did you get a name or a patrol car number, anything we can report to the FBI?"

  Matt sat like stone. "No."

  She wondered where else they'd hit him. In Jackson she'd learned that the cops go for the organs-the kidneys, the liver-and bone structures like the spine and the kneecaps. Orientation. What to do? No ice. Try to get Matt to talk. "Don't we need to call Jackson? You need to see a doctor. What if you have a concussion or something?"

  He said nothing.

  Way off to their right, a train sped over the baking red earth, a toy to dream on. Was it going to New Orleans? The City of New Orleans, Ltd. Her train. Name like a lure. Music, dancing, freedom, water. That woman in the station had said to her, "Don't want to miss my train." Celeste was sad to see it go past, knowing that whatever sanity was left in the world went with it. She wished Matt could speed up, catch the train, throw her suitcase and book-bag up and help her get on board. So long, Mississippi, see you later.

  They passed through Collins. Hattiesburg was thirty miles ahead and from the looks of things, there wasn't going to be anything much in between. Celeste scoped each side road, each driveway, looking for patrol cars, cars with white men in groups, panel trucks with loaded gun racks. The pain in the little cuts on her arms quieted to a dull prickle.

  Matt's eyes shot back and forth from the rearview mirror to the highway. He steadied his hands on the steering wheel, his jaw dropping, his lower lip slack, his body braced.
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br />   Celeste sank in her seat. "What now?"

  Matt kept his eyes dead forward, slowing as a car pulled around to pass them. A white sheet flung across its front seat-back lifted in the draft of the car's acceleration as it went by. It billowed gently, like Momma Bessie's bed sheets on the backyard clothesline. Then, like a crumpling parachute, airless, quiet, the sheet relaxed. A stretch of red satiny fabric lay next to the snowy sheet. Four white men, two in front, two in back, glanced at Matt and Celeste. They wore short-sleeved shirts, relaxed ties, narrow-brimmed straw hats. Their eyes were flat. They went by, a blurry glare of recognition passing between them.

  "Klan meeting in Hattiesburg tonight." Matt smiled a creak of a smile. "You hear about them Negroes in Louisiana?"

  "What about 'em?" Celeste was so happy he was talking, she didn't much care what he said.

  "They arming themselves. The Deacons for Defense and Justice. Don't want to hear another word about nonviolence." Matt stared ahead, watching the car that had passed them disappear on down the highway, driving a good deal faster than they were with no fear of being harassed.

  After what had just happened to Matt, she had her own new questions about the payoff for nonviolence. Matt had gone limp, never spoke a provocative word, and they beat him anyway. You might as well have a gun. This waiting for the spiritual power of nonviolence to tame the opponent was already running short. So many people had already been beaten and jailed and the summer was just beginning. And now those three volunteers were completely missing, just gone, disappeared like vapors. Two Jewish students from New York and a Negro kid from Meridian.

  Celeste had a sudden overwhelming feeling that she'd never get back home, never sit in Momma Bessie's kitchen again or picnic on Belle Isle or walk along the shore of the river, looking across and seeing Canada as a benign restful place across the way. She'd never sit at the bar with Shuck and pretend she was more grown up than she really was, sipping the alcohol-free concoction that Posey used to make for her and for Billy. Now she could drink real drinks at the bar, drop quarters in the party girl, swap stories with the regulars and tap her feet to Shuck's jazz favorites. It seemed so far away. That wallpaper Shuck had ordered especially for his bar with all those fine Negro people who seemed to have the world in their hands, bigger than life up there on the walls of the Royal Gardens, smiling and reminding everyone that they were real. It was all on another planet. She had dropped into a foreign country, an alien place filled with death and pain. She felt the scratches on her arms, the tiny nicks in the skin on her face, pressing them, feeling the pricks of renewed pain.

  South of Hattiesburg, the rust-red soil changed to orange. Along the road, the gravel shoulders gave way to soft sand, then rolled off into a shallow depression. For a few miles, the land up-hilled into a forest of longneedled pines that blocked the sun and perfumed the air like a thousand women wearing fringed-green dresses, laughing. Margo had called it the Piney Woods.

  Just after Lumberton, with the speedometer marking them at still well under the limit, they entered Pearl River County as if on tiptoe. Celeste felt coolness in the air, felt it on her stinging face, prayed it would last. But within minutes the long-needled pines gave way to hundreds of decaying stumps, dead logs scattered in the open spaces. The barren expanse screamed beneath the peacock-blue tropical sky, a sky fit for an island paradise in the Gulf of Mexico. The sun pounded down on it all. She flinched but there was no getting away from its rays.

  Before they reached the Pineyville town center, Matt left the blacktop for a part-sand, part-gravel side road. No alluvial plain, no cotton plantations here. Power lines, but no phone lines. Matt pulled up and stopped near a stunted water pipe with a spigot that seemed to periscope up out of a square concrete platform. At the turn-off, Celeste saw a large country mailbox attached to a leaning post, beneath a street sign that read, "Freshwater Road."

  5

  Detroit summers pulled thick, water-logged air from the lakes, boiled it with car and bus exhausts, mixed in smokestack poisons, then asked you to inhale. At Shuck's house, on an island boulevard lined with red maple, elm, yellow birch, and hickory, the trees saved the day, so that on the ground you could breathe in the scent of roses, lilacs, and wet, fresh-cut June grass.

  The first thing a city does when it knows Negroes are moving into a neighborhood is cut down all the trees. Thank God they'd done little of that on the West Side except over by the projects. Not a tree in sight there. Outer Drive, where Shuck lived, had the feel of a rich man's street, lush and green in summer, vibrant red, orange, and ocher in autumn, and quietly carpeted with snow in winter. The trees made the difference.

  Whatever went on in those perfect houses stayed neatly behind closed doors. None of that sitting out front loud-talking. In fact, Shuck barely knew who his neighbors were; he nodded and greeted the people from those quiet houses without ever thinking about who lived in which. He preferred it that way since his life was still the nightlife. His neighbors lived and worked the nine to five or something close to it, or so he thought. For those who blue-collared at the plants, they put up such a good front of middle class respectability, of nine to five instead of shifts at the plants, you missed the blue of it all together. He appreciated that.

  One night a new customer happened into the Royal Gardens still wearing his work clothes, a familiar face but Shuck knew not from where until in conversation it came out that the man lived right around the corner from him. The man seemed embarrassed to be seen in his work clothes and he never came back to the Royal Gardens again. Shuck's regulars worked blue-collar, too, but they wore sports jackets and slacks to work and at home and changed into their work clothes at the job. Those blue-collar clothes were not for the streets.

  Posey gave Wilamena's first phone message to Shuck. Shuck decided, without telling Posey, that he wasn't of a mind to return the call. She called a second time and a third. Posey said she was hot on the phone, fussing at him as if he hadn't given Shuck the message. Posey told him to take care of it because he didn't want her calling and cussing him out. Shuck knew Wilamena never used that kind of language, but she could make you feel like she did.

  He propped the little square of paper with her name and phone number written in Posey's grade-school scrawl against the base of his bedside lamp. When he opened his eyes, the black ink vibrated on the white background of the paper. In the shade of his secluded room, the drapes drawn tight for daytime sleeping, he eyed the numbers and considered selecting two sets of three and playing them on Monday. If he played the area code boxed, and the numbers fell, he'd get a hit regardless of the configuration. Funny that Posey thought he didn't have his ex-wife's number. Maybe he figured with the kids grown and gone, it had faded from Shuck's mind. But Shuck was good at remembering numbers.

  He dozed until afternoon, surface dreaming of a Wilamena who gave him kisses that spun him out of control, flew his heart on a balloon caught in a sailing breeze. When he woke, he'd dreamed so hard he shuddered to find she wasn't sleeping beside him.

  Wilamena had been in the Outer Drive house only once. She'd breezed into town for her own mother's funeral and stopped by on a moment's notice to see Celeste's new bedroom furniture. She'd spent most of her time there pacing in the foyer waiting for her husband, Cyril Atwood, to pick her up. She never saw Shuck's room with its wall of east-facing windows, the tan and blue silk comforter spread, and the matching drapes. She never felt its deep carpet under her feet. Maybe she didn't want to see what his life had become. But he hadn't even been home that afternoon, and he always kept his bedroom door closed.

  Shuck showered and threw on his blue summer robe over a pair of black slacks. He went downstairs and headed straight for his high-fidelity record player in the dining room. He stacked on two LPs, staring at the machine until the needle locked into the vinyl's grooves. Count Basie's downbeat sounded through the silence. He retrieved the morning paper, dropped it on the kitchen table, then went out the backdoor to the expanse of yard, the smell of gr
ass and leaves like a new world coming. Wilamena loved this afternoon light, the light that signaled the softening down of the sun as it dipped behind the giant elms and maples standing in rows all over the neighborhood. Back in the kitchen, he fried himself three pieces of bacon, scrambled two eggs with a splash of milk, salt, pepper, and half a palm of grated cheddar cheese, made toast, and perked two cups of good strong coffee. He sat in the kitchen and went through the newspaper with flat, focused attention. After scouring the front sections, he turned slowly to the sports page. Neighbors along Outer Drive dreamed of supper as he sat down to his first meal of the day.

  Shuck spent the two weeks since he got the first message kiting through an assortment of reasons for Wilamena's call, knowing all the while that it had to be about Celeste. The thought that distracted him as he drove back and forth to the club was that Wilamena's husband might be lying in a hospital bed holding on to life by a breath. Wilamena might just need Shuck's support.

  She'd meet him at the Albuquerque airport, her dark hair in wavy lengths to her shoulders, wearing a dress the color of the New Mexico sky on a postcard she'd sent to Celeste. It would sway gently as she walked. Her golden brown eyes would flash her need for him. She'd be darker than she'd ever been in Detroit, and he wouldn't stop looking at her. They'd rush to the hospital, but it'd be too late. Over drinks at his deluxe hotel, she'd ask if he was involved with anyone, tell him they should rescue their own love. He'd sit there with a long face and hold back his heart. For once, with Wilamena, he'd hold back his heart. They'd order more drinks, and he'd take her up to his room without saying anything about the future, knowing that would only ignite her passion. They'd make love like they'd done a long time ago.

  When he looked down, his plate was empty and he hadn't tasted a thing. For years, he'd worked at convincing himself that he no longer loved Wilamena, that he only remembered loving her.