Dreamer Page 3

  He shook his head.

  “I calls my disability check my husband, it comes on the third,” and she cackled wildly. The staff fell in love with her that day, with her feathery wig that knocked twenty years off her total of seventy-eight, with the way she worked her toothless mouth like a fish while listening to King explain his plans in Chicago, bobbing her head and asking, “Is you, really?” with her head pushed forward, wig askew, and feet planted apart in two shapeless black shoes. She was utterly unselfconscious. Egoless, and flitted round the flat as though she had feet spun from air. Descending like twin trees from her checkered dress were two vein-cabled legs, lumpy in places, bowed, but it was her voice that everyone remembered most. Thinking she might be thirsty, I offered her a soda, which she declined, shaking her head and explaining, “Thank you, dah’ling, I’m tickled, but I bet’ not drink no pop, I might pee on myself.” Her bag was filled with medicine for her heart and high blood pressure, ills of which she was heedless, saying, “Naw, I ain’t supposed to eat salt, but I eats it anyway. I eats anything.”

  In point of fact, Mama Pearl was everybody’s grandmother. “There wasn’t nothin’ I didn’t do in the fields,” she said, speaking of her childhood in southern Illinois. Now she lived on Stony Island in a seventy-five-dollar-a-month walkup with no running water, where she passed her time crocheting (she gave the minister a quilt she’d worked on for two years), “eye-shopping” (as she put it) in downtown stores, and fishing, which was her passion. She’d go with what she called another “senior” or Amy, having her granddaughter lug along a bulging bag of fried chicken, cookies, grapes and peaches, a few ribs, and a thermos. For Mama Pearl fishing was a social event, one to be shared as you ate and talked and played whist. Standing ankle-deep in the water, she’d throw out her line, but was almost too afraid of saltwater worms to slice and bait them (they were hairy and huge and had serrated teeth like a saw). During her afternoon at the flat, she brought forth from her enormous bag three canisters of her own home-cooked raspberry, apricot, and cinnamon rugelach, which she distributed to the entire staff. She inspected everything, involved herself with everyone, including me (“Now, you don’t mind my bein’ nosy, do you, Matthew? I was jes ovah there talkin’ to that light-skinned fellah and he didn’t mind”), and giggled like a young girl, “Ain’t I somethin’?” Before leaving she collected SCLC stationery as souvenirs for the other “seniors” in her church and, waving good-bye at the door, assured us all that “I had a re-e-e-al fine time.”

  So had we all, especially King, who kissed her hand as she left (again she giggled), and Amy, who seemed aglow whenever she looked at the grandmother who’d taught her Scripture and how to be a woman, how to crochet, that she could use a string and old tin can for fishing just as easily as a pole and line, and that at all times she must remember others. Yes, she’d taken care of Amy well, raising her—or so I thought—to be as pure in love and self-forgetfulness and service as herself, though Amy at twenty, with her brilliant Dorothy Dandridge smile, was drop-dead beautiful. She did not eat meat. Synthetic fabrics, she said, gave her a rash. She had briefly studied drama and modern dance at Columbia College, where I’d first seen her in the hallways, but then she ran short on funds and took whatever temporary job turned up—short-order cook, dayworker, then watching the Lawndale flat after I’d recommended her for the job.

  I had my reasons for that.

  Compared with her, I was shy and unsure of myself in everything except my studies. Most of the time feelings banged and knocked through me like something trying to break free from inside. But I screwed up my courage and asked her out to dinner a week after she came to work. Amy thought about my request for a moment, her head cocked to one side, and simply replied, “I don’t eat.” I never had the courage to ask her again.

  To avoid her eyes, I turned to the minister, who said, “Well, where is he?”

  “I told him to wait outside on the steps,” Amy said, pulling her skirt down a little. “I’ll get him. You two go on back to the kitchen. Matthew, show him the I.D.”

  The minister asked, “What I.D.?”

  From my shirt pocket I extracted a dog-eared card. “She means this.”

  The card I handed over as we walked back down the hallway was an expired Illinois state driver’s license issued to one Chaym Smith, birth date 01/15/29, height 5′7″, weight 180, eyes brown. The minister gazed—and gazed—at the worn license, picking at his lip, and finally looked back at me, poking the card with his finger.

  “This could be me!”

  “That’s what we thought too,” I said.

  “Who is this man?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “But what does he want with me?”

  “Sir,” I said, “maybe he should tell you himself.”

  I could see the minister was impatient now for some explanation. Minutes passed. In the kitchen, the wall clock ticked softly beside an Ebony magazine calendar. Food smells, sour and sharp, floated from the sink and an unemptied, paper-lined garbage pail beside it. Then from the front room we could hear the door open. Outside, sirens pierced the hot night air. The neighborhood dogs howled. Through the window, I saw flames from burning cars dancing against a dark sky skirling with tear gas and smoke. The night felt wrong. All of it, as if the riot, the looting and lunacy, breakdown and disorder, had torn space and time, destroying some delicate balance or barrier between dimensions—possible worlds—creating a portal for fantastic creatures to pour through. I could not shake that feeling, and it grew all the stronger when Amy entered the kitchen with the man whose driver’s license I’d handed to King. A man without father or mother, like the priest Melchizedek who mysteriously appeared in the Valley of Siddim after the king of Sodom rebelled against Chedorlaomer.

  Stepping back a foot, King whispered, “Sweet Jesus …”

  “I thought you’d be interested,” I said.

  Far beyond interested, he looked spellbound. Then shaken. He might have been peering into a mirror, one in which his history was turned upside down, beginning not in his father’s commodious, two-story Queen Anne-style home in Atlanta but instead across the street in one of the wretched shotgun shacks crammed with the black poor. Certainly in every darkened, musty pool hall, on every street corner, in every cramped prison cell he’d passed through, the minister had seen men like Chaym Smith—but never quite like this.

  He tore his eyes away, then looked back. Smith was still there, his eyes squinted, the faint smile on his lips one part self-protective irony, two parts sarcasm, as if he carried unsayable secrets (or sins) that, if spoken, would send others running from the room. His workshirt was torn in at least two places, and yellowed by his life in it; his trousers were splotchy with undecipherable stains and threadbare at the knees—he was the kind of Negro the Movement had for years kept away from the world’s cameras: sullen, ill-kept, the very embodiment of the blues. Then, as the minister knuckled his eyes, Smith, behind his heavy black eyeglasses, beneath his bushy, matted hair and scraggly beard—as rubicund in tint as Malcolm Little’s—began to look less threatening and more like a poor man down on his luck for a long, long time, one who’d probably not eaten in a week. Neglected like the very building we were in. Everything about him was in disrepair. Just as the city’s administration and the flat’s landlord, a white man named John Bender (who was hardly better off than his tenants), had failed to invest in the crumbling eyesore and allowed it to degenerate into a dilapidated, dangerous public health hazard, so no one, it seemed, had invested in Chaym Smith.

  For a moment, the minister looked faint. His right hand reached for the back of a kitchen chair to anchor the spinning room and steady himself. He took a deep breath, then shook his visitor’s hand and motioned for him to sit down at the table. “When they said I needed to see you, I had no idea—”

  Smith’s lips lifted ever so slightly at the corners. “Thank you for taking the time to see somebody like me, Reverend. I know you busy. But, I swear, ever since nine
teen fifty-four, people been telling me I got a twin. Looks is about all we got in common, though. People love you. Especially white people. Sometimes”—he laughed again, at himself it seemed—“I figured God flicked up and missed with me, but He had you for backup.” Smith peered down at his hands, squeezing them together. A dollop of sweat slid from his hairline down his cheek to his chin, and suddenly I had the feeling he was acting, playing a role he’d rehearsed many times, even using black English—a pâté of urban slang and southern idioms—playfully, as one would a toy. “I’ve read your books. Everything I could about you. Caught you on TV more times than I can count. So when I heard you were in Chicago, I figured I had to come by and at least shake your hand.”

  “You live here, then?” asked King.

  “All my life, mainly on the South Side. That’s where I grew up, in one of the county’s juvenile homes. I reckon I been everywhere and done a li’l bit of everything. Most of it”—he laughed again—“come to a whole lot of nothing. Not like with you. I went in the service when I was twenty, the year after Truman signed Executive Order 9981. That put me right in the middle of Korea, but I was lucky, you know? I cruised through two years without a scratch. Guess it was ’cause I was on my knees every night, praying God’d get me outta there safely. See, I trusted Him. That’s how I was raised. ’Bout a month before I was to fly home, I was filling out college entrance forms. Day before my plane left, I walked outside the base to celebrate with a buddy of mine named Stackhouse and smoke a li’l Korean boo—and what you think! My boot-heel came right down on a land mine. I left part of my leg—and all of Stackhouse—back in Pyongyang.”

  Smith lifted his left trouser leg, and my stomach lurched. The sweep of his shin was crooked. Brown flesh below the knob of his knee was twisted, muscleless, blackened as crisp and crinkly as cellophane. Amy’s hands flew to her lips, stifling a moan. And then, suddenly, Smith looked straight at me, flashing that ironical, almost erotic smirk again, as if somehow we were co-conspirators, or maybe he knew something scandalous about me, though we’d met only minutes earlier.

  “The doctors spent a year rebuilding that from the femur to the metatarsal. My jaws were wired for months. Reverend, I tell you, after that—after my discharge—I just drifted and drank. I stayed in the East, sorta like being in exile, till I healed. I knew every bartender by his first name in Kyoto, Jakarta, and Rangoon. Finally come back to the States, and got me a li’l room at 3721 Indiana Avenue, and I was doin’ okay for a while, trying to stay dry and go to school over at Moody Bible Institute—I always wanted to preach—then things kinda … fell apart for me again …”

  The minister bent forward, squeezing his hands, unaware he was mirroring perfectly Smith’s posture. “How do you mean?”

  Smith drew a deep breath. (King took one too, as if slowly they were slipping into synchronization.) “I ain’t sure what happened. I don’t look for trouble, sir, but sometimes trouble just comes looking for me. Maybe it’s bad karma, or something’s wrong with my ch’i like they say in the East, I can’t figure it.”

  He was working nights as a custodian, said Chaym Smith, and taking classes in the day. Back then he was an insatiable reader, the sort of autodidact who (like Harlem Renaissance writer Wallace Thurman) could absorb whole paragraphs at a single glance; his recall was so good he barely had to study for his exams. Sometimes when he came home three young boys—Powell, Jay, and Lester—would be playing on the steps or directly in front of the building in the street. They were good kids, he thought. Wild, but that was because each of them had a different father. In effect, no father. And with no Daddy, they saw everything—and anything—as permissible. He knew what that was, not knowing your father, but feeling that the indifferent sonuvabitch who brought you into the world was out there somewhere, faceless and unreachable, silent and remote, someone you needed and hated all at the same time until the moment came that you damned him, renounced Him, and moved on. Nearly every day Smith saw those boys, and he liked them—he bought the trio candy and Tales of the Unexpected comic books at the corner store, shot a few hoops with them on Saturday when he was tired of studying, and after getting permission from their mother, Juanita Lomax, who was young and pretty and seemed to like him whenever she bumped into Smith in the hallway, he drove them in his battered secondhand Corvair to see Sidney Poitier’s portrayal of a black soldier in Korea in All the Young Men. It reminded him of his time in Korea, and he hoped Juanita’s boys would pick up something positive from Poitier’s performance, though he couldn’t be sure they had, given the way Powell and Jay hooted and threw popcorn at the screen when Alan Ladd’s bigoted character came on. Still, they told him they’d had a great evening when Smith brought them back to their mother’s basement apartment.

  As it turned out, Juanita was not there when he brought her boys home. Thing is, this was nothing new. Often she left them alone to fend for and feed themselves, usually potatoes, which they peeled with a pocketknife, threw into a handleless skillet in the closet-sized kitchen, then proceeded to burn until the four dark, below-ground rooms, which always smelled damp, clouded with smoke. Smith always worried they’d set the place on fire. That night, however, he’d filled their stomachs at White Castle, so he was sure they’d do no cooking and go straight to bed.

  His own tiny but tidy room was three flights up, one of the front bedrooms in a flat rented by Vera Thomas—a kind, brown-skinned woman about thirty—and her mother, an elderly woman who often said she wished he, Smith, had been her son, what with the way he studied and worked so hard after he got out of the service, and him with a disability too. Smith said he turned his key in the door and walked through the darkened living room—it was by then nearly midnight—then entered his bedroom, clicking on the light. Under his covers, wearing only a smile, was Juanita. Vera, she said, let her into his room when she explained he was out with her boys. She had something to give him to express her thanks for his being so kind to her kids. He asked her what that was. She said, Come here and see. Although he could not remember undressing, or the details of what he said—or might have promised her—Smith spent that night under the covers with Juanita Lomax.

  The next week he was in court.

  How he got there even he couldn’t rightly say. The police had picked him up on his job. Later he learned that Juanita had sworn on a stack of Bibles that he’d forced himself on her. Fortunately for Smith, this was not a case the judge wanted to hear. Juanita argued—as she had twice earlier in the same court—that he was obliged to make her an honorable woman. No, the judge said, he would have to do nothing of the kind. He lectured Juanita not to take up the court’s time this way again, but once they were outside again on the street, her waiting at the bus stop and crying, he stepped up behind her and said yes, he would marry her, if that was what she wanted.

  King lit a fresh cigarette off the one he had going. “Was that what you wanted?”

  Smith shrugged. “I guess so. I wanted them boys to have a father. I figured Juanita’n me could come together on that.”

  “I think you did an honorable thing.”

  “Naw,” Again, that satiric grin. “I was a fool.”

  He’d tried, said Smith, to provide for the boys and their mother, but maybe—who knows?—he didn’t try hard enough or just wasn’t meant to be married, or maybe he had an inverted Midas touch so that everything he brushed against transmogrified into crap. He gave up going to school, he got a second job with a moving company, and after two years he was able to get them into a bigger place, a housing project, in Altgeld Gardens, though it seemed like even with two jobs there was hardly anything left at the end of the month after he paid the bills, and somehow—he wasn’t sure how—what little was left he wound up putting on another bottle of whiskey because he needed that to wind down and get to sleep some nights; and there wasn’t much time either to go to church after he took a third job as a night watchman on the weekends, or to spend with the boys, who started cutting school and keeping bad company,
or with Juanita, who, he discovered, liked Colombian Gold as much as he did Johnny Walker (Black), so much so—according to one of his neighbors—that she slipped away in the afternoons when he was working to see another man who sold exactly what she wanted, though his neighbor said he had no idea how Juanita was paying for it, and when he confronted her with this the fights began, him accusing her of infidelity, her damning him for his drinking, their shouting going on sometimes all night, so loud other residents threatened to call the police, and her boys couldn’t bear that, naturally; they took to staying away from the place as long as they could, and after a time so did he, feeling thankful he was so mired in nickel-dime jobs that he had a way to escape that household, escape thinking about himself, escape the near hysteria he felt when he realized his life was a nightmare, a ghastly joke on everything he’d once dreamed of becoming. He rode the streets for hours some evenings after work, simply to avoid returning home, and it was on one such night in 1963, after cruising the South Side until he was nearly out of gas, that he realized he didn’t have the faintest idea where the hell he lived. Try as he might, he could not remember the address or recognize the street. Other things were gone too, whole quadrants of his memory. Unable to get home, he pulled up in front of a police station and told them his predicament, and they held him overnight for evaluation.