“Ah, hell,” he said again and peeled off his overcoat and holstered his gun and came down into the sump with the two of us, Castle and me.
The rain flooded down. It crashed around us. Two black boys and one white guard, bailing like crazy, buckets and barrels, and from the corner of my eye I was watching those fence posts. We were always talking about how high they went, those fence posts, high wood pillars connected by sheets of mesh with cyclone wire at the top, always talking about how high they were, but never how low they went. That was another question—how deeply those posts were rooted. I had never thought of it, but now the rain was turning the dirt to mud, and you could see where the roots of the posts were leaning, shifting in that mud, just a little, starting just a little bit to shift and lean.
“We’re doing it, fellas,” shouted Reedy, forgetting himself entirely. “We’re doing it! Keep on, now.”
But he was wrong. As furious as we were bailing we weren’t keeping up with it, not even close, not now with the rain filling up the blood hole as fast as we could pump it. Reedy was maybe working the hardest of the three of us, going faster and faster, until he was grunting and sweating, and I was watching the ground beneath that fence post getting muddier and muddier, the post coming looser in the mud. But Castle was watching Reedy, who wasn’t just grunting but moaning now, who had dropped his bucket and collapsed onto his knees, splashing and falling into the mud and lurching forward.
“Oh, Lord,” he said, and then something else that wasn’t words at all. Just a long animal groan.
“Mr. Reedy,” I shouted, and he said something like “Get—” and then stopped talking. His mouth hung open, frozen, like the word had thickened in his throat and stopped him up.
Get help. Get someone. Get me up. But Reedy was past words. His face was dark, choked, and red; all his body’s blood had come up into his cheeks and his neck, and I was wet with fear and the rain in wild sheets. Reedy staring at us helpless, arms flapping, eyes wide, like a great fish.
“It’s okay now, sir,” I said, talking automatically, and I stepped toward him through the waist-high thickness of blood water, and Castle grabbed me hard and pulled me close and slapped me. Castle’s big eyes, wide in the rainstorm, Castle shaking me by the arms—by both arms.
“Turn around, boy,” he said. “Turn and run to that fence. Go!”
I did it—I ran to the fence and bent to its foundation and was tugging at it when I heard the shot behind me, one hollow shot swallowed in the rain. I had the post up already. I had the chain down.
“Come on!” said Castle, still holding Reedy’s pistol, and we ran. There was no time, but I looked back once and saw Reedy’s body as it slipped down and was swallowed in all that blood.
Part Two
South
Obviously there will be disagreements within any such body, and the United States of America does not shrink from disagreement. But every nation has her traditions, and America shall not relinquish its traditions as a prerequisite to participation in any institution.
—Secretary of State Henry Kissinger at a press conference to announce the United States’ withdrawal from the United Nations, December 11, 1973
Good riddance.
—Sir Colin Crowe, British permanent representative to the United Nations, quoted in the London Times, December 12, 1973
1.
We drove south all day Monday, Martha and me.
We drove in a white Toyota with Wisconsin plates, an Airlines junker that had been waiting in a Southside parking lot, just where Cook had said it would be, with the keys duct-taped in the wheel well. The Toyota rattled at speeds over sixty miles per hour, so I kept it at fifty-five all the way through southern Indiana and the western part of Kentucky. Route 65 down there behaved more like a country two-lane than a big interstate, winding and gentle, running like a brook. We drove up and then down the Blue Ridge Mountains, into the clear blue air of Tennessee. The ugly weather burned away as we went. We passed red barns and green fields and acres of swaying corn. The sky was all porcelain blue and gentle white clouds, the whole curve of heaven like painted pottery. Every town had its steeple and its water tower, and the shoulder was dotted with wooden signs advertising pies and antiques.
It all made me weary and anxious. I took it all, all the sugar-sweet beauty of the sky and the charm of the landscape, as a taunt: a haughty sneer from the venerable southland as we drew nearer. Purty down here, ain’t it? Well, come on, now, ’n’ sit a spell…
We listened to Michael all the way down. We started with Thriller, then we jumped back in time, did Ben, MJ with the big Afro on the cover, looking mournful.