I suppose I ought to have known something like that was coming. It was the next step. I could hear the roar, the power coming down. You have to understand, it was July and hot and they were talking, we were all talking, in the coffee bars in the Village, in church halls, in the (inside) pages of our own paper, about The Problem of the South. They were killing Negro boys down there. Still killing Negro boys, despite all the so-called advances. Reckless eyeballing was the name of the crime, and it could get you hung or burned alive or tied to an engine block and thrown in the river. The NAACP were saying something had to be done. The White Citizens Councils were threatening blood and fire. And Chester was proposing to go into Negro neighborhoods in the Delta and knock on doors to ask if they had old records. It did not seem wise.
I was not what you would call a political person. There were plenty around, the earnest folk fans, the gloomy girls with the turtlenecks and the French books, but I wasn’t part of all that. I couldn’t look anyone in the eye, let alone speak at a public meeting. Don’t get me wrong, I believed in civil rights. I thought every man ought to be able to live his life. But handing out flyers and signing petitions didn’t seem to make much difference. Sure, I spent all my time listening to the blues, but one of the reasons I liked those old songs, those disembodied voices rising up out of the past, was because they were a refuge from the world. I didn’t want them contaminated by current affairs. I had no idea what Chester thought about it. He never passed comment on the condition of the American Negro.
But I also knew I had to say yes. Some things are just fate; you can’t step out of their path. I told my boss I was taking a week’s vacation and borrowed a car from an aunt on Long Island. It was an old wood-paneled Ford wagon, the kind everyone called a “woody.” It looked like a tool shed on wheels, but it ran OK and the old lady didn’t mind me borrowing it. I’d drive, Chester would pay for gas, and we would split other costs. That was our arrangement.
When I picked up Chester from his building, I was surprised to find him dressed in his suit, as if he was on his way to work. I thought he was crazy, but as it turned out, like so many things with Bly, his appearance had been carefully thought through. In the places we visited, he was often taken for a minister of religion, an assumption he encouraged by carrying around a large black Bible. People would address him as Reverend and let him into their houses. Chester didn’t have much you could call a sense of humor, but he promoted this deception as a huge prank, a cunning and hilarious practical joke. He wedged his suitcase in the trunk, alongside a portable record player and a crate of vanilla seltzer, brought along because he “didn’t trust the drinking water.”
We drove out of the city, heading south.
WE DRIVE OUT OF THE CITY, heading south, Leonie a passenger in her own expensive convertible, me running my fingers over the soft white leather trim on the wheel as the New Jersey Turnpike slides by. Walnut and lacquer. Adjusting the tone on the eight-track. I’m a man, yes I am. Crossing into Pennsylvania, then Maryland. The low sun dazzling me as we barrel into the heat of a long-ago summer evening.
—So, I say. What do you want to hear?
There is only so long you can feel afraid before something cracks. We laugh too hard at things that aren’t funny and she tells me another story about how people don’t see her, just her name. I understand, I say, as if I too have a famous family name that obscures my reality as a person. It does not seem important what I say. I can be as daring as I like. I am in the moment. What surrounds that moment is fuzzy and I don’t feel like looking at it directly, but I am inside completely and it is beautiful. This bubble! Our reconciliation!
How long ago? With each mile we are heading further into the past. This is what I made her understand, that night in her apartment. That we had to repeat something, to go back to meet the force that is reaching out towards us from history.
—It’s the only way.
—The only way to what?
—To save Carter. To save ourselves.
We already did this. We already traveled down this road. Now we drive on, laughing, forgetful, and only when we pull over do we touch reality, set foot on the land we are skimming over. Truck stops and little roadside settlements: post office and diner and general store. Early in the evening we cross the line into West Virginia and pull in for dinner at a Chinese buffet restaurant, a great barn off the highway with Formica tables and steaming metal trays of food. A family walks in. The man is a peacock, with long hair trailing over his shoulders, the brim of his camouflage cap carefully shaped. He is trailed by a stout brown wife and three kids. Down from the mountain for sweet and sour pork, white people as exotic to me as any Papuan tribe.
I have been up twice to heap my plate. Leonie is not eating anything, because of MSG. She has a can of club soda and a straw. Her mood has darkened. The mountain family sit down at a nearby table. One of the kids, a little boy of two or three, gets down off his chair and begins to wander around. Suddenly Leonie buries her head in her hands. This is her rhythm. For hours at a time she will make conversation, talk about her friends, movies and books, the things people talk about. Then for a while she will seem distracted, lost in her thoughts, and I know that sooner or later it will come—as it does now—a sudden pang of grief for her brother that racks her body with convulsions. Electromagnetic grief. Mesmeric grief, raising up her corpse and dropping it down again. The little boy watches her, the shoulders lifting, the head thrown back, eyes, mouth and nose streaming fluid. When it is over, she collapses forwards like a doll.
—What you doing, the little boy asks.
I get up to comfort her but she waves me back to my seat. She sucks in air, wiping her nose on the sleeve of her shirt.
—Don’t treat me like I’m sick. I’m not sick.
So I drop back onto my chair and we eat. At least, I eat and she watches me, toying with the straw in her can. The sorrow has passed like bad weather, leaving a few traces, blotchiness, a redness to her eyes. She wears an increasingly skeptical expression, the look of someone who needs to be on her guard.
—You are such a weird guy. That night in my apartment you were sobbing, but all day you’ve been putting out this whole friendship is forever vibe. Like we’re on vacation. You were terrified and now all of a sudden it’s spring break. Do you see how insane that is?