Irving Wallace - The Man

Then, when she saw the door close, she started running.

Sally went blindly, crazily, drunkenly up the street, and at the intersection fell against the post of a stoplight, gasping for air. A cruising taxi slowed, and she hailed it.

Inside, disheveled, mascara on her cheekbones, she was still too choked to speak, unable to direct the Negro cabdriver, who was attending her with curiosity, where to take her. Again, there was nowhere to go. But the last unimpaired although dying impulse of her self-esteem began to form her utterance. Only in one place, in months, years, a lifetime, had she had a raison d’être . So, not she, for she was no more, but the surviving impulse within her gave voice to her suicidal mood.

“Take me to-to the White House,” she said thickly.

She tried to look at the domes and spires of this city of monuments which she had dirtied, but she could not see. She tried to smoke a cigarette, but dropped it. She tried to cry, but no tears came, for total wretchedness suffused her heart and dry lungs.

She could not breathe, that was the worst of it. The inside of the careening taxi was dank, foul, suffocating. She made out a patch of wooded area, the tree-bowered walks ahead, and she cried out, “Boy-lemme off there-right there-Jackson and H-lemme out!”

The taxi swung into H Street, and she shoved a bill into the driver’s hand, released the door and herself, and went weaving into Lafayette Park, past the frostbitten Steuben statue, past the wet vacant benches, into the park, deeper and deeper, going nowhere.

Her sickened, self-lamenting brain would not stay behind, let her be free, but remained in the cage of her skull, mercilessly haunting and chastising her. Down through the liquor haze, her relentlessly chasing brain showed her herself as she was: the ghastly scene in the Lincoln Bedroom, the overpainted woman on the Senate podium spouting her distorted adventures into Abrahams’ pitying face, the degraded sound of her name on that sorrowful black man President’s tongue today.

All at once, through the last trees of the park, she saw the incredible sight, and seeing what she saw, her heart and legs quickened at the strange madness of it, a nightmare, another nightmare, and again she was running, drawn to the brightness ahead like a moth batting against a light.

She came through Lafayette Park, bursting out on the sidewalk of Pennsylvania Avenue, and then stood paralyzed with disbelief at what was happening in the night.

To be seen through the iron grillwork fence, engraving itself in licking flames on the slope of the White House lawn, beyond the fence and before the North Portico, blazing in the night, burned a fiery cross.

There was more than the mammoth red glowing cross on the White House lawn, she could see. There were men around the cross, and in the White House driveway, and men clogging the open gate and straining past the guardhouse entrance. There were whooping young white men, rampaging hoodlums with incandescent torches, fleeing the lawn, then grappling and slugging it out and rolling on the grass and cement when caught by the white and colored White House policemen and Secret Service agents.

The pitched battle between the white marauders and hooligans who had incinerated a section of the lawn, now trying to escape, and the White House police trying to contain and arrest them, centered about the entrance gate. The convulsive sounds of men become animals, the sounds of clubs thudding on bone and flesh, of human wailing and cursing, of shotgun blasts in the sky and shrilling metallic whistles, made Sally recoil.

And suddenly, so suddenly, there was another sound-that of skidding rubber tires, angry brakes-and there was another sight-dozens of cars surging into Pennsylvania Avenue, erupting with shrieking men, black and white, most of them black, young and old, most of them young, all of them frenzied and armed.

More speeding and jolting cars were emptying out their vengeful cargoes of fierce Negroes or bellowing ofays and pinks. At once, the snarling white bullyboys who had branded the President’s House, and those rushing to reinforce them, and the embittered products of the capital’s squalid black slums that ringed the White House, who had had enough, enough, who would protect this one of their own, now as persecuted as they were, locked themselves into brutish pitched battle.

From the dark rim of the park, still standing detached, Sally Watson watched as if in a hypnotic trance.

The fighters milled through the street before her, striking and being struck, hurting and being hurt, vilifying and being vilified. And as she watched the race riot-the knives and scissors rising and falling, the broken bottles jabbing, the chains swinging, the hurled rocks flying, the brawling blacks and whites cursing, sobbing, shrieking with pain, the beaten men with slashed bloodied faces and smashed jaws loosened in their sockets, men whining, whimpering, going down-as she saw all of this demoniac barbarity, Sally slowly began to relate it to herself.

The seething caldron of humanity was not the result of her witchcraft, the product of her madness alone, Sally knew. The causes were wider, deeper, older than the provocation of her own evil. Yet it was, this wildness in the night, more her doing than that of any other person present.

She wanted to tell them this, tell one and all, tell them to stop doing this to one another and to do their cruelty to her.

This must cease.

They must punish her.

Unsteadily, tripping once, twice, she left the sidewalk and made her way into the swirling center of the riot.

Dimly, she was aware of the inflamed, gap-toothed, bleeding Negro faces raging around her. Dimly, she was aware of the howling, spattered-nosed white faces fulminating around her. Dimly, she was aware of policemen in uniforms and soldiers in fatigues, hammering right and left with their billy clubs and rifle butts.

The jagged edges of a bottle ripped through her coat. A rock struck her shoulder and sent her plunging to her knees. A heavy combat boot skidded against her mouth.

She crawled between legs, then staggered upright, begging them to stop, but no one heard, and she was buffeted and slapped, and then she felt the spittle and blood mingling down her face. Then, unaccountably, she begged them not to kill her, not to kill her, until she did what she must do. Pushing, tearing, fighting, beating her fists, she tried to free herself from the rioters.

And then suddenly there was room to run once more.

She looked about, trying to make out what was happening, what was breaching and parting the mob, and then she could see. Police cruisers and army trucks were surrounding the thoroughfare. Lawmen with their pistols and leashed dogs, khaki-clad soldiers with their carbines rattling gunfire overhead, helmeted firemen with their swelling and flooding hoses, swarmed through the battleground, dispersing whites and blacks.

She had wanted to reach the White House sentry box, but she could only reach the iron fence. She gripped the metal pickets to keep from falling, and then her legs gave, and she slid to the pavement.

There was the sound of feet, and then she heard her name and opened her eyes.

She blinked up into the worried features of a mulatto woman, blinked up with no recognition.

“Miss Watson-Sally-are you badly hurt?”

“I dunno-no-not-what’s your-”

Then, for Sally, recognition came. She had seen the mulatto face before, yes, every day, newspapers, television, Senate, yes, Wanda Gibson, Wanda Gibson, President’s lady.

“I’d better find you help-” Wanda Gibson was saying.

Sally closed her eyes, listening to the sirens, and then through stinging, puffed lips, she groaned, “No, Wanda-no-just get me home-please, please, take me to my father-you take me-I-I’ve got to tell him something, it’s important-help me-it’s important to both of us.”