Charles Johnson - Dreamer

“No!” I was leaning over him, unclear how I’d climbed back into the moving car. “You need a doctor.” Blood spread on his white dress shirt. The seat cushions. On me. The back of the car was peppered with bullet holes. The floor littered with hot casings. The air thick with the sweet, pungent odor of gunpowder. The blood in back was enough for a butchering.

Smith, holding his side, tried to sit up, then stopped. “Ho, Lawd! That hurts! ”

“We have to find a hospital—”

“Been in too many hospitals. I don’t wanna see no more hospitals long as I live.”

“How about a mortician? That’s what you’ll need if we don’t get you to Cook County.”

“Fine, but no hospitals.”

Already his eyes were starting to slick over, to blur. He was slipping into shock. “Do like I said. I been shot at before. That jacket’ll stop the bleeding.”

“Matthew!” Though she was yelling, I could barely hear her. “We have to get him to a doctor.”

“Do what he wants. It’s his life.”

She made a sound not to be deciphered.

I tore off my jacket, tied it around the entrance and exit wounds. With my palms I kept applying pressure until the bleeding subsided. By then, Smith had passed out. But before he lost consciousness, he’d been thinking more clearly than Amy or I. Hospitals were risky. There would be too many questions. Too many police. Too many reporters saying the minister had been shot by … another black man. How the Chicago campaign’s opponents would love that . We needed time to regroup. Amy headed for the freeway. I thought she was about to go into shock, barreling down Route 51, driving on adrenaline. She squeezed one fist into her mouth to keep from crying. Outside Champaign, she stopped to give me the wheel when the image of the pistol firing repeatedly rose up unbidden in her mind, forcing her to the side of the road. She cut off the engine and sobbed. “I never thought this would happen. I can’t do this. I can’t.”

I climbed into the driver’s seat, though I was hardly in better shape than she (sounds still came to me flattened, as if from far away). In Pinckneyville we stopped for bandage compresses, gauze, items to fight off infection. “Listen,” I said, “if not for Chaym, that could have been Doc tonight.”

Shortly after daybreak I pulled up in front of the farmhouse. We were tired. Wired. Yet even before we reached the porch, shouldering Smith on both sides, I sensed that something at the Nest was wrong. Footprints not our own led up the front stairs. The door, which I’d locked, was cracked open. Cautiously I kicked it with my heel, and we entered disheveled rooms that looked as if they’d been visited by the Israeli Mossad, followed by the Tontons Macoutes. I thought something in the house had exploded. Clothing was tossed everywhere. Files confettied the floor. Bookshelves were overturned. Cabinets and Mama Pearl’s tables were broken. Amidst this wreckage of her grandmother’s belongings, Amy was silent. And not to be consoled. She looked round the room with something like resignation, slowly and quietly uprighting a steeple-backed chair topped with a wooden fleur-de-lis, and I knew at that moment we had lost her. I got Smith into bed. After washing his wound, I took the first watch, standing vigil over him all that day as he slept.

Quite possibly, that was the longest day of my life. The old man was a bad shot. Only one round had struck Smith, the bullet slamming into his left side with the force of a sledgehammer, then punching out his back. He’d lost a great deal of blood and lay so still on the stained bedsheets I was afraid he was slipping away. No, that wasn’t right. As I sat beside him, checking his bandages, I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was not Chaym but King dying right before me, and all because I’d frozen, paralyzed by my own fear, when I saw the old man draw his pistol and pump round after round into the car. If he died, it was my doing.

Once or twice I thought he’d stopped breathing. Then, just as I was about to run from the room to wake Amy, wind lifted his chest again and clouded the mirror I held close to his mouth. Still, he did not answer when I whispered his name; he remained as remote and unreachable as my mother had been when she was dying in a hospital bed at Cook County and I stayed beside her cooling body night and day, holding her left hand, listening to her breaths come at ever slower intervals. I’d prayed. Bent over her, gripping her hand, I begged the god she’d given me when I was a child to return to me whole the only person in this world who’d cared if I lived or died, but He did not accept the offering of my tears, and she was taken from me, I was orphaned, and whatever flame of faith she’d nurtured in me flimmered out forever. Though I owed Smith my life, I could rekindle none of that. My prayers rang empty in my own ears. Hollow rinds. Form without feeling. And in this fallen condition I could neither pray for his recovery nor believe, if he died, that any part of his personality — his consciousness, his well-stocked mind — would survive the promised failure of the flesh.

Later that night, I walked unshaven, aching in every fiber, into the kitchen, tasting the film on my teeth, so tired I felt even Lena Home couldn’t keep me awake. My eyes ached. I found Amy seated at the table, her lips compressed, toying with something she’d fished from the littered front room. I sat down across from her, picking up the object she pushed toward me. A broken flower vase. Turning it over, I felt my heart tighten. Taped inside was a tiny monitoring device no bigger than a thumbnail.

“I disabled it,” said Amy. “Matthew … we need to talk. I thought I was strong, but … I’m just not cut out to be in the trenches.”

“You are strong.”

“No way.” She leaned her head left, the way she did when thinking. “I’ve never seen anyone shot before. Oh, on TV, sure. Or at the movies. But the real thing? I don’t want to see that again. I can’t handle it. If you or he had died …” She waved away the thought. “I know we’re being watched. Maybe right now. And I can’t take that. After Chaym is on his feet, I’m going back to the city. You two can stay here. I’ll talk to Mama Pearl about it.”

“Any chance I can change your mind?”

“None. I’m sorry.”

“Suppose Doc calls us? Can you stick it out until the first of the year?”

“Maybe … No promises. I want to get on with my life.”

My tongue, that traitor, flew ahead of my thoughts. “I’ll miss you.”

“I think I’ll miss you too.” All at once, her eyes crinkled and she laughed for the first time in days in that light, effervescent way I’d loved from the first day I met her at school. With her forefinger Amy pushed her glasses back up the bridge of her nose, and looked at me as if for the first time. “I didn’t know you very well when we started this. Mama Pearl used to always tell me not to judge a book by its cover. I guess that’s really true for bookworms, eh? I mean, Matthew, you talk like a damned thesaurus. You don’t think like anybody I know. At first I didn’t know what to make of that. Now I know that’s just you. And I know something else too. If I was ever in trouble, I’d want you around. Maybe if you get back to Chicago, you could give me a call.”

“Amy,” I said, “I understand how you feel. What happened last night, with that lunatic we picked up, and the way this place was broken into since we left is … Call you, did you say? ”

“Yes. Call me.”

“I … I will.”

Oh, but Matthew—”

“What?”

“Get rid of the pencil-holder in your shirt pocket, okay?”

Yet Smith’s recovery was not all that concerned us. Upstate in Chicago, where the marches continued, King’s highstakes chess game against that Belshazzar, Daley, grew more daring and dangerous, culminating in a promise to lead his legions into Chicago’s no-man’s-land for the Negro: Cicero. Richard Ogilvie, the Cook County sheriff, rightly called this “suicide”; he begged the minister to reconsider, but the possibility for bringing to the surface the real face of urban racism for all to see was too great for King to pass up. Not now. Not after Daley’d maneuvered through the courts and Judge Cornelius Harrington to limit the frequency, size, and duration of the demonstrations. And besides, this was the sort of fight his militant detractors were spoiling for — going head-up against the American Nazi Party’s George Lincoln Rockwell and every other fascist faction that flew to Chicago to join forces with enraged whites in ethnic enclaves. As the day, August 28, for the assault on Cicero approached, swords were gleefully drawn on both sides.