CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
"Well, can you tell me why it’s worth it?" Wade
asked. His hands were at his sides, but doubled up into fists. His face
was one of the most intense I have ever looked into.
"Wade, I could give you a lot of good reasons, but that
won’t be enough," I aid. "All of us lefties are almost too able to make
speeches for anything. You go to the convention, you don’t see one super
star making a great speech and carrying along a huge audience. You see
lots of people on all sides of all the questions able to make a very good
speech. Johnny sure can. But I’m learning that no one should be convinced
of anything just because someone else can make a good argument for it.
You won’t be really convinced if that’s all I can give you - not for long.
Your brother and Jean believe what they believe because they’ve done things,
they’ve had a bunch of experiences, they’ve lived a whole lifetime in the
last two years, since the war got big - and they’re not twenty yet. Bump
who’s out there with Johnny and Jean told me once that people have to learn
by moving. You have to find out for yourself."
"I guess I’ll have to talk to Johnny tomorrow and
then I’ll talk to you later," Wade said. He turned around and walked out
the door and slammed it behind him.
"He’s so angry and troubled," Hope said. "He could
have knocked you flat."
"But he still has a question," I said. "What about
you, Hope? Do you think it’s worth it?"
"I might as well," she said. "Zack and I don’t have
anything to go back to. You know what our father is like. Our mother stays
with our father just because he makes a good pay check. They don’t really
have any use for me. It’s just right now I’m supposed to be too young to
get away from them - but I did."
I kissed her and said, "I’ll be back in a little
bit." I walked back to Brandy’s grocery and bought two cans of frozen orange
juice and a small sack of tomatoes. Then I went over to the Corner Grill’s
men’s room for the first time in my life I bought a rubber. I put it in
my back pocket. I didn’t know what was going to happen, but I wanted Hope
to be protected. Thinking of protection, I remembered back when I was at
the office in Jeff Davis, a big southern city. I was glad to be in a place
where I could bathe my whole body. The people I lived with in the little
town northwest of Jeff Davis didn’t have running water in their shack.
And when I walked a few blocks away to use the bath tub, the lady there
wouldn’t let me draw a film of water - just enough to cover the bottom
of the tub. She was too poor to afford for me to run up her water bill.
So most of the time I stunk like a goat.
So I had a fantastic bath as the staff apartments
in Jeff Davis. And then I was hanging around the office with Sam and Ellie
Margolis, a married civil rights worker couple. We were rapping with a
NEW YORK TIMES reporter who offered to take us over to the black barbecue
place next to the office and buy us a meal. We took him up on it with an
enthusiasm that must have surprised him. We sat there in the restaurant
in the black slums of Jeff Davis, in hot heavy air only weakly stirred
by an electric fan. After we had gorged ourselves on two barbecue sandwiches
each, Ellie looked at Sam and all of a sudden her long thin pale face went
from enjoyment to anxiety. They were going back to their civil rights project
in the boondocks the next day.
"Oh God, Sam, don’t let me get pregnant down here!"
she cried out with an intensity that startled the TIMES reporter and me
both. She was so very thin, so pale. A few months later Sam’s body was
found with a bullet through the head.
I got back to Harry’s. I put the orange juice and
the tomatoes in the refrigerator. Hope was still watching me. "You better
try some of this stuff along with the peanut butter sandwiches and coke,"
I said. "Wade’s right about that one."
But the thought was in the back of my mind - if
we were together for a long time, how much good food could we buy? When
would there not be a war to oppose or an Organization that never paid more
than $20 a week?
We played Monopoly some more, but it wasn’t nearly
as much fun as it had been that afternoon. Finally Harry came in from work
early with Marrah Brett. Marrah was sort of Harry’s girlfriend. She had
followed him to three different college towns where he worked in restaurants.
She never lived in the same house with him and she
had plenty of boyfriends on the side, but they kept getting back together.
She was twenty-six and looked a lot older.
She brightened up and called out, "Hey Dale!" when
she saw me. I had met her before I ever knew Harry. She had hung around
the fringe of the Organization Chapter in another college town where I
visited doing campus traveling.
"Why did you come home so early?" I asked.
"I need to see the monkey and smoke a little and
get back into a good head!" Harry said. He uncaged Harry the monkey who
squealed joyfully and climbed up on his shoulders.
"I’ve had it with that place I work!" Harry said
as the monkey picked through the wisps of red hair that fringed his bald
spot. He and Mariah both collapsed on the couch and the monkey jumped jump
on the back of the couch.
"THE CHAIN!" Mariah said in a contralto bellow.
"One week of being a waitress for THE CHAIN was enough for me!"
"Like there’s one old woman who works in the kitchen
with me," Harry said brushing the monkey’s tail away from his glasses.
"She brought in her own home-made salad dressing. Thought it would liven
things up a little."
"And the manager chewed her out." Mariah said, pulling
a bag of pot out of her purse and rolling a joint, "He says, ‘sorry but
THE CHAIN only uses its own CHAIN salad dressing!"
"So now the salad dressing tastes shitty
like everything else!" Harry added.
Mariah lit the joint and took a deep toke and handed it to Harry
who took an equally deep one and passed it on to Hope and me down on the
floor. This pot had a cool, sweet fruit-like taste.
"I tell you, people just don’t appreciate decent
food!" Harry said as Mariah passed him the joint again. He took a drag
and passed it on to Hope. He was facing the ceiling with his eyes closed
and the back of his hand on his forehead like for a headache. "Tonight
we ran low on spaghetti sauce, so I took some coffee grounds and mixed
them with ketchup and Russian dressing and dumped them all in the spaghetti."
"And I was outside waiting for Harry to get off
work," Mariah said. "Everybody just ate their spaghetti like that was the
way it was supposed to be! Nobody even noticed!"
"Well, it tasted like everything else in THE damn
CHAIN!" Harry said. The other Harry bounded back and forth on the back
of the couch. "Now that pizza place I worked when I first met Mariah, I
made sure they served good food because they weren’t a CHAIN. I brought
in a lot more money than I stole from them."
Most of the few times I have really enjoyed pot
have been around Harry’s. By now we were all really flying, not saying
much. I was holding onto the throw rug like it would keep me from falling
off the floor.
Then the pot started to wear off. Mariah stood up
and grabbed Harry by the wrist. "Come on!" she yelled, pulling him towards
the bedroom. Harry stood up and put his arm out and the monkey wrapped
himself around it. Then he put the monkey in the cage and closed the door.
"Unwept, unhonored and unballed!" he wailed aloud.
I took Hope’s hand and helped her get to her feet.
We walked out unto the screened porch. She went ahead of me up the ladder
through the hole in the porch roof to the spot where she had the sleeping
bag spread out. We laid ourselves down on the bag under the stars.
Alcohol is supposed to get you all carried away,
burning with passion - although often it takes away your power to actually
fulfill that passion. Marijuana just makes everything very slow and fuzzy.
I was lying there beside Hope shaking my head and blinking as the marijuana
wore off while she stroked the hair growing out of the back of my neck
and it stood up.
I took off my clothes and she started taking off
hers. It was all pretty slow. It seemed to take years. When she got everything
off she got up against the hair on my chest like she just wanted to be
warm. I kissed down her neck to her breasts - her breasts were very small.
I went on further down between her legs. Her opening was very small. Sandra
who I had hitched with for so long with had not been a virgin - Hope was.
I could just tell that if I tried to do anything about that, it would hurt
her a lot at first. I would have to be very committed to her - rubber in
my pocket or not. I had such a hard on I was sore. All I could do was put
it between her thighs and keep rubbing myself against her until I had a
climax. Then I licked and caressed her down there until she sighed - like
she was getting some pleasure. All this time we made very little noise.
Then we heard all the ghastly moans and squeals from the room where Harry
and Mariah were. I lifted up my head from between her legs and we both
started giggling. I pulled the sleeping bag around us and we fell asleep
in each other’s arms.
When we woke up the early morning was still dreamlike.
A female cardinal with bright red head and dull brown wings was whistling
in a cottonwood tree next to the house. I looked into Hope’s eyes - they
seemed so large and beautiful that morning. We kissed and it was like the
healthy taste of fresh green leafy things again.
We put our clothes back on and just sat there listening
to the cardinal’s song while the morning was still fairly cool until we
could hear Harry moving around in the kitchen. We walked across the roof
and went down the ladder onto the screened porch and walked into the kitchen.
Harry had coffee boiling and oatmeal cooking.
"Do you all want some coffee?" he asked.
We both said "no". But we were hungry. He spooned
us big bowls of absolutely tasteless oatmeal - there was no sugar at his
place - and we gobbled the oatmeal down. Then Mariah came staggering out
of the bedroom with her clothes all askew. She didn’t want any oatmeal,
but she downed six cups of coffee rapidly.
Harry went and put a lot of sunflower seeds in the
cage for his monkey and then he got all the rest of us playing Monopoly.
He started telling all his stories about the restaurant where he worked
like how he always kept a pot of cream of peyote soup on the stove there
for himself so he could cope with the place.
"About twelve buttons of peyote," he said. "And
a few cans of Campbell’s tomato and Campbell’s mushroom. It’s not just
for me, but for if a friend visits. Very tasty - and it’s nourishing too."
We played on and on and listened to Harry all morning.
Around noon, Hope went to the refrigerator and fixed us all peanut butter
sandwiches and glasses of orange juice. While we were sitting around consuming
this little lunch, there was a knock on the door. Harry opened the door
and there stood Johnny and Jean Collins. When they saw me, they ran in
and hugged me and I could feel the tears from Jean’s eyes warm on my neck.
They were very blond young people, tall and graceful
and they would have both been beautiful except they were so gaunt. Both
of them were crying a little but they both had big smiles. One of the greatest
things about our Movement was having so many people glad to see each other.
"You know," Johnny said. "After Jean got out of
the hospital we went back to the staff apartments. Laura and all the other
Regional Office people were there and made a big circle around us. I looked
around that circle and thought, "I don’t care if they all work for the
FBI, I love ‘em!"
"What about Bump?" I asked.
"I’m worried about him," Jean said, shaking her
head. "More worried about him than about us. We - I just know someday,
someday we’re gonna have another baby," and she bent her head and started
crying again. Then she looked up quickly, "Bump!" She went on, "I don’t
know about him. I’ve never seen anything like how he was for a while after
I got out of the hospital."
They both looked around at the other people in the
room and I introduced them to Hope, Harry and Mariah. Jean found Harry
the monkey in his cage and said, "Oh, wow, is it all right if I let him
out?"
"Sure!" human Harry said, "he loves visitors." Jean
let the monkey out and he climbed on her shoulders.
"Does anybody want some Coca-Cola?" I asked.
"God, no!" Jean said. "That’s all we had at the
Regional Office. I got the first cavities I ever had in my life there.
Today we had fried chicken and mashed potatoes and gravy over at Johnny’s
parents - the first decent meal we’ve had in months."
"What about orange juice?" I asked.
"OK!" she answered. "Anything as long as it’s real
food."
I poured some orange juice and brought glasses of
it in for Johnny and Jean who were sitting on the couch with monkey.
"Wow!" Johnny cried out, pointing at the half-eaten
peanut butter sandwich in Hope’s hand. "Regional Office food! Excuse me
sister, but peanut butter was all the dinner we had for so long," and he
laughed and showed strong white teeth under a proud hawk-like nose.
"But let me tell you-uh, what’s your name again,
sister?" Johnny asked.
"Hope Vann," Hope replied.
"People like you, Hope, so many teenagers are coming
by our office to help out this summer," Johnny said to Hope. "In Cuba they
name years: The Year of Agriculture, The Year of Literacy...and so on.
This year can be The Year of High School Revolutionaries!" He raised his
fists over his head, grinning, almost back to his old self.
"I’m already out of high school," Hope said with
a little smile that somehow showed the faintest traces of doubt around
the corners of her mouth.
There were many regional office stories from Johnny
and Jean and Harry and Mariah threw in some of their restaurant stories.
But Hope stayed quiet all that afternoon.
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