A cup of coffee clatters on the formica in front of me and I come to life again.
She is as old as her make-up says she is and her cigarette dribbles ashes onto the floor behind the counter. I assume she has already taken my order. I’m sitting on a stool, holding a local newspaper.
The Macon Telegraph. October nineteen fifty-seven.
There’s a huge mirror on the wall behind the counter on my end. I can see the entire room. Every table and booth are empty. There’s me and the waitress. And a short-order cook, a sullen ghost coated in ash-gray stubble.
At the far end of the bar is a man in a uniform. Thick neck, crew cut, a badge on his jacket and a weapon on his hip. He huddles over his coffee, tired and wet.
In the mirror and through the front window, some neon name for this place blinks over a dark state highway. Open All Nite, another strand of neon announces.
I’m in a truck stop diner in Macon, Georgia in nineteen fifty-seven. The clock above the jukebox says nine-fifty-five.
I see myself in the big mirror. I’m wearing a dirty blue jacket. My new face is rough, unshaven. I guess I’m forty or so. I have a cap on my head and a dark flannel shirt. I belong here. No one will look twice. That always makes things easier.
The room is flourescent-bright. There’s music on a radio somewhere. There’s the mortal sputter of a wounded exhaust fan over the grill, like a baseball card in bike wheel spokes. It’s too bright and too loud for this late at night. It’s too hot in here, even for such a cold, wet night, the place feels like a laundromat. I sip the coffee. It’s terrible.
The tables and chairs have been here since the Depression. So has the smell, a permanent cloud of fried potato, ozone and burned coffee. This room does not change with presidents or hit parades. It is dull and plain and defiant. This room belongs more to itself than most of the places I show up in.
Cook, waitress, cop. No one else around. Maybe someone else will happen by.
I’ll be taking one of them tonight.
I can take them any way I please. On a crosswalk, in a bathtub, off a church pew. With a sudden fall, a chunk of food in the windpipe, a violent fever. In a sudden sharp breath, in prolonged agony, in their sleep. Up to me. I’ve never known why. Slipping out of one night and into the next, nights like this, an unending blur of them, like white lines in headlights. I stopped counting the decades decades ago.
Today is always a tomorrow or a yesterday and I never know which it will be and I don’t care anymore.
I don’t think I’ve ever been here before, though the late Fifties are familiar. I love the Fifties, the early Sixties, this wonderful stretch of years when all that post-war character and fortitude was washed off the pavement by all that post-war money. Everything was suddenly farther apart. A swell of whispers and murmurs and taunts but no shouting yet. Young old white black but all the blood was hidden. In places like this. Nothing has come to a head yet; it’s all still simmering. Makes my work easier.
I never see their eyes. I sit where I sit and I watch. I watch them and I consider. I form opinions and judgments, like I was robed and sitting high on a bench, but I feel more like the fellow who runs the newsstand. Destiny? Two bits.
Then I pick one. Doesn’t matter who. Or why. I have to pick one. Can’t move on till it’s done.
Sometimes there’s a crowd, sometimes there’s just a couple of old women on a park bench next to me.
Whatever. I choose. Just one.
I passed on John Mason at Mystic River. Took an elderly Pequot woman who’d stopped the butt of a rifle with the side of her head. She’d have been burned alive otherwise. It’s not always that simple; one time, the last time I was anywhere near this place, I popped into a Klan meeting, and, well, you can imagine. Took me all night to pick. Decided to take the top dog, big fat mean sonofabitch, a pervert, too, and I took my sweet time. Took him slowly, writhing on the floor, in front of them all.
Flopping like a fish, he checked out right there on the cold church basement floor. Scared the bejeezus out of them all. One kid pissed himself. And once I was at a funeral visitation, late in the evening because the guy was beloved, and I was serving punch to mourners, if you can imagine anything more cruel. But that one turned out to be easy, pretty obvious. They’d had sixty-two wonderful years together, and she was shaking in terror at the prospect of going on without him, and everyone understood, and then there was that embolism spinning up from her lower ventral medullary. I took her quietly, in the ladies’ lounge. Just put her to sleep.
I never see their eyes. I look into them through other portals, through their gray voices and tics and the smells they smother in Amazing Grace and self-absorbed chatter. I don’t need to see their eyes. And they don’t need to see mine.
I light up as the waitress tops off my coffee. Her make-up is so thick I almost check my coffee to see if any of it fell in. As she shuffles off, checking to see if the deputy needs a refill, I take a casual peek inside.
She drinks, in little nips and swigs, all the time, morning to night. On her breaks. In the pantry. In the john. Since her uncle went at her when she was thirteen. After she hit her daughter. In the mornings, when she woke up late, after her daughter left. After she yells at her mother.
She’s hard and rude and unkind. She doesn’t pinch from the cashbox because she’s terrified of her boss but she thinks nothing of stealing from her mother. She resents the old bitch, imagines her dead. It gets her through the long hours.
The smells of frying meat cut through the odor of coffee and smoke. I don’t know if it’s for me or the cop. The cook flips the steak like a silver dollar. With a grimy handful of flour he conjours gravy.
I look him over and see him outside Lyon fifteen years ago, separated from his squad. I see him going into the barn. He almost trips over the half-conscious German, who couldn’t get out of the way if he wanted to. He relieves him of the few rations in his pack. He pushes his bayonet into the German’s chest for no good reason.
There’s a tiny lump in his left lung. He won’t see the Sixties. Maybe just spare him and have him now.
Maybe not.
There is a sudden heavy diesel growl and thunderstorm white noise followed by a long blast of cold. A spray of ice rain follows two lean figures into the diner. Blinking neon rakes the wet surfaces of their coats. A man and a woman. The door bangs shut. The man is carrying a small child. They are soaked, just from running in from their car. All the same they enter timidly, remaining as quiet and unobtrusive as possible. The child begins to speak, a tired, whining syllable. His father shushes him.
I don’t really notice, except to register that a small child has now entered into my field of choices. Then I remember where I am.
African-American? Black. No, too early. Negro.
They stand there in the doorway, dripping. The Negro looks up. Straight at the cook.
He is waiting. As he has waited many times before, for the words. The waitress stops. She doesn’t quite look at the Negro, and then she turns and doesn’t quite look at her boss.
I read my newspaper.
The deputy takes another drink from his mug and watches the radio. He keeps an eye on the situation in the big mirror. He isn’t going to say it. This is the cook’s place of business, after all. His problem. The deputy will back him up if need be.
The little boy stares around the room, uncertain. His father waits. For the words. It’s almost a ritual.
We can’t serve you.
We don’t serve color’d’s.
Y’all move along, boy.
Or some variation.
The cook looks at me out of the corner of his eye. I am oblivious, engrossed in the sports page. My indifference smooths the way for him. He turns back to the grill with a shrug. The place is empty except for me and the deputy, and neither of us gives a shit.
Unchallenged, the Negro and his wife and son ease silently into a booth as far from the counter as possible.
I won’t be taking the cook tonight.
The waitress confers covertly with the cook before impatiently marching to the table across the room with three glasses of water. There will be no more drink orders. She takes them no menu. After setting down the water, she turns and goes back behind the counter to the icebox. She takes out some cold sandwiches, unwraps them, puts them on a tray, and returns to their table. She sets down the tray without a word. Neither the man nor the woman responds. They take the sandwiches, paradoxically grateful.
The cook hands her a plate as she passes, a country-fried steak covered in gravy, with green beans and a roll. She deposits it in front of me, flashing an empty smile. As I shake pepper all over it I notice movement out of the corner of my eye. The father and boy quietly move from their booth to the short corridor past the diner entrance. Where the restrooms are.
I don’t watch the deputy watching the man and boy. I don’t watch him look over at the cook, and I don’t watch the cook stare back at him, pushing through his agitation toward anger. The waitress inadvertently breaks this up with another slug of coffee for the deputy.
I don’t really need to look the family over. But as the mother sits there, radiating anxiety at her momentary aloneness and vulnerability, I can’t help but notice that her heartbeat is a little off, her breathing, her –
Pregnant. Little girl. Not very far along.
At this moment, the deputy gives her a lazy examination. She’s young, mid-twenties. Not ugly. Skinny. No dirtier than any of the rest of us. I feel the vicious, scummy thought flash through his mind. If he said it out loud, she’d flee in terror.
Just for the hell of it, I peek inside.
He’s been a deputy in this county almost since the war, thinks he’ll be the next sheriff. This month alone he’s beaten three inmates in the local lock-up for no good reason. Doesn’t drink to excess; he’s just mean. Looked the other way when a young Negro woman just like this one was raped and beaten until she bled to death two years ago, in the alley behind the market downtown. The guys who did it were his poker buddies.
Might be the best thing to make sure this guy doesn’t make sheriff.
But I speak too soon. The diner door bangs open and a noise rushes in, or rather a pair of noises, stumbling and dripping and laughing. Morons. Local morons who receive instant recognition from the deputy and the employees. Recognition but no greeting. Perhaps my opinion reflects popular consensus.
Fresh meat.
They’re young, maybe old enough to have been in Korea. Not that the army would take these two. Grease and beer on legs. I can tell them apart from their breath alone, each equally distinct, equally potent at a dozen yards.
“Evenin’, Hollis! Hey, Royce!” one of them calls out as they stumble to the counter. The cook ignores them.
The deputy’s poker buddies.
“Jimmy,” the deputy mutters. His acknowledgment is more warning than greeting.
“Cassie,” the quieter of the two says in the direction of the waitress. There is darkness in his voice.
She doesn’t respond.
I watch them with interest.
“Whud you lookin at,” the waitress-greeter growls at me.
“Wellnow! Whuh we got here!” Jimmy cries out as he catches the father and boy trying to ease back into their booth unnoticed. “Hey!” he calls toward their table. “You! Niggah!”
He saunters over, mustering menace. He looks ridiculous. But menace he is. The father gathers himself around his glass of water, willing his family into invisibility without success.
“Niggah! Ah’m talkin t’you!” Jimmy barks, and he suddenly doesn’t seem so drunk.
The deputy reluctantly half-turns, just enough so he can see what’s going on.
“Aincha got no manners, boy?” He leans in close. The black man doesn’t flinch. He’s ashamed but there’s a cop in the room and his little boy is watching and he knows how it will go if he doesn’t just take the shame.
He’s not much older than Jimmy and his friend. Skinnier. But they’re drunk and he isn’t. He could probably take either one of them one-on-one and maybe both of them in their current state. But there’s a cop in the room. And there’s his wife. And his son.
“Aincha gonna innerduce me to yer lovely lady here?”
The father is at a loss. He opens his mouth, then closes it again. There is no safe response.
In a motion too quick and fluid for a drunk man, Jimmy grabs the father’s arm just under the shoulder and yanks him out of the booth, flinging him back. Maybe he was army. His partner appears behind the husband, who rises to stop Jimmy from grabbing his wife.
“Virgil, shut that peckerwood up,” the waitress mutters. She doesn’t want to see this.
Virgil puts the father in a hammerlock as Jimmy pulls the wife from the booth, laughing like an idiot. The boy is under the table in a flash. It’s clearly a learned behavior.
Jimmy wraps an arm around the woman. Her eyes are wet and brimming with cold fright. She is shaking.
“Whassay we go around the corner for awhile?” Jimmy says in a beery voice, and his mind lights up with happy flashes from the downtown market alley. He pulls her in the direction of the restroom. He’s not just playing with her. He means it.
The husband strains against Virgil’s grip. Virgil wrenches his arm upward. Way too far, way too hard. I can see satisfaction on his face. The rush rolls off him like slaugherhouse stench. He wants her even more than Jimmy does. And there’s something else there, something blacker than his rush. He wants to hurt her.
I feel the father’s shoulder. There is tearing, the wrong kind. It doesn’t break. But it will never quite heal. His groan is low and long. He’s biting his tongue clean out of his head, to keep from crying out; he doesn’t want to let the pain take him, he doesn’t want to scream. Not in front of his little boy.
“You got somethin’ fer me?” She whirls in Jimmy’s grip. He tightens in and reaches a grimy hand around the front of her dress, trying to reach in. “You got somethin’? Oh, I bet you do …” She has begun to sob.
I spear up some green beans. Couldn’t do anything about this if I tried. Not what I’m here for.
“Take it outside,” the deputy says in what I presume is his no-nonsense voice. He is uncomfortable. He’s had a long day and he’s been slogging around the county backroads for hours in pouring rain and he doesn’t give a shit what Virgil and Jimmy do. But it’s his job to keep them from making a mess in this establishment, so he’s torn between action and inaction, and the solution is to banish them from earshot so it won’t be his problem.
But they’re not taking it outside. It’s Noah’s Ark weather out there. The ultimate cold shower. So Jimmy resorts to a secondary entertainment.
“All’s I want’s a little dance!” He grabs her by the arm. “May I have this dance?”
And he drapes her like an overcoat over his arm, staggering in a circle. Tears are streaming down her cheek but she doesn’t make a sound. Virgil is aware, through his own stupor, just how idiotic Jimmy looks. He grins.
She steps on his foot. She doesn’t mean to. Panic streaks across her face.
“Aaoooww!!!” Jimmy howls like a dog and grabs his foot, hopping and then falling. He is back up too fast. She is terrified and her hands are covering her mouth. She whimpers.
“Goddam nigger bitch!” Jimmy slurs and he shoves her with all his might.
I feel her hit the tile, in the base of my spine.
There is a long, tiny scream in the dark ether, a savage rip of tissue, a neural shock too heavy for the fibers inside, a sudden rush of blood from one point of need to another. There is a rending, an unfixable tearing. The mother does not cry out. The father makes an angry syllable that is not quite a challenge. His self-control is wavering. Still the boy under the table. Virgil wrenches the arm again. Hard.
I look into the baby.
She’s going to lose it now. Not this minute, but probably within the next few hours. Possibly while they’re still on the road.
“That’s enough!” the deputy barks. He’s annoyed. “You had yer fun.”
Maybe I’ll pass on the deputy.
Wondering what comes next I stare at Jimmy and Virgil. I don’t look any deeper. I don’t need to see any more than I’ve seen already.
Jimmy moves toward the mother, on the floor.
“Oh, leave her be, Jimmy,” the waitress mutters through her cigarette. No love for her sister here that I can see. Don’t know that she cares so much what Jimmy does to a nameless black girl but she doesn’t particularly want to listen in. And if I felt the wife hit the floor, maybe she did, too. All Men Are Shits beats Send the Niggers Back. Jimmy and Virgil make her more uncomfortable than black does.
It won’t be her tonight.
Virgil would just as soon grab a stool and have a beer. His lust is darker, deeper, more controlled than Jimmy’s. Jimmy is anger. Virgil is rage. But Jimmy isn’t done and so Virgil can’t let the father loose.
Jimmy reaches down. She recoils. His eyes blaze up and he stands over her. I know what comes next.
So does the husband. He is bracing himself, cop or no cop.
The deputy finally acts, firmly, emphatically.
“Time you folks was movin’ on.”
The spell breaks. The whole scene unravels, and Jimmy and Virgil abandon their fun with a kick and a shove and a laugh, mounting counter stools with muttered remarks and blurred chuckles.
The father looks at the deputy. His expression is just barely subservient enough, just sufficiently compliant to not say what they both know he is thinking. Thoughts to which he is not entitled, as far as this badged redneck is concerned. The father says nothing. He fishes his son out from under the table. He pulls change out of his pants pocket and lays it on the table. He even leaves a nickel tip. His son is watching. Shaking, they retrieve their wet coats from the booth, their meal unfinished.
I never see their eyes.
But suddenly this little boy is looking right into mine. Right into me. I have an impulse to deny him, but I’m interested. I let him see my eyes, for a long moment. I wonder what he sees. From my point of view there is puzzlement in his face, at the weakness he is seeing in the father he knows to be strong; a cool chill spreading into him from his mother’s dull tremors; a dread that he doesn’t understand but which he already perceives to be appropriate, even routine. There is shame, a casual hand-me-down he can’t refuse, because there’s nothing else to wear. It fits him like an older sibling’s sweater. He will never shed it.
Jimmy and Virgil demand beer.
I do something I haven’t done in at least a century.
I ask if I can take them both.
I eat my steak as I await the answer.
The deputy turns on his stool impatiently, remembering his edict and wondering why he hasn’t yet heard the open-and-shut of the diner door. The father is helping the mother on with her coat. He is having trouble. His arm doesn’t work anymore. She is trembling. They aren’t moving fast enough to suit him. The deputy opens his mouth, on the edge of barking. But he’s really tired. He turns back around, disgusted.
I get my answer.
No.
I expect it. But I drink my coffee and survey the mirror, taking in the room.
I hear the frantic pulse of the daughter’s heart. At this particular moment, the mother’s is faster. No distress yet but the damage is done. I see her hand shake as she fumbles with the buttons of her son’s coat. I let in the father’s shoulder for an instant. The pain is blue-white. It throbs.
I don’t listen to Jimmy’s joke. Or Virgil’s snicker. The boy is watching me, curious, in the big mirror.
No is No.
But I can improvise.
I thin out the rubber of the right front tire on Jimmy’s pick-up truck as I sop up the last bit of gravy with a wad of white bread. Jimmy’s hyena laughter soothes me. I kill off the last of my coffee and sluice up the rainwater in a sharp curve on the state highway about three miles south. Just enough for a little hydroplaning.
Reliably, there’s a pair of crumpled dollar bills in my pocket. I toss them on the counter and saunter toward the door, zipping up my jacket, stepping through puddles, well-fed and warm inside. I still feel the boy’s eyes, like an itch. I leave Jimmy and Virgil to destiny.
No.
So I can’t take them both. I can still send them into the abyss together, into the banshee scream of metal and cold vertigo and bottomless white terror. But only one of them can die tonight.
The other one will wish he had.
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