Tucking the shaft of wood into the inside of his overcoat, Clarence picks up his cardboard suitcase, goes down the stairs two at a time, melds into the 4 A.M. darkness, rain slanting yellow in the streetlights of Harlem.
* * *
The feel of the wood in his hands and the way it crushes the skull, like opening up a cantaloupe with a single blow. McAuliffe slumps down against the fender of his smashed-up Buick. Clarence pounds again with the handle of the shovel. Some blood jets out and hits the corner of his eyepatch. He says to the corpse, “We forget we have blood till it comes from us, motherfucker.”
As he rounds a corner, running at full speed, a whistle is blown and he is knocked backward with a police nightstick. But the adrenaline is huge and unstoppable in him, and he rises from the ground with the shovel handle swinging. There is a mighty strength in his aim at the white cop’s jaw.
Hoofer McAuliffe and the white cop, in their sudden silence, are left with the unbelieving looks of men searching for the beat of their own gone hearts.
* * *
Clarence rocks between the cars of a southbound train. Adrenaline still shoots through his twenty-three-year-old heart. A cooling wind brings him relief, the heat unbearable in the rear of the train. He props his sinewy arms between the carriages and goes with the sway. Looking down at the bloodstains on his shoes, Clarence spits on each, smears the blood on the back of his dungarees.
It is morning and the world is heating up already as the train whips out of a tunnel and merges into the gray and green of New Jersey: two boys fighting on a heap of coal, ravaged cars on cinder blocks at the edge of pasturelands, warehouses, a church steeple reaching up in the distance.
The conductor takes his ticket. “Georgia?” he asks.
Clarence doesn’t reply.
“Change in Washington.”
Clarence stares at the railway man’s badge.
“Hey,” says the conductor, staring into Clarence’s face. “The words ‘Yes sir’ mean anything to you?”
No reply.
“Hey, uppity nigger, I’m talking to you.”
After a silence, he leans into Clarence’s face. “You goddamn sumbitches, all of y’all. You listening to me? You’re a goddamn uppity sumbitch. Understand?”
And in his weariness the young man says, “Yessir.”
When the conductor leaves, Clarence leans against the carriage, puts his cheek to the cool of the metal. He could fall right now, land on the tracks and lie there, snakelike, and wait for the segmentation of his body, let the wheels chop him into the tiniest of pieces, let his head travel a mile from his feet, slice his heart into two pumping pieces, scatter his toes to the different winds.
Looking down at the spinning gravel at his feet, Clarence imagines his mother coming home with the laundry as she was supposed to do. In the vision, she sits on the sofa beside her grandson and jokingly puts a finger in the child’s belly button. Then she goes back across the room to the kitchen, where she removes the cosy from the pot and pours herself a cup of tea. She drops the sugar cube in and lets the spoon whirl and says, “Ahhh, now that’s the medicine.” She brings the steaming cup across the room and sits on the edge of the chair and, smelling of tea leaves, she leans over her grandson and says, “He’s the cutest thing I’ve ever seen.”
Clarence lets the vision drift with the miles — grain elevators, smoke from slag heaps, whitewashed farmhouses.
He reaches Brookwood Station in Atlanta the following day, wanders way beyond Peachtree Street. The city is a conundrum of highways and overpasses. Sapped of all energy, he stumbles along, feet slapping languidly through puddles. On the outskirts of the city, a new concrete ramp reaches out into empty air. Men work on the ramp, dangling on ropes in midair. He watches their antics in the rain, then raises his head, sees the sun break out behind dolorous clouds.
In the afternoon he finds a Laundromat off Hunter Street, and the dark-skinned manager lets Clarence sit in the bathroom in his underwear until his clothes are ready. There is a newspaper on the floor. He picks it up. On the front page there is a report of a fourteen-year-old lynched in Greenwood, Mississippi, for whistling at a white woman. Maybe the boy whistled and maybe he didn’t. Maybe his body is still whistling. Maybe he will whistle forever. The face stares out at him from the newspaper, and Clarence’s hands shake.
After an hour the Laundromat manager hands his clothes around the door. Clarence finds the blood stains have left small copper patches on his dungarees. Dressed, he gazes long and hard at himself in a cracked mirror, then wanders across the street to a barbershop where a red-and-white pole swirls merrily. He gets his hair shorn down to the scalp and the black barber says to him, “There ya go, bud, good as new.”
Clarence looks at himself in the barber’s mirror. “Shave me,” he says.
The hot wet towel is placed on his neck and the cream is lathered on. The razor feels cool against his throat. He imagines it going deeper and deeper into his neck, right down to the tendons and the veins and beyond — when the veins are open and deep, his baby boy will swim down into his bloodstream, his groin, his brain, his heart.
The towel grows cool as the razor slides.
“Even better’n new,” says the barber, scraping the side of the razor on the hip pocket of his apron. Clarence leaves a small tip and wanders on, looking at his reflection in shop windows, seeing a person he doesn’t want to be.
Later that week, in the main post office on Forsyth Street, he searches for his own face on the WANTED posters but sees only the eyes of other men, all of them dark and grim, expectant of death. He walks the city streets of Atlanta, weeping.
* * *
Four policemen stand in Walker’s room as he sits holding Louisa’s hand. Louisa is shaking. She hugs her baby high, hiding a milk stain on her dress. Maxine and Deirdre lie sobbing on the beds.
“So,” says one of the cops, “where d’you think he might go?”
“No idea.”
“He won’t get too far with one messy eye. Not too many men running around with eye patches. You listening, Walker?”
“Mister Walker to y’all.”
“Where is he?”
Walker looks at the ceiling and remembers himself in the canoe when young, moving beneath the cypress trees that blocked out most of the summer light, reaching up to grab Spanish moss, his gnarled paddle making long swishes in the water, a silence to his movement, a quiet intent, a slight twist of the wrist at the end of each stroke to redirect the canoe, the paddle barely making a splash, bending himself into the work of repetition, the moss coming away softly in his fingers, the Okefenokee screaming around him.
The cop leans over and stares in Walker’s face. “We need you to tell us where you think your son might go. He’s in a high heap of shit.”
“Is he now?”
“We can help him.”
“I bet you can.”
“You’re asking for it, old man.”
Walker remembers rounding a corner, holding a flaming branch with the resin burning, seeing a huge sweep of white in the night air, a whole flock, and a solitary sentinel at the edge of the swamp, not moving.
“If you find out, you better tell us. It’s for his own good.”
“Sure it is,” says Walker.
“Don’t get smart with me, old man.”
A poisoned silence floats through the room.
“Where the hell is he?”
“I’d say he’s probably done made his way to California. He was always talking about California. Ain’t that right, Louisa?”
“That’s right,” she says.
“Little town by the name of Mendicino, I believe. He was always talking about Mendicino. Don’t know what it is attracted him there. But he was always yapping on about Mendicino. Sun and waves. He was partial to the idea of sun and waves.”