All Over but the Shoutin' (19 page)

A man, all but invisible in the dark, sat at a picnic table a few feet away. He approached them once to ask for a cigarette, and again, later, to ask for a match. The third time he walked up he held a gun. He ordered them to stand up, then ordered both of them to take off all their clothes.

His name was John Sparks, described as a sexually obsessive man, addicted to alcohol, who had failed at everything he had ever tried, junior college, jobs, relationships. He was kicked out of the Air Force. He felt he never fit in anywhere, in anything.

The two young people were at his mercy. He fondled her, then him, then her again. When she screamed, he slapped her, hard, across the face. Mark, trying to keep his temper under control, trying to stay alive, finally lost control. He told Sparks that, before he touched Donna again, he would have to shoot him. It was not foolish bravado, but genuine fury. He expected Sparks to shoot him. Sparks did.

The first bullet drilled into his jawbone, the second sliced through his neck and his spinal cord. Then, Sparks turned the gun on Donna, shot her twice in the head, and ran.

Police found them about two hours later on a routine patrol. She would die. He lived, but now he turns the pages of books with a stick in his mouth. He is paralyzed from the neck down.

The next day, I awoke to see the springs acrawl with police, not just the locals but the county and the Alabama Bureau of Investigation. Word spread from house to house, the neighbors describing in detail the violence but leaving out, for decency’s sake, the other details. It was the next afternoon when the officers came to the house.

We were not alone. They rounded up everyone who lived close to the scene who was either poor, black, had a criminal record, or was retarded. I remember seeing some poor fool with Mongoloid eyes sitting, confused and frightened, in the lobby of the building at Jacksonville State the investigators were using as a command post. It is a point of fact that they did not question the rich kids who lived near.

It lasted just a little while. They asked me where I was and what I was doing. I told them I was watching television. They wanted to know exactly what I was watching, and what it was about. I said I was watching
The Deadly Game
, with Lloyd Bridges, I believe.

Then, they pissed me off.

They asked me who else had been around and I said my brother, Mark, and they asked me what kind of car he drove. And I said a Nova, burgundy red with a white stripe and a white or black top. I couldn’t precisely recall. “What is it, black or white?” the investigator said, thinking he was Starsky or Hutch. “Don’t you even know the difference between black and white?” It went on like that for a few minutes, but I guess I didn’t fit the pervert profile, and they let me go. Mark had to go through the same thing, but it was nothing like what our mother was going through.

She was frantic. She knew we had not done anything, but for a woman who had grown up at the mercy of rich folks, that did not mean a damn thing. It terrified her because she thought the police would hang the crime on one of us purely because they could, purely because we were who we were.

That Sunday, I had worn a pair of old sneakers to the river to swim in. The backwaters of the giant man-made lakes of Alabama are made by dams, which flood the low country and cover over everything from barbed-wire fences to whole houses. Only a fool walks on that bottom barefoot. I came home with my shoes filled with muck and gravel, and left them on the front porch.

My momma saw them, and panicked. She had heard that the killer, when he ran, crossed the stream. She was afraid the investigators would see my shoes, and think it was me. She buried them in the backyard, under a pile of trash.

J
ohn Sparks found Jesus in prison. He preaches about hell and salvation at the tiny Uriah First Baptist Church in Monroe County, way down in south Alabama. People say he preaches a good sermon down there. He tells his congregation that he is living proof that religion can save anyone.

I reckon so.

I
knew I was never in any real danger of being blamed for that terrible thing. But it still makes me mad enough to shake, sometimes, because it was so evil, so vile, because I was forced to have any connection to it all. But, it did one thing for me. It confirmed, fiercely, my notions of class, and power. It was not so much a matter of having power to do a thing as it was having the power to stop things from being done to you. My momma never had that power, not one day in her life. I would have it.

I had blown most of my money that summer on cars and girls and drive-in cheeseburgers, but I had enough left, as September came, to enroll in one class at Jacksonville State University, which I passed every day on my way to work. It would be the first step, the first act, in a series of moves and machinations—most of them involving dumb, blind luck—that would give me what I was searching for.

For my one class, I picked feature writing under the formidable Mamie B. Herb, a woman with flaming red hair piled a foot high on her head. She told me, after reading my first few assignments, that I had talent, and promise. She gave me only a B, but it was a talented and promising B.

I was a college student. No one had to know I was just taking one class. No one ever even asked. At registration, I listed my major as “undecided,” since there was no box for “barely there at all.”

I wandered over to the office of
The Chanticleer
—the school newspaper named after the rooster in that poem—and volunteered to write. I told them I had experience from high school, and they took me. They would have taken anyone breathing. I covered the Fighting Gamecocks on beautiful Saturday afternoons, and got the facts right, mostly. I still worked every day for my uncle Ed, still stacked the pulpwood and forked the rocks and killed the snakes.

A few weeks later, the editor of the local weekly newspaper, the
Jacksonville News
, called my house and asked if I wanted a job writing sports, for money. They had called the college paper, and someone had told them I was halfway literate. The editor said I could even write a column if I wanted to. I would have not only my name above my stories, but my face, too. I would be an instant somebody.

The job only paid fifty dollars a week, more or less, but that was unimportant. They gave me a desk and an Underwood typewriter that wouldn’t type a
Q
, but I learned to write around it. I learned to type with two fingers, which was about as fast as I could think, anyway. My momma cut out my first story and put it in a scrapbook, as she would every story I wrote that she could find.

To most people, it would not seem like much of a job, hunched over a typewriter late at night, writing about games. To me, it was a blessing. I went to a press conference and got to wear a tie. It was a clip-on, but no one knew. Unless you tugged real hard on it, my new tie, like my newfound respectability, stayed safely in place. In time, it dawned on me that I lingered over that old typewriter longer than was healthy for an eighteen-year-old boy, that I lingered over sentences, searching my mind for the images and details that could make those disjointed words from that faded typewriter ribbon take on color and life.

I learned, a while later, that the
Jacksonville News
had first offered the job to another writer at the college paper. He already had a steady job at the Kentucky Fried Chicken, so he turned it down.

The Lord must have been riding with me, still.

I
had no idea where this writing business would take me. I did dream, then, that someday it might take me fourteen miles down Highway 21 to the respected daily newspaper, the
Anniston Star
, circulation 30,000. If you could get on there, you could get $114 a week, subsidized Blue Cross, Blue Shield and free roast beef at the Christmas party. I never dreamed, I never would have dared dream, of the great joy and despair that it would open up to me. I never would have dared dream it would take me into the temple of my profession, to that almost mythical place above the dirty sidewalks of West 43rd Street. And I never dreamed, to get there, I would run through the dark, twisting tunnels of other people’s nightmares, that I would choose to do it that way because, in a foolish and romantic way, I believed I knew the way.

2
LIES TO MY
MOTHER

16
In the temple

New York, winter 1994

T
he newsroom and subway always seemed a lot alike to me. Both of them seemed barely under control, both rumbling, clattering, powerful things that people depended on to take them someplace. I sat at my desk in that crowded, busy place, and willed the words to come. I stabbed hard on a single letter on my computer keyboard, once, twice, again, harder. Nothing. It was broken, again. You can make it to the big time, make it all the way to the
New York Times
, but that doesn’t mean you’ll have a
Q
when you need one.

I walked home that evening to my little company apartment on 50th Street, through the cold of a Yankee winter, through the lights that people write songs about. It was after nine o’clock, but a river of yellow taxi cabs still ebbed and flowed down Broadway and Seventh Avenue, merging with a chorus of curses shouted in a dozen languages, unheard behind the tightly closed windows. The sidewalks still teemed, even at that hour, and I thought to myself, “Don’t any of these damn people ever go home?” Some of them, the ragged ones who clutched at wrinkled garbage bags full of treasure and used plastic forks, were home already.

I walked past high art and low art, past the theaters where famous people played to packed houses, past theaters where anonymous people played with themselves. I passed up the delis with their eleven-dollar chicken salad sandwiches and stopped instead at the Popeye’s Chicken and Biscuits, where you could eat enough to kill yourself for five dollars and change. It is the warmest place in Times Square. On a cold night, you can feel the glow from the deep fryer all the way across the counter. I got myself some chicken to go.

It might have been snowing before I stepped inside but I noticed it for the first time when I came out, little specks of white, murdered by the warmth of the sidewalk. A few blocks from home, a thin, unhealthy-looking woman with yellow hair and a pink plastic jacket stood beside a pay phone outside a dirty movie theater, not talking, just holding it, pretending, waiting for the police car to roll on by. She never solicited out loud, she just stared at you, hard, and smiled, slick and hard, like lipstick on the bathroom mirror, until you shook your head, no.

At 49th Street a beggar asked me for a little help, and I gave him a quarter, maybe two, because I had not been there long enough not to give a damn. The beggars could tell I was new, like horses can tell when you are afraid. They chased me for whole blocks sometimes, pleading. I was lucky this time. I got a Born Again, a man who did not blame God for leaving him on a freezing and dirty sidewalk. He only blessed me.

The doorman opened the door to my apartment building, and, as always, I felt funny about that. “How can you eat that stuff?” the doorman said. I told him my stomach was impervious to cayenne pepper and most forms of grease, and he smiled at my accent, like he did every night. He must have thought Gomer was loose in the Big City. He always told me everything twice, I guess so I would understand. I didn’t mind that, either. He was a nice man.

I ate my chicken and biscuit out of the sack, on the couch, half-listening to the television that I had turned on for company, glancing out the window to the top of the Winter Garden, over to Broadway, to a string of headlights that stretched to the end of the world or at least to 110th Street. I had just finished a story about living and dying in New York, and I looked at the front page, trying to keep grease and crumbs off the words.

Somewhere between one more killing in the inner city and the obscurity of the grave, is a wall in Brooklyn.