False Entry (47 page)

“You drove her?” Hake’s distaste was plain—the use of such terms lessened the dignity of pursuit. What sensible man could pursue “nishness”?

And now Semple, puzzled, hung on my answer, as if all would be explained by it. Was I “Johnny”? Had I come from that corner? Or had I come from some other still unknown. Would I go on—to the top?

“I was only the runner,” I said. “A kid. I was told to go home at nine.”

Semple’s eyelid flicked again. Johnny had been sent home then. He had his answer. But only part of it. Another puzzlement was beginning. What was my reason?

Silently I sent my answer to him. You. I. There is no other.

“And did you?” asked Hake.

Careful. Take it slow. I forced my hands to lie separate again on the table. Not yet. For now I had come to the part where I must make my jump across the gap between what is and what might be. What had been and what might have been. And this was the part where, last night, Dobbin too had halted, made me repeat. Head sunk on his breast now, his eyes, whatever their change by day, were veiled, but that no longer mattered, and if he cared to look, I should not be afraid of what he saw. I was that boy. He himself had said it.

“No, Mr. Hake.” I smiled at him. “At fourteen—would
you
have?”

Everyone on Hake’s side burst out laughing, except for the young clerk—too near him, still too abashed. Laughter was precious in that room, and I had provided it; they could not help but like me the better for it. And as they relaxed, stretching in their fixed chairs, one could see more clearly their human differential; they were emerging from the office picture one by one. It was the moment when their group took the ascendant, and I with them. For their own laughter had reassured them; as so often happens when men think collectively, it gave them the confidence to believe in what further I would have them believe.

“You see—” I said. In their receptive faces I could see my own bearing—sunny, boyish, median, image coveted for their sons, resembling or replacing their quondam selves. “You see—I knew they hadn’t told me all their plans. I knew they were concealing something. I didn’t know what.” And this I had seen to be true enough, in its way, in the moment last night when, still unwitting, I had said it to Dobbin. Johnny had told me of the grove, what they did there and had done, of what they had done that day and would do that evening—while we hunted the hiding place, poked about in the room’s decaying niches. On and on his words had come, spoken into a bin as we pried there, to a corner as he absently turned to it—a rush of words fascinated with its own release, like that of a boy who in that very moment had learned to read. And even then, following after him, I must have sensed and somewhere recorded it—the something he had not told me, that still for my innocence, or for us both, he had held back.

“What had they told you?” Hake, intent on his memoranda, had let the laugh wash by him.

“What everyone knew—that they were going up to the dams.”

“You knew what they were going to do there?”

“Burn a cross on each one—as a warning.” I could see Johnny, pushing at the fallen paper with his toe. “Will they be coming back?” I had asked him. Not tonight. They’re going up to the dam. Nigger took a job there couple of days ago.

“You knew why?” Hake had to ask me twice.

“A—Negro had taken a job there. A few days before.”

“Why—we’d had a whole mess of them for months, on the construction gangs!” This was Anderson.

“Yes, sir.” I spoke slowly, from two positions in space. “But not for equal pay. They kicked back to the foreman, and it was redistributed to the others. Everyone knew it.”

“What was this man’s name?” This was Davis, the pharmacist. One by one, there on the right, they were coming to the fore.

“I didn’t know. Nobody much did, I guess.”

“You mean to say they just went along with it? Let themselves be called out—and didn’t even know that!” His glasses shone with pedantic triumph and he turned them from side to side, letting their light shine on all. I knew his type as well as his accent, having encountered both in New York. He would see injustice behind every bush, often where it was not, but any to really interest him must first be humanized by some inside dope that, inaccurate or not, he always had.

“There was nothing personal about it,” I said. I had had to go North to see that.

“For the record.” Hake, holding up one hand to address the clerk, read from one of his memoranda. “Triplicate of employment record in files U. S. Employment Office, Washington, D.C.; original lost when the Charlotte hiring office was flooded. On September 12, 1932, one Lucius Asher, aged 23, born Tuscana, holder of mechanical draftsman certificate from manual training high school, Philadelphia, taken on assistant inspector on blueprints, attached to Dam Number Three.” He glanced briefly at Davis, a ward boss’s appraisal of the underfoot liberal, then turned back to Dobbin. “Suppose the existence of such a person here can be further established—no need to go into it now.”

“No.” Dobbin was fiddling with the yellow paper, folding it, tapping with a nail. “Let’s finish with the witness.” He leaned back. “Any questions?”

“Where
did
you go?” It came uninflected, a voice to match the eyes.

I had forgotten him for the moment. I was remembering Johnny in the long grass—“Weren’t due to pass this way!” Johnny at the door of the annex—“Where else they gonna find him?” Johnny waiting there. “You coming? Or ain’t you?”

“Where all the cars did, Mr. Semple.” I had been there before the cars came, not with them. But, early or late, a fair of that sort is much the same. “Through the backs.”

“Why-eee!” Frazer’s aged semiquaver rose to a height and faded. “Sit here,” he grumbled. “Sit here, listen to a continental liar. But now we got you.” His voice rose again, and one wavering finger. “No-ow we got you. Because I was right there on the job at my signal, all that night. You couldn’t a crossed thew there ’thout me seeing you. Not you nor any other bo—” He stopped, finger in mid-air. All but senile as he was, it had got to him too.

“No. You wouldn’t have seen me.” Once more I felt how it would be, to cover the white face. “But there’s no road to the backs, there at the signal light, Mr. Frazer. And I didn’t mention that we crossed there. How did you know we went across the tracks?” Mouth open still, he did not answer me.

“Did you—they—meet anybody?” Dobbin no longer lounged. “In the backs.”

“No one. There wasn’t a sound.” One voice calling: Louie-lamb? Louie-lamb?, but they would never hear it. “It was like a fairground, I thought. Like after the fair is gone.”

“Did they stop? Pick up anybody?” What was it he wanted?

“Not as far as I knew. They kept the pace. Went through without stopping.”

“Go on.” I saw by his face that I had given it to him. They already had him.

“Getting out was easier, along the old road that led back to the highway, then the new mile and a half of macadam, to the base of the dam site. They went slow all the way, as if they were on some kind of work operation—from the outside it looked as if the cars were driving themselves. Nowadays there’d be too much traffic, but that night they were all the traffic there was. And when they spread out—it was hard to believe that over a hundred men could be that quiet. From then on, it must have gone according to plan. I don’t know how the lead cars got past the gates and the guards, but they got there. It was a clear night. After a while, everyone for miles around could see that they had.”

“What did
you
see?”

That image was still on my retina; let Dobbin probe as he wished now, this is what he would find. I answered to the room at large. “The crosses burning. One on the top of each dam.”

Hake put his papers aside. Their rustle was the only thing heard. Again I had the sensation that what I said was new to these walls. And almost at the moment of triumph, I wished myself outside them. If I turned my head, the window there on the periphery would flash like a mirror at the end of a burrow. At least let that bird speak again, bearing in its poetry of elsewhere. But the moment remained heft on its pin.

“You’re the first person to say that publicly, do you know that?” With his screen of papers down, Hake seemed more threatening. I nodded to his every question. “I was here later,” he said, “on the investigation. It turned up nothing—you recall? Dam Number Six wasn’t built yet.” This was the dam that now blocked off Tuscana. “A clear night, you said? Then Tuscana had a clear view. Eight thousand people, and they saw nothing. You know that?”

“Where were you?” Semple’s voice was hoarser. “I asked you that before.”

I drew a long breath, took the long jump.

“I was invisible,” I said.

I could feel the recoil in the room, the air curled like a lip ready to explode with the nasal rage of the tricked. Here in this public room, a hundred men might be credited their dream of “nishness” and still be found sane; the same tolerance would not be accorded the private fancy of one. It took the simplest sleight of hand—to slip the private dream inside the other. “The Invisible Empire, Mr. Semple. You remember? I had a pass to it for one night.”

Then, quickly, I turned away from him to the others, for now drama must be deserted, the manner to be as ordinary, dry, humbly aware of the strange stuff it dealt with as I could make it.

“Believe me, I couldn’t do it now. Only a kid that age could have.” Did the older ones already begin to smile at my assumed eminence of age, the way Dobbin had at our first meeting? “I was the go-between for all sorts of errands, among them the delivery of the tokens for seats in the cars. By mistake one of these was for a dead man—I found that out when I brought it to his widow.” Davis must have his name, I thought, glancing at the pharmacist, and
whang
, in the same instant it was provided me; in the hour of triumph, I thought, arrows fly to the hand. I mentioned the last name on the list, the one scratched out and replaced by Nellis’s. “She made me take his hoodwink back with me—that’s what gave me the idea. I was tall enough. I knew the proper signs and exchanges, all to be whispered. We were to remain as anonymous as we could. I knew where the car was. I could be already dressed and seated in it when the others arrived.” I turned to Dobbin. “I saw what I saw, in privileged company. No account of it can sound more reasonable than it was.” I turned to Hake. “I can’t prove what I saw. What a whole town said it didn’t. But there must be those who saw it from the other side.” He knew that as well as I. And finally, I turned to Semple. “There were one hundred eighteen of us who were invisible that night, Mr. Semple. I took the place of a dead man named Victor Miller.” I raised my fists with the thumbs aligned so that all could see them. “I was Klansman Two, of the thirty-ninth car.”

Outside, the heavy sunlight had dipped beyond the eaves; within, all the faces before me darkened to a platinum with gleaming edges, the daguerre stillness, I thought, that must be asked of life by habitual liars. “Later on, I was scared enough,” I said. “On the way back there was drinking in some of the cars, luckily none in mine. But everybody was more careless; most of us were set down still in our rig. I’d asked to be let off at Pridden Street to mislead the driver, but he was from one of the other towns and went past it, instead let me off at headquarters. I was the only one on the street—and the street looked strange. I remember thinking that the town looked inside out.” I smiled, in patronage for that boy back there, and they smiled with me at him, at me, their son, their “self,” and I saw that I had them now—from now on I might show them the truth as freely as the lies. “The public lights were out,” I said. “There was none on this courthouse.” I glanced down the line, at Charlson. “The light was out over the church door. It was the houses that were lit, waiting for us to come back. But there would be nobody at home in mine.” I hesitated. There was not much truth left.

And here I faltered, not just in speech, but deep within. For now, advanced far on my plateau of time shift, fact blend, truth change, I saw opened like a pit before me, that up to here Johnny, either in what he had done or had yearned to, had been with me. All along, in the lies just told, he or his theme had been there. But now, just as I neared that denouement toward which—still innocent—I saw my story to be tending, I was deserted. That line of faces before me—I had meant to bring them, with a great lariat swing, into Semple’s lumber-room, there, before their eyes, to let them see me once again hide the pamphlet with its list of names. And in the same moment reveal it, for its practicable uses. After which I could fall silent, Semple and his band struck down by the perfect boomerang of memory, my testimony—ours—done. But Johnny, back there in the lumber-room, evaded me like an after-image, sliding to the door when I fixed on him at the table, back at the wardrobe, the peaked hood over his head, when I strove for him at the door. Now, when I needed him, he hid himself in the unforeseen shadow of memory, behind what he had not told me, whatever it was I did not know. And I knew myself lost without him. “There
is
a town,” I said to myself, but that moral dream, magic prop, could not help me; it had always been more his than mine.

“I went back inside headquarters,” I said in a weak voice. “To … get rid of the rig, of course. I … put it in the big wardrobe … where they kept the extras.” The wardrobe was solid enough, still. I clung to it. “Then … I don’t know why I did … what I did then. There was a rule book there on a table … under an arrangement of pins and thread in the shape of a cross … they would know when you touched it. Something … made me. There was a list inside … all the members and officers. I read it. Then … I suppose I wanted to play a trick on them. Let them know, in a way, that I’d been there. And there were so many places to hide a thing … in that room. So … I took it up, pins, list and all … and I hid it. Then I ran home.”

Surely they must hear how false my tone was, how labored my story and breath. I forced out the remaining bit of truth I had. “I can’t explain—why I did it. But they would never look for it there. If the rats haven’t eaten it—it’s there yet.” Surely now, in a great, healthy, hawhaw burst of reality, they were about to put me down. Perhaps, in my way as Semple in his, I wanted the secret to snap like a pod. “I’m sorry.” I finished—or thought I had—with a quaver. “I can’t explain it … any better.”