Lonely Crusade (34 page)

“Good day, gentlemen,” the sheriff said.

When they were again seated in Smitty’s coupe, Hannegan turned to Lee. “Well, Gordon, that’s it. You can file charges against the four deputies if you wish, but you will lay yourself open to be prosecuted for false arrest. I advise you against it.”

“Well—” Lee said. “If that’s it, that’s it.”

“Lee, I want you to know that we are with you,” Smitty said sincerely. “But let this business drop, won’t you? Luther won’t be around anymore, and we are going to check the Communists too.”

“Well—I won’t make any more fuss about Luther and I won’t file any charges,” Lee promised. “But I won’t forget it.”

“That Luther!” Hannegan commented. “He’s some boy, it seems.”

“I don’t understand him,” Smitty confessed.

Instead of taking Lee home, they dropped him at the hospital to have his bandages changed. It was past two o’clock when he arrived home.

Abe Rosenberg was sitting in the living-room, reading the morning paper. Looking up with those bright, wise eyes, he said: “You shouldn’t try to fight four men at one time. A Jew would never have done that.”

Lee laughed for the first time in two days. “A Jew would have taken the money and said nothing about it, I suppose.”

“Why not? It’s not like as if they could buy me.”

“That’s probably what Luther thought.”

“That Luther! He shouldn’t have done a thing like that. An old Jew like me, I would take their money and deny it to their faces. But that Luther, he’s a crook.”

For a moment Lee looked at Rosie, grateful to be believed. Then he started toward the bedroom door.

“Your wife told me to tell you that she had to go to work,” Rosie said, stopping him.

“Oh!” He looked inquiringly at Rosie. “When did she leave?”

“Around noon.”

“And you have been here since?”

“I have no other place to go that’s any more important.”

“What’s important here, Rosie?” Lee asked from curiosity as he crossed to the davenport and sat down.

“You are, Lee,” Rosie stated. “You are important. And what’s happened to you is important. And how you feel about it is important. So for that reason I want for you to go with me to the headquarters of the Communist Party to see Bart.”

“Rosie, what good will that do? Bart knows what Luther did. They all know; they’ve known all along. I’m the only sucker of the lot.”

“Not the only one, Lee—I didn’t know.”

“No, I’m convinced you didn’t, but the others did.” For an instant his thoughts touched Jackie and he added bitterly: “All of them!”

“As a favor then, Lee—as a favor for an old Jew who wishes you well. Perhaps some day I may be able to do as much for you.”

“Well—okay,” Lee consented, rising to his feet. “You have a way of putting things that makes it hard to refuse.”

During the long streetcar ride downtown they avoided discussion of all union matters and Lee related to Rosie his experiences in old man Harding’s house. Once Rosie interrupted to say: “Lee, you have a wonderful wife.”

“That’s what everybody says,” Lee replied, and caught Rosie looking at him.

Entering a dilapidated office building on Spring Street, they rode a creaking elevator to the fifth floor and turned down a dimly lit, narrow corridor toward offices in the rear. They found Bart seated behind a battered, flat-topped desk, conversing with a one-armed, mannish-appearing Jewish woman who had been pointed out to Lee several years before as one of the Communist party executives.

“Well, Rosie and Gordon, this is a surprise,” Bart said in his high, precise voice. “What brings you comrades here today?”

“Business!” Rosie replied in his most Jewish voice. “Always it is business—party business. And how are you, Maud?”

“Hello, Rosie,” she greeted in a rasping voice, looking at the two of them with brazen curiosity.

“You know Lee Gordon, Maud?” Bart asked. “Maud Himmelstein,” he said to Lee.

“I’ve heard of Lee but I’ve never seen him,” she rasped. “Hello, Lee.”

Lee nodded briefly to them both. “Hello.”

“I have a report of a confidential nature to make,” Rosie said. “It is a matter of serious business and I wish to present a formal charge.”

Sudden suspicion flared in Maud’s hard face but Bart remained impassive.

“Well, what is it, Rosie?” he demanded.

“Yesterday Lee was beaten by four deputy sheriffs—”

“Yes, we know that,” Bart interrupted.

“And he was with Luther McGregor—”

“We know that too.”

“And he heard Luther confess to accepting a bribe from Foster, the manager of Comstock, for betraying the union—”

Maud’s look turned from suspicion to malevolence, but Bart raised his hand, silencing her.

“You don’t believe that, do you?” he asked Rosie, but underneath the question lay a subtle threat.

“I believe it,” Rosie said defiantly. “And I wish to state formally that I do not think Luther is fit to be a member of the Communist Party and should be expelled.”

“What kind of Communist are you?” Maud said, but again Bart silenced her.

“That is a serious charge to make against a fellow member,” he said to Rosie in his precise level voice. “You have only Gordon’s word—”

“And for me that is enough,” Rosie interrupted.

Without looking up, Bart continued in the same tone of voice, “—and you are putting it above the word of one of our most militant members, Luther McGregor, a tried and true Communist. No one can seriously believe that Comrade Luther, with all of his burning revolutionary zeal, would sell out the proletariat.”

“Lee heard him confess to it—”

“At the point of a gun, he claims. Yes, we’ve heard Gordon’s story and it’s doing incalculable harm to the union’s organizing campaign. But the true story, as Luther reports it, is that Gordon’s temper led him into the fight. As to his charge against Luther, we can see no purpose in it unless it is Gordon himself who is guilty of selling out the union and by this means is bringing confusion into the ranks.”

“That’s a goddam lie!” Lee shouted, no longer able to restrain himself. “And you know it’s a lie. You knew it was Luther all the time, even night before last when you were plotting to frame Lester McKinley to cover for him. And you were going to front me to do it for you, weren’t you?”

“Don’t you come down here and try to start trouble,” Bart warned, rising to his feet.

“You don’t scare me,” Lee said in a contained voice, starting around the desk to meet him, but Rosie clutched him from behind.

“Lee!—Bart!” he cried. “Are we Nazis that we can not talk like comrades?”

“And you do not frighten me,” Bart said to Lee, ignoring Rosie. “You have caused trouble enough.”

Lee ceased to struggle but his voice was harsh with rage. “Not nearly as much trouble as I’m going to cause all you dirty rotten Communists.”

“Lee! Lee! Don’t judge all Communists by Luther,” Rosie entreated. “I’m a Communist. Bart’s a Communist—”

“I told you it wouldn’t do any good, Rosie,” Lee said as he turned toward the door. “And I’ve had enough.”

“Wait, Lee, wait, let’s be men about this thing—”

“No, Rosie, I am through,” Lee said over his shoulder and went through the doorway and down the corridor. Disdaining the elevator, he went down the stairs. Rosie started to rush after him but was halted by Bart’s harsh voice, “Rosie, I am going to hold you responsible for this.”

“For what?” Rosie asked, turning back again.

“You have made a serious and unsupported charge against a comrade of high dependability, one of our most dynamic working-class leaders.”

“Then I wish to make it formal,” Rosie replied, undaunted. “I wish to present my charge before the executive committee and demand Luther McGregor’s expulsion from the Communist Party.”

“You dirty little Jew!” Maud rasped.

But Bart merely uttered: “As you wish, Rosie, as you wish!”

On the way home Lee stopped at a bar and had a couple of drinks to get the tightness from his mind, but the whisky fed his aversion to them all. But long after his thoughts had contemplated and condemned all others, they remained on Jackie inconclusively. His logic lumped her with the rest, but his heart held her apart. Or was it vanity? he asked himself. Was he trying to acquit her of guilt or himself of folly? He felt more chagrined by the esteem he had given her than by the fool she had played him for, since the latter was the usual risk, but the former a tribute above the price demanded. What worried him now was the fear he had given it to her race instead of to herself. And after he had another couple of drinks it became urgent that he find out.

He called her from the booth beyond the bar. Kathy answered and he asked to speak to Jackie. He could hear her calling: “It’s for you, Jackie. I think it’s the colored fellow.”

And then Jackie’s voice: “Lee—darling.”

“May I come up?”

“Of course, I want you to.”

“Can you get rid of Kathy.”

“Oh, sure, she’s good as gone for the night.”

After hanging up, he stood for a moment pondering over the affection in her voice. Could it be that she was so happy to hear from him? Or had she received further instructions from Bart? It was with an impelling sense of urgency that he hastened to the bus. The late sunset was fading into darkness when he arrived.

Her bright-carmine smile was already fashioned when she opened the door for him, and there was a Hollywood abandon in her sensuous attire, from her loosely flowing hair and tight white sweater, to her pleated blue slacks. But shock showed sharply in her face when she looked into his eyes and saw the grinding hurt. It confused the attitude of three-fourths sex and one-fourth understanding she had so carefully rehearsed, and brought dismay.

“Oh, Lee!” she exclaimed with involuntary irritation. “What all did happen to you?”

“Well, I didn’t do it,” he snapped, coming in and closing the door behind him. “I took a sapping, what more do you want?”

Now in her eyes there was acute vexation. The bargain she had made on the telephone was for a hurt no greater than sex could cure, around which she could attitudinize until the flesh was hot. In showed in the delicate mold of her features, cramping them, and in the inflection of her voice, leveling it.

“Oh, Lee, you’re so tight. Can I fix you some dinner?”

“All you can do is kiss me,” he said, roughly taking her in his arms. For to him in that moment of seeing her eyes go disappointed came the necessity for taking her as a woman, shorn of race, brutally if required, or ever be denied his physical masculinity.

His lips sought hers, searching, feverishly demanding, until he could feel all of her flowing up to him. And she could not stop herself. She became like a river running up a hill, spreading her ardor on the warm plateau of his passion. He shook her then, to the core of her reserve, struck her loose in a strange, remote, terrifying wilderness of sensuality. Now she became a woman in all of the contradictions it entailed. Her body cried out to him for love while her mind whirled in racial chaos. But once, before the breath had left them both, she closed her mind and was lost in the great black interdiction. And when she opened it, their mouths were apart, gasping, while their bodies clung and she trembled from head to foot.

“Ill make coffee,” she said, tearing herself from him. But so weak had she become she could scarcely make the distance to the kitchen.

Lee went over and sat on the divan, stretching out his legs toward the cold fireplace. Well, he had finally scratched her cool, white surface, he thought, and it was disillusioning to discover that she was just another woman underneath. And now he knew without having to go any further that whatever it was he was looking for, she didn’t have it either. In a way he wished he hadn’t come.

By the time she had made coffee she had regained an outer composure although inside she still tingled with an unceasing warmth. And when she appeared with the two steaming cups, she said: “I love you, darling,” soulfully, coming over to sit beside him on the divan.

Although that night before as they had lain naked in each others arms she had said the same: “I love you, I love you, I love you,” reaching the culmination of ardor, her saying it now as she stood in the light and fully robed startled him—not the words, for the words were trite. It wasn’t the proclamation of an emotion, for this he did not believe, but her naive assumption that the knowledge that he was loved by a white woman should be of so much help.

He gave an abrupt burst of laughter.

It shocked her but it did not hurt her, for she was white enough to take it. That he was rejecting her race would never occur to her, and that at this time he would repulse her body was no less inconceivable. She attributed it to his distraught condition further aggravated by his desire for her, and was actually sincere in wanting to help him.

“Tell me what happened, Lee.”

“Haven’t you heard? I thought all the Communists would know by now that I’ve been maligning their favorite comrade.”

“There has been a little talk, of course—” The telephone wires had buzzed and telegrams had gone from coast to coast and every party member knew all there was to know concerning Lee’s accusation against Luther and were waiting breathlessly for instructions from the national committee—“But I haven’t heard your side.”

“Why hear my story, Jackie? You know the truth—you and Bart and all the rest of you,” he said. “You knew the other night when we sat here and you fronted me off to—”

“No, Lee darling,” she interrupted. “Don’t say it, please.” She put her palm across his mouth. “You’re so confused, Lee darling, don’t make it any worse.”

He removed her hand and held it in his own as he continued: “You knew then while you were offering me on a platter to your fellow traitors as the Judas to put Lester McKinley on the spot. And you thought that because—”

“You know I wouldn’t do that to you, Lee. You know I wouldn’t—” The sound of the tears in her voice drawing his gaze to the pure, open innocence of her eyes. “You know I wouldn’t, Lee, you know it!”

“Why wouldn’t you?” he asked, and from this she should have known that he had changed.

But she said: “Because I love you, Lee,” as ardently as ever, and reached up and drew him down to the full benediction of her lips. It was not the same as before but she did not know it, and rising in her glory she stood looking down at him.