War at Home: A Smokey Dalton Novel (31 page)

“Yeah,” she said. “Hang on.”

She set the phone down.
I counted my dimes, hoping she’d return before I had to plug the phone again.

She did.
She gave me a name and number, which I dutifully wrote down.
“If he doesn’t have anything, you come here, Smokey,” she said, and gave me her address.

I promised I would.

“Don’t be a stranger,” she said.
“If you’re in the city, I want to see you.”

Oddly enough, I wanted to see her
,
too.

After we hung up, I kept my hand on the receiver.
The phone spit back some coins, but I didn’t dig them out of the coin return.

I was shaking.
That had gone better and worse than I had expected.
Gwen was the first person from my past I’d spoken to in a long time.
But I knew she was safe.
We hadn’t been in contact for several years, since I’d called her in 1960 on a trip to New York, just after I’d inherited some money.

Gwen had still been married then, and she had whispered into the phone that seeing me wouldn’t be a good idea, that Lionel was jealous even of the mention of my name.
He tore up my letters
to her
— not that they’d been very personal or informative — and he didn’t want her to have contact with me, not then, not ever.

So I
’d
honored that request until now, knowing that of all the people I had known, Gwen Cole was one
who
wouldn’t have shown up on the FBI’s list.
If old friends or my family had even mentioned her, they would have called her by her maiden name, Gwen Daines.
But I didn’t recall ever telling anyone much about her.
When I’d known Gwen, I hadn’t been talking to people at all.

I stayed awake for hours
that night
. I took first guard duty, figuring if anything was going to happen, it would happen around midnight.

I sat in darkness, watching the parking lot.
I would be happy to leave New Haven.
I hated this place. Both Memphis and Chicago had had communities that would have adopted me, Malcolm
,
and Jimmy in a moment.

From what little I’d seen of New Haven’s, it was repressed and frightened, and only peripherally aware of how to fight back.
Those that had the power to fight, like Whickam, had convinced themselves that racial problems happened elsewhere, not in his comfortable little corner of the world.
I wondered how Freeman was doing on his story about the police and hoped I hadn’t gotten him in too far over his head.

About twelve-thirty, a bevy of sirens rushed by, their sounds magnified by the silence around me.
I stiffened, watched the parking lot for multicolored lights, and
,
as the sirens faded, relaxed only slightly.

From that point on, the silence grew.
I finally woke Malcolm around three for his
turn at
watch, then fell asleep myself.

The nightmare brought its usual chill
, o
nly the dream ran backward.
Instead of carrying my friend out of the trench, his hot blood dripping all over my hands, I carried him into it.
I was still covered with blood, which steamed in the cold Korean night.

We stood in the trench and watched as a sergeant showed us how to use grenades.
Only he wasn’t using grenades — not real ones.
He was making Molotov cocktails.
He was going to have me stuff cloth into the liquid-filled bottles, until he saw that my hands were covered with blood.
So he gave me the matches instead.

I couldn’t light them, but somehow the cloth caught fire anyway.
The bottles blew, and I woke up, a scream caught in my throat.

Malcolm was watching me as if he had never seen me before.
“You okay?” he asked.

I nodded, got up shakily, and went into the small bathroom.
I grabbed the only clean terrycloth washcloth,
flowed
cold water
over
it, and slowly bathed my face, trying to slow my heart.

These days, Jimmy usually had the nightmares.
Now I was the one who
se dreams revived
the horrors of my past, and I wasn’t sure exactly how to stop it.

THIRTY-ONE

W
e checked out of the hotel just after dawn and drove out of New Haven.
Just outside of town, I stopped at a space
-
age Mobil
g
as station.
It had a round umbrella-like roof over the conical gas pumps, and the square concrete building had a red Pegasus painted on the sign.

The boys waited while I used the pay phone to call the New Haven police.
I gave them the address of the Barn, said I’d been inside, and that I had found components for making bombs.

Then I hung up and headed out as quickly as I could, disappearing down the road toward New York City.

The day promised to be muggy.
Even though the sun was out, a haze hung over everything.
I had to squint as I drove.
The diffuse light was brighter than it seemed.

Jimmy bounced on the seat across from me, happy to be leaving New Haven.
Malcolm hugged the window, his knees pressed against the dash.
He looked nervous and uncomfortable.
I remembered how frightened he had been to drive through Pennsylvania, and I wondered how frightened he was now.

“I think it’s good that we’re leaving New Haven,” I said to him.

“I was getting tired of that room,” Jimmy said. “Kinda felt like my mom’s place, that last one, you know.”

The one that she had abandoned him in. The one his brother had left him in as well.
The one that had locked him out when the rent money hadn’t been paid, the one that nearly made him live on the street.

I hadn’t wanted him to remember that.
But his past was as vivid for him as mine was for me.

I wondered how Daniel felt about his past.
Disconnected from it? Empowered by it?
I couldn’t tell from the few clues I’d found.
He had become more of an enigma to me in these last few days.

I hadn’t called Grace to tell her we were leaving New Haven.
I wasn’t sure how to talk to her.
The evidence in the Barn put me at odds with my initial mission.

Finding Daniel was no longer enough.
I had to stop him.
I had to do everything I could to keep one of those bombs from going off.

The road twisted past a junkheap of discarded train parts.
Old cars with holes through their sides, torn-up track, and warning lights were mixed in with old tires and piles of organic garbage.
Gulls picked through the wreckage.
Beyond it, one of the rivers glistened.

“Chicago’s not this ugly,” Jimmy said.

“Chicago’s bigger,” I said. “You haven’t been to all parts of the city.”

He frowned at me, as if he didn’t want me to contradict him, and then rested his arms on the dash, peering out the windshield.

Malcolm said, “I heard New York is the worst.”

“The worst for what?” I asked.

“Dirt,” he said. “Garbage.
Crime.”

“I’ve always liked New York,” I said, and that was the truth.
I always felt hopeful in Harlem.
The first time I’d climbed out of a subway platform onto 125
th
S
treet, I stopped and stared in awe, knowing that this was the place
where
Langston Hughes had lived, the place where Duke Ellington had gotten his start, the place where W.E.B. Dubois published
t
he
Crisis
.
W.C. Handy, father of the
b
lues, left Memphis to come to Harlem, where he made his name, and played with Eubie Blake
,
among others.
Once upon a time in
Harlem, on any given afternoon, you could see Zora Neale Hu
r
ston or Madame C.J. Walker or A. Phillip Randolph.
And then there were the nightclubs — Small’s Paradise, the Rhythm Club, and Connie’s Inn.

Harlem was also a place of scandal—a place where blacks performed for slumming whites at the Savoy Ballroom and the Cotton Club (which didn’t integrate until long after its heyday).
Riots happened here, and assassinations — Malcolm X got shot at the Audubon Ballroom only four short years ago, even though it felt like a lifetime had passed.

Like most people who’d spent time in Harlem, I loved it and I hated it
,
and still it
called to me.
I had nearly settled here once.
Only that horrible breakup with Gwen
,
which left me adrift and wandering, led me to Memphis, my odd jobs, and the first real home I had ever had.

When I’d been at Boston University, I’d come down to New York almost every weekend — at first to get away from Boston, and later to see Gwen.
We had been intense for nearly two years.
Then I’d moved to Harlem for one brief summer, and everything changed.

Malcolm was looking at me.
I felt my cheeks heat, as if he had seen each memory, each thought pass across my face.

“Give New York a try,” I said.
“And don’t believe everything you hear.”

He grunted, and I left him to his silence.
He would have to make up his own mind about the
c
ity.

I certainly had.

* * *

I parked the van in one of the lots at the Newark Airport.
We took our small bags, hid everything else under a blanket, and locked the van up tight.
Then we headed into the terminal as if we were going to fly somewhere.

Malcolm had never been in an airport terminal.
He looked at the milling people, the ticket counters, and all the luggage as if it were a miracle.
Jimmy kept close to me.
He hated official buildings and the crowds inside them.
So far, we hadn’t seen any security guards, but there had to some, and we knew, by virtue of our color, that we’d be instantly suspect.

We took the stairs down to baggage claim and followed the brown signs that led us to public transportation.
A number of cabs were parked along the curb, but I wasn’t even going to try to take one.
When I had lived in New York in the 1950s, cab drivers refused to pick up blacks.
If you were somehow lucky enough to get a ride, the driver would deposit you at
110th Street
rather than enter Harlem.

Instead, we took a bus.
I paid the fare for all three of us, and we sat in the back, mostly to avoid trouble.
We kept our suitcases on our laps like shields.
Jimmy peered out the window, but Malcolm stared straight ahead, ignoring everything around him.

He looked intimidating, but I knew, just from the set of his body, how terrified he was.

The Port Authority Bus Terminal in
m
idtown didn’t help matters much.
We got out on a
lower
level filled with garbage and smelling of diesel exhaust.
I led us
along
a vaguely remembered route, trying to find the subway trains that would take us to Harlem.

The walls were filthy and covered with graffiti. Junkies shivered near garbage cans, and more than a few had their hands out for money.
A busker played his guitar a few yards from a newspaper kiosk.
His guitar case was open and
dotted
with scattered coins, probably his own
,
to encourage other people to add some.
He was playing some rock tune so badly that I couldn’t figure out what it was, and I hoped he wouldn’t start singing until we were past him.

The train ride
to Harlem was uneventful.
The farther north we went, the darker the faces became in the car.
That helped Malcolm relax just a little, but he still clutched his suitcase as if it were the only weapon he had.

When we got off, we
we climbed up to the street level
.
The city’s noise hit me first, then the smell of diesel and exhaust, and finally the sidewalk, surrounded by buildings
.

We stepped away from the subway entrance. 
Malcolm stood beside me, biting his lower lip. He wasn’t looking at the skyline in the distance, but at the graffiti-covered buildings beside us.
He looked like he had never seen poverty before in his life.