Terraplane Page 15

  "Doubtful," I said. "If he's present, he's kept covered. We've no method of safe contact in any event."

  Doc cranked his scope's wheels, focusing. "Remember that fellow hollering in the window last night? He works out at the fair. He's a Red, too. He might be able to dig up some dirt over at the Soviet Pavilion. See if anybody admits to hearing anything. Can't hurt to ask."

  In some situations it killed to ask. Still, any straw was worth a snatch. "We can contact soon?" I asked.

  "He'll be downstairs again tonight. Comes uptown ever' weekend. Rabble-rouses over on Lenox during the weekend, during the day, comes listening to jazz at night. We'll go down there this evening and wait for him. Usually gets there around eight."

  "What's his role at the fair?"

  Taking a sausage-sized glass hypo, affixing a clean needle to its end, with it puncturing the cap of a squat brown bottle, Doc drew in fluid that he then injected into the blood sample. "He worked on the Futurama," Doc said. "For GM. That's the best exhibit out there. Shows what the country'll be like in 1960. Being from the future, of course, it's bound to be old hat to you. Writes articles predicting things, too. Scientifically, of course; it's fascinating stuff."

  "What's foreseen?" I asked.

  "You've got to ask? You don't know?" he laughed. `All kinds of things. Superhighways where you can go eighty miles an hour right through town. Ever'one living in these skyscrapers surrounded by parks. Cars and planes and trains'll all run on atom power." I smiled; wished not to say that his world as it evidenced appeared to be growing into an adulthood not unlike ours, and maturing much more quickly. "Machines that control the weather. You know all about it, I'm sure. You were flying an atom-powered plane, weren't you?"

  I shook my head. "If so, the swamp would still be burning and half of New York would be irradiated."

  He lifted gaze from the eyepiece. "Irradiated? Like with X rays?"

  "Worse," I said. "We employ more traditional techniques for transport. "

  "Guess it's like gambling," said Doc. "Can't be guessing right all the time. I'll admit I've always been a sucker for those world-oftomorrow stories, though-"

  "Let the future show as it comes," I said. "It always disappoints."

  "If you all are any example, I suppose it does." His stone face cracked with sudden laughter. "I still don't know how's I believe you all. Guess I'm just waiting for you to make a slip."

  "I'm grateful for your help," I said, knowing we'd make no such slip. "We'd be lost without."

  "You all seem like good people," said Doc. "Even Jake, considering. "

  "He's very set in his ways," I said. "Sometimes he frightens without intent-"

  "I mean considering that he's white," said Doc, taking the slide from its slot. "You're clean, Luther."

  "What's meant-?" I began; didn't finish.

  "That fellow, Bill, one I was talking about," said Doc, seeming thoughtful. "He's better than most, but even so ... whenever I read his articles or he shows me something he says is just around the corner, it always seems to me something's missing. One time I asked him, I said, `Bill, you mean colored people'll be living like this too?' Cause I started thinking, if they're not, then where're they going to be?"

  With the rest, in the valley; under the rocks, between the bricks and lost amidst plenty. "He responds how?"

  "He shrugs, he says, `Of course they will. Ever'body'll live the same way.' Like I say, he is a Red so you got to take ever'thing he says like that with a grain of salt." Doc stood, walked over to a wooden chair set atop a wheeled pivot. "Don't think the thought ever really occurred to him. Don't guess I should be surprised. He's still not like most whites though, just the same."

  "Doc," I said, "had I been white would the police have still trounced?"

  "Yeah, under the circumstances," he said. "You were smarting off, to their mind, and so they'd have beat you up anyway unless you made it clear you had connections somewhere. Point is, if you'd been white nobody down there'd have bugged you to begin with. "

  "It's unreasoned," I said, stepping down from my seat at tabletop, reshirting myself with careful gesture, to lessen stab and ache. He'd replaced my old turban with smaller gauze so I wouldn't show so disabled. "I'd read about it but had no idea-"

  "You said it," he laughed. "Tell me something I'm having a hard time with, though. You and Jake. I mean he acts like you're white-"

  "Jake responds equally to all."

  "It seems so natural, though. In your time whites really get along with the Negro people, or have they just finally got used to em?"

  "Our day has many hates," I said. "More diffuse. No less painful, much more reasoned. Generalized and nonspecific but for those regarding government or class or alien."

  "It just seems unbelievable," said Doc, leaning hack; his chair squeaked in pain beneath his weight. "They got new laws or something that make 'em give equal rights?"

  All have equal right to suffer. "It's not something that comes up. Money and merit decide-"

  "Money," he laughed. "If that was the case, ever'body'd be equal here. Nobody's got any money." With thick fingers he tapped his chairarm, as if awaiting word from someone distant. "Still find it hard to believe. 'fell me something, Luther. I don't care how well you say ever'body gets along, somebody's got to slip sometime. When was the first time you remember somebody calling you a nigger?"

  Twenty-odd years ago, I thought, on Long Island's smooth beach. "Last night," I said.

  "All right, tell me this then. There must have been some time some day some white person must have done something and let you know you was different somehow. There must have been. When was it?"

  Delving more deeply than I'd allowed previous, desired previous, I drew rotten meat from the broth's pure surface: remembered my white roommates at Andover disbelieving my preference for Nielsen's Fourth or Tallis's Spem in Alium over the blues-not Robert Johnson's blues-they so continually played and too often sang along with, claiming that they had to introduce me to my own culture, guardians of it that they felt themselves; recalled how, as a teen, boarding the elevator in our building on East Eightysixth, the way older white tenants simultaneously rising seemed instinctively to draw themselves deeper cornerways, their eyes black as Jake's; recalled Skuratov's specification of negritanski in his reference to me; thought of the Happy Golliwogs we'd seen at Detsky Mir. While armied I'd never experienced such, never in the field; in the field, when 1 controlled many men, in Long Island, most still were black or Hispanic themselves, excepting Sergeant Johnson. I'd known no comment at Dryco where, granted, I was the only black topender but for Ms. Glastonbury. They'd hired me deliberate, true. But had I not been an army success-

  "Uncertain," I said, my paranoia brimming as his interrogation's lead settled. "What about you?"

  "Early 1905," he said, after second's thought. `After they sold me." His words passed with so little tone that he might have been describing his travels between bed and breakfast.

  "Sold?" I repeated. "I'm unclear."

  "I'd barely even seen white people before then. See, I grew up on Reynolds's burley tobacco lands down in North Carolina. They'd bought the plantation that owned my folks, back after things got worked out, and, having northern money to spare, used it to buy up more land. Reynolds was better than most companies, like you've probably read. It's true, to a degree. By the time I was growing up we had our own little towns on the land itself. Our own stores run by our own people. Time I reached school age we had all colored teachers. Good teachers. In the summer we kids all had to work in the fields pulling hugs, cutting, but soon as school started that's where we were sent. Went home to nice little houses and small plots of land. The overseers was all colored. Lived the way it seemed right to live-" He stopped; gripped the chairarms as if to throttle nostalgia. Doc knew when rage essentialled to tear apart false dreams. "But they still owned us, body and soul."

  "That brand," I said, thinking of his back's unerasable insignia. "They sold you-"

 
"To the only company still did that." He nodded. "They always did what they wanted to do, up till the end. What we'd heard was that Reynolds was getting too much heat from the foreign markets, for one thing. For another, old man Duke wanted to get better teachers and more students for his university but couldn't till the company switched over to paid labor. They needed money to pay paid labor so they sold us and that made everybody happy. CocaCola picked us up dirt cheap. Only place that was still buying by then; most were already phasing it out-"

  "This was in 1905," I repeated; perhaps I'd heard wrong. I hadn't.

  "That's right. I was fifteen. Reynolds had about eight thousand at the place where I was. Coca-Cola sent up these trains from Atlanta. We got loaded on, packed in shoulder to shoulder like we was in goddamn cattle cars. Able to keep just what we could carry. My train carried about nine hundred, went out at night, unloaded at night once we got down there. They'd built a new plant just outside of town. Damn white crackers with shotguns ever'where you looked. They took us off the train six at a time to control us better. First thing they did was bring out the brandin' iron. Then they took us to where we was going to he living. Cheap barracks across from the factory. Dirt ground. Outhouses. Barbwire ran all around the camp. We was ready to run that first night."

  "Did you?"

  He shook his head. "They shot you if you tried. See, I don't think they thought they was going to have their hands so full with us. Hell, ever' week there'd be trouble. They tried to keep us working the bottling line sixteen hours a day. Fall behind, you'd be whipped good." He laughed. "Ever'body fell behind. After a while it must have sunk in their heads that they were going to have to kill off their investment one by one so they stopped doing that, came up with new ways to deal with troublemakers. I was a troublemaker. Organized a sit-down one day. Ever'hody in my part of the line just stopped, sat down, wouldn't budge. Finally had to send in the state militia to get us out."

  "They punished, after?"

  "Of course," he said, staring windowways. "After the initial steps they sent Wanda and me down south. This was not long after they'd hitched us-"

  "A fixed wed, then," I said.

  "Any other kind?" he asked, leaning back, bringing fresh cries from his chair. "I didn't mind. Hell, I was a sixteen-year-old kid and Wanda was a fine-lookin' girl back then. They wanted to get rid of her, too. She grew up with 'em and so she was even more trouble to 'em in sneakier ways. They married ever'body they had while they had 'em if they could, see, cause in the future they knew they'd be needing a lot more workers and wanted ones that were homegrown. Just the same they didn't want a bunch of babies growing up like wood-colts. Wanted children of theirs to be brought up by a mother and father, in a Christian home." He cleared his throat of its accumulations; lit up a new one. "Wanda and me was troublemakers, though, and they sent us to Cuba."

  "Cuba?" I said. "They had some sort of diplomatic arrangement-"

  "Diplomatic?" Doc said. "With another state? Cuba's been the fiftieth state ever since the war with Spain, almost. Still a territory while we was down there, but-"

  I didn't inquire as to the forty-ninth; it might have been the Philippines, for all I knew, or even Nicaragua.

  "I always heard Havana's something, but it was hell where we were. Bugs, spiders, centipedes. Poison snakes. Poison frogs. Hurricanes. Kept the men all chained. I still got a big scar on my ankle. We worked in the cane fields, bringing in the sugar. Woke us at dawn, kept us working till nightfall."

  "How long were you there?"

  "Not long. Lots of people, they think old Teddy was the greatest man on earth for outlawing slavery but I think he had reasons didn't have anything to do with us. There was a stock market panic that year, a bad one. What I've read since says that J. P. Morgan helped save the country by keeping it funded. Now Europe'd been giving the U. S. all kind of hell for years for still having slaves but I think that's when they knew they could pull their trump card. Lot of Morgans money was tied up in Europe and I have a hunch they said over there, all right, you can get your money out in time if you tell Teddy he's got to do something. Morgan also probably thought that if the big southern companies suddenly had trouble holding on to their workforce then it'd be easier for big northern companies to swallow 'em up, which is just what they did later on. I got a feeling it all got worked out behind the curtain. Bill and I've done some talking about this sometime, and he feels the same way of course. Anyhow, one day in 1907 old Teddy said he decided the time had come to outlaw slavery and he did. One day we went to bed dirt and woke up earth."

  He sat silently for a time, sunlight's strips throwing shadow bars across us. "How'd you return from Cuba?"

  "Wasn't easy-" The phone rang in the other room, a loud, sparkling alarm. "Excuse me." Stepping out, he answered before the third ring. I looked more closely over the pennies in his blue glass jar. While a few Indian heads showed within, upon the predominant thousands was the grinning, spectacled face of Theodore Roosevelt. Though my feet were firmly floored, below me I felt only air.

  "That was Sydenham," he said, returning. "They confirmed what I sent over."

  "Why the pennies, Doc?" I asked.

  "Christmas presents for the little ones," he said. "In the neighborhood. There's something else we got to talk about, Luther."

  "What?"

  "I'd guess that in your time," he said, facing me, his dark eyes agleam, "they got cures for just about every disease."

  "Why?"

  "Can they cure DS?"

  "What's DS?"

  "You don't know?" His brow rippled like water into which a stone had been dropped. From a nearby shelf he pulled a thick volume hound, seemingly, in el car's varnished rattan. "Maybe they got rid of it by your time." After a moment he'd found the entry sought. "Read this."

  Taking the book, I read from the opening:

  Dovlatov's Syndrome, commonly known as DS, Brainbuster, or Siberian Plague, was first described at Irkutsk, Russian Empire, in February 1909.... By the close of the following decade it had spread worldwide, its progress assisted by mass movements during and after the Great War.... The virus is of influenzal origin, though apparently of a mutated variety.... In America, House Speaker Joe Cannon, baseball player Christy Mathewson, author William Dean Howells and film star Charlie Chaplin; in Great Britain, Queen Mother Alexandra; in France, Premier Clemenceau, composer Claude Debussy, poet Guillaume Apollinaire and painter Amedeo Modigliani all succumbed to DS's effects-

  Continued reading, coming at last to the conclusion:

  All human beings bear the virus within their bodies, although only in the earliest stages is any similarity in symptoms seen.... Neither inoculation nor cure has been discovered. There are no known survivors of Dovlatov's Syndrome.

  "Horrific," I said, handing the tone back to him. "We've no disease such as this."

  "You all are mighty lucky, then," Doc said. "Sometimes diseases just fade away and no one ever gets 'em anymore. Doesn't happen often but it happens. If it was still around, you'd know about it."

  As I stared round the room, my mind dizzied with what I'd just read, I discerned a sudden change in all I saw, as if this existence had been suddenly rinsed in shadow, leaving stain on even the purest surfaces. "Seventy million died?"

  "Over twenty years," he said. "Took long enough getting out of Russia but once the war came it started spreading fast. Ever'body that didn't die of it knew somebody that did. About ten years ago it started to just disappear, though it's never gone completely away. I think I've read there's still about three thousand new cases a year."

  "What's purposed by this info?" I said, fearful to inquire.

  "Like I said, you're clean. So's Jake. That is to say, the virus isn't active in you all and probably won't be-"

  "It's in us-"

  "You been breathing since you got here, right?" he asked. "You got it. It's in you. In me. It's in ever'body. But if it was going to start up in you I'd say it already would have. Peewee-" he said, eyeshut. "She's got i
t." The el rumbled by, topside; the stoplight in the street outside switched from blue to orange, and the traffic moved along. "It's progressing faster in her than I've ever seen it, Luther."

  "Then how long does she-"

  "Not a week," he said. "Probably a lot less. When I saw her catch those flies this morning, that was the giveaway. Nobody moves that fast unless they have it. If I'd have thought, I'd have run the tests last night, but I don't think it would've made any difference. We're all just so used to it. I'm sorry, Luther."

  Apology's nonessentialled for me," I said. "What was her response, hearing?"

  "I didn't tell her yet-"

  "No?"

  "Jake, neither. They got eyes for each other, don't they?"

  "Of sorts," I said. "Why didn't you tell?"

  "I wanted to be sure. That's why I was waiting till I heard from the hospital. It's certified. I was going to say something, but she's so-" He faltered. "She looks so young. Cat got my tongue. Couldn't say a word."

  "Then it's finalized?" I asked. "Death's secured? Such a death?"

  "Unless you get back and unless you got a cure for it there once you get back, it's for certain."

  Otherwise, then, an army death, bringing nothing with it but waste and pain. Returning with all speed more than essentialled now, not simply to save her-for we had no such disease in our world of which I was aware, and therefore no antidote-but if her departure prematured it would almost certainly make finding Skuratov a moot point, and locating Alekhine seemed evermore doubtful. Jake's unpredicted reactions disconcerted as well; that he knew attraction of his own was obvious, if unspoken. If he knew she would be leaving, so soon after arrival, would he act with reason, or-

  "Luther," Doc said, "it's in the Lord's hands." To fall through those hands, as ever, I nearly said. "Listen, there's a patient of mine works weekdays. He's coming round in about ten minutes. Let me get ready for him and I'll be down once I'm finished with him."