None of which meant that the Federal Bureau of Investigation took any less interest in the President of the San Francisco chapter of the NAACP than in his counterparts in Georgia and Alabama. Hence the stupid rigmarole of having to walk up one side of Geary Boulevard, cross the road and walk down the other for a couple of hundred yards, ostentatiously halting, turning around and making absolutely certain that it was obvious — even to an FBI man — that he was checking to make sure that nobody was following him. Terry Francois hated the cloak and dagger nonsense. He was a respectable citizen who tried his best — and his best was in this respect demonstrably much better than most whites in his country — to respect the Constitution while campaigning to be treated exactly the same way as any other law-abiding American. Moreover, he was not working for a subversive organisation bent on harming his country; he was as American as any other man. Damn it! He had served in the Marines!
The NAACP was an historic organization with impeccable democratic credentials run by and for honourable men and women; which was a great deal more than could be claimed by the FBI! Or, for that matter the San Francisco Police Department!
It said a great deal about the state of the Union that a little more than a year on from the most catastrophic war in human history, members of the Administration which had unleashed a rain of thermonuclear fire on the nation’s enemies without — it seemed — the least compunction, clearly lacked the moral fibre to deal openly with the leaders of the outrageously racist, segregationist elements of their own natural constituency.
“I thought they might send you, brother,” Terry Francois half-smiled, eyeing the huge man blocking the pavement two paces in front of him. There was something about Dwayne John that always reminded him of a giant redwood tree. The man was six feet and three or four inches tall and on a day like today when the cold wind blew in from the Pacific and he was wearing an oversized raincoat over a suit and waist coat, he seemed almost as broad as he was tall. It was an illusion of course, the man was built like a heavyweight at the top of his fighting game and moved like an Olympic sprinter stepping up to his blocks with a languid, lithe grace.
The two men shook hands.
“I have letters for you from Dr King.”
Terry Francois smiled broadly and shook his head.
The two men had fallen into step, turning left off Geary Boulevard onto Gough Street walking in the direction of distant Lafayette Park. It was approaching mid-day, soon congregations would be spilling out of the churches and chapels. If families were looking forward to a walk in the park they were going to be disappointed for the weather was closing in and there was already a spit of cold rain in the air.
“How are things in Atlanta?” Terry Francois asked.
“Calm.” Dwayne John grunted. “There’s bad shit happening in Alabama and Mississippi all the time, they say. Never thought I’d say it but Dr King says there are actually white men in Georgia who see the way things are going. But Alabama,” he shrugged. “Them old boys are beyond reason. Maybe it’s because Sherman didn’t march through Alabama!”
The younger man spoke with low exasperation.
“The SFPD pulled me in and asked me about you the other day,” Terry Francois reported. The men had stopped briefly outside a closed ironmongery shop, each eyeing the street over and around the other’s shoulder. “Two of the Commissioner’s guys. The way things are at the moment the Mayor doesn’t want any trouble with the NAACP. The FBI thinks we’re all Communist stooges,” he did not attempt to hide his scorn. “Anyway, the Mayor has enough trouble with weirdoes and peaceniks trying to block the gates of the Navy Docks at Hunter’s Point and going out in sailboats to harass the nuclear submarines at Alameda. The SFPD is having to run twenty-four hour patrols in the Bay to stop protestors approaching the nuclear submarines moored over there. Some idiot tried to drop half-a-dozen rocks on a Polaris submarine as it sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge a couple of weeks ago.” The older man sighed. “People don’t go out so much lately after dark. Stuff always used to be going on in this city, Dwayne, but now,” he added with a wistful shrug of remembrance for the days before the war, “you hear gun shots every night. Nobody feels safe anymore.”
“It ain’t just here, brother.”
“No. We’re the lucky ones, I suppose.”
The men parted at the intersection of Gough Street and Sutter Street.
The big man did not watch Terry Francois’s retreating back as he turned on his heel and retraced his steps back towards Geary Boulevard. This was the fourth time he had been back to San Francisco since the night of the October War. So much had happened in the intervening thirteen months he thought of his old, pre-war self as a stranger, a man he had never really known that well. His former self had been a wastrel, a dreamer and often he wondered what had happened to him.
Mostly, he was guilty because he hardly ever asked himself what had become of Darlene. She had disappeared the night of the war; the night he hooked up with that crazy blond bitch at Johnny Seiffert’s party. That had been a wild night! It was only when he was outside on the kerb, his head still speeding, with no pants on that he had got his shit together in a hurry, dodging the SFPD cruisers he had watched bundling the blond bitch…
They had never gotten onto first name terms but she was something! Or maybe he was imaging that. But for the war he might have gone back to talk to that prick Johnny Seiffert. The little shit owed him money for studio sessions going back months; that was the only reason him and Darlene had had to hang out at his pad in the first place.
Oh, Lord! That was a night!
That was the night that had taught him that there was nothing capable of bringing a sinner back to the faith faster, than being thrown out on the street with his pecker flapping in the wind by a crazy guy waving a Navy Colt on the night the World blew itself up. A couple of days later he had re-found his Christian soul; and vowed to be a good man again. He still did not know if he was born again; or a good man but he was as sure as Hell penitent!
That night of the war he had walked, well, stumbled mostly north up Masonic Avenue. The people at St Agnes’s Church had literally pulled him in off the street as a SFPD cruiser drew up alongside him while he was puking up his guts up on the street. He was not any kind of Catholic; he had been brought up a Baptist by folks who did not see the point of saving the rod. The folks at St Agnes’s — white, Hispanic, and black — had not cared if he was Catholic or what the colour of the skin was, in his hour of need they had simply taken him in and done their best to keep him safe from evil.
That morning after the war he had still not learned what kind of Christian he was; that was a thing he had had to work out for himself later. Good people had taken him in that night. He had lost his faith and now he was re-found, re-formed and re-made in the image of the man his Ma and Pa — God bless their begotten souls — should have been proud of.
Nonetheless, he still felt really bad about Darlene.
Not least because he missed her so much it physically hurt…