Another door (leading to the chapel itself?) was ajar on darkness.
He stepped back to the sidewalk—
“Hey, there!”
The old man wore maroon bell bottoms, gold-rimmed spectacles; underneath a dull corduroy jacket, a bright red tanktop: beard, beret. He carried a bundle of newspapers under one arm. “How you doing on this pearly afternoon?”
“Hello.”
“Now…I bet you’re wondering what time it is.” The old man strained his ropy neck. “Let me see.” He gazed at the steeple. “Let me see. That would be about…eleven…twenty-five.” His head came down in wheezy laughter. “How do you like that, hey? Pretty good trick, huh? (You want a paper? Take one!) It is a trick. I’ll show you how to do it. What’s the matter? Paper don’t cost you. You want a subscription?”
“Under your beard…where’d you get that thing around your neck?”
“You mean…” The old man’s free hand moved to the peppery hair that went without break from the top of his chest to his chin. He unfastened the necklace, which fell, like a diamond snake. “…this? Where’d you get yours?”
He’d thought collar and cuff hid his own. “On my way here. It says it comes from Brazil.”
The old man held the end of the chain close to see: “…Japan?” then extended the end for him to look.
On the tab of brass were stamped letters: ade in Japan. Before ade there was a squiggle undoubtably an m.
The old man got it around his neck again and finally managed to secure it with one hand.
He looked down at the papers: he could read, just at the old man’s crumpled cuff:
BELLONA TIMES
Wednesday, April 1, 1979
NEW BOY IN TOWN!
He frowned at that.
“I didn’t see your chain,” the man went on, in unrequested explanation. “But you wouldn’t have asked if you hadn’t got one yourself, now, would you?”
He nodded, mainly to make the geezer continue—an urging not needed.
“I guess it’s like a prize for an initiation. Only you didn’t know you were being initiated? And that sort of upset you, I bet.”
He nodded again.
“My name’s Faust,” the old man said. “Joaquim Faust.”
“Wakeem…?”
“You’re pronouncing it right. From your accent, though, I bet you wouldn’t put the same letters in it I do.”
He reached for Joaquim’s extended hand: Joaquim caught his up in a biker shake. “You say—” Joaquim frowned before he let go—“you got yours on your way here? Outside Bellona?”
“That’s right.”
Joaquim shook his head and said, “Mmmmmm,” while a roaring that had been gathering seconds now, broke overhead. They looked up. Nothing was visible in the haze. The jet lingered disturbingly long, then pulled away. The taped organ sounded soft after it.
“On the clock,” Joaquim said. “The front face. That little stub used to be the minute hand. So you can about figure out which way it’s pointing.”
“Oh. What about the hour?”
Joaquim shrugged. “I left the office around eleven. Least I guess it was eleven. I haven’t been gone that long.”
“What happened to the…hands?”
“The niggers. The first night, I guess it was. When all that lightning was going on. They went wild. Swarmed all over. Broke up a whole lot of stuff around here—Jackson’s just down there.”
“Jackson?”
“Jackson Avenue is where most of the niggers live. Used to live. You new?”
He nodded.
“See if you can get hold of the paper for that day. People say you never seen pictures like that before. They was burning. And they had ladders up, and breaking in the windows. This guy told me there was a picture of them climbing up on the church. And breaking off the clock hands. Tearing each other up, too. There’s supposed to be one set of pictures; of this big buck, getting after this little white girl…a whole lot of stink about them pictures. ‘Rape’ is the nasty word they didn’t use in the paper but rape is what it was. People was saying Calkins shouldn’t’ve printed them. But you know what he did?” Joaquim’s twisted face demanded answer.
“No. What?” he ceded, warily.
“He went down and hunted up the nigger in the pictures and had somebody interview him; and he printed everything. Now if you ask me, what he shouldn’t have printed was that interview. I mean, Calkins is all interested in civil rights and things. He really is. The colored people in this town had it bad I guess, and he was concerned with that. Really concerned. But that nigger had the dirtiest mouth, and didn’t use it to talk nothing but dirt. I don’t think he even knew what a newspaper interview was. I mean, I know the colored people got it rough. But if you want to help, you don’t print a picture of the biggest, blackest buck in the world messin’ up some little blond-headed seventeen-year-old girl, and then runnin’ two pages of him saying how good it was, with every other word ‘shit’ and ‘fuck,’ and ‘Wooo-eeeee’, how he’s going to get him some more soon as he can, and how easy it’s gonna be with no pigs around! I mean not if you want to help—do you? And because of the article, Harrison—his name was George Harrison—is some sort of hero, to all the niggers left over in Jackson; and you’d think just about everybody else too. Which shows you the kind of people we got.”
“But you didn’t see it, though?”
Faust waved that away.
“There’s this other colored man up from the South, some civil rights, militant person—a Mr. Paul Fenster? He got here right around the time it happened. Calkins knows him too, I guess, and writes about what he’s doing a lot. Now I would guess this guy probably has some decent intentions; but how’s he going to do anything with all that George Harrison business, huh? I mean it’s just as well—” he looked around—“there’s not too many niggers left in Jackson.”
He resolved annoyance and curiosity with the polite question:
“What started it? The riot I mean.”
Joaquim bent his head far to the side. “Now you know, nobody has the story really straight. Something fell.”
“Huh?”
“Some people say a house collapsed. Some others say a plane crashed right there in the middle of Jackson. Somebody else was talking about some kid who got on the roof of the Second City Bank building and gunned somebody down.”
“Somebody got killed?”
“Very. It was supposed to be a white kid on the roof and a nigger that got shot. So they started a riot.”
“What did the paper say?”
“About everything I did. Nobody knows which one happened for sure.”
“If a plane crashed, somebody would have known.”
“This was back at the beginning. Things were a hell of a lot more confused then. A lot of buildings were burning. And the weather was something else. People were still trying to get out. There were a hell of a lot more people here. And they were scared.”
“You were here then?”
Joaquim pressed his lips till mustache merged with beard. He shook his head. “I just heard about the newspaper article. And the pictures.”
“Where’d you come from?”
“Ahhhhh!” Faust waggled a free finger in mock reproval. “You have to learn not to ask questions like that. It’s not polite. I didn’t ask nothing about you, did I? I told you my name, but I didn’t ask yours.”
“I’m sorry.” He was taken back.
“You going to meet a lot of people who’ll get all kinds of upset if you go asking them about before they came to Bellona. I might as well tell you, so you don’t get yourself in trouble. Especially—” Faust raised his beard and put a thumb beneath his choker—“people wearing one of these. Like us. I bet if I asked your name, or maybe your age, or why you got an orchid on your belt…anything like that, I could really get your dander up. Now couldn’t I?”
He felt the discomfort, vague as remembered pain, in his belly.