“I think you’d better leave now,” said Smith. “I’m not interested in anything you have to say.”
Groat chuckled and gave Withersby a sideways glance. “We’ll leave, if that’s what you want. But I just want to say that it’d be a shame if somebody decided to reopen the investigation into who killed Juanita Lomax and her kids.”
Withersby added, “Don’t forget that apartment fire on Indiana Avenue.”
“Oh, that’s right! Whoever did that would be facing, oh, what would you say, Vincent?”
“Twenty years, easy.”
Groat gave a headshake and scratched his chin. “Mmhmm. I’d say that.”
Smith looked as if his mind had stopped. The line of his lips thickened. When he spoke, his voice shook. “Listen, I was just starting to put my life back together. Right here, in this place—”
“That’s good to hear,” said Groat. “It’s something you could come back to, and with a whole lot more money to help you make it better. Do you think we could take a ride and talk a little more?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“Not really.”
“Chaym,” I said, “you can’t go with them—”
“Matthew.” Withersby looked square at me. “This doesn’t concern you anymore. The best thing for you to do is go back to Chicago. Maybe get back in school. Or maybe you’d like to think about becoming an agent. I believe you’d be a good one. I could help you with your application, if you like.”
“No, thank you.”
Smith looked at me as a man might if a noose was tied round his neck. “It’s all right, we’re just gonna talk.” Then he laughed, brokenly. “It’s just a li’l karma catching up with me, I guess. Check your Deuteronomy 32:35.”
I followed them to the front door, coming close up behind the Wise Guys just in time to hear Smith asking a question that had bothered me from the beginning. “How long have you been watching us?”
“Since the day you arrived at King’s apartment,” Withersby said. “You know, it’s a shame someone as talented as you has always been in the shadows. But that happens to geniuses, doesn’t it?”
“You think that’s what I am?”
“I know it, Chaym. And we want to help you …”
After they left, squeezing Smith between them on the front seat of their green Plymouth, pulling away at twilight, I sat on the front porch for hours, drinking a six-pack of Budweiser, waiting for them to return. In the distance, darkness began to stain the horizon, the hills, all the farmhouses, and the blue silhouettes of trees were black against the sky. Then it was night, and the world shrank. Was smaller, it seemed to me. Each time I saw a pair of headlights appear on the narrow, root-covered road, I stepped drunkenly into the yard, straining my eyes, only to see those lights pass the farmhouse by. I returned to the porch, starting on a second six-pack. And waited. The more I drank, the more the palpable dread I felt mercifully dulled, but I was unable to shake off Withersby’s words and wanted to shoot him. There was something awful in the way he’d said it, We want to help you, as if he knew well the demons of desire and inadequacy that dwelled within Smith, all those decades of never being appreciated, and was playing him, but for what?
What possible use could these Wise Guys have for the minister’s double? I tore the tab off another beer, drained half its contents, and belched, remembering that leaders like Hitler and Stalin employed stand-ins, and it was rumored that Fidel Castro had a couple of look-alike actors always waiting in the wings to impersonate him. So we had envisioned Smith’s role from the start. But what happened to doubles when the original became expendable, or a liability? I wondered: What if the Wise Guys really had no use for him? No more than they did for King. What if their assignment was to eliminate or discredit the minister — wouldn’t they want to eliminate as well the one capable of standing in during his absence?
By midnight they still had not returned. My stomach felt sour. My thoughts kept twisting, torquing so I could not stay any longer on the porch, listening to the wind whirling leaves and whistling in the treetops. I went inside the empty farmhouse, which seemed desolate and ghostlike, now that Amy was gone for good and, I feared, Smith was gone too. My aimless pacing took me through the front room where he’d devoted himself to studying minutiae of the minister’s life, to the spot in the kitchen where I’d kissed Amy, and finally to the closed door of Smith’s bedroom. I turned the knob, cracking open the door. I stepped inside, clicked on the ceiling light, and sat heavily down on his bed. There in one corner was his dented saxophone. I picked it up, plopped down again on the bed, wet the mouthpiece, and tried to play, producing not the mellow sound he’d conjured from his instrument but instead a blaat! that more resembled breaking wind than melody. No, I would never be a musician.
I returned the horn to its place in the corner, and as I turned around I saw something sticking out from under his bed, barely concealed by the blanket. I got down on one knee, peered under the mattress, and found a cardboard box filled with sketches, some in watercolor, others in charcoal. I spread them on the bed. It had been months since I’d seen his drawings, months in which his heart had subtly begun to change. His earlier pieces, I recalled, had seemed anguished and grotesque, some indebted to George Grosz’s savage depictions of the German bourgeoisie during World War II, except that earlier Smith’s targets were Negroes and American whites who betrayed the dream of the beloved community — race merchants who capitalized on their people’s suffering for personal profit, black thieves who preyed upon the poor unable to escape them in an era of apartheid, and Caucasians so guilt-ridden by the sins of their forebears they lost all reason when blackmailing, professional Race Men accused them of every social crime imaginable; all these players fell beneath Smith’s brutal pen and brushwork, the opportunists, race pimps and profiteers, and bigots whom he always drew dragging their knuckles on the ground like Neanderthals. But these new pages he’d filled, showing them to no one, shoving them under his bed in a cardboard box, were astonishingly different. In some way he’d descended into hell in his earlier work, during his days of exile, facing without flinching the ugliest, most paralyzing features of color and caste and inequality, squeezing them for every drop of pus and corruption they contained. And then, sometime after taking the bullet intended for King (so the dates on his drawings suggested), he’d let that go, released it. His new sketches were simplicity itself: delicate, lovingly detailed studies of the landscape around the farmhouse in different gradations of light. There were at least two dozen wordless meditations on a single ramose tree in the front yard, as if that one object — seen clearly and through no eyes but his own — might reveal the world’s mystery and wonder. He reveled in the play of colors, knowing they did not exist — colors, secondary qualities — outside the miracle of consciousness, which made every one of us (so his notebooks claimed) the magister ludi, the maestro of each moment of perception. I found drawings of Amy so real, so naturalistically rendered, it seemed she had appeared instantaneously, transported from Chicago to Carbondale like the spacemen in a TV series. There were several portraits of me, though I barely recognized myself. Me as he envisioned I might be in a decade, no longer the insecure, callow prop in the background of someone else’s story (or the chronicles of a mass movement) but instead an individual inexhaustible and ineffable in his haecceitas and open-ended promise. I stared and stared at these portraits. I went through all his sketches, studying each carefully, and I came to see that in them Smith had decided that if the world our absent fathers made was hideous, unfair, and unacceptable, a realm where we were condemned, then all right: he would reinvent it from scratch, if need be, in his art and actions.