King lit a fresh cigarette off the one he had going. “Was that what you wanted?”
Smith shrugged. “I guess so. I wanted them boys to have a father. I figured Juanita’n me could come together on that.”
“I think you did an honorable thing.”
“Naw,” Again, that satiric grin. “I was a fool.”
He’d tried, said Smith, to provide for the boys and their mother, but maybe — who knows? — he didn’t try hard enough or just wasn’t meant to be married, or maybe he had an inverted Midas touch so that everything he brushed against transmogrified into crap. He gave up going to school, he got a second job with a moving company, and after two years he was able to get them into a bigger place, a housing project, in Altgeld Gardens, though it seemed like even with two jobs there was hardly anything left at the end of the month after he paid the bills, and somehow — he wasn’t sure how — what little was left he wound up putting on another bottle of whiskey because he needed that to wind down and get to sleep some nights; and there wasn’t much time either to go to church after he took a third job as a night watchman on the weekends, or to spend with the boys, who started cutting school and keeping bad company, or with Juanita, who, he discovered, liked Colombian Gold as much as he did Johnny Walker (Black), so much so — according to one of his neighbors — that she slipped away in the afternoons when he was working to see another man who sold exactly what she wanted, though his neighbor said he had no idea how Juanita was paying for it, and when he confronted her with this the fights began, him accusing her of infidelity, her damning him for his drinking, their shouting going on sometimes all night, so loud other residents threatened to call the police, and her boys couldn’t bear that, naturally; they took to staying away from the place as long as they could, and after a time so did he, feeling thankful he was so mired in nickel-dime jobs that he had a way to escape that household, escape thinking about himself, escape the near hysteria he felt when he realized his life was a nightmare, a ghastly joke on everything he’d once dreamed of becoming. He rode the streets for hours some evenings after work, simply to avoid returning home, and it was on one such night in 1963, after cruising the South Side until he was nearly out of gas, that he realized he didn’t have the faintest idea where the hell he lived. Try as he might, he could not remember the address or recognize the street. Other things were gone too, whole quadrants of his memory. Unable to get home, he pulled up in front of a police station and told them his predicament, and they held him overnight for evaluation.
They held him for a long time, first at the station, then at an institution in Elgin, because when the police knocked on his door, discovered it open, then stepped inside, they found Juanita’s three boys strangled in their beds and pieces of their mother distributed here and there throughout the apartment. When they told him, Smith wept in his cell. He swore he knew nothing about it. Twice he passed a polygraph test. They could not convict him of the crime, but they did send him to Elgin, where he worked sometimes in the kitchen, sometimes with other patients cleaning up the grounds around the hospital, and met with doctors who spent two years helping him patch together the broken pieces of his personality. When he was released, there was nowhere for him to go except to Vera Thomas, who gave him back his old room and accepted the little he could offer her from what he made doing odd jobs, here and there, on the South Side.
After a silence, Smith and King drew breath at the same instant. The minister let Smith speak first.
“Like I said, Reverend, I been tryin’ like hell to get back on my feet, to do somethin’ worthwhile with my life.”
“If we can achieve our goals for equality here, I think things will be better for you.”
“What if you don’t?”
“Excuse me?” The minister scratched his cheek.
“I guess you think the Lord puts us all here with a definite purpose, don’t you?”
“That’s right. Everyone is equal in His eyes.”
“I don’t see that.”
King was silent, perhaps uncertain of what to say, or so challenged by the sharpness of Smith’s voice that his own thoughts were stilled.
“Sir, I need work. That’s all I’m asking for. Right now I can’t rub two dimes together. Problem is, there ain’t too many places that’ll hire me. But I figure there is maybe one thing I can do, if you’re willin’, and I been praying night and day you will be.”
“What is that?”
“I read that when you was in Montgomery you got over forty death threats a day — is that so?”
“Yes,” the minister said, nodding, “and I still get them.”
“That woman who stabbed you? Weren’t you signing books when that happened? The knife come within an inch of your heart, didn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“I coulda been there instead of you,” said Smith.
“What?”
“When you go somewhere or leave a place, I could be there too, and if somebody’s tryin’ to hurt you, they won’t know whichaway to turn. That’s all I’m askin’, that you let me do somethin’—maybe the only thing in this world — I can do.”
“No.” The minister stood up so suddenly the back of his legs sent his chair skidding a foot behind him. “Absolutely not. I could never agree to anything like that.”
Smith smiled bitterly. “Thought you might say that. You ain’t the first person to turn me away. Or to take a shot at me ’cause I favor you so much.”
“What did you say?”
“I said I been catching hell since you come to Chicago.
Last week a couple of boys pushed me off the El platform.” Smith measured five inches between his forefinger and thumb. “I was ’bout that far from landin’ on the third rail. Lots of people know where you’re stayin’ in town, but some don’t. They see me and come to my place. Some of ’em tore up my room. Scared my landlady so much she’s askin’ me to leave. But where am I gonna go? Hell, I can’t walk down the street or go to the store without somebody stoppin’ me. Some of ’em spit in my face. That’s colored as well as white. That’s why I come here. I figure if I’m catchin’ hell ’cause of you, I might’s well catch it for you instead.”
“You’ve no place to stay?”
“Not after tomorrow.”
The minister made a sharp intake of breath. He rubbed the back of his neck, then paced back and forth in the kitchen, perhaps thinking — as I had been all evening — of that ancient Christian story of the couple who found a bedraggled old man at their door, invited him inside, fed and comforted him, and only after their guest left discovered he was the Nazarene. Finally King took his seat. “Would you all come here with me at the table? Mr. Smith has suffered much. I’d like to say a prayer for him.”
Amy and I sat down; she was to my left, the minister to my right, and Smith directly in front of me. We joined hands and closed our eyes. Looking back, I cannot recall the whole content of King’s prayer, but it was appropriate, an affirmation that all, regardless of circumstance, were loved by the Lord. And I would not have opened my eyes before he’d finished, but I felt pressure beneath the table on my left foot, a gentle tapping like a lover’s signal. Thinking this was Amy, hoping it was so, I let my lids blink open, and saw that Smith had never closed his eyes. He was staring at us — like a fugitive peering at a comfortable bourgeois family through their window as they eat dinner, oblivious to his presence — and on his face was that unsettling smile as he critically scrutinized King, then Amy, who gripped his hand tightly (heaven knows what she was thinking). And then, tilting his head, tapping my foot again, he winked.