Sam felt as if his whole body had been hollowed out, lifeless and weak like a baby. He hardly dared try to lift a finger; not knowing if his body would actually co-operate.
“I feel,” he retorted, “like shit…”
“That figures,” the woman said, scowling. “You look worse, babe.”
“Anybody ever told you your bedside manner sucks, Sabrina…”
“That’s what they said at nurse school,” she grinned, tenderly stroking his face with her right hand.
Sam noticed the line going into the back of his left hand, looked up at the drip bags hung on an aluminium frame.
“Just saline, mostly,” Sabrina assured him casually. “They pump you full of Penicillin every few hours. They think you had some kind of bad reaction to than shit Vincent gave you. Miranda was completely freaked out!”
Miranda!
“Miranda’s hair looks good the way it is now,” Sam muttered, exhausted.
Sabrina scowled before she could stop it.
Sam was still delirious, obviously!
“Vincent would never have got in to see you and you’d probably be dead now if she hadn’t pulled strings,” Sabrina declared, reluctant to give the younger woman any credit. “Vincent reckons that bastard Reggie O’Connell must have put the word out to shut you and Doug Weston up for good! I didn’t believe it but when he said how beat up you were,” she shrugged and for a split second her defenses came crashing down, she looked sixty not pushing fifty and worn out, despairing. She recovered fast. “Anyway, Miranda came through for us.”
Sam heard clunking somewhere near his right hand.
“The bastards chained you to the cot,” Sabrina declaimed loudly and contemptuously as if she was talking to somebody in another room. “There’s a fucking cop outside the door!” She added, even louder. In a near whisper she went on: “And there’s a guy from the DA’s officer who wants to talk to you but Vincent says not to talk to him under any circumstances whatever he says to you or threatens you with, unless he’s in the room.”
The man wondered where Vincent Meredith was.
Reading his mind Sabrina answered his unspoken question.
“Vincent’s got business in the Hollywood Hills,” she explained, minx-like. She sighed. “How come you never said your folks had friends in the White House?”
Now Sam was bewildered beyond measure.
Sabrina moved so as to be able to support his head as she held a plastic beaker to his lips.
The cool water tasted like nectar as it dribbled down his chin and seeped into his throat.
“My folks,” he forced out after words had failed to form on his dry lips, “don’t have any friends in DC…”
Sabrina went on trying to get him to drink.
“Sam, baby,” she murmured several minutes later as she resumed her watching brief; somebody would be with Sam all the time while he was in the hospital they had decided. “Sam, baby, you have no idea!”
Chapter 49
Bobby Kennedy was under no illusion that the thousands of people filing down towards Auburn Avenue had come to see him; but as his heavily guarded cavalcade of bullet proof limousines crawled down Jackson Street to the intersection with Auburn Avenue he had the oddest sense that the future was rushing towards him. America was changing and sooner or later the peoples of American were going to wake up to a different country. Sooner or later that change might have happened anyway; the October War and last month’s Battle of Washington had pressed the ‘fast-forward’ button, and brought the civil rights agenda to a head.
Here in Atlanta the place from which a century ago William Tecumseh Sherman’s Union Army had set off through Georgia on its ‘March to the Sea’, only a fool or a charlatan or a diehard Klan bigot could still believe that the hundred year old post-Civil War settlement which had unjustly disenfranchised and disadvantaged millions of men, women and children simply because of the color of their skin, was anything other than fundamentally wrong. Although Bobby Kennedy did not hear many people saying it out loud, not yet, one day they would shout it out aloud in their thousands and millions and when they did, he planned on being there to hear the thunder of righteous voices. Here in Atlanta and elsewhere in the South, countless whites and blacks alike had realized that their futures were inexplicably intertwined, and that the old ways which had so recently killed so many of their fellow Americans, were unsustainable in the new age.
The Attorney General’s personal apotheosis had come upon him late. He had grown up in the hothouse of northern Democratic Party politics, suspicious of and forever mindful that Southern Democrats weren’t like him; it had not been until he and Jack had been on the election trail and of necessity courted exactly that southern constituency that the reality of life in the Deep South nearly a hundred years after the abolition of slavery in the Union and the end of the Civil War, had really stuck in his craw. This was his fifth visit to Atlanta since the October War and nothing in politics — very little in life in fact — had given him more pride and satisfaction than his association and his developing friendship with the extraordinary man to whom the massive crowd had come to look to for hope.
Something remarkable was happening across the Deep South. Yes, religious and racial bigotry, segregation and countless injustices remained ingrained, entrenched within the fabric of the South but increasingly, the Civil Rights movement was being embraced by poor whites who shared the privations of the larger part of the colored community, and by middle class whites who just wanted to live in peace with their neighbours. For every diehard red neck bigot there were many more decent, pragmatic souls who — rocked by the near disaster of the October War which had robbed them of the certainties of their former lives, and frankly, who had been terrified by the spectre of Washington burning — had privately seen the light. All men were equal in the sight of God; and all men were the same flesh and bone beneath the skin.
“Now and then,” the Attorney General of the Unites States of America said distractedly as he smiled and nodded at the waving, cheerful throng pressing close to the Governor of Georgia’s limousine, “I find myself honestly believing that some good might yet come out of the war.”
Samuel Ernest Vandiver, the forty-five year old seventy-third Governor of Georgia did not reply immediately. Like many of his contemporary Southern Democrats his college education, his war service and exposure to influences and ideas from outside his insular Georgia caucus, Vandiver had for many years found himself espousing views and prejudices that he no longer personally regarded — if he ever had — as being articles of faith. He was no latter-day born again reformist and he had fought tooth and nail to preserve Georgia’s County Unit System of voting — a form of electoral college rather than one man one vote brand of democracy right up until the moment the United States Supreme Court had ruled it as unconstitutional; but a part of him had welcomed being forced to eventually start doing the right thing.