“You didn’t say there’d be snakes, Pa,” the boy — he was twenty years old but a boy still — whined, darting frightened looks at the ground around him.
“There ain’t no snakes around her, son.”
“Please yourself!” Jackson chortled. “Please yourself.”
The old man would not have been so self-satisfied if he had troubled to note the violence in Galen Cheney’s hard grey-blue eyes.
“They didn’t say what your name is stranger?” Horatio Jackson asked.
Cheney halted and jabbed a finger in his face.
“You don’t need to know my name, friend.”
“Just being civil!”
Galen Cheney halted before the hovel that he was paying good money to rent from the dissolute ‘farmer’. If anything finally brought home to him that the cream of the resistance had been frivolously thrown into the fires of Washington DC in December, it was the manner of men he had thus far encountered in Atlanta. Nobody he had met in Atlanta was fit to pick up the shit of the brave men who had died in Washington. Several times he had been on the verge of profanity; other times he had very nearly reached for his gun. The leeches wanted his money, the glory of his sacrifice and looked at Isaac like he was simple. Which he was not! The boy was one of God’s gifts to him and his wife, dearly departed, may she rest in the peace of God’s grace for eternity. Isaac was different; he had skills that few if any other living man could match; a man once in the cross hairs of his sights at a thousand yards was dead and even while such a man walked on the Earth, he was only a dead man walking. Yet these Southern ‘hicks’ — they all seemed inbred, ugly of face, spirit and voice — treated Isaac as if he was a freak…
Cheney sighed.
They clearly could not rely on any of the people in Georgia; the people in Atlanta were no more than the ‘stay at home’ rump of the Georgia militia he had helped to train last year. The resistance had no need for ‘good old boys’ like the deadbeats and losers he and Isaac had been handed around in the last twenty-four hours. Mistakenly, he had believed he would need ‘local knowledge’, and ‘enablers’ but actually all he needed was a street map and a car. He could buy the former and steal the latter at his convenience. As for finding his target the whole city was festooned with hurriedly thrown up billboards proclaiming the forthcoming rally in Bedford-Pine Park; and the civil rights people were already erecting a makeshift stage in one corner conveniently overlooked by the high rise apartment blocks and offices of midtown Atlanta.
“We’ll stay in the house,” Galen Cheney decided. “You can sleep in the outhouse.”
Horatio Jackson’s face creased into what might have been a smile; but then he realized the tall man with the Texas drawl was not joking.
“Now steady on Mister…”
Galen Cheney reached into the folds of his leather jacket.
Isaac chortled nervily as the muzzle of the long-barrel .44 calibre Smith and Wesson Magnum prodded the chest of the old man who had tried to frighten him by talking about snakes.
Chapter 64
Dwayne John had imagined that he was coming home when he had boarded the Greyhound bus in San Francisco. Now he knew this was just another one of the things he had been wrong about in the last few years. Or rather, not so much things he had got wrong as things that had not turned out in any way like he had thought they were going to turn out. A man did things for the best of all possible motives and yet fate, somehow, had a contrary knack of tripping one up when you least expected it.
He had been an unlikely Galahad to Darlene Lefebure’s Cinderella — it helped to think of these things in terms of fairy tales, he had discovered — and as God was his witness he had never meant to lay a finger on her right up until he did. Things had got crazy in an infernal rush once they had got to California; too many new things all at once, no time to adjust. Looking back he had no idea how he had avoided ending up locked away for five to twenty-five in San Quentin; he had been doing drugs, getting into fights…
Was that really me?
The night of the October War was the surrealist thing of all.
Miranda.
Darlene finding them together.
Johnny Seiffert waving his Navy Colt, the threats and the abuse as he drove them out into the street half-dressed and as high as kites. He had looked around for Miranda — he had not even known her name at the time — but she had gone and he was left standing on the pavement with his dick swinging in the breeze…
And now he had come home to Georgia, except the West Coast was his home now because that was where Miranda was, two-and-a-half thousand long miles away!
He had put a call through to her office in Sacramento yesterday. He could not remember if California was two or three hours behind Atlanta; she had put him right on that, having only just got into work.
That was a bad start; made good immediately.
‘It’s really great to hear your voice,’ she had said and those words, crackling and attenuating past the mush on the long distance line had made him feel like a million dollars. He had talked to her about the plans for the big rally in the middle of Atlanta on Friday. The news about Dr King’s ‘summit’ with the President had been on the wires last night and was all across the TV news channels and the daily papers coast to coast that morning. ‘There may be over a hundred thousand people there on Friday!’
The Atlanta Police Department had pleaded for the rally to be abandoned or delayed. They were afraid there would be a riot, or city-wide disorder but State Governor Vandiver had spoken face to face to Mayor Allen — a man many of those close to Dr King were beginning to suspect was actively searching for ways to befriend the civil rights movement — and by telephone to Dr King himself, promising to do everything in his power to enable the rally to go ahead.
‘The time has come for men of good will to come together,’ he had asserted. ‘The rights enshrined in the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America will be exercised by all Georgians regardless of the color of their skin.’
Dr King was in the process of polishing the speech he had intended to give on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC late last summer; that ‘March on Washington’ had been postponed — many around Dr King said ‘banned’ — by a Kennedy Administration afraid of antagonising its ‘Southern friends’ at a time when the country was still reeling from the aftershocks of the October War. Now the gossip was that the ‘March to Philadelphia’ was not just back on the agenda, it was actually going to happen in as little as a month, or maybe, two and there was an expectation that the leader of the movement would make the announcement on Friday.
Dwayne had described the plans for the procession starting from outside the Ebenezer Baptist Church on Auburn Avenue. Dr King would lead the way accompanied and flanked by civic and religious leaders up Jackson Avenue north to the seventeen acre park in the Fourth Ward of the city. Bedford-Pine Park had been created from the open area left by the Great Atlanta fire of 1917, now it was an island of greenery in the middle of a growing urban, commercial and industrial sprawl.
The Atlanta PD was worried because the park was overlooked on three sides and it claimed did not have enough officers to provide a continuous cordon around it. The police had also voiced concerns about the park’s paucity — more correctly the ‘absence’ — of public facilities given the size of the crowd anticipated in the park, the problems of general crowd control, the inevitable blocking of adjacent roads and issues around access for emergency vehicles; fire wagons, ambulances and for the police themselves in the event of some accident occurring or emergency arising during the rally.