Only the Strong (37 page)

He took his post in front of the glass. The first time he had noticed Artinces Noel, she was standing in the very room into which he now peered. She was young, not long out of medical school. But she had looked comfortable with her authority, displaying an ease bolstered by principle and conscience. At the grand opening of the well-baby center, she posed for the
Citizen
photographer with one infant in her arms and four others arrayed on an exam table. When he saw the picture in the paper, Goode couldn't help focusing on the doctor. He liked the arch of her eyebrows, the upright posture and pursed lips suggesting that under no circumstances would she ever fall for the okey-doke. She had the kind of regal, self-assured profile that belonged on a coin.

Artinces had been after him for a while, urging him to visit the babies. “You'd be surprised how good it feels,” she said. So there he was, not sure what he was looking for but looking nonetheless.

Earlier that day, Goode had stood at the bedside of his barely breathing wife. Barely breathing, barely there. Through the speakers at the corners of the room, Johnny Mathis demanded to be flown to the moon, a pitiless reminder of how utterly earthbound Goode was.

He was drying out, shrinking, finding new folds in his skin everyday. One day he'd be curled up in a hospital bed too, wearing a diaper and tubes up his nose. He used to think he wanted to go out in a blaze of glory. Now he just wanted to die in his sleep. Why did he feel so much older than he was?

Barely breathing, barely there.

The beep and whir of the machines.

Was she dreaming under there? When she twitched or shuddered, Goode had the idea that she was dreaming of falling, a long,
breathless plunge through endless stories. But she never approached the ground. Never woke up sweating, thirsty for air, relieved.

Beep. Whir.

A pillow over her face could end the ache for both of them. He had been a man with muscular, even monstrous appetites. With his gambling, his death-defying criminal escapades, his many mistresses, and his myriad cruelties, he had crushed the life out of her long ago. According to his thinking, the pillow would be less a killing device than an instrument of freedom, a cushion for her to land on after years of descent.

Behind the glass, a baby stirred. The nurse appeared and bent over the cradle. She lifted the infant out and disappeared. Soon she was at his side, holding the blanketed bundle before him.

“How about for a little while?”

“I don't know.”

The nurse placed the baby in his hands. He was a beautiful boy, brown and bright-eyed.

“You've held a baby before?”

“I have.”

“Then you've got nothing to worry about. It's like riding a bicycle.”

Children usually made him jumpy. He avoided them, especially boys. For years, every time he saw one, the boy turned into his Julius, dented and lifeless, still as a stone in the huge hands of Guts Tolliver.

Looking down at the baby, Goode smiled through his nervousness. “You're a big baby boy, aren't you?” he cooed. “A big boy. Yes you are.”

To press the pillow down. To nudge her toward the peace that she likely longed for in some miniscule, still-flickering fragment of consciousness. To press the pillow down. Let her go. Set himself free.

In the space between the pillow and the ravaged countenance, amid the beep and whir of the vigilant machines, while Johnny Mathis crooned “Chances Are,” insight arrived: this sleeping woman, once his whole world, posed no barrier between him and the elusive, rejuvenating calm that hovered just out of reach. He
knew that losing her wouldn't help him find it. Her death would offer him no deliverance.

He wouldn't do it. Couldn't.

Tossing the pillow aside, he fell to his knees and wept, a silent, choking agony that left him windless and drained. Finally, he stood and brushed off his pinstriped trousers.

Maybe he had a heart after all.

The baby began to writhe in his arms, his little face wrinkling in anguish. The first few cries had squeaked from his lips when the nurse reappeared.

“You'd better take him,” he said. “I think I scared him.”

“Nonsense. He likes you. Just sing to him.”

Goode shook his head. “I can't do that.”

“I don't believe it.”

“What would I sing?”

“Whatever comes to mind. You'll figure it out.” She smiled and left him.

Goode took a deep breath. His mind traveled back to Liberty, to the memory of his mother's sweet voice. He was shooting marbles, a small circle drawn in their neatly swept dirt yard. His mother hung laundry a few feet away, pulling clothespins from her apron in pairs and holding them between her lips. The clothespins dangled as she sang. But they never fell.

“
Hush
,” he sang. The baby's movements slowed as his little body relaxed. Eyes wide open, he looked up at Goode. “
Hush
,” Goode sang again. “
Somebody's calling my name. Hush, hush. Somebody's calling my name. Oh my Lord, Oh my Lord what shall I do?
”

A
CONFESSION FROM
C
HARLOTTE
might very well have changed her tentative rapprochement with Artinces into something richer and more mutually assuring. They might have huddled at the kitchen table over cups of tea while Charlotte explained her wanderings, the great grief behind her peripatetic moods. Artinces might have shared something about her own past beyond platitudes and up-from-poverty clichés. She might have told the girl that she, too, had wrestled with the consequences of love. Charlotte might have told Artinces that she would never again give away her heart, because when you love somebody, something always happens. Artinces might have held Charlotte when the girl finally broke down. There, Artinces might have said, softly, like a lullaby, it's all right. At least somebody in this house knows how to cry.

But first they had to get home.

At the park, Artinces sat behind the wheel in disbelief as her car's engine repeatedly failed to turn over. She was tempted to slap her head in frustration. It had been a childhood tendency until the day her father caught her wrist in mid-air. She was six, her hair
in pigtails with ribbons on the end. “Nope,” he cautioned, “your brain's in there. Be kind to it.”

So instead of slapping her head she hissed, slowly and loudly like a deflating tire. After a long day of working the booth and waiting in vain for the three women to reappear, she was close to exhausted. She searched in her purse, dipping her fingers blindly until they emerged with a business card. She gathered coins from a zippered pouch and walked across the street to the parking lot of A&U Barbecue, where a pay phone stood under a security light. She pushed a dime in the slot and dialed the number on the card.

“Hello,” she said. “Mr. Reid? Wendell Reid? This is Dr. Artinces Noel. I'm fine, thank you. I'm wondering if you might be available to give me a ride?”

When Goode had his country retreat, before the Continental plunged into the lake and ended his flirtation with feudal pursuits, his men sometimes played baseball in a neighboring field. He'd join in occasionally, his suit jacket left behind in the farmhouse, shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbows, suspenders straining against the bulk of his chest. His men knew better than to pitch him high and tight or risk beaning him with a curve. They knew to lob something soft toward the plate and wait for him to wallop it past the deepest man, to greet his home run with requisite cheers and the gravest respect. To shout encouragement as he took his gentlemanly jaunt around the bases, Josh Gibson in custom boots, stogie clenched between those powerful teeth.

White men loved baseball, he'd tell his men after the country breeze cooled their sweat and they cracked open beers under a canopy of maples and oaks. With its fenced-in frontiers and diamonds carved out of cornfields, baseball was the American Dream played out under the lights. You could start out in the batter's box with hope and a stick, steal your way across the heartland in search of a big score, and end up a winner by the time you got home.

But white men would soon hate it, he continued.

They'd soon hate it because, in places, like Kansas City and Indianapolis and Oakland and Birmingham, black men had grabbed hold of the national pastime with their black hands and dragged their jazzy flair from Jim Crow sandlots to Ebbets Field and the Polo Grounds. They circled under pop flies with deceptive ease and turned double plays like wizards of the air. Jackie Robinson was only the beginning; it was a new game now. Soon, only the ball would be white. They'd hate it because they made the game and we're remaking it. They made the country from black sweat, Indian blood, and grand theft. If we can remake their game, we can damn sure remake the country.

Three beers in and Goode would be ballistic, proclaiming his expertise on the art of making and remaking. “Just look at me,” he'd declare. “I'm one self-made motherfucker.” Hadn't he come from Liberty with little more than the lint in his pocket and a talent for inflicting pain?

His men, stretched out in the grass and tipsy themselves, eyed one other nervously, lest Goode's temper take a fearful turn. If he kept it aimed at white folks, they were safe. If he aimed it inward, they were safe. Sometimes he went down to the lake and raged at his own reflection.

They call baseball the national pastime, he ranted, and they love it sure enough. But the real national pastime is crushing niggers. So crush or be crushed, goddamn.

He might be from Mississippi but his mama didn't raise no fools, he'd say. He knew the rules, he'd say, and if he ever struck out he'd go down swinging.

Back then, everything was an argument to be proved, a score to be settled. But now he was standing in the well-baby center at Abram H., holding a baby in his arms. The infant's fresh innocence was a shock to his system, a balm to his soul, and all he wanted to do was forgive. Forgive his wife for never forgiving him. Forgive Artinces for refusing to save him. (For whom had he ever saved? Not a single soul.) Forgive himself for asking her.

Because he still had business to take care of, Goode's upstart compassion was not expansive enough to include those who
had foolishly dared to cross him. Of late, only one misbegotten individual had been so reckless: Sharps.

That thing about keeping your enemies closer? Damn straight.

Thinking about Sharps brought to mind another of Goode's countryside homilies, delivered to his disciples as they sucked down their beers: a skunk can spend all day in a garden, rolling around in the roses, eating them, shitting them, but when the sun goes down his black ass is still gonna stink.

That perfumed chump had been fouling his air for long enough.

Pretending to be stupid had been torture. But he had to bumble along as if clueless until he discovered what the hell Sharps was after. The idiot overestimated himself when he tried to follow his boss one Wednesday. Goode, on his way to meet Artinces at the Riverbend, shook him long enough to place a call to Grimes. The detective caught up with Sharps at the edge of the bridge.

“I work for Goode,” Sharps said when Grimes pulled him over.

“Don't know him,” Grimes quickly replied.

Sharps lowered his sunglasses and looked directly at him. “It's me, Sharps.”

He got silence in return. “I work for Goode. Ananias Goode.”

“I'm going to tell you again that I don't know him.”

“But I thought—”

“Don't think and drive. It's a dangerous mix.”

“What's the problem?”

“Your brake light's out.”

“No way. I just had this car tightened up from stem to stern.”

Grimes turned and walked to his unmarked cruiser. He came back with a baton, which he swung at Sharps's taillight, shattering it. He returned to Sharps's window. “I got a good look at it,” he said. “I'm pretty sure it's out.”

He wrote Sharps up and sent him on his way. By then Goode and Artinces were long gone.

Goode had planned to send Guts after Sharps, knowing how much the big man detested him. But then he saw the strangest thing. He'd pulled up at an intersection beside Fairgrounds Park and spotted Guts on the playground, pushing his girlfriend in a
swing. Guts looked ecstatic, transformed. His happiness removed years and pounds from him, making him look as young and uncorrupted as the strapping youth Goode had noticed outside the train station so many years before. He liked seeing that young man again. Seeing that joy. So he called Grimes instead.

When Grimes got the call he was doing what he always doing while off duty: sitting on the couch in his front room, staring at the painting on the wall. His wife, Virginia Grace, was upstairs cleaning the bathroom, it sounded like. He could hear her humming as she worked; some defiantly cheerful church song, something that reminded him of
when you're happy and you know it clap your hands
. Her humming was soft and reliable. It didn't ride above the other sounds, the gently controlled splashing and the brisk-brisk of a scrub brush, so much as it accompanied them, melody marching to harmony's dependable beat.