South of Haunted Dreams (6 page)

I had parked my bike down the street. I was late and was walking quickly. As I crossed the street in front of the café, a tan car turned sharply across my path and into the alley. Two men jumped out, one black, the other one white. They were not in uniform. They never flashed a badge. But I knew right away they were cops. Their haircuts. The car. The way they swaggered when they walked toward me. They made sure I saw the guns hanging from their belts. The one cop kept a hand on his pistol.

The black cop hurried to me and yanked away the helmet I carried.

“We need to have a word with you,” he said and shoved me toward the car. “Let's see some ID.”

“What for?”

“You match the description of a man shoplifting up the street.”

“Was he on a motorcycle? Was he carrying a helmet?”

“He was carrying something. Could have been a briefcase, could have been a helmet. Let me see some ID.”

I refused. He threw me against the car and searched me anyway. He yanked my jacket off my back and went through it. He found nothing. He took the wallet from my pants pocket and went through that too.

“I think we're going to run you in,” he said. “How would you like that?”

I had to think about it. I didn't want it, but I wasn't about to give in to them and cooperate. Finally I raised a finger to the woman waiting for me, just to make sure she knew it was me, and to tell her I'd be a moment or two. If they dragged me off to jail, I didn't want her to think I had stood her up.

“Is she waiting for you?” the black cop asked, as if that made a difference, as if a shoplifter wouldn't have a friend waiting, wouldn't want to break for lunch.

I didn't answer.

The white cop got a brainstorm. He decided to call in the information from my driver's license. In a second he came back.

“I think we can let you go,” he said.

“Why? Did some bozo cop catch the real thief?”

“No,” he said. “It turns out that you don't match the description after all. The guy we're looking for is five foot three.”

“Five foot three,” I shouted. “Does he have a beard at least?”

“Well, no. But he is black,” he said, as if that justified everything. “Sorry, but hey, you understand how it is.”

“Well you can just kiss my ass,” I said. “Because no, I don't know how it is.”

“Hey, hey, hey,” the black cop said, trying to calm me down. “You don't have to make a scene.”

“You pull up, snatch away my helmet, rip the jacket off my back, search me like I'm some sort of a criminal and
I'm
the one making a scene? You must be out of your mind.” I was shouting, going crazy.

“Don't make this any worse than it already is,” he said.

“It can't get any worse than it already is,” I said.

I put my finger in the black cop's face. “You especially,” I said through gritted teeth. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

Being black is still the crime. And every cop, black or white, is Bull Connor to me. Every cop is a southerner at heart.

And now here in Hartford was another one. A southern one.

He had a slight paunch that hung over his belt, but otherwise was lean. He wore a clean white shirt, sweat stains at the armpits, collar buttoned to the last button but one. Clipped to his belt was his pistol. I waited for him to touch it, was sure he would before long.

Hartford is the county seat. The courthouse sits up on a grassy hill. At the base of the hill is a retaining wall. On the very corner is the phone booth. That's where I was when the cop, a deputy sheriff, came to me.

I was thumbing through the little phone book hanging from a small chain. You hardly ever find directories hanging in phone booths anymore. People rip pages out of them. People steal them.

I was trying to find a phone number for the Coon Hunters' Club. It wasn't listed. When I dialed directory assistance, they didn't have a number for them either. So I stepped out of the booth and leaned against the wall. The cop was waiting for me.

“How y'all doing?” he said.

“Okay.” Suspicious. Cagey. “How about you?”

“About as well as can be expected,” he said. And then he touched the gun. He tugged at the waist of his pants and adjusted the way the gun hung on his belt.

His accent was soft, hardly southern at all, almost midwestern but slower and with a slight twang.

“Sure is hot,” he said. He pointed with his chin across the street. “Is that your bike over by the bank?”

“Yeah.”

“Sure is a pretty thing,” he said. “How's she run?”

“Smooth,” I said.

“And fast, I bet.”

“Fast enough,” I said. “Speed limits, you know.”

“Yeah, right.” I don't think he believed me.

“You're loaded down,” he said, never taking his eyes off the bike. “Going far?”

“Just to Bowling Green right now. After that I'm just going.”

“Living every man's dream,” he said. “Ooo-wee! That's just about heaven.”

He started to walk away, around the corner and to his car parked there, but he came back.

“Hey, you ain't lost, are you?” he asked. “You looking for something you can't find in that phone book?”

“Well, yeah. I'm trying to find a number for the Coon Hunters' Club I passed a while back.”

“You passed it on this road? How far back?”

“Not too long ago,” I said. “Back between here and Owensboro.”

He scratched his head and shook it. “Naw, sir,” he said. “I don't remember ever seeing no Coon Hunters' Club on this road.”

“But I just saw it.”

“Naw. Not in this county. If it was here I'd know about it. I know where just about everything is in these parts. That must have been back in Daviess County. And you won't find that number in this phone book. This here is Ohio County.”

He gave one more long glance toward the bike, shook his head and smiled.

“You be careful on that thing,” he said. “I'm not going to tell you to have fun. That's not something I even have to worry about, is it?”

He walked away, still adjusting the gun on his belt and pulling at his collar. I heard him muttering to himself. “Man oh man,” he was saying. I couldn't tell if he was talking about the heat or talking about the bike.

I took a long look at the bike myself. It certainly was a beautiful machine, big and blue and sleek and all loaded down, two black saddle bags, one on each side, a canvas duffel strapped to the luggage rack on the rear, and a fishing rod attached. I admired my choice. The first bike I ever owned. The first I ever rode. BMW. K75s. A sport bike that looked like a racer but built for long-distance touring. It had six miles on the odometer when I picked it up, twenty-two at the end of the first afternoon I owned it. The dealer and I went to Forest Park on it and he taught me how to ride it. Twenty minutes it took and he told me I was on my own. By the end of the next week, I had put six hundred miles on it. The bike was ready for its first routine service, and I was ready to hit the road. I wondered how the odometer would read by the time I got home again.

I crossed back over and suited up, slowly for all the world to see and envy, jacket, gauntlets, helmet. I looked like a road warrior, I
felt
like a road warrior. As slowly as possible I climbed on. A light squeeze on the clutch handle and the kickstand retracted by itself. I stuck the key in the ignition and started the engine. An instant of slight pressure on the little green button was all it took. She fired right up. I said to myself: Ah! Those Germans! as I always did when I had climbed on and was about to take off. When I applied the brakes, the red light on the instrument panel went off, telling me the rear brake light was working. Ah! Those Germans.

I checked for traffic. I put the bike in gear. In half a moment I was gone. I forgot all about Bull Connor and the hateful past, forgot I was in the South. And for the moment I was back to my old self, a tall man with a beard, now with a hot-looking motorcycle. I was king of the world again. Being black hardly mattered.

IV

The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men Gang aft agley.

—Robert Burns

The year I took to the road was meant to be the year I bought a house and settled down somewhat, the year I could finally, honestly and without hesitating or fudging answer the question: Where is your home, where do you live? I had my eye on one of those rehab deals in some desperately rundown inner-city neighborhood—itself an adventure—where you can buy a big house, old and tired, for about twelve dollars and a promise to revitalize it, which I was eager to do: eager to make something with my own hands, my own sweat and a few tools, something beautiful out of nothing special, out of something ugly. Never mind that I'm no carpenter and know nothing about electricity or plumbing or construction. I can handle a saw. I can drive a nail. And I can learn.

But I hadn't any money—not enough income anyway to buy and redo a house, but yes, money enough for a more modest adventure, money enough to buy a motorcycle, money enough to hit the road.

Once I took to the road, I imagined it might become the year I would learn to hit a curveball, long after any threat of a baseball career was over. That threat ended in 1969 when I was thirteen. I couldn't hit a curveball then either, nor even a well-thrown fastball. So I wanted to spend the summer going from batting cage to batting cage, in every small town I came to, punching in quarter after quarter, hour after hour, swinging at every pitch the mechanical arm threw at me. I would start off in the little league cage and progress until I was up to major league speed. I would wait for the machine to click into gear and for the yellow light to come on, and then stare down a ninety-mile-an-hour fastball, one after another after another. Timing, a good eye, and quick wrists. That's all it takes. I didn't want to try out for the majors. I just wanted to be able to hit the damned thing.

This is what American men and young boys aspire to, the happiness of hitting a baseball, the same as they dream of one day hitting the road.

But way has a habit of leading on to way. The goals do blur. You learn to take the bends in the road as they occur, the hills as they arise, continuing on until a dead end bars the way. You turn. You take what the road offers. You follow where it leads.

I could no more have bought a house and settled down than I could have avoided the South. The road I was on headed south. Even when it had gone north it was carrying me south.

I sped along Highway 231 toward Bowling Green. All seemed suddenly right with the world. It was autumn in the South, which is quite unlike that same season anywhere else. The sun shone so hot the day would have seemed full-blown summer to a New Englander. There was not a trace of coolness in the air. The leaves had not yet given thought to changing color. But once you got used to it and accepted it for what it was, once you put out of your mind notions of autumn's chill, the heat was magnificent.

The sun traced its path in the southern sky and radiated full on my face. Inside the helmet was like an oven. I opened the visor to let in air. The heat had been debilitating. Now the wind rushed inside the helmet and was invigorating. It rushed into my eyes and made them water. A bug smashed against my cheek.

I unzipped my jacket. The wind slammed against my chest. At eighty miles an hour, I began finally to cool down.

Tobacco fields patched the land. Houses here and there were scattered, simple and made of wood, most of them painted white. There were few cars on the road.

Then all of a sudden, as if out of nowhere, traffic began to get heavier. Trees cropped up where farmers' fields had been. The yards got smaller. The houses started coming closer together. Bowling Green lay just over the next hill, and I slowed down.

At the edge of town Highway 231 turns east. It merges with Highway 68 coming in from the right, from the west and south, and together the two roads, now one, come to an abrupt end about two hundred yards farther on. The road dead-ends into a hospital. What appears to be the main branch carries off to the right, but forks as well off to the left and up the hill. The road left and the road right both seem about the same, just as fair. I can't say why—the wind, the smell, the way the bike leans—but I'm in the left lane. When the light turns green, I turn left.

The left fork takes me along a few twists and turns and carries me into the center of town. Perhaps the road right would have done the same; I'll never know. I probably won't be going back that way. But this is where I want to be. This is where, I suppose, I need to be.

In the center of the square there is a little park that lies dark green, cool and moist in the shade of trees and shrubs. There are freshly painted benches, none of them occupied, and the park looks like the perfect spot for an afternoon nap. My shoulders are tired, my lower back very stiff. But I'm also hungry.

I park the bike in the shade and strip off the hot riding gear. I hook the helmet on one of the bike's foot pegs. I tuck the jacket under one of the straps that holds the duffel on. Refusing to worry about any of it for more than a second, I leave it all on the bike. I stretch. I loosen up a little. Then I stroll around the square. I want to find food.

On all sides the square is surrounded by shops and stores and what used to be a movie theater. Repair work is being done to the faÒ«ade of one of the shops. Ladders lean against the side of the building. The men who climb up and down hang on with arms hooked through the rungs. With one hand they hold buckets and brushes and tools. The free hand chisels away old paint, applies new colors, mortars bricks in place. And as I have been watching these workers, they have been watching me. One of them calls down. “Hey! Nice bike.”

I wave up, a feigned casual air, but I'm thrilled, as proud as an envied child with a new toy.