He smiled sardonically.
'Kennedy said he wanted to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the wind. Soon after he said that he was killed. After his death the South-East Asian situation escalated with no visible provocation. John Foster Dulles, ex-Secretary of State, still held phenomenal power in this Warfare State they had created, and his brother Alan was head of OSS. With his brother protecting him from any unpleasant consequences, Alan Dulles went ahead to satisfy the military-industrial demands of the Far Right. Alan
Dulles was the same guy who'd run Operation Paperclip towards the end of the Second World War. He'd been posted in Switzerland, his function to round up and assist German specialists in all the fields of armaments and military production. Between 1945 and 1952 they brought six hundred and forty-two German and foreign specialists - scientists and the like - and their families into the U.S. and placed them in senior positions within aerospace programs, war industries, armaments manufacture and defense systems. In 1945 ex-General Reinhard Gehlen joined forces with the OSS. Gehlen was placed in charge of wartime intelligence for Foreign Armies East. Gehlen met with the main players at the Pentagon itself - Hoover, Dulles, some others. That affiliation, Gehlen's intelligence network and the OSS, became what is now known as the CIA.'
Schembri lowered his spoon and leaned towards me. 'You didn't know this shit did you?' he whispered.
I shook my head.
'Tomorrow I'll tell you about the fucking Ku Klux Klan, same folks you collided with down in Carolina, eh?'
I leaned closer. 'Tell me… tell me now.'
But my informant leaned back slightly, and again smiled, that wry knowing smile that made you feel he knew everything there was to know in the world, and all of it was true.
'And so there you had it… the Nazi experts in clandestine assassinations and reversal of judicial proceedings became the tutors for Dulles and Richard Helms. These were the people who invented the American-Soviet conflict and the Cold War.'
I felt frustration for a moment, a sense of agitation. 'What about the Ku Klux Klan?' I asked. 'Tell me what you know about that.'
Schembri again spooned in a mouthful of food and swallowed it without chewing. He looked at me without seeing me.
'And our friend Nixon… he applied to the FBI after graduating from law school. They never replied to him. With the outbreak of World War Two he requested sea duty and was assigned to the South Pacific Combat Air Transport Command. He was out there fifteen months and then he was posted to Alameda, California with Fleet Air Wing 8 under special orders from the Navy Bureau of Aeronautics. His job was to wind up active contracts with aircraft firms such as Bell and Glenn Martin. Those same six hundred and forty-two scientists were coming in at this time, and with a healthy donation from the Guggenheim Foundation they secured a hundred and sixty acres and the medieval castle built by the financier Jay Gould at Sands Point on Long Island.
'Those German and foreign scientists were stationed there under the auspices of the Navy's Office of Research & Inventions. And the American states that were most likely to benefit from this influx of German scientific brilliance were those in the South and Southwest. The segregated, racist states were fuelled by propaganda machines funded by those same departments, and it was in those states that the majority of the military-industrial production facilities were based.
'Nixon himself was in New York, wondering where he would go career-wise. He decided to move to Maryland, and coincidental with his move an advertisement appeared in twenty-six different newspapers. The ad asked for a Congressman candidate, no previous political experience, no political strings or obligations, but with a few ideas for betterment of the country. Herman Perry, Vice-President of the Bank of America, called Richard Nixon and asked if he was a Republican, and if he was available.'
Schembri nodded as if to grant Papal indulgence to his statement.
'Nixon was a creation of some very interested people, a creation that was born as an idea by the Committee of One
Hundred Men in California in August of 1945, and wound up here, the early 1970s, with the realization that Nixon is a fucking loon and he needs to disappear quietly.'
Schembri smiled and again emphasized his words with his spoon.
'And I'll tell you something else, kid… if they hadn't shot Kennedy back then in '63, if they'd gotten him out through the legal process or perhaps exposed his sexual history and predilection, they would have shot Nixon instead of cooking up this bullshit longwinded Watergate fiasco. They can't shoot Nixon, they wish they could, but even they figure they might have a hard time pulling it off twice. Anyway, Nixon's crazy enough to do himself in if someone doesn't get there first.'
Suddenly there was a commotion behind us. I turned to see the majority of General Populace making its way towards the exits. The end of meal bell had sounded and I hadn't noticed. My own food sat untouched in front of me. I snatched a piece of bread, folded it, stuffed as much chicken as I could between the two halves and buried it in my pocket.
'They're all a bunch of crazies, kid… and you ran foul of a very small corner of that world… you and your man Goldbourne, and all that shit that went down with Jack Kennedy's brother. Tomorrow,' Schembri said, 'I'll tell you all about that tomorrow.'
He winked knowingly, put one last spoonful of rice into his mouth, and then he stood and waited for the guard to come down and take him to his cell.
That move in March of '69, the journey we took out to Panama City and Pensacola, was really the beginning of the end.
If I try to collapse this thing into one statement, like trying to synthesize the extent and scope of my life into one paragraph, it is really about nothing more than a friendship. My friendship with Nathan Verney was really the beginning and end of everything. It was with Nathan Verney that I discovered the world, and I cannot think of any significant event that occurred prior to his death that we didn't share. It was always the two of us. From six to twenty-four years old we ran parallel lives, and though one or other would veer momentarily to the left or right, perhaps pause or slow or miss a step, there would always be that moment a little way up the line where we would coincide once more.
Truth be known, it would have been difficult to create a life after Nathan's death. With him gone it was perhaps simpler to just vanish into the American judicial and criminal system, to become a non-person, to disappear from the eyes and minds of the world. That's what I had done, and sometimes I would wonder if I hadn't wanted it that way.
There have been times when I have tried to imagine what it would have been like to grow old, to sit on some porch stoop or verandah, to recount tales of Eve Chantry, of Sheryl Rose Bogazzi, of Caroline Lanafeuille and Linny Goldbourne, of Marty Hooper and Larry James; to talk of the day the Army came to Greenleaf, of Reverend Verney and the day Kennedy died; to reminisce about the baked ham sandwich by Lake Marion where the smell was like the flowers and the fish and the trees, and summer mimosa down near Nine Mile Road, and something like pecan pie and vanilla soda all wrapped up in a basket of new-mown grass.
I have tried to imagine.
But I cannot imagine any of it without Nathan beside me.
Truth be told, I don't want to imagine without Nathan.
We were never brothers, we were more than that, for in the same way that I believed so hard that he'd died for me, I try now to convince myself that my death will serve some other purpose, redress some universal imbalance perhaps.
It was never meant to be this way, I know that much, but at the time it all seemed so innocent and simple and magical.
Smoke and mirrors, Nathan would say whenever he felt there was something he didn't understand, something we weren't being told, something that didn't make sense.
Well, the smoke and mirrors were there, and we, in our passion, our naivete and our desire to really live, walked in between them.
One of us lived to speak of it.
And one of us… well, one of us just disappeared.
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* * *
Chapter Seventeen
I knew from the moment we arrived that Panama City was a mistake.
Father John would ask me what I meant when I told him that later, and I would be vague and uncertain. Sometimes you just know, I would tell him, an intuition, a sixth sense, call it what you will, sometimes you just know.
Until Panama City we had stayed in smaller places, towns or suburbs, but here we were colliding with the real world once more. Seemed to me that as soon as we arrived we were treated with suspicion and curiosity. Nathan said I'd smoked too much weed and gotten paranoid, but I didn't believe that to be the case. I felt people were looking, watching us, wondering what the black guy was doing with the white guy and vice versa. Nathan had grown his hair, he wore a headband, his clothes were a mixture of things we had traded and bought from the beach people in Apalachee, and in Panama City he stood out like Hendrix at a Methodist Chapter. I warned him, told him to dress down, to be a little less conspicuous, but Nathan used words like square and off-track. He didn't listen, he was of a mind to be what he wanted to be, and when he was in such a mood there was no purpose in arguing.
'The problem with you,' he said, 'is that you're always anticipating trouble. You go looking for trouble and it'll find you.'
'But I don't go inviting it,' I replied. 'There's a difference between being aware and just being fucking obvious.'
He smiled like he knew best.
He'd started doing that, the leave it to me routine, and it pissed me off.
'Look, Danny, you gotta understand something about people. People don't naturally want to upset their own lives. They want everything plain and simple and straightforward. The ones who start trouble only start it because they figured you were starting first…'
'That is so fucking naive, Nathan.'
Nathan laughed. 'Naive? You're calling me naive?'
It was worded as a question, but I understood the intention.
'You seem all set to create a problem when there isn't one,' he went on. 'There are times when I really don't get where you're comin' from.'
'Same place as you,' I replied.
'Yeah, right,' he stated, his tone sharp and sarcastic.
I wanted to tell him that I had only come along because of him, that had he left me to my own devices I would still be in Greenleaf, still be right there at Karl Winterson's Radio Store earning some money and minding my own business. I didn't say it, it was weak and feeble-minded, and if there was one thing I believed this escape had taught me it was that there was no place for weakness. Indecision was what had started the war in Vietnam; indecision was back of all the dead bodies that lay burned and black and without identity in some place that was once a country; indecision was what had brought me out here with Nathan. Had I been there again, back home when he came down the path with the letter, I would have told him No, you make your own way now. I have a life here, perhaps not a great deal as far as lives go, but I have time. And indecision was the cause of losing both Caroline and Linny.
I felt my fists clenching and unclenching as he spoke.
'You ever figure out how to have an original thought you let me know,' Nathan said, an unnecessary and vicious comment.
I wanted to slug him upside the head; I bit my tongue and said nothing.
There was silence for some time, stilted and awkward, but eventually he turned and smiled at me.
'Figure that's enough arguing for this week,' he said.
I nodded. 'Enough,' I replied.
'Don't want to fight with you, Danny, but hell, man, you gotta relax a little, okay?'
I nodded in agreement, but back of the agreement there was no feeling. I let it slide, but even as I watched that ghost depart I believed that a time would come when Nathan Verney would have to stand down against me. I vowed there would be.
'Truce,' he added.
'Truce,' I said.
I found work easily, warehouse labor, simple, basic-wage stuff. Nathan tried to get work at the same place and they didn't want to know. He said it was his color, I said it was his attitude. He said You go be a lowly Uncle Tom nigger boy and see how it feels.
I left him alone for some time and he came back to battery. He had me cut his hair, he bought some straight pants, white tee-shirts, a denim jacket. Next day he got a job unloading dead chickens at a factory on the outskirts. There was a little community, ten or fifteen black guys, and come the end of the day I'd walk over there and watch them playing craps. They didn't seem bothered by me, a single white guy. They thought I was retarded or somesuch and left me alone. No white boy in their right mind would go down there and hang out.
Nathan eased up a little, he made some friends, he didn't smoke weed or drink too much, and within two weeks we had a small place on Rosemont Street, a couple of rooms over a laundromat. Rent was low, it was close enough to where we worked for both of us to walk, and we figured maybe we could hang out there until the war was done.
I thought once again of calling my ma, writing at least, but still the thought of how it might affect her worried me. I knew she would want me to go back, just for a little while perhaps, just to visit. I knew I couldn't do that. They'd be onto us within hours. Someone in Greenleaf would see me, that someone would say something, and before I knew it someone else would have made a call and it would all be over. I think I believed the war couldn't go on for much longer. I think I fooled myself every which way I could.
So I didn't call. I kept my mouth shut, kept my head down, and we worked until we could afford a car. It was some beat-up piece of shit but it went, and for the first time since we'd left Greenleaf we felt as if we had arrived somewhere. We were no longer the vagrants, the hobos - we had an apartment on Rosemont, a car, some money in our pockets. And it was that attitude, that sense of confidence, that started the trouble.
It was the end of June. America was all aflame about the Space Program, that we would be the first to land a man on the moon. It had been three months since we'd left Apalachee, almost six months since the Devereau sisters had graced our lives with their bizarre Louisiana magic.
Our thoughts turned to girls.
Like moths to a flame.
It was a Saturday night, between us we carried more than a hundred dollars, and we drove out towards the south side of the city. Here were the bars, the nightclubs, the gambling joints, the brothels. We made a deal: if we hadn't both connected with someone by midnight then we'd take half of whatever money we might have left over and go pay to get laid.
It seemed a good plan, a simple plan, and a plan that rolled out just fine and dandy until we hit Ramone's Retreat on Wintergreen and Macey.
I sensed no alarm when we entered. It was perhaps the fourth or fifth joint we'd drunk in that night, and though there were no blacks inside that wasn't something I even noticed until afterwards.
We played pool. Nathan's game had much improved and his playing wasn't the thing that prompted a reaction; his color was.
Leaning against the bar was a group of three men. Later I would recognize that something in their faces was similar to that of Mr. West at Sumter. They possessed dark aspects, shadows where shadows should not have been, and it was these three who said the thing that started the trouble.
As Nathan passed ahead of them to gain the far side of the table and line his shot, the center man made a sound like a pig. It was a brief snort. Like someone clearing their throat. Nothing more than that.
Nathan merely glanced towards him. Just for a second. Less than a second. Half a second.
But that was enough to prompt a question.
Why was Nathan looking at him?
What did he want?
Was there something he wanted to say?
Nathan merely smiled and nodded.
Was Nathan now laughing at them?
Was there something funny Nathan had on his mind?
And they called him Boy, like Hey boy, you got something funny to say?
We had been here befo
re - both of us - and this particular place was not somewhere we wished to visit again.
Nathan looked towards me. He glanced quickly to the left indicating the door, and then he gently laid down his cue and started to walk. He didn't pick up his jacket, left his glass there on the edge of the pool table, and though he was quiet and slow and nonchalant it was still very obvious that he had every intention of leaving the bar without another word passing between him and the group that had challenged him.
And they knew it.
Knew it instantly.
The center one picked up the cue.
He said something which was indistinguishable among the grunts from the other two.
'Go!' Nathan hissed, and without any further prompting I ran for the door.