Edge of Eternity

  "That's nice. I'm George Jakes."

  "Cora Jones. Mrs. Jones. My daughter's baby is due in a week."

  "Her first?"

  "Third."

  "Well, you seem too young to be a grandmother, if you don't mind my saying so."

  She purred a little. "I'm forty-nine years old."

  "I would never have guessed that!"

  A Greyhound coming in the opposite direction flashed its lights, and the Riders' bus slowed to a halt. A white man came to the driver's window and George heard him say: "There's a crowd gathered at the bus station in Anniston." The driver said something in reply that George could not hear. "Just be careful," said the man at the window.

  The bus pulled away.

  "What does that mean, a crowd?" said Maria anxiously. "It could be twenty people or a thousand. They could be a welcoming committee or an angry mob. Why didn't he tell us more?"

  George guessed her irritation masked fear.

  He recalled his mother's words: "I'm just so afraid they'll kill you." Some people in the movement said they were ready to die in the cause of freedom. George was not sure he was willing to be a martyr. There were too many other things he wanted to do; like maybe sleep with Maria.

  A minute later they entered Anniston, a small town like any other in the South: low buildings, streets in a grid, dusty and hot. The roadside was lined with people as if for a parade. Many were dressed up, the women in hats, the children scrubbed, no doubt having been to church. "What are they expecting to see, people with horns?" George said. "Here we are, folks, real Northern Negroes, wearing shoes and all." He spoke as if addressing them, although only Maria could hear. "We've come to take away your guns and teach you Communism. Where do the white girls go swimming?"

  Maria giggled. "If they could hear you, they wouldn't know you were joking."

  He wasn't really joking, it was more like whistling past the graveyard. He was trying to ignore the spasm of fear in his guts.

  The bus turned into the station, which was strangely deserted. The buildings looked shut up and locked. To George it felt creepy.

  The driver opened the door of the bus.

  George did not see where the mob came from. Suddenly they were all around the bus. They were white men, some in work clothes, others in Sunday suits. They carried baseball bats, metal pipes, and lengths of iron chain. And they were screaming. Most of it was inchoate, but George heard some words of hate, including Sieg heil!

  George stood up, his first impulse to close the bus door; but the two men Maria had identified as state troopers were faster, and they slammed it shut. Perhaps they are here to defend us, George thought; or maybe they're just defending themselves.

  He looked through the windows all around him. There were no police outside. How could the local police not know that an armed mob had gathered at the bus station? They had to be in collusion with the Klan. No surprise there.

  A second later the men attacked the bus with their weapons. There was a frightening cacophony as chains and crowbars dented the bodywork. Glass shattered, and Mrs. Jones screamed. The driver started the bus, but one of the mob lay down in front of it. George thought the driver might just roll over the man, but he stopped.

  A rock came through the window, smashing it, and George felt a sharp pain in his cheek like a bee sting. He had been hit by a flying shard. Maria was sitting by a window: she was in danger. George grabbed her arm, pulling her toward him. "Kneel down in the aisle!" he shouted.

  A grinning man wearing knuckle-dusters put his fist through the window next to Mrs. Jones. "Get down here with me!" Maria shouted, and she pulled Mrs. Jones down next to her and wrapped her arms protectively around the older woman.

  The yelling got louder. "Communists!" they screamed. "Cowards!"

  Maria said: "Duck, George!"

  George could not bring himself to cower before these hooligans.

  Suddenly the noise diminished. The banging on the bus sides stopped and there was no more breaking glass. George spotted a police officer.

  About time, he thought.

  The cop was swinging a nightstick but talking amiably to the grinning man with the knuckle-dusters.

  Then George saw three more cops. They had calmed the crowd but, to George's indignation, they were doing no more. They acted as if no crime had been committed. They chatted casually to the rioters, who seemed to be their friends.

  The two highway patrolmen were sitting back in their seats, looking bewildered. George guessed their assignment was to spy on the Riders, and they had not reckoned on becoming victims of mob violence. They had been forced to join the Riders' side in self-defense. They might learn to see things from a new point of view.

  The bus moved. George saw, through the windshield, that a cop was urging men out of the way and another was waving the driver forward. Outside the station, a patrol car moved in front of the bus and led it onto the road out of town.

  George began to feel better. "I think we got away," he said.

  Maria got to her feet, apparently unhurt. She took the handkerchief out of the breast pocket of George's suit coat and mopped his face gently. The white cotton came away red with blood. "It's a nasty little gash," she said.

  "I'll live."

  "You won't be so pretty, though."

  "I'm pretty?"

  "You used to be, but now . . ."

  The moment of normality did not last. George glanced behind and saw a long line of pickup trucks and cars following the bus. They seemed to be full of shouting men. He groaned. "We didn't get away," he said.

  Maria said: "Back in Washington, before we got on the bus, you were talking to a young white guy."

  "Joseph Hugo," George said. "He's at Harvard Law. Why?"

  "I thought I saw him in the mob back there."

  "Joseph Hugo? No. He's on our side. You must be mistaken." But Hugo was from Alabama, George recalled.

  Maria said: "He had bulging blue eyes."

  "If he's with the mob, that would mean that all this time he's been pretending to support civil rights . . . while spying on us. He can't be a snitch."

  "Can't he?"

  George looked behind again.

  The police escort turned back at the city line, but the other vehicles did not.

  The men in the cars were shrieking so loud they could be heard over the sound of all the engines.

  Beyond the suburbs, on a long lonely stretch of Highway 202, two cars overtook the bus, then slowed down, forcing the driver to brake. He tried to pass, but they swerved from side to side, blocking his way.

  Cora Jones was white-faced and shaking, and she clutched her plastic handbag like a life preserver. George said: "I'm sorry we got you into this, Mrs. Jones."

  "So am I," she replied.

  The cars ahead pulled aside at last and the bus passed them. But the ordeal was not ended: the convoy was still behind. Then George heard a familiar popping sound. When the bus began to weave all over the road he realized it was a burst tire. The driver slowed to a halt near a roadside grocery store. George read the name: Forsyth & Son.

  The driver jumped out. George heard him say: "Two flats?" Then he went into the store, presumably to phone for help.

  George was as tense as a bowstring. One flat tire was just a puncture; two was an ambush.

  Sure enough, the cars in the convoy were stopping and a dozen white men in their Sunday suits were piling out, yelling curses and waving their weapons, savages on the warpath. George's stomach cramped again as he saw them running toward the bus, ugly faces twisted with hatred, and he knew why his mother's eyes had filled with tears when she talked about Southern whites.

  At the head of the pack was an adolescent boy who raised a crowbar and gleefully smashed a window.

  The next man tried to enter the bus. One of the two burly white passengers stood at the top of the steps and drew a revolver, confirming Maria's theory that they were state troopers in plain clothes. The intruder backed off and the trooper locked the door.
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  George feared that might be a mistake. What if the Riders needed to get out in a hurry?

  The men outside began to rock the bus, as if trying to turn it over, all the while yelling: "Kill the niggers! Kill the niggers!" Women passengers were screaming. Maria clung to George in a way that might have pleased him if he had not been in fear of his life.

  Outside, he saw two uniformed patrolmen arrive, and his hopes lifted; but, to his fury, they did nothing to restrain the mob. He looked at the two plainclothesmen on the bus: they looked foolish and scared. Obviously the uniformed men did not know about their undercover colleagues. The Alabama Highway Patrol was evidently disorganized as well as racist.

  George cast around desperately for something he could do to protect Maria and himself. Get out of the bus and run? Lie down on the floor? Grab a gun from a state trooper and shoot some white men? Every possibility seemed even worse than doing nothing.

  He stared in fury at the two highway patrolmen outside, watching as if nothing wrong was happening. They were cops, for Christ's sake! What did they think they were doing? If they would not enforce the law, what right did they have to wear that uniform?

  Then he saw Joseph Hugo. There was no possibility of mistake: George knew well those bulging blue eyes. Hugo approached a patrolman and spoke to him, then the two of them laughed.

  He was a snitch.

  If I get out of here alive, George thought, that creep is going to be sorry.

  The men outside shouted at the Riders to get off. George heard: "Come out here and get what's coming to you, nigger lovers!" That made him think he was safer on the bus.

  But not for long.

  One of the mob had returned to his car and opened the trunk, and now the man came running toward the bus with something burning in his hands. He hurled a blazing bundle through a smashed window. Seconds later the bundle exploded in gray smoke. But the weapon was not just a smoke bomb. It set fire to the upholstery, and in moments thick black fumes began to choke the passengers. A woman screamed: "Is there any air up front?"

  From outside, George heard: "Burn the niggers! Fry them!"

  Everyone tried to get out of the door. The aisle was jammed with gasping people. Some were pressing forward, but there seemed to be a blockage. George yelled: "Get off the bus! Everybody get off!"

  From the front, someone shouted back: "The door won't open!"

  George recalled that the state trooper with the gun had locked the door to keep the mob out. "We'll have to jump out the windows!" he yelled. "Come on!"

  He stood on a seat and kicked most of the remaining glass out of the window. Then he pulled off his suit coat and draped it over the sill, to provide some protection from the jagged shards still remaining stuck in the window frame.

  Maria was coughing helplessly. George said: "I'll go first and catch you as you jump." Grasping the back of the seat for balance, he stood on the sill, bent double, and jumped. He heard his shirt tear on a snag, but felt no pain, and concluded that he had escaped injury. He landed on the roadside grass. The mob had backed off from the burning bus in fear. George turned and held his arms up to Maria. "Climb through, like I did!" he shouted.

  Her pumps were flimsy compared with his toe-capped oxfords, and he was glad he had sacrificed his jacket when he saw her small feet on the sill. She was shorter than he, but her womanly figure made her wider. He winced when her hip brushed a shard of glass as she squeezed through, but it did not tear the fabric of her dress, and a moment later she fell into his arms.

  He held her easily. She was not heavy, and he was in good shape. He set her on her feet, but she dropped to her knees, gasping for air.

  He glanced around. The thugs were still keeping their distance. He looked inside the bus. Cora Jones was standing in the aisle, coughing, turning round and round, too shocked and bewildered to save herself. "Cora, come here!" he yelled. She heard her name and looked at him. "Come through the window, like we did!" he shouted. "I'll help you!" She seemed to understand. With difficulty, she stood on the seat, still clutching her handbag. She hesitated, looking at the jagged bits of glass all around the window frame; but she had on a thick coat, and she seemed to decide a cut was a better risk than choking to death. She put one foot on the sill. George reached through the window, grabbed her arm, and pulled. She tore her coat but did no harm to herself, and he lifted her down. She staggered away, calling for water.

  "We have to get away from the bus!" he yelled to Maria. "The fuel tank might explode." But Maria was so racked by coughing that she seemed helpless to move. He put one arm around her back and the other behind her knees and picked her up. He carried her toward the grocery store and set her down when he thought they were at a safe distance.

  He looked back and saw that the bus was now emptying rapidly. The door had at last been opened, and people were stumbling through as well as jumping from the windows.

  The flames grew. As the last passengers got out, the inside of the vehicle became a furnace. George heard a man shout something about the fuel tank, and the mob took up the cry, shouting: "She's gonna blow! She's gonna blow!" Everyone scattered in fear, getting farther away. Then there was a deep thump and a sudden fierce gout of flame, and the vehicle rocked with the explosion.

  George was pretty sure no one was left inside, and he thought: At least no one is dead--yet.

  The detonation seemed to have sated the mob's hunger for violence. They stood around watching the bus burn.

  A small crowd of what appeared to be local people had gathered outside the grocery store, many cheering the mob; but now a young girl came out of the building with a pail of water and some plastic cups. She gave a drink to Mrs. Jones, then came to Maria, who gratefully downed a cup of water and asked for another.

  A young white man approached with a look of concern. He had a face like a rodent, forehead and chin angling back from a sharp nose and buck teeth, red-brown hair slicked back with pomade. "How are you doing, darling?" he said to Maria. But he was concealing something, and as Maria started to reply he raised a crowbar high in the air and brought it down, aiming at the top of her head. George flung out an arm to protect her, and the bar came down hard on his left forearm. The pain was agonizing, and he roared. The man lifted the crowbar again. Despite his arm George lunged forward, leading with his right shoulder, and barged into the man so hard that he went flying.

  George turned back to Maria and saw three more of the mob running at him, evidently bent on revenging their ratlike friend. George had been premature in thinking the segregationists had had their fill of violence.

  He was used to combat. He had been on the Harvard wrestling team as an undergraduate, and had coached the team while getting his law degree. But this was not going to be a fair fight with rules. And he had only one working arm.

  On the other hand, he had gone to grade school in a Washington slum, and he knew about fighting dirty.

  They were coming at him three abreast, so he moved sideways. This not only took them away from Maria, but turned them so that they were now advancing in single file.

  The first man swung an iron chain at him wildly.

  George danced back, and the chain missed him. The momentum of the swing threw the man off balance. As he staggered, George kicked his legs from under him, and he crashed to the ground. He lost hold of his chain.

  The second man stumbled over the first. George stepped forward, turned his back, and hit the man in the face with his right elbow, hoping to dislocate his jaw. The man gave a strangled scream and fell down, dropping his tire iron.

  The third man stopped, suddenly scared. George stepped toward him and punched him in the face with all his might. George's fist caught the man full on the nose. Bones crunched and blood spurted, and the man screamed in agony. It was the most satisfying blow George had ever struck in his life. To hell with Gandhi, he thought.

  Two shots rang out. Everyone stopped what they were doing and looked toward the noise. One of the uniformed state troopers was holding
a revolver high in the air. "Okay, boys, you've had your fun," he said. "Let's move out."

  George was furious. Fun? The cop had been a witness to attempted murder, and he called it fun? George was beginning to see that a police uniform did not mean much in Alabama.

  The mob returned to their cars. George noticed angrily that none of the four police officers troubled to write down any license plates. Nor did they take any names, though they probably knew everyone anyway.

  Joseph Hugo had vanished.

  There was another explosion in the wreckage of the bus, and George guessed there must be a second fuel tank; but at this point no one was near enough to be in danger. The fire then seemed to burn itself out.

  Several people lay on the ground, many still gasping for breath after inhaling smoke. Others were bleeding from various injuries. Some were Riders, some regular passengers, black and white. George himself was clutching his left arm with his right hand, holding it against his side, trying to keep it motionless because every movement was excruciatingly painful. The four men he had tangled with were helping one another limp back to their cars.

  He managed to walk to where the patrolmen stood. "We need an ambulance," he said. "Maybe two."

  The younger of the two uniformed men glared at him. "What did you say?"

  "These people need medical attention," George said. "Call an ambulance!"

  The man looked furious, and George realized he had made the mistake of telling a white man what to do. But the older patrolman said to his colleague: "Leave it, leave it." Then he said to George: "Ambulance is on its way, boy."

  A few minutes later, an ambulance the size of a small bus arrived, and the Riders began to help each other aboard. But when George and Maria approached, the driver said: "Not you."

  George stared at him in disbelief. "What?"

  "This here's a white folks' ambulance," the driver said. "It ain't for nigras."

  "The hell you say."

  "Don't you sass me, boy."

  A white Rider who was already on board came back out. "You have to take everyone to the hospital," he said to the driver. "Black and white."

  "This ain't a nigra ambulance," the driver said stubbornly.

  "Well, we're not going without our friends." With that the white Riders began to leave the ambulance one by one.

  The driver was taken aback. He would look foolish, George guessed, if he returned from the scene with no patients.