The man spoke in that same guttural whisper. “How are you doing?”
“Fine,” said Arthur with exaggerated cheeriness. “How about yourself?” The man pushed by him and went into the restaurant. Arthur was glad he hadn’t stammered, but he was angry about the intimidation he felt. The man’s slightest moves, even the nuances he created when standing perfectly still, evoked fearful responses. He wondered why the man thought hate was such a wonderful thing that he wanted to celebrate it on the back of his noggin. He took a deep breath and turned to another man standing on the boardwalk, a tradesman headed to Alaska. “What time is it?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” the tradesman said. “My watch stopped. Somewhere between three and four, I guess.” Arthur thanked him. The man turned away and wandered into a nearby
convenience store.
Arthur was returning to Spokane from Illinois, where his mother, an eighty-three year old widow living by herself, had just suffered a stroke. Since none of the other family members were available to help, he took a bus to Chicago to be with her during her recovery. Now that she had stabilized and improved, he was on his way back.
The stop in St. Regis took longer than expected. Some of the passengers were getting restless. A large Asian family huddled together in a scrum where the bus had dropped everybody off, anxiously clutching bags of groceries they had purchased at the convenience store. Other families had scattered in various directions, with frustrated parents yelling to their children to get back up onto the boardwalk. A gaggle of laborers and tradesmen going to jobs in Western Washington, Canada, and Alaska loitered in front of the casino, surreptitiously sipping from bottles in brown paper bags. After a while, the tradesman going to Alaska came back with his own brown bag and stood next to Arthur. “You don’t think they’ve forgotten us, do you?” he asked.
“No,” said Arthur, pointing to a vehicle service area a few hundred yards away. “I think that’s our bus there, gassing up.” The tradesman nodded and wandered away.
Twenty minutes later, the bus pulled up in front of the boardwalk. The door opened, and a new driver, a tall, barrel-chested man with a friendly smile and a military style crewcut, stepped out. “Re—boards only!” he shouted. “Re—boards only to Seattle!”
The first ones to board were the Asians. They took up the first three rows on both sides of the aisle. They were followed by a tall, big-boned woman with pale skin and sand-colored hair. With her were two mixed race toddlers, twins apparently, a boy and a girl. Both seemed hyperactive, and the boy wore no shoes. As they rushed down the aisle, Arthur could hear the woman screaming. “Stop jigglin’ ’round! Y’all can use the rest room after we get to our seats!” Then she turned to the boy. “And as for you, Mister I-Left-My-Shoes-in-Billings, I don’t even want to talk to you!”
Behind the woman and her toddlers, an Iranian-American gentleman got on board. The
man had sat next to Arthur when they both boarded the bus in Chicago. They spent most of the trip talking about God, morality, virtue, the immortality of the human soul, and how to stop self-destructive behaviors. The Iranian-American had confessed to Arthur that he had a serious gambling problem, and he hoped to find a decent-paying job in a Seattle, which was about as far away from New Jersey as he could afford to get. He had been a good traveling companion, and Arthur was grateful for the company.
Arthur boarded next, stepping onto the bus with his good foot then gripping the rail as he hoisted his club foot and the rest of his squat, chubby body up onto the steps. After negotiating the steps, he spotted the Iranian-American gentleman in a window seat behind the Chinese family. The gentleman smiled and waved. “That couple sitting here got off in St. Regis,” he said. “So I thought I’d come up here and get a window seat.” Arthur smiled and waved back. He moved onto his own window seat two thirds of the way down on the left.
After Arthur came the laborers and tradesmen, who sucked in their breaths as they slipped past the driver, hoping that this would somehow camouflage the smell of alcohol. The tradesman going to Alaska was part of this group. They took up seats in the middle of the bus on both sides.
Behind them, the families entered and filled out most of the rest of the seats. Then, just as Arthur thought he might be getting a chance to stretch out, the man who had decorated himself with “HATE” sauntered down the aisle until he stopped next to Arthur’s seat. He put his carry-on bag in the rack above the seat, removed his jacket and carefully folded it so only a black square containing the red insignia could be seen on top. The man looked down at Arthur, smiled a twisted smile, and spoke. “So,” the man with hate on his mind hissed. “We meet again.” He sat in the aisle seat next to Arthur.
Arthur nodded and tried to act relaxed and friendly. Being a compulsive
conversationalist, he had been counting on a friendly seat mate to help pass the time. He looked down at the man’s left arm. A tattoo displaying a bloody knife penetrating a human skull wearing dreadlocks adorned the area between his elbow and wrist. Underneath the skull was a banner with the words “Death to the Mud People” displayed across it. The man settled in his seat, closed his eyes, and balanced his jacket on his lap.
Arthur stared at the red shield. He felt anxious. He had strong convictions against racism but had spent most of his life avoiding confrontation. In grade school and high school, he had felt a kinship with the few racial and ethnic minorities who attended because he and they were harassed and beaten up on a daily basis—them for being minorities and him for being fat, crippled and passive. It was during those school days that Arthur dreamt of becoming a spiritual hero to his fellow oppressed students. In his imagination, he wanted to be someone who could reason with the bullies and make them see the error of their ways, but he never acted on any of these daydreams. Instead, he went out for Debate and joined the Chess Club. This was the source of considerable shame to Arthur. He yearned to have the courage and power to convince his attackers and antagonists they were wrong.
At the university during the turbulent 1960s, Arthur became slightly more acceptable since he was always helping his fellow students with their homework. This was a development that Arthur sincerely appreciated. In order to maintain this new level of popularity, he conscientiously avoided any discussions that had the potential to force him to express any opinion that might possibly offend anybody. He went to no rallies, signed no petitions, and displayed no buttons, banners, clothes or hair styles that could be construed by others as carrying some kind of a political message. By this time, his behavior had become a reflex, one that he had trained himself to perform as a survival strategy in the years before he attended college. His goal was to appear neutral, which is what he determined to be the safest possible strategy. But he wished he had had the courage to speak out then.
The young man opened his eyes. He looked down at his jacket, then up at Arthur. “I see you’re looking at my jacket,” he said in that characteristic whisper of his.
“Um—yes,” said Arthur. “I was admiring its workmanship.”
The young man raised his eyebrows, and he lifted his head up a little.
“It’s well designed,” Arthur went on. “It’s composition is well balanced yet interesting. Very well executed.”
“You really like it?”
“It’s masterfully done.”
“Masterfully,” the man repeated. “You talk like an encyclopedia.”
Arthur smiled ruefully. “I’m a retired librarian.”
Just then the driver’s voice came over the speaker system. “Welcome, everyone. In just a few minutes, this bus will be pulling out and heading toward Seattle. We’ll be making brief stops in Wallace and Couer D’Alene. We should be arriving in Spokane a few minutes before sunrise. Once you get to Spokane, you’ll be there for an hour, and then you’ll re-board this same bus with a different driver for Seattle and all points west.” As the driver called everyone’s attention to the various state and federal regulations concerning passengers’ rights and responsibilities, he was summarily ignored by most of the passengers, who shifted in their seats, made last minute adjustments to their luggage in the racks and under their seats, and yelled at their children to quit running back and forth in the aisles. The driver finished by saying, “Please do not engage me in conversation during your bus ride unless you are calling my attention to an emergency. My name is Carl. Thanks for riding with us.”
As the driver got up from his seat and walked down the aisle to make a final count of seats and tickets, the man adorned with “HATE” turned to Arthur. “Were you kidding when you said you liked my insignia?”
“No,” said Arthur. He became nervous as the man kept staring at him. “I already told you it had good composition. And good contrast between colors.”
“Contrast,” the man repeated.
“Yes,” said Arthur.
“I designed it.” The man leaned back and closed his eyes.
Arthur said nothing for a few minutes. Even with someone as disagreeable as this, he had the overwhelming desire to chat. “Is that what you do for a living?”
“Yep. Jacket insignia designs, air brush work, and tattoos.”
Arthur looked at the insignia and searched for different words. “Good draftsmanship,” he said. “Excellent proportion and relationships.”
The man chuckled, then he asked, “Are you one of us?”
At that exact moment, the driver returned to his seat behind the steering wheel and
switched off the overhead lights. “One of us?” Arthur repeated.
“White separatists,” the man repeated.
After a pause, Arthur said, “Not really.”
“What do you mean, not really?”
“I guess I just haven’t given it much thought.”
The man opened his eyes and stared directly at Arthur. He said nothing for a very long time. Then he said, “Where have you been living? Under a rock?”
“I don’t get what you mean,” Arthur said.
“It’s all around us, you idiot!” the man declared. “These creatures, these baboons, these things! They’re destroying our world, our way of life. If we don’t stand against them, we’ll all fall for sure.”
“We?” Arthur asked.
“White people!” the man hissed. “How stupid are you?”
Neither one of them said anything as the bus pulled out onto the frontage road,
accelerated, and turned onto the expressway. The lull in the conversation continued for several minutes as the bus zoomed through the night along the almost deserted highway. The situation made Arthur jittery. He didn’t want to discuss this any further, but he had traveled by bus too long and needed the soothing balm of conversation to ease the pain of a loneliness that now plagued him like an open sore. “Tattoos,” he finally said. “Can’t you get a disease from that?”
The man’s eyes were still closed. “Yeah,” he said, “if you get a tattoo from some moron who uses dirty needles. I use an autoclave to keep my needles clean. I’ve never had a single infection flare up on any work I’ve ever done.”
“I see,” said Arthur. “How do you do that?”
“Do what?”
“Tattoo.”
The man opened his eyes. “You really want to know?”
“Yes.”
“It’s really quite simple. First I shave and clean the spot on the body where I’m going to put the tattoo. Then I put on this gel stuff that looks like Vaseline. After that, I can get out a decal and put it over the gel. The gel picks up the ink outline from the decal and transfers it to the arm. All I do is fill in the outline with dark ink from the needles. And after the outline’s done, I fill it in the colors. That part’s not much different from paint by numbers.”
“But how do you do the colors?” asked Arthur.
“Same way I do the outline,” said the man. “With needles. I use five needles at a time, bunched together to puncture the skin and get the color underneath. I keep doing that till it’s all filled in.”
“That’s all there is to it?”
“Yeah. It’s not hard.”
“Hmm,” said Arthur. “I thought there’d be more to it.”
“Most of the time, there is.”
“How do you mean?”
“I do most of my best work freehand, without decals or physical guides of any kind.”
“How does that work?”
“I get an idea for something I want to do and the way I want to do it, then I study my art books.”
“Your art books?”
“Yeah, so I can do some planning about color, contrast, and style. If it’s complicated or tricky, I might sketch it out on a piece of paper first. But once I settle on what I’m going to do, I know where I’m going to put everything, and in what size and color.”
“When you say art books, you mean tattoo books?”
“I look at them too, but mostly I try to copy the great painters, like Bosch.”
“Hieronymous Bosch?”
The man snorted. “That worthless degenerate? No, I’m talking about real artists like Peter Bosch and the Dutch Masters. Vermeer, Rembrandt. Artists like that.”
“What do you get from the Dutch Masters?” asked Arthur.
The man smiled. “Ever notice the way the light hits a solid object in a painting by Rembrandt? Take The Anatomy Lesson, for instance. The Dutch were experts on using light to give their paintings a heightened sense of reality. If you don’t do something like that in a tattoo, then it’s just a piece of crap. A flat, two-dimensional work—-a cartoon, like everybody else’s.”
Arthur was impressed. “What’s the best piece of work you’ve ever done?”
The man thought for a second. Then he said, “I did a tattoo of this bloody, crucified nigger hanging from a tree once. I covered the guy’s whole back with it.” Arthur was glad it was too dark for the man to see him wince. He had been encouraged by the man’s knowledge of the Dutch Masters. He wanted to talk to him about the art that he loved: The Stoning of St. Stephen, The Pieta, and both El Greco’s and Goya’s versions of The Repentant St. Peter. Perhaps he could discuss DaVinci and Michelangelo with the young man. Maybe even talk about the presence and grandeur of God in their works. Then he could bridge from there to his favorite subject: the lives of the Christian saints and martyrs. But with that one sentence, the man celebrating “HATE” managed to make a sudden and drastic turn in the conversation.
Twenty more miles flew by before either one of them spoke again. It gave Arthur a
chance to think about Mahatma Ghandi, and Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. He had vivid
memories of three brave college classmates, two Jews and a Black, who had gone down South to
register voters during spring break. He remembered it like it was yesterday, sitting there in the student union listening to and being thrilled by tales of how his friends had gone racing downisolated dirt roads, barely escaping from drunken rednecks in pickup trucks. But the very next day, when a co-ed asked him to sign a petition for fair housing, he felt a sudden rush of fear and declined.
After a few more minutes, Arthur’s urge to speak overcame his fear. “You know a lot about art,” he said. The man kept his eyes closed and didn’t answer. Another few seconds passed before Arthur got the courage to speak again. His pulse quickened as he said, “I’m not sure why you hate people who aren’t white, though.”
The man opened his eyes, lifted his head, and turned to face Arthur. “What do you want from me?” he rasped.
Arthur didn’t know. He only knew what he didn’t want. He stuttered, then he stopped talking. The man lay back and closed his eyes again. Another minute passed while Arthur thought of his heroes: Dr. King, Ghandi, the Saints and the Martyrs. What would they think if they could see how unwilling he was to make even a simple statement in opposition to what this young man said? Suddenly, Arthur felt a glimmer of hope. He didn’t know what the man with “HATE” tattooed on his head truly believed. Maybe he was ignorant. Maybe he was repeating what he heard someone else say. Maybe he went along with the white supremacist line because he didn’t really know any people from racial and ethnic minorities. He could’ve fallen into step with them because they appreciated his art work. As time passed, he drew courage from this. His mind raced, trying to remember the arguments he heard when he was in college. “Do you know anything about genetics?” he ventured.
“Do I—what?”
“Biology, genetics. Research that shows that, if people stay within their own narrow gene pool, remarrying over and over again, they become weaker, less intelligent, less emotionally stable and are more susceptible to diseases.”
The man sat up quickly and glared at Arthur. “What in the hell are you talking about?”
“Reality,” said Arthur. He felt a sudden burst of adrenaline, something he hadn’t felt since his old debating days. “Theoretically, if all the people who suffered from Cystic Fibrosis—a European disease—married all the people suffering from Sickle Cell Anemia—a disease that affects people of African heritage—both diseases could be eliminated in one
generation.”
The man didn’t say a word, but even in the dark, Arthur could tell he was highly
displeased. After a long pause, during which the tradesmen and laborers in front of them grew louder and more boisterous, the man spoke. “I’m going to ask you again: What the hell do you want from me?”
Arthur was puzzled. He should have been terrified. Instead, he was tingling with
excitement. “Here’s what I want,” he said. “I want you to be fair. Nobody has control over being born the color they are, even you. What if you woke up tomorrow morning, and you had the same goals, the same ambitions, the same dreams you have right now? And you looked in the mirror and saw that you had changed to some color other than white. How would you see the world then? What would you do about it?”
Without hesitation, the man said, “I’d kill myself.”
Arthur was flabbergasted. “How could you? Why?”
“Because that’s what I believe,” the man answered, pointing to the tattoo on his arm. “All mud people must die.”
“Mud people?” Arthur repeated. “I don’t understand what that means.”
“Mud people!” the man hissed as the noise in front of them escalated to the point where the driver began peering nervously into his rear view mirror. “Blacks, browns, reds, yellows—all those degenerate, inferior ones that are ruining our lives! Don’t tell me you think they should have the same rights as us?”
“Of course, I do. Because they’re people—just like us!” Fear mixed with adrenaline, was causing his heart to beat out of control. It was not an altogether unpleasant feeling.
“No!” the hateful man exclaimed. “They’re not!”
Normally Arthur would have been self-conscious about speaking so forcefully, but the tradesmen in the middle were becoming louder, drunker, and more vulgar. Other passengers were now grumbling, and the driver’s eyes in the rear view mirror were filled with consternation. No one except the man with “HATE” on the back of his bald head was paying any attention to Arthur, who continued to stew for another few minutes. After taking a deep breath, he turned to the man and asked, “How many mud people have you killed so far?”
“I don’t have to kill mud people,” the man declared. “They’re so damn dumb they kill themselves with their own drugs and immoral lifestyles. And their shooting and stabbing each other in the street. I don’t have to do a thing. The mud people are taking care of that for me.”
Arthur shook his head. He leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes.
“You know what’s a lot more dangerous than mud people?” asked the man with “HATE”
on his mind.
“No,” said Arthur. There was weariness in his voice.
“Race traitors.”
“Now what, in God’s name, is a race traitor?” Arthur met the man’s steady gaze with an immutable expression of his own.
“People like you.”
An angry heat buffeted up inside Arthur like a summer wind. “Maybe it’s people like you,” he snapped. “Since the race we’re talking about is the human race!”
“I’m talking about the white race,” said the man.
“How do you know you’re part of it?” Arthur said. “You might have a drop of red blood or yellow blood. Or brown blood or even black blood. How do you know for sure what race you are if you don’t have pedigree papers like a prize dog, papers that absolutely prove your bloodlines beyond the shadow of a doubt?” He was astonished by what he said. His heart was racing.
Just then, two drunks in the seat in front of got into a fist fight, and the driver pulled the bus over onto the shoulder. As the driver started walking back toward the source of the disruption, the man with “HATE” tattooed on the back of his head stood up, extracted something from his carry-on bag, then sat down.
The driver stopped in front of the drunken offenders. “Look, fellahs,” he said quietly. “I’ve been single most of my life, and I’ve had to work a lot of different jobs before I finally landed this one.”
“So?” said the tradesman going to Alaska.
“So I’m trying to give you guys a break. You know it’s against the law to bring alcoholic beverages on board, and you know it’s against the law to drink or be drunk while riding on a bus. It’s the company’s policy that we should pull over and call the State Patrol to pick you guys up when it becomes obvious you’ve been drinking.”
Tradesmen on both sides of the aisle exchanged glances.
“I know some of you guys are struggling just like I used to,” the driver went on, “and if you get thrown off, you probably won’t have enough money to get to where you need to go, so I don’t want to do that. Why don’t you guys help me out a little and hold it down for the rest of the trip. Can you do that?”
The tradesman going to Alaska was the first to speak. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s fair. I know I don’t want to get thrown off. What do you say, guys?”
The other tradesmen agreed and things quieted down. The bus driver turned around, went back to his seat and eased the bus out onto the highway.
Things stayed calm for about a half an hour. Then the tradesman going to Alaska got into a fist fight with a large man in a plaid jacket who had crazy eyes. Evidently they were fighting over the last few swallows left in the tradesman’s bottle. As the cursing and fighting erupted, the man who was marked by “HATE” bludgeoned Arthur several times with his fist.
This time, the driver pulled over and came tearing down the aisle, gesticulating wildly at the tradesman going to Alaska and the man with the crazy eyes. “Okay, that’s it!” he declared. “You two either get off the bus now, or we’ll just sit here and wait for the State Patrol to remove you!”
As the other tradesmen grabbed the two of them and pushed them out into the aisle, the tradesman going to Alaska panicked. “Please! Please!” he begged. “I don’t have enough money to get to my job if you put me off!”
“You should have thought of that before you and your pal here started fighting,” the driver said. He looked over at the tradesman’s partner in disruption, but the man’s crazy eyes registered no emotion at all.
“Yeah!” yelled one of the other passengers. This was followed by a cacophony of
epithets and accusations. After a pause, the tradesman sighed, grabbed his bag from the luggage rack, moved around the driver, and trudged slowly toward the front of the bus.
The driver turned to the other combatant. “What about you?” he asked. “You want to leave now, or wait for the State Patrol to take you out in handcuffs?”
The man with the crazy eyes shrugged, grabbed his luggage and walked toward the front of the bus.
As the two men waited in the well by the bus’s front door, the driver ambled back to his seat, sat down. “Sorry it has to be this way,” the driver said as he opened the door. “Good luck to both of you.”
The two men exited. The driver closed the door. Then he put the bus in gear and got it back on the road. The inside of the bus was so quiet that the passengers could hear the tires hum as the bus traveled down the highway. Everyone settled in, in anticipation of a quiet journey from that point forward.
At the next stop, the bald man looked over at Arthur, who was still slumped over in his seat. He smiled and stood up, carefully unfolding his jacket, and putting it on. With his one carry-on bag, he walked slowly toward the front of the bus, waited for the door to open, and glided down the steps and out of the door. Since he was the only one getting on or off, the driver did not turn on any lights.
Later, the passenger in front of Arthur kept adjusting his seat, trying to get rid of the discomfort caused by Arthur’s body as it hulked up against the back of his seat. He even turned around and made a few snide comments. But no matter what he did or said, he couldn’t get comfortable and he couldn’t get Arthur to respond to his requests to shift position.
When the bus pulled up under a streetlight in Wallace, Idaho, the two mixed-race children were playing in the aisle next to Arthur’s seat. As the driver switched on the lights, the children began screaming.
“Why can’t that damn woman control her kids?” said one of the other passengers in a
loud voice. Several passengers turned in the direction of the screams. The ones who could see what the twins saw began gasping and shrieking. Arthur Howard was stretched over the two seats on his side of the aisle. Blood was running from his nose. His eyes were closed, and a beatific smile creased his lips. On his forehead, “NIGGER” had been written in indelible marker. After all these years, this chubby little man with the club foot, the one who admired the great Saints and Martyrs yet lacked their courage, looked to be at peace. He finally stood up for his beliefs.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comment or Email The.Juiced.Avenger@gmail.com