Read Online Dreamer by Charles Johnson - Free Book Online

I’ll kill you
!”
    â€œNo,” Amy said, shocked. “How can you say that? I thought you said you wanted to preach.”
    â€œWhat’d you think I was just doing?”
    â€œI mean,
be
a right and proper minister!”
    â€œOh … well, I did. Once.”
    â€œWhat about now? Last night you talked differently. You were almost begging for help. But tonight you don’t sound like the same person at all. Which are you?”
    Smith was quiet, his hands squeezed round the steering wheel at nine and three o’clock. Then he rummaged through his trouser pocket, found a linty, flecked stick of Doublemint gum, and stuck the wad into his cheek. “Sometimes I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe you can help me figure that out.” He looked sheepishly at her. “I’m sorry, I guess I didn’t know what I was saying. It’s been like that since I was at Elgin. Can you forgive me?”
    At that Amy softened. Her profile from where I sat dissolved from irritation to sympathy, as if it was the minister himself who’d appealed to her for understanding, seeing how he’d looked in a flickerflash trompe l’oeil uncannily like King when he apologized. For an instant I could have sworn Smith was playing her masterfully like a finely tuned lyre, one keyed to her (all of our) affection for King, fluidly shifting from one mask to another as the occasion demanded, as if maybe the self was a fiction—or, if not that, a multiplicity of often conflicting profiles. He seemed full of Machiavellian deceits and subterfuges. To my astonishment, he glided from the tribal languages of the Academy to Niggerese, a skill most educated black men possessed (myself included), but in Smith’s hands, black slang became a weapon used for startling effect, like tossing a grenade into the middle of a polite tea party. As he put rubber to the road, tear gas drifted into the car, the shock of inhaling it like breathing in burning coals or hellfire when it filled the tissues of my lungs. I pressed one hand over my mouth, but I couldn’t breathe or see. Smith gave more gas to the Chevelle, gunning it through an intersection, the speedometer riding sixty, then he stomped on the brake and began to skid. Up ahead, an elderly barefoot black man, wearing only wrinkled blue pajamas,held his bloody forehead and stepped blindly into the beam of the Chevelle’s headlights. Smith cut the wheel hard, running the car onto the sidewalk. A mailbox sprang up in the way, and he cranked the wheel again, passing just close enough to throw gravel against the man’s kneecaps but leaving him otherwise untouched as the car slammed through another intersection and at last came to rest in front of Smith’s building.
    Amy was shaking. “You almost
hit
that man!”
    â€œFool shouldn’ta been out.” Smith rolled his window down, now that the tear gas was behind us, and coughed. “Let’s get my things. It won’t take long, I don’t have that much.”
    Actually, it would take less time than he knew. All of Smith’s belongings were piled on the street and stairs in front of 3721 Indiana Avenue. “I don’t believe this,” he whispered. On the sidewalk his shoulders slumped; he looked from his possessions dumped like refuse up to his landlady’s third-floor window. He climbed the stair, favoring his left leg, whipped out his key, and stuck it about a quarter-inch into the door before it stopped. He twisted it once. Twice, then it broke off in his hand. “She
did
it,” he was still whispering, staring at the fragment on his palm. “Mrs. Thomas locked me out …”
    â€œIt’s all right,” said Amy. “We can put some of this in Matthew’s car and come back later.”
    Smith threw his key into the street and headed for the rear of the building. “Do what you want with it.”
    â€œWait! Where are you