BLACK PRESIDENT, CHAPTER 28. Twins attend 1st school/Jackson speaks for both himself and brother. Leon tries to be a long-distance dad, & Rudy almost gets to meet Sarah before fate deals him a card.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

January 7, 1968

The six-and-a-half year old twins clung tightly to Sarah’s hands as she led them down the slippery, snow-swept cement stairs into a basement-level entry hall. The kindergarten that the twins would attend was located just a few blocks off University of Chicago campus. Once inside they immediately began shedding their jackets and shoes. A nice, young Black woman, Mattie, greeted them and their mother, commented on the twins identical appearances, then showed the boys in which cubbies to stow their lunches, where to hang their jackets and footwear. She then ushered them over to a row of small desks and chairs already half-filled with other youngsters.

The kindergarten consisted of mostly Black children, but there were a few Whites and some Chinese as well, all finger painting with their bare hands on large sheets of butcher paper. As usual, Jackson did all the talking while John held back, saying nothing, but paying very close attention to his brother’s words.

“You intend to just leave us here until noon, correct?” Jackson spoke in his usual adult-mocking Oxford English. He enuciated more clearly than most adults they knew. After being taken aback at first by such refined diction coming from a small child, the adults around him generally tended to speak more carefully themselves,

“Yes, that’s the plan,” said Sarah, looking at Jackson with confidence, knowing that he could obviously handle the transition to school. But she was concerned about John, who wasn’t saying a word. Maybe Jackson could pull him out of his shell. She and Dee were used to talking to John by way of his brother, accepting Jackson as his mouthpiece. So Sarah tried to get a fix on the quiet twin’s mood by the usual method.

“Jackson? Could you ask John if he will be OK if I leave for a few hours...come back at lunchtime?” Sarah looked in John’s direction.

“Well?” said Jackson, looking directly at his brother. John remained silent, so Jackson repeated the question in his own words. “Mommy wants to know if you can handle the interaction with the other children?” Only one little kid looked up from the painting table, to stare at the newcomers over his messy work. He held his gaze as John looked back at him.

“Why’s he looking at me?” John questioned, to no one in particular. Jackson piped up right away. “Because he’s never seen a twin before, of course. We’re twins. People are interested in us. It’s always like that. Remember Christmas?”

John remembered the big fuss everyone made when he and his brother had sat on one electric pony ride together, one behind the other at the 5-and-10-cent store. There was a man in a Santa Claus suit and beard (Jackson had quickly identified him as an imposter), who kept ringing his bell to get money dropped in his bucket. As shoppers walked by they had stared indulgently at the twin riders. John hadn’t liked it, but Jackson had brightened up, made faces at people. Finally, John had stuck his tongue out too in retaliation. Jackson had explained to his brother that the man with the bell was just hired to take the real Santa’s place.

“Santa...the real Santa...lives in the North Pole and is still making our presents. This man just gets money for poor people. His beard comes off at night. A real Santa’s beard can’t be pulled off. It’s like the hair on our heads.” John had nodded. He seemed to relax the more his brother continued talking. Sarah could always spot the transformation. Jackson took the lead and John came through for him in the end.

“He’ll get used to the other children. This is our new school,” Jackson told her cheerily, grabbing John’s hand in his.

“Don’t worry Mother. We’ll be fine.”

Walking back to the car, Sarah had to chuckle to herself. Was she the only one who saw Jack Kennedy and his brother Bobby in her boys? Was she the only one who understood that they were destined for greatness?

***

The old men who hung around at the garage were quick to notice the change in their friend Leon. Aside from letting his appearance go, living in the same greasy overalls day after day, he’d done some pretty weird things since Sarah split. About a month into the separation he pulled down all the fan belts hanging high up along the lube room walls and piled them on a three foot stanchion he used for roping off the work area. All those black rubber belts for old cars, some discontinued models – Edsel, Ford coupe, Packard V-8, Dodge trucks, 1/2 tons, full-ton some for generators and water pumps – looked like they’d been used for a ring-toss game at a fair. When Leon found himself hating his life and all it stood for, he’d acted out by stripping the walls of all those belts that had hung forever on nails around the ceiling. What’s the fuckin’ use, he had thought to himself, that late January night. He had considered burning them with some gasoline and a match, but instead had made a game of slinging them all up over the pole, one after the other from about ten feet away. He had loosened up, enjoyed the game. By the time he had thrown some two hundred onto the stanchion, he had worn himself out enough so that torching the pile became just too much added work. He had simply left the belts piled high and had returned to his room at Bela’s.

Whatever the reason Leon had made the strange mess, it didn’t look very professional, thought Sonny and Sam Harris when they showed up the following morning. The garage used to have class when Sarah was around, they agreed. It had been respectable. So on that morning the old men had convinced Leon to call his wife in Chicago. And it had worked out pretty well.

“Hello,” a female voice answered.

“Hello? Is...Sarah there?” Sonny and Charles’s faces brightened up as they gave Leon the high sign for good luck.

“Speaking....”

Leon couldn’t believe it. He hadn’t even recognized his own wife’s voice on the phone, and she hadn't recognized his. And he was thrown by her use of the word “speaking.” When did she start talking like that on the phone? he wondered. So damn high-falutin’ and such. “Speaking?” Why couldn’t she just say “Hi” or “It’s me” like a normal person?

“Sarah, it’s me, Leon. How are you doing?”
“I’m fine. Want to talk to Jackson? He’s right here on my lap.”

Without waiting for areply, Sarah moved the phone to Jackson’s ear and adjusted the mouthpiece to place it as close to his lips as possible.

“Say hello to your Daddy?” she prompted him, knowing Jackson had begun to enjoy communicating verbally and had picked up proper English at a rate that astounded her and his grandmother, Dee.

“Hello, Daddy. How are you?”

Leon could hardly believe his ears. His little three-and-a-half- year-old son sounded twice his age, spoke perfect English and could put words together better than either Leon or any of his friends.

“Hello back....there, son.” Leon felt off-kilter and a little sad, knowing he’d already missed so much of his family life. But at least he got it together to add, “I miss you.”

“I miss you too. Here’s Mom.”

“We’re doing fine,” said Sarah, back onto the phone. Without a break she continued. “I’ve got a job working in a restaurant. Dee is being great...I have a nice room to sleep in with the boys. How’s Bela?”

Leon smiled over at his old friends to let them know it was going fine.

“Bela’s getting a little tired these days. I kinda worries about her. But I check on her at night and inna morning. She misses yuh like I do. Are you gonna come back here or do I have ta come out thar to Chicago to see my boys?”

“I figure I’ll be here for a patch more a time. You can certainly visit here if you behave yourself. Don’t want no horrible arguments in front of my boys. You know that can’t be good.”

“OK. Ok then. I’ll see you sometime soon, you hear? And remember that I done love y’all.”

The old men had grinned for some time after Leon hung up. He had done all right on the phone. Now, they thought, he should just get his mojo on an East-bound train.

“To hell wit the garage!” said Sam loudly. “Nobody done cum down hare wit dare cars no mo, no how.”

***

March 8, 1968

One more customer, thought Rudy, and he could have his weekend. Over the course of four years, he had diligently applied himself to running the Four-Corners Texaco station at Denny and 4th in Seattle, while at the same time doing a methodical search for Sarah Little. He had broken the city up into small sections by outlining each separate district on a AAA map with a blue marker, forming squares that could be investigated and marked off – his “little hobby” as he called it. Sarah Little’s jet had continued on towards Seattle in 1962 and he was going to find her through her husband’s gas station (or former gas station) and confront her about the Kennedy story. It had been six years since they had met, but he hoped he’d still recognize her and vice versa. Actually he was surprised that he hadn’t been able to track her down sooner. Where had the time gone?

After his initial failure to find Sarah his interest had flagged, been diverted with watching football games, or trying to keep one girlfriend or another. But then some mention of Kennedy-this or Kennedy-that in the news would inadvertently bring him right back to his obsession. Lately it was Bobby Kennedy’s run for the Presidency that kept the Kennedy name on everyone’s lips. Rudy had a blow-out with his current lover, Doris, who tried to convince him that he should forget about Sarah. Doris quickly became Rudy’s seventh ex-girlfriend since he’d arrived in the Pacific Northwest.

At first it had been easy for Rudy to eliminate the knowns, visiting gas stations in each squared-off area, asking questions, crossing off the location when it came to naught. Sometimes he got a friendly response, sometimes just hostility. Was he a Dick – a private investigator? A bill collector? There was always a bit of suspicion surrounding his attempts to gain information. Rudy had wondered if his knotted pigtail helped or hindered his investigation. Half the time the garage attendants had long hair like him, so weren’tthey“brothers”afterall? SummerofLoveandallthat?

Rudy revisited his worn and re-creased Seattle map, looking for the missing link. He had hit almost all the gas stations over the years, and had moved on to the garages without any luck. None of the people he’d talked to had recognized the name “Sarah Little.” Could there be an underground garage, he wondered? A secret car repair business somewhere he hadn’t found?

Early in 1964, when Rudy first arrived, he had called all the “Littles” in the phone book, all thirty-five of them, but none had heard of a “Sarah.” Staring at the blue squares with red lines through each one, Rudy knew should consider a new tactic.

Was it time for an ad in the paper? Maybe! A billboard? No, he didn’t have $5,000 for that extreme a measure. But at least he was re-thinking his approach.

Suddenly Rudy remembered something Sarah had said on the plane. She had described her husband’s business as, “More of a garage than a gas station really.” So maybe that meant deserted or removed pumps. Maybe the station had been converted into a quick stop market of some kind! That’s what had been happening a lot of the time. Businesses failed. Maybe that was it! Why had his mind been so fixated on just gas stations?

Rudy brought a fresh, new map home from the service station that next evening and drew in the squares again – 1 to 22, from A to R (the map didn’t reach to Z), all in red marker. Red alert! He decided to spend a solid two days a week, plus some weekends and all national holidays, looking for her. But it took only three days with the new parameters for for Rudy to hit paydirt.

When Rudy entered the West Seattle Quickstop on third and Tyler, a converted gas station in a rough neighborhood, he felt some trepidation. It was impossible not to notice the extreme precautions the owner had used to protect the store from break-ins. There were bars on every window, both inside and out (two sets!), TV cameras at each corner of the ceiling, TV monitors behind a wire mesh cubicle where the thin clerk took the money. It looked more like a prison than a grocery store. And all the customers were either Black or Hispanic. Being the only white guy in sight made him feel like a target. Luckily, Rudy thought, he had worn his old garage clothes, instead of something that might attract attention.

After standing along the counter, waiting for the steady stream of beer and cigarette purchases to abate, it was finally Rudy’s turn to talk to the clerk. The young Black man customers called Sammy had long skinny fingers and not much of a build, but glittery gold necklaces hanging down lent some metallic power to his presence. His skinny arms and hawk-like face – pock marks covering his forehead – made it hard to tell his exact age.

“Yessir, what brand?” asked Sammy, named for his grandfather, Sam Harris.

“No cigarettes,” said Rudy quickly, feeling the pressure of the line forming behind him. As four more men, each holding a six- pack or two, were pressing in, Rudy popped the important question.

“Just need to know if you ever heard of a Sarah Little?”

Rudy had been told “No” to that question so many times that he was set for the standard answer. But unbelievably, it was in the affirmative.

“Yeah... ”

“Yes?” Rudy echoed in amazement.

“Yeah,” Sammy repeated, getting nervous with the pay line getting longer.

“As in...you know her?” pushed a stuttering Rudy, trying to make sure he’d heard right. He was in some kind of shock.

“Did know her...” said Sammy, “...before she left for Chicago, that is.”

Watching the White guy get all excited, Sammy (with one eye on the line) quickly added, “Yeah, my dad knew her well. Hung out here at the station...when it was a station.”

“Chicago?” repeated Rudy. “It there an address? (Continuing on, too excited to be sensitive to the growing discord in the store) “I met her once...on a plane ride from Chicago and...”

Before Rudy could add another word, a customer finally interrupted – “Hey! Keep it moving, bro...”

The tough-looking, young Black man pressed in toward the counter, as Rudy hesitantly stepped aside.

Ten minutes later, as Sam Jr. gave the last customer his change, he looked over at Rudy who’d been loitering near the tiny food section, and threw him a bone. “No address, but just look under Little and that should get you there.”

Sam Jr. failed to mention that her ex-husband, Leon, still lived within a mile of the store and stopped in regularly. Driving back home, Rudy was ecstatic. He’d finally cleared up the Seattle mystery.

Back home, Rudy gathered up the mail from the box and bounded up the stairs of his rented room. He sat down on his bed, clicked on the TV for whatever football game was in progress, and opened the first envelope he came to. It was from the Selective Service, announcing in bold print that he’d been drafted into the United States Army, ordered to report to the Oakland Army Induction Center within 60 days, on or before May 1st, 1968. But Rudy outsmarted them. Yes he did. Before Induction day could roll around, he joined the U.S. Marines instead, just like his father had done. He figured he might as well be part of the elite, a member of the most feared, ferocious, fastidious, free-wheeling, freaking fighting force on planet Earth.

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(Chapter 29 next)