BLACK PRESIDENT, CHAPTER 30. Leon catches cop trouble in Moscow, Idaho, while hitching. He remembers how Bela died.
https://www.eurobuch.de/buch/isbn/9781034176725.html
CHAPTER THIRTY
June 4, 1968
For the last six years Leon had been sending any extra cash he had to Sarah and the boys, who were now almost seven years old. With the demise of his long-diminishing business, and Bela’s recent death, it was finally time to send himself to his family as well. He hadn’t left Seattle since his arrival there in the late fifties, and right smack in the middle of the Summer of Love he would hit the road again.
Fortunately, the trip began pretty smoothly. After a few hours of sitting with his sign, “Chicago or Bust,” on the freeway entrance at Denny Street, he got a long ride out past Spokane. He had encountered everything from flower-painted VW buses driven by pot-smoking young hippies, to beer-drinking truck drivers asking him, “What’s going on?” He had not considered himself either liberal or conservative, but out there, in the middle of America, he found that because of the color of his skin it was “cool” for hip people to pick him up.
Things had gone exceedingly well until a ride had dropped him down into Moscow, Idaho. It was around 7:00AM on a Sunday morning when Leon stepped out of a car on the outskirts of town. He tried his thumb on any vehicle passing by at that early hour, but the pickings were slim. Standing by the open road in the crisp, clear, bone-chilling cold, he wrapped himself tighter in his jacket and pulled his scarf out of his suitcase.
The sun began to peek over the ridge and, if the first rays didn’t actually warm his stiff body, they at least boosted his spirits. It comforted him to realize he was getting closer to Chicago each day, closer to seeing the boys and Sarah after so long. Maybe it had been Martin Luther King’s death that was the final motivator for the trip. Somehow, King being assassinated, like the President, had tied the two men together in his mind, and brought back memories of Sam and her Kennedy obsession. It was just before King was shot that Bela had died. She’d kept him there, cohabiting the apartment with her, just as if he were still living with her grand- daughter. In fact, she treated him even better, it seemed, trying in her way to mend his broken heart and the loss of the children. She never mentioned the phone bills either, even though he quickly fell behind with the phone payments. When Bela died in March that meant the end of her apartment as well. There was no way he could pay the entire $100 a month himself.
<https://www.eurobuch.de/buch/isbn/9781034176725.html>
At first, after all the cleaning and arranging for the memorial service, he thought that Sarah might try to return for the funeral, but he’d been wrong. He had read over the sympathetic note she wrote though, trying to read into the cursive strokes to decipher where he stood with her.
“Dear Leon and friends,” she had begun, with the “L” looping high above the line then dropping below with its second loop, the cursive stroke extending far out beyond the rest of the letters in his name. A BIG loop. He went to the library, found a slim paperback book titled, The Mysteries of Handwriting Analysis, and looked up “loops.” What the book had revealed was disturbing. It said that when the tall part of letters reach unusually high it means the person doing the writing has a strong imagination. Yes, thought Leon, that figures, given all the Kennedy crap. Farther on, he read that low-lying extensions of letters, lines that dip unusually far below the line, indicated “a strong sex drive.” Shit, Leon thought to himself. That analysis brought back the entire weight of his sexual disfunction problem with Sarah. He was reliving the whole stupid thing again – climbing up the drum barrels, crawling up on the roof, the glare of the sun, slipping, falling, the spike sticking out from the grass – when a Idaho police cruiser gliding by pulled a U-turn and screeched to a halt at the curb near where Leon was standing. Leon moved back to the center of the sidewalk as the tall Indian-looking cop got out of his vehicle and approached. When the officer was about five feet away, Leon felt a chill of fear go down his spine. The man was giving out some seriously bad vibes. The stiff starched uniform hinted at the severity of the situation.
“You know it’s illegal to hitchhike around here?” said the cop forcefully, glaring out from under his spit-polished black-leather hat brim. “Worth a week in jail. Let’s see what you’ve got in that suitcase.”
Apparently, Leon didn’t move quickly enough, because the cop barked out a louder command.
“THAT’S RIGHT BUSTER...OPEN ER UP NOW!”
Immediately Leon got down on his knees and unlatched the slide on the suitcase. From inside he pulled out a plastic bag that contained a white shirt, suit jacket, slacks with dress-up belt. In the bottom of the suitcase there were black, dress-up leather loafers, each shoe with a sock pulled over it to protect the rest of the clothes from any dirt and grime that might have collected on the soles. Four pairs of underwear, and a few pairs of socks in another plastic bag functioned as padding. A thin sleeping bag rolled up tightly in his back pack completed the list of his worldly possessions.
“OK, unroll the bedroll too,” said the cop, his attitude clearly communicating don’t you dare talk back to me about anything -- just obey every order I give. Leon complied, rolling out the sleeping bag, unzipping the side, spreading his stuff out over the sidewalk. At this point, another cop car cruised by, the driver glancing over to make sure the scene was under control.
“Carrying any drugs...grass, cocaine? LSD?”
Even as Leon answered the question, part of his mind was wondering what the cop’s dark complexion meant. Was he Navajo, Mexican, or? In either case, why was a person with skin almost as black as his giving him such a hard time?
“No...no sir. Nothing,” Leon answered, instinctively adopting the humble-Negro manner that had got him safely across the American South years before.
“Ok, partner,” said the cop. “Pack it up and start walking. Out- of-town is on the other side of those tall buildings in the distance. If I see that thumb of yours sticking out just once I’ll throw you in jail for a week. Understood?”
“Yes. OK.”
“But how will I know exactly when I’m gonna be completely outta town,” Leon asked, risking the wrath he knew was bottled up inside the man. But the cop answered evenly this time.
“Other side of the overpass. Just get beyond that, and keep it moving.” Without another word the officer walked to his car, got in and drove off.
By the time Leon reached the downtown Moscow, the temperature had climbed considerably, up to around 85 degrees from what had been near-freezing temperature a couple hours earlier. As he walked sluggishly along he again started thinking about old Bela and the night her heart gave out. The evening had begun normally enough. She said she’d wanted some barbecued beef for sandwiches. He added a five-dollar bill to her ten, and went to the deli on Broadway. The aroma of barbecue sauce rose from the pots of beef and pork, and smoke billowed up into the overhead exhaust fan. The place was popular, so Leon had to wait for twenty mouth- watering minutes. Jim’s Barbecue was one of the most successful black-owned businesses in Seattle. Leon had known Jim for years, and watched entranced as he painted the thick, dark sauce on each side of the beef with a large brush, then made slices, weighing the results until he hit 1.5 pounds on the scale. Jim wrapped the meat in waxy paper and handed it to Leon with a nod of recognition.
“Hey, ma man! Power to the People!” Ron handed Leon his change and gave a quick black power salute.
“Yo, rat on, Bro!” Leon replied, forgoing the arm gesture. Then, noticing Ron had given him back more change back than expected, Leon added a small sweet potato pie, knowing it was Bela’s favorite. He returned to the house and he and Bela had sat there watching TV for about an hour, eating the drippy sandwiches while the potatoes baked in the oven. They would have “good ol’ bakers” with sour cream for a side dish before the pie, she said. Then seventy-six-year-old Bela had complained about some indigestion. Leon went back out again to buy some Tums. The corner drug store at Johns and Broadway was still open so he entered through the turn-style, went straight to the pharmacy section, picked up the anti-acid roll, paid quickly and drove back home.
When Leon opened the door he found Bela’s body sprawled face-down across the beige-colored living room rug. He ran to her side and, turning her over, discovered a small red spot on the carpet where her nose and mouth had been pressed up against the thick shag. Was it the barbecue sauce or blood? His eyes strained to tell the difference. Bela’s face was covered with it and she wasn’t breathing. Leon set her head back down carefully and grabbed the phone to call “O” for help.
“Please give me a doctor or ambulance! My grand...in-law has stopped breathing here!” he yelled into the phone. He then pushed on her chest with his hands like he’d seen the doctors on TV do, to try and resuscitate, but his efforts had no effect. Still, he just kept doing the “artificial respiration” while he waited for help to arrive. With sweat pouring down his face he listened for the wailing of sirens, but minute after minute he heard none approaching. Time ticked by horribly on the loud wall clock.
“Com’ on, Bela,” he repeated more than once. The red blotch on the rug would have infuriated her, he thought, as he kept pressing in and easing up, still hoping she’d start breathing on her own. The rug was getting ruined. He had watched her dedicate years of her life to maintaining that textile, doing her daily carpet sweeping back and forth in front of the TV, moving chairs and placing them carefully back on their little plastic coasters, cleaning around the sofa, even doing an occasional wet-cloth shampooing in places to keep it looking as fresh as possible. He couldn’t help staring at the red stain that would never come out.
When the ambulance finally did arrive, around 10PM, and the attendants took her away, Leon was completely numb. After seing her off, he could barely heft his legs up the few stairs. He simply collapsed on his bed. Days later he found the two baked potatoes in the cold oven, as hard as volcanic rocks.
As the memory of the tragedy concluded, Leon snapped back to the present-day trek through Moscow, only now at higher temperature than before Bela’s memory had surfaced. Sweating ain’t no big deal, cause I’m almost there, thought Leon to himself when he had passed the tall downtown buildings and spied an overpass about a half-mile up ahead. But as he got closer a new fear gripped him. Another black- and-white patrol car was parked about two hundred feet ahead under some shade trees. The officers were just sitting and staring, but he knew that they could jump into action in an instant. He wondered what they’d do when he stuck out his thumb there at the end of town. Was this the “right” overpass? Or did the cop mean something else, another overpass...one much farther out of town? He could imagine the two officers in the cruiser idling slowly over to where he was standing, and giving him the whole run-around again. He’d probably get a week in the slammer just for back-talk at that point. If they decided to send him packing back to the other end of town again (a typical cop’s game), through the now-sweltering Arizona afternoon, he’d surely collapse from dehydration. So they had him either way.
As Leon waited to be accosted, he thought again about how he and the cop who’d set him walking were both men of color. Black men in a White world. And were they helping each other get along, or survive? Hell no! Leon thought about how he would have given the brown-skinned cop a ride through town, deposited him right there at the overpass...if the shoe had been on the other foot.
When Leon reached the overpass he thrust out his thumb and aimed it down the road, east, toward Illinois. After about ten minutes of the stand-off, cops still waiting in the shade, Leon heard the car’s engine burst into life, the chug, chug, chug of a high-torque machine reverberating across the deserted landscape. He watched out of the corner of his eye as it rumbled out from the shade then roared to life, spitting dirt and pebbles up from its tires, a large dust cloud blown over the pavement. The police car charged away at high speed, trailed by an ever-expanding mirage off the hot asphalt.
————
