The Last Ballad(106)

“You’ve been drinking too,” Albert said.

“But I ain’t on the outs with the chief. You are. So hand it over.”

Albert removed his pistol from the holster and handed it to Tom. Tom leaned his chest against the steering wheel and tucked the pistol into the back of his pants waist.

“I thought we were friends,” Albert said.

“We are,” Tom said. “That’s why I’m taking your gun.”

Being there on the sidewalk on this warm night while something like a parade raged up the street before him reminded Albert of the afternoon they’d just spent in Charlotte, how he’d stood on a sidewalk just like this one and wished he were a better man than he was. He was drunk then and he was drunk now, but in Charlotte at least he’d had his pistol.

The chanting and cheers grew louder as they approached the crowd. Automobiles headed east and west rolled past on Franklin Avenue, honking their horns and flashing their lights, people leaning from the windows and taunting the strikers as they passed. Albert saw mostly women of varying ages, but there were a few men, boys really, walking alongside the women. He looked for weapons, but he knew that most of the men were cowards and refused to picket without their rifles, choosing instead to stay close to the headquarters where Fred Beal allowed them to stay armed.

“Let’s split up,” Tom said. “I’ll start at the mill and head north. You start up north on Loray Street, and we’ll meet in the middle. You see any niggers, you tell them you’re police, and you hold them there. There hasn’t been any coloreds at a one of these rallies, so there shouldn’t be any here tonight.”

Albert didn’t say anything. He just stared out at the crowd, some of whom had started to look their way. He and Tom didn’t look like police officers, but it was clear they didn’t belong here with this ragtag group.

“You hear me?” Tom said. “Split up.”

“I’d feel better about this if I had my pistol,” Albert said.

“You’ll get it back when we’re done,” Tom said. “Ain’t no reason to worry about it until then. You ain’t going to miss it.” He walked off down the sidewalk and disappeared into the crowd. Albert saw a few of the strikers note Tom’s arrival among them.

Albert crossed to the other side of Franklin and walked along the storefronts toward Loray Street, where the edge of the crowd gave way to the open road that led to the train tracks and the tent colony and strikers’ headquarters just beyond it. He felt small and lost among this mass of people, all of them shouting and marching. He felt like he didn’t belong to anything.

“Pig!” someone yelled. “Get out of here, pig!”

Albert looked in the direction of the voice and saw a young woman holding a sign, her face pinched in anger. She spit at him, but he was too far away for it to touch him.

“Get out of here, pig!” she said again.

Her appearance shocked Albert as much as what she said. She couldn’t have been any older than sixteen, tall and thin with black hair and a face that looked as if it had been laid over her skull and pulled tight. The girl elbowed a woman standing beside her and said something to her that Albert couldn’t hear. The other woman turned and looked at Albert. She spit at him too.

Soon ten or fifteen people were taunting him, calling him “pig” and “fat boy.” A few of them even knew his name. A young man pushed his way through the crowd, his hands clenching a wooden placard on a stick. The sign read solidarity forever.

“Get out of here, Roach,” the man said. Albert didn’t recognize him, and it was strange to hear his name spoken by someone he’d never seen before. It thrilled him. “You ain’t the police no more, Roach. We know you. Get on out of here.”

Albert thought the man would stop marching toward him, but he kept coming, and as he got closer Albert prepared himself without fully realizing what his body was doing. By the time the man was within arm’s length, Albert had swiped the stake from his hands. The man stepped back, shocked, but not shocked enough. He charged toward Albert, and that was when Albert swung the stake, the placard’s slim edge catching the man’s face like a knife blade. His cheek fell open against his jaw, and blood covered his face, poured onto his shirt. It looked as if his throat had been cut, and Albert half-expected him to fall to his knees and die right there.

A woman’s scream rose up from the crowd, but Albert didn’t have time to see to whom it belonged. They were on him almost immediately, and he was suddenly aware that he and Tom should not have come to the mill tonight.

He swung the sign, and it was enough to keep the crowd at bay, but it moved slowly as it cut through the air like a giant fan. Albert tore the placard free so that all that remained was the stake, and he swung it like a billy club, aiming for heads and shoulders and knees. It was the first time in a long time that he felt as if he were accomplishing something, as if he were getting something done, making a difference.

In a drunkenness that quickly gave way to rage once his mind computed what the women had called him and what the boy did in disrespecting him, it did not matter to Albert that the people he struck were primarily women, some of them young and some of them very old. They were all part of the same enemy. As he swung the stick and felt the jolt of bodies, he pictured himself atop a garlanded float sixty years from now, a proud veteran of this heroic struggle on the streets of Gastonia on the night the Loray strike came to an end.