Chapter 4
The Jungle
At the airbase outside Montgomery, I behaved pretty much as Pierre had in Lev’s book, drinking with my comrades and displaying bravado in unpredictable ways. I had also learned a lesson from my uncle the senator, who had helped steal Geronimo’s skull from his grave in Oklahoma and deliver it to the Tomb, the Skull and Bones clubhouse on the New Haven campus. I wasn’t proud of my uncle for that, but it surely showed bravado in an unpredictable way. And many big-boys laughed and loved it.
“Did your uncle ever tell you about it?” asked my Tomb-mate Harriman at a meeting after my initiation into that elite dark secret club.
“He knows how to keep a secret,” I said, as though my uncle may have told me much, as though he may have trusted me so much.
So I made a splash in flight-school, by seeming carefree while also becoming expert with those little airplanes. And I made a splash at Skull and Bones, by learning from Lev to fly the little nuances of his French Russian drawing-rooms. And I made a more tangible splash in the war, very touching for me.
After 57 successful missions of mine in the chase, a Japanese fighter shot me into the Pacific Ocean. I was flying a small bomber, with no copilot but a bombardier back in the belly of that little lumbering plane. I also did not know my bombardier would not make it out alive, and that’s the first thing I thought about as I floated alone in the ocean, the first death I knew this trip here. I still don’t know how he couldn’t bail as I did, but that doesn’t help my feelings. He was a friend of mine, and I was responsible. I was the pilot and more than he knew. I knew why I was there.
But that wasn’t the last of my thoughts there. My thoughts turned as they had when I was Pip here to help with the Civil War. Then also I thought of the deep unsounded Atlantic in which I was floating, having fallen from a harpoon-boat and left alone for hours while the rest in the boat did their work. Captain Ahab had nothing on me for understanding the depth of the sea. That is, until he learned its full depth later, strapped dead to the white whale. Or maybe he did know, with his focus.
He made me his cabin-boy after my friends Quequeg and Ishmael fished me out, and serving Ahab was sound experience for working for Lincoln during the war. Both Ahab and Abraham had focus, and the two of them even looked a lot alike, and they both fought the white whale. And they both listened carefully to me, and they both died early, like my bombardier. Still I don’t know if I could have done better for either.
Yet, of course, that helped me at Skull and Bones also, having been so close to a United States president and to a battle with an enemy I hardly saw and never touched, and having been so close to death myself in that hardly sounded sea. Eisenhower learned bravado at West Point and quietness from De Gaulle, but he didn’t make the quiet bravado of the circle of the Tomb until after he won at Normandy.
“What were you thinking about,” Harriman asked me, “all alone in the ocean.”
I didn’t tell him I had thought of my influence on Ahab and Abraham, and so his family hired me to work for them in Texas. That was my plan, with my degree in economics, to make my way up in the oil business, which powered the world economy, which powered Earth. But braver silence was Beatrice.
I had her name and a portrait of her painted on the side of my plane. And, after that picture sank into the sea, I rose from the sea and flew back to Beatrice herself, as quickly as I could. I hadn’t told her I was from outer space, but I did tell her I was going to be president of the United States, and she believed me.
“If that’s what you want,” she answered. “You’re so brave and quiet. I know you can do whatever you wish. And I know it’ll be good for all of us.”
So, as soon as I was back from the war, she accepted my hand in marriage at a military wedding. The swords of my comrades arched over us and everything, and we went on to Yale and started to raise a family of Earthlings immediately, living in a little apartment just off campus while I studied economics, and that other stuff.
We named our first child Quincy, after John Quincy Adams because he had followed his father John Adams into the presidency. It was Beatrice’s idea, but I liked it because I didn’t wish to be noisy as a president, any longer than I had to be to get the job done, and legacy would be necessary. Quincy could carry on, if Beatrice and I could teach him well enough. And I knew Beatrice could, however busy I was otherwise.
So, after I muddled through the mess of abstraction that academic economists heap onto the concrete dynamics of supply and demand, while having a little fun playing very well for Yale at the United States’ national pastime, I and my little family left the silver spoons of New England for the black gold of Texas, to accept the job Harriman’s family had offered me, to get going in this world, more into our mission.
At first, we rented a house, but we bought a car, to get us around, to get settled. The car was a red Studebaker, and that idea also came from Beatrice, because I had introduced her to Theresa and Raymond when she had visited me in Montgomery from New Orleans, and Theresa had told her about Raymond’s selling his car for the Scottsboro boys’ defense fund. Beatrice took all that to heart.
“If they come to visit,” said Beatrice, “he can take us all for a ride in it.”
And soon we bought a house, a little two-story white clapboard just outside the edge of Midland, with a wide front porch looking across the wide Texas plain. Midland was appropriately named, as then from there one could see across flat land to the horizon, in any direction. From our home, West Texas reminded me of the wide western ocean into which I’d fallen a few years before. But Beatrice was much better company than her picture that had sunk in that sea. We had another son quite quickly.
Soon after buying the house, Beatrice began teaching Sunday school at the Presbyterian Church. She was making friends, while I was making mostly business contacts in the oil-industry, before Harriman called me from Houston with a little surprise that didn’t surprise me much. When the telephone rang, I was washing the Studebaker in front of the house on a Saturday afternoon, to take Beatrice and Quincy to church next day in it. Wiping my hands, I went inside and answered the call.
“Hey,” said Harriman. “It’s me.”
“Hey, Harriman,” I answered. “What’s up?”
“I got what you asked for,” he said.
“What did I ask for?” I asked.
“Well,” he said. “I can’t tell you on the phone. I’ll drive out to Midland tomorrow. My dad wants me to look at some things there, anyway. But, believe me, you’ll be happy. You’ll be happy.”
Next day, we did our usual Sunday thing. I drove Beatrice and Quincy to Sunday School and sat through the adult class myself, although a lot of it irritated me a little, not the feelings but the facts. After Church, we had some of Beatrice’s church friends over for lunch, and after lunch we sat and talked on the porch. Beatrice sat on the swing, pregnant for our second child. Quincy sat beside her.
We could see Harriman coming, the dust rising more than a mile away. As his car became visible out of the brown cloud of dust, Beatrice lowered her hand from her brow and told me it looked like my friend.
“Yeah,” said Quincy, imitating his mother, his hand hardly big enough to shade his eyes from the wide Texas sky. “That looks like Uncle Harry’s car.”
After Harriman got his hugs, and his howdies and pleased-to-meet-you’s from our church friends, he leaned against the nearer porch-post by the steps. Beatrice spoke into the first lull in the following congenial Sunday chatter.
“You haven’t eaten,” she said. “Have you, Harry.”
Still sitting with Quincy on the swing, she looked at Harriman leaning against the porch-rail, his arms folded as he looked down at the assembly of dusty Texas shoes of smiling Texas church-people. He looked up but didn’t answer.
“Go inside,” she said smiling. “See what’s left.”
He and I went into the house and got him a plate of potluck fried chicken and Beatrice’s potato-salad from the fridge, and we walked on out the kitchen door and sat on the back steps. The Azaleas blooming beside us reminded Beatrice of New Orleans, in the Garden District where the houses were much larger but the view much more curtailed. I let Harriman bite and chew and swallow a little before I spoke.
“Something good, huh,” I said.
“You’ll think so,” said Harriman.
He chewed and swallowed and spoke on.
‘We’ve found you a Russian functionary, and we’ve figured a way to get him out of Russia to meet you, and he talks like he might be as excited about the possibilities as I think you are. God, I hope you can pull this off.”
Harriman usually didn’t say that much in one stretch. So he was excited, too.
“Okay,” I said, smiling at my school-chum with his mouth suddenly again full of potato-salad. “How do we do it? What’s the next step?”
“Well,” said Harriman swallowing. “It has to be secret. So, you’re fired.”
“Fired?” I asked, grinning. “I was just getting good at this oil business.”
“Oh,” said Harriman. “You’ll stay in the oil business for a while. But you’ll be on your own, not just working for us. We’re going to back you in your own oil exploration company, so you can say you’re exploring for mineral rights around Texas while you’re actually gallivanting around the world, making all those friends you say you need. That is, if it’s what you want, and if you can bear being away from Beatrice, or if she can bear not being with you. Beautiful azaleas.”
“I’ll try to keep the trips short,” I had to answer. “And it’s necessary. We cannot not do it. Beatrice won’t like it, but she’ll understand. She understands.”
“You’re a lucky soldier,” said Harriman. “We’ll get it done this winter.”
So, it was in my early days in Texas that I met Gorbachev. It amazed me later that no one figured that out, as obvious as it should have been to anyone who had read biographies of both him and me. It took us fifty years to win the cold war Truman and Churchill had caused by their mistakes after Eisenhower and Stalin defeated Hitler. But that was short-order, considering the size of the mess they’d made. How could so few have noticed? What do humans look at? Why don’t they see?”
I had married Beatrice, the woman whose face I had painted on the side of my plane, and my presidential campaign biographies show only one period in my life after our marriage when I was away from her more than a few days. It was after the Harrimans set me up with my own oil-exploration company, which I named for a Mexican revolutionary in hope that we might unite all of North America, with its capital at Flagstaff Arizona, someday. What wasn’t plain?
The biographies say I was off buying mineral-rights from Texas farmers, but I didn’t buy many. Gorbachev’s biography has him separate from Raisa then also, leaving Russia to visit Western Europe. Such travel was hardly permitted for someone as low as he was in his Party then. I understand that few know much about Skull and Bones. But the CIA should have been suspect.
Anyway in Paris, Gorbachev became my friend, much like my bombardier. He listened to me, both as a friend and as what the CIA called his control. And he lost his job for it, but at least he didn’t die early.
“It’s very strange,” Mikhail said in our first conversation, as the morning sun lit the dust of the cobblestones of Montmartre, “that you should name your oil-company for a hero of the people.”
Brilliantly the sun lit the dome of the basilica, the sacred heart.
“You’re going to be a great hero of the people,” I answered.
“Should we tour the Bastille while we’re here?” he asked.
“I’m not much into prisons,” I had to politely answer.
“Neither am I,” said Mikhail. “I much prefer this hill.”
“Well,” I replied. “I hope we’ll be a beacon from it.”
“I’m not supposed to know the Sermon on the Mount.”
“But you do. Isn’t that a little why you’re here?”
“A little,” he said. “But more for my wife.”
“Do you have any children?” I asked.
“Not yet, but maybe soon, with this new hope.”
So we made friends, all of us. By the time Theresa started our open effort, that December evening by sitting down on that bus and refusing to stand up in front of the Empire Theater without her rights, she had made so many friends that many thought her friends had put her up to that. Truth, nevertheless, is that not even Bob put her up to it. She was already up to it, because she was Theresa. She was just waiting for her own right time. But Bob and we three others understood. We saw how well she’d done.
“Until justice rolls down like water,” was Oliver’s answer to the question of how long would last the movement Theresa had begun by sitting down on that bus, when he was asked to accept official leadership of that movement, a new young preacher in the community there, an outsider with nothing to lose, or so the other leaders thought, a child among them, “and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
And, when he said it, Theresa wept real Earthling tears of joy, and all the African Americans in that church then and African Americans in other churches all across Montgomery and the nation shared her joy and much of her courage through the winning of the bus boycott more than a year later, and beyond to national legislation ten more years later. How long, O Lord? Ten years, maybe? More than that!
And further than there. A generation later, when a student stopped a Chinese communist tank in the Chinese communist capital, by simply standing in front of it in Tiananmen Square in front of the Chinese communist capitol, Nelson Mandela had something to say about it in Africa. Not in African America, but in Africa!
“It was a Theresa moment,” he said, and he was right as spring rain.
Also on one of my rights exploration trips, I met Yasser Arafat. A couple of future prime ministers, of the state that Earth gave Zionists as much too meager besides hardly appropriate compensation for what Hitler and his supporting sycophant Germans had done to Israel’s people then dispersed worldwide, had formed an organization to force the founding of that state by any means necessary.
One of the means was to blow up a hotel named for the king of Israel we say wrote the Psalms, killing nearly a hundred noncombatant British, Arabs and Jews. Arafat retaliated, as Slavey might have recommended before he returned to Mecca and learned Islamic brotherhood and tried to take up the methods of Oliver and Ghandi and was killed for that turn to pacifism. Arafat formed a terrorist counterterrorism organization, hoping to fight fire with fire, I guess.
The organization Arafat formed to retaliate in kind was Fatah. The future prime ministers were Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, and the organization they formed was Irgun. Together those factions refueled the flames in Canaan after all those millennia, with fighter planes from America terrorizing one side and Slavey's inspiration of pride terrorizing the other side, making suicide a means for homicide, unreasonably and irrationally, irreligiously.
The next means the Zionists thought necessary was to call the retaliation terrorism. They knew the crusading culture of the Christian nations of Earth would ignore their instigation, and call their retaliation against Yasser’s retaliation an eye for an eye, and support it, despite Christ. Also, someone calling himself a Muslim murdered Ghandi, the month I met Yasser. But who cares about a Hindu, even in America?
Mikhail and I drank tea in Paris. Yasser and I drank tea in Jerusalem. About a quarter of a century later, I would drink tea with Chairman Mao in Beijing. One of the few things I ever found funny about all these meetings was that so many different Earthlings drink tea but from different containers. Russians drink it from big glasses while Arabs drink it from glasses a little smaller, and the Chinese drink the tea they keep in China from little cups, while the British drink it from cups a little larger. As for me, it gave me a buzz, literally. It made my head buzz. I didn’t like it.
But it could have been worse. We could have been drinking vodka or smoking hashish or opium or drinking Beefeater gin or some of Hitler’s hofbrau, and I was plenty spacey enough without so much as the tea. And, after a while, I stopped finding that funny, after I learned that all that stuff messed up Earthlings’ minds as much as it did mine, and I learned that a United States intelligence collection method was to give alcohol to Muslims as a token of respect, and that many Muslims accepted it as such, despite proscriptions of their religion. But Yasser wasn’t in on that.
“You can’t stop it,” he told me as we sat in the old city, drinking tea from middle-sized glasses at a table outside a small open-front teashop on the Via Dolorosa, at a table unstable on the cobblestones of this narrow street of this particular vaulted antiquity. “They’ve started it again, and it won’t stop until they stop, and they won’t stop. Their heritage is less fair and older than ours. Peace can’t come from age-old greed, at all.”
Those cobblestones had paved Christ’s path of tears. And they were far more dusty than those on Montmartre, and Yasser’s people were far more willing to be martyrs than had ever been Parisians or Russians. As Muhammad, Slavey had offered them that possibility, as Saul of Tarsus had offered it to the early Christians, but Slavey hadn’t expected folks to take it up so fervently. He’d offered them a religion to unify their pride as a people, and martyrdom as only a symbol of dedication, not as a necessary means.
“I know,” I said. “They won’t willingly stop. Many of them believe God gave them this whole country, and many of them covet the country whether God gave it to them or not, and most of them will try to use religion as an excuse, but all of them is not a world majority, or even a majority in Canaan. They can be stopped.”
“Who’s going to stop them?” asked Yasser. “The world majority? The majority in Canaan? Whatever the majority of people, the majority of power is with the weapons of the United States and the United Kingdom and Western Europe, and they’ve all promised to lend that power to Israel if we make any move to reclaim the land they’ve taken from us. And, by the way, why do you call the land Canaan, knowing as you must that most of the population is Palestinian?”
“I call it Canaan exactly because I regret that the superiority of weaponry has anything to do with it. I call it Canaan because the best deal any of you is ever going to get is that you share it with no claim to superiority. And the only way you’re going to get that deal is by saying so and behaving so. The western powers will respond well to that, if they can see it. We have to show it.”
“Well,” said Yasser. “At least you don’t call it the former British mandate, and you speak a worthy ideal. So, I think you may be a friend to anyone worthy of a friend, but I have to say again that people calling thievery religion would make that idealism our tombstone if we stood by it alone. Anyway, who are you, and how did you gain your references, those for this meeting?”
“I’ll answer in a moment,” I said. “if you will forgive a question in the meantime. Have you read Kipling’s The Jungle Books?”
“Children’s books,” said Yasser. “Books for children.”
“From a winner of the Nobel prize for literature,” I responded. “From an Englishman in India, while England treated India as England did Canaan when I was born on this Earth. He wrote of war, and he wrote of Islamic subterfuge, and he wrote of reasons for both. And he wrote of how we all could just get along with each other. Do you know what he said were the ‘Master-Words’?”
“’We be of one blood,’” quoth my new friend, on this other side of Earth from our landing, from our powerbase. “’Ye and I.’”
“I am a friend,” I answered. “And I gained my references through other friends, and you don’t stand alone. But I know you’re right that the problem is horribly out of balance, and I know it will take some time and so I’m not asking much from you, not now. All I’m asking of you now is that you work toward the ideal as well as you can, in the best ways you can see to do.”
“I do that anyway,” said Yasser. “So I’ll give you the promise, all on my side and asking nothing from you, about whom I know nothing beyond what I see and hear now. I will never produce an imbalance, never cause more Israeli eyes to be taken than Israelis take from my people, never break more promises to Israelis than Israelis break to my people. I don’t have the power.”
“Then isn’t it an empty promise?”
“The promise is I’ll do the best I can.”
“Then I believe it’s a good one!”
So that was set in motion, however slowly it might move, and Theresa’s movement was moving quickly. And her timing was right as well to move on quickly to the motor city to be nearer to her Earthling little brother, and to Slavey. Her Alabama friends in our movement, their movement for their freedom on their Earth, were starting to feel that their personal power was more important than their collective motion. They were vying to be more powerful than she, and so she left them.
By missing her, they learned better and jumped back on her track, their track on their no-longer-underground railroad. The subtlety of her inspirational devices always honored all of us, as did how she could move so many ways at once while seeming at rest, at peace. She moved ahead leaving no one behind.
But I wasn’t having her move so far from Texas without coming to visit and telling me some of the details before she put the distance at hand. I’d been so busy gallivanting that I’d hardly read the newspapers about what was happening in Montgomery, and I hadn’t spoken with Slavey or Oliver in years. When you have eternal life, you don’t pay much attention to time, and sometimes it goes quickly. So, before Detroit, I asked Theresa out to Texas, and had her tell me all about it. We sat on the swing as Raymond drove Beatrice halfway to El Paso and back. He did love that Studebaker, though not as much as he loved Theresa.
“Tell me about the bus,” I begged.