Dreamer by Charles Johnson Page B

fingers would throb, he’d have to soak his hand later in a pan of hot water, as he often did after standing in receiving lines and pressing the flesh with thousands of admirers. And that was just all right. As Abu Sa‘id, an Islamic scholar he admired, might put it, there was nothing inside the blue coat and skirt Stephanie was wearing except Allah.

5
    We stayed on State Route 51 south from Carbondale, following a map Amy scrawled on the back of SCLC stationery as Smith did impersonations of the waitress Arlene and the old man in the Pit Stop. He was a remarkably talented mimic, I realized during the rest of the ride, and so scathingly funny in his interpretations that even while Amy and I laughed until tears cascaded down our cheeks, which helped me forget for a while my shame at the damage I’d done to the diner (every police car we passed made me squirm down in my seat), I was afraid to think of Smith applying his imitative skills on
me
. The possibility of seeing things as he did, from the oblique angle of alienation, fascinated and frightened me at the same time; he was so antithetical to King, yet in some ways I saw in Smith the distillation of the minister’s message to a black student he met at Lycoming College in Pennsylvania,young man so consumed by anger and hatred and dualism that all King could say was, “Son, the best thing you can do is try to understand yourself.” Smith forced me to think on this, to turn it over and over, and inspect it from every side: My Self. Yet for all his similarities to King, his talk earlier about envy and divine rejection put me on edge—indeed, had briefly pushed me over it. My skinned knuckles were sore and I’d cut my left forearm when smashing bottles on the counter. In other words, I’d injured myself quite as much as I’d wasted the Pit Stop. And it was his—Chaym Smith’s—doing. But slowly, as I saw him slip effortlessly into Arlene’s physical eccentricities, I began to feel that, for all his exasperating qualities, perhaps he could stand in for King, and told him so.
    â€œSure, I can mark him,” he said. “That’s easy. Everybody’s playing a role anyway, trying to act like what they’re supposed to be, wearing at least one mask, probably more, and there’s nothing underneath, Bishop. Just emptiness …”
    The Chevelle coasted down a dusty road trenched between enormous trees that domed overhead, breaking sunlight into flecks of leaf-filtered brilliance that flickered on a road that wound past a dilapidated Methodist church and ended in front of a rough farmhouse. It seemed to spring up suddenly out of kudzu vines and broomsedge, a one-story structure erected on rocks: it floated above these huge stones like a raft, shadowed by a double-trunked oak tree in the yard. Paint on the front porch was peeling away in large strips like sunburned skin. The yard, wild with windblown weeds, was as uncultivated as a backfield full of burdocks and snakes. I cannot say I was relieved to arrive at this remote, rural destination. The heat was withering. Out there more than two miles from the highway, and possibly three to the nearest store, there were none of the distractions to rescuea man at night from the feelings and thoughts he least wanted to confront.
    Or from the strangeness of Chaym Smith.
    Skeptically he squinted at the dilapidated house. “Anybody living in this dump?”
    â€œNot this summer.” Amy’s brow pleated. “And it’s not a
dump
. Mama Pearl rents it out to kids over at the college. At her age she doesn’t like to live so far from other people. It’s furnished inside and she’s never asked for more than what she needs to pay the taxes and keep her place upstate, but it’s been empty since June. That church we passed up the road? Most of our family is buried in a cemetery there …”
    Smith cut off the engine, and we unloaded the car,