Two Smiths

May. Spring is late to come. Slush and the streets full of shivering lushes near the Spadina LCBO. The boy standing in front of me eager to talk, hair as long as that of Charles Dickens at nineteen, a gold circle in one ear; impetuous to talk, a bright orange and green sailor jersey striped boldly above his Levi Strauss blue jeans, blue-eyed; determined to tell me how it is with him, why he clipped out on the reserves, where he smoked across the border, his smile twisted in a billy-jo, mountain boy way; gurgling out how it was with him when he got to enjoying his brother’s enjoyment of killing people way over there in Asia and how it was when he knew he just had to get out, to cut out, because he could see how easy it would be for him to start enjoying the same killing. He, Jimmy Randall Smith.

Sure. January. Full winter may never come. Rhett Smith is beside me in the midwest, lifting an old .12 gauge out of his flower-painted Chevy. His young man’s clipped beard is gone.

“Have to have the car repainted now,” I say.

Rhett doesn’t answer. His face is tight in the cold, near-winter wind. Something else is bothering him. Something else is keeping him from talking, from replying to my jest about his repainted Chevy. So that I talk, uncharacteristically. Once we have climbed over the fence and are into the corn fields, completely stripped down now, completely ready for winter. He waves at the thin-faced girl with peroxide hair who sits in the Chevy and looks discontented, as though the heat may be suddenly and mysteriously turned off while we are hunting.

“A funny old bird is all that I’m sure is left,” I say. “I’ve almost given him a name. I’ve seen him three or four times in the whole year. He’s got one singular habit that keeps him alive. He flies straight up.”

I look at Rhett Smith. I am not amusing him. He’s back in the south, or he’s back in the county seat, or in the state’s capital, in a courtroom under pressure. He is unable to relax, as I can now in the cleared corn field, looking for that one old bird with the singular habit.

“Shouldn’t hunt him down,” I say, “but you know how it is, sometimes you reach a certain intensity about getting something done. I’ve got my freezer stocked. He’s probably tough, probably full of old lead.

“Put some lead near him myself, one time, doing it the local way: without dogs, just lots of men in a line. We came through the fields six at a time. Twice we peppered away at that old bird. It’s a well-analyzed way of hunting, the way you do it here. The birds go up, they go along, or they go away; it doesn’t really matter. There’s always two or three men who can get an angle on him. Sometimes more if he flies the wrong way.

“This bird seemed to know there was something else. Went up like a partridge into a pine tree. Went up thirty or forty feet. Everybody had a shot at him, more or less. Good business for the hardware store — that was about all. We all shot into one another’s shot. It’s just not something you’re used to. You’re used to a long, quick, lean flight. You’re used to aiming ahead. A transcendental bird, I guess. A romantic out of place in the pragmatic west.”

Rhett Smith is not looking at me.

“They put a lot of pressure on you, I guess.” I say.

“Wasn’t bad,” he says. “Wasn’t bad at all. I admit I made a mistake.”

I know him, Rhett Smith. In the modern way I know details, facts, histories. Who he stayed with when he went down south for freedom. What kind of beer he drank with the people he stayed with, the Haydts. What Mr. Haydt did for a living. But I couldn’t have predicted that he was going to peak out at this stage. Anger and a desire for action were building up inside of him, that was obvious. And some desire for fame or attention. Then he just threw in the whole sponge. Took a dive or got smart. Realized that he was being led astray by forces inimicable to the American way of life. The way you describe him now doesn’t matter, the way you describe him is forever relative. I know details about his beard. I know what precise moment of awareness triggered all the actions of the past three years. The thing, the moment, and all that. Somewhere inside the rented farmhouse it sits in a file.

Now, the corn is soggy with the damp that comes when a real cold delays. A rustle. Down the field, a long shot, the old cock is running through the stubble. Smith listens to it, as though it were a distant crow, something distant and bleak. Into the scrub weed along the fence, the wild marijuana? Or a right turn and across the furrows and back up distant stubble?

“Funny all that wild pot up here, so far from Mexico,” I say. “We had a good crop this year, but you have to get it at the right time.”

“I was never one for that,” he replies. There is something Baptisty about him, small-town Methodist, and I wonder why I am wasting this unusual hunting time with him.

It was newspaper reports of a girl being raped in New York which set him going. A lot of people saw it from an office building, stood up, and went to the windows to watch. But nobody did a thing. Apathy, that got to him. Religious disgust welled up in him. Apathy is one of his key words. Lack of compassion. That’s what he didn’t want to suffer from when he came of age. The apathy that the newspapers and magazines chronicled for him during the ’60s. Oil millionaires and rat-infested slums. He was going to do something and he went down to Mississippi.

Where the police beat him up but didn’t shoot him. He thought that if he had been Jewish they might have, but he was a boy of German extraction from Iowa. He came back with a lot of stories to tell and decided to go on a hunger strike. He sat in bars and apartments with the young radicals and poets who listened to his stories. He told them how young Haydt’s car had been shot up by the police as they drove home late one evening. “Car’s getting a bad case of rust there boys,” one policeman said. “Better be careful it doesn’t spread.” Laughing a little. “That been like that long?” the other policeman said about the shattered windshield. “Ought not to drive around like that. Might have to ticket you. You boys better take better care of that car; bet it ain’t even paid for yet.”

He told all his new stories and enjoyed the response and trimmed his beard a little more neatly and then in the winter went out with three other friends and sat in front of the Federal Post Office with only a tent and sleeping bags and they promised not to eat until they had raised five thousand dollars for people who had been deprived of shelter and amenities during the troubles in the south.

And raised quite a good proportion of the five thousand dollars, although two of his friends quit and Rhett caught the third one eating candy bars one night and would have asked even that one to acknowledge defeat except that he didn’t want to have to go through it all alone.

Then when spring came he painted his car with flowers and became more interested in the war and eventually burnt his draft card. He was the second person in the whole country to do that. Events swirled about him. A washing machine millionaire, third-generation, offered him financial support.

Now, he explains to me very seriously where the wild marijuana came from.

“During the war, the second war, they tried to grow hemp in the state because there was a shortage of rope and they felt that anything would grow here. But it didn’t do too well for that purpose. It spread all over the place, but nobody cared. The war was over by then and nobody was interested in drugs. Now they’re beginning to worry.”

We come down to the corner and the bird hasn’t gone up. I kick along through the weeds, but nothing happens.

Repetition. The thin thread of reality. Suddenly the cock goes high, still the colours of the sun and the fall in this dull season lingering beyond reason. The bird goes high enough so that Rhett comes out of his lethargy and gets his gun up and bangs off a shot and I am glad enough at that sudden action to forego my careful watching for the moment when the bird must level off, when it gets beyond even its unlearned height.

“Perhaps he’s inherited it,” I say. “It’s a whole new breed to make things hard on us killers.”

A glimmer of a smile.

I have been up to the small town which bred Rhett. His father runs a shoe repair shop which also stocks boots and tennis sneakers and slippers. In the front window is a sign which states that one can pay his American Legion dues here. I have been up to the town school from which Rhett graduated and talked to the teacher he says helped spark him towards this life of action.

“Most of the people here are kinda anti-Rhett,” she said, with just the smallest of nervous smiles as though I might be weird enough not to understand what was implied, what all Americans would understand was implied. “If not, you just don’t say anything. When Rhett wanted to speak on civil rights here in the school last fall, before any of this worse trouble came, there were some who felt he should be let to talk, but those who didn’t had a point and what could you answer? We’re a public-supported school; we have to walk a middle path. Otherwise you get yourself too involved. My husband didn’t want me to come at all to talk to you. I told him what you wanted to know about, about Rhett, and, well, we own a rent house over in Cedar Rapids and we’re renting it to Negroes now, but that’s our first real contact. I do quite a bit with the Negro in American History of the twentieth century and I was glad to see that this year the English people were reading Raisin in the Sun in that magazine they work out of, Cavalcade. One of the younger teachers asked me about it, there’s a conservative minister or two in town who could stir up trouble if it were handled wrong, but — of course English’s different than history — but I told her to handle it just as people. The play was about people in a slum, she said, so I said to her just have them judge it as a family living in a slum and what they would do if they were in similar conditions.”

Such is inspiration.

The bird has flown east and landed again in the stubble. We walk slowly up back towards the farmhouse. A light snow is falling. When we reach the fence around the old orchard which surrounds the house, Rhett relaxes and unloads his gun, but I am still alert, the phrases of the woman teacher in his small town still running through my mind. Repetition. I kick through the weeds, walking towards the far fence, and the old cock goes up thirty yards ahead of me. I down him very quickly, before he can do his spiral act.

I offer the tail feather to the blond girl who has been waiting unhappily in the Chevy, but she refuses it. I know that she suspects me as one of those people who led Rhett astray, and we are awkward, so I let them leave and turn to clean the old bird. His left eye has been shot out.

Don Silverbuck phones while I am still plucking wing feathers. He is very excited. He has been following all of Rhett’s activities, planning to write another In Cold Blood as soon as Rhett is jailed. That is why our house is full of files.

“I’ll be home in about two hours,” he hollers into the phone. “You should have seen that trial yesterday, you wouldn’t have believed it. Clarence Darrow all over again. What a phrase. Rhett was late and he said: ‘I’m sorry, judge, we took a wrong turn on the way to the courtroom.’ How’s that for a title? Sell a million. I’ve been checking a few things. I don’t know how they got to him; he just crumpled. But there’s going to be a big protest meeting and all the poets are going to read.”

“He told me he got off.”

“Suspended sentence. It’s a different thing. Christ, what I’m learning about law. They should have let him off completely, that’s our point. Or he should have gone to jail. I don’t know, something’s happened to him. Drugs maybe, I wouldn’t put it past them. The FBI were out in force. He’s going straight. Did you get anything out of him? We’re having real signs printed for the protest.”

“No, Don. We just hunted. I’m going to get ready to leave. As soon as they start bombing Hanoi I’m going to leave.”

“What? We’ve got to finish this. It’ll make us both rich. We’d never do that anyhow. Bomb Hanoi, you must be out of your mind. Even the generals aren’t suggesting that. Christ, we’ve got to finish this. All the hard work’s done; we’ve got all the details in the bag.”

“I shot the old bird today,” I say. “Somebody shot his left eye out a long time ago, that was all. That was why he kept going high. That was all.”

“Look, you’ve got to stay. Write a poem, you could do it, and come to the protest. It’s all going to be recorded and we’ll get some of it on the AP wire. That old woman, you remember, the one we talked to who leaned on the lockers in the hall as though she was going to make them and said please don’t repeat any of this, she was there today and she didn’t say a damn thing. Just Rhett was a good student, and Rhett went a little astray, but Rhett was going to be okay now.”

“I don’t know, Don. All you guys are like flies or ants somehow. One of these days somebody’s going to lift the swatter and that’ll be it. I’ll see you at supper.”

May. This mountain boy, Frank Randall Smith, walks up a wide and dirty street in my city. He’s never heard of Pratt. He doesn’t know who donated this street to the city and where the farmhouses used to be, before the high rises, before the grand houses. But he is intent on talking to me, talking about how he got to enjoy his brother’s enjoyment of killing, especially one story where the squad had taken three prisoners and nobody wanted to kill them so they dressed the three of them up in uniforms of their own dead buddies, American uniforms, and then let them go a little until the Cong shot the hell out of them. That pleased him to a frightening extent and he is desperate to tell me about it, desperate, while I take him in and buy him a hamburger and some chips and a coke and tell him where he can get a bed for a few nights while he settles into his new life.