Without Country
10th place, NYC Midnight Short Story Challenge 2020
Clifton Phifer hailed from Black Metropolis, and under the auspices of the Fighting Eighth, his country sent him all over the world in the name of freedom. Whose freedom exactly was up for debate. But the Great War had been a just one, and wasn’t fighting for the ideals of his country, rather than its messy truths, a noble cause? He told himself this most nights, while trying to calm his inflamed lungs and fall asleep on the cold floorboards of the freight cars that ever crisscrossed the continent. Clifton had returned from Europe with a persistent cough, a product of the mustard gas the Krauts employed in the Argonne and a physical manifestation of the regret he refused to consciously acknowledge.
He came home to a city not only inhospitable to his bronchi, but to his body and his being. The Krauts had nicknamed him and his brothers in the 370th Infantry the “Black Devils” for the ferocity of their fighting in the Hundred Days Offensive. But they fought under the Tricolour; the Stars and Stripes wouldn’t have them. Upon his Chicago homecoming, Clifton was still seen as a Black Devil, but the moniker was no longer one of grudging German respect. His Irish neighbors invoked the epithet with a fiery hatred in their eyes, and indeed, the flames burned throughout the Red Summer of 1919. He had given his blood on the battlefields and in the trenches of the Western Front, and back in the so-called Land of the Free, his countrymen demanded it spilled tenfold. His house, his anchor to American soil, was rent to its charred foundations, along with those of hundreds of other Black men, women, and children on the South Side, by those who looked at the red, white, and blue of Old Glory and saw only White.
Rendered homeless and unmoored, Clifton gathered what was left of his meager belongings into a bindle and lit out for greener pastures. He had no immediate family on whom to rely, nor who could likewise encumber his journeys. For the last two years and change Clifton had ridden the rails between Chicago and New Orleans, where he had a distant cousin who was willing to intermittently provide hot meals and a patch of floor on which to sleep. In between, he worked the sharecropper fields up and down the Mississippi. The bulls hired by the railroads to protect their investments met freight hoppers with brutal force, and Clifton took great pains to evade their grasp. It was not the life promised him when he enlisted in the Fighting Eighth. But Clifton had been conditioned over the years to expect nothing more from his American dream than to survive. And so he did.
The summer of 1922 in Arkansas was a scorcher, and in the Southern heat, tensions were quick to boil. Clifton had been hired on to help grow sugar and tobacco by Josiah Gibbs, a family farmer who had nothing but school-aged daughters and needed all the help he could get just to break even on the debt he owed his landowner. Clifton and Josiah were out in the fields taking a breather and sharing a hand-rolled cigarette when Powell Freeman ambled up, having returned from a supply run to the commissary up the road. Clifton had just finished telling a joke that Josiah had already heard countless times but at which he never failed to laugh. Powell wiped the sweat that had gathered on his brow during the long walk under the summer sun. He wasn’t in the mood to laugh.
“What’s the rumpus, Pow?” Clifton asked.
“They done hanged a boy in Modoc last night.”
Clifton and Josiah got quiet.
“For what?” Josiah asked.
“Some white girl said something, somebody else said something, somebody else said another something. Does it matter?”
They knew it did not.
“Elaine wasn’t enough for these folks?” Josiah demanded. “Killed damn near two hundred of us then.”
“It’s never enough when it comes to our blood,” Clifton answered.
They nodded.
Clifton and Powell, who came to Arkansas by way of the Carolinas, looked at each other. Josiah sighed.
“Look, Pow, Phife, if you boys didn’t want to stick around the summer, I wouldn’t blame you. It’s only getting hotter. And things ain’t gonna get better before they get worse.”
“That’s mighty kind of you, Josiah,” Powell said.
“You sure you and the girls’d be alright?” Clifton asked.
“We’ll manage. Where else we gonna go? These here are my crops. I may not own this land, but I make money, I make my living off it. That’s more than my grandparents could say. That’s something. But you, you boys don’t owe this land nothing.”
“Pow?”
Powell kicked at the dirt. “Shoot, home ain’t been home to me for some time. If it’s all the same to you, Joe, I think I’ll stay on and see it through.” They exchanged a solemn nod.
And looked to Clifton. He lowered his eyes.
“Speaking of home, well, I ain’t seen Chicago for a spell. And well, I suppose I miss her. I’ve suspected for some time that she wasn’t yet finished with me.”
“A man’s gotta do,” Josiah offered.
“I want to thank you, Josiah. For the hospitality, and for the work. It was a pleasure to know you and your family. And you, Pow.”
“I appreciate the kind words, Phife. You’ve done more than your fair share. I only wish I could have paid you more.”
“That makes two of us,” Clifton said, and the three men shared one last laugh.
Clifton hopped a northbound freight train the next night, and coughed himself to sleep.
He awoke with a nervous start two mornings later as the train pulled into a railyard just outside Chicago. Clifton didn’t like to be caught flat-footed on his arrival anywhere, but the bulls that patrolled the Chicago yards were notoriously violent. He should not have slept so long. Mustering all his strength, Clifton hauled open the freight car’s sliding door as the train rolled to a stop, heaving steam, its whistles screaming. He peeked out into the yard. Three cars up, a bruiser in a bull’s uniform hauled a fellow hopper, clothed in dirty rags, out onto the ground. Clifton heard the man cry out in anguish as the bull beat him with a billy club, and he rubbed his forearm at the phantom pain of a long-ago baton-inflicted wound. Trapped, his mind raced.
With nothing else to do, Clifton slipped out of the car and immediately rolled underneath, scrambling to his feet on the other side of the train. He heard the cocking of a pistol behind him.
“Oy, hands in the air, darkie.”
Clifton lifted his hands and slowly turned around to face the pugilistic countenance of a uniformed bull brandishing a Smith and Wesson.
“Whaddya know, it’s me lucky day,” the bull grinned.
Thwack!
The bull’s eyes rolled into the back of his head and he fell forward, hitting the ground with a dull thud. Standing behind him, a young Black man, of similar circumstances to Clifton, wielded a blackjack and flashed a satisfied smile.
“Luck of the Irish, indeed. Not as fun as smashing Kraut skull, but it’ll do.”
Clifton’s eyes lit up. “The Fighting Eighth?”
“You were three-seventy? I was three-sixty-ninth.”
Clifton beamed. “A Harlem Hellfighter. You get around.”
“Looks like you do, too. Welcome home, brother.”
The two men shook hands.
In the distance, their country loomed.
Written for NYC Midnight Short Story Challenge 2020, Final Round: Open Genre / Comeuppance (Subject) / A ne’er-do-well (Character)
