Lost fic: Fortunate Son (1/4) (Jack/James; AU)
So probably the use of the term "historical AU" is misleading, as though I were going to write about 15th century France or the Ming Dynasty. This is a little...nearer to our time, but decidedly out of my realm of experience.
Title: Fortunate Son (1/4)
Pairing: Jack/James...eventually
Rating: R
Summary: AU. It's the early spring of 1968. At a university in the deep south, the president of a liberal student group comes to give a speech about the problems in this country, and he meets a clever but bitter janitor who thinks he's the damndest sort of hippie. And, yeah, he'd tell him just how much they resent his kind down here...if he didn't want so badly himself to escape the south. This part, 5000 words.
I'm being brave and posting this part before I write the rest of it. It feels like that kind of story. And I do know where it's going. I promise.
I've got an odd summer job, and some of it involves archiving audio from a series of speeches given at my university during the late sixties and early seventies. This plot bunny was inevitable, and I'd've run it off if it didn't seem so interesting to me.
Fair warning: this story involves politics, but I'm not trying to preach, especially not about Vietnam. (That would be ludicrous, given that I was born at the dawn of the Reagan Era.) I've brought these two down on the sides I think they could conceivably be on, given their personalities and backgrounds, as well as the events of their lives, not based on my own preferences about politics. Luckily, neither of them is entirely conservative or liberal, just reacting personally to the world around them.
Also note: I obviously didn't live through the Age of Aquarius, so rather than descend into a lot of clichés, I've chosen to play it safe and not overindulge on too many gratuitous details to mark the late sixties, like a lot of slang or stuff about their clothing or anything. Maybe some music, and that's it. So I'm likely to fuck things up royally. Let us hope nobody (except one lovely flister--hello, darling, you're NOT old!) can call me on any of this from personal experience.
(Ha ha, and I'm aware, even if you're not, that CCR didn't cut "Fortunate Son" until 1969. But, see, we're reading this in 2007, so this sort of harmless little anachronism is okay, especially since I don't directly reference the song anyway. (Geez, so why am I explaining all that, then?) Anyway, I do actually quote from "All Along the Watchtower," which in spring of 1968 could have been on the radio only as Dylan's version. His arrangement probably fits the tone of most of this the best, anyway, but I'm rather partial to the Jimi Hendrix's cover (released later that year), which Dylan himself thought of as the definitive version. So feel free to lay that vibe over this, too. It will make its own kind of sense...eventually.)
Fortunate Son
I.
"There must be some way out of here," said the joker to the thief,
"There's too much confusion, I can't get no relief.
Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth,
None of them along the line know what any of it is worth."
James said goodnight to the head cleaning woman with a nod and breathed a sigh of relief to finally have the building empty, or at least as empty as it could be-and that only temporarily, given the auditorium full of undergraduates just beyond that set of heavy wooden doors. Soon, they'd be spilling out into the lobby, noisy and oblivious, but he hoped to be long gone by then.
They didn't think he listened to their chatter, but he did-listened to every goddamn word they said when they walked past him like he wasn't there, not that they said anything worth hearing. It was just that there was nothing else to do with those mind-numbing hours James pushed the trash cart around, so he couldn't help but keep his ears open.
He didn't just listen, though; he thought-always, and about everything. Maybe too much sometimes. He mulled over the newspapers with his coffee in the morning as he ate a piece of toast over the sink and listened to his momma coughing in the room down the hall, still half asleep or hung over; at any rate, not likely to care about what new fuck-up in southeast Asia had made the protesters even more crazy.
He cared about what was happening to this country that used to seem so stable (or maybe it was that he was getting older, finally seeing things clearly; he didn't know), but he had nobody to talk to about it. It wasn't like he could flag them down coming out of Harland Hall and suggest what? That they all forget he's a janitor and just let him take up space on the steps of the old library and shoot the breeze with them? That they come on his rounds with him and watch him pick up wads of toilet paper from the floor of the girls' lavatory and have a long rambling discussion with him as they walked?
He wasn't stupid. This was a university, and if he'd learned anything about universities from living in this town, it was that they weren't about learning or open-mindedness. They were about kids leaving home, thinking that hour or two of distance from their families made them sudden experts on the world.
James knew a lot about a few things. He could work on an engine and he could shingle a house. He could even make a passable meatloaf, if nobody was standing over him nagging him. He knew a little about a lot of things, but he certainly would never say he was an expert on anything he'd never seen for himself. Like the war in Vietnam. He didn't believe he could have anything better to say than people who were actually over there, from the generals down to the lowliest soldier, even the newspaper reporters-all of them risking their lives for truth and freedom.
He didn't even feel like an expert on this dark cloud that hung over his town and every other town in Alabama-hell, from Mississippi all the way to Orangeburg, South Carolina. This so-called negro problem wasn't just a southern problem, and it wasn't even just a negro problem, he reckoned, but he didn't think he had the answers to that any more than he thought he could figure out how General Westmoreland might deal better with the latest offensive of the Vietcong.
But even if he didn't presume to have easy answers, he didn't see any harm in discussing things, maybe coming to better conclusions about them, and it had made him almost sick to his stomach earlier that day to see this girl come out of the dining hall and put her political science book on the front steps so she could sit her barely-covered ass on it instead of the concrete. Knowledge was a stepping stone to these people, a thing they accumulated only to turn it loose again before it could change them. They didn't care about anything other than complaining, and they did that only for its own sake. He didn't give a flying fuck about their long hair or any of it, it was the willful ignorance that made him lay his forehead hard against the doorframe of the supply closet and slow down his breathing, just enough that it didn't supersede the faint sound of the speaker's voice leaking out of the auditorium. He wanted ammunition. He wanted to be able to tell people he heard it with his own two ears: university jerks who only wanted a revolution because they were bored out of their fucking minds.
But even that, really, he could understand, and maybe that's why it made him so twitchy.
The speakers were brought in for a student government sponsored program. It had a nice enough sounding name, but it was really just an excuse to stir the pot. A genuine excuse, though, with out-there liberals balanced against steadfast conservatives in something like a grudge match of words and ideas, designed to make people actually think about the world they were living in. All the speakers were a little nuts, but a smart sort of nuts, something James could appreciate. It was the one worthwhile thing he'd seen the university do this year, and he could only stand outside in the corridor, pretending to clean up, in reality listening to some damn kid from California-some student leader, and they were the worst-talk in over-earnest tones about the same shit they always did: not being complacent. Rebellion, he thought, was all fine and good…so long as there was actually a reason to rebel. So far, James hadn't seen a clear one, and he hadn't heard one from this nasal-sounding motherfucker either.
The doorframe was cool to the touch, but he felt too hot, and his head was pounding. He needed a cigarette and some fresh air. The kid was the last speaker of the night-a shame, because he was the weakest-so James took off his smock and his uniform cap, threw it in with his cart as he pushed it inside and locked up the closet, already shaking out a cigarette from a half-crumpled pack as he slipped out the back door.
He took slid down to sit on the concrete, already feeling much more like himself without the polyester nightmare clinging to him. He took his wallet out of his back pocket as it poked at his ass, and he laid it beside him and the pack of cigarettes on top. The wind was strong enough to put out two matches before one would stay lit, but everything was right with the world as the nicotine hit his system and he finally cooled off. He felt a little less grimy and ornery out here under a sky full of stars. He had to admit that the campus was beautiful at night, the canopy of trees on the Quad making him feel every ghost of this institution's memory, even the crazy Civil War soldiers, looking down on him.
Every night when he walked out of that building, tired and smelling of cleaner and polish, he wondered what kind of sky they saw over there. He didn't wonder too long or too much, knowing he couldn't get too far in mapping it in his mind without seeing the flash of bombs or hearing gunfire that could never be the same as the terror of having it flying past your ear. And, anyway, he normally had only the short walk to his car to fret over it before the reality of a trip to the liquor store and what to make for dinner and what kind of mood she'd been in always quickly took over, and he didn't think about them again until the next morning, in that brief time before he left for work at the shop, where he would hear people talk football and carburetors until lunch. Life went on. That was the cruelest thing of all. He'd learned that after his father left and he realized-at a twelve too old to really be twelve-that nothing stopped or fixed itself just because you wanted it to.
But tonight, he had somehow found one of those moments when the world comes to a dead halt around you and even if it's quiet, you begin to feel all the things you shut out creeping up to the edges, pressing to get in. He was thinking, and it made him feel kind of small. Even the flag flying over the library was small, flapping in the stiff breeze undaunted. What was big was the buildings and the expanse of grass in front of him, a place he came to every day that sometimes could still take him by surprise, transform in his mind from a breeding ground for half-unconscious idiots to the wide open place of learning it was meant to be.
Of course, the illusion was broken when he heard the sound of voices echoing strangely back over the Quad as the students trickled out of the building at the front and milled around outside, probably forgetting everything they'd heard.
That wasn't fair. They'd been wildly attentive to Bobby Kennedy the day before. But the man was like a celebrity, like a charismatic actor. Misguided but so cool and intelligent. They met him with cheers. He deserved all of them, James thought, if only for making his generation give a damn.
He made up his mind to have another cigarette, given the way traffic would be hell for a little while yet. As he took up the pack, he couldn't resist opening his wallet and rifling through it. Pictures of his younger cousins, kids that looked up to him like an uncle. Stub from The Graduate, which he'd been too busy making out with Mona Ritter to really see. Ten dollars in ones.
Then that thing.
It was a sickness, a compulsion, but a man who didn't have some hidden compulsions about it or deep-seated fears was either inhuman or lying. He had to look at it from time to time, as though it would disappear when he wasn't paying attention. Not that its disappearance would help anything.
On the surface, it was so innocuous, so mundane; it was what it meant that was scary. So even if he didn't hate is as a piece of paper, the minute he thought about anything happening to his fucking draft card, he came over in a cold sweat. He knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he could never burn it. He didn't see how people could. Of course, his uncle asked him how he could bear not to watch the lotteries. Everyone has their own ways of coping, he said. Self-preservation.
He gingerly slid the card back into his wallet and let it rest on the ground again. He'd been feeling a little lately like everything he did needed to be that precise and controlled. If it wasn't, something in him would come apart. He'd been teetering on the edge of something, no longer happy with this simple life he had. Maybe it was that he was coming to decide it wasn't really as simple as he thought it should be, that that was never really possible. Anyway, this low-level tension, ratcheted up a notch as he was out there vulnerable under the sky, was perhaps what made the sound of the other back door being thrown open so jarring.
He couldn't see who it was coming out into the dark, only hear an exchange of voices-excited, maybe a little tired, but definitely the sound of minds still firing on all cylinders. For them it would easily be the kind of night when you just keep talking and talking until you fall asleep or get too drunk and pass out. James hadn't had a night like that in a while, maybe since high school, when he and his small group of buddies used to go camping up at the lake and didn't sleep until sunup.
It was different seeing something like that from the outside. Grating, almost, to hear that sort of camaraderie, especially when certain words floated out into the air, and he could almost see the gesticulations of their hands as they talked. He was both mesmerized and irritated, and he only heard too late a particular intonation, recognized it and how it sounded different when the guy wasn't on the stage spewing easy words about hard things to do like think for yourself and fight for things that are worthwhile. Out there, he was less majestic, but less nasal, too, and it bugged James to no end that he still couldn't see him, because he didn't know what he looked like, could only picture him in his head.
James stood up, finally, as though to go home when all he really wanted was to stay there in that peaceful place. Maybe they heard him, because suddenly someone said, "You have any matches over there?"
A girl's voice giggled, but James said anyway, "Yeah."
Before he could stride over, make the gesture and retreat, one of them crunched over the grass between them. He was in a suit, could have maybe been one of those graduate student nerds in Payton Hall who looked so serious and maybe a little old-fashioned in their professional attire. Not really the type he would normally associate with that crowd, although those types sometimes did surprise a person. Fuckin' flower children crawled out of the most unexpected woodwork, especially down here. But the guy's tie was loose and he smiled crookedly at him and ran his hands through his short-cropped brown hair as James handed over the book of matches. His brown eyes were tired but amused, and he said thanks softly.
He was about to turn and walk away when he stopped and held up the matchbook, obviously planning the negotiation of if and how he'd return it.
He said, "You smoke?" James flashed the pack in his hands, but the guy's eyes narrowed and he said, "No, I mean smoke."
James tried not to gape at him. Wouldn't be the first time the preppy type blazed up in front of him. Truthfully, James wouldn't have minded a joint right about then, but he would have entirely minded smoking with that bunch, so he just frowned before he could help it, and when his eyes shifted skeptically to the knot of people in the darkened doorway on the other side of the bushes, the guy just nodded and laughed a little too openly and pulled a joint out his pocket.
"They get on my freaking nerves, too, sometimes" he muttered, and as he nodded toward the side of the building, the dark alley between Harland and McKinney, and as James followed his sensible shoes, the echo of that voice begins to creep in, how he'd said get and not git, how his no had been the same one James had heard for half an hour a little while before, emphatic and accompanied sometimes but what sounded like the slam of his fist against a podium. He wondered what the man's now tired and placid face had looked like when he had been doing his best preaching just half an hour earlier.
"You're Jackson Shephard," he said to his back, almost shellshocked, and for no good reason.
The guy turned and gave him an equally surprised look. "You listened to my speech?"
"Yeah."
"What did you think?"
"I think you're a fucking moron," James said, and then he stopped, utterly bewildered by how something like that could have come out of his mouth without his meaning it to. He prized himself on keeping his tongue in check. He'd learned the hard way over the course of his life to keep out of fights by being cool-headed, observing and then acting. Except when something really pushed his button, and then he struck back so fast it scared him. He hadn't realized so many of his buttons were being pushed that evening until he said what he said and stood ready for the Shephard kid to wheel on him and take a shot.
But the guy just glared at him, puzzled or amused, he couldn't tell, and kept walking. James kept walking, too, in spite of himself. The man was apparently unpredictable, so if nothing else, that would be interesting. And he did have grass he was willing to share, even with someone who called him a moron.
Shephard's back was already against the stone façade of McKinney, his arms stretched over the railing by the side entrance, when James came into the alley.
And he was already smoking. After he took a hit, he said, "You think you're the first person to disagree with me?"
"No," James said, coming up to stand in front of him, digging his shoes into the sidewalk. "I reckon you expected that when you came down here."
Shephard laughed and held out the joint. "You think you people-"
"You people?"
"Sorry," he said, as if to stave off James's annoyance. "Southerners." But then his voice slid right back into the sarcasm. "You venerable southerners-"
"Watch your mouth," James snapped.
Shephard scoffed, his voice rising a bit. "This from the person who called me a what? A fucking moron? Trust me when I say I don't have anything to say against particular ones of you, it's just that some of you are crazy and backward. But I don't know you. So when I say venerable southerners-"
"You mean hillbillies who still think they live on plantations."
"Isn't that mixing things up a bit?"
James just glared at him and took a hit before he held out the joint to him, hoping like hell it would calm him down enough and fast enough that he didn't have to take a swing at the guy.
Shephard took the joint back, but he quickly caught it up in his left hand and extended his right, tentative but not quite backing down. He said solemnly, "We got off on the wrong foot, I think. I'm Jack Shephard."
"Not Jackson?"
"No. But it sure sounds impressive, doesn't it?"
James grinned in spite of himself and took his hand. It was warm, sweaty even. He said, "James Ford."
His palm slid away from Jack's slowly, as though both of them were somehow reluctant to break away from human contact. Why he should be that desperate to connect with this kind of uppity asshole, he couldn't fathom, so he halfway spat out, "And, no, I'm not a student."
"No? Thank God."
"Why?"
"It would take too long to explain."
"But you're the president of some national student thing, aren't you?"
He nodded. "Then you can imagine I get sick of undergraduates."
"You a grad student?"
"Yeah."
He didn't elaborate, and James didn't want to ask the question. There was no crime in finding legal ways to dodge the draft, and deferment for graduate school was as good as any. Okay, so maybe it made James's skin itch, that instinctive reaction to these types, but he fought that battle between his patriotism and his realism daily, so he was used to it by now. Mostly.
Shephard said, "Anyway, what I was going to say was that you folks down here are no different from people anywhere, really. This whole country's got its head up its ass. It's all fucked."
"You really believe that?"
"Sure."
"It's a sad world you live in, then."
Shephard just nodded and exhaled, closing his eyes for a moment, and James could almost see his face relaxing. He hadn't realized how wound up the guy had really been until he saw him come unwound. And he hadn't realized how uncomfortable the guy was with trying to be charismatic until he found that this face in front of him, the one he'd seen from the first, couldn't possibly match the face of the man he'd heard on stage.
After a long silence, Shephard said, "This is the place, isn't it? Where the governor tried to keep the colored kids from registering?"
"As if you didn't know that."
He smiled. "Just making conversation. Were you here, then?"
"Here? How old do you think I am?"
"No. I meant in town. You are from here, aren't you?"
"Yeah." There was no sense in being coy about that, or about his age, even if the guy probably had four, five years on him. "I was starting high school."
"What was it like?"
"What was what like?"
"Being down here during the civil rights movement?"
"As if it's over, or as if it's only happening down here."
"Are you always this difficult?"
James nodded.
Shephard laughed. "But seriously, what was it like?"
"I just don't know how the hell a person answers a question like that."
"Honestly," he said, passing back the joint.
James sat down on the cool steps, and he was surprised to see Shephard sit down beside him and plant his elbows on the step behind, like he was comfortably settling in for a story. Because that's what southerners are, right? Storytellers. Recounting patiently and colorfully the story of a troubled region. James almost snorted to himself. Fuckin' ignorant west coast asshole.
So James frowned and took the joint from him, leisurely taking a hit before he said, "It's not like we were camped out in lawn chairs on the Quad. We saw it on the news like everybody else."
"Sure."
James laughed, feeling it finally start to hit him. Damn if weed didn't make him giggly sometimes. He rubbed his palm over his face to sober himself, but it really was a funny story, thinking about telling it to an outsider.
"My uncle," James said, "was one of the policemen there that day."
"Blocking the door?"
"Nobody was actually blocking anything. It was more of a…I don't know, symbolic kind of thing? And I think he was way off, so far from the grandstanding he spent most of the day talking to the guys in the press core. Anyway, he didn't much care whether those negro kids were allowed in or not. But he did what he was supposed to do. Backed up the governor like he was born to do it. And, then, when Kennedy called in the National Guard to break up the blockade, my uncle shrugged his shoulders, went home, changed into his National Guard uniform, and came back to stand on the other side and help walk them through."
"No shit?"
"Who could make up a story like that? He wasn't the only one, either. But, really, that's all the inside knowledge I have about that day. This big step for civil rights and it was like a big pageant or something, like a play."
"Sometimes I feel like everything's a play and we're all just stuck in roles we didn't write." He exhaled with a cough, his eyes first on the sky then staring ahead at the brick wall across the sidewalk. James could almost see the gears turning in his mind.
"Do y'all really believe that kind of shit?"
"Y'all?"
"You all."
"I know what y'all means. I've been listening to your SGA president spit it out all day. I mean, who all?"
"You…lefty types. You're good at saying things you think are so profound. I wonder if you realize how much dope a person has to be on for those things to sound like they mean something."
"Oh, they always sound like they mean something. It's whether they actually do that's the question." He leaned to the side a bit, as though he were trying to get a better look at James. "You didn't call me a hippie or a pinko commie."
"You don't look like a hippie, and I don't know that I'd recognize a commie unless he was wearing his 'I love Stalin' badge."
Shephard giggled. "Fair enough. And I'm not one anyway. Either."
"Well, I didn't think a guy as rich as you could really be a hippie."
"Rich?"
"That's a tailored suit."
"And you would know because…?"
"My mother, she sometimes does alterations. Where do you come from?"
Shephard gave a slow, sarcastic grin. "The greatest country on earth, or so they say."
James felt his stomach tighten up. "You're a damn sight dumber than you look," he snapped. "People around here are liable to kick your ass for that kind of attitude."
"Will you?"
"Maybe."
"I'll take that under advisement. I meant it anyway, James."
Something about the way he said his name, so serious and quiet, rumbled quick through him, and he couldn't put his finger on what that feeling was except strange and real. No, not real, he told himself. High. That had to be it. But Shephard was still looking at him, too earnestly, and it made him nervous.
James said, "Didn't sound like it."
"Here's what you might not believe: I love this country. If I didn't, I wouldn't waste my time trying to get people to care about what's happening to it. I'd just go to Canada."
Scornfully, he said, "You love your country?"
"Yeah. But I don’t always like it, you know?"
"Whatever," James replied, even if he thought he might know what Shephard meant. "How in the hell does a person manage to be a rich protester type? What does your father do?"
"Specifically, operate on people. More generally, kick me out of the house and threaten my tuition."
"Why?"
"They're so conservative it's practically criminal. Or at least criminally insane."
"Yeah?"
"If it wasn't such a prestigious position I got for myself, they might have cut me off altogether. But I guess they think if I can't be a good person, I can at least be the kind of enemy that looks good on a resume."
"Enemy?"
"Didn't you know-the world divides into those that support LBJ and those that are going to hell."
"There's only one place that's hell, and people go there whether they voted for President Johnson or not." Shephard didn’t nod, but he didn't have to, given the way his eyes soberly agreed. James added, "In fact, I'd bet most of them didn't."
"I did," Shephard said softly.
"What?"
"I was just legal. Just barely old enough." He frowned. "Just stupid enough, too, to think he knew what he was doing."
"I don't suppose you're gonna tell me why you turned from a Johnson man to a…" He raised his eyebrows at him.
"Depends," he replied with a sly smile. "Do you know where I can get some beer?"
Slightly taken aback, but covering that shock pretty well, James said, "I could definitely point you in the right direction. Where you staying?"
"The big hotel out on the highway. Just like the other speakers."
"That was nice of them."
"Couldn't afford to make it look like they take me about as seriously as you do. But, really, I'm staying with some new friends. On…" He pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket, unfolded it, and squinted at it. "Maple...? Okay, so that word can't possibly be what I think it is."
"Maple Court?" James asked with a chuckle. Then he gave an internal snort: more trust-fund kids, biding their time in school. That misread word wasn't actually so far off, from what he knew. "That's only a few blocks from here."
"Good. My car's at the hotel, anyway."
They had stood up, and they paused there, staring mostly at the ground. Time to part or time to move forward, and James would be damned if he admitted how much he wanted to stay in the man's company. Really, he didn't know why he did, so it was easier to simply let it be Shephard's decision, as if it didn't matter to him.
Finally, Shephard nodded his head. He said, "It might be nice to get rid of them for a while. If you don't mind playing host."
He shook his head. "You sure?"
"They've been chauffeuring me around all day, and by now I know enough about this town and this university to write a book about it. A very boring book." He looked at James out of the corner of his eye. "No offense. Anyway, they'll be too stoned to care in a little while. And I think I'd kind of like to have a drink with you. You might actually show me something interesting."
"I know just the place, then. We can walk, too. It's just up the main drag there."
"Then I'll go tell them I'll catch up with them later," he replied, walking down the sidewalk. Then he stopped and did a turn, swinging his arms a bit and continuing to walk backward as he said: "So…remind me, so I can explain it to them: why am I going to what will undoubtedly be a redneck bar with a person who definitely thinks I'm a moron?"
"Because you're a smart moron and I'm not a redneck."
Shephard grinned at him oddly, the kind of smile he really did think he felt all along his nerves, in a way that might've been good if it wasn't so disconcerting.
"I never said you were."
James paused and watched him slink out of the alley, back toward his friends, before he followed him out into the lamplight of the Quad, completely unsure of where he was going, even if he knew exactly where his feet were taking him.
on to part two-->
~
Title: Fortunate Son (1/4)
Pairing: Jack/James...eventually
Rating: R
Summary: AU. It's the early spring of 1968. At a university in the deep south, the president of a liberal student group comes to give a speech about the problems in this country, and he meets a clever but bitter janitor who thinks he's the damndest sort of hippie. And, yeah, he'd tell him just how much they resent his kind down here...if he didn't want so badly himself to escape the south. This part, 5000 words.
I'm being brave and posting this part before I write the rest of it. It feels like that kind of story. And I do know where it's going. I promise.
I've got an odd summer job, and some of it involves archiving audio from a series of speeches given at my university during the late sixties and early seventies. This plot bunny was inevitable, and I'd've run it off if it didn't seem so interesting to me.
Fair warning: this story involves politics, but I'm not trying to preach, especially not about Vietnam. (That would be ludicrous, given that I was born at the dawn of the Reagan Era.) I've brought these two down on the sides I think they could conceivably be on, given their personalities and backgrounds, as well as the events of their lives, not based on my own preferences about politics. Luckily, neither of them is entirely conservative or liberal, just reacting personally to the world around them.
Also note: I obviously didn't live through the Age of Aquarius, so rather than descend into a lot of clichés, I've chosen to play it safe and not overindulge on too many gratuitous details to mark the late sixties, like a lot of slang or stuff about their clothing or anything. Maybe some music, and that's it. So I'm likely to fuck things up royally. Let us hope nobody (except one lovely flister--hello, darling, you're NOT old!) can call me on any of this from personal experience.
(Ha ha, and I'm aware, even if you're not, that CCR didn't cut "Fortunate Son" until 1969. But, see, we're reading this in 2007, so this sort of harmless little anachronism is okay, especially since I don't directly reference the song anyway. (Geez, so why am I explaining all that, then?) Anyway, I do actually quote from "All Along the Watchtower," which in spring of 1968 could have been on the radio only as Dylan's version. His arrangement probably fits the tone of most of this the best, anyway, but I'm rather partial to the Jimi Hendrix's cover (released later that year), which Dylan himself thought of as the definitive version. So feel free to lay that vibe over this, too. It will make its own kind of sense...eventually.)
Fortunate Son
I.
"There must be some way out of here," said the joker to the thief,
"There's too much confusion, I can't get no relief.
Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth,
None of them along the line know what any of it is worth."
James said goodnight to the head cleaning woman with a nod and breathed a sigh of relief to finally have the building empty, or at least as empty as it could be-and that only temporarily, given the auditorium full of undergraduates just beyond that set of heavy wooden doors. Soon, they'd be spilling out into the lobby, noisy and oblivious, but he hoped to be long gone by then.
They didn't think he listened to their chatter, but he did-listened to every goddamn word they said when they walked past him like he wasn't there, not that they said anything worth hearing. It was just that there was nothing else to do with those mind-numbing hours James pushed the trash cart around, so he couldn't help but keep his ears open.
He didn't just listen, though; he thought-always, and about everything. Maybe too much sometimes. He mulled over the newspapers with his coffee in the morning as he ate a piece of toast over the sink and listened to his momma coughing in the room down the hall, still half asleep or hung over; at any rate, not likely to care about what new fuck-up in southeast Asia had made the protesters even more crazy.
He cared about what was happening to this country that used to seem so stable (or maybe it was that he was getting older, finally seeing things clearly; he didn't know), but he had nobody to talk to about it. It wasn't like he could flag them down coming out of Harland Hall and suggest what? That they all forget he's a janitor and just let him take up space on the steps of the old library and shoot the breeze with them? That they come on his rounds with him and watch him pick up wads of toilet paper from the floor of the girls' lavatory and have a long rambling discussion with him as they walked?
He wasn't stupid. This was a university, and if he'd learned anything about universities from living in this town, it was that they weren't about learning or open-mindedness. They were about kids leaving home, thinking that hour or two of distance from their families made them sudden experts on the world.
James knew a lot about a few things. He could work on an engine and he could shingle a house. He could even make a passable meatloaf, if nobody was standing over him nagging him. He knew a little about a lot of things, but he certainly would never say he was an expert on anything he'd never seen for himself. Like the war in Vietnam. He didn't believe he could have anything better to say than people who were actually over there, from the generals down to the lowliest soldier, even the newspaper reporters-all of them risking their lives for truth and freedom.
He didn't even feel like an expert on this dark cloud that hung over his town and every other town in Alabama-hell, from Mississippi all the way to Orangeburg, South Carolina. This so-called negro problem wasn't just a southern problem, and it wasn't even just a negro problem, he reckoned, but he didn't think he had the answers to that any more than he thought he could figure out how General Westmoreland might deal better with the latest offensive of the Vietcong.
But even if he didn't presume to have easy answers, he didn't see any harm in discussing things, maybe coming to better conclusions about them, and it had made him almost sick to his stomach earlier that day to see this girl come out of the dining hall and put her political science book on the front steps so she could sit her barely-covered ass on it instead of the concrete. Knowledge was a stepping stone to these people, a thing they accumulated only to turn it loose again before it could change them. They didn't care about anything other than complaining, and they did that only for its own sake. He didn't give a flying fuck about their long hair or any of it, it was the willful ignorance that made him lay his forehead hard against the doorframe of the supply closet and slow down his breathing, just enough that it didn't supersede the faint sound of the speaker's voice leaking out of the auditorium. He wanted ammunition. He wanted to be able to tell people he heard it with his own two ears: university jerks who only wanted a revolution because they were bored out of their fucking minds.
But even that, really, he could understand, and maybe that's why it made him so twitchy.
The speakers were brought in for a student government sponsored program. It had a nice enough sounding name, but it was really just an excuse to stir the pot. A genuine excuse, though, with out-there liberals balanced against steadfast conservatives in something like a grudge match of words and ideas, designed to make people actually think about the world they were living in. All the speakers were a little nuts, but a smart sort of nuts, something James could appreciate. It was the one worthwhile thing he'd seen the university do this year, and he could only stand outside in the corridor, pretending to clean up, in reality listening to some damn kid from California-some student leader, and they were the worst-talk in over-earnest tones about the same shit they always did: not being complacent. Rebellion, he thought, was all fine and good…so long as there was actually a reason to rebel. So far, James hadn't seen a clear one, and he hadn't heard one from this nasal-sounding motherfucker either.
The doorframe was cool to the touch, but he felt too hot, and his head was pounding. He needed a cigarette and some fresh air. The kid was the last speaker of the night-a shame, because he was the weakest-so James took off his smock and his uniform cap, threw it in with his cart as he pushed it inside and locked up the closet, already shaking out a cigarette from a half-crumpled pack as he slipped out the back door.
He took slid down to sit on the concrete, already feeling much more like himself without the polyester nightmare clinging to him. He took his wallet out of his back pocket as it poked at his ass, and he laid it beside him and the pack of cigarettes on top. The wind was strong enough to put out two matches before one would stay lit, but everything was right with the world as the nicotine hit his system and he finally cooled off. He felt a little less grimy and ornery out here under a sky full of stars. He had to admit that the campus was beautiful at night, the canopy of trees on the Quad making him feel every ghost of this institution's memory, even the crazy Civil War soldiers, looking down on him.
Every night when he walked out of that building, tired and smelling of cleaner and polish, he wondered what kind of sky they saw over there. He didn't wonder too long or too much, knowing he couldn't get too far in mapping it in his mind without seeing the flash of bombs or hearing gunfire that could never be the same as the terror of having it flying past your ear. And, anyway, he normally had only the short walk to his car to fret over it before the reality of a trip to the liquor store and what to make for dinner and what kind of mood she'd been in always quickly took over, and he didn't think about them again until the next morning, in that brief time before he left for work at the shop, where he would hear people talk football and carburetors until lunch. Life went on. That was the cruelest thing of all. He'd learned that after his father left and he realized-at a twelve too old to really be twelve-that nothing stopped or fixed itself just because you wanted it to.
But tonight, he had somehow found one of those moments when the world comes to a dead halt around you and even if it's quiet, you begin to feel all the things you shut out creeping up to the edges, pressing to get in. He was thinking, and it made him feel kind of small. Even the flag flying over the library was small, flapping in the stiff breeze undaunted. What was big was the buildings and the expanse of grass in front of him, a place he came to every day that sometimes could still take him by surprise, transform in his mind from a breeding ground for half-unconscious idiots to the wide open place of learning it was meant to be.
Of course, the illusion was broken when he heard the sound of voices echoing strangely back over the Quad as the students trickled out of the building at the front and milled around outside, probably forgetting everything they'd heard.
That wasn't fair. They'd been wildly attentive to Bobby Kennedy the day before. But the man was like a celebrity, like a charismatic actor. Misguided but so cool and intelligent. They met him with cheers. He deserved all of them, James thought, if only for making his generation give a damn.
He made up his mind to have another cigarette, given the way traffic would be hell for a little while yet. As he took up the pack, he couldn't resist opening his wallet and rifling through it. Pictures of his younger cousins, kids that looked up to him like an uncle. Stub from The Graduate, which he'd been too busy making out with Mona Ritter to really see. Ten dollars in ones.
Then that thing.
It was a sickness, a compulsion, but a man who didn't have some hidden compulsions about it or deep-seated fears was either inhuman or lying. He had to look at it from time to time, as though it would disappear when he wasn't paying attention. Not that its disappearance would help anything.
On the surface, it was so innocuous, so mundane; it was what it meant that was scary. So even if he didn't hate is as a piece of paper, the minute he thought about anything happening to his fucking draft card, he came over in a cold sweat. He knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he could never burn it. He didn't see how people could. Of course, his uncle asked him how he could bear not to watch the lotteries. Everyone has their own ways of coping, he said. Self-preservation.
He gingerly slid the card back into his wallet and let it rest on the ground again. He'd been feeling a little lately like everything he did needed to be that precise and controlled. If it wasn't, something in him would come apart. He'd been teetering on the edge of something, no longer happy with this simple life he had. Maybe it was that he was coming to decide it wasn't really as simple as he thought it should be, that that was never really possible. Anyway, this low-level tension, ratcheted up a notch as he was out there vulnerable under the sky, was perhaps what made the sound of the other back door being thrown open so jarring.
He couldn't see who it was coming out into the dark, only hear an exchange of voices-excited, maybe a little tired, but definitely the sound of minds still firing on all cylinders. For them it would easily be the kind of night when you just keep talking and talking until you fall asleep or get too drunk and pass out. James hadn't had a night like that in a while, maybe since high school, when he and his small group of buddies used to go camping up at the lake and didn't sleep until sunup.
It was different seeing something like that from the outside. Grating, almost, to hear that sort of camaraderie, especially when certain words floated out into the air, and he could almost see the gesticulations of their hands as they talked. He was both mesmerized and irritated, and he only heard too late a particular intonation, recognized it and how it sounded different when the guy wasn't on the stage spewing easy words about hard things to do like think for yourself and fight for things that are worthwhile. Out there, he was less majestic, but less nasal, too, and it bugged James to no end that he still couldn't see him, because he didn't know what he looked like, could only picture him in his head.
James stood up, finally, as though to go home when all he really wanted was to stay there in that peaceful place. Maybe they heard him, because suddenly someone said, "You have any matches over there?"
A girl's voice giggled, but James said anyway, "Yeah."
Before he could stride over, make the gesture and retreat, one of them crunched over the grass between them. He was in a suit, could have maybe been one of those graduate student nerds in Payton Hall who looked so serious and maybe a little old-fashioned in their professional attire. Not really the type he would normally associate with that crowd, although those types sometimes did surprise a person. Fuckin' flower children crawled out of the most unexpected woodwork, especially down here. But the guy's tie was loose and he smiled crookedly at him and ran his hands through his short-cropped brown hair as James handed over the book of matches. His brown eyes were tired but amused, and he said thanks softly.
He was about to turn and walk away when he stopped and held up the matchbook, obviously planning the negotiation of if and how he'd return it.
He said, "You smoke?" James flashed the pack in his hands, but the guy's eyes narrowed and he said, "No, I mean smoke."
James tried not to gape at him. Wouldn't be the first time the preppy type blazed up in front of him. Truthfully, James wouldn't have minded a joint right about then, but he would have entirely minded smoking with that bunch, so he just frowned before he could help it, and when his eyes shifted skeptically to the knot of people in the darkened doorway on the other side of the bushes, the guy just nodded and laughed a little too openly and pulled a joint out his pocket.
"They get on my freaking nerves, too, sometimes" he muttered, and as he nodded toward the side of the building, the dark alley between Harland and McKinney, and as James followed his sensible shoes, the echo of that voice begins to creep in, how he'd said get and not git, how his no had been the same one James had heard for half an hour a little while before, emphatic and accompanied sometimes but what sounded like the slam of his fist against a podium. He wondered what the man's now tired and placid face had looked like when he had been doing his best preaching just half an hour earlier.
"You're Jackson Shephard," he said to his back, almost shellshocked, and for no good reason.
The guy turned and gave him an equally surprised look. "You listened to my speech?"
"Yeah."
"What did you think?"
"I think you're a fucking moron," James said, and then he stopped, utterly bewildered by how something like that could have come out of his mouth without his meaning it to. He prized himself on keeping his tongue in check. He'd learned the hard way over the course of his life to keep out of fights by being cool-headed, observing and then acting. Except when something really pushed his button, and then he struck back so fast it scared him. He hadn't realized so many of his buttons were being pushed that evening until he said what he said and stood ready for the Shephard kid to wheel on him and take a shot.
But the guy just glared at him, puzzled or amused, he couldn't tell, and kept walking. James kept walking, too, in spite of himself. The man was apparently unpredictable, so if nothing else, that would be interesting. And he did have grass he was willing to share, even with someone who called him a moron.
Shephard's back was already against the stone façade of McKinney, his arms stretched over the railing by the side entrance, when James came into the alley.
And he was already smoking. After he took a hit, he said, "You think you're the first person to disagree with me?"
"No," James said, coming up to stand in front of him, digging his shoes into the sidewalk. "I reckon you expected that when you came down here."
Shephard laughed and held out the joint. "You think you people-"
"You people?"
"Sorry," he said, as if to stave off James's annoyance. "Southerners." But then his voice slid right back into the sarcasm. "You venerable southerners-"
"Watch your mouth," James snapped.
Shephard scoffed, his voice rising a bit. "This from the person who called me a what? A fucking moron? Trust me when I say I don't have anything to say against particular ones of you, it's just that some of you are crazy and backward. But I don't know you. So when I say venerable southerners-"
"You mean hillbillies who still think they live on plantations."
"Isn't that mixing things up a bit?"
James just glared at him and took a hit before he held out the joint to him, hoping like hell it would calm him down enough and fast enough that he didn't have to take a swing at the guy.
Shephard took the joint back, but he quickly caught it up in his left hand and extended his right, tentative but not quite backing down. He said solemnly, "We got off on the wrong foot, I think. I'm Jack Shephard."
"Not Jackson?"
"No. But it sure sounds impressive, doesn't it?"
James grinned in spite of himself and took his hand. It was warm, sweaty even. He said, "James Ford."
His palm slid away from Jack's slowly, as though both of them were somehow reluctant to break away from human contact. Why he should be that desperate to connect with this kind of uppity asshole, he couldn't fathom, so he halfway spat out, "And, no, I'm not a student."
"No? Thank God."
"Why?"
"It would take too long to explain."
"But you're the president of some national student thing, aren't you?"
He nodded. "Then you can imagine I get sick of undergraduates."
"You a grad student?"
"Yeah."
He didn't elaborate, and James didn't want to ask the question. There was no crime in finding legal ways to dodge the draft, and deferment for graduate school was as good as any. Okay, so maybe it made James's skin itch, that instinctive reaction to these types, but he fought that battle between his patriotism and his realism daily, so he was used to it by now. Mostly.
Shephard said, "Anyway, what I was going to say was that you folks down here are no different from people anywhere, really. This whole country's got its head up its ass. It's all fucked."
"You really believe that?"
"Sure."
"It's a sad world you live in, then."
Shephard just nodded and exhaled, closing his eyes for a moment, and James could almost see his face relaxing. He hadn't realized how wound up the guy had really been until he saw him come unwound. And he hadn't realized how uncomfortable the guy was with trying to be charismatic until he found that this face in front of him, the one he'd seen from the first, couldn't possibly match the face of the man he'd heard on stage.
After a long silence, Shephard said, "This is the place, isn't it? Where the governor tried to keep the colored kids from registering?"
"As if you didn't know that."
He smiled. "Just making conversation. Were you here, then?"
"Here? How old do you think I am?"
"No. I meant in town. You are from here, aren't you?"
"Yeah." There was no sense in being coy about that, or about his age, even if the guy probably had four, five years on him. "I was starting high school."
"What was it like?"
"What was what like?"
"Being down here during the civil rights movement?"
"As if it's over, or as if it's only happening down here."
"Are you always this difficult?"
James nodded.
Shephard laughed. "But seriously, what was it like?"
"I just don't know how the hell a person answers a question like that."
"Honestly," he said, passing back the joint.
James sat down on the cool steps, and he was surprised to see Shephard sit down beside him and plant his elbows on the step behind, like he was comfortably settling in for a story. Because that's what southerners are, right? Storytellers. Recounting patiently and colorfully the story of a troubled region. James almost snorted to himself. Fuckin' ignorant west coast asshole.
So James frowned and took the joint from him, leisurely taking a hit before he said, "It's not like we were camped out in lawn chairs on the Quad. We saw it on the news like everybody else."
"Sure."
James laughed, feeling it finally start to hit him. Damn if weed didn't make him giggly sometimes. He rubbed his palm over his face to sober himself, but it really was a funny story, thinking about telling it to an outsider.
"My uncle," James said, "was one of the policemen there that day."
"Blocking the door?"
"Nobody was actually blocking anything. It was more of a…I don't know, symbolic kind of thing? And I think he was way off, so far from the grandstanding he spent most of the day talking to the guys in the press core. Anyway, he didn't much care whether those negro kids were allowed in or not. But he did what he was supposed to do. Backed up the governor like he was born to do it. And, then, when Kennedy called in the National Guard to break up the blockade, my uncle shrugged his shoulders, went home, changed into his National Guard uniform, and came back to stand on the other side and help walk them through."
"No shit?"
"Who could make up a story like that? He wasn't the only one, either. But, really, that's all the inside knowledge I have about that day. This big step for civil rights and it was like a big pageant or something, like a play."
"Sometimes I feel like everything's a play and we're all just stuck in roles we didn't write." He exhaled with a cough, his eyes first on the sky then staring ahead at the brick wall across the sidewalk. James could almost see the gears turning in his mind.
"Do y'all really believe that kind of shit?"
"Y'all?"
"You all."
"I know what y'all means. I've been listening to your SGA president spit it out all day. I mean, who all?"
"You…lefty types. You're good at saying things you think are so profound. I wonder if you realize how much dope a person has to be on for those things to sound like they mean something."
"Oh, they always sound like they mean something. It's whether they actually do that's the question." He leaned to the side a bit, as though he were trying to get a better look at James. "You didn't call me a hippie or a pinko commie."
"You don't look like a hippie, and I don't know that I'd recognize a commie unless he was wearing his 'I love Stalin' badge."
Shephard giggled. "Fair enough. And I'm not one anyway. Either."
"Well, I didn't think a guy as rich as you could really be a hippie."
"Rich?"
"That's a tailored suit."
"And you would know because…?"
"My mother, she sometimes does alterations. Where do you come from?"
Shephard gave a slow, sarcastic grin. "The greatest country on earth, or so they say."
James felt his stomach tighten up. "You're a damn sight dumber than you look," he snapped. "People around here are liable to kick your ass for that kind of attitude."
"Will you?"
"Maybe."
"I'll take that under advisement. I meant it anyway, James."
Something about the way he said his name, so serious and quiet, rumbled quick through him, and he couldn't put his finger on what that feeling was except strange and real. No, not real, he told himself. High. That had to be it. But Shephard was still looking at him, too earnestly, and it made him nervous.
James said, "Didn't sound like it."
"Here's what you might not believe: I love this country. If I didn't, I wouldn't waste my time trying to get people to care about what's happening to it. I'd just go to Canada."
Scornfully, he said, "You love your country?"
"Yeah. But I don’t always like it, you know?"
"Whatever," James replied, even if he thought he might know what Shephard meant. "How in the hell does a person manage to be a rich protester type? What does your father do?"
"Specifically, operate on people. More generally, kick me out of the house and threaten my tuition."
"Why?"
"They're so conservative it's practically criminal. Or at least criminally insane."
"Yeah?"
"If it wasn't such a prestigious position I got for myself, they might have cut me off altogether. But I guess they think if I can't be a good person, I can at least be the kind of enemy that looks good on a resume."
"Enemy?"
"Didn't you know-the world divides into those that support LBJ and those that are going to hell."
"There's only one place that's hell, and people go there whether they voted for President Johnson or not." Shephard didn’t nod, but he didn't have to, given the way his eyes soberly agreed. James added, "In fact, I'd bet most of them didn't."
"I did," Shephard said softly.
"What?"
"I was just legal. Just barely old enough." He frowned. "Just stupid enough, too, to think he knew what he was doing."
"I don't suppose you're gonna tell me why you turned from a Johnson man to a…" He raised his eyebrows at him.
"Depends," he replied with a sly smile. "Do you know where I can get some beer?"
Slightly taken aback, but covering that shock pretty well, James said, "I could definitely point you in the right direction. Where you staying?"
"The big hotel out on the highway. Just like the other speakers."
"That was nice of them."
"Couldn't afford to make it look like they take me about as seriously as you do. But, really, I'm staying with some new friends. On…" He pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket, unfolded it, and squinted at it. "Maple...? Okay, so that word can't possibly be what I think it is."
"Maple Court?" James asked with a chuckle. Then he gave an internal snort: more trust-fund kids, biding their time in school. That misread word wasn't actually so far off, from what he knew. "That's only a few blocks from here."
"Good. My car's at the hotel, anyway."
They had stood up, and they paused there, staring mostly at the ground. Time to part or time to move forward, and James would be damned if he admitted how much he wanted to stay in the man's company. Really, he didn't know why he did, so it was easier to simply let it be Shephard's decision, as if it didn't matter to him.
Finally, Shephard nodded his head. He said, "It might be nice to get rid of them for a while. If you don't mind playing host."
He shook his head. "You sure?"
"They've been chauffeuring me around all day, and by now I know enough about this town and this university to write a book about it. A very boring book." He looked at James out of the corner of his eye. "No offense. Anyway, they'll be too stoned to care in a little while. And I think I'd kind of like to have a drink with you. You might actually show me something interesting."
"I know just the place, then. We can walk, too. It's just up the main drag there."
"Then I'll go tell them I'll catch up with them later," he replied, walking down the sidewalk. Then he stopped and did a turn, swinging his arms a bit and continuing to walk backward as he said: "So…remind me, so I can explain it to them: why am I going to what will undoubtedly be a redneck bar with a person who definitely thinks I'm a moron?"
"Because you're a smart moron and I'm not a redneck."
Shephard grinned at him oddly, the kind of smile he really did think he felt all along his nerves, in a way that might've been good if it wasn't so disconcerting.
"I never said you were."
James paused and watched him slink out of the alley, back toward his friends, before he followed him out into the lamplight of the Quad, completely unsure of where he was going, even if he knew exactly where his feet were taking him.
on to part two-->
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