Black & White

by Lewis Shiner

  Without letting Michael respond, she stood up. “That is absolutely the only gloomy thought I am going to allow myself in this perfectly lovely evening. Now it’s time to go, before the waiters mutiny.”

  The check was long paid. Michael held the restaurant doors for her, and as they walked to the car his arm, all on its own, went around her and he felt hers just as easily slide around his waist. As simple as that. He unlocked the passenger door and she slipped quickly inside.

  They didn’t talk much on the way to her apartment, and Michael liked the ease of the silence. She seemed to be the kind of person who could be comfortable and happy in the moment, a trait he envied. It had, indeed, been a perfectly lovely evening, an antidote for the last month of grim fortitude.

  As soon as he parked at her complex she said, “Can you come up for a minute?”

  “Sure,” he said. He could feel his own heartbeat.

  He followed her up the stairs. When they got inside she said, “Wait here.”

  He didn’t have time to construct a fantasy of her reappearing in a diaphanous nightgown; she was back in seconds, carrying a hardcover of Sand Castles. “Rachid had this. When I asked him about it, he said it was quote awesome end quote. I have to say, I was shocked when I looked through it. He was only 13 when he bought this. Obviously I should have been monitoring his reading more closely.”

  “Other than being shocked, what did you think?” Her answer, he realized, was more important than he wanted it to be.

  “I thought the art was beautiful. I saw N.C. Wyeth and Whistler and Sargent in it. I thought the story was smart and also very cynical. And there was too much violence for me, and it bothered me that it was so…stylized.”

  “I was not even thirty when I started working on it. I didn’t think anything about the violence at the time. It was like a movie or something. By the time I was done, it bothered me a lot. It was one of the things we talked about for Luna. Not that there would be no violence at all, but that it would have consequences, that it wouldn’t be pretty, that it would be clear that it caused real suffering. It was one of the few arguments I ever won with Roger. I quoted his own rap about narrative and asked him what he was explaining and preserving with it.”

  “I’m glad. Do you think you could sign this for Rachid anyway?”

  “Sure.” Michael sat down and took his time with the inscription, then drew a quick Batman next to his signature. He watched Denise’s expression while she read it.

  She laughed, fortunately. “This is so he can show his friends, right?”

  “The stuff about us drinking beer and chasing women together in Tijuana? Yeah, that’s the idea.”

  “Thank you. He’ll love it.” She found a place for the book on the cluttered coffee table. “I noticed you didn’t eat any of the meat dishes tonight. Are you vegetarian?”

  “Yeah. It happened toward the end of Sand Castles, actually. I got to where I didn’t want to see any more blood.”

  “Does it bother you that I still eat meat? I mean—” Though her posture didn’t change as she stood by the table, he suddenly felt her nervousness. “It wouldn’t put you off, or anything. The smell of it, or…the taste?”

  Michael could take a hint. He walked over to her. She watched him do it, and didn’t look away as he stepped in and kissed her. He was very gentle about it. Her lips were cool and soft. She reached up as he did it and rested the fingers of her right hand on his cheek. He put both hands around her waist and drew her in until he could feel the full length of her body.

  When he broke the kiss, she turned her head into his shoulder and said, “Michael.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I—”

  “It’s not like that. I just have to take this slow. Really, really slow.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Okay.” She took his face in both hands and pulled him down for another kiss. There was desire there, but not the mounting passion that would have invited more.

  It finished and, still holding his face, she whispered, “You should go.”

  “Okay.” He started toward the door. “Can I come by on Monday and look at those interviews?”

  “Yes.” As he put his hand on the knob, she took three long steps and kissed him again, a big sloppy one. “Yes. Go. I’ll see you Monday.”

  He could see her still standing in the doorway as he pulled into the street.

  Sunday, October 24

  Michael was carrying a load of groceries up the stairs to his hotel room when his cell phone buzzed.

  “He’s dying,” Ruth said.

  “What is it?” Michael asked. “What’s going on?”

  “I can see it in his eyes. He’s not fighting anymore.”

  “Maybe he just had a bad night.”

  “It’s in his breathing, too,” she said. “It’s slowing down. I’m losing him.”

  “Have you talked to the doctor?”

  “It’s the weekend,” his mother said. The weekend meant the Pakistani resident, whose accent she claimed to be unable to understand.

  “Is he awake now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let me talk to him.”

  “This is your fault, you know. Bringing those police around.”

  “Just let me talk to him, okay?”

  His father got on the phone. “Don’t pay any attention to her,” he said. “She always has to make a federal case out of everything.”

  His voice was weak, and Michael couldn’t help but wonder if bringing Sgt. Bishop in had in fact hastened the end. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  “There’s no point. I’m all right.”

  Michael wished that for once his father would ask him for something, if only for his company. Especially for his company. “I’m coming anyway,” Michael said.

  “Suit yourself. Did you want to talk to your mother again?”

  “No,” Michael said. “No, that’s okay.”

  He spent an hour sitting in the hospital room in silence and saw that his father had been right. There was no point. His mother worked on a crossword, and his father flipped through the channels on the TV, dozing off for minutes at a time.

  He talked to the charge nurse, who told him only that his father was stable and that he should talk to the doctor in the morning.

  There was nothing more to do, no conversation to be had. He said goodbye to his mother, who gave him a resigned and disappointed look, and returned to his hotel.

  He didn’t know whether Denise’s “talk to you Monday” meant not to call before then. He decided to take a chance and ended up with her voice mail. He hadn’t prepared anything to say. “It’s Michael,” he said. “I was…just thinking about you.” Once he hung up he wondered if it was too much.

  She had warned him about her schedule. Still he kept looking at the clock, coming up with reasons why she was just about to call.

  Monday, October 25

  As part of his expectation management, he made himself take the 15-minute drive to the impound lot in Raleigh on Monday morning. The metal door of the shed where Bishop had been working was closed and padlocked, and the guard at the gate had no information. Michael felt Bishop had brushed him off, that the investigation was moving along without him.

  He got back on the road to Durham. His emotions, he noticed, were running a bit high. It was one of the reasons he’d tended to fall into affairs at conventions, relationships that could be picked up or set aside as convenient. He was no good at the dance of exposure and withdrawal that dating required. He couldn’t imagine any sane person enjoying it.

  And yet, as he climbed the steps of the Hayti Heritage Center, he felt lightheaded with anticipation.

  Charles let him go downstairs unescorted. Denise smiled when he knocked on the frame of her open door, but she didn’t get up, and her body language made it clear that she was on the job. “Rachid went totally nuts when he saw what you wrote. He took it to school today.”

  “That’s great. When do I get to meet
him?”

  “That’s going to require serious diplomacy. I have to be careful about freaking him out.”

  Michael was pleased that she believed there was something to freak out over.

  Denise nodded to his shoulder bag. “If that’s your computer, you can set it up here.” She pointed to a newly bare corner of her desk. “See, I made room for you. You should be flattered.”

  She handed him a single slimline CD case. The words HAYTI ORAL HISTORY #1 were neatly lettered in Sharpie on the surface of the disc.

  They talked as Michael unpacked his laptop. She didn’t mention his phone call on Sunday, so he didn’t either. He loaded the CD and found 14 MS Word documents with titles like “Ezra_Dawkins_b1948_ 20040317.doc.”

  He searched all the documents in the folder for the word “Cooper” and got no hits. For “Robert” the only matches were people other than his father, though Michael found himself getting caught up in some of the story fragments that he read in the process. Like Liza Mae Davis, born in 1931, interviewed in June:

  “First thing I done when I got my own house—it was unheard of in those days for a woman that never had no husband or no children to own her own house all to herself—the very first thing I done was plant me a magnolia tree in the front yard, because I love me the sweet smell of magnolia blossoms in the summertime.

  “I hadn’t been there a year when the man from the city come around and says I got to sell up. Says the law give them the right to pay me a ‘fair market value’ for my house, which happened to be less than I paid for it. So I end up owing money on a house I don’t even own no more. But what made me mad, I asked that man what about my magnolia tree? And he said I could go on and dig it up and move it with me to where my brother lived in Henderson, which is where I had to move because I couldn’t find no place to live in Durham at that time. But I come home from my last trip taking my furniture out there, and they already got that bulldozer up in my yard, already got that tree busted up and buried under a pile of dirt with the pieces of the sidewalk.

  “Now why would somebody want to do a thing like that for? The man in that bulldozer, he knew what that tree meant to me because I told him before I left that last time, I said, ‘You be careful of that tree, I be coming back for it.’ That tree never did no harm. It was just a baby. Had its whole future ahead of it, and they went and smashed it up like so much garbage.”

  Michael kept looking. He came up blank for “Antree” as well. It was Barrett Howard’s name that finally struck pay dirt.

  “There are some things I don’t miss,” a woman named Camilla Prentiss said. “I don’t miss living across the street from that Barrett Howard’s girlfriend. Always putting on airs with her French sounding name when she wasn’t nothing more than a tramp. If it wasn’t that troublemaker Howard over there, it was that white man, and if it wasn’t that white man, it was some of her tramp friends. Never gave me a minute’s peace.”

  He scanned the rest of the interview. It was short and seemed typical, except that Mrs. Prentiss thought she’d gotten a good deal on the sale. She was one of the lucky few; with her income and her husband’s, she’d been able to rent an apartment further down Fayetteville Street.

  Michael highlighted the paragraph about Howard and called Denise over to look at it. He was intensely aware of the warmth of her body as she stood behind him, and felt a jolt of pleasure when she rested one hand on his shoulder with easy intimacy.

  “I remember her,” Denise said. “She’s only 61. She’s living with her kids in a subdivision in Southwest Durham. Her son’s at Duke Medical Center, doing well for himself. She’s got an apartment over his garage. She’s got a stake driven very deeply into the high moral ground.”

  “Do you think she’d talk to me?”

  “Probably. You want me to call her?”

  “Would you? I’m thinking the white man she’s talking about might be Mitch Antree.”

  *

  Mrs. Prentiss was at her clerical job at Durham Regional Hospital. She had a lunch break at 11:30, she told Denise, and they were welcome to join her.

  Her office was one of several that encircled a waiting area. Radiology outpatients would come in, give her their insurance information, and she would route them to the proper destination. She was five ten, solidly built, with short hennaed hair in a kind of pageboy cut. She had a strong nose and crinkled eyes, and she was one of the privileged few hospital employees who got to wear a business suit instead of scrubs.

  When she shook Michael’s hand, she looked at him oddly, he thought. She seemed to shrug it off and said, “Let’s eat. I’m starving.”

  They got cafeteria salads and settled at a table near a window that gave onto the lawns at the back of the hospital. “I can see,” Prentiss said, “you’re a polite young man that knows how to be kind to old ladies. Go ahead and ask your questions. You don’t have to butter me up with chitchat.”

  She had a remarkable face, Michael thought. He doubted many had thought her beautiful, but her eyes flashed with sass and her mouth fought off one smile after another.

  “I’m mostly interested in Barrett Howard,” Michael said. “In your oral history you mentioned a girlfriend?”

  “Lord, yes. Miss Mercy Richárd.” She pronounced the last name ree-SHARD. “Short for Mercedes, though she was more of a Dodge Dart if you ask me. That was a car anybody could drive. At that time I was living on East Beamon Street, Hayti, North Carolina. I was number 108, she was 109.

  “That woman had so many contradictions it was impossible to know what to think. She was what they used to call a high yellow gal, skin light enough that she could have passed if she wanted to. Long wavy black hair. Looked like one of those Italian actresses, Sophia Lollapalooza or whatever. Some said she had a double life, that she was passing in her day job. Some said she was white, passing for black, though why in the world anyone would want to do that is beyond me. Here she is going around with Barrett Howard, who was black as the ace of spades and shouting from the housetops about black power, and at the self-same time she’s messing around with a white man.”

  Michael had brought the printout of the Antree obituary. “Is this the white man she was messing with?”

  “No. I might have seen this man around at one time or another. She did have some wild parties there. But that’s not the white man that was more or less living there with her.”

  “Can you describe him?”

  “I don’t have to describe him. Go look in the mirror, you’ll see him.”

  *

  Michael tried in vain to press her for details. Over the next fifteen minutes his own emotions began to boil until they felt like a slow, muted screaming inside his skull, until he could barely hear what she was saying.

  She had moved out in the summer of 1968, she said, long before the neighborhood went under the bulldozers. The first time she had seen Michael’s father at Mercy’s house would have been the summer before. She had no idea what had become of Mercy or where she had gone. She had never seen Michael’s father again either. “He was your father, wasn’t he?” she asked, and Michael numbly nodded. As for Barrett Howard, she had understood that he had sold out to the white man and gone to Mexico until she had seen his name in the paper on Tuesday.

  *

  Michael drove Denise back to her office with white knuckles and a blank stare.

  “Michael?” Denise said. “Michael, please say something.”

  “I don’t know where to start.”

  “You think this Mercedes woman could be your mother, don’t you?”

  “And my father could have killed Barrett Howard over her. It’s the missing motive.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to make him talk to me. I don’t know how, but he’s going to talk.”

  “Do you want me to come with you?”

  He saw nothing in her face beyond concern for him. “That’s sweet,” he said, “but this is going to get pretty ugly.”

  “H
oney, I’m from Queens. You don’t know from ugly.”

  He reached over to squeeze her hand. “Thanks. I’ll call you tonight and tell you what happened. If you’re available.”

  “Call after ten. I’ll be waiting.”

  He’d brought his computer when they went to lunch, not wanting Charles to get up to mischief, so he had no excuse to go inside. He parked long enough for Denise to get out, walk around to his side of the car, and put her hand on his cheek. “Good luck,” she said.

  “Luck hasn’t been getting it,” he said. “I want some answers.”

  *

  He spent half an hour on the Internet at the Regulator, then made a call from his cell phone. Based on that information, he got the supplies he needed at a drugstore across the street. Then he drove to the VA.

  His parents were just back from walking Robert up and down the halls. Ruth was tidying up the plastic containers from lunch and Robert was in the bathroom. Ruth saw the determination in Michael’s face and reflected it back to him as fear. “What?” she said. “What is it?”

  “I’ll tell you when he comes out,” he said.

  “Your father just had his exercise. He needs to get to bed and rest.”

  “This won’t take a minute.”

  She walked warily over to her armchair and sat down. The toilet flushed, water ran, and Robert came out of the bathroom. Looking at him, Michael thought: Not long now.

  “Hello, son,” Robert said.

  Michael nodded. Robert made his painful way to the bed and got in.

  “I should have done this a week ago,” Michael said. “As soon as all these questions started coming up.” He reached into the Kerr Drugs bag and took out a package of sterile cotton swabs, the hospital kind, with the long wooden handles. “Two sticks each. Swab the inside of your cheek and give them back.” He held out two swabs to Robert, who shrugged and took them. He offered two more to Ruth. His hand, he saw, was trembling visibly.