Black & White

by Lewis Shiner

  They walked on. “When that place goes, won’t be anything like it to take its place,” Howard said. “You ever been to Europe?”

  Robert nodded. “I was there in the Army.”

  “You know what I’m talking about, then. They got buildings there hundreds of years old. It’s history you can walk around inside of, you know what I’m saying?”

  People they passed called and reached out to Howard. Most of them were young, most of them male, but there were women too, and Robert had a strong feeling that Mercy was not the only one straining against the limits of the relationship. None of these people seemed to want anything more than the acknowledgement that Howard gave them—a nod, a handshake, the sound of their own names.

  “Down at the end of the block, that’s the Carolina Times. Louis Austin bought it in 1927, used to be the Standard Advertiser. That’s 37 years that man has been fighting. We don’t always see eye to eye. He’s a very religious man, which I am not. He got his positive message, which I sometimes don’t think is justified. But damn. Two or three editorials every week, for longer than I been alive, going up against the Klan, the NRC, the City Council, the Durham Select Committee, never backing down, not even in the face of death threats, never giving up, never losing his faith. I cannot imagine that. If you was to read that paper—”

  “I do read it.”

  That stopped him. “For real? Since when?”

  “A few weeks now.”

  “Why?”

  Robert shrugged, wishing he hadn’t said anything.

  “Jungle fever, that’s why,” Howard said. “You got the fever for Mercy.”

  “Are you sure you want to talk about this now?” Robert said. “Here in the street?”

  “Why, you afraid I’m going to come after you? I ain’t going to come after you. Not unless there’s something I don’t know about.”

  “No,” Robert said. He felt a drop of sweat run down under one arm. Then, amazed, he heard himself say, “Except what’s in my head.”

  Howard stared at him. “Man, you either brave or crazy, one.”

  Later, when he tried to explain it to himself, Robert thought it was the loneliness. He couldn’t talk about Mercy to Ruth or Mitch Antree; not to anyone else at work; not to any of his casual acquaintances at the country club. Barrett Howard was the only man he knew who could possibly understand what he was feeling.

  “Come on,” Howard said. “Let’s get this off the street.” They were standing in front of Elvira’s. Howard walked up to the door and motioned Robert in. They sat at a red vinyl booth, and Howard ordered two bottles of Schlitz.

  “I have to go back to work,” Robert said with little conviction.

  “Antree knows you’re with me. He ain’t going to say nothing.”

  The waitress, a heavyset beauty in her late thirties, was already back. She ran her hand affectionately through Howard’s hair as she dropped off the bottles.

  “Drink your beer,” Howard said.

  Robert drank. The beer was as cold as freshly melted snow, so cold it tasted like nothing at all.

  “So what are you trying to say about Mercy?” Howard asked. “Are you in love with her?”

  “I don’t know,” Robert said. “I don’t know what I’m feeling. I’ve never felt anything like it. I’m all knotted up when I’m not with her, and when I’m around her, if she’s even somewhere in the vicinity, then I’m calm and happy.”

  “This is based on what, seeing her twice in your life?”

  Robert had to stop to count. “Yeah. It’s like she’s a place and not a person. Like a tree house when you’re a kid.”

  “I never had no tree house,” Howard said. “not that many trees in most of the places I lived.”

  “How long have you known her?”

  “Couple years.”

  “Where did you meet her?”

  Howard thought it over for a second or two, then shook his head. “I can’t tell you that.”

  “Is this that voodoo business?”

  Howard fixed him again with a look that should have terrified him. “Yeah,” Howard said. “Yeah, it’s ‘that voodoo business.’ I went to her for instruction.” He took a long drink and then put his left arm up along the back of the booth. “I don’t know any of what you’re talking about, that calmness and all. It was the power that got me. There is something about a powerful woman that does the trick for me, and I felt it the first time I saw her.” Then, as if he couldn’t help himself, as if he had to prove ownership, he said, “She felt it too. She was in my bed that same night.”

  Robert had to look away from him, down to the rings their beer bottles had left on the table.

  “Look,” Howard said, “you are in so far over your head you got no idea. You ain’t got the idea of an idea. You think this is all about Bebop and the Lindy Hop. That shit ain’t even a gnat on that woman’s windscreen.”

  “You’re wrong,” Robert said.

  “You’re telling me I’m wrong?”

  “I’m saying I know how she feels about the music and the dancing. I feel the same way. If you don’t feel it, how can you understand?”

  “Motherfucker,” Howard said, and his voice was barely a whisper, “you want to understand, I’ll give you understanding.” He stood up and for a second Robert thought he might be in serious physical danger. “You be outside your house at midnight. You might want to be wearing old clothes. I’m a come pick you up. Be out there waiting, ‘cause I don’t want to have to come in there and wake your ass up.” He threw two dollars on the table, finished his beer in one long swallow, and walked out the door.

  *

  Robert went back to the office. His hands felt weak and unsteady and he couldn’t control his pencil. When he tried to roll the lead against the parallel bar it leapt out onto the page; when he tried to letter the point snapped off. He knew he should talk to Antree, but still jumped when he heard Antree’s voice suddenly behind him saying, “My office.”

  Robert followed him in and closed the door. Antree’s smile melted when he saw Robert’s face. “What the hell happened?”

  “Nothing,” Robert said, his shrug stiff and unconvincing. “He wanted to give me a history lesson so I would stop knocking Hayti down. I tried to tell him it wasn’t my decision.”

  “And then what?”

  “What do you mean, then what?”

  “You look like a college girl trying to smuggle dope through customs. What did you do?”

  Robert shrugged again. “We talked about Mercy.”

  “Holy Christ. What did he say?”

  “We just talked.”

  “The hell you did. Why does this always happen? Why does some chick come along, and everybody starts thinking with their dicks, and everybody else’s hard work goes down the drain? Friends, business partners, employees, everybody turning on each other and burning everything down, and for what? A piece of ass? Something that will come and go and leave nothing but regrets?”

  Robert thought it would be worth anything to avoid one of Antree’s bouts of self-pity. Rare as they were, they seemed endless when they came. “It’s not like that,” he said. “He made me drink a beer with him in the middle of the afternoon and it gave me a headache. In fact, we’re going to hang out some more later tonight.”

  Antree’s emotions spun in a tight circle and came roaring back. “You’re kidding. No shit?”

  “It’s true,” Robert said.

  “Why didn’t you say so in the first place? This is great. I don’t know how the hell you pulled this off, but it’s groovy, dad. Take the rest of the afternoon off. You’re going to need your wits about you.” As Robert stood up, Antree came around the desk and put his arm around him. “You’re the key to this whole deal,” Antree said. “If you can handle Barrett Howard, man, we are home free.”

  *

  All the way home Robert tried to come up with a believable excuse for going out at midnight. His brain was sluggish. He had pulled all the way into the driveway, in
fact, before he noticed the brand-new red and white Buick sedan parked in front of him.

  Ruth met him at the door. “Oh my Lord,” she said. “Is something wrong? I can explain about the car. What are you doing home? Are you sick? Is everything all right?”

  “Whose car is it?” Robert asked, his thoughts leaping automatically to infidelity. He almost hoped it was true.

  “It’s mine. Ours, I mean. I was going to surprise you. Well, I guess I did surprise you. Daddy bought it for my birthday next month, and I’ve been keeping it parked down the street. I didn’t think you’d be home—”

  “Down the street?”

  “Well, I know how you feel about Daddy’s money, and him paying for the house and everything.”

  Not to mention buying my job, Robert thought bitterly.

  “And so I was trying to think of the right way to tell you without you getting upset, or feeling like…” She broke off and attempted a smile.

  “Like what?” Robert asked, keeping his voice calm.

  “You know, like you can’t take care of me or anything. In the style to which I’m accustomed.”

  Robert saw then that he didn’t have to explain anything. All he had to do was walk away.

  And, surprising himself yet again, that was exactly what he did.

  “Robert?” she called after him from the front door. “Robert, where are you going?”

  He got in the Mercury, headache gone, elation rising in his chest. I don’t know, he thought. I don’t know where I’m going. And I don’t care.

  He drove toward town out of reflex, then remembered that Howard was supposed to pick him up at midnight. He had no phone number for Howard or Mercy, no way to reach either of them other than driving to their house. So that was what he did.

  He arrived a few minutes after four and parked behind a boxy black 1960 Ford Falcon on the street. Mercy’s Impala sat in the driveway, and the sight of it excited him. He looked at his hair in the rearview mirror and finger-combed it away from his forehead, checked his deodorant, which had not yet given up, and got out of the car.

  It was a beautiful afternoon, cloudless, hot, not yet suffocating the way it would be in July and August. Here in Hayti it was less beautiful than it was among the rich lawns and overarching trees of Woodrow Street. Life here was exposed, raw, transitory.

  Robert climbed the steep sidewalk to the porch and knocked on the front door. There was no answer, so after a minute he tried again, louder. He hesitated a few seconds, then, suddenly self-conscious, started to turn away.

  The door opened. Howard stood there in nothing but a pair of blue jeans, primal and imposing. Behind him, Mercy leaned against a doorway in a white terrycloth robe. She wore her usual abstracted smile. “Hello, Robert,” she said.

  Howard seemed more amused than angry. “I guess God really does look after fools and drunkards. I can’t believe you come pounding on my door like this and I ain’t killed you yet.”

  “I’m sorry,” Robert said. “I didn’t mean…I didn’t realize I was interrupting….”

  “You didn’t interrupt anything,” Howard said. “If there had been something to interrupt, I wouldn’t have come to the door. But I still have hopes, so tell me what you want and be on your way.”

  “We need to meet someplace else tonight,” Robert said.

  Howard turned to Mercy. “You go on back to the bedroom, honey. I’ll be there in a minute.”

  He stepped out onto the porch and pulled the door to. “What happened, your wife throw you out?”

  Robert shrugged, not yet ready to think through what he’d done. “You could pick me up at Elvira’s or something.”

  Howard looked at him closely. “You all right?”

  “I’m good,” Robert said. “Really.”

  Howard started to go in, then said, “This thing tonight. Mercy don’t know about you being there. It might be better for everybody if we kept it that way. You understand what I’m saying?”

  Robert nodded, though he did not, in fact, understand. “Can you pick me up at Elvira’s? Midnight?”

  Howard nodded once, sharply, and went in the house. Robert tried not to think about him going into the darkened bedroom, slipping out of his jeans, opening Mercy’s robe, peeling it back from her shoulders, her still smiling that mysterious smile.

  *

  He drove to the Kresge’s downtown to eat, and while he was there, not knowing when or if he would go back to the house, he picked up a cheap white shirt and a change of socks and underwear. The defiance was liberating and a bit dangerous, as if he were a teenager running away from home.

  He ate a hamburger at the lunch counter. None of the black people that shopped all around him were eating. Robert was still trying not to think of those other two black people and what they might or might not still be doing. Images from racy films he’d seen in the Army came unbidden into his head, with Howard and Mercy substituting in the lead roles.

  Once cool, the hamburger lost most of its appeal. Robert grazed on the remaining potato chips and pickle slices, then surrendered to his impulse to return to the office. Outside of Ruth, his records, and his tentative new life in Hayti—none of which were available at the moment—work was all he knew.

  The lights were all on and Miles was in the midst of one of the more dirgelike moments on Sketches of Spain when Robert opened the door. Mitch looked up from his central drafting table, blinking, as if he’d been asleep. His tie was loose and his collar open, his eyes puffy and his chin dark with stubble. When he saw Robert, he smiled. “Bobby! I thought you’d be home with the little woman.”

  Robert’s innate caution kept him from saying anything about Ruth. He shrugged instead.

  “You still seeing Barrett tonight?”

  “Later. I got a few hours to kill.”

  “Hell, let’s make some plans, then.” It was a joke Mitch never tired of. “You want a drink?”

  “That’s okay.”

  Robert went to the drawers and took out the plans and elevations for a suburban bank branch that Fred Mason had drawn. Mitch went to his office and emerged with a highball. On the way back he took Miles off the turntable and put on Cannonball Adderley’s Them Dirty Blues, leading off, appropriately, with his brother Nat’s “Work Song.” The change in tempo brightened the room.

  Robert taped down the drawings and began taking sections through the walls, stopping at interesting intersections to lay out piece drawings for the individual members. It was work that occupied the part of the brain that worried while leaving free the part that listened to music.

  Mitch kept the music coming, moving from Adderley to Duke Pearson’s Dedication, then to Ellington at Newport, and finally back to Miles for The Birth of the Cool. He seemed to be rationing himself to one drink per album, a pace nonetheless sufficient to put him well in the bag by 8:30.

  “That’s it,” he said at last. “Time to split this lame joint. The service is for the birds.”

  “You okay to drive?”

  “Hell, yes. The day I have to drive sober, that’s the day you should start worrying.” Robert knew that Mitch was drunk, even if he couldn’t point to clear symptoms. His hands were steady and his speech was clear, but his eyes were anesthetized. “Good luck with Howard. Don’t worry about coming in on time tomorrow. Get a decent night’s sleep.”

  Robert nodded, not sure such a thing was possible. A minute later he heard Mitch’s Cadillac start up over the last notes of “Darn That Dream” and gently squeal its tires as it pulled out of the lot.

  With Mitch gone, Robert’s concentration faded. After 15 restless minutes he shut the office down and pointed his car south, past Hayti and St. Joseph’s, past Beechwood Cemetery and out into tobacco country, one small farm after another, the plants only a few inches high and pale green in the moonlight. At some point he pulled over and walked out between the rows. He fired up a Lucky, the end product of all this effort, though it was no longer made in Durham. Somewhere near where he was standing the new I
nterstate 40 would go, connecting the south edge of Raleigh to the south edge of Durham and the north edge of Chapel Hill. Meanwhile I-85 would swoop down and replace State Highway 70 across the north of Durham, meet up with 40 on the far side of Hillsboro, and the two roads would run west together until Greensboro.

  Durham’s East-West Expressway would connect the two. When it was done, it would split off from I-85 eastbound near Robert’s house, cut through downtown, then curve south to meet I-40 on the edge of RTP. There was talk that the East-West expressway might get designated an alternate route for I-40, which would put them in the way of even more federal money. Altogether the three highways represented millions of tons of concrete that would change the face of the Triangle, of all of North Carolina, wake Durham from its coma, bring jobs and money and the whole star-spangled dream. Despite Barrett Howard’s union speech, it was still a dream Robert believed in, a dream where the jobs and the money weren’t ends in themselves but the raw materials of freedom.

  However tainted his entry, the dream was his to be part of, if he could keep his focus. His career would survive a divorce, if it came to that. If the improbable happened with Mercy, the thing that he believed in and Barrett Howard insisted was his ignorance talking, Mitch would sympathize if anyone would. And if he couldn’t save Hayti, he would save all he could.

  He drove slowly toward town, feeling the length of the day, the lateness of the hour, and drank coffee at Elvira’s until midnight.

  *

  Howard was late, and Robert began to let himself hope that nothing would happen. Elvira closed up and put him on the street, and Robert was thinking about where he was going to spend the night when Howard’s black Falcon jerked to a stop in front of him. It was 12:15.

  “Get in,” Howard said. Robert climbed in the passenger seat, trying to judge Howard’s mood. Not anger or triumph, but something more turned in, private, determined. Once they were moving, Howard handed him a large gray hooded sweatshirt. “Put that on. Once we get there, keep the hood up so you won’t be so conspicuous.”