Black & White

by Lewis Shiner

  Harebrained mysticism aside, it was what Robert himself wanted to believe. Otherwise the importance of the work, and the pleasure and fulfillment he found in it, were hopelessly tainted.

  “Speaking of Hayti,” Mitch said, “what do you hear from your pal Barrett Howard these days?”

  “Nothing,” Robert said. It was October 7, and the election was approaching. “I haven’t seen him in months.”

  “Well, you might want to keep it that way. The word is out he’s recruiting a private army.”

  *

  “We have to find him,” he told Mercy. “He’s going to get himself killed.”

  “Donald would know where he is.”

  “Donald, the kid you…”

  “Initiated. Yes. And he would tell me.”

  Jealousy had not been an issue since the affair started. Just the same, the mention of the Harriman kid brought back images that made Robert wince. “Do you know how to get hold of him?”

  “No,” Mercy said. “But I can find out.”

  It took her two days. She learned that Barrett’s group met at 2 a.m. Saturdays in the shell of the old Biltmore Hotel, room 207, the former Honeymoon Suite. The plywood over the back door, Donald told her, was loose and allowed them to come and go.

  Friday night before midnight Robert dressed in dark clothes and rubber-soled shoes. His hands shook as he put batteries into a massive steel flashlight.

  “You have to protect Donald,” Mercy said. “You can’t let Barrett know that’s how you found out.”

  “I know,” Robert said.

  “One more time I’m going to ask you to let me do this. They won’t hurt me. They might kill you.”

  “Barrett won’t let that happen,” he said, wishing he believed it. “And I don’t mean for anybody but Barrett to see me.”

  “Then will you at least think about taking the gun?”

  Mercy kept a .38 revolver in the nightstand on her side of the bed. “Absolutely not. Who do you want me to shoot with it? Barrett? Donald? No, baby, I’m not taking a gun.”

  She walked up to him, and her arms went around his back the way they always, inevitably did. It did not strengthen his determination.

  “I have to go,” he said.

  “I love you,” she said.

  “I love you too.”

  Ten minutes later he parked near the mouth of the alley that led behind the Biltmore. It took him five long, nervous minutes to figure out the trick with the plywood, which turned out to be an inner frame of 2 × 4s wedged into a matching frame around the door. Once he tugged at it from the correct angle the whole thing slid straight out toward him. He replaced the panel once he was inside, and then he turned on the flashlight.

  A foot-long rat stared at him from the curling linoleum of old kitchen floor, then ambled off with arrogant deliberation. The place smelled of mold and urine; apparently Barrett’s people were not the only ones who knew the trick with the plywood.

  Swinging double doors led out into the ballroom. Sadness threatened to overwhelm him. The very notion of progress seemed hopelessly inverted. What good was a bright concrete future with no dancing, with no hand-sawn hardwood floors and deco archways? He tried to trace a couple of steps across the floor, his rubber soles clinging to the wood and keeping him from being able to pivot. He remembered dancing with Mercy to “Moonglow,” and it nearly turned him around and sent him home.

  Instead he found the stairs and made his way to the second floor.

  The carpet was decayed. Doors to some of the rooms stood open, and in one of them a man lay face down on a bare mattress. Robert wasn’t sure if he was dead or alive, and didn’t attempt to find out. Suite 207 was double-locked, with both the hotel’s original hardware and a shiny new hasp and heavy duty padlock.

  Robert found a chair with a missing leg in one of the rooms, propped it against the wall, and made himself as comfortable as possible. He turned the flashlight off and rested it in his lap with his thumb on the switch. The thought of being alone in the dark with the rats and junkies was almost more than he could bear.

  Despite his fear and best intentions, he must have fallen asleep, because a banging from downstairs woke him. Someone had entered the stairwell. Footsteps shuffled up the stairs.

  Robert stood up and flattened himself against the wall, staring at the shades of blackness in the hallway.

  The second-floor stairwell door opened and closed. The glow of a flashlight appeared beyond the angle of the hall, bright as dawn, and a big man passed Robert’s room. Robert thought it was Barrett, wished he were more sure.

  He waited until he heard the jingle of keys at the lock of 207 and then whispered, “Barrett?”

  The noise stopped and the light went out. “Who’s there?” Barrett’s voice said.

  “It’s me. Robert.”

  “Jesus Christ. Are you alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you out of your stupid mind?” Barrett’s muffled steps moved closer. “Turn the flashlight on yourself.”

  Robert did, blinding himself. He sensed, but could not see, Howard standing in the hall.

  “All right,” Barrett said.

  Robert pointed the light at Barrett’s feet. It took his eyes a few seconds to adjust, and when the spots cleared he saw Barrett pointing a military style .45 automatic pistol at his chest. “You can’t be here,” Barrett said. “You really cannot be here.”

  “We have to talk.”

  “How did you find this place?”

  “Mitch Antree told me what was happening.” Which was true as far as it went.

  “Shit, goddamn. How’d he find out?”

  “ ‘Word on the street’ is what he said. What’s behind that lock?”

  “That is the last thing you want to know. You understand what I’m saying? The last thing.”

  “Are there guns in there?”

  “I need you to get your lily-white ass out of here before the rest of the brothers show up. Come on.”

  Barrett led him downstairs at a trot, through the ballroom and into the kitchen. As they arrived at the door, the plywood hatch groaned and eased back into the alley.

  Barrett gestured with his flashlight, motioning Robert into a corner of the kitchen along the inside wall. Robert stood behind a rusting steel refrigerator and clicked off his light. Something rustled in the space under the refrigerator, and Robert curled his toes away from the ends of his shoes, breathing shallowly through his mouth, sweat dripping under his arms.

  “Barrett?” From where he stood, Robert could see Donald Harriman in the reflected glow of Barrett’s light.

  “Go on upstairs, son. I got something to deal with, may be a few minutes.”

  “Everything all right?”

  “Everything fine. Move on, now. You can leave that hatch open.”

  Robert watched Harriman’s flashlight bob away. Barrett stuck his head out into the alley, then waved Robert forward. “Let’s go,” he said.

  Robert followed him into the alley, and Barrett put the plywood back in place. “Go on now,” Barrett said.

  “Barrett, I have to talk to you.”

  “Yeah, all right, but not now.”

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow Saturday, or tomorrow Sunday?”

  “Saturday. Later today.”

  “Where? Where are you living?”

  “Nowhere. I don’t exist.”

  “Then where do I meet you?”

  “Seven o’clock Saturday night. Drive up to where Elvira’s used to be. Wait five minutes. If I don’t show up, come back at eight. If I’m not there at eight, I’ll call you at Mercy’s. Now go.”

  *

  Robert waited at the curb from 6:58 until 7:07 and then drove away, convinced Barrett had never meant to keep the rendezvous. Then on Robert’s second attempt, at 8:02, Barrett walked quickly out of the deep shadows between the surviving buildings and got into the passenger seat of the Chevelle.

  “Where t
o?” Robert said.

  “How about your construction site? Nobody bother us there.”

  Robert parked in the deep cut near St. Joseph’s, within sight of the symbol on the steeple. Barrett was unshaven and obviously hadn’t bathed in a while. He looked like a street person, dressed in the same clothes he’d had on the night before—pants, jacket, and shirt that were various shades of gray and beige. Robert had brought a thermos of coffee and some sandwiches, just in case, and Barrett tore into them.

  “Barrett, what’s going on?”

  “The Revolution,” Barrett said. “It’s happening.”

  “When, you mean now?”

  “Within the next year. Probably less.”

  “And when you say revolution, you mean…”

  “I don’t know how far it’s going to go. I’m here to light the fuse and fan the flames. If it’s up to me, I’m a burn it to the ground.”

  Robert thought about the hopelessness of his marriage, his conflicted feelings about Hayti, the smugness of Randy Fogg and his supporters, and for a fleeting moment he thought, let it burn.

  But Robert knew that he would not survive the burning, and because of him Mercy might not either. All he truly wanted was to do his job and come home every night to the woman he loved, and maybe dance on the weekends.

  “There’s no other way?”

  Barrett relaxed in the seat and closed his eyes, showing a weariness that came from more than late nights and physical exertion. “In August, in Miami, Nixon cut a deal with Strom Thurmond. Thurmond delivers the white South for Nixon, and in return Nixon rolls back integration.”

  “That can’t happen. Nixon is a crook and a loser. The whole world knows that. He can’t get elected.”

  “You sit there, having watched King and Kennedy get shot down, having watched the Miami and Chicago cops go nuts without even a slap on the wrist, watching the black men come home in body bags from Southeast Asia every day, and you tell me Nixon can’t get elected? The Summer of Love is over, man. It was a freak. A hiccup. The white man got distracted, let a little slack in the rope, and he’s taking it back now.”

  Barrett roused himself, reached for the coffee. Robert stopped Barrett’s arm and pushed the sleeve up to reveal the tattoo that had peeked out from the edge of the cuff. It was the crossroads shape from the voodoo ceremony, a cross breaking out of a circle with smaller circles at the end of each arm.

  “Legba,” Barrett said. “And a Yoruba symbol of reincarnation.”

  “You’re all going to die,” Robert said.

  “If we do, then that’s how it is. Nothing to lose at this point. At least we got the lwa on our side. That’s our edge.” He drank off a cup of hot coffee and put the last plastic-wrapped half-sandwich in his jacket pocket. Then he stuck out his right hand, soul-style, like they were going to arm-wrestle. Robert took the hand, and Barrett squeezed his shoulder briefly with his left. “Take it easy, man. And take care of Mercy. I hope you come out all right when the shit comes down.”

  “Barrett, let us help you. Find you someplace to stay, make sure you eat. I could give you a job on my crew, nobody would look for you there.”

  “Too late for that now. I appreciate the thought and all, but the time for that is over. The war has already begun.”

  With that he opened the car door and was gone.

  *

  Nixon indeed won the election. He did it despite George Wallace carrying most of the southern states, proof enough that the worst predictions of white backlash were true. Overnight the legal machinery of integration ground to a halt, even as Nixon’s “secret plan” to end the Vietnam War turned to smoke.

  In the same election, Randy Fogg won a seat in the House of Representatives for North Carolina’s 2nd district. It was one more disaster in a year of the worst setbacks the US had ever known.

  In the spring of 1969 the city of Durham was still negotiating right-of-way for the East-West Expressway. The exact location of the roadbed was long settled, but a few crucial homeowners refused to sell, complicating the placement of on- and off-ramps. Equally stubborn were the Carolina Times and Service Printing, who refused to move off Pettigrew Street. Robert spent his days at the drafting table coming up with alternate traffic patterns or working on other projects.

  “We could lose our federal money,” Mitch said, “if we don’t build this thing. RTP wants to know where the expressway is. I’m starting to freak, here.”

  “What do you want me to do about it?” Robert asked. “Knock down houses we haven’t bought yet?”

  “Accidents happen,” Mitch said. “Right?”

  Maurice, who hardly spoke anymore, looked up. “Is that supposed to be funny?” On three separate occasions Maurice had told Robert he was quitting, but Mitch had apparently offered him more money than he could dream of making elsewhere. Mitch’s self-image would crumble, Robert knew, if he couldn’t point to a senior black man in his office.

  Mitch shrugged. “Sure, a joke, that’s all.”

  At the end of February, Robert woke to the sound of Mercy throwing up in the bathroom, followed by the sound of her scrubbing her mouth with toothpaste. When she returned to bed, he said, “Are you okay?”

  “I’m pregnant,” she said.

  It was dark, and he couldn’t read her expression. His own first reaction was joy. He had long ago given up hope of conceiving a child with Ruth and this seemed a minor miracle.

  He gathered her in his arms and kissed her all around her neck and ears. “This is fantastic,” he said. “But how…?” When they’d first started she’d assured him that she was taking care of protection.

  “Like the undertaker said, ‘Life is full of surprises.’ ”

  He rolled over and turned on the light on his end table. “What’s wrong? You’re not happy?”

  “How can I be happy? First of all, I got serious doubts about bringing a child into a world like this one is turning out to be. Secondly, I will not have a child that only has a part-time father.”

  Robert opened his mouth and Mercy blocked it with her hand. “I’m not blaming you for anything. I’m talking about the way things are. I already made the appointment to get rid of it. I’m barely six weeks along and it won’t be a problem.”

  “Whoa, stop, wait. Don’t. I love you. I want this baby. I want to marry you and live with you. We’ll do whatever we have to do to make that happen.”

  “And what’s that going to be?”

  “We’re within a few months of finishing the first leg of the expressway. When that’s done, with that experience under my belt, I can get that job in Dallas easy. We’ll bring your mother with us. If she really doesn’t want electricity, we’ll build her a little stone-age house in the yard.”

  “And what’s Ruth going to do?”

  “She’ll have to get over it.”

  “She threatened your life.”

  “I can’t believe she’d have me killed. Whatever else is true, I do believe she loves me. And I will not spend the rest of my life being blackmailed.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “She can’t be happy, living like this, no matter what she says. She was so convinced that you and I would burn out in a few weeks. She’s got to see that I’m never going to get over you.”

  “You’re doing it again.”

  Mercy insisted that words like “never” were bad luck. “Don’t start with your superstitions,” Robert said. “Not now.”

  “Are you sure you’re still going to want me when I’m all swole up?”

  “I don’t know,” Robert said. “I do know I want you now.” His hands began to move over her body.

  “Better get it now,” she said, “before I get big as a damn house.” She wasn’t laughing, but Robert was so full of lust and love that he didn’t care.

  *

  That night the haunted dreams began again. This time it was not Erzulie speaking to him, but his own fevered brain. The dreams were always of an expressway, and he was trying to route it around a s
eries of impossible obstacles: a sheer cliff face, swampy ground that melted under his feet, rivers that constantly changed their courses and carved huge canyons overnight. What exhausted him was the intensity of his concentration, the desperate importance of the quest, the elusiveness of the solution, always just out of reach.

  He would wake up at four or five in the morning with his pulse racing, and as he tried to hang on to whatever puzzle had been torturing him in the dream, one real-life crisis or another would take its place. What dire alimony would the North Carolina courts impose on him after he deserted a prominent white woman for a black bank teller? Had Ruth’s threats been serious after all? How much longer would it take to finish the freeway?

  *

  On March 17, Malcolm X Liberation University, a longtime dream of local hero Howard Fuller, opened and closed within a single hour. The school had hoped to teach Afro-American History, Psychology of Racism, Political Science, and other “pragmatic” courses. Later Robert heard from Tommy Coleman that the plan had been that Duke University’s black students would leave Duke en masse and enroll at MXLU. The students failed to materialize. In the photo accompanying the story in the Carolina Times, Barrett Howard was visible with his back to the camera, shoulders slumped in defeat.

  *

  In May, Robert flew to Dallas overnight, keeping it secret from both Mitch and Ruth. His friend Arthur picked him up at Love Field and took him to an interview in Carrolton, a suburb north of the flat, sprawling city. Afterwards they drove west to the empty prairie between Dallas and Fort Worth where the land for the new airport had already been purchased. “The Spaceport,” Arthur called it, as the specs required that the reusable space ships the government was talking about building be able to land there.

  He stayed that night at Arthur’s house, and after dinner Bill, the head engineer of the firm, called to make a tentative offer. The money was better than he was making in Durham, and the start date was to be some time “in the fall.” Robert accepted, and took his first relaxed breath in longer than he could remember.

  Robert and Arthur stayed up drinking Canadian Club after Arthur’s wife and 2-year-old son went to bed. Arthur was six foot three and thin, with wavy brown hair and bushy sideburns. He’d had bad luck with women all through college, then had married a sweet and statuesque blonde soon after moving to Dallas and still didn’t seem to believe his luck.