by Lewis Shiner
Robert told him about Mercy, and that Ruth would not be coming when he moved. As he laid out the bare bones of it, he watched Arthur’s guarded reaction. In truth, Robert thought he sounded unstable even to himself.
“I don’t think Bill is going to care about the race issue,” Arthur said. “But I’d let all this settle out before you starting airing it in public.”
“You think I’m crazy?”
“Not crazy so much as…irresponsible. It’s not something people look for in an engineer.” Arthur was two years younger than Robert, having gone straight from high school to college. In the seven years they’d both been working, he had somehow made the transition to grownup, a condition that still felt alien to Robert. It was like Arthur had passed him and moved on to their parents’ generation.
*
With the prospect of Dallas that much more real, Mercy began to have her own second thoughts. “I’ll be leaving everything I know,” she said. “I already don’t know who I am. I used to be mambo, a woman of power. Now what am I? A bank clerk and a housewife to somebody else’s husband. And now you want to pull me up by my roots and stick me in some foreign soil.”
“It’s a second chance. You could go to medical school, or work in a hospital, or find some other way to do the kind of work you’ve always wanted.”
“Maybe.”
“It’s foreign to me, too. I don’t know anybody there but Arthur.”
“I’m scared, that’s all. I don’t even know whose emotions these are that I’m feeling. My body’s like a haunted house.”
They were naked; Robert put his hand on her belly and felt the pulsing life inside her.
“There’s no history in Dallas,” he said. “The place where they’re putting the airport, there’s nothing there. A few cows and some grass. We can leave Hayti and Randy Fogg and Mitch Antree and start clean.”
“You can tell me about it once we’re there. Right now, you and me are the only people in the world want this. All I can see is everything standing in the way.”
He pulled her to him and held her gently. He held the two of them, mother and child, the bulge of her pregnancy nestling perfectly in the hollow of his abdomen, their three hearts beating together.
*
In July, as Robert battled the increasing frustrations of pushing through a freeway where it wasn’t wanted, Mason and Antree lost a major RTP contract that Mitch had promised was “in the bag.”
“We got underbid,” was all he would say. “O’Farrell Brothers is going to screw up the job and everybody is going to be sorry afterwards, but there’s nothing we can do about it now.”
Mitch retreated to his office. Maurice motioned Robert outside for a smoke. It was hazy and stifling, humidity and temperature both pushing 100.
“Mitch is losing it,” Maurice said. “He’s smoking pot, he’s drinking, he’s chasing women, he’s not getting the job done. Me, I’m waiting for a confirmation letter and then I’m gone. Thought you might want to make some plans of your own.”
“I’ve made them,” Robert said, feeling ahead of the game for once. “Thanks. I’ve got something lined up in Dallas.” Maurice, he knew, would not confide in Mitch.
“Dallas, eh? There’s a lot happening in Dallas, I hear.” Maurice offered his hand. “Good luck.”
*
In August he got a call from Arthur. “Everything’s still on,” Arthur said. “We’re just running behind.”
“How far behind?”
“Your start date will be in November. December first at the absolute latest. You know how it is, it’s the construction business. Nothing is ever on schedule.”
Mercy was in her final month of pregnancy and was, in fact, huge. Their sex life, which had been good through the first two trimesters, had dropped off to nothing in the last two months. Her breasts were too tender to touch, she couldn’t get comfortable in any sexual position, and her own need had disappeared. She used her mouth and hands to give Robert what satisfaction she could, but Robert felt her discomfort and lack of desire, and it often left him unable to finish.
It made for an undercurrent of frustration they’d never felt with each other. Mercy had been forced to quit her job; her boss knew the baby was illegitimate and refused to hold the position for her. Then there were the delays in Dallas and the delays on the East-West Expressway and the endless, unrelenting heat.
The next blow came one morning as Robert was leaving for work. He was barely awake and he might not have seen it, except that Mercy had followed him to the door and he had stopped beside his car to wave goodbye to her.
She saw his expression and stepped out on the porch in her black silk kimono. “Oh,” she said.
During the night the house had been vandalized with black spray paint. There was a swastika on one side of the door and a cross in a circle on the other. Splotchy letters read, DEATH TO MIXED RACE BASTARDS and, even more ominously, WHITE SEED DIES IN BLACK GROUND.
Robert climbed the sidewalk with long strides and put his arms around Mercy from behind.
She seemed hardly to care. “Celtic cross,” she said, pointing to the left of the door. “That’s our friends in the Night Riders.”
“We have to call the police,” Robert said.
“Why?”
Robert knew well enough what she was asking. When the police came to Hayti, it wasn’t to help out. “Because I’m afraid. This scares the hell out of me. This isn’t some random race-baiting. This is personal. They know about us, about the baby. I can’t leave you here alone.”
“Come inside,” Mercy said.
She put her arms around him, and even with the fear and helpless rage boiling inside him it was all he could do not to be overwhelmed with desire for her. “This don’t mean anything,” she said. “It’s just talk, is all, ugly talk. If they wanted to do something they would already have done it.”
“What if they come back? What if I’m not here?”
“Anybody breaks in this house going to answer to Mr. Smith and Mr. Wesson. You know that.”
For once he was glad she had the gun. “So you’re saying you don’t want to do anything about it.”
“Nothing we can do. Outside of the house don’t matter, it’s the inside that’s important. We got to try not to let it make things worse than they already are.”
“I’ll have a crew over here before noon to clean it up and repaint.”
“You do that, they’ll just come back.”
“If they come back, I’ll paint over it again,” Robert said, letting her go. “Or maybe you’ll get to use that gun. I can’t leave it, and I can’t come home to that at night.”
They were poised for their first fight, and as high as Robert’s emotions were running, it could have raged out of control. Robert saw Mercy choose not to let that happen. “Go ahead then,” she said. “Do what you got to do.”
They said their goodbyes again, and Robert drove to work knowing they’d given the bastards exactly what they wanted, that their hatred had seeped deeper into the walls than the paint, had added its weight to the load pressing down on them.
As he struggled to hold on to his happiness with Mercy, Ruth sweetly and quietly insisted that he spend at least one night a week with her. “We are still married,” she said, smiling in a coy way that Robert found unsettling. “I want to know how your work is going, want to fix you dinner, want to know you’re there. If you were home waiting for me when I got back from the farm on Sunday afternoons, I could at least pretend things were the way they used to be.”
Robert had not forgotten the way she’d turned on him when he asked for a divorce, hard as it was to reconcile that image with this one. “All right,” he said.
“You might as well sleep with her,” Mercy said when he told her. “I’m no good to you in that department anymore. Like she said, you are still married to her. You got the right.”
“I’d rather do it with a snake,” Robert said.
“You say that now, but give it another
month, you’ll be out there at the woodpile, ‘Here snake, here snake.’ ”
“You say that like you don’t care.”
“I never said that. Not caring isn’t the same as understanding that things happen sometimes.”
“Well, that thing isn’t going to happen.”
*
Mercy’s phone rang late on a Thursday night. It was August 28, two weeks from Mercy’s due date. Half asleep, Robert heard Mercy say, “Hello?” Then, her voice softening, she said, “Barrett? Are you all right?” She switched on her nightstand lamp and put a hand on Robert’s shoulder. “Where are you?” she said into the phone.
Robert rolled over toward her, squinting against the light. She was shaking her head. “He only wants to talk to you,” she said, handing him the phone.
“Hey, Barrett,” Robert said. His brain was still struggling to its feet.
“Can you pick me up? Same place as last time?”
“When? You mean now?”
“If you can do it. I need to get to Raleigh. Can you drive me? Just drop me off there and you can come straight home. I wouldn’t ask you if it wasn’t important. And I won’t ask again.”
“Okay. I can be there in ten minutes.”
“Thanks.” The dial tone buzzed.
As before, Robert pulled up to the curb where Elvira’s had been, and this time Barrett appeared immediately. He was clean, if scruffy, and his energy level seemed high. “Thanks, man,” he said as he got in and shut the door. “This helps.”
“Where do you need to go?”
“Shaw University, downtown. Is that cool?”
“Yeah, it’s fine. What’s it about?”
“You know I can’t tell you that.”
“No. I guess I don’t really want to know.”
Robert headed east on Business 70. After a few minutes’ silence he said, “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m making it. We’re getting down to the nitty-gritty now, and after that nobody knows how it’s going to shake out.”
Something in his tone made Robert look at him. “Nitty-gritty?”
“I’m all nerves, man. I’m talking more than I should.”
“There’s about to be trouble, is what you’re saying. A riot, like in Watts?”
“Watts was small time. Listen, I heard Mercy’s pregnant. Is that true?”
“Yeah, it’s true.”
“You’re standing by her?”
“I love her. We’re getting away from here. Going to Texas.”
“That’s good. That’s very good. The farther from here the better.”
To fill the time, Robert found himself talking about the job in Dallas, the new life he hoped to start there. Other than Mercy, there had been no one he could confide in, and he’d been holding it in for months. The only thing that scared him was how unreal it all sounded, like the elaborate pipe dreams that old winos would tell to con somebody out of a quarter.
When the words ran out they drove in silence again until Barrett said, “I wonder sometimes if I did this whole thing wrong. That maybe it could still be me with Mercy, that I could have had a straight teaching job and a family and been a regular citizen.” He glanced at Robert. “No offense, man. Just a little idle jealousy. I know it wasn’t meant to be.”
Robert nodded. He was long past seeing Barrett as a rival. If anything, he was jealous of his own early days with Mercy, before her pregnancy, before the world turned so sour.
Highway 70 had turned into Glenwood Avenue, and they were in Raleigh now. The houses along Glenwood were huge and set well back from the road, houses where blacks cooked and cleaned and maintained the yards. Durham was evenly divided between the races, while less than a quarter of Raleigh’s population was black. Raleigh imagined Durham to be a city of constant crime; Durham saw Raleigh as rich, white, and arrogant.
Shaw University was a black college in the center of downtown, only a few blocks south of the Capitol building. As they drove through the wide, deserted streets, Barrett got increasingly restless. Finally he said, “Listen, man, I have to warn you. I didn’t want it this way, but stuff is going to happen to your freeway.”
“Stuff?” Robert said.
“A lot of people see it as a symbol, you know, of what happened to Hayti and all. There’s going to be some shit come down there.”
“What are you talking about? What exactly is going to come down?”
“I said too much already. All’s I’m saying is, at night, for the next week, don’t be working late. You’ll be all right.”
The parts of the expressway that were finished were either precast or poured concrete over reinforcing steel. There was little anyone could do to damage them with less than an atomic bomb. Even so, the threat felt personal and Robert didn’t like it.
They’d come to the front gate of the college. Robert stopped the car. “Don’t hurt my expressway,” he said. “It’s not right.”
“It’s out of my hands,” Barrett said.
“I don’t believe that.”
Barrett opened the car door and left it open. “One second,” he said.
The car was covered in dust from the construction site. Barrett stood on the sidewalk and used his finger to draw the crossroads symbol for Legba on the passenger side of the hood. Then he walked around to the other side and drew the heart-shaped ideogram for Erzulie. He wiped his hands on his pants and came back to the open door.
“A little extra protection never hurt,” he said. “Thanks for bringing me.” He leaned in the car to offer his hand.
Robert looked at it, anger and sadness and love fighting it out inside him. “Goddammit, Barrett,” he said.
“Take my hand,” Barrett said. “You never know when you’re going to see somebody again. We’re at the crossroads, man. You want to be at your best when you’re standing in the crossroads.”
Robert took his hand. “Be careful,” he said.
“You too.” Barrett closed the door, vaulted the gate, and was lost in the darkness.
Robert turned north at his next opportunity, shutting off the car’s air conditioning and rolling the windows down to feel the damp air on his face, his emotions still churning. “Goddammit!” he said again, and pulled over under the next streetlight. He shut off the engine and found a rag in the trunk and used it to wipe the hood clean.
When he was done, he felt suddenly cold and alone. “Superstition,” he said out loud, crumpling the rag. He threw it in the trunk and drove, carefully, back to Durham.
*
Mercy was awake and waiting for him.
“He’s going to do something to the expressway,” he told her. “Him and his army.”
“Oh no,” Mercy said.
“What am I going to do? Am I going to just lie here and let him do it?”
“You already know the answer to that. You know you won’t choose concrete over a man.”
“Why do I have to make that choice at all?”
“I can’t tell you that, baby,” she said, stroking his shoulders. He tried to hold her and she tried to let him, shifting around in an attempt to get comfortable, but he saw he was hurting her and he moved away. “I’m sorry, baby,” she said. “Not much longer. Another couple of weeks and I’ll be a normal human again.”
“Yeah, I know,” he said. “I know.”
*
He wrestled with it in his head all weekend. Sunday night, in the house on Woodrow, Ruth had felt his nervousness and rubbed his shoulders as he pretended to watch TV, asking him what was wrong. When he’d told her there were threats of sabotage, she’d gotten upset and wanted more details than he was willing to give.
“Are you in danger?”
“No.”
“Do you swear?”
“I promise. It’s just the freeway.”
“Oh, Robert, if anything happened to you, I don’t know what I’d do. I couldn’t abide it.”
On Monday he told Leon to spread the word among the crew: Nobody was to come on the construction site
after dark.
“Why is that, Captain?”
“Just some rumors going around. Best to be safe.”
“Yeah, I heard some rumors too.”
“What did you hear?”
“Nothing, Captain, not really. Something about there might be trouble on the freeway site.”
“Where did you hear it?”
“Not sure I remember exactly. Booker, maybe. Booker probably heard something at one of those bars he hang out at.” Booker wasn’t there to confirm or deny. Most likely Barrett had warned Leon himself.
They were working on the Fayetteville Street overpass. Fayetteville Street itself had moved 50 feet to the west while they dug out the old roadbed. Down below, in the cutout, they’d bolted one six-legged precast T on either side of the right of way, with a third T in the center. There was a raw wood framework most of the way across, nestling the tops of the Ts, floored with plywood, ready to take the concrete for the overpass itself. Below it stood a form for the north buttress, looking ramshackle and random, the way forms always did from the outside.
As he stared at the fragile wooden structures he felt a fresh wave of sweat break across his forehead. That would be the target, he thought. There, in the center of Hayti, under the voodoo weathervane on St. Joseph’s. A few well-placed sticks of dynamite could set them back for weeks.
It wasn’t just the company’s money, or the wasted work. Part of Robert wanted to see the freeway open and cars driving on it before he left for Dallas. Losing two or three weeks would make that impossible.
He spent that night in his Chevelle, blocking the end of the overpass scaffolding on the St. Joseph’s side. He’d parked a bulldozer at the other end. After nodding off a half-dozen times, he quit struggling and curled up on the bench seat and slept for a few fitful hours. When the sun woke him he went to Mercy’s for another two hours, so exhausted that even her restless turning couldn’t keep him awake.
He did it again on Tuesday, but by Wednesday he couldn’t face another night of it. He ate and showered and went to bed, only to have the phone wake him at 2 a.m.
