Black & White

by Lewis Shiner

  They had been getting a lot of crank calls, the caller hanging up as soon as Mercy answered. Those had all been in the evening hours, never this late. Robert heard her pick up the phone and mumble a hello, then say, “Who?” in an irritated voice. She passed the receiver to Robert. “Mitch Antree,” she said.

  Robert stared at her in confusion and took the receiver. Mercy moved the body of the phone onto the bed between them to keep the cord from cutting across her breasts.

  “Mitch?” Robert said. “How did you get this number?”

  “Put your pants on,” Mitch said. “I need you here at the office.”

  “Christ,” Robert said, thinking immediately of Barrett, “what did he do?”

  “What did who do?”

  Robert took a breath. “Nothing. What happened?”

  “Nothing happened. Put on your work clothes and get down here. We’re going to pour some mud down by Fayetteville Street.”

  “In the middle of the night?” Robert said. “I don’t understand.”

  “I hope to God you never do,” Mitch said. “Listen to me, now. The fun and games are over. You come down here to the office, don’t ask any questions, and I mean no questions, and when this is done you go home and you keep your mouth shut.”

  Robert hung up. “I have to go into the office. Like, now.”

  “Is it Barrett?”

  “He won’t say. My best guess is he’s cooking up some kind of countermove against him. You know how weird Mitch has been getting. This could all be the drugs.”

  “Robert, is this going to be dangerous? If it is, don’t go. This baby has got to have a father.”

  “I don’t think it’s like that. It’s nuts, but I don’t think it’s dangerous.” He kissed her. “I won’t let anything happen to me. I pr—”

  “Don’t,” she said. “Don’t.”

  He brushed the hair from her forehead and kissed it. “I’ll be careful, okay?”

  *

  A cement mixer sat in the Mason and Antree parking lot. It had a full load, and the barrel was turning. Mitch sat behind the wheel. He had the window down and he beckoned to Robert to get in the passenger side.

  Robert got in. He looked at Mitch’s face and saw that he would keep quiet, like he’d been told. In Germany, Robert’s outfit had been required to make three parachute jumps. Mitch had the look that Robert had seen on one of the men before his first jump. He’d gone out the hatch, but the next day he’d filed for a transfer.

  Mitch was already fighting with the gearshift, trying to find reverse. “I drove one of these after college,” he said. Robert did not offer to take over. Mitch kept his gaze moving between the side-view mirrors and didn’t make eye contact with Robert. Finally he jammed the gears into place, got the behemoth turned around, and lumbered south toward Hayti.

  As they drove, Robert felt a chill spread from his stomach out to the ends of his fingers and toes. Part of it was exhaustion and the lateness of the hour; most of it was fear. Fear came off Mitch in palpable waves, a sense that the safe and normal world had tilted so far off axis that nothing would ever be the same. The feeling was so strong that it eradicated Robert’s curiosity. Now he silently echoed Mitch’s hope that he would never find out what was going on. He pulled in his shoulders and stared straight ahead, past the conical beams of the headlights, into the darkness.

  They rode the temporary blacktop across the canyon of the freeway. Robert didn’t turn his head to look at the glow of floodlights down in the cut. Mitch turned left in front of St. Joseph’s and followed the track of the access road down into the construction site, then swung a wide U-turn back to where the overpass would be. Leon and Tommy Coleman waited there. Their postures were all wrong; they looked worse than Mitch did.

  Mitch backed the truck up to the form on the north side of the overpass. One rear wheel collided repeatedly with something it couldn’t roll over. Robert did not want to know what it was. Still without looking at Robert, Mitch said, “Stay here.” He got out, leaving the truck idling. Something crashed and he got back in. He backed up another six feet and got out again.

  Robert heard muffled voices, then the familiar sound of the chute swinging out and the slurry rolling into it, like a hailstorm on a tin roof. Leon fired up his vibrator, the single-stroke engine roaring like the chainsaw it resembled. The familiar sounds helped. We’re just pouring some concrete, he told himself. Nothing unusual about that, except the hour. He could have gotten out and joined them, standing around the back of the truck like any other workday. Instead he stayed where he was.

  With every passing minute that he didn’t have to get out, he relaxed a little more. Still, the inside of his brain was white and locked down, as if pinned in a thousand watt spotlight.

  He didn’t look at his watch until the mixer was empty and Mitch had driven them back to the office. “Go home,” Mitch said then. It was not yet three. “Tell yourself this was all a bad dream. Do not tell anyone, not Mercy, not your wife, not anyone, what you saw tonight.”

  “I didn’t see anything,” Robert said.

  Mitch nodded. Apparently they were done. Robert got down and shut the door of the truck, and Mitch immediately pulled away.

  Robert walked slowly to his car. He’d thought it was later, thought the sun would be coming up. The stars shone fiercely, like they were giving their all for the final time. A faint breeze told him that he had sweated through his clothes without being aware of it. The air smelled of tar and the dumpsters on the corner, but to Robert it seemed fine. He lit a cigarette and leaned for a moment against the driver’s side of the Chevelle. His brain was starting to thaw. He refused to let it speculate.

  Mercy was still awake when he got home. “I need to shower,” he said, stripping off his damp clothes. “It was dusty at the site.”

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing,” Robert said. “We drove out to the site and back again. It could be Mitch was worried about Barrett and wanted me there. I don’t know.”

  Though there was nothing strictly untrue in what he’d said, he knew he had just lied to her for the first time. He watched himself do it with sadness, and yet no other possibility seemed available. Later, maybe, when he knew more, they would talk. After the baby was born.

  “Mitch is losing his mind,” Mercy said, turning away from him. “Hurry up and come to bed. You need your sleep.”

  *

  Robert was in the office by nine the next morning. Mitch had phoned in sick. “Probably hung over again,” Charles said. “He can’t seem to get it through his head that he ain’t twenty anymore.”

  Maurice was gone now, having made good on his threats at last, leaving Charles and Robert as the senior men in a bullpen of eager kids, none of whom had been out of college longer than three years. Charles was bigger than ever and had taken on Maurice’s role as chief cynic. And, like in the commercial, he was smoking more these days and enjoying it less.

  “I’ll be at the site,” Robert said,

  Leon and Tommy were already there, putting a slick trowel finish on a fresh load of concrete that completed the north buttress.

  “Captain,” Leon said, not looking him in the face. Tommy didn’t say anything at all, just dipped his trowel in a white plastic bucket and massaged the face of the concrete, bringing the fine, smooth grains to the surface.

  Robert nodded to them and kept walking.

  *

  Two weeks later they’d moved west to the Duke Street overpass. Late in the afternoon, as the sky had begun to cloud over, a runner from the office found Robert sitting on his haunches in front of a set of bluelines, the corners anchored by rocks. The runner had a pink sheet torn from a phone message pad that simply said, “Call M.R.”

  It was the code he and Mercy had agreed on. “Leon!” he yelled. “You’re in charge!”

  Leon said something he couldn’t hear—wasn’t meant to hear, most likely.

  Mercy was waiting on the porch, suitcase at her feet, as he squealed up to
the curb. She smiled as she stood up. “Be cool, baby,” she said, as he ran up to the porch. “Nothing’s going to happen for a while yet.”

  “Contractions?” He reached for her suitcase with one hand and her hand with the other.

  “About ten minutes apart. About—” Her face contorted and she sat back down. “About a minute long. Shit.”

  He held her hand until the pain subsided. She stood up and said, “Wait, now I have to pee again.”

  Robert could not keep still. He paced the porch, needing a job to do. Mercy laughed as she came out of the house. “Home stretch, sweetie,” she said, giving him a big, smacking kiss. “Like the jockey said. Now drive slow.”

  She’d insisted on Lincoln Hospital, near North Carolina College. Robert had pushed for Watts Hospital in his own neighborhood, but she wanted to be with the doctors who’d treated her throughout the pregnancy. Robert only knew that Lincoln was old, dark, and septic looking.

  Once she was in a semiprivate room, in a gown and in bed, she said, “There’s something I want you to do for me. I promise I won’t have the baby until you’re back.”

  “Back from where?”

  “I want you to bring my mama. I got word to her, and she’ll be ready to go when you get there. Get her and bring her to me. Please?”

  “I want to be here when—”

  “You will be. Most likely it’ll be another 12 hours. Will you do it for me?”

  He understood that her desire for her mother should not make him jealous, despite his prickly temper. Driving would at least give him something physical to do. “All right,” he said.

  He drove fast, but not carelessly. Mercy’s mother, as promised, had her own suitcase packed and was waiting by the front door. She was not one for small talk, and once she’d gotten an update on Mercy’s condition, they had run out of things to say. Then, unexpectedly, half an hour into the drive, she said, “When Mercy told me you wanted to keep the child, that you would stand by her, it told me what kind of man you are. It was what I already felt about you, and it made me glad it was true.”

  Since the night of the cement mixer, Robert had felt that he was no kind of man at all. “Thank you,” he said.

  To cover his unease, he began to talk to her about Dallas. He knew that Mercy had brought it up to her as a possibility. Now Robert laid out the scenario in detail and asked her to join them.

  She nodded. “It’s time for a change. I’ve been all my life in this one place, and lately it seems like everything I see reminds me of how much better things used to be.”

  “Good,” Robert said, surprised and relieved. “That’s good.”

  “Being alone is not everything it was once cracked up to be either,” she said, and Robert found himself opening up to her, telling her about the spaceport and pre-stressed concrete, and the vision of the future that had sustained him through the long and frustrating summer.

  Mercy, for her part, was as good as her word. She was still in her room, though her nightgown was soaked through with sweat and she was biting her lower lip with pain. “I read up on this,” she said, as her mother put one hand on Mercy’s bulging stomach and the other on her forehead. “This is the time when I’m supposed to feel like giving up. And you know what? I do.”

  It seemed wrong to Robert that she should hurt this much, wrong that the doctors weren’t investigating. He couldn’t stop himself from wishing that he’d taken her to Watts Hospital instead.

  At that moment a nurse and an orderly rolled a gurney up to her bedside. “Let’s get you into delivery,” the nurse said.

  As they lifted her onto the gurney, Mercy said, “Can my mother come in with me? She’s a nurse.”

  “We’ll see what the doctor says.” To Robert she said, “The floor nurse can take you to the obstetrics waiting room.”

  Robert caught Mercy’s hand for a final squeeze as they wheeled her away, saw her mouth the words “I love you,” and watched her disappear down the corridor.

  *

  The doctors, nurses, and staff were all black. If they found it odd to see him there, they did a decent job of hiding it. That was more than Robert could say about the two other expectant fathers in the waiting room who eyed him suspiciously until each, in turn, was called.

  By midnight Robert’s anxieties had full control. Until that night his greatest fear had been the one he could never speak aloud, even to himself: the fear that the child would be black. He wanted to believe it made no difference, even as the very persistence of the question made him a liar and a hypocrite in his own eyes.

  Now he was sure that Mercy, or the baby, or both, were dying or dead, and Mercy’s mother was holding him responsible. He imagined the operating theater awash in blood, Mercy terrified in a room full of strangers. He sat in a hard plastic chair and paged through a tattered copy of Ebony again and again, taking nothing in.

  Finally, at 2 a.m., a nurse he hadn’t seen before came in and said, “Mr. Cooper? Mother and son are both fine.”

  Mercy was alone with her mother when Robert got to the room. She was crying. Her mother was curled in a battered armchair by the window, asleep. He sat on the edge of the bed and took both her hands in his. He’d never seen her cry before, and now he thought the hospital had made a dreadful mistake. “Baby, what’s wrong?”

  “I’m just so tired, and relieved, and tired, and sore, and happy, and tired.” She smiled, but the tears kept coming.

  “It’s a boy,” Robert said.

  “Had to be. Felt like a six-year-old, coming out.”

  He was exhausted as well, had hardly slept in three weeks, had hoped that her happiness would lift him up with her, only to find himself now wanting to cry too.

  The nurse came in with a bundle of blankets. When Robert saw the pinkness of the ancient, wrinkled face, the tiny, pale, perfectly formed fingers, he hated his own feelings of relief.

  *

  When he called in sick the next morning, Mitch got on the phone. “Did she have the baby?”

  Robert didn’t ask how he knew. “It’s a boy,” he said. “We named him Malcolm.”

  “Congratulations. Take Monday off, too. You owe me a cigar.”

  Mercy’s mother had made herself a bed on the living room sofa. The next two days were disconnected fragments: sleeping, trying to sleep, driving back and forth from the hospital, watching the baby at Mercy’s breast, learning to change a diaper, finding himself endlessly fascinated by the tiny creature’s every movement, his rubbery face and twitching slumber.

  Sunday afternoon Mercy saw him watching the clock and feeling his own needs and desires clash with his promises. “Go,” she said. “There’s nothing you can do here, and at least you’ll get one good night’s sleep.”

  *

  On Monday he brought Malcolm and Mercy home from the hospital, and that afternoon he lay in Mercy’s bed as she slept curled against his side. Her mother snored in the living room, audible through the closed door, and Malcolm snored in the crib next to them. Robert had never known that babies snored.

  Mercy stirred, turned over, locked one leg around Robert’s, and put one arm across his chest. They were in their underwear, and the overworked air conditioner in the window leaked a thin stream of cool air. Mercy opened her eyes, pulled herself forward, and kissed Robert on the mouth. It had been a long time since she’d kissed him like that, and his reaction was instantaneous.

  She laughed and took hold of him. “Not much longer,” she said.

  He could barely speak. “How much, do you think? Longer?”

  “I’m sorry, baby. I have to heal up. They gave me an episiotomy, you know.”

  “No. Is that the spinal thing?”

  “It’s an incision.”

  She showed him. The doctor had cut her from the bottom of her vagina all the way to her anus, and then stitched her up again. The sight of it made Robert cringe from his diaphragm out to the ends of his fingers. “Oh my god,” he whispered.

  “It’s routine. Especially with a b
ig baby.”

  “It’s barbaric.”

  “I didn’t want them to do it. They don’t listen to you. They always think they know best.”

  He gathered her gently in his arms. “I am absolutely sure they don’t do anything like that in Dallas. It’s time to go.”

  She didn’t say anything, just held him tight against her.

  *

  “First of the year,” Arthur said. “That’s definite. I told him you had to start then or take another job, and he put it in writing. You start January second.”

  “That’s more than three months.”

  “You’ve still got the highway job. You can finish that up and have one last Christmas in North Carolina. Maybe you could go see your dad up in Asheville.”

  Robert had not yet told his father about Mercy. He couldn’t find the words, couldn’t picture acceptance on his father’s stern, Puritan face.

  “Just swear to me there won’t be any more delays,” Robert said.

  “I swear,” Arthur said.

  *

  On a rainy morning in early October, Mitch said, “What do you hear from your pal Barrett Howard these days?”

  Robert was stunned. Once he got past the sheer shock value of the question, a bubble of hope rose up inside him. For Mitch to even ask the question meant that the thing Robert had been unable to admit to himself, the thing he’d kept bottled up since that early September night, might not be true after all.

  “Barrett Howard?”

  “You can’t have forgotten him already. Big cat, very dark, used to be involved in local politics?”

  “Cut the crap, Mitch. What are you trying to say?”

  “I was wondering if you’d heard anything. There’s some stories going around.”

  “What kind of stories?”

  “Supposedly he’s been doing some fundraising. Got money from the Panthers, from Cuba, from the Soviets. Quite a bit of money. Then a few weeks ago he’s gone, and so is the money.”

  “And?”

  “And now he’s turned up in Mexico.”