Black & White

by Lewis Shiner

  Thursday, November 4

  Michael took his seat on the plane and began to clean out his cell phone.

  The first few calls were from Ruth, first angry then devastated, pleading with him to return his father’s ashes. Her last message was cold, telling him she was leaving for Dallas, if he cared.

  The calls from Roger overlapped the last from Ruth. He hoped Michael would reconsider. He trusted Michael would not make use of any confidential information that might have come out during their last talks. He felt that Michael’s continued silence was passive aggressive and quite immature.

  With each deleted message Michael felt lighter, more relaxed. Then the messages from Denise began.

  The first few were short. “Michael, where are you? Are you all right?” “Michael, please call me.”

  Then they got longer. “It seems like you don’t want to talk to me. I hope to God it’s nothing worse than that. I went by your hotel and they said you’d checked out. This feels like it’s all my fault.”

  It hurt to listen, but once he’d started he couldn’t stop. Maybe the next message would be definitive, would tell him what to feel. He melted when she said she missed him, then cooled when she said she didn’t want it to end this way. How, exactly, did she want it to end?

  The final message was from 7:32 that morning. “Michael, I know I shouldn’t keep calling. But I’m a little freaked out. There was this…thing outside my door this morning, sitting on my balcony. It’s like a, like a brown pillowcase or something. And it’s got these tools inside.”

  *

  He punched in her work number from memory, his hands shaking.

  “Denise Franklin.”

  “Thank God,” Michael said.

  “Michael? Where are you?”

  “I’m on the runway at RDU, on my way to talk to Ruth. Never mind that. Are you okay? Did anyone follow you to work?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so. What’s this all about?”

  “I have totally screwed up and now you’re in the middle of this.”

  “In the middle of what? Please slow down, you’re scaring me.”

  “I need you to be scared. And this plane is going to take off any minute, so I have to rush. Do you have anyone you can stay with, not a relative or somebody obvious? Just for a day or two, until I can get back there?”

  “Yes, probably, but why?”

  “That thing on your porch was a message from the NRC. They know I was in their meeting hall, and they’re telling me they know about you. Rachid needs to stay with friends too. Promise me neither of you will go back to the apartment without a police escort.”

  “Okay.”

  “I want you to call Sgt. Bishop right now and tell him what I told you. He knows I was trespassing on the Bynum farm. He’s going to be pissed that Vaughan found out, but that won’t stop him from giving you protection.” He gave her the number of Bishop’s cell.

  “Okay, I’ll call him as soon as we finish. What about you? They must be looking for you, too. Do they have people in Dallas that can find you?”

  “I won’t be in Dallas long. Overnight, maybe, no more than that. Then I’m coming back to Durham.”

  “You are?”

  He tried to read the emotion in her voice. It sounded like hope. “Yes,” he said. “I’m going to have to lie low until Saturday. After that, one way or another, the NRC should be slowed down for a while.”

  “One way or another?”

  “I’ve learned a lot in the last couple of days. The short version is, Barrett Howard’s activist group is still around, and Dr. Donald Harriman is up to his ears in it. I told him the NRC is going after American Tobacco. If the cops don’t stop them, Harriman’s people will.”

  “Oh my God. People could be killed.”

  “Maybe,” he said, stung. “If the cops can’t control it. What else was I supposed to do? I can’t let them get away with whatever it is they’re planning. It could be a bomb, a riot, I don’t know what.”

  “I’m not blaming you. The NRC started this. It’s just terrifying to think about open race warfare on the streets of Durham.”

  “It is war. I never saw it before because I was a bystander. It’s been war ever since Lincoln told the South to give up their slaves. I don’t see any end to it.”

  “I’ve never heard you this angry. Is this because of me?”

  Michael forced himself to take a long breath. “Maybe,” he said. “I’m also scared, and I don’t know what my life is going to look like if I make it through this. I’m tired of living out of hotel rooms and I’m tired of being alone.”

  It was out. In the silence that followed, the flight attendant announced that they were about to push back from the gate and that all cell phones needed to be turned off. Michael said, “Are you still there?”

  “Yes,” Denise said. “I don’t like being alone so much anymore either.”

  “What do you want to do about it?”

  “Can I…can we see each other? Talk face to face?”

  “You know I want to see you more than anything. I’m not the one with the conflicts and the questions.” The words seemed harsher than he wanted.

  “I told you from the beginning we needed to go slow.”

  “Slow is fine. As long as we’re both going the same direction.”

  After another long silence she said, “I don’t want to be without you, Michael.”

  “Okay, then. That’s what I needed to hear.”

  “I miss you.”

  “I miss you too. Can I call you tonight?”

  “Please. It doesn’t matter how late.”

  The attendant was standing over him, a sympathetic look on her face. “I have to go,” Michael said. “I’ll call you.”

  *

  Another airport, another rental desk. His father’s house was in a subdivision of upscale custom-built homes near White Rock Lake in East Dallas. Michael took Mockingbird Lane all the way, the route so familiar he could drive it in his sleep, yet now also strange, dreamlike.

  He parked in the driveway, careful not to block the garage door. The lawn had yellowed from lack of water and the house seemed unkempt, like someone who slept in his clothes. His father had designed and built the place himself in the early nineties, an upper floor at street level and a lower floor that grew out of the hillside and extended down toward the creek. He’d put his office in that lower section, in a room with windows on three sides, surrounded by willows, looking out on feeders for birds and squirrels, the creek visible in the background.

  It helped to think of his father in that room full of light, alternating between working on a set of piece drawings and watching the animals. He must have found moments of peace there, even with Ruth upstairs, even with the cancer and the secrets eating away at him.

  Michael got out of the car and rang the doorbell. He could hear a TV tuned to a talk show. Ruth’s heels clacked across the tile, and the light behind the peephole went dark.

  When the door opened, the chain was on it. “What do you want?” she asked. The wedge of sunlight coming through the door lit up one shoulder of a pale blue jogging suit, a thin silver watchband. Beyond that, it seemed she’d had a permanent and was fully made up.

  “We have to talk,” Michael said.

  “What about?”

  “Your father.”

  “Did you bring Robert’s ashes?”

  “They’re in Beechwood Cemetery in Durham.”

  Ruth closed the door and Michael heard a deadbolt snap shut.

  He raised his voice. “If you don’t talk to me, I’ll go to the newspapers.”

  After a long moment the door opened again, still on the chain. “What are you talking about?”

  “ ‘Local farmer headed hate group for forty years.’ It could make the national wire.”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  “I’ve got nothing to lose. Are you going to let me in?”

  This time when the door opened, the chain was off. Michael followed
her into the living room, where he found the remote and shut off the television. “They only had crackers on the plane,” he said. “I’m going to make a sandwich.”

  She led the way into the kitchen, then sat on the stepstool by the phone and watched him go through the refrigerator. “You’re limping,” she said. “And your face is torn up. What happened?”

  “I cut myself shaving,” he said. He found peanut butter and jelly and made two sandwiches. As always, there were single serving bags of Fritos in the cabinets. What had changed, he realized, was that she had removed the few traces of his father that had marked the upstairs—awards from the shelves above the TV, framed drawings from the dining room walls.

  “Michael, you have changed so much lately that I would hardly know you. You have become cruel, sarcastic, spiteful, and withdrawn. It started the day you moved out of the Brookwood. I don’t know what brought it on, but it has hurt me more than I can say.”

  It was true. He’d seen a dark and petty side of himself in the last few days and weeks that he didn’t care for. “I’m sorry,” he said. He stood there awkwardly in the middle of the kitchen, holding his plate. “I didn’t set out to hurt you. The lies and the secrets got to be more than I could stand.”

  “You act like it was all me. Your father had more than his share of secrets as well.”

  “Then how about this? Let’s start over, as of now, and tell nothing but the truth. Can we do that? Talk to each other honestly and openly, without anger or fear or blame. Clear the air, once and for all. And then see where we are when we’re done.”

  She thought it over. “I’m not sure if I can trust you.”

  “That’s fair enough. I expect we both need to earn each other’s trust at this point. And either one of us can back out at any moment.”

  He took her silence as provisional agreement. “I would really like to hear you talk about your father,” he said. “Anything you wanted to tell me.”

  “Why?” she asked. “Why this sudden concern with a man you showed no interest in for your entire life?”

  He was careful with his answer. “You know what it was like around here. Whenever the subject of your father came up, it seemed to make Dad angry. Kids watch things like that, and they learn not to talk about them.”

  Ruth nodded. “Adults too. He made me ashamed of my own family. You still haven’t answered my question. And we’re supposed to be telling the truth, right?”

  “Okay. I think your father may have murdered Barrett Howard.”

  “You must be joking.”

  “I think some of his fellow Night Riders brought Barrett out to the farm. Your father killed him there, maybe in that secret meeting room downstairs.”

  “You’ve been busy, I see.”

  “The murder weapon was a cobbler’s awl that he kept in that glass case in the living room.”

  Ruth shook her head. “Sit down and eat. I’ll fix you some iced tea.”

  Michael sat and tore open the bag of Fritos. He was so tense that the chips scattered across the tabletop.

  As she poured the tea, Ruth said, “There was no glass case in the living room, and no cobbler’s awl, not that I ever saw. Not on all my trips to the farm, not even on those few I had the gumption to take after we moved to Dallas. My father never killed this black man. He was many things, but he was not some savage that would take pleasure in an act like that. He was a leader. There were things he…I didn’t always…”

  She didn’t finish the thought. “People loved and respected him,” she said, “and they did anything he asked them to. But he never ordered them to kill this black man either.”

  Michael started to say something, and then understanding came to him in a rush, like a map unfolding in his head. Bright red lines like Interstate highways connected all the small, isolated stories, and together they made a pattern that could not be contested.

  “He had friends,” Michael said, “at the Army Recruiting Office in Raleigh, didn’t he?”

  “He had friends everywhere.”

  “These particular friends were willing to backdate a few enlistment forms, weren’t they? To please Wilmer Bynum and get themselves a healthy, white, high-school graduate athlete to send to Vietnam?”

  Ruth didn’t answer, didn’t need to.

  “It was Greg Vaughan that killed Howard,” Michael said. “And your father put him in the Army to get him out of town and give him an alibi at the same time.” He had a sudden memory of Vaughan at the stove in his trailer, a flaring match lighting a fatal hunger in his eyes.

  “And the Army taught him all kinds of skills,” Michael went on, “like how to blow things up. Skills that he used to firebomb Service Printing and the Carolina Times.” And, he thought but did not say out loud, skills he’s going to use to set off a bomb on Saturday at the American Tobacco complex.

  Ruth sat down on the far side of the table, her back to the sliding glass doors and the willows. “My father didn’t know about the killing. Not until Greg came to him and told him what he’d done. My father was very angry, and Greg had only done it to please him. He knew how much my father hated that man.”

  “It was your father that called Mitch Antree.”

  “He called Randy Fogg in Washington and made him do it.”

  “Who put the body in the form?”

  “Greg and some of the older men. They knew how to…clean up afterwards.”

  Michael was sure that they did. “What about the fire bombings?”

  “Well, we were here in Dallas when all that happened.”

  “Yes. And…?”

  Ruth looked down at the table. “Greg wrote me about them. Nothing direct. He said that he was carrying on the work. It wasn’t hard to figure what he meant, when I heard about the fires.”

  “Do you still have those letters?”

  Ruth fluttered her hands. “I don’t know. Maybe. Somewhere.”

  “Never mind,” Michael said. “It doesn’t matter. Keep talking. Tell me everything. Everything.”

  RUTH

  1940-1970

  All little girls love their fathers, but it seemed to Ruth that none of them had ever loved the way that she did.

  From the time she was 4 she understood that her father was the most important man in Johnston County. Her older sisters told her so, when they weren’t tormenting her, stealing her toys, and telling her she was adopted. She understood even then that they were jealous of the special love her father had for her.

  No grownup life could compare to the childhood she had. She was able to run for hours in any direction and never leave her father’s land. The whole world came to her, including the ice cream truck every Saturday in the summer, even during World War II when other people had to do without. There were horses in the corral, ducks in the pond, pigs and chickens in their pens, cats and dogs everywhere, all of them living off her father’s bounty.

  At night they would sit by the radio and listen to the comedy and variety shows, all except for her mother, who disapproved. Ruth always sat next to her father on the big couch. Her favorite program was Make Believe Ballroom, where she imagined she was dancing for hours in her father’s arms.

  Sometimes parents who came to visit would bring their children. The mothers would go into the kitchen and the fathers would go in the study with Ruth’s father and close the door. The other fathers were usually downcast and sometimes ashamed going in; most of the time they had big smiles by the time they came out.

  The little girls treated Ruth and her sisters like royalty. Ruth would show them her dollhouse and her dolls and all their clothes, or take them down to the swimming hole, where some of her father’s friends had dammed the creek for her, or out to the swings and monkey bars and the real tin-floored slide at the side of the house.

  Boys required a different strategy, often staying in their fathers’ pickup trucks wearing sullen faces. Still Ruth could usually coax them out to see the new John Deere Model B tractor, with cultivator and hay rake attachments, and the
high seat where she would ride on her father’s lap.

  *

  She couldn’t remember the first time she saw a Negro. Most likely it was on a trip into Smithfield with her mother. Milk and groceries were delivered, her mother made most of their clothes, and their church was near them in the countryside. That left little reason to go to town, which suited Wilmer perfectly well, if not Ruth or her sisters.

  Negroes were as alien to her as crawfish. Her mother told her that she must be kind to them because their lives were hard. Ruth pictured them doing the labor that animals did, dragging plows, pulling stumps, carrying loads of firewood on their backs.

  Later she understood that many people had Negroes who worked in their homes, cleaning, cooking, doing yard work. One night, when it was her turn to do the dishes, Ruth asked why they didn't have somebody to do them for her, like her friend Mary had.

  “We do our own work here,” her father said. “Every one of us.”

  *

  Ruth was 5 when Orpha was born. It was not the brother she had hoped for; instead it was another girl to have to share her father with.

  “Look who’s not the baby anymore,” her sister Esther told her. “We’ll see how you like it now.”

  It didn’t help that Ruth had to start kindergarten before Orpha was a month old. To be separated from her father as her father was preoccupied with this little drowned rat of a child was too cruel. On top of that, they put Orpha’s crib in the room Ruth had formerly had to herself, the room her father had built especially for her. It reminded Ruth of the Bible story where Adam and Eve had to leave the Garden of Eden, only Ruth hadn’t broken any rules, at least not any big ones. At night she would ask God to take Orpha back to Him, and then curl up and hide under the covers in shame at her own evil thoughts.

  When Orpha “failed to thrive,” as the doctors called it, Ruth was tortured by guilt. One day she heard her father tell a hired hand that Ruth’s mother had been too old to have another child, and that he didn’t know if Orpha would ever have a normal life. In his tone of voice she heard him pulling back from the sickly Orpha, and her instinctive thrill of triumph brought on more nights of torment.