Perdition, U.S.A.

by Gary Phillips

  “Yes, you can see I rented it.”

  “May I see the papers?”

  “They’re in the glove compartment.”

  The cop—his name tag read Anderson—centered his pale blues on Monk’s hands as if they were going to leave his body and find a knife or pick a pocket. Then he shifted them in his unblinking face. “Get them, will you?” He moved his heavy body around to the passenger side, the strap still on the holster.

  Monk got in the car and reached across to the glove box, the cop watching him too casually. He got the contract out and came out of the car.

  He handed the folded NCR paper to the cop.

  “What brings you to Perdition, Mr. Monk?”

  He gave him the same story he told in the restaurant.

  Anderson handed the stuff back to Monk.

  “So you might be bringing some business here, huh.”

  “Could be.”

  Those unfathomable blues gave away nothing, then he tossed off a “Be seeing you” and got back in his cruiser, driving away.

  Monk started his car and headed for Oray’s room and board, unclear of how to interpret his encounter.

  Juanita Oray’s place was a three-story nondescript wood frame house. Its saving grace was an enclosed porch that fronted it on two sides. The roof was peaked, the trim was chipped, and a tan boxer slept on the front lawn as Monk approached along the walkway.

  The dog raised a lumpy head and looked at him disinterestedly. Monk found himself in a narrow foyer from which a front parlor extended on the right. An elderly Asian man in a lumberjack coat—Monk guessed him to be Chinese—was watching a soap opera on the TV. The furniture was neat, and like the house, of no particular style or era.

  “May I help you?” a voice said. The owner was a lean older black woman, of above average height, in a gray dress with matching gray hair which was pulled back from an unblemished forehead. She held a pencil in one hand and idly pointed it in Monk’s direction.

  “Yes, ma’am, I’d like to rent a room for about a week or so. I’d be happy to pay in advance.”

  “So would I.” She came toward him, extending her hand. “I’m Juanita Oray, and I suppose you know this is my rooming house.”

  Monk introduced himself and gave her his cover story.

  She seemed to be assessing the information as she bobbed the pencil’s eraser up and down on the end of her thumb. “Well, Mr. Monk, Perdition is made up of many a good hard working folk. But you know, like in the big city, it’s got its ups and downs.”

  “I understand some of the Elihu’s are still around,” he said conversationally.

  “Yes, so?”

  “They still have juice like the gent they made the statue for in the park?”

  She crinkled a brow. “Why’s that important to know?”

  He folded his arms. “Don’t you find it interesting that people with the ability to live anywhere would still stay in Perdition?”

  Nonplused, she retorted, “We got ’lectricity in just last winter.”

  Embarrassed, Monk tried to make up ground. “I guess everybody doesn’t have a fever to live in smog, crime and the bright lights of Hollywood.

  “Uh-huh.” She waved a hand at the dining room table in the part of the house to the left of the foyer. “Would you like some tea or juice?” There was nothing on the table, but beyond it was a swing door to the kitchen.

  “Thank you, but I’ll just go get my stuff then pay you.”

  She was already heading for the kitchen door. “That’s fine.”

  Monk wheeled about as a young man strode through the front door. He was taller than Monk and more than a decade his junior. The younger man was a light-skinned African American and wore a black leather jacket, a mudcloth motif shirt, and jeans tattered at the knees. His hair was closely shaved to his squarish head, but there was a single braided strand in the back that extended further than the jacket’s collar. An ankh earring dangled from one ear. The dog had followed him inside, suddenly energetic.

  “Look at this, mom.” The young man shoved a piece of paper at the older woman. The dog sat on his foot and sneezed.

  Juanita Oray opened the paper as if it were a pirate’s treasure map, one hand grasping the top, the other pulling it from the bottom. “Shit,” she said softly upon reading the contents. She lifted her head. “You gotta be cool about this, Orin.”

  For the first time, the son acknowledged Monk’s presence by raising an eyebrow in his direction. “On your way to Spokane, mister?”

  “I meant to come here.”

  Orin bent and scratched the dog under its chin and said to his mother, “What are we supposed to do? Wait and see if the mighty white Sheriff Hamm and his do-nothing men do their duty?

  “You can’t stop them from having a rally.” Forlornly, Juanita Oray stared at the paper again.

  “Sure we can,” Orin countered, rising. “As far as I’m concerned, Bright and those bastards ain’t got no rights of free speech or assembly.”

  “Orin,” she warned in the universal tone of scolding mothers.

  “You sticking around for the carnival, man?” Orin gently took the paper from his mother’s hand and passed it over to Monk.

  “I saw them putting some up in the town park.” He took the paper and placed it on the dining room table.

  “Where you from?” Orin tried to ask casually.

  “That’s none of your business. You ain’t running this rooming house.” His mother put a hand on her side.

  A mood shift seized the lanky youngster and he leaned over and kissed his mother on the cheek. “I’m going over to Dudley’s for some grub.”

  “You ain’t fooling no one with that act.”

  “I’m just hungry, mom.”

  All playfulness left her voice as she spoke. “Look, Orin, I agree we need to stand up to people like Bright, but that don’t mean we use their means.”

  “That loving your enemy stuff went out with liberals and midnight basketball.” He chucked the dog on the head and the animal followed him as he walked out into the sun.

  The man in the easy lounger hadn’t stirred, absorbed in his program. Monk fingered the flyer, a duplicate of the one in his back pocket. “Has Bright been in Perdition long?”

  “Lately, off and on for about a year now.” She adjusted a sampler in a round walnut frame, her face hidden from his vision. “I grew up here, Mr. Monk. My folks came from Oklahoma in the forties to work the Kaiser shipyards down in Portland.” She moved toward the swing door again.

  “They lived in wartime housing in the Vanport projects.” She stopped, one hand on the glass rectangle of the swing door. Her body leaned forward, as if deciding to step through the portal and somehow close off the past. She didn’t move through it.

  “After the war,” she began, “the fathers of Portland hemmed and hawed as to what to do with all these black workers and returning soldiers. People organized and demanded that the city Housing Authority make the Vanport Projects permanent. See the city had always resisted creating a viable expansion plan. But now with all these people, they didn’t have much choice.” She decided to sit in one of the cabriolet chairs at the large drop leaf table.

  “Edgar Kaiser put his two bits in and brought out Robert Moses.”

  “The Robert Moses, the man who designed modern New York?” Monk asked.

  “One and the same. He may have been the cat’s pajamas of urban renewal back east, but folks out here criticized his plan for ignoring landmarks and old neighborhoods. Anyway, the council adopted his plan. But rebuilding didn’t happen soon enough and come the Winter of ’48, a dike near Vanport gave way and washed out the shoddy projects. Displaced, my folks moved on and settled here, which was a booming city at the time.”

  Monk sat down also. “Was Perdition very prejudiced?”

  “Not so bad. All kinds of people migrated here. It wasn’t Disneyland, but it wasn’t a Selma either. The town has some rough spots, especially after the timber started to run th
in by the early ’80s. Added to that, most of the farms have been bought up by big agribusiness concerns.

  “Plus there’s always been a strong fundamentalist current around here, and they kind of got their hindquarters up as the recession hit. And what with all the rising supremacist movement not too far away in Idaho, they found fertile ground for raising a new crop of haters.”

  Monk leaned back, taking mental notes. “So a local ARM gets started.”

  “Yes. But there was already skinheads. Both kinds.”

  “Your son Orin?”

  She smiled ruefully. “Rameses as he prefers to be called among his posse.”

  “You tell all your guests this fascinating history?”

  “I figured you ought to know. What with you being who you are and scouting for a company that could help turn this town around. It seems to me you should know what you’re getting into.”

  Guilt made Monk involuntarily shift his eyes to the floor then back up. “I don’t have the last word in the matter.”

  She was already up and moving. “It seems nobody black in this country ever does.”

  He paid, settled in, and took a stroll around the town. He’d expected a pronounced demarcation between the racial sections of Perdition. Instead, the northern area he was in seemed older, modest in its dwellings, but mixed in its racial makeup, with whites, some blacks, a healthy number of Latinos and a handful of Asians, if he could judge by the kids he passed wandering home from school. Closing into the downtown, he noticed some interracial couples about, several of them sporting the modified gangster style favored among the young and hip-hop.

  At the southern end, the homes got larger, the lawns more spacious. He saw fewer faces of color about. The houses were built in the post-Victorian/San Francisco style, with an occasional brick-and-wood Plantation number. In the driveways, Monk observed C4 and Cabrera Porsches and 540i Beemers laced among the Marquis station wagons and even a red Jeep or two. The Jeeps caught his attention and he noted the addresses where they were parked.

  He came to a house with a jockey implanted in its trim, sloping greenery. Though it had been painted over in an off-pink, some of the paint had chipped away. Flecks of dark umber, like a runaway skin disease, mottled the jockey’s immobile countenance. One of the arms was outstretched but the ring that normally would have been on the end was missing. Monk wondered if the owners of the house had put the ring in the nose of a larger statue.

  “Can I help you?”

  He’d heard the car approach and turned his head slightly to address the deputy sitting behind the wheel. “Just enjoying the sights,” he said tersely.

  “You the one work for some kind of computer company?” He was already getting out of the car. It wasn’t Anderson, the deputy who’d stopped him earlier. This one was shorter and wore two-toned aviator glasses. Oates was the name on his tag. He had the deceptive build of a wrestler and an affable smile was affixed to his pleasant face. “I don’t mean to put you out or anything, but you being a stranger, well you just naturally stick out is all.”

  “Perdition isn’t that small,” Monk observed.

  “We’re just trying to be vigilant. We hear there’s going to be quite a few outsiders coming to town.”

  “Because of the white supremacists’ rally.”

  Oates nodded. “Don’t judge this place ’cause of some kooks.”

  Monk didn’t reply.

  “Well, thanks for your time, Mr. Monk.” He adjusted the hat on his head and climbed back into the cruiser. “If you have a notion I’d suggest getting over to Jenson Lake. Its been stocked recently with some Rainbow trout.”

  “Thanks,” Monk replied.

  “You bet.” The car eased away.

  Monk pursed his lips and continued his appraisal of the town, eventually meandering back along Hollis, the main drag in the northern end of Perdition, where the neighborhood people did their business. There was a funeral home with an overhanging roof supported by plaster Grecian columns; a restaurant called Dudley’s Shack, Fine Eating a Specialty; a hardware store; a quick print establishment, a beauty parlor, and an engine rebuilding shop. Added to the mix were a bodega and a carne asada especials stand by the name of Lizardo.

  But the hub of activity as the sun went down was a place called Velotis Records. It wasn’t right on Hollis, but down a side alley. The record shop had a blue awning perpendicular over the entrance so that as you walked past, you could see the name in script on the side of the fabric. What drew Monk to it was spotting Juanita Oray’s son standing under the awning, vigorously talking with some others.

  In age and manner, they seemed to be the doppelgangers of the crew that Malik Bradford had assembled in Pacific Shores. But this group included a number of whites and women. Some were dressed in the baggy pants look while a couple of them held to a more Rasta-like aesthetic of dreads and untrimmed beards.

  One of the women, a chunky muscular white woman wearing a straining white T-shirt and leather waist jacket, had her blonde hair frizzed out with tangerine-colored tips.

  Monk came up to the shop’s entrance in time to catch one of the gathered vigorously jabbing a finger at Rameses.

  “… When Bright gets here, I say we fuck him up. Fuck his shit up for good.”

  Rameses cold-eyed the kid with his baby browns and a cloister-like silence descended on the group. He remained rigid, staring straight ahead as Monk, tipping his head to the younger man, made to enter the record shop. Several of the troop were bunched in the doorway, but they parted to let him in. The door was shut on his back, and the group departed.

  Several patrons browsed along the isles of the store whose inventory included the usual pop and R&B fare on tape and CD, plus a healthy collection of vinyl. In several back bins were 78’s persevering in their original cardboard protectors.

  Monk got wondrously lost reading through such titles as Ivory Joe Hunter on the Pacific label; Nat King Cole with Bill May and his orchestra on Capitol; and the Mills Brothers on Decca doing “You Always Hurt the One you Love.”

  He wanted to believe these were the ancient sounds, the calls from an uncomplicated era. It would be nice if it had been, but it was also a time of lynchings and Jim Crow. But those days were gone, right? Yeah, that’s why America voted the right-wingers into office across the country. Cut them lazy bastards off welfare and give their kids to orphanages to raise ’em up right. Turn out even more black and brown men prepared for prison than college. Everything was just swell in the New World Darwinian Order.

  Then Jimmy Henderson’s respirator, rising and falling in ominous heaves, intruded on him. Maybe life was meant to be one big wheel for black folks. A never-ending cycle of hate and fear and doubt that they pushed around and around.

  Monk caught himself holding onto a brittle platter, his hands shaking, threatening to splinter the disc into countless pieces. After some effort, he focused and got back to browsing.

  He found an Erskine Hawkins he’d been looking for and paid at the counter. The proprietress behind it was heavyset, of uncertain age. Her coloring was a lustrous mahogany. She chomped on an unlit thin cigar in a holder with a gold band on the end of it. The woman looked vaguely familiar to Monk, and as he made to leave, it came to him.

  “You’re Lonetta Thomas.”

  What might have been a reaction made the holder in her mouth twitch. She spoke around it, “You don’t miss much, huh?”

  The voice surprised him. It was like listening to a whisper in an echo chamber.

  “Throat cancer, took out one of my vocal chords,” she said, used to the look he gave her. “Can’t be much of a singer without your pipes.”

  “I’m sorry,” was all Monk could say.

  “It’s cool. Ain’t nothing but life, baby. You the cat that’s been looking over our town.”

  “Yeah, we might be setting up our interactive division here.”

  “You gonna bring all them kill-the-aliens computer CDs with you, ain’t you?”

  Monk ha
d to laugh. “We’re not going to open up retail, Ms. Thomas. Anybody who’s got ‘Blue Yodel’ by Jimmy Rodgers on vocals and guitar, I’d stand in the doorway if the wrecker comes.”

  That got her going and they exchanged a few asides on jazz and blues artists. Monk, pretending he was ready to go, asked as casually as he could. “You think there’s going to be trouble at Bobby Blight’s rally?”

  She sucked in an audible amount of air. “I don’t know, mister. One way I say fine, let him have his say and the devil take the sonofabitch. But honestly, I wouldn’t mind somebody sending him and some of his kind to hell a little quicker.”

  “Like Rameses and his merry bunch?”

  “Worried about the business climate?” she said in her oddly compelling sotto.

  “Something like that. You know I’m not just the token blood in the firm.”

  She leaned her large frame across the counter, a glass top with a patchwork of business cards trapped beneath it. “Bright ain’t as big as he thinks he is. He ain’t the peckerwood’s answer to Malcolm X.”

  “Malcolm broadened his agenda.”

  “Well, Bobby hasn’t, and that ain’t changed since the days he was a punk around here in high school.”

  Monk was about to pursue that interesting information when one of the browsers, tired of waiting, came over. She got her opening and let fly with questions about hard-to-find numbers. Monk left and walked back to Juanita’s rooming house.

  The front parlor was empty but the TV was still on. At the other end of the hall was a small phone alcove with a built-in desk and overhead light. He picked up the handset and dialed Jill’s number. He hung up before completing it, and looked at the phone as if it were an alien device sent on a mission to betray him.

  He wanted a drink and his woman. He’d get the first wish in a bar he’d passed on his way back. But booze would hold no answers for where he and Jill were heading. Instead, he went up to his room and lay on the bed with his clothes and shoes on. From outside, he could feel the low rumble of 18-wheelers as they made their way along the interstate.