“Oh . . . yeah. That’s why you’re here.”
“Shall we begin?”
“It’s funny that you came here just now,” I said. “I mean, not funny, but . . . I was just writing to my sister—”
“Angeline Vaness-Brownley,” Lance Harding of the FRC interjected. “She lives in Cambridge with her husband, Ivan Brownley, the union organizer.”
“Wha’? Oh, right, Seth’s sister too. How much do you know about us?”
“About you, particularly, we know that you have never been charged with, much less convicted of, a crime and that most of your adult life you were either employed or at college. You have three years matriculation at Cal State. Your concentration was in history, but you dropped out and began to work for various businesses. You’ve never been married, but you were once engaged to a woman named Irene Littleton.”
“Seth told you all that?”
“No.”
“Then where’d you get it?”
Harding’s face was oblong and a little larger than even his tall frame might predict. For the most part his expression was tranquil, but my question teased out a mild frown.
“I am here at your brother’s request,” he said.
“But you know all this shit about me, and he didn’t tell you. So I’d like to know where you got it.”
“Nora Dunbar,” he replied, his face once again at peace.
“Who?”
“She is the statistical and research analyst at our firm. When a client engages our services, Miss Dunbar does a background check on the client and the recipient of the message or package.”
“Why?”
Harding sighed and then said, “Suppose the message that someone wished to pass on was a name and an address. If the recipient was a known killer, or maybe someone who had a grudge against a person with the name we were being asked to deliver, we would refuse the job. We are not bound by fealty to the state, but we are a moral corporation.”
“So you wanted to make sure that I wasn’t a hit man or a stalker or somethin’?”
“Quite right.”
“But you figured that I was a good bet and that you could deliver your message without messin’ anything up.”
The great sculpted face smiled and bobbed.
“You got a sliding scale you charge?” I asked. I realized that I wasn’t eager to obtain information passed on to me across the border of death.
“We charge five thousand dollars, plus expenses, for every message a client wishes to charge us with.”
“Expenses?”
Lance Harding smiled and seemed to relax a bit. He gave the impression of having surrendered to my fear of his charge.
“Once we were engaged by a woman to deliver an apple pie she’d baked to the man she loved but never married,” he said. “In order to keep the pie in fair condition we had to freeze it. The accommodations were made, and she was charged accordingly.”
“So, Seth paid five thousand dollars for you to deliver this message to me?”
“That is the fee all clients are charged,” he said, “plus expenses.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Three reasons. First, I can’t see Seth payin’ that kinda money, when he coulda sent a letter to my sister or our mother to give me after he died. Secondly, I can’t see Seth spendin’ that kinda money on me—period. And third, traveling all over the country and the world makin’ these kinda visits would cost a lot more than five thousand dollars.”
I would have talked all day long to keep this man, the most official man I had ever met, from discharging his message.
“As to your first two arguments—we question our clients, but never their money, once they’ve passed our qualification test. Your third dispute would make sense if the FRC didn’t have regions of responsibility divided among its various agents. My area is California. You asked why I’m late delivering this message. That is because I was in central and northern California for the last two weeks. We would like to have delivered this communication exactly at the six-month mark, but the wording of your brother’s last request allowed me some leeway: ‘not less than six months after my demise.’”
I had nothing left to ask, but still I was not ready for any information from the dead.
“Are all the people who work for the FCR white?” The question was one my stepfather would have had me ask.
“FRC,” Lance corrected. “Most of the employees of the company are Caucasian but not all. Now, may I deliver my charge?”
I took in a deep breath, exhaled, and then nodded.
Lance Harding reached into the left side of his red-brown jacket with his right hand.
I leaped up from my chair, sure that he was going to take out a gun or a knife—my fear was that great.
But the FRC agent merely brought out an ivory envelope, almost exactly the same color as his skin.
“This is the letter that your brother charged us to deliver,” he said. “As I hand it to you, our duty in this matter is fulfilled.”
He extended the hand, offering me the rectangle of paper. I hesitated before taking it.
The mood was so ceremonial that I expected some kind of devastation or revelation to follow. But nothing happened.
The FRC agent stood abruptly.
“I will leave you to do with the letter as you will,” he said.
“Don’t you want me to sign something?” I asked. “To prove that you actually gave me this?”
“The client didn’t ask for corroboration,” he said, smiling. “That usually means that the delivery contains nothing of material value. I can see myself out.”
I sat there at the messy table, holding the still-sealed envelope, for long minutes after Lance Harding was gone. Something about the white man’s demeanor—coupled with the fact that I had been writing a letter concerning Seth when the strange note from him arrived—was, to say the least, eerie. Something having to do with me not attending his funeral, I thought, and now he was reaching out to me . . .
I put the letter down and picked up my smartphone. I entered A-N-G, and Angeline’s number appeared.
She answered on the fourth ring.
“Where are you?” she said, instead of hello.
“At home.”
“But you’re on your cell.”
“I had the landline disconnected, figured I didn’t need two numbers. People hardly ever call one.”
“You’re not a kid anymore, Roger. Having your phone disconnected makes you seem transient.”
“How’s Boston, Sis?”
“Cold. They’re predicting snow for tomorrow.”
“Snow? It’s not even Thanksgiving yet.”
“How are you, Rog?”
“All right. Have you heard from Seth?”
“What?”
“A letter, package, or somethin’?”
“Seth is dead.”
“I know,” I said. “I know, but a guy just dropped by and hand-delivered a letter to me that Seth had set up before he died.”
Angeline didn’t say a word for at least a minute. This told me more than any confession or lie: whatever it was that Seth was telling me, Angeline knew before I did.
“Did you read it?” she asked at last.
“No. Not yet. I was wondering if he’d sent the same note to you and Mom.”
“You should burn it, Roger,” she said. “Nothing good can come from a dead man’s hand.”
“The guy brought it to me was very much alive.”
“Burn it, shred it, or just throw it away, Roger,” she said, in her best big-sister voice. “You know how Seth was always trying to mess with you.”
“What does it say, Angeline?”
“How do you expect me to know?”
“Don’t you mess with me, Sis.”
“I haven’t heard anything from Seth, and neither has Mom, for all I know. I talked to her last Monday, and she didn’t say anything about any letters.”
“How is Mom?”
“Fine. She said that she hasn’t heard from you in over six months. You know you could go to her house. She’s just a few miles from your place. It’s a shame I see her more often than you do, and here I live three thousand miles away.”
All the anger that I had at my mother and sister and deceased stepfather, Norland Reese, came up in my breast.
“I gotta go, Angeline,” I said.
“Wait, Roger. What about that letter . . . ?”
I pressed the red icon on my smartphone, and the connection was broken. Putting the little device down, I picked up the sealed envelope again.
Seth had terrorized me when we were children. He would lock me in closets and trunks just for a laugh. I learned the value of silence from him. Because if he put me in the big trunk in the attic of our house, I learned that he would never let me out as long as I yelled. But if I was quiet, he worried that maybe I had suffocated or something. He was the kind of torturer who fed off the screams of his victims.
I might have hated my brother, but his brand of torment wasn’t nearly as bad as that of my parents—I should say my mother and her husband Norland. My blood father was a white man named Patrick Hand. The story goes that he abandoned our family when I was two, Angeline was four, and Seth five.
“He just ran off and left me with three children and a dollar seventy-five,” my mother would say. Then she’d spit on the ground, cursing him.
Seth never believed that our father abandoned us. Patrick Hand was a known gambler, and Seth was convinced that he had been slaughtered over a bad debt, and that our mother, instead of cursing him, should have gone out looking for his killers.
Norland wouldn’t let Seth tell that tale. He was of my mother’s opinion and ruled over us with an iron fist.
In my mind I managed to believe both Seth and my mother. Sometimes I hated my father; at others I prayed for his murdered soul.
Dear Roger,
I know that we haven’t talked in a long time. We might not ever talk again if what the doctors say about my heart is true. They’re telling me that I better settle up my business because I could die any minute. That’s why I’m writing you this letter. It hurts to admit the truth and so I’m using the Final Request Company to deliver it after I die. I’m not proud of what I did but at least this much is right.
I guess you remember back when you were seventeen and going with that white girl—Timberly Alexander. You broke up with her because Mama and Norland leaned on you so hard. I was mad that you didn’t even tell Timmy why you stopped talking to her and so one day I went over to her house out there in West Covina. I told her how much Mama and Norland thought that interracial relationships only ended in heartbreak. I tried to explain how much you needed Mama and that her rules were too much for you to deny.
That’s when Timberly told me that she was pregnant. She was so broken up because her parents were mad and you wouldn’t even talk to her on the phone.
She was so upset that I told her she could always talk to me. And she did.
For the last twenty years I’ve been giving Timmy a couple hundred dollars a month, and her little girl, Sovie (named after Sojourner Truth), has called me Uncle Seth from the day she could talk.
Timmy didn’t want me to tell you about your daughter because she was mad and hurt that you left her without a word. I probably should have told you but I guess I got a little possessive. I kind of thought of Timmy and Sovie as my little family.
At the bottom of the page is Sovie’s full name and address in Los Angeles. Yes, she lives in L.A. just like you.
Timmy died a year ago from breast cancer and so, when I’m gone, Sovie’s going to be alone in the world.
I’m sorry for keeping this from you, Little Brother. I know it’s worse than anything else I ever did. I hope you can forgive me.
Seth
My heart started beating rapidly a minute or two after the third time I’d read the letter. I could have sat there and guessed for a hundred years and never come up with what Seth had to say. I had a child in the world and hadn’t known it. I was a father with none of the responsibilities, fears, or joys of parenthood.
I went out to the liquor store and bought two quarts of Jack Daniels and three packs of filterless Camels.
For a day and a half all I did was drink and smoke. I had given up both habits when I was twenty-three years old. I realized one day that I was trying to kill myself with the legal drugs of my culture.
And every day for seventeen years I had wanted to end my smokeless sobriety.
I crashed around the house, cursing my brother, mother, and sister—all of whom seemed to have known but never told me the truth. At one point, near the end of my private orgy, I raised a hickory chair up above my head and smashed it on the hardwood floor. Then, melodramatically, I crumpled to my knees and cried over the broken furniture.
Maybe five minutes after my outburst, a rapping came at the door. A few seconds later I heard another, bolder knock.
I climbed to my feet, suppressed a gag reflex, and stumbled to the door.
Standing there on our common porch was Rose Henley; she was as short as ever, but her hair had not yet turned completely white.
“Are you all right, Mr. Vaness?”
“No, ma’am, I am not.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing I can point at but everything else.”
“I don’t understand. I heard a crash and I wanted to make sure you weren’t hurt.”
“You’re a brave woman,” I said, barely aware of the words I mouthed. “Somebody could have been killing me over here.”
“Does it have to do with that man who came here a few days ago? The tall one in the nice suit?”
“Yes. But he was only the bearer of the bad news. The messenger.”
“Why don’t you come over to my house and have a cup of coffee?” she suggested. “Sober up a little bit.”
Rose Henley’s home was everything that my apartment was not. The floor was carpeted, and not a hair was out of place. A painting on the living room wall was of a reclining nude woman who looked somewhat like a younger version of my neighbor.
She had me sit on a tan sofa and served me a weak cup of percolated coffee.
“Now,” she said, when we were both settled. “What’s the problem?”
Her face was broad, but her black eyes were set close together. The concern in that face was something I didn’t remember ever having been shown me before.
I told her everything, all about how Seth tortured me and how my sister probably knew about the child I’d fathered, about my mother and father and stepfather, and about my failure to surpass the image that everyone seemed to hold of me.
“I don’t even know why I dropped out of college,” I said at one point. “I don’t know when I gave up on myself.”
“You haven’t been to work this week, have you?” she asked.
“I’m sure they fired me. The temp agency called, but I didn’t answer.”
“You need to take a cold shower, get a good night’s sleep, and then go to see your daughter,” Rose said.
“I have to get a job first,” I replied. “You know Mr. Poplar wants his rent.”
“Poplar works for the landlord,” she said. “I don’t think the owner would kick you out under these circumstances.”
“Oh? Why not?”
“Because I own this house, Mr. Vaness. And I like you.”
The address for Sojourner “Sovie” Alexander was on Cushdon, just south of a Pico Boulevard. It was the smallest house on the block and in need of a paint job. But the lawn was green and manicure
d, and there were healthy rose bushes under the front windows of the home.
The door was open, and the screen closed. I saw a doorbell but knocked anyway. After a few moments, a tallish, honey-colored girl in her early twenties appeared.
“Miss Alexander?” I said. I’d practiced calling her “Miss.”
“No,” she replied, pursing her lips, as if she were going to whistle or maybe kiss someone. “Who are you?”
“I’m here to see Miss Alexander,” I said. “Is she home?”
Staring quizzically at me, the honey-colored young woman shouted, “Sovie! It’s for you!”
The young woman went away, and before I could count to ten, a young white girl, more or less the same age as her roommate, walked up. She had light blond hair and looked at me with a furrowed brow. All at once she realized something and took in a sharp breath.
“Roger Vaness?” she said.
“Um, yes.”
“You look a lot like Uncle Seth. Three days ago I got a letter from him,” she said. “This tall bald guy brought it. The man told me that Uncle Seth had died. He gave me the letter that said, Uncle Seth said, in the letter, that my real father was . . . was you.”
“I got a letter from Seth too. I never knew. Nobody . . . not your mother or Seth or anybody ever told me that I had a little girl.”
We stared at each other through the gray haze of the screen, both of us unsure of what to do.
“Can I take you out for coffee?” I asked.
“I’ll get my sweater.”
We commandeered a small round table at the window of a coffeehouse on Westwood near Pico. There we talked for hours.
Timmy had told her daughter that she didn’t know who her father was, that she had been wild as a child but had sobered up when Sovie came. Seth was an old friend who dropped by regularly. Sovie had often wished that Seth was her father or at least her real uncle.
“I guess he was my uncle,” she said at one point, realizing for the first time the blood relation.
“But Timmy never told you that I, I mean that your blood father was black?” I asked.
“Never.”
“Does that bother you?”
“It bothers me that she lied about you.”
The Awkward Black Man Page 21
