We Cast a Shadow

by Maurice Carlos Ruffin

  “Looks like a storm shelter,” Pavor said.

  “That’s a hotbox,” Nigel said.

  “Very good.” Nathan wiped his forehead with a handkerchief.

  “How did you know that?” I asked.

  “Mom’s genes,” Nigel said. Penny laughed that wheezy laugh of hers.

  “You have to remember,” Nathan said, “there was no police force or easily accessible court system. The farmers needed a simple but humane way to maintain order hereabouts. The box was rarely used because it was so effective.”

  “I bet,” Penny said.

  “You didn’t want to end up in that box.” Mary chuckled.

  “Good way to kill people, too,” Penny said.

  Everyone stared at her. The sun was unusually intense, so much so that the grass seemed more yellow than green.

  Nigel had taken his hat off again. I told him to put it back on. “Aw.” He furrowed his brow.

  “Be like your old man.” I tipped my straw fedora and nudged him.

  We continued into the woods and stopped at a small clearing. Nathan took off his wide-brimmed hat and held it with both hands at his waist. I could tell he had said whatever he was about to say a hundred times before. Someone stepped in a cow pie and cursed.

  “The Southern economy,” Nathan said, “of the mid-1800s was a powerhouse of the world. A land of unheard-of splendor.” His accent got thicker in the woods. Southern was “suh-thun.” Powerhouse was “pow-ah-haus.” Every time he said splendor, I thought he was talking about the sweetener I used in my coffee. Mary talked the same way. I couldn’t tell if they were laying it on thick as part of the show.

  “See these individual pine trees here?” He threw a thumb over his shoulder. “There are hundreds of them. Today they stand where acres upon acres of grade-A-quality cotton, sugarcane, and tobacco once grew for export the world over.”

  “The Southern economy,” Mary said, “was such that Southerners enjoyed a level of opulence not seen since the time of the pharaohs of ancient Egypt.”

  Penny clenched and unclenched her fist. Her knuckles were white. “Can I yank that animal off her head?” she asked.

  “Easy,” I whispered. “I have to work with these people.”

  “You’ll recall,” Mary said, “that the Northern section of this present nation launched its war of unprovoked aggression on the presupposition that it was sovereign supreme. To wit: the North believed it had the right to impose absolute authority over the economic structure and governing freedom of these Southern states. This was in no way different than the tyranny the founders fought and defeated in the Revolutionary War.”

  Penny’s nose twitched. She raised her hand to her shoulder. I pulled her wrist down. She reraised it.

  But Nigel beat her to the punch. “What about slavery?” he asked.

  Some of the shareholders grumbled. Pavor snorted. It struck me that this was the first time I’d seen Pavor without Dinah nearby in a while.

  “Is that a question?” Nathan asked.

  Penny stepped forward. “This place only has nice furniture and tapestries and shit because everyone was forced to work for free. They were denied their human rights.”

  Sometimes I almost forgot about Penny’s activist streak, that I’d met her at a protest against low wages in the retail sector, that I’d bailed her out of jail. My little insurgent. She spent her present days, pen in hand, jotting notes about her clients. But I could still see her angrily charging across a parking lot with a red placard because of some real or imagined slight.

  “Well, I never,” Mary said, still in character, fanning herself.

  “She has a point,” I said. “The Civil War started because of slavery and the—”

  Mary held her hand out to stop me from talking. This shouldn’t have worked, but I found that I couldn’t say a word. It was almost like she had my vocal cords in her grip. She stared at me. Or maybe through me. She was looking at the Old House behind the group.

  That’s when I noticed that she was a lot older than I thought. It must have been the humidity that revealed her. Her makeup was running at the cheeks. Underneath the melting foundation, her skin was mottled, the color of raw beef tongue.

  “Sugar,” she said, “every schoolboy knows the Civil War didn’t start because of slavery. That was just spin Lincoln’s cronies put out to keep the Europeans from joining the Confederacy. Read a book.”

  “How much do they pay you to tell these lies?” Penny asked.

  “Wait just a minute, little miss,” Nathan said.

  Penny gestured at Mary. “This kind of stupidity and romanticizing a past that never existed—”

  Nathan waved his hands as if trying to put out a fire. “I do not think—”

  “People like you”—Penny stepped toward the guides—“are the reason everyone is confused about what actually happened.”

  “That’s it!” Mary yanked off her wig and bonnet. “You got some nerve, sister.” Out of character, Mary had a New Jersey accent. “Busting my hump when I’m just trying to make a living.”

  “Let the composed head prevail,” Nathan said, still performing.

  “Stuff it, Jake!” Mary threw her wig and bonnet to the ground and stormed back to the Old House, holding her skirts up the whole way. At the top of the stairs, reduced to the size of a poodle by distance, she turned back. “I quit.”

  “Come on, Merle,” Jake said. “Don’t be that way.” He gave us a nasty look and jogged away. The group walked back to the mansion.

  “Where’s Nigel?” Penny asked.

  Pine branches swayed overhead and a rabbit jumped into a hole in the middle of the field. We called for Nigel, but he didn’t answer. I hoped this wasn’t another of his disappearing acts. He’d been better recently about not scurrying away like a field mouse when he was stressed. But the incident at the School Without Walls had been a reversion to form. I didn’t want him to have to go back on anxiety meds. He was doing so well.

  “The hotbox,” Penny said.

  We went to the box. The iron doors were too heavy for me to open alone, but with Penny’s assistance, I managed to crack one open enough to see that our son wasn’t inside. I pressed my hands against the side of my head.

  Nigel wasn’t in the gallery of the Old House, the pouting room, or the kitchen. No one had seen him. I called security. Sometime later a man with a bloodhound showed up. It was the bellboy who had brought up our bags and gawked at Nigel. He said his name was Moses.

  “The security man on the other side dealing with some foolishness, so the manager sent me over with Rufus here to help you folk find your young one.”

  “I guess you won’t need a picture,” I said. “You got a good enough look at him earlier.”

  Penny gave me a Don’t be a jerk—he’s here to help. Moses wondered out loud if we had anything of Nigel’s that Rufus could sniff. Penny produced Nigel’s hairbrush from her purse.

  Before long, we were in the woods. Since the end of the tour, the sun had receded a good bit, so the woods were more shadow than light. We couldn’t see that well. Moses took a stick from the ground and wrapped it in a greasy cloth. He lit the assembly to make a blazing torch. Rufus, jowls shaking, woofed in delight.

  At the entrance to the woods, Moses took Nigel’s brush and held it to Rufus’s nose. The dog leaped forward, pulling Moses along.

  “Y’all try to keep up. No time for lollygagging. I’m missing tips for this.”

  Penny and I followed.

  “Oh. He must got him a good scent,” Moses said. And it did seem as if Rufus had read the directions. Unlike our earlier stroll, we didn’t double back or wander. We moved more or less in a straight line for a good while until the woods thickened considerably. A little ways off, a pack of coyotes ran away from us, and I realized the sun was completely gone. The orange flicker
of the bellboy’s torch provided the only light. Then, as unexpectedly as he had started, Rufus stopped.

  “Would you look at that?” Moses said. I couldn’t tell what he was talking about since Rufus’s jowls covered whatever it was he sniffed. The dog gathered the thing in his mouth, but Moses made him give it up. The bellboy deposited the wet ball in my hand. A crumpled dark-chocolate wrapper.

  “You don’t think Nigel came this deep into the forest, do you?” Penny asked.

  I shrugged, not wanting to stoke the hysterical fire building in my gut. My shoulder was still sore from breaking through that door at the School Without Walls. And in the forest, I felt especially helpless without any doors to ram through. What could I do? Knock down a tree? Dig a new route to China? My son is resourceful. My son is okay. I repeated these words in my head like an improvisational drum solo. My SON is resourceful. My son is OKAY. I yelled his name.

  Rufus took off again, pulling Moses and, by extension, us. But a few moments later Penny cried out. She reached down and grabbed a small high-top shoe. Nigel’s shoe. The other one was a few feet away. A coyote yowled. Penny and I locked eyes for an extended moment.

  Moses motioned for us to come over. I spotted a protein bar wrapper near Rufus, who sniffed the base of a nearly vertical earthen structure. It was almost more of a wall than a hill. Moses said Nigel was up there.

  “There’s no way,” I said. “Not unless he grew a tail.”

  Penny went to the wall, grabbed some exposed tree roots, and climbed. I leaned on my knees to catch my breath. I wished I had gone along with Penny and Nigel to the indoor rock-climbing facility those few times they had gone. A section of soil broke loose and showered down on me. “It’s not safe,” I said. But Penny wasn’t listening. All this, and I never caught up with Octavia.

  Then something happened that I never forgot and could not initially explain except to say it was confusion of my senses, a synesthetic illusion. I heard splashing, laughing, singing, and in leaves above the hill, I saw the twinkling of stars that could not have been so luminous or active.

  Penny climbed faster. I called Nigel’s name again. No answer, but the singing stopped. I grabbed a root and followed Penny. Without the torch, my eyes adjusted to the night. The far side of the hill was steep, but not as steep as what we had just climbed. It was there, atop the hill, we found Nigel’s hat, shirt, and a ribbon, the color of which I couldn’t make out in the gloom.

  “What’s that?” Penny asked. A bulb of light drifted into her hand. A firefly. Beneath us, dense foliage partially obscured a stream.

  I lost my footing and dirt-surfed down the slope of the hill. A short way off I saw my son, buck naked in a burbling current. He was waist deep and standing motionless, as though waiting for me to collect him from the sidewalk outside school. A rustling in the brush, as if from a gaze of rabid raccoons, sent a prickle down my ribs.

  I asked Nigel what he was doing. He drew his hand across his face in an attempt to dry it. “Just swimming.”

  “But why didn’t you tell us where you were going?”

  Nigel had the strangest smile on his face and looked fit to burst into laughter.

  Penny appeared. She looked worried, relieved, confused.

  “You knocked them over, Dad.”

  A mason jar lay on its side at my foot. I had knocked the lid off. Fireflies flew out of the jar and lit into the treetops.

  8

  Although I was an average talent, I always possessed a great love of sport, competition, game. In high school, I was mildly athletic, the kind of boy who could run the expected number of laps without complaint or deploy any number of defenses in a chess club match to keep my king out of serfdom for a reasonable time. But my love of competition outstripped my talent: I couldn’t outrun the speedsters, and my deflections rarely led to victory over my young masters.

  I played, for a single season, on our basketball team, the Chickenhawks. Hootie hoo! I wasn’t particularly tall, fast, or agile. I certainly didn’t have the hidden ankle wings of my fellow airmen that allowed them to dunk the ball from the concession stand. However, I was blessed with a facility for ball control. I became the team’s point guard after the starting senior was arrested on possession charges and died of a rare and undiagnosed heart problem while in custody. A terrible loss, as he’d already got an offer to go pro. I remained Chickenhawk number one until I blew out a knee while blocking the shot that would have knocked us out of the state playoffs. My sacrifice was all for naught. Three nights later I sat on the bench, my leg in a black brace, while Royceland, a crew of upstaters that preferred three-pointers over dunks, bombed my beloved Chickenhawks to smithereens, 114 to 81. What was the Royceland Red Roosters’ cheer? Ah. “Death from Above,” son.

  “If you could have played on crutches, you would have,” Nigel said.

  “You’ve heard this story before, eh?” I tugged his baseball cap down.

  “Just once.” He smirked and pulled the cap back up. “Or a million times.”

  The Monday after Nigel’s plantation bath, he and I were in the bowels of the City’s professional b-ball arena, Secret Nine Arena. There were two reasons I had never brought Nigel until that night. First, I almost always had to work late.

  Second, Nigel had always shown an innate ability as a young sportsman. At age six, he could cartwheel and leapfrog like any other American boy, but he could also drive a soccer ball like a transplanted Brazilian. Whatever gene existed in me had combined with Penny’s fairer ones and amplified Nigel’s sportiness, even in informal settings. I was disturbed no end that whenever he visited my office, he’d stand as far away from my wastebasket as possible and plunk crumpled balls of paper into the receptacle like so many pennies into a well. The last time I brought him to my office, I snapped at him to stop, and he did. I felt guilty, of course, but for the love of Meadowlark Lemon, did the world really need another child of the diaspora with highly developed ball skills? The answer was in the question, and I made all indirect efforts to discourage his growing love of sports. America could cheer someone else’s brown boy down a field and, after he’d wrecked body and mind, into an early grave.

  It was an irresistible magnet that drew us to the cavernous arena that weekday evening. Octavia pinged me with a message: “Meet at the firm suite and bring your kid. Seven-thirty P.M. Gate seven. Suite 342. Do not miss.”

  We breached the building through a restricted side entrance reserved for kings and their retainers. We were early and wandered the semiprivate corridor, where workmen sped by in motorized carts and vendors offered frozen drinks, pretzels, and gaudy, glossy pamphlets. My son fairly hummed with electricity. He was dumbstruck by the many people milling about, the glowing advertisements floating above, the echo of the arena announcer’s voice telling us not to miss our shot at a photo with the team mascot. Nigel’s joy flowed into me, and we carried his awe in tandem.

  As we rounded the base of the arena, we came to a darkened tunnel. At the far end of that tunnel was a clear view of the bright, marqueted hardwood floor where players in warm-up suits dribbled basketballs in and out of view. Faint holographic shapes—circles, lozenges, clouds—appeared on the floor and vanished to a rhythm I couldn’t catch. Nigel paused midstep and watched. It was during this reverie that I bought him an oversize We’re Number One foam hand and a veggie hot dog. In retrospect, I probably should have purchased the foam hand after the hot dog because my son refused to put down the one in order to eat the other. I found some amusement in watching him solve this puzzle by using the foam hand as a food tray.

  I also noticed that his baseball cap had disappeared.

  “Where is your hat?” I asked. Nigel shrugged. He said he must have lost it. “How is it possible that you lose every hat I buy you?”

  He shrugged again. “There’s not even any sunlight in here,” he said. “It’s nighttime.” I realized he was right.
>
  Across from the tunnel where we stood, an older white woman in chintz smeared balm on her lips with a pinky. “Do you know where the garbage cans are?” she asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “Oh. Well, can you take this?” She offered her plate of picked-over crab claws to me. She thought I worked for the arena, that I was a janitor.

  I glanced down at my T-shirt and immediately regretted my choice to dress like a normal person going to a basketball game rather than wear a top hat and tails. Of course, then she would have thought I was the doorman. I shoved my hands into my pockets.

  “That’s nice team spirit you have,” the woman said to Nigel.

  “Thank you, ma’am.” My polite boy. I placed a hand on his shoulder.

  “Where did you get it?” she asked.

  “Right over there. I think.” It was about then that I noticed she was concentrating quite deliberately on Nigel to the exclusion of me, but this wasn’t about his birthmark. The woman wasn’t judging the composition of his face so much as his relationship to me. She was a Good Samaritan. I’d participated in this puppet show before, too. It wasn’t the first time someone, thrown off by the variance in our physical appearances, thought that I’d kidnapped my own child.

  “Did this man buy it for you?” she asked. She had a booger of garlic on her lip.

  “Uh-huh,” Nigel said, dropping a bit of veggie chili on the smooth concrete below.

  I nudged him. “Don’t speak with your mouth full, son.”

  “Sorry, Dad,” Nigel said.

  A giant security guard, possibly a failed player himself, seemed to be trying to decide whether to cross over from his comfortable post on the far side of the corridor.

  The woman knelt and grabbed Nigel’s wrist. “You can trust me.”

  “Don’t touch my son,” I said.

  The woman ignored me. “Are you okay, young man?”

  Nigel looked at her, his eyes wide. For a blink, I worried he might say that he wasn’t. “Miss, can you let go of me?”

  The woman shook her head, as if casting off a spell. She rose to her feet and walked away, her Birkenstock sandals slapping her heels. She glanced back once more before dumping her trash into a receptacle and turning in to the arena proper.