We Cast a Shadow

by Maurice Carlos Ruffin

  “Here, this is him.” The warden stopped at a door. Center door: a sign of nonsense letters, a code of some kind. He shook his head as he punched a keypad. As soon as I entered, he closed the door behind me. The door clamped shut in a permanent-sounding way, causing my heart to jump. But I had to focus.

  My father sat on a stiff-backed chair facing away from the door. He seemed impossibly small compared to the man of memory, small-shouldered, small-bodied, small-boned, vulnerable, infinitely vulnerable, like a child on a tricycle during an earthquake. The room was clean, the bed made, and he watched a flat screen that was flush with the wall and encased in clear plastic. That television played cartoons that had been old when Grandpa was a boy. Animated creatures attacked each other with balls of light, staffs composed of light, branches of light, and light twisted into the form of a tornado. The sound was very low. My breath was louder than the show.

  “Sir?”

  I walked around to him. But he didn’t seem to notice me. His hands were on his knees, and his chest expanded, then contracted. His hair was carbuncles of gray, his face full of parentheses, commas, and semicolons. My father was a wizened old man now, prematurely so.

  I sat on the low cot next to him. “I know it’s been a while,” I said. “My fault for not coming sooner. But I’m here.”

  The spikey-haired character on the screen flopped to the ground and grunted. His clothes smoldering, he ripped off his shirt to reveal a scarred torso.

  I grabbed Sir’s leg. He did not look away from the television.

  “Don’t be that way,” I said. “We have a lot to cover. Like why didn’t Othello ever realize how much danger he was in?”

  Something in me assumed my father was playing some kind of game by ignoring me. Perhaps he wanted to get my full attention before speaking. Maybe he was too pissed to form words. I didn’t need him to be eloquent. My heart was quickening. I just wanted him to speak.

  I put a hand on his cheek. The coarseness of the poorly shaved skin surprised me. I realized with some discomfort that I hadn’t touched Sir’s face since I was a child. His eyes swiveled toward me. They were wide open but empty of the kindness I remembered even when he was upset with me. There was no sign of recognition at all.

  I stood and gestured wildly. “Sir!” I slapped the back of my hand against my palm. “I need you to talk to me!” I paced from one side of the room to the other. But he watched me with only mild interest, as if I were a random pedestrian in a crowd. “Why didn’t you warn me how hard it was to be a father? You could have told me what to expect. That was your one job. To get me ready for the world.”

  No reaction.

  A small red light blinked above. A surveillance camera. I wondered if whoever was on the other end of it was laughing at us.

  I sat again. Sir’s chest moved slightly with his breath. “It’s not fair for me to blame you, is it?” I grabbed his shoulder.

  Sir blinked without recognition. I could have been a guard, a half-consumed glass of water, the wall.

  He wasn’t in there. The man who had earned a Ph.D. at age twenty-one, who could recite Gwendolyn Brooks without a pause, who had given me my words, was gone. I felt as though I were at his tombstone.

  * * *

  —

  I exited the prison waiting area, with my hat in my hands, trying to wrap my mind around the fact that my father had suffered a type of identity death while off stage. No. He was on stage, but I had left the auditorium. Logic told me that he had been this way for some time. That I could have grieved for him yesterday, last week, months ago. But I was stunned by the realization that I’d managed to lose the same man twice.

  I removed a Plum from a nook in my jacket and crossed a grassy field toward the visitor parking lot. I was acutely aware that the field was a shooting gallery for prison snipers. If anyone tried to escape, they’d get taken out real quick if they came this way. I wondered what it would feel like, the impact of a hollow tip through my heart.

  Mama never lost him. Not completely. Not like I did. Electronic communication wasn’t allowed, but they wrote each other several times a month. Over the years, she’d reported on his small victories, like becoming a trustee in the prison learning center, and his state of mind, which rose and fell on hopes of getting free. In fact, Mama must have known something was going on with him, but you would think she would have told—

  I stopped dead. The Plum rolled from my fingers and bounced onto the parking lot pavement. Wearing a flowy floral blouse, my mother leaned against the Bug. She opened her arms. I didn’t have to say anything. But I did.

  “Mama. I’m sorry.”

  32

  Shortly after I dropped Mama at Aunt Shirls’s, I sped along General J. S. Beauregard Boulevard. The streetlights popped on in groups of three, as if to say, Wake up you fool wake up you fool wake up. I needed to see my son immediately. We had been drifting apart lately. But I was struck by the notion that I needed to make a few things plain. Some things could not go unsaid. He needed to hear that I loved him. He needed to know that I had his best interests at heart. He needed to know I would never leave him to fend for himself.

  But where was Nigel? I sent him a message. It was time for his evening salmagundi of pills. And the hour of his nightly denatured demelanizing shot (auroxsorormab; Big Pharma name Erazamal—the stuff would settle into the nooks and crannies of Nigel’s body so that Dr. Nzinga could activate it when the final phase of treatment began) would follow shortly thereafter.

  I consulted Nigel’s schedule: a soccer practice due to end momentarily.

  I descended upon the soccer field, where girls and boys in knee socks swept across the green with the balletic grace of those who hadn’t yet had their hearts broken. One of the volunteer coaches approached me.

  “Nigel isn’t here. I wish he was. He’s a good player, even if he plays like he’s afraid of his own shadow. We’ll pound that right out of him. Unlike Karen.” The coach took a few steps into the field—and leaped straight up into the air. “Kill it, Karen! You’ve got to beat it like a piñata!”

  “Where did he go?” I asked.

  He turned back to me but kept his eyes on Karen. “Oh, come on!” He slapped his palm against his face, then rested his hands on his hips. “You mean you don’t know?”

  “Know what?”

  The coach threw his arm over my shoulder and shook his head. “There’s always one. Every season!”

  “What are you saying?” I asked.

  “We haven’t seen him in weeks. He said you didn’t want him playing because you thought he’d get hurt. You need to have a talk with your boy. Straighten him out.”

  I tried calling Nigel’s device. He didn’t answer, but as fate would have it, I was near the Pest’s neighborhood. Those two had become virtually inseparable of late. It was all I could do to set limitations on when and where they could see each other outside school. Chaperoned visits on the weekends and occasionally during the week, if there was a class project. But never at night, and certainly not without my permission. Araminta seemed quite protective of Nigel. What did she, a short pitch-black wood nymph, know about my son anyway? Yet Penny had always liked Araminta. It was the main reason I didn’t forbid Nigel from seeing her.

  A three-minute drive, and the duplex came into view. The house where she lived was on the last residential block before the Tiko. Up the street, the barbed Tiko gate flashed and rolled open. Security stanchions dropped into the ground. The warning arm swung up and out of the way. A family of five carried grocery bags stuffed with their belongings into the compound.

  I parked the Bug in front of the duplex where Araminta lived. An old brown dog, the worst kind of dog really, lifeless as a throw rug, sprawled across the porch. A diapered brown boy, the worst kind of boy really, all snails and tails, threw a ball at the dog. I passed a lopsided oak tree, climbed the front steps, and stepp
ed over the dog-rug. The porch was a calamity. Empty alcohol bottles and discarded toys lay about. I stepped on what could have been a shell casing.

  The interior glowed with warmth, and an adult-size shadow lurked on the other side of the semi-opaque curtain. When I picked Nigel up from here long ago, the shadow had been in the same place. I rapped my knuckles against the door. I noticed that one of my knuckles was bleeding. It didn’t hurt. Araminta opened the door but left the chain on the rickety latch. I asked about Nigel.

  “Oh, hey, mister,” Araminta said. Only her big white eye was visible. “Nigel’s not here. Did you check where they play that soccer?”

  “Was he here earlier?” I asked.

  She said something that I couldn’t hear because a trumpet in my brain was going off. I could smell Nigel. Yes, my son, like everyone I loved, had a signature scent. But it wasn’t so acute that I typically made note of it. I mean, when he was an infant I used to kiss his baby-powder-scented feet and nuzzle the spring-field-smelling crown of his skull. But the present trace was linked to the way his room at home smelled lately. A sweet musk.

  I lowered my shoulder. And the next thing I knew, I was inside the warm embrace of the house, tasting the odd air.

  “Why’d you do that?” Araminta yelled. “You broke the door, you big crazy!” This was not true. I only terminated the functionality of the chain.

  The shadow I had seen by the window wasn’t a person at all. It was a cutout of the basketball player I’d seen with Nigel that night at the arena. Several other cutouts were arranged around the room: a silhouette of a woman, a full-color of the chocolate milk spokesman who dressed like a crotchety old lady in those commercials, You bet not steal my good milks! A medical dummy sat in a chair at the dinner table.

  Another odd thing was the cleanliness of the den. The ping of pine oil, freshly applied. Dewy flowers on an end table. Not a single nit on the carpet. Not a single volume out of place on the bookshelf, where titles by Du Bois and Nikki Giovanni reminded me that the intense study of these problems did not mean a better future was on the way—

  Nigel’s C-Troos, the fad transparent tennis shoes of the moment, sat, like a pair of stone lions, on the floor at the far end of the couch. Araminta grabbed the shoes and hid them behind her back.

  I smacked my lips and handed her my hat. “Where is he?”

  She lowered her head and pointed toward the back of the house. Just then I noticed a hickey on the side of her neck.

  Still following the ribbon of Nigel-scent, I passed an unoccupied room and then looped back across my own path and entered the room where Nigel had just slipped out of the closet and was trying to open the window, which appeared to be painted shut.

  “Nigel,” Araminta said.

  He turned around with a hopeful expression that faded when he saw me. “Oh, hey, Dad.” He did a little wave.

  “Hello, Sonny Jim. I got you.”

  “I guess I’m in trouble.”

  “No trouble at all, other than being grounded for the rest of your ever-loving natural life. What did you think you were doing? What am I supposed to do with you?”

  “I can explain.”

  “We’ll talk when you get home. Just take your medicine.” I pulled a very small water bottle and a plastic pouch from my blazer.

  “I’m not going home, and I’m not swallowing more of that junk.”

  “Don’t play. I don’t have time for foolishness.” I sprinkled Nigel’s pills into my palm.

  “He doesn’t want to take them,” Araminta said.

  “Excuse me?” I said. “Who are you?”

  “He doesn’t have to either.” She stepped in between us.

  “This is family business, and it doesn’t concern you in the least.” I pushed past her with my hand open, in offering to Nigel, but he swatted it away, and the pills scattered through the air like fireworks. Araminta stepped on one of the pills, the white one that encouraged the emolliation of melanin within skin tissue. It had been worth several hundred dollars. Only powder remained.

  “Stop!” I grabbed Araminta’s arm.

  “Leave her alone!” Nigel rammed my stomach—a soccer header, ironically enough, so he had learned something after all—and I fell onto the bed. I lay a moment. I wasn’t hurt, but I was shocked. My son was in love. Dumb young puppy love. I stood up and held my palm at him. “Your own father,” I said, not being sure what I meant or why I said it.

  “What kind of father?” he said, his chest heaving.

  “I didn’t mean to shove you,” I said to Araminta. I got up. “You live here alone.”

  “No.” She looked self-consciously to Nigel. “I don’t.”

  “I could make a lot of trouble for you. I could call my law school classmate who works for child services and have him ship you upstate. But I wouldn’t do that. I have a better suggestion. You should come live with us. You shouldn’t be here by yourself.”

  Nigel’s eyebrows had shot up. At least two of us liked the idea.

  “No way. I ain’t closing my eyes in any house you was in.”

  “Mr. Moses next door looks out for her,” Nigel said.

  I gathered my hat from the floor, but not before dabbing my wet pinky in the powder and licking my finger. Bitter, bitter stuff. “Come on, Nigel.”

  “No,” he said.

  I told him I would call the services as soon as I stepped outside if he didn’t fall in line. Nigel frowned, and Araminta nudged him.

  In the Bug, I opened the glove compartment and removed a bottle with the rest of Nigel’s medicine in it. I counted out the proper pills and added one. A sedative that Penny had sometimes used for insomnia.

  33

  By the time we finally arrived home, Nigel was limp as a soiled dishrag. I slung one of his arms over my shoulder and guided him up the back steps, as if he and I were college roomies returning to our dorm after too much fun down in the ville ancienne. I would have made a decent wingman for my boy, swatting away the nappy-headed beasts and subtly singing his praises to the angels among us.

  We mumbled across the landing to the door. It’s not every day a father sees his son high as a dirigible. Rarer still the father supplies the hydrogen. What unimaginable Chutes and Ladders we encounter. What eddies and whirlpools. What burned-out metal frames. I watched Nigel for a moment. His dull eyes. The spittle collecting at the corner of his mouth. Those reedlike arms. A helpless lamb in this world, but morally strong. Could he muster the backbone to be the kind of father I was? I hoped not.

  “Hnh,” I said.

  “Wuh,” Nigel said. “Wub,” he said. “Ch—”

  I pinched his cheek. “Articulation, son. You have to enunciate fiercely.”

  “Can we…chocolate cake?”

  “I’ll make one,” I said, leading him through the kitchen and into the hallway. When he was small, Nigel would wander down into the valley of the shadow of sleep in this way, and I would point out the sights, the sweetmeat cabins and hairy-knuckled, ravenous accountants, until he made the lowest point of the valley and slipped into faultless, dreamless sleep. “We have everything we need to make a very good cake. We have the eggs and the cocoa and the flour and the sprinkle berries.”

  “No,” he said. “Pa, no sprinkle berries. I ain’t six.” And then he promptly leaned forward and evacuated his stomach onto my shoes.

  “I suppose you’re not, huh?” I asked. What his exchange lacked in volume, it made up for in colorfulness. I wasn’t as repulsed as I would have been if he were some stranger. I remember another habit of his, this one from infancy. If he was in a particularly rotten mood, Nigel would wait until just after you changed his diaper to deliver a fresh package.

  I led Nigel to his bedroom, again bracing him against my body. When I removed my arm, he fell face-first onto his bed, his arms awkwardly bent beneath him. I straightened them
out and prepped his shot. He had vomited the pills I gave him not even thirty minutes ago. I couldn’t do anything about that. But I could fill the syringe to nearly double the usual dose. A bead of nacreous liquid pearled at the needle tip. “And I’ll churn some vanilla ice cream.”

  “No. No. No,” he said, drooling on the bedspread. “Can’t be vanilla. Gotta be. Chocolate. Chocolate every day. Chocolate every nigh—” I couldn’t be sure, but that last bit sounded like Crown lyrics.

  In truth, I had always been a little squeamish. The sight of a firm needle against soft skin raked an ice pick down my brittle spine. And the first time I did it—that is, plunged a shiny two-inch needle into his left butt cheek—I inhaled. I sucked my teeth as if his rampant, squealing pain were my own. But when I thought of it logically, of the fact that I was doing something of profound importance for Nigel’s future, all terror receded, and I was as calm and confident as a coroner over a cadaver.

  Nigel sat up on his elbow. “What are you doing with that needle, Dadzel Azazel?”

  “Just go to sleep, son,” I said, guiding his head back to his pillow. “You have school in the morning.”

  “Lots to learn.” His body relaxed again. I swabbed part of his skinny rump with an alcoholic cotton and let it dry. I steadied the syringe. I aimed. He popped up again. It took everything I had not to drop the syringe. “Heard about a town that’s been burning underground for a hundred years. But the people call it home.”

  I should have anticipated that the effects of a powerful sedative on the virgin cardiovascular system of a teenager would be unpredictable. His system was on a roller-coaster ride between wakefulness and sleepfulness.

  I went to the kitchen and rummaged for a drink and located a half-consumed bottle of Grand Marnier that I uncorked. I sat on the wicker chair that Penny had made during her wicker-chair-making phase and sipped my drink. Penny was a maker. She was always making things. Wicker chairs, ceramic bowls, our son. Did that make me a destroyer? The brandy tasted like nail filings.