by Billy Coffey
“Same to ya, Andy,” he answered. He waved and popped the hood of his car in one motion. “Might need a little oil this morning.”
I doubted that, since I’d seen Michael’s Caddy down at Bobby Barnes’s shop for an oil change not four days earlier. I set the nozzle and walked around to the hood anyway. Michael was already there, looking at the motor like he knew what he was seeing.
“How’s the shoe business nowadays?” I asked him.
“Fair,” he said. “Got a sale goin’ on boots, if you’re interested.”
“Might be,” I said.
For the last twenty-five years, Michael Potter had spent his weekdays in one of the shoe stores up in the Stanley mall. I could never remember which. He was good at his trade (if you could call selling shoes a trade), though I’d heard he’d recently been turned down for a promotion that was given to someone else.
I pulled the dipstick and didn’t even bother to wipe it. The oil was a bright amber and stopped exactly at the full line.
“You’re good, Mike.”
He nodded, satisfied, and cupped his thumbs between his suspenders. It was always suspenders with Michael, bright red ones that clashed with the brown belt he liked to wear. I always thought it was the very definition of insecurity to have both a belt and a backup.
I’d just topped off his tank when the BMW pulled into the lot. Brand new, bright yellow, tinted windows. Very expensive. The car came to a halt directly in front of the doors, its engine kept running. Out climbed an attractive black woman who checked her watch as she walked through the doors. Michael watched as she made her way past the counter to the coffeepot. I watched as the Old Man walked around and joined her.
“Who’s that?” he asked. He let go of one suspender to shield his eyes against the car’s impeccable wax job. The gleam coming off the paint looked like a small sun.
“Must be a stranger passing through,” I said. “Ain’t nobody around here driving a car like that.”
Michael eased around to get a look at the license plate. “Lookie there,” he said.
I followed his eyes and craned my neck to make out the state amidst a slew of letters and numbers.
“Massachusetts?” I asked.
“Yankee.” Michael bent his head and shook it. I swear he would’ve spit if he had thought about it. “I swear, when they gonna shut the gates and stop the Yankee flood? They all call us rubes, but they sure don’t mind comin’ on down here to retire and enjoy the simple life.”
Ms. Massachusetts had finished fixing her cup and was making her way to the cash register. The Old Man followed close behind and settled back into his booth. Michael and I walked toward the doors. He slowed as he passed the front of the car and stole another look at the license plate. Just to be sure, I assumed.
“Massachusetts,” he said again. “Probably a liberal feminist lesbian who belongs to the ACLU, too.”
I grabbed the door and whispered, “Reckon we should be on our best behavior then, huh?”
Michael walked in and waited while I made my way around the counter to the register. The Old Man said nothing.
Ms. Massachusetts was drumming her fingers on the Marlboro placemat in front of her.
“Mornin’, ma’am,” I said.
The woman smiled and offered an exhale that was either impatience or stress. Or both.
“This is all I need,” she said. She checked her watch once more.
“All right. I’ll get with you as soon as I take care of this man here.” I punched a few keys on the register and then turned to Michael: “Anything else, Mike?”
“No,” he said, “I guess that’ll—”
“Excuse me,” the lady said.
“Fifteen bucks, Mike,” I said to him, then I turned back to her: “Yes, ma’am?”
Her long fingernails had stopped their tapping. The blank look that had greeted me at first had now turned into half of a snarl, and it looked as though the other half would be following shortly.
“What are you doing?” she demanded.
“Well, I’m just waitin’ on Mike here.” I eyed Michael, but he was eyeing her. “Is there a problem?”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, there is a problem. I’m in a hurry and I have to be in Richmond in two hours.” The strong voice she’d thus far exhibited cracked under a quivering bottom lip. “My niece is having surgery, and it’s frightening surgery. I want to see her before she goes under.”
“I’m real sorry about that, ma’am,” I said. “Sure hope everything goes well with her.”
Michael handed me a twenty. I took it without knowing I did.
“I was here first,” she said. Louder again.
I looked at Michael’s money in my hand. He was staring at her and then me. The look on his face was one of puzzlement.
“Sorry,” I told her. “Just a second, promise.”
The drawer popped open and I dug for Michael’s change. Ms. Massachusetts let out a small sigh that was followed by a chuckle, then she shook her head. “Oh, okay,” she said. “I get it now.”
“What’s that you get now?” I asked. I started to hand Michael his money.
“You think I’m just an ignorant porch monkey.”
My hand froze halfway to Michael’s. “Excuse me?”
The Old Man finally spoke then. “Andy?” he asked. “‘Anger, if not restrained, is frequently more hurtful to us than the injury that provokes it.’ Seneca said that.”
I ignored him. The woman did not ignore me.
“I will not excuse you,” she shot back. “I knew sooner or later I’d get a taste of some Southern hospitality around here. I just expected it to be from some corn-farming good ol’ boy and not a redneck like you.”
Michael opened his mouth to say something, but I cut him off with my hand. I slid his change across the counter and turned to face her.
“Lady,” I said, “I’m real sorry about your circumstances, but you can’t come in here actin’ all high and mighty talking to me like that. You don’t know me, or you’d know better. I don’t know where you get off—”
“Where I get off?” she screamed. “What, I’m not worth your precious time? You expect me to sit here like some quiet little servant girl who should know her place? Well excuse me for speaking my mind, Massa!”
“What did you say, ma’am?” I asked. I looked to Michael for help, but his eyes were riveted on her. My heart was thumping, ready to jump out of my chest. I felt blood race from my head and gather somewhere in my gut, pooling there in a wave of nausea. This lady—this stranger—had just all but called me a racist. Me. Andy Sommerville. The guy who’d always treated everyone the same. The fact that she was black had nothing to do with it. The fact that she didn’t know me but had just made that snap judgment did. My conversation with Ms. Massachusetts had reached its apogee and was now beginning to spiral downward. I had two choices. I could either swallow my pride and follow the philosophy of the customer always being right, or I could not.
My anger chose for me—not.
“All due respect, lady, but if you’d have kept your mouth shut, you’d be halfway to the interstate by now.”
“Yeah,” Michael said, “I don’t know how you people—”
“—‘you people’?” she said.
You people? I thought. I peered over to the Old Man and studied the sad look in his eyes.
Michael leaned every bit of his three hundred pounds onto the counter and glared at her. Their eyes met for a few seconds, then she humphed and turned back to me.
“I know what you were doing. You waited on him first because he’s one of your own. That’s what all you people do.”
You people? I thought again.
“I what?”
“Did you refuse to wait on me first because I’m black?” she asked me.
“Did you ask me that because I’m white?” I asked her.
Ms. Massachusetts’s eyes shriveled into her head. I wasn’t sure if that reaction was because she thought I was be
ing obnoxious or because I had actually made a good point. Whichever the case, she slammed her fist onto the counter and then stormed through the doors, leaving her coffee behind. Her BMW gunned its engine and she sped out of the parking lot, leaving a thin layer of rubber along Route 320.
Michael and I stood motionless. Even the Old Man seemed at a loss for words. I took her cup of coffee and poured it into the trash.
“What just happened?” I asked.
I didn’t care which of the two answered, but it turned out to be Michael: “You just stood up to a genuine, honest-to-God New England liberal darkie,” he said. He slapped a giant hand onto the counter. “You tore her up and spit her out!”
“What?” I asked him.
“She was prolly a God-hatin’ Nazi, too.”
“Huh?”
“I always knew there was somethin’ sensible about you, Andy.” Michael beamed like some kind of proud father. “We’re alike, you and me. We both been around long enough to know them people need to be put back in their place.”
“‘Them people’?”
“Yeah, you know. The niggers.”
My jaw fell open. “The huh?”
“They,” he said, pointing out toward the road, “ain’t worth nothing but trouble. You can see it in them, the way they walk and talk and act. Like that old Johnny Johnson. That’s why they gave him my promotion, you know that? Just b’cause he’s black. They told me that, Andy. Now you know what I gotta do? I gotta smell feet until the day I retire. Do you know how bad people’s feet smell, Andy?”
I didn’t. And I supposed the question was rhetorical, because Michael didn’t give me a chance to answer anyway.
“Folks’ll only take so much of them before they realize them people outgrew their usefulness about a hundred years ago.”
I stood by the trash can utterly speechless. I could not believe what this man had just said.
I looked to the Old Man—“‘All looks yellow to a jaundiced eye.’ Alexander Pope,” he said.
Michael gathered his keys and turned to leave. Halfway to the door, he turned back.
“Dang, Andy. In all this excitement I forgot your tip.” He gave me back the five dollars I’d given him as change, then stopped. “You know what? You deserve a little extra today.” He pulled out a ten as well and tossed both on the counter. “You have a good ’un, Andy.”
Michael walked through the door with one last “That was great!” and sunk into his Cadillac. The old boat sputtered to life on the fourth turn of the key, and he puttered away in a cloud of exhaust.
*
I turned off the lights that evening around 7:30. Most of Mattingly was either settled in or gone out by then, and there wasn’t much use in staying open. I locked both doors and the cash register and slipped the keys into my pocket. My fingers brushed against the two bills Michael had handed me earlier.
I had never really looked to see how much money Michael had given me in the past few months. Over the years I’d just thrown it all back into the register, but lately I’d been keeping them in a cigar box on the shelf. Which, I happened to notice, was now so full that the lid would no longer close all the way. It looked like a sick grin that accused me of being a party to Michael’s prejudice.
I lifted the box to the counter and opened it. Crumpled and folded five-dollar bills spilled out, trying to escape. I corralled them back where they belonged
(where did they belong?)
and estimated the pile. There had to be nearly a hundred dollars there, all told.
The Old Man peered over my shoulder and said, “Better keep that.” He didn’t point to the money, though. He pointed to what looked like a fake piece of red plastic that had lodged itself under the placemat by the register. Ms. Massachusetts’s fingernail.
“Keep it?” I asked.
“Most definitely.”
I pulled it out and put it into the angel box beneath the register. I felt disgusted, though I wasn’t sure if that was because I was keeping someone’s fingernail or keeping her fingernail.
The Old Man pointed again. “Lotta money there.”
“You got that right,” I told him.
“What are you gonna do with it?” he asked, pushing himself up onto the counter beside me.
“I was gonna use it for a new fishing rod. They got some nice ones over at the Super Mart.”
He studied the pile. “Looks like you’re in luck, then. Plenty there for a new rod.”
“Yeah,” I said, “and then some. But I can’t spend that money now.”
The Old Man raised his eyebrows and asked, “Why’s that?”
I looked at him and wondered if he really didn’t know. “He’s my friend. At least as good a friend as I have, anyway. We talk and joke and cuss. The man’s a deacon at church, for crying out loud. I…liked him.”
“That’s past tense, Andy. You don’t like him anymore?”
“Are you nuts? The man’s a bigot. How can he in good conscience sit there in God’s house and read from God’s word and have faith in God’s son? How could a man who says he abides by the religion of love be consumed by such hate? That ain’t even possible.”
The Old Man raised his eyebrows. “It isn’t?”
“No, it isn’t. That’s like being two people. Like livin’ a lie.”
“You sit in a church pew every Sunday, Andy. You read God’s word and have faith in God’s son. But deep down you have your own prejudices too, don’t you? I think most people do. That lady all but called you a racist. You know you’re not and I know it, too, but you still treated her different. You know that, right?”
I didn’t. Not until then. But the Old Man had a way of being a mirror to me in many ways, and everyone knows that a mirror doesn’t lie. I looked in his eyes and they replayed for me everything I’d said and done in those former minutes. The way I didn’t hear the pain in that woman’s voice (and if there was one thing I seemed attuned to in people, it had always been their pain), the way I’d shown favor to Mike. Not because he was white, but because he was from town. Because he was not from Away, as she had been.
“She was disrespecting me.”
“She was hurting. People do all kinds of things when they’re hurting. You’re different than Michael, Andy. He’s a bigot. You’re not. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re better than he is. You both tend to see with your eyes, when you should see with your heart.”
I looked at the pile of money, which now seemed stained with more than the dirt and use of so many countless hands. “What do you think I should do?”
The Old Man smiled and said, “Well now, there’s a question I think only you can answer.”
*
“Well lookie here,” Jackie said. “Andy Sommerville? Harry, you’d better get ready ’cause the Lord’s on his way.”
I slid into the pew beside Harry and shook his hand. Jackie had to reach around him and pinch my cheek just to make sure her eyes were working right. They were.
“Nice to see you,” she said.
“Nice to be seen,” I answered.
The prayer was said and the songs were sung and the preacher began his sermon. It was a beautiful Sunday morning, the sort that made you happy to be alive. I thought of Michael in his church across town, all decked out in his Sunday best and murmuring Amen to the high points of his preacher’s sermon. He was a broken man, confused and twisted by his own fears and biases. Not unlike us all, I supposed. And if that was the case, then maybe a church pew was the best place for him to be.
And for me as well.
It was a good sermon (I murmured my own amen once or twice, which felt quite good but was an act not encouraged in my own church). Jackie was pleased. An offering was collected just before the benediction and placed on the altar in front of the pulpit.
If there were any questions about the bulging envelope full of five-dollar bills that found its way onto the plate, I never heard them. I felt it was a cowardly act in a way; neither Michael nor the woman with t
he broken fingernail ever knew of my feeble attempt at making things right.
But it still felt good in the doing.
21
Black and White
Wow,” Elizabeth said.
“Yeah.” I considered saying nothing more, but since this had become the closest thing to confession I’d ever gotten, I didn’t. “Know what the bad thing is?”
“What’s that?”
“I took some of the money and bought that fishin’ pole anyway. Not the one I wanted, though. Got something cheaper.”
“Why’s that bad?” she asked. “It’s what you honestly wanted, right? And it didn’t hurt anyone.”
“I guess,” I said. “But it’s still sitting there in the garage. Never been used.”
“And how about Michael? You still see him?”
“Oh, yeah. Still every Saturday and still with the fiver for a tip. I still take it, too. I’ll let them build up for a few months and take them back down to Jackie’s church. But you know what? Despite it all, despite who he is, I can’t help but like him still.”
“Do you feel guilty about that?” she asked.
“Sometimes.” I paused, not so I could think of what to say next, but how to say it. “He used to remind me of me in a way. We had a lot in common. Have, I mean. Little things that don’t really matter but still hold people together, like a love of baseball. We like talking baseball. But now he reminds me of me in some bad ways, too.”
“You mean the way you both put people in little boxes?” she asked. “He didn’t like that woman because she was black. You didn’t like her because she wasn’t from town.”
“I can get along with most everyone,” I said, “whether they’re from town or Away. At least, I thought I could. I saw that woman as a stranger rather than a person, and I missed out on a chance to help her. I don’t know what I could’ve done. People’s hurts can be a wall sometimes, and it’s a wall you can’t breach. If anyone knows that, it’s me. But I could’ve done something, even if it was just getting her out the door quick so she could get to her niece. I missed that opportunity, all because I was seeing with my eyes and not my heart. I think that’s why that fingernail is in my box. So I won’t forget that.”