by Lewis Shiner
The affection Michael’s mother displayed for her husband seemed far more real than the shows she made for Michael. Michael’s father put up with it, barring the occasional outburst that drove his mother back and often left her in tears. Michael had grown up thinking him cruel, but by high school he saw all the ways she brought the anger on herself, doing the kinds of things Michael had long ago learned to avoid, like asking him too many questions when he was watching TV, or following him from room to room.
His friend Jimmy’s parents were divorced, and Jimmy lived with his mother, brother and sister, and stepfather. They’d converted their garage into a game room with a ping-pong table and stacks of worn records—Bill Cosby and Lenny Bruce, the Beatles and the Electric Prunes. When people in Jimmy’s family hugged each other, Michael felt envious. He couldn’t understand why his own parents stayed together, why his mother wanted to be with someone who didn’t want her, why his father would continue to punish her. It was a question he’d never answered, and it was among the reasons he was 35 and still single.
He took out his phone and called information. They gave him the number for RHD Memorial Hospital, only a few blocks from his parents’ first house in Dallas. The hospital put him through the same procedure that Durham Regional had—birth date, names of both parents, including mother’s maiden name—and the results were the same: no record of his birth.
That left the other name on his list.
His father had worked closely with two men all the years he’d been in Durham: Leon Coleman and his nephew Tommy. Information had a listing for Tommy only.
Michael keyed the number into his phone and then, suddenly nervous, hesitated before pushing the call button. He sat there in his rented car, traffic rushing by him in both directions, and suddenly he felt the past falling away from him. Catch it, he thought, catch it now.
The voice that answered was deep and wary. “ ’Lo?”
“Is this Tommy Coleman?”
“Who’s calling, please?”
“My name is Michael Cooper. My father is Robert Cooper. He used to work with Mr. Coleman in the sixties.”
“Robert Cooper, you said?”
“That’s right.”
“What’s this in regard to?”
The man’s reluctance hit Michael physically, draining his resolve. “Look, Mr. Coleman, I’m not trying to make trouble for anybody. My father is dying, and I need to talk to somebody about him.”
“He’s sick?”
“He’s got cancer, Mr. Coleman. He’s at the VA Hospital in Durham.”
Now Coleman seemed genuinely alarmed. “Here? Here in Durham? I thought y’all was in Texas.”
“He came back here to die.”
“I’m very sorry to hear that.” In more ways than one, it sounded like. “How did you know my name?”
“My father always talked about you and Leon. He said you two were his right and left hands.”
“Yeah, that’d be the Captain all right. My uncle Leon passed last year.”
“I’m sorry. Mr. Coleman, can I come talk to you?”
“To my place? You mean now?”
“Yes, sir. That’s what I would like.”
“What do you want to talk about?”
“About my father. Maybe you were working with him when I was born. I would like to know about that.”
“I don’t really know anything. I just worked for him, that’s all.”
“Mr. Coleman, what is it you’re so afraid of?”
After a long half minute, Michael said, “Mr. Coleman? Are you still there?”
“Yeah, I’m here.” Michael heard surrender in his voice. “There’s no getting away from it, is there?”
*
Coleman’s apartment complex was near the western end of the Durham Freeway, where it merged into I-85. The complex formed a long figure 8, the two-story brick buildings facing into roughly landscaped courtyards. Michael saw the Durham Freeway at the top of a rise beyond Coleman’s building, lightly masked by pine trees. The fine weather had brought the neighbors outside. They were mostly in their 20s, mostly black and Latino, sitting on steps or on the hoods of cars. Michael smelled grilling ribs.
The second-floor apartments opened onto a walkway. There was no bell. Michael knocked on the glass outer door and the inner door opened on a man in his 60s, handsome, a little overweight, running to gray, in need of a shave. He wore a white T-shirt, khaki pants, and fuzzy slippers.
“Mr. Coleman?”
Coleman opened the glass door without saying anything, as if recovering from a shock. Michael walked past him into a wide room with an oak floor, well lit by a long window that faced the walkway. An entertainment center to Michael’s right held a TV and stereo; to the left was a couch and coffee table. The room took an L-shaped turn into a dining area, where a newspaper fought for space on the table with dirty dishes and a coffee cup. Coleman began to collect and fold sections of the paper.
Michael gripped the back of one of the sturdy oak chairs. “Mr. Coleman, I—”
“You can call me Tommy,” he said. “Sit down.”
Michael sat.
“The Captain always called me Tommy. You look ungodly like he looked, the last time I saw him. You drink coffee?”
“I’m fine, thanks.”
Coleman finished clearing the table and sat with his hands around the coffee cup. “You came here with your daddy?”
“A month ago. He insisted on coming here, and I think there’s something he’s not telling us. Some kind of secret that he’s been keeping.”
Coleman didn’t answer. His hands stopped turning the cup and his eyes lost their expression.
“Something happened,” Michael said. “Something about Hayti. Didn’t it?”
“What makes you think it was about Hayti?”
“The way he talked about it. Like he was afraid of something. Afraid and guilty.”
“How much do you know about it?”
“I know it was a black neighborhood and they put a freeway through it.”
“They didn’t just put a freeway through it. They wrecked it. We wrecked it. Tore it down to the ground.”
“Why?”
“They called it urban renewal in those days. Black people used to say urban renewal wasn’t nothing but ‘Negro removal.’ White people said Hayti was run down, and they were going to fix it all up for us colored folks. So they had a referendum, and us colored folks voted for it just like the whites did, and then they started to tear everything down. Long before they really had to, just to show they could, I guess. That would have been 1963 that they had the vote, and the Captain and me and Leon, we was part of it from the first.”
“And you all worked for Mason and Antree.”
“Truth of the matter is, there was two companies. There was Mason and Antree, Architects and Engineers, which the Captain worked for. Then Mr. Antree had his own company, One Tree Construction, which was the name on me and Leon’s paychecks. One Tree and Antree, don’t you see, though I always thought it was a odd name for a construction business. He needed to keep his name off it so it wasn’t so obvious that the two companies was really just one big one.
“Anyways, Mr. Antree was the Engineering side of Mason and Antree, and he would sometimes have your daddy supervise us. That was the way of it back then. Even in Durham, which was fifty percent colored, it went easier if there was a white man there watching while the colored men worked.
“We liked your father well enough. He didn’t try to act like he knew what he was doing when he didn’t, like when we was doing demolition work. Now, when it came to pouring concrete, the Captain knew about that. The man had almost a religious feeling about concrete.”
“I know.”
“I expect you do. For five long years, we didn’t pour any concrete in Hayti. All we did was knock things down. There was other work that was construction, but when it came to Hayti it was the wrecking ball and the bulldozer. Homes, businesses, schools. Like a war zone. Wasn’t
until 1967 that we started building there, and then it was the expressway to take the white folks out of Durham altogether and get them over to RTP.”
“And that was barely started when my father left.”
“I think it broke his heart, all that destruction. People would be standing there on the streets while we knocked down the drugstore they’d gone to for candy when they was kids, or knocked down the splo house they used to go to on Saturday nights.”
“Splo house? What’s that?”
“Splo is what we used to call that moonshine liquor. Short for explosion, I guess, which is what it did inside you. A splo house might have a still in the basement and then upstairs they’d sell what they manufactured.”
“Do you remember when I was born?”
“What do you mean?” Michael’s question sent Coleman back in his chair, his right hand raised across his chest to hold his left shoulder.
“I mean, when I was born, my father must have told you. Didn’t they hand out cigars or something in those days?”
“Maybe he gave one to Mr. Antree, but not to us.”
“You do remember when it happened, right?”
“We were the hired help, we didn’t—”
“You were his right and left hands. He wouldn’t have told you when his son was born?”
Coleman withdrew. He didn’t move physically, but he was no longer available. He was staring at the table in front of him, his eyes not focused on it.
“You have to help me,” Michael said. “All my life I’ve known something was wrong, but I couldn’t put that feeling into words until we came here. I feel like I don’t even know who I am anymore.”
“Sometimes it’s better to leave the past alone,” Coleman said.
“Just answer one question. Was I born in Durham?”
Slowly, reluctantly, Coleman nodded.
“When?”
“That last fall, before the Captain left town.”
“Then what is the big secret that everyone is keeping from me? Is it something to do with why we left Durham?”
“You should talk to your father.”
“He won’t talk to me. He’s afraid to tell me himself, but he wants me to find out. That’s why we’re here. He wants whatever this is to come out before he dies. It’s eating him up as surely as the cancer.”
“It’s eating at us all.”
It took Michael a long second to realize what Coleman had said. When he did he had the sense to shut up and sit back in his chair and wait.
Coleman got up slowly, shuffled to the kitchen, and took a long time to refill his coffee cup. He poured in milk from the refrigerator and stirred in a packet of sweetener. “You sure you don’t want no coffee.”
Michael shook his head.
Coleman sat down again. “I’ve been waiting thirty-five years to talk about that night. There was four people there that night: Mitch Antree, your father, and me and Uncle Leon. Leon and me, we never once talked about it since that day, though there hasn’t been a lot of days I don’t think about it. Every time the phone rings and it’s a voice I don’t know, there’s a part of me wants to run and hide. Like when you called today.
“Maybe they put me in prison for my part in it. Don’t know that I care anymore. Been in a kind of prison all these years anyhow. However long I may have left, I don’t want to spend it living like that.”
Michael nodded and kept his silence, afraid Coleman would change his mind.
Coleman sat and looked at his coffee for a bit, and then he said, “It was September, September of 1969. Thirty-five years ago last month. It was the 4th, I remember, the month had just started. It was a Thursday. I got the call at two in the morning.”
“So Thursday was the day before, or it was 2 a.m. Thursday morning?”
“Two a.m. Thursday. The phone was in Uncle Leon’s room. He had a house in Walltown then, Old North Durham. Him and his wife was separated, and I was sleeping on his couch, trying to get the money together to get a place of my own. Well, the phone commenced to ringing. Uncle Leon could sleep through the Rapture, and after I got tired of yelling at him to wake up, I answered the damn thing myself. Well, it was Mr. Antree, and he said we was to meet him at a particular part of the job site, which was the overpass at Fayetteville Road, there where St. Joseph’s church is. You know what I’m talking about?”
“I was there this morning.”
“Every time I drive by there, I still get a chill.” He drank from his coffee cup as if he needed the warmth. “Anyway, I asked Mr. Antree what he wanted us for, and he said we were going to pour some concrete. Now he had just woke me up, remember, so I didn’t have all my best manners in place, if you understand what I’m saying. I asked him if he knew what time it was and so forth, and his voice got cold like I never heard it before, and he said, real quiet, ‘Tommy, you get your uncle and get down to the site like I told you and I don’t want to hear anything more out of you tonight but “yes, sir.” You got that?’ and I said, ‘Yes, sir,’ and that was that.
“Now, Mr. Antree, he was what we used to call at the time a jive-ass white man, tried to act like he was black, and talk and dress that way too. The way he was talking that night was not his way, and for some reason that made me very afraid.
“I woke Leon up and we got into our work clothes and I made us a thermos of coffee and we drove out to the site.
“Now we was scheduled later that day to pour a retaining wall for that overpass. The form was already put together, the steel was tied inside the form, it had all been ready for a day or two. We had a generator there, and Leon cranked it up and turned the lights on. There wasn’t nobody else there yet, just the two of us standing around drinking coffee and not saying anything. Leon was shivering like I was, even though summer was barely gone and it was not cold at all.
“For some reason Leon decides he’s going to move this fourteen-foot aluminum ladder that’s leaning against the plywood form. Only the ladder ain’t moving, and the lights that are shining down into the form, they’re at an angle so you can’t see the top of the ladder. Leon, maybe it’s his nerves or something, he don’t want to let it go, so he climbs up the ladder to see what it is wrong, and two seconds later he’s down the ladder again and his face is gray. ‘I need you to climb that ladder and tell me what you see.’
“ ‘You know I don’t like being up on no ladders,’ I told him, but he was looking at me the same way that Mr. Antree was talking to me on the phone, and the next thing I know I’m sure as hell climbing that ladder. And I looked at what I saw, and I came down again.
“ ‘What’d you see?’ Leon asks me, and I say, ‘There’s a man in there.’
“ ‘What kind of a man?’
“ ‘A dead man. All pushed down into the steel. He got one hand caught on the last rung of the ladder, which is why the ladder don’t move.’
“ ‘You know who that man is?’
“And I said, yes, I knew who it was, because it was Barrett Howard. You know who Barrett Howard was?”
It took Michael a second to realize Coleman was talking to him and not to his dead uncle. “No. No, I don’t.”
“Nobody remembers him now, but he was a thorn in the side of the white man all through the sixties. He was always the one talking about how the black man needed to arm himself for self-defense. When they had that referendum on Hayti, he was the one saying it was all a boondoggle, that the white man would tear Hayti down and pave it over and never build the things they said. In the late sixties he got more militant, like the Panthers and all that, and the talk was he was going to start the Revolution right here in Durham.
“Only he didn’t. He disappeared instead. And the word got around that he had taken the white man’s money and gone down to Mexico. Flat took the heart out of the Movement around here. And I knew that it wasn’t true, and I never said a word.”
“Go back to that night,” Michael said. “What happened after you found the body?”
“Well, Leon, he got in the
truck and just sat there, staring. I couldn’t sit down. I remember the night was so still and clear it was like you could see every star that ever was. You don’t get nights like that no more. I was praying for clouds because I didn’t want God to see what we was about to do.
“I kept jumping every time I heard a car, and then finally I hear a cement mixer coming. Mr. Antree is behind the wheel, and the Captain, your daddy, is in the passenger seat. The two of them look about the same as Leon did when he came down that ladder.
“The mixer is turning, got a full load, and Mr. Antree backs it up toward the form. He’s so nervous he keeps backing into this cinderblock, and it’s too big for the mixer to back over, until finally he gets out the cab and throws the cinderblock off to one side. Throws it so hard it cracks, and that sound, that breaking sound, makes everybody freeze for a minute. Then Mr. Antree gets in the cab again and backs it up to the form, and he gets out and says, ‘Let’s go to work.’
“So Leon gets the vibrator out of our truck and fires it up—you know what that is? It’s like a chainsaw without the chain, this big vibrating paddle you use to get all the air bubbles out of the mud. Mr. Antree is trying to swing that chute out from the back of the mixer, and I’m waiting for somebody to say something, anything, I don’t care what, so we don’t have to go through with this thing. The thing is, Mr. Antree don’t know what he’s doing, and if I don’t help him he’s going to pour that mud all over hisself, so that 400-year-old habit takes hold of me and I drag the end of the chute over the top of the form and give the signal. Mr. Antree opens it up and now it’s too late to say anything because the concrete is going in the form.
“Leon goes up the ladder with the vibrator, and I hear the sound of that blade hitting something soft like flesh, and I know Leon has pushed the dead man’s arm down inside the form. All this time the concrete is coming down with that thick, wet plopping sound, and you can smell it, you can smell the lime and the dirt in it, and the smell is making me sick to my stomach on top of all that coffee, and there’s the diesel smell from the truck and the racket from the vibrator and the generator. When I die, where I’m going, I’m going to hear those sounds and smell those smells for eternity, and serve me right.