Black & White

by Lewis Shiner

  He sat there in something like a state of shock, arms wrapped around himself, smoking when he thought of it, for about 45 minutes. Finally Howard appeared, by himself, carrying the sweatshirt. “Get in,” he said.

  Robert threw down his cigarette and opened the car door.

  “Face down on the car seat, like before,” Howard said.

  With mild interest, Robert processed the information. If it mattered that he not see where they were going, then Howard must mean for him to live. He got in the car and knelt on the floorboards.

  Howard seemed completely without emotion. He cranked up the car, backed out, and drove over the same bumpy road they’d come in on. He was, Robert noted, driving faster. Robert grunted at a couple of worst lurches, as did the Falcon’s suspension.

  Howard didn’t speak again until they were on hardtop and the cool night air was whipping through the open windows. “You got any questions?”

  “Yes,” Robert said. “One question. How could you…How could you sit there, while that man…while another man…did that to Mercy?”

  After a silence Howard said, “That wasn’t Mercy. That was a lwa, the lwa Erzulie.” He was quiet again for a while, then he said, “Erzulie was using Mercy’s body, that’s all. Riding her, they call it.”

  Do you really believe that? Robert nearly asked. The hesitation in Howard’s voice was all the answer he needed.

  When Howard told him to sit up they were in Walltown, a black neighborhood north of Duke’s East Campus. They rode in silence through downtown and then, as they turned onto Pettigrew, Howard asked him where his car was.

  They parked at the curb behind the Mercury. As Robert opened the door, Howard said, “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?” Robert said. It came out with a bitterness that surprised him.

  “Everything,” Howard said. “I’m sorry for everything.”

  Robert stood on the curb and watched him drive away. It was three in the morning. Robert stank of smoke and the sour sweat of fear. He had been given what he asked for. But when he reached for the door of the Mercury, he felt as if his hand could pass right through it.

  *

  He drove to the house on Woodrow Street and parked in his tree-lined driveway, behind Ruth’s shiny new Buick. The porch light was on. He turned it off and locked the door behind him. “Robert?” Ruth’s voice called sleepily from the bedroom. “Is that you?”

  “I’m home,” he said. His voice sounded like someone else’s, but Ruth seemed to recognize it. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

  He stood under a hot shower until he realized that he could stand there for hours and it wouldn’t remotely be enough. When he got out he found himself with hands planted on the marble countertop, searching the mirror in vain for some sign of the corruption that had lodged inside him.

  Ruth was asleep when he got in next to her, and soon so was he. If he had dreams, he didn’t remember them.

  *

  In the morning he had Ruth phone the office and say he was sick. He lay in bed until noon, dozing intermittently. He saw that he could go on that way all day, so he got up. Ruth watched him without asking questions. She was like a puppy that had been spanked and then fed. She no doubt assumed he’d gotten drunk, maybe gone to one of those places on Highway 70 and been with a prostitute. It disturbed him that she didn’t seem to care.

  He volunteered to grill steaks for dinner, and she was pathetically grateful. Somehow he made it through the day and night, and Friday morning he went back to work.

  *

  Mitch arrived at 10:30, jumpy and excited, and called Robert into his office. Robert was unable to summon either concern or relief. He was a drafting machine. If Mitch sent him out to do demolition, he would be a demolishing machine.

  “Two things,” Mitch said. “First, Howard cancelled the strike meeting he’d called for this afternoon. I heard about it from Leon. I don’t know how you did it, but you are the golden boy around here until further notice.”

  Robert nodded.

  “Here’s the second thing.” Mitch spun a copy of an offset-printed press release across the desk. It was two pages long and much handled. It had an IBM letterhead and a date of April 7, 1964, two weeks ago. It announced the company’s plans to begin selling a new product to be called the System 360. It was the first mass-produced computer, designed to sit in businesses as well as college computing labs. You could buy one outright for five million at the top end, or rent one starting at less than three thousand dollars—the price of a new car—every month.

  “Sounds like a big deal,” Robert said. “Something like that could change the world.”

  “You ain’t just whistling Dixie, Slim,” Mitch said. “The world it changes could be your own.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Mass-produced. That means manufacturing. That means new plants. That means they need to be in RTP.”

  “You may know that, but who’s going to persuade IBM?”

  Mitch smiled and leaned back in his chair. “Let’s just say a lot of people would be willing to go a long, long way to get IBM here. All the way up to the governor’s office. This is strictly on the QT, but land sales have been dropping for years. This whole RTP dream could go in the toilet if we don’t snag some major names, and fast.”

  “Are you trying to scare me?”

  “Au contraire, cat daddy. I think we’re about to have it made.”

  *

  That December he and Ruth drove to Asheville to spend Christmas with his parents. Ruth fought the idea long and hard, but Robert’s parents were older than Ruth’s, and he hardly saw them, while Ruth’s family was a constant presence, in spirit if not in fact.

  Robert’s father had retired that summer at age 60. He and Robert’s mother lived in one of the cottages in Biltmore Village, outside the walls of the estate. These were the homes that George Vanderbilt had constructed for the workers who built his mansion in the 1890s, and that his daughter had sold off after World War I.

  Ruth had never been to Asheville, never been farther west than Durham, and her delight was obvious as she saw the tall trees and narrow half-timbered houses, lit by moonlight and streetlamps, their tile roofs lightly dusted with snow. “It’s like something out of a Christmas movie,” she said.

  The house smelled of fresh-baked gingerbread, the Frazier Fir in the living room, the blazing logs in the fireplace. Robert’s parents were truly happy to see them, herding them into the kitchen for snacks and mulled wine before sending them upstairs to bed.

  It was late the next morning before Robert managed to be alone with his father. They had gone to the basement, where Robert’s father kept his model railroad layout, now more than tripled in size since Robert had last seen it.

  It was HO scale, the tracks 5/8 of an inch wide, one inch in that world equivalent to more than seven feet in Robert’s. The upper left side of the layout, against the back wall, was a miniature version of Biltmore Village in its prime, with a replica of the elegant station that head architect Richard Morris Hunt had designed. From there the tracks wound to the right around a sheer mountainside, passed through a tunnel, and came out in the post-World War I town of Boone, with its icehouse, People’s Bank, and five-and-dime. Then they stretched across a four-foot long bridge over the Cape Fear River and descended, finally, to the Outer Banks at the far right. A pier jutted into glassy rolling waves, and sunbathers in antiquated costumes, less than an inch high, watched from beach umbrellas that bent before an intangible wind.

  The front half of the oval layout led inland, and Robert noted that his father had added downtown Durham halfway between the beach and Asheville, complete with sidings where miniature workmen offloaded Brightleaf tobacco onto ramshackle trucks bound for nearby warehouses.

  “Durham started with the railroads,” his father said. “Durham Station, 1850, named after the doctor who donated the land for it.” He was wearing a dress shirt and a burgundy cardigan, wool slacks and leather house shoes, and merely be
ing in the presence of his creation seemed to kindle an inner glow. He lifted a hinged section near the beach and stepped into the open center of the layout, then knelt, taking care of his back, to plug the transformer, bolted to the underside, into the wall.

  The trains and some of the props—the animals, the human figures, the autos, and some of the trees and shrubs—were storebought. Robert’s father had meticulously constructed the buildings and the terrain himself with balsa, plaster, glass, and papier-mâché. The layout preserved forever the summer of 1919, when Robert’s father had been 15 years old. When Robert had asked the reason for that year in particular, his father had rattled off a list of events from 1920: Prohibition, Hitler’s first public speech, the division of Ireland, the first commercial radio stations in the US. Nineteen-nineteen was, his father said, “the last time when things were simple.” Robert could only infer that he meant it personally as well as politically.

  Now, as the tiny locomotive pulled out of the Biltmore Village Station, Robert felt the power of that nostalgia wash over him as well. His father had created a world without voodoo ceremonies or superhighways, a world without revolution, without any change at all beyond the occasional miraculous appearance of new, changeless towns or scenic views, where the perfect wave would never break on the shore, leaves never fall, birds never flap away into the sky.

  “As best I can tell,” his father said, “in 1919 it was still the Southern that provided passenger service through Durham, taking over the Richmond and Danville roads. Most of the freight was through the Seaboard Air Line, though why they called it an Air Line is beyond me.”

  This obsessive knowledge of railroad history was new, too. “You’ve changed your mind,” Robert said. “Haven’t you? About the highway system?”

  “Maybe I’m getting old. When your mother and I went to Paris last year, we felt such a sense of community there. We never got in a car or a taxicab. We rode the Metro everywhere, and it was clean and safe and efficient. If we’d chosen to, we could have retreated behind a newspaper or a book, but we didn’t, and so we talked to people we would never have met otherwise and learned of a marvelous flea market and a splendid Moroccan restaurant.”

  “America is different,” Robert said. “Europe is old and gray and cluttered. America is wide open. You couldn’t have enough trains to take everyone where they wanted to go.”

  “Perhaps,” his father said. His father had always been a gentle man, as sure of himself as he was reluctant to impose that certainty on others. Robert’s mother had been in charge of discipline.

  The train pulled into Durham station, and Robert suddenly realized that he was standing where Hayti would have been.

  “Who owns the world?” Robert’s father asked suddenly.

  Robert looked at him in confusion. “I don’t know what you’re asking. The rich and powerful, I suppose?”

  Robert’s father nodded. “I suppose. I would like to think that we all own it, in common. It’s an interesting word, is it not, ‘common’? It’s a pejorative if applied to manners or dress, but as a plural noun it was the heart of the village. And a thorny problem. Who is responsible for the things we all hold in common? Like the air we breathe, or the oceans? If it’s everyone, is that not the same as saying no one at all?”

  “That’s government’s job.”

  “It would be, if we gave them the power to do it. We had a nationalized railroad system in 1919, did you know that? The United States Railroad Administration, which lasted a sum total of 26 months. It was because of the Great War, of course. The individual railroad companies could not bring themselves to cooperate, and it was hurting the war effort. They were still robber barons by nature.”

  “Did I just hear you say ‘robber barons’? I’m stunned. Father, what’s come over you?”

  “Too much time on my hands, I suppose. Too much reading and thinking. I used to believe that the rich were the only ones with the resources and objectivity to provide for the public good. As I look around, all I see is that trust betrayed. When I read about the awful violence that these men perpetrated, the Commodore among them, or the stock manipulations that left hundreds of thousands destitute, all for no other purpose than the enhancement of their profits, I fear for the human race.”

  “That was a long time ago. We have anti-trust acts and incentives for small business. No one has that kind of power anymore.”

  “We can hope so. At any rate, yes, the government nationalized the railroads, got rid of the redundant routes set up by squabbling rivals, raised wages, particularly for the lowest on the ladder, and in the process designed a series of locomotives that became the de facto standard for years to come. Like that one, a USRA Light 2-8-2 Mikado.”

  He pointed to the locomotive now crossing the seemingly fragile bridge on the back of the layout. Robert understood that the numbers had something to do with the number of wheels on the various parts of the engine, though the parts themselves were somewhat vague to him. Mostly he liked that his father was so deeply immersed that he felt no need to explain.

  “It couldn’t last,” his father said. “For Americans nationalization was Bolshevism, and so the roads went back to private industry, which has now all but destroyed them. I’ve heard rumors that the Southern is going to stop passenger service to Durham. That would break my heart.”

  Robert’s father no longer drove on the highway except in cases of dire necessity, not trusting his vision or reflexes in high-speed traffic. His mother had never learned to drive at all. Losing the train would mean seeing his parents less. While his love for them did not have the intensity and demands of Ruth’s love for her father, it was nonetheless strong.

  “Yes,” Robert said. “I would hate that too.”

  “When the day comes that there is no cheap, reliable public transportation in this country, something will have been lost forever. Once the commons is lost, swallowed up by private greed, how do you get it back?”

  “I think you’re letting yourself be seduced by the past,” Robert said. “Things change, that’s all. We’re moving faster now, too fast for railroads. People are flying more and more, and the airline industry is regulated. Once the Interstate system is finished, it’ll be cheaper and faster to ship by truck than by rail, and the trucks will pay their own way with gasoline and road use taxes.”

  “Perhaps,” his father said.

  “Do you think I should quit my job?” Robert said. “It would hurt me to think you disapproved of what I’m doing.”

  “No, not at all. You are serving the public, and the public has made its decision. As Carlyle said, ‘Do the duty which lies nearest to you.’ And it’s the duty of the old to believe the world is going to hell. In that way we make it easier for ourselves to go.”

  “Not anytime soon, I hope,” Robert said.

  “No, I expect not. And don’t ever think I’m not proud of you.”

  They stood there, separate but close, watching the train move through its dream landscape, and Robert suddenly felt it was possible to talk to his father about Ruth. As he was searching for the right words, the door at the top of the stairs opened, and Robert’s mother said, “Lunch is ready, you two! Everybody off at the next station!”

  *

  In the spring, Robert found himself sitting in the audience at a press conference at the offices of the Research Triangle Institute, in the woods east of Durham. It was 11:30 in the morning and Robert was in the suit and white shirt Mitch had instructed him to wear.

  Mitch himself was on the podium with Fred Mason and a host of movers and shakers that included North Carolina Governor Dan K. Moore and former Governor Luther Hodges, both pale, overweight, and white-haired. Hodges was now Chairman of the Board of the Research Triangle Foundation, a clear signal that RTP was going to happen.

  Next to the politicians were three representatives from IBM: Clarence Frizzell, head of the systems manufacturing division; Arthur L. Becker, former general manager of the Rochester, Minnesota, plant; and Donald F.
Busch, former manager of the Endicott, New York, lab. The IBMers looked like tyrannosaurs in dark suits and narrow ties, exuding willpower and monolithic vision.

  At the back of the audience, silent, the object of much whispering and attention, sat local celebrity Randy Fogg: sportswriter, white supremacist, and mysterious associate of Mitch Antree.

  Apparently all involved had done a good job of keeping the announcements secret. Once the IBM contingent got to the meat of the proposal, the bankers and developers and real estate agents in the crowd were audibly excited by figures like “$15 million dollar plant,” “400 acre site,” and “over 1,000 employees,” two thirds of whom would be local.

  Frizzell had the podium. He was thin and jug-eared, with an uncomfortable smile. A temporary office would open within the next few days to start hiring, he said. They would be looking for highly skilled technical workers, and the number of major universities in the area had been a major factor in the decision.

  “And finally,” Frizzell said, “let me introduce to you the gentlemen who will design our RTP campus. Fred Mason and Mitch Antree, of Mason and Antree, Architects and Engineers.”

  Mitch and Fred both stood up. Mitch had for once foregone his usual turtleneck in favor of a tie, though he’d kept his sideburns and tinted fighter-pilot glasses. As the audience cheered, he looked straight at Robert, grinned, and pantomimed shooting him with his index finger.

  As Robert had predicted to his father, the pace of change was accelerating, like the thrust of the new Chevy Chevelle SS he’d bought in January, a kick that he could feel in his gut. Robert no longer read the Carolina Times, but the news was all over the Durham Herald as well—Johnson’s wholehearted push for the Civil Rights Act, Martin Luther King winning the Nobel Prize, the Bloody Sunday attacks on civil rights marchers in Selma the month before.

  They’d been followed two weeks later by the first manned Gemini flight on March 23, the next step in a program that was supposed to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. And if it happened, it would be made possible by computers like the ones IBM would be building at RTP.