by Lewis Shiner
“Bullshit.”
“There was a photo of him in a Mexican paper.”
“What paper? You saw it yourself?”
“The guy I heard it from did.”
“Who was that?”
“Nobody you know.”
“It’s not possible,” Robert said. “Barrett had—has—more integrity than anyone I’ve ever known.”
“Integrity.” Mitch sounded it out like he’d stumbled across it in a dictionary for the first time. “Well, I guess you knew him better than me.”
What if it were true? Robert thought. What if Barrett were alive and living it up somewhere in the wilds of Mexico?
*
In North Carolina, the rain refused to stop. Robert and Mercy and the baby all went together to take Mercy’s mother back to Johnston County. It was the longest drive Malcolm had yet taken, the only time he’d been out of the house except for a routine checkup at the hospital. The motion seemed to calm him.
On the drive home, Mercy stared out at the rain. “It’s never going to change.”
“The weather? Yeah, it’s grim.”
“Nothing’s going to change.” Her voice was flat. “You’re never going to get that job in Dallas. You’re never going to leave Ruth. We’re never going to be the way we were before I got pregnant. I wish I’d never told you. I wish I’d just gotten rid of it like I wanted to.”
Reflexively, Robert looked down at Malcolm, asleep in her lap. A rush of love for the baby muted his anger at Mercy. “I don’t,” he said. “A lot of women get depressed after they give birth. That’s all this is.”
“Yeah, that’s what the doctor said. He gave me a bunch of pills to make me stupid, like that’s a solution.”
“You didn’t take them?”
“No. I don’t take white man’s pills so I can get up in the morning.”
Robert sat in silence, seething over the “white man” remark.
“Maybe you should go back to your own house for a few days,” she said.
His own house? Robert thought. Was she being deliberately cruel, or merely thoughtless?
“Having you around all the time is not making things better right now. I need to think.”
“Think about what? Are you hoping to come up with more ideas that involve us being apart?”
She put her hand on his arm. As always, her touch calmed him. “Today’s Wednesday. Stay at your place through the weekend, come back on Monday. I’ll get out of this funk by then. Everything will turn around.”
Dallas was supposed to be the way they would turn everything around. The two of them moving away, together. “Do I have a choice in this?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, and took her hand away. “You can choose to not give me what I’m asking for.”
*
When he walked into the house that night at 11 o’clock, Ruth was childishly happy to see him. “Is everything all right?” was all she asked.
“Sure,” Robert said. “Why wouldn’t it be?”
They sat on the couch and watched the news together, Ruth making small talk. Robert missed Mercy, missed his son, but his pride was smarting and the two pains nearly cancelled each other out.
*
He tried to work late Thursday. The rain still poured down, and the emptiness of the office made him blue. Twice he picked up the phone to call Mercy, only to change his mind when he pictured the cold and distant reception he was sure to receive. When he got home, Ruth was taking a pot roast out of the oven. “I wasn’t sure if you were coming or not,” she smiled. “I thought I’d go ahead, just in case.”
She was still not much of a cook, but she’d gotten a few recipes from Robert’s mother down well enough to trigger his childhood memories. Robert ate hungrily and dozed afterwards on the couch until Ruth woke him and led him half-asleep to bed.
The rain let up on Saturday, letting Robert make a dent in the yard work he’d neglected all summer. He trimmed branches, raked leaves, pulled weeds, and tried not to think about what was happening in the house on Beamon Street. Ruth brought him fresh lemonade in a pitcher and a plate of cookies.
Sunday morning it was drizzling again. The house was cold, and Robert woke warm and relaxed under a pile of covers. He lay there for a long time, knowing there were thoughts waiting to crowd into his head, but able to convince himself that none were terribly serious.
He turned over and saw Ruth was looking at him.
“Good morning, sleepyhead,” she said.
She was wearing fresh perfume, Robert noticed. He was suddenly and completely awake. Very, very slowly, Ruth took an arm out from under the covers and touched his face. He could see her bare arm all the way to her shoulder and up to her neck and realized she was not wearing a nightgown.
Oh god, Robert thought.
She touched his lips and then, very slowly, moved toward him. He closed his eyes, then opened them. She kissed him, softly and lingeringly, and then her tongue flicked at the corners of his mouth. Her eyes were open wide. She moved up a little in the bed and the covers fell away, revealing her breasts, full and soft and pale. Robert reached for them, unable to stop himself.
“Yes,” she whispered. “Oh, yes.”
Once he was inside her there was no going back. He tried to make it last as long as he could, basking in the warmth and softness of her flesh, feeling her hands dig into his back and pull at his hair, tasting her mouth and neck and breasts. Still he finished all too soon and shame and revulsion at what he’d done washed over him.
He tried to turn away, but Ruth clung to him. “Oh, Robert, I’ve missed you so much. So much.” She covered his neck and chest with kisses, and even in his disgust and despair his body responded to her, and he began to make love to her again.
*
Afterward he tried to explain. “Ruth, nothing has changed. I didn’t mean for this to happen. My—other relationship—it’s not over.”
“Oh,” she said. “I thought—”
But you didn’t ask, he wanted to say. He wanted to blame her though he knew it was his own weakness that had betrayed him. “I’m going back tomorrow.”
“Oh,” she said, looking as if she might cry, then slowly forcing a smile. “Well, at least we have today. It’s something to keep me going a little while longer.”
*
The alarm failed to go off Monday morning. Robert had lain awake much of the night, trying to find a position where guilt would not twist his muscles into knots. When he did wake up it was to more rain and Ruth’s hand gently on his mouth, hushing him. “I turned off your alarm when I got up. I already called the office. You don’t need to go in. You’re going to stay right here and have a second honeymoon. Just like Jamaica.”
The bed and their bodies smelled of sex. The word “Jamaica,” whispered in his ear and followed by the caress of Ruth’s tongue, drove the guilt away again. What was one more day? What difference could it make now?
*
Robert couldn’t bring himself simply to walk out of Ruth’s house and go to Mercy’s on Monday afternoon, or Monday night, not with the stink of his shame on him. Though a part of him wondered if she would even notice, a thought that prompted another spasm of guilt.
He woke frequently through the night and finally got out of bed before six on Tuesday morning. He would go straight to Mercy’s house and tell her what had happened. There was no other way. Maybe, just maybe, it would break the maze of loneliness they’d built around each other.
Those were the only thoughts he allowed himself as he drove across town. Do this thing you have to do, get it over with, see what happens next.
He hesitated on Mercy’s front porch, feeling as if he should knock. It was the longest they’d been apart since their first weekend together.
The need to talk to her, to fix things, to do whatever he had to do, was strong in him. He unlocked the door and went in.
*
It was funny, in a way. One drop of Negro blood, so they said, was enough to make yo
u black. Yet he had never seen skin so white.
There was more than a single drop of blood, though. There was an entire bathtub full of blood, diluted to pink by the bathwater.
She was naked in the tub. At some point she had clearly turned onto her side to get more comfortable. It was like going to sleep, he’d heard somewhere. Her head was on her right shoulder, her eyes closed, her back turned to him where he sat on the closed lid of the toilet.
He wished she hadn’t turned her back to him.
He didn’t think it had been more than a few hours. There was no smell of decay from her skin. He’d only touched her the once, to look for a pulse, to make sure. Her body was cold, and the house was cold. He was sure the mix of blood and water in the tub was cold, though he hadn’t put his hand in it.
Monday night, he imagined. The light was on in the bathroom, and the lamp next to the bed. That was where he’d looked first. He tried to remember what he’d felt like, back then. When he’d first walked in. Before he knew. Before everything changed forever.
He had her note in his hands. She’d left it next to the bed. Like calling the police, like the simple act of standing up, reading the note seemed more than he could do. It felt like giving consent.
In the end he had to do it, because Malcolm was nowhere in the house, and as much as he feared the answer, still he had to have it.
*
In the note she blamed Robert for nothing, herself for everything. Her biggest fear was that Robert would not forgive her. She accused herself of selfishness in resenting Malcolm, said no one could hate her more than she hated herself. “Things used to be one way and they changed,” she wrote, “and I don’t know why I don’t believe they could change back but I don’t.”
Then she wrote, “I will always love you.” She signed her name and then wrote a PS, saying that Malcolm was with Mrs. Invers two houses down.
Robert read the note over and over, until there was no meaning left in the words, like chewing a bite of apple until the juice was gone and there was nothing left but dry, tasteless pulp. Then he looked at his watch. It was 7:30. He’d been sitting there for an hour. He got up and called the police.
He went back and sat on the lid of the toilet again. Then he got up and called Ruth.
“She’s dead,” was all he said. He didn’t know if Ruth would recognize his voice. He didn’t think he would have.
“I’ll be right there,” she told him.
*
Ruth got there before the police did. The address was Hayti, after all. No one really cared if a black woman killed herself.
Ruth found him still sitting on the toilet seat. She took him by the arm and led him out to the porch. She sat him down on the steps and then perched next to him, not saying anything, even after she took the note from his hands and read it. In a minute the police arrived.
First there were two uniformed officers. One went in for a look while the other stayed to keep an eye on Robert. “She’s in the bathroom,” Robert said helpfully.
The second officer took Robert’s name and address, and by the time he had that, the first officer came out and nodded. The first officer went to the squad car and talked into his radio. The second officer asked Robert what his relationship was to the deceased.
“They were involved,” Ruth answered for him. She handed the officer the note. “They were having an affair.” She took hold of Robert’s arm again. To the rest of the world it might have looked like she was getting support from him.
“And you are?”
“I’m his wife. Ruth Cooper. Same address as Robert. He came over to break things off with her and found her like that.”
“Thank you, ma’am. The detectives will be here in a minute and they’ll get all that information from Mr. Cooper himself.”
The ambulance came next. Two white men carried a stretcher into the house and emerged a few minutes later with something on top of it, covered in sheets, darkened in places with wetness. Robert watched the stretcher roll down the sidewalk, the only sidewalk on the block, watched the men load it into the back of the ambulance, watched them exchange a few friendly words with the uniformed officers, watched the ambulance drive away.
When the detectives took him aside to question him, he found himself telling the same story Ruth had. As he stood on the porch talking to them, he saw Ruth walk down the street, go up to a house, knock on the door, and speak with a woman in the shadows of the porch. Then she went to the next house and went inside. Half an hour went by. Robert told the truth about everything except when he said that he was breaking up with Mercy. By the time he’d said it a few times, it, too, started to sound like the truth.
Ruth came back. She was holding Malcolm. Malcolm was crying and Ruth was trying to calm him, but Malcolm didn’t want to be calm. He wanted to scream.
Robert excused himself and took Malcolm away from Ruth. He cradled him where Malcolm could see his face and began to talk to him, a lot of nonsense about jazz musicians and the weather. Malcolm stopped screaming to listen, cocking his head and flexing his tiny fingers.
“Is that the deceased’s child?” one of the detectives asked. They were both white.
“Our child,” Robert said. “His name is Malcolm.”
The two detectives exchanged a look. It seemed very rude to Robert, but before he could get around to telling them so, the idea had lost its urgency.
And then they were finished and they told him he could go home. They might have more questions later. There would be an autopsy and an inquest, but everything seemed straightforward. It was not yet ten in the morning. It didn’t seem like enough, somehow.
Ruth had been arguing with a man in a suit. At one point she called, “Robert, is there a phone in the house?” He nodded, and the two of them went inside together. When Ruth came out she said, “Malcolm is coming home with us.”
Robert felt a quick flicker of relief. “Okay,” he said. Malcolm himself had nodded off.
“I’ll take him,” Ruth said. “You follow me. We have things to talk about.”
*
Robert followed heR to the house on Woodrow. They made a nest for Malcolm on the couch and then sat at the dining room table. There was a full pot of coffee already perked and Ruth brought cups.
“Now,” she said. “We’re keeping the baby, but we can’t possibly stay here.”
Robert looked at her in confusion.
“We’re going to go ahead with your plan to move to Dallas. We’ll start over there. No one will know the baby isn’t mine.”
Robert stared.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “I know about your plans. I know everything. Everything. I don’t imagine there’s another woman alive who would put up with what you’ve done. But I love you. I love you so much that I’m going to take you back and start again.” She touched his cheek gently and for a second Robert thought his defenses might collapse.
“Now,” she said, and took her hand away. “Malcolm is no name for a white child. From now on his name is Michael. Michael Cooper. A plain, ordinary name for a nice, ordinary baby.”
*
The house sold in November, and they were able to lease it back through the end of the year.
No one ever called again about Mercy’s death, and no one ever questioned Robert’s right to the child. On some level Robert knew this was the work of Ruth’s father, probably with assistance from Randy Fogg. The machinations remained invisible to him. If Ruth paid a price of her own for Robert’s damage to the Bynum family reputation, he never heard of it.
Life began to go through the motions again. Robert went to work in the morning and came home to a bland dinner and an evening of television. Ruth’s doctor gave him a prescription to help him sleep and Robert took it faithfully.
In the first days after Mercy’s death, Michael would wake up screaming in the night. It wasn’t hunger; sometimes he’d had his formula only minutes before. Nothing Ruth could do would comfort him. It took the sound of Robert’s voice, his inane
one-sided conversations about baseball or highway construction, to calm the baby down. Robert would often fall asleep in mid-sentence and wake again with nonsense words on his lips, still talking.
The bloodcurdling interruptions went on for over a week. Then one night Ruth grabbed Robert’s arm as he was about to get up. “Let him cry,” Ruth said. “If you keep going to him, he’ll never learn to be normal.”
“I can’t listen to him cry like that. The poor little guy—”
“Yes, you can. Because if you get up I’m going to scream louder than he can.”
After five minutes Michael showed no sign of letting up. His cries went deep into Robert’s own pain and threatened to let it out. “Ruth…” he said.
“Hush,” Ruth said. “He’ll stop.”
And, eventually, he did.
*
By mid-December the first leg of the Durham East-West Expressway was finished. The constant delays had taken them into serious winter weather, and they’d scheduled the final pours around cold rains and hard freezes. Fences, signs, and median rails were all on order, and such landscaping as they could do had all been done.
At Mitch’s request, Robert drove him to the westernmost end, near the new NC Mutual Life tower. They stood in their overcoats in a cold wind on the Duke Street overpass, looking east as the highway rose, fell, curved, and disappeared over the horizon. The lanes shone fresh and white, the shoulders asphalt black.
“From here,” Mitch said, “you can see all the way to the future.” He pointed straight ahead. “Interstate 40.” He jerked his thumb toward his shoulder. “Highway 70. Someday Interstate 85. Full of cars, taking people to Research Triangle Park, and home to the burbs.”
He turned to Robert. “You made this.”
Robert nodded. He wondered if he should pretend to feel something.
“You want to drive it?” Mitch asked. “You should have the first go. You can take it all the way to Alston Avenue and back. Fast as you want. No traffic, no cops.”
“That’s okay,” Robert said. “Maybe another time.” It seemed that he was feeling something after all, something so large and so dark that he didn’t dare look closely.