Black & White

by Lewis Shiner

  “Thank you for coming,” Michael said. “It means a lot to me.”

  A voice behind him said, “Michael?”

  He turned and saw Helen Silberman. “I’m so sorry for your loss,” she said.

  “Thanks. I had no idea you might be here. This is really…when did you get in?”

  “Last night,” she said, and something in the sound of her voice gave her away. She’d flown down to be with Roger, Michael saw, leaving her husband and child in New York and Roger’s wife in California. How very convenient this all must be, he thought.

  Before Michael found anything to say, Roger stepped in next to Helen and slipped one arm around her waist. “How’re you holding up, then?” he asked, as if the day before had never happened.

  “I’m fine,” Michael said. “Roger, Helen, this is Denise.”

  Denise shook Roger’s hand and said, “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

  Roger mimed surprise. “I wish I could say the same.”

  Denise gave Michael a smile that warmed him from the center out.

  “Listen,” Roger said, “are you going to talk to your mother or not?”

  It was Roger more than Ruth that made him say, “My mother’s dead.”

  “Oh, don’t let’s quibble. You ought to say something to her.”

  He’d been headed that way, but Roger’s commandeering the situation stoked his resentment. As the inappropriate replies lined up in his mind, nothing emerged from his open mouth.

  “I think Michael needs to take care of himself today,” Denise said. “If he feels like talking to her, fine, if not, then he won’t.”

  Michael reached for her hand and squeezed.

  “Bravo,” Roger said, looking her over in an exaggerated and, Michael thought, condescending way.

  A commotion at the front door broke the tension. Two white men in dark suits and sunglasses stalked into the room like a parody of Secret Service agents, scanning the thin crowd. One nodded to the other, who went back outside. A minute or so later, having successfully drawn the attention of everyone in the room, he returned with US Representative Randy Fogg.

  Fogg was in his seventies now, with thinning white hair, pink skin like an albino’s, and jowls that sagged to his chest. He carried a huge belly in front of him like a load of firewood, weighing down his every step. He came into the center of the room, looked around, and nodded his approval.

  As soon as he’d finished his entrance, the funeral director appeared, as if on cue. “The chapel is open now,” she said. “If you’ll all come this way.”

  Fogg made his way to Ruth and offered his arm, though he seemed barely able to support himself. Ruth blushed, got nervously to her feet, and walked with him toward the side exit.

  “Is that who I think it is?” Denise said.

  “Yes.”

  “Did you tell me he was a friend of the family?”

  “He was a friend of Ruth’s father. My father couldn’t abide him.”

  “This feels pretty weird, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

  They filed into the chapel through a side door that brought them in front of the first row of pews. The room had a high ceiling and a wine-red carpet, 20 rows of wooden seats, and a recessed area in front with a lectern and a microphone.

  One of the fantasies that had played out in Michael’s head as he waited for dawn had him making a speech in which he revealed himself as the bastard offspring of his father’s adulterous, interracial love affair, then accused Fogg of murdering Barrett Howard. It ended with his being wrestled out onto the street by Ruth’s outraged relatives, Fogg admitting his crime in the heat of his anger, and the police arriving to take Fogg away as he foamed at the mouth and cursed the African race.

  In the cool, dim sanctity of the chapel Michael saw that he would do nothing of the kind. He would endure it as best he could and leave.

  The funeral director gently took his arm and led him to the front row, where Ruth sat by herself. Fogg was in the row behind, flanked by his bodyguards, with Greg Vaughan at the end. Michael sat down next to Ruth and said, “This is Denise.” Denise extended her hand across him. Ruth took it briefly, then looked confused. “Are you with the funeral home?”

  “She’s with me,” Michael said.

  “Oh,” Ruth said, clearly not understanding.

  Everyone was seated now and music began to seep out of the speakers. Bach, Michael thought. Doubtless to be followed at some point by the Pachelbel Canon. Not Sketches of Spain or Charlie Shavers or anything that might dare to evoke his father’s memory.

  He stopped himself. Let it go, he thought, or you’ll never get through this.

  The music faded and one of the Johnston County crew took the microphone, a short, balding man the same age as Randy Fogg, with a huge mole over his left eye. “I never knew Robert Cooper,” he began, and Michael saw then that it was going to be as bad as it could possibly be. “But,” the man said, “I have known Ruth Bynum since I first became pastor of Mount Calvary Baptist Church in 1963. I know her to be…”

  Michael leaned forward and put his head in his hands. Surely that was allowed at a funeral.

  When the pastor finally wound down, he had used up over fifteen minutes of Michael’s life. He then introduced, at length, “a man who needs no introduction, Congressman Randy Fogg.”

  As Fogg lumbered toward the stage, Denise whispered, “You owe me. Big time.”

  Fogg withdrew a sheaf of folded papers from his suit pocket, arranged them on the podium, and adjusted his glasses. “I hope y’all will forgive me for jotting down a few thoughts to share here today. I don’t believe any of you would enjoy it if I just got up here and rambled on as I’ve been known to do.” There were appreciative chuckles from Fogg’s supporters.

  “I’m here today to pay tribute to Robert Cooper, who was more than a personal friend—he was a man of vision who helped shape the city of Durham that we know today.”

  “My father hated you,” Michael said, under his breath.

  Fogg went on in that vein for a while, talking about the Durham Freeway and RTP as if Michael’s father had been an equal partner in the planning and design and not merely a hired hand. Then he said, “Many of you remember what Durham was like before Robert Cooper. There was a blight on the edge of our downtown, a slum, a home to the worst elements in the city. Shiftless welfare parasites, reefer peddlers, and communists.”

  Michael looked at Denise, half expecting her to get to her feet and answer Fogg. Instead she seemed amused, in a bitter way. “Did he say ‘reefer peddlers’?” she mouthed.

  “Not only communists,” Fogg went on, “but revolutionaries, violent, ruthless men bent on destroying the American way of life. We all owe Robert Cooper more of a debt than we know for burying that threat under the Durham Freeway.”

  “My God,” Michael said, his voice lost in the murmur of approval on all sides. He looked at Denise again. “That was practically a confession.”

  “Shhhh, baby,” Denise said. “We need to be very cool, here. This is getting scary.”

  Fogg went on, now praising Ruth, and Ruth’s father, and the fine humble working men who were still the backbone of this country. Michael barely listened. He was giddy, angry, and not a little afraid himself.

  Finally, when Michael believed he could not stand another minute, Fogg wrapped up and called Ruth to the stage. She dug through her purse, pulled out a wad of hotel stationery, and got unsteadily to her feet. She took Fogg’s place at the microphone, tears now running down her face, and fumbled with her papers.

  “I tried to write some things down last night,” she said. “A few memories and things.” Then, as if suddenly remembering, “Thank you, Congressman Fogg. You have always been a dear, dear friend of our family.”

  Michael looked down again. And saw, protruding from the purse she had left behind, a #10 envelope with Michael’s name on it. The writing was his father’s.

  Michael plucked it from the purse. The flap had been sealed and t
hen torn open again. Inside was a sheet from one of the blue-line graph paper pads that his father had always used.

  The letter was dated Wednesday night, the night before he died. “Dear Son,” it said. “I’m trusting Ruth to pass this on to you if she should find it before you do. I am also trusting her not to read it before she gives it to you.”

  The words, Michael thought, were meant to shame Ruth if she read that far. Clearly they hadn’t worked.

  “I have one last request, which I know is not going to sit well with her. I have purchased two grave sites in Beechwood Cemetery for her and myself, and I would like you to see that I am buried there. Obviously this represents something of a change of heart on my part. I have thought a lot about the things you said to me, about the reasons I wanted to come back to Durham, and I see now that you were right.”

  Michael couldn’t remember his father ever having made an admission like it. Come back, he thought. I want to talk to you.

  “I needed to be here, and I see now that I would like to stay here. Do this for me, son, if you can.

  “Your father”

  Michael handed the letter to Denise.

  From the podium, Ruth suddenly noticed what he was doing and broke off in mid-sentence. “Michael?”

  Michael stood up. He was aware, though he couldn’t see them, that everyone in the room was staring at his back. “Did you mean for me to find this?”

  “I was going to give it to you,” Ruth said, into the microphone.

  “When, exactly?” Michael asked.

  He felt a hand on his shoulder and turned, shaking it off. Randy Fogg was on his feet now too, staring at him with red, watery eyes. “Mind your manners, son.”

  Before he could respond, Denise touched his arm and gave him back the letter. “Maybe we should go,” she said.

  He started to refuse, then saw the wisdom of it. “You’re right,” he said. “We’re going.”

  Everyone in the room seemed to be whispering. It sounded like distant surf. “You can’t leave,” Ruth said. “I forbid it.” She was too close to the microphone, and there was a short whistle of feedback.

  Michael folded the letter and put it in his jacket pocket. He nodded to Denise.

  When he got to the side door, he found Greg Vaughan blocking it. “I think you should go back in there and apologize to her.”

  “This doesn’t concern you,” Michael said, fighting a tremor in his voice. “Now if you’ll excuse us…”

  Vaughan did not move. “Ruth’s feelings concern me.” He smiled in what almost seemed a reasonable, friendly way.

  “Then maybe you should go take care of her,” Michael said. “And get out of our way.”

  Vaughan looked at Denise, then back at Michael, and shook his head. “Like father, like son.” The words were barely audible.

  Michael’s face burned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Vaughan dropped the smile. “Keep your voice down, college boy.”

  Michael’s emotions were out of control. The last week of turmoil had built up to this moment. Vaughan, despite being in his fifties, was tough and wiry and undoubtedly dangerous. Michael wanted very much to kill him with his bare hands. “If you have something to say to me, say it,” he said.

  Vaughan took a step closer. “I don’t take orders from you, boy.” He was barely audible. “If you think you’re man enough to do something about it, then you and me can go along over to the parking lot and have this out. But not here, not in front of Ruth and the Congressman.”

  “Michael,” Denise said. She pointed with her chin toward the back of the chapel, where the main doors opened onto the street. “Let’s go this way.”

  “Better do what she says, boy,” Vaughan said. “You’re out of your league.”

  Denise physically inserted herself between the two of them, forcing Vaughan to take a step back. She turned Michael by the shoulder and pushed him toward the other exit. “Go,” she said. “Now.”

  She got Michael by the arm and led him down the left-hand aisle, past the rows of embarrassed mourners, most of whom looked away, and into the foyer and down the steps to the sidewalk. “Keep walking,” she said. “Don’t think, just walk.”

  They got in the car. Michael clenched his fists until they screamed with pain.

  “I don’t know what he said to you,” Denise told him, “but I can make a pretty good guess. The guy is a cracker asshole and you have to not let him control the level of the discourse. Michael. Look at me.”

  Slowly, painfully, he made his head turn until he was looking at her. Every muscle in his body was rigid.

  “When I first came down here from New York, I nearly gave myself an ulcer. It took me a while to figure out that there is power in walking away. You have to not let them make the rules.”

  He looked at his hands and willed them to open. Eventually they did.

  “We need to go to Ruth’s hotel room,” Michael said.

  Denise cocked her head.

  “I think—I hope—my father’s ashes are still there.”

  Denise smiled. “That’s my boy.”

  *

  Michael couldn’t shake the idea that Ruth had second-guessed him and dispatched her cousin Greg to intercept them. He left Denise in her car with the engine running and sprinted upstairs, his key card in hand.

  The ashes were there. Michael grabbed them and got a Ginsu knife from the kitchenette. He took the stairs down, two at a time, and arrived at Denise’s car out of breath.

  “Beechwood?” Denise asked, putting the car in reverse as soon as he got his door shut.

  “Beechwood,” he said.

  Crowds were sparse at the cemetery. The rush would come, Michael thought, after church let out. He carried the ashes and the knife to his mother’s grave and knelt in the grass by her headstone. He sawed the top of the plastic box halfway off, then wrenched it open. The ashes were grainier than he had imagined them, not the smooth texture of the ones he’d carried out of his parents’ fireplace for so many years. He shook them out into the grass, moving the box back and forth, as if he were pouring detergent. When the box was empty, he spread them with his hands until they disappeared.

  He clapped his hands, then looked at the graphite-colored stain his father had left on his skin. “Oh, man,” he said. “Oh man.”

  “Are you okay?” Denise asked.

  “I keep hearing Bugs Bunny saying, ‘Of course you realize, this means war.’ She’s never going to let me get away with this.”

  “You did get away with it,” Denise said. “There’s no way to put the ashes back in the box. They’re gone. Your father would be proud of you.”

  Michael started to cry. Denise sat next to him and held him. He cried for a good long time while Denise stroked his head. When it was over he said, “Wow. That was weird.”

  In silence, Denise offered him a tissue from her purse.

  “It’s funny,” Michael said. “Watching you with Rachid, I can see what it would have been like to have a real mother.”

  “Was it really that bad?”

  “You don’t know what you’re missing when you’re a kid, you don’t know that other families are different than yours. Then by junior high, high school, it gets pretty obvious. She was always so awkward around me, like I was some kind of gross, foul-smelling animal that had gotten loose in her house. She didn’t know how to touch me. She would try to go through the motions, but it made me wonder why she was doing it.”

  “What’s going to happen to her now?”

  “I don’t know. I do feel sorry for her. She devoted her entire life to my father. Everything was always about him. That was another thing that used to make me crazy—she would always take his side over mine, even when he was clearly wrong. She’s going to have to fill that hole with something. At least she’s got all her friends in Dallas, and her bridge club.”

  “And you?” Denise asked. She looked down at her hands. “Will you be going back to Texas, too?”

 
“No,” he said, carefully. “Not any time soon. I have a lot to do here.”

  “Aren’t all your friends there?”

  “They’re all over the place. I spend way more time on the phone or writing email than I do face to face with anybody. I can do that just as well from here.”

  She raised her eyes again. “So what are all these things you have to do here?”

  He took both her hands in his. “I want to be with you, for one thing.”

  “Okay, that’s one.”

  “I want to find some more people who knew my mother. I would like to know who killed Barrett Howard. And…”

  “And?”

  The thought had just come to him. He saw from the first that he would not be able to resist it. “I want to go back to my grandfather’s house. This time without the tour guide.”

  *

  That afternoon denise organized a picnic. She improvised a hamper from a cardboard box and packing tape and stuffed it with potato salad, slaw, fresh fruit, bread, and cheese. They lured Rachid out of the apartment with only token protest on his part and drove to Jordan Lake, a few miles south of Durham.

  Michael appreciated the gesture, even if he could not get his whole heart into it. Denise didn’t push him to feel more than he was able. Part of it was his father. Mostly it was the idea of going back to Johnston County, an idea that, as he’d anticipated, was not fading.

  It was the single most dangerous thought Michael had ever had. Goading him on was the anger and humiliation he still felt from Greg Vaughan’s bullying at the funeral. He knew he was not a physical match for Vaughan. He had an objective understanding that might and intimidation did not make right. Nonetheless it galled him to retreat from it. A certain defiance was required.

  Beyond that, he was convinced that Wilmer Bynum’s house was hiding secrets. Why else would Vaughan be preserving it like some kind of temple? The entire time he and Michael had been inside, Vaughan’s nerves had been stretched tight.

  Denise suggested an early night and Michael found that, as advertised, sex was made all the sweeter by the presence of death. After Denise fell asleep he lay on his back, and his thoughts circled again to the Bynum farm.