Black & White

by Lewis Shiner

  He passed all this along to Ruth, but not to Greg. From time to time Greg would look at him with a question in his eyes, the kind of look Ruth had seen on dogs who’d been sent to bed for misbehaving, waiting for some sign of forgiveness. All Ruth’s father had for him was a shake of the head.

  For Ruth he had considerably more.

  “There’s no question who the better player is,” her father said. He seemed to be talking to himself. “The nigra boy got the scholarship because of his skin color. It was some more of that affirmative action like Lyndon was always talking about.” Then, barely audible, he said, “I may have to undertake some affirmative action of my own.”

  Harvey Boyette’s new Triumph TR6 crashed into a tree less than a month later. Surgeons at Duke Hospital put pins in both his knees and told him he would never play basketball again. In his sworn statement to the police, he claimed to have been run off the road by a pickup with no lights, but the open bottle of bourbon in the car raised questions. Boyette said he didn’t know where the bottle came from, and friends and family agreed they’d never seen him take a drink. None of that changed the fact that Boyette was black, and newly a celebrity, and that the accident happened in Johnston County. There was no investigation.

  The estrangement that Ruth first felt after the King murder became complete. If acts of equal or greater violence had taken place in her childhood, her father had taken care to shield her from them. She no longer believed in angels; until Harvey Boyette, however, her father had at least allowed her to look the other way.

  She began to spend more weekends apart from her father, alone in the house in Durham. Having failed as a wife and as a daughter, she would never have the opportunity to fail as a mother. She had to ask herself, as a matter of simple logic, what the point might be in going on. Robert had a box of heavy-duty plastic bags that he used for leaves and lawn cuttings. She could put one of them over her head and suffocate herself, like she had heard of people doing. Robert would find her that way, in their bed, one more bag of trash that he had thrown away.

  She prayed for a sign and went outside for a walk.

  It was a Saturday morning in early June, and the world was green and damp and fertile. Birds sang with no apology. How little it would take to be happy, she thought. To have the things that others around her had—Robert with his mistress, her father with his cause.

  A horn honked beside her. She turned and saw Cindy Berkshire, a crooked grin on her face, leaning out the driver’s side window of a new Cadillac. “Hey, Ruth,” she said. “I haven’t seen you in a dog’s age.”

  It had been more than a year, and Ruth saw that liquor and cigarettes and loose living had taken their toll. Cindy looked ten hard, withering years older than her actual age.

  “Cindy, how are you? How’s Bill?”

  “We’re all just right as rain. How’s that handsome devil of a husband of yours?”

  “He could stand to be a little less busy, I suppose. When business is booming you can’t complain.”

  “No, I suppose not.” Cindy had a way of making the most ordinary words sound like she was looking down her nose at them. “You tell him I said hey.”

  “I surely will,” Ruth said.

  As Cindy drove away, Ruth thought, how small she is. How easy it was to outlast her, though it seemed difficult then. This must be the lesson, she thought. Time is on my side. If I wait, my time will come.

  *

  In late July, Greg celebrated his 18th birthday. Ruth went to the farm for the party, only her second trip that month. Her father had not commented on her absences, though he had surely noticed.

  It was a solemn birthday. Ruth’s father had arranged to get Greg into Duke, though he would be on academic probation the first year. The possibility existed that he could try out for the basketball team and make it, though no one brought it up, least of all Greg. Ruth’s father told her the boy had not touched a basketball since Harvey Boyette’s scholarship offer.

  Ruth had once again bought him a Shepherd puppy. The first Shepherd she’d given him, Duke, was now 11 years old, blind in one eye, and badly arthritic. Though he’d adopted various strays over the years and even taught them tricks, Duke was his great love. Ruth was afraid that when Duke died Greg would lose his last anchor.

  The gift rekindled their original bond. Greg was reluctant at first to take pleasure in the dog, but it would have taken a far more bitter boy than Greg to resist for long. The puppy got under everyone’s feet, ears at perpetual alert, barking and leaping and licking every face and hand he could get close to.

  After the party, Greg put the puppy in a training collar for the first time and brought Ruth along for a walk to the river. Though it was difficult, Ruth refrained from making small talk and let the silence last as long as Greg wanted. The air was thick and hot, and Ruth smelled the spice of wild grasses on the riverbank. Cicadas shrilled and a thin sheet of water hissed over the dam.

  Greg let the puppy off the leash. The dog tried to walk across the tops of the rocks below the dam, promptly falling in. Greg fetched him out, putting a calming hand on his head and not flinching as he shook off a shower of creek water.

  Walking back to the house, he said, “What do you do when you only wanted one thing in your entire life and can’t have it?”

  At first Ruth didn’t realize he was talking about himself. “You never give up,” she said. “You just keep holding on.”

  He looked at her then, in a way that told her he understood. Maybe there was even a new respect for her there. Then he looked away and shook his head. “Sometimes you got to admit something’s hopeless. Ain’t no good in lying to yourself, telling yourself there’s a chance when there ain’t.”

  “There are other schools,” Ruth said.

  “Third rate Podunk colleges that have never even made the NIT. Every day would be a reminder that I’m not good enough to play for a real team.”

  “What about your friends? Your girlfriend? What do they think about all this?”

  “There are the guys I used to play ball with. They’re not my friends. They’re all Harvey’s friends now. As for…the other thing…”

  “Girlfriend?” Ruth said.

  “No,” he said. “There isn’t one.”

  “Why not? You’d be a real catch. Handsome, athletic, sweet.”

  “Because it ain’t right. It ain’t right to do those things before you’re married.”

  He couldn’t look at her, and he was sweating more than the heat justified. Could he not know, Ruth wondered, how often the man he idolized did “those things,” and with how many different women?

  As if hearing her thoughts, he said, “The worst is your daddy.”

  “What?”

  “Your daddy. I can’t stand the way he looks at me now. Pity instead of pride. I feel like a horse with a broken leg, waiting for him to take me out behind the shed and shoot me.”

  “That’s not the way he feels at all,” she said. “He thinks you were robbed.”

  “That ain’t the way he acts.”

  She reached up to touch his hair and he jerked away.

  “Poor Greg,” she said. “You’ve got to ease up on yourself. If you don’t, you’re going to explode.”

  *

  She found herself thinking more and more about Robert’s baby. It should have been hers. She was the one who had suffered in silence for all these years. Where was her reward?

  She only cooked two nights a week now, big meals that she carefully divided and froze, her own homemade TV dinners. She had just brought her tray into the living room one night when the phone rang. The man on the other end asked for Robert and she told him, as was her habit, that Robert was out at the moment.

  “This is Bill Morris in Dallas.”

  “Mr. Morris, how are you?” This was the man Robert’s friend Arthur worked for.

  “I wanted to call him personally and apologize for all the delays.”

  “Delays?”

  “With the job
. I know y’all were hoping to be down here in the next month or two, and I’d hoped for the same thing. I wanted him to know that I’m not trying to give him the runaround.”

  “I’m sure,” Ruth said, “he thinks nothing of the kind.”

  “He’s a hell of an engineer, and I’m looking forward to working him within an inch of his life, just as soon as I can get all my ducks in a row.”

  “I feel confident he knows that, Mr. Morris, but I will surely tell him you said it.”

  “Everything is looking good for November. We should be able to get the two of you down here and get Robert working by the end of November at the very latest.”

  “That sounds fine,” Ruth said. “That gives us time to take care of all the loose ends here.”

  “Good, that’s just fine. Sorry to interrupt, and I hope you have a great evening.”

  For a moment, after she hung up, Ruth allowed herself to believe that this was a surprise Robert had planned for her, to begin anew, far from all their mistakes. Her heart knew better. The reward Robert had planned for her was abandonment, while he made everything official with his harlot and bastard child. Would he try to pass the harlot off as white as well? Nothing seemed beneath him.

  So she had until November. She knew Robert’s weakness, knew what she would have to do to get him back. She needed only the opportunity, and if it failed to present itself, then she would have to create it.

  *

  That August she phoned Mitch Antree.

  “This is not a social call,” she said, when he started his routine of flattery and balderdash. “I am not calling you as Robert’s wife, but as Wilmer Bynum’s daughter. Do you understand me?”

  After a silence he said, “Yes.” The dancing was gone from his voice.

  “I assume you know about my husband and his mistress.” This silence went on even longer, and Ruth said, “Don’t bother to cover up. I’ve known about it since it started, and I didn’t expect you to report back to me.”

  “I know about her,” he said.

  “Do you know she’s pregnant?”

  “No,” he said, then, involuntarily, “I’ll be damned.”

  “I have no doubt that you will,” Ruth said. “That’s beside the point. The baby should be due sometime in the next month. I want to know when it’s born. If Robert calls in sick, or even late to work, I want to know about it. Any deviation from his schedule, any mysterious phone calls, anything that might be a signal from her that she’s about to give birth, and I find out about it. Is that clear?”

  “Yes,” Mitch said. The resentment was like a deep well on his end of the phone. She could almost hear the echo. “Is that all?”

  “That’s all. For now.”

  He hung up without another word.

  *

  On the first Friday in September, her mother called in the afternoon. “Were you planning on coming down this weekend?”

  “I hadn’t decided,” Ruth said. In fact she had a bridge game, a secret she continued to keep from her mother. “Why?”

  “I think you’d better come.”

  Her breath stopped. “Is something wrong with daddy?”

  “Nothing like that. You’ll see when you get here.”

  She threw some clothes into an overnight bag, arranged a substitute for bridge, and left immediately. Highway 70 East was already crowded, and Ruth thought about the highways that Robert was building and had yet to build. Someday I-40 would connect Durham to Raleigh and beyond, and traffic delays would be a thing of the past.

  She parked in her usual spot, under the ancient oak in the lot north of the house. As soon as she opened the car door, Greg’s German Shepherd puppy came bounding up to meet her. He was barely four months old, all energy and no grace. Greg had named him George, supposedly after Patton, more likely after Wallace.

  The screen door to the house was unlatched, as always, and she found her mother making cornbread in the kitchen. She kissed her mother’s dry cheek and said, “Tell me what’s going on. Where’s Greg? George is never more than five feet from him.”

  “Best let your father tell you that.”

  “Where is he?”

  She pointed with her chin. “Tractor shed.”

  Ruth found him at his workbench, cutting slots in a 2 × 6 with a hand router, one eye squinting against the cigarette in the corner of his mouth. Ruth waited for the whine of the bit to stop and then said, “Daddy?”

  He looked up and smiled. “Hello, Sugar.”

  “Daddy, what’s happened to Greg?”

  His smile faded like a dream. “Greg’s on his way to California.”

  “California? Why? What’s going on?”

  “Greg decided to enlist in the Army. He thought maybe that would give him a fresh start.”

  Everybody, it seemed, was looking for a fresh start. “Daddy, they’ll send him to Vietnam. Something’s wrong. He wouldn’t go without saying goodbye to me.”

  “He made the decision kind of sudden-like.”

  “There’s something you’re not telling me.”

  “Greg got himself in a bit of trouble. This was the best answer for all concerned.”

  “What kind of trouble? Was it that business with Harvey Boyette?”

  “Greg had nothing to do with what happened to Harvey.” Her father had all sorts of different denials; this one rang true.

  “Is it some girl?” She hoped it was true.

  “Honey, this is nothing for you to be getting your nose into. He’s gone, and that’s all you need to know. I expect he’ll write you once he gets settled.”

  Dinner was like a bad church service. The three of them went through the motions, enduring it with blank faces, eager to get away. Afterwards Ruth’s father turned on the TV in the den, and her mother retreated upstairs to read her Bible and mend clothes. Ruth washed the dishes, then sat silently with her father through Hogan’s Heroes, the canned laughter as unconvincing as play money. After the first half of the CBS Friday Night Movie, another World War II story, she went up to bed. Unable to sleep, she turned the pages of her high school yearbook and thought about other directions her life might have gone. Most of her friends from those days were married, some with three, even four children. When she ran into them in Smithfield, they seemed numb and exhausted by their lives. She would have traded places with any of them.

  She woke in the early hours of the morning to the sound of her door opening. She was still heavy with sleep, not sure how old she was. “Daddy?” she said.

  “Shhhh.” The door closed and someone came to sit on the floor next to her bed. “It’s Greg,” he whispered. “I hope I didn’t scare you.”

  She was fully awake now. “Daddy said you were gone to California.”

  “Not yet. He’s got me a ride with a trucker headed out there in a couple of days. Until then I got to hide out in the basement.”

  “What happened?”

  “I did something.”

  She longed to turn on the light. She couldn’t tell from his whispered voice what he was feeling. “Something bad?”

  “I don’t know. It needed doing. Your daddy wanted it done, he asked for it to get done. But I did it on my own, without permission, and your daddy is really mad.”

  Your daddy too, Ruth thought. She’d never told him, and would not now; it was not her secret to reveal. “Greg, what did you do?”

  “I killed him. The nigger, Barrett Howard, the big, tough Black Power nigger. I killed him with my own hands.”

  “Oh, Greg, no.”

  “Don’t you start in on me, too.”

  “I’m not ‘starting in.’ I love you like a brother. I hate to see you come to this.”

  “I had to do something,” he said. “I had to show him I was still a man.”

  “Barrett Howard was a man, too. You took his life.”

  “Don’t tell me you never wanted to kill anybody. What about that woman, Mercy? You never wished her dead?”

  When Ruth didn’t answer, he snorted. �
��This is war. People get killed in wars all the time. He knew that when he declared war on the white race.”

  “Daddy said you’re going in the Army.”

  “Yeah.”

  “They’ll send you to Vietnam, you know. You always said you didn’t want to go.”

  “I got no choice. Your daddy said it was the smart thing to do, and I got to do what he tells me just now. Give me an alibi, take me out of the picture. I think he’s afraid I’d talk, but I wouldn’t. I never would.” His hushed voice was feverish, pumped with bravado and raw need.

  “I know,” Ruth said, a meaningless, soothing sound.

  “He had to call Congressman Fogg, get the brothers to help clean up the mess I made.”

  “Are the police after you?”

  “Not yet. So far don’t nobody know he’s dead but us. Your daddy says he’ll take care of it, and maybe he will, and this whole thing will blow over. While all that happens, I’ll be in Vietnam.”

  His knees creaked as he shifted his weight. “I got to go. I don’t want your daddy to catch me up here, no telling what he’d do. I was listening at the pantry door this afternoon, when you came in the kitchen and were talking to your mama. I knew I had to see you, get a chance to say goodbye. You were always good to me, always treated me special. I wanted to thank you for that.”

  Tears ran down Ruth’s face, across her nose and onto her left hand that held up her head. “Be careful,” she said. “I hope you…I hope you find your way out of this.”

  She wanted him to kiss her forehead, or touch her hand; that was not Greg’s way. “I’m going to sneak outside for a while, be with my dog,” Greg said. “He’ll be full grown before I see him again.” He was standing now, moving toward the door. “You won’t tell your daddy about this?”

  Then he was gone.

  *

  On September 18, a Thursday, Mitch Antree called. “He just had a message come into the office saying ‘Call M.R.’ This may be it.”

  “Thank you,” Ruth said.

  “Don’t mention it,” Antree said, and put the phone down sharply.

  She’d been dreading this day without knowing why it was so important to her. There was no plan in her mind, only a powerful and formless longing. Now that the day was here, she wished she hadn’t known about it. The problem with the gift of knowledge was that you could never give it back.