Mike’s an ex-con who used to work for my father’s landscaping business. When he got out of jail for manslaughter, my father was the only one who would hire him. Eventually, Mike was able to save enough to open a pawnshop, grease some palms, and open this bar. He was always grateful to my father for giving him a job that didn’t require him to degrade himself completely. Mike repaid him by letting him come into his bar, even before segregation had begun to weaken. But that situation lets me know just how much of an unjust world this is: a white ex-con can buy a business and a bar and condescend to my father by letting him come in here and drink himself to death.
I go over and take the stool next to my father’s. The man on the other side of me is already sloppy-drunk. He finishes off his drink with a hard swallow and slurs, “Who keeps leavin’ that door open? All these goddamn flies keep comin’ in here.”
Mike grabs a mug, holds it under the spout, and wrenches open the tap. He turns to the irritated man and slams down the mug so hard it sends a small wave of beer onto the counter and into his lap. “This one’s on the house,” says Mike. “Drink up.”
The drunk gently brushes off his lap, picks up the drink, and before tilting it toward his lips, says, “Mike, you always are the gentleman.”
My father nurses his drink and only acknowledges my presence with a grunt. I already know why he’s here. I never remember the date, but I remember that look—and his face is the only calendar I need. It’s his birthday. Fred’s birthday. My dead brother’s birthday.
“C’mon, Dad. It’s getting late, and you’ve had too much to drive home by yourself.”
“Car won’t start. That’s why I’m still here.”
“Dad, how long are you gonna drive that Edsel? Why don’t you let me get you a new car?”
He looks at me. “I don’t need you to get me shit, man. It’s an okay car. Just ugly as hell.”
He slams his drink down after taking a gulp that makes him wince. He grabs both elbows and leans forward, emitting something like a sigh and a gasp.
He loved the son that came before me, before he met my mother, made with a woman he was never married to. Fred suffered a head injury—he jumped from a tire swing at the edge of a creek and dove head-first into the shallow water. He met with the rocky bottom a lot sooner than he expected. But according to my father, the delirious boy walked two miles—dazed and bloody—just to die at home. My father no doubt loved him. I’ve never seen pictures of him, but I’m sure he must have been a strong and handsome boy. Dad’s spitting image.
He stands and grabs my shoulder, then my neck—firmly, in that way that fathers do to their sons. That act that says I love you and I’m proud of you in more ways than I can show or say, so I’m just going to do this simple gesture.
But then I realize he is just trying to steady himself after too much drink. His legs don’t have any steadiness to them yet.
“Give me a few more minutes, son,” he says as he sits back down and knocks on the bar for another dose. “I’m not ready yet.”
I decide to smoke outside until the old man is ready to leave. Across the street, the neon sign in front of Lucky’s diner catches my attention. It glows lucently over the large encompassing window that makes the place look like an enormous aquarium. Inside, the patrons are hovering over their lukewarm coffees, their collection of cigarette butts and greasy plates under jaundiced fluorescence. No one seems to be bothering anybody. Everybody maintains their invisibility, lonely souls only aware of themselves. It seems like a place I’d be comfortable in. For a moment, I think about going in. Lucky’s has been desegregated recently, but I don’t see any Negroes inside and I’ve seen enough trailblazing for one evening.
But then I see Mathis sitting inside, and this sends a shock through me that deadens my good leg. With a folded newspaper and cigarette hanging precariously from his lip, he leans back and lets out a puff of smoke. I quickly retreat into the alley between Mike’s and a trade school. Shielded by the backstreet darkness, I watch for a long while, amazed that our worlds have collided in this way. And it’s here that I become aware of his vulnerability.
My head becomes hollow. All sound disappears, except the question: If they are watching us, who is watching them? Just by asking that question—epiphany isn’t strong enough—suddenly in the darkness, a gilded path presents itself before me.
Something like half an hour passes. Mathis gets into a black Ford when he leaves the diner and drives onto Luckie Street. The old man can occupy himself with another drink. I’ll pick him up later.
I get into my Caddy and follow him, just to see how far I can take it, but he makes a turn onto Jones, then Northside, and he disappears into the darkness. I’ve already lost him, but everything is bright and clear in my mind.
These are hard times, and they seem to be calling for a far more aggressive approach than the one that Martin has been offering. There is a man up north who uses just a letter, a symbol, X, for his surname. He tells us to shake the enduring ties to our former masters and rid ourselves of our slave names. I think of my own name: Estem. My great-great-grandfather was a slave owned by a Spanish-Frenchman named Esteban-Margeaux. When slavery finally ended, my grandfather couldn’t even read or spell the name his old master had given him. Esteban-Margeaux. All he could write was E-S-T-E, followed by an M.
Estem.
Even in my name, I bear the exclusive brand of the Negro—cursed by society with woeful limitations, but blessed by nature with an uncanny knack for reinvention.
I give the agents a call, but not from my usual place; I’m much closer this time. I tell them that I won’t be making it to our rendezvous, that something’s come up, and then I wait in front of their office building for a very long time, until the streets empty and the sky becomes dark. I see both of them. I could put the tail on Strobe, but he is just an ornamental pillar. Mathis is the keystone; weaken him and the whole thing comes tumbling down.
Again, I follow him up to the intersection a few blocks away. I suspect the beginning of a pattern: Left off Peachtree, right on Sixth, straight on Spring. I commit it to memory and keep my distance. I don’t want to get too close.
The trail leads to a large square box, adorned for no functional reason with dead gray concrete columns. Mathis’s car drives toward the darkness under the building—some sort of underground parking lot.
I wait again for a while. Many cars leave, but not one of them belongs to Mathis.
A few days later, I finally meet up with the agents. I offer them some bullshit story about how Martin’s personal behavior is causing concern at the SCLC, and there is talk about having Abernathy replace him. All the while, I think about how to get to Mathis. I thought the story would be some sort of peace offering and that the sensational aspects would smooth things over for missing our meeting. But Mathis just sits across from me, his legs crossed and an unlit cigarette crammed in the corner of his mouth, and taps a matchbook from the Quiet Time Motel rapidly against the desk. There’s a sleeping hillbilly on the cover, and I watch his head bounce up and down.
I finish my story. Mathis’s unlit cigarette makes me hungry for my own. I reach into my pockets for my lighter.
“Don’t,” Mathis says.
I withdraw my hands, then cross my arms.
“This is the information we waited days for? Listen,” says Mathis, “when we make an appointment, you keep it. If you can’t make it, it’d better be life or death.”
I look at him more closely. I’ve never seen him this irritable. His eyes are bloodshot, he needs a shave, and his shirt looks like it has been working overtime. All this irritability and nervous tapping must be due to all those late nights at Lucky’s diner and their ulcer-inspiring coffee. Or is it something else?
“Mathis, I apologize. It won’t happen again.”
He stands. “You’re goddamn right it won’t happen again!”
“Take it easy,” says Strobe.
“You people just don’t get it! You think you can
just press a goddamn button and we come running. You think we’re just government machines and we don’t have lives of our own?”
“Mathis . . .” Strobe says.
I sit quietly, taking a peculiar interest in this breakdown.
“Is that it, dammit? You don’t think we’re people too? We’ve got lives—children, bills, taxes, mortgages—just like the rest of you.” He gets about an inch from my face. “And all I ask is that you have the decency to keep a goddamn appointment when you make one!”
“Dick,” Strobe says, placing a hand on Mathis’s shoulder. “Enough.”
I wipe the heat of Mathis’s breath off my face as I stand.
“I think we’re done here,” Strobe says.
I don’t say anything. I just close the door behind me.
Mathis was practically on the verge of hysteria. A man in that state needs to be watched. It’s almost comical listening to him go on about mortgages and property taxes—his membership dues in suburban conformity—to show he’s like the rest of us. What kind of desperation would prompt that kind of frantic outburst? I need to find out, and he may have given me a way to go about it.
I meet her again in front of the county assessor’s office where she works as a clerk. She’s still skinny, but she’s added a few pounds, I hadn’t noticed that, and I can tell she is not married even before I see her bare ring finger. Pearls, white gloves, shoulder shawl—she’s dressed like a woman expecting a man to call on her, like she’s ready for a date.
Samantha DePlush. Her mother is friends with my mother. A preacher’s daughter, smart as a whip. She went to Spelman, the all-girl college next to Morehouse, and was in a co-ed accounting class with me. We Morehouse boys used to pray for classes that would allow us to penetrate that fortress of steel and brick and stone, so we could catch a glimpse of those golden-brown treasures that waited inside. She had a thing for me back then. Well, more than a thing really, but I was too busy pining over Candy to even notice or act on it. It’s not that she was unattractive. She had a nice enough face, but her body was a little too boyish, not curvy like I like them—like most Southern men like them. The weight of her desperation seemed to add to her thinness, flattening out the roundness of her breasts and hips.
I got her phone number from my mother—who was more than happy to retrieve it from Samantha’s mother, despite the possibility of being embarrassed about her delinquent property taxes. She seemed excited enough to hear from me, so we scheduled a time for me to meet her outside of her work.
I get out and open the door for her.
“Ooh, nice car, John,” she says once I’m inside.
“Thank you.”
“I was surprised to hear from you, but I’m glad you called.”
“After I saw you that day, I’ve been thinking about you.”
“You’ve been thinking about me?”
“Yeah, I’m in a bit of a bind and I need your help.”
Her eyes drift dejectedly out the window. “Of course. You need some help and you thought of me.”
“No, Sam, this isn’t like cribbing your notes in accounting class. It’s not like that at all. I’m working for Martin Luther King—”
Her eyes light up. “Really?”
“Don’t act like you didn’t know. We’ve got the same kind of mother.”
She laughs. “Okay, I knew. Go ahead.”
“This man wrote us a bad check and I neglected to collect on it in time. The money has already been spent, creating a deficit in the books—”
“Right . . .”
“The address he gave me is a dead one. He either moved or never lived there.”
“That’s terrible. What do you want me to do?”
“Well, I was hoping you could get me a current address.”
“John, this is my job. That’s illegal. There’s no way I could do that. How could you ask me to do something so . . . so unethical?”
“I know, Sam, I know. I’m in a lot of trouble here . . .”
“Well . . . what’s in it for me?” she asks, looking first at her folded hands, then directly into my eyes. I’m not sure what to offer her—my time or the fattened envelope inside my glove compartment.
“All you have to do is tell me what you want, Sam. What is it that you want?”
She answers my question with a dive toward my mouth. A hard lustful kiss, more breath, mouth, and tongue than actual kiss. Something must have changed in me over the years. I feel myself responding to her.
“Is there some place we can go?” she asks.
We drive back to my apartment with the awkward silence dragging time, despite the shortcuts I pursue.
The experience was far more pleasant than I anticipated. She did most of the work—not like she was merely servicing me, but more like I was her plaything and she did with me as she willed.
I open my eyes after a brief postcoital slumber and she looks at me triumphantly. I feel myself growing smitten in that moment.
Fluttering those long eyelashes and parting those lips, still tinted with a passion-smeared shade of ruby red, she says, “I gotta go,” and jumps out of bed and starts getting dressed.
I sit up and pull the sheets to my chest. She puts on her undergarments with her back turned to me.
“Give me the name of the guy you’re trying to find,” she says, “and I’ll call you from the office when I do.”
“It’s Dick Mathis,” I say to her back, waiting for her to turn around and give me some recognition. “Try ‘Richard.’”
Now dressed, she faces me. “When I have it, I’ll contact you. Don’t worry about driving me. I’ll find a cab or a bus—or I’ll walk or something.”
“You want to get some dinner some time—my treat to say thank you?”
She keeps her eyes on me, but I can tell she would rather look away. “John, I want to apologize to you.”
“Apologize about what?”
“Well, back in school, with the way people chattered about you. Sometimes that place was so much like high school, with people making their snide comments all the time.”
“I’m confused. What does that have to do with me?”
“I just want you to know that I am a good Christian woman. I normally don’t condone that sort of thing, but sometimes the peer pressure is just too great and we do things we don’t want to do to fit in. I always felt guilty for not defending you, but now I see that I should have told you, maybe it would have given you a chance to change . . .”
“Are you saying that you and other people were talking about me behind my back?”
She adjusts her shawl in response.
“Well, what sort of things did they say about me?”
“You know . . . just the usual obnoxious sort of things.”
“Such as?”
“Well, the obvious—look, I’d rather not get into it. I just wanted to apologize.”
“No, it’s okay. I’m a big boy. I can take it. The obvious stuff, like what?”
“John, please, you’re making me uncomfortable. I just wanted to say I’m sorry. That’s all.”
“I see. So people were making fun of my brace and limp, is that it? People were making fun of me for surviving a childhood horror. I’m walking around with the battle scars to prove it, and people were making fun of me? And you’re joining in on it?”
Her posture stiffens at that moment. “Actually, no, John, that’s not what I meant.”
“Well, what did you mean?”
“It was your tendency to put on airs, to seem above it all. Your strange sense of superiority—arrogance, I think is accurate . . .”
“Okay, thank you.”
“Your naked cynicism and obvious disdain for other people.”
“Okay, Samantha, enough. I get the picture. Apology accepted.”
“Thank you, John. You have a good night.”
“Wait, Sam. You’re right, maybe I could’ve benefited from spending more time with you, but why can’t we start now? You never answer
ed my question about dinner.”
“You’re sweet,” she says. “But after I do this for you, don’t ever contact me again.”
I had trouble sleeping that night—the newly christened air still lingered with her, and my distracted mind toyed with the cultivation of a new priority: ruining Mathis or winning her over? But my window was cracked, and by morning the night breeze had aired out the room.
Samantha provided two possible addresses, but the sign in the window proclaiming Jesus Saves Niggers Too quickly narrowed it down.
His home is a modest one-story in the Devonmoore district. The house could use a good paint job, and the yard is patchy with yellowing grass. Hearing that last tape of Martin put me in an extended daze. My actions were foggy, but now I see that I was propelled by an unconscious determination. As I watch his home, waiting for Mathis to surface, I am not completely sure how it is that I am sitting here.
“How long’s this gonna take?” Lester asks me.
I turn my attention away from the street and look at Lester in the driver’s seat. “I’m not sure. But don’t worry—I’ll give you a day’s fare for this.”
“Why do you keep havin’ me follow this guy, Mr. Estem? He owe you money or somethin’?”
The first night was a bust. Lester instinctively slowed for every person waving on a corner, and we lost him.
“That’s right, Lester. He owes me money. Well, not me exactly—he wrote a number of bad checks to the SCLC, and since I keep the books, I intend to collect.” As I finish lying, Mathis comes out and gets into his black Ford.
My Cadillac may be too easy to spot after so many failed pursuits, so I’ve paid Lester in advance for his exclusive services, making him my driver, essentially. I know he’s attempted to extend his hand in friendship, but I have to admit it feels good relegating him to being my chauffeur. I used his need for money to put him in his place. Now I know how Count feels.
For the first few days, Mathis is consistent. Only work and home. However, today he takes a different route, and I sense he’s not heading back to the office. I fear that he knows we’re following him. I tell Lester to ease up—give him more room, set a rhythm for our strange dance. He may discover us. For a moment, I consider turning back, but then I embrace the consequences, and they do not frighten me. If he knows, to hell with him. If not, to hell with him anyway.
Our Man in the Dark Page 15