“What happened to this guy?” A man in a faded yellow baseball cap checked me out from head to toe. He was medium-brown and very tall, with a reddish beard. Suddenly I felt severely outclassed. I hadn’t paused to take stock of my condition, but it dawned on me that I had the psychotic drifter look down pat. I wiggled my dirty toes, which had ripped through my remaining ruined sock. Earth and grass stained my seersucker pants. My shirtsleeve was ripped at the shoulder.
A crowd had gathered around me. I ran a hand through my hair. “What kind of farm is this? Cotton? Peanut?”
“This is New Rosewood,” Artsy Latina reappeared sans canvas and easel. But she gripped a pitchfork. “You should go back to where you came from, mister.”
Yellow Baseball Cap carried a shovel, which he pointed at me.
“Who sent you?” a wild-eyed blond girl in overalls said. She had a hoe.
I held my hands up. “Listen. I just ran out of gas and—”
“Answer me,” the blonde said. “Where did you come from?”
“The City.”
“That’s almost six hundred miles from here,” Artsy Latina said. “Come on. We’ll show you the road back.”
The blonde grabbed my arm. “Or we can bury you in the corn. Your call.”
I twisted away. “Hold on. I’m just trying to find someone very important to me.”
Then she raised her hoe.
“Easy, Dopey,” Yellow Baseball Cap said.
“Why?” Dopey asked. “First the government sends drones. Now they’re sending snoopers. Next thing it’ll be troops, and then developers. Ain’t that right, Doc?” Dopey nodded at Doctor Artsy Latina. They were using code names.
Doc nodded back. “The last thing we need is fresh trouble.”
“You kids sure are rude,” I said. “You ever hear of the concept of hospitality to strangers? I haven’t eaten in a day. And there are weirdos in the wood.”
Yellow Baseball Cap had put his shovel down and was standing off to the side watching me with arms tightly folded across his chest. He stepped closer to the group of us and chuckled with a sheepish look of guilt. “I almost didn’t recognize you.” He placed a hand on my shoulder.
“No way, Watchdog.” Dopey said. “This is that dude?”
Nod. Under the cap, beard, and black man’s skin was my boy. My Nigel.
41
Doc and the girl in the overalls, Dopey, forced me at the point of a pitchfork into a partially curtained area where I was made to climb into a steel washbasin—the kind you might use for a large, filthy, shaggy dog.
They dumped scalding-hot water on me, water that had a strong medicinal punch to it that flared my nostrils. Something about delousing for the protection of the community. I wasn’t sure where Nigel had gone, but it occurred to me that he was likely not in control of his movements. He may have been barred from coming to me by one of the others. Worse, he may have been brainwashed into not wanting to see me. The thought made me shiver even as steam rose from my skin.
Nigel.
It wasn’t too late. Yes, he was dark-skinned. And the mark—it had darkened and spread beneath that beard. Where did it go, and where did it stop? The overall blackening of his skin made the mark almost unnoticeable…almost. But then again, his whole body was basically a mark now.
I would get him back to the City for treatment. It wasn’t too late. It was never too late as long as we were on this side of the void. Dr. Nzinga stood ready to help. And if not her, then one of the other clinics that had popped up across the nation. She’d licensed her techniques, and they were being used from sea to shining sea. All over the world, even. Yes, some other magician could cast their spells, and Nigel would rise. Even if he was now almost as dark as me—well, as dark as I once was.
Out of the bath, I put on sandals and a belted, caftan-type garment they called a tupa. Once I was fully dressed outside the little shack next to the baths, Dopey came to me and picked through my hair with a comb.
“Can I help you?” I asked.
“Hush, man,” she said. “Can’t have you spreading bad luck. And keep your hands where I can see them. I know you’re some kind of sicko.”
I winced. What had these people convinced my son to believe about me? What false memories and manufactured fears? No doubt there had been some sweat lodge session. Some dark guru presiding. That master would have coerced Nigel to find the so-called source of his so-called pain. No doubt they contorted my son against me, so that he would embrace them and whatever their feeble ideology directed.
A dark-skinned and very pregnant girl in an empire top ambled over. She looked like she would walk right through me if I didn’t get out of the way. But she stopped just short of that and stared at my face. Her black features were unmistakable. Araminta!
Unlike Nigel, and except for the obvious, she still looked like the annoying girl who drove up my blood pressure every time she opened her mouth. Something crashed inside me. I hadn’t realized how much I missed her.
“That’s so weird, mister.” Araminta pulled my cheek, as if to test its substance. “God damn.”
“Watch your mouth, young lady,” I said. “Need I remind you—”
“You really damn did it.” I swatted her hand away.
Her face slid from offense to softness. Then she gave me a warm hug, pinning my arms against my body. It was the first act of kindness any of the New Rosewoodians had shown me.
“Looks like you got into a little trouble,” I said.
“Looks like you got a lot white.” She grabbed my hand and turned it over in hers. “What’s white and white and white all over?” She poked my chest. “You are.”
I had almost forgotten about my demelanization. If there was anyone crass enough to broach the issue of the work I had had done, it was Araminta. To be honest, it wasn’t something I thought much about anymore. Sure, when I was undergoing the process at Personal Hill, I obsessed over my improving visage. It had taken several long months (which felt like an eternity of visits to the DMV). And each week, after a session, I would compare my retoned face in the mirror to the memory of my darker self, fading into the grasslands of the past. Each time I smiled. I smiled when I saw my reflection in storefront windows downtown or in the winking waters of the Myrtles mall fountain. I smiled at the strange absence of recognition of my otherness. When white men saw me, they shook my hand as they would the hand of a brother or old college pal. When white women saw me, there was no fake chumminess to compensate for their fear that I might snatch their purse and run. I was just a man on a mezzanine minding my matters. Uncle George. Mister Smith. Good old Norm from the tavern. I marveled at this new sense of normalcy like a fish that suddenly realized it could breathe out of water. But the novelty wore off eventually, and I took on an unexpected but comfortable invisibility.
A pickup truck tore up the dirt road, trail pluming dust. It stopped hard. The engine knocked as the driver rolled down the window.
Nigel sat in the driver’s seat. “It’s time to go, Dad.”
42
My son killed the engine of the dented pickup and leaned out the window the way a train engineer might. This threw me. In my soul of souls, Nigel was still an adolescent, younger even.
But even wrinkles in time get sorted out. And once free of the truck, Nigel swaggered toward me and Araminta. My, he really was tall. Even taller than I realized in our quick exchange earlier. His long stride cleared the distance between us in a few steps. His green eyes—Penny’s eyes—were unchanged, thankfully. Unfortunately, there was the issue of his skin, which was fair-angel-fallen-into-the-mud-pit brown.
This Nigel was much darker than the boy I’d raised. He vaguely reminded me of some of my lighter-skinned cousins on Sir’s side of the family. These cousins had been older than me when I was a child, and I hadn’t seen most of them since adulthood. But I had been jealous of thei
r worldliness, their masculine beauty, the hint of final assimilation into whiteness they heralded. Still, it wasn’t my cousins, whose names I could hardly remember, that I thought of when my son came to me just then. In fact, it wasn’t really a thought that I experienced so much as a feeling that caught me by the collar from behind.
Where is my gun?
The weapon had been tucked into my belt holster when I made it to the commune entrance. But I must have lost it before my delousing. I glanced around. Which one of these kleptos took it? One of the cotton pickers? Doc? Dopey?
During my woodland journey and before my flight to the underwater tunnel, I had raised the gun to eye level and pointed the muzzle at a grand old evergreen. I had choked the trigger—pop—and relished the sight of mottled bark exploding away from pearlescent flesh. I still smelled gunpowder in my nostrils.
I worried that Nigel and Araminta saw my thoughts in a bubble over my head. But now that I was paying attention to them, it was obvious they weren’t paying attention to me. They were shouting at each other. She kicked the wheel of the truck. He pounded the hood with his fist. What was the fuss?
He wanted to take me somewhere right away, and she wanted to come along. I pleaded for calm, and they told me to shut up, simultaneously. I recognized the pattern of their argument as one I once knew well. This was the exchange of two people who had been grievously in love for years. Two souls who had been divided prior to their disposition on Earth and now were angry at the effort of trying to fuse the jagged halves back together. They wore wooden bands on their ring fingers. I wished Penny could see them now.
These two new adults—so greatly changed from their larval stages when they fed on the leaves of the garden Penny and I planted—frankly astonished me. They were a family of two, soon to be three. And inside the big swell of Araminta’s belly was a precious baby—my grandchild. A person who would hopefully not take after me in any significant way, who would favor my Penny, inside and out, if there were any justice in the multiverse. But then again Araminta was still black as a meteorite—
“Look, Minty,” Nigel said. “I”—he shot a look my way—“have to do this.”
“This ain’t what we talked about,” Araminta said.
Nigel placed his hands on her shoulders.
“Fine,” she said. He kissed her forehead. With that, Araminta tugged his beard.
When I got into the truck, my door wouldn’t close. Nigel instructed me to pull the handle when I shut it. We were already in motion before I fully latched the thing. Crumpled notepaper and fallen leaves cluttered the floorboard. The truck was a beater for sure. The tailpipe banged against the bumper, adding to the noise that made the truck sound like a bundle of pots and pans tumbling downhill. A jagged crack ran down the center of the windshield. The passenger rearview mirror was missing so that the bracket seemed like an empty eye socket, silently appraising my worth.
We hung a right and curled up the mountain road. Dark valleys and wooded slopes all around us. Jackrabbits leaped along gravel, their eyes glowing like diamonds.
“This is certainly in the middle of nowhere, isn’t it?” I asked.
“It sure is.”
I turned to Nigel. “You like this?”
He gave a small nod. “It’s quiet, and the air is clean.”
“I sold the house,” I said.
He nodded again. “Oh.”
“It was too big for just me.”
And again. “That makes sense.”
“That doesn’t mean you can’t come home, son.” Up to this point, Nigel had been focusing on the shadowy road. His voice was flat, and his eyes betrayed nothing more than vacant concentration. Whatever ideas they had fed my son seemed to have turned him into a drone. But at my last comment, something flickered across his face.
“Home?” He glanced at me.
“Yes. The condo is small, but I have a rollout, and wait till you see—”
Nigel opened his mouth to speak, then closed it. He took a half breath and placed a hand on my forearm without looking away from the path.
“We’ll talk when we get up the mountain,” he said.
“But I really think we can—”
“Dad.” He smiled. I had been shushed by my own son, who now seemed to be laughing at something foolish about me. I stared at my hands, confused. We didn’t say a word for the rest of the ride. The rattletrap cacophony of the truck was abrasive. The silence? That was worse.
43
The truck pulled onto a drive off the main road, which continued back down the other side of the mountain. We were on a smooth expanse where the curvature of the formation mimicked the Earth’s. Soon we came to a small lodge with a tower attached to one side, so that the building looked like a toy soldier shouldering a rifle.
Nigel got out, slammed his door, and grabbed a full cardboard box from the back of the pickup. As he approached the building, he gestured with his hand, as if to say, Come on, old man, don’t be afraid.
Inside, an ax and cords of wood lined the back wall as though the occupants were prepping for a long, hard winter. A window opened onto the back of the mountain, where leaves shone in the starlight. Below in the valley, the commune firelights were Lilliputian, the faint rooftops benign as mushroom caps.
I peeked into a side room. A mattress was pushed against the wall under a dreamcatcher. On the mattress lay a partially wadded-up dress. The dress was like what Araminta wore.
I stepped back into the main room. “You live here.”
Nigel rummaged through a hutch. “I spend most of my days up here on lookout while Minty does her counselor thing. Unless it’s harvest time. Then it’s all hands on deck. Or on field if we’re being particular.” He paused and grunted to himself. “No one comes up here because it’s so far. I guess that’s what I like about it most.”
The place was simply furnished but contained a certain warmth. There was a potbellied stove, a rough-hewn table with benches, and a colorful mandala-esque hemp rug. Rumpled papers, mechanical pencils, and old textbooks—many by authors I remembered from my schooling like Nolan; Shrumley and Aloise; and Hatter, Wang, and Jonson—were everywhere.
“Still reading, I see.”
“It gets pretty dead, so I go up in the tower.” Nigel pointed up.
A trio of rifles were propped on a rack near the fireplace. He had placed the opened cardboard box next to the rifles. A familiar holstered weapon sat on top of some linens.
“What’s with the insurrection?”
“I handle the guns and ammo because I’m in charge of security. Sometimes we get unwanted visitors.” I furrowed my brow. “Anyway, most of those books are Minty’s, though. She’s been studying extrapolational humanism.”
“Is that my revolver?”
Nigel went over to the box and picked up the holstered gun. “Yeah. They took if off you because they thought you were from the government.” He unholstered it, went to the stove, and with his free hand flipped on a propane burner to warm water. “We don’t keep much up here. I’m having tea if you want some.” I nodded.
“Why’d you come?” Nigel placed the gun on the table.
I casually lifted the weapon and tried to spin the chamber. Again, it didn’t work, but I saw it was still loaded. I gathered the holster and secured it and the revolver around my waist.
“I was very worried about you after the festival,” I said. “I searched everywhere. I almost went bankrupt paying a PI to find you. I searched flophouses and under cold bridge overpasses. One freezing night, leaving a mixer at the City Rail Station, I saw a boy sleeping on a mat by an exhaust vent. I tried to wake the boy, who I quickly determined was dead. For a moment, I thought he was you. It sickened me, that boy’s death, and the idea that you might be as dead as him.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you where I went,” Nigel said. “That wasn’t
fair. But I needed to protect myself.” He placed teabags in two mason jars on the table and poured steaming water into them, one at a time.
“Protecting you was my job.”
“Dad.” He shook his head. “Are you sure that’s what you were doing?” He handed me a jar of tea.
“How could you say that? When you ran off with those terrorists, I thought I’d never see you again.”
“That’s all well and good, skip, but I wasn’t kidnapped. I enlisted.”
“Don’t play with me.” I had no idea what kind of charade Nigel was playing at, but I wanted to shake some sense into him. I couldn’t let him see my frustration. I was his father. I was in control.
“Who’s playing?” Nigel took a sip of tea. “I joined ADZE along with some other kids. Not long after that mall attack, that was.”
“You wouldn’t join up with terrorists. Not willingly. They must have gaslighted you into thinking it was right.”
Nigel looked me in the eye. “You were my hero. I thought you were good. Whatever you said, I sopped it up with a biscuit. ‘Wear a stupid hat for your own good, Nigel.’ ‘I know the needle hurts, but I would never hurt you, Nigel.’ ‘I love you, Nigel, so grin and bear it, Nigel.’ ” He imitated my voice so well that I was afraid to open my mouth, afraid of what might come out. He pulled off his faded yellow cap and tousled his hair. “That’s why I still keep this thing.”
He turned it over in his hands and sniffed it. “It’s a reminder, I guess. I don’t want to forget you. I can’t afford to. Everything you did to me, I really believed was for the best. Even the way you convinced me to lie to Mom about what you were doing. But then I met Minty at school. Boy, did she help me turn my head around. We had this long talk at that plantation you went to for your job. She helped me see things that were right in front of my nose. Better yet, she helped me see my nose. But I still remember what we were like before I woke up.”
We Cast a Shadow Page 28