Scared of the Dark

by Easton Vaughn

  “Fourth-year rotations start the first of July,” Aiden said. “It’s one of the hardest years. I have to get back.”

  “Damn, I missed an entry, Aiden. ‘Persona Non Grata’. Now that’s interesting.”

  “I swear I won’t mention any of this to anyone. You’re safe, if you let me go.”

  “Tell me about this Persona Non Grata. My interest is piqued.”

  “It’s nothing,” Aiden said.

  “Then you don’t mind sharing,” Merritt said.

  Aiden sighed. “My father.”

  “Is that right? So it’s Persona Non Grata I contact for this money you keep talking about?”

  Aiden said nothing.

  “Persona Non Grata that means—”

  “Our relationship is strained,” Aiden admitted. “He’ll come up with the money, though. If you let me talk to him I—”

  “What happened, Aiden? Is Daddy not quite as liberal as you? He didn’t take to Saina? Aghast at the idea of little caramel-colored grandbabies?”

  Aiden grew silent.

  “I’ve hit it dead on again haven’t I?” Merritt said, smiling and shaking his head. “I tell you, I should’ve gone on to college myself. Maybe not Harvard, but like a two-year school or something. Maybe even Howard up in D.C., if I really wanted to aim high. I have a pretty good head for things. Love to read. Self-taught, you might say.” He paused, studied Aiden, and then said, “Intellectual curiosity, Aiden. That’s what I have. Speaking of which, I’ve never had the pleasure of talking to a true Harvard man before. What’s been your most interesting medical school experience so far?”

  Nothing.

  Standing, knees cracking as he made it upright, Merritt moved over and placed a foot on Aiden’s chest, shoving aside all pretense of goodwill. “I don’t think you understand. I asked you a question, boy.”

  “You can’t be serious,” Aiden said. “You want to talk as though…as though none of this is happening.”

  “Yes, I do. And you don’t have much choice in the matter.”

  “I’m scared, okay?”

  Merritt nodded. “As well you should be, young SoBo man such as yourself. But you have nothing to fear if you do what I tell you to do. Always, with no exceptions. Now, I want an interesting story with a rich dilemma at its core. I might never get this kind of opportunity with a Harvard man ever again.”

  “You don’t know what you’re asking of me,” Aiden said.

  Merritt put some weight into his foot pressure on Aiden’s chest. “I’m sure there is something in your oeuvre that I would find interesting.”

  Aiden sighed and thought for a moment before launching into the story of his first internal pelvic exam. At that point, Merritt moved his foot so Aiden could breathe freely and talk.

  Harvard medical students worked with professional patients, Aiden explained, and Amanda, his subject, was much calmer than him. Obese, with close-cropped hair and Cola-brown eyes, she’d started in right away with easy conversation. She loved the Boston Celtics, particularly Paul Pierce, was devastated by the cancellation of Scrubs, and laughing and patting her mound of stomach, said, “I’ve taken being a Masshole to heart. Too many Boston Cremes, as you can probably tell. A guilty pleasure among many.”

  Her self-deprecating manner had set Aiden at ease. Later, she guided him through a breast exam, lowering the top of her johnny to reveal a bosom that dripped like melted candle wax down to her navel; taking Aiden’s hand and placing it over dense fibrous scar tissue. “Once upon a time these bad boys were quite impressive,” she said. “Okay for picking up willing young men on Fridays and Saturdays at the pub but terrible for the back. Got ‘em reduced, believe it or not. Haven’t had many dates since. You men are so shallow.”

  “Not all of us,” Aiden had said.

  “You’re the exception to the rule?”

  Aiden nodded. “I’d like to think so.”

  “Hmm. What are you doing after this exam, Doc?”

  Aiden had laughed.

  Then Amanda covered her shoulders again and spread a paper sheet across her lap. Aiden positioned a lamp while his clinical partner ran warm water over the speculum they would use to open Amanda’s vagina and study her cervix. She guided Aiden on how to feel her labia, taught him how to spread her labia majora to expose the crinkled pink labia minora inside.

  “Rotate the speculum ninety degrees and push it toward the back of my vagina. Keep pressure toward the bottom of the speculum because if it drifts up and hits my clitoris I just might rip your pretty little head right off your shoulders.”

  Aiden told Merritt how he saw pink tissue wall streaked with lines of creamy white mucus. Amanda, looking in a hand mirror, offered a slight suggestion. “You might want to try closing the lips and adjusting your arm down. Push the tip up.”

  Aiden tried again. Saw the raised cervix and the bull’s-eye red spot that opened into the body of the uterus. “Yes!” Amanda barked, and laughed. “Sorry about that. But now you can say you’re one of the lucky few that’ve heard my Marv Albert impression after my honey Paul hits a three-pointer.”

  “Paul Pierce is your honey? Now I’m jealous.”

  “Doctor to patient relationships are frowned upon, Mr. Exception to the Rule. Don’t they teach you anything at Harvard?” Smiling as she said it. One of the nicest smiles Aiden had ever known.

  Next came the bimanual exam. Aiden wearing lubricated gloves, easing the fingers of his right hand into Amanda’s vagina.

  “In further,” she’d directed.

  Merritt whistled, cutting the story short. “I wouldn’t want a doctor’s headaches, but med school sounds like a blast. That’s a fine story, Aiden. Keep honing it. A fat girl giving you a tour of her twat. Damn.”

  “What do you do?” Aiden asked.

  “What’s that? You’re trying to build some kind of rapport with me?”

  “You mentioned construction?”

  “I sure did.”

  “Tell me about it, James.”

  “Shit,” Merritt said, reapplying pressure with his foot. “We’re on a first-name basis now, boy? I don’t recall giving you permission to call me by any name, let alone my first.”

  “Why is this happening?” Aiden cried.

  “Don’t whine, Aiden. You’re a Harvard man. It’s beneath you to grovel.”

  Aiden’s jaw trembled, but he managed some steel in his tone. “Let’s make that call to my father then.”

  Merritt laughed. “Don’t come at me too hard, either. Keep that SoBo toughness in your pocket. I’d hate to have to kick you in the head. Liberal boy like you never used the N-word in your life. We need to find a happy medium here, Aiden.”

  Aiden said nothing.

  “All of us here gave everything up,” Merritt said. “That takes courage you couldn’t begin to understand, boy.”

  “Where are we?” Aiden tried again.

  “Safe from the trouble out there.”

  “That’s the second time you’ve mentioned trouble. What trouble? Maybe I can help you.”

  “You look like you’d be a lot of help to me,” Merritt said, laughing without mirth.

  “Fifty thousand,” Aiden said. “We can ask my father for that. I think he could scramble and come up with it.”

  “Good ol’ Persona Non Grata.”

  “Cut me loose. Let me give him a call.”

  “I feel good knowing something a Harvard man has yet to figure out.”

  “He might even be willing to go higher,” Aiden said. “Just cut me loose. My arms are numb.”

  Merritt peered down at him. “I can’t believe you still haven’t figured it out.”

  “Figured what out?”

  “We don’t want any money from you.”

  “What do you want?” Aiden asked.

  Merritt smirked and moved toward the shed door. Heavy, deliberate steps, the sound echoing through the small space—meant to mark his presence and announce his power, to completely dishearten the white boy.
r />   “What do you want?” Aiden called.

  Merritt gripped the shed’s door handle, ducked his head and moved outside, slapping mosquitoes away from his nostrils and mouth. Frowning and spitting.

  “What do you want?” Aiden called a second time.

  Merritt closed the door behind him, still not quite plumb, a tiny sliver of light leaking in.

  Aiden was nearly hysterical. “What. Do. You. Want?”

  Saturday, June 23

  Sweat leaked from James Merritt’s hairline and into his eyes. The sun was as bright as a camera flash, and even though a gentle breeze stirred, it felt like muffler exhaust on his skin. He blinked against the sting of perspiration in his eyes and wiped it from his brow with a tattered old T-shirt. Wiped and shooed mosquitoes attracted to the sweetness of his fire.

  The fire was a necessary evil. He needed it to boil water for his daily cup of coffee. The caffeine jolt kept him sharp. Alert. Ready for whatever challenges he was presented with: At the moment, three men breaking through the tree cover and trudging like a column of black ants toward his quiet spot on the beach. They represented one fourth of the island’s twelve Trustees. All three were covered in wet stink. A wobbly, billiard ball-shaped meddler named Mosley Walters at the head of the line. He was a runt of a man. Wide as he was tall. Obnoxious as he was wide. With features Merritt simply couldn’t reconcile with a black man—thin long nose, an equally thin wafer of lips, eyes the color of honey. Added to that, he was dressed in ridiculous khaki shorts that were large enough to accommodate two men at once, and a T-shirt stretched out of shape by the tubes of fat settled around his middle. He was a strange looking man from crown to heel.

  Tall and rail-thin Haywood Daniels followed close on Mosley’s heels, khaki shorts of his own, a colorful short-sleeved shirt decorated with island trees billowing behind him like a cape, a straw cowboy hat cocked on his head. It was made of Mexican palm and wrapped with a leather band, a cattleman crease in the crown. Haywood loved his fashions, however dreadful they happened to be, and seldom shut up about them. Despite his incessant preening, Merritt found him at least tolerable.

  Bringing up the rear was a man everyone on the island called Pleasant—his surname, apparently—though his disposition wasn’t anything close to making the name apropos. Pleasant hovered well above Mosley but didn’t quite reach Haywood in height. His muscles were hard like granite and he had an alcoholic’s eyes—tinged nicotine-yellow and red—and a mean drunk’s demeanor to match the eyes. Despite the visual comedy and entertainment provided by Mosley and Haywood, Pleasant was the one that would have to be watched the closest.

  Merritt spit and turned his back to them. He stirred coarse coffee grounds into a dented tin pot filled halfway with water he’d boiled over his fire. A thermos was planted in the sand next to the tin pot. Shirtless and barefoot, he had a worn-thin cotton sock draped over his left shoulder like a military epaulet. His only clothing was a baggy pair of Tar Heel-blue basketball shorts missing the drawstrings.

  As the three Trustees settled around him he whistled a made-up melody and continued stirring the coffee grounds. In the distance, a bird chirped a tender song, and quiet waves from Pamlico Sound lapped at the sand just yards beyond Merritt’s tent. Mosley Walters cleared his throat. Merritt didn’t look up.

  “James?” Mosley said.

  Whistle, whistle, whistle. Stir, stir, stir.

  “James?”

  Merritt counted ten Mississippi in his head before speaking. A part of him wanted to ask Mosley when the baby was due, nod at Haywood’s awful shirt and ask where the island was that produced trees with purple bark and orange leaves on blue sand. Instead, in an even tone from his crouched position, he said, “Buy you gentlemen a cup of java?” His gaze was trained on Pleasant’s feet as he spoke. They moved even an inch, Merritt would move two inches. And deliver the first blow.

  “We have some serious matters to discuss with you,” Mosley Walters said. “Please don’t be flip with me, James.”

  Merritt made note of the “me.” So Mosley was the spokesman. Not a surprise, but good to know just the same. With this knowledge in mind, Merritt carefully set his stir spoon aside, a crooked smile settling on his face as he peered up at the shorter man. “Flip, huh? And here I was shooting for personable, hospitable.” Looking directly at Mosley but focused on Pleasant in his periphery. Haywood Daniels had settled beside Mosley and was smoking a Djarum Black that seasoned the air with a cloying blend of vanilla and clove. He wasn’t an issue.

  “As I was saying, we need to have a serious talk,” Mosley said.

  “That right?” Merritt noticed that Pleasant’s battered Reeboks had sunk silently in the sand an arm’s reach away. Comfortable with that, he reached for the worn cotton sock draped over his shoulder and positioned it so that the foot hung down the well of his thermos and the striped top fit snug over the lip. “Before Shepherd liberated me I thought I might hide out in Central America,” he said, and then, with considerable care, he wrapped the sweat rag from earlier around the handle of the tin pot, lifted it, and poured the steaming black mix of water and coffee grounds into the sock-and-thermos contraption. Filtered coffee dripped into the thermos.

  “That’s lovely, but did you hear me, James? We need to talk.”

  “Learned this trick with the sock in Costa Rica,” Merritt continued, setting the tin pot back at rest on the sand. “They call it agua de medias down there. Sock water. It tastes a whole lot better than it sounds, I promise you that.”

  “Are you even listening to what I’m saying to you, James?”

  Merritt nodded and unrolled the sock from the thermos, then emptied the wet coffee grounds on a yellowed newspaper he’d spread out on the ground near his fire. He twisted the thermos free from the sand, brought it to his nose, closed his eyes and inhaled.

  “A lot has happened,” Mosley said, continuing in spite of Merritt’s indifference. “And we feel as though we’ve been kept completely in the dark. I’m afraid we cannot tolerate that.”

  Merritt opened his eyes and made it to his feet. Even barefoot he was more than a head taller than Mosley. “I’m noticing you’ve moved from “me” to “we, we, we.” Does that mean you speak for everyone on the island, Mosley?”

  “I do,” Mosley said, nodding.

  “That’s not possible,” Merritt replied. “You don’t speak for me.”

  “Well…” Mosley’s voice trailed off. Merritt stared at him, waiting. A crooked grin flowering on his face with each silent second that ticked by.

  “I see your efforts to intimidate don’t end with helpless women,” Haywood Daniels piped in, taking up the slack from his friend. He dropped his Djarum on the sand and stamped the stub out with his dirty shoe. “Just a dyed-in-the-wool bully, aren’t you?”

  Merritt turned to face him, the smile completely gone from his face. “I need to scare up a dustpan, or you plan on picking that up with your fingers?”

  Haywood frowned. “Pick up what?”

  “Your litter,” Merritt said, nodding at the Djarum in the sand.

  “For crying out loud. That’s what concerns you most at this moment?”

  Mosley bent and captured the whittled Djarum himself, holding it away from his body between two thick fingers, his nose crinkled. Not a smoker. Not happy with anyone who chose to indulge.

  Haywood noticed the look on Merritt’s face and took a hard step back.

  “You should probably reward old Mosley here with a neck massage later,” Merritt told him. “He helped you avoid a major hassle, Wood.”

  Haywood narrowed his eyes. “I don’t know what you’re insinuating.”

  “That Djarum cigars aren’t the only thing you like in your mouth,” Merritt said.

  “You’re a vile and disgusting man,” Haywood gasped. “Just hateful.”

  Merritt’s tone lightened and his posture relaxed. “Pot calling the kettle black, Wood. And nothing I haven’t heard before. You must’ve spoken with Mrs. Potter, sha
red notes or something. Well, I have news for you, and her. We’re all vile and disgusting. Every last one of us. I’m better for knowing so.”

  “I’m nothing like you,” Haywood said, his voice trembling. “I stopped being vile and disgusting the moment I stepped foot on this island. Shepherd set me free.”

  Merritt frowned. “Free? That’s a mighty progressive thought. You’ll have to excuse me then, because I certainly didn’t realize you were a free man. There’s no reason for a free man to be here. So hopefully you’ll forgive me for the slight. In the meanwhile, since you’re so free, it might be time for you to move on to bigger and better things, Wood.”

  “It’s Haywood,” the thin man corrected. “And you’re not going to bully me. I won’t stand for it.”

  Merritt smiled and something sparked in his eyes.

  Haywood opened his mouth to respond further but Mosley quieted his response with an upraised hand, and then he once again turned to face down Merritt, chest puffed out, shoulders square. “Haywood is right, James. We won’t be bullied by you. We’re prepared to start impeachment proceedings if this cannot be a civil discussion.”

  Merritt’s frown grew and he cocked his head. “You’ve written new code into our constitution, have you?”

  “We’re fairly certain that Shepherd wouldn’t disapprove,” Mosley said. “What we have here on the island is much too exceptional to compromise.”

  “And you feel as if I’ve somehow compromised us?”

  Mosley shook his head and pursed his wafer-thin lips. “I’ve elected to withhold judgment about that until I’ve heard your say. All of us are waiting for your response to some crucial questions. Shepherd placed you in charge because he believes in your leadership. After all I’ve seen from him, I trust Shepherd’s discernment without compunction. And because of that, I’m more than willing to give you the benefit of the doubt. Like I said, that is until I’ve heard your say.”

  “Okay.”

  Mosley sighed and cleared his throat. “Per your order I would presume, Willard is not talking. He’s offering nothing of substance, at least. And your friend Ruck isn’t even capable of telling us that you’ve ordered him silent. I’m not a doctor, but I’d venture a guess that the man’s catatonic or close to it. That leaves you, James. And that’s fine because we’re most interested in your explanation about what has happened anyway.”