by Bill Morris
He collapsed on the sofa next to her magazine. “I already know how to fight. I was Golden Gloves champion of Detroit when I was sixteen, case you forgot. Let’s drop it. Have a seat, Willie.”
He sat in an overstuffed chair facing the sofa. Through the large bay window he could see a lopsided moon hovering above their heads. Behind them the lawn ended in a distant stand of trees. Looking around, it occurred to Willie that this room was nearly as big as the house he grew up in. Yet the room somehow felt cramped, stuffed with too much furniture, too many lamps and vases and flowerpots, too many pictures on the walls, too many winking decanters. Willie sensed desperation in all this clutter.
The Surf gave his wife a recap of the Tigers game, which clearly bored her. Finally, when she gave out a big yawn he took the hint and drained his glass and stood up. “Willie’s going to take my car back to the club, Shug. Can you give me a lift over in the morning to pick it up?”
“Sure.” She accepted another peck on the cheek. Willie stood up and shook Chick Murphy’s hand and wished him goodnight. Instead of going upstairs Chick stepped into the half-bathroom under the staircase and, without closing the door all the way, took a stance at the toilet.
While Blythe struggled to light a fresh cigarette, Willie glanced at her husband. As he was zipping up his pants Chick gave out a little yelp of pain, then struggled to free his dick from his zipper. It was all Willie could do not to laugh out loud. Witnessing a white man’s distress—without him knowing it—was without a doubt one of life’s most under-rated joys.
After Chick made it up the stairs, Willie turned to say goodnight to Mrs. Murphy. But she said, “Sit down, Willie. Let me fix you a quick drink before you run off.”
What the hell, he thought. He was in no hurry to get back to the Quarters for the inevitable late-night poker game and sparring session with Wiggins and Hudson. “Thank you, Mrs. Murphy. I guess I could drink a beer if you’ve got one.”
She went to the bar and leaned over to fish in the refrigerator. Her skirt rode up far enough to reveal the tops of her stockings, the clasps of black garters, creamy slivers of thigh. Willie felt a pleasant buzzing in his groin and wondered if she was giving him this show on purpose or was just sloppy from the scotch.
She brought him a bottle of Cinci beer. “You need a glass?”
“No, ma’am,” he said, reaching for the bottle.
She didn’t let go of the bottle. “Cut the ‘ma’am’ crap, would you? We’re not at the club anymore. My name’s Blythe.”
He thought of the hippie girl Sunshine on Plum Street giving him the same command on Opening Day. He said, “The bottle’s fine, Blythe. Thank you very much.”
She released the bottle and returned to the sofa. Her stockings made a crackling sound when she crossed her legs. The Herb Alpert record ended, and to Willie’s relief she didn’t ask him to turn it over. “So tell me, Willie, where’s your home again?”
“Alabama. A little town called Andalusia, down around Mobile.”
“That’s right. My husband’s told me a lot about you. You’re Bob Brewer’s nephew, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“And didn’t you go to college?”
“Just one year. A little less, actually. At Tuskegee.”
“Tuskegee?”
“It’s a black school in Alabama.”
“Oh. Our youngest boy’s playing football at Notre Dame. So why didn’t you graduate?” She re-crossed her legs. That crackling sound again.
Three gulps and already Willie could feel the beer going to work, thanks to fatigue and an empty stomach. “Well, Blythe, that’s a long story. The short of it is that I got caught up in the movement.”
“The movement?”
“The civil rights movement.”
“Really? Chick never said anything—how fascinating.” She leaned forward, like she was actually interested. “I thought Dr. King was a remarkable man. Did you know him?”
“Wouldn’t say I knew him. I met him a few times. Had some dealings with him.” He heard the voice again, a complete sentence this time: Man believes he’s de Lawd hisself!
“What all did you do?”
It occurred to Willie that this was probably the first time a black person—other than maids and caterers and furniture movers—had ever set foot inside this house. He took another drink of beer. “Mostly I tried to integrate lunch counters and bus stations, get poor black sharecroppers to register to vote. Stuff like that.”
“Was it hard?”
“Damn near imposs—excuse me. Yes, it was very hard. Most of them were scared to death. And with good reason.”
“Was it dangerous?”
“Sometimes, sure.”
“Did you ever get, you know, attacked? Or beat up?”
“Few dozen times is all.” He pointed at the scar on his lip. “I got this from a beating.”
“Who beat you? Rednecks?”
“Depended on the day. Rednecks. Upstanding citizens. State police. City cops. National Guard, you name it. My lip was rednecks.”
“How awful.” She held a hand to her throat, and bracelets jangled on her wrist. “Of course I’ve seen pictures of the fire hoses and the dogs and all. But I’ve never met someone who actually got beaten. I can’t imagine what it must be like to live down there. For a colored person, I mean.”
He had half a mind to tell her it wasn’t all that different from Detroit, but white northerners never believed this. Blythe Murphy was waiting, her eyes unblinking, and Willie realized she actually thought she wanted to hear the truth. He knew better. Very slowly he said, “Let me put it to you this way, Blythe. One of the first people I met in Detroit was this old black guy from North Carolina named Erkie. He told me something that’s just now beginning to make sense to me. He said, ‘Down South, everybody knows where the lines are drawn. Up here in the North you got to find out as you go along. They don’t Jim-Crow you up here, but making a mistake in Michigan can get a black man killed just as dead as it can get him killed in Mississippi.’”
“And you believe that’s true?”
“I know it’s true.”
“Well!” she said, sitting up straight and removing her hand from her throat. “Of course we’ve got our share of racial problems up here too. After what happened in Detroit last summer, that’s no big secret.”
He looked at the woman and thought, You got no idea what happened in Detroit last summer.
She changed the subject, started talking about how much she loathed golf and everything else about the country club set. She loathed cocktail parties and bridge and car talk. She loathed her father, who’d made a fortune manufacturing ball bearings and was convinced the Detroit blacks were getting ready to rape and pillage all of Bloomfield Hills.
Willie enjoyed her little rant. Halfway through his second Cinci, he was feeling pleasantly loose, his face aglow, and Mississippi and Martin Luther King and the riot were the farthest things from his mind. Just as he was beginning to sink into the folds of the chair, Blythe stood up. “I’m going to run you back to the club now, Willie. That way Chick’s car’ll be here in the morning and I’ll be able to sleep in. Wait here while I get the keys.”
“The keys are in the ignition.”
“How do you know that?” She seemed flustered.
“Cause I left them there.”
“Oh, of course. You drove Chick home. Let me freshen up real quick and we’ll go.”
He watched her cross the room, that ass, those sculpted legs. She was not walking in a straight line, and he wondered how long she’d been drinking. All day? All her life? He watched her go into the half-bathroom. Unlike her husband, she closed the door behind her.
Willie studied the room’s clutter while he waited. There was even a gazelle head with corkscrewing antlers mounted over the fireplace. Had the Surf gone big-game hunting in Africa? Or was that a prop from some furniture store in Royal Oak?
“All set!”
Blythe was standing in the
doorway holding a purse that matched her shoes. Her lips were a hotter pink than before, glossier.
He followed her out the front door and down the winding brick sidewalk to the Buick. Watching her ass sway in that silk skirt, it was all he could do not to reach out and give it a squeeze. Watch it, he told himself, that’s trouble you don’t need.
When they reached the car she hopped up and sat on the hood, a surprisingly nimble move for a woman who’d had trouble getting up off a sofa and walking across a room. She held out her hands.
“Come here, Willie.”
He didn’t move.
“Don’t be afraid. Come here.”
The bracelets jangled again—a noise so loud he was afraid it would wake her husband, dogs, the whole neighborhood. He felt himself being tugged into the cloud of her perfume, her whiskey warmth, and then her pink lips were on his. Her tongue darted into his mouth. When his cock began to stir, he tried to pull away.
“Come back here,” she said, kissing him again, more greedily, tongue swirling, fingernails raking his back. He heard her shoes drop to the driveway, clop, clop.
It went on until he thought he would explode in his tuxedo pants. Finally she pushed him away. They were both breathing hard. “Let’s go,” she said, hopping down off the hood, opening the door and sliding behind the steering wheel. He walked around behind the car, wiping his lips with the back of his wrist, hoping this nightmare was over. His cock was aching. When he slid onto the passenger’s seat she was wiping lipstick from her face with a tissue. At Lahser Road she turned right.
“Um, Blythe, I believe the club’s to the left.”
“I know where the club is. There’s something I want to show you.”
Willie was thinking how bad it would look if a cop saw them. But the streets were empty, the houses all dark. He tried to relax. She had forgotten to put her shoes back on, and he could smell the hot nylon on her feet mingling with her perfume and the car’s leather upholstery. That smell doubled the ache in his cock.
After a mile or so she turned left, then right onto a narrow road that curved between tall hedges. He remembered all those late-night drives on Mississippi back roads with his headlights off, the gas pedal on the floor, his heart in his mouth. Those drives had seemed as dream-like as this one. The only difference was that now he felt dread along with the fear.
In the dash lights her face was green, but softer than it had been back in the house, prettier. When her hand brushed against his stiff cock, she said, “Oh my. . . .” Squinting, she slowed the car, then turned left through a gap in a barbed-wire fence and onto a dirt lane that led down to a small lake. She pulled into a thicket of trees and zipped down the power windows before shutting off the headlights and the engine. Crickets were singing. A bullfrog burped. Through the trees Willie could see moonlight wiggling on the lake.
“Isn’t it lovely?” she sighed.
“It’s very pretty. Where are we?”
“It’s called Orange Lake.” She giggled. “My boyfriends used to bring me here to make out when I was in high school.”
Suddenly, with the same agility she’d exhibited hopping onto the Buick’s hood, she slipped from behind the steering wheel and slung her left leg across his lap. Now she was straddling him, kneeling, and they were kissing again. “Grab my ass,” she commanded, and he obeyed. The skirt rode higher, and he realized she was not wearing panties. She was very wet.
Her hands grappled with his zipper. She moaned as she guided his cock up into her, and then her head was banging the car’s roof as she pumped him. It was all he could do to hold on, just hold on and try not to think about what he was doing. Try not to think about how good it felt and how hard it was going to be to live down, how impossible it was going to be to forget.
The first birds were singing as they rode back to Oakland Hills. Neither of them spoke. She shut off the headlights as she pulled onto the club’s big empty parking lot. When she stopped the car, she put it in PARK but left the engine idling.
“Can I ask you something personal before you go, Willie?”
“Uh, sure.”
“Was that . . . is this . . . you know, the first—”
“The first time I’ve ever been with a white woman?”
She nodded. He could smell leather and perfume, sex and sweat. Again he considered telling her the truth but instantly decided to tell her the lie she wanted to hear. “Yes, this is the first time.”
“Me too. I mean—”
“I know what you mean, Blythe.”
“And I loved it. Every minute of it.”
“Me too, Blythe.” And this time, though he hated to admit it, he wasn’t lying. He’d loved every sweaty thrashing vulgar taboo minute of it. He’d loved her urgency and her hunger and her lack of shame. He’d loved hearing her curse as each orgasm came on. It was perverse perfection that she was married—to a former Golden Gloves champion who had a gun in his sock drawer and was ready to kill any man who tries to come between you and I. That may have been the thing that had turned Willie on most—crossing a line that could get him killed.
She kissed him one last time, and then he was standing alone in the parking lot watching the Deuce and a Quarter’s taillights vanish into the blue dawn, not quite believing what he had just done.
12
BOB BREWER LET THE HOT WATER WASH OVER HIS SORE NECK and shoulders. He was dead on his feet, trying to shake off the cobwebs. Without his glasses he could barely read the labels on all the products lined up on the sink next to the Quarters shower stall. Royal Crown hair relaxer. Sulfur-8 scalp conditioner. Shavine depilatory. All the empty miracles that promised to make the black man less black.
Bob had taken the past week off work so he could devote all of his time and energy to cramming for the real estate licensing exam. Nothing else mattered. He was so focused he even forgot about the visit from the sharp-dressed Detroit cop who’d come out to Oakland Hills to ask all the wrong kinds of questions. If Bob passed the exam, he would finally be able to kiss the waiter’s job goodbye. If he flunked. . . . No, that was not going to happen.
Yesterday, the day after the exam, he got a call from Dick Kowalski begging him to come in and work a big private party for the top hundred Chrysler salesmen in Michigan. Since he wouldn’t know the results of the exam for two weeks, Bob decided it would be unwise to burn his bridges at Oakland Hills just yet. It was while he was dropping off his last tray of dirty glasses at the dishwashing station at 2 A.M. that Bob had heard the news on the kitchen radio: Minutes after being declared winner of the California Democratic primary, Bobby Kennedy was shot in the head by a lone gunman in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. When Bob heard the news he sagged against the dishwashing machine and sobbed.
Now the shower was going cold. Bob shut off the water and stepped out of the stall. As he was toweling off he thought again of Bobby Kennedy and he had to hold on to the sink till the urge to cry passed. He put on his glasses and boxers and plastic shower slippers, wrapped the towel around his neck and went out to get dressed.
He was surprised to see Willie on his bunk reading The Confessions of Nat Turner with a flashlight. Bob walked over to him and whispered over the gentle snoring of the men, “What up, Cuz?”
Willie’s head jerked up from the pillow. “Uncle Bob,” he whispered back. “What you doing up so late?”
“You mean so early. Had to work a private party that went into triple overtime. Caught a few winks and now I gotta go meet my lawyer downtown, sign some papers. You weren’t here when I got up. Where you been?”
“Chick Murphy got drunk and asked me to carry him home. Let me drive his Deuce—even invited me in for a drink.”
“How’d you get back?”
“His wife drove me.”
“Watch out for that one!” Bob said with a chuckle. “I hear she shagged the golf pro. You just now getting back?”
“No, I . . . couldn’t sleep. Went for a long walk on the golf course.”
&nbs
p; Bob started dressing. “You hear the news?”
“No. What news?”
“About Bobby Kennedy?”
“What about him?”
“He got shot.”
Willie slumped into the pillow, picked up his flashlight and went back to his book.
“You ain’t even gonna ask what happened?” Bob said.
“Sure. What happened?”
“Some A-rab shot Bobby in the head. He’d just given his victory speech after the California primary—and the motherfucker shot him while he was walking through the hotel kitchen. I still can’t believe it. I bawled like a baby when I heard the news.”
“He dead?”
“Last I heard he was in surgery—critical condition. But you figure it out. Shot in the head isn’t usually good news.” Bob turned on his transistor radio and held it to his ear. After a while he shut it off and put it in his locker. “No change,” he said as he finished dressing.
On his way out the door Bob remembered the other thing. He walked back to Willie’s bunk. “By the way, Cuz, a Detroit po-lice was here last week asking me questions.”
He watched as Willie snapped into the sitting position, then took a deep breath and eased his head back down onto the pillow. “What kind of po-lice?” Willie said.
“A homicide detective.”
“He white or black?”
“White.”
“Big guy with white hair and bad skin?”
“No, he was kinda thin, actually. Reddish hair, tall, dressed too good to be a cop, I thought at first. But he damn sure talked like a cop.”
“What all he want to know?”
“All kindsa shit about that apartment building I own down the street from you. The one where Wesley use to stay.”
“What about it?”
“Like I say, all kindsa shit.” Bob leaned in, close enough to whisper. “Say, Cuz, how come you so interested in this detective?”
“I’m not interested, Uncle Bob. Just curious is all. You’re the one brought it up.”
“Bullshit. I stand here and tell you the next President of the United States has a bullet in his brain—and you go right back to reading your book. Then I tell you some honky cop stopped by—and you bout jump out your black hide. I’m holding on to my patience, Willie. What’s going on?”