by Peter Manus
“Perhaps I am more intuitive that I seem,” I stall.
He waits for more. “Come off it.” There is firmness in his tone. He will not budge—he will not even bed me if I do not come clean on how I know about Oleander and his past.
I sigh. “I sat through the trial. Some of it, anyway.”
“You were there?”
I dare to send him a quick signal—I suggère that he should believe me—after all, it is the truth I have just spoken. Following this, of course, I lie. “I was in the States for a visit with my parents, already having trouble with Michel, you see, although certainly not ready to admit to it. This was after my first miscarriage. My parents had moved to South Boston, so I was not even visiting a familiar neighborhood. The case was gritty, steeped in tragedy from all angles, and I got it in mind that I would write about it. Not a news piece, and not junk, but a dispassionate study, you see? So I arrived early enough each morning to line up in front of the rabble. Each day I sat in the courtroom, and I took the notes. No one forbade it, but I worried that they might, so I wore the gloves and I held a little pad in the palm of one hand and a tiny white pencil in the other. I filled twenty-seven pads. I took stabs at beginning the piece over the years. Michel was dead against it.”
He nods to himself. “And now you’re trying to revive that ambition to write.”
I shrug. “I never acknowledged that I had given up. Women do not, when they sacrifice a personal goal for a man. We call it postponement. We are good at self-deceit, you see? That is why divorce can be so nasty.”
“She sees a sacrifice where he sees a free ride, that sort of thing?”
“That is it.”
I look off, out the windows, as if through being frank about my life. For a moment, I dare to fourrage in his brain. He is a naturally suspicious man.
“Shall we talk?” I prod him.
“Oleander was the woman who made me try in life,” he says. “She wasn’t a relative. Not even a friend of the family, really. Just a neighbor while I was growing up, and then, when I became a man, a fellow neighborhood activist. Not an ally, mind you. Too strict by about half, and the old girl knew nothing of the art of compromise. But somehow, from all the way back when I was a kid, she was the one I was proving myself to in life.”
“A grandmother figure?”
“I wouldn’t say that.” Wilkie smiles bemusedly. “I had a grandmother—well, into my tenth year, anyway—so I didn’t need a surrogate there. It was kind of mysterious, that I would feel any kind of connection to this other lady. And for all her Bible preaching, Oleander was less benign than the typical granny. So it wasn’t a gap, and it wasn’t that she was so good. It was more that she took a serious interest in me—Lord knew why, because to my recollection I was just another neighborhood squirt, but she must have spotted something—and from then onward she was like, I don’t know, a force of judgment. A voice, tsking away in the back of my head, proclaiming an ideal that I knew I’d never fulfill—that I was pretty damned comfortable not fulfilling, in fact—but which I liked having out ahead of me. A royal pain in the ass, she was, and I know for a fact that there were whispers, after she was gone, that the community meetings she used to attend made a lot more progress than they used to.”
He pauses. “Here, let me try to put it how she might have—Oleander Tidwell was a tough old bird who insisted that life could be for us black folk what life was for the white folk. She scorned the reality that things will never be equal. And the mean old thing latched onto me, for some reason, as the black man worth pushing, and pushing constantly, on this point.”
He runs dry, shaking his head. “Haven’t thought about Oleander for a stretch of time. I probably should, more often.”
“So,” I say. “Turning over that car was personal for you.”
He glances at me sharply. His eyes, dark brown, have a bluish ring around the irises that seems to glow when he is intense. “Seeing her die in the street was quite a shock. Damn near made me see fireworks when that little shit tried to motor off like he’d hit a dog.”
“So you were punishing that boy behind the wheel. Street justice.”
He studies me and I wonder if he is floating thoughts into my head. “I acted out of anger. But my intent—my sole intent—was to make sure that the driver didn’t leave the area.”
“For his own good,” I say dryly.
“It damn well was for his own good. You kill someone with your car, accident or not, and you take off from the scene? Honey, you talking about some serious time. You hit someone, stay with the victim, see it through.” He paused to wipe his mouth. “Well, a nice clean white boy with no record gets to go on with his life.”
“Was the guy who hit Oleander Tidwell a nice clean white boy?”
“That I couldn’t have told you at the time,” Wilkie admits. “But I sure as hell knew that he weren’t doing himself any sort of favor trying to hightail it out of there. Everyone saw what had happened plain as day.”
I speak slowly, as if picking my words carefully. “I think that what you are saying, Wilkie, is that you were trying to do the right thing. Is that a fair translation?”
“Christ, no,” he says. “Nothing that happened that day was right. Nothing.” He picks up his wine glass, just for something to grip, and has himself a swallow.
“I went about this clumsily.”
He shakes his head. “Oleander is an indelible part of my past. You were right to pick up on that. Her memory is an element of my decision-making on many an issue. Perhaps more importantly, she—what happened to her—was just about all that got me through the trial, back then. I did an unforgivable thing. You saw that kid! But I knew why.”
“You are quite brave, I think, to explain this to me.” When he doesn’t respond, I hurry ahead. “What were you doing on the street that day? Wrong place, wrong time, was it?”
He seems about to nod at my cliché, then stops himself. “I was heading to a meeting, actually,” he says. “The same meeting Oleander was heading to, at the church. About the drug problem. Sales on the streets, local gangs preying on their own, a rumor that drug deals were going down in the church itself. That sort of thing. The usual hand-wringing, the usual neighborhood watches and kids’ clubs—weak as water, always seems, but somehow it must counterbalance the problem because if it doesn’t happen the neighborhood goes straight to hell. So, no, actually, I wasn’t in the wrong place at the wrong time. I was in the right place, and something wrong just happened to me on my way.”
“Happened to you?” I say, jumping on his words before I think.
“Very true, very true,” he agrees, unfazed. “That boy in the car suffered far more for his sin than the rest of us did for ours.” He cocks an eye at me. “Is he—Jake Culligan, that is—someone you know? Maybe your parents got to know his family when they moved to Southie?”
I pause before murmuring that it is just as he says, but I am sure that my fear shows.
Wilkie shifts his gaze from my face to my wine glass, as if the shimmer there has him mildly distracted. “I hear that he is doing well, relatively speaking,” he says.
“You hear this?” I am sure he detects the tremor in my voice.
He looks me in the eye. “Jake Culligan is twenty-eight years old. He’s brain damaged for life. His condition has not changed much from what it was at the time of the trial.”
“He is dead,” I say, unable to help myself.
He shakes his head. “He isn’t, unless it happened fairly recently. I’ve kept track. He lives in South Boston with his mother Prudence. Economically, they’re taken care of completely. The older brother is trouble. Other than that, not much.”
“Why have you kept track?”
“Don’t want to forget.”
I clear my throat and he chuckles sympathetically at my discomfort, then graciously changes the subject. “You know I was related to Terry D’Amante?”
“No,” I say gratefully. “I never learned that.”
&nbs
p; “Well, not by blood. Terence was a distant cousin, second or even third. Barely had heard that his girl at the time was expecting, time of the arrest, but apparently it had happened a month or so prior. They never let Terence out. No bail, like the rest of us got—he’d already jumped bail on another charge and was about to be rounded up. Must have been finishing up some business before seeking to get his ass out of town when the incident occurred.”
“What business was this, do you think?”
Wilkie spreads his hands. “Nothing he was prepared to talk about, since no one was offering him a deal. My guess is that he thought he could collect some cash from someone to make running viable. Or maybe he had a score to settle. He was like that. When the case against us reached settlement, they just took him straight out to Walpole for his other stuff. I tried to see Neva, offer what assistance I could, but she wouldn’t have a thing to do with me. Possibly she resented me for walking away while Terence did time. I’ve never even seen the child. Went in to see Terence a few times, tried to talk with him about his paternal obligations. He said the right things, but…” Wilkie spreads his hands again. “Guess we’ll never know. All we can say is that he tried to see his son soon as he got released.”
“It is,” I say, “quite chilling, this part of the story.”
He nods. “Unfortunately, it isn’t going into a piece about me. Neva isn’t to be mentioned, nor my efforts with Terence.”
I concede with a dip of my head. “Of course.”
We listen to the sound of a jet taking off across the bay. It seems to remind Wilkie of the time. He crosses to the sliders and closes them with a soft thump, then skirts the seating area and pokes at his bouillabaisse. When he returns, he has brought the wine bottles. He tips, and I nod him on. I take a cigarette out of the pack in my purse and gesture with it.
He shakes his head. “Maybe later. But you go ahead.”
I light one and drop the match on his stone table. “Perhaps I may take a look upstairs?”
Wilkie nods. “You surely may,” he says solemnly.
The stairway is unassuming, around a corner by the front door. I had not noticed it earlier. Upstairs, the bedroom is more expansive that I imagined it from below. The carpet is blue-grey, matching a velvety coverlet that half-drapes the bed. At the foot of the bed sits a massive old carved chest, the only item in the room that isn’t sleek and smooth-sided. A glass sculpture seems to be an image of African femininity. The music floats up. It is semi-dark, but I can see that the room is untidy, with the bed made carelessly, the closet doors hanging open with clothes dangling from hooks and knobs and laundry spilling in a loose tangle from a basket on the floor. I make out a plate next to the bed, a crumpled napkin, a beer bottle.
“You are separated,” I say without thinking. I turn from the middle of the room, where I have just stepped out of my shoes. Wilkie is leaning against the rail, bulky—even fat, I see now that I’m viewing him in silhouette and he is not sheathed in a suit. His arms are massive, his shoulders slope smoothly, his gut makes a proud round bulge—he is the male counterpart to the cool, blue statuette that sits adjacent to where he rests, both of them watching me.
“I should not have said that,” I apologize.
I see his teeth flash in the dim light, and he laughs, sounding almost shy. “That’s okay. And, no, my wife and I are not separated. Not exactly.”
“Ah, I see,” I say across the space. “You are two mature, mutually supportive adults with an understanding. You comprehend the French, then, after all.”
“We care about each other, Claire and I, but we try not to stand in one another’s way.”
“Ah,” I say. “I think that maybe she started it. My apologies for presuming it was the other way.”
“You miss very little,” he observes quietly. “Not at all how you put yourself across at first, are you, though?”
It should frighten me, this remark, but somehow it does not. It does not matter what he knows, at this point. He wants sex, you see, and, like so the males of all species, he will copulate even with the certainty that the female will cut him down him shortly after. I raise my wine glass and sip. “Such flattery,” I say. “Now where will that get us?” I sit down on the shiny bed-stuff with a soft plop, then cross my legs and gaze over at his silhouette. “Anything else I should know that might make me live to regret this?”
Wilkie walks forward, swirling his wine. “Haven’t washed the sheets in a month.”
I scoff and blow smoke off to one side. “I do not mind the human odors.”
“I’m a damn good lay.”
I laugh aloud. “I did not need to be told this. I am the one who first flirted across that auditorium, remember?”
He nods, studying me thoughtfully. “Look, bedding down visitors isn’t particularly a habit of mine, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“I think perhaps it is,” I say, looking about for a place to park my wine glass and stub my cigarette. “But I do not really care.”
“So you don’t mind being just one in a line of conquests?”
“Not if you do not mind being the same,” I say.
He barks a laugh. “I don’t mind, naturally.”
“That is what you say now,” I coo.
Again, Wilkie laughs. “I won’t say differently later,” he says. “That I can assure you.”
“I believe you,” I say. Of course I believe him. But, truthfully, I would have believed him even if I had been planning to let him live out the night.
Wilkie stands close now, his leg practically touching mine. I turn from where I have stretched up so as to nuzzle my empty glass into the clutter on his bedside table and gaze up at him, leaning back on my elbows. I slide my legs up slowly so that they present themselves for him to do with as he will. He reaches forward, cups each of my knees in one of his large hands, and gently separates them. I relax, then, and lie back against the pillows.
I give him the best I am capable of giving. It is not that I am sorry that he will die tonight, which I am. I give him my best because I see the scars. The entire left side of his chest, along with a swatch of his belly and the inside of his arm on that side, form a twisted mass of white-pink flesh, more like exposed intestines than skin, each patch shiny in the middle and black around the edges. I do not flinch from the sight—I am accustomed to it. But the stories that the lawyers told in court about how he broke the VW’s side window and tried with all his might to pull Jakey from the burning vehicle—now at last I know that these tales were quite true. So I give him my best as a thank you for this effort on his part to make up for what he did, and for his integrity in not displaying himself during the trial in some self-serving attempt at sympathy. Just as he finishes, when a man’s mind is in its most unguarded state, I fourrage deep into his brain. I find the moment immediately, as if by instinct:
Wilkie stops, one foot on the curb and the other in the gutter, so as to make room for a woman to pick her way around a pile of dog crap. She darts him a smile, not quite sure of him, or maybe she wonders why he gives her such wide berth. It’s a vestige of his youth, the myth that white women are afraid of black men. He’s recently come to realize that at least some of them are not nearly as intimidated as all that. In fact, seems there’s a tone of abandonment inherent in interracial sex that he has not tasted with women of his own race. All this has been an exciting revelation to Wilkie, not solely because his prurient tastes run to white women, but also because the eager reciprocation he’s experienced of late offers him an entirely new take on his world. Suddenly he is part of the new century’s political culture. He shares in it. He is not simply the underclass, the guilt trip, the weight. He is the Mighty Negro—fertile, exotic, irresistible. Over time he can change that caricature, perhaps in part through the curiosity that stirs the sexes and, apparently, transcends race tribalism.
All that bodes well, sure, but today is sweltering—sweat weighs down his shirt, and no female of any race needs to smell the stink coming off
Wilkie like heat off tar. So he gives the white lady her space, then watches her walk off down the busy sidewalk, the hem of her polka-dotted sundress fluttering in time to the bounce of her rump. Beyond that twitching derrière he spots Oleander, decked out in full church lady regalia—hat, gloves, Bible—marching off the curb on her side of the street, bright-eyed with righteous fervor. The old bird’s out for blood, namely that of the diffident priest-in-training who runs the youth group. Claims he’s a bad influence—won’t explain further, although Wilkie himself is aware that the fellow’s had issues. Serious issues, whispered around the parish. Wilkie’s on his way to pow-wow, maybe avoid the lasting injuries that will come from a public scandal. Oleander is the enemy, this round. She is a crusader for mercy, but only for her own people.
With a sigh, Wilkie raises a hand in response to Oleander’s raised finger. In spite of his efforts to work quietly, it surely looks like he is about to hear her out there on the street. But she’s not focused on Wilkie, he realizes even as he thinks this. She’s flagging down a VW, ordering the driver to halt. Wilkie recognizes the car, somewhat sketchily, as that of a lowlife from South Boston, the type who prides himself on plying his drug trade in neighborhoods other than his own. The type with no consciousness that all neighborhoods house someone’s kids, someone’s hopes. Someone’s God. Wilkie frowns, pivoting so that he, too, is now in the street, heading toward the moving vehicles. He’s seen the shark who drives that incongruous powder blue bug—guy’s got eerie eyes, furry jowls, and a smirk like the devil’s. If Oleander thinks that trade like him is likely to be intimidated by a scrawny lady with iron grey hair, she’s mistaken.
She is fatally mistaken, turns out. Wilkie watches in dumb awe as the guy behind the wheel catches sight of the old girl. The Beetle swerves, but only to a point. Hits her—drives through her, actually—she twists over the hood and through the air like so much litter caught in an updraft. When Oleander hits the ground, she seems to collapse into herself with no skeletal resistance, folding down in a seamless instant as if every brittle bone had just snapped upon impact. She’s dead, Wilkie realizes—there will be no moment of clutched hands, no fruitless straining to hear the ambulance, no lingering breaths. She’s off reaching for heaven, right before his eyes. In an instant, Wilkie’s mind’s eye jumps to the litany of ceremony that confront his community—the solemn public remembrances, the keening before the news cameras, the memorial fundraising.