“Didn’t we agree that that wasn’t wise, Miss Watson? Given the current climate?” He’s drawing an invisible glyph on the arm of the chair with a bony finger.
Didn’t we agree. As if she were a child. “I wanted to sleep in my own bed.” She says, “Do we have any other leads?”
“I have an idea or two about who our mysterious person may be,” Mr. Reed tells her. “But I’m not prepared to discuss it. My theories are, at the moment, only half formed. In any case, I imagine that preparations for the Follies will keep our adversaries busy until after Wednesday. Do you plan to attend?”
“The Follies?”
“You’re not performing, are you?”
She’d forgotten about the Funicular Follies. “I’ve never been,” she informs him.
“I try to avoid them myself. Such a garish display. But with the election next week, it’s important for Lever to put in an appearance. In these crucial final days.”
“Of course,” Lila Mae says. It will not be wise for her to attend, since it’s a Department function and she is currently a suspect quantity in the office.
Is her concern in her face? Mr. Reed says, “You decided not to report to work today, I assume.”
“Evidently.”
“That won’t look good with Internal Affairs. That was a mistake.”
“I’ll handle it. Once we have the box, it won’t matter, correct?” Place it back in his lap.
“Of course,” Mr. Reed says to her. “But I don’t know how Chancre will play it with the tabloids.”
“I’ll handle it,” she says. “What’s next, then?”
Mr. Reed stands. “If you really want to help … if you’re not going to take my advice and talk to IAB, it’s best if you just stay out of sight. I’ll have more information in a few days and we can talk about it then.”
She nods. Reluctantly. She is not sure if Mr. Reed trusts her any more than she trusts him. Possible he went to her apartment last night to look for her and saw the mess? Perhaps he is trying to get her out of the way, now that she has served her role as their colored liaison to Mrs. Rogers. The one who knew her language.
He says, “Your room is still available upstairs. I think it is our best option at this point.”
Our. Keep her on ice, away from enemies and undue influence in this crucial time. “I agree,” she says.
Mr. Reed looks down at papers and poises his pen. She has been dismissed. Lila Mae walks stiffly out of the parlor. Every room she enters lately is a cell, she thinks as she steps up the stairs to her guest quarters. Each room is an elevator cab without buttons, controlled by a malefic machine room. Going down, no one else gets on, she cannot step off. There is a tap on her shoulders at the top of the stairs. It is Natchez, who asks, “Can I visit you tonight? There’s something I need to talk to you about.”
* * *
She knew he was nervous about asking her, judging from the protracted ellipsis between “Would you like to see that new picture at the Royale” and “with me,” a gap that the song on the radio took astute advantage of, wedging in a bridge and chorus. She said yes. They’d gone to the movies together plenty of times before. Movies good and bad, over the course of many years. Lila Mae’s parents liked Grady Jr., and Grady Jr.’s parents adored Lila Mae. Grady Jr., in fact, often stopped by the house just to talk with Marvin Watson. About fishing, or the eternal question of when exactly the county would get around to paving the roads of colored town. Usually they talked on the porch, as Marvin Watson did with his friends, which was how he regarded Grady Jr. Lila Mae and Grady Jr. were friends, and he had just asked her out on a date. After she said yes, she paid for her chocolate shake as she always did when they stopped in at the drugstore. And he paid for his vanilla shake, and they went their separate ways for the afternoon.
She knew things were different from the way he smiled at her when she opened the front door to the night air. Lila Mae and Grady Jr. had grown up together, skinned knees in tandem, learned to crawl through mutual toddler encouragement. It was a tricky crescent of a smile, and Lila Mae had never observed it in his repertoire before, in all the years they had known each other. Never seen it before in her whole life, one might say. He asked, “Are you ready?” and soon Lila Mae was in the passenger seat of his father’s red and rusting pickup truck. He’d been born chubby; the subplot of his maturation had been a long skirmish toward natural proportions. Before Lila Mae could sit down in the car, she had to remove Grady Sr.’s toolbox from the seat, and on the rutted trek to the movie theater, a screwdriver and hammer clinked against each other at every pock in the road. And there were many pocks in the road. The moon had just cleared the treeline.
She knew there was not much time left for the movies, or much else. Grady Jr. was heading up to the capitol in the fall to go to college. Lila Mae had not seen much of him that summer; he spent most of the summer working at the quarry to save up for books and anything else he might need up North. Summers had not been the same for a long time, Lila Mae reckoned. There was no school, but nothing else to take its place. The streets were shrinking, and she felt about the places they led to the same way she felt about her hair when she saw it on the bathroom floor after her mother cut it off. She sensed that the change she felt within her was sister to the change within Grady Jr. They always did everything together. He didn’t speak much as they drove to the Royale.
They walked around the side of the Royale to the stairs that led to the entrance reserved for colored patrons. Walked up the stairs to the balcony seating reserved for colored patrons, up to nigger heaven, and when Lila Mae reached in her pocket to pay Skinny, Grady Jr. preempted her and paid for the both of them. Grady Jr., who had kept a rigid accounting of every cent Lila Mae had ever owed him, and would demand the two or three cents she owed him for candy or a comic book, whatever she had borrowed, each time he saw her. He was a curious boy. He wanted to be a dentist, a pragmatic choice. Teacher, doctor, preacher, undertaker. What a colored boy can aspire to in a world like this. Colored people always got bad teeth, always got a soul needed tending. Always dying. His father did carpentry, whatever he could pick up. His mother worked in town cleaning for the judge’s family. Scrubbing stone steps. Grady Sr. had names for each of his tools that he would never utter in the presence of another living person. A dentist. But first he had to go to college, which was not a problem because he was a nice boy, and industrious, and the colored college in the capitol was eager for boys like him. The future of the race. It was the third moon of the summer, and it hung above the treeline as if the night were a farm and it a farmer, and he would take his time as he tracked through the crops, knowing and understanding it was his and only his and he knew all its secrets.
She had not seen the movie before and had seen the movie before. That’s how Lila Mae perceived the movies. Sometimes they had different titles, but the actors were usually the same, and if they were not the same, they looked the same. At one point Lila Mae noticed that she and Grady Jr. were sharing the same armrest. She was sure that she had laid claim to it when the lights dimmed, and had not noticed when this situation came to be. Now she was acutely aware of the situation. How had he snuck his arm up there? She did not move her arm. She noticed that his arm began to press against her, a firm warmth. The pressure against her arm, and the warmth, would retreat and then insist again as it rediscovered its boldness and purpose. On the screen, a white lady with long dark hair wept as she realized that social forces would keep her from her love. Eventually, Lila Mae removed her arm and placed it across her lap. A few minutes later, Grady Jr. sighed.
As for Lila Mae, she had her own plans for the future and had started to make inquiries.
“That was some movie,” Grady Jr. said, as they started for home.
“It sure was,” Lila Mae seconded.
As they cleared the town limits, Grady Jr. said, “That was some movie. It was pretty short.”
“It seemed like a regular movie,” Lila Mae said.
�
��No-uh,” Grady Jr. said. “I looked at the clock when we were leaving the movie. It wasn’t even an hour and a half long. It was short.” There were no more streetlights, and few houses to offer light from their windows.
“Maybe it was,” Lila Mae replied.
Grady Jr. cleared his throat and stared at the road. “This morning when I ran into your father, I told him that I’d have you back on the front porch by eleven, but it’s not even close to that, and we’re already on the way to your house.”
He had turned off the county road, into the patchy trail that wound to Miller’s Hollow. She had passed the overgrown entrance countless times, and sometimes her mother or her father would make a joke that she didn’t understand. She knew one or two jokes herself, though: that half of colored town wouldn’t be walking and breathing if not for Miller’s Hollow, and more than one marriage ceremony had been performed, under duress, a month or two after the betrothed had spent some time at Miller’s Hollow. There was another way to the Hollow, a path through the woods that the children played in. Whenever the clearing’s daylight was visible through the trees, the children stopped and doubled back into the woods. While they were not prohibited from going there, the children understood that it was not their place. It would have been a nice place to play and stumble; kites would have soared in the lively wind that poured up out of the quarry. But the children understood, and found other places to play.
Lila Mae felt let down when she and Grady cleared the woods. It wasn’t a hollow at all, she saw, but a wide clearing that terminated at the sullen lip of the quarry. The excitement over such an illicit adventure evaporated quickly. The hollow wasn’t thrilling or scary or even dull; it was just a place where no trees grew, and brown grass dried out in the sun.
“That was some movie,” Grady Jr. said again. He cleared his throat again.
“Yes it was,” Lila Mae said. That was the last either of them said for a time. She was aware of his breathing, and the new loudness of everything in the car, every minute shifting. The car’s engine ticked off seconds as it cooled, insects clicked and night birds exchanged confidences. She could see the white stone of the other side of the quarry over the curved red hood of the car. It looked like the moon. She’d left the earth some moment when she had blinked and now she and Grady Jr. were on the moon, and that’s why it felt so cold, because the moon is cold. And still.
Grady placed a trembling hand on her shoulder and it stopped trembling once he put it there, once he had a place to place it. She felt she was supposed to look at him, and did so. His lips first bumped into her nose, then her cheek, and then he recovered and placed his lips on her lips. His lips were dry and sharp. Once his lips were in place, he did not move them, and the two of them, Lila Mae and Grady Jr., sat there for a time, their lips touching. Then he pulled his lips away and stared out the windshield and placed his hands firmly on the steering wheel. Lila Mae adjusted her feet around the toolbox.
Grady said, “It must be eleven o’clock by now.”
Lila Mae said, “It must be.”
They looked over at her house when the pickup truck pulled up in front. They could see her father draw back the curtain in the porch window and wave.
Grady said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you mad.”
Lila Mae said, “I have to go inside,” and all night she cursed herself because she knew that she and Grady Jr. would never go to the movies again. She wasn’t mad at all, but she didn’t say that. He should know how she is after all this time. She wasn’t mad at all, she wanted him to kiss her more. But Lila Mae didn’t say that.
* * *
She has removed her jacket and tie and opened the top button of her shirt. Natchez did not specify a time. It’s inching on midnight. She disassembles elevators in her mind and imagines that there is a discrepancy between the mass of the elevator before disassembly and after. That this mass returns when the elevator is reassembled. Fulton did not write that, she extrapolated it from the second volume of Theoretical Elevators. She is an Intuitionist but is not a fan of the new additions to Fulton’s work that come from overseas, are debated in the rooms below her by Intuitionism’s epigonic practitioners. They muddle through and sometimes the journals are not all empty, but she prefers her own extrapolations. She thinks her creations adhere to the spiritual side of Fulton’s words, while the rest of the movement gets dizzy in the more recondite apocrypha. An unforeseen loss in mass. A mystery.
When he enters he holds a piece of chocolate cake before him as he creeps through the doorway. “I thought you might like some of Mrs. Gravely’s cake,” he says. He is still in his servant’s uniform, a tight white trapezoid around his torso. He sits on the bed next to her. “It was a big hit at dinner,” he adds, “which you weren’t at.”
“I wasn’t hungry,” Lila Mae says over the fork.
“You have a lot on your mind?” he asks.
“You could say that.”
“You don’t mind that I came up here?”
“No, I’m glad.” Half gone already, the cake.
Natchez looks over to reassure himself that he closed the door and says, “I don’t know what Mr. Reed down there told you about your house, but it wasn’t like he said it was.”
She sets the plate down on the nightstand. “What are you talking about?”
Natchez takes a deep breath and looks at the door again. It’s still shut, Lila Mae thinks. He says, “Yesterday when you didn’t come back with Sven, he threw a fit. He was mad—I didn’t think that little white man had it in him, but there he was, yelling at Mr. Lever and Sven and saying all sorts of stuff. He said Sven should have waited for you. Then he said you must have made a deal with Chancre—I think that’s his name—and that you had double-crossed him. I was outside in the hallway. Then he got on the phone and told some men to go and find it. He gave them your address.”
The cake in her stomach curdles. “He said this?”
“I figured he was talking about the black box,” Natchez says. He sits up straight. “When he said ‘it.’ ”
All wrong. “What do you know about the black box?” she demands.
Natchez smiles. “I know a lot about it,” he says. “Fulton was my uncle.”
* * *
The boy dreams of places that are not like this, where there is no mud and there is pavement, where there are not wood walls that don’t keep the cold out but buildings that erupt from the ground like ancient gods awakening. The night in the places he dreams of is not abundant and terrifying, making him tiny, because the buildings are so tall that there is no night and no stars, just darkness. He is never out in the open where people can see him because the people are locked up in their holes, stacked up one on top the other like in a beehive. They do not speak. Nobody knows anybody’s business. Nobody knows where you came from.
There is another world beyond this one.
He understands that she loves him deeply and painfully. She is his mother. But he does not look like her except around the eyes. Their eyes want to hide from their faces, the mother and the son. When they walk into town she makes him walk closely behind her, she clutches him behind her back, as if to shield him from the eyes of the white people. As if she thought they would see him and take him away from her. She does it less now that he is older and taller, but it seems to him it was always unnecessary. The white people do not see colored people, even in broad daylight, in the middle of town. He is as light as white folk when he has not been in the sun much, perhaps that is why she was afraid, but he stays in the sun as much as he can and usually has a slight nut color to his skin. The sun never makes his skin as dark as the skin of his mother and sister. If he stays out of the sun, as in winter when the light is dead and stingy, the darkness in his skin sleeps.
He understands that his sister loves him even though they don’t have the same father, and when she gets mad at him she reminds him of this, and this is supposed to hurt him. But it doesn’t hurt him because he has never met his father so he migh
t as well not exist. And if he doesn’t exist then there’s no point in feeling anything at all about him. You make do, like when there’s no food in the house. You make do. Besides, her father only shows up once in a while, and no good ever comes of it.
He has always been terrified of the woods. Outside, surrounding the house, advancing on the house. Except he’s the only one who knows the trees and sticker-bushes are advancing on the house, coming to get him. The moon lets him know. The moon’s light picks up the movement of the branches and places it on the wall of his room, and he watches the shadows shake and threaten him. The moon has been warning him since before he could speak that his time with his mother and sister is short: he must leave this place or something bad will happen to him. He does not belong here and the woods are casting him out. The woods say what other people’s tongues will not say.
His sister says she knew he was coming that night when their mother came home torn. She says she knew by their mother’s silence and crying after that night that something new was coming into their house, and it turned out to be him. Their mother did not go into town to work and the neighbors brought them food and took his sister into their houses some nights when their mother got loud, or was crying and would not leave her bed. Then he came and their mother got better as soon as she saw him and started to go into town again to work. To work for someone else. His sister cleaned him when he was dirty even though she was not that much bigger than him.
Some colored babies are light when they’re newborn but he didn’t get colored as he got older. His hair was very curly when he was born but it got less curly as he got older. His sister teased him that he had white folks’ hair, but one time their mother heard her say this and she yelled at his sister to never do that again. And she didn’t. She said she was sorry, later that night when they went to bed. Said it to God in her prayers, I’m sorry for what I said. The boy forgave his sister because it did not occur to him that he had been insulted until his mother got mad. His sister told the truth.
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