Whispers in the Night (24 page)

“Mr. Black was going through some of the barrels looking for a shirt,” Sh'ron started. Neither he nor Jake even glanced up, but she continued anyway. “I'm thinking about tying him down, before he goes through everything and makes a mess.”

Daniel wished that the state would do an inspection tonight: Regional would be shut down for sure. He realized that only he, Jake, and Sh'ron were on as aides. That would be great except that they were it for all three floors. The lone nurse in the building spent her evening running back and forth among the floors. Her standing orders were that if the residents gave them any problems, tie them in restraints. State regs be damned, Daniel guessed, when they worked this short.

Sh'ron had a broader definition of residents giving her problems: All the residents in her hall were tied down. They would probably stay that way, unturned and unchecked, until it was time to wake and dress them. Daniel wasn't up for idle chatter tonight, though. Behind the nurse's station, his right knee danced up and down with its own nervous energy.

“Is it me, or do the residents seem extra agitated?” Jake asked.

“It's him.” Sh'ron thumbed toward Daniel.

Daniel's doubts picked at him like an unhealed scab, needling him with the Devil's voice. How long could he tread water believing, not believing, as he did? He wanted to surrender to the doubt, let the insecurities rush over him like a quick slice across his wrist and give in to the gentle caress of the abyss. He needed the church, the danger of community, to feel real. Yet he knew he was cut off. Something within no longer worked, connected, leaving nothing in him for belief to latch on to. No love to fill those empty spaces, those cancers of his faith.

“I'm going to go pray over Ms. Mayfield,” Daniel said.

“No, Daniel, wait.” Jake grabbed his arm.

“Look, all I'm going to do is pray for the demons to leave in the name of Jesus Christ. If it works, fine. If not, all I've done is pray.”

He would have his answer: Would God's might truly protect him?

Daniel crept into her room. The last sharp stabs of light from the hallway faded with the door closing behind him. The parking lot lights spilled through the curtains. Daniel noticed a few facedown picture frames along her dresser. He flipped them over to see that every picture of Ms. Mayfield, even photos that caught only a thatch of hair or a passing elbow, had been circled. Probably done during her last lucid moment to remind herself that she wasn't forgotten.

“Who's there?” she stirred.

“It's me, Ms. Mayfield.”

“I keep hearing voices in my head.”

“Have you ever prayed against the voices?” he asked. She flinched as if in pain. “I mean, have you ever thought about talking to Jesus about your . . . problems?” She continued to grow uncomfortable, writhing slightly, and quietly wincing.

“I don't want to pray. I don't like it,” she muttered.

“That's okay, you don't have to.”

He laid his hands on her and prayed. Trying to sound stern, yet compassionate, he exhorted the demons to leave in the name of Christ. Her hands fell to her chest, her head rolled to the side, and she fell into a deep sleep. He peered at her face: peaceful and melancholy.

“It's all futile, you know,” Mr. Black said from behind him. “You feel it? The wisps of that fragile thing you call faith escaping through your fingers. You don't know what to do with your terror, shame, and grief.”

“What do you want from me?” Those bloodshot yellow eyes, those veiny egg yolks, followed his movements.

“Hurm. It's what you don't want. You don't want to have to think, to struggle with reality. You don't want God, not really. You want something that will make you feel good, something bigger than you to lose yourself in. Something safe. God is none of those things.”

“I'm doing His work. There's Ms. Mayfield. Her soul's safe now. She won't be joining you in hell.”

Ms. Mayfield's eyes sprang open. She spoke through a contemptuous grin of utter, hostile malevolence. “Let that belief comfort you at night, but know this—hell is empty. We have no more a wish to be there than you. We just want to live in peace. To
feel
.”

Daniel backed away from her. He felt movement behind him, a shifting among the shadows. Mr. Black opened the window. His flabby jowls made him look all the more like the Devourer. He gestured for Daniel to join him. “Tempting, isn't it? To jump in, unthinking, and embrace the decrepit whore you call faith. Pimped out to a God that doesn't listen to you. The irony is, if you find proof, you no longer have faith. Then what do you have?”

Daniel wanted to escape, be free of the constant harangue. He leaned forward, peering out the window. The sidewalks loomed far below him. He wanted to let go. Nothing made sense to him anymore. Nothing about the world that he lived in felt right. The way he lived, the way he moved, down to the core of his being—God seemed so far from him. The tattered edges of his faith clung to life like a man residing under hospice care. The weight of Mr. Black's glare pressed in on him long before Mr. Black spoke again.

“It's the ultimate test. The final answer to all of your questions.”

Daniel mouthed the words to the Lord's Prayer, and it lodged like a cold stone in the pit of his stomach. His mind tried to latch on to something to anchor him. Reading the Bible first thing in the morning used to bring him such simple comfort. Now it was like reading the love letters of an ex-girlfriend. The prayer died on his lips. He doubted it would be answered anyway. For that matter, he doubted if he would be heard. He doubted if there was ever a hearer in the first place.

Daniel keeled forward through the window.

He didn't make a sound as the pavement rushed to greet him.

“What the hell's going on in here?” Jake rushed in. He joined Mr. Black at the window.

“Hurm. Seems someone's been asking the wrong questions,” Mr. Black said, “had himself a bit of a fall.”

Jake stared down at Daniel's broken body. “May you be in heaven a half hour before the Devil knows you're dead.”

Mr. Black handed Jake a dollar.

“Oops, too late.”

Terence Taylor

I
once saw a sign on a pillar in a New York City subway station,
WET PAIN,
written in bright red block letters on glossy white card stock. Back then I thought it was a joke or mistake, meant to read
WET PAINT,
but maybe I was wrong; maybe it was a warning of a different kind and I just missed the point because I didn't know enough to understand what I was reading.

That's how I feel about what happened to my good buddy, Dean, that I saw the danger signs all along but never realized what they meant, what they really warned me about. Not until he opened my eyes and I saw a side of the world I never wanted to see.

It all started when Dean moved back to New Orleans.

 

 

We met almost five years ago, on a job.

Dean was master electrician and I was tech director for a live multimedia press conference announcing the UPN Network's new fall season. The client reps for the ad agency handling it were assholes, cut corners in all the wrong places, so we had to cover each other to survive. We worked together on floor plans for his lighting and my video equipment to do what they wanted with what they gave us, and made it through a two-week job from hell without killing each other or anyone else.

We stayed in touch. No one expected a white reformed redneck from New Orleans and a black gay geek from Park Slope like me to become best friends, least of all us, but we did. We were opposites in taste, education, upbringing, everything but how we saw the world and thought it should work; Dean called us “twin brothers of different mothers. . . .”

I made regular treks out to New Jersey for dinner with the family, but didn't know his wife, Lynn, was a black girl from the Bronx until my first visit almost a year after meeting Dean. I must have looked surprised when a stylish black woman opened the door instead of the suburban southern belle I'd expected. A short Afro crowned a dark pretty face, big gold hoops hung on either side of her broad smile. She feigned shock when she saw me, raised her eyebrows, and widened her eyes as she turned back to yell at her husband.

“Omigod, Dean! You didn't tell me he was a
Negro!
”

I loved her immediately.

After dinner we discussed Dean's colorblindness over beers on the back porch while their three-year-old, Milton, an only child then, ran around the yard in circles. Dean was built like a truck, six feet tall capped with a military-style crew cut. Lynn was small, compact; she nestled under Dean's free arm on the couch while we sipped beer and the two of us talked about her husband like he wasn't there.

“Dean says since he doesn't care about race he sees no reason to bring it up. I think it's passive-aggressive. You just know he only married me to see if it would kill his cracker family. . . .”

“Worth it, even if I am stuck with her,” Dean said with a grin. She smacked him lightly. He winked at me, took a deep swig of beer.

“Anyway. I say ignoring color implies something's wrong, when difference should be recognized and celebrated,” finished Lynn.

“Just sounds like a cheap way for them to get off the hook to me,” I said. “ ‘Black people? What black people? Everybody looks the same to me!' ”

“Yeah, I get it.” Lynn slapped Dean on the thigh with a grin. “No black people, no reparations! ‘Slavery? What slavery? We don't owe you
shit!
'” We laughed like coconspirators, while Dean waggled his empty bottle until Lynn passed him another beer.

“Y'all need to keep me on your side,” he said as he twisted off the cap. “We remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends. . . .”

“Smart-ass,” said Lynn. “He quotes King, but doesn't fool me. Shakespeare said even the Devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.”

“Never marry a teacher,” laughed Dean. Lynn kissed him hard, and he kissed her back; they kissed a lot, had an easy affection for each other I envied.

Between jobs I'd hang with Dean at his place or mine, kick back, knock down tequilas, and take apart the world. Most of the time we talked by telephone. I had a headset that let me chat with both hands free while I drew floor plans at home on my Mac. He'd call on his Bluetooth earpiece from location while his crew set up lights and we'd burn up free long-distance by the hour while we both worked.

Lately more conversations were in person, less about Dean's dreams than nightmares about the war and a looming recession. A downturn in New York's economy after the Twin Tower bombings cut back on jobs for both of us; a few years of the Iraq war hadn't made things any better. I was single with low expenses in a rent-controlled Brooklyn apartment, but Dean had a family to support in Jersey, a wife and two kids.

Debts grew and no work was in sight; his wife's teaching salary wasn't enough to pay the bills. They'd already gone through their savings and started cashing out their IRAs, no matter how much they lost in early withdrawal.

“Freelance sucks, bruh. You know what they say,” he said with a sigh. “Sometimes ya gotta chew off a leg to set yourself free.”

Then his mother died.

 

 

I heard the phone ring as I walked upstairs with my grocery bags, but couldn't get inside my third-floor apartment in time to answer before it went to voice mail. There was a short message when I checked, no name, but I knew it was Dean.

“Greg, give me a call on cell, will ya? No big, bruh. Just need an ear, okay?”

He was down in New Orleans with the movers, getting furniture and boxes unloaded and into his mother's house before the wife and kids arrived from New Jersey to help unpack. I called him back on my headset phone while I put away groceries.

“Dean! How's life in the Big Easy?”

“Nothin' easy 'bout it, bruh.” He paused. I heard a ring top pop, followed by what sounded like a long swallow from a tall cold beer. “Got everything in, so I'm takin' time off with my ol' pal Sam Six-pack. Don't think he's long for this world.”

“How's the place look?”

“Like hell, but always did. Still can't believe what this dump is worth. Glad now I didn't burn it down as a kid. Lord knows I tried.”

He grew up in New Orleans, a short walk from the main tourist drag of the French Quarter. Dean and his generation moved out first chance they got, but his widowed mother stayed in the family house until the end, in a quiet neighborhood called Marigny.

“Named after Bernard Marigny. His only piece of history's bringing craps to America in the 1800s and sellin' off the land we live on to pay his debts.”

“From losing at craps?” I asked.

“My roots have cursed me, bruh. It's why my fortunes rise and fall.” Dean had been out of work for over a year, had a family to support. “You know what houses in the French Quarter sellin' for now? Shit. Had no choice but to move back, and cash out Ma's place to stake a new start.”

The move to New Orleans was only temporary. Lynn made that clear. Even in the early twenty-first century she didn't look forward to being the black half of an interracial couple in what she still considered the Deep South, no matter how “New” everyone said it was.

I finished unpacking groceries and started making lunch, commiserated with Dean about the twin nightmares of a major move and low cash flow. He sounded more down than usual; I wrote it off to the stress of moving. It was only later I'd look back and see it as the start of something more. By the time I made a sandwich and heated a bowl of soup, he'd finished three beers and was opening his fourth. I signed off to eat, but couldn't get the last thing he said out of my head.

“They say you can't go home again, bruh, but they're wrong. It's not that you can't, only that you shouldn't. Sometimes leaving home's the best thing to do, and you should stay away like you had sense.”

“Too many memories?”

“Too many ghosts.”

I laughed as I sat at the table to eat. “Don't tell me you believe in ghosts.”

“Don't matter, bruh,” he said. “They just have to believe in you.” That was the phrase that struck me.

They just have to believe in you.

 

 

Dean called back a few days later.

His mother had lived on the ground floor of her worn yellow clapboard corner house and kept everything else stored in the small narrow rooms upstairs, packed so full over the years Dean could barely get in to clean. He'd dug in, found things he'd forgotten and others he never knew about. Old family photos, even a few original daguerreotypes, trunks of antique clothes, books, family papers. Some he packed in garbage bags to throw out, some he put aside to be appraised.

“Might be sumpin' worth a few bucks. Maybe I'll give it all to some local museum. The Dean Duvall Collection.”

“Yeah, they could name a wing after you.”

“Be some 'preciation, bruh. More'n I get round here.”

Dean's speech was slurred, his accent the bad cliché movie redneck he always affected when drunk. It sounded like he'd been sitting with Sam Six-pack again, plus a few of his pals. I looked at the clock. It seemed a little early even for Dean to be in the tank.

“What do you mean?”

“Damn wife, f'true. Don't matter what you do, never enough.”

“It's just the move. She'll settle down once you get the place cleared out.”

“That's what they say.”

I tried to lighten the mood. “Hey, how's the famous food down there? You have a chance to go out and check some of your old haunts?”

“Only haunts I seen been up here, bruh. No time or money for fun. Wife makes sure of that.”

“You're upstairs now?” For some reason the news startled me, sent a shudder through my body, like some childhood fear was triggered by the thought of him crouched in a long low dust-filled upper room while we talked, sunlight streaming through small windows to cast long shadows while he labored late into the afternoon, alone with me and the ghosts.

“Where else I gon' be, bruh? Takin' care of business while we talk. All I do's take care of business. . . .”

We talked a while longer, but conversation never strayed far from complaints about his wife and kids weighing him down, giving him a hard time. I wanted to be supportive but felt drowned in his self-pity. When it was clear I couldn't pull him out of it I had to escape before I sank, told him I needed to get to a store before it closed, the best excuse I could think of to get off the phone.

“No problem, bruh. Catch ya later. Oh, and keep an eye out. Got a little surprise headed your way. . . .”

He wouldn't say what it was, no matter how hard I pressed. The way he'd been talking I wasn't sure what to expect. I hung up and poured a drink, stared at my computer screen instead of working or going out, and wondered what was happening to the man I'd known in New York.

 

 

A few days later my present arrived.

The bell rang and the mailman called me downstairs to sign for an oversized delivery sent Priority Mail. It was a long flat package wrapped in taped-together brown paper bags, thickly padded inside with cardboard for protection,
DO NOT BEND
! and
FRAGILE
!
PLEASE DO NOT FOLD
! scrawled all over it in Dean's blocky print. I carried my gift upstairs and opened it on the dining table where I had room to lay it out flat.

I unwrapped it and carefully removed the packing.

Inside was an old panoramic photograph over three feet long, brittle, cracked, the black-and-white image gently faded to sepia browns on thick, yellowed paper. It was a huge crowd at the base of the Washington Monument, ghostly pale women and children in the foreground, scattered in a semicircle around the edges of an open clearing.

Outnumbering them many times was a multitude of men that extended back to the horizon as far as the eye could see, dressed in dark street clothes or light robes, with and without hoods, many with left arms outstretched in a salute to the monument, to their fellow Ku Klux Klansmen, to their families, their country, and their God.

In the middle of the photo, Klansmen and their women stood around the edges of a massive American flag, long enough to take twenty to hold aloft at chest level, displayed proudly as if at a patriotic event, and on that day it was. I felt a chill despite Brooklyn's late summer heat.

The casual audacity of it scared me the most, the easy social exchanges among people in the crowd, that the photographer had snapped the picture and labeled it in precise handwritten text at the bottom, as if it were a quaint scene of any other approved public assembly:

I went to my computer, did a quick Google, and confirmed that there had been a big meeting in Washington that year and read some history of the first Klan, founded in 1865 by Masons. They donned masks to inspire terror in their enemies; the white robes and masks were either to imitate the Knights Templar who fought in the Crusades or to pose as avenging spirits of Confederate dead come back as ghouls.

One site said by 1925, the Klan numbered four million, its members unlikely to be convicted by local southern juries even if arrested. I stopped reading and called Dean on the phone. He picked up after one ring, knew it was me without asking.

“Bruh! Guess you got my little package.”

“Pretty big package for a white man,” I joked.