Whispers in the Night (25 page)

“Yeah, well, saw it and thought of you.” He laughed, long and loud.

“Not sure how to take that, but thanks. I'm touched. It's probably a collectible.”

“Don't say I never give yuh nothin'.”

“Did Lynn see it?” She'd marched in demonstrations against Bush and the Iraq war, organized petitions for feminist and civil rights issues; I could only imagine what she had to say when he brought it downstairs.

Dean laughed. “Yeah, took one look and said if I wanted to live with it, I could move my picture and skinny white ass into the garage.”

“No surprise there.”

“Guess not. Nearly told the bitch where she could put it, but like they say, you gotta pick your battles.”

I paused. Despite their differences, Dean and Lynn were one of the most functional couples I knew. “Since when are you two fighting?”

“Ain't no fight, bruh. Just me layin' down law on who's boss around here. You know what they say, give 'em an inch and they'll take your balls!” He guffawed.

I tried to laugh it off, but was disturbed by the force of his cracks about Lynn. Dean had made the usual guy jokes about his wife in the past, but never anything this hostile. I asked to speak to her later and he either didn't hear or ignored me.

“Me, bruh, I think it's a piece of history. Real Americana.”

“I'm with you. What's the story? You related to any of these guys?”

“Hell, probably all of 'em. You know how inbred those old bastards were.” He laughed and coughed.

“Did you know you had Klan fans in the family?”

“Bruh, I'm learning more than I need to know. You'd never believe the shit I found. Scrapbooks of lynch photos, newspaper and magazine clippings, pages of hangings and burnings, fuckin' museum of the misbegotten. My roots. 'Fraid some's worth somethin', or I'd burn it all.” He started to drift. “Need cash now. Never get this place cleared in time. . . .” When I asked to talk to Lynn again, Dean made an excuse and rambled on until he ran down like a spent windup toy. While I considered ways to get past him to talk to her, I got off the phone and rewrapped the photograph.

I took it to a local frame shop in Park Slope. The teenaged white clerk behind the counter did a double take when he realized what it was, smiled slyly while he took my order as if in on some secret joke between us. His manager came in from lunch as we finished up, a professional-looking young woman, styled with current fashion magazine cover perfection. She glanced at the photo with a polite smile of feigned interest that dropped as soon she read the caption.

“Is this for a museum or gallery?” she asked, pushing back frosted blond hair for a better look.

“It was a gift. A friend found it in his mother's house in New Orleans.”

She arched her eyebrows, as if wondering what kind of friend he really was. “Well. I wouldn't want to live with it.”

“Sometimes it's good to remember it wasn't so long ago.”

“I suppose. . . .” She looked unconvinced. “I know my grandparents don't keep postcards of Auschwitz.”

“They were there. The rest of us need reminders.”

“I suppose,” she repeated, smiled professionally but failed to conceal a scowl as she turned to walk away. I pictured her coming back that night, turning off the alarm, unlocking the door, and tearing the picture to pieces with her well-manicured nails, savaging it with the sharp stiletto heels of her designer shoes, then dismissed the image. This was the civilized Slope where we publicly aired our differences in the light of day, not Dean's inscrutable South that sent me souvenirs of a time when they were settled under cover of darkness.

 

 

I got busy on location for a job and lost touch with Dean. After a few more calls like the last one I was glad for the break. We traded messages on voice mail, but by the time my job was over, I was too tired to deal with one of his repetitious rants, so I put off calling back until I'd regained my strength. Hopefully by then things would have improved.

The phone rang one night after I fell asleep on the couch watching TV. It woke me enough to fumble for the phone without thinking to check caller ID, and I caught it just before it went to voice mail.

“Yah?” I said.

“'Bout time! Who do I kill to hear back from you, bruh?”

“Dean.” I stretched, carried the phone to the kitchen to get coffee and a drink. A double. “Sorry, I got tied up on a gig. Had to spend more time on-site than I thought. You always say beggars can't be choosy.”

“I ain't mad at you. Do what you gotta, I'll do the same.”

He was so drunk I could barely understand him. It was exactly the call I'd been trying to avoid. “How's Lynn?”

He snorted, blew his nose, and laughed. “You know what they say, the darker the berry, the sweeter the juice . . . Bitch is fine, boy, why, you want some of that?”

“Boy? Excuse me?” My voice went up like a Richard Pryor routine. “Don't call me boy, asshole. And stop calling Lynn a bitch. I don't like it and I doubt she does.” I'd had arguments with Dean over politics and art, but never really been mad at him until now.

His voice came back low and deep, dead serious. “I'll call you whatever I want to, boy. You ain't got no right ta tell me what to do, no more'n that black bitch downstairs.”

There was a moment when I was going to respond with an easy retort, tell his cracker ass what I thought as usual, but there was something in his voice that stopped me. When he said those words it hadn't been the slurred accents of the drunk who called me. It was the voice of authority, clear and decisive, stating a truth. I wouldn't be challenging Dean, but everything he thought and believed in. I wasn't sure enough of what that was anymore to start a fight. Not without knowing what I was up against.

“We'll talk later. When you sober up,” I said.

“Ain't drunk, boy. I'm high on life.” He laughed like that was some kind of joke. “Yeah, that's it. High on . . .” He started to cough again, from a chest thick with phlegm.

“Enough with this boy shit, okay?”

Dean wheezed as he chuckled into the phone. “High on lives, boy. We high on lives. . . .”

I disconnected and turned up the TV to drown my thoughts.

I'd never been called boy by anyone before, and to have a good friend be first made it all the worse. I felt trapped in the apartment, the scene of the crime, and needed to get out, so I called a nearby friend and asked him to meet me at Excelsior, a local gay bar only a few blocks from us.

Winston was tall, dark, and dressed to kill as always, already posed cocktail in hand at the long curved wooden bar when I arrived. He'd just had his shoulder-length dreadlocks done, still moist and glistening with fresh oils, and toyed with them while we talked.

It was a quiet night at the bar, still early, and the jukebox played soft music instead of blasting dance hits. Excelsior was like any neighborhood bar, only gay, one of the few bars I'd ever felt comfortable hanging in. I'd met Winston there when he'd introduced himself to one of my friends who appealed to him. They lasted one night, but Winston and I ended up friends for years.

“What can I say, honey?” he said after I told him about my grim conversations with Dean, raved and ranted the rage out of my system. “I'm from Louisiana. White folk down there can be that way. Friends for years until you hit a rough patch that shows you who they really are. He's just getting back to his racist roots.”

“I can't believe that.”

“I tell you true. It's pack nature. When the choice is between you and their own . . .” He waved a hand to finish the rest of the thought while he downed the last of his drink.

I told him he was crazy. I told him he was wrong. I told myself to stay calm and give Dean time to redeem himself.

“Sometimes friends need a vacation from each other, boo. Let it go,” Winston said as I finished my beer. “Forget it and him.”

We walked out the door and hugged as we said good-bye. There was a crash of breaking glass against the sidewalk behind us as we heard voices yell, “Faggots!” from the street, then the roar of an engine.

People ran out of the bar before Winston and I understood what had happened and described it to us. A car full of teenagers was passing when one of the kids threw a bottle while the others jeered and cheered him on; then they took off through a red light. Regulars made sure broken glass hadn't hit us while the owner, ordinarily a quiet gentle man, ran out with a cell phone in his hand, snapped out orders to his burly partner behind him.

“I'm on hold with the local precinct. Did anyone get a plate number?” Someone waved, and he went to talk to her while I checked out Winston. He was furious.

“Goddamn them! How dare they! Goddamn motherfuckers!” He stamped back and forth in front of the bar, cursed while people tried to console him, or encouraged him to let it out. The owner came back over to me.

“Lord, Greg, I am so sorry. The cops are on their way. I don't know what to say. We've been open for years and that's never happened. Never. Come in if you need a drink while you wait. On the house.” Winston headed back inside before I could answer for either of us. He turned at the door and gestured to the street, in the direction the car had sped off.

“Pack nature,” he said, and disappeared inside.

 

 

Over the next week I noticed a rise in news stories about hate crimes: synagogues and cars vandalized with swastikas, fires in Baptist churches, Hassidic Jews attacked by Latin teens, black men beaten with bats by a white gang in Howard Beach, a turbaned Sikh assaulted for the Twin Towers. I was extra watchful on the subway after a news story about an outpatient off his meds who'd pushed a girl onto the tracks, stopped wearing my MP3 player so I could keep my ears open for suspicious sounds behind me on the street. I couldn't tell if the surge was real or if what happened outside the bar made me pay more attention to stories that were always there. It was as if whatever shadow Dean was living under had made its way up here to look for me.

I picked up a voice-mail message that my picture was ready, and stopped on my way back from the city to pick it up. When I got it home I saw they'd done a great job, despite the manager's reservations. The mat was a narrow strip of ivory with a thin bloodred border on the inside. The frame was rounded, high-gloss bloodred to match the border. The best place to put it seemed to be over my desk, so the long-dead Klansmen could watch over me while I worked at my computer.

When I was done hanging it I sat in my chair with a shot of tequila to take a look. Smoldering eyes stared down in disapproval, an allied assembly of racists who would gladly have lynched me for being the free nigger cocksucker I was. I was everything they'd tried to prevent; I thought trapped in framed glass their world was harmless, frozen in the past, too far away to hurt me, but Dean had proved me wrong.

I stared up at the panorama, examined faces and details while I tried to forget my last conversation with him, tried to let the anger die down, but drink only fueled my fury. The rest of the night was spent brooding, as I gulped tequila and smoked weed, tried not to call Dean and start a new fight, used all my years in therapy to try to understand what made him change. I'd picked a bad combination; the tequila broke down my defenses, left me open to paranoid fantasies inspired by the weed. They came all too easily and all made sense when I was stoned.

There were only two explanations, internal or external.

If the answer was internal, Dean was having a mental breakdown. The expenses and pressure of the move had been too much, even for him. He was striking out at the only ones in reach, his family and me. If it was external . . .

All I needed to spur my stoned fantasy was the photograph in front of me. The crowd of Klansmen swarmed in a ring like white blood cells gathered to engulf invaders, a mass of individuals united to think and act as one killing organism. What if evil wasn't born of any single thought but was the product of a group mind, spread through the body of society like a virus that ate into healthy heads and converted them, made them its own?

What if there was an evil infecting America, demons, haunts, call them hungry ghosts? Something that followed us from the old world and made its home in the heartland where it grew and nourished itself on lynchings, serial killings, race riots, and state executions. It could have started in Spain during the Crusades, accidentally unleashed by the same Knights Templar that inspired early Klan leaders, Crusaders foolish enough to test powers they didn't understand and couldn't control.

Maybe alchemy or incantations woke an ancient hunger that followed them to inspire the tortures of the Inquisition, the violence of the French Revolution, sent somber pilgrims across the sea to murder natives for their land, advised judges to hold witch-hunts in Salem, donned hoods of the Ku Klux Klan to spread terror through the South, ordered officials to inter Japanese Americans and drop the atomic bomb, while its forebears in Europe bred the Holocaust, traveled with soldiers to My Lai and Abu Ghraib, pushed misfortune into disaster, whenever, wherever it could to make things worse, fed our fear of each other to nourish itself. I didn't know what it was, what form it took; maybe it was hidden in all our hearts, passed down from generation to generation like a congenital disease.

So here was Dean, freshly infected by the Old South he'd fled. Whatever it was had slept buried in boxes of his family's racist memorabilia, waited for the right host, and woke when it found Dean in its reach, weak, afraid, and alone, sank in its fangs, fed on his soul, and regurgitated what was left back into his brain like poison.