Whispers in the Night (4 page)

Another fly circled, landing on the counter, and Uncle June killed it with his red flyswatter without blinking. He wiped it off the counter with a grimy handkerchief, his eyes already looking beyond Danielle toward the next customer.

“Won't be long now, Danny,” Odetta said.

Danielle nodded again.

Odetta opened the gas station's glass door for her, and Danielle followed with the stroller. She was looking forward to another nap. Hell, she might sleep all day today, while she had the chance. She hadn't had a good night's sleep since Kyle had been gone.

Danielle almost ran down an old white man in a rumpled black Sunday suit who was trying to come in as they walked out. “Sorry—” Danielle began, but she stopped when she saw his face.

Danielle and her neighbor had never exchanged a word in all these years, but there had been no escaping his face when he ran for Town Council in ninety-nine and plastered his campaign posters all over the supermarkets. He was Old Man McCormack, even though his face was so furrowed with lines that he looked like he could be his own father. He was also very small, walking with a stoop. The top of his head barely came up to Danielle's shoulder.

Odetta froze, staring at him with a stupefied expression, but McCormack didn't notice Odetta. His eyes were fixed on the stroller, down at the baby.

He smiled a mouthful of bright dentures at Lola.

“Just like a little angel,” McCormack said. Some of his wrinkles smoothed over when he smiled, as if a great burden had been lifted from his face. He gently swatted away a fly that had been resting on the tip of Lola's nose. Danielle didn't know how long the fly had been there.

“
Lit-tle an-gel
,” Lola said.

McCormack's smile faded as he raised his head to look at Danielle, as if he expected to find himself staring into a harsh light. His face became tight, like hardening concrete.

“Afternoon, ma'am,” he said. His voice was rough, scraped from deep in his throat. And his eyes flitted away from hers in an instant, afraid to rest on hers too long.

But Danielle had glimpsed his runny eyes long enough to see what he was carrying. She could see it in his stooping shoulders, in his shuffling walk. She felt sorry for him.

“Afternoon, Mr. McCormack,” she said.

He paused, as if he was shocked she had been so civil. His face seemed to melt.

“You and your pretty little girl have a good summer, hear?” he said with a grateful smile.

“Yessir, I think we will,” Danielle said. “You have a good summer, too.”

Despite the way Odetta gaped at her, Danielle wasn't in the mood to pass judgment today. Everyone had something hidden in their past, or in their hearts, they wouldn't want dug out. Maybe the McCormack family would have to answer to God for those bodies buried on their land, or maybe they wouldn't. Maybe Danielle would give Lola six drops of Uncle June's remedy at midnight tonight, or maybe she wouldn't.

She and this old man deserved a little peace, that was all.

Danielle rubbed the top of Lola's head, gently massaging her neatly braided scalp. Her tiny visitor in the stroller turned to grin up at her with shining, adoring eyes.

Wrath James White

T
he lithe and sensuous cinnamon-skinned black woman whose desk lay directly across from Malik's cubicle was staring at him again. Malik could feel her eyes crawling over him like maggots on a fresh corpse. He knew what she was thinking.

He'd heard it all before, not from some racist rednecks but from his own people, every day of his life for as long as he could remember. He was getting tired of it. Sick and tired. As a teenager, he'd used every skin-lightening cream on the shelves and he'd done nothing more than given himself a severe case of acne and several chemical burns that had blistered and left scars.

He turned his head to catch her staring and she smiled at him, holding his gaze. Malik turned quickly away. He knew she was just trying to fuck with him.

Malik's self-esteem had been formed in the early eighties when he was just reaching puberty and Michael Jackson, Prince, and Ray Parker Jr. were the symbols of black male sexuality. Effete, sallow-toned, androgynous beings, whose voices lilted like castrated tenors and whose racial composition was as ambiguous as their sexuality. Malik was the very antithesis of that cultural aesthetic, being the color of liquid night, with thick African features, and a large muscular body that held no suggestion of femininity. By eighties pop-cultural standards he was pure ugly, a bete noire destined for solitude and depression.

The fact that the modern aesthetic now favored his complexion and physique was not lost on him. He had been amazed when he first began to see models and actors with skin as dark as his, thick lips, wide noses, and shaved heads. He'd been even more amazed when a black woman had come up to him and called him beautiful for the first time in his life. But more than a decade later, he still found it hard to believe them, and harder still to forgive them and impossible to forget. The cruel mocking voices of his youth haunted him without relent.

The echoes redoubled. They ricocheted around Malik's skull, building up momentum and making him feel like his head was about to rattle apart. His chest started to feel tight; he felt himself starting to hyperventilate just as he had back in junior high school when the walls would close in and suffocate him as he watched the curly-haired, caramel-skinned crowd lord over their darker brethren, insulting them every chance they got and teaching them to hate themselves for not having more European features.

Malik looked back across the room at the beautiful office assistant and saw one of the greatest tormentors of his youth leering at him with that cruel smirk as her mind worked feverishly to concoct the next put-down. Her name was Kelly. Her cocoa-brown visage swam into view, transposed over the office girl's features. A vicious sneer twisted her lips as they moved to form that vituperative storm of insults Malik had come to expect from her.

The irony was that she was just a shade or two lighter than him. Definitely not the coveted high-yellow complexion favored at that time. But she was not alone. Jennifer Hart, who was the color of buttermilk, added her voice to the choir.

Between the two of them they had driven him to two suicide attempts and numerous elaborate murder/ suicide schemes that he'd plotted out to the last detail but had never put into action. He still heard their thirteen- and fourteen-year-old voices in his head, even though reason told him that the girls would be well into their thirties by now. He heard them whenever he looked at a beautiful cappuccino-colored woman like the one staring at him from the next cubicle. The one smiling seductively, as if she might actually be interested in a black scab like him.

No. He didn't think she would want him. All she would do was make fun of him and his African ancestry. She would call him a spear-chucker behind his back, when all the girls were gathered around the coffeemaker gossiping in the morning. She'd tell them how disgusting it would be to kiss his big lips. How his hair felt like Brillo. And how his thick arms and chest made him look like an ape. Then she'd laugh just like Kelly and Jennifer had. She'd laugh and laugh until Malik would have no choice but to kill her.

He caught her looking at him again, and once again she did not turn away when he looked back. She held his gaze and smiled, batting her eyelashes flirtatiously, waiting for him to say something. She twirled a pencil in her left hand and touched it to the corner of her mouth, nibbling the end of it as she tilted her head and let her eyes slide slowly down his body and then back up again. He could almost feel the heat of her smoldering stare warming him as it traveled over his flesh, turning him on despite Kelly's and Jennifer's combined voices interpreting every gesture she made into a diatribe of racial slurs.

Malik winced as if he'd been slapped as the woman continued to stare at him. He was still turned on, but now he was getting angry as well.

How dare that bitch make me feel like this?
he thought.
Why is she fuckin' with me? Why can't she just leave me the fuck alone?

He whirled around in his chair, turning his back on her and trying without success to go back to his work. He stared at the screen, but all the letters and numbers were running together into some indecipherable stew. He could still feel her eyes on him, like intimate caresses touching him everywhere. He wanted to get up and choke the life out of her.

Malik had always made it a point to steer clear of women like the beautiful tan-skinned woman in the next cubicle. The majority of his romantic conquests had been with white women or women with skin as dark as or darker than his, though even they sometimes made him uneasy. Not all of the girls who'd teased him back in high school had been light-skinned. Even the ones with skin the same color as his had looked down on him, as if his onyx complexion made him somehow subhuman. Usually when he went after black women they were African or West Indian, or even darker-skinned Cubans and Puerto Ricans. With American girls there was always the fear that some honey-complexioned gigolo with hazel eyes and wavy hair would come and take her away from him.

One of the other office girls had now joined the girl in the next cubicle. Her skin was smooth and flawless and the color of milk chocolate. Her hair was thick and wooly, though neat and well kept the way his had been before he'd gotten tired of fussing with it and shaved it all off. Her nose was wide with nostrils flared like a wild beast scenting a fresh kill and her lips were full and thick. The very same features he'd been ashamed of all his life she wore with beauty and grace. On her that woolly Afro looked stylish and trendy, that wide nose wild and exotic, those full lips sensuous and sexual. He knew that there were women out there who looked at him the same way. But they were usually not black women.

The two women were smiling and whispering and now they were both staring at him. Malik wanted to melt into the floor. He felt as if he were in an interrogation room under bright lights. He knew everything they were saying about him. He could read their lips even with his back turned. He could hear them in his head. See them laughing and pointing at him in his mind's eye, tearing him apart piece by piece until there was barely enough left of him to flush down the toilet.

His mother had tried to teach him to be proud of his African heritage.

Malik got up and stormed away from his desk with Kelly and Jennifer screaming in his head and the two office assistants boring their eyes into his back. He had to get some fresh air.

Walking briskly past rows and rows of identical cubicles in which the other office drones toiled, Malik began to calm down. The voices in his head began to slowly abate. He hurled himself into an elevator and rode it downstairs to the lobby, then dashed out onto the teeming city streets, into the flow of pedestrian traffic. He leaned against a light pole and inhaled deeply several times, finding himself inexplicably wishing he had a cigarette even though he'd never smoked a day in his life. The voices were quieter now, but they were still there whispering hateful things to him. It had been a long time since they had come on this strong and Malik knew the reason for their renewed vigor: that damned office assistant with the Halle Berry smile and complexion. Despite his anger, he could not ignore the fact that he'd been immensely attracted to her, and Kelly and Jennifer had known it too. That's why they had attacked him.

Malik gnashed his teeth together, the squeaky grinding sound drowning out the sonorous echoes in his skull. He whirled suddenly and almost jumped out into the street, pinwheeling his arms to stay on the curb as a cab rushed toward him, his eyes fixed in horror at the beautiful light-skinned office assistant who'd just placed her hand on his shoulder. She reached out for him again to help him regain his footing, pulling him back onto the sidewalk.

“I'm so sorry,” she said. “I didn't mean to frighten you.”

“You almost killed me!”

She continued smiling at him despite the bristling rage and hate boiling off him in waves. She was oblivious.
She probably expects the world to love her
, Malik thought as he struggled to calm his galloping heartbeat.

“I just wanted to introduce myself,” she said.

“Why?” Malik found himself backing away from her in horror as if she were something dangerous that might attack him. The woman took a step closer with every step he took in retreat until he was once again teetering on the edge of the curb.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“My name is Danika.” She held out her hand and Malik had to take it to keep from falling off the curb into traffic.

“I'm Malik.”

“I know. The girls in the office already told me about you.” She swept her eyes down to his feet and back up to his eyes again, and once again his body tingled everywhere her gaze landed.

“What did they tell you about me?”

“They said that you only date white girls.”

“What? That's stupid. I date plenty of black girls. I date all kinds of girls.”

“Then why haven't you asked me out? How come every time I look at you, you look like you want to run away? Do you think I'm ugly or something or are you just scared of me?”

Why is she doing this?
“I'm not afraid of you and you know you aren't ugly.”

“Then what's the problem?”

“Why would you want to go out with me?”

“Why? Look at you! You're gorgeous!”

Malik paused and looked closely at Danika's face to see if she was serious, hunting for any sign that she was putting him on or patronizing him.

“What, do you have some kind of bet with your friends or something?” he asked. “Is that what this is about?”

“Look, I just think you're fine as hell and I'd like to get to know you. But if you're not interested, I ain't going to beg you. A sista does have her pride. If you prefer those white girls, then that's just your loss.”

She turned on her heel and started walking back into the building.

“Danika?”

“Hmmm?”

“How about tonight?”

 

 

The date was going well. Malik was surprised by how much he and Danika had in common. Even the voices in his head were silent for once. Malik was enjoying himself. Each time Danika laughed he laughed with her. She reached out and took his hand as she told him about how her grandparents had to flee the South sixty years ago with the KKK hard at their heels because her grandmother had married a black man. She told him how much she hated being called “high yella” or “redbone” as if she were some other race than black and how she hated being called a mulatto most of all because it sounded so much like “mutt,” which she'd also been called on a few occasions. Malik kept his own stories to himself, listening instead, staring at her tiny brown hand in his and wondering what he'd ever been afraid of.

“What about your parents?” he asked. “Were they both black?”

“My mom, like I said, was half black and half white and my dad was Puerto Rican.”

“So what do you consider yourself, then?”

“Well, Puerto Ricans have black blood in them too so I just call myself black. It gets too complicated otherwise.”

She smiled and Malik smiled with her. The waiter brought their food and they ate their meal of Cornish game hens stuffed with wild rice and cranberries in small bites in between conversation, sipping white zinfandel and never once breaking eye contact.