“You say that like you don’t care.”

“I never said that. Not caring isn’t the same as understanding that things happen sometimes.”

“Well, that thing isn’t going to happen.”

Mercy’s phone rang late on a Thursday night. It was August 28, two weeks from Mercy’s due date. Half asleep, Robert heard Mercy say,“Hello?” Then, her voice softening, she said,“Barrett? Are you all right?”

She switched on her nightstand lamp and put a hand on Robert’s shoulder.“Where are you?” she said into the phone.

Robert rolled over toward her, squinting against the light. She was shaking her head.“He only wants to talk to you,” she said, handing him the phone.

“Hey, Barrett,” Robert said. His brain was still struggling to its feet.

“Can you pick me up? Same place as last time?”

“When? You mean now?”

“If you can do it. I need to get to Raleigh. Can you drive me? Just drop me off there and you can come straight home. I wouldn’t ask you if it wasn’t important.And I won’t ask again.”

“Okay. I can be there in ten minutes.”

“Thanks.”The dial tone buzzed.

As before, Robert pulled up to the curb where Elvira’s had been, and this time Barrett appeared immediately. He was clean, if scruffy, and his energy level seemed high.“Thanks, man,” he said as he got in and shut the door.“This helps.”

“Where do you need to go?”

“Shaw University, downtown. Is that cool?”

“Yeah, it’s fine.What’s it about?”

“You know I can’t tell you that.”

“No. I guess I don’t really want to know.”

Robert headed east on Business 70.After a few minutes’ silence he said, “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m making it.We’re getting down to the nitty-gritty now, and after that nobody knows how it’s going to shake out.”

Something in his tone made Robert look at him.“Nitty-gritty?”

“I’m all nerves, man. I’m talking more than I should.”

“There’s about to be trouble, is what you’re saying.A riot, like in Watts?”

“Watts was small time. Listen, I heard Mercy’s pregnant. Is that true?” “Yeah, it’s true.”

“You’re standing by her?”

“I love her.We’re getting away from here. Going to Texas.”

“That’s good.That’s very good.The farther from here the better.”

To fill the time, Robert found himself talking about the job in Dallas, the new life he hoped to start there. Other than Mercy, there had been no one he could confide in, and he’d been holding it in for months.The only thing that scared him was how unreal it all sounded, like the elaborate pipe dreams that old winos would tell to con somebody out of a quarter.

When the words ran out they drove in silence again until Barrett said,“I wonder sometimes if I did this whole thing wrong.That maybe it could still be me with Mercy, that I could have had a straight teaching job and a family and been a regular citizen.” He glanced at Robert.“No offense, man. Just a little idle jealousy. I know it wasn’t meant to be.”

Robert nodded. He was long past seeing Barrett as a rival. If anything, he was jealous of his own early days with Mercy, before her pregnancy, before the world turned so sour. Highway 70 had turned into Glenwood Avenue, and they were in Raleigh now.The houses along Glenwood were huge and set well back from the road, houses where blacks cooked and cleaned and maintained the yards. Durham was evenly divided between the races, while less than a quarter of Raleigh’s population was black. Raleigh imagined Durham to be a city of constant crime; Durham saw Raleigh as rich, white, and arrogant.

Shaw University was a black college in the center of downtown, only a few blocks south of the Capitol building.As they drove through the wide, deserted streets, Barrett got increasingly restless. Finally he said,“Listen, man, I have to warn you. I didn’t want it this way, but stuff is going to happen to your freeway.”

“Stuff?” Robert said.

“A lot of people see it as a symbol, you know, of what happened to Hayti and all.There’s going to be some shit come down there.”

“What are you talking about? What exactly is going to come down?”

“I said too much already.All’s I’m saying is, at night, for the next week, don’t be working late.You’ll be all right.”

The parts of the expressway that were finished were either precast or poured concrete over reinforcing steel.There was little anyone could do to damage them with less than an atomic bomb. Even so, the threat felt personal and Robert didn’t like it.

They’d come to the front gate of the college. Robert stopped the car. “Don’t hurt my expressway,” he said.“It’s not right.”

“It’s out of my hands,” Barrett said.

“I don’t believe that.”

Barrett opened the car door and left it open.“One second,” he said. The car was covered in dust from the construction site. Barrett stood on the sidewalk and used his finger to draw the crossroads symbol for Legba on the passenger side of the hood.Then he walked around to the other side and drew the heart-shaped ideogram for Erzulie. He wiped his hands on his pants and came back to the open door.

“A little extra protection never hurt,” he said.“Thanks for bringing me.” He leaned in the car to offer his hand.

Robert looked at it, anger and sadness and love fighting it out inside him. “Goddammit, Barrett,” he said.

“Take my hand,” Barrett said.“You never know when you’re going to see somebody again.We’re at the crossroads, man.You want to be at your best when you’re standing in the crossroads.”

Robert took his hand.“Be careful,” he said.

“You too.” Barrett closed the door, vaulted the gate, and was lost in the darkness. Robert turned north at his next opportunity, shutting off the car’s air conditioning and rolling the windows down to feel the damp air on his face, his emotions still churning.“Goddammit!” he said again, and pulled over under the next streetlight. He shut off the engine and found a rag in the trunk and used it to wipe the hood clean.

When he was done, he felt suddenly cold and alone.“Superstition,” he said out loud, crumpling the rag. He threw it in the trunk and drove, carefully, back to Durham.

Mercy was awake and waiting for him.

“He’s going to do something to the expressway,” he told her.“Him and his army.”

“Oh no,” Mercy said.

“What am I going to do? Am I going to just lie here and let him do it?” “You already know the answer to that.You know you won’t choose concrete over a man.”

“Why do I have to make that choice at all?”

“I can’t tell you that, baby,” she said, stroking his shoulders. He tried to hold her and she tried to let him, shifting around in an attempt to get comfortable, but he saw he was hurting her and he moved away.“I’m sorry, baby,” she said.

“Not much longer.Another couple of weeks and I’ll be a normal human again.” “Yeah, I know,” he said.“I know.”

•

He wrestled with it in his head all weekend. Sunday night, in the house on Woodrow, Ruth had felt his nervousness and rubbed his shoulders as he pretended to watch tv, asking him what was wrong.When he’d told her there were threats of sabotage, she’d gotten upset and wanted more details than he was willing to give.

“Are you in danger?”

“No.”

“Do you swear?”

“I promise. It’s just the freeway.”

“Oh, Robert, if anything happened to you, I don’t know what I’d do. I couldn’t abide it.”

On Monday he told Leon to spread the word among the crew: Nobody was to come on the construction site after dark.

“Why is that, Captain?”

“Just some rumors going around. Best to be safe.”

“Yeah, I heard some rumors too.”

“What did you hear?”

“Nothing, Captain, not really. Something about there might be trouble on the freeway site.”

“Where did you hear it?”

“Not sure I remember exactly. Booker, maybe. Booker probably heard

something at one of those bars he hang out at.” Booker wasn’t there to confirm or deny. Most likely Barrett had warned Leon himself.

They were working on the Fayetteville Street overpass. Fayetteville Street itself had moved 50 feet to the west while they dug out the old roadbed. Down

below, in the cutout, they’d bolted one six-legged precast T on either side of the right of way, with a third T in the center.There was a raw wood framework most of the way across, nestling the tops of the Ts, floored with plywood,

ready to take the concrete for the overpass itself. Below it stood a form for the north buttress, looking ramshackle and random, the way forms always did from the outside.

As he stared at the fragile wooden structures he felt a fresh wave of sweat break across his forehead.That would be the target, he thought.There, in the center of Hayti, under the voodoo weathervane on St. Joseph’s.A few wellplaced sticks of dynamite could set them back for weeks.

It wasn’t just the company’s money, or the wasted work. Part of Robert wanted to see the freeway open and cars driving on it before he left for Dallas. Losing two or three weeks would make that impossible.

He spent that night in his Chevelle, blocking the end of the overpass scaffolding on the St. Joseph’s side. He’d parked a bulldozer at the other end. After nodding off half a dozen times, he quit struggling and curled up on the bench seat and slept for a few fitful hours.When the sun woke him he went to Mercy’s for another two hours, so exhausted that even her restless turning

couldn’t keep him awake.

He did it again on Tuesday, but by Wednesday he couldn’t face another night of it. He ate and showered and went to bed, only to have the phone wake him at 2 am.

They had been getting a lot of crank calls, the caller hanging up as soon as Mercy answered.Those had all been in the evening hours, never this late. Robert heard her pick up the phone and mumble a hello, then say,

“Who?” in an irritated voice. She passed the receiver to Robert. “Mitch Antree,” she said.

Robert stared at her in confusion and took the receiver. Mercy moved the body of the phone onto the bed between them to keep the cord from cutting across her breasts.

“Mitch?” Robert said.“How did you get this number?”

“Put your pants on,” Mitch said.“I need you here at the office.” “Christ,” Robert said, thinking immediately of Barrett,“what did he do?” “What did who do?”

Robert took a breath.“Nothing.What happened?”

“Nothing happened. Put on your work clothes and get down here.We’re going to pour some mud down by Fayetteville Street.”

“In the middle of the night?” Robert said.“I don’t understand.” “I hope to God you never do,” Mitch said.“Listen to me, now.The fun and

games are over.You come down here to the office, don’t ask any questions, and I mean no questions, and when this is done you go home and you keep your mouth shut.”

Robert hung up.“I have to go into the office. Like, now.”

“Is it Barrett?”

“He won’t say. My best guess is he’s cooking up some kind of countermove against him.You know how weird Mitch has been getting.This could all be the drugs.”

“Robert, is this going to be dangerous? If it is, don’t go.This baby has got to have a father.”

“I don’t think it’s like that. It’s nuts, but I don’t think it’s dangerous.” He kissed her.“I won’t let anything happen to me. I pr—”

“Don’t,” she said.“Don’t.”

He brushed the hair from her forehead and kissed it.“I’ll be careful, okay?”

•

A cement mixer sat in the Mason and Antree parking lot. It had a full load, and the barrel was turning. Mitch sat behind the wheel. He had the win

dow down and he beckoned to Robert to get in the passenger side. Robert got in. He looked at Mitch’s face and saw that he would keep quiet,

like he’d been told. In Germany, Robert’s outfid Leon himself.

They were working on the Fayetteville Street overpass. Fayetteville Street itself had moved 50 feet to the west while they dug out the old roadbed. Down

below, in the cutout, they’d bolted one six-legged precast T on either side of the right of way, with a third T in the center.There was a raw wood framework most of the way across, nestling the tops of the Ts, floored with plywood,

ready to take the concrete for the overpass itself. Below it stood a form for the north buttress, looking ramshackle and random, the way forms always did from the outside.

As he stared at the fragile wooden structures he felt a fresh wave of sweat break across his forehead.That would be the target, he thought.There, in the center of Hayti, under the voodoo weathervane on St. Joseph’s.A few wellplaced sticks of dynamite could set them back for weeks.

It wasn’t just the company’s money, or the wasted work. Part of Robert wanted to see the freeway open and cars driving on it before he left for Dallas. Losing two or three weeks would make that impossible.

He spent that night in his Chevelle, blocking the end of the overpass scaffolding on the St. Joseph’s side. He’d parked a bulldozer at the other end. After nodding off half a dozen times, he quit struggling and curled up on the bench seat and slept for a few fitful hours.When the sun woke him he went to Mercy’s for another two hours, so exhausted that even her restless turning

couldn’t keep him awake.

He did it again on Tuesday, but by Wednesday he couldn’t face another night of it. He ate and showered and went to bed, only to have the phone wake him at 2 am.

They had been getting a lot of crank calls, the caller hanging up as soon as Mercy answered.Those had all been in the evening hours, never this late. Robert heard her pick up the phone and mumble a hello, then say,

“Who?” in an irritated voice. She passed the receiver to Robert. “Mitch Antree,” she said.

Robert stared at her in confusion and took the receiver. Mercy moved the body of the phone onto the bed between them to keep the cord from cutting across her breasts.

“Mitch?” Robert said.“How did you get this number?”

“Put your pants on,” Mitch said.“I need you here at the office.” “Christ,” Robert said, thinking immediately of Barrett,“what did he do?” “What did who do?”

Robert took a breath.“Nothing.What happened?”

“Nothing happened. Put on your work clothes and get down here.We’re going to pour some mud down by Fayetteville Street.”

“In the middle of the night?” Robert said.“I don’t understand.” “I hope to God you never do,” Mitch said.“Listen to me, now.The fun and

games are over.You come down here to the office, don’t ask any questions, and I mean no questions, and when this is done you go home and you keep your mouth shut.”

Robert hung up.“I have to go into the office. Like, now.”

“Is it Barrett?”

“He won’t say. My best guess is he’s cooking up some kind of countermove against him.You know how weird Mitch has been getting.This could all be the drugs.”

“Robert, is this going to be dangerous? If it is, don’t go.This baby has got to have a father.”

“I don’t think it’s like that. It’s nuts, but I don’t think it’s dangerous.” He kissed her.“I won’t let anything happen to me. I pr—”

“Don’t,” she said.“Don’t.”

He brushed the hair from her forehead and kissed it.“I’ll be careful, okay?”

•

A cement mixer sat in the Mason and Antree parking lot. It had a full load, and the barrel was turning. Mitch sat behind the wheel. He had the win

dow down and he beckoned to Robert to get in the passenger side. Robert got in. He looked at Mitch’s face and saw that he would keep quiet,

like he’d been told. In Germany, Robert’s outfit had been required to make three parachute jumps. Mitch had the look that Robert had seen on one of the men before his first jump. He’d gone out the hatch, but the next day he’d filed for a transfer.

Mitch was already fighting with the gearshift, trying to find reverse.“I drove one of these after college,” he said. Robert did not offer to take over. Mitch kept his gaze moving between the side-view mirrors and didn’t make eye contact with Robert. Finally he jammed the gears into place, got the behemoth

turned around, and lumbered south toward Hayti.

As they drove, Robert felt a chill spread from his stomach out to the ends of his fingers and toes. Part of it was exhaustion and the lateness of the hour; most of it was fear. Fear came off Mitch in palpable waves, a sense that the safe and normal world had tilted so far off axis that nothing would ever be the same.The feeling was so strong that it eradicated Robert’s curiosity. Now he silently echoed Mitch’s hope that he would never find out what was going on. He pulled in his shoulders and stared straight ahead, past the conical beams of the headlights, into the darkness.

They rode the temporary blacktop across the canyon of the freeway. Robert didn’t turn his head to look at the glow of floodlights down in the cut. Mitch turned left in front of St. Joseph’s and followed the track of the access road down into the construction site, then swung a wide U-turn back to where the overpass would be. Leon and Tommy Coleman waited there.Their postures were all wrong; they looked worse than Mitch did.

Mitch backed the truck up to the form on the north side of the overpass. One rear wheel collided repeatedly with something it couldn’t roll over. Robert did not want to know what it was. Still without looking at Robert, Mitch said,“Stay here.” He got out, leaving the truck idling. Something crashed and he got back in. He backed up another six feet and got out again. Robert heard muffled voices, then the familiar sound of the chute swinging

out and the slurry rolling into it, like a hailstorm on a tin roof. Leon fired up his vibrator, the single-stroke engine roaring like the chainsaw it resembled. The familiar sounds helped.We’re just pouring some concrete, he told himself. Nothing unusual about that, except the hour. He could have gotten out and joined them, standing around the back of the truck like any other workday. Instead he stayed where he was.

With every passing minute that he didn’t have to get out, he relaxed a little more. Still, the inside of his brain was white and locked down, as if pinned in a

thousand watt spotlight.

He didn’t look at his watch until the mixer was empty and Mitch had driven them back to the office.“Go home,” Mitch said then. It was not yet three.“Tell yourself this was all a bad dream. Do not tell anyone, not Mercy, not your wife, not anyone, what you saw tonight.”

“I didn’t see anything,” Robert said.

Mitch nodded.Apparently they were done. Robert got down and shut the door of the truck, and Mitch immediately pulled away.

Robert walked slowly to his car. He’d thought it was later, thought the sun would be coming up.The stars shone fiercely, like they were giving their all for the final time.A faint breeze told him that he had sweated through his clothes without being aware of it.The air smelled of tar and the dumpsters on the corner, but to Robert it seemed fine. He lit a cigarette and leaned for a moment against the driver’s side of the Chevelle. His brain was starting to thaw. He refused to let it speculate.

Mercy was still awake when he got home.“I need to shower,” he said, stripping off his damp clothes.“It was dusty at the site.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing,” Robert said.“We drove out to the site and back again. It could be Mitch was worried about Barrett and wanted me there. I don’t know.” Though there was nothing strictly untrue in what he’d said, he knew he

had just lied to her for the first time. He watched himself do it with sadness, and yet no other possibility seemed available. Later, maybe, when he knew more, they would talk.After the baby was born.

“Mitch is losing his mind,” Mercy said, turning away from him.“Hurry up and come to bed.You need your sleep.”

Robert was in the office by nine the next morning. Mitch had phoned in sick.“Probably hung over again,”

Charles said.“He can’t seem to get it through his head that he ain’t twenty anymore.”

Maurice was gone now, having made good on his threats at last, leaving Charles and Robert as the senior men in a bullpen of eager kids, none of whom had been out of college longer than three years. Charles was bigger than ever and had taken on Maurice’s role as chief cynic.And, like in the commercial, he was smoking more these days and enjoying it less.

“I’ll be at the site,” Robert said,

Leon and Tommy were already there, putting a slick trowel finish on a fresh load of concrete that completed the north buttress.

“Captain,” Leon said, not looking him in the face.Tommy didn’t say anything at all, just dipped his trowel in a white plastic bucket and massaged the face of the concrete, bringing the fine, smooth grains to the surface.

Robert nodded to them and kept walking.

Two weeks later they’d moved west to the Duke Street overpass. Late in the afternoon, as the sky had begun to cloud over, a runner from the office found Robert sitting on his haunches in front of a set of bluelines, the corners anchored by rocks.The runner had a pink sheet torn from a phone message pad that simply said,“Call M.R.”

It was the code he and Mercy had agreed on.“Leon!” he yelled.“You’re in charge!”

Leon said something he couldn’t hear—wasn’t meant to hear, most likely. Mercy was waiting on the porch, suitcase at her feet, as he squealed up to the curb. She smiled as she stood up.“Be cool, baby,” she said, as he ran up to the porch.“Nothing’s going to happen for a while yet.”

“Contractions?” He reached for her suitcase with one hand and her hand with the other.

“About ten minutes apart.About—” Her face contorted and she sat back down.“About a minute long. Shit.”

He held her hand until the pain subsided. She stood up and said,“Wait, now I have to pee again.”

Robert could not keep still. He paced the porch, needing a job to do. Mercy laughed as she came out of the house.“Home stretch, sweetie,” she said, giving him a big, smacking kiss.“Like the jockey said. Now drive slow. ”

She’d insisted on Lincoln Hospital, near North Carolina College. Robert had pushed for Watts Hospital in his own neighborhood, but she wanted to be with the doctors who’d treated her throughout the pregnancy. Robert only knew that Lincoln was old, dark, and septic looking. Once she was in a semiprivate room, in a gown and in bed, she said, “There’s something I want you to do for me. I promise I won’t have the baby until you’re back.”

“Back from where?”

“I want you to bring my mama. I got word to her, and she’ll be ready to go when you get there. Get her and bring her to me. Please?”

“I want to be here when—”

“You will be. Most likely it’ll be another twelve hours.Will you do it for me?”

He understood that her desire for her mother should not make him jealous, despite his prickly temper. Driving would at least give him something physical to do.“All right,” he said. He drove fast, but not carelessly. Mercy’s mother, as promised, had her own suitcase packed and was waiting by the front door. She was not one for small talk, and once she’d gotten an update on Mercy’s condition, they had run out of things to say.Then, unexpectedly, half an hour into the drive, she said,

“When Mercy told me you wanted to keep the child, that you would stand by her, it told me what kind of man you are. It was what I already felt about you, and it made me glad it was true.”

Since the night of the cement mixer, Robert had felt that he was no kind of man at all.“Thank you,” he said.

To cover his unease, he began to talk to her about Dallas. He knew that Mercy had brought it up to her as a possibility. Now Robert laid out the scenario in detail and asked her to join them. She nodded.“It’s time for a change. I’ve been all my life in this one place, and lately it seems like everything I see reminds me of how much better things used to be.”

“Good,” Robert said, surprised and relieved.“That’s good.”

“Being alone is not everything it was once cracked up to be either,” she said, and Robert found himself opening up to her, telling her about the spaceport and pre-stressed concrete, and the vision of the future that had sustained him through the long and frustrating summer.

Mercy, for her part, was as good as her word. She was still in her room, though her nightgown was soaked through with sweat and she was biting her lower lip with pain. “I read up on this,” she said, as her mother put one hand on Mercy’s bulging stomach and the other on her forehead. “This is the time when I’m supposed to feel like giving up. And you know what? I do.”

It seemed wrong to Robert that she should hurt this much, wrong that the doctors weren’t investigating. He couldn’t stop himself from wishing that he’d taken her to Watts Hospital instead. At that moment a nurse and an orderly rolled a gurney up to her bedside. “Let’s get you into delivery,”

the nurse said.

As they lifted her onto the gurney, Mercy said,“Can my mother come in with me? She’s a nurse.”

“We’ll see what the doctor says.”To Robert she said,“The floor nurse can take you to the obstetrics waiting room.”

Robert caught Mercy’s hand for a final squeeze as they wheeled her away, saw her mouth the words “I love you,” and watched her disappear down the corridor.

The doctors, nurses, and staff were all black. If they found it odd to see him there, they did a decent job of hiding it.That was more than Robert could say about the two other expectant fathers in the waiting room who eyed him suspiciously until each, in turn, was called.

By midnight Robert’s anxieties had full control. Until that night his greatest fear had been the one he could never speak aloud, even to himself: the fear that the child would be black. He wanted to believe it made no difference, even as the very persistence of the question made him a liar and a hypocrite in his own eyes.

Now he was sure that Mercy, or the baby, or both, were dying or dead, and Mercy’s mother was holding him responsible. He imagined the operating theater awash in blood, Mercy terrified in a room full of strangers. He sat in a hard plastic chair and paged through a tattered copy of Ebony again and again, taking nothing in.

Finally, at 2 am, a nurse he hadn’t seen before came in and said,“Mr. Cooper? Mother and son are both fine.”

Mercy was alone with her mother when Robert got to the room. She was crying. Her mother was curled in a battered armchair by the window, asleep. He sat on the edge of the bed and took both her hands in his. He’d never seen her cry before, and now he thought the hospital had made a dreadful mistake.

“Baby, what’s wrong?”

“I’m just so tired, and relieved, and tired, and sore, and happy, and tired.” She smiled, but the tears kept coming.

“It’s a boy,” Robert said.

“Had to be. Felt like a six-year-old, coming out.”

He was exhausted as well, had hardly slept in three weeks, had hoped that her happiness would lift him up with her, only to find himself now wanting to cry too.

The nurse came in with a bundle of blankets.When Robert saw the pinkness of the ancient, wrinkled face, the tiny, pale, perfectly formed fingers, he hated his own feelings of relief. When he called in sick the next morning, Mitch got on the phone.“Did she have the baby?”

Robert didn’t ask how he knew.“It’s a boy,” he said.“We named him Malcolm.”

“Congratulations.Take Monday off, too.You owe me a cigar.”

Mercy’s mother had made herself a bed on the living room sofa.The next two days were disconnected fragments: sleeping, trying to sleep, driving back and forth from the hospital, watching the baby at Mercy’s breast, learning to change a diaper, finding himself endlessly fascinated by the tiny creature’s every movement, his rubbery face and twitching slumber.

Sunday afternoon Mercy saw him watching the clock and feeling his own needs and desires clash with his promises.“Go,” she said.“There’s nothing you can do here, and at least you’ll get one good night’s sleep.”

On Monday he brought Malcolm and Mercy home from the hospital, and that afternoon he lay in Mercy’s bed as she slept curled against his side. Her mother snored in the living room, audible through the closed door, and Malcolm snored in the crib next to them. Robert had never known that babies snored.

Mercy stirred, turned over, locked one leg around Robert’s, and put one arm across his chest.They were in their underwear, and the overworked air conditioner in the window leaked a thin stream of cool air. Mercy opened her eyes, pulled herself forward, and kissed Robert on the mouth. It had been a long time since she’d kissed him like that, and his reaction was instantaneous. She laughed and took hold of him.“Not much longer,” she said. He could barely speak.“How much, do you think? Longer?” “I’m sorry, baby. I have to heal up.They gave me an episiotomy, you know.” “No. Is that the spinal thing?”

“It’s an incision.”

She showed him.The doctor had cut her from the bottom of her vagina all the way to her anus, and then stitched her up again.The sight of it made Robert cringe from his diaphragm out to the ends of his fingers.“Oh my God,” he whispered.

“It’s routine. Especially with a big baby.”

“It’s barbaric.”

“I didn’t want them to do it.They don’t listen to you.They always think they know best.”

He gathered her gently in his arms.“I am absolutely sure they don’t do anything like that in Dallas. It’s time to go.”

She didn’t say anything, just held him tight against her.

“First of the year,” Arthur said.“That’s definite. I told him you had to start then or take another job, and he put it in writing.You start January second.” “That’s more than three months.”

“You’ve still got the highway job.You can finish that up and have one last Christmas in North Carolina. Maybe you could go see your dad up in Asheville.”

Robert had not yet told his father about Mercy. He couldn’t find the words, couldn’t picture acceptance on his father’s stern, Puritan face.

“Just swear to me there won’t be any more delays,” Robert said. “I swear,”Arthur said. On a rainy morning in early October, Mitch said,“What do you hear from your pal Barrett Howard these days?”

Robert was stunned. Once he got past the sheer shock value of the question, a bubble of hope rose up inside him. For Mitch to even ask the question meant that the thing Robert had been unable to admit to himself, the thing he’d kept bottled up since that early September night, might not be true after all.

“Barrett Howard?”

“You can’t have forgotten him already. Big cat, very dark, used to be involved in local politics?”

“Cut the crap, Mitch.What are you trying to say?”

“I was wondering if you’d heard anything.There’s some stories going around.”

“What kind of stories?”

“Supposedly he’s been doing some fundraising. Got money from the Panthers, from Cuba, from the Soviets. Quite a bit of money.Then a few weeks ago he’s gone, and so is the money.”

“And?”

“And now he’s turned up in Mexico.”

“Bullshit.”

“There was a photo of him in a Mexican paper.”

“What paper? You saw it yourself?”

“The guy I heard it from did.”

“Who was that?”

“Nobody you know.”

“It’s not possible,” Robert said.“Barrett had—has—more integrity than anyone I’ve ever known.”

“Integrity.” Mitch sounded it out like he’d stumbled across it in a dictionary for the first time.“Well, I guess you knew him better than me.”

What if it were true? Robert thought.What if Barrett were alive and living it up somewhere in the wilds of Mexico?

In North Carolina, the rain refused to stop. Robert and Mercy and the baby all went together to take Mercy’s mother back to Johnston County. It was the longest drive Malcolm had yet taken, the only time he’d been out of the house except for a routine checkup at the hospital.The motion seemed to calm him. On the drive home, Mercy stared out at the rain.“It’s never going to change.” “The weather? Yeah, it’s grim.”

“Nothing’s going to change.” Her voice was flat.“You’re never going to get that job in Dallas.You’re never going to leave Ruth.We’re never going to be the way we were before I got pregnant. I wish I’d never told you. I wish I’d just gotten rid of it like I wanted to.”

Reflexively, Robert looked down at Malcolm, asleep in her lap.A rush of love for the baby muted his anger at Mercy.“I don’t,” he said.“A lot of women get depressed after they give birth.That’s all this is.”

“Yeah, that’s what the doctor said. He gave me a bunch of pills to make me stupid, like that’s a solution.”

“You didn’t take them?”

“No. I don’t take white man’s pills so I can get up in the morning.”

Robert sat in silence, seething over the “white man” remark.

“Maybe you should go back to your own house for a few days,” she said. His own house? Robert thought.Was she being deliberately cruel, or merely thoughtless?

“Having you around all the time is not making things better right now. I need to think.”

“Think about what? Are you hoping to come up with more ideas that involve us being apart?”

She put her hand on his arm.As always, her touch calmed him.“Today’s Wednesday. Stay at your place through the weekend, come back on Monday. I’ll get out of this funk by then. Everything will turn around.”

Dallas was supposed to be the way they would turn everything around.The two of them moving away, together.“Do I have a choice in this?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said, and took her hand away.“You can choose to not give me what I’m asking for.”

When he walked into the house that night at 11 o’clock, Ruth was childishly happy to see him.“Is everything all right?” was all she asked. “Sure,” Robert said.“Why wouldn’t it be?”

They sat on the couch and watched the news together, Ruth making small talk. Robert missed Mercy, missed his son, but his pride was smarting and the two pains nearly cancelled each other out. He tried to work late Thursday.The rain still poured down, and the emptiness of the office made him blue.Twice he picked up the phone to call Mercy, only to change his mind when he pictured the cold and distant reception he was sure to receive.When he got home, Ruth was taking a pot roast out of the oven.“I wasn’t sure if you were coming or not,” she smiled.“I thought I’d go ahead, just in case.”

She was still not much of a cook, but she’d gotten a few recipes from Robert’s mother down well enough to trigger his childhood memories. Robert ate hungrily and dozed afterwards on the couch until Ruth woke him and led him half-asleep to bed.

The rain let up on Saturday, letting Robert make a dent in the yard work he’d neglected all summer. He trimmed branches, raked leaves, pulled weeds, and tried not to think about what was happening in the house on Beamon Street. Ruth brought him fresh lemonade in a pitcher and a plate of cookies. Sunday morning it was drizzling again.The house was cold, and Robert woke warm and relaxed under a pile of covers. He lay there for a long time, knowing there were thoughts waiting to crowd into his head, but able to convince himself that none were terribly serious.

He turned over and saw Ruth was looking at him.

“Good morning, sleepyhead,” she said.

She was wearing fresh perfume, Robert noticed. He was suddenly and completely awake.Very, very slowly, Ruth took an arm out from under the covers and touched his face. He could see her bare arm all the way to her shoulder and up to her neck and realized she was not wearing a nightgown. Oh God, Robert thought.

She touched his lips and then, very slowly, moved toward him. He closed his eyes, then opened them. She kissed him, softly and lingeringly, and then her tongue flicked at the corners of his mouth. Her eyes were open wide. She moved up a little in the bed and the covers fell away, revealing her breasts, full and soft and pale. Robert reached for them, unable to stop himself.

“Yes,” she whispered.“Oh, yes.”

Once he was inside her there was no going back. He tried to make it last as long as he could, basking in the warmth and softness of her flesh, feeling her hands dig into his back and pull at his hair, tasting her mouth and neck and breasts. Still he finished all too soon and shame and revulsion at what he’d done washed over him.

He tried to turn away, but Ruth clung to him.“Oh, Robert, I’ve missed you so much. So much.” She covered his neck and chest with kisses, and even in his disgust and despair his body responded to her, and he began to make love to her again.

Afterward he tried to explain.“Ruth, nothing has changed. I didn’t mean for this to happen. My—other relationship—it’s not over.” “Oh,” she said.“I thought—”

But you didn’t ask, he wanted to say. He wanted to blame her though he knew it was his own weakness that had betrayed him.“I’m going back tomorrow.” “Oh,” she said, looking as if she might cry, then slowly forcing a smile.

“Well, at least we have today. It’s something to keep me going a little while longer.”

The alarm failed to go off Monday morning. Robert had lain awake much of the night, trying to find a position where guilt would not twist his muscles into knots.When he did wake up it was to more rain and Ruth’s hand gently on his mouth, hushing him.“I turned off your alarm when I got up. I already called the office.You don’t need to go in.You’re going to stay right here and have a second honeymoon. Just like Jamaica.”

The bed and their bodies smelled of sex.The word “Jamaica,” whispered in his ear and followed by the caress of Ruth’s tongue, drove the guilt away again. What was one more day? What difference could it make now?

Robert couldn’t bring himself simply to walk out of Ruth’s house and go to Mercy’s on Monday afternoon, or Monday night, not with the stink of his shame on him.Though a part of him wondered if she would even notice, a thought that prompted another spasm of guilt.

He woke frequently through the night and finally got out of bed before six on Tuesday morning. He would go straight to Mercy’s house and tell her what had happened.There was no other way. Maybe, just maybe, it would break the maze of loneliness they’d built around each other. Those were the only thoughts he allowed himself as he drove across town. Do this thing you have to do, get it over with, see what happens next.

He hesitated on Mercy’s front porch, feeling as if he should knock. It was the longest they’d been apart since their first weekend together.

The need to talk to her, to fix things, to do whatever he had to do, was strong in him. He unlocked the door and went in.

It was funny, in a way. One drop of Negro blood, so they said, was enough to make you black.Yet he had never seen skin so white.

There was more than a single drop of blood, though.There was an entire bathtub full of blood, diluted to pink by the bathwater.

She was naked in the tub.At some point she had clearly turned onto her side to get more comfortable. It was like going to sleep, he’d heard somewhere. Her head was on her right shoulder, her eyes closed, her back turned to him where he sat on the closed lid of the toilet.

He wished she hadn’t turned her back to him.

He didn’t think it had been more than a few hours.There was no smell of decay from her skin. He’d only touched her the once, to look for a pulse, to make sure. Her body was cold, and the house was cold. He was sure the mix of blood and water in the tub was cold, though he hadn’t put his hand in it. Monday night, he imagined.The light was on in the bathroom, and the lamp next to the bed.That was where he’d looked first. He tried to remember what he’d felt like, back then.When he’d first walked in. Before he knew. Before everything changed forever.

He had her note in his hands. She’d left it next to the bed. Like calling the police, like the simple act of standing up, reading the note seemed more than he could do. It felt like giving consent. In the end he had to do it, because Malcolm was nowhere in the house, and as much as he feared the answer, still he had to have it.

In the note she blamed Robert for nothing, herself for everything. Her biggest fear was that Robert would not forgive her. She accused herself of selfishness in resenting Malcolm, said no one could hate her more than she hated herself.“Things used to be one way and they changed,” she wrote,“and I don’t know why I don’t believe they could change back but I don’t.”

Then she wrote,“I will always love you.” She signed her name and then wrote a PS, saying that Malcolm was with Mrs. Invers two houses down.

Robert read the note over and over, until there was no meaning left in the words, like chewing a bite of apple until the juice was gone and there was nothing left but dry, tasteless pulp.Then he looked at his watch. It was 7:30. He’d been sitting there for an hour. He got up and called the police. He went back and sat on the lid of the toilet again.Then he got up and called Ruth.

“She’s dead,” was all he said. He didn’t know if Ruth would recognize his voice. He didn’t think he would have.

“I’ll be right there,” she told him.

Ruth got there before the police did.The address was Hayti, after all. No one really cared if a black woman killed herself.

Ruth found him still sitting on the toilet seat. She took him by the arm and led him out to the porch. She sat him down on the steps and then perched next to him, not saying anything, even after she took the note from his hands and read it. In a minute the police arrived.

First there were two uniformed officers. One went in for a look while the other stayed to keep an eye on Robert.“She’s in the bathroom,” Robert said helpfully.

The second officer took Robert’s name and address, and by the time he had that, the first officer came out and nodded.The first officer went to the squad car and talked into his radio.The second officer asked Robert what his relationship was to the deceased.

“They were involved,” Ruth answered for him. She handed the officer the note.“They were having an affair.” She took hold of Robert’s arm again.To the rest of the world it might have looked like she was getting support from him.

“And you are?”

“I’m his wife. Ruth Cooper. Same address as Robert. He came over to break things off with her and found her like that.”

“Thank you, ma’am.The detectives will be here in a minute and they’ll get all that information from Mr. Cooper himself.”

The ambulance came next.Two white men carried a stretcher into the house and emerged a few minutes later with something on top of it, covered in sheets, darkened in places with wetness. Robert watched the stretcher roll down the sidewalk, the only sidewalk on the block, watched the men load it into the back of the ambulance, watched them exchange a few friendly words with the uniformed officers, watched the ambulance drive away.

When the detectives took him aside to question him, he found himself telling the same story Ruth had.As he stood on the porch talking to them, he saw Ruth walk down the street, go up to a house, knock on the door, and speak with a woman in the shadows of the porch.Then she went to the next house and went inside. Half an hour went by. Robert told the truth about everything except when he said that he was breaking up with Mercy. By the time he’d said it a few times, it, too, started to sound like the truth. Ruth came back. She was holding Malcolm. Malcolm was crying and Ruth was trying to calm him, but Malcolm didn’t want to be calm. He wanted to scream.

Robert excused himself and took Malcolm away from Ruth. He cradled him where Malcolm could see his face and began to talk to him, a lot of nonsense about jazz musicians and the weather. Malcolm stopped screaming to listen, cocking his head and flexing his tiny fingers.

“Is that the deceased’s child?” one of the detectives asked.They were both white.

“Our child,” Robert said.“His name is Malcolm.”

The two detectives exchanged a look. It seemed very rude to Robert, but before he could get around to telling them so, the idea had lost its urgency.

And then they were finished and they told him he could go home.They might have more questions later.There would be an autopsy and an inquest, but everything seemed straightforward. It was not yet ten in the morning. It didn’t seem like enough, somehow.

Ruth had been arguing with a man in a suit.At one point she called, “Robert, is there a phone in the house?” He nodded, and the two of them went inside together.When Ruth came out she said,“Malcolm is coming home with us.”

Robert felt a quick flicker of relief.“Okay,” he said. Malcolm himself had nodded off.

“I’ll take him,” Ruth said.“You follow me.We have things to talk about.”

Robert followed her to the house on Woodrow.They made a nest for Malcolm on the couch and then sat at the dining room table.There was a full pot of coffee already perked and Ruth brought cups.

“Now,” she said.“We’re keeping the baby, but we can’t possibly stay here.” Robert looked at her in confusion.

“We’re going to go ahead with your plan to move to Dallas.We’ll start over there. No one will know the baby isn’t mine.”

Robert stared.

“Oh, yes,” she said.“I know about your plans. I know everything. Everything. I don’t imagine there’s another woman alive who would put up with what you’ve done. But I love you. I love you so much that I’m going to take you back and start again.” She touched his cheek gently and for a second Robert thought his defenses might collapse.

“Now,” she said, and took her hand away.“Malcolm is no name for a white child. From now on his name is Michael. Michael Cooper.A plain, ordinary name for a nice, ordinary baby.”

The house sold in November, and they were able to lease it back through the end of the year. No one ever called again about Mercy’s death, and no one ever questioned Robert’s right to the child. On some level Robert knew this was the work of Ruth’s father, probably with assistance from Randy Fogg.The machinations remained invisible to him. If Ruth paid a price of her own for Robert’s damage to the Bynum family reputation, he never heard of it.

Life began to go through the motions again. Robert went to work in the morning and came home to a bland dinner and an evening of television. Ruth’s doctor gave him a prescription to help him sleep and Robert took it faithfully.

In the first days after Mercy’s death, Michael would wake up screaming in the night. It wasn’t hunger; sometimes he’d had his formula only minutes before. Nothing Ruth could do would comfort him. It took the sound of Robert’s voice, his inane one-sided conversations about baseball or highway construction, to calm the baby down. Robert would often fall asleep in midsentence and wake again with nonsense words on his lips, still talking.

The bloodcurdling interruptions went on for over a week.Then one night Ruth grabbed Robert’s arm as he was about to get up.“Let him cry,” Ruth said.“If you keep going to him, he’ll never learn to be normal.”

“I can’t listen to him cry like that.The poor little guy—”

“Yes, you can. Because if you get up I’m going to scream louder than he can.”

After five minutes Michael showed no sign of letting up. His cries went deep into Robert’s own pain and threatened to let it out.“Ruth...” he said.

“Hush,” Ruth said.“He’ll stop.”

And, eventually, he did.

By mid-December the first leg of the Durham East-West Expressway was finished.The constant delays had taken them into serious winter weather, and they’d scheduled the final pours around cold rains and hard freezes. Fences, signs, and median rails were all on order, and such landscaping as they could do had all been done.

At Mitch’s request, Robert drove him to the westernmost end, near the new NC Mutual Life tower.They stood in their overcoats in a cold wind on the Duke Street overpass, looking east as the highway rose, fell, curved, and disappeared over the horizon.The lanes shone fresh and white, the shoulders asphalt black.

“From here,” Mitch said,“you can see all the way to the future.” He pointed straight ahead.“Interstate 40.” He jerked his thumb toward his shoulder.“Highway 70. Someday Interstate 85. Full of cars, taking people to Research Triangle Park, and home to the burbs.”

He turned to Robert.“You made this.”

Robert nodded. He wondered if he should pretend to feel something. “You want to drive it?” Mitch asked.“You should have the first go.You

can take it all the way to Alston Avenue and back. Fast as you want. No traffic, no cops.”

“That’s okay,” Robert said.“Maybe another time.” It seemed that he was feeling something after all, something so large and so dark that he didn’t dare look closely.

“Man, if you don’t want it, I do,” Mitch said. Robert held out his car keys, but Mitch shook his head.“I’ll come back later. Maybe tonight.The night time is the right time.”

The wind rattled their coats and stung their eyes.

“When do you leave?” Mitch asked.

“Next week.We’ll stay at Arthur and Ann’s for Christmas, find our own place in the new year.”

Awkwardly, Mitch tried to draw him into a hug. Robert, startled, submitted with the best grace he could. He patted Mitch on the back with gloved hands.

“This isn’t how it was supposed to be,” Mitch said.

After a long second Robert stepped away, and Mitch folded his arms across his chest.“We’re young, right?” Mitch said.“Our best work is still ahead of us.”

“Sure,” Robert said. He turned his back on Hayti, on St. Joseph’s, on Pettigrew Street and Beamon Street and Lincoln Hospital and looked west, toward the unfinished cut of the freeway, toward Dallas.“Why not?”

m i c h a e l 2004

Wednesday, October 27

A

t 9 o’clock on Tuesday night, Michael’s father began to describe finding Mercy’s body.After a few minutes, Michael saw that he would not be able to take any more. He got up in mid-sentence and walked out of

the hospital and stood for a long time watching the cars roar by on Erwin Road. He imagined he was a common enough sight; one more shattered person stumbling out of that house of pain, barely knowing where he was. He located Beamon Street on the map in his car and negotiated a maze of

one-way streets to get there. He was not surprised to see everything changed, the single-family homes long since cleared for public housing. He sat in the cul-de-sac at the end of the street, thinking about his father’s weakness, Mercy’s selfishness, himself as an infant, crying in the dark.

He could not bear to think about Ruth.

The next morning he was back at the hospital, asking questions that his father answered to the best of his ability. By 11:30 they were, more or less, finished.

“It took eight or nine months,” his father said,“before I was able to feel anything at all.We had the house on Wildflower Drive then.All the boxes were unpacked, and we had new furniture that Ruth’s father paid for. I had a straight shot up Webb’s Chapel Road to work every morning.

“I don’t know if you remember Bill Morris or not. I was working at his offices there on the square in Carrolton.We were starting to fool around with some design ideas for the airport, and I was doing the road through the middle of the thing, and all the clover-leaf intersections for the terminals. “There was an A&P across the street from our office, and I would generally

get a sandwich there for lunch. One day I saw a woman ahead of me in line who looked like Mercy.

“It wasn’t like I hadn’t thought of her.There hadn’t been a day where I didn’t think of her. I had to keep the lights on in my head all the time, you know what I mean? So nothing could surprise me. But that woman came out of a dark corner.

210 “After that I had a bad couple of years. I’d be thinking about anything, about, I don’t know, going swimming in the neighborhood pool.And I would think, Mercy should be the one going swimming with me.And that would start everything again.”

He shifted uncomfortably in the bed.“When it wasn’t Mercy, it was Barrett Howard. I would see him, too, walking on the side of the road, maybe wandering around one of my building sites. It caught me out every time, every time it was bad.

“The both of them believed in voodoo, they both believed it could raise the dead.They were wrong.This is what raises the dead.” He pointed at his own temple.“This is what keeps them walking around among us.”

Michael was not yet ready to feel sorry for his father.“What about Barrett Howard?” he asked.“Who killed him?”

“You know that as well as I do. It was Randy Fogg or one of his henchmen.”

“Then why didn’t you call the police? Take him down?”

“For all I knew Randy Fogg owned the police, too. Maybe he still does. If I started making noise, I could have ended up in an underpass myself.And how could I explain being in the passenger seat of that cement mixer?”

His father began to cough. It was a terrible, violent sound, a sound of flesh tearing, a sound that a human body could not make and continue to live for long. He put a tissue to his mouth and it came away bright with blood. It took a minute or more for him to get the coughing under control. He drank a glass of water, his chest still twitching with aftershocks.

“If I could do one thing before I die,” he said,“I would like to make him pay for that. I would like to go to my grave with the belief that there was some kind of justice in this world.”

“Maybe there’s somebody who can help you do that. Did you know Donald Harriman is still here? He’s teaching at unc. I talked to him a few days ago.”

His father’s face lost what little color it had. I’m taking hours off his life with this, Michael thought.And he doesn’t have many left.

“He claimed to have heard of me because of my work,” Michael said. “He knows a lot more than that, doesn’t he? He knows all about you and Mercy.”

His father nodded.

“I think you meant for me to learn all this,” Michael said.“It really was you who put the idea into my ... into Ruth’s head to recruit me for this trip, wasn’t it? I didn’t believe her when she told me.”

Pain clearly made it hard for his father to keep talking.“If I had ... some agenda ... it was not conscious. I’m past playing games.”

“Maybe Barrett Howard was your agenda. Maybe you wanted me to get Randy Fogg for you.”

“Listen to you.You sound like some tv tough guy.‘Get’ Randy Fogg? Who are you to ‘get’ anybody?”

As long as Michael could remember, his father had used words like those to hurt him and push him away.“Just once,” Michael said, stinging,“I wish you would ask something of me.Ask me to do something for you.”

His father closed his eyes, and for a second Michael thought he was going to die then and there.“Dad?”

His father’s eyes opened, then winced shut again.“Tell your mother she can come back now. I’ve kept her out long enough.”

Michael stood up. His father would die before he would stop referring to Ruth as Michael’s mother. If there were such a thing as magic, if symbols were real, the cancer would have gone away once the festering secrets came out. Except in this world cancer trumped magic, and his father had waited too long.Thirty-five years too long.

Michael stuck his head in the lounge on the way out of the hospital. “He wants you to come back now,”

he said.

Ruth nodded glumly without meeting his eyes.

He could not yet connect this frail, somewhat pathetic figure with the woman who had stood beside his real mother’s corpse, with the seductress and schemer who had destroyed his father’s dreams. She didn’t seem like a plausible target for the rage and bitterness and sadness and loss swirling inside him. Just as well, he thought, for surely she would not be able to withstand it. He drove to unc, feeling urgency without a clear purpose.A student

waited outside Harriman’s office, and Michael smiled at her and said,“I need a second with Dr. Harriman. It’s urgent.”

“I have an appointment?” she said. She looked and dressed like an African and sounded like the San Fernando Valley.

“I understand,” Michael reassured her.

The door was slightly ajar. Five minutes later it opened to reveal a boy in flipflops, shorts, and an oversized T-shirt. Michael quickly slipped into the office and closed the door on the young woman’s exasperated sigh. “I don’t believe you’re Jennifer Brown,” Harriman said, looking over the

tops of his glasses.

“I think you’d better send Jennifer home,” Michael said.

“You’re that graphic novel artist, correct?”

“Let’s skip the games.You know exactly who I am.You know my mother, Mercy Richárd. Intimately. She initiated you into the cult of Erzulie. And I’d bet a substantial chunk of money that you’ve got that tattoo I asked you about, that Four Moments of the Sun, on your left wrist, above that high

dollar watch.”

“I see.” Harriman got up and went to the door.“Ms. Brown, I’m going to have to reschedule your appointment. I’ll see you in class tomorrow and we’ll make arrangements then.”

He closed the door and sat down again.“I’m a tenured full professor, and the University is aware that I have firsthand experience with vodou. If your intent is to blackmail me, I would advise against it.”

“What do you know about my mother’s death?”

“She had what we recognize today as postpartum depression. It’s not unusual. Unfortunately, for a working-class black mother, especially an unmarried

one, psychological counseling was simply unheard of at the time.” “So she killed herself.”

“She cut her wrists in the bathtub with a kitchen knife.”

“You were in love with her.And that’s all you can say?”

“I’ve had a long time to recuperate.Thirty-five years.”

“Do you have a picture of her?” Harriman shook his head.“Can you, can you at least tell me something about her? What was she like?”

Harriman finally softened. He thought for a few seconds and then said,“I only saw her dance once.There was a period of about six months where I was obsessed with her, in ... I guess it was the spring and summer of 1967. I would loiter near her house, watching from my car. Sometimes I followed her and your father when they went out. I don’t think they ever knew I was there. “One night they went to a dance at the Durham Armory. It was the Tommy

Dorsey band—in name only, of course. Mostly white kids fresh out of college, led by some old guy on trombone playing the Dorsey arrangements.That

night Mercy wore a short black pleated skirt that flew up every time she spun around, and a black flowered blouse with one too many buttons undone. Her skin looked pale by comparison.

“I remember watching her and your father walk over to the chairs along the wall to change their shoes.Watching her was like watching a major league hitter in the on-deck circle. She was so focused and eager and yet so calm and confident, all at the same time.

“You know what a hovercraft is? They never got the technology down to a graceful size. If they had, it would have looked like Mercy dancing. Her feet were flying while her body floated above them like it was weightless.And the joy surrounded her, like the mist around a waterfall.”

Harriman stopped, and then he said,“I hated your father for many years. First because he had Mercy and I knew I never would.Then, when she died, I blamed him for her death. How could he not have left his wife for her? How

could he have let her kill herself?”

“I’ve been asking myself those same questions.”

“He was human, is the answer.Those were different times. Divorce was not that common then, they didn’t have no-fault divorce laws in North Carolina, and indeed, Mercy’s father was not someone to take lightly.”

“No, I ... wait. Did you say Mercy’s father? I thought she didn’t know who her father was.”

“Ruth’s father. Robert’s father-in-law.Wilmer Bynum. I misspoke myself.”

Harriman looked terribly uncomfortable, more so than a simple verbal misstep could justify.

“No, I think you just slipped up.Wilmer Bynum was Mercy’s father, wasn’t he? So she and Ruth were what, half-sisters? Holy shit.”

Harriman didn’t answer.

“Tell me,” Michael said.“Tell me, for God’s sake.Was Wilmer her father?” “Yes,” Harriman said.

“And she never told my father?”

“She didn’t know it herself. Perhaps she suspected as much. Her mother refused to tell her, and I only got it out of her after Mercy’s death.” “Why did she tell you?”

“With Mercy dead, she had no reason to keep the secret any longer. She wanted to hurt your grandfather, and hurt anyone who had any part in Mercy’s death.”

Dazed, Michael realized that Wilmer Bynum was back to being his grandfather.“Is Mercy’s mother still alive?”

“No. She died in 1989.”

“So my father still doesn’t know that Mercy was Bynum’s daughter.” “I don’t see how he could. Ironic, though, isn’t it?”

“I’m not exactly in the mood for irony.This is not academic to me.” “I apologize.”

He seemed sincere.“What other secrets are you keeping? Do you know

who killed Barrett Howard?”

“Know? I don’t know for a certainty. Randy Fogg is certainly the obvious suspect.”

“Was he—is he—head of the nrc?”

“Today the grand dragon is a man named Herbert Strong. He lives in the mountains near Asheville and is tied in with the militias out there.As for the sixties, I don’t know.We assumed it was Fogg. It was much more of a secret society then.”

“We?”

“The group that Barrett started.”

“Do you have a name?”

“It’s past tense. Everything fell apart after Barrett disappeared.” “Did you have a name, then?”

“No.To be able to put a name to something gives you power over it, places limits on it.We believed we would be stronger without it.”

“Can I see the tattoo?”

Harriman hesitated, then slowly removed the cufflink from his shirt and folded the cuff over twice.

His skin was lighter than Barrett Howard’s, and he had the advantage of not having been dead for 35 years. Other than being more clearly visible, the tattoo was identical to Howard’s.

“What was he planning?” Michael asked.

“Nothing less than the Revolution.With a capital ‘R.’That, we did have a name for.”

“You had guns in the old Biltmore Hotel?”

He seemed surprised at the extent of Michael’s knowledge. He nodded and said,“M16s with grenade launchers. Browning Automatic Rifles.We had dynamite. Handguns, shotguns, .22 target rifles.”

“How many of you were there?”

“Close to two hundred.”

“Doesn’t seem like enough to start a Revolution.”

“Two hundred angry black men with guns? It surely would have started something. ” Michael had not seen this fire before.As quickly as it flared, it cooled again.“No. Evidently it was not enough.”

“What happened to the weapons?”

“I don’t know. I suspect they were sold off for drugs.That’s pretty much what happened to all the revolutionary movements of the sixties. Everyone was jailed, killed, run out of the country, or ground down and disillusioned to the point of giving up.As a generation, we beat our swords into hypodermic needles.”

“Do you know where any of the others are?”

“A few. One of them is a salesman for a Toyota dealership in Durham. Another works at the Herald-Sun. Another is a master sergeant at Fort Bragg. A good number of them have been killed or incarcerated, which is what this country does to black men whenever possible.”

“Do you know where my mother is?”

“I don’t understand.Your mother is dead.”

“Is she buried? Does she have a grave?”

“The grave is in Beechwood Cemetery.There’s an office there.They can show you how to find it.” He shifted forward, clearly ready to stand and usher

Michael out.

“Are you trying to get rid of me?” Michael asked.

“Yes. In all honesty.This has not been a pleasant conversation for me, as you might imagine.And you are disrupting my office hours.”

Michael held back a sarcastic reply.“Do you have a cell phone?” “Yes.”

“Give me the number, and I’ll leave you alone. For now.”

Harriman wrote the number on a sticky pad and handed Michael the top sheet.“Can I trust you?” Michael asked.

Harriman took a cell phone out of his pocket and pointed to the land line on his desk.“Call it,” he said.

“No,” Michael said.“That’s good enough.” He was suddenly ready to be somewhere else.“I’m sorry to have put you through this.”

Harriman offered his hand.“I’m sorry too. More than you will ever know.”

Michael called Denise as soon as he hit the street.

He’d talked to her every night after the conversations with his father, and she’d done her best to help him keep perspective.“So if your mama was black, that makes you black, right?” she’d said.“That is going to be a relief to my own mother, who’s been ragging me about dating a cracker.”

She listened to the latest revelations and said,“I know the supervisor over at Beechwood from my research. Let me call him up now, because he’s about to go home for the day. I’ll find out where your mom is, and we can go over there together.”

It was strange to feel all the urgency of a new relationship and yet have it be so overshadowed by the rest of his life. She was on his mind constantly, an anxious question that he couldn’t answer.What was she feeling? Did he know what he was feeling himself? Even the powerful memory of their first kiss was subject to interruption by an image from his father’s narrative.

She was waiting for him on the steps of the Heritage Center. It was all he could do not to grab her as she slid in next to him.“I missed you,” he said.The three days had crawled by like weeks.

“Me too,” she said. She stared at him intently.

“Do you see him?” he asked.

“Who?”

“That black man lurking inside me.”

“I’m sorry.You’d think I’d know better.”

“It’s okay,” Michael said.“I’ve been doing the same thing.”

He’d stared in the mirror until his vision blurred.The conundrums of race were no longer academic.Why did a single drop of African blood make you black, but a single drop of European blood not make you white? Did that heritage make him different than he would have been if Ruth had been his mother? Was his penis bigger, were his hands better able to catch a football, did he have more natural rhythm? If that was the fantasy, the reality included the possibility of sickle-cell disease and increased risk of prostate cancer and diabetes.

In high school, most of his generation’s role models were black, from Michael Jordan to Michael Jackson, from Prince to Eddie Murphy to Mr.T. White boys in North Dallas had aped black slang and gestures, copied black fashion, listened to black music, maybe had a black friend. Now he’d been granted the implied wish, with no magical bonus of cool or toughness or style. And what of his own children, if he ever had any? How would he feel if he

fathered a black child with a white woman? What would the neighbors say? “How are you holding up?”

Denise asked.

“Not sleeping as much as I’d like to. I have all this frantic energy, and I don’t know what to do with it. I feel like climbing a ladder and shouting at people on the street, only I don’t know what I’d say.‘Hey, look at me, I’m black and my mother’s dead’?”

He turned left on Fayetteville Street and they drove past the remains of the Victorian houses where John Merrick and Aaron Moore and C.C. Spaulding and the rest of the elite of Hayti had lived, now broken up into apartments or knocked down altogether; past the Lincoln Community Health Center, a squat, utilitarian clinic in front of a parking lot where Lincoln Hospital once stood, the hospital where Michael had been born; past the sleekly modern nccu campus; past a block of beautiful turn-of-the20th-century red brick bungalows; past Fayetteville Street Elementary to Beechwood Cemetery, where

Merrick and Spaulding and Shepard and so many of the others had ended up. Denise directed him to a narrow driveway leading through the high

chain link fence and then west for a few hundred yards, to the far end of the cemetery.

Section D, like most of the other sections, was stark, flat, and treeless.The headstones, most the size of the Durham phone book, lay flat on the grass, many with attached vases and fresh flowers. Mercy’s grave was in a thickly populated patch, the graves laid end to end and side by side with barely room to walk between them.A handful of other people wandered around nearby, most of them old, all of them black.

A polished granite marker listed her name as mercedes richards with the dates 1941–1969. Michael knelt in the still-green grass and put both hands on the stone. Denise stood beside him, her fingers lightly touching his neck. So this is it, he thought.The end of the search.Apparently he was not going

to cry, nor was he going to find closure.What he did feel was a painful finality to the name carved in rock, and more powerfully, a kind of comfort. “I know I’ve probably talked myself into this,” he said,“but something about

this seems right. In exactly the way that everything about Ruth always seemed wrong.”

Denise nodded encouragement.

Until that moment he had never understood why people would want to

put their bodies in a box in the ground to rot. Now he saw the value of having some part of them still there, essence seeping into earth that he could

touch with his hands.

He felt no urgency to leave. Instead he let his thoughts drift, thinking of the way Harriman had described Mercy dancing, the way his father had felt so calm around her.These secondhand memories, already worn smooth by others, were all he had of her.

When he finally stood up, Denise hugged him loosely and said,“Better?” “I don’t know. Maybe. Do you have to go back to work?”

“Not really.”

“Can we get something to eat? I’m starving.”

She directed him to Fortune Garden, a Thai restaurant near his hotel.The name seemed lucky, and in fact they arrived just as it was reopening for dinner. The inside was red vinyl booths and wood paneling, the food cheap and plentiful and good.When it was gone, Denise said,“So first Ruth was your mother,

then she was no relation at all, and now she’s your aunt?”

“Yeah. I think my emotions are on strike.‘Give us a call when you can get your story straight.’ ”

“Are you going to tell your father?”

“I don’t know yet. I think I’d better sleep on it.”

Denise looked down at her plate.“Speaking of which...” She seemed nervous.“Where were you planning to sleep?”

“Are you making an offer?” Now he was nervous too.

“It doesn’t have to be, you know ... sex.You can just stay the night. Rachid is at a friend’s house, and...” She looked up at him.“I was just thinking...” Michael took her hand.“Yes. I’d like that a lot.”

“I thought you might want to maybe stop by your room and get a change of clothes and a toothbrush.And condoms. If you happen to have any. Just in case.”

They started on the couch, talking.They were both so nervous and distracted that Denise finally said,“This is ridiculous. Come on.” She led him to the bedroom door and said,“Take it slow, okay?

Really slow.”

It had been a long time for her, long enough to be painful for her when he first tried to enter.That in turn made Michael self-conscious and afraid of hurting her again. She let him know there was no hurry. Michael loved touching the clean, compact lines of her body, feeling the sweet silk of her skin against his lips. Eventually, with her hand on top of his, she helped him bring her to a climax, and after that he fit inside her perfectly and she took him to his.

“Now you’ll sleep,” she said, and he did, so heavily that it seemed only minutes later when he woke up to sunshine pushing hard at the blinds.

“Is that your phone?” Denise said.A buzzing noise came from the pile of clothes on the chair in the corner.

“Mmmmmm. It’ll stop.”

“It could be your father.”

Michael got heavily to his feet, put his glasses on, and fished up the phone. He was too late; the voice mail system had picked up. He looked back at Denise and saw her grinning at him. She was wearing a thin white T-shirt and white cotton underpants, the basic talking points of her anatomy barely disguised.

“You’re beautiful,” he said. More than anything he feared her regret. He didn’t see any in her eyes.

“Don’t you even think about kissing me until I’ve brushed my teeth,” she said, getting up.

“I’m thinking about a lot more than that.”

“I can see that. If I’m late to work, people will talk...”

“That doesn’t sound like ‘no.’ ” He followed her toward the bathroom. The phone rang in his hand. Once he saw that the call came from the hospital, he’d missed his chance to ignore it. He switched it on, said “Hello,” and heard only silence.“Ruth?” he said.“Ruth, is that you?”

Finally she said,“He’s gone.”

Michael sat on the edge of the bed.“When?”

She didn’t seem to have heard him.“Where were you? Why didn’t you answer your phone?”

He tried again.“When did it happen?”

“I don’t know. Some time in the night. I was sleeping in the chair next to him, and I got up in the night and when I checked on him, his skin was cold ... oh my God!” She began to cry.

“He died in the middle of the night?”

“I’ve been up since 4 am taking care of this.”

“And you waited till now to call me?” Denise’s clock read 8:17.

“There’s been too much to do. I didn’t have time to stop and call you.” Michael let it go.“Where is he now?”

“Still in the room, waiting for the funeral home to pick him up.”

He saw Denise in the doorway, toothbrush in mouth, register his expression. She ducked out again and he heard her rinsing her mouth.

“I’ll meet you there,” he said, and switched off the phone.

Denise came and sat beside him.“Bad?” she said.

Michael nodded.“He died in the night.”

She put an arm awkwardly around his shoulder.“I’m so sorry, Michael.”

“It’s not like it’s a surprise or anything. Except that it is. It’s a total shock.”

“You were just starting to get to know him.”

“Yeah,” he said.“I have to go. Can I ... I mean, are we...?”

“Yes,” she said.“Yes, we are, and you can.You’d better, in fact, whatever it is. Now put your clothes on and get out of here.”

They had drawn the curtains around his father’s bed. His primary care physician, Dr. Zeigler, had come off rounds to look at him herself.

“You folks can request an autopsy if you like,” she said.“I doubt we’d learn anything. In terms of cause of death, there’s no question about that.” She was in her forties, trim, businesslike, yet gentle.

“No,” Ruth said.The accusation Michael imagined he heard was probably his own guilty conscience.

“Can I see him?” Michael asked.

“Well, yes,” Zeigler said.“In my opinion, you might be better off remembering him the way he was.”

“No, I want to see,” Michael said.

“I can’t bear this,” Ruth said.“I’ll be outside.”

Zeigler drew the curtain. Michael saw what she meant; his father looked like a bad wax dummy of himself. His eyelashes looked like crude stitches across his eyes, and the skin around his mouth had puckered like rotten fruit. It was not credible that this side of meat had ever walked around under its own power, that intelligence had lit its eyes.

“Do you know what plans he’d made for his ... disposition?” the doctor asked. Michael looked at her blankly, and she tried again.“Was there a funeral home?”

“Oh,” Michael said.“Ruth will know all that.Whatever she wants to do is fine.”

“He was an interesting man,” Zeigler said.“I never heard anyone speak so passionately about concrete.”

Michael spent the day with Ruth, wading through paperwork: death certificates, insurance, the funeral home, one obituary for the Dallas Morning News, another for the Durham Herald-Sun. She spoke in a monotone, ignored any food or drink he put in front of her, and lost all animation in her face when he wasn’t asking her questions. She’d never been physically affectionate, and she rebuffed his attempts to get her to talk about what she felt. She too, he realized, must have believed in magic, believed this day could be held back indefinitely if she only loved enough.

He saw her through dinner and took her back to her hotel room, where she suddenly became a ball of nerves.“I can’t possibly sleep here alone,” she said. “You can stay the night, can’t you?”

Michael hesitated, torn between guilt and self-preservation.“No,” he said at last.“I’m sorry.”

If she’d softened, pleaded with him, he would not have been able to refuse a second time. Instead she said,“I’m still your mother, you know.”

He stared at her. I’m going to wake up in the middle of the night, he thought, with the exact words on my lips that I should be saying now.“I’ll see you tomorrow morning,” he said. He hugged her, and she accepted it stiffly, arms at her sides.“Try and get some sleep.”

He sat in the parking garage with his car windows down, letting the cool night air roll over him. Beyond his numbness and exhaustion he felt only the residue of the day’s work, the nagging of unfinished business.There would be no mourning yet.

He called Denise.

“How are you holding up?” she asked.

“Hanging in there. Can I see you?”

“Rachid’s home.”

“I don’t care, I want to meet him.” He could hear her mulling it over.“It’s got to happen sooner or later,”

he said.

“I’ll ask him.” She muffled the ensuing exchange with her hand, then said, “Okay, come on. Have you eaten?”

“For some definition of the word. I had to take her to Applebee’s.”

“I’m sure there’s something here you can eat.You understand you have to behave, right?”

“I’ll do my best.”

Rachid turned out to be as tall as Michael, and thin in the way of hyperactive teenagers. Denise kept her distance as she introduced them. Rachid shook hands quickly, then his arms dropped to his sides like dead weight. “Hey,” he said nervously.

Comic conventions were ideal training for dealing with the terminally uncomfortable.“Hey,” Michael said.“You doing all right?”

“Yeah, yeah, good,” he mumbled. Despite bad skin and posture, he was quite handsome and clearly had his own sense of retro style, wearing his hair in a scraggly natural cut that stood out an inch from his head.

“So what comics do you read?”

“Batman,” he said.“X-Men.” It was comfortable ground, and he showed the first signs of relaxation.“You know the Black Panther?”

“Yeah, the Black Panther’s cool. Marvel’s got a Black Panther movie in development, did you know that?”

“No shit?” He glanced quickly at Denise.“I mean, no kidding?”

“I heard it was Wesley Snipes’ company. Nobody’s saying if Snipes is going to play T’Challa, but he probably will, since the Blade movies did well.”

“Blade was awesome.”

“Why don’t you guys sit down?” Denise said.“I’ll see if there’s anything to drink around here.”

Michael managed to keep Rachid talking for half an hour. He worked hard at it. Rachid was a likable kid, a little too smart for his own good, a little alienated, a little lost in his inner universe, the way Michael had been at his age.

Finally Denise sent him off to do his homework.“And you,” she said to Michael,“go this way.”

“You’re sending me home?”

“No,” she said. She pushed him onto her front balcony, where she kissed him fiercely.“Okay, Mr. Smartass, you impressed me.”

“He’s a good kid.”

“You don’t have to tell me that. Just be very, very careful. I don’t want him to get too attached until we know where this is going.”

“What about you? Can I let you get attached?”

“That’s the battle I’m fighting right now.”

“Throw in the towel,” he said, and kissed her again.“Let me stay the night.”

“No,” she said, and he saw how she could control a boy twice her size.The limits were clear and strictly enforced.“Sorry. I warned you it would be complicated.”

“It’s okay,” he said.“I understand.”

She reached up and combed through his hair.“I could probably get away for a while tomorrow afternoon. I’ll call you, and we can meet at your hotel room for sex. It’ll be cheap and tacky and thrilling.”

“It’s a deal,” he said.

Back inside, they sat on opposite ends of the couch.They had entire lifetimes to catch up on. Michael talked about his father, how at times Michael’s very presence had seemed to make him angry or depressed, for reasons that were now obvious. Michael had tried to win his approval at sports, where he was a dismal failure, and schoolwork, where he was only marginally better. In the last three days he’d found himself rereading his childhood, now that he had the key, and all kinds of things were starting to make sense.Too late, of course, to undo the damage.

It was harder for Denise to open up. Michael gently pried loose a few facts. She’d been a good student, bright and eager to please. She’d never liked sports. She’d dreamed of being a dancer, but there was no money for classes. By high school she was barely five feet tall and filled out to the point that everyone told her to forget it.

“Ballet, modern, what?” Michael asked her.

“Anything,” she said.“I would see Broadway dance numbers on Ed Sullivan when I was little and try to memorize everything they were doing.”

“It’s not too late,” Michael said.“We could take some swing classes or something.”

“Swing dancing? Where did you get that idea? Is it because of your father?”

“Possibly. He made it sound like such a blast.”

“Michael, you’re not trying to relive your father’s life through me or anything weird like that, are you?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean...” She let out a sigh.“I mean, you come to Durham, you start poking around in your father’s past, and you get involved with the first black woman you meet.”

“I’ve been in Durham, which is full of black women, for a month, and you’re the first person I’ve asked out.And I didn’t know about Mercy when I met you.Are you saying you don’t know why I would be attracted to you?” He lowered his voice.“After last night you can still ask that?”

“I don’t know. I’m confused. It’s all happening so fast.”

“Those are the words women say before they say things like,‘We should back off a little.’Are you running away from me?”

“It doesn’t help for you to lump me with the entire female species.”

“No,” he said.“You’re right. I’m sorry.You’re scaring me, is all.”

“I’m scared too. Obviously.” She stretched out her hand and Michael, after a second, took it.“Maybe this wasn’t a good idea,” she said.“It’s hard to be natural with Rachid only a few feet away.” She rubbed her thumb along his palm. “I want to touch you, too.”

It was not the time, Michael saw, to push.“It’s late,” he said.“Maybe I should go.”

When she nodded, he realized how much he’d hoped she would argue with him. She let go of his hand and stood up. Michael walked to the door, and she stepped outside with him. He put his arms around her, and she rested her cheek against his chest.“I’m sorry,” she said.“It’s been such a long time for me. I’m not used to all this.”

“Are we still on for tomorrow?”

“I’ll call you,” she said. It wasn’t a yes or a no. She kissed him softly, lingeringly. It could have been a promise or a farewell.

He walked down the steps, forcing himself not to look back.When he’d started the car and come to a stop at Campus Walk, he yelled,“Goddamn it!” and shook the steering wheel with both hands.“You think I’m used to this? How could anybody be used to this?”

Friday, October 29

Ruth called at 7:30. He’d been up late, first calling Roger to tell him the news, then working on Luna until after two, nodding off with the blue pencil slipping from his fingers, descriptions from the script morphing imperceptibly into dream.

She’d had a terrible night, she said. She didn’t trust herself to drive. She needed to see to the cremation, to go by the funeral home, buy a dress, and then she would need his help making phone calls in the afternoon. Had he checked the paper for the obituary?

“I just woke up,” he said.

“Oh,” she said, and went back to her list of tasks.

“Give me a few minutes, all right? I’ll call you back.”

Finding his way back to sleep already seemed an impossibility. He washed his face, pulling at the skin to erase the lines that made him look like his father. Then he poured a glass of orange juice and had time for one swallow before Ruth called again. Ruth had planned the memorial for that Sunday, two days away. Halloween.The funeral home, Hall-Wynne of Durham, had found them a 9 am time slot. Michael had failed to convince her to delay it for a few more days. Ruth wanted to return to Texas as soon as possible, a reasonable enough desire in the circumstances.

Michael had not yet told her he was not going with her.

By three o’clock he had checked his watch so many times that Ruth asked,

“Do you have somewhere you have to be, dear?”

“Maybe,” he said, hope fighting it out with fear.They were in Ruth’s room at the Brookwood, and Michael was making the calls to Robert’s friends and family that Ruth said she was unable to put herself through. Robert’s friend Arthur, with whom he’d been in business for years, broke down and it was all Michael could do to hang on to his own composure.Arthur’s grief seemed so much more real than his own.

On the other end of the scale, Ruth’s one surviving sister, Esther, took the news with little comment. Michael had only spoken with her a few times in his life, in keeping with his father’s policy of ignoring Ruth’s family. He sensed she was disappointed—though not surprised—that Ruth herself hadn’t called. It was nearly 4 when his own phone finally rang. Michael took it out on the

room’s tiny balcony.“Hello?” he said.

“Whatcha wearing?” It was Denise.

“Oh, the usual. Leather thong, some handcuffs.”

“How far are you from your hotel room?”

“I can be there in fifteen minutes.”

“If you get there before I do, go ahead and take your clothes off.You won’t be needing them.”

For all her big talk, she was shy at first, once they were alone in the room, the door locked, the curtains drawn. Michael didn’t ask her how much time she had. Enough, apparently, to make love a second time as the sun was going down. Michael was hovering on the edges of sleep when she finally extricated herself.“What time is it?” he mumbled.

“Eight-thirty. I have to go. Can I put the light on?”

“Sure.”

She gathered up the bits and pieces of her clothes, which lay on a path from the door to the bed.“I want you to spend the night tomorrow. Okay?” “Yes.What about Rachid?”

“He’ll be there.We talked. He’s pretty grown up.And of course you

charmed him.”

“That was the idea.”

“He wants to know what I’m going to tell his father. I said it was none of his father’s business. I know it won’t be as simple as that.”

“He’ll be jealous? Rachid’s father?”

“He won’t admit it.There will be remarks. Nothing I can’t handle, and it’s time I started acting like a normal adult with a life of my own. I may not be as uninhibited as I was this afternoon.You’ll be patient with me, right?” “Yes.Will you come to the funeral with me Sunday?”

She hesitated.“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure.Why wouldn’t I want you there?”

“Am I going to be the only black person there?”

“Other than me, you mean?”

“Other than you.”

“Tommy Coleman will be there for sure.There may be others. Harriman, maybe. Does it matter?”

“It shouldn’t matter. But you’ve only been black a few days.There’s a lot you don’t know yet.”

“That sounds like the punchline to a bad joke.”

“I’m serious, Michael. I don’t want to minimize the shock of what you’re going through, but you’re not black the way I am, and you never will be.You look white, you were raised white, you have that sense of privilege totally ingrained in your personality.You don’t know what it’s like to walk into a big room full of white people and wonder if you’re going to make it out without something happening. A look, a word, a man brushing his arm against your chest.” She pulled on her red silk Tshirt as punctuation.

“Yeah, okay,” Michael said.“I guess I had that coming. I still want you there.”

“Then I’ll be there. I’ll get to meet your ... Ruth.” She hesitated again.“You don’t want me there just to shock her, do you?”

“Are you still going to be questioning my motives ten years from now?”

“Ten years should be close to enough. She is going to flip out though, isn’t she?”

“Yeah,” Michael said.“And maybe I do want that.What if you’re right? What if I’m just using you somehow? I would hate that. How can I be sure my motives are clean? Can I even trust my own feelings?”

She sat on the edge of the bed and picked up his hand. She was fully dressed except for her shoes, fully separate from him.“It felt pretty real this afternoon. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t trust you. Still, it probably wouldn’t hurt for both of us to keep asking questions.”

She pulled her shoes on, stood up, and kissed him.“Call me tomorrow afternoon.”

“I’ll miss you,” Michael said.

“You, too.” She blew another kiss from the doorway and was gone.

Saturday, October 30

Late Saturday morning, Ruth called and begged him to come take his father’s clothes away.They still smelled of him, she said, and it made her think he would be standing there every time she turned around. It took him two trips to carry the clothes down to his car. He was painfully aware of his father’s ashes, sitting on Ruth’s bedside table in a brown plastic container the size of a hardcover book. He felt his father’s presence in them. Though he knew it was a projection of his own feelings, he couldn’t shake the idea that his father had after all wanted something from him, something he had never been able to ask. He drove the clothes to Thrift World, a cavernous space in a run-down strip center a few miles from the hospital. His cell phone buzzed as he was carrying the last of the clothes through the back door. It was Roger.“I don’t mean to be in the way or anything,” he said.“I’m at the Sheraton out by the airport if you’ve nothing on at the moment.”

“You’re here? In North Carolina?”

“Thought you might need a bit of moral support at the funeral.”

“Wow.” Michael was deeply touched.“That’s really ... I’m glad you’re here. Is it just you?”

“You mean, did I bring the trouble and strife? Not likely, mate. So do you know your way out here?”As usual, Roger was not to be diverted. Michael got directions and promised to be there within the hour. He finished up at the thrift store and decided he didn’t need to go back to the Brookwood, where Ruth would only find more busywork for him. He wound his way to the Durham Freeway and fought heavy traffic to the Page Road exit from I40.

“Sit anywhere,” Roger said as he let Michael in.As always, he wore black jeans, black sneakers, and a black T-shirt. If he got cold he would add a black leather jacket. His thick black beard was always a shock, at odds with his young, pale blue eyes.“Be with you in a tick, trying to lay hands on some notes I had a minute ago...” He began to circle the room, rifling his possessions. The room had high ceilings, muted gray-on-white wallpaper, thick carpet, solid hardwood furniture. It made Michael’s suite look like a doghouse. Or it would have, had Roger not already cluttered every available surface with fallout from the chaos that constantly swirled around him—books, magazines, cameras, cell phone, clothes, used towels, unfinished food and drink, piles of photocopies, notebooks, scraps of paper with images, dialog, addresses and phone numbers, in one case just a single word,“arachnotype,” scrawled on a bar napkin with a fine-point black Sharpie, the only pen Roger ever carried. All of it smelled faintly of cigarette smoke.

Michael moved a Discman and a stack of cds out of an armchair and sat down.The cds were all field recordings of vodou ceremonies from Haiti. Michael picked one up and turned it over.

“I brought those for you, actually,” Roger said.“Thought you might want to hear what that sort of racket sounded like. Here.” He took the case from Michael’s hands and put the disc in the player, fussing with a pair of batteryoperated speakers until he got a loping, chaotic mix of drums and chanting voices to emerge.

“Do you have all this in your house?” Michael asked.“Filed away somewhere, on the off chance that you might need it some day?”

“Yes, why?”

“How do you keep track of it all?”

“I’m very well organized.” Roger seemed unaware of any irony in the statement.“Sod it, let’s talk.” He perched on the edge of the king-size bed, facing Michael.“Tell me some more of what your father said.”

Despite the distraction of the music, which made his stomach flutter, Michael summarized the high points. It took fifteen minutes.Toward the end he found himself drawing the story out, enjoying the novelty of having Roger listen to him for a change.

When he was done, Roger said,“I can’t imagine pulling all of that out of him and then having him die. It’s like the old myth of the killing joke, only not funny, and turned in on itself.”

“Ruth blames me for him dying.”

“Yeah, she would do, wouldn’t she? He was all she had.”

“I don’t know how to respond to her.We’ve never been physically comfortable around each other, you know? Even when I was a kid.That’s not a good basis for a mother-son relationship, and it doesn’t give us a lot to go on now.”

Michael paused and then said,“There is one more wrinkle. It turns out she is related to me after all.” He told Roger about Harriman’s revelation.

“Christ, this is amazing, isn’t it? Hang on, let me get some of this down.”

“Get it down?”

“Just a few notes.”

“I thought you were here to give me moral support.”

“I am.Without question.You have to admit, though, this is bloody great material.”

“It’s not material, Roger. Look, I don’t think I want you using this.”

“All right, no problem then, not if you don’t want me to.”

“Okay, good.”

“All I’m saying is, you ought to think about it.”

“Roger—”

“This is primal stuff, and the next bloke that comes along with a dead father—and that’s all of us, sooner or later—could learn a lot from this.”

“Learn what, exactly? That it sucks to find out your mother is your aunt, your real mother’s dead, you’re black, and now your father’s dead, too? How big is the demographic for that, Roger? How many millions of lives is this going to save?”

“Look, you’re upset, obviously.This is not a good time—”

The voices on the cd player were screaming, tearing at Michael’s nerves. He jabbed the stop button and said,“I’m upset? I’m upset? Like I’m the problem here?”

“This is not like you, Michael.”

“Not like me to stand up for myself? Not like me to object to being the doormat?”

“Now you’re starting to hurt my feelings. I can’t believe you would want to do that, when I’ve come all this way.”

Everything Roger said, with his calm tones and injured innocence, made Michael crazier.Worst of all was feeling like he was only seeing what had been in front of him, unacknowledged, all this time. Michael stood up.“I have to go.”

“I’ll call you later,” Roger said, as Michael crossed the vast room toward the door.“To make sure you’re okay.”

Traffic was unreasonably heavy on the short stretch of I40 between the Sheraton and Michael’s hotel.The reason proved to be a wreck at the Durham Freeway split, where somebody in an suv had tried to change his mind at the last minute in front of an 18-wheeler.The legacy of the Interstate Highway System, Michael thought. Urban sprawl, pollution, crowding, hurry, frustration, mutilation, death.This is what my father’s dream has become.

A shower and clean clothes failed to dispel his mood. It still clung to him as he rang Denise’s doorbell for dinner, carrying his shaving kit and his suit for the funeral.

Dinner itself was pleasant enough. Rachid held forth through most of it about school, friends, the basketball team, television, and anything else that flitted through his hyperactive mind.Afterwards, Michael and Denise sat on the couch as Rachid, to Michael’s amazement, did the dishes with only minor prompting.

“Am I naïve?” Michael asked her.

“Yes,” she said, without hesitation.“Is that what’s been eating at you tonight?”

“Was it that obvious?”

“Yes. So why are you asking?”

He told her about Roger, and then said,“Listen to me. It sounds like I’ve been nursing a grudge for years.”

“Sounds like he’s been taking advantage of you for years.”

“It feels weird, like waking up one morning and realizing you’re married to somebody who never loved you.”

“I happen to know exactly what that’s like, if you ever need a point-forpoint comparison.”

“The thought of not working for him anymore is ... it’s too strange. I can’t wrap my brain around it.”

“Don’t think about it, then. Not now.You’ve got your father’s funeral tomorrow, you’ve got all this other chaos in your life, you can leave this part of it alone for tonight.”

Michael closed his eyes, nodded, and let himself slump on the couch.

“Whatever happens,” Denise said,“you’re going to be okay.Whether you keep working for Roger or not.” She raked her fingernails through his hair, which calmed him as if he were a nervous cat.“You’ve got your skills, you’ve got the person you are inside.The chaos will pass. It always does.”

“My God, that feels good.”

“Let’s go say goodnight to Rachid and I’ll show you something that really feels good.”

“Don’t we need to make a show of staying up with him for a while?”

“The weekends are the only time I let him play video games. He couldn’t care less about us.”

Sunday, October 31

Denise’s alarm buzzed at 7. She shut it off, rolled over, and put her face on Michael’s chest.“How long have you been awake?” Her voice was still slurred with sleep.

“An hour and a half,” he said. He’d woken up hard, heart racing, thoughts jostling and bumping against each other in his head. Roger, Ruth, his father, Mercy. Memories of himself as a child, pointing a cap gun at Ruth and firing six shots, and Ruth bursting into tears.The panels he’d already drawn and lettered in the current Luna that exploited his relationship with his father.The image of Mercy floating, cartoonlike, above a blur of whirling feet.There was no chance of falling asleep again, so he’d propped himself up and watched sunlight slowly leak into the room.

“Are you okay?” Denise asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t think I want to do this.”

She pushed herself up on one arm.“Michael, you have to go to your father’s funeral. Now get up and get going.”

Her will power got him up and dressed and out the door with coffee and a piece of toast in his stomach. Denise drove.

“How should I introduce you?” Michael said.“As my girlfriend, or what?”

“Why don’t you just tell them my name and let them figure out the rest for themselves?”

The funeral home was on Main Street, a few blocks west of downtown, in a 1920s-era brick building with a vast parking lot and its own freestanding chapel. Ushers led them to a long parlor in the main building with a sofa, stuffed chairs, and a tasteful floral pattern on the far wall. Ruth sat on the sofa with Roger next to her. He held her hand in an odd, Victorian way, as if it were a cup and saucer.With a jolt, Michael realized that the willowy blonde standing next to the two of them was Helen Silberman, their Vertigo editor. He’d only seen her twice before, at comics conventions. On a chair by herself some distance away was Mitch Antree’s widow, Frances Stanley.Tommy Coleman stood uncomfortably in the middle of the room with another late-middle-aged black man. The other eight people in the room Michael guessed to be members of Ruth’s extended family. Greg Vaughan, the dog lover, was in the middle of them, and their brown suits, wide ties, and 1970s haircuts all cried out Johnston County.

Tommy Coleman was relieved to see Michael. He took Michael’s hand, then pulled him into an awkward hug.“I’m real sorry,” he said.“I never should have started all this. Look what it’s come to.”

“This wasn’t your doing,” Michael said.“We talked a lot there toward the end, and I could tell he was relieved to finally get all that business out in the open. I think it helped him go easier.”

The man with Tommy was short, very heavy, and wore a large hearing aid attached to the earpiece of his thick glasses.“This here is Booker,”Tommy said. “Booker knew your daddy.Ain’t that right, Booker?”

“What’s that?” Booker said. He was squinting at Michael through the glasses. Michael introduced Denise, and then Booker shook Michael’s hand. “Thought you was the Cap’n,”

Booker said.“Give me a turn.”

Out of nowhere, Michael suddenly thought he might cry. He made excuses to Tommy and Booker and led Denise over to Frances Stanley. After the introductions she said,“I told myself I wouldn’t go to any more funerals. Yet here I am.”

“Thank you for coming,” Michael said.“It means a lot to me.”

A voice behind him said,“Michael?”

He turned and saw Helen Silberman.“I’m so sorry for your loss,” she said.

“Thanks. I had no idea you might be here.This is really ... when did you get in?”

“Last night,” she said, and something in the sound of her voice gave her away. She’d flown down to be with Roger, Michael saw, leaving her husband and child in New York and Roger’s wife in California. How very convenient this all must be, he thought.

Before Michael found anything to say, Roger stepped in next to Helen and slipped one arm around her waist.“How’re you holding up, then?” he asked, as if the day before had never happened.

“I’m fine,” Michael said.“Roger, Helen, this is Denise.”

Denise shook Roger’s hand and said,“I’ve heard a lot about you.”

Roger mimed surprise.“I wish I could say the same.”

Denise gave Michael a smile that warmed him from the center out.

“Listen,” Roger said,“are you going to talk to your mother or not?”

It was Roger more than Ruth that made him say,“My mother’s dead.”

“Oh, don’t let’s quibble.You ought to say something to her.”

He’d been headed that way, but Roger’s commandeering the situation stoked his resentment.As the inappropriate replies lined up in his mind, nothing emerged from his open mouth.

“I think Michael needs to take care of himself today,” Denise said.“If he feels like talking to her, fine, if not, then he won’t.”

Michael reached for her hand and squeezed.

“Bravo,” Roger said, looking her over in an exaggerated and, Michael thought, condescending way. A commotion at the front door broke the tension.Two white men in dark suits and sunglasses stalked into the room like a parody of Secret Service agents, scanning the thin crowd. One nodded to the other, who went back outside.A minute or so later, having successfully drawn the attention of everyone in the room, he returned with US Representative Randy Fogg.

Fogg was in his seventies now, with thinning white hair, pink skin like an albino’s, and jowls that sagged to his chest. He carried a huge belly in front of him like a load of firewood, weighing down his every step. He came into the center of the room, looked around, and nodded his approval. As soon as he’d finished his entrance, the funeral director appeared, as if on cue.“The chapel is open now,” she said.“If you’ll all come this way.”

Fogg made his way to Ruth and offered his arm, though he seemed barely able to support himself. Ruth blushed, got nervously to her feet, and walked with him toward the side exit.

“Is that who I think it is?” Denise said.

“Yes.”

“Did you tell me he was a friend of the family?”

“He was a friend of Ruth’s father. My father couldn’t abide him.”

“This feels pretty weird, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

They filed into the chapel through a side door that brought them in front of the first row of pews.The room had a high ceiling and a wine-red carpet,20 rows of wooden seats, and a recessed area in front with a lectern and a microphone.

One of the fantasies that had played out in Michael’s head as he waited for dawn had him making a speech in which he revealed himself as the bastard offspring of his father’s adulterous, interracial love affair, then accused Fogg of murdering Barrett Howard. It ended with his being wrestled out onto the street by Ruth’s outraged relatives, Fogg admitting his crime in the heat of his anger, and the police arriving to take Fogg away as he foamed at the mouth and cursed the African race. In the cool, dim sanctity of the chapel Michael saw that he would do nothing of the kind. He would endure it as best he could and leave.

The funeral director gently took his arm and led him to the front row, where Ruth sat by herself. Fogg was in the row behind, flanked by his bodyguards, with Greg Vaughan at the end. Michael sat down next to Ruth and said,“This is Denise.” Denise extended her hand across him. Ruth took it briefly, then looked confused.“Are you with the funeral home?”

“She’s with me,” Michael said.

“Oh,” Ruth said, clearly not understanding.

Everyone was seated now and music began to seep out of the speakers. Bach, Michael thought. Doubtless to be followed at some point by the Pachelbel Canon. Not Sketches of Spain or Charlie Shavers or anything that might dare to evoke his father’s memory.

He stopped himself. Let it go, he thought, or you’ll never get through this. The music faded and one of the Johnston County crew took the microphone, a short, balding man the same age as Randy Fogg, with a huge mole over his left eye.“I never knew Robert Cooper,” he began, and Michael saw then that it was going to be as bad as it could possibly be.“But,” the man said, “I have known Ruth Bynum since I first became pastor of Mount Calvary Baptist Church in 1963. I know her to be...”

Michael leaned forward and put his head in his hands. Surely that was allowed at a funeral. When the pastor finally wound down, he had used up over fifteen minutes of Michael’s life. He then introduced, at length,“a man who needs no introduction, Congressman Randy Fogg.”

As Fogg lumbered toward the stage, Denise whispered, “You owe me. Big time.”

Fogg withdrew a sheaf of folded papers from his suit pocket, arranged them on the podium, and adjusted his glasses.“I hope y’all will forgive me for jotting down a few thoughts to share here today. I don’t believe any of you would enjoy it if I just got up here and rambled on as I’ve been known to do.”There were appreciative chuckles from Fogg’s supporters.

“I’m here today to pay tribute to Robert Cooper, who was more than a personal friend—he was a man of vision who helped shape the city of Durham that we know today.”

“My father hated you,” Michael said, under his breath.

Fogg went on in that vein for a while, talking about the Durham Freeway and rtp as if Michael’s father had been an equal partner in the planning and design and not merely a hired hand.Then he said,“Many of you remember what Durham was like before Robert Cooper.There was a blight on the edge of our downtown, a slum, a home to the worst elements in the city. Shiftless welfare parasites, reefer peddlers, and communists.”

Michael looked at Denise, half expecting her to get to her feet and answer Fogg. Instead she seemed amused, in a bitter way.“Did he say ‘reefer peddlers’?” she mouthed.

“Not only communists,” Fogg went on,“but revolutionaries, violent, ruthless men bent on destroying the American way of life.We all owe Robert Cooper more of a debt than we know for burying that threat under the Durham Freeway.”

“My God,” Michael said, his voice lost in the murmur of approval on all sides. He looked at Denise again.“That was practically a confession.”

“Shhhh, baby,” Denise said.“We need to be very cool, here.This is getting scary.”

Fogg went on, now praising Ruth, and Ruth’s father, and the fine humble working men who were still the backbone of this country. Michael barely listened. He was giddy, angry, and not a little afraid himself. Finally, when Michael believed he could not stand another minute, Fogg wrapped up and called Ruth to the stage. She dug through her purse, pulled out a wad of hotel stationery, and got unsteadily to her feet. She took Fogg’s place at the microphone, tears now running down her face, and fumbled with her papers.

“I tried to write some things down last night,” she said.“A few memories and things.”Then, as if suddenly remembering,“Thank you, Congressman Fogg.You have always been a dear, dear friend of our family.”

Michael looked down again.And saw, protruding from the purse she had left behind, a #10 envelope with Michael’s name on it.The writing was his father’s.

Michael plucked it from the purse.The flap had been sealed and then torn open again. Inside was a sheet from one of the blue-line graph paper pads that his father had always used. The letter was dated Wednesday night, the night before he died.“Dear Son,” it said.“I’m trusting Ruth to pass this on to you if she should find it before you do. I am also trusting her not to read it before she gives it to you.”

The words, Michael thought, were meant to shame Ruth if she read that far. Clearly they hadn’t worked.

“I have one last request, which I know is not going to sit well with her. I have purchased two grave sites in Beechwood Cemetery for her and myself, and I would like you to see that I am buried there. Obviously this represents something of a change of heart on my part. I have thought a lot about the things you said to me, about the reasons I wanted to come back to Durham, and I see now that you were right.”

Michael couldn’t remember his father ever having made an admission like it. Come back, he thought. I want to talk to you.

“I needed to be here, and I see now that I would like to stay here. Do this for me, son, if you can.

“Your father”

Michael handed the letter to Denise.

From the podium, Ruth suddenly noticed what he was doing and broke off in mid-sentence.“Michael?”

Michael stood up. He was aware, though he couldn’t see them, that everyone in the room was staring at his back.“Did you mean for me to find this?”

“I was going to give it to you,” Ruth said, into the microphone.

“When, exactly?” Michael asked.

He felt a hand on his shoulder and turned, shaking it off. Randy Fogg was on his feet now too, staring at him with red, watery eyes. “Mind your manners, son.”

Before he could respond, Denise touched his arm and gave him back the letter.“Maybe we should go,”

she said.

He started to refuse, then saw the wisdom of it.“You’re right,” he said. “We’re going.”

Everyone in the room seemed to be whispering. It sounded like distant surf.“You can’t leave,” Ruth said.“I forbid it.” She was too close to the microphone, and there was a short whistle of feedback. Michael folded the letter and put it in his jacket pocket. He nodded to Denise. When he got to the side door, he found Greg Vaughan blocking it.“I think you should go back in there and apologize to her.”

“This doesn’t concern you,” Michael said, fighting a tremor in his voice. “Now if you’ll excuse us...”

Vaughan did not move.“Ruth’s feelings concern me.” He smiled in what almost seemed a reasonable, friendly way.

“Then maybe you should go take care of her,” Michael said.“And get out of our way.”

Vaughan looked at Denise, then back at Michael, and shook his head.“Like father, like son.”The words were barely audible.

Michael’s face burned.“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Vaughan dropped the smile.“Keep your voice down, college boy.”

Michael’s emotions were out of control.The last week of turmoil had built up to this moment.Vaughan, despite being in his fifties, was tough and wiry and undoubtedly dangerous. Michael wanted very much to kill him with his bare hands.“If you have something to say to me, say it,” he said. Vaughan took a step closer.“I don’t take orders from you, boy.” He was barely audible.“If you think you’re man enough to do something about it, then you and me can go along over to the parking lot and have this out. But not here, not in front of Ruth and the Congressman.”

“Michael,” Denise said. She pointed with her chin toward the back of the chapel, where the main doors opened onto the street.“Let’s go this way.”

“Better do what she says, boy,” Vaughan said.“You’re out of your league.”

Denise physically inserted herself between the two of them, forcing Vaughan to take a step back. She turned Michael by the shoulder and pushed him toward the other exit.“Go,” she said.“Now.”

She got Michael by the arm and led him down the left-hand aisle, past the rows of embarrassed mourners, most of whom looked away, and into the foyer and down the steps to the sidewalk.“Keep walking,” she said.“Don’t think, just walk.”

They got in the car. Michael clenched his fists until they screamed with pain.

“I don’t know what he said to you,” Denise told him,“but I can make a pretty good guess.The guy is a cracker asshole and you have to not let him control the level of the discourse. Michael. Look at me.”

Slowly, painfully, he made his head turn until he was looking at her. Every muscle in his body was rigid.

“When I first came down here from New York, I nearly gave myself an ulcer. It took me a while to figure out that there is power in walking away.You have to not let them make the rules.”

He looked at his hands and willed them to open. Eventually they did.

“We need to go to Ruth’s hotel room,” Michael said.

Denise cocked her head.

“I think—I hope—my father’s ashes are still there.”

Denise smiled.“That’s my boy.”

Michael couldn’t shake the idea that Ruth had second-guessed him and dispatched her cousin Greg to intercept them. He left Denise in her car with the engine running and sprinted upstairs, his key card in hand.

The ashes were there. Michael grabbed them and got a Ginsu knife from the kitchenette. He took the stairs down, two at a time, and arrived at Denise’s car out of breath.

“Beechwood?” Denise asked, putting the car in reverse as soon as he got his door shut.

“Beechwood,” he said.

Crowds were sparse at the cemetery.The rush would come, Michael thought, after church let out. He carried the ashes and the knife to his mother’s grave and knelt in the grass by her headstone. He sawed the top of the plastic box halfway off, then wrenched it open.The ashes were grainier than he had imagined them, not the smooth texture of the ones he’d carried out of his parents’ fireplace for so many years. He shook them out into the grass, moving the box back and forth, as if he were pouring detergent.When the box was empty, he spread them with his hands until they disappeared. He clapped his hands, then looked at the graphite-colored stain his father had left on his skin.“Oh, man,”

he said.“Oh man.”

“Are you okay?” Denise asked.

“I keep hearing Bugs Bunny saying,‘Of course you realize, this means war.’ She’s never going to let me get away with this.”

“You did get away with it,” oncern me.” He smiled in what almost seemed a reasonable, friendly way.

“Then maybe you should go take care of her,” Michael said.“And get out of our way.”

Vaughan looked at Denise, then back at Michael, and shook his head.“Like father, like son.”The words were barely audible.

Michael’s face burned.“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Vaughan dropped the smile.“Keep your voice down, college boy.”

Michael’s emotions were out of control.The last week of turmoil had built up to this moment.Vaughan, despite being in his fifties, was tough and wiry and undoubtedly dangerous. Michael wanted very much to kill him with his bare hands.“If you have something to say to me, say it,” he said. Vaughan took a step closer.“I don’t take orders from you, boy.” He was barely audible.“If you think you’re man enough to do something about it, then you and me can go along over to the parking lot and have this out. But not here, not in front of Ruth and the Congressman.”

“Michael,” Denise said. She pointed with her chin toward the back of the chapel, where the main doors opened onto the street.“Let’s go this way.”

“Better do what she says, boy,” Vaughan said.“You’re out of your league.”

Denise physically inserted herself between the two of them, forcing Vaughan to take a step back. She turned Michael by the shoulder and pushed him toward the other exit.“Go,” she said.“Now.”

She got Michael by the arm and led him down the left-hand aisle, past the rows of embarrassed mourners, most of whom looked away, and into the foyer and down the steps to the sidewalk.“Keep walking,” she said.“Don’t think, just walk.”

They got in the car. Michael clenched his fists until they screamed with pain.

“I don’t know what he said to you,” Denise told him,“but I can make a pretty good guess.The guy is a cracker asshole and you have to not let him control the level of the discourse. Michael. Look at me.”

Slowly, painfully, he made his head turn until he was looking at her. Every muscle in his body was rigid.

“When I first came down here from New York, I nearly gave myself an ulcer. It took me a while to figure out that there is power in walking away.You have to not let them make the rules.”

He looked at his hands and willed them to open. Eventually they did.

“We need to go to Ruth’s hotel room,” Michael said.

Denise cocked her head.

“I think—I hope—my father’s ashes are still there.”

Denise smiled.“That’s my boy.”

Michael couldn’t shake the idea that Ruth had second-guessed him and dispatched her cousin Greg to intercept them. He left Denise in her car with the engine running and sprinted upstairs, his key card in hand.

The ashes were there. Michael grabbed them and got a Ginsu knife from the kitchenette. He took the stairs down, two at a time, and arrived at Denise’s car out of breath.

“Beechwood?” Denise asked, putting the car in reverse as soon as he got his door shut.

“Beechwood,” he said.

Crowds were sparse at the cemetery.The rush would come, Michael thought, after church let out. He carried the ashes and the knife to his mother’s grave and knelt in the grass by her headstone. He sawed the top of the plastic box halfway off, then wrenched it open.The ashes were grainier than he had imagined them, not the smooth texture of the ones he’d carried out of his parents’ fireplace for so many years. He shook them out into the grass, moving the box back and forth, as if he were pouring detergent.When the box was empty, he spread them with his hands until they disappeared. He clapped his hands, then looked at the graphite-colored stain his father had left on his skin.“Oh, man,”

he said.“Oh man.”

“Are you okay?” Denise asked.

“I keep hearing Bugs Bunny saying,‘Of course you realize, this means war.’ She’s never going to let me get away with this.”

“You did get away with it,” Denise said.“There’s no way to put the ashes back in the box.They’re gone.Your father would be proud of you.”

Michael started to cry. Denise sat next to him and held him. He cried for a good long time while Denise stroked his head.When it was over he said, “Wow.That was weird.”

In silence, Denise offered him a tissue from her purse.

“It’s funny,” Michael said.“Watching you with Rachid, I can see what it would have been like to have a real mother.”

“Was it really that bad?”

“You don’t know what you’re missing when you’re a kid, you don’t know that other families are different than yours.Then by junior high, high school, it gets pretty obvious. She was always so awkward around me, like I was some kind of gross, foul-smelling animal that had gotten loose in her house. She didn’t know how to touch me. She would try to go through the motions, but it made me wonder why she was doing it.”

“What’s going to happen to her now?”

“I don’t know. I do feel sorry for her. She devoted her entire life to my father. Everything was always about him.That was another thing that used to make me crazy—she would always take his side over mine, even when he was clearly wrong. She’s going to have to fill that hole with something.At least she’s got all her friends in Dallas, and her bridge club.”

“And you?” Denise asked. She looked down at her hands.“Will you be going back to Texas, too?”

“No,” he said, carefully.“Not any time soon. I have a lot to do here.” “Aren’t all your friends there?”

“They’re all over the place. I spend way more time on the phone or writing email than I do face to face with anybody. I can do that just as well from here.”

She raised her eyes again.“So what are all these things you have to do here?”

He took both her hands in his.“I want to be with you, for one thing.”

“Okay, that’s one.”

“I want to find some more people who knew my mother. I would like to know who killed Barrett Howard.And...”

“And?”

The thought had just come to him. He saw from the first that he would not be able to resist it.“I want to go back to my grandfather’s house.This time without the tour guide.”

That afternoon Denise organized a picnic. She improvised a hamper from a cardboard box and packing tape and stuffed it with potato salad, slaw, fresh fruit, bread, and cheese.They lured Rachid out of the apartment with only token protest on his part and drove to Jordan Lake, a few miles south of Durham. Michael appreciated the gesture, even if he could not get his whole heart into it. Denise didn’t push him to feel more than he was able. Part of it was his father. Mostly it was the idea of going back to Johnston County, an idea that, as he’d anticipated, was not fading.

It was the single most dangerous thought Michael had ever had. Goading him on was the anger and humiliation he still felt from Greg Vaughan’s bullying at the funeral. He knew he was not a physical match for Vaughan. He had an objective understanding that might and intimidation did not make right. Nonetheless it galled him to retreat from it.A certain defiance was required. Beyond that, he was convinced that Wilmer Bynum’s house was hiding secrets.Why else would Vaughan be preserving it like some kind of temple? The entire time he and Michael had been inside,Vaughan’s nerves had been stretched tight.

Denise suggested an early night and Michael found that, as advertised, sex was made all the sweeter by the presence of death.After Denise fell asleep he lay on his back, and his thoughts circled again to the Bynum farm.

Vaughan was probably comfortable with the idea of killing trespassers. On the other hand, he might be reluctant to shoot up the Bynum house, or Bynum’s own grandson. Michael was kin, and if there were secrets in the Bynum house, he had the right to know.

•

Monday, November 1

At his hotel the next day, sitting at the breakfast bar with his drawing board, he could not make himself concentrate. He saw that he wouldn’t sleep decently again until he either went through with it or gave up on the idea altogether. Giving up seemed the harder of the two.

After lunch he went to a Home Depot and bought a putty knife, window putty, latex gloves, a glass cutter, a flashlight, a utility knife, and a roll of white duct tape.

“Doing some breaking and entering?” the cashier asked.

“That’s right,” Michael said.“Watch for me on the news tomorrow.” He hoped his smile looked more natural than it felt.

At Thrift World he bought a dark brown pillowcase to hold everything. Then he went to his hotel room and watched tv, unable to say afterwards what he’d seen.

He ate dinner with Denise and Rachid.After Rachid went off to do homework, Denise tried to talk Michael out of going, then retreated into a hurt and angry silence. Michael decided to wait for midnight at his hotel.As he left, Denise said, “If you do this, I want you to call me as soon as you’re away from there.And if you change your mind, call me too.”

Michael nodded, realizing that he had turned his cell phone off after the funeral to avoid Ruth and never turned it on again.“It’ll be late,” he said.

“I’ll be awake,” she said, and closed the door on him.

He got on the road by 12:30.The car’s heater couldn’t take the chill out of his hands and feet.All the landmarks from his first trip had faded in the darkness, and once past West Smithfield it got increasingly hard to find his way. The Bynum house was on him before he knew it so he drove past for a couple of miles, then turned around and drove slowly back. He turned his lights off before he was in sight of the house and pulled well off the road into a patch of weeds and dried grass. He closed the car door soundlessly and left it unlocked. He was wearing black jeans and a navy blue sweatshirt. No ski mask; he wanted Vaughan to recognize him if it came to that, rather than be shot as a burglar or, God forbid in rural North Carolina, a terrorist. He had the bag of tools in his left hand, which was now sweating.

Henry was the first obstacle. If he was wrong about the dog, it was all over before it began. He’d barely entered the driveway when Henry started to bark. Michael stood still and waited, heart pounding. Hurry, he thought, get over here before you wake Vaughan. The moon was past full, the skies clear, and Michael saw the huge Shepherd galloping across the field toward him in full cry, a bounding blur of gold and black.“Henry!” Michael said, a shouted whisper.Two hundred yards away, Vaughan’s trailer was still dark.“Henry!” he said again, louder, suddenly afraid the dog could not hear anything over his own barking.

The dog was 50 feet away and closing fast. I’m going to die, Michael thought. Right here. He stood his ground and one last time said,“Henry! Heel!”And, remembering, snapped his fingers twice. Henry threw on the brakes, his hindquarters sliding around on him as he backpedaled. By the time he stopped he was facing the other direction and needed only a few minor adjustments to end up in heel position on Michael’s left side. He looked up at Michael and panted. Michael leaned over to scratch the dog’s chest.“Good dog, Henry,” he said.“Good dog.”

A light went on in the trailer.

There was a ditch to the left of the driveway. Michael snapped his fingers once and said,“Henry. Go.”Then he scrambled into the ditch and lay on his stomach with his face pressed into his tool bag. The night was full of noises: wind in the dry leaves, crickets, the deeper chattering of frogs. Even so he heard the creak as the trailer door opened. Vaughan’s voice called,“Henry? Henry, what are you doing?”

“Go,” Michael whispered, and Henry ran toward the trailer.

Michael forced himself to lie still despite a sudden, overwhelming need to urinate.You were fine ten seconds ago, he told his bladder.You’re bluffing.

“What have you got out there?” Vaughan said.

Henry barked, once.

Please, Michael thought. Please don’t come look.

“That didn’t sound like a rabbit bark.Were you chasing rabbits? Were you chasing rabbits, boy?”

Vaughan’s voice had gotten husky, nearly crossing the line into baby talk. Michael pictured him roughing up the dog’s fur.

If he knew I was listening, Michael thought, he’d be humiliated. He’d kill me for sure.

“You want me to come see? Is that what you want?” Henry barked again. “You want me to come see what you’ve got?”

The voice sounded closer. It could be the wind, Michael told himself.

“Well, I don’t want to see what you’ve got. I want to go back to sleep. Now you run along and be a good boy.” Henry gave one final bark, a simple cry of joy from a being whose life was black and white, who had only to distinguish between friends, intruders, and food. Michael envied him. The trailer door closed. Michael lay still as long as he could, which in fact was not long at all. He put the shed between himself and the trailer, hurried to the trees on the far side of the driveway, and let his bladder go.Tears of relief came up in his eyes.

He zipped up and turned back to the road, where Henry waited for him, tail wagging. Michael snapped his fingers twice, and Henry fell in step with him.“Traitor,” Michael said.“You’d have given him my name and the license number of my car if you could talk.”

He retrieved his bag of tools and approached the rear of the house. He had the thought that he could turn around and go to his car and be safe in bed at the hotel in an hour. He pushed the thought away. He sat on the back stoop, dried his sweaty hands on his pants leg, and put on a pair of latex gloves.Then he fished around in the bag for the duct tape. Everything made too much noise: the clink of metal on concrete as he set down the bag; the ripping sound as he slowly peeled away a strip of tape. He wrapped the loop of tape around one hand, sticky side out, and cut it free from the roll. He stuck the loop to the glass pane nearest to the lock and pressed it firmly in place. Shielding the flashlight with his left hand, he looked at the glass. It was secured with quarter round and covered with multiple layers of paint, so plan A, where he scraped away putty and replaced it when he was through, bit the dust. That left plan B, the glass cutter. He’d cut a lot of glass for frames at Pratt, and it didn’t take him long to get the hang of it again. He cut out the entire pane, as close to the frame as he could. It took the longest five minutes of his life, and when he finally lifted the glass free, his nerves had terminally frazzled. He set the glass on his tool bag, reached through the hole, and had his gloved hand on the inner knob when his confidence failed.

Vaughan hadn’t turned off an alarm when he let Michael into the house that day. Maybe he activated one at night? A few feet away, Henry scratched himself. No, Michael thought, there’s his alarm. He cranked back the deadbolt, twisted the button on the inner knob, and opened the door. Silence.

He was sweating so hard his eyes stung from it. He cut another long strip of tape and cut it again lengthwise.With the two narrow pieces of tape he put the windowpane back in the frame.The tape was a reasonable match for the white paint on the door, at least by flashlight. Unless Vaughan looked closely, or had some reason for suspicion, it could pass for a while. He peeled off the other tape he’d been using for a handle and put it in his tool bag.

He made sure everything else was in the bag and then stepped into Wilmer Bynum’s kitchen. Before he could close the door, Henry whined a complaint from the porch.“Don’t embarrass me,” Michael said as he let the dog inside. “I’m trusting you, here.”

The house had few windows, so he felt safe enough taking a quick look around with the flashlight. In the dark again, he oriented himself by the greater darkness of the doorway that led to the dining room and made his way to the front hall and the stairway.

Henry followed in patient silence as he climbed the stairs.At the top landing he risked the flashlight again, masking the glow with his fingers.A hallway ran down the center of the second floor.The first door on the left led to what must have been Wilmer’s room. It held a king-size bed, a big screen tv, and a dresser full of argyle socks, white boxers, and old-fashioned tank top T-shirts. Wife-beater shirts, a girlfriend of Michael’s used to call them.

In the top drawer was a German Luger. Michael stared at it for a long minute.The temptation nearly overwhelmed him.What better antidote for his fear than a gun in his hand? Then his better judgment kicked in, and he made himself close the drawer and turn away.

The walk-in closet was full of clothes, the polyester pants and wide-collared dress shirts that so many old men ended up in.They smelled of detergent and the cedar that lined the walls.The shoes, neatly arrayed on the closet floor, reflected the glow of the flashlight.

He found Regina’s room across the hall. Doilies and framed photos of Wilmer sat on top of an empty dresser; her closet held only cleaning supplies.

Next to the bedrooms were two gleaming tiled bathrooms, across the hall from each other, then two bedroom additions. Michael couldn’t help but wonder which was the guest room where his father had spent his first night at the farm, where Ruth had come to him in the night and sealed the peculiar relationship that had, in the end, cost him everything.

Despite their haphazard exteriors, the bedrooms perfectly matched the rest of the house: hardwood floors, double-hung windows, crown molding all around. It was evidence of Wilmer Bynum’s contempt for appearances and the surface of things. Given that Michael shared his genes, he was glad to find something in the man to admire.

Still, it was not the revelation he’d been hoping for. He’d found someone else’s memories, lovingly and bizarrely enshrined, but no secrets. Every moment he stayed put him more at risk. He’d proven his point, shown his flag of bravery, and that was going to have to be enough. He moved quickly down the stairs and through the dining room, Henry’s nails clicking the hardwood beside him. He opened the back door and then stopped with his hand on the outside knob. Why were all the cleaning supplies upstairs instead of in the kitchen?

He turned back, opened the pantry door, and leaked light past his fingers. No shelves, no brooms, no cans, no water heater. No dog food.The floor was an empty square, four feet on a side, set back into the wall of the kitchen. Henry sat and stared into the emptiness, tense and alert. No, Michael thought, something is not right here.

At that moment he heard Vaughan’s voice, faintly, outside.“Henry! Where you at, boy?”

The dog’s ears went straight up and he bolted out the open back door. Michael, blinded by panic, fought the urge to follow. He didn’t know where Vaughan was, didn’t know if he could see the rear of the house. Instead he eased the door closed and turned the lock, putting it back the way it had been. Then he stepped into the pantry and shut the door.

Don’t come into the house, he thought. Please do not come in this house. He was sweating again. He pushed the stem of his watch to light the dial. It was 2:25. Fifteen minutes, he thought. If nothing happens by then, I’ll try slipping out the back. He lowered himself to a sitting position against the back wall.As he eased down, he put his left hand against the side wall for balance.

The wall moved.

At the same moment he heard Vaughan’s voice on the front porch and the sound of a key in the lock.Vaughan was talking to the dog again, though Michael couldn’t make out the words. Michael risked the flashlight.There, at waist height, where the left hand wall met the door jamb, there was a button: white-on-white, virtually impossible to see from outside. Michael pushed it and felt the left wall of the closet open out into darkness.A damp, earthy smell hung in the cooler air there. Beyond the opening he saw stairs leading down.

Vaughan and the dog were now in the foyer.“What are you trying to tell me?” Vaughan said. He wants you to meet his new best friend, Michael thought. So we can all play games together. He switched off the flashlight and choked up his grip on the pillowcase of tools to keep it from clinking. In absolute silence he got to his feet, slipped through the door, found a handle on the other side, and closed it behind him.

He felt his way down the stairs in darkness, and only when he got to the bottom did he try the light again.

“Holy shit,” he whispered.

The room was wider and longer than the house above it,100 feet by 80 or so.The suspended ceiling was low, barely eight feet from the green linoleum floor.The walls were cheap paneling for four feet, then white paint over sheetrock the rest of the way up. Chairs folded along one wall looked like they could seat a hundred people.

Across the front wall spread a gigantic rebel flag,9 feet long and 6 feet high. On either side were banners emblazoned with the Celtic Cross and the logo of the Night Riders of the Confederacy. In one corner stood a seven-foot high, plain wooden cross; in the other a US flag—substantially smaller than the Confederate—drooped from a pole.

There was a six-inch high platform in front of the rebel flag, supporting an antique wooden lectern. In the corner by the US flag was a plain wooden door, locked with a deadbolt.Along the wall opposite the chairs stood two metal cabinets with triple padlocks.The cabinets smelled of machine oil and Michael involuntarily pictured the guns inside.

He felt physically ill. He wanted out of that room more than he could remember ever wanting anything before.

The desire was in inverse proportion, he knew, to his chances of getting away. Already Vaughan and Henry were standing at the closet door above.

Briefly he considered lying in wait where the stairs emptied into the room and trying to bash Vaughan over the head with one of the folding chairs. Even if he got away with it, Henry would certainly turn on him. It was a comic book idea, not worthy of him.Why hadn’t he brought the gun from upstairs?

There were no alternatives, no hiding places, no dark corners, no emergency exits. Only... The ceiling.

He held his flashlight in his mouth and put his tool bag on top of one of the cabinets. Both cabinets were bolted to the wall, solid as bedrock. He hooked one arm over the top and braced his foot against the molding of the half-paneled wall, struggling to keep from banging the hollow metal with his knees. Lying on his back, stretched across the two cabinets, he used both hands to push one of the acoustical tile squares upward and to the side.

There was room for him. Barely.

He put the bag of tools in first. He could hear Vaughan at the top of the stairs, working the latch of the inner door.“You think somebody’s down here, boy? I think you’re crazy. I think you’ve been eating loco weed again.That what you’ve been doing?”

Michael slithered into the space between the ceiling tiles and the heavy wooden joists that held the floor above.

He’d worked for a record store the summer after his freshman year at Pratt, and he’d had to go into the ceiling to hang displays. Like this one, it had been filthy with dust and insulation, crowded with ductwork. He’d learned to negotiate the metal framework that held the tiles, a framework like the one under him now, suspended from the joists above with strands of wire the thickness of coat hangers. Sweat flowed into his eyes, turning his vision red. He blinked it away and shifted himself around, feeling blindly for the loose tile, lowering it into its frame just as the lights clicked on in the room below. The effect was eerie, blades of light stabbing up around the edges of the tiles. It made Michael feel conspicuous. He switched off his own light and settled slowly into the most comfortable position he could find.

His chest heaved. He opened his mouth wide and felt the sweat rain off him. Even Vaughan is going to smell me at this rate, he thought.

Henry certainly did. Michael could hear him on the linoleum below as he trotted in circles around the room, whining.

“What is it, boy? What do you think is down here?”

Henry tried to answer, clearly frustrated at Vaughan’s inability to understand, his voice modulating from whine to growl to bark.

“Henry!” Vaughan said, the dog quieted.“What are you looking up for?”

They were directly underneath where Michael knelt.This is it, he thought, and willed himself to not exist. Nobody here, he thought.There’s nobody here.

“When we was upstairs, you wanted down. Now you want up again?”

Reacting to Vaughan’s tone, Henry barked once in affirmation.

Good dog, Michael thought.

“That’s it,” Vaughan said.“I’ve lost enough sleep over you tonight. I’m going to bed.”

Michael stayed in the ceiling, in darkness, for another thirty minutes. His sense of relief was so powerful that he drifted momentarily into sleep, waking disoriented and panicky. Taking one step at a time, deathly afraid of making a mistake in his eagerness to be gone, he finally switched on the flashlight, worked the tile free, and lowered himself to the cabinet. He was filthy, the dust and sweat having formed a thin layer of mud over his exposed skin. He cleaned his glasses as best he could, then took his sweatshirt off and used it to mop tile crumbs and footprints and dirt from the top of the cabinets. He swept the residue underneath, then put the shirt on and started for the stairs.

Something made him hesitate. Partly from curiosity, partly from fear that Vaughan might still be lurking upstairs, he swept the flashlight around the room.The linoleum was scuffed and worn, the wooden panels warped and faded, the ceiling tiles gray with age.This was not some recent addition that Vaughan had made; it had to date back to the fifties or earlier.

Next to the locked wooden door was a 2004 calendar, poster sized, with a marker pen hanging on a string.The first Wednesday of every month was circled.The meetings were still going on, then.The next one was in two days.

The only other date marked was November 6, the coming Saturday.There was a black X through the date. Some hated anniversary? Michael wondered. Not MLK’s birthday; that was in January.The day the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education? Or something more sinister?

Whatever it was, Michael had to leave. He had begun to tremble all over. The tension was catching up to him, and he couldn’t allow that to happen, not yet.

He climbed the stairs and let himself out of the pantry.The house was quiet.When he stepped out the back door, Henry was waiting for him, scampering back and forth with excitement. Henry barked again, and Michael jumped.“Henry, heel!” he whispered, and snapped his fingers twice. He turned the lock on the doorknob and pulled it closed.Then he knelt and rubbed the dog’s chest fur.“You ratted me out, you bastard,” he said. Henry licked Michael’s face, untroubled by the dirt and sweat, eager for more adventure.

Together they walked to the end of the driveway.And it was there, as he stripped off the latex gloves, that Michael realized he’d left his bag of tools in the ceiling.

“Henry, sit,” he said, with a finger snap. Henry sat. Michael looked back at the house and thought about doing it all over again, peeling the tape from the window and unlocking the door, climbing into the ceiling, cleaning up after himself. It wasn’t worth it.What were the odds that Vaughan would ever find that bag?

And what difference would it make if he did?

Michael took one step toward his car, then another, fighting the urge to run that might have made Henry chase him. Henry whined. Michael looked back, said “No,” and kept walking. When he got to the car he fumbled the keys, dropping them twice in the dirt before he remembered that the door wasn’t locked. He got behind the wheel and turned the keys in the ignition, breathing the plastic-scented air, comforted by the quiet ping as the electrical system sprang to life and the engine turned over.

He pulled onto the narrow tarmac and coasted past the driveway, where Henry still waited with a forlorn expression, before switching on the lights. Then he found himself going too fast and had to take his foot off the gas.

The rearview mirror was clear. He put the windows down and sucked cold, clean air into his lungs. At highway 70 he turned his cell phone on.The display announced seven new messages. He called Denise.

“Thank God,” she said. She sounded weak with relief.“I almost called the police three times.Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” he said.

“Did you find what you were looking for? Was it worth putting me through this?”

“I think my grandfather used to host the Night Riders of the Confederacy in his basement.And now my cousin Vaughan is continuing the tradition.” He told her what he’d seen.

“Oh my God.And you’re sure he didn’t see you?”

“I’m sure. If he’d seen me I wouldn’t be here now.”

“Michael, you have to walk away from this.The nrc is not some joke.They are still killing people and getting away with it.They’ve got members who are cops, politicians, business people.They’re everywhere.”

“I’m done,” Michael said.“I’m telling Sgt. Bishop everything I know tomorrow, and that’s it.”

“Are you sure you can trust him?”

“Am I positive? No. But he’s been straight with me so far.And I have to trust somebody.”

They talked another 20 minutes, until Michael hit the Raleigh city limits, and then he had to hang up and pay attention to the road. By the time he got to his hotel he was beyond exhaustion. He passed out twice in the shower and was asleep within seconds of hitting the bed.

Tuesday, November 2

He woke hard at seven o’clock, thinking of the brown pillowcase of evidence he’d left behind. He spent half an hour telling himself that it made no difference, no one would ever find it, and if they did, nothing in it would identify Michael.

Gradually his breathing slowed, and he was on the verge of sleep again when he remembered the receipt. He’d taken everything from the plastic Home Depot bag and transferred it to the pillowcase, there outside the thrift store. Everything? The receipt would tell Vaughan where he’d bought it and when. It would lead Vaughan to the clerk, who would remember Michael because of the breaking and entering joke.

He sat up in bed. He’d thrown the plastic bag in a trash can outside the thrift store. If the receipt was in the bag, it meant it wasn’t in the pillowcase. He tried to picture it in his head, a ribbon of white paper in the bottom of the bag as he crumpled it.

The memory wouldn’t come.

He might have put it in his pocket. He got up and searched his khakis from the day before, then went through the filthy black jeans he’d worn to the Bynum farm.

Nothing.

He got dressed and went downstairs. No receipts in the rental car.

If they hadn’t emptied the trash outside the thrift store, the bag might still be there. He drove to the Durham Freeway and took it north through downtown, noting absently that they’d finished work on the American Tobacco complex, with signs and lights and retail businesses in place. He caught a glimpse of fountains and green lawns between the rows of former warehouses.

Then he was exiting, curving south again to Lakewood.The stores in the center were still dark, meaning no one would be watching him.This seemed like a good thing, as Michael was operating on nerves and three hours sleep. He parked at the curb and got out onto stiff legs.The trash can lid was brown, with a V-shaped flap. Michael took it off and looked inside.

Empty.

At least, he thought, it saved me the indignity of standing here on the sidewalk, going through a couple of days’ worth of garbage.

He stood for a while under overcast skies, listening to the breath move in and out of his body.This is ridiculous, he told himself. Get some sleep and you’ll realize what an idiot you’re being. He slept restlessly until 2:30, then called Bishop’s mobile. “Michael,” Bishop said.“I was sorry to hear about your father.” That caught him off guard.“How did you...”

“I saw it in the paper. I tried to call, but your cell phone was out of service.”

“Thanks,” Michael said.“I appreciate your thoughtfulness.” “Is your mother all right?”

“You’re behind the curve, Detective. Have you got time for me to come over and fill you in?”

“If you come now, I can spare a few minutes.”

The skies had cleared, and the temperature was near 80. It seemed crazy to have this kind of heat wave in November. Michael thought of Roger; whenever the subject of global warming came up he would point out that bad kings always brought bad weather.“The time is out of joint,” he would quote from Shakespeare.“O cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right.”

Roger was probably there in his voice mail, with Ruth and Bishop, yet another call he didn’t want to take. Bishop met him in the lobby, as before, and Michael began his story on the elevator. He talked about Mercy and his father, his birth, Mercy’s suicide. He talked about the weapons in the Biltmore Hotel and the revolution that failed. For reasons he didn’t entirely understand, he didn’t mention Donald Harriman. By that point they were seated in Bishop’s office.“So you don’t think anymore that your father was involved in Howard’s death.”

“No, except as an accomplice after that fact. I’m more convinced than ever that it was Randy Fogg.Who showed up at the funeral, by the way, to make a speech about the debt Durham owed my father for knocking Hayti down and burying Barrett Howard under the expressway.”

“In those words?”

“He didn’t mention Howard by name.And his contingent of nrc pals was there to cheer him on.”

“Not in hoods, I hope.”

“They might as well have been. Did you know that they meet at Wilmer Bynum’s farmhouse, like they’ve been doing for years, the first Wednesday of every month?”

Though Bishop hadn’t moved, his attention had snapped into focus.“How do you know that?”

“Can you prosecute me for what I say here?”

Bishop spoke carefully.“I won’t talk to you off the record. I won’t promise you immunity. But if you confess that you threw a candy wrapper on the street or ran a red light, I don’t think the State is going to care.”

“I broke into Wilmer Bynum’s house.” It was a relief to confess it.“There’s a giant basement underneath that’s a meeting hall. I’ve seen it with my own eyes.”

“Did you take anything? Damage anything?”

“No.And it is my grandfather’s house.That gives me some right to be there.”

“I thought you said Ruth Bynum wasn’t your birth mother.”

“Wilmer Bynum was Mercy’s father.”

Bishop leaned back in his chair, the light glinting off his glasses.“All right, Michael, I’m impressed.You’ve obviously got some detective skills. Let me point a few things out to you. First of all, there is no law against being a member of the Night Riders of the Confederacy.There is, however, a law against illegal entry. Not only can I not keep you out of jail if you persist with this kind of crap, there’s no guarantee that you won’t get killed.”

“There’s more,” Michael said.

“What do you mean?”

“They’re planning something.An action or something.This Saturday.”

“What kind of action?”

“I don’t know. I saw it marked on a calendar.”

“Maybe it was somebody’s birthday.”

“No. It’s going to be something big. I think lives are at stake.”

“This is what, a hunch?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. I respect hunches. I wish you’d give me more to go on.”

“What’s happening Saturday? Someplace where there might be a lot of people.”

“There’s football. Duke’s away at Florida State,unc’s playing Virginia Tech here. State’s at home against Georgia Tech.There’s no big concerts or special events.There’s live music at the clubs, maybe a race angle there...”

Michael shook his head.“That’s the kind of stuff that happens every week. I’m thinking something really unusual.”

“I’ll follow up on it,” Bishop said.“I promise—if you’ll give me your word you’ll back off. I don’t want to get called out to a crime scene and find your body.”

Michael stood up.“Something’s going to happen. I don’t think you’re taking me seriously enough.”

Bishop got up too.“Believe me, I do not like the words ‘I told you so.’ It gets in the papers, people remember, the whole department ends up looking bad. I will pursue this.You have to understand that all I’m working with here is a date circled on a calendar.”

“It wasn’t a circle,” Michael said.“It was a big, black X.”

He called Denise from his car, bypassing the alert for new voice messages. “I’m working late tonight,”

she told him.“It’s going to be leftovers and bed

for me.”

“You don’t want company for the second half of that?”

“I can’t tonight, baby. It’s too crazy right now.”

“Is this because of last night?”

“It’s work, is all it is. I told you I’m really swamped.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll call you before I go to sleep, okay? Just for a few minutes. Right now I got to run.”

When he switched off the phone, Michael felt sick to his stomach. Maybe everything was all right with Denise, he told himself. If he started a list of all the reasons he had to feel bad, he could go on forever. Lack of sleep, stress, his father’s death, Luna pages overdue, hiding out from Ruth and Roger, on and on. He started the car, drove to the Durham Freeway, and merged with the

scant traffic. As he topped the hill overlooking downtown, it all clicked in his head.

He didn’t trust himself to drive and talk at the same time. He pulled into the breakdown lane and called Denise again.

“Denise Franklin.”

“It’s me.”

“Michael, I’m serious, I don’t have time for this now.”

“This is important.That opening at American Tobacco, that’s what you’re having to work late on, right?”

“Yes, that’s what I—”

“When is it? When does it happen?”

“Didn’t I tell you?”

“I don’t think you did.”

“This Saturday. November sixth.”

He called Bishop again.

“Michael, I thought we had an understanding—”

It seemed like no one wanted to talk to him.“I know where it’s going to be,” Michael said.“The American Tobacco complex is opening this weekend. They’re billing themselves as the fulfillment of the Hayti dream. It’s run by a black-owned consortium.This is it. I know it.”

“Christ, I’d forgotten about that.Yeah, that makes sense. Do you have any hard information to back this up? Or is it more of the same hunch?”

“It feels right.You said so yourself.”

“All right. I’ll get some extra people on it.And you’re done now, correct?”

“What else is there for me to do?”

“You tell me.”

“Nothing.”

“Good answer.”

“I’m done,” Michael said.“I’m going back to my hotel and draw comics.”

He made an honest effort. He ate a lonely meal at Fortune Garden and returned to the stack of overdue script pages that sat on the dresser, accusing him.

He got into bed with his drawing board and script.The next scene had Louann writing in her journal with an architect’s lead holder.There was a long explanation about how her suspected father had gone to a technical college and learned drafting there, how he’d taught her to use a lead pointer at an early age, and now the mere thought of it had her on the edge of tears.

Michael had somehow missed this when he’d made his first quick pass through the script. Roger’s loyal fans, he was sure, would choke up as they read it. For Michael it was like he’d seen the pulleys and wires at the magic show. Or, he thought, more like feeling empathy for the cow being slaughtered to make his hamburger. It took his appetite clean away.

He didn’t remember telling Roger about his father and the lead holders, though obviously he had. Beyond Michael’s personal sense of violation was something more objective and disturbing, the way Roger had labored so mightily to bring in this irrelevant moment of purloined sentiment. Michael had brought a complete run of the series with him for reference. He took out the first issue and found, with some relief, that it still read well. By the third issue, though, the plot had started to meander, and by issue seven Roger was coasting.

He put the comics in a neat stack and set them on the breakfast bar.Then he sat up in bed and stared glassy-eyed at the wall in front of him. How much could somebody lose and not fall apart? The mother he had never known was dead. His father, whom he’d only started to know, was dead. His relationship with Denise had turned uncertain. And now the thought that would have been completely unthinkable a week before was right there in front of him.

Quitting Luna.

Just finish this page, he told himself. Maybe momentum will take over. No matter how hard he willed it, his hand refused to pick up the blue pencil. Instead it reached into his pocket and took out his cell phone.As soon as he switched it on, it began to ring, flashing the id “Roger cell.”

“Hello, Roger,” Michael said.

“Where have you been? I’ve been calling for days.”

“Something came up.”

“We need to talk, yeah?”

“Yes, we do.”

“Helen and I had some lengthy discussions—”

“Is that what you guys call it?”

“Michael, you don’t sound yourself.Are you ill?”

“Oh, let’s not be so concerned about me all the time.What did you guys talk about?”

“Now, it’s not like there aren’t extenuating circumstances, and God knows no one is blaming you.We’re only concerned about number 25.”

“And here I was thinking you were only concerned about number one.” Michael felt giddy. It wasn’t every day you got to throw away the only thing you had left.

“Have you been drinking?”

“You know better than that.”

“Can we be serious for a moment, then? You haven’t by any chance finished the book, have you?”

“No.You’ve got everything I’ve done.”

“Twelve pages, then. Half.”

“That’s right.”

“Helen wants to bring a fill-in artist on board. Just until you’re back on your feet.”

Michael stood up.“I’m on my feet now.”

“Michael, you’re making this extraordinarily difficult. It’s hard enough as it is.”

“Oh, sorry, there I was being selfish again. So who is she talking about?”

“Sean Phillips has offered to pitch in. He’s got a similar style to yours, not quite as good, maybe, but still a first-rate—”

“So she’s already set it up.”

“Well, merely on a contingency basis—”

“I’m going to make this very easy for you, Roger.You can’t fire me, I quit.”

“Michael, don’t be absurd.We’d only use him for an issue or two.You’re crucial to the book and as soon as you’re ready—”

“You’d go right back to using me. I guess I’m feeling used up at the moment.”

“Michael, what is all this?”

“Among other things, I don’t like you stealing my life and putting it in Luna. ”

Roger’s annoyance finally broke through.“D’you think you’re the only one with paternity issues? D’you think this isn’t personal for me? You should try being on the other side of the equation sometime.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“Nothing. Forget I said anything.”

“You’re talking about Helen’s daughter, aren’t you? You’re her father. Jesus. Does her husband know?”

“Michael, I’ve never told this to anyone before. I hope you appreciate the amount of trust I’m showing in you.”That was Roger all over, Michael thought, always telling you how you were supposed to react.

“So after everything that’s happened to me,” Michael said,“you’re going to torture that little girl with the same lies and doubts and confusions that I went through?”

“It’s not that simple,” Roger said.

“Yes it is,” Michael said.“It’s very simple. I don’t think I like you anymore, Roger.And I don’t want to work for somebody I don’t like and don’t respect.”

After a silence, Roger said,“I’m sorry you feel that way.”

“Yeah,” Michael said.“Me too.”

He switched off the phone, packed the script and Bristol board, and washed out his brushes and lettering pens. It took 40 minutes.

When he was done, the room seemed oppressive. He got in the car with no destination in mind, ending up drawn to the gravitational pull of the Durham Freeway. He got off on Fayetteville Street and parked in the Hayti Heritage Center lot, next to Denise’s car, and walked across the overpass and down to the freeway.The city had patched the retaining wall where Barrett Howard’s body had been, and the new concrete was a light gray against the existing dark beige.

Michael sat on the grassy slope and watched the sun ease below the horizon.At one point a cop car slowed to look at him. Michael ignored it, and it drove on.

Around 6:30 he saw Denise walking across the overpass, headed toward him. He loved to watch her move. Beneath the grace and sensuality was a New Yorker’s swagger. She sidestepped down the slope and sat next to him.

After a few seconds Michael said,“I just quit Luna. ”

Denise slipped under his left arm and held him.“Because of Roger?”

Michael nodded.

“You’re too good for him,” Denise said.“I’m glad you finally figured that out.”

“It’s so hard. I helped create all those characters. I’m the one that brought them to life. It’s like walking out on your family.” He thought that over.“I guess that’s what it would be like, if I’d ever had a family.”

“I expect there’ll be a feeding frenzy once word gets out that you’re available.”

“Maybe. I wouldn’t put it past Roger to badmouth me around the industry. And I don’t want to go draw superheroes anymore. I want something more ... real.”

Denise didn’t try to cheer him up, for which he was grateful.They sat in silence for a while, then Michael said,“What’s going on with us?”

“I don’t know. I went out to the parking lot, on my way to get something to eat, and when I saw your car there, I felt this ... pressure.”

“Uh oh.”

“I really like being with you.You’re smart and talented and you’ve got a wonderful heart.And you’re a sweet and patient lover.”

“But...?”

“But Rachid and I have been on our own for so long that this is all very strange to me. Sometimes I feel like you need more from me than I’ve got to give.”

“Do you want to break up with me?”

“No.” She sighed.“I don’t want to. I get these compulsions to run away sometimes.”

“Don’t listen.Your compulsions don’t know what’s good for you.”

She squeezed him tightly for a few seconds, then let go.“I have to get back to work.”

“You didn’t get anything to eat.”

“It doesn’t matter.” She got slowly to her feet.“Charles is working late too, I can send him out for something.” He felt jealousy as a physical pain, then, like a stitch from running too hard. It eased when she raked her fingernails through his hair in the way that he loved.

“Denise?”

“What, sugar?”

He shook his head, unable to find words.

“It’ll be all right,” she said.“This too shall pass.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” he said.

“I’ll call you before bed if I can.”

He watched her walk away, and once she was gone he felt the evening chill for the first time. They were waiting for him in the parking lot.There were four of them, and they carried the shadows with them when they stepped into the light. They wore sweat clothes with the hoods up, in anonymous gray and navy and black.

He was still ten feet from his car when they moved into a loose circle around him.“Say, man,” said the one to his left.“You got a smoke?”

“Sorry,” Michael said, his voice dry with sudden fear.All four were black, all over six feet tall.The one who’d spoken carried a 16-ounce plastic bottle of Coke; otherwise their hands were empty. Not that they needed anything more than their hands.

Michael nodded and smiled and made as if to push his way past the man in front of him.The man didn’t give way. Instead he stared at Michael and said, “Yo, wait up a second.”

Michael couldn’t see inside the hoods, nothing beyond a broad nose, the flash of a gold crown.

“We just want to talk to you for a minute,” the first man said.

If I start yelling, Michael thought, this will go to the next level, whatever that might be. Escalation didn’t seem smart.

“So what do you want to talk about?” he asked, failing to make his voice sound relaxed.

“What you doing in this part of town?” the first man said.

Michael went with the first idea that came into his head.“My girlfriend works here.”

“His girl friend,” the third man said, from behind Michael’s back.

“Your girlfriend black?” the second man said. He seemed genuinely surprised.“You trying to change your luck or something?”

“I’m black too,” Michael said.“My mother was black.” Just like you, he wanted to say. Only he wasn’t black the way they were. Denise was right. He never would be.

“Don’t look black to me,” the second man said.

“Come on,” the third man said. He sounded nervous.“Let’s get on with it.”

“Look white to me,” the second man said.

“My grandmother was black,” Michael said, feebly.

“Motherfucker,” the first man said,“we know who you are.”

The words chilled him.This wasn’t robbery or casual sport. Now or never, he thought, and he tried to dodge between the two men in front of him.The second man gave way, and for an instant Michael thought everything might turn out all right.Then the first man swung him around by the shoulder and hit him in the stomach.

It was a serious punch, and though Michael tried to fall away from it, still it took him to his knees. His lungs emptied and refused to fill again, and his vision narrowed to a two-foot radius directly in front of him.Then somebody shoved him from behind, and he went face down into the asphalt, scraping his chin, nearly smashing his glasses.

“Hold him,” said the first man, and Michael made it onto all fours from sheer panic before two of them caught his shoulders and pushed him to the ground.

“Help!” Michael shouted.A passing truck covered his voice.

The first man knelt next to him and grabbed him by the hair.“You yell again and I smash your face into that curb over there, knock every tooth out your stupid head.You be still, this be over with in a second.”

He let go and stood up.“Get his legs.”

The fourth man lifted Michael by his ankles.When he felt the hands go around his waist and start to unbuckle his belt, Michael tried to thrash and kick himself free. His arms were coming out of their sockets, and the first man kicked him in the ribs, hard enough to make everything go gray again. Stunned, he felt his pants and underwear slide down his legs.

“Damn, man, your asshole stinks.” Michael no longer knew which voice was which.“Don’t you wipe yourself?”

“Probably shit hisself.”

“Shut up and give me that.And hold him tight.”

In spite of the roaring panic in his ears, partly claustrophobia and partly the more conscious fear of rape, he did register a strange, liquid noise above and behind him.Then he felt a hand parting the cheeks of his bare ass.

He began to scream. It was not a high-pitched, horror movie scream, but something low and ragged from deep in his guts.Then a fist hit him in the side of the head, right over the metal stem of his glasses, and the pain was so intense that he stopped struggling and lay passively as something wet and burning exploded across his rectum.

Then the pressure was gone and the men were laughing, slapping each others’ hands, from the sound of it. Still he lay on the asphalt, meaning to get up, unable to remember the muscle sequence required to do it.

Part of his mind still functioned, analyzing what he’d felt, thinking, hoping, that it hadn’t been an ejaculation—there had been too much liquid at once, no penetration, only the sudden heavy spray. The first voice said,“Time to go back to Texas.You understand what I’m saying?”

“I don’t think he hear you,” another voice said.

“Nod your head if you hear me, so I don’t have to hurt you again.”

Michael found that he could nod.

“See, he hear me all right.You go back to Texas, there be no more trouble.”

The voices, still laughing, moved away.When he could no longer hear them, Michael rolled onto his side. He reached between his legs, and his hand came away covered with thin, sticky brown fluid. He sniffed at it. Coca-Cola.The empty plastic bottle lay a few feet away.

For a second he was giddy with relief, then he began to feel the pain—in his raw chin, in his ribs and stomach, in his temple, in the sockets of his arms. He pulled up his pants and looked around to see if there had been any witnesses.The streets were empty. He saw Denise’s car, thought of her sitting inside a few feet away while they worked him over, and the image was so humiliating that he had to push it away. He got in his car and locked the doors and started the engine.Then, as he was backing out, he saw a movement in the darkened upstairs gallery of the Heritage Center.Too tall for Denise.What was his name?

Charles. How naïve he’d been to let Charles see the drawing of the tattoo. No wonder he jumped when he saw it. He probably had one himself.

He drove to the hotel with both hands on the wheel, eyes on the road, thoughts churning. He felt one leg already stiffening as he climbed the stairs.

With the door double locked, he emptied his pockets, took off his belt, and stuffed his torn trousers in the kitchen trash. He put his underwear in after them, then his T-shirt and socks as well. He started the hot water running in the bathroom and did a quick assessment in the mirror.There was a patch of dried blood the size of a shirt button on the point of his chin that burned without his touching it. His lower lip was split in the middle. His left temple looked bigger than the right, and bruises were already showing dark pink on his left ribs and abdomen. Both knees were scraped, the right worse, neither bleeding badly.

He showered for half an hour, washing his crotch repeatedly, shampooing twice, mostly letting hot water beat down on his neck and shoulders.When he got out he treated the scrapes with peroxide and Betadine and put band-aids on his knees. He took three aspirin and held a baggie of ice against his temple. I can take care of myself, he thought.The way I always have. He called Southwest Airlines and converted his open return ticket to Austin into a reservation for 12:55

the next afternoon.Then he turned off his cell phone and unplugged the room phone in case Denise should call. He put on a clean pair of drawstring pajama bottoms and got into bed and turned out the lights.After a minute he got up and turned the bathroom light on and left the bathroom door open wide enough that he could see into all the corners of the room.

Only then did he begin to shake.

Wednesday, November 3

He slept, eventually. His nightmares were not explicitly about the assault. He was trapped in the back seat of a driverless car rolling downhill. Later, he needed to get to an urgent destination and found himself in turn on a bicycle, a scooter, on foot, eventually crawling on his belly. He was packed and ready by nine o’clock. He drove to the airport and turned in the car and checked his bags, then sat at the gate and pretended to read Rolling Stone. He had to hold his right knee out straight, and he wore sunglasses to hide the blackening at the outside of his left eye. He’d been unable to shave. His ribs, though he was reasonably sure they were only bruised, hurt every time he breathed. This too shall pass, Denise had said.

Eventually they called his flight. He was in the first boarding group.To his surprise he failed to get in line.The second and third groups boarded, then the standby passengers.When Southwest paged him, he didn’t respond.The flight

seemed to have nothing to do with him.When they closed the door to the jetway, it was 1:05. At the main counter he arranged for his luggage to be flown back to rdu. He was a veteran of lost luggage and canceled flights and so had two days’ worth of clothes in his carry-on.The woman was not sure if she would be able to refund his ticket. He told her it didn’t matter. She asked him twice if he felt all right.

The rental agency gave him the same silver Echo, newly vacuumed and scented. Michael sat in the lot and turned on his cell phone.The voice mail alert flashed at him. He called Donald Harriman’s cell and got Harriman himself.

“Surprised to hear from me?” Michael asked.

“I’m sorry?”

“Surprised I’m still in town? And not on a plane to Texas?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Where are you?” Michael asked.

“I’m walking home from campus. I intend to have a late lunch and grade some papers.”

“Why don’t you give me your address and I’ll meet you there?” “As I said, I have papers to grade, and this afternoon is not really

convenient—”

“I think you’d rather talk to me alone than talk to me and the cops, but it’s your choice.”

“What do the police have to do with it?”

Michael heard the nerves in Harriman’s voice.“Four men attacked me last night. I got a chance to pull one of their sleeves back, and I saw your tattoo.”

As bluffs went, it felt like a good risk.“What do you call it, the Four Moments of the Sun? So I think your group, which supposedly has no name, is still going strong.And Charles at the Hayti Heritage Center is a member, as are you. I

don’t think it would be hard to prove once somebody knew where to look.” “What do you want?”

“Information.And I’ve got some to trade.”

The address Harriman gave him was across the street from the unc campus, off a labyrinth of narrow lanes that were more like alleys. Michael parked behind a maroon bmw that was either new or maintained at considerable expense.The house itself was a sprawling one-story ranch in tasteful gray brick. He rang the bell, and a moment later Harriman let him in.

The marble-tiled foyer opened into a dining room with a cathedral ceiling that carried through the living room beyond.There was a lot of low mahogany furniture, with cushions covered in rough fabric of black, gold, and green. The far wall was mostly glass and looked out on birds, exotic landscaping, and a fountain.

“Do you want a drink?” Harriman asked.

“I’d like to sit down. I hurt in a lot of places.”

Michael took an armchair that faced Harriman’s massive green leather recliner.As he sat, Harriman said,“I had nothing to do with the attack on you.”

“The rest of it’s true.Your group is still active, and you’re still part of it.” He watched Harriman’s reaction, then he said,“Even if you didn’t have anything to do with the attack, you knew about it, didn’t you?”Again, no denials.“So, was it Charles’s idea?”

“I’m not going to admit to anything.What deal did you want to propose?”

“The nrc is planning something big, probably violent. I know when and where. I went to the cops with it, but I don’t know that they’re willing to do what it takes to stop it.As they like to point out, the nrc is a perfectly legal organization.”

“And why do you care so much what the nrc does?”

“Because my mother was black. Because my grandfather was part of the nrc and I want to make up for that somehow. Because I know something bad is going to happen and I can’t just stand by and watch.”

“And what do you want in exchange?”

“I want your cooperation. Not just yours, I want your entire group to help me.And no more bullshit like last night.”

“Help you how?”

“Help me get answers to my questions.About my mother, about Barrett Howard.”

“And if I say no, you call the police.And because we’re a black organization, we won’t get the same protection the nrc gets.”

“That’s right.These days they might even call you terrorists.You could wind up in Guantanamo.”

Harriman looked out the window, pondering. Michael was impressed with the man’s control over his emotions. Michael himself was ready to fall apart at a moment’s notice, to start smashing furniture or curl into a fetal ball in the middle of the floor.

“I won’t make you any guarantees,” Harriman said at last. “As you implied, there is something of a power struggle taking place at the moment. Charles, and the younger members, against myself and the old guard. Charles sees no point in vodou unless he can use it directly as a weapon. I think perhaps he’s seen too many cheap horror films.Whereas myself and some of the older members respect the discipline and understand that it provides a vital adhesive that binds us more than our shared goals or heritage.”

“I think Charles would welcome a confrontation with the nrc.” “No doubt.Tell me what you know.”

Michael told him, in detail, about the secret room under Wilmer Bynum’s house, the date on the calendar, the opening of the American Tobacco Campus.

“That’s the only evidence you have? An X through a date on a calendar? I can see why the police were not impressed.”

“It all fits.The Black Star Corporation is billing itself—”

“Yes, I know. Hayti rises again.The nrc would love to make it fall all over again. I don’t doubt you.And I don’t doubt that Charles would, as you say, welcome a confrontation. It would help if we knew what they’re planning. Maybe it’s not a demonstration. Maybe it’s something more ... explosive. Like in Oklahoma City.”

“Can you find out? Don’t you have people in high places? Like in the cops?”

“We might.We’ll look into it. Now what’s your end of the bargain?”

“If my father had a last wish, it was that Randy Fogg go down for killing Barrett Howard. I want enough proof to put him in jail.”

Harriman shook his head.“We’d like nothing better than to prove the same thing.We have no love for Randy Fogg. Unfortunately, there’s no evidence to tie him to the murder. He was in Washington when it happened, with dozens of witnesses. Believe me, we checked. And there’s no way to prove he ordered it.”

“Prove the nrc did the killing and that he was Grand Poobah of the nrc.”

“Dragon.They use many of the same titles as the Klan, but without all that precious K-L

nonsense—klaverns and klockards and such.We’ve tried for thirty years to prove Fogg was Grand Dragon of the nrc and never succeeded.”

Michael said,“We know he and Wilmer Bynum were practically blood brothers, and Bynum was hosting his nrc meetings for him.”

“You’ve made a long chain of suppositions and provided no facts.”

“I want to see what the Durham police got from Barrett Howard’s autopsy. I want to see the whole file on Howard. I’m the one that brought Tommy Coleman in.They would never have found that body if not for me. I’m entitled.”

“You expect me to smuggle you into police headquarters and get you a few hours alone with Barrett’s file? You can’t be serious.”

“You must have somebody in the department. I want them to make a copy of the file.”

Harriman’s eyes shifted as Michael watched. Michael leaned forward, ignoring the pain in his ribs.“You already have a copy, don’t you?”

Harriman looked away.

“Where is it? You have it here, don’t you?”

Harriman sighed.“If I show you the file, will that satisfy you? Will you then go away and let us handle this?”

“No,” Michael said.“In the last few days I’ve lost everything. My father, the woman I thought was my mother, my girlfriend, my job.There’s nothing left. I want to be part of this. I am part of this.” He stopped and took a breath.“But we can start with the file.”

Harriman’s study was expensively and impersonally furnished, like a high-dollar law office.A dark rolltop desk held a green blotter and a banker’s light.A swivel chair in matching wood sat on a forest green Persian rug that ran to the baseboards in all directions. Small African carvings and masks filled in the spaces in a floor to ceiling built-in bookshelf.

Opposite the shelves stood a brass-handled combination safe the size of a refrigerator.

“I must ask you to wait in the hall while I get the file out,” Harriman said.

“What have you got in there, guns?” Michael had intended it as a joke, but Harriman’s scowl told him he’d guessed correctly.

“I must insist,” Harriman said, and Michael backed out as Harriman closed and locked the study door.Through the door Michael heard the sounds of tumblers and handles and the sigh of the opening safe.When Harriman let him in again, the safe was locked, and a plain manila folder lay open on the desk. Rather than the chaotic pile of odd size papers he’d reflexively pictured, it consisted of a tidy stack of 8

1/2 × 11 photocopies.

It opened with an incident report by Sgt. Bishop, followed by transcriptions of his interviews with Tommy and Michael.Tommy’s interview held no surprises, though Michael couldn’t help noticing the haste and errors in the transcription.

Reports followed on the excavation of the corpse and the attempted bombing. He paged through expense reports for the ground-penetrating radar, the jackhammers, the food and beverages consumed by the student workers. Another report summarized 1960s newspaper stories by and about Barrett Howard from the Carolina Times, followed by pages of barely legible printouts from a microfiche reader. Michael had heard about the asphyxiating quantity of reports involved in police work, and this was worse than he’d imagined.

He skipped forward to the autopsy.The State Medical Examiner, who worked out of the unc Medical Center in Chapel Hill, had handled the case personally.

The report ran to 11 pages of word-processed text. Page one summarized the contents, listing the probable cause of death as a “single sharp force injury” to the chest, penetrating the heart. Most of the rest of the report followed the course of the autopsy, step by step, with a detailed description of the mummified remains, what was left of Howard’s clothing, his injuries, and the lack of toxicology results due to the dehydration of the body.After 30 years the internal organs were barely recognizable and could not be weighed.

Essentially what remained was dried skin shrunken down over a skeleton. However, the mummification had preserved a remarkable amount of detail beyond what would have been found in a body that had been buried in the ground for the same period. For example, a skin defect was visible on the back of the head, with an underlying skull fracture.The indications were consistent with blunt-force trauma from an object such as a bottle.

A stab wound in the chest pointed to bony injuries in the rib cage.A sharp instrument appeared to have penetrated the ribs in an area over the heart.The location and angle of the blow was likely to be fatal. No indications of post mortem lividity survived.

Through a happy accident, the me happened to have a copy of Paleopathology in Peruvian Mummies on his shelves, and he’d used the rehydration techniques in the book to restore several skin samples.A photograph showed the Four Moments of the Sun tattoo, the skin remarkably smooth and the pattern clear; the harsh lights of the autopsy room and the high contrast of the photocopy had bleached Howard’s skin to a pale gray.

A second photo showed the deformation in the skull from the blunt trauma, and a third showed the patch of rehydrated skin that included the stab wound. The skin wound did not show much detail, but a fourth photograph showed the impression of the sharp force instrument as it nicked a rib in passing. It looked like the planet Saturn in profile—circular, with a fine cut extending slightly to each side. The incidental findings on the last page of the report identified small particles of leather clinging to Howard’s clothes.

The next document transcribed an interview between Sgt. Frank Bishop and the me where Bishop had pressed for more detail on the murder weapon.

“Given the extraordinary conditions,” the me said,“and the fact that the date of death was over thirty years ago, we can’t do much more than make a few wild guesses.”

Bishop had asked him to do so.

“The findings are contradictory.The weapon could have been an ice pick, or it could have been an extremely thin-bladed knife. Frankly, it looks a bit like both.”

Michael stood up.

“What is it?” Harriman said.

Despite the pain in his body, Michael felt like dancing.The sensation was so delicious that for a moment he didn’t want to share it.

At last he said,“I know what the murder weapon is. I’ve seen it with my own eyes.”

“Go on.”

Michael poked the file with his index finger.“It’s a shoemaker’s awl. That’s why the leather particles. Some of the nrc thugs lured Howard into an abandoned shoe repair shop in Hayti and hit him over the head.Then they brought him out to my grandfather’s farm, along with a cobbler’s awl they found in the shop. And my grandfather killed him, and then he had the nerve to go and put the awl in a trophy case in his living room where he could look at it for the rest of his life, whenever there was a time out in the Duke basketball game.

“Then he called his best pal Randy Fogg to tell him the good news, and Fogg pulled Mitch Antree’s strings.The thugs put the body in the form, and Antree buried it in concrete.”

Harriman frowned.“You say the awl is still in the house?”

“It was two weeks ago, when my cousin Greg showed it to me.”

“Greg Vaughan?”

“You know him?”

“He’s on one of our lists somewhere.Was he involved in the murder?”

“No. He was in California, in basic training, about to ship out for Vietnam. Look, I have to call Sgt. Bishop and tell him.” He pulled his phone out and was switching it on when Harriman grabbed his wrist.

“Wait,” Harriman said.

Michael looked at him.

“How are you going to explain having seen the autopsy report?”

“It doesn’t matter. I saw it, that’s all.”

“It does matter. Bishop isn’t stupid. He’ll know there’s a leak in the department, and it won’t be that hard for him to figure out who it is.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m asking you to wait.Wilmer Bynum has been dead a long time, and Barrett even longer.You don’t need to close the case tonight.You said you wanted to be part of this group. Is that still true?”

Michael thought about it. Solving Barrett Howard’s murder was well and good, but the threat against American Tobacco was immediate.“Yes,” he said.

“Then you have to place the needs of the group ahead of your own.Are you willing to do that?”

“What are you asking?”

“We do have, as you suggested, people in high places.We will see to it that Barrett gets whatever justice he can at this late date. I assure you that I have a personal interest in seeing that done, perhaps greater than yours.As for American Tobacco, we have been training and disciplining ourselves for many years to be ready for a major confrontation. If this is it, we will be there, and we will know what to do.”

“And you want me to stay out of it.”

“If you’re serious about joining us, then your day will come. But not yet.”

“In other words, I should go back to Texas.”

“I don’t agree with the way that message was delivered.And you don’t need to go as far as Texas. But I would advise you to stay well clear of the American Tobacco Campus on Saturday.”

Michael turned toward the door.

“Michael,” Harriman said.

Michael stopped, his back still to Harriman.

“We owe you an enormous debt of gratitude. First for bringing Barrett’s murder to light, and for everything you discovered about the circumstances. And for the warning about American Tobacco. Please know that.”

Michael nodded, once, and let himself out.

As he got in his car, his emotions were upending themselves. Beyond his disappointment was a sense of relief, a readiness to go back to picking up the pieces of his life and career. Beyond that was something darker, a sense that he had forgotten something, as if he’d left home with the stove on. Nothing he tried to match against the feeling seemed to fit—the unanswered calls from Denise on his cell phone, the unresolved situation with Ruth, his need to find work.The very attempt to figure it out depressed him. He picked a new hotel, a Holiday Inn Express on Miami Boulevard. It was a few miles east of his previous location, equally close to the Durham Freeway. This was a tall brown building so new that Michael thought he might be the first to stay in his room.

He unpacked his shaving kit and change of clothes and eased his aching body onto the bed, trying to remember his Aunt Esther’s married name, which he’d read out of Ruth’s address book a few days before. Not Peterson but Pedersen, with a D and Es all around.

Information found a listing in Richmond. Michael dialed it and immediately recognized the voice that answered—feminine, but harsh and low.“It’s your nephew Michael again,” he said. After a long pause, Esther said,“Michael, I wasn’t expecting to hear from you again so soon.”The tone had softened, and at the same time grown wary. “It’s not Ruth, is it?”

“Ruth is fine as far as I know. She’s gone back to Dallas. I need to ask you some questions, for my own piece of mind.”

“Oh dear.What sort of questions?”

“It’s about your father.”

Esther sighed.“When Jack got transferred to Virginia, I almost didn’t come with him. I was afraid of being as close as a day’s drive from the farm. I knew that some day it was going to come back to haunt me.” Unlike Ruth, Esther had shed every trace of her Johnston County accent.

“Did the Night Riders of the Confederacy meet in your basement?”

“Yes,” she said.“Once a month, unless they had to go burn a cross or an innocent man’s house down somewhere. From the time I was old enough to know what was going on until I was old enough to leave.”

“Was Congressman Randy Fogg head of the nrc?”

“Randy Fogg?” She sounded amused.“Wherever did you get that idea?”

“Fogg is a racist, he was close to your father, he had virtually the same agenda as the nrc—”

“Fogg is a completely political monster. He knew better than to associate himself with the Riders. It was too risky, and Fogg never took a risk, never showed an ounce of courage in his life.”

For a moment Michael was confounded. Finally he said,“If Fogg wasn’t the Grand Dragon, then who was?”

“You really don’t know? You knew about the basement and you don’t know that?”

“No,” Michael said.“Please tell me.”

“My father was.Your grandfather. For forty years.”

“Did everyone know it?”

“All the other Riders knew it, as you would expect. Unlike the Klan, however, the Riders never went out in public without their hoods. One of the catchphrases that they bandied around to intimidate people was,‘We could be anyone.’Anyone white, that is.”

“And you’re sure about Fogg? He wasn’t in the background somewhere pulling strings?”

“It was Fogg’s strings getting pulled. My father practically had to call him in the morning and tell him to wake up.The heart went right out of Fogg when my father died. I guess ‘heart’ is not the word.The clarity.The clarity of his intentions. He’s been like one of those radio controlled cars with nobody driving it ever since. Bumping into the furniture, spinning his wheels. People are only afraid of him now by force of habit.”

“Did you hate your father that much?”

“Words cannot convey the depth of it.”

“Because of the nrc?”

“That, and so much more.”

“Tell me.”

“No.” Her voice was flat, final.

“I beg your pardon?”

“There are things that I have never talked about, and never will. I don’t expect I have all that many years left, and I plan to exit with my last few shreds of privacy intact.This conversation has been more painful for me than you can possibly know, and now I’m going to have to say goodbye.”

“One more question, please.A simple yes or no.”

“Go ahead.”

“Did your father kill Barrett Howard?”

“Who?”

“He was a black activist in Durham in the 1960s.”

“That would have been after my time.As far as I know, my father never killed anyone with his own hands. But I would not have put it past him.”

“And there’s nothing more you’re willing to tell me?”

“If you want to know more, ask your mother.”

Michael played his last card.“Ruth is not my mother.”

“Ah.”

“You don’t sound surprised.”

“She was not supposed to be able to have children. I always wondered how it happened that she did.”

“You never had any children yourself.”

“No. Nor did Naomi.We didn’t have the examples of child-rearing that would incline someone to try for themselves.”

“But Ruth did want kids.And she didn’t hate her father.”

“Each of us deals with what life throws us as best we’re able. I wish you luck, Michael, with whatever it is you’re searching for. I would be happy to hear from you again if the subject matter were different.”

“I’m sorry this hurt you,Aunt Esther.”

“I expect I’ll survive.” She paused, then said,“Talk to Ruth.”

The tv failed to hold his attention. He got a sketchpad out of his bag and let his subconscious dictate a few faces at random.Wilmer Bynum, Randy Fogg, his father.The desire came to draw Denise, and he pushed it away. Finally he found himself sketching a face that he could not at first put a name to.Then he remembered the hospital cafeteria and her story of living across the street from Mercy. He’d scrawled her name across an earlier page of the book: Camilla Prentiss.

He turned to a new page and let her face completely fill it, blanking his mind so the details would come on their own. At first he worked in his usual clear, strong lines, then suddenly found himself using the side of the lead and blending it with his fingers, picking out highlights with a corner of his eraser. It got to be eight o’clock. On the freeway outside his window, red taillights shrank and faded into the cold and dark. Denise was probably wondering where he was. Or maybe she wasn’t, which was enough to keep him from calling.

He phoned Southwest Airlines instead.They had his luggage and offered to send someone out with it. He told them he would pick it up himself.

He stopped on the way to the airport for a sandwich, parked in the multistory lot by Terminal A, and got his luggage at the service desk.Then, without conscious plan, he stopped by the main ticket desk and put himself on a flight to Dallas the next morning.

Thursday, November 4

Michael took his seat on the plane and began to clean out his cell phone. The first few calls were from Ruth, first angry then devastated, pleading with him to return his father’s ashes. Her last message was cold, telling him she was leaving for Dallas, if he cared. The calls from Roger overlapped the last from Ruth. He hoped Michael would reconsider. He trusted Michael would not make use of any confidential information that might have come out during their last talks. He felt that Michael’s continued silence was passive-aggressive and quite immature. With each deleted message Michael felt lighter, more relaxed.Then the messages from Denise began. The first few were short.“Michael, where are you? Are you all right?” “Michael, please call me.”

Then they got longer.“It seems like you don’t want to talk to me. I hope to God it’s nothing worse than that. I went by your hotel and they said you’d checked out.This feels like it’s all my fault.”

It hurt to listen, but once he’d started he couldn’t stop. Maybe the next message would be definitive, would tell him what to feel. He melted when she said she missed him, then cooled when she said she didn’t want it to end this way. How, exactly, did she want it to end?

The final message was from 7:32 that morning.“Michael, I know I shouldn’t keep calling. But I’m a little freaked out.There was this ... thing outside my door this morning, sitting on my balcony. It’s like a, like a brown pillowcase or something.And it’s got these tools inside.”

He punched in her work number from memory, his hands shaking. “Denise Franklin.”

“Thank God,” Michael said.

“Michael? Where are you?”

“I’m on the runway at rdu, on my way to talk to Ruth. Never mind that. Are you okay? Did anyone follow you to work?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.What’s this all about?”

“I have totally screwed up and now you’re in the middle of this.” “In the middle of what? Please slow down, you’re scaring me.” “I need you to be scared.And this plane is going to take off any minute, so I have to rush. Do you have anyone you can stay with, not a relative or somebody obvious? Just for a day or two, until I can get back there?” “Yes, probably, but why?”

“That thing on your porch was a message from the nrc.They know I was in their meeting hall, and they’re telling me they know about you. Rachid needs to stay with friends too. Promise me neither of you will go back to the apartment without a police escort.”

“Okay.”

“I want you to call Sgt. Bishop right now and tell him what I told you. He knows I was trespassing on the Bynum farm. He’s going to be pissed that Vaughan found out, but that won’t stop him from giving you protection.” He gave her the number of Bishop’s cell.

“Okay, I’ll call him as soon as we finish.What about you? They must be looking for you, too. Do they have people in Dallas that can find you?”

“I won’t be in Dallas long. Overnight, maybe, no more than that.Then I’m coming back to Durham.”

“You are?”

He tried to read the emotion in her voice. It sounded like hope.“Yes,” he said.“I’m going to have to lie low until Saturday.After that, one way or another, the nrc should be slowed down for a while.”

“One way or another?”

“I’ve learned a lot in the last couple of days.The short version is, Barrett Howard’s activist group is still around, and Dr. Donald Harriman is up to his ears in it. I told him the nrc is going after American Tobacco. If the cops don’t stop them, Harriman’s people will.”

“Oh my God. People could be killed.”

“Maybe,” he said, stung.“If the cops can’t control it.What else was I supposed to do? I can’t let them get away with whatever it is they’re planning. It could be a bomb, a riot, I don’t know what.”

“I’m not blaming you.The nrc started this. It’s just terrifying to think about open race warfare on the streets of Durham.”

“It is war. I never saw it before because I was a bystander. It’s been war ever since Lincoln told the South to give up their slaves. I don’t see any end to it.”

“I’ve never heard you this angry. Is this because of me?”

Michael forced himself to take a long breath.“Maybe,” he said.“I’m also scared, and I don’t know what my life is going to look like if I make it through this. I’m tired of living out of hotel rooms and I’m tired of being alone.”

It was out. In the silence that followed, the flight attendant announced that they were about to push back from the gate and that all cell phones needed to be turned off. Michael said,“Are you still there?”

“Yes,” Denise said.“I don’t like being alone so much anymore either.”

“What do you want to do about it?”

“Can I ... can we see each other? Talk face to face?”

“You know I want to see you more than anything. I’m not the one with the conflicts and the questions.”The words seemed harsher than he wanted.

“I told you from the beginning we needed to go slow.”

“Slow is fine.As long as we’re both going the same direction.”

After another long silence she said,“I don’t want to be without you, Michael.”

“Okay, then.That’s what I needed to hear.”