Whispers in the Night Page 22

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

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

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

  Then his mother died.

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

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

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

  “Dean! How’s life in the Big Easy?”

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

  “How’s the place look?”

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

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

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

  “From losing at craps?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

  “Too many memories?”

  “Too many ghosts.”

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

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

  They just have to believe in you.

  Dean called back a few days later.

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

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

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

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

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

  “What do you mean?”

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

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

  “That’s what they say.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  A few days later my present arrived.

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

  I unwrapped it and carefully removed the packing.

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

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

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

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

  Gathering of the Klans

  Virginia Klans arrive at Sylvan Theatre

  Potomac Park * Washington, D.C. *August 8, 1925

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

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

  “Bruh! Guess you got my little package.”

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

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

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

  “Don’t say I never give yuh nothin’.”

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

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

  “No surprise there.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Yah?” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Enough with this boy shit, okay?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “I can’t believe that.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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