Whispers in the Night Page 23

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

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

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

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

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

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

  There were only two explanations, internal or external.

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

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

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

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

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

  That was the hate I heard, not Dean’s, but the raw fury of the hungry ghosts of America, speaking through Dean’s mouth like ventriloquists through a dummy.

  I fell asleep on the couch in front of the photo, sure I had it all figured out, and was going to let Dean know first thing in the morning.

  I woke with my worst hangover since high school.

  There’d been some major epiphany the night before, but the details escaped me, scraped away with the rest of my memories of the night by pain. I cleaned up as well as I could, put dishes and glasses in the sink before I made coffee. There were scribbles on a pad on the desk, a map or diagram like a family tree with roots in Jerusalem ending in New Orleans, branches through Europe and North America, “Knights Templar” and “Ku Klux Klan” scrawled at either end. I remembered something about evil as organic or viral, that the photo had seemed significant; all that really remained was a churning in my stomach, a sense of foreboding, that there was something very wrong with Dean and not just a drinking problem.

  I decided to call Lynn later and ask her how she felt. It was possible I was only overreacting to Dean blowing off more steam than usual. It was a tense time for them; I had to remember that when I brought up the subject with her.

  In the living room I turned on the TV. After 9/11 the biggest change in my life was that I turned on local news as soon as I woke up, to see what had happened overnight. It looked like a quiet morning until they got to the weather.

  While I sipped coffee and washed down a handful of aspirins for my head, the forecast went from New York’s heat wave to a hurricane off the coast of Florida called Katrina. I didn’t pay attention at first, but when they started talking evacuation and New Orleans I turned it up, heard enough to make me swallow my pride and call Dean.

  The phone rang for a while. No machine or voice mail picked up. I imagined the sound ringing through the worn yellow house, echoing off bare cracked walls. I got ready to hang up. Maybe they’d left already. The ringing stopped. There was silence, then Dean’s voice, rough, as if he’d been sleeping. Or drinking.

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s me. I’ve been hearing bad weather reports. . . .”

  “Bruh, wassup?” He dropped the phone. I heard it rustle as he picked it up and put it back in his ear. “I’m busy here.”

  “Yeah, look, there’s a class-four hurricane coming in, they’re talking about evacuating New Orleans.”

  “S’what damn bitch downstairs says. Not leavin’ my home, boy. Don’t need damn niggers tellin’ me what to do. Niggers and illegals why I ain’t got no work, why decent God-fearin’ white men can’t find jobs no more. . . .” His breathing was heavy, labored. I knew Dean had a temper; I’d seen him reduce teamsters to near tears, but he’d never lashed out at me.

  “Slow down. Stop.” I held it together, kept myself from launching into a speech. “This isn’t like you.”

  “Maybe you don’t know me good as you thought.”

  “No. I know you. Something’s wrong. It’s like something down there . . .”

  Dean laughed it off. “What, boy? Go ahead and say it.”

  I couldn’t.

  A flash went off in my head and I saw the photograph.

  I remembered everything I’d thought sitting in front of it the night before, as insane as it all seemed now. The infectious pack nature of ancient evil ac
cidentally unleashed by the Knights Templar and carried to the new world like a plague. Dean taunted me as if he knew exactly what was in my head, dared me to say the words and hear how ridiculous they sounded out loud.

  “Say what’s on your mind, boy.”

  It was as impossible for me to believe Dean was possessed by evil spirits that fed on racism and fear, as it was to believe he’d always been like this, that his easy smile and our long hours of conversation had been a mask, a pretense. That was more terrifying than believing in monsters.

  “What is it, boy? You think I been bit by a hungry ghost? Superstitious enough to believe in nigger crap like that?” He started humming, some old rock relic I couldn’t quite make out. I heard things move in the background, like he was pushing boxes around, or digging through them like he’d lost something.

  “You have to get out of there. Forget this fight. Go downstairs, pack some bags, lock up, and get the family out of town for a few days. Just go to the airport, I’ll charge tickets, you can fly up here. . . .”

  “Can’t leave. Got work to do, boy. Maybe your kind don’t get that, but down here we take care of business.”

  “Let me talk to Lynn.”

  I heard a dial tone and got a busy signal every time I called back. After a few tries I got the message and left for a drink to slow the creeping dread in my gut.

  Excelsior was having another quiet night.

  There were still enough people for me to blend in and be alone in the crowd. I ordered a beer and before I’d half finished it saw a blond white guy in his late twenties notice me from the end of the bar. I wasn’t in the mood for company, but before I could break eye contact he smiled and wandered my way. He wasn’t my usual type, small, wiry, and a little too friendly, like a terrier, but cute.

  “Hey,” he said when he reached my side, and signaled the bartender as if he was just there to order.

  I nodded.

  “I don’t usually see many black guys here. Too bad.”

  “Yeah, well, at these prices, you won’t see many more.”

  He pulled out a twenty and slapped it down on the bar. “Next one’s on me, then. Gotta keep you coming back.”

  “I’m kidding,” I said. “It’s an old joke, about a bartender and a horse.” I let him buy my next beer, anyway.

  “Yeah? Comparing yourself to a horse?” He swayed a little, rested his hand on my thigh as his smile broadened. I could tell he was more than a few beers ahead of me. “What’s funny about that?”

  “What? No . . .” I laughed and started to explain, realized we were past any pretense of intelligent conversation. He leaned closer and I let him kiss me as his fingers explored the front of my pants, found what he was looking for, and squeezed. His mouth tasted of beer and cigarettes, but his tongue was warm and wet in my mouth, and his hand was doing a good job of convincing me to let him go further.

  I didn’t bring guys home from bars often. The few nights I did were like this one, when all I needed was someone warm beside me to pull my mind from whatever bothered me back to my body and its needs. We left our beers unfinished and walked the few blocks to my place.

  Outside, back in the real world, we looked like a couple of straight buddies barhopping down Fifth Avenue, while he whispered dirty comments under his breath about what he’d do to me once I got him home.

  We raced up the stairs and into my hot apartment, tumbled onto my bed, moist shadows in the dark, undressed each other, and twisted on the sheets like snakes tying each other into knots until I heard the words hiss out of his wet lips . . .

  “Yeah, that’s it. That’s my sweet nigger.”

  I shoved him away, rolled out of bed, and turned on the light, stared at him like I’d just walked in on a naked stranger.

  “Okay,” I said. “I don’t need that right now.”

  “What’s wrong?” He looked sincerely baffled as he stood, his pale boner poked up like a raised eyebrow. “Shit, what I said? Everybody says it. No big deal anymore, right? Hip-hop made it okay, they say it on MTV and BET all the time, know what I mean, mah niggah?” He said the last with a broad urban accent, laughed as if it was funny, then saw I hadn’t joined him.

  “Do you know how many black parents and grandparents died to keep me from being called that? I don’t care how you spell it. You gots to go. Now. Get the fuck out of my house, faggot.” I shook my head, pulled on my pants.

  “Damn, bro,” he started, but stopped when he caught the new look I gave him and put on his clothes.

  “Yeah. Not so funny now, is it, queer? Didn’t we make those words okay, too?”

  I walked him out, silent, as furious at myself as with him for playing his hot black stud long enough for him to think he could say those words and have them excite me. After he left, I double-locked the door behind him, as if that could keep out what I was trying to escape.

  Whatever it was.

  The storm was coming.

  They were past warning; it was on its way, tore along the Florida coast. I flipped channels to follow the coverage, stayed whenever I saw long lines of cars leaving New Orleans, the mayor and the governor of Louisiana urging citizens to abandon their homes and get to safety.

  The hurricane was hyped so hard by the media it was hard to believe they were serious, that it could really be that bad. What they predicted sounded epic, the kind of biblical disaster we were used to seeing in other countries on TV. The idea that New Orleans could be washed out of existence seemed insane despite digital simulations that showed us how and why; how could anyone in power leave levees that unprotected in a city built below sea level? I stopped only to make dinner, watched coverage until I fell asleep on the couch as the sun went down.

  The phone rang. I woke in the dark.

  “Hey, boy.”

  It was Dean. A bad connection or my imagination made his voice sound distorted, off-pitch; it slid in and out of range like a digital movie effect.

  “Can you hear it, boy?”

  I reached over and turned on the light next to the couch. The room looked the same as always, possessions intact, the clutter I never keep cleared for long still strewn, but it all felt alien, like I woke up in free fall, my apartment inexplicably in outer space. There was an air of exploration, like I was in a new world where anything could happen, finding my footing for the first time.

  “It’ll be here soon.”

  “What’s that? The storm?”

  He laughed, the same choked chortle I’d heard before, like he was dying of consumption. “Ain’t no storm. It’s the dark that’s comin’. Not dark like you, nigger, but real dark, deep dark, deeper than night, blacker than black, so deep nothing gets out. It’s calling me, boy, like God called to Abraham. It’s awake and hungry and ain’t going back to sleep until it’s been fed.”

  I froze; his words echoed the fantasy that haunted me since the night I’d fallen asleep in front of the panorama. I’d never admitted it to him, never spoken the words aloud. There was no way for him to know. “What are you talking about, buddy? Doesn’t sound like you.”

  “You sure right there, boy.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You’re so bright. What do you think?”

  I looked up at the sepia-toned Klansmen over my desk. Some looked directly into the camera like they could see me, made me half afraid Dean could see what they saw, that they were all connected across time and space. “Cut it out.”

  “Why? Not so sure there’s not somethin’ out there can push people past the limit? Put icin’ on the cake, turn a simple muggin’ into vicious murder, date rape into a weeklong torture session? Not so sure you’re always in control?” His voice was soft, seductive, an old-time movie country lawyer selling his case to the jury, Daniel Webster defending the Devil.

  “You’re talking crazy.” I was frozen, unable, unwilling to believe what I feared the most.

  “You want to hear crazy? Listen to this, nigger.” He was on his feet, walked downstairs to the tile
d kitchen wearing the headset phone.

  “Hey,” I started, but he cut me off.

  “What?” Dean laughed and coughed at the same time; one rolled into the other, almost a death rattle, dry but filled with mucus. “You ain’t a nigger? Any more’n that nigger bitch asleep in the bedroom?”

  “Stop it.”

  “Stop what, cocksucker? I’m just getting started.”

  He laughed again and I knew this wasn’t some kind of game or sick practical joke. Money stress, the move, something had pushed him too far to come back, over some edge I hadn’t seen coming—that or something else. I heard kitchen drawers open and close, silverware rattle.

  A butcher knife clanged as it hit a cutting board.

  I recognized the sound because I knew the knife, had used it to help make dinner in their Jersey home, sharpened it myself the last time I was there and chastised Dean for not keeping a better edge on the blade. I wondered if he’d taken my advice, wondered how sharp the knife was now as I listened to his footsteps leave the tiled kitchen and walk into silence on the carpeted hall.

  “Hey, what’s up?” I asked, tried to sound casual.

  “Just cleaning house, boy. Got work to do. Some folks don’t seem to know their place. But I’ll be taking care of business every day, and every way. . . .”

  He started singing the old Bachman Turner Overdrive song aloud. I recognized it when I heard the lyrics; it was what he’d been humming for weeks upstairs while he talked to me on the phone. The way he chanted the words broke the spell that held me frozen. The only place he could be going was to the bedroom.

  With a butcher knife.

  I stood up with no idea where to go. To the police? The airport? Even the fastest flight would get me there hours too late. I couldn’t hang up as long as I could use the phone to hear what Dean was doing, and I couldn’t call his local precinct on my cell without him hearing me.