Dominion (8 page)

Clarence punched numbers again, his tenth phone call in the last hour and a half.

“Bowles and Sirianni. How may I help you?”

“Grant Bowles, please. This is Clarence Abernathy.” He waited, flipping through more file cards.

“Morning, Clarence.”

“Grant—so what’s the deal with Dani’s house?”

“It’s borderline as to whether her assets are sufficient to require probate. But since she didn’t have a will, we can probably count on it going to probate.”

“How long is this going to take? And how much is it going to cost?”

“Who knows? Months at the very least. You know my hourly fee. Depends on how many complications we hit.”

“I can’t believe she didn’t have a will.”

“When you had me meet with her a few years ago, to clean up things with her ex-husband and all, I gave her the papers. According to the file here, my secretary followed up with a call, but Dani never returned the papers. At the time I asked her what would happen to her kids if she died, and she said you’d take them.”

“She said what?”

“I’m looking at my notes right here. She said she wanted you to raise them. Said they needed a man and she was sure you’d do it.”

You might have mentioned that to me, Sis.

He felt guilty even thinking it. He’d promised to always be there for her. Of course he’d take the kids.

“We need to get that house up for sale, Grant. I want to get the money into that trust for Dani’s kids.”

“You can’t sell the house until it goes through probate, Clarence. That’s how it works. Sorry.”

“So what do we do with it? We leave it sitting there and it’ll be torn to shreds. You don’t know that neighborhood.”

“I’d recommend somebody live there until this is settled. Maybe it can be rented out.”

“Yeah, and turned into a drug house or something.”

“You’ll have to think of something.”

Clarence hung up, hating the legal system. It was like politics—supposed to help people, and all it did was make life harder for them.

The phone rang. “Hello, Mr. Abernathy. This is Sheila, Councilman Norcoast’s secretary. The councilman wonders if you’re available to speak with him.”

“I haven’t got much time. But I guess I could squeeze him in.” Clarence smiled. It felt good.

“Clarence?” Norcoast spoke with a television anchor voice.

“Yeah?” Clarence tried to sound as unimpressed as he could.

“This is Reg. I know I said it at her funeral, but let me express to you again my deepest sympathy. Danita was a wonderful person. I’m so sorry about your loss.”

Nobody called her Danita. Nobody would, unless pretending to know her when he didn’t.

“Yeah, me too. Thanks for the flowers.”

Paid for with our tax dollars, no doubt.

“You’re very welcome. It’s the least I could do.”

“What’s on your mind, Mr. Norcoast?”

“Call me Reg, please, Clarence. Well, I have an idea of something we can do for your sister and the community.”

Aren’t you a little late for that?

“We’ve decided to kick off our ‘Fight Crime’ campaign a few weeks early. We’re thinking the best way to capture the public’s imagination is to have victims of violence appear at the rally and press conference. So people can see that those getting hurt are real people.”

Of course they’re real people. What other kind of people would they be?

“My assistants are contacting the other families, but I wanted to talk to you personally so you’d know my commitment.”

Yeah. So I can say nice things about you in my column or so people will think I support you. Forget it. Never happen.

“A lot of people know your name, Clarence. You’re highly respected. A role model to the community. You being on the platform, that would be a real boost to what we’re trying to do.”

“I don’t think so,” Clarence said. “I’m not comfortable doing that. Besides, I don’t think it’s good practice for a journalist to make appearances at political events.”

“Oh, no, you don’t understand, Clarence. This isn’t political. It’s part of a concerted effort to reclaim our neighborhoods, to stop the violence, get kids back into school, say no to drugs and yes to opportunity.”

An endless fount of political platitudes. You forgot a chicken in every pot.

“No thanks.”

“But Reverend Clancy, your sister’s pastor, he said he thought you would be perfect.”

“Clancy said that?”

“Yes, he did. He’s going to be up there, kick off the program. So are family members of at least a dozen different people who’ve been killed. This is for our children. Can we count on you to help?”

“I’ll have to think about it.”

“Well, please call me back by tomorrow. The rally is this Saturday, one o’clock at Woodlawn Park. Maybe you can say something?”

“I’m not saying anything.”

“All right, no problem. But I do hope you’ll be there up on the platform. I know it’s something that would have made your sister happy. And it would be a big encouragement to our whole community.”

To whose community? What are you, an honorary black person?

“I’ll think about it.”

“All right, thanks, Clarence. I’ll look forward to hearing you say yes. And again, my deepest sympathies about Danita.”

Clarence put down the phone and shook his head, his profound distrust for politicians reinforced again. Democrat, Republican, Independent, it didn’t matter. He just couldn’t believe these guys were doing anything more than trying to keep themselves in power, cutting deals and taking payoffs. They were notorious for sidling up close to journalists, getting chummy. Reporters joked about this, but Clarence had seen them succumb to political charm, usually without knowing it. He’d determined not to spend time informally with any politicians unless he thought he could get more from them than they could get from him. Politics. Patterson, the
Trib
reporter assigned to the state capital in Salem, had told him, “There’s two things you don’t want to see made. Sausage and laws.”

Clarence was all for laws. It was lawmakers he didn’t trust. He worked to get a jump on his next column, forcing himself not to think about what kept trying to hijack his mind.

Tomorrow’s face-off with Detective Ollie Chandler.

At six o’clock in the morning, Clarence sipped a strong cup of coffee to prepare for the ritual of shave and shower. He stood gazing into his saltwater aquarium, watching the glass steam up from the heat of the cup. The brilliant yellow tangs glided across in formation, while the red-and-white lionfish with its swirling, feather-like spines ominously patrolled what he clearly regarded as his dominion. Hard to believe anything so beautiful could be so deadly.

Clarence loved the order and beauty of the underwater world. It was a world where he controlled the temperature, the water purity, the vegetation, the food, the props. Even the inhabitants. A world he could govern. A world where he called the shots.

His prize possession Eli, the black-speckled moray eel, lurked in the darkness, waiting to scare one of the kids’ friends who came by and tapped on the glass despite being told not to. Clarence chuckled to himself, realizing Eli was more terrified than the children to whom he’d become a legendary threat.

Clarence studied the glowing blue-and-orange Potter’s angelfish and the green-and-blue long nose bird wrasse. He watched as the orange-and-white two band anemone fish darted in and out of his makeshift home. He wondered sometimes how they could stand living in a world so small and artificial. He imagined they must long to live in the adventurous world for which they’d been made, rather than this confined one. Reaching to sprinkle food into the water, he felt certain they must yearn to see beyond the distorted glass, to make sense of the shadowy image they now saw from a distance, the caretaker who provided their food and maintained their environment.

He untucked his shirt and wiped a fingerprint off the glass. There. The world he governed looked perfect now.

You poor dumb creatures don’t even know what you’re missing, do you? You can’t imagine the great oceans beyond. You can’t even see past your little artificial world.

After his shower, Clarence performed the daily ritual of putting in his contact lenses. People wear contacts for different reasons, but Clarence Abernathy wore them because glasses emphasized a flaw. It was never good strategy to give visibility to a weakness. Which was why most people who knew him weren’t aware he was an insulin-dependent diabetic. He took the blood test now: 132. Not bad. Barely above normal. He took two insulin bottles from the refrigerator and stuck a slender syringe into the bottle marked Humulin U, then withdrew twelve units. Next he extracted fifteen units of Humulin R. With his left hand he untucked his T-shirt and injected the insulin, then went to pour his breakfast cereal.

His only other physical liability was, as the doctor put it, anomalous trichromatism. A type of color blindness. He could see the whole range of colors visible to people with normal vision, but he matched colors differently than they. He especially had trouble with greens, often mixing up yellow and green. It was a source of irritation in little ways. Like bringing home Golden Delicious apples instead of Granny Smiths.

He would keep the chinks in his armor invisible. That was critical when you advanced into enemy territory, which Clarence felt he did nearly every day. Especially today, when after finishing his column he would march to police headquarters and demand some answers from Ollie Chandler.

Clarence was eager to get to the office. Still, he determined to read the Bible now, just in case God was keeping score and it would stack up on the side of healing Felicia.

“Name and claim the blessings of God,” he remembered the preacher say in his former church. “Jesus wants you well,” he’d said. “The only reason you don’t have money and health is you don’t ask for it. God takes care of his own.”

The preacher hadn’t quoted many passages, but Clarence looked up those he could remember.

“Well, God, I’m naming Felicia. And I’m claiming her. I’m claiming your healing for her. I don’t know why you let Dani die. But I’m trusting you not to let Felicia die. I’m trusting you to keep your promises.”

Four miles from his house, Clarence pulled up to a stoplight at the corner of Burnside and Powell. His window rolled down and arm leaning out, he glanced at the snow-white Toyota Camry LE on his left, meeting the eyes of the young female driver. He heard a familiar sound—the decisive thud of power locks.

As he pulled across the intersection, he stole a look in his rearview mirror. What was it that terrified people? His skin was rough, weathered as if he’d endured more life and carried more burdens than a man of forty-two should have. But he didn’t look like a killer or a mugger or a rapist. Did he?

He studied the backside of his dark brown hands on the steering wheel, his creamy-white fingernails making a striking contrast. He turned up one of his palms, surprisingly light. It was as if an artist painting his skin had used up all the dark brown paint and only had enough left to spread it thinly on his palms, with none left at all for his nails. If his whole body was the color of his nails, or even the color of his palms, how might his life have been different? Better? Worse? He would never know.

Clarence walked into the
Trib
at eight o’clock, exchanging smiles with Joe the security guard and Elaine the receptionist. Things weren’t as bad now. People were asking about Felicia, but that was okay. He hoped his optimism was infectious enough to influence God.

He went to his desk, sat down, and inserted his tan foam earplugs, preparing to write his column. But he had four hours before his noon deadline. Too much time. The incentive wasn’t strong yet, the mood not quite right. As usual before starting the column, he revisited his inner world, walking through its vast interconnected corridors, picking up things along the way that would work themselves into the column.

In his first few years as a journalist, he’d carried his blackness like a heavy backpack. He wasn’t ashamed of it, but he could never leave it behind. Just the moment he started to forget it, he saw someone staring at him, studying him as if he were a zoo specimen. Whenever he looked at them, their eyes immediately turned the other way. He felt as if some of the whites were overseers, standing and watching him, looking for him to slack off, to pause too long between pulls on the hoe. It was a few years before this feeling subsided.

When he’d worked at the
Oregon Journal
back in the late seventies and early eighties, they’d been curious about him, as his white friends at OSU had been. In a predominantly white college he had still hung with blacks almost exclusively, just as whites hung with whites. The white ball players talked about things utterly foreign to him—camping, hunting, surfing, skiing, even hang gliding. Only the occasional reference to fishing and tennis struck a resonant chord.

Both in college and at the newspaper he found most white folks awkward and self-conscious and over-polite. He supposed he understood them far better than they understood him. No wonder. He had to live in their world; they didn’t have to live in his. White reporters in the newsroom thought they knew him, but they didn’t. That was painfully obvious.

“Clarence,” one of them told him, “you’re the whitest black man I’ve ever known.”

“Thanks, Lee. I suppose that’s quite a compliment coming from you.” There was no use trying to educate some people. He didn’t even know where to begin.

An editor looked at him one day and asked, “You people spend a lot of money on clothes, don’t you?”

“Not a dime,” he said. “Us people shoplift all our threads.”

He couldn’t win. If he looked like a slob, like some of them, he’d be a shiftless black man. If he wore decent clothes, he’d be a materialistic superficial black clotheshorse on the make.

Socializing was a challenge his first few years at the
Journal.
White people tended to be old fashioned, apprehensive, constipated. “White tight” the brothers called it. White folk stood around, schmoozed, talked about current events, and told corny jokes. It wasn’t bad, just a different world with different rules. White parties were weird. Lots of times there was no music. No music at a party? Kind of like no meat at a barbecue. Black parties pulsated with rhythm, throbbing beats, perpetual dancing. A black friend once said to him, “At white parties, nobody sweats.”

Though he’d been tempted to quit more than once, in time Clarence had become more at home in the workplace with whites than he’d ever felt possible. But that’s where it ended. His interaction with them started and stopped at the
Trib’s
front door. In his home, in his personal life, even out in the white suburbs, he didn’t feel close to a single white man. Except Jake. He was still weighing and measuring his relationship with Jake. He knew too many black men who’d thought they had a good friendship with a white man, only to discover it wasn’t what it seemed. A brother at the
Trib
warned him not to think Jake could ever be a real friend. He’d been stubborn enough to ignore the warning but guarded enough to keep his eyes open and let time be the test.

At the
Journal
Clarence had been the only black person in sports. He’d had to learn the white culture, as a missionary must learn a nation’s culture in order to understand its people and not misread their intentions. At first he’d been offended when other reporters would brush by and not acknowledge him with a word or a nod. In black neighborhoods, you didn’t do that unless you were sending a message of disrespect. Eventually he realized this was part of white culture, or at least part of the busy milieu of newspaper culture. What was rudeness elsewhere he came to regard as professional efficiency here.

In 1982 the
Journal
was absorbed into the
Tribune.
Going to work for the
Trib
meant starting over for Clarence, having to prove himself again. He worked long shifts and often came in on his day off. It had been tough on Geneva. He realized why the divorce rate was so high among journalists, as it was among doctors, lawyers, and pro athletes. In the newsroom it was harder than in sports—men and women working long hours with each other, creating a “let’s go have a drink” synergy while their wives and husbands were off in their own world a million miles away. Given this reality, Clarence felt thankful to be holed up in the sports department.

This crew can bug me, but they sure don’t tempt me.

Race was omnipresent, always there though rarely spoken of. It lurked in the shadows, just beneath the surface of words. It skulked around in Clarence as much as some of the whites, sometimes more. Occasionally he’d balked in those early years, thinking the white guys were getting the good assignments while he was covering double-A high school JV water polo.