Our Man in the Dark (21 page)

“You have your tapes. You've sent your letter. What do you need me for?”

“I'm not sure what letter you're talking about, but the FBI can't go around recording citizens engaged in private acts and then make the tapes public,” says Strobe. “It's beneath us.”

“Personal accounts are more convincing. Are you with us, John?”

Be smart. Bluster and indignation won't work on them. It never has. I need to stay put until I can think of a better move.

“Yes,” I say. “I'm with you.”

For a moment that seems to satisfy Mathis, but his attention shifts to the door and the mysterious figure lurking on the other side of it. No one moves. Whoever it is we can hear him breathing. The doorknob turns, producing a clinking sound that makes its handler stop and try it again. This time, the door opens slowly.

Mathis jumps up and turns over his chair in the process. Strobe reaches for his gun. The old man, a Negro holding a mop in a bucket, is silent and still.

I give the agents a pitiful look, and the old man a comforting pat on the shoulder. “You should get that lock fixed,” I say as I walk out.

The room is smoky and appointed with dark wood and leather. A cone of light shines down on us through the nicotine cloud. Martin puts his arm around my shoulder, bringing me closer to him. “Thank you,” he says, patting my chest with his free hand.

There is an audience—all of them men, and all of them in gray suits, but their faces are blurred like fogged glass.

I put my arm around him to complete the embrace, but when I bring back my hand, I am holding a letter opener with blood on the blade. I look at the weapon, then at him. His look of horror mirrors my own.

I open my mouth to apologize, but my voice does not follow; the only sound I make is a loud mechanical shriek.

My phone rings. I yawn and roll over to answer it. My mother greets me with a long empty sigh followed by silence.

“What's wrong, Mama?”

“Talked to Mrs. DePlush the other day. You remember her, don't you? You went to school with her daughter. Hope I didn't wake you. Thought you might still be up, being a night owl and all.”

“Mama . . .”

“He ain't come home yet.”

I look at my clock—damn near two in the morning.

“Don't worry about it, Mama. Go back to sleep. I'll go get him.”

I get dressed and then start the long drive out to Mike's bar. I hate that he's gotten me out of bed for this, but there is a certain pride I feel in coming to my father's rescue—running out into the vast and deep uncertainty that lies hidden in the night, saving him from drowning—saving him from himself.

I walk into Mike's and look around at the desperate, lonely souls, a bunch of buzzing barflies that have lost their way inside a maze of
wonder, temptation, and danger and have forgotten how to get back outside. They are all white, except for the one Negro sitting at the bar by himself.

Mike comes from around the bar and stops me at the door. “Look, I don't want any trouble. We already got one in here and that's enough. Not everybody is as . . . progressive as I am.”

I look away from Mike's big broad shoulders and barrel chest and into his eyes so that he can see my face. “It's me, Mike.”

“Oh. Hey, John,” he says. “Sorry about that. He's at the bar.”

Mike's an ex-con who used to work for my father's landscaping business. When he got out of jail for manslaughter, my father was the only one who would hire him. Eventually, Mike was able to save enough to open a pawnshop, grease some palms, and open this bar. He was always grateful to my father for giving him a job that didn't require him to degrade himself completely. Mike repaid him by letting him come into his bar, even before segregation had begun to weaken. But that situation lets me know just how much of an unjust world this is: a white ex-con can buy a business and a bar and condescend to my father by letting him come in here and drink himself to death.

I go over and take the stool next to my father's. The man on the other side of me is already sloppy-drunk. He finishes off his drink with a hard swallow and slurs, “Who keeps leavin' that door open? All these goddamn flies keep comin' in here.”

Mike grabs a mug, holds it under the spout, and wrenches open the tap. He turns to the irritated man and slams down the mug so hard it sends a small wave of beer onto the counter and into his lap. “This one's on the house,” says Mike. “Drink up.”

The drunk gently brushes off his lap, picks up the drink, and before tilting it toward his lips, says, “Mike, you always are the gentleman.”

My father nurses his drink and only acknowledges my presence with a grunt. I already know why he's here. I never remember the date, but I remember that look—and his face is the only calendar I need. It's his birthday. Fred's birthday. My dead brother's birthday.

“C'mon, Dad. It's getting late, and you've had too much to drive home by yourself.”

“Car won't start. That's why I'm still here.”

“Dad, how long are you gonna drive that Edsel? Why don't you let me get you a new car?”

He looks at me. “I don't need you to get me shit, man. It's an okay car. Just ugly as hell.”

He slams his drink down after taking a gulp that makes him wince. He grabs both elbows and leans forward, emitting something like a sigh and a gasp.

He loved the son that came before me, before he met my mother, made with a woman he was never married to. Fred suffered a head injury—he jumped from a tire swing at the edge of a creek and dove head-first into the shallow water. He met with the rocky bottom a lot sooner than he expected. But according to my father, the delirious boy walked two miles—dazed and bloody—just to die at home. My father no doubt loved him. I've never seen pictures of him, but I'm sure he must have been a strong and handsome boy. Dad's spitting image.

He stands and grabs my shoulder, then my neck—firmly, in that way that fathers do to their sons. That act that says I love you and I'm proud of you in more ways than I can show or say, so I'm just going to do this simple gesture.

But then I realize he is just trying to steady himself after too much drink. His legs don't have any steadiness to them yet.

“Give me a few more minutes, son,” he says as he sits back down and knocks on the bar for another dose. “I'm not ready yet.”

I decide to smoke outside until the old man is ready to leave. Across the street, the neon sign in front of Lucky's diner catches my attention. It glows lucently over the large encompassing window that makes the place look like an enormous aquarium. Inside, the patrons are hovering over their lukewarm coffees, their collection of cigarette butts and greasy plates under jaundiced fluorescence. No one seems to be bothering anybody. Everybody maintains their invisibility, lonely souls only aware of themselves. It seems like a place I'd be comfortable in. For a moment, I think about going in. Lucky's has been desegregated recently, but I don't see any Negroes inside and I've seen enough trailblazing for one evening.

But then I see Mathis sitting inside, and this sends a shock through me that deadens my good leg. With a folded newspaper and cigarette hanging precariously from his lip, he leans back and lets out a puff of
smoke. I quickly retreat into the alley between Mike's and a trade school. Shielded by the backstreet darkness, I watch for a long while, amazed that our worlds have collided in this way. And it's here that I become aware of his vulnerability.

My head becomes hollow. All sound disappears, except the question: If they are watching us, who is watching them? Just by asking that question—epiphany isn't strong enough—suddenly in the darkness, a gilded path presents itself before me.

Something like half an hour passes. Mathis gets into a black Ford when he leaves the diner and drives onto Luckie Street. The old man can occupy himself with another drink. I'll pick him up later.

I get into my Caddy and follow him, just to see how far I can take it, but he makes a turn onto Jones, then Northside, and he disappears into the darkness. I've already lost him, but everything is bright and clear in my mind.

These are hard times, and they seem to be calling for a far more aggressive approach than the one that Martin has been offering. There is a man up north who uses just a letter, a symbol,
X,
for his surname. He tells us to shake the enduring ties to our former masters and rid ourselves of our slave names. I think of my own name: Estem. My great-great-grandfather was a slave owned by a Spanish-Frenchman named Esteban-Margeaux. When slavery finally ended, my grandfather couldn't even read or spell the name his old master had given him.
Esteban-Margeaux.
All he could write was E-S-T-E, followed by an M.

Estem.

Even in my name, I bear the exclusive brand of the Negro—cursed by society with woeful limitations, but blessed by nature with an uncanny knack for reinvention.

I give the agents a call, but not from my usual place; I'm much closer this time. I tell them that I won't be making it to our rendezvous, that something's come up, and then I wait in front of their office building for a very long time, until the streets empty and the sky becomes dark. I see both of them. I could put the tail on Strobe, but he is just an ornamental pillar. Mathis is the keystone; weaken him and the whole thing comes tumbling down.

Again, I follow him up to the intersection a few blocks away. I suspect the beginning of a pattern: Left off Peachtree, right on Sixth, straight on Spring. I commit it to memory and keep my distance. I don't want to get too close.

The trail leads to a large square box, adorned for no functional reason with dead gray concrete columns. Mathis's car drives toward the
darkness under the building—some sort of underground parking lot.

I wait again for a while. Many cars leave, but not one of them belongs to Mathis.

A few days later, I finally meet up with the agents. I offer them some bullshit story about how Martin's personal behavior is causing concern at the SCLC, and there is talk about having Abernathy replace him. All the while, I think about how to get to Mathis. I thought the story would be some sort of peace offering and that the sensational aspects would smooth things over for missing our meeting. But Mathis just sits across from me, his legs crossed and an unlit cigarette crammed in the corner of his mouth, and taps a matchbook from the Quiet Time Motel rapidly against the desk. There's a sleeping hillbilly on the cover, and I watch his head bounce up and down.

I finish my story. Mathis's unlit cigarette makes me hungry for my own. I reach into my pockets for my lighter.

“Don't,” Mathis says.

I withdraw my hands, then cross my arms.

“This is the information we waited days for? Listen,” says Mathis, “when we make an appointment, you keep it. If you can't make it, it'd better be life or death.”

I look at him more closely. I've never seen him this irritable. His eyes are bloodshot, he needs a shave, and his shirt looks like it has been working overtime. All this irritability and nervous tapping must be due to all those late nights at Lucky's diner and their ulcer-inspiring coffee. Or is it something else?

“Mathis, I apologize. It won't happen again.”

He stands. “You're goddamn right it won't happen again!”

“Take it easy,” says Strobe.

“You people just don't get it! You think you can just press a goddamn button and we come running. You think we're just government machines and we don't have lives of our own?”

“Mathis . . .” Strobe says.

I sit quietly, taking a peculiar interest in this breakdown.

“Is that it, dammit? You don't think we're people too? We've got
lives—children, bills, taxes, mortgages—just like the rest of you.” He gets about an inch from my face. “And all I ask is that you have the decency to keep a goddamn appointment when you make one!”

“Dick,” Strobe says, placing a hand on Mathis's shoulder. “Enough.”