Our Man in the Dark Read online

  I meet them at their office. The somber atmosphere is intimidating.

  “What do you have for us?” asks Mathis.

  “I’ve been promoted,” I tell him. “I’m thinking about getting a larger apartment.”

  Strobe takes a step toward me. Mathis raises his hand.

  “Congratulations,” says Mathis. “It seems the year has been good to you. What do you have for us concerning communists?”

  “Nothing at the moment. But once I return from my trip, it’s possible that things might pick up.”

  “Trip?” Mathis asks.

  “Martin and I—Gant too—will be taking the message abroad, as they say.”

  “Where?” asks Strobe. “What hotel will you be staying at? Who else will be there?”

  “Gentlemen, once I have all the details I’ll relay them to you.”

  “It’s important you get that information to us before you leave,” Mathis says. “Let’s say by this time tomorrow.”

  “Why the rush?”

  “Who planned this trip?”

  “Gant, of course.”

  “Exactly. He could be using the trip as a cover for some communist rendezvous. If that’s happening, we need to know.”

  “Agent Mathis, I can assure you that I am taking my duties seriously. I understand the severity of the task at hand, and I am approaching it in a systematic and professional way.”

  “Professional?” Strobe is stone-faced and humorless. He goes over to a file cabinet and reveals a manila folder. He opens it and scans the contents with his finger. “Recently, you were seen in the presence of a Reginald Glover, aka ‘Count.’ A known peddler of narcotics—and women—within the Negro community. Is that what you call professional?”

  The nerve of them, to have the audacity to collect my comings and goings in a file and then read them back to me, as if my life is a performance for their pleasure. I want to feed that folder to him. However, I decide to show some restraint.

  “What else do you have in there?” I ask. “Your mother’s brassiere size?”

  Strobe drops the folder. “You son of a bitch!”

  “Strobe!” says Mathis. “Sit down.”

  He does as instructed. His face, now reddened, is augmented by a wild and savage look in his eye.

  “Everyone,” Mathis says as he stares down Strobe, “needs to remember what his job is.”

  He turns to me with a look that practically begs for my forgiveness.

  “John, I don’t want you to think that we were invading your privacy. We were keeping a watchful eye over you to keep you safe. I apologize for Agent Strobe, but you need to leave here with the understanding that you shall return with results. Understood?”

  I look over Mathis’s shoulder at Strobe, who’s loosening his tie and glaring at me without even a hint of blink. “Answer him, for Christ’s sake!”

  “Strobe . . . John, do we understand each other?”

  “Of course, Agent Mathis. You and I are on the same page.”

  I leave their office, but I don’t drive home. Their disapproving tone makes me want to see my mother—not to be protected but to be comforted. The dynamic has shifted so quickly, and I know that I am responsible. I made it obvious how much I wanted to gain their approval, which was ridiculous. Why would I raise the expectations so high if I knew I would have difficulty delivering? But it is too late; they’ve seen how eager I have been to comply, and they’ll milk it for all it is worth. Right now, the power is in their hands unless I do something to change it.

  When I arrive at my parents’ house, my father is drinking whiskey in the dark.

  “Your mother’s asleep.”

  “I figured as much.”

  “So what’s the special occasion?”

  “I can’t visit my parents? Say hello?”

  “It’s in the middle of the goddamn night. You in some kind of trouble?”

  It’s never just chitchat with him. Conversations are always ruthless interrogations.

  “No trouble,” I answer. “I’ve been promoted.”

  “Promoted?” He slides the whiskey toward me. “Sit down.”

  I pull a chair up to the table and sit. I roll the bottle in my palm before I take a swig from it. I feel it burn my throat, then my chest, but I don’t recoil—I stare deep into the old man’s eyes.

  “Tell me about this promotion.”

  “I’m the new assistant financial director.”

  “Ain’t that what you were before?”

  “I was the liaison to the financial director.”

  “Uh-huh. You still the bookkeeper though?”

  “I’ll be an accountant soon, Dad. Not just a bookkeeper. I oversee every penny that goes in and every penny that goes out. I’m good at what I do. I make sure that the money’s there. When you see those Negroes on television—the marches, the campaigns, the programs—I make sure that it happens.”

  He looks at me, then smiles.

  I feel embarrassed in my excitement.

  “When you hear about this promotion?”

  “Today.”

  “You must’ve known you’d get it. Must’ve known for sure.”

  I hate when he does this. “How do you mean, Dad?”

  “Well, you’ve had that brand-new car for a while now. Not that long, but long enough. Yeah, you must’ve been cocksure of the good fortune headed your way.” He sips his whiskey and looks over my shoulder into the shadowy living room. “I’m so old that it feels like I’ve always been an old man. I forget that I was young. But then I look at you and I start to remember.” He leans forward, “You got a woman?”

  I look at the whiskey bottle and scratch at its label. “Yes.”

  “Who?”

  I hesitate for a moment, considering whether to withdraw my answer. “Candice,” I offer. “You remember her, don’t you?”

  He smiles, revealing those large yellow teeth. “Naw, you don’t got a woman. A woman got you.”

  I slam the bottle’s base hard against the table, like a gavel. I grip it tightly, still holding it upright. I look at him, bracing myself for whatever comes next.

  He places his whiskey glass far to his left, preparing a frank path in front of him. “Whatever it is you’ve got yourself into, you’re not cut out for it. You’re not made for it, boy. I’m no fool. I know what you want. This country keeps promises to everyone except colored folks. It makes a man desperate. I ain’t proud to admit it, but I made a good sum of money running liquor. You don’t know what it’s like to wake up in the morning and pray for night, ’cause that’s the only time a colored man can make some real money without attracting too much attention. It’s a hard life. You got to have a stomach of steel to survive it. You can’t grow one—you’ve got to be born with it. You don’t have that kind of strength.”

  I take a large, painful gulp from the bottle to help wash down what he has said.

  “And this Candice—you’re not the kind of man for that kind of woman. She needs a hard, unforgiving man who can control her like everything else in his world. Your mama was like that. Wild. She was wounded in those days. She drank hard and gambled—could roll some bones like a man. Fought like an alley cat, too. Once cut a woman for looking at her wrong. But when I said enough is enough, she knew I meant it. Yeah. When I look at you, I start to remember. I remember what I was and what you’re not.” He brings his glass in front of him and tilts it toward his face. He could be sniffing it or looking at his reflection on the whiskey’s surface, but he does not drink.

  I feel foolish for letting my guard down. He sees a weakness and exploits it; the old habit of an ex-bootlegger. I get up to leave. I stumble a bit; my irritation made the whiskey act fast.

  “Take your time,” he says, not looking up from his glass.

  I make my escape, thankful for the safety of my car. He’s hard to tolerate, but I feel grateful to him for simplifying my situation and giving it the commonality of a blues song. You don’t got a woman, but a woman got you! Truly,
he does surprise me: wooing my mother in her less discriminating days. Drinking, gambling, fighting—my mother? I’ve never met the woman he describes, yet she seems so familiar to me. He saw her potential and reinvented her as he had himself.

  He has given me hope to do the same.

  As I drive to Candy’s, I think about that night Martin and I talked, and I am, for the moment, inclined to grant my father clemency. It seems that all fathers offer their sons trouble and anguish—that must be their duty.

  I’ve grown used to the idea of being alone, and it’s easy for me to forget that sometimes people do experience things in the same ways that I do. Although, it is still surprising that it was Martin who reminded me of this.

  The clock above his door read one thirty, but we both pretended to ignore it. I wasn’t ready for our conversation to end, and he wasn’t ready to go home.

  “So, John, how often do you attend service?” Martin asked.

  “Pretty often,” I lied, “but not as much as my mother would like.”

  He absently scratched his knee. “Whenever I hear that, I am reminded that the majority of His work is done once we leave the place of worship. I’m sure she would understand that.”

  I nodded, maybe a little too eagerly.

  “What about your father? Was he in accounting as well?”

  “No, nothing of the sort.”

  “Oh, for some reason I got the impression that you were involved in the family business—following in the old man’s footsteps . . . like me.”

  “No. My father and I are nothing alike. Our interests couldn’t be more different.”

  He leaned forward, propped his elbow on his knee, and rested his chin on the knuckles of his curled fist. He did not look directly at me, but somewhere off to my right.

  “Fathers can be an overwhelming force in a child’s life, especially for sons,” he said. “The relationship a son has with his father can become frustrating as the child tries to simultaneously please and perform for the parent. I know this firsthand. Imagine the imposing figure of my father—Daddy King, we called him. I desired desperately to free myself from the shadow of his two-hundred-and-twenty-pound frame. Imagine the standard I had to live up to, raised by a man—a sharecropper’s son—who yearned for an education and a life that transcended the toil of the fields so passionately that he was brave enough to begin high school as an adult, eighteen years of age, and ultimately earn a degree from Morehouse. Do you see, John? This is where the pressure for excellence originates. He had already left a large footprint in the struggle long before I could have anticipated my own contribution. Even then, I knew a great deal was expected of me. I struggled. I struggled to find the catalyst that would ignite my potential. Then I struggled for the capacity to understand why this potential was given to me and what I was to do with it. But the pressure to succeed never abated. In school, I didn’t properly attribute the source material for some papers I had written . . .” He smiles to himself for a moment, “I guess that’s a ten-dollar way of saying I plagiarized some papers, and that’s just a five-dollar phrase for ‘I stole.’ But now I can trace it back to a persistent and overwhelming sense of inadequacy. Can you understand such a feeling, John?”

  From my car, I have been watching her apartment for hours, when a tap on my passenger window startles me.

  I lean over to let her in.

  “Don’t think I’m letting you come in,” she says.

  “I’ve got some good news.”

  Up close, my amorous intentions begin to fade. Her current state does not match the image imprinted in my fantasy. Her hair and makeup are a mess, and I swear I detect Count’s odor coming from her. But I continue anyway.

  “I’ve been promoted,” I tell her.

  “Good, John. That’s real good,” she says as she lights a cigarette.

  I roll down a window for ventilation. Anonymous insects croak in the shadowy heat. “I’m going on a trip with Martin soon. Have you ever been to Los Angeles?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Would you like to go? I mean, I think I can arrange it.”

  She looks at me and brings her eyebrows together in disbelief. “What are you trying to do? What point are you trying to prove? That you’re just as much a man as he is? Well, you’re not, John. He will kill you. If you cross him, he will kill you and never give it another thought.”

  Cigarette smoke is the only thing of substance between us. I’ve grown weary of trying to understand her attachment to Count. Maybe the old man is right. Maybe my stomach could use some girding up.

  “Is that what you want—an animal that pisses on everything to mark his territory?” I say. “You want to crawl around on all fours like a goddamn animal?”

  I must have hit a sore spot. Her shoulders drop. She turns away and looks out the window, but there is nothing out there for her.

  “I don’t know what I want,” she says. “I’m still trying to figure myself out. I thought I wanted to be a singer, but it’s kind of hard when no one wants to hear you sing.” She faces me again. “I just know that I can’t do it by myself. Whatever I want, he can give it to me.”

  “What’d he give you tonight, huh? A couple of smacks to the face? Did you mouth off? Make eye contact with another man? Or did you not come quickly enough when called?”

  “It comes with the territory.”

  “Don’t you want something more for yourself? Maybe he can pull a few strings. But is it worth it? Don’t you want to be a better person?”

  “Don’t judge me—or him. You’d trade places with him in a second.” She takes a long drag and blows smoke in my face. “Don’t pretend that you don’t want anything from me. The difference between you and him is that he can walk away when he doesn’t get what he wants. But you’re always there. Always will be. Sometimes that makes me hate you. But you just keep on giving. Why can’t you be like everyone else and take what you want and go? But that ain’t like you. Sometimes I love you. If I had any friends, I’d say you’d be the best one. But sure enough I hate you again, because you remind me I don’t deserve it. You remind me that I wouldn’t do the same for you.”

  “If that’s how you feel, then give me what I want and I’ll never bother you again.”

  “What do you want?”

  “You know what I want.”

  She gives me a wicked smile and tosses her cigarette out of the window. “If that’s what you want, then be man enough to take it. What? You want me to put it on a silver platter for you? If you’re waiting for me to choose you, then you’re wasting your time, because I don’t want you. But here it is.” She hikes her dress to midthigh and parts her legs. “Show me what kind of a man you are.”

  I stare into the dark space between her legs and mutter a desperate incantation to myself, but no magic appears.

  “That’s what I thought.” She pulls down her dress and leaves.

  I arrive at Count’s, but I don’t enter through the front bar. Even at this late hour, it’s surging with music. Instead I head for the entrance in the back that faces the alley.

  I walk past the crumbling brick, through the shadows that reek of piss and garbage that seems to move as I pass. Then I see it: that door made red by the colored light above it.

  I knock on the door in a secret rhythm. Two eyes appear through a narrow slot. The door opens and I enter. The hallway buzzes with moans and screams only vaguely muffled by the thin white walls. At the end of this hallway is a room with the number 21 painted on its door. My girl is waiting inside.

  “Fuck or suck?” she asks.

  “Fuck,” I say so softly I can barely hear it.

  She has a young round face, but there is a manufactured innocence in her eyes. She’s a big girl; my father would say she’s farm-fed. I say she’s zaftig. She looks like her a little . . . not quite. You have to squint your eyes, let your head fall back, and your mouth hang open, and then they are identical. She is twice her size, but that is what I need: two of her. I need to be ov
erwhelmed and hide myself in the shadow between her thighs.

  “Come on, baby. Come for Mama.”

  I’m trying, but I’m too self-conscious and aware of my surroundings. My brace seems to squeak with every thrust. I can hear the wet smack of skin against skin, the soft scrape of tongue against tongue. The noise keeps me there and traps me with my anger for Her. It won’t let my resentment give way to desire.

  I feel a sudden jolt, as if someone had unexpectedly tapped my shoulder. I remove myself from the girl and struggle to get my pants on.

  “What’s wrong?”

  I don’t respond.

  “You’re a real creep! What is your problem?”

  I hear a loud thud, wood splintering, and many pounding footsteps.

  “Raid!” Somebody screams. I hear the policemen shout, “Freeze!” and kick in doors.

  “I can’t be arrested,” I tell the girl.

  “Me neither. They gonna send me back to my grandmama’s house.”

  “Don’t let them find me.”

  “What the hell you want me to do?”

  “Don’t fuckin’ move!” comes from the room next to ours.

  “Run out there and distract them.”

  “Hell, no.”

  I reach into my pants and pull out some money. “Here.”

  “Like this?” she asks pointing at her naked body.

  I give her more money. “Please.”

  She jiggles out of the room. “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!”

  I gather my clothes and crouch in the corner.

  I wait for what seems like a long while, but it’s probably just minutes. The chaos seems to subside and I begin to feel safe. Then I hear footsteps. They are faint at first, but grow louder. They echo down the hallway, then pivot and move into the rooms. I cry a little and pray a lot. The footsteps are closer—so close I think I hear the tips of the laces hit the shoes.

  The door creaks open slowly. I do not move.