'You hate black people?'
'No.'
'You think they should stay poor and get AIDS and shit?'
'No.'
'You think black people stupid?'
'No.'
'I think you do. I think you got ideas about black people.'
'I'm sure you've got a few ideas about white people.'
'You hate the black man.'
'No.'
'You hate his superiority.'
'No.'
'You hate his sexual prowess.'
'No.'
'You hate everything about him.'
'You hate white people?' I asked.
He breathed through his nose. 'Yes.'
'You hate the white man?'
'Yes, indeed I do.'
A girl poked her head inside. Her lips were the color of taxis. She was wearing high heels, a thong, and a fringed top. All the color of taxis.
'Come here, LaQueen.'
'Oh, I know what you want,' she said in a high, happy voice that suggested little pills that gave people high, happy voices. She saw me. 'Who this?'
'He just some white dude who don't know what the fuck he doin'.'
'You want some fun?'
'Come here. Like my daddy used to say, girl, you look better than a government check.'
She glanced at me playfully. 'Don't look, mister.'
I looked. She knelt down between his huge jellied thighs, spread the red robe. But all I could see was the lovely dark violin of her back, her ankles together, heels sticking out.
'Slow, baby.' Then he lifted her face off of him. 'You love that thing, don't you? You love my monster.'
'I do, baby.'
'Say it, say I love your monster.'
'I love it, H.J. You my diesel nigga.'
He pressed her head back onto him. Then he looked up to address me, over her bobbing head. 'My auntie tells me you- you sent my Uncle Herschel out into cold weather and he had- a heart attack. Everybody who know Uncle Herschel know he got a bad heart.'
'I don't know what happened to him. He was working for Jay Rainey.'
H.J.'s feet were tapping a kind of slow rhythm. I saw a gun strapped to his ankle. 'You're takin'- money from him, it's the- same thing.'
'That's not exactly what-'
H.J. looked at me, showed his gold teeth. 'You want my blow job?'
'No thanks,' I said, coolly as I could.
' 'Cause you lookin' like- like it looks good to you. I seen your eyes.' He glanced at the girl's head. 'Looks tasty.'
'No thanks,' I said.
'What- something wrong with my woman?'
'No,' I said.
'Not good enough for you?'
'I didn't say that.'
'Maybe she too black for you.'
'No.'
'See, the white man like you, he scared of the black woman. And the white woman, she want the black man. And the black woman, she ain't interested in the white man. They all want the black man, see. Same for the Chinese and the Spanish. Once they go black they never go back!' He let his hand fall on the girl's head, rubbed it, and smiled at me hatefully. 'Maybe you need to learn to appreciate. You know, I ask LaQueen-she'll do you, after me. She may not want to but she will. Ain't that right, baby?'
She nodded, made a humming, filled-mouth affirmative.
'So then you could see for- yourself, boy.'
I said nothing. We were living in different movies, both terrifying. H.J. whispered to the girl, 'LaQueen, go easy there.' He lifted his freaky sunglasses up to his forehead and stared at me with oddly small and sensitive eyes set on his large cheeks. 'My auntie, she say they found Herschel's ass out on the bulldozer, frozen. Frozen! How you let a black man freeze, boy? That don't go down, you know what I'm sayin'? Something wrong in all this, and we gonna find that Poppy or Popeye or whatever the fuck he called!' He reached down to his ankle and pulled out his gun, pointed it at me. 'That make a man feel murderous! White man never pay Uncle Herschel shit! He work that land for somethin' like thirty years, never saw nothin'!' He let his hand rest on LaQueen's shoulder, holding the tempo. 'I want repairation! You got to pay the repairations! We heard that land got sold for fourteen million dollars!'
'You heard wrong.'
'Shut up! I want three hundred-'
'You're talking to the wrong guy.'
'— thousand dollars. Don't think so, Mr. Wyeth. I think we got exactly the right muthafucka! We watchin' you, we know where you hang out, we know where this guy Rainey's new building is. We got it covered, boy.'
Some of this was bluffing, I hoped. 'You've got to take all this to Rainey,' I said.
He moaned and rolled his head and looked upward in anticipation. 'Go, LaQueen, do it, sista!' The girl was working harder, faster. 'Give me the booty!' he screamed. He pushed the girl deeply onto himself, holding her head all the way down with both of his hands, making her feet kick a bit in gagging panic, the gun next to her ear, his knees shaking with the pleasure, and when the moment came, he lifted the gun over his head triumphantly-'Oh, you fucka!' he screamed- and fired into the ceiling, then again. I flinched. 'Oh, sista!' he cried, collapsing backward and pushing the girl away to reveal a giant wet black penis that leapt from between his thighs. He tipped his head forward, inspected himself, then looked up at me looking at him, at it. The girl lay her head on his thigh, licked his softening size with obligatory reverence, her eyes on mine, coldly dismissive. The room smelled burnt. H.J. grabbed his security headset. 'Antwawn, come up here and get this white boy outta my face.' He aimed the gun at me. 'You get me my money,' he said, stroking the girl's head as she sucked him in and out. 'Lawyer-man, you get me that goddamn fuckin' money or I'm goin' find you and fuck up whatever shit ain't already in your pants.'
Five
The next morning was blue-skied and excellent — if you weren't freaked out. Which I was, coffee-jittery, anxious, driving a rent-a-wreck too fast away from the city toward Jay Rainey's old farm, my terrorized heart pattering, It's bad, they're bad, it's bad. Like anyone, I prefer to forget that I am to die, not be reminded, prefer to think of my last breath as a far-off event, the years measurable in, say, the unit of time it takes to discover, test, refine, approve, and market a major new pharmaceutical. Yes, give me two or three of those epochs, a couple of new brain-boosters and cartilage-thickeners, and I'll be fine; the romping American society I die in will be unrecognizable to me. But meanwhile, the passage of days is ominous. I feel the past dropping away an inch behind me, a dark wind sucking coldly at my ears, yanking on the shorthairs of the back of my neck, gurgling like a suffocating eight-year-old boy. Yesterday is not yesterday, it is lost and gone forever, collapsed, rotten, moaning in
