before the afterimage on my retinas faded.
I got in two solid hours before someone started kicking my door.
Probably they weren’t kicking the door, but that’s how it sounded. I struggled to the surface and to my feet, stumbled downstairs to the door and opened it. Not mules at all. Two guys in black shirts and berets, one’s skin as black as his shirt, the other’s the color of
“You Griffin?” the darker one said.
Apparently everyone in town knew where I lived.
“Why not. Sure.” I left the door open, turned, and walked into the kitchen. “You guys want coffee or something? A beer, maybe.”
There was coffee left over in the pot. I poured it in a saucepan and set it on a burner.
“We don’t use stimulants,” Au Lait said. He pushed the door shut behind him.
“Or abuse our bodies with alcohol,” Blackie added.
“Okay. You ever use chairs?” I waved toward those around the table.
“We’ll stand.”
“Your call.”
Steam rolled above the pan. I poured coffee into a mug, added milk. Blisters of fat formed on top. I sniffed the milk in the carton. Not bad. I’d drunk worse.
“So what can I do for you gentlemen? Since you didn’t drop by for coffee or to use my chairs.”
They looked at one another.
“Gentlemen,” Blackie said.
The other cocked his head briefly to one side and back. Strange world out here.
“You’ve been asking about … an incident,” Blackie said. “Took place at Dryades and Terpsichore?”
“Yeah?”
“Best stop asking,” Au Lait told me.
“It’s a local thing.” Blackie. Conciliatory. “No one needs waves.”
I sipped coffee.
“Sorry,” I said. “Nigguh ain spose ta unnerstand all this, right? Jus spose ta do what chu say.”
Blackie stared at me a moment. “It’s complicated, Griffin.”
“Sure is.”
“Discretion’s called for.”
“I think I may still have a little bit of that tucked away at the back of my underwear drawer. Some I saved just in case. You want me to go look?”
I dumped the rest of the coffee in the sink and pulled a Jax out of the icebox.
“What do you know?” Blackie said.
A reasonable question.
I told him.
“Where do you think all that money came from, Lewis?”
“Contributions, I heard.”
“Right. And Tar Baby came on strong in the primaries.” He picked up my bottle and took a healthy swig, set it back down in the circle it came out of.
“Body handling the abuse okay?” I said.
“Yeah, they told us you’re a smart mouth.”
“And a tough guy.”
I shrugged. “Hobbies.”
“Say no one pushes you around, or stops you when you don’t want to be stopped.”
“I have breaks and bruises to prove it.”
“You’ve also got about the strangest reputation I ever rubbed up against. I asked around. Three out of four people tell me you’re crazy as batshit, the original bad news, cross the street. Then the fifth or sixth one I talk to says he’d trust you with his life.”
“Kind of work I do, those two things aren’t mutually exclusive.”
Blackie nodded. “So I figure it like this: your own way, you’re a soldier too.”
“For about ten minutes-but I blinked.”
“What?”
“They threw me out.”
He smiled. There was no humor in the smile. “Exactly. They’ve thrown us all out. For three hundred years. Out of their buildings, their neighborhoods, their schools, their professions, their establishment, their society. That’s what all this is about, right?”
For a time when I was a kid back in Arkansas, every Saturday night someone blackened the face of the Doughboy statue on Cherry Street with shoe polish. And each Sunday morning one of the jail trustees was out there scrubbing it clean. You see how it is, Lewis, my father said. We raise his children for him, cook for him, bring up his crops, butcher his hogs, even fight his wars for him, and he still won’t acknowledge our existence, we’re still invisible.
“Revolution,” Au Lait said reverently.
“Lots of small revolutions,” Blackie went on, “all taking place on their own. Local groups, communities, brotherhoods, churches. All over the country. People helping bring it along in their own way. People like us. Wave after wave coming together, growing.”
“This guy that’s been shooting people: he one of your waves? One of your revolutionaries?”
“Absolutely not. We abhor and decry violence in any form.”
“Unusual attitude for a soldier.”
“There’s more than one kind of soldier, Griffin. Some only keep the peace.”
Au Lait: “That’s why we’re here.”
It was a thought I’d had before: few things are more frightening than a person who’s rendered his life down to this single thing. Religion, sex or alcohol, politics, racism-it doesn’t much matter what the thing is. You look into his eyes and see the covered light, sense something of the very worst we can come to, individually and collectively. But one of the things that’s even scarier is people who haven’t rendered their lives down to anything at all.
“Excuse me,” I said. “I came in in the middle of this movie. I don’t know the plot. Who the characters are. Why everyone’s zipping around so purposefully onscreen.”
Blackie thought it over. “Our intelligence people tell us that you were brought in on Yoruba’s side.”
“In which case your intelligence-with, believe me, no personal slur intended-is sadly lacking. So perhaps you’ll at least raise the level of mine?”
“Then what’s your interest in this?” Blackie said.
“I’ve already told you. The shooter.”
“He has nothing to do with it.”
“That’s my point. But after two hours’ sleep in, I don’t know, three or four days, I’ve got a couple of guys in funny hats standing here in my kitchen either trying to serve me slices off tomorrow’s pie-in-the-sky or threatening me. Hard to tell.”
“You’re not working for Yoruba?”
“I’m not working for anyone. I have a few dollars put away that just
Blackie didn’t say anything for a while. Au Lait walked over to the window and stood looking out.
“Maybe I’ve misjudged you,” Blackie said.
“It happens.”
He held out his hand. “Leo Tate. That’s Clifford.” Au Lait glanced back from the window and nodded. “Good to meet you both,” I said.
