Casserole Diplomacy and Other Stories (24 page)

Still, the disappointment turned to outright resentment for some, on occasion of the three month anniversary celebration of the black man’s arrival. He ate three hotdogs at the barbecue, surprising everyone, then proceeded to display a prodigious set of basketball skills in an energetic game of hoops with the kids, followed by a stunning and varied performance of dance moves and rhythmic intelligence which continued through most of Robbie Gooding’s funk collection.

Keeley O’Keefe, who taught Celtic Studies at the university, shook her head in disgust. “That’s offensive. A catalogue of clichés that serves only to perpetuate the stereotype.”

“And it’s a stereotype we invented, as the people who have the power,” said Doug Smolz. He ordered his sons not to watch.

“Should we take the hoops down?” said Ginger Goodings, at the next community association meeting. “Can we forbid funk?”

Tom Hawkins shook his head. “That would be an overreaction.”

Ginger sighed. “I guess you can’t force people to have compassion and good values. God knows I’ve tried with Robbie. He only gets worse.”

No one could think of a solution. When the sweet familiar sounds of the black man’s violin began, they simply shut the window and decided to go over the community association’s books and accounts. They found them completely out of order, and not even Doug Smolz could make sense out of them.

Despite the neighbourhood’s percolating disappointments and resentments, a considerable number of women began to get crushes on the black man, first in secret, then more openly.

“He’s gorgeous,” said Atlanta Bowkers, a doctor at the Women’s Medical Centre. “The way his hair goes, almost like he’s got horns underneath.”

“Makes me horny,” Debra Gentry said, a bit hoarsely. “Why I bet he’d really—”

“What?”

Debra Gentry giggled, then coughed. “Said he makes me horny.”

She flushed, but they all laughed at the pun, which went a long way toward displacing their isolated embarrassments, and inaugurated an immediate sense of shared secret. Within days, there was an almost virtual community of black man admirers, who recognized each other on the street, and nodded gently, and smiled, and sometimes winked.

“He’s a babe,” they would say, in the vernacular of the preceding decade. “He is babe-a-licious.”

“No doubt. I’d love to see . . .”

At which the conversations would inevitably dissolve into chuckles, and mugs would be sipped, and low-fat bagels bit, and in some cases, though not many, cigarettes lit.

Things might have picked up for the black man, with his growing coterie of secret admirers, had he not one day walked unannounced into the community association offices, sat down without a word, and balanced all the accounting. It took him five minutes. When he was done, he simply rose, closed the books, and brought them to Ginger Goodings, who had been watching and fantasizing about his long ebony fingers.

She phoned Tom Hawkins immediately.

“He’s brilliant.” She could barely breathe. “He fixed everything. It took him about two minutes.”

But Tom Hawkins was not impressed. Neither was anyone else on the committee, nor anyone else who heard the story.

“We could have done it ourselves,” said Doug Smolz. “We just didn’t have the time.”

“I was going to do it this weekend,” said Gwen Packer.

Keeley O’Keefe, who had never attended a committee meeting, let alone been in the building, had her own take. “The light is feeble in there. He could simply see the columns more clearly. They have some genetic advantage with their eyes. Good night vision.”

“Common among hunter-gatherers,” agreed Doug Smolz. “One of the things that makes them superior to those of us in the civilized world.”

“My daddy says he’s an asshole,” said little Dylan Hawkins, at which his father glared, and said, “Who taught you that word?” while everyone else gazed at the floor or their fingernails. Even Ginger Goodings finally disapproved of the black man’s accounting, and suggested that Doug Smolz go over the work and correct it in time for the next meeting, to which Doug Smolz agreed, with the qualification that he was quite busy that week, and wouldn’t have the time to do it to his complete satisfaction.

Word spread quickly; resentments grew. Only Atlanta Bowkers still admitted to wanting to, as she put it, “take a bite out of the black man.” In fact she followed him to the basketball court at the Gwynn Hunter Elementary School one night, just as the moon was peeping through the lattice of poplars on the hill. He had been hitting shots with such accuracy and consistency, and leaping so high, that it looked to be some kind of devilment, and Atlanta Bowkers found a heat flushing down from her belly button, and splitting to sizzle the inside of her thighs.

“Listen, honey.” She blocked his way off the court. “I’m a doctor. But that doesn’t mean I can’t be a nurse.”

He returned her gaze with neither interest nor puzzlement.

She went for broke. “Will you tie me up? Toss me around?”

“I’d prefer not to.” It was the first time anyone had heard him speak.

Atlanta Bowkers felt such an anger rise in the hollows of her skull that, for a moment, her eyelids went completely dry, and she could not see at all. When the moon misted her eyeballs once again, the black man was halfway across the schoolyard. His legs blurred in a rising mist cloud—droplets breathed from the field’s moist belly. Suddenly the sprinklers gushed, floating him up on moonlit rainbows. His feet did not touch the ground again, and he sailed into the night on a chariot of blue mist, looking for all the world like an angel.

The next day, Atlanta Bowkers told everyone she met that the black man was the devil himself.

“I doubt he’s the devil,” said Tom Hawkins, at the emergency meeting of the community association.

“No.” Doug Smolz chewed the tip of his pen, staining his lips blue. “The devil is part of an old Christian myth that has licensed enough misery in the world, thank you very much.”

“Yes,” Keeley O’Keefe, who had recently found within her a latent activism, agreed. “The crusades. Slavery. Colonialism. The list is long and bloody. No, let us not reactivate the Old World tales of the devil. Let us look for a less incriminatory myth.”

“I heard,” said Gwen Packer, “that the whole edifice of Christian beliefs is actually built on an older stratum of Pagan mythology.”

“You heard that in my class,” said Keeley O’Keefe.

“I never took your class. I’ve never even been to university.”

“Then you heard it from one of my students.”

“I read it in a book by Guru Babi Cromwell, someone twice as knowledgeable about other cultures as—”

“Ladies,” Doug Smolz held up a hand, blue-stained along the fortune lines. “You’re both right. There are older models to look at here. We need to give indigenous peoples their due, and recognize where we have stolen their lifeways.”

“Were the Celts indigenous?” said Tom Hawkins. “Wasn’t anyone there before them? Because those are probably the people we should recognize, the people that had the roughest go of it.”

The meeting lasted for five hours, only one of which was actually devoted to practical solutions. Of these, there were only three, soon whittled to one: to find and hire an expert in indigenous pagan mythologies. But this was no easy task. In fact, in the week after the ad was placed, only a few herbalists and chiropractors from the nearby suburb of Hummingbird Hills showed up, and, after their interviews, were all dismissed with a perfunctory “thank you.”

“Good lord.” Tom Hawkins rubbed his sinuses, after the last chiropractor was gone. “What is the colour of evil anyway?”

“White,” Doug Smolz said without hesitation. “Moby Dick was white. He was evil. Batman wears black, he’s a good guy.”

“What does Robin wear?” said Gwen Packer.

“Green. He wears tights too.” Tom Hawkins saw the look on Doug Smolz’s face, and quickly added, “Which doesn’t mean that he was gay. Or that there’s anything wrong with being gay. Not that it’s wrong not to be gay. Or not wrong to not be . . .” He rubbed his head.

They made no headway over the next week. Meanwhile, many of the neighbours began to show up in growing congregations beneath the black man’s window, where they proceeded every sundown to beat drums to drown out the despicable wail of his violin. Those who didn’t own drums either went to buy them at the African Drum Shop, or resorted to rhythmic household items—gonging pots, panging pans, snipping scissors.

“What colour is God?” yelled Keeley O’Keefe at the crowd.

“No colour!” they yelled back.

The drums throbbed. There were phone calls from adjacent suburbs, inquiring into the racket. The
Six O’Clock News
showed up. High school cheerleaders arrived to lend choreographic support, and nobody quite caught the irony that the Bergamot High football team was nicknamed The Devils. Not until Robbie Goodings, who seemed to enjoy the chaos, pointed it out. “Why not make the black man the team mascot?”

He suggested it sarcastically; it was received seriously. “Yes,” folks said with a great deal of enthusiasm. “Why not? That’s the best thing the neighbourhood could do under the circumstances.”

The drums throbbed. Through it all, no one noticed that one evening the black man himself quietly packed up his violin and left by the back door. No one noticed, not for weeks, until one evening Atlanta Bowkers burst sobbing from the front doors, mascara smearing her cheeks in salty stripes, and cried, “He’s gone!”—then collapsed to the lawn, while behind her Debra Gentry forgot that the doors opened inward, and, in her roaring hurry to second the news, flattened her face on the glass like a bug on a windshield.

The drums stopped. There was a grand moment of silence, a collective indrawing of breath. Somewhere in the neighbouring suburb of Hummingbird Hills, a police siren unwound itself.

“After all we did for him,” said Keeley O’Keefe, finally. The sentiment was echoed in an instantaneous and almost mystical outpouring of collective rage, in which everyone’s self-awareness vanished, and the drums pounded again, and the usually composed citizens of Bergamot View began to dance madly, and wailed, and smoked cigarettes materialized from nowhere, and pulled each other’s hair, and, perhaps, though it was not substantiated, engaged in unspeakable varieties of sexual commerce with each other’s spouses, behind bushes, inside faux-fountains, atop picnic tables.

Next morning, no one was completely clear on what had happened. Tables were overturned. There was mustard everywhere. And the black man—the devil, or djinn, or whatever he was—had truly gone. Robbie Goodings suggested that, if the devil had been watching the night’s shady spectacle—already so vacant in collective memory—he had probably decided to leave for good.

“Well, fine,” said Robbie’s mother. “He was not what we were looking for in the first place.”

Days later, Robbie, himself, disappeared. The police found nothing but a cold trail through the woods at the end of Dinger Crescent, where the moon pooled in silver hollows, and the detectives grew sleepy, and emerged hours later with only a hushed memory of violins. They said the boy had likely run away. There was no foul play. There was nothing anyone could do. Ginger Goodings cried for days, and could not sleep at all, not even with the aid of gentle herbs. She spent nights repainting her walls in fauvist greens and yellows, and only came out of mourning to practice yoga and deep breathing on the boulevard.

After several weeks of embarrassed nods and perfunctory hellos, the community association regrouped to organize damage control and a new plan, for the suburb of Bergamot View did not take lightly its responsibilities to social justice and world citizenship.

“We need to get back on the horse,” said Tom Hawkins. “We need to address, once again, the imbalance of racial diversity in our community. We need to get someone into that apartment again.”

Everyone nodded. Ginger Goodings nodded off.

“But what kind of tenant?” said Doug Smolz. “We need to do it right this time.”

“A Celt?” suggested Kelley O’Keefe.

“Not indigenous,” said Tom Hawkins.

In the end, they prioritized a list of visible ethnicities, and decided that, in context, a Native American—not an Indian, they were from India—would make the most suitable tenant for the flat above the old Chinese grocer’s, given that they were here first, and that they had a beautiful mythological system which could really teach everyone a lot about taking care of the earth, if not the lawns.

The new plan, while not foolproof, was a measurable improvement over the last. Its possible ramifications were thoroughly discussed and specified, its margins for error finessed through a software designed originally by Aruna Mohanraj, one of the suburb’s dentists, to track the hygienic maintenance of her patients. So the community association sent out a new summons, by newspaper and worldwide web, which said:

Wanted: One red man to receive free lodging and sundry benefits in the Community of Bergamot View. We are very firm on our criterion: you must be a red man. Please apply in person.

That evening, the hedge that ringed the woods at the end of Dinger Crescent parted its leafy curtains, and a devil stepped through.