Without Prejudice (23 page)

‘I couldn’t sleep. I was going to read some, but I left my glasses in the living room.’ He looked questioningly at Robert. ‘Sorry if I woke you up.’

‘I couldn’t sleep either.’ Robert looked over at the kettle. ‘You want a hot drink?’

Duval shook his head. ‘No, thanks. It would just keep me awake.’

‘How about a real drink? I’m going to have some bourbon myself.’

Duval smiled. ‘That’d be nice.’

‘Come on then. If we keep our voices down, the girls won’t hear us.’

They tiptoed down the hallway and into the living room, which had a wall of bookshelves at the near end with a low protruding shelf that served as a bar.

‘Have a seat,’ Robert said, pointing to the sofa. He poured them each two fingers of Maker’s Mark, then handed one of the glasses to Duval. ‘Do you mind it straight up?’

‘No point diluting the medicine.’

Robert sat down in the leather recliner across from Duval. Each sipped the whiskey in peaceful silence.

Finally Robert broke it. ‘How’s it going then? Any luck on the job front?’

‘Not yet. I got an interview Thursday with a trucking firm. Wants a clerk in their depot to cover the night shift.’

‘You mind working nights?’

Duval shrugged. ‘I’ll work any old time, somebody just give me a job.’ He paused and seemed to be listening to something. ‘It sure is quiet out here.’

‘I know. I’m still not used to it. It’s as if I need traffic noise and people talking on the sidewalk before I can go to sleep. The only sound out here is the crickets.’

‘Kind of spooky.’

‘Yeah, if you’re used to people being around you.’

Duval sighed. ‘I got used to that all right.’

Of course he did, thought Robert. He must have shared a cell throughout his years inside. He wondered if he would ever have heard crickets there.

‘There was always some kind of noise,’ said Duval, his voice thoughtful and low. ‘Somebody would be crying, or yelling; sometimes there’d be a fight in a cell. Most every night there was something going on – even when there wasn’t, the guards would be coming by each hour, shining their flashlights wherever they were disposed to. In your face, on the wall.’

‘You get used to it?’

Duval looked at him as if he’d never considered this before. ‘I guess you get used to anything, if that means you don’t go crazy or kill yourself. It’s like fear.’

‘Fear?’ he said, and just saying the word had the weird effect of chilling him.

‘Yeah, fear. You got to understand, in there you’re scared all the time. After a while, it’s just second nature. It’s in your blood. Nothing carefree, everything cautious. You can’t even laugh out loud in case somebody thinks you’re making fun of them. “
You diss me, man?
”’ he said in a high-pitched voice. ‘Mocking somebody could get you an unjust reward.’

This explained Duval’s covering manoeuvre with his hand each time he started to laugh.

‘When the cell door closed at night you could feel safe – ain’t that strange? Until you woke up. Then it started all over again.’

‘You must have seen some terrible things,’ said Robert, wondering if he’d said this only out of curiosity.

Duval looked down at the tumbler he held in his hands. ‘I did, though most of them were in my early years. Maybe I just noticed them more then.’ He took a sip of whiskey, and Robert noticed his hands were trembling slightly.

‘There was a kid my second year that shared my cell. Nice boy, went to service each Sunday, kept his mouth shut, didn’t put one foot out of line – not one foot. Then one day some gang dudes got to him in the shower.’ He looked up at Robert with disbelief. ‘They
strangled
him. There was ten other prisoners in the showers with them and not one of them said a word. I wanted to talk to the assistant warden, tell him what happened, and this other dude says to me, “Man, you do that and you’ll be next.”

‘So I didn’t. Everybody knew who did it, but wasn’t nothing going to happen from the prison people. Most of them was already in for life, and these days life means life. So what difference did it make?’

They sat in silence again, Duval seemingly lost in his memories. Robert drained the last of his bourbon. ‘We’d best be going to bed, Duval. It’ll be morning soon if we don’t go now.’

‘Okay,’ said Duval. Robert collected their glasses and they walked to the kitchen, where Robert put the glasses in the sink.

‘’Night,’ said Duval, going out the back door.

‘Sleep as late as you like,’ Robert called after him, though he doubted Duval would. There would have been too many years of early wake-up calls – Robert’s father, after five army years of reveille, could never lie in.

After Duval tramped up the steps to his apartment, Robert heard a tinkling noise, tinny yet reverberating. It was the radio.

2

Robert was up early. He let Anna stay in bed, dozing. He looked in on Sophie and was glad to see her still asleep. There was a soft toy cuddled in her arms. Not for much longer, he thought, since she seemed so intent on growing up fast.

He made coffee and toast, and wondered what Duval would like for breakfast. Pancakes would probably go down well, so he made enough batter for Sophie and Duval, with some extra in case Anna wanted some. Leaving the mix to air, he opened the back door and went out into the yard. The sun was already rising above the birches and warming the air – by late morning it would be thickly hot, and Sophie would want a swim before they left.

When he turned to go back into the house, he saw a police car coming from the Poindexters’, cruising gently along the drive. It stopped by the fence and a lone policeman got out. He had an air of small town about him – as if he once had worked for his father’s hardware store, or managed a fruit middle-man’s depot. His parka was blue and he didn’t wear a state cop’s wide-brimmed hat. A local cop, Robert decided.

‘Morning. Are you Mr Danziger?’

‘That’s me.’ He tried to sound cordial, but all he could think about was Duval. Maybe Robert got the paperwork wrong for his permission to leave the state. Was there a call out now from Duval’s officer in Chicago?

‘Mr Poindexter reported some damage to his property. I thought I’d better come out and have a look. He said you’d had some too.’

‘Just two windows broken in the garage.’ With relief, he pointed to the outbuilding. ‘I fixed them yesterday.’

‘Nothing else?’

‘No. I checked the house. There’s an apartment upstairs.’ He pointed towards Duval’s window above the garage. ‘But it’s fine.’

The policeman nodded. ‘You haven’t seen anybody hanging around?’

‘No, but we’re only here at weekends.’

‘Mrs Poindexter said there’d been a man on the beach early this morning.’ He turned and pointed towards the dunes. ‘Just over there.’

‘Lots of people walk on the beach. It’s public land. By the water anyway.’

‘I know, but she saw a man come from this way across the dunes. This was early: Mrs Poindexter says she walks her dog at the crack of dawn. The guy was six feet and a bit, middle-aged.’ He paused. ‘Gentleman of colour, she says.’

Gentleman of colour? His father had been the last person Robert had known to use the phrase. ‘Give me just a second,’ he said. He ran up the outside staircase to the apartment. As he neared the top he called out for Duval, then knocking on the door waited. There was no answer, so he went in, crossed the living room and peered through the open door of the bedroom. It was empty, the bed neatly made.

When he came back down Anna was standing in the back door of the coach house, in blue jeans and a plum-coloured T-shirt. Robert said to the cop, ‘I think it must be the man who’s staying with us.’

The policeman’s eyes widened. Robert explained, ‘He’s helping me with some work here. On the fence and in the yard.’

The cop nodded. ‘Okay. Just wanted to make sure. I’ll let you know if we find who the vandals were.’

‘What was that about?’ asked Anna as the patrol car left.

He explained the purpose of the policeman’s visit, and Tina Poindexter’s sighting of a mysterious black man on ‘her’ beach. ‘It must have been Duval. I don’t know where he is – he’s not upstairs.’

‘Racist bastards.’

‘Come on, you can’t blame the cop. Not many black people live in this neck of the woods.’

‘Bollocks. You’re as bad as they are.’

‘No, I’m just being realistic. Blacks don’t live here, blacks don’t come out here – unless it’s to—’

‘What? Fulfil your stereotype?’ She shook her head in disgust. ‘Why don’t you try thinking about it from a black person’s point of view? Say you get invited to a place like this, only to find everybody’s suspicious – can you imagine what that feels like? If anything’s stolen the first thought is that it has to be you.’ She was heading inside, opening the kitchen door, but stopped to deliver a parting shot. ‘Come on, Robert, you must be able to see how unfair that is.’

Sure, he thought, it was completely unfair. But also perfectly reasonable. The Poindexters had said there had been a rash of burglaries of the properties along the beach, committed by people who drove out from Gary or Hammond, looking for places to rob during the week when they were empty. ‘People’, it was clear, given where they were coming from, were black people.

And that was the problem: both sides to the argument thought they were right. No wonder the divide was so great, magnified by white fear and black resentment. Though sometimes the feelings switched sides: he thought of his father and how his early liberalism had receded. Johnny had given large sums when he didn’t really have it to give, in the 1950s and ’60s, to the United Negro College Fund and the NAACP (how quaint that seemed now), but had grown disillusioned as Black Power and separatism abandoned the integrationism of the early Civil Rights Movement. Blacks moved from being victims to being
angry
victims; his father was puzzled, then infuriated, to discover that he was being blamed too.

Robert had once thought his father’s resentment ridiculous, until he went to boarding school. There he had been friends with a black boy, Larry Williamson, also from Chicago. Then all the black students had walked out of morning assembly one day. Robert’s fellow white students were mostly the privileged sons of East Coast Wasp wealth, with six-hundred-dollar stereo systems in their rooms, yet they all smoked dope, wore Bass Weejun shoes, and had long hair. For all their hipness, however, they reacted to the black walkout worse than any redneck Robert had known in Michigan. ‘I be oppressed by the white motherfuckers so I don’t wanna go to school today,’ one had mimicked sarcastically, and the others had all laughed. And Robert had thought, These people aren’t hip. These people disgust me.

But his own liberalism faltered when Larry Williamson suddenly made it clear he couldn’t be pals with a white boy, not even in the rarefied confines of a Yankee prep school. Just as later at college he resented it when black undergraduates almost universally shunned white company. His attitudes were no longer informed by communication across the racial divide other people had struggled for years to bridge.

He realised now that in his adult life, with the exception of Latanya Darling, he had never had a close friend or a lover who was black. Living in England, race had disappeared from his life – it didn’t seem to have a role. And somehow he had thought that in his absence it had become a smaller part of American life as well. Had he been kidding himself? It seemed Anna thought so.

Then he saw Duval, heading towards them from the dunes. He waved, and his old friend waved back. When he got back to the coach house, Duval was breathless. ‘I had me quite a walk,’ he said. ‘Must have gone four or five miles down the beach. I still ain’t used to so much exercise.’

‘See anybody?’ asked Robert mildly.

‘There was some lady when I started walking, with a big dog that kept barking. She waved at me, but I didn’t know her so I didn’t wave back. I never did like dogs much.’

3

It was called Little Slovakia, a roomy white pine house converted into a restaurant with a car park where the back yard would have been. It had a small bar with old-fashioned padded leather stools, and one large dining space full of round tables and dark wooden chairs. Locals ate there, and they looked with unfeigned interest as Robert came in with his wife and child and a tall black man.

‘This is my shout,’ he told Duval when the waitress came with menus, then realised Duval didn’t know what he meant. ‘It’s on me, okay? My treat, to say thanks for coming out all this way.’

When they ordered, Duval looked flustered. So Robert went first, choosing roast duck with cherries, and Duval rapidly said he’d like that, too. While they waited for their food, Sophie coloured in her paper menu.

Watching her, Duval said, ‘You’re a good artist.’

‘Thank you,’ said Sophie. She seemed completely at ease with him. ‘Hey, Duval,’ she said, her eyes on the paper, ‘when you were little, did you know Vanetta too?’

‘I did.’

‘Vanetta was Duval’s grandmother,’ Robert explained.

‘Really?’ she asked. She seemed to find it hard to believe that Duval had once been somebody’s grandson.