We Cast a Shadow Read online

  “Don’t do that, son,” I said. “Why don’t you sketch for a while?”

  “I don’t want to sketch now.” Viewing him through the rearview mirror, the shadows of trees flowed over his face. “It smells like dog back here.”

  “Just occupy yourself, kid.”

  “And put on your seatbelt,” Penny said. “We should’ve taken the van.”

  “Wouldn’t have made it.” We prided ourselves on not having car notes. My car was an unfortunate bit of forced inheritance, given to me as my father had no use for transportation. He was an indentured servant—had actually cut organically grown sugarcane—in the fields not very far from the plantation we were headed to. As for Penny’s ride, we’d paid that off years earlier. The minivan was safe for her commutes around town, but it shook with righteous indignation at being forced to travel at highway speeds. My Bug, although an antique, was a solid bet on long trips. I drove it to hearings in small-town courts all over the state without incident. I was sure the car would cruise the highways and byways of my nation long after I, and everyone I loved, went dust to dust.

  When we hit the northbound interstate, I put on Pet Sounds. Penny turned to me from the passenger seat. I didn’t look, but I could tell she was studying my face as if to say, I can’t believe you still listen to that crusty old white boy music. My grandparents didn’t even like the Beach Boys. You must be the whitest black man on earth. I thought it would just be a phase.

  “It is,” I said, forgetting the nonverbal aspect of our chat. “A very long phase.”

  “What?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” I said and wobbled into the second verse of “God Only Knows,” but Carl Wilson’s tenor was far too high for me to glide with for long, especially with other people’s ears at stake. After the bridge, Penny’s voice came in as clean and clear as the original. Nigel leaned forward from the rear, gripping Penny’s seatback for stability. By the swirling, three-part finale, we were all singing together.

  Penny and I both looked back at our son for an extended beat. Nigel smiled at us. He was missing a canine tooth then.

  “Put on your seatbelt,” we said in unison.

  “Okay, okay,” he said. “Jeez.”

  We exited the highway and dashed into molehill country. Somehow Nigel convinced us to take the scenic route for the last leg. Country towns in the South gave me the jimjams. I worried about every police station, every church I saw. I wondered what evils were done in the name of separating the whites and coloreds, as if people were nothing more than dirty laundry. We passed brick-faced homes that sat far back from the road like they were waiting to pounce. Some had little American flags on their rickety mailboxes. Scarecrows. Spinning windmills. It must have been anxiety-inducing to travel those roads many decades earlier, say, in the time of my father’s father or even earlier yet—like in the 1950s.

  What would the people in those houses think of a well-dressed Negro, a redheaded beauty, and an olive-skinned boy puttering by in a spotless German car? Would a patrolman pull us over? Would Penny have to explain that I was her chauffeur? Would the cop knock out a headlight and write us a ticket? Or would he bring us to an abandoned schoolhouse for reeducation?

  Still, there was something about that shadowless afternoon, wheeling the freeway with my family. I wasn’t particularly religious, but I noted brief sequences in my life where the invisible medium—air, mist, water, I could never say what the medium most resembled—seemed to drain away. In those moments, there was nothing at all between me and them, the two souls I cared most about in all the unknowable universe. Those were the times when I believed that there was a plan, although I wasn’t privy to the details, and that it was a just and good plan designed to benefit Nigel, Penny, and perhaps even me. Those slim fissures in my logic never lasted long enough.

  6

  I’d never been to Shanksted Plantation. Actually, I’d never been to any plantation. I actively resisted it. Every time someone tried to lure me to Harper’s Alley or Carriageway for a day trip, I begged off. I’d lived in the City my whole life and swore that I would drink a cup of bubbling battery acid before I dipped my ladle in the polluted cultural springs of the hinterlands. In my thinking, the entire South beyond my hometown was just one sprawling countryside of ectoplasmic Colonel Sanderses on horseback chasing runaway spirits until the Rapture. Hardly my idea of a refreshing getaway.

  Of course, I knew the basics from movies, books, and Joey Watson’s fifth-grade Gone with the Wind poster board, which I poured chocolate syrup all over before the start of class. (Joey still won best presentation. He hung a Mammy/golliwog/gorgon from the board. How could he not win?) However, none of my vicarious experiences prepped me for being on plantation soil. I’d never done a double-take at a gleaming white chateau with shadowy, Dracula-teeth columns. I’d never ridden up a rustic promenade, across the same twigs and pebbles over which somebody’s barefoot mom once hauled kindling. I’d never wondered if it was better for a pregnant woman to die from strangulation or a broken neck.

  “What are those?” Nigel asked.

  Penny squinted, her mouth agape. At first, I thought the wavering golden-brown shapes dangling from the branches were Spanish moss, but I’d heard that all the moss was eaten by pests years ago. The shapes were fabric, perhaps a tip of the hat to what the plantation had lost. Strange fruit indeed. Good Lord. The Shanksted trees were positively crawling with banshees.

  “They look like strung-up people,” Nigel said.

  “God,” Penny said. “I hate this place so much.”

  I steered us toward a clearing in the distance. The mansion was only a front. Behind it, in the forest, was a complex of hotel buildings all done in an antebellum theme. The Big House, a building with covered galleries on each of its four floors, was where check-in awaited our arrival.

  “I don’t know how this happened, sir,” the lanky brunette at the front desk said. “Your name is here, but somehow we don’t have a room for you.”

  “We’ll take whatever you give us,” I said.

  After a conversation with her supervisor, the lanky clerk returned from the hidden room behind the desk and said, “We’ve found a solution for you, sir.” She gave me a key card and beneficently pointed us to the narrow staircase at the back of the lobby.

  Upstairs, we found our accommodations, a megaroom called the Planters Suite. The bellboy, a little guy who could have been an older cousin, brought our bags up. He could have been a cousin except for the work he’d had done to his face. His lips had been deplumped so that he seemed to grimace in pain as he pointed out the myriad gracious features of our quarters, the hot tub, the balconies overlooking the whole property, a basket full of complimentary chocolates—dark, milk, and premium white.

  At the door, as I counted off his tip, the bellboy gave Nigel a strange look. In such situations, I had to figure out what the person found unsettling: Nigel’s face, my marital relationship, or the offspring of our union. These shadows followed us wherever we went. Sometimes I felt like we all had birthmarks.

  The bellboy shook his head. I realized from the way his eyes swept over each of us that it was likely a combination of all three reasons. Penny didn’t notice. She was opening the curtains to let some daylight in. Nigel furrowed his brow. I sent him to his room. I was no stranger to such audacity.

  Mixed-race couples were rare these days, having reached a climax during Sir’s youth, before the authorities overreacted to a protest by a black nationalist organization. As for the porter’s distraction by Nigel’s birthmark, that was just one more reason Nigel needed the procedure.

  I pinned the money to the bellboy’s chest with my fingers. “That’s enough,” I said. He took the money and left.

  I went to Nigel’s room, one of three bedrooms other than the master suite allotted to Penny and myself. The balcony doors were open, and a brisk wind swooped in. Nigel sat on
his bed, flipping through a book of colorful sea creatures. He wasn’t looking at the pictures, just turning the pages absentmindedly. Nigel loved real books made of real paper. Bless him, the little weirdo. But occasionally he stroked the page as if trying to switch over to the next screen.

  “This place is cool,” he said.

  “It is, isn’t it?” I said.

  Nigel glanced at me, then averted his eyes back to the book. I closed it. He lowered his chin.

  “That man,” Nigel said. “I don’t like being looked at that way.”

  “Some people lack all refinement,” I said.

  “Would you speak English?” Nigel sat up. “It’s like he thought I was an alien or something.”

  “Hey.” I grabbed Nigel’s chin and considered what Penny would say if she were in my position. “None of this is your fault,” I said. “Don’t let anyone else’s opinion cross you up. You’re exactly the way you were meant to be.”

  “You sound like Mom.”

  Such a smart boy. “She knows what she’s talking about.” I wanted to tell Nigel about temporary injustice and how everyone had to persist in difficult situations until things cleared up, but the strings in my chest were too tight. Words were only words after all. “You— Do you want a chocolate?”

  He nodded.

  I made a wrapped square of milk chocolate appear then disappear, using sleight-of-hand Sir taught me when I was around Nigel’s age.

  “You’re going to show me how to do that,” Nigel said.

  I reproduced the chocolate between my thumb and forefinger. “Maybe when you’re ready.” I dropped the chocolate into his palm.

  “I’m ready.” He unwrapped the package and ate.

  “Not quite.”

  Nigel groaned.

  “Do you have your comics?” I asked.

  He gave a thumbs-up. I switched on the light because he’d read in the dimness if I didn’t.

  “Look, Dad.” Nigel took a jar of Madame C.J.’s cream from his book sack. “I remembered the cream!”

  I glanced over my shoulder to make sure Penny wasn’t around and placed a finger over my lips. I’d forgotten that I’d stocked Nigel up with several jars of the stuff weeks earlier. Based on my promise to Penny, I should have taken the jar away and explained that he no longer needed it. But the bellboy’s gawking reminded me of reality. The cream was for Nigel’s own good. “But remember,” I said, “between us.” I kissed him on the forehead and went to the door. “Be sure to wear your big hat when we go out. It’s getting sunny.”

  Then I closed his door. In the hallway, between his room and the master suite, I pulled a Plum from my shirt pocket. The pill slipped through my fingers and bounced across the carpet. I picked it up and, without checking it for debris, popped it into my mouth. My esophagus lit up as that little elevator descended into my basement.

  Penny lay on our bed, a four-poster canopied special, like something out of Lady Chatterley.

  “Everything all right?” she asked.

  “Hakuna matata.” I locked our double doors and turned on the stereo. There’s a point where you’ve been married long enough that you can pluck hidden meanings from the ether. In the middle of our ongoing fight over Nigel’s skin cream and how best to handle his adjustment problems, Penny had chosen to join me on this expedition into the heart of darkness. During meaner times, she would have let me drive off without a word. Her singing in the Bug was another such sign. In a full-on argument, she would have grumpily turned off the stereo. The slight blush on her cheeks as the song ended, and that mischievous glint in the corner of her eye as the last note echoed against the glass. The subtle presence of feminine pheromone only detectable by the ever-so-slight itch at the back of my throat. Unspoken communication. Married-folk semaphore. An invitation to a truce. A man has only two options in circumstances like that: play it cool and risk the train chugging from the station without you, or climb into the engine cab, knock out the engineer, and toot that horn.

  I tossed my fedora onto a wine rack by the fireplace and undid the first few buttons of my shirt. The overhead fan shook and the ferns around the room dipped in sympathy to those currents.

  “You called for your Mandingo, Miss Penelope?” I asked.

  “Oh, hush, boy,” she said, and flipped the smoke-gray sheets away from her naked body. I kissed the top of her foot and yanked her closer to the bottom of the bed. Once the sheets settled, we fucked a flame into being.

  7

  In the late afternoon, I decided we should go down to the Old House, the mansion we had driven by on the way in. Octavia was not responding to my emails, but she had to be somewhere on the property. The resort offered golf, skeet shooting, a spa. Tennis courts, bike rentals, and canoeing. Scavenger hunts. A tour would depart from the Old House soon. Tour title: “Paradise Lost—A Survey of Antebellum Farming Life.” The tour was my best chance to locate Octavia, so I signed us up.

  The sun came out from behind the clouds. Nigel seemed to have left his own black cloud in the suite. Hauling his book sack of widgets and goodies—magnifying glasses, jars for insect collecting, soy jerky, etc.—he slid down the staircase railing in the Big House, laughing, and we set off for the tour. We immediately got lost. Penny, Nigel, and I wandered out onto the property, using a cartoonish map provided by the concierge. Not only did I find the mascot icon—a dark-skinned man in tatters—offensive, but the map itself was useless. Penny was better with maps than me, but even she was confused. The chart wasn’t to scale. The proportions were way off. Those tennis courts weren’t right behind the Big House as suggested, but a few hundred yards away, behind hedge-obscured fences. The lying map claimed the swimming pools were slightly east and the amphitheater slightly west, but everything was due south.

  Penny and I held hands as Nigel orbited us like a proton. We passed a neatly trimmed garden. Then another set of tennis courts. And another neatly trimmed garden. No. The same neatly trimmed garden. We were trapped in a loop.

  “Is this really happening?” Penny laughed nervously.

  “Maybe we went forward when we should have gone back,” I said. Between Penny’s and my linked bodies, Nigel passed, a neutrino. The fishing hat looped around his neck brushed against my side. It should have been on his head, not his back. “Put it on, son.”

  “Aw, but it’s too big.”

  “Don’t back-talk your father.” Nigel righted the hat on his head. “And don’t you roll your eyes, young man.”

  “There’s got to be a way out of here,” I said.

  Nigel trotted to a hedgerow a few yards away, his fists clenched to his sides. The fishing hat bobbed in time to his footfalls. He had grown considerably in recent months, but he was still on the smallish side, and the brim of the big floppy hat brushed his shoulders on the downstroke.

  “That hat is a little obnoxious,” Penny said, grinning. “He looks like Dumbo before he learned to fly.” I shrugged. It could be hard to tell where the line was with Penny. Whereas I felt Nigel should only go outside in a mirrored hazmat suit to protect his mark from darkening, she was sanguine about the whole affair. Sure, there were various no-fly zones in the airspace of Nigel’s birthmark. Penny was 100 percent opposed to lightening cream, for instance. Yet she more or less agreed that hats were sensible protection from the genetic-mutation-inducing qualities of the jolly old sun. She wore a field hat and sunglasses herself.

  Nigel found a knob and pulled a door open, hedge and all.

  I glanced at Penny. “My side of the family,” I said.

  “Might be.” She took a protein bar from her purse and tossed it to Nigel, who grinned.

  The main hall of the Old House was flanked by two broad staircases. Freshly waxed wood and engine oil scents predominated. About thirty shareholders were gathered, dressed in khaki shorts, maxi dresses, and flip-flops. There was enough wrinkly flesh to challe
nge a pugs-only dog show. I waved at Paul Pavor, who sipped something from a go-cup, then gave me finger guns. I didn’t see Octavia.

  Our tour guides, a man and a woman in period clothing, introduced themselves as Nathan and Mary. The woman wore a complicated wig-and-bonnet arrangement.

  “Why are they dressed like that?” Nigel asked.

  “We should go,” I said to Penny.

  “No.” She pursed her lips. “I want to see this.” I didn’t want to spend any more time with my superiors than I had to, but my nervous system was too happy to argue much. Penny rarely turned away from incidents of obvious racism or bigotry. She jumped into them like a Viking with a long sword, her neck flushed as she dismantled her opponent’s arguments.

  The pair led the group through the mansion, pointing out Venetian drapes and fine china, over here the property owner’s desk for writing letters to his business partners, over there Old Miss’s pouting room.

  In the grand ballroom: “Andrew Jackson Smith’s troops ransacked this very home.” Nathan had a high-country accent. “It took over a decade to restore the property to its original splendor.” He jammed his hand into his gray overcoat and sniffed as he walked past us.

  The guides brought us to the back porch and offered white parasols from a copper drum. I didn’t take one, nor did Penny.

  “It can get awfully bright out there,” Mary said, fanning herself. She smiled from the cheeks down, but her eyes were dead. She adjusted her wig. “A small price to pay for a nice Southern life.” Her crinoline was so wide, I was sure she’d get stuck in the door, but she turned sideways and popped through with no trouble.

  She and Nathan led us across the field, the one I’d seen from our room at a distance, and the crowd closed into a dense semicircle around us. A pair of iron doors erupted from the grass several yards away.

  “What’s that?” Deb, a labor lawyer from one of the Carolina offices, asked.