Mortal Fear

CHAPTER 8

“It’s that damned nigger contractor,” says Bob Anderson.

“Robert, not in front of Holly,” scolds Margaret, his wife.

Bob Anderson is my father-in-law. He points across his Mexican tile patio toward a small girl child splashing in the shallow end of the swimming pool.

“She can’t hear me, Marg. And no matter how you cut it, it all comes back to that nigger contractor.”

Patrick Graham, my brother-in-law, rolls his eyes at me while carefully making sure I am the only one who can see him. Patrick and I went to school together and are exactly the same age. An oncologist in Jackson, Mississippi, he is married to Erin, my wife’s younger sister. His rolling eyes sum up a feeling too complex for words, one common to our generation of Southerners. They say, We may not like it but there’s nothing we can do about it except argue, and it’s not worth arguing about with our father-in-law because he won’t ever change no matter what.

“It” being racism, of course.

“What are you jabbering about, Daddy?” Drewe asks.

My wife is wearing a yellow sundress and standing over the wrought-iron table that holds the remains of the barbecued ribs we just devoured. Erin excluded, of course. My wife’s sister is a strict vegetarian, which in Mississippi still rates up there with being a Hare Krishna. This get-together is a biweekly family ritual, Sunday dinner at the in-laws’, who live twenty miles from Rain, on the outskirts of Yazoo City. We do it rain or shine, and today it’s shine: ninety-six degrees in the shade.

“Don’t get him started, honey,” my mother-in-law says wearily. Margaret Anderson has taken refuge from the heat beneath a wide-brimmed straw hat.

“I’m talking about my new office, baby,” Bob tells Drewe, ignoring Margaret.

Bob Anderson is a veterinarian and an institution in this part of the Delta. His practice thrives, but that is not what pays for the columned Greek Revival house that towers over the patio we are sitting on. In the last twenty years, Bob has invested with unerring instinct in every scheme that made any money in the Delta, most notably catfish farming. Money from all over the world pours into Mississippi in exchange for farm-raised catfish-enough money to put the long-maligned catfish in the same league with cotton. A not insignificant portion of that money pours into Bob Anderson’s pockets. He is a short man but seems tall, even to those who have known him for years. Though he is balding, his forearms are thick and hairy. He walks with a self-assured, forward-leaning tilt, his chin cocked back with a military air. He is a natural hand with all things mechanical. Carpenter work, motors, welding, plumbing, a half dozen sports. It’s easy to imagine him with one strong arm buried up to the shoulder in the womb of a mare, a wide grin on his sweaty face. Bob Anderson is a racist; he is also a good father, a faithful husband, and a dead shot with a rifle.

“I took bids on my building,” he says, looking back over his shirtless shoulder at Drewe. “All the local boys made their plays, o’course, first-class job like that. And all their bids were close to even. Then I get a bid from this nigger out of Jackson, name of Boyte. His bid was eight thousand less than the lowest of the local boys.”

“Did you take it?” Patrick asks.

Erin Graham-Patrick’s wife-turns from her perch at poolside. She has been sitting with her tanned back to us, her long legs dangling in the water, watching her three-year-old daughter with an eagle eye. Erin’s dark eyes glower at her father, but Bob pretends not to notice.

“Not yet,” he says. “See, the local boys somehow got wind of what the nigger bid-”

“Somehow?” Drewe echoes, expressing her suspicion that her father told his cronies about their minority competition.

“Anyhow,” Bob plows on, “it turns out the reason this nigger can afford to bid so low is that he’s getting some kind of cheap money from the government. Some kind of incentive — read handout-which naturally ain’t available to your white contractors. Now I ask you, is that fair? I’m all for letting the nigger compete right alongside Jack and Nub, but for the government to use our tax money to help him undercut hardworking men like that-”

“Are you sure the black contractor’s getting government help?” Drewe asks.

“Hell yes, I’m sure. Nub told me himself.”

“So what are you going to do?” asks Patrick, as if he really cares, which I know he does not.

“What can I do?” Bob says haplessly. “I’ve got to give it to the nigger, don’t I?”

“DADDY, THAT IS ENOUGH!”

Patrick and I look up, startled by the shrill voice. Erin has stood up beside the pool and she is pointing a long finger at her father. “You may do and say as you wish at your house any time you wish-except when my daughter is present. Holly will not grow up handicapped by the prejudices of this state.”

Bob looks at Patrick and me and rolls his eyes, which from long experience we sons-in-law have no trouble translating as, What do you expect from a girl who ran off to New York City when she turned eighteen and lived among Yankees?

“Calm down, honey,” Bob says. “To you he’s an African American. Five years ago he was black, before that a Negro, before that colored. How am I supposed to keep up? To me he’s a nigger. His own friends call him nigger. What’s the difference? Holly won’t remember any of this in five minutes anyway.”

To be fair, Bob Anderson would never use this kind of language in mixed company-mixed racial company-or in front of whites he did not know and feel comfortable with. Unless, of course, someone made him mad. To Bob Anderson, “politically correct” means you salute the flag, work your butt off, pay your taxes, pray in school, and you by God go when Uncle Sam calls you, no questions asked. I could ridicule his views, but I won’t. Guys like Bob Anderson fought and died for this country years before I was born. Guys like Bob Anderson liberated Nordhausen and Buchenwald. Bob himself fought in Korea. So I keep my thirty-three-year-old mouth shut.

But Erin doesn’t. “Goddamn it, Daddy, I’m serious!” she snaps, her tanned cheeks quivering. “Holly’s like a sponge and you know it!”

Bob’s face glows pink. He half rises from his reclining lawn chair. “You hear that, Margaret? Your daughter just took the Lord’s name in vain, and she’s on me for calling a spade a spade! I think any civilized person would agree that blasphemy is far worse than saying nigger now and again!”

Margaret Anderson snores beneath her straw hat.

“No it’s not, Daddy,” Drewe says softly from the table. “But you’ll never understand why.”

I am enthralled by the continuing role reversal Erin and Drewe have been undergoing since they were kids. When they were teenagers, it was Drewe who almost daily pushed her father to the point that he locked her in her room or thrashed her with his belt. She constantly tested her limits, proving only that she was as stubborn as he was. Erin was a creature of equanimity, slipping through life with no resistance at all. Yet now that Erin is a mother, it is she who faces down Bob without fear or second thoughts.

As a child Drewe was a tomboy, curious, competitive, and tough. After puberty, she began to soften into a more feminine figure at the same time her intelligence put her at the top of her ninth-grade class. To prevent the inevitable taunts of being “too good” for everyone else, Drewe evolved a unique strategy. She became the wildest girl in the class. Or at least she seemed to. And one of her most convincing moves in this game of social survival was dating the wildest boy in her class-me. And so it was that I alone knew her secret. While the other girls were perpetually awed by the craziness of some of the things Drewe did, I knew, for example, that on those occasions when we managed to spend nearly all night together in bed, she stopped our passionate groping well short of “going all the way.” Yet she was perfectly content to let her friends think otherwise. And in the whirlwind of our relationship, no one seemed to notice that she maintained a 99.4 average in all subjects.

Erin was just as deceptive, but she took the opposite tack. A year behind Drewe, she effortlessly convinced every parent and teacher within thirty miles that she was a perfect angel while actually having sex with any guy who took her fancy, from clean-cut quarterbacks to pot-smoking cowboy rebels. Her grades were middling at best, but on the other hand, they were irrelevant.

Erin’s secret was her looks.

I gaze past Patrick and Bob: Erin has finally turned back toward the shimmering pool. I am now looking at what was once described as the finest ass in the state of Mississippi, and it still manages to make the one-piece bathing suit that covers it seem more revealing than a thong bikini. Even now, I am convinced that this thirty-two-year-old mother could give any high school senior a run for her money.

During 1979, Erin Anderson’s face appeared on the covers of six national magazines. Four days after she graduated from high school, she left Rain, Mississippi, for New York with five hundred dollars and the name of a modeling agent in her purse. Two months later she had signed a contract with the Ford agency. In quick succession came runway work, the six magazine covers, some TV spots. Then came a brief hiatus, and after that it was the inner pages of the magazines. Another hiatus, then mostly they used her hands, feet, breasts, and hair.

No tragic accident had disfigured her face. If looks alone were the criterion, Erin would still be gazing out from the racks at the supermarket checkout instead of gathering up her child from the shallow end of her parents’ swimming pool. Erin’s problems were inside her head, not outside.

But first the exterior. Where Drewe is fair, Erin is dark. I lay that at the feet of genetics. Bob Anderson came from Scots-English blood, Margaret Cajun French. Drewe got her father’s genes, Erin her mother’s. And the differences hold true right down the line. Drewe’s hair is thick, auburn, and slightly curly. Erin’s is fine and straight and so brown it is almost black. Drewe’s eyes are green and bright with quick intelligence; Erin’s are almond-shaped, as black and deep as smoldering Louisiana bottomland. Drew has a pert nose, while Erin’s is long and straight with catlike flared nostrils. And where Drewe’s lips are pink, like brush strokes on a Royal Doulton figurine, Erin’s are full and brown, her upper lip dusted with fine tawny down. Both girls are somewhere around five foot nine, but Erin is long.

I don’t mean to shortchange my wife. Any man with functioning retinas would call Drewe a beauty. She is also demure-except while working-and her strength and smarts give an edge to her elegance. She is a doctor, after all. Erin is a former model turned jet-set girlfriend turned housewife. But as I watch Erin leading her child by the hand to the wrought-iron table, the physical difference comes clear: Drewe is feminine; Erin is feline.

This is a difficult art, watching another woman without your wife noticing. You look with unrestricted freedom for the early part of your life, then suddenly you have to learn to conceal your interest. The battle is hopeless, like a physicist trying to train iron filings not to follow a magnet. But with Erin, I have had lots of practice.

Since I dated Drewe in high school, Erin and I were almost natural enemies. We constantly razzed each other, behaving as if related ourselves. I grew adept at ignoring her stunning legs as we hung around the pool in the summers. But sometimes ignoring her was impossible.

Once, at a high school lake party, some of the seniors got drunk enough to start skinny-dipping. Dusk was falling, and a few of the girls felt safe enough or bold enough to slip off their suits in the growing shadows and dive off the pier into the silver water.

When Drewe saw this, she silently stood up, threw her “wild” act to the winds, and started walking back toward the car. She obviously had no intention of stripping nude in front of strangers, no matter how drunk they might be. Besides, her coolness quotient was secure. She didn’t look back at me, but I knew she expected me to follow. And I meant to. But as I stood up, I heard a voice say softly: “Harper.”

I turned around to see Erin standing behind me. She wore the bottom half of a bikini, but her brown-nippled breasts were exposed. With her eyes locked on mine, she hooked a finger in the side of her suit and stepped lazily out of it.

She was glorious. And she knew it. I stood blinking in the dusk, trying to take in what I was seeing. Looking back now, I realize that trying to see-truly see — a naked woman in her entirety is like trying to take in the carnage at a traffic accident. Your brain simply cannot process all the input being channeled like floodwater through your eyes. I saw bits of her: collarbones like sculpted braces inside a guitar, her flat brown oiled belly, beaded with pearls of lake water descending to a stark tan line where a lighter brownness descended again to the rough black triangle blurring the wide cleft between her thighs. And always her eyes. How long did I stare? Five seconds? Ten? I heard a long, reverent whistle from the water below the pier. Then Erin’s gaze floated above my shoulder and she simply stepped off the pier and dropped into the lake. When I turned around and looked up to the house, I saw no one. But after I reached the car, Drewe remained silent all the way back to Rain.

“Uncle Harrrrp — ”

Startled, I look away from Erin and into the face of Holly, her daughter. “What is it, punkin?”

“Where’s your git — tar?”

Bob chuckles.

“I didn’t bring it today.”

“Play me a sawng,” commands the three-year-old.

“I can’t. I guess I could sing one a cappella. What do you want to hear?”

“Blackbirdie!” she squeals, laughing. She means “Blackbird,” by Paul McCartney. Sometimes Patrick whistles birdcalls while I play the song, which drives Holly into fits of laughter.

“Sorry, Scooter,” I say. “I need the git — tar for that one. What’s your second choice?”

“BARNEY!” she screeches.

“Christ,” whispers Patrick. “I thought she got over Barney last year.”

“Uh, Marg?” Bob says softly. “Didn’t you tell me ol’ Barney got killed in a car wreck yesterday?”

“What?” Holly asks, her eyes round.

“Daddy!” Drewe snaps.

To prevent bloodshed, I begin the anthem adored by most humans under three and reviled by most above that age. Holly sits entranced. She actually resembles Drewe more than Erin. The Scots-English genes apparently overpowered the Cajun. I give the Barney theme a soul-gospel ending; Holly claps and giggles, and even Margaret lifts the brim of her hat and applauds.

“Did you hear about Karin Wheat?” my mother-in-law asks me softly.

While I consider my answer, she takes a sip of half-melted Bloody Mary, shivers, and says, “Gruesome.”

“I did hear about that,” I say noncommittally, feeling Drewe’s gaze on the back of my neck.

“I was just reading Isis, ” Margaret goes on. “I’ll bet one of her crazy fans killed her. That book was chock full of perversion.”

“Didn’t stop you from reading, though, did it?” Bob snickers. “What’s happening on the porno box, Harper?”

“Porno box” is Bob’s nickname for the EROS computer. “Same old seven and six,” I say, though I would give a lot to know whether the Strobekker account has gone active in the last few hours and, if so, whether the FBI was able to trace the connection.

Bob shakes his head. “I still don’t get why anybody-even sex maniacs-would pay that much money for a box that won’t even transmit pictures.”

“Actually, it will now,” I tell him. “There was so much demand for it, Jan Krislov decided to give in.”

“I’ll be damned.”

Erin slips on a terry cloth robe and leads Holly away from this conversation onto the perfectly manicured lawn. Bob keeps all eight acres as immaculate as a golf green and does all the work himself.

“I heard on A Current Affair that the killer cut off her head, ” Margaret adds.

I force myself to look disinterested.

“This is one time I’m gonna surprise you pinko-liberals,” Bob says with good humor. “I’ll guarantee you it was a white man killed that writer woman.”

Drewe raises her eyebrows. “Why do you say that?”

“ ’Cause a nigger don’t kill that way,” Bob replies seriously. “Oh, they’ll cut you, or shoot you. But it’s an impulse thing. A nigger gets mad quick, kills quick, gets over it quick. He’s likely to be feeling sorry about it five minutes after he did it. White man’s different. A white man can nurse a hate a long time. A white man likes to hate. Gives him a mission, a reason to live. And a murder like that thing in New Orleans-mutilation, I mean-it takes a long time to build up an anger like that.”

We are all staring intently at Bob Anderson.

“’Course, it was New Orleans,” he adds philosophically. “God knows anything can happen there.”

After a thoughtful silence, Margaret asks Drewe about some policy change at one of the Jackson hospitals. Drewe and Patrick both have staff privileges there, and strong opinions about the issue. Every now and then Bob chimes in with an unsolicited expert opinion. While they banter back and forth, my eyes wander back to Erin and Holly. They move like exotic animals over the dappled lawn, Erin graceful as a gazelle, Holly like a sprite risen from the grass. As I watch, I let my eyes take on the thoughtful cast I have practiced so often at this gathering. Everyone assumes I am thinking about bond trades or commodities. Before long, Bob will ask me if I made any killings this week.

But for now I am granted a dispensation.

I try to keep my mind clear, but the effort is vain. As always, my secret rises unbidden. It is always there, beating like a second heart within my brain. The ceaseless tattoo grows louder, pulsing in my ears, throbbing in my temples, causing little storms of numbness along my upper forearms. These are parasthesias; I looked up the symptom late one night in one of Drewe’s medical books. Parasthesias are caused by extraordinary levels of stress. Everyone has a different tolerance, I suppose. What would terrify an equestrienne would not faze a bull rider.

I have carried my secret for a long time, and consequently thought I had learned to live with it, like a benign growth of some sort. Then, three months ago, I discovered that my secret had far more frightful consequences than I ever imagined. That my guilt is far greater than my capacity for rationalization.

And my skill at deception is crumbling.

Beyond this, I have an irrational feeling that my secret has taken on a life of its own-that it is trying to get out. It flutters at the edge of Patrick’s consciousness, polishes the fine blade of Drewe’s mistrust. I sometimes wonder whether she knows already but lives in a denial based on fear even greater than mine. Is this possible? No. Drewe could not know this thing and not act. Look at her, sitting in the black iron lawn chair, speaking with calm authority, words precise, back straight, green eyes focused.

Erin joins hands with Holly as they dance across the grass, now closer, now farther away. They spin like dervishes in the August heat. The drone of medico-political conversation presses against my eardrums, blending with the sound of Bob’s bees in Bob’s bushes. Comparing Drewe and Erin now, I see beyond the physical. Their innermost differences are stark, essential. They can be divided by single words: Drewe is control, Erin chaos. Drewe is achievement, Erin accident. Erin’s eyes catch mine for the briefest instant. I try to blank my mind, to shake my preoccupation and smile.

But I cannot.

She spins more slowly, her eyes catching mine each time she turns. What is in those eyes? Compassion? I believe so. In these fleeting moments I sense an intimacy of such painful intensity that it seems almost in danger of arcing between us-of ionizing the air dividing our eyes and bodies and letting that which resides separately in both our souls unite, as someday it inevitably must. What is this power that burns so for unity? That threatens to declare itself without invitation? What is it but the truth? A knowledge that Erin and I alone possess, of things as they really are.

And what is the truth of things as they really are?

Holly Graham is my daughter.