‘Can I sit down?’ Omar asked.
‘Do I have to give you permission all of a sudden?’
He leaned against the window.
‘What’d you come here for?’
‘To see you.’
‘Oh.’
‘Gimme a cigarette,’ Omar said.
She shook her head. ‘Last one,’ she whispered, holding her breath. She’d just taken a drag and held the half-smoked cigarette in the air. She exhaled. ‘And you thought: Chetta wants to do it with me. That’s what you thought, isn’t it?’
He laughed.
‘What you doin’ here, Omar?’
She was staring back at him, brow furrowed. She had pulled up her knees and leaned her arms on them. She seemed to have forgotten her question. Her thoughts were someplace else. As if it didn’t matter that he was standing in her bedroom in the middle of the night.
‘You need to go to sleep,’ he said.
She laughed. ‘D’you know I have an aunt in New York? My mother’s big sister. Name’s Jo. I only know her from stories. She was just fifteen when she took the bus up north, all on her own. She lived in some backwater in North Carolina. Didn’t tell anybody she was pregnant, not even my mother. My mother just cried and cried till her eyes burned and she was out of tears.’ Chetta paused. ‘I want to go see her in New York sometime. I think my mother only saw her once or twice since. Crazy, isn’t it? If you ask me, my mother’s still mad at Jo, or maybe jealous.’
She was talking more to herself than to him, but still, her words lessened the distance between them.
Omar sat down on the foot end of her bed. ‘Come on,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Can I kiss you?’
‘Sure.’
‘And then I’ll go.’
‘Whatever you want.’
‘I like you, Chetta.’
‘I like you too.’
He only gave her a quick peck on the cheek. He didn’t really know why. There was something in Chetta’s demeanor that scared him. He didn’t want to hurt her. He got up and went over to the broken window, looked outside, and saw only white. Thick mist hung between the trees and above the lawn and the street. The glow of the streetlamp shone vaguely through it. The mist muted all noise: it was so still that he almost wondered if he’d gone deaf. The world seemed so small. As he climbed back outside he stopped halfway, with one leg outside and one inside. Chetta had already switched off her bedside lamp. She was invisible. He heard only the soft gray hum of the radio as he breathed the cold, damp night air. Imagined he saw clouds instead of mist. The clouds were so thick and firm it was like you could walk on them. His foot felt for the drainpipe and then he slid back down.
He stood in the narrow alley behind their house on West Chestnut. He had no idea how long he’d been walking. His jacket and T-shirt hung heavily on his shoulders, sodden from the fine gray rain. But he didn’t want to go inside yet, didn’t feel like talking. His grandmother was always home. He leaned against the neighbor’s shed and looked into the yard. The branches of the thick old oak tree hung low over the lawn. The grass hadn’t been mown for months now; weeds were taking over. At the back of the yard his grandmother grew herbs and strawberries and bell peppers. Billy’s rusty bike lay on the stoop by the kitchen door. The garbage can was open, the ground was strewn with leftovers and broken glass: the neighbor’s dogs had probably gotten loose again.
He had to go in and sleep. He’d promised Reggie they would go out tonight before work. But he just stood there and felt how tired his limbs were. He hadn’t seen Chetta again after that one visit. He’d done his best to avoid her. The way she talked to him, like she knew more about him than he did. ‘What you doin’ here, Omar?’ He was almost embarrassed to think back on that encounter in her bedroom. The thick mist that seemed to swallow everything up. He was the only human being on earth that night; at any moment the cold white clouds might have swallowed him up too.
He pushed off the shed wall with his foot, walked over to the kitchen door, opened the screen door, and went inside.
‘Grandma,’ he called. No answer. ‘Grandma.’
‘I’m here,’ came the singsong voice from upstairs.
‘It’s me.’
‘There’s food for you on the stove,’ his grandmother called. She looked down from the top of the stairs. Wisps of scraggly gray hair fell along her round face. He was always surprised that his grandmother had almost no wrinkles. Her eyes sparkled. Sometimes she looked even younger than Mama.
‘Somebody came by for you,’ she said. ‘He left a note. It’s on the table.’
‘This early?’
‘A Mr. Evans. He came all the way from Cleveland. Had a beauty of a car. He was a real gentleman. I made him some coffee.’
Ahmed Evans had left behind a note in elegant, old-fashioned handwriting. Saturday afternoon, 2 p.m. Antioch College, Yellow Springs, Ohio. Let me know if you can be there. Black Arts Festival. You’re in charge. Peace, Ahmed.
Fred Ahmed Evans was a black nationalist. Omar had met him at a club in Cleveland about a year back. Evans drank orange juice and water. He wore a black suit with a white dress shirt. He was a small, slightly built man with a suspicious, self-assured look in his eye. Evans had the aura of an intellectual but his hands were large and strong and calloused. He had been a welder in a Cleveland steel factory before deciding to devote himself to the cause.
‘Where’d you get that fancy shirt?’ Evans had asked him. ‘Looks like it’s made out of gold.’
‘From a neighbor of mine who died. His wife gave it to me. She said it suited me. Why do you ask?’
‘Sad.’
‘He was sick.’
‘I hear you. Sad.’
‘What are you doing here? You look lost. That suit and all. You from the Nation or something?’
‘I haven’t come all this way to be put down again,’ Evans snapped.
‘Whoa, didn’t mean to rile you. Let me buy you a drink.’
Evans made a dismissive gesture. Then extended his hand. ‘Evans. I’ve seen you here before. I hoped we’d get the chance to talk.’
‘You’re from the cops.’
For the first time Ahmed Evans’s stern face broke into a smile. ‘You could be doing other things,’ he said.
‘Like what?’
‘For your own people, your own kind … the way I see it, you’re nothin’ but a big, stupid, motherfuckin’ nigga.’
‘Say what?’ Omar was surprised that he wasn’t even angry at this slender man with his strange sense of humor.
‘All that time you spend on women and hustling. You’d feel better if you did something for your own people. I guarantee it.’
‘I feel fine.’
‘Really?’
‘Why wouldn’t I?’
‘Because you do exactly what white people expect you to.’
‘Fuck off.’
‘Why don’t you come to one of our meetings.’ Evans scribbled an address on the back of a silver foil lining from a pack of Marlboros. ‘Tuesday at eight.’ Shook his hand, as though to confirm the appointment.
But Omar misplaced the slip