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“So you listened to my message, then went back out and mowed the lawn ’cause you wanted to call me?”
“What?”
“Don’t give me your trash, Monroe. I need you to drive me to the hospital.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I got a butcher-knife cut across my hand is what’s wrong. Now get your sorry black ass over here.”
“Who cut you?”
“That’s what we’re gonna talk about. You getting the implication? I been beat up, I been run in, I been threatened, I been racially humiliated, and now I been cut. Got the picture, Negro?”
“My recorder is still running. Hang on.”
“Stop fucking with your machine and listen to me. We’re gonna file a civil rights suit against the sheriff’s department. They’re gonna pay for what they done to me.”
“I hear you, Herman, but who cut you?”
Herman’s level of frustration and anger with Monroe was such that he could barely speak. Then he looked through the sliding doors and thought he saw a silhouette standing just to the side of an orchid tree. “I t’ink somebody is outside. I t’ink it’s probably them kids from next door. Stay wit’ me. If I tell you to call 911, that means get the Eighty-second Airborne out here, you got me, Monroe?”
Herman walked to the open glass doors, the cordless gripped in his left hand, a fist thudding inside his chest. “You in trouble?” he heard Monroe say.
“Hang on,” Herman said.
He stepped outside and felt the wind blow on his face, drying the sheen of sweat on his forehead. The trees were rustling loudly, leaves drifting down on the brightness of the pool. He stared hard at a barrel-potted bottlebrush tree that in the shadows seemed fatter and denser than it should have been.
“I can’t take this anxiety,” Monroe said. “You all right, Herman? Tell me what’s happening, man.”
“Shut up, Monroe,” Herman said, staring at a silhouette that disconnected itself from the bottlebrush tree and now stood framed against the moonlight that shimmered like a white flame on the bayou.
“Herman? You there?”
“Yeah, I’m here. There’s somebody by the pool.”
“Who?”
“If I knew, I’d tell you.” Herman could hear a creaking sound in his ears, like water pressure at a great depth. “Monroe, stay wit’ me and call the cops on your cell. Don’t break the connection, you reading me on this?”
“I’m your cousin, man, I’m wit’ you all the way. You got anything in your house you shouldn’t have, get rid of it. Flush the bowl two or three times. Don’t use the drains, either.”
“Make the call and come over here, Monroe.”
“I’m coordinating everything from right here. It’s under control. I got your back, man. This is the command center.”
But Herman had removed the cordless from his ear and was no longer listening. “What are you doing here?” he said to the silhouette. He paused, but there was no reply. “I ain’t big on this silent-treatment stuff. You got somet’ing to say that cain’t wait till business hours, do it. But you’re on my property, and I wasn’t expecting no callers, except maybe a lady friend and her sister that’s coming t’rew the door any minute now.”
Again there was no response.
“How about saying what you got to say so I can go back inside and get dressed, ’cause I ain’t comfortable walking around outdoors in my underwear talking to myself,” Herman said.
“Herman, who you talking to?” Monroe’s voice said.
But Herman was no longer thinking about Monroe or the cordless phone that hung uselessly from his hand. He wanted the children who had been playing tag in the dark to appear at his piked gate; he wanted someone from the lawn party to arrive by boat at the back of his property and invite him over; he wanted clothes on his body to take away the sense of nakedness and vulnerability that turned the backs of his legs to pudding.
He made a chugging sound when he cleared the clot in his throat. “Maybe it’s my accent that ain’t working here, ’cause you don’t seem to understand what the focus is in our sit’ation. See, the focus is getting everyt’ing out on the table so we can look at it and resolve it and so it don’t be a problem to nobody. But we cain’t do that when we get inside this silent-treatment groove and try to scare the shit out of everybody. See, that’s what John Wayne do in the movies, but in the real world, it gives everybody anxiety and the wrong idea about how t’ings are gonna work out.
“’Cause look, this ain’t funny no more. I ain’t saying I necessarily got a weak heart, but I wasn’t planning to get ’jacked in my own yard, I mean by my own pool, where I’m fixing to entertain these ladies that’s coming over. ’Cause you’re here to ’jack me, ain’t you? Not nothing else? You can have my stash and my cash, it ain’t a lot, but what more can I say, I ain’t in this world to argue or give nobody trouble. I was just telling my attorney, he’s on the line now if he ain’t already on his way over, I’m a bidnessman and put deals together and ain’t never been greedy about it and piece off the action and he’p as many people as I can if they want in on it, but I’m axing you not to point that t’ing at my face no more.
