There are cameras on top, but you can see over the fence. You can see the New England forest. It looks tired and small, maybe even dusty, as if it needed someone to clean the leaves. There's another small hill. You can hear birds. Royce and I climbed up to the top, and I gathered up my nerve and said, "I really like you. "
"Uh-huh," he said, balancing his soup, and I knew it wasn't going to work.
Leave it, I thought, don't push, it's hard for him, he doesn't know you.
"You come here a lot," he said. It was a statement.
"I come here to get away. "
Royce blew out through his nostrils: a kind of a laugh. "Get away? You know what's under your feet?"
"Yes," I said, looking at the forest. Neither one of us wanted to sit on that red soil, even to eat the soup. I passed him his crackers, from my coat pocket.
"So why did you pick me? Out of all the other Stiffs?"
"I guess I just liked what I saw. "
"Why?"
I smiled with embarrassment at being forced to say it; it was as if there were no words for it that were not slightly wrong. "Because I guess you're kind of good-looking and I. just thought I would like you a lot. "
"Because I'm black?"
"You are black, yes. "
"Are most of your boyfriends black?"
Bull's-eye. That was scary. "I, uh, did go through a phase where I guess I was kind of fixated on black people. But I stopped that, I mean, I realized that what I was actually doing was depersonalizing the people I was with, which wasn't very flattering to them. But that is all over. It really isn't important to me now. "
"So you went out and made yourself sleep with white people. " He does not, I thought, even remotely like me.
"I found white people I liked. It didn't take much. "
"You toe the line all the way down the line, don't you?" he said.
I thought I didn't understand.
"Is that why you're here?" A blank from me. "You toe the line, the right line, so you're here. "
"Yes," I said. "In a way. Big Lou saw me on the platform, and knew me from politics. I guess you don't take much interest in politics. " I was beginning to feel like hitting back.
"Depends on the politics," he said, briskly.
"Well you're OK, I guess. You made it out. "
"Out of where?"
I just looked back at him. "Los Angeles. "
He gave a long and very bitter sigh, mixed with a kind of chortle. "Whenever I am in this. situation, there is the conversation. I always end up having the same conversation. I reckon you're going to tell me I'm not black enough. "
"You do kind of shriek I am middle class. "
"Uh-huh. You use that word class, so that means it's not racist, right?"
"I mean, you're being loyal to your class, to which most black people do not belong. "
"Hey, bro', you can't fool me, we're from the same neighborhood. That sort of thing?" It was imitation ghetto. "You want somebody with beads in his hair and a beret and a semi who hates white people, but likes you because you're so upfront movement? Is that your little dream? A big bad black man?"
I turned away from him completely.
He said, in a very cold still voice. "Do you get off on corpses, too?"
"This was a mistake," I said. "Let's go back. "
"I thought you wanted to talk. "
"Why are you doing this?"
"Because," he said, "you are someone who takes off dead men's watches, and you look like you could have been a nice person. "
"I am," I said, and nearly wept, "a nice person. "
"That's what scares the shit out of me. "
"You think I want this? You think I don't hate this?" I think that's when I threw down the soup. I grabbed him by the shirt sleeves and held him. I remember being worried about the cameras, so I kept my voice low and rapid, like it was scuttling.
"Look, I was on the train, I was going to die, and Lou said, you can live. You can help here and live. So I did it. And I'm here. And so are you. "
"I know," he said, softly.
"So OK, you don't like me, I can live with that, fine, no problem, you're under no obligation, so let's just go back. "
"You come up here because of the forest," he said.
"Yes! Brilliant!"
"Even mass murderers need love too, right?"
"Yes! Brilliant!"
"And you want me to love you? When you bear the same relation to me, as Lou does to you?"
"I don't know. I don't care. " I was sitting down now, hugging myself. The bowl of soup was on the ground by my foot, tomato sludge creeping out of it. I kicked it. "Sorry I hassled you. "
"You didn't hassle me. "
"All I want is one little part of my life to have a tiny corner of goodness in it. Just one little place. I probably won't, but I feel like if I don't find it soon, I will bust up into a million pieces. Not love. Not necessarily. Just someone nice to talk to, who I really like. Otherwise I think one day I will climb back into one of those trains. " When I said it, I realized it was true. I hadn't known I was that far gone. I thought I had been making a play for sympathy.
Royce was leaning in front of me, looking me in the face. "Listen, I love you. "
"Bullshit. " What kind of mind-fuck now?
He grabbed my chin, and turned my head back round. "No. True. Not maybe in the way you want, but true. You really do look, right now, like one of those people on the train. Like someone I just unloaded. "
I didn't know quite what he was saying, and I wasn't sure I trusted him, but I did know one thing. "I don't want to go back to that bunkhouse, not this afternoon. "
"OK. We'll stay up here and talk. "
I felt like I was stepping out onto ice. "But can we talk nicely? A little bit less heavy duty?"
"Nicely. Sounds sweet, doesn't mean anything. Like the birds?"
"Yes," I said. "Like the birds. "
I reckon that, altogether, we had two weeks. A Lullaby in Birdland. Hum along if you want to. You don't need to know the words.
Every afternoon after the work, Royce and I went up the mound and talked. I think he liked talking to me, I'll go as far as that. I remember one afternoon he showed me photographs from his wallet. He still had a wallet, full of people.
He showed me his mother. She was extremely thin, with dark limp flesh under her eyes. She was trying to smile. Her arms were folded across her stomach. She looked extremely kind, but tired.
There was a photograph of a large red brick house. It had white window sills and a huge white front door, and it sagged in the way that only very old houses do.
"Whose is that?" I asked.
"Ours. Well, my family's. Not my mother's. My uncle lives there now. "
"It's got a Confederate flag over it!"
Royce grinned and folded up quietly; his laughter was almost always silent. "Well, my great-grandfather didn't want to lose all his slaves, did he?"
One half of Royce's family were black, one half were white. There were terrible wedding receptions divided in half where no one spoke. "the white people are all so embarrassed, particularly the ones who want to be friendly. There's only one way a black family gets a house like that: Grandfather messed around a whole bunch. He hated his white family, so he left the house to us. My uncle and aunt want to open it up as a Civil War museum and put their picture on the leaflet. "Royce folded up again. "I mean, this is in Georgia. Can you imagine all those rednecks showing up and finding a nice black couple owning it, and all this history about black regiments?"
"Who's that?"
"My cousin. She came to live with us for a while. "
"She's from the white half. "