The Between (11 page)

And now, unexplained, they were back. Not to mention his eerie, wide-awake hallucination the other night. Hilton stared at the basketball court with heavy eyes, barely registering a Heat three-point shot that tied the game. He didn’t even know what the exact score was, or if O’Neal was still on the court. Raul was hooting gleefully beside him, but the other sounds in the vast indoor arena sounded far away. Hilton drank the last of his rum and Coke and rested the empty cup beside his feet. He should know better than to drink on an empty stomach.

Hilton was annoyed by the too-loud whispering of a man and woman sitting behind him, the kind of pompous conversation spoken to be overheard: “. . . but let’s just say I don’t have to fly to L.A. next month. Say we shoot in Orlando. That still leaves us four, five weeks to edit. We’re not dead in the water
the way they found that poor orphan child . . . And no lifeguard . . . Course not, just us coloreds . . . Brought him down from Belle Glade way . . . You knew Eunice Kelly, who was raising him after her daughter ran off . . . died of an attack, just like that, some kind of heart ailment . . . That’s what I’d heard . . . boy found her in the kitchen, dead-cold . . . Lord have mercy . . .

“. . . His cousin Melva brought him to Virginia Key, wanted to see if somebody from the family could . . . Oh, well, no sense worrying ’bout it now. . . . Water was plain deadly, Matt said . . . The grandmama dead last year, now the boy . . . Damn shame . . . This world ain’t right, just ain’t right
. . .”

“Are you fucking crazy?” Raul asked Hilton, nudging him.

“What?” Hilton mumbled, stirring.

“You’re asleep at a fucking game. Now I’ve seen it all.”

“I’m not sleeping. Go to hell,” Hilton said, but he knew from his familiar heartbeat thudding at his temples that he’d been sleeping, that he’d been dreaming. He glanced around him at the cheering faces, at men waving their game programs with wide-mouthed shouts as the players bounded toward the Heat’s end of the court. He looked to see whose voices were speaking behind him; he saw a blond-haired woman wearing a black dress and sunglasses, even indoors; the man beside her wore his graying hair in a ponytail. They were huddled close together, discussing details of some film project. Hilton stared a moment, then looked away. He hadn’t expected them to be white, for some reason. He hadn’t expected to see a man, or a woman so young. He’d expected someone else.

“What’s the score, then?” Raul taunted. “And don’t look.”

“All right, all right. I was sleeping. Lay off, huh?”

“You’re better off asleep. Twelve unanswered points. And this guy misses . . .
Oye, maricon!”
Raul’s voice rose to a shout as the basketball bounced wildly off the backboard.

Hilton stared hard at Raul. He hadn’t noticed how much his friend’s hair was thinning, that he was combing it to the side to make his scalp look less sparsely covered.

“What are you looking at? Too much rum for you, I think.”

“Where’s your Mets cap?” Hilton asked suddenly.

Raul touched the top of his head, then shrugged and turned his attention back to the game. “Left it tonight. Couldn’t find it. De-fense, de-fense! They call that defense? Jesus Christ.”

The screams and shouts in the arena roared a moment in Hilton’s ears as though he were in a sound tunnel of pulsing waves. He leaned over to examine the floor, finding crumpled hot dog wrappers and a discarded program. Then he glanced at Raul’s lap, where Raul held tightly to his cup still half-full of rum and Coke. No Mets cap.

“You were wearing it when I came in. You took it off and waved it to me,” Hilton said.

“Are you here to be fashion consultant, or are you watching the game? I can’t believe you were sleeping,” Raul said, not looking at him. His voice was slightly slurred. “I think you’re still sleeping.”

Hilton sighed, annoyed at Raul’s tipsy dismissal. “Maybe so. I can’t sleep at night lately.”

Raul shouted and jumped from his seat as the Heat grabbed a skillful rebound from a missed O’Neal shot. The noise coiled around Hilton’s earlobes, and he shook his head to clear it. No, he would never again drink on an empty stomach. He needed to find a hot dog, or he’d doze through the rest of the game. He tried to remember if he’d dreamed that Raul was wearing the Mets cap, but he knew he hadn’t.

He could still see the blue corduroy fabric and orange logo waving in Raul’s hand. That part had been real.

The Heat never made up the dozen points, and the gap had widened to fifteen by the time the final horn sounded. O’Neal had been in amazing form, a treat to watch from so close. Hilton forgot his troubles through the end of the game, but he was still irritated with Raul as they made their way out and found the line for the men’s room, by an unspoken understanding that they both needed to piss.

Raul had an excited conversation with a Spanish-speaking man ahead of them in line, then he bumped his shoulder back against Hilton to get his attention. The sound of flushing urinals and toilets from the stalls echoed against the walls, making it hard to hear him.

“You say you’re not sleeping? Why not?”

Hilton shrugged. “I’m not sure.”

“Dreams?”

Hilton met Raul’s reddened eyes, which were concentrated on him as though the sober therapist inside had snapped to life. Hilton only nodded.

“Bad ones?”

“Just like before.”

“Shit,” Raul said.

As they always did, they had both chosen a parking lot blocks from the arena because it was cheaper, so they joined the stream hurriedly making its way through the glass-littered streets of the Miami ghetto where the incongruous pink arena had been built. The homeless and the nameless lingered in shadows around them, their eyes studying the well-off intruders who lit up their unhappy streets with headlights and laughter so late at night.

“How long?” Raul asked.

“Couple weeks.”

“You feeling okay?”

“It’s getting to be a strain. I’m wired at work from not getting enough rest. Dede wanted me to talk to you about it. Maybe I should come in.”

Raul made a thoughtful sound but didn’t speak.

“What?” Hilton asked.

“Call me Monday. I have a name for you.”

“A name of what?”

“A therapist. She’s good, if that’s what you’re looking for.”

Hilton stopped walking, stunned, and Raul fell ahead of him by three paces before Hilton jogged to catch up. “No thanks. I’m not going through this whole routine with somebody new. Let me just come in for some hypnosis or something, man.”

“Lo siento mucho
. . .” He shook his head.

“What are you talking about? You know me.”

“Exactly. I know you as a friend. You’re not my patient, Hilton. That relationship is over now. I cannot work that way.”

“What we did before worked, Raul.”

Raul shrugged. “If it had worked, I don’t believe you’d still be having the dreams. You have some unresolved issues.”

Hilton laughed. “You sure sound like my shrink now.”

“Call me. I’ll give you her number, and I’ll give her your file. If therapy is the route you want . . .”

“No way. If it’s not you, no therapy.”

“You may not need it. It may just be stress.”

The elderly, sallow-skinned parking-lot attendant yawned, seeing them, and unlocked the padlocked fence to allow them to walk inside. Raul greeted him in Spanish, and the man responded grumpily. From what little Hilton could understand, the man said he was ready to go home because it was too cold outside.
Hay mucho frio,
he said. Raul drove a red 1970s Mustang convertible he kept immaculately shined, and it glistened beside Hilton’s beat-up old Corolla. Hilton knew he needed a new car, and he’d always said he couldn’t afford it, but the truth was that he hated to let go.

“How’s Dede?” Raul asked while they lingered beside the Mustang, and Hilton recognized the veiled inquiry into the state of his marriage. Raul couldn’t help being a counselor, even when he tried.

“Good. Very good.”

“What about work?”

“You’re not charging me by the hour for this conversation, are you?” Hilton asked.

“Fuck you,” Raul said, turning to fit his car keys into his door. Hilton laughed, watching him fumble to open the lock.

“You okay to drive?”

“You’re asking me? You’re the one who passed out during the game. I can drive fine. I live right across the bridge in Little Havana. This is not drunk. You’ve seen me drunk.”

“I know that’s right.”

Hilton still stood beside the car while Raul started his engine and the car roared flawlessly to life, as though it were new. Hilton was sorry the night was over, that he’d have to find his way home and crawl into bed beside Dede to face his simultaneous desire to sleep and to remain awake, the two yearnings that fought within him each night. Right now, he simply wished he could sleep. He wished Raul could pop him into a quick hypnotic trance and make his problem disappear.

“Any undue stress in your life?” Raul asked.

“Well, a weirdo sent a death threat to Dede’s office a couple of weeks ago. Called her a nigger and said he wanted to kill her and her family. We’re having the police look it over.”

Raul nodded, pursing his lips, then he smiled at Hilton. “Two weeks, you say? It sounds like that’s enough to give anyone nightmares. Wouldn’t you agree?”

He was right, of course. That was the simplest answer. Yet it wasn’t the right one, Hilton believed. He wished he could explain why he felt that way, but he couldn’t explain that any more than he could explain how he’d seen Raul wearing his Mets cap when he insisted he’d left it at home, and he wasn’t wearing it now.

There was simply too much, lately, he couldn’t explain— even to Raul, whom Hilton had hoped could give him answers. He hadn’t realized how much he’d hoped for Raul’s help until now, with his hands grasping the cold metal of Raul’s car as though he were afraid to release it.
dead-cold

He felt afraid of everything tonight; afraid to drive through the grim, skeletal streets of Overtown; afraid of facing the empty stretch of U.S. 1, which had been blocked by fire engines and ambulances from a nasty accident earlier that night. He could still see the fresh image of a man with a bloodied shirt being pulled gingerly by paramedics from the driver’s side of a crumpled Honda; he’d stared so long, trying to see the man’s face, that the line of cars behind him blared a symphony of horns.

Most of all, he was afraid to sleep, and going home meant sleep would come. If he were still in therapy with Raul now, Hilton realized, he would be breaking the primary rule. He was holding back. He wasn’t being honest. Short of begging, however, there was nothing left to say, and the cool air was uncomfortable. The old parking attendant was right to complain. It was a bad night.

“It’s probably the letter,” Hilton said. “You’re right.” “You see?” Raul said, winking. “That’s a hundred bucks. I’ll mail my bill.
Buenas noches, compadre.”

“Yeah. Good night,” Hilton said, his spirits lower than he could remember in a long time.

“Hilton! You get back here, boy. Do you hear me?”

A sharp voice he knows pierces through a cacophony of rhythms playing in his brain. He tries to open his eyes. He will answer her this time instead of hiding. “I’m coming, Nana,” he says.

He sees nothing except fluid spots of every color swimming before him in a broth of darkness. Tiny voices fly at him in flurries, tickling his ears. Nana’s aged voice is no longer with him; the voices he hears now sound like sinister mimicries of his own. They hurt his ears, and he tries to bat them away.

“How many times,” says one voice, fading in and fading out from one ear to the other, “do you think you can die?”

Another voice explodes in a cackling scream that comes from everywhere. “Do you think you can keep dying forever?”

He covers his ears, but the flurry of voices penetrates his flesh as if he has none. He doesn’t know where he is. “All I want is peace,” he says. “Please just let me have peace.”

The flurries race through his head, and the spots swimming before him lurch into a mad dance. He is taunted by old voices, young voices, strangers and loved ones, the remembered, the forgotten. The last voice is a kind one at last, Nana’s: “Hilton, there’s no peace where you’re at,” she says, her words laden with the sadness of a dozen lifetimes.

“Child, you done swum out too far.”

Even a spirit looks after his child.

—Ghanaian proverb

Question:        What do you call a baby nigger?

Answer:          A niglet.

Question:        What do you call Dede James’s two little niglets?

Answer:          Dead.

I hope you’ve studied for your final exam. I am your judge, Your Honor. My sentence on you won’t be commuted by a wall made of coral or a nigger house built of bricks. I’ll huff and I’ll puff, and I’ll blow your house down.

“Where are the kids?” Curt asked Hilton quietly, slipping the plastic-encased note back into Hilton’s hand. This note was neatly typed like the rest, but it was worse than the others. It had been delivered in person.

“They’re at Dede’s mom’s,” Hilton answered gloomily. “We told them Grandma Kessie wants them to spend the night. Kaya knew something was wrong, though.”

The two men stood in the doorway of the Dade state attorney’s systems researcher’s office at the timeworn justice building downtown. Dede, uncharacteristically still sporting her black judge’s robe, sat across from a gray-haired man taking patient notes while she spoke to him in a voice very unlike her own, shaken and small and frightened. The prosecutors’ offices were deserted except for the four of them. There was a somber hush here tonight.

“Are you and Dede spending the night at home?” Curt asked.

“We haven’t talked about that yet,” Hilton said.

This note, the fifth in two months and by far the most cryptic, had been delivered in a business envelope addressed to The Honorable Dede James in her chambers two floors below in the justice building. When she called Hilton earlier, she’d told him she happened to see it on her secretary’s desk just before she planned to leave for the night. Hil, he might have been right there when I was alone, Dede said. He slipped in somehow. This isn’t some nut upstate anymore. He’s come back to Miami.