Nigger in the Window.

What's it called when niggers toting gifts go calling door-to-door? Father's Day in the Flats.

Funny joke, Darryl thinks. Yeah. Real funny. The day the joke was told though, Darryl hadn't laughed. He might have laughed had a Black friend, Two or somebody, told it to a group of Blacks. But no Black face other than his had peppered the rustling sheet of White laughter lining the hallway that day - back in high school, back home in Fitzgerald, Texas - so Darryl kept still. He wrestled down the smile wrestling his lips into activity and slipped away from the crowd where the joke was told. His friend Kevin Walton, who told it, ran after him.

"Darryl . . .," he called, catching up.

"Damn, Kevin," was all Darryl said, steadily striding down the hall.

"C'mon Darryl," Kevin said. "It was just a joke."

"In bad taste. Especially in front of me."

"C'mon, man. You know I, we . . . . Nobody looks at you that way."

"What way?"

"You know," Kevin said. "As Black."

"Then what the fuck am I, Kevin!" . . .

Darryl squats, his naked knees pulled up to his bare chest, leaning back against the cool plaster of the wall. Minnesota night cold outside the window snaps a sting into the air and stretches across the dormitory room. The still falling snows of late March accumulate in upside-down white arcs on the sill outside the glass, slowly climbing the sides but leaving a bright valley at the bottom. Darryl looks from the window over to Cathy Collins, asleep on his small twin bed, her pale skin glowing in the dark.

What's it called when niggers toting gifts go calling door-to-door? . . .

"C'mon, Darryl," Kevin said, his head buried into the collar of his green-and-gold letter jacket.

Kevin Walton. At Fitzgerald High, he and Darryl found themselves confronted with friendship. Growing up, they lived four houses apart in Oakbrook Heights and always ended up on the same side in summer league baseball. Then, in high school, they shared the same backfield on the football team, were ranked number two and three in their class, and soon ended up sitting side by side in the upper-level courses, passing them with an equality of ease.

. . . Father's Day in the Flats.

But then Kevin got riled himself. "Lay off it, will you?" he said. "It was just a joke. You're walking around with a chip on your shoulder. That . . ."

"A chip on my shoulder! You call me a nigger in front of everybody . . ."

"I didn't call you a nigger."

"You talked about 'nigger this' and 'nigger that.'"

"I didn't call you a nigger," Kevin corrected him. "It was a joke. It was about guys not knowing who their fathers are . . ."

"It was about Black guys not knowing who their fathers are."

"All right," Kevin conceded. "It was about Black guys not knowing who their fathers are."

Then Darryl said, "I've never met my real father."

This was new information to Kevin, and Darryl watched his face shift while the information registered in his mind.

"Still. Darryl, look," Kevin said. "I'm sorry, okay? It's just . . . I'm sorry."

Darryl remembers feeling bad for Kevin. He remembers looking at his friend, who was hardly able to look up at him, feeling sorry for his discomfort and telling him to forget it. What's it called when niggers toting gifts go calling door-to-door? And, squatting in the cold so far away, Darryl remembers Peggy McPherson - Kevin's girlfriend, his own good friend - looking from Darryl to the ground while the whole group laughed, wanting to laugh with the rest and trying not to. Father's Day in the Flats.

"The Flats," Darryl thinks. What a weird and ugly name for a neighborhood. Even as a kid, he liked "Beezville" so much better. The faded mural on the side of Booker T. Washington Junior High School, the husky black-and-gold bee with the menacing smirk. Beezville seemed more volatile, more dangerous. Proud.

But what the hell was "the Flats"? What was it supposed to refer to? The houses there? Because they were one-storied, because they were rickety and small and when the wind blew outside you felt it inside? They might as well have called it "the Shacks" then. That would be a more fitting name. But "Flats." What's "the Flats"?

The Flats was tired. The Town Council closed Booker T. Junior High to integrate it into the larger Fitzgerald J.H.S.; then they decided it was racially offensive to refer publicly to Beezville as Beezville anymore (although most of the older people still did). So the children went to Fitzgerald Junior High and later Fitzgerald High, home of the Fightin' Pioneers, and when their teachers talked about where the Black children lived, they talked about the Flats. And the children were uncomfortable and embarrassed - ashamed - and they weren't sure why. And even though Darryl's family didn't live there, he was ashamed, too.

"The Flats" sounded like a bad word, but actually it was Darryl's stepfather, Jack Mitchell, who first used it to describe Beezville.

Jack Mitchell. He seemed like such an ominous figure to Darryl as a kid: big and wide and always looming about, like a dark bank of clouds in spring. Now, Darryl can only imagine him as he is, as he'd seen him his last time home from college, over summer break: Jack Mitchell was big but round, a once normal-sized man gone soft, and balding, who now looked more like an over-sized and over-dressed brown egg. Jack Mitchell was so unlike Darryl's real father, Cameron Frederick Young: unlike how Darryl had imagined him to be before he actually met him, and how he really turned out to be, too.

When Darryl was ten, Jack Mitchell married Darryl's room and moved the new family down to his home in Fitzgerald, Texas, from theirs in Junction City, Kansas. He bought into a business partnership - the Two (now Three) Jacks' Bar and Lounge - in the Black area of town, but for his home, he bought a stout red-brick house on Keeler Street on the north side of Oakbrook Heights, Fitzgerald's upper-middle class and White residential area. It wasn't that he felt superior to the other Blacks, Jack Mitchell would explain, but rather that he felt equal to the Whites, and he wanted the Whites to know it. "Person's got to take a stand sometime, to show that it's all right to be Black," young Darryl often overheard Jack Mitchell telling Darryl's mom. She was White, and her flip expression in response seemed to be saying that she of all people didn't need to be told.

With all the talk about integration that was so common then, several Town Councilmen pushed Jack Mitchell - who was an Army veteran and now a business owner - to run for a seat on the Council. Jack Mitchell thought it over, then agreed. At a Council meeting his first term, Jack Mitchell moved to have Beezville renamed "Booker T. Washington City," because he said the old name, which dated from segregation days, was offensive. Since his political platform centered around the integration of Fitzgerald Junior High School, the other selectmen agreed that it didn't really make sense then to distinguish by name the Black part of town from the rest. Jack Mitchell's proposal was overruled. Refusing to call it "Beezville," Jack Mitchell got stuck when, during his ramblings at meetings, he had to refer to the section of the Fitzgerald community that he was there to represent. He took to calling the Black part of town what the Black part of town in Junction City, Kansas, had been called: the Flats.

Jack Mitchell was then quoted in the Fitzgerald News-Herald, talking about "the Flats." It began to appear in the "Police Log" column when citing culprits' last known whereabouts. Not long after that, all of Fitzgerald's future-minded citizens quit referring to "Beezville" when they talked about subsidized housing or about cheap lots upon which to build warehouses, but rather, very conscientiously, they said "the Flats."

In the Flats, though, conversations wore a different color altogether.

"Ain't that a mother-fucking bitch," someone at the Three Jacks' would say once Jack Mitchell would step out the door on a business errand.

"That no-good, high-assed niggah . . ."

"Yassuh'n Mister Charlie this, and nossuh'n him that . . ."

Upon his cue, Darryl (who'd spend his days at the bar because his mother worked and he was too young to stay home alone) would pretend that he wasn't paying any attention: He'd dig his nose into his comic book, or doodle-doodle-doodle on a napkin, and try to diminish the already minuscule size of his ten-year-old presence.

One of the other two owners, Jack Johnston or Jack Pickering, would rally to Jack Mitchell's defense: "Come on now. Y'all Brothers be fair."

"No, no, Jack. That niggah's off and you know it. I seen what he doing at them meetings. Hollering about this and that down here in poor Beezville . . ."

"Beezville? Ain't no Beezville no more."

"This the Flats now."

"Beezville, Flats, shit. Ain't a damned thing changed but the name."

"And you know what beats all? The niggah's making these executive decisions from that fat LazyBoy in Oakbrook Heights."

"Tst-tst-tst," a last one would say, nodding his head. "Probably got her serving him tea, too."

This man's fingers would be pinched and his pinky raised, lifting an imaginary teacup to his puckered lips. And everyone would laugh.

Before Jack Mitchell made Beezville the Flats, Darryl would listen to all the back and forth jiving at the bar and he thought it meant folks were happy and were having fun. But though just a kid, he could hear that this new stuff wasn't the multicolored laughter of cheer. It was tainted red, and bitter.

When the Town Council closed Booker T. J.H.S. - a school that the community had built and maintained itself - to integrate the larger junior high, the angry laughter changed tones again. Folks now talked their talk, even when Jack Mitchell was in the back office and could probably hear it.

"Wearing his white," Mr. Horton, a daytime regular of the Jacks' once said, leaning over a whiskey glass empty of anything but ice.

A scattered chorus of "Uh-huh"s from the afterwork crowd punctuated his slurred point. Jack Johnston and Jack Pickering stayed silent.

Then Mr. Tillman, the top button of his stained Texaco work shirt undone, spoke to Darryl - who was reading intently at the back of the room so he wouldn't have to hear what he couldn't help but listen to - without ever even looking in Darryl's direction. "The niggah knows you can't put rabbit and bear in a pen and expect to make a mate . . .," he said, facing the crowd of men.

"Niggah ought to know."

"Uh-huh."

Darryl looked down, focusing on the lines that bordered the images in his comic.

"Niggah knows they can't make no mate," Mr. Tillman said, "and expect everything to come out straight."

But then Jack Mitchell appeared in the doorway to the back office, his imposing form blocking out the light as much as the previously closed door had, and everything in the bar stood still.

"Come on now, Brothers," Jack Mitchell said.

When he moved out into the gray light of the barroom though, into the crowd of men at the bar, his arms outstretched, his hands palms-upwards, Jack Mitchell looked much smaller.

"Charley," he said toward Mr. Tillman, who would not face him but did not turn away either. "Xavier." Jack Mitchell continued, looking from one man to the next. "Cole. Michael." He turned toward the bar. "Jack. Come on now," he appealed. And to the other, "Jack?"

Neither moved.

No one looked at, or away from, Jack Mitchell.

"Ain't nothing different now from ever," Jack Mitchell said. "Just trying to take care o' business. For everybody down here. Same-old, same-old."

The others finished their glasses, even Mr. Horton, who had nothing to finish, and filed out of the bar.

And young Darryl could not divorce himself from this image of his stepfather. Whereas the White Councilmen would smile at Darryl and praise Jack Mitchell for how well he was raising the boy, Darryl never got the impression from folks in the Flats that he was being raised right at all. And at Fitzgerald Junior High, the Brothers his age treated Darryl as though he carried his ass just as high as Jack Mitchell did.

The "Brothers." Darryl tosses the word around in his mind, stretching a cramp out of his legs, theft squatting back down, his back bonding to the cold, white wall. "Brothers" - that word doesn't sound quite right coming out of Darryl's mouth. Never has. For awhile, Darryl used to try to say "Brothers" like his friend Two, or the other young Brothers, said it. But it always sounded forced, unnatural.

This was his mom's fault. It wasn't Jack Mitchell but his mom who raised him. She spoke like what she was and passed it on to her son. So Darryl always had to content himself with his own poor pronunciation, and, as often as possible, he avoided words that would emphasize this distinction between him and the other Blacks.

What's it called when niggers toting gifts go calling door-to-door? Father's Day in the Flats.

That's some funny joke, Darryl thinks. A feather for Kevin's cap! The real humor, though, was that White-assed Kevin was being dead-accurate and he didn't even know it.

Of the ten or so Black girls in their class, Sandra Smith'd had a baby, some said by Bobo Furman but Bobo denied it; Lawanda Copeland and Deborah Jones and her twin sister Jackie had all had babies; and Melanie Windsong had had a baby by Quinton Patterson and another by Jitterbug Johnson. By the eleventh grade! They turned sixteen, then left school and got jobs there in Fitzgerald, at the A&W or the A&P. Or they left little James or Latasha with Momma or Aunt Phyllis (Momma always helped, or Aunt Phyllis would), finished high school, and then got the jobs. These girls always seemed so much . . . older . . . to Darryl, than him or anyone else in the class for that matter. Even before they had babies. And in fact, they probably were older, inside themselves, and finally had the means to prove it on the outside. They'd been trapped in the Flats all their lives: had been born and beaten and fed and kissed there. Now they were finally free in that trap for the rest of their lives, to birth and beat and feed and kiss there. As equals, among their own.

But there were some White girls too who'd gotten pregnant. Not girls like Peggy McPherson, of course, who was a cheerleader and went out with Kevin, and who Darryl often doubted did anything. Although Lizzie Majors, who was also a cheerleader and who lived just down the street from Darryl, got pregnant. It was different, though. Just wasn't the same. It happened so much less frequently with these girls, and when it did, their Bible Belt God forgave them their sin and showed it: Lizzie Majors married in a flowing white dress, with folds and fringe, and afterwards lived happily-ever- after just down the street from Daddy in the house that he bought for her and her new husband there. Lizzie Majors was no longer a girl either, but at least she had been, and for some reason that seemed important to Darryl.

There were White girls who went with Blacks, a few. The White girls who went with Blacks - the ones that Kevin Walton and the others called whores (I don't know why I ever liked that Kevin Walton! Darryl thinks) - they hardly ever seemed to get pregnant either. Except Julia Quinton, but her parents sent her to live with grandparents in Beaumont and no one ever saw her baby anyway. These White girls were different from the others: They seemed angry, or bitter maybe. They wore the fact that they had Black boyfriends the way they wore the scar across their upper lip or bad complexion or too much weight in the hips. They were never of the accepted crowd, or they had never accepted that crowd, and Darryl always wondered whether their boyfriends were cause or effect.

And they were still White. Darryl remembers overhearing Julia Quinton in the school cafeteria before she left Fitzgerald, saying something about "that nigger Bobo Furman," who everybody suspected was the father of her baby (which he again denied). The word cracked on the air of the room then stayed there, seething like searing venom - an effect only a White person can get by saying "nigger."

Then Darryl remembers Peggy McPherson in the crowd by the lockers, looking down, looking away from Darryl, trying not to let slip the smile that would cut. If she hadn't been just a good friend, but his girlfriend and not Kevin's, would Kevin call her a whore, too?

Darryl glimpses the darkness of his bed in the corner of the room. He hadn't heard Cathy turn, but she lies curled up on her side, her back half-uncovered. Her pale skin screams in the shadows of the bed, resounds throughout the darkness. Darryl turns toward the brightness outside his window.

All those Black girls had babies by all those Black boys; it numbs Darryl. Then he remembers when he used to fool around with Tammy Stillman, when he was a senior, and she told him that she thought she was pregnant. He hadn't told his morn because he didn't know how. He didn't tell Kevin. And telling Jack Mitchell had never even crossed his mind.

"Goddamn Two, what am I going to do?" he'd asked his friend on that wet spring day, sitting under the awning outside the Jacks'.

"Damn, Darryl," Two said. "She ain't your girlfriend, right?"

"Naw, Two." He stopped, listened to the rain. "Still," he said. Then, "What am I going to do, man?"

Two said nothing.

Darryl had felt strange, calling Two, asking to meet him at the Three Jacks', because they hardly saw each other anymore. But Two seemed like the best, and maybe the only, person Darryl could talk to about this. Before high school, when Darryl would spend his days in the Flats, they'd been best friends. And Two was friends with Bobo, Quinton Patterson, and Bug Johnson, and so he seemed better placed to know how to deal with this sort of thing. And besides, Two was Tammy's cousin.

Darryl said, "I guess I got to marry her."

But Two laughed. "That's what the White boys do," he said.

"Come on, man," said Darryl. "I'm serious."

"I am too," Two shot back, his face a fist. "Tammy ain't the first girl to go off and get pregnant. Plenty did and do and will. If she's going to have that baby, it's because she wants to have that baby. But that don't mean you got to have the baby, too." Two's face unclenched. "You're always talking about getting out of here, going to college and shit. Well, you ain't going nowhere with a wife and kid. And you certainly ain't helping neither one of them being another nappy-head niggah hustling dimes in the Flats."

Darryl put his face in his hands. Listened to the rain drumming on the awning and falling all around. Two's help had been little help at all. Even Two didn't understand Darryl anymore.

Within ten days, Tammy Stillman had resumed menstruating and Darryl breathing. But what a long ten days. Darryl had decided in those first few days to marry her, despite what Two had said. He just couldn't abandon his own child like that; he refused to walk in the footsteps of his father, his real father. Darryl decided that he would leave school and hire on at the Phillips Refinery. (Jack Mitchell probably knew someone who could get him on.) Later, when the child was older, he could go to college.

It became a pretty thought: playing catch in the park, teaching his boy - it'd be a boy - to ride without the training wheels, hunting butterflies behind deserted Booker T. Junior High and bringing them home in a jar for Momma. Darryl could imagine it, he almost fancied it, and he was a little disappointed and sad in that part of his heart he had opened up to his new baby boy the day he found out that the baby didn't exist.

Cameron Frederick Young. That was his father's, his real father's name. 1013 Locust Avenue, Kansas City, Missouri. That was his father's, his real father's address. Darryl stands up with that remembrance. He crosses to the chair facing his bed and sits, turned sideways, legs hanging over the arm.

After his scare with Tammy, Cameron Young became an obsession with Darryl. In his everyday thoughts, Darryl sang his name like a litany. Cameron Frederick Young: dad that never was, always will be. Was he tall? Was he muscular and athletic? Darryl had no idea. He had nothing, only curt descriptions given by his more, who spoke about Kansas City like an unlived nightmare she'd rather forget and who always evaded the subject of Darryl's real father with a fiery and forced indifference. Darryl also had the black-and-white, army I.D. photo that he'd found in his mom's things; but it dated back at least nineteen years. And of course, he had the address, but it dated back nearly as far.

Growing up, Darryl had sent a few things to that address: a letter when he was seven and had just learned to form simple sentences in school, a Christmas card the year his mother married Jack Mitchell and they moved to Fitzgerald, and just two years before, when Darryl was seventeen, an invitation to his high school graduation.

He'd been certain that Cameron Frederick Young wouldn't come. Darryl wasn't even sure if the ancient address was still good (although he imagined it was, because none of his earlier correspondence had ever been returned). Darryl had sent it anyway, just to let his real father know that it was okay, that things had worked out anyway. Not to worry.

Cameron Frederick Young didn't attend Darryl's graduation, but after the Tammy thing, more than ever before, he was present in Darryl's thoughts. And he remained so throughout Darryl's first year at college. Because Darryl just wanted to know. He remembers: Just the year before, on a sleepless night during the still falling snows of late March, he'd decided that soon he would know . . . . Exactly what he would know, Darryl hadn't been sure, but he would know.

Darryl thinks that he knows it now, sitting sideways in the chair opposite his bed, gazing again at still falling snows in late March, gazing around his room, gazing into the bright stillness on his bed. But the year before, his ignorance was just one more monkey he lugged around and could not shake. And the monkey made that first year away from home nearly unbearable.

Darryl's freshman year had been hard on him in so many ways. To begin with, it snowed here in Minnesota, a lot. It was crisp and cold and white - everything - even Darryl, who became pale like a plate because he seldom got outside and when he did, so much cloud and clothes separated him from the sun it was like there was no sun at all. To make things worse, college work was difficult, college people were different, and he was so, so far away from home.

Winter turned to summer without much spring, and the school year ended. He decided to take the bus home, partly because the price of the ticket was much cheaper than flying and better suited his debilitated bank account. But also because the thirty-six-hour ride involved two layovers, one being in Kansas City. He'd decided to use the layover there to meet his father. He would stop by 1013 Locust Avenue, say, "Hello, this is me," then leave. Just like that. Then he would know. On the third Saturday in May, he'd boarded the red Jefferson Lines bus southbound.

Through the frame of the bus window, Darryl watched Iowa go by. Iowa was unending. It was long and flat, it all looked alike, and as each passing meadow yielded its place to an exact copy, Darryl became increasingly convinced that the bus wasn't really moving at all, but just seemed to be; that, in fact, the bus was really rolling in slow circles around the same stretch of languid field, the same barren tree, the same writhing creek; that this must be some sort of cruel hex that a weird other force was enacting upon him; that some god or witch or warlock had jinxed him and tethered him here, between states, because he was so anxious to get home, too anxious, and because he wanted to meet the father he'd never known. Inside himself, Darryl knew that there was nothing wrong with wanting to meet his real father. Yet his jaw was clenched and he was agitated and his back was wet with sweat against the seat. Too much was happening too fast - Kansas City approached so rapidly, without the bus ever seeming to get any closer - so Darryl knew that it must be something more powerful than himself that was controlling it all. He was just along for the ride. And Darryl didn't like this feeling. Sure, it'd been itching on his inside for more than a year, but it just wasn't that easy: What would he say to the man whose smile he flourished when he smiled? whose ears he wore although he had never laid eyes on the originals? what would he do?

Darryl had absolutely no idea what he would do.

He wanted to meet his father, his real father, but that didn't even matter anymore. Darryl just wanted to be in control again.

He got off the bus in Des Moines and bought a Coke in the station. The cold, burning carbonation helped to calm him. From the station window, he looked at the bus, the silver-and-red vehicle of this nightmare. Darryl looked and was not sure if he should board again. If he stayed there in the station, then he might be able to regain control.

"What a stupid thought," Darryl said aloud to himself. Of course he was in control. He didn't have to see his father in Kansas City. He didn't even have to get off the bus. Darryl felt embarrassed inside himself and laughed out loud, and he was glad that no one could hear his thoughts. Still anxious but no longer afraid, Darryl got back on board. Making his mind an empty screen, no thoughts could project themselves onto it. He sipped his Coke and looked at the pictures in an old Sports Illustrated, and soon the bus entered Kansas City, Missouri.

Kansas City, Missouri. This was Darryl's birthplace, and it was nothing like Darryl had imagined it would be. Where reality is animated, imagination is like a still life: vivid but static. The longer Darryl looked though, the more he realized that this Kansas City wasn't shockingly different from the Kansas City of his imagination. In fact, this Kansas City, the real one, was a still-life. The tall buildings in the downtown area cast the streets in shadows, but despite the big-city look, life here seemed hardly to shift or shimmer. There was a mute trickle of traffic, and the few people out moved as if they had no real destination and were in no hurry to get there.

The bus wheeled into the Greyhound station and the driver announced that all passengers were obliged to change busses. Darryl entered the station to check the departure board. The first southbound to Tulsa would leave at 7:10. It was 4:35. That left roughly three hours, Darryl figured, which should be plenty of time to get anywhere he wanted to in the city and back again.

He walked out the front door to one of the waiting cabs.

"Where to?" the driver, a graying Black man in a Chicago White Sox cap, asked as Darryl slid onto the back seat.

"I need to go to Locust Avenue, 1013. Is it far?"

"Shit man, you practically on top of it."

"What?"

"That's it right there. 1013, that's the Hotel Thatcher."

"Oh," Darryl said. "Sorry." He climbed out and crossed the vacant lot toward the tenement that the cabby, who was now laughing with the other drivers behind him, had pointed out.

Downtown Kansas City, now that Darryl was actually in it, no longer seemed slow, but instead decadent. This section of inner-Kansas City where the bus station was located, the section of inner-cities where bus stations were always located, seemed to run in retrograde motion. A heavy heat swelled around buildings and over people. It seemed like all life would sweat to a stagnant standstill from staying in these streets too long. At least Darryl's life would. Or so it seemed to Darryl. He walked briskly through the heat, although inside himself he knew that he should be hesitant. Three hours could be an eternity to stay here in Kansas City with his father. His real father.

Darryl entered the glass front door of the Hotel Thatcher and crossed the lounge to the reception desk. There were a few older Black men sitting in front of a boxing match on the television set. Darryl wondered if one of these were his old man. He began to feel the fear again. I hope not, he thought, as he told the attendant, "I'm looking for Cameron Young, please."

The attendant was a middle-aged White man who had his eyes fixed in the center of the sports page. He gazed at Darryl over the rim of his reading glasses. "Who?"

"Cameron Frederick Young. He used to live at this address and as far as . . ."

"Freddy? Freddy Young?" the attendant asked, studying Darryl. "Who wants him?"

The older men left the boxing match and turned toward Darryl.

"I do."

"Who are you?"

"His son."

The room stood still an instant. The attendant moved first: He smiled.

"You're Freddy's boy? I'll be damned, Freddy never told me he had a son. What's your name, boy?"

"Darryl. Darryl Young. Is he around?"

"As far as I know. I haven't seen him leave. Any of you?"

The old men grumbled, having returned to the fight.

"I think he's up in his room," the attendant continued. "You can go on up and check."

Darryl turned toward the elevator, but then stopped. "Where am I going up to?"

"517. Fifth floor. Room in the corner."

"Thanks."

Darryl pushed the fifth-floor button. The elevator doors sealed behind him as he said to himself, "My dad lives in the corner room of a run-down hotel in downtown Kansas City . . . Christ." The elevator doors opened. Darryl stepped out into the hall. He took a deep breath. He wanted to go over it all one last time - what he would say, what he would ask - but his mind was blank, an empty chalkboard with only streaks of erasure marks where before thoughts had been. One word - "dad" - remained distinct on the blur. Darryl needed to call his mind back to life. He tried very hard to concentrate on this situation, but his feet were carrying him toward room 517 and Darryl wasn't sure he could do anything to stop or change that. He glanced at the doors as they paraded by on either side of the corridor. 509, 508, 507. Wrong way. He changed directions without thinking. 515, 516, 517. Darryl stood before the door. "Dad" was close enough to touch. Darryl realized that his breath was hurried - he stopped himself, forced deep, regular breaths. Then his hand rose, he watched it rise. It knocked. He fought the idea of fleeing - It wasn't too late! . . . - and the door opened.

Darryl wasn't sure what he had imagined his father would look like, but he was sure he hadn't imagined him to look like this. Cameron Young looked the opposite of Jack Mitchell, which was a good start. He was lanky and vivid, the color of a penny soaked in alcohol, and his motion - pulling open the door; even just standing there, holding the doorknob in his hand - was electric, alive, as if he were plugged into a wall socket. But just that instant, the power went out. Cameron Frederick Young stood very still before the familiar stranger.

"I'm Darryl Young," Darryl said. "Your son."

They faced each other, frozen still.

A sculpted mahogany mask appeared from around the corner. "Who?" she said.

"This is my son," Cameron Young said, "Darryl." Then to Darryl, "Come in." He waved toward himself.

Darryl stepped inside.

"Sit down." Cameron Young - Freddy . . . Dad? . . . - pointed to a sofa against the wall. "I knew I'd see you someday," he said. The electricity began to flow through his body again. "You look just like the pictures your momma sends." Freddy Young wore charm in his smile and intelligence in his eyes and seemed like the type who was capable of disguising any other trait with those two features. "She sends a school picture religiously every year, you know." And he was so tall; Darryl wasn't that tall. "Sends them to my momma's address, to make sure I get them, I guess."

The woman whose face was like Africa emerged from the other room, her body a flow of green and blue in a wide-legged jump suit. "Hi. I'm Emma Rose Martin," she said, extending her hand.

Darryl had already seated himself on the sofa so he rose to take it, but he wasn't sure what to do with her hand once he'd done that, and it seemed like an eternity that they stood there, their hands clasped but still.

"Good, Emma Rose Martin," Freddy Young said. "Now if you don't mind getting lost for awhile."

"I was just on my way out," she shot back. Removing her hand from Darryl's -

"Take care, honey" - she grabbed her bag, which rested beside the sofa, and disappeared out the front door.

Darryl sat back down, and it was silent.

Freddy Young stared at Darryl. "She's just a friend," he explained. "She comes by when I need her to. Let me get you something to drink."

"No." Darryl motioned with his hand. "Thank you," he said. "I'm fine. Thank you."

Cameron Young asked, "How you been?"

Starting from when? . . .

"I've been fine."

"You graduated from high school," Freddy said. "That's good."

"Yes. Yes, I'm a freshman. This year. In college." The silence was too loud, a clumsy third presence. "I'm on my way home." It bumbled in and around Darryl's speech. "Home to Texas. For the summer." And that was uncomfortable.

"First year of college?" Freddy smiled. "That's good."

"Yes."

"Where at? Up here? . . ."

"No, no," Darryl said too quickly. "Not here. In Minnesota. Up north."

"Huh," Freddy said. "You like it up there?"

"It's uh . . ." And his hands looked ridiculous folded across his stomach. "It's good, uh . . ." So he rested one on each thigh. "It's a good school." They looked ridiculous there, too.

"Minnesota?" Cameron Young laughed. "They got niggahs up in Minnesota?"

"Sure," something from somewhere inside said, too quickly. "Lots." But, of course, this wasn't true.

The silence changed tones then, stretched away from around Darryl to encompass the whole room when Cameron Young asked: "How's your momma?"

The discomfort of this new silence startled Darryl - he felt himself pulling his whole self in tight - but he focused only on the question, because he had to find the right response. "Fine," he said.

"yeah," Freddy continued, "she sends me those pictures sure as Hell every single year" - Darryl never knew about the pictures - "sometimes adds a note: Darryl's on the Honor Roll, Darryl scored two touchdowns on the football team. Guess she wants me to be proud of how . . ."

"Or ashamed." Darryl suspected, but was not really certain, that it was him who said this.

"Maybe." Freddy still smiled. He slid the long angle of his arm over the back of his chair. "You sent me some things, too. Which one was it you wanted me to feel?"

"I don't know. Both. Neither. I just wanted to see what you were like."

Each stared at the other.

"Well," Freddy said, "here it is." Still smiling.

"Yes," said Darryl.

Again, it was silent. But in this silence Two's laugh echoed - "That's what the White boys do!" - as did Kevin Walton's joke, Peggy McPherson looking from Darryl to the ground, her mouth twitching to keep the corners down.

"Your momma married down there, didn't she?" Freddy Young said. "A Black man?"

"Yes."

"She always had something for Black folks. Good for her."

"No, good for me," Darryl heard himself say. "She didn't want me to grow up without the right kind of male influence around." Those weren't his words, weren't words he'd ever even thought.

"That's your momma all right," Freddy said, but his smile now looked forced. "She's always giving."

"She's given me everything . . ."

Darryl's mind settled, became clear and sharp like summer day just after the dawn, when the West Texas sun has burned the morning haze off the air. He knew then . . .

"To make her proud," he said to himself.

When Darryl looked up, Cameron Young had turned his face toward the window. His animation stilled to a hollow quiet. A long, hollow quiet. Then anger flashed in the room. "What did you expect me to do?"

"I didn't expect you to do anything," Darryl said, slowly, without menace. "But what about her?"

"Shiiit . . . ." Cameron Young drew the word out long and rode it like a wheelchair. "You're a man now. You know. You understand."

"I don't understand," Darryl contradicted him.

"No. I guess you don't then," Cameron Young said. "That was twenty years ago. That was 1966! Niggahs weren't shit in 1966! Niggahs ain't shit today, so you know what they were in 1966.

"You just don't know," Cameron Young continued. "You just don't know what it's like, waking up every morning and seeing the same face, and going to bed every night with that same face. Knowing that the bed ain't yours, no more than the apartment, or the television set, or the face, that face." He paused to breathe. "I was young, man, and I was tight. Too tight. And she was pretty. Your momma was a pretty woman, a pretty White woman . . ."

"Don't you ever talk about my mother that way! Ever!"

Darryl was standing, his words echoing off the walls of the empty room.

The words wouldn't stop rebounding in the hollow quiet of that empty room.

When they finally faded, Freddy Young smiled. "She married good," he said. "Yeah, man. That niggah raised you good."

"I've got to go now." Darryl turned toward the door, opened it and passed through. "Good-bye," he said, moving down the corridor.

He heard behind him, "That niggah raised you right good."

Darryl avoided the too-tight elevator, hustled down the stairs, then left the hotel. He walked quickly, slicing through the heavy heat outside, looking downward; fled into the bus station and sat in the waiting area. Once there - finally! - he felt drained, weak, like he couldn't move his arms or legs, and just needed to sleep. But Cameron Young's last words had gotten trapped in Darryl's head. That niggah raised you good repeated rhythmically inside him, reverberated throughout his whole body, then stopped and swelled into a ball in his throat.

. . . That nigger raised you good . . .

That tomming nigger didn't raise me, Darryl cut it off. The White . . .

The . . .

"Whew," Darryl exhales, disoriented an instant, no longer aware where he is, what year it is . . .

"You okay?" . . .

Huh? . . .

It's Cathy's voice, from the corner. He makes out her silhouette in the dark of his bed: lying on her side, her head resting on her folded arm. He can't make out her features; he can only see the glow of skin, bright curves and lines on the shadows.

"You all right, Darryl?"

"Yeah, I'm uh . . ." He clears his throat. "I'm good," he says. "Couldn't sleep, that's all." And for the first time, he's aware of his nakedness. Sitting sideways in the chair, he feels his penis hanging limp between his legs, so he closes his knees tight. Feels his nipples erect in the chill sting of the room, chicken skin stretching all over him. Darryl crosses his arms, makes himself small and holds himself. "I'm good," he says.

"I'm cold," says Cathy. "Will you come keep me warm?"

"Yeah," he says. "Sure."

And he rises. Quickly crosses the room. Crawls in behind her.

She is naked, too.

"Better," she says. Then she presses back against him.

Darryl wraps his arms around her and one hand goes without forethought onto her still-flat stomach. Now that it's there, he doesn't dare move it.

"Darryl," Cathy says, "is this a love thing?"

"A love thing?"

"Yeah," she says. "You and me?"

Love? Darryl breaths in Cathy Collins, his nose nuzzled in the soft eruption of her hair, and it feels like love. But Darryl remembers that wet spring day and Tammy Stillman, and he wonders why this is different. He says, "Yeah," breathing in Cathy Collins, his nose buried in her flat hair, and somewhere inside a snap snaps and something releases, unrestrained, so he clears his throat. "Yeah," he tells her, careful to command his voice. "It could be."

"Then what do we do about this other thing?" she says, putting her own hand on his hand on her stomach.

The snap now loosed, Darryl feels a sudden scampering of fear like mice all over his insides. He holds Cathy Collins tighter, pulls her closer, but the scurrying doesn't calm, it quickens. "But this other thing," he says. "This other thing. I don't know, Cathy."

"I don't know either," she says.

Darryl says nothing. He holds Cathy Collins, the tiny-clawed fear scuttling and fumbling inside, and he remembers that story he never understood, about bear and rabbit making a mate . . . Is this what it's about? About this thing playing itself out in his bed, about the glowing shadows in his bed? If it is, then maybe they're not alone there: him, and her, and the million mice and their popcorn scurrying. And Mr. Tillman and Tammy Stillman? Maybe they're there too. And who else? . . .

Darryl holds Cathy Collins, his nose, his face shrouded in her hair, his breath shuttering. Darryl is knowing: the scurrying feeling that he can't control, the fear that's scurrying and scampering across his stomach, maybe it's about more than just this. Darryl is knowing: Maybe yes, it's about more than just this. About more than just love. His hand under her hand on her still-flat stomach, nose and face nuzzled in hair he can't understand, Darryl knows now: No, it's not just this.

But the rest? Mr. Tillman and Tammy Stillman and the rest? The rest won't stay still so he can grasp it, won't stop shimmering and fluttering so he can grab it and snap it back in and know it. So he holds Cathy Collins. Tight. Hand under hand on stomach. Being held. Darryl holds Cathy Collins.

David Wright is an M.F.A. candidate in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and a member of the Dark Room Collective. He is also working on a memoir of his expatriate experience in France.