The Quiet Game

“What does he want?”

“You. Want me to say you’re not here?”

I reach for the receiver. “This is Penn Cage.”

“Well, well,” says a precise male voice in the middle register, a voice more white than black. “The prodigal son himself.”

I don’t know how to respond. Then a fragment of Dad’s thumbnail sketch of local politics comes to me: Shad Johnson moved home to Natchez from Chicago specifically to run for mayor. “I hear the same could be said of you, Mr. Johnson.”

He laughs. “Call me Shad.”

“How can I help you, Shad?”

“I’d like you to come see me for a few minutes. I’d come to you, but you might not want the neighbors thinking we’re any closer than we are. News travels fast in this town. Like those Payton women coming to see you this morning.”

A wave of heat rolls up the back of my neck. “I have no intention of getting involved in local politics, Mr. Johnson.”

“You got involved the second you talked to the newspaper about Del Payton.”

“Consider me uninvolved.”

“I’d like nothing better. But we still need to talk.”

“We’re talking now.”

“Face to face. I’m over at my campaign headquarters. You’re not afraid to come to the north side of town, are you?”

“No.” My father is straining hard to hear both sides of the conversation. “But I’ve got to be somewhere in an hour.”

“Not that fund-raiser for Wiley Warren, I hope?”

Shad Johnson obviously has the town wired. I’m about to beg off when he says, “You and your family are in danger.”

I fight the impulse to overreact. “What are you talking about?”

“I’ll tell you when you get here.”

“Give me your address.”

“Martin Luther King Drive. It’s a storefront setup, in a little strip mall.”

“Where’s Martin Luther King Drive?”

“Pine Street,” Dad says, looking concerned.

“That old shopping center by the Brick House?” I ask, recalling a shadowy cinder-block bar I went to once with two black guys I spent a summer laying sewer pipe with.

“That’s right. But it’s not the Brick House anymore, just like it’s not Pine Street anymore. Times change, counselor. You on your way?”

“Give me fifteen minutes.”

“What the hell did he want?” Dad asks, taking the phone from me and hanging it up.

“He said our family’s in danger.”

“What?”

I tie my tie and walk to the bedroom door. “Don’t worry. I’ll be back in forty-five minutes. We’ll make the party in plenty of time.”

He gives me his trademark stern-father look. “You’d better take a pistol with you.”

The north side looks nicer than it did when I was a boy. Back then it was a warren of shotgun shacks and dilapidated houses separated by vacant lots and condemned buildings, their walls patched with tin or even cardboard. Juke clubs operated out of private houses surrounded by men drinking from paper bags, and paint-and-body shops sagged amid herds of junk cars, looking like sets for The Road Warrior. Now there are rows of well-kept houses, a sparkling video store, a state-of-the-art Texaco station, good streetlights, smooth roads.

I swing into the parking lot of the strip mall and scan the storefronts: a styling salon, a fish market, an NAACP voter-registration center, a Sno-Cone stand thronged by black kids, and one newly painted front hung with a bright banner that reads, SHAD JOHNSON—THE FUTURE IS NOW.

An open-air barbecue pit built from a sawn-in-half fifty-five-gallon drum smokes like a barn fire outside the NAACP center, sending the aroma of chicken and pork ribs into the air. A knot of middle-aged black men stands around the pit drinking Colt .45 from quart bottles. They fall silent and watch with sullen suspicion as I get out of the BMW and approach Johnson’s building. I nod to them and go inside.

A skinny young man wearing a three-piece suit that must be smothering him sits behind a metal desk, talking on a telephone. Behind the desk stands a wall-to-wall partition of whitewashed plywood with a closed door set in it. The young man looks up and motions me toward a battered church pew. I nod but remain standing, studying the partition, which is plastered with posters exhorting the public to vote for Shad Johnson. Half show him wearing a dark suit and sitting behind a large desk, a model of conservatism and rectitude; the other half show a much younger-looking Johnson sporting a Malcolm X-style goatee and handing out pamphlets to teenagers on an urban playground. It isn’t hard to guess which posters hang in which parts of town.

A voice rises over the partition. It has anger in it, but anger communicated with the perfect diction of a BBC news reader. As I try to get a fix on the words, the young assistant hangs up and disappears through the door. He returns almost instantly and signals me to follow him.

My first impression of Shad Johnson is of a man in motion. Before I can adequately focus on the figure sitting behind the desk, he is rising and coming around it, right hand extended. A few inches shorter than I, Johnson carries himself with the brash assurance of a personal-injury lawyer. He is light-skinned—not to a degree that would hurt him with the majority of black voters, but light enough that certain whites can reassure themselves about his achievements and aspirations by noting the presence of Caucasian blood. He shakes my hand with a natural politician’s grip, firm and confident and augmented by a megawatt of eye contact.

“I’m glad you came,” he says in a measured tenor. “Take a seat.”

He leads me to a folding chair across from his spartan metal desk, then sits atop the desk like a college professor and smiles. “This is a long way from my office at Goldstein, Henry in Chicago.”

“Up or down?”

He laughs. “Up, if I win.”

“And if you lose? Back to white-shoe law in Chicago?”

His smile slips for a nanosecond.

“You said my family is in danger, Mr. Johnson.”

“Shad, please. Short for Shadrach.”

“All right, Shad. Why is my family in danger?”

“Because of your sudden interest in a thirty-year-old murder.”

“I have no interest in the murder of Del Payton. And I intend to make a public statement to that effect as soon as possible.”

“I’m relieved to hear you say that. I must have taken fifty calls today asking what I’m doing to help you get to the bottom of it.”

“What did you tell them?”