HARRISON WHEELED DOWN 75 WHILE EMMANUEL DOZED IN THE SUN. The day was hot but he ran with the windows down while the wind played at his chest and face. They were down to the Georgia line by noon and into the commuter sprawl of Atlanta by the end of the lunch hour. Harrison prodded Emmanuel awake. He sat there under the heavy influence of sleep for a few minutes before he was able to give directions.
“It won’t take long. I remember the place pretty well.”
They got off the interstate and cruised into midtown, where they parked in a stucco deck. Harrison picked up his gym bag from the trunk and left the car itself unlocked. It was empty and besides, the only vehicle in the parking area worth less than fifty thousand dollars. They walked down the smooth dark concrete of the ramp into the tremendous city light and heat and it was if they were cast onto the blister of a completely new world, but they moved through that too, past all the glass and Gucci until they found the sidewalk and began to make their way through the midday crowds.
Ten minutes later found them in the climate-controlled lobby of the hotel where they stood waiting for one of the glass elevators. When it arrived it made a sounds like expelled breath. No one else was inside, and when Emmanuel pushed the button for the top and it began to lift them they could see the lengthening dimensions of the inner building rush away.
The doors opened into a dark corridor that held a single door framed by a rectangle of sunlight. They walked toward it as they heard the sound of lapping water and people talking. The door opened and a naked bodybuilder stood blocking the way.
“Are you here to see Mister Sterne?” the bodybuilder asked. As they got closer they could see that he had touched up his cheeks with the suggestion of rouge. Also, he smelled good, some expensive perfume dabbed along his neck or chest.
“We are,” Emmanuel said. “He’s expecting to see us.”
The bodybuilder stood aside and waved them through.
As they crossed the threshold they came into a large area contained with a high glass ceiling open at the peak. Several nude men wearing sunglasses sat sunbathing around a turquoise swimming pool sipping cocktails from zinc mugs and long-stemmed glasses. At a recess a black man wearing a woman’s single-piece swimsuit served drinks across a lacquered bar.
“Emmanuel, my savior, there you are!” an old man wearing a terry cloth robe crowed. He wore a hemp beach hat pulled down on what must have been an enormous skull. He reminded Harrison of Marlon Brando in The Island of Doctor Moreau.
He stood and took Emmanuel in a full embrace and did the same to Harrison as soon as they were introduced.
“Excellent to finally meet you, my boy. Your reputation does you many favors. Would you care for refreshment of some stripe? A Mai Tai or something more butch perhaps? We do have an entire cooler stocked with Samuel Adams.”
“I’m fine, thank you.”
“Of course you are, my lad. But please, before we get to any significant discussion, I’m absolutely overheated. Let’s all retire to the pool for a few minutes.”
Without waiting to see if his visitors were in agreement, Sterne loosened his belt and let his robe pool at his feet, releasing pale bulk unguarded by the mercy of clothing. He strolled past and cannonballed into the pool with a tremendous splash. Emmanuel and Harrison disrobed and lowered themselves into the water via the ladder. They tread water as they watched Sterne make two laborious laps before waving them over. The beach hat, though streaming, remained clapped securely to his head.
“Much better. Thank you for your indulgence, gentlemen. Now, with all propriety served, I suppose it would be efficient to go ahead and discuss the vicissitudes of our business arrangement. I understand, through Emmanuel here, whom I implicitly trust, that you may have means of distributing product into a region that remains relatively undeveloped, is that correct?”
Harrison nodded.
“Well, I am certainly open to the idea of diversifying all my assets, though I am a little hesitant, if you don’t mind me saying so. It was my understanding that the lovely hills of Southern Appalachia were rather saturated with distraction of the prescription variety or otherwise that scourge known as methamphetamine. Both nasty strains of human suffering, from what I’ve seen. Something I’m not at all interested in becoming entangled with. The powder that we move is at a price point somewhat beyond the grasp of the working classes as well. I’m uncertain, in short, that there’s a sufficient market to support its distribution.”
Harrison watched the fat man’s limbs flapping in the water. It was as though the air of his words alone were what buoyed him up.
“There’s plenty of tourists. Plenty of college kids,” Harrison told him. “I know how to unload what you give to me in good time. You won’t lose a dollar.”
Sterne pinched his nose and slipped his head beneath the waterline. He reemerged with tears in his eyes.
“Your confidence is inspiring, Mister Harrison. I must say it does make all the difference in the world to discuss these details in person, it really does. I wouldn’t dare contradict a man of your . . . conviction. Nevertheless, I must remain prudent. Why don’t we start with a reduced amount? Conduct something of an environmental scan before going the whole proverbial hog. I think that would put my mind at rest while allowing you time to secure a smooth infrastructure on your end. Is that something you might find agreeable?”
Harrison, knowing that he had no choice, said that it was.
“Excellent. I trust the gym bag you’ve left over by the beach chair is your end of the bargain, so I’ll have my people exchange what is a fair market value while we enjoy a little more time in the water.”
Sterne raised his hand to call the attention of the bodybuilder. The man briskly approached, and seeing the bag of money, took it with him out a glass door at the far end of the swimming pool. Harrison followed the man with his eyes and was caught unawares when Sterne splashed him across the face and giggled.
“So intense! I can see why you’ve collected him, Emmanuel. He really is something else.”
Emmanuel said nothing.
The bodybuilder returned in a few minutes and settled the bag where Harrison had left it before. He and Emmanuel swam to the pool’s edge and heaved themselves out. They stood dripping while they waited on an attendant to bring them towels. They had dried off and dressed by the time Sterne ascended the shallow stone steps and stood basking in the refracted pool light with hands on his flaccid hips. Harrison collected the cocaine and nodded his farewell as they left by the door through which they had entered.
They walked around the corner to an expensive steak house and sat in a deep booth next to a view of Peachtree Street. Commerce and transit in its full urban flower. They ordered martinis and ribeyes and ate hunks of hot buttered bread while they looked through the window at men in suits and tight shoes flustering past.
“This is the kind of people we have to work with?”
“It’s the price of efficiency, honey. I wouldn’t lead you astray. I hope you remember that. It’s been enough to keep me out of the big house working with people like that.”
“Hey, now. No need to get rough about it.”
“Sorry, I wasn’t thinking. Anyhow, the last thing I want to do is sharpen up my pen pal skills all over again. I’ve done enough of that already, don’t you agree?”
“I do.”
The martinis arrived. Harrison popped one of the olives in his mouth as he drank.
“It’s fine. As long as he doesn’t run scared we should be able to do respectable business. Nothing like what you do in Knoxville, but still something halfway justifiable. Then we’ll see from there.”
“You’re using the royal we, I take it?”
“I don’t know, Emmanuel. I told you things are complicated with Delilah.”
“Sounds to me as if you like them being complicated.”
“Is this the part where you play the pissy queen?”
“I only do that when you decide to play the part of the closet faggot.”
Their steaks came and they ate without speaking. Their utensils hard against the metal plates.
“I have obligations. I thought you understood that.”
“Yeah, obligations. You and your cracker whore. Don’t you ever get worn out by all that shit? Doesn’t it get confusing?”
“Look, this is the way my life is right now. You’ve known that. I never pretended any different.”
Emmanuel watched the smooth blur of outside life, slowly chewed.
“Order me another fucking drink, please,” he said. “I absolutely cannot tolerate being blind sober just this very minute.”
AFTER DROPPING Emmanuel off in Knoxville, Harrison drove on toward Little Europe and made it back in the hour of the last good light. Civil twilight was the term. Emmanuel had named one of his paintings after it. That time when the sun was gone but light enough remained to live under its natural blush. A kindness in what remained of a lapsed day. The painting was a landscape, a picture of a river slicing through the base of a mountain, the sun gone over the ridge but still present. Harrison had thought of that, thought of what Emmanuel must be expecting from him and how the colors of the world were at work on what it would make of them. How ridiculous it must have seemed, how trite. A black man in love with a white supremacist. Could have been a joke if he ever managed to figure out the punchline.
There was still the question of what to make of himself with Delilah. Time spent with someone had an effect on who you were and what you could become, as surely as a tool held long enough would wear a callus. Harrison knew Emmanuel sensed the kind of people he’d been forced together with in prison. Too much of the then and now working inside Harrison’s head to sort it out in a way that made sense. Delilah offered an extreme. A desire for belonging, but belonging that demanded you reject the rest of the world. Hate was love. Hard to see it any other way once you were inside and breathing the different kind of air that everybody else did. Hard to imagine surviving any other way.
He parked around the side of the building and tucked the gym bag under his arm, walked up to the room and stowed the drugs behind the removable panel at the back of the closet. He pressed the wood back in snugly and piled some of Delilah’s shoes in front. It was far from perfect, but he had no better options. He had just shut the door when he heard Delilah coming from the end of the hall.
“Hey.”
“Hey yourself. I was wondering if you were going to get back tonight.”
“I told you I was.”
“Yeah, you told me.”
She stepped past him and flung herself across the bed. The box springs creaked. He eased down beside her, put his hand on the pillow next to her head. It seemed like a foreign member there, dark and encumbered.
“Look, I’m tired of this being mad at each other.”
She turned her face toward him, said nothing for a long time. He took that as some measure of agreement.
“Can you just please leave me alone for a while? Please?”
He thought of asking her where she would want him to go, but instead he simply rose and left the room.