He got up from the living room table and walked toward me. “You should have asked me,” he said. “I got more than enough.”

“I wanted some mouthwash too,” I said.

He fumed a while longer, and then told me how I had ruined his evening because the amazon would not leave the room to wait for me and the little one would not do anything with the amazon around. He suddenly thought about going down and bringing them back; and he went out for a while. But he came back without them, saying that they had been picked up again.

“When a man looks out for you, you got to look out for him,” he warned me.

“I’m sorry.”

“A hell of a lot of good that does. And that’s the last time I look out for you, baby,” he said. “From now on it’s me all the way.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“If she was too much for you I could of taken the amazon.”

“It didn’t matter that much,” I said.

“You could of had Doris if you couldn’t handle the amazon.”

“They were both too much,” I told him.

But Claude Sheats did not answer. He just looked at me.

II

AFTER TWO MONTHS of living with him I concluded that Claude hated whites as much as he loved them. And he hated himself with the very same passion. He hated the country and his place in it and he loved the country and his place in it. He loved the Brotherhood and all that being in it had taught him and he still believed in what he had been taught, even after he had left it and did not have to believe in anything.

“This Man is going down, Howard,” he would announce with conviction.

“Why?” I would ask.

“Because it’s the Black Man’s time to rule again. They had five thousand years, now we get five thousand years.”

“What if I don’t want to rule?” I asked. “What happens if I don’t want to take over?”

He looked at me with pity in his face. “You go down with the rest of the country.”

“I guess I wouldn’t mind much anyway,” I said. “It would be a hell of a place with nobody to hate.”