“Well …” I stepped toward the door. I half-hoped to be called back. Otherwise, when would I ever see her again? And she looked so much like him, sitting there sad. “You’re not going to send me off,” I told her. “We’d both regret it. There’s too much history. I was brought here to find something out. Or get a kind of blessing from you. Please? It’d mainly be for Clyde.”

She looked straight ahead.

“I’ll leave a business card. Ma’am? You feel way more mine than my own mother. Don’t make me go. I could help you around here. I could help.”

“Get on out now, boy. You came hoping to find you’re bettern you are. But—son?—you didn’t deserve even him. Go back to Hell where you all came from. Any idea what you costs us? You ain’t a thing but white.”

V.

After my Falls reunion’s farewell banquet-dance, I watched a hundred matched-up classmates wander half plotzed to station wagons rigged with child-seats. They all moved, linked romantically arm in arm, maybe feeling, as I did at 2 a.m., about eighteen. Weren’t they destined, if ever again, to make love (foreplay and all) tonight?

I found myself alone. On foot, weaving thanks to drink, I was aware of being so richly unaccompanied, an “only-child” feeling like the only white child ever born to a black man, feeling “only,” aiming vague toward my downtown hotel (formerly the Bank).

I took my time. Nobody except the Pay-for-Play soft-core “Adult Channel” waited in Room 306. After two blocks, I thought I heard, just half a block behind me, springy footsteps, taps pinging the toes of shoes.—In the manner of noir movies, I kept stopping, a trick … to catch … the sounds … of someone tailing me. I convinced myself—with help from our reunion’s generic-brand gin—that the spiffy, almost tap-dance cadence in arrears of me must mean my own departed father’s resurrected steps.

Caught up in a drama only partly self-invented, I dodged into the doorway of a defunct pawnshop. Scanning my recent route, I heard three more tentative footfalls slow then, coyly, halt. I saw absolutely no one.

Falls, like most small American towns, has gone all soft and moribund downtown. Everything alive’s leached westward toward the malls. Baby Africa, once homemade, unpainted, and organically pleasing as a set of mud daubers’ nests, now stands disfigured by low-cost cinder-block housing. Units uninterested in charm, incapable of coziness, as prisons are.

Now, a little drunk, feeling fully blessedly anonymous, I permitted myself the luxury of simply going with this, whatever—this pursuit. A bit of 2 a.m. staggering wouldn’t hurt a living soul. And if Clyde did stalk me, my show of willingness would surely draw him closer. That’s all I hoped. To lure him. Wouldn’t it help if he found his Bible copilot somewhat fallen? Me, all too mortal, fully grown, no longer the priggish teetotaling little boy Clyde had somehow decided to go ahead and love.