WALTER BERNARD'S GREAT BALANCING ACT
EXCERPT

by Lee R. Haven

Chapter One

Walter Bernard flips through a Jet magazine he bought at a mall bookstore while waiting for Kim to examine seemingly every item on seemingly every aisle in a clothing store across from it. He steals a look at the centerfold of a brown, thick-hipped girl in a yellow bikini and tells himself he’ll examine the woman more freely when not around Kim, who, right now, is on the kitchen phone, dying.
     “Keith, how could you just misplace the album? It’s the only photos we have of Mom and Dad.”  Grimacing, she drops her head and taps the receiver against her ear, her brother’s explanation buzzing in and out.  She paces for as long as the white cord will allow— this time not untangling it, a task at which Walt has witnessed her perform with enviable ease— and she throws a shoulder, frustratingly, against the wall. “I knew I shouldn’t have let you borrow it. I just knew it.”
Walt is also finishing a bologna sandwich and orange juice at the kitchen table. He's not that hungry, but it's been close to four hours since they ate, and the thin slices looked manageable if not tantalizing when he opened the refrigerator for juice.
He thought he had turned the page, but she, the woman in the bikini, is still there — smiling, hands on hips. Walt hyperventilates, mildly, at the ass, or when following the expansion of the crossing leg’s thigh into the curve of an apparently daunting butt. He flips several pages, and there’s a photo of Jesse Jackson. He’s with…somebody doing… something.  Something his daughter said when she was no older than six, makes him smile. “I see that man everywhere,” Soy had said. He shuts the magazine. “What’s that?  You talking to me, Kim? 
“Don’t you hear the cat scratching? He’s ready to come in. … Now listen, Keith ... ”
“I’m gonna make a run.” 
“Hold on, Keith.” The receiver drops from her ear. “What did you say, Walter?”
“I'm leaving.”
       “Look, Keith, I have to go. OK. ‘Bim.’ What? Yeah, I said I’ll tell him. And Keith — look.” Kim follows her husband into the great room, where he drops the Jet near an Esquire that numbers among several magazines fanned out on glass covering the table of walnut wood with curvy legs, behind the sofa. Kim adjusts the Jet so that it aligns properly with the arrangement. She threw him off for a second. He counted a corner of the magazine twice.
He does this thing in his mind sometimes. He counts things, their corners mostly. But also —and exclusively when objects are round —their number. He counts with the same relish and neurosis, if not outward demonstration, of a kid avoiding cracks in a sidewalk. He stops at an even number of whatever he’s counting. Then he starts again.
Kim folds her arms.  When she tilts her head, hair on one side of her chin-length bob falls away from her face, her expression a combination of the exasperation that dominated it on the telephone and, seeming to Walt, of trying awfully hard to be happy about something.
“Where are you going?”
  “I just want to unwind, Kim. We’ve been out all afternoon, the mall, dinner and checking on that crib.” Yet another one we both know we can’t afford.  God.
“Mrs. Baldwin said she might call tonight too about the house.” Kim transitions to another support point when Walt says nothing about the house. “Didn't you say you wanted to be here when Laji gets in, so you could see what he’s doing in that algebra class?”
The cat had stopped scratching the door, or Walt had stopped hearing him, but now there’s more an undeniable sense of urgency. 
 “He said he passed the last test,” Walt says. “He knows he needs to pass that class if he’s gonna graduate next month.  Just try to see if he knows any of it.”
“You always leave it up to me. And remember, we’ve got to get up early in the morning.” 
That’s right. For absolute bullshit. But why quibble? “It’s not like I’m driving. I can sleep on the bus. It’s a long ride.” He picks up his derby, the blue one, from a hall table.
“You have to drive to get us to the bus, remember?” “Look, I'm not gonna be gone long.” Walt has occasionally wondered if his wife has ever remotely considered driving with him in the car.
“You how know dangerous it is out there.”
“I’ll be inside. There’s nothing to worry about. Oh, Bim wanted you to tell me something?”
“What was that? Oh, yeah. He said he just counted at least fifty eight blows the police gave that man out in Los Angeles—King—not fifty six like they’re saying. He was saying maybe you could break that news in a column. I want to know where does he find the time to sit around and count how many times that man is being hit when he can’t find his own parents’ pictures. I feel like breaking his head with a nightstick.”
Walt wouldn’t know about anything in the video anyway. He’s avoided watching it. That’s not been easy. It’s been plastered on TV since it happened two months ago. He glimpsed it maybe once, and all he noted was a lot of fury. But they usually build it up before showing it and he has been successful in clicking it away —or walking out the damn room. As he’s trying to leave this one now. 
“Well,” Kim says, “if you’ve just got to go out, we need deodorant and toothpaste. We forgot to pick them up for the trip.”
“I’ll get them. And don’t worry. I’m sure Bim will find the album.”
Langston Hughes rushes in, his nemesis Big Cat screeching to a stop and scampering off in another direction, when Walt opens the door.

Raymond’s sits in a cluttered commercial district inside a curve Skidaway makes before hooking up with not-too-far away Victory Drive, site of four strip malls and an intersection at which red lights doom motorists to waiting hell.  A 7-11 that is rarely open and an Italian restaurant still catering to whites in a neighborhood gone black are close neighbors.
       Raymond’s was a white club under another name before this black guy bought it.
Walt almost never visits the club, but someone told him it had made improvements, and it probably has, yet it remains an old, stale and poorly lighted place, bearing a relationship with just about any Savannah bar where Walt has seen blacks congregate. (For some reason, Wednesday, not the weekend, flushes out the black Savannah party crowd.)  Walt thinks that, on its face, the conditions prevail for danger in Raymond's, but he has yet to hear of anyone suffering harm, much less a shooting taking place in the club, even now with all these crazy killings taking place in this city.