Free Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt

eye makeup at all as far as I could tell. But he was walkin’ sideways around the store like a damned crab, twistin’ this way and that. Then he went past a mirrored wardrobe, and I saw it plain as day: He’d put the makeup on the other eye.
    “I was ready to kick his butt clear out the door, then and there. But he’s good at what he does, and it doesn’t seem to bother the customers. So I kept my mouth shut. And from that day to this, he’s kept that eye turned away from me. He must take me for blind or some kind of idiot, but that’s okay with me. He pretends he’s not wearing makeup, and I pretend I don’t know he’s ignored my wishes. Meanwhile, he keeps walkin’ sideways, twistin’ around, speakin’ outta the corner of his mouth, and hopin’ I won’t notice. And I make out like I don’t. I don’t know who’s crazier, Jack the One-eyed Jill or me. But we get along just fine.”

    Before long, I found myself settling into a pattern of daily routines: an early-morning jog around Forsyth Park, breakfast at Clary’s drugstore, a late-afternoon walk along Bull Street. I discovered that my activities coincided with the daily rituals of certain other people. No matter how widely our paths may have diverged for the rest of the day, we overlapped again and again at our appointed hour and place. The black man who jogged around Forsyth Park at the same hour I did was one such person.
    He was lean, very dark, and a little over six feet tall. When I fell in behind him the first time, I noticed he was carrying a short blue leather strap. Most of it was wound around his hand; eight or ten inches of it protruded. He snapped the free end against histhigh every other step, producing a rhythmic
whap
that forced me to run in step or very much out of step. I ran in step; it was easier. As he turned the corner at the south end of the park that first day, he looked back in my direction but not quite at me, a little behind me. I looked over my shoulder. About fifty yards back, there was a blond woman jogging with a little terrier romping beside her.
    The next time I started my run, the blond woman and her dog were running ahead of me. The dog would dart into the park and then double back to join her. As I drew near, she turned her head to look across the park toward Drayton Street on the other side. The black man was jogging along Drayton, having already made both turns at the far end. He looked back at her.
    After this, I never saw one of them without also seeing the other. He always carried the little blue leather strap. She always had her dog with her. Sometimes he was in the lead; sometimes she was. They were always separated by at least a hundred yards.
    One day I saw the man at the M&M supermarket pushing a shopping cart. Another time I caught sight of him getting into a late-model green Lincoln on Wright Square. But no blue strap and no blond woman. A few days later, I saw the blond woman coming out of a bank. She was unaccompanied except for her terrier, who trotted along beside her. He was straining at the end of a blue leather leash.
    “We don’t do black-on-white in Savannah,” Joe Odom told me when I mentioned having seen this couple. “Especially black male on white female. A lot may have changed here in the last twenty years, but not that. Badness is the only woman I know of who had a black lover and got away with it. Badness was the wife of an influential Savannah businessman, and she had lovers during most of their marriage. That was all perfectly acceptable. Savannah will put up with public infidelity no matter how flagrant it is. Savannah loves it. Can’t get enough of it. But even Badness knew enough to leave Savannah and go to Atlanta when she felt the urge to have an affair with a black man.”
    I understood all that, but I still wondered about certain small details concerning my jogging companions. Why, for instance, did he carry the leash? And when and where did they get close enough for her to give