He was the son of a vastly wealthy fertilizer manufacturer in Southeast Georgia, and had been shipped around the South from one military school to another since he was seven years old, seldom lasting more than a year before being expelled for some flagrant, lazy and mocking infraction of the rules. They usually involved fighting or drinking, or both. He was a tall boy about my age, but because of his predilection for trouble, he was a year behind me at North Fulton, where he had transferred at midyear after his latest ouster, this one from the Georgia Military Academy in College Park to the southeast. He was living temporarily and conditionally with his aunt and uncle on Northside Drive and attending North Fulton as a last resort before his father gave up totally on his education and cut him off without a penny.
Red had not altered his habits one iota, but North Fulton, being a public school, was more lenient than the military fastnesses in which he had previously been held captive, and the aunt and uncle were classically poor relations and frightened to death of Red’s smiling, murderous father. No one reported his indiscretions, and it was not likely that anyone would. They only served to add luster to his legend, except in Lucy’s eyes.
“He thinks he’s God’s gift to women,” she said dryly. “I’ve got news for him.”
Red was silver-blond and had hooded, drowsy blue eyes and his father’s slow, insinuating grin and blind white temper. He was purported to have three or four aborted pregnancies to his credit in small cities and towns around the South, and was a wonderful dancer, a whiplash athlete, and possessed of the kind of quick, spurting rage that many Southern men mask behind affability and slow, sweet smiles. He was called Red because of the lightning flush of fury that flooded his face when he was provoked, which was often. He was not dull-witted; far from it. Red was as quick and cunning as a cobra. Indeed, despite his abysmal academic record (and because of his father’s alumnus status and potential for endowment) he planned confidently to go on to Princeton when he graduated from wherever he finally prevailed. This was the first thing Lucy ever told me about him, smiling sweetly at him as she spoke: “Red, this is my cousin Gibby Bondurant, who looks after me like a big old brother whenever he can. Be nice to him, because he’s going to Princeton just like you. Maybe you-all can room together.”
And she slid the smile from Red over to me in one smooth, rich pour, like molasses.
Red Chastain looked so much like the faded photographs of a young Jim Bondurant Lucy kept in a scrapbook in her room that I started when I met him, as if he had actually been that gilded ghost.
After that first day, there was hardly a moment that spring when Lucy was not in his company. He picked her up in the mornings and drove her to school, and ate his lunch with her, and walked down the halls at school with his long arm about her waist as Boo Cutler used to do, and carried her books to the open MG afterward and tossed them into the back and drove her away, and brought her home in the long green twilights in time to eat dinner, change her clothes and climb again into the MG. The burr of the car was the first thing I heard before leaving the summerhouse for school in the mornings, and the last I heard in the evenings before falling asleep. Lucy still necked and petted long into the nights of that last honeysuckled spring, but the mouth and arms and auto now were those of Red Chastain and Red alone, and the only reason I knew that she was not going all the way with him was, as with all the others before him, that no one was talking about it, and they would have been, instantly, if it had been accomplished. No one talked of anything else that spring but Lucy and Red Chastain.
My parents said nothing about her alliance with him but smiled pleasantly at Red when he ground up the driveway in the MG, and he was always the soul of punctilious courtesy with them. He was charm itself with Aunt Willa, and she was as cordial to him as I ever saw her with any of Lucy’s boyfriends; almost, though not quite, coquettish. Red had that effect on most women. And of course, he was powerfully, spectacularly rich. Aunt Willa was a shade warmer to Lucy that spring, or at least, not so noticeably cool. Her bread was always fresh and ready for buttering.
Even in her near-total absorption with Red, Lucy was behaving oddly with me. She was alternately sharp and contentious and wistful and almost seductive, constantly in an emotional flux, and I put it down to the fact that she still did not want me to go away and leave her alone in that unloving house. But Sarah had her own ideas about Lucy’s mercurial moods.
“She’s so jealous that you take me places she could kill us both,” she said once, and then blushed furiously. But I dismissed that with such unfeigned ridicule that she did not mention it again. And the days spun on toward June and the end of school, and through them all, Lucy burned like a white candle on the arm and in the yellow MG of Red Chastain.
In the last week of May, a scant week before I graduated from North Fulton, we went in a flock of snorting cars on a still, hot afternoon out to the Chattahoochee River, where it ran under the tall old abandoned steel bridge beside Robinson’s Tropical Gardens.
We were all there, my immediate crowd, the small set of Buckhead Boys that predated even the Jells; many of us in the pairs in which we would move into our adult lives. Ben Cameron came with dark, gentle Julia Randolph; Tom Goodwin with tiny, venomous Freddie Slaton; Snake Cheatham with Lelia Blackburn; Pres Hubbard with plain, aristocratic Sarton Foy who had just moved to Atlanta from Savannah with a royal-blue genealogy that left ours in her dust. A.J. Kemp brought Little Lady, who was allowed to tag along even at fourteen because A.J. was poor, polite, and adjudged harmless by Aunt Willa. I was with Sarah Cameron; even Sarah seemed afflicted by the restlessness that rode under the flat surface of the day, and abandoned her studio. Charlie Gentry was alone, but he rode with Sarah and me, in the backseat of the Fury, cracking smart-ass jokes and glancing at Sarah to see how she would respond to them. I saw him in the rearview mirror.
Lucy came with Red Chastain.
We had not planned to come to the river; we had just left Wender & Roberts, bored with the stale chill of the air conditioning and the hanging hiatus in our lives, and drifted in a jostling flock out to the water as if sung there by a water witch. We went there three or four times during the springs and summers; vaguely, as if to check in.
We could not have said why. There was better swimming than the Chattahoochee available to us in a dozen pools, and better necking at Sope Creek and a dozen other spots. Drinking was best done in the parking lots of a handful of drive-ins around town, under cover of darkness and pulsing neon. There was no place on the river in those days to put a boat in; and in any case, river rafting did not become a craze until two decades later. None of us would be caught dead fishing; it was, to us, the social equivalent of bowling. The river was not even a very scenic one, as rivers go. It ran flat and opaque and rusty with the slick mud of the foothills from which it sprang, and there were not, this far south, any appreciable shoals or rapids or waterfalls.
The river was deceptively deep and fast-moving under its sluggish snake’s hide, and was, even on hot days, still cold in its depths in May. But it looked, simply, like a brown, slow, overgrown creek heaving itself along between flat, weedy banks. There were some fine stands of great old willows and hardwoods along its banks, and graceful bamboo forests, and in a few places the land soared high into granite palisades, and the pastures and forests bordering it were still largely innocent of the beetling, overpriced, shabbily built chalets and châteaus and villas that shouldered greedily down to its fringes a decade later. But still, there wasn’t much in the way of natural splendor to lure us there. It was simply that where there is living water, the young near it will—must—eventually come.
“I swear,” Lelia Blackburn said, holding her hair up off her sweating neck. “If it doesn’t go on and rain I’m going to jump out of my skin.”
“How about your clothes?” Snake said, and she slapped him lightly.
We were all about to pop out of our skins like ripe grapes that day. There was thunder in the thick, wet air, and our arms an
d necks crawled with it. The heat was intense for May, and had gone on too long. The end-of-school social season for the sororities and fraternities was at its fever pitch, and we were all worn and sated and heavy-eyed. Several of the girls were angry with their boyfriends and each other, a normal state that intensified at this time of year, and sniped and jabbed with sweet, sucking accuracy.
“Sarton, I can see smack through that skirt when you stand against the sun,” Freddie Slaton chirped. “Tom would kill me if I showed off my panties to everybody in the world like that.”
“You’re probably the safest girl in America,” patrician Sarton drawled. “The sight of your panties would probably put the world into a coma.”
Undischarged sexual tension hummed like electricity prowling a live wire; most of us had necked and petted ourselves near crazy in the long, hot nights after the dances. Exams loomed. And over us all, especially those of us who were seventeen and eighteen and seniors, there drifted the freighted miasma that overhangs each of the great divisions of life and time. Graduation loomed; could not be held back, no matter how many raw young hearts cried out for it to halt; would, inevitably, come. For most of us, there was the certainty that whatever else it held, life would never again be, for us, so sweet and seamless and golden. It was our first taste of loss and inexorability, and we quivered with that promissory loss like violins tuned to infinity.
Restless Ben Cameron was the only one of us who came close to articulating what we all felt: “We won’t ever come back to this bridge,” he said, his gray eyes far away and somehow drowned.
“Oh, we will too,” Julia chimed. “Of course we will.”
“It won’t be us who comes,” he said.
No one asked him what he meant.
There was no traffic on the old bridge—the new bridge just downriver had siphoned it off—and the smooth, flat water ran silent in the sun toward Apalachicola and the sea, mesmerizing us. Not even cicadas buzzed in the stillness, though there came, cool and rippling, the small splashes far below of snakes or turtles or other water creatures entering the river. It was three-thirty in the afternoon when we got out onto the bridge and stood there, our forearms resting on the pitted old railing, looking down into the dull mirror of the water. Its surface this day was not brown but the rich gray of pewter, and the entire May sky and the great, silver-edged galleons of the thunderheads were caught in it. It was like looking down into the mirror-twin sky of a heretofore unimagined world. There was not even a breeze; the wind had died at noon.
Sarah is adamant in her contention that it was Lucy who began it. She is probably right. I was too far away to hear her, but it was in all ways Lucy’s sort of thing, and on this day she was primed for it like a pulsing pump. She fairly glittered there in the still, silent sunlight, with energy and restlessness and the strange, skittering tides that had been driving her since she met Red. I knew when they got out of the MG that they had been drinking, and not just beer. I could smell whiskey sweet and heavy on Red’s breath, and Lucy’s cheeks burned with the two hectic red circles that liquor always painted there. Her eyes stabbed back light from the sun.
“The last one in that river is a—a Bovis Hardin,” Sarah says Lucy cried. And was out of her skirt and sleeveless blouse and black Capezio shoes before the words were out of her mouth.
My head was turned away from the water when I heard Snake’s cry, “Hey, you idiot, you want to kill yourself?” but even as I swiveled to face them I knew that I would see Lucy. And there she was, standing poised on the railing with white-gripping toes, stripped down to her nylon panties and bra, naked on every silvery-white inch of her save a few, giving a strange, long, wordless, jubilant cry and diving like a polished knife out and down into the sky-smitten water, fully twenty feet below. Red Chastain, stripped also to his undershorts, followed her in a lazy, panther’s racing dive. We all stared in absolute, dream-snared silence. For a heart-stoppingly long time there was nothing on the steely water but the concentric stigmata of their dives, and then their sleek, wet heads broke the surface like seals, and their strong, slim arms Brought them to a little sandy beach some yards downstream, fringed with showering willows.
We were wrapped for another long moment in sun and singing air and river silence. And then Snake cupped his mouth with his hands and gave the great, hideous Tarzan cry out of all the Saturday matinees of our childhood and went off the bridge.
“Kowa Bunga!” yelled Ben, and followed him.
“Oh, God, I’m going to get killed for this!” Julia shrieked, but she slid out of her pedal pushers and blouse and squeezed her eyes shut and jumped in feet first, after Ben.
Julia would have leaped into hell after Ben; in a sense, she did.
The long tension of the day was broken then. One by one, shouting, the Pinks and Jells of Buckhead skinned out of their clothes and dived into the river. Before I could even get a strong breath, there were only four of us left on the bridge. Pres could not swim in his heavy metal brace; he grinned and yelped from beside us. Charlie risked a diabetic’s death from cold and infection if he swam in any but summer-warmed water. I still stood there, on the pitted macadam. And Sarah Cameron, by far the best swimmer and diver of us all, stood indolently at the railing, smiling coolly down at them while they shouted at us to strip and dive, dive, dive!
“It’s the worst kind of showing off,” she said to me in a low, urgent voice. “It’s gumption and not courage. Be really brave and don’t do it.”
Of them all, only she and one other person knew that my fear of heights went beyond mere terror into mindlessness.
Lucy had always known.
They thrashed out of the water and stood on the little beach, gasping at the audacity of their own act, wet, laughing. Even the girls laughed. Even Freddie Slaton, looking like a water snake; even Little Lady, looking like a soaked Easter chick. Even Sarton Foy, looking like what she was—a sopping, near-naked aristocrat.
“Dive, y’all! Dive! Dive! Come on!” she shrieked. “You’re chickenshits if you don’t dive!”
Sarton is the only woman I ever knew besides Lucy on whose lips profanity sounded like an Ave Maria.
Everyone was laughing except Lucy. Lucy did not laugh, did not even smile. She stood a little apart, dripping and slender as a water reed, head thrown back, body gleaming through the sucking nylon, blue eyes blazing straight into mine, hands cupping her mouth, and called up, “Come on, Gibby, jump, or we’ll think you’re a North Fulton fruitcake! Come on! Mark my trai-i-i-l!”
And at that shared, blood-and-heart-deep summons out of our childhood, I ripped off my pants and shirt, scrambled desperately up onto the hot steel railing, steadied myself on the struts and poised blindly for a dive. I opened my eyes then, for one despairing moment, and looked down into the water so sickeningly far below, and saw there instead only the endless, wheeling sky. I toppled backward onto the bridge, pulled myself up on my hands and knees, and vomited.
From below, Lucy’s laughter soared above a scrambled chorus of hard, bright jubilation. It seemed to go on forever. By the time I had gotten numbly into my clothes and walked back to the Fury where I had parked it on the verge of the bridge, stiff and silent with Sarah in my wake, Lucy had come sleek and dripping and incandescent up the bank, shimmering like a young otter. Red Chastain grinned insolently beside her.
“What’s the matter, Gibby?” she said lightly and merrily. “Eat something that didn’t agree with you?”
Red laughed.
Sarah Cameron drew her slender brown arm back and slapped Lucy so hard that her neck snapped back and her wet hair lashed across her face. Someone is always slapping Lucy, I thought stupidly.
“I will never forgive you for that, Lucy Bondurant,” Sarah said in a voice I did not know and never heard again. “Shep will, because he’s a fool. But I won’t.”
We walked on past them, and were in the airless front seat of the Fury before we heard any of them speak, and I could not tell what it was they said. I turned the key
and eased the car onto the sunlit emptiness of Paces Ferry Road. Neither of us looked back.
We drove home without a word, but when I let her out at the bottom of the long Cameron driveway, I leaned over and kissed Sarah briefly on her soft mouth, which tasted, surprisingly, of tears.
“Thank you, Sarah,” I said.
“You’re welcome, Shep,” she replied.
From that day until the summer morning I left for Princeton, I went few places without Sarah at my side.
Lucy’s tears of remorse that evening were fierce and real enough, and she was so wildly and desperately penitent that I forgave her as I always had and would; as Sarah had said I would. But the slight remove between us now was impenetrable. I had found to my great pain and profound surprise that the true legacy she had bestowed upon me was not, as I had thought, the power of savior and near-sainthood, but the open wound of vulnerability. An invisible and invincible shield, one that we had forged together on nearly the first day we had known each other, had been breached, and blood had been let. Neither of us, I know, ever forgot that day, though no one in our crowd spoke of it again, at least in my presence.
Almost immediately after the incident on the river the word got around that Lucy was doing the Black Act with Red Chastain almost every night, sometimes two and three times, and that they had vague plans to get engaged when he finally graduated, if he did. She wore no fraternity pin, for Red had refused to join one, so I had no way of knowing if the latter rumor was true.
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