The Fortunate Ones

by Ed Tarkington

  All at once, the colors of the world seemed too bright. I could smell everything—flowers and herbs in the beds around the factory, woodsmoke and tamales over hot coals in the open-air market across the highway.

  “Uncle Jim asked me to come down and bring you home,” Arch said. “He told me exactly where I could find you, down to the bench you like to sit on in that park.”

  “He had me followed?”

  “He’d do anything for your mother. He wanted to come for you himself, by the way, but he doesn’t dare leave her side. He’s a complete mess. You wouldn’t believe it. He can barely talk without bursting into tears.”

  Arch went on, but I wasn’t listening. Instead, I was thinking of my mother—young and carefree in jeans and a T-shirt with cutoff sleeves, laughing with the women of Montague Village; in that blue dress she wore on the day she took me to see Yeatman for the first time; the two of us on the couch at the carriage house, eating popcorn and watching Gone with the Wind.

  “I don’t know how quickly I can get a flight,” I said.

  “I came on Uncle Jim’s plane. We can leave as soon as noon tomorrow. I assume you have a valid passport.”

  I nodded.

  All at once, a little childish bitterness, nursed into a ten-year grudge held firm by mutual stubbornness, was obliterated. In a matter of seconds, I’d gone from hating Jim Haltom to accepting a ride on his private jet.

  “We should probably call Jim, though,” Arch said. “So your mom will know to expect you.”

  We went back inside. I pointed to the phone on the desk at the far end of the room and explained the procedure for placing international calls. Arch picked up the handset, dialed, and waited. A muffled voice came through the receiver.

  “Hi, this is Arch Creigh,” he said. “Is Jim there?”

  He nodded at me.

  “I have Bonnie’s son with me,” he said. “Can you put me through to him, please?”

  For years, I’d played out the moment I spoke to Jim again for the first time. In those rehearsals, I always had the upper hand. Fate had flipped the tables.

  “Uncle Jim?” Arch said. “Yes. He’s right here . . . All right . . . Yes, sir, tomorrow afternoon. Probably between six and seven . . . All right. Here he is.”

  He handed me the receiver and gave my shoulder a squeeze.

  “Jim?” I said.

  “Hello, son.”

  I tried to keep my voice steady.

  “Can I talk to my mom?”

  “She’s sleeping. I can try to wake her.”

  “No, don’t do that. Just tell her I’m on the way. Would you like to speak to Arch again?”

  “If he’s available.”

  I handed Arch the receiver. He turned toward the desk. I walked back out onto the stairs. Beyond the parking lot, the land opened up to raw desert. In the foreground below the purple shadows of the mountains, the landscape was dotted with scattered cacti and flowering Judas trees. I closed my eyes and remembered the farm in April and the endless green meadow in the cool, misty damp of early morning. I thought of my mother there, the way she had looked to me, in love, but also afraid. And I wondered, as she must have then, and perhaps for many years after, why I had found it so hard just to be happy for her.

  two

  I found Teddy in the kitchen, still dressed in her cleaning clothes, her face a bit begrimed. A pot of mole bubbled on the stove. I could smell chiles rellenos in the oven.

  “How did it go?” I asked.

  “I’ve cleaned a few bathrooms in my life.” She turned her back to me and chopped the vegetables on the cutting board with cold precision.

  “He didn’t tell me he was coming.”

  “He just popped in,” she said.

  “That’s right.”

  “Why?”

  “My mother is dying,” I said.

  Teddy placed the knife on the counter and turned around. “Your mother?”

  “Yes. She hasn’t got long to live.”

  “Oh, Charlie.”

  Teddy came to me, arms outstretched.

  “I haven’t spoken to her for ten years,” I said.

  “I know.”

  Her arms tightened around me, and I clung to her, but I was thinking about Arch. What would he think of our house? Would he like the food? How would he behave toward Pancho and Murray and Mariela?

  Outside, the sun was dipping toward the horizon, turning the patch of sky through the window orange and pink.

  “Arch wants me to leave with him tomorrow,” I said.

  “Can you get a flight that fast?”

  “He came down here on my stepfather’s jet.”

  “Right,” Teddy said. “Of course. And how long will you be gone?”

  “As long as it takes, I guess.”

  The words gripped me with their cold finality. I was going home, I thought, to watch my mother die.

  Teddy turned the gas down and covered the pot.

  “I don’t know what to say, Charlie.”

  “I don’t either.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I know,” I said. “I am too.”

  Teddy left the pot to simmer and went to her bedroom to get dressed. I went up to the roof and took out a cigarette and watched the sky purple as the last sliver of sun slid beneath the distant mountains and the lights began to come on along the church spires. Bells pealed from the Parroquia and the Iglesia de San Francisco, marking vespers.

  It was almost dark when I heard a knock at the door below. I hurried down the stairs and opened the door for Arch. He was dressed in pressed slacks, alligator loafers, a polo shirt, and a navy blazer with gold buttons.

  “Am I overdressed?” he asked.

  I looked down. I was still in the same paint-stained clothes I’d been wearing when Arch found me in the park.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I lost track of time. Teddy should be ready by now. Mariela and Pancho and Murray should be here in a few. Come on in. You can have a drink while I throw something decent on.”

  I led Arch through the living room and into the kitchen and offered him a drink. I had bought a bottle of twelve-year-old scotch the day before for Murray. Arch helped himself to a tumbler and poured a few fingers over ice.

  “Nice place,” he said.

  “It’s Teddy’s,” I said. “Mariela’s, actually. She owns it. I pay a little rent.”

  “You’ve always had a knack for getting the discount upgrade.”

  Teddy came out of the bedroom in a black cotton dress, large silver earrings, and a turquoise pendant she’d bought in Chiapas. I went to the bedroom to wash my face and change. When I came back out to the courtyard, Teddy was flushed, giggling at something Arch had said. It reminded me of that time I’d found them together outside the great house on the Boulevard. I smiled, recalling how I’d thought I’d walked up on something inappropriate.

  Pancho and Murray arrived, followed shortly by Mariela. Introductions were made. I served drinks in the courtyard, then left to help Teddy and Mariela with dinner. Arch and Murray seemed to have a lot to talk about. Pancho joined us in the kitchen.

  “Archer knows quite a bit about the oil trade in the Southern Hemisphere,” Pancho said.

  “Pancho,” I said, “I have to go back with Arch to the States. My mother’s very sick. She hasn’t got long to live.”

  “Your mother?” Mariela said. “Oh, Carlitos, lo siento. Teddy, why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I just found out myself,” she said.

  “Do you need money?” Pancho asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “When are you leaving?” Mariela asked.

  “In the morning,” I said.

  “How’d you get a flight on such short notice?” Pancho asked.

  “Arch has a private jet,” Teddy said.

  Pancho’s eyes widened.

  “It’s not his,” I said. “It’s my stepdad’s.”

  Mariela let out a low whistle.

  “You said they were rich,”
she said. “You didn’t say how rich.”

  “My stepfather prefers the term ‘affluent.’”

  “My, my, Carlitos,” Pancho said. “Maybe you should be loaning money to me.”

  He leaned out the kitchen door.

  “Murray,” he shouted, “did Archer tell you about Charlie’s mother?”

  “Charlie has a mother?” Murray called.

  “I know,” Pancho said. “Can you believe it? After all these years.”

  “What’s happened?” Murray asked.

  “Cancer,” Arch said.

  “How long has she been sick?”

  “A little over three years,” Arch said.

  “Three years?” Pancho said. “Shame on you, Charlie.”

  “Go easy on Charlie, Pancho,” Arch said. “She kept it very quiet. I didn’t even know myself until very recently, and Charlie’s stepdad is my father-in-law. But we were great friends before all of that.”

  “So the two of you are stepbrothers-in-law, but you were friends before,” Pancho said. “There must be a story.”

  “It’s a long one,” I said.

  “Do tell,” Pancho said.

  “I’d rather not.”

  “If you won’t tell, I’ll just ask Archer,” Pancho said. “You’ll tell us all about it, won’t you, Archer?”

  “I’m an open book,” Arch said.

  “Save it for the table,” Teddy said from the kitchen. “Dinner is served.”

  Looking back, I wish I’d savored the taste of Mariela’s family mole, a recipe handed down for hundreds of years. Instead, I ate little and gulped the fine wine Pancho and Murray had brought as if it were cheap sangria.

  “So, Arch,” Pancho said, “tell us about Nashville.”

  “Well, it isn’t all honky-tonks and ten-gallon hats,” he said. “But you must know that from Charlie and Teddy.”

  “I almost forgot,” Pancho said. “You lived there as well, didn’t you, Teddy? But not long.”

  “Less than a year,” Teddy said. “I barely remember it.”

  “You wouldn’t recognize it if you did,” Arch said.

  He regaled the table with tales of Nashville old and new. I was too drunk to remember anything but the way they looked at him, the way they hung on his words, the way his beauty and his charm captivated them all. It was enormously confusing to sit there knowing that my mother was across the border in Tennessee dying—perhaps already dead, for all I knew—and there I was being overtaken again by Arch—the sound of his laughter, his easy manner, the flash of mischief in his eyes, the way he could simultaneously enthrall both two gay men and two lesbians who usually regarded wealthy gringos like Arch with a suspicion bordering on hostility.

  When Murray began to fade, Arch and I helped Pancho get him out to the car.

  “Will I see you in the morning?” Pancho asked me.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “I’ll call when I get there.”

  “Lo siento, mi hijo,” he said. “Te amamos.”

  “Y tu tambien.”

  When I came back in, Arch and Teddy and Mariela had moved into the living room. Mariela spread out across the length of one couch, the hem of her dress pulled up over her knees, Teddy curled up next to her. Arch sat in a club chair admiring the two of them with a faint leer, which, against all reason, engendered a pang of jealousy in me.

  “Well, bud,” I said, “we have an early morning.”

  Arch glanced at his watch.

  “Indeed we do,” he said.

  I led him to the door, then stepped out onto the curb and hailed a cab. Arch buttoned his blazer.

  “Don’t forget your passport.”

  “I’ll be ready,” I said.

  Teddy and Mariela had disappeared, so I went into my bedroom and spread out on the bed the nicest clothes I had, folded them neatly, and stacked them into a suitcase. Afterward, I went into the bathroom and turned on the hot water to fill the sink. With a pair of scissors, I trimmed away the dense clumps of wiry hair from my face. Soon, all that was left was uneven stubble. I dipped a towel in the hot water and dampened my face, covered my cheeks with shaving soap lather, and began to shave, something I hadn’t done in months.

  My cheeks were leaner than they had been before the beard. The flesh was pink, compared to the tanned nose and forehead. It felt as if Carlitos were a pile of hair in the wastebasket and a scattering of whiskers in the sink. The person getting on that plane the next morning would be Charlie.

  I felt a deep sadness. It wasn’t for my mother—that was not yet real to me. It was something else. I felt as if everything about my life since I got off the bus in San Miguel ten years before had been one long, listless dream, that the life I’d thought I’d been building was always temporary, an illusion, something I’d invented to cover up that ceaseless longing, and I’d just been waiting for Arch to wake me up so I could go on living.

  three

  After we boarded, Arch sent me back to the bedroom. It’s quite a feeling, taking your shoes off and crawling under the covers of a queen bed at cruising altitude. One could get used to it.

  When I woke, I came out to find Arch in a reclining chair, scratching notes on a legal pad. He motioned for me to sit down across from him.

  “Good nap?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  He pointed at my face and stroked his own cheek.

  “It’s nice to see your face again, by the way,” he said. “I mean, all of it.”

  “I wanted my mother to recognize me,” I said.

  “I thought of that,” he said. “I was afraid you might take it the wrong way.”

  “Glad I figured it out on my own, I guess.”

  Arch straightened the papers in front of him and slid them into a calfskin briefcase.

  “We’ll drive straight out to the farm,” he said. “Your sister will be there. She goes by Dolly. She’s in the fifth grade at Ensworth. I thought you might want to bring her a get-to-know-you gift. I had my girl pick something up.”

  My girl, I thought. I remembered hearing Nancy Haltom refer to my mother with the same words, and I thought of how to people like the Haltoms and the Creighs, servants and assistants were possessions, no different from houses or cars or private jets.

  “I should have brought her a painting,” I said.

  “Maybe you can paint something for her while you’re in town.”

  “So what am I giving her?”

  “A silver heart necklace from Tiffany’s.”

  “My mother used to love those blue boxes,” I said. “What kind of kid is she?”

  “She’s beautiful,” he said, as if that were all that mattered.

  “I don’t doubt it,” I said. “How is she handling everything?”

  “All right, all things considered. Her mom’s been sick for so long she barely remembers her being different, so it’s sort of normal for her. I don’t think she understands what’s coming. I’m not sure any of us are ready for that.”

  I gazed out the window. The plane floated above a blanket of clouds.

  “So what else do I need to know?” I asked.

  “I expect you’ve already thought about this, but your mom—well, she doesn’t look the way she did when you left. She’s very thin. She’s lost all her hair. She wears a turban most of the time, but you might see her without it, which is pretty hard. She looks much older than her age.”

  I nodded. I knew I wasn’t prepared for any of this, that nothing Arch could say to me would make it easier. I was just going to have to go through it.

  “Anything else?” I asked.

  “Just your arrangements. You can stay out at the farm if you like, but I thought it would be better for everyone if you stayed over at our house. It might make things smoother.”

  “Is that what my mother wants?”

  “She isn’t lucid very often. She has a few decent hours in the daytime. And Dolly’s at our house too—she’s using Vanessa’s old room. It’s too hard for her to be at the farm with your
mother being so sick and Uncle Jim being so helpless and pitiful. Van thought that would be better for everyone, and Uncle Jim agreed. So you’ll see a lot more of Dolly if you stay with us. What do you say?”

  “Whatever you think is best.”

  Before long, we plunged through the canopy of clouds, and the green hills and blue lakes of Middle Tennessee came into view. When we’d landed, Scott, the Haltoms’ old caretaker, was waiting for us. Arch seemed to have inherited him along with the house. His hair had turned from dark brown to salt and pepper, but otherwise, he seemed unchanged.

  “It’s good to see you, Scott,” I said.

  “You too, you little turd.”

  As Scott drove us out to Leiper’s Fork, I asked him about his wife and boys—they were in the seventh and eighth grade now, attending Yeatman at Jim’s expense.

  “That’s one hell of a perk,” I said.

  “I call it the golden handcuffs,” Scott replied. “He’s got me for six more years at least.”

  “Next thing you know, he’ll be offering to pay their way through Vanderbilt.”

  “I won’t say no if he does,” Scott said. “You, my friend, are about the only fool in history to turn down that deal.”

  I had forgotten the humidity of Tennessee in spring. Every lungful felt like a drink of water. There had been several days of rain before we arrived, followed by clear skies, such that the sun lit up the verdant pastures in greens so bright and vivid they all but begged to be painted.

  “You won’t recognize Nashville,” Scott said. “Especially since the tornadoes.”

  “Tornadoes?” I said.

  “You didn’t know? Just last April, two megatwisters ripped right through the middle of the city. They jumped the Cumberland and made mincemeat of your old neighborhood. Leveled thirty-five buildings downtown and three hundred homes in East Nashville.”

  “Your old home at Montague Village?” Arch said. “Gone. Completely demolished.”

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “Don’t worry, everybody there got out before the tornado hit. And your aunt wasn’t living there anymore anyway. She moved out to Donelson a few years ago.”

  “You’ve kept tabs on her?”