The Fortunate Ones

by Ed Tarkington

  Arch whispered something to Averett that brought a smile to his lips. He reminded me of myself at fourteen, my whole sense of self immersed in my association with a superior specimen of manhood. I wondered if anyone had ever viewed me with the same envy and contempt I now felt for Nick Averett.

  Jamie signaled the bartender, a rangy man with a goatee and longish black hair slicked back into a small ponytail.

  “Roger, this is my oldest friend,” Jamie said. “His money’s no good here, capisce?”

  “Sure, Jamie,” Roger said.

  Jamie pulled out a cigarette and placed it in his mouth. Roger produced a lighter from his breast pocket and lit it and then lit one of his own.

  This is the way the world ends, I thought.

  “I gotta take a piss,” Jamie said. “You need to go?”

  “No,” I said.

  “I mean, do you need to go?” Jamie tapped his nose with his index finger.

  “I’m good,” I said. “But thanks.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  Jamie slid off the stool and ambled over toward the restrooms. Roger was drying cocktail glasses with a bar towel and hanging them upside down in the narrow brass racks above our heads.

  “My mother worked here,” I said. “Years ago.”

  “What was her name?”

  “You wouldn’t know her,” I said. “It was a long time ago.”

  “Try me.”

  “Bonnie Boykin,” I said.

  Roger dried another glass and slid it into the rack. “She’s your mom?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Shit, man, me and Bonnie go way back.”

  “No kidding.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’m real sorry, man.”

  I didn’t know what to say. “Thank you”? Was there a code, like saying “Congratulations” to the groom and “Best wishes” to the bride? I could have used Vanessa to give me cues.

  Arch took the stool next to me, where Jamie had been sitting.

  “You might have told me about your new career plans,” I said.

  He signaled the bartender.

  “Club soda, Rodge,” he said. “And the tab.”

  Roger nodded. A moment later, he returned with the drink and a slip of white paper. Arch pulled two one-hundred-dollar bills from his wallet.

  “Give Teri the change, will you, Rodge?” he said. “And call a cab for me.”

  He sipped his soda.

  “I was going to tell you,” he said. “I was waiting for the right moment.”

  A twinge of resentment seized me as I recalled Arch’s past history of keeping secrets from me until the arrival, in his judgment, of the right moment.

  I lifted my glass, shook an ice cube into my mouth, and sucked on it.

  “Too much club soda to drive?” I asked.

  “The cab’s for you,” he said. “I’ve got a meeting.”

  “This late?”

  He nodded.

  “I might be a while. I could leave you here, but Jamie would probably try to stuff an eight ball up your nose.”

  “He already offered,” I said. I signaled Roger for another drink.

  “Jim used to have a lot of late-night meetings,” I said. “I think most of them were with my mother.”

  “This is how it gets done, Charlie.”

  “Politics.”

  “Yep.”

  Jamie returned from the restroom, his mood considerably elevated. He stood between me and Arch, and slung his arms around our shoulders.

  “Here we are, together again,” he said. “The three amigos. God, weren’t those days the best?”

  Jamie lurched forward, reached for the string hanging beneath a large brass bell fastened to one of the pillars that held up the glass racks, and rang it three times.

  “Roger,” he cried, “a round for everyone, on the house. I want to make a toast.”

  Roger had skill behind the speed rack. He filled every order in under five minutes. The last drink went to Jamie. He rang the bell again and held his drink aloft.

  “A toast,” he said. “To Charlie Boykin, my dearest and oldest friend, home from the wilderness!”

  The drunken lot cheered in unison. Jamie raised his hand.

  “And to my brother-in-law, Archer Creigh,” he said, “the next mayor of Nashville. To Arch!”

  His name echoed off the exposed brick and reclaimed lumber on the walls, and another round of cheers went up. But Arch had already left.

  six

  I lay awake in my mother’s old room for what felt like hours that night, scrolling through the gauzy, imperfect catalogue of my remembrance, sorting through emotions long repressed, things I’d wanted to forget, because it had seemed easier to push them down and behind me than to make peace with them. This was why I’d left in the first place: I couldn’t reconcile the love and need I had for my mother, for Arch and Vanessa—even for Jim Haltom—with the indignation I’d felt when I discovered that all of our lives had been governed by a grand deception of which only I was unaware. It was easier to cut them out of my life, to behave as if I’d never known them, than to make sense of how I could so desperately love people who thought nothing of lying about things of such great consequence. Had they never considered how it would feel to discover that my very identity, my entire sense of self, was built on a delusion?

  But memory doesn’t let go of us. We can no more choose to put away the past than we can cease to breathe and go on living. And yet we try. We persuade ourselves that a new city or a new country, a new job, a new life, a new religion, a new love, will remake us and liberate us from the prisons of our old errors and the wrongs dealt to us, real or perceived. But the old sins and scars always come to reclaim us, whether borne along by memory alone or in the form of a private jet.

  When sleep finally came, it swallowed me with such force that not even the full sun pouring through the open windows could wake me. When I lifted my head and looked over at the clock on the nightstand, I saw that it was after eleven. I dressed and went over to the main house. I hesitated at the kitchen door—Should I knock? I thought—before entering. There was coffee, still hot. I knew where to find a cup, as well as where the sugar bowl was kept. I dropped a cube in the brew, stirred it, and went back outside—to the rose garden. I was still there twenty minutes later when Arch arrived, toting a blue plastic bag from an electronics store.

  “Good morning,” he said. “It is still morning, by the way. Just barely.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m usually an early riser.”

  “Travel takes it out of you.”

  “What’s that?”

  He handed me the bag. Inside, I found a box containing a new BlackBerry, identical to the one Arch was always fiddling with.

  “Now you can reach me, or anyone else, whenever you like,” he said. “It’s all ready to go. I got you the international calling plan. And I had the guy at the store load my address book into it. Vanessa, Jim, Jamie, Scott—all of their numbers are in there. Probably a few other folks you might want to catch up with too. And me.”

  “I don’t know how to use one of these things,” I said.

  “In another year or two, you won’t be able to get along without one. These little fuckers are going to make some people very, very rich.”

  “They haven’t already?”

  “They’re just getting started. Here, let me show you.”

  Arch explained how to summon numbers from the address book, how to place calls and send text messages.

  “Text messages?” I asked. “Why wouldn’t you just call?”

  “I know, it’s weird, but that’s how people do it now. There,” he said. “It’s easy. There’s a manual in there if you want to learn how to use the calendar and so forth. But you’ve got the basics. So you can get in touch with any of us anytime.”

  He handed me a set of car keys.

  “Use my Range Rover while you’re in town. Consider it yours. Just promise me you won’t drive to Texas an
d sell it to a chop shop on the border.”

  I blushed. Arch gave me a playful punch on the shoulder.

  “Is Jim still sore about that?” I asked.

  “I think he’s ready to call it even. Just promise me, okay? That you’ll stick around. See this through.”

  I winced at the thought that Arch might think me capable of deserting my mother on her deathbed. Then again, I’d yet to give him reason to believe otherwise.

  “I promise,” I said.

  “I talked to Uncle Jim,” he said. “Your mom’s a little better today. I’ll take you out to the farm. But take a shower first. You reek.”

  Only after I went inside did I remember that I hadn’t spoken to anyone back in San Miguel since I’d left. I set the sleek little phone on the dressing table and stared at it for a solid minute before picking it up, punching in the numbers, and pressing the call button. I listened to the crackle of static and the beeping of the international tone. At last, the answering machine picked up, and I heard Teddy’s voice on the recording. I left a message: The journey had been uneventful. I’d seen my mother. I didn’t know how much longer she had—maybe a few days, maybe a week, maybe more, but not much. I did not say how strange it felt to be back in the carriage house, to see Arch and Vanessa, to slip right back into my old life—different for sure, but similar enough to make everything since feel like a lost weekend.

  I showered and shaved. I was still unsettled, even alarmed, by the sight of myself in the mirror. I dressed and ran a comb through my damp hair, stuffed the little phone and the keys into my pockets, and hastened down to meet Arch. He insisted that I drive. We stopped at a diner on the way out to the farm, for coffee and eggs.

  “I always thought if you got into politics that you’d set your sights higher,” I said.

  “It’s not about my sights. It’s about the city.”

  “Arch,” I said. “It’s me.”

  “I’m serious. A lot has changed since you lived here. People are moving to Nashville in droves. The economy is booming. Estimates suggest that the population of Middle Tennessee is going to grow by a million people over the next twenty years. A million. The traffic’s already a nightmare. Can you imagine what it will be like with a million more people here? And where are they all going to live?”

  “In whatever all those cranes are building?”

  “Sure, some of them. A lot of them are moving into neighborhoods like the one you came from. East Nashville is filling up with artsy types and yuppies migrating from out of town. They’ve already broken ground on a new condo development right where Montague Village used to be. You better believe those units won’t be occupied by your old neighbors. People from New York and Chicago come down here, decide they like the weather, and see a slick new condo or an old Craftsman they can buy with cash or for a note that’s a third what they used to pay for half the space. They can’t believe their luck. They aren’t turned off by discount cigarette shops and check-cashing businesses. Some of them lived in rougher places back where they came from.”

  “What’s so bad about that?”

  “Nothing,” he said, “if you forget about the people who lived there before. What’s going to happen to them? Terrence and his grandmother couldn’t live in East Nashville today unless they went into public housing in some shithole like Cayce Place. So they get pushed over to Bordeaux, where half the blocks look like fucking Sarajevo, or they move out to Madison or Donelson or Antioch and have to spend three or four hours a day sitting on a bus. That’s no way to live. And where are all of these new people going to send their kids to school? How are we going to move them around the city? Who will pay for all of this shit Metro’s buying on credit? It’s a real problem. And if you want to make a difference, you need to be at the top of the chain. There’s a way to fix these issues, but it needs to be top-down. We don’t want to end up like Atlanta.”

  I thought of all the old talk of tradition back at Yeatman—the notion that we were obliged to uphold our way of doing things, to push back against the tide of mediocrity and vulgarity. And I remembered what Yeatman had taught me about Tennessee history—how the gallant knights of the South had fought and died for the Southern Way of Life; how they had resisted the so-called tyranny of Reconstruction, often under the cover of white hoods; how they had rebuilt their fortunes and the order of things and somehow managed through the civil rights era to avoid being cast as scoundrels or losing control of their city, the way it had happened in Memphis and New Orleans and Jackson and Birmingham. I doubted that Arch’s desire to prevent Nashville from ending up like Atlanta had as much to do with keeping down housing costs, fixing the schools, and keeping the traffic under control as it did with preserving an order in which people like him continued to decide what was best for the rest of us.

  “Well,” I said, “best of luck. I think you’d make a fine mayor.”

  “Thanks for saying so.”

  “And after that?”

  “Let’s win first.”

  That word—“let’s”—gave me a jolt, not unlike the one I’d felt the first time Arch shook my hand; the first time he said “Hey, bud”; the first time he called me “brother.”

  I took a walk around the farm that afternoon with Jim. He had lost a dramatic amount of weight. The old fullback’s neck was thin, his shoulders were sloped, and the shock of cropped black hair was silvery and longish. He moved slower, took shorter strides.

  “I want to thank you for coming,” he said.

  “I should have come a long time ago,” I said.

  “You didn’t know.”

  “I don’t blame you for not telling me until now,” I said. “I was a terrible brat the last time we spoke. I’m sorry.”

  “You were a boy,” he said. “You had a right to be hurt. I didn’t think enough about how you would take it. I was too much in love. I didn’t try as hard as I should have. I only wanted your mother to be happy.”

  “She seems to have been pretty happy.”

  “Yes,” he said. “But she missed you every day.”

  “You’ll understand if I find that hard to believe.”

  “Let me show you something.”

  We rounded the barn and made our way back toward the house through the vegetable gardens—a project of my mother’s, Jim said. As we neared the house, I mentioned Arch’s mayoral candidacy.

  “I’m not sure it’s the best thing,” Jim said.

  “I assumed he had your support.”

  “Clem Cardwell’s an old friend,” Jim said.

  “Do you mean to say you’re not backing him?” I said. “Arch, I mean.”

  “He’s my godson, and my son-in-law. Blood comes first. But I advised him to wait, or look at another opportunity. It’s Clem’s turn. He has more of a centrist appeal anyway. It’s hard for a Republican to win anything in Davidson County. Regardless, I’m giving Arch my full support. But he doesn’t have all of Clem’s advantages.”

  “You think he’s going to lose.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  We reached the house, on the end where they’d added a new sunporch and a corner with a wet bar built into the wall. Jim led me back through a large door, into a drawing room with a steep vaulted ceiling, the walls adorned with dozens of framed paintings.

  Scanning the walls, I became overwhelmed with emotion. Every one of them—I counted twenty-four—was mine.

  “Did you get these from Pancho?”

  “Pancho?” he asked.

  “Eugene Craddock,” I said. “He represents me. His friends call him Pancho.”

  “I see. No, we didn’t get them directly. I have a buyer.”

  I walked around the room, taking in the career retrospective hanging on the walls before me. At the center of one wall hung the painting I’d done in high school, the infamous scene at the T-Cup.

  “How’d you get that one?”

  “When I stepped down from the board at Yeatman, Kip Dodd wanted to give me a gift. So I asked for the paintin
g. Your mother loves them all, but that’s her favorite. She used to sit in here for hours. She’d take a book and say she was going in to read, but whenever I found her, she was looking at the paintings.”

  “I don’t remember Mom being much of a reader,” I said.

  “You never knew her very well then, did you?”

  “No, sir, I did not.”

  “As children, we only see our mothers in relation to ourselves. It’s only when we’re older that we get a chance to know them.”

  “I guess I missed out on that.”

  “You did indeed.”

  “I wish I hadn’t.”

  Jim walked around me and gazed out the window.

  “I have a proposition for you,” he said. “Would you paint your mother for me? Not as she is now, but as she was before.”

  As she was before.

  “I don’t do very many portraits,” I said.

  This wasn’t true. I painted faces almost as often as landscapes. But to reproduce my mother as she had been before the cancer ravaged her—did I dare attempt such a thing?

  “I’ll have everything set up for you in her room,” he said. “You’ll work there, by your mother’s bedside. She wants you near her. I have some pictures for you to use. There’s one in particular that I like.”

  He paused to catch his breath.

  “For the completed portrait, I’ll pay you ten thousand,” he said. “And I’ll see that you’re taken care of, in every respect.”

  “I don’t want your money,” I said.

  Jim sighed. “I’ve only ever shown you kindness,” he said.

  “I know.”

  I almost wanted to hug him.

  I began that afternoon, sketching studies from a photograph of my mother taken at their wedding. She looked so beautiful. The complexity of Jim’s divorce had forced them to wait until well after Dolly’s birth to marry; in the photograph, my mother had lost her pregnancy weight, though she still seemed to have the famed prenatal radiance.

  I raised all the windows to let in fresh air when I set up my easel. The bedroom was large; I had plenty of room to work without interfering with my mother’s care. Years of painting in far more inhospitable conditions had inured me to distractions.