by David Payne
“No, Sultan, I’ve not forgotten you.” He takes a scrap out of his handkerchief and throws it to a large bloodhound, which turns viciously on the other dogs and takes his prize into the corner of the pen. “That’s right, boy, show them who is Lord God of the yard.” Harlan gives a lusty and approving laugh. “But damn me, which one is the key?” he says, examining the padlock on the storehouse door against his heavy ring.
“What a charming little house,” says Addie, leaning over the fence of a white cottage with a begonia vine in bloom along the porch and flowers in the yard. “But, Harlan, aren’t these they?” She cups and sniffs a fragrant, large white rose that’s rioting along the palings.
“I’m sorry, dear?”
“The ones you sent that morning…after the Jockey Club Ball? I put them in my drawer with my…intimate things, and, ever since, every time I opened it, I thought of you.”
“Oh, yes,” he says, with a vague, false smile, “yes, I do recall. They’re banksias, I think.”
“These? Banksias?” she says. “They’re musk roses, Harlan. They aren’t like banksias—not the least little bit!”
“Well,” he answers, caught, “I was never good with common names. The Latin, though, I think, is rosa muskaplentia.”
Addie laughs aloud. “Harlan DeLay! You know I married you for them?”
“I hope that was not the only reason.”
“But it was!” she cries. “The only one! Because you didn’t send those silly flowers on a stick! Now we must call it off.”
“You are pleasant, madam.” He is smiling, but his ginger eyes have narrowed a degree.
“Blame your Colonel Lay. His punch is quite insidious. It’s gone straight to my head. Truly, though, who lives here? It must be a woman.”
“No, it’s Jarry’s house. He and Father, though, are thick upon the floral theme.” His expressive lips—which have always struck her as almost, but not quite, sybaritic—take a slightly sour twist as he says this.
“I see the way of it. Your brother is your Cyrano.”
The key now finds the lock, but when he looks back up, the smile is gone. “He’s not my brother, Addie. Never call him that. If a man said that to me…”
“My dear!” she says, her hand over her heart. “Forgive me, I only meant…”
“I know,” he says, “I know it was a jest. But I cannot smile at it, Addie—not at that. What I have to say concerns him, though.”
Opening the great plank door, he extends his arm, and Addie precedes him into the redolent dusk.
NINE
Whew! Fuck me!”
Climbing the stairs backward, Ransom power-jerked the pot behind him, step by step.
“Damn, boy! You really need to get back to the gym!” Hands on knees, he panted on the upstairs landing till his wind came back, and then he dragged his heavy find into the bath. With a doleful harbor-buoy clang, the pot landed in Claire’s antique clawfoot tub, and Ran wheeled on the taps.
Setting the water to its loosening work, he gazed through the same window where he’d seen the figure looking out. The ants…the gun…the pot…now, the silhouette…Ransom had the sudden, fleeting sense that he was being led…. But where? By whom? Another clue, some voice whispered in his head. Was it the same that in the morning helps you choose between the blue shirt and the red? How come, at times, that voice seemed like someone else?
“Nah, you just imagined it, amigo,” he reassured himself, smoothing his hand over the swirls and eddies in the pane. The glare of sunlight on old hand-blown glass…“That’s all it was…. And while we’re at it, let’s stop talking to ourselves, all right? You know, and I know, it’s no big deal, but certain other parties might not understand. So mum’s the word, agreed?” Ran zipped his lips and smiled, amused by his own wit. He knew, of course, how this conversation would be viewed—hadn’t he seen his passengers’ expressions in the cab? But the truth was, he felt perfectly okay—Ran, in fact, felt better than okay: strangely good.
When he turned back to the tub, a drift of red earth had begun to bleed into the water, releasing a faint smell that seemed familiar somehow, though he couldn’t quite say how. Ran felt suddenly hungry, though. Remembering his resolution to make nice, he turned the water off and headed downstairs to start dinner.
As fate would have it, there on the bottom shelf of the fridge a package of Perdue whole fryer parts sat waiting for him. The moment Ransom saw it, gleaming in Saran, he knew fried chicken was the very thing he had to have and set to work, assembling the sacerdotal implements like a priest for Mass. Into a brown paper bag, two heaped cups of flour—self-rising, naturally, with a double pinch of cayenne and black pepper. A deep-sided cast-iron skillet received a dollop of Crisco the size of a shrunken head. Firing the gas, he tossed in the secret ingredient, the quiddity and fundamental particle of proper soul-food cooking, a stick of butter, indispensable for proper blistering and flavor. And like our metaphoric priest, getting happy in the sacristy, indulging in a swig or two of the not-yet-consecrated wine, Ran decided that a glass of something was in order. And there, as if at his thought-command, was an open bottle on the countertop beside the Peugeot pepper grinder Claire had lifted from New York.
A terrible wine snob, Ran took a chance. “Damn!” he said approvingly. “God damn!” Lusty, spirited, full of youthful insubordination, fat as hell and wholly indiscreet—it had his name all over it! The label rang no bells, and when he saw the tag he blinked in disbelief—IGA: $1.99.
“Holy shit! Remind me to get some more of this,” he said, forgetting his resolution. “Hell, let’s buy a freaking case!”
And what was that smell? Now it had drifted down the stairs. As Ran inhaled, he suddenly flashed back to a hot September night in Killdeer almost thirty years before…. Seventeen, nursing a Colt 45, he was standing on the stoop of a small brick house, staring through the screen at a woman working in her kitchen.
It was Friday, payday at the mill, and behind him, Ran could hear Bagtown hopping with sounds of harsh and not-entirely-joyful revelry. Carrying his malt in a brown paper bag, he’d walked from seven blocks away, the corner of Bane and Depot, where he’d gathered with some friends beneath the light to listen to the new Stones album and to admire the Earl Scheib paint job on Tommy Hicks’s candy-apple-red Trans Am.
At home, Mel would be breaking ground on his second bottle of Old Screwtop or Chateau Shotgun Shack—whatever Friday special Earl’s happened to be running—getting worked into a lather over the editorial in the Socialist Worker and ready to lash out at Herbert Kincannon or the first convenient capitalist who came his way. Kincannon, however, hadn’t run the mill for thirty years without the savvy to stay the hell away from Bagtown after dark, and Ran and many of his friends had also found it politic to steer clear of home on Friday nights till after ten.
The first place Ran found to go was that streetlight on the corner where his friends still were. The consensus of the crew was that Exile on Main Street was pretty good, but Tommy nailed it when he added, “But it ain’t Let It Bleed.” They’d put the older album on the eight-track, and the music followed Ransom on his ten-minute stroll, floating, airborne, over an unmarked border that on the ground was as fraught as that dividing East and West Jerusalem.
Not in Bagtown anymore, Ran could still hear it playing on Delores Mills’s stoop. Even distorted by distance, challenged by the notes of tree frogs and cicadas, by the rumble of cruising muscle cars and the clack of freights uncoupling in the yard, there was no mistaking what it was. The song was “Gimme Shelter,” the first piece of music he ever knew, reliably, as great. On the hundredth listening as on the first, Ran marveled at Mary Clayton’s Valkyrie-like harmonies and, still more, Keith Richards’s mighty licks, which seemed to him, at seventeen, as fundamental, as always-so, as the opening motif of Beethoven’s Fifth, a symphony first opened up to him by the woman frying chicken at the range in her nude hose, the old-fashioned kind with seams, whose flesh tone, Ransom noticed—as he sipped his
beer, afraid to knock—was not the color of her flesh.
The organist and choir director at the New Jerusalem Church of God in Christ, Delores Mills had taught music at Killdeer High since integration. By the time they met, Ransom had been studying guitar for three years on his own. He bought his first electric at thirteen—a solid-body, sunburst Teisco single pickup, mail-ordered from Chicago for $49.99.
While other boys dreamed of touchdowns and winning buzzer shots, Ran tuned to open G and dreamed of playing Shea and Fillmore East, mounting the stage and letting them get a little nervous, letting them begin to sweat a bit—especially those girls in halter tops and braided hair bands, with the keys of their daddies’ BMWs outlined in the pockets of their poured-on jeans. Then he would hit the riff, that one impossible riff that would be, to rock guitar, like Bannister’s first sub-four-minute mile, like the triple lutz that Donald Jackson landed on the ice in ’62…. Ran’s inability to read music had begun to seem like a potential obstacle to this future by the afternoon he stopped by Mrs. Mills’s office to see if she could help. Her suggestion: join the band.
“The band?” Ran looked over his shoulder, as though this might be addressed to some more credulous individual who’d stolen up behind him in the hall. “You’re kidding, right?”
Delores Mills’s expression made clear her lack of comic intent.
“Yeah, well, thanks a lot.” Tossing his hair, Ran raked his fingers after it and started out. “See ya round.”
“Mr. Hill…”
He turned back.
“Close the door.”
Two weeks later, he was back. Forced to choose an instrument, he picked the most preposterous one he could think of in an effort to preserve his fifteen-year-old dignity and revolutionary credentials: the slide trombone. And he had to pay for his humiliation, too. When he asked Mel for a loan to buy his uniform and instrument, the old man laughed and gave him a playful smack up ’side the head. Mrs. Mills came to his assistance. So instead of wailing on his ax at Shea like Keith or Jimmy Page, Ran spent his Sunday nights at New Jerusalem, mopping up the banquet hall after a bunch of niggers for a nigger teacher at a nigger church. And that’s exactly how he thought of it.
Musical notation, time signatures, scales, intervals, and forms—without regard for his political opinions or the color of his skin, Delores opened these and many other mysteries, and eventually cracked the outer shell of rock for him the way she cracked the egg she used to bind the flour to the meat. So when Ran heard “Love in Vain,” he knew—unlike Tommy and the other redneck exegetes at Bane and Depot—that Robert Johnson wrote the song. He learned to recognize, beneath the flesh of rock ’n’ roll, the older pattern of the twelve-bar blues, which are the bones. And when Delores asked him to her house one Friday night for supper, Ransom—nervous about his table manners and also half afraid of “nigger germs”—went in order not to hurt his teacher’s feelings and had the first and only decent home-cooked meal he’d had in his short life. And this became a standing invitation, and in addition to her other gifts, Delores taught him to prepare the only genuinely accomplished meal he ever learned to make.
Once he learned the surprising news that black people were only superficially different from himself, Ran developed an unsurprising crush on her, and Delores—who’d been married once and had a child, who was attractive, single, and not inexperienced with men—was perfectly aware of Ransom’s feelings and used them shamelessly—but only for his benefit, encouraging his passion and his focus on the work, always pushing him a little further than he wished to go. She was the first person who made Ransom Hill believe that there was something in him worth an effort on another human being’s part. And this, Ran knew, was the one difference between him and his friend sat Bane and Depot: he found a second, better place to go. And he still said “nigger” when he was with them. He still laughed and called the part of town Delores lived in Niggertown—even though her house was brick and better than his own. But after Mrs. Mills, it never sat quite right, like some once-familiar food his system had lost the ability to digest. And even if he said it, even if he laughed, he knew Delores Mills had saved him. And so, when what he really wanted was to mount the stage at Shea and hit that riff of riffs and make those rich girls who had heaped such scorn on him grovel at his feet and beg for it, Ran, instead, took his place in line and marched up and down the sodden football field in his cheap shoes and played the slide trombone for Mrs. Mills. And he would have marched to hell for her and back by way of Selma, Alabama, if only Delores hadn’t had a daughter, if only her daughter hadn’t been Shanté….
If only at the Christmas choral program in assembly—in the midst of Handel and the standard fare, as Ransom, slouching somewhere in the twenty-second row, feigned sleep—Shanté, home for break from prep school, where early talent and her mother’s doggedness had won her a full ride, had not stepped forward from the chorus and begun to belt out “Jordan, Roll” in a voice as rich and strong as Gladys Knight’s, but with six or seven colors Knight’s did not possess. There was melting sexuality in it, and sorrow, and, in its upper register, a joyful longing that threw itself toward transcendence like a trapezist letting go the bar, careening through the spot with arms outstretched, never doubting that an unseen hand would lift her where it was her destiny to go.
If only none of this had happened, Ransom, three years later, on that hot September night, would not have been standing on Delores’s stoop with malt liquor on his breath, watching her fry chicken and afraid to knock. When he finally did, she glanced over her shoulder, wiped her hands, and came up to the screen and didn’t open it.
“Something sure smells good,” he said with a big grin full of desperate charm that would later open many doors. Not this door, though.
“I’m sorry, Ransom,” Delores said, “I can’t ask you in.”
“Oh,” he said. “Oh, okay, well.” He was halfway down the steps before the impact hit him like a speeding car with a drunk driver at the wheel. He turned around and pressed his face against the screen. “Why not?” he asked in a soft, pleading voice. “Why not, Miz Mills?”
Delores looked him in the face, full in the face, for a long beat. In her expression, pity and sorrow had made peace with something else resigned and hard.
“Did I do something wrong?”
“No, Ran, you didn’t.”
“Then why can’t I come in?”
Delores simply looked at him, and softly, slowly closed the inner door.
From the yard, he saw Shanté silhouetted in the dormer window. She put her hand against the glass. The train, by then, had left the station. In the distance, Mick was singing:
…it had two lights on behind
Well, the blue light was my baby, and the red light was my mind
Ransom turned away and threw his beer can at the streetlight. Punching someone’s car, he stumbled up the street, cradling his bleeding hand, with two tickets in his pocket for the New York City bus he took alone. As he went, the smell of Delores’s chicken followed him, which he never ate again.
Yet here it was today at Wando Passo, all around him now, the smell that wafted through the screen that night. And the curious thing was, Ran had not yet started cooking. Even before he floated the first breast, like a Viking longboat, out into the lake of oil to burn, the house was redolent with the smell of Delores Mills’s chicken, released by water’s softening action from the earth in a long-buried pot. And how this could be so, Ransom didn’t know, any more than he could explain the nature of this wine.
The more he drank of it, the more magisterial it became, filling him with an exquisite sadness, like a long view from an eminence on a perfect autumn day, with a church bell ringing in the distance and a tang of frost. He’d never tasted anything quite like it, and this was saying something. For he’d had something to prove with wine, distancing himself from the threaded jelly jar that Mel was often clutching when Ran came home and found him passed out in the front seat of the Thunderbird, listen
ing to the Town and Country playing softly off a charger from the house. None of the rare vintages that, in better times, had cost him many hundreds—and, on occasion, more than that—had ever affected Ran the way this one did, which hinted of imperishable truths in the very process of its vanishing.
And it was wholly vanished by the time he put the final piece of chicken on the plate and glanced up at the clock. “Holy shit! The kids! The party! Claire! Fuck me!”
And Ransom grabbed the keys and ran.
TEN
Harlan catches Addie’s wrist and wheels her to the storehouse door as it snicks shut. Pressing close, he kisses hungrily—her mouth, her neck, her collarbone. Moving from below, his hand nudges her breast upward as he drops his face into her décolletage.
“Harlan! Harlan!” she whispers, in mingled scolding and entreaty.
“Is this unwelcome to you?” he asks with flaming cheeks and an expression that is suddenly indolent, almost dull.
“No! Of course not, no. I only meant…”
“I’ve waited so long, Addie. I’ve so looked forward to tonight.”
“But, you must wait,” she tells him, straightening herself. “You must wait till then.”
“Must I? Tell me why I must. What if I cannot?”
She laughs, half complimented, half alarmed, and starts off down the aisle. “What a strange place,” she says, wiping a spot of saliva off her breast as she gives her top a hoist. A few stray sunbeams work their way through cracks of daub and show dust motes rising from the earthen floor, where tubs of lard, rendered from the Christmas killing, have been sunk to cool. When Harlan lights the sperm-oil lamp, she makes out burlap sacks of coffee, row on row, and shelves of pickles and preserves; corned beef and pickled pork in tubs, hams and sides of bacon strung up from the rafters. There is flour by the barrel, soap and olive oil, candles, hogsheads of molasses, boxes of cigars and fancy sugar in the nine-pound loaves. And all across one side, the spirits, wine in racks, perhaps a thousand bottles, with a heavy representation of the vinos generosos—Jerez, Málaga, and Amontillado—the strong, heavy wines of southern Spain, which Harlan, like Percival before him, developed a taste for in his Cuban days. For the quarters, there are casks of the cheap Spanish red called vino Catalán and of the raw cane brandy Cubans call aguardiente.
