Barefoot to Avalon

by David Payne

  Stacy’s expression drops incrementally through this. To me, it reads: Here we go again, another of David’s mystery moods that blow in like the weather, who knows when or where? Why are you like this? What’s wrong with you? Who are you?

  –Look, I’m tired, let’s not fight, okay? she says. Why make this heart surgery? Let’s just find something everyone will eat and get on with our evening.

  Will now, behind her back, smiles at me victoriously. He raises his hands and puts his index fingers in the air, shrugging his shoulders up and down, a Travolta disco move, an “I’m too sexy for my shirt” routine.

  The malignant spirit bursts into the light.

  –Get your ass upstairs! I shout. Goddamnit, you disrespectful little shit, do you hear me, get upstairs this minute!

  –David, Stacy says, alarmed and stepping between, you need to back off—do you hear me? Now. Right now.

  –You do this every time, Stacy, every fucking time, I say, turning on her then. You blow out of here at 8 A.M., leave the house a wreck for me to clean, ask me to take responsibility for dinner, and when I do, you waltz in here at what—I glance at the clock—7:15, and erase everything I’ve done. They take their cue from you and don’t take a word I say seriously, and then, guess what, I explode on cue. I’m the bad guy; you’re Wonder Mom with mini-pizzas. Do you see how you set me up? This is because of you.

  –Me? That’s such a crock. You make yourself the bad guy, David. You don’t need any setup.

  Behind her, on the stairs, Will does “I’m too sexy for my shirt” again, but his eyes are smoky, on the verge of tears.

  As I blow past, Stacy grabs my arm, but I wrench away and put my finger in his face.

  –Goddamnit, don’t you do that. Don’t you mock me. I won’t be mocked by you, you hear me?

  Will frowns, making no response.

  –ANSWER ME, GODDAMNIT!

  –Yes, in that same grudging, resentful tone.

  –SAY, “YES, SIR!”

  He glowers. His bottom lip is trembling.

  –SAY, “YES, SIR!” I shout, beside myself.

  –Yes, sir.

  –Get upstairs right now, you hear me? Right fucking now! And when you’re hungry, you can have the rice and beans I made, or you can wait till breakfast.

  Tears are running down his face by now. Hiccuping sobs, Will turns away, head bowed, shoulders hunched, and goes. I’ve conquered his resistance. I’ve wiped him out.

  –Nice, says Stacy, taking Grace’s hand and going after him, and the look she gives me is the old one: Who are you? What’s wrong with you? What happened to you in your childhood?

  I stalk off the other way, toward my office, where I check email again, looking for what I don’t know, the mysterious message that will come in from the blue and somehow change this. I sit there, sick to my stomach with regret, replaying what I’ve thought and said and done, and justifying everything.

  The thing I thought could never happen has: I’ve become my father, annihilating Will the way Bill once upon a time annihilated George A. and me. And though some puny voice inside whines, It’s different! It’s different!, it really isn’t different. I want to say that a malignant spirit rises from the deep, that alcohol erodes the chains that hold it in the ancient mine shaft, that it possesses me, that I don’t will it, that “I” am not even really there, so how exactly can I intervene to stop it? I want to say that I don’t know the spirit’s name, that it’s as alien and repugnant to me as it is to Stacy and the children, but all of this is bullshit. However it infected me, the spirit lives in me now, the way it once lived in my father, who didn’t create it either. And the only difference there can ever be between me and him is in the future, if I change it the way he didn’t.

  And there’s a part of me that’s scared, but underneath fear, it’s as if something I’ve longed for and despaired would never happen is finally going to, I’m going to tell the truth.

  And you see, I’ve fancied myself a truth-teller all along, fancied I’d been telling it for twenty-five years in fiction, speaking about myself, my life, my loves, my family relationships, wearing various masks and straining it through various filters. But suddenly today I realize I wasn’t. I’ve kept who I really am a secret, not just from the world, but from myself. And now I think I have to tell it, whether or not anybody else is listening.

  And could it be that the story of George A. is the doorway that opens into something bigger that includes me also, some kind of building, perhaps a church or even a cathedral that it’s time for me to build my little piece of as others before us built their pieces, those whose names are chiseled on the headstones outside in the graveyard?

  Or is the door that opens through George A. not to a church or a cathedral after all, but to a charnel house or an asylum. If the unfiltered truth is such a good idea, why does it seem dangerous, revolutionary, maybe even crazy, and why am I so nervous? What if the footprints in the yard are leading toward a precipice like the one that George A. fell from? The one thing that’s clear is that I’m going. Today’s the day, there is no other day but this. And here I sign my name in blood upon this contract with my children and the future.

  Will I succeed? I guess by six o’clock the verdict will be in.

  III

  1975

  All of a sudden he discovered, not what he wanted to do but what he just had to do, had to do whether he wanted to or not, because if he did not do it he knew that he could never live with himself for the rest of this life, never live with what all the men and women that had died to make him had left inside of him for him to pass on, with all the dead ones waiting and watching to see if he was going to do it right, fix things right so that he would be able to look in the face not only the old dead ones but all the living ones that would come after him when he would be one of the dead.

  —Absalom, Absalom!, William Faulkner

  3

  A month shy of turning seventeen, George A. stands alone on the beach after a swim. Slicked back from a widow’s peak, that thick, mink-black hair I envied adds, even wet, a good two inches to his height, and is long enough in back to show a curl escaping under his right ear. George A.’s smiling, squinting in a glare no longer evident, head tilted slightly. His sense of humor would be hard to miss, even for a casual observer. That he’s sticking it to the cameraman may be less obvious. If George A.’s cheerful here and full of beans, it’s because we’ve just come from a run—down to the pier at Avalon and back—and today for the first time he’s beaten me. Here’s looking at you, big bruh, he’s saying with that grin and little squint, This one’s for you, DP. My reply, delivered wordlessly, in kind: Enjoy it while it lasts . . . The camera clicks.

  We’ve spent the summer at Four Roses, our family summerhouse in Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina, and are leaving in a week, George A. to start early football in Virginia, me for my junior year at UNC. The month before he’s asked if he might run with me.

  We’re downstairs at Four Roses at the time. Our basement room is called “the lair.” George A. and I have shared the place since he was three and got promoted to the big boys’ quarters, where our cousins sometimes join us. At the back of the garage, the lair features a rat slab floor and exposed joists overhead, where Margaret, in a short-lived decorating fit, stapled the old seine we used to catch our morning’s bait when we went bottom-fishing in the Albemarle with Pa Rose—her dad, the first George A.—who built this place. The walls are planks of inch-thick juniper in random widths, and there are surfboards leaning in a corner and board games in a spavined cupboard inherited from some old aunt.

  Our books go back to One Fish Two Fish, George A.’s early favorite, which his kids will pass to mine in a distant future. When Colleen, his ex-wife, sends the book, I’m intrigued to find the text bedizened, starred and underlined in many colors, something I write off to a delinquent impulse in the nursery. On my college-er
a shelf, Jung and Eliot rest alongside books on Taoism and astrophysics. In one of the latter, I first read about the Twin Paradox and Brother A, who boards a rocket traveling at light speed only to return to Earth years later to find Brother B, his twin, an old man, prematurely aged from time dilation. After four years up north in boarding school, I feel as if I’ve come south not to a future world but to a past one represented by this summerhouse where Margaret and her older sister, Genevieve, grew up much as George A. and I and our much younger brother Bennett have, a world where girls aspired to marry well and mother children, to carry the social water for their families, and boys went into business and dealt in timber, farms and profits. I’ve come back from Exeter as someone different, on a space trip and unsure where my spaceship’s headed.

  With the surfboards and guitars, the overflowing ashtrays and trails of puddled, dirty underpants, the place looks like the Lost Boys’ Adirondack summer camp, one from which the counselors absconded long ago. As I pan across the scene, a ghostly cameraman, I note, too, the bottles, amber, green and clear, some empty, others half full of room-temp beer. We’re drinking now, in fact, a little after breakfast, and George A.’s puffing on a joint.

  –When I get back, I have to run a mile in under six, he tells me, worry burrowing between his brows. If we’re going to do this, I need you to really kick my ass.

  –Do I have to pay, or is this privilege free? I ask in my overelaborate English-major sort of way.

  He turns a droll deadpan on me.

  –I’m serious, David.

  –Yeah, sure, okay. No problem.

  Running since fourteen, I’m putting in thirty-five or forty miles a week this summer, sometimes twelve or fifteen on a Saturday or Sunday. George A.’s out of shape as we begin, but I don’t mind, I’m pleased he asked me. I get to help and also beat him on a daily basis.

  George A. is flipping through his blues LPs, a new obsession brought back from boarding school the previous semester, along with that new Gibson lying on his unmade bed, a J-45, a sweet instrument that really bugs me. Why? Because I know George A. simply asked and he received it, and I could never ask, you see. I assign myself, on this account, a secret brotherly superiority—I’m “self-sufficient,” “pure,” “not into material things,” whereas George A. is “needy,” “superficial,” “selfish.” But the true basis, as I now perceive it, is fear: mine, not his. If I asked for a guitar and got it—and the giver, whose name I’m strangely hesitant to speak, is Margaret—if I asked Margaret for a guitar and got it, something bad would happen.

  At twenty, I have no idea what this is. The response goes back so far and deep I can’t see to the bottom. What comes to mind, though, is when I was four and had my tonsils out in Mariah Parham Hospital and Margaret brought me an ice-cream soda from the drugstore. I still see the white lump of vanilla bobbing in the cola and feel the pleasant tickle of effervescing bubbles. Margaret stroked my hair and said, Poor thing, poor darling, and her expression—tender, jocular, warm, available—shocked me with electric happiness.

  When I came home, though, she greeted me with a prim smile and her gaze caromed off me to Infant George A. in the cradle, who couldn’t walk or talk or mind his manners or control his bowels, and got, for nothing, what my independent efforts failed to win me. I expect I fudged it on occasion, exaggerating a stubbed toe or putting a frog into my voice to gain back the electric something. But I didn’t like the feeling that came afterward. Though I got something, I had to give up something for it—what, I couldn’t put my finger on, but I sensed the bargain was not a good one. You had to be sick or hurt or on your back and in her power to receive it, and when you were well, it vanished and you—that is, I—became invisible. And if this wasn’t good for me, it wasn’t good for George A. either. So much of our relationship, or mine as older brother, has consisted in trying to teach him not to take what isn’t good for us even if we can’t help wanting. My Older Brother lessons have never been more than intermittently successful. George A. listens, but it’s more as if he’s humoring me than convinced by my position. Somehow it’s not the same for us, and I suspect this has to do with why, so early, I’ve turned my ambitions toward the immaterial realm of psychology and poetry. George A., by contrast, is firmly launched on the trajectory that will make him the youngest broker in Merrill’s Buckhead office. Though at twenty I don’t pretend to understand it, I’ve begun to ask the question—how, coming from the same family, did George A. become George A. and I become me?

  Facedown beside the Gibson on George A.’s bed lies his summer reading, Guitar Styles of Brownie McGhee by McGhee and Happy Traum. George A.’s been teaching himself the rudiments of the Piedmont style, the alternating thumb bass with the melody picked on the treble strings. His ambition for the summer—to play the “Cocaine Blues” like the Reverend Gary Davis—has proved out of reach, but George A.’s made it farther up the hill than you might think and has even spent an hour here and there walking his big brother through some simple turnarounds in E.

  He has on scuffed work boots, a filthy T and paint-­spattered khakis sagging at the knees. It’s 9:30 in the morning and he’s just off his shift with the town sanitation crew, a job I had some summers back. Every night at midnight, the big truck rolls up at the bottom of our drive, the brake lights flash, and George A., with his coffee in a thermos and a ham and cheese in his back pocket, swings aboard to hoist the heavy cans till daybreak. You can smell him coming at twenty yards, a whiff of marine sewage—turned shrimp peels and blue crabs boiled in Old Bay.

  This summer I’m at the other end of the social spectrum working at the Nags Header Hotel, one of the last of the old oceanfront grande dames. It’s been taken over by two thirtysomething guys from upstate, one of whom walks through each morning dispensing designer stardust with a backhand papal wave, the other limping close behind, bent over under large but leaking bags of family money. They’ve filled the dining room with palms and potted plants and hired an artist to reprise Botticelli’s Birth of Venus on the kitchen screen, where the naked goddess rises on a half shell from the ocean. There are starched pink linens on the tables and fresh-cut flowers by the armload. Guests are comped a glass of good champagne. And when it rains, the water pours through the roof in solid streams. Two nights out of three, there isn’t any fish.

  –No fish? the sunburned patrons say, smiles dying over flutes of Veuve Clicquot.

  –No, sir. I’m sorry.

  –Shrimp?

  I shake my head.

  –Oysters? Crab?

  –The chicken Kiev is very good, I say, often to their backs.

  It is, too, if the chef isn’t drinking—and even when he is, only then it takes an hour and a half to make it to the table. The good news is, the waitstaff, after hours, gets to go down to the bar and drink all night for free. Sometimes I hook up with a summer girl and read her passages from “Burnt Norton” or “The Dry Salvages” while we’re still in wait-and-see mode, getting tanked and screwing up our courage. As seduction techniques go, this has a marginal success rate.

  The truth is, with my long hair and cutoffs, my bare feet calloused from going shoeless from April till Thanksgiving, I don’t entirely fit in at the Nags Header. The other waiters are kids about my age from eastern North Carolina backgrounds not dissimilar from mine and George A.’s. Their dads are lawyers and doctors, own small businesses or farms. They grew up playing Midget Football and rooting for the Heels as we did, reciting the Apostles’ Creed at the Episcopal church on Sunday, with no more notion than we had of what “the communion of the saints” might mean, thinking, if anything, of the buffet being laid out at the Club and a long afternoon knocking a white ball around a court or links. They’ve gone on to pledge DKE or Chi O at Chapel Hill like their dads and moms, and to enroll in premed or business, where George A. will wind up. I’ve washed ashore at UNC also, but by now my path and theirs have long diverged. I’ve been away four years up north
while Bennett and George A. stayed home with Margaret. She and Bill divorced apocalyptically and left Henderson in full retreat, him first, her not long after. Margaret’s remarried to a handsome sales rep named Jack Furst, who has a firm handshake, a good head of auburn hair, shoots a scratch game of golf and has a winning smile with excellent white teeth from which I half expect a starburst to wink off at me. At night at the dinner table, when the sauce is flowing and the conversation starts to roll and thunder the way it did so often with Bill Payne, Jack smiles ever brighter and sinks ever lower in his chair until he falls asleep. Fifteen years from now, he’ll leave Margaret for a woman who looks uncannily like Margaret now.

  And Bill? When last seen, our old man was driving an aging two-toned F-250 with a camper top and a pilfered U-Haul on the hitch behind it, up and down the Shenandoah Valley, seeking curios to sell, through Lexington, Front Royal, Dayton, up there where his father’s people come from whom we know so little of, taking back roads, following his hunch, stopping at the little stores to talk to the old men whittling on the porches, working them the way he works George A. and me, with such good humor, such shrewd and large self-parody, that they no longer care they’re being worked and start to open up and tell him what he wants to know: where the good quilts and their makers are, up what washed-out road you go to find the Double Wedding Rings and Broken Wheels, the Card Tricks, Eyes of God, the Flying Geese and Hearts and Gizzards. He collects the dolls with mountain faces made from shriveled apples, and vintage signs—Burma-Shave and Esso—and those with messages like, “Mom’s Not Here but the Pop’s on Ice.” The former English major knows a double entendre. When George A. and I speak of him we’re like Ike McCaslin with the older men around the fire and Bill is our Old Ben, the spirit bear you only get to see after you leave behind your gun and hang your watch and compass on the tree branch. Since the divorce, we’ve both been to see him—in a trailer park on Colington Island, and an unplumbed cabin in the mountains up near Murphy, and a ranch house in Phenix City, Alabama, where Bill, so he told us, was in business with men who squared accounts with 2x4s and not in double-entry ledgers. And after every disappointment, each sad or shattering rebuff, George A. and I tell each other, and ourselves, that this time was the last, the fucking last, yet back we always go again to see him, Bill, who once upon a time was Daddy.