by Lewis Nordan
He put his fist up to his mouth and gave a little cough.
“Scratchy throat,” he said. “I think it might be an allergy.”
Lord Montberclair poured three inches of brandy into Solon’s coffee cup.
Solon fingered his pistol through the gabardine. Its small heft provided some comfort.
He could get it out, too. It wasn’t impossible. Not quick draw, but he could get at it. You wouldn’t have to be quick with Lord Montberclair, drunk as he was.
Solon could work the pistol out of his pants pocket, a little at a time. Dexter would never notice. He could have that little pea-shooter in his hand before Dexter ever knew what happened. He could blow this arrogant rich man’s hair and eyeballs all over these ferns before he knew what hit him. That’s what he was going to do, too, if Lord Montberclair wanted to pursue the subject of Solon’s white-trashery any further. Lord Montberclair wouldn’t look half so handsome, with all his military and plantation airs, if he had a bullet between his eyes, now would he?
Sometimes in New Orleans Solon didn’t even remember the men he robbed. Sometimes he would wake up the next morning with folding-money in his pocket and new suits in his closet, and maybe a wet dick in his pants, and not know where he got any of them. He might have killed somebody and not remembered, he honest to God couldn’t be sure. He hoped he left at least one of those perverts bleeding in a hotel room.
Solon wouldn’t mind killing Lord Montberclair, either. It would give him pleasure, sholy would. All Solon wanted to do right now, though, was just to get out of this durn crazy house alive.
The conversation was over at last. Nothing was decided. Lord Montberclair said much obliged for the information, thank you very much, you are a good neighbor, words to that effect.
Solon said, “No payment necessary, none at all.”
Lord Montberclair said, “You’re a good man,” and paid Solon nothing, stingy son of a bitch.
After Solon had walked back out into the rain, Dexter Montberclair filled up a whiskey glass with ice and poured bourbon over it—it was late enough in the morning to switch from brandy to bourbon now—and sat down again in a wicker chair on the sun porch. He stretched out his legs in front of him and propped the glass on his stomach.
His lips were numb with alcohol. For two months now, Sally Anne had been sleeping in the room she called her office. It was an insult to Dexter. A woman was supposed to sleep in the bedroom with her husband. Wasn’t she? Wasn’t that the deal when they got married? Didn’t a woman promise to sleep in the bed with her husband, when they spoke their sacred marriage vows?
The last time they talked, Dexter said, “Why, Sally Anne?”
Sally Anne said, “I don’t know.”
He kept on asking the same question.
All she would say was “I don’t understand it myself, Dexter. I’ve just got to be alone for now.”
Well, what kind of answer was that?
When Dexter stood up from the wicker chair, he wobbled a little bit and realized that he was drunk.
He left the glass of bourbon on the table and stuffed the Luger into the front of his pants. He started to walk through the house, though he wasn’t sure where he was going, and he felt unsteady on his feet.
If that sassy little nigger lived out on Scratch Ankle, Dexter’s own place, it would be a different story. He’d evict them, whole family, simple as that, cut off their credit, anyway. That was the whole problem with letting foreign niggers come into town. Our own niggers don’t act like that. It’s these out-of-town niggers that are forever causing the trouble.
Dexter had seen the light revolver in Solon’s pocket. It might as well have had a string of Christmas tree lights on it, it was so obvious. You could all but read the writing on the barrel.
This was who Dexter found himself indebted to.
Dexter was pacing the house. Sun porch, living room, kitchen, and back again. He adjusted the gun in his pants for comfort.
His head was beginning to clear up. He needed a clear head, to think what he had to do here. He had to do something. He might just pistol-whip the shit out of his wife, it’s what she deserved, humiliating him like this. It might give him some satisfaction.
He paced through the kitchen and looked at the dishes Sally Anne had left in the sink. She must have gotten up in the middle of the night and fixed herself a snack. A plate with crumbs on it, cookies maybe, the last of a pan of brownies, and a glass that had had milk in it.
Why didn’t she tell him she wanted a snack? Why didn’t she come out to the bedroom and wake him up? He would have been glad to fix her something to eat, to bring her milk and cookies down to the room where she was sleeping, for that matter. All he wanted was for his wife to be happy.
Dexter was crying now, and adjusting the pistol in his pants. Why wouldn’t Sally Anne just allow him to make her happy? He wanted to take care of his wife, to baby her, to make Jell-O for her when she was sick, and tapioca pudding, and to feed it to her with a spoon, and then to sleep next to her. They could work something out, couldn’t they, if they just loved each other?
SOLON GREGG didn’t know what kind of reception to expect at home. Not so good, probably. Probably nobody at home was going to be overjoyed to see him, he might as well admit the truth about that, right up front.
He had left in a hurry six months ago and hadn’t been in touch since. Still, he sometimes let himself hope that things would be different. Why didn’t he wish for a million dollars, while he was at it?
Solon thought about the Prodigal Son, that sleazy, lazyass rich boy in the Bible. It pissed Solon off to think about him. Maybe that’s the way some rich sissy’s daddy acts when you spend all his money and run his good name in the ground, chasing off from home in a big car without no insurance on it and living in a pig sty in some unfriendly city in a foreign land.
Shit. Goddamn. Must be nice, that’s all Solon had to say about it, must be durn nice. “Daddy, look, I done spent every cent you give me and been rolling queers in New Orleans and living in a stinking room in the District where the former tenant was still laying dead in the bed in the room with me, blue as a fuckin Andalusian rooster, when I paid my cash deposit to the landlord and helped him pull the dead sumbitch out in the hall by his feet. I been fucking fatted calves and wearing they clothes and spending they money on food and drink a swine wouldn’t never eat, ever since I seen you last.”
Oh, I’d just love to see that, Solon thought. Yeah, that’s the story that would assure me of a proper welcome home, now wouldn’t it. I can just hear myself telling my daddy that story when I was a boy. I wonder what kind of reception I would of got if I had come back home with a story like that. I never would have got that ridiculous story out of my mouth. I never would have made it up the front steps, with a story like that on my lips.
The truth was, if Solon had been the original Prodigal Son, Solon’s daddy never would have noticed that he was gone, let alone that he had come back home. Solon’s daddy would have been too busy trying to get his hands up underneath Juanita’s shirt to feel her breasts in the kitchen while she was crying her guts out and trying to fix something for the old pervert’s dinner. And Solon’s younger brother, who stayed home and sacrificed his whole life trying to keep their daddy from fucking Juanita, would have shot Solon in the heart with a deer rifle for running off in the first place. It’s a lucky thing the Prodigal Son didn’t have a younger brother like Solon’s, he would have got his ass blowed off. The Prodigal Son got lucky twice, if you wanted Solon Gregg’s own personal opinion.
Solon thought about that old song, “If I knew you were coming I’d have baked a cake.” Solon liked that song, he really did, it was hopeful, it was upbeat and gay, you know, but in a way it made him think about his daddy pinching his sister’s nipples in the kitchen. It kind of made him want to throw up. “Howdja-doo, howdja-doo, howdja-doo!” Snooky Lanson and Giselle McKenzie, singing like a couple of songbirds, just warbling they hearts out on Your Hit Parade.
Solon wished somebody would bake him a cake, hire him a band, grandest band in the land, and be waiting for him and smiling and happy to see him when he come back home from wandering in a foreign land and living an unfortunate life in a pig sty.
That’s what he would do for Neat, too, if she ever came back, his sister Juanita, even if she brought her little nigger child and pimp-ass husband with her, he didn’t care. Well, he cared, but he’d just be so glad to see her.
In fact, he’d love to see that child. He’d bake that child a big durn cake. Children loved cakes, he bet. Chocklet. He’d bake that little nigger kinfolk of his a big chocklet cake, if he knew how. He could find out how, he could look up a recipe, buy him some ingredients down at Red’s, and a bowl and a spoon and a pan to cook it in.
And he would try to find something in common with the pimp, too, Neaty’s husband. What did nigger pimps like to talk about? he wondered. He could tell him about rolling queers in the Quarter. Well, Solon wasn’t sure about that, but he would think of something.
Solon had listened to some extra delightful tap dancing on the radio when he was down in New Orleans, tippity-tippity-tappity-tappity, whoo! Whoever was doing that toe-tapping could dance like a motherfucker. Fast, too, lickety-split. Niggers liked to dance, even pimps. Hell, yes! Solon would talk to Neat’s husband about dancing. Well, sure. See? That was just the thing! That was just great!
Mainly, though, he’d take Juanita in his arms and hold her so tight to his chest that neither him nor her would never be lonely again, and she wouldn’t never have to remember her daddy’s hands on her body. He’d say, “Neaty, baby sister, howdja-doo, howdja-doo, howdja-doo!”
But what kind of names were Snooky and Giselle, anyway? Well, Snooky wasn’t bad. He knew an old boy name of Snooky Butler, had a place out in Cohoma County. Snooky let Solon go pig hunting in the big woods one time, long time ago. Snooky was all right. He let Solon use his .32-20 to hunt with. But Giselle? No way, man. He didn’t want nobody name of Giselle baking him a cake, not if he could help it. If I’d of knowed you was coming I’d of changed my name, is what Solon wished Giselle McKenzie would sing to him.
Solon didn’t expect no cake when he got home today, that much he was certain of. Solon figured he’d be lucky if anybody was civil to him. His wife hated him, his children were scared of him, some of them. The last time he saw his own house, he was jumping out through the window with his clothes and hair on fire, headed for the bus station. His oldest boy, Glenn, had tried to set him on fire with gasoline.
Solon had heard from several different sources now that Glenn, his murderous child who was so handy with a jug of gas, had gotten his ownself singed in the same fire he started. Well, Solon didn’t want no innocent child to be hurt in a fire, of course, but at the same time, didn’t it really just sort of chap your ass to no end when somebody tried to murder you, even your own son?
I mean, didn’t it really just serve the little bastard right, in a way, getting scorched in his own fire? Ought not nobody pour gas on a drunk man and strike a match and then fail to get some signal that it was an inappropriate thing to be doing to your daddy, is all Solon meant, that’s all he had to say. So he wanted to keep his homecoming expectations low. That was the main thing. He was trying to be realistic.
BALANCE DUE, the white-trash ghetto, ran right into the Belgian Congo. It looked about the same as when he left, except that it was fall now, late summer. There were no trees here, only house after house, shack after shack, all the same, on both sides of one long straight Delta road.
Power lines swagged from post to post, high above the muddy street, a fragrance of creosote, released from the posts by the rain, always heavy on the warm breeze.
Solon Gregg walked on, in the direction of his house.
On top of each light post, high above the street, perched a buzzard, many buzzards, one right after another, post by post, down the road, as far as you could see, to the railroad tracks, an enormous flock that slept at night in a cypress swamp not far away and came out to sit on posts with heavy-lidded eyes by day. The big birds were slick and black with rainwater where they sat with hunched shoulders and wattled necks like sad old men in dark coats.
The locals called them swamp eagles, sometimes just eagles, though they were clearly buzzards. The birds were descendants and remnants of an ancient flock, attracted here long ago by the corpse-stench of a Civil War battle, when Balance Due and the Belgian Congo were only a big field, a significant Mississippi defeat. Cannon shells and belt buckles and maybe a finger joint still turned up, from time to time, in the muddy street after a hard rain.
These birds were a part of the glorious history of the South. They were written up, now and then, in local newspapers, and in newspapers all across the state of Mississippi. Photographs taken almost a hundred years ago by anonymous photographers with big, boxy explosive cameras and tripods and black drapery over the photographer’s head, and recent photographs as well, some in color, stood behind glass in display cases in the Old Capitol Museum in Jackson.
Historians studied the century-old photographs and even named the birds in the flock. Schoolchildren from all around, every county of this sovereign state, as it was always referred to in political speeches, visited the museum in Jackson, and even visited this dangerous street in Arrow Catcher, on field trips, to view the historical vultures, to learn something of their solitary nature, their weight and length, their wing span, their reproduction cycle, their incredible longevity.
Some of the birds on the light posts beneath which Solon Gregg trod on his way home were as ancient as the historical battle itself, older, ninety, a hundred years old, a few of them, so historians and ornithologists reported, and so, as part of this same flock, those birds on the light posts above Solon Gregg had actually fed on the flesh and eyes and tongues and nutritious organ meat of Confederate troops, fallen, hungry, frightened boys before they were made buzzard bait by a mini-ball or cannon shot.
Historical experts identified, with some certainty, several of the very birds in those early photographs. They pointed to dim details of broken-and-rehealed wings, or unusual posture, or mutations of feathering. They looked through binoculars, or they even drugged and carried individual birds away to scientific laboratories in Jackson and Biloxi and spread them out on stainless-steel tables and poked at them and said, “See the similarities between this bird and Bird Vardaman in Photograph Seventeen-A, upper right quadrant, grid-number Thirty-six? It’s him all right.”
The buzzards were named Vardaman and Bilbo and Hugh White and J. P. Coleman and Ross Barnett and other names of past and future governors and senators of the sovereign state of Mississippi.
Other birds on the light posts, youthful by comparison, possessed only blood-memories of the ancient feast, genetic egg-yolk longings for distant, unremembered culinary ecstasy and freedom from deprivation, and sat with hope in their bird hearts and nothing at all in their bird brains, for many years, decades really, a human lifetime and longer, above the homes of damaged rednecks and maniacs with pistols, on smelly light posts planted in stinking mud, whiling away all of their valuable, irretrievable daylight hours and years in the sad innocence of poultry-patience during this lean century since the glorious Festival of Dead Rebels long ago, and they were content for now with roadkill.
The vulture named Ross Barnett, ancient and ugly, had excellent eyesight. Far away in the distance, at the lucky spot on the rails where the Katy crossed the Dog, Ross Barnett espied an armadillo, not moving.
Ross Barnett closed in prayer his heavy-lidded buzzard eyes and sucked swamp air inside his lungs to savor the fragrance of loss.
Where had they come from, the tribe of armadillo, this gift, this manna, this perfection of the South, sweeter than turtles?
Ross Barnett didn’t like to be greedy, he was as good-natured and open-minded and as willing to share the riches of Mississippi as the next old buzzard, but with an armadillo, well, no, he didn’t think so, he thou
ght maybe it would be best for all concerned, best for the flock, really, not to do that, not just now, and it wasn’t entirely selfish, either, it was just a better idea for him to head on over towards the cypress swamp as if he were calling it a day, and then, when the others were settled in, sucking in swamp poisons with their sleepy, vulturely snores, he would circle back around to the crosstracks of the Katy and the Dog and discover just what sweet surprise this little armor-backed Delta dumpling had hidden away from him, deep inside the shell.
SOLON GREGG arrived at his home. The window was still busted out, where he had, six months ago, jumped through, in flames. Shards of glass still lay on the ground.
The little house where he had lived out the tragedy of his adulthood was the same, and yet he hardly recognized it. It seemed larger, brighter.
He didn’t bother to knock, he walked right in.
Wanda, his fifteen-year-old daughter, was the first person he saw when he entered the house.
She was holding a straw broom in her hand, which she dropped onto the floor with a clatter, the instant she saw him. She was terrified of him. She gathered her long shirt-tails up in both her hands and wrung them like a wet rag.
Solon had forgotten how beautiful she was, how grown up. She was wearing bright blue pedal pushers and one of his old shirts with the long tail not tucked in. Her hair was longer, he noticed, and she had it drawn back in a pony tail and secured with a wide rubber band. She looked like a real teenager, the ones you heard about on the radio and saw pictures of in the newspaper and watched on the TV sets owned by queers in New Orleans.
He saw the fullness of his daughter’s breasts and was filled with gratitude that he had never touched her, as his father had touched his sister Juanita.
The younger children ran into the room and hugged him, and said, “Daddy, Daddy!” He knelt down to greet them.
Mrs. Gregg came into the room then, from the bedroom. She did not speak, of course.
