Their mom told him that Miller was taking the buyout and moving to Metropolis without the kids, only one of whom Gene had ever met and that was when she was a baby. Miller and his ex-wife, Margaret, a self-employed yoga instructor, had changed the custody schedule so she would have the kids during the school year and Miller would have them summers and holidays. Their mother had been distraught about this arrangement, as she and the ex repelled each other instinctively, each even hating the other’s smell, and it meant she would rarely see her grandkids. Miller had argued that she only saw them summers and holidays anyway, that it wasn’t going to make a difference, and she said he was putting his own interests before his children’s by only seeing them a few times a year. She eventually stopped talking to Miller altogether and even cut him out of her will. Without the occasional family holidays they used to share, Miller and Gene drifted even further apart. From what Gene could guess, Miller seemed completely unaffected by this loss of contact with both Gene and his mother. Gene could never shake the nagging feeling that if Miller wanted to exile himself from the family, it was because Miller felt superior to the rest of them, that he’d finally escaped his grim genetic heritage. Gene didn’t even contact Miller to inform him that he was putting their mother in the Eldorado Senior Care Center a few years ago after it became clear that her dementia, brought on by several strokes and possibly Alzheimer’s, prevented her from taking care of herself. These days she didn’t always know who Gene was. But he still visited her regularly. Or as regularly as he could.
Tiny morning gnats and bugs pinged off his visor, as Gene accelerated into a curve. Miller may have been a pain the ass, but why would anyone want to put two bullets in his brain? Just thinking about his brother made Gene mad. What an aggravating shit—always championing some cause that seemed to be less about the cause and more about Miller. He remembered back in high school when Miller decided he was going to be a vegetarian, which after several months turned into not eating red meat.
“So you’re only going to eat white meat?” Gene had asked at the family dinner table. “What’s so special about white flesh? Is it more pure?”
“I think it’s fine if Miller wants to eat less red meat,” said their mother, trying to be the peacemaker. “It’s healthier.”
“Shit,” said Gene, laughing and shaking his head. “What about pork? It’s the other white meat.”
“You of all people know how hogs are treated,” said Miller. “It’s horrible. I’m not eating intelligent, warm-blooded mammals.”
“What about pussy? You gonna stop eating pussy, too? Or you only gonna eat white girl pussy?”
“Oh, Gene,” their mother said, burying her face in her hands and choking back a theatrical sob. Gene never said another word about it, but a few months later Miller was back to eating barbecue, burgers, and steaks with his usual massive appetite that never seemed to add any weight to his lanky body, not even a beer gut.
And then there was the poet phase. That was the worst. Miller showed up after his freshman year of college playing the cynical drunk poet in a wide-brimmed High Plains Drifter hat. What a joke. That phase actually lasted for years, well past Miller’s college graduation, which he hadn’t even attended because of some principle or other.
Gene flew over a gentle rise and looked down at his speedometer: 80 mph. Thinking about Miller was gonna get him killed. He slowed down and tried to remember what he’d liked about his brother. Turns out there wasn’t much. The only thing he could think of was that time he’d tried to stop Gene from getting beat up and took that humiliating pounding for him. One solitary thing in all those years, and here he was driving down the back roads to Metropolis, a place he’d never been before, the only place he could guess where to turn his bike, risking his neck to find out how Miller died. He pictured the key-shaped hole in Miller’s skull and figured he owed the son of a bitch at least that much.
FIVE
THE WARM SMELL of hogs was one thing, but the stink of the nursing home always gagged Gene as soon as he walked into the lobby. He wished he could keep his helmet on when he went in, but he hung it on the handlebars of his BMW and walked across the parking lot. To the left were mini apartments, little duplexes clumped together, assisted living homes for the elderly who could still mostly function on their own. These units circled a grassy courtyard with a fountain and a recreational building, which also housed their own cafeteria and a large room for crafts, movies, and bingo. His mother, Elizabeth Barnes, stayed in the larger building, the one Gene referred to as the slobber house, the one for old people who were far gone and needed constant attention.
The slobber house was emblematic of Carmi and this whole region of Southern Illinois. Carmi was one sprawling nursing home anyway. Most young families left, or when kids finished high school they moved to larger cities and never came back. Most of the people his age had either moved or died. The old folks who remained were eventually transferred to nursing homes where they could finish their years in derangement, misremembering their personal histories, family histories, and the history of Southern Illinois—all in a miasma of piss and baby food.
Gene checked in at the front desk, and the receptionist, Laurel, recognized him immediately and smiled behind her bangs while checking the computer.
“Hi, Mr. Barnes!”
Gene always winced when anyone called him Mr. Barnes.
“It’s not visiting hours until seven,” she drawled. “Is it an emergency?”
“I’m traveling out of town and may be gone for a while.”
“No problem. Elizabeth is already up and in the community room. Have a good visit!” Gene wondered if she were flirting with him. Laurel was certainly cute. To be cute at that age, mid-twenties, all a girl had to possess was good skin and little fat, but she was much better than not fat. He would have traded Danise for Laurel any day.
The community room was a large colorless room with white-curtained windows and beige, fake-marble linoleum tile. A television showed The Weather Channel on a big-screen TV in the corner, which Gene thought was funny since none of these residents ever went outside, and the weather in this building was always the same: musty, urinary. Gene soon picked out his mother in her wheelchair among the rows of other white-haired ladies, whose heads bobbled like wispy dandelions in the late summer.
Elizabeth had once been fantastically pretty—Gene still had pictures of her and his dad, and she looked like a young Elizabeth Taylor or Natalie Wood with thick dark hair, pale skin, and a charming smile. After his parents married, his mother taught middle school for several years and never lost her sweet, not-quite-condescending, reassuring singsong teacher’s voice, ideal for a full-time mother of two troublesome boys. When he was growing up she filled out a bit, but was always one of the prettier soccer moms on the sidelines. Later she put on a bit more weight and looked like a sweet, plump, doting grandmother, a part she played well, but now, even though Gene prepared himself before each visit, he was struck by her emaciated frame.
Gene approached her with a casual, “Hey, Mom” and wheeled her toward an alcove, studying her once full head of hair, now thinned to white unwashed cobwebs and combed back over a dull, pale skull. The reception area, with two avocado-green vinyl chairs and matching vinyl couch, was where he usually wheeled her so they could talk privately, if one could call these talks “private” or even “conversations.”
“Are we going to a basketball game, Kelly?”
“No, Mom. Kelly was your uncle. He died thirty years ago.”
“Oh. That’s too bad.”
Gene sat facing her in one of the vinyl chairs and touched the back of her hand, birdlike bones beneath crepe-paper skin. “I’m Gene. Your son.”
“You’re awful old to be my son,” she said skeptically.
“Well I am.”
She looked down at her wheelchair, a little puzzled, then said decisively, “My car is in the shop. All they had was this convertible.”
Gene laughed in one short blast and
shook his head. A few other sparse-haired old ladies dozed or stared from their wheelchairs parked at the end of the hallway less than thirty feet from their little alcove.
“Look, they must have their cars in the shop, too. They’re all driving convertibles.”
He tossed his head back and laughed again. “Hope it doesn’t rain,” he said. He found his mother easier to get along with in her demented state and cartoony emotions than when she had her wits about her but was always having her feelings hurt and feeling sorry for herself. At least this state of mind was entertaining and didn’t make him feel guilty. He shook his head, wondering where his mother thought she was at this very moment, then tried to get serious. He could stretch out his arm and touch an empty gurney, recently occupied, and supposed that someone had died there in the middle of the night.
“Mom, there’s something I need to tell you.” He paused until she looked up at him. “Miller is dead.”
“Who’s Miller?”
“Oh gawd,” he sighed, then mustered more patience. “Miller is your son, my brother.”
“He is? Where’s my husband?”
“Pardon?”
“I said where’s my husband?”
“You don’t have a husband.”
“I do too have a husband. I’ve always had a husband.”
“Mom, you don’t have a husband. Dad died years ago.”
“I do too have a husband. I just saw him. He went right through there,” she said, nodding down the hall where someone, he didn’t see who, went into a room.
“Mom, trust me, you don’t have a husband. Dad died of a heart attack twenty years ago.”
“Oh, thank goodness,” she sighed, clearly relieved. “I didn’t think I could ever love anyone again.”
Gene guessed that his mother was referring to Bobby, her high school sweetheart she always wanted to marry but never did because her family believed Bobby was literally from the wrong side of the tracks that cut through Carmi, not the type of people their people married.
“Did you hear what I told you, about Miller?”
“Yes, I heard you.”
“OK.”
They sat there facing each other, and Elizabeth smiled at him sweetly. It was the kind of smile a small child would give an indulgent stranger in the next booth at a restaurant.
“Mom, I gotta get going. But I thought you should know. Maybe it will sink in later. Maybe you’re better off not understanding.”
Gene wheeled his mother back to the community room among the rows of old people who stared straight ahead or looked up at him and smiled. The smell of mushy greenbeans spilled into the whole room, mingling with the tang of urine, hospital bromide, and antiseptics. Gene bent down and kissed his mother’s tissue-paper cheek.
“Love you, Mom. I’ll be back soon.”
“Thanks for visiting,” she said, looking up at him through her watery brown eyes with what Gene thought looked very much like love.
SIX
IN THE HOUSE where Gene and Miller grew up, one wall had been crowded couch to ceiling with portraits of long-dead ancestors. Many of the black and white and rust-colored photographs hung in their original wood frames, and some contained clumps of colorless hair bundled and fastened behind the glass, like relics in religious shrines. These were the grim faces Gene put to the family stories his mother told them as children. Everything he knew about his family came from Elizabeth, who was a compulsive storyteller and first-class exaggerator, and, as he continued to witness every week at the slobber house, sometimes an out-and-out fabricator. He had always loved the family history and didn’t care how much was actually true. He especially loved that all the stories, generation after generation, were set on the little-changed family land where he now lived and worked. It was easy to picture his ancestors riding buggies down the same old roads, sitting beneath shade trees, or wringing chicken necks in backyards. When he thought of these stories, as he so often did, as if remembering them for the children he would never have, he heard them in his mother’s drawling little-girl voice. Now, heading south toward Metropolis, Gene realized his memory was all that was left, and he told himself the stories once again.
After the Civil War, Joseph Miller, who had been a personal aid to General Grant, returned to Carmi with a war wound and a goodly sum of money. Nobody else in Carmi had any money, so Joseph set up business as a loan shark and promptly made substantially more money, enough to start First National Carmi Bank. He bought up thousands of acres of farmland, which he rented out to tenants or worked in sharecropper arrangements. Despite the searing hot and humid Southern Illinois summers, he always wore a large camel-hair coat—even to bank board meetings—to stave the chills of his opium addiction. According to family lore, Joseph had started injecting opium even before the war ended, sometimes smoking it, to blur the pain in his shoulder from the wound that never quite healed. Elizabeth said he lived the rest of his life in an opium haze that deteriorated his nerves but never dulled his business acumen. He accumulated more and more farmland, buying out his neighbors or foreclosing on their property through his bank, until he owned everything as far as he could see from his front porch in any direction.
Joseph’s wife, Willamina, also smoked a pipe, but she puffed tobacco, not opium. Gene often imagined them sitting on the porch of a house no longer there, a few cultivated acres from his place, Joseph in his camel-hair coat and Willamina smoking her favorite corncob pipe, both of them surveying the thousands of shallow-hilled acres stretching from the Little Wabash all the way to the outskirts of Carmi.
Gene was now the oldest male on this side of the family—and one of the longest-lived in the whole family history. Miller had been until yesterday. All of Joseph Miller’s male offspring lived short lives of decadence and disrepute. One of his progeny died of syphilis complications while reading a book in a bathtub, where he spent his last years soaking the burning torment of his sins. Another fell off a yacht in the Florida Keys, intoxicating nearby carnivorous sea-creatures with his blood-bourbon level. Another died of an infection after a duel over a married woman 170 miles north in Champaign, a woman to whom neither duelist was married. All drank too much and died young, a tendency which didn’t stop when it branched into the Barnes line of the family, certainly not with his brother Miller.
Joe Barnes, a descendent of Joseph and Willamina Miller’s daughter, married Lizzie Cross—Grandma Lizzie, as Gene’s mother called her in these stories, her namesake. Lizzie came to Carmi with her mother from Kentucky after the Tennessee Valley Authority flooded their home, an inn famous for putting up politicians stumping through the hick electorate. The most famous politician to stay at their inn was Abraham Lincoln, and even though he’d been a Republican, Gene’s mother talked right up to her last coherent days about how the family still owned a bed that had once been slept in by Abraham Lincoln. Gene guessed that if the bed remained in the family now, it belonged to Miller’s ex-wife.
He glanced behind him as a silver Ford Explorer with tinted windows came up fast and passed him—someone obviously more anxious to get to their destination than he was.
Lizzie and her mother had arrived in Carmi with plans to set up a new inn, which is how she met Joe Barnes, an attractive and independently wealthy young lawyer whose two primary afflictions were reading and drinking. All the Barnes men were notorious readers and drinkers, and Joe Barnes was the most accomplished in both but not without his charms. Lizzie, however, coming from a backwoods Kentucky holler, was rough-hewn at best, and before they got married, Joe sent her to finishing school where never-married schoolmarms tried to polish her Kentucky accent and tame a tongue that had more than a little taste for profanity. Lizzie learned how to dress in polite society, how to wear gloves and hats, how to serve tea, and how to curtail her exuberant streams of profanity—at least in polite company.
Lizzie was also a diabolical cook and brought a rich lore of southern cuisine with her to Carmi, and her instincts with wild game were accented by more continen
tal flavors she learned in finishing school. Her cooking was known all over White County: raccoon in barberry sauce, Grand Pacific Game Pie (with woodcock or snipe), herb-roasted otter, Spanish fricasseed rabbit garnished with roses. Lizzie used the finishing, finery, and presentation they taught her to sneak the savagery of wild game in right under the noses of Carmi high society. She made roast haunch of venison, roast possum with cranberry sauce, hare pie, quail on toast points, merkel turtle stew, and her most famous dish of all: cherry blossom gravy, dumplings, and beer-battered squirrel.
Gene only remembered eating her dessert, specifically peach cobbler with a dollop of “mode,” and licking the last smears from a blue depression-glass plate he held up to his face. His mother typically frowned on such behavior, but Lizzie thought it perfectly appropriate, a compliment even, to lick the plate clean, and no one would correct her, especially in her own house.
Lizzie had been a large, big-bosomed woman, laughing and vivacious, the center of a swirling political whirlwind of loyal FDR Democrats. She continued the family tradition of putting up politicians and debating and plotting political fortunes late into the night—concealing from everyone political ambitions of her own. Their young son, Frank, stayed up, too, lurking under the heavy-legged Arts & Crafts furniture in the dining room. Lizzie’s husband, Joe Barnes, had no interest in politics and preferred to drink and read in his basement, where he spent increasing amounts of time, especially as their three-story Victorian house grew busier and busier. By the time Joe was in his late twenties, he wore nothing but a ragged old bathrobe, which barely went around his burgeoning gut, and rarely ventured into daylight or Democratic company.
Lizzie left him meals on the kitchen table. Joe assembled a small bed and furniture and often stayed in the basement days and nights at a time, climbing the stairs to the main floor less and less often. Since he rarely went upstairs and never outside, no one knew how he obtained his books, but he read the best that was written at the time. Lizzie assumed his friends, mostly drunken novelists, drunken ragtag philosophers, and just plain drunks, delivered the books—along with beer, bourbon, and bottles of Bordeaux—when they stopped by to talk.
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