Then, at twenty ’til one, I saw Dickey Pope, bright-faced with sweat and high blood and drink, staggering up to me on his heeled boots. He had a deep cut over his cheek, and his black satin shirt with its yoke of roses was ripped open to his navel. Dickey was unzipping his jeans, his other arm thrust out to shove open the men’s room door, when I registered on him.
“Fucking Lieutenant,” he belched. “What’s happening?”
I said, “What happened to you?”
“Nothing. I’m just having me a good old time!” He took his hand from his open fly and waved it back at the blare of noise down the hall. “Hey. Joe Lieberman says you’re gonna turn Preston loose.”
“Maybe.”
He swayed toward me with unfocused belligerence. “You better. You savvy? I’d love to kill you.” Dickey threw in this last remark casually, not even looking at me.
“Really? Is Graham here with you?” I was thinking that if Graham were around, I should either get rid of him before Luster arrived, or tell him what we were doing and ask for his help.
Dickey chortled, throwing his arm around me. “Graham’s on a goddamn hunting trip. He don’t even sleep. He’s tracking something.” Dickey was so delighted with this conceit that he hugged my shoulder.
I said, “If you mean what I think you mean, Luster Hudson’s still in Hillston.”
Dickey pulled away, crafty-eyed. “My brother Graham raised Preston from a baby,” he said, and backed through the door to the men’s room, with a slurred, “Fucking Lieutenant!”
When Dickey came back out, I followed him into the bar to see if he’d lied about not being with his brother. But I didn’t see Graham—the size of a buffalo and hard to overlook—anywhere in the crush. Dickey fell into a booth beside an underage, overripe girl wearing a sequined jersey, inside which he immediately plunged his hand. She poured a stream of beer over his head, and he rubbed his hands in his black curls and then stuck his fingers in his mouth.
I walked back to the hall and waited some more. At five ’til one, a drunk couple went behind a recessed partition at the end of the passageway and made love. I could hear their grunts between the band’s twanging chords and could feel the thumps along the wallboard.
At 12:59, craning my neck to peer down the dark alley, I saw the nose of Ratcher Phelps’s black Buick. I checked the push bar on the door again, my palm so moist it slid along the steel cylinder. Slipping my gun from its holster, I held it inside my coat. There was no one anywhere in the alley.
I felt Phelps coming an instant before I saw him, small and straight in a checked overcoat, his feathered fedora at a conservative angle. He carried a brown paper bag rolled at the top.
Phelps had come only a few yards toward me when, from Jupiter Street, two of the old scavenger drunks I’d seen in the Piedmont lobby wobbled into sight.
Mr. Phelps hesitated, reluctant to put the bag down until they were gone. But one of them, scratching at the stubble on his chalky face, came wheedling over. “Hey you. Got any change?”
His companion slapped at him feebly. “You asking a nigger for money?”
I was straining to see around them as they crowded against Phelps, and then suddenly Hudson was coming up fast behind the two old drunks. He was not as tall, but he was as big as Graham Pope. He had about a two weeks’ growth of dirty-blond beard and wore a muddy fleece-lined jean jacket.
Hudson knocked through the tiny derelicts, grabbed Phelps, half his size, with one beefy fist, snatched the bag away with the other, and then, almost lifting him, slammed the small black man without a word into the brick wall. “God’s sake,” moaned Phelps, his hat tumbling away. Hudson grunted, “Shaddup, coon, and lissen.” I was terrified to wait, fearing that if he opened the bag, he’d kill Mr. Phelps. I was terrified not to wait. Phelps said, “Just a—” and Hudson shoved his hand over Phelps’s face and banged his head harder against the bricks. I jumped out around the door yelling, “Hudson! Police!” He reeled about, Phelps slumping to the pavement behind him, and fired the big automatic suddenly in his hand. The bullet burned past my ear, wood chips splintering back from the door into my neck. From the left I heard another shot, Cuddy’s, that missed, and I was shooting too, as Hudson spun, already running. Cuddy was already flying past me after him, as I stumbled over the crouching drunks in my way.
Swinging off-balance around the corner onto Jupiter Street, I saw everything with the most intense swelling of sensation. The Piedmont. By the snow-heaped curb, Hudson’s pickup with three basset hounds howling in back, lunging on their chains. Cuddy in a crouch, gun out, shouting “Halt!” Hudson turning. The Mustang behind Hudson across the street. The huge shaggy shape of a man jumping to the Mustang’s hood, lifting something shiny to its shoulder.
Hudson was firing and Cuddy’s revolver flew spinning away over the sidewalk.
And then I had stepped in front of Cuddy, pushing him down behind me, my arm shoving him back, and in my other hand I felt my gun keep shooting, and I heard Hudson keep shooting, and I heard a cracking echo.
And the whitest light exploded inside me, blowing up too fast and too big, distending the light through me so there was no room for me inside my body. And still so expanded were my sensations that I even had time to think how strange I had time to think I was dying, time to think how strange it should be Rowell’s words I was hearing—Jay, this isn’t the life I meant to have. And time to think of Alice. And time to feel beneath my head the sliding sheen of Cuddy’s parka before the black sky widened.
part three
The Seasons Alter
Chapter 30
Of the first long timeless night, I have no memories at all. How long it was, I was not to learn until much—until months—later. Of how far I had traveled into that darkness, how nearly I had touched the faint sinking banks I floated toward, I had no sense at all, until slowly and from a dim, clouded immensity of height, pain reached down for me and in a blast hooked through me to snatch me up. The dark water felt so restful, felt languorous warm, and the huge squalling shape that grappled to lift me was so cold and screeched at me so loudly, that I kicked out at it to let me fall back, drop deeper and deeper into the muffled lake, to let me slip listless down deep into the quiet quaggy muculent dark. And so falling I would escape again into the timeless night.
But more and more persistent, this intolerable creature would come back for me with its grapple to gouge me up into the sharp cold. More and more precipitant, more and more intrusive, until, unable to fight free, I was snatched through the eclipse.
I was jolting with convulsions I couldn’t stop, and thinking, “I have to get back. This is too far to ask me to go, and too fast. If I’m not held back, I’ll die, sucked up into that mire of light.”
Then there was an I there, hearing voices that were not me.
I heard voices, calm and medical. “Dad?” I was saying, but there was no voice to take the word outside me, and no one answered.
Time came back voluminous.
My mouth moved. With the strangest labor it brought out the sound, “What’s wrong?”
A cry I knew came saying, “Oh, my God.” Then I heard my mother’s weeping and felt her hand. “Jay? Jay? Jay?”
“Can you,” I sank away and, flailing, swam back, “make them stop this pain?”
But she couldn’t stop it. Nights and days labored on and were the same to me. The same black, as profound as the slime at the lake’s unfathomed deep. My eyes were pressed shut, closed with tight weight.
Time wove on, and finally my hand came up and felt, and my head and eyes were wrapped with thick tape and gauze. I heard someone moving gently around me. I asked, stuttering and frantic, “Am I blind?”
“No. No. We don’t think so. Just sleep. You’re all right.”
“Alice?”
“Yes.”
“Alice?”
“Yes, it’s me.”
“Where…”
“Yes, you’re in the hospital. Don’t try to talk.”
/> “Where…”
“You were shot. But you’re all right, you’re all right now.”
Memory blasted everywhere through my body. My fingers grabbed up at the mask of bandages over my head and at the tubes tangled in my nose and the tube needled into my hand.
“Justin! Stop it, stop moving!”
“Cuddy? Where’s Cuddy!”
“He’s fine. He wasn’t hurt. Lie back!”
But by now I was heaving in spasms, and then there were doctors back, hands and voices looming around me.
Day by night, like the old delirium, my self drowned and surfaced, plunged and swam back to air. Ghosts already drowned clutched at me, or groped sightless past me. Joanna. Cloris. Bainton. My father. Day by night the pain funneled toward the places where two bullets from Luster Hudson’s gun had entered my body. The first had passed through my bent leg into my stomach. The second had taken away a tiny back corner of my skull.
Voices came and went. Cool medical voices that advised in whispers, they couldn’t promise anything. “I’m afraid he isn’t out of the woods yet, Lieutenant Mangum, but don’t say that to Mrs. Savile at this stage in the game.”
Voices of my relations. Alice’s voice, reading to me from her textbooks, hurrying history by me, and with it, time.
Day by night, rambling quietly in a stream of words, Cuddy’s voice: “Hello, General. O Bottom, thou art changed! I saw that in a play. Once again, you took them too literally when they told you to go on sick leave. You came close to showing us Stonewall Jackson had nothing on you, jumping in front of me like that, you’re so dramatic. Being in reference to the fact that General Stonewall got himself shot and went west to the Great Chancellorsville Above, and being in reference to the fact he was what you might want to call a hero, which don’t ever do again, you hear me? Welcome back.”
• • •
“You still here, Sherlock? What? ‘Come again?’ as my grandma was always saying to her pappy after he got the palsy and lost the free use of his lips. Can’t you talk any plainer than that? ‘What happened?’ You mean nobody bothered to mention that Luster shot you? Well, Luster shot you. Next time you save my life, would you try to do it so you can keep a little closer grip on your own? I can’t keep taking all this time off to troop over here to University Hospital to see if you’ve checked out. I’m a busy man. I’m trying to get engaged to Junior, plus V.D.’s flying all over the place to the Southwest Moneybelt, licking toadies, trying to get a big-city job out there and leaving behind a mess on his desk that’s a revelation of his so-called mind.
“Come again? I think Justin’s asking us about Luster. I know it’s hard to believe, Alice, but this man used to be a real smooth talker. Well, now, Luster. Luster is a corpus delicti. Nawsir, you didn’t kill him. You did just what it says do in the manual, Wild Bill. You shot him bull’s-eye as anything, right in the leg.
“Nope, it was Graham Pope gave Luster the coup de grass. I don’t know if you had a chance, you were so busy knocking me down and trying to squish me, chance to notice somebody great big standing on the hood of a Mustang with a Western Field 550 pump gun, twenty gauge, firing three-inch magnum shells? Well, that was my deputy, Graham.
“No, you’re right. It’s a shame. I was looking forward to asking Luster a couple of hundred questions about him and C&W myself, but Graham hadn’t read the manual.”
• • •
“Good evening, General Lee. Now, you scared us bad last night, slipping away again. Pull yourself together. Bubba Percy down at The Star got halfway through your obituary, had you joining all your fancy ancestors up in Preppie Heaven. But I told him, ‘Bubba, you rot-eating hyena, that man’s not about to die. He’s got a closet full of clothes he’s never even worn. Plus he owes me $69.50 for jumping on top of me and bleeding all over my JC Penney parka.
“Speaking of owing money, we got a bill here from Mr. Ratcher Phelps. He wants the city to reimburse him for the $233 in cash he claims he was carrying in the wallet he claims was removed from his person by those two old drunks in the alley. Says I, ‘My, my, you mean right there in the middle of the guns of Navarone, which you might have thought would scare off such jittery tiny little rummies as those two, you mean those two eensy-weensy winos whipped around from where I saw them scrabbling away, and coolly relieved you of that much untraceable money?’ Says Phelps back, ‘Young sir, Greed knows not Fear, and an inebrious man has no ears, and it is devastatabalistical to me that when the white people get robbed, you people come running, but when the black people get robbed—yea, in the very midst of laying down their lives for the white people—that’s when you people turn your backs, and perambulate the other way.’
“Well, he had me there. Says I, ‘Parson Phelps, think of nephew Billy, out of jail and back on the streets up to his childish pastimes. And doesn’t a citation of gratitude from the mayor of Hillston himself mean more to you than filthy lucre?’ Know what he said? He said, ‘No.’ Now, who’d suspect he could talk so short? So, I get him the money, don’t ask where from, but Hiram Davies would go rabid and chew up his desk. So now Phelps says, ‘Here’s the rest of it’ The ‘rest’ meaning a bill for, one, dry-cleaning his coat; two, replacing his fedora; and three, outpatient services to paint Mercurochrome on his noggin. Meanwhile, Savile, you owe Phelps seventy-five dollars a month for the rest of your life, which needs to be a real long one.
“What for? Why, the new piano installed in your living room you gave him that eight-hundred-dollar down payment on. He threw in the stool ’cause he took a fancy to you.”
• • •
“Well, my my! They took those coils out of your nostrils. Tell you the truth, they didn’t do a thing for your looks. ’Course, you still look a little too much like the creature from the black lagoon, what with all your hair gone under that wrapping, and I’m really not all that crazy about your scruffy beard. But on the other hand—now don’t rile up, Peggy Savile—ma’am, you do have yourself a handsome son somewhere underneath it all. Now if he’ll just go back to sleep and stop pestering us with all this begging for sips of water, maybe we can play us some more bridge before they throw us out. Is that Ms. Woods, R.N., on again? Umm ummm, she was so short-tempered to my little poodle last night. Where’d Junior and Alice go? I swear, sometimes I get the feeling those girls aren’t really trying all that hard to learn how to play this game, Peggy. Do you get that feeling? Lordy, they already owe us four hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and they’re still trumping their own aces. Can I offer you a glazed doughnut, ma’am? I see you’re watching the basketball game. A blue-through Tarheel, you sweet lady!”
• • •
And days of nights passed by. And not until then was I told how long the timeless while had lasted. Not until then was I told that outside the sealed window of my hospital room, everywhere on the trees along the branches swollen buds had burst to petals, unleafing snow and rose.
Chapter 31
They said it was the third week of March. It might as easily have been in my dreaming one night or one year since I’d felt myself fall back into the sheen of that blue parka, but by the moon’s time, a few days more than two months had circled round, passing by. Two months that would have no past. I thought how less than a twinkling of an eye must time be to the dead.
They told me I had been unconscious for three weeks, and only semiconscious for three more. They told me that two doctors had given me up, and a third had flown into Hillston from Baltimore, and contradicted them, and snapping off his surgical gloves had flown back away. They told me that I was lucky, and that I would be living from now on with a shorter intestine, a stiffer right leg, and a head made harder by a small plate of steel. They waited no longer to tell me that Earth had turned tumbling on without my knowing, slanting the Piedmont to spring, because doctors were going to cut away my bandages to see if I could see, and everyone was concerned that for me to see the world so changed since last I saw it would bring about a relapse.
But what
I saw after the chilling blade snipped, and weight lifted gauze by gauze, was light brightening until it hurt, and then the white and rose Highlander face of Alice MacLeod. And that hadn’t changed at all.
“Hi,” she whispered. “I was saying when you hung up: I love you.”
After a few minutes, another face leaned down and winked a blue jay eye. “Let’s move on out of the mush, you two,” said Cuddy. “I’ve got an official ceremony to perform. This is business.” He waited until the warm, limpid eyes of the doctor from India finished searching in mine, finished touching my face with the same long, thin, careful fingers I had seen months ago feel for Rowell Dollard’s pulse. Then Cuddy said, “Here goes. Now watch me mess up. Dulce et decorum est pro frate just about mori.”
In his hands was yellow shine that unfolded into a long, fringed, yellow sash. With studious pats he draped it across my hospital shirt. “I memorized that,” he said. “You want me to tell you what it means? ‘How sweet it is to throw your body down for your soul brother.’ More or less. Doctor Dunk-it was my consultant. Don’t you just love it? It’s old. That sash is old, too. That sash is a genuine Confederate sash I bought in Washington, D.C. This auction agent that found the coin for poor old Joanna Cadmean helped me locate this sash. I told him you were dying and I wanted you to be buried in it.”
“I don’t know why in the world,” said my mother to Alice MacLeod, “men think women are so sentimental.”
“But, General, even though you fooled me, you can keep it anyhow if you want to.”
“Why, my God, Alice, I remember how Justin and his father both cried all the way through Bambi.”
“Oh, didn’t that movie just break your heart?” sniffed Cuddy. “But now, Dumbo was even sadder than that. Did y’all see Dumbo? Remember when they chained up his momma? Oh, my!” Cuddy blew his nose, yanking a Kleenex out of the box beside Mother’s Shut-in Surprise.
Uncivil Seasons Page 29
