Rebel Yell

by Alice Randall

  The rules of life, unlike the rules of war, cannot be rewritten.

  SEVEN

  DRIVING FROM THE hotel home, Hope was surprised to discover that some of her love of Monday night had seeped into the bitterness of the strange day. She was finally feeling less stunned and less stoned. She was starting to be able to imagine waking up Tuesday sober and ready to help Ajay start sorting out life after Abel.

  It had been a long weekend. After Waycross had dosed him down with whiskey before dawn on Friday morning, Ajay had eventually cried himself to sleep at about eight o’clock. He had awoken at noon.

  Ajay had joined Hope and Waycross at the big dining table, picking at, but not eating, the remnants of Thanksgiving breakfast: cold grits casserole, cold peppered brown-sugar bacon. None of them had known what to say, so they had babbled banalities until Hope had reached across the table for Ajay’s hand and toward the head for Waycross’s. Reflexively, Waycross had taken Ajay’s. Together they’d gone silent.

  To someone glancing into the room at that moment it might have appeared that they were about to pray except for the fact that their heads weren’t bowed and all their eyes were wide open. Hope was saying, and Waycross was seconding, with no words spoken, “Our circle will not be broken.” Then it had been. Hope had started clearing off the dishes and Waycross had started reading the paper.

  “I have so many questions I want to ask him,” Ajay had said. The circle had reformed, quickly.

  “Your daddy loved you so much,” Hope had said, walking back to Ajay’s chair and placing the hand not full of plate on his shoulder. He had shrugged it off.

  “That’s not one of my questions,” Ajay had said.

  The tall boy had slid from the table and shuffled, in bare feet, up the floating rosewood stairs to his bedroom. Not knowing what else to do, Hope had followed Ajay. Waycross had followed Hope.

  They had sat in the boy’s room in forlorn silence, Ajay and Hope on a sofa, Waycross in a chair just beside the sofa. Eventually Ajay had broken the silence.

  “Do you two have to be in here?” he had asked.

  “Yes,” Hope had said.

  “Is it possible Dad’s not really dead?” Ajay had asked.

  “No,” Hope had said.

  Ajay had risen and put a movie into the DVD player. Citizen Kane, Abel’s favorite. When the card reading “In Xanadu last week was held 1941’s biggest, strangest funeral” had filled the screen, Hope had excused herself, mumbling something about a contact lens. Ajay had settled deeper into the couch, moving closer to Waycross’s chair.

  “Promise me somethin’?” Ajay had asked.

  “Anything,” Waycross had said.

  “We go to Idlewild,” Ajay had said.

  “Now?” Waycross had asked.

  “Soon as Daddy’s buried,” Ajay had said.

  Waycross had not been blindsided by this request. The quiet particular to Idlewild had frequently scared the kid and sometimes like to driven the boy crazy, but Ajay loved the quiet and noise of the place. It was a particularly male quiet and a particularly male noise. Waycross had promised.

  They had come a long way from that Thursday and that Friday of wails and promises to get to Monday night. She turned on the car radio, tuned to a country station, and did her best not to think.

  Thirty minutes later, still high from Nicholas’s cocktail and longing for a bath, she walked through her front door and was surprised to find hunting duffels in the front hall. She wouldn’t have been if Waycross had told her about his conversation with Ajay, but he hadn’t.

  Banjo trotted out to greet her. When she lifted the dog he gave a quick yelp. She would take him to the vet tomorrow. She should have taken him three days earlier, should have but hadn’t. Silently chiding herself for failing to be a good dog mother, she kissed Banjo, then put him back down.

  The dog followed beside her back to the kitchen, toward the sound of Waycross’s voice. She had a staircase to climb and several rooms to walk through before she got to her men. She made her slow way, vaguely beginning to wonder when Ajay should go back to school.

  They were leaving for Michigan. She wanted to argue. Way-cross shook his head.

  “We’re going to Idlewild,” said Ajay.

  “I’ll go with you,” said Hope.

  “No. Just Waycross,” said Ajay.

  “Why?” asked Hope.

  “Because,” said Ajay.

  “I promised him,” said Waycross.

  “When?” asked Hope.

  “Now,” said Waycross.

  In their bedroom, just before Waycross joined Ajay, already in the Expedition, Hope extracted a promise. In the strange event anything happened to her, in the event she dropped dead anytime soon, Waycross would tell Ajay his mother had run off with her hairdresser.

  She sealed the deal with a kiss. It would be better, they both agreed, for Ajay to think he had a nut for a mother than to know that he had another dead parent.

  EIGHT

  WAYCROSS LET AJAY drive. It had been what was planned and just then getting back to some part of the plan was an urgent need of his stepson’s. Almost as urgent as getting Ajay away from the world of too many women and too many soldiers.

  Driving upset could be as dangerous as driving drunk— which, despite having had one drink five hours earlier, Ajay assured Waycross he was not— or driving upset could be a great way to regain a sense of control of one’s journey through the universe. Waycross was hoping to provoke this latter response.

  And Waycross, who was tired of thinking, wanted to get comfortable in his seat, close his eyes, and ride a few miles.

  Having established on earlier trips that each hated the other’s music with a passion that did not allow for compromise, they rode in silence. Inside his head Waycross was hearing—note for note—Miles Davis playing “Some Day My Prince Will Come” and trying not to think about “what if’s,” particularly “What if I dropped dead and Hope found out about me and Ruby like she found out about Abel and some bullshit with the military?” Inside his head Ajay was cussing Abel out, cussing him and accusing him of all manner of sin—large and small—from being responsible for Ajay’s ugly ears and allergy to nuts to being responsible for the use of water boarding as a tool of interrogation.

  Alternating cussing and imagining his father standing in the middle of the road with cussing and imagining driving Abel down, Ajay made a hundred and some miles while drinking sixty-four ounces of Coke without a squirm or a pee break. When he finally tired of cussing Abel, he lit into Sammie.

  “That bitch is a fucking whore. A horny non-fucking whore. A rose-tattooed non-fucking whore.”

  The third time Ajay said “whore” Waycross decided it would be inappropriate to continue ignoring the fuck-storm of profanity. He opened his eyes and craned his neck in the direction of his stepson. “Have you seen the tattoo?” Waycross asked.

  “Sorry,” said Ajay. He hadn’t realized he was talking aloud.

  “Ass, breast, or ankle?” asked Waycross, wanting to assure his stepson that there was nothing the boy could say that would shock a man who had started off life as a small-town doctor’s only son and then spent the last thirty years practicing gyneco-logical surgery.

  “Seen it all, done most of it twice,” Waycross was fond of saying. He didn’t say it just then. With Hope and Ruby so recently on his mind, and awkwardly close together, that phrase wasn’t something he wanted to pull out and mouth to Hope’s boy just at the moment.

  And “ass, breast, ankle” was a better invitation to the boy to speak. There was less boast in it.

  Something more than the death of his father was troubling the kid. Waycross wanted to put a finger on it and hadn’t yet found it, but he found a joke to cheer himself up. “Ass, breast, ankle?” is a probing question, particularly the ass part. Waycross chuckled in his head when he thought that. He kept his face solemn for the kid’s sake and didn’t speak the joke aloud. Way-cross loved Ajay.

  “Face,” said Aj
ay.

  “How’d I miss that?” asked Waycross.

  He couldn’t tell if Ajay was lying or taunting or starting to go crazy. All he knew for sure at the moment was that he needed a rest room. He’d been counting on the kid needing to go first. He wasn’t counting on it any longer. Surprise and age had made Waycross’s need urgent.

  “Pull in at the next rest stop, we can get some coffee,” directed Waycross.

  “A’right,” said Ajay.

  “What was it, some of that makeup eye shadow tattoo mess?” asked Waycross.

  “Naw,” said Ajay.

  They were fast coming up on a sign for an exit with a McDonald’s and a Wendy’s. Ajay started moving across to the far right lane.

  “I slapped Sammie,” said Ajay.

  “You slapped Sammie?” Waycross repeated.

  “I slapped Sammie and Daddy died,” said Ajay.

  The On Star indicated they were somewhere outside Fort Wayne, Indiana, as Ajay pulled into the McDonald’s parking lot. Driving erratically across empty parking spaces, hesitating between the painted lines, oddly unable to pick a parking place, Ajay started talking about how he had read somewhere that Wendy’s was better than McDonald’s. Waycross kept his face blank but began to wonder if a crack-up hadn’t started. Ajay, like his mother, was an excellent driver and Ajay thought Wendy’s was for girls and geeks. Something was very wrong with Ajay. He kept talking and driving and not parking.

  Just as Waycross was deciding a U-turn back to Nashville might be prudent, Ajay swerved into a wide turn and then pulled the Expedition, rather precisely, between two parked cars in the row closest to the arches. Waycross breathed easier.

  As a teaching physician Waycross spent a lot of time worrying about the almost grown. He had a long time previously come to the conclusion that the almost grown were uniquely delicate. Possessing little wisdom and fast losing possession of their innocence, the almost grown were overdependent on insight they rarely had and visceral knowledge they found confusing. The young person beside him was no sturdier than most.

  All Ajay knew was he had something he needed to tell Way-cross before they got to Idlewild, before they got to what both his fathers had called the black Eden, before they got to the ghost town, before he polluted the place in some fundamental way that could not be undone, before he finished puzzling over the proposition just crossing his mind that maybe curiosity was the opposite of fear.

  They got out of the car, both slamming doors. Ajay’s khaki pants and blue button-down shirt, similar to the one he had worn to the funeral (he understood this journey to be a “class dress” occasion), were already more than a little wrinkled. Waycross (in an old-school jogging suit he had owned since the seventies but since the nineties had only worn twice a year, on the drive to and from Michigan— except the year it had been given to the Goodwill and he had had to go and buy back what he had already owned) looked sharp. Purple jogging suits do not wrinkle.

  Waycross put his arm around his Ajay. The boy was as tall as the man, six feet, and he would be taller soon, might actually be a hair taller already, but neither of them was quite ready to see it. “Tall and a string bean,” Waycross had been heard to brag. Because he could think of nothing else to say that was both true and innocuous, he said it now, “Tall and a string bean.”

  The boy hesitated at the heavy glass door. Waycross opened the door and waited for his stepson to pass through.

  “I can’t go in,” said Ajay. Waycross gave the boy his fierce do-as-I-told-you-to-do glare that had gotten so many residents through their first difficult cesarean section, then quickly let the glare morph into something less belligerent.

  It wasn’t fear animating the boy’s face; it was plain determination and sharp sorrow. If Waycross pushed, something might break. Something might even break without his pushing.

  “After I pee and buy me a coffee we can go wherever the fuck you want,” said Waycross. He threw Ajay the keys. Ajay caught them in his hand high above his head. The kid was down but he wasn’t out.

  They laughed as they found themselves wedged into seats that seemed designed for shorter people: women and children. Ajay ate a bacon cheeseburger and Waycross ordered two Frostys and a burger. He wanted to drink some scotch for lunch but that wasn’t happening. He’d make do sucking on two straws jammed into a shake.

  “And why exactly are we avoiding McDonald’s?” asked Waycross.

  “We were in that fucking ‘roll tide, roll’ kitchen, Daddy’s plane was late, or he had missed the one he was supposed to be on, some redundant shit,” began Ajay.

  “And this has something to do with McDonald’s?” asked Waycross.

  “Yeah,” said Ajay, “somethin’.”

  Ajay and Sammie had been in the messy Crimson-Tide-red kitchen. The little girls, Ajay’s half sisters, had been out of sight but their light high voices, shouting commands to one another as they had played a game of freeze tag, had carried over the wide board fence that separated the yard from the field. The room had smelled like the McNuggets and fries they hadn’t finished. Abel’s plane had been delayed but no one had called to tell Ajay, so he had shown up, knocking, at the back door.

  He had caught Sammie scavenging. Her big children had been at a movie and Sammie had been making lunch out of her little daughters’ leftovers. She had said she was saving to buy something. She hadn’t said what, but she had said “saving” in a way that had made Ajay ashamed of his Bills Khakis pants, ashamed of his leather wallet, ashamed of his expensive school, ashamed of all the things her kids, both the ones she had had with the car wash owner and the ones she had had with Abel, would never have.

  She had offered Ajay the unbitten end of a baked-fried apple pie. He had been surprised that she had offered him a half-eaten piece of food, surprised when he had accepted it, surprised when he had bitten into it to find it still warm.

  With his second bite into the apple-filled dough some of the filling had squirted out, then had landed back on his chin. Sammie had laughed at Ajay; she had wiped the sticky stuff away with her fingers and then she had licked them.

  “Do I look old enough to be your mother?” Sammie had asked.

  “No,” Ajay had said.

  “My oldest twins are older than you,” Sammie had said.

  “You’re a lot younger than my mother,” Ajay had said.

  “Is that a compliment, Abel Jones the fourth?” Sammie had asked.

  “I guess,” Ajay had said.

  “How old are you?” Sammie had asked.

  “Sixteen,” Ajay had said.

  “I was seventeen when I had my first babies,” Sammie had said.

  The boy hadn’t said anything. But he hadn’t stepped back. She had stepped closer.

  “What do you like to do, Abel Jones the fourth, except get good grades and wear fancy clothes?”

  He still hadn’t said anything. Samantha had worked harder to get his attention. She had touched his belt buckle, gold and initialed, when she had said the word “babies.” She had drawn happy face smiles in the air, as if she were directing a little orchestra, as she had pronounced, singsong like, taunting, “get good grades.”

  When she had got to “wear fancy clothes” she had ever so softly, lightly enough so it had been impossible for him to know if she had done it by accident or on purpose, grazed the fabric of his trousers with her hand.

  She hadn’t seen his hand rise. She’d been too busy trying to work her way into setting him up with one of her young cousins; she hadn’t even thought of how he might misconstrue or construe the introduction of her eventual invitation.

  He had slapped her. Hard. An inking. She had been wondering how she was going to explain the palm print to Abel when Ajay had thrown a box of fries at her head. Two or three stragglers had fallen into her cleavage before the red box had hit the ground. Ajay had bolted out the door.

  Waycross was laughing. It was a tonic for Ajay. He started laughing too.

  “You did not do one thing wron
g, boy,” reassured Waycross.

  “I felt kinda stupid throwing the fry box,” admitted Ajay.

  “Insignificant,” declared Waycross.

  “Insignificant,” Ajay said, starting to mean it.

  “You did not do one wrong thing, and you helped that crazy bitch not do another thing wrong. You a better man than me, boy,” said Waycross.

  “Truth,” said Waycross.

  “Word,” said Ajay.

  “Word,” said Waycross.

  “I know about Ruby,” said Ajay.

  “Ruby,” repeated Waycross.

  “She called the house. Told me she wanted me to tell my mama about her. Said you made her have an abortion in 1964 and she couldn’t have babies after that. Said you wouldn’t marry her because she was a hairdresser,” said Ajay.

  “Did you tell your mama?” asked Waycross.

  “No,” answered Ajay.

  “Thank you,” said Waycross.

  “Is any of it true?” asked Ajay.

  “Some,” said Waycross.

  “She sounded crazy,” said Ajay.

  “She’s not crazy,” said Waycross.

  “Are you in love with her?” asked Ajay.

  “Everybody loves Ruby,” said Waycross. It hurt him to smile. But he smiled anyway. Ruby brought a smile to his lips. “It’s not so much love. I knew her from when we were kids in Georgia, back in Waycross. She’s the only person left in this world who calls me Dan.”

  “It’s like that old blues song, I’ve only loved four womens in my life, my mother, my sister, my girlfriend, and my wife?”

  “Something exactly like that, except, Ruby’s gay,” said Way-cross.

  “Ruby’s gay?” asked Ajay.