William George lists me as the sales agent for the properties and I take the real estate exam and get my license. My days pass quickly, staying on top of subcontractors, making sure all the supplies are on the job at the right time, jawing with the crew, meeting prospective buyers. In the evenings I start going to hear live music, blues at a tiny juke called Wild Bill’s, and folk-rock journeymen like Steve Forbert and James McMurtry at the High Tone. Lane Edge plays guitar and sometimes I go over to his house and jam. I’m not sure if I want to buy a guitar, too many humiliating memories of jumping up onstage in Nantucket. Lane’s better than me so I pick up a few licks. Two weeks pass, I collect my paycheck, mail in the car payment, put a couple of hundred dollars in the bank. I know I’m lucky. I ought to be out on the street.
“Seems like I never meet any girls that I can connect with in Memphis,” I say loudly over bar noise at the Blue Monkey to Lane Edge.
“You want something unusual, a one-off, a unique specimen.” Lane is six-three and very skinny. He holds his long arms in front of him, fingers interlaced, palms out, and cracks his knuckles.
“Aren’t we all one-offs?” I sip a beer. Dr. Fielding says a couple of drinks a day is okay, now that I’m off the antipsychotics. I drink two glasses of water between each glass of beer or wine and spend a fair amount of time in the toilet but I never get more than a mild, comfortable buzz.
“Oh, no, some people come off conveyor belts.” Lane grins and nods at some women at a table, all of them with heavy makeup, fake tits, bleached hair.
“Memphis’s finest,” I say.
“Maybe you need an earth mama.”
“I do respect canoeing skills in a woman.”
“An artist?” Lane holds his chin like Rodin’s thinker. “No, artists have egos. If I trade Lynn in for a new model, I’m mail-ordering an Oriental who doesn’t give me any lip, or better yet doesn’t even speak English. That’s my advice to you. Start hanging around Saigon Le and all those Cong shops over on Cleveland. Find a nice Vietnamese girl.”
“You’ll never leave Lynn.” I find myself taking everyone literally even when I know that they are joking. “You’re lucky. She’s smart, sexy, funny, everything a man could ask for.”
“You’re not listening to me, boy. Ego, lad. You have to consider the ego.” He tilts his long neck back and drains the last swigs of a bottle of Tecate, then sets it on the counter and turns it very slowly, whispers, “You want someone you can dominate down to the last drop.”
“I don’t want a slave.” I tilt an empty glass of ice water to my lips, catch the slice of lemon in my mouth, and say almost unintelligibly, “I want a goddess.”
“You mean like a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model?”
“Naaa.” I spit out the lemon. “Lame-, I mean Lane-brain, I mean someone like her.”
Two girls come in out of the night and wait by the hostess station. One’s tall with long brown hair and a gentle, bemused face, while the dark eyes of the other, who only comes to her chin, are striking at twenty feet, maybe green, so rare that color. She wears her hair short, almost like a boy’s, a simple white button-up blouse with no sleeves or collar, slim-cut khakis, and red cowboy boots. As she turns to speak to her friend, I see that her ass is like a small melon, hardly there at all. I say, “Holly Golightly.”
“Those two dykes?” Lane raises his hand for the bartender.
“You think they’re lesbians?” I crush some ice in my mouth.
“Know for a fact. The tall one’s the catcher and the short one with the butch haircut is the pitcher. Don’t go getting between two lezzies. Get your balls chopped off.”
The hostess leads them to a table not far from where we’re sitting at the bar and I say, “You’re full of shit, Lane. They’re not lesbians.”
“Famous lesbians,” Lane says. “Most famous lesbians in West Arkansas. The tall one’s called Bonnie and the little one goes by Clyde.”
“Those two?”
“Yep.” Lane pops a lemon slice into the tall neck of the Tecate bottle.
“I heard of them.”
Lane scrutinizes my face.
“Yeah.” I take a swig off Lane’s beer. “One night they took a guy hostage who’d beaten up his girlfriend, a friend of theirs back in Polecat Junction. At gunpoint they took him to the local shit-kicker dive and made him and his best pal, another wife-beater type, give each other blow jobs in front of a crowd of rednecks. The biggest one started to cry.”
“You heard about that way up in Nantucket?” Lane laughs.
“Yeah.” I’m conscious of how I’m enjoying myself, the simple pleasure. “The big one cried when he came in his pal’s mouth in front of fifty of his farmer buddies. The girls left the gun on the doormat of the bar on the way out. Turns out it was plastic. Obviously they haven’t been back to Polecat since.”
I see that Bonnie and Holly are watching us, drawn to our laughter. I catch their waitress’s eye and when she comes over ask her, “Would you ask those young ladies if they would like a drink for their heroics in West Arkansas.”
“Their heroics in West Arkansas?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The waitress crosses to their table. They look over at us with indifferent expressions, speak to themselves, shake their heads emphatically. The waitress returns looking grim. She says, “They say you must have mistaken them for someone else.”
“I told you they weren’t Bonnie and Clyde,” Lane says.
“They refuse your drink,” the waitress goes on.
“Ouch,” Lane says.
“Unless you go and sit at their table.” She smiles, darts off.
“I’m a married man,” Lane says, moving toward their table.
“Doesn’t mean you can’t read the menu.”
“Evening, ladies.” Lane sits next to the tall one. I sit down next to Holly Golightly. “I’m Lane and this here reprobate is Cage.”
“Alli,” the tall one says, “and my friend Samantha, or Sam.”
Lane raises his eyebrows at me discreetly at the mention of the masculine name. He calls the waitress over and we order, then he says, “Yeah, Cage was trying to convince me that y’all were famous lesbians from Arkansas.”
“Now, hold on . . .” I feel myself blushing. I expect them to be offended but they only look at each other and smile. Lane keeps going, the whole fish story, and the girls are laughing and Sam keeps glancing at me. Soon all four of us are laughing.
“My, what an imagination,” Sam says. “What does that say about you?”
“I’ve been feminized,” I reply. “I’m close to my mama.”
“That’s a good quality.” Sam’s eyes aren’t green after all but brown. Her heart-shaped face has a delicate nose and a pretty mouth with full lips. “You from Memphis?”
“Nah, I just moved here a couple of months ago.” I’m not telling anyone about the long stint in my parents’ attic, any more than I would carry around a banner with Mentally Ill sewn on it. “My parents are here. My dad’s from here. What about you?”
“I live here with my little boy.” She watches my eyes. “I grew up in Mississippi and went to Rhodes, went back to Jackson and got married. Came back here after I got divorced. I’ve got a sister here.”
“How old’s your boy? What’s his name?”
“Ray. He’s five.”
“Ray, that’s nice. What a great age. I had a blast when I was five. We lived at the edge of the mountains, outside Knoxville. My dad used to take us up in the Smokies. Does Ray like the woods?”
“Ray loves the woods.” She has a calm presence. She tells me she’s gone back to her maiden name, Samantha Anne Carr. She owns a vintage clothing place called Time’s Arrow at a shady intersection in midtown which has a number of cafés, antique stores, gift shops, restaurants, a couple of blocks of pastel Haight-Ashbury ambience. She and Ray rent an old house in midtown, a converted duplex. Ray spends most of his weekends down in Jackson with his father, a lawyer who has remarried.
Sam’s laugh is delicate. She’s a hummingbird. She leans her head forward and slides her hand from her forehead through her hair, holds it back.
In August the unfinished tin-roofed structures in Harbor Town are like the hot boxes used to torture prisoners in Cool Hand Luke. Lane Edge tries to convince the crew that they should arrive on the job at first light, take a long siesta from noon to four, then work again until dark falls after nine, but no one else will go for it. Lane begins to work solo, on Mexican time.
In the long summer twilight we carry a canoe out the front door of Garret Stoval’s converted warehouse loft through his little yard, over the Illinois Central tracks, down a hundred and fifty feet of sloping grass levee, across Riverside Drive, and down another fifty yards of broken stone levee.
“Pick it up, Huck.” Garret has red hair and big square-jawed good looks. He was a college friend of Nick’s, once went camping with Nick and Harper and me, when Harper was about fifteen, and he used to run around Memphis with my cousin Rut. Several times Garret came by and tried to talk to me while I was hiding in my parents’ attic. Now he never mentions my madness and there is an unspoken sense that he’s looking out for me, that a bond of brotherhood was transferred from Nick to me.
“All right, Jim,” I drawl, and move faster through the sharp rocks to the river’s edge.
In the late light, out in the middle of the river, the surface of the water is a frothy pink. The wind and the slap of water against the fiberglass are the only sounds. The Memphis skyline looks like a flimsy set, a row of false fronts, perched on the top of the massive levee wall. On the other side a row of ragged trees, flood survivors, curtains off the marshlands of Arkansas. We paddle against the current, inching upriver toward Mud Island.
“You heard anything from Rut?” My cousin writes Garret from Africa about as much as he does his own parents but tells Garret more amusing stories. “Has he gone native?”
“He says he’s only fucked one girl in a year and a half, a white girl.” Garret stops paddling and looks in my face to see if I believe that.
“Why don’t we like black girls?” Sweating heavily now, I’m cooled slightly by a downriver wind. “None of us do. Everyone I went to college with at Sewanee, all Nick’s friends at Vanderbilt. None of us ever tried to fuck a black woman.”
Garret’s face is dismissive, like the answer’s obvious. Different colors.
“It’s because we were segregated,” I continue. “There were barely any blacks in the postintegration private schools we all went to. The only blacks we knew at all were our maids. Whoever wanted to fuck his big old fat maid?”
Garret laughs. “I know a guy.”
We paddle hard quietly for ten minutes until a river current swirling into the mouth of the cove on the north side of the Mud Island peninsula takes the canoe and we hold our paddles across our thighs. Coming out of the wind into the cove is like stepping into a steam room. The canoe stops in the middle by itself. It’s quiet. The C-shaped shore of the cove is a parking lot set on a steep slope. This is where the annual Memorial Day canoe race will start.
“Three hundred canoes,” Garret says. “Think we can take ’em, Huck?”
“Yassuh, Jim, I reckons we can.” I swat a mosquito on my neck. Clouds of gnats move in over our heads.
“How’s it going with Samantha?” Garret starts to paddle toward the mouth of the cove, out of the steam and bugs.
“Great. Going great. I moved in two weeks ago.”
Garret looks back over his shoulder. “Must be a relief to be out of the bishopric.” He smiles. “I always wanted to use that word. Bishopric.”
“That’s not a bishop’s house.” I laugh. “That’s his office.”
“Whatever. What about the kid?”
“Ray’s a kick. I got him a redbone coonhound, beautiful auburn puppy. ”
“What’s the dog’s name?” Garret spits, takes a slug of bottled water.
“Ray started calling him Jonathan, I think from the Bible. Then the dog loves biscuits, so I started calling him Jonathan Seabiscuit-Eater, after the racehorse my grandfather loved so much.”
“Happy little family.” Where the cove opens onto the mighty river, Stoval says, “Let’s see how fast we can make it to the end of the course.”
“Full speed ahead,” I say. Knifing the paddles into the water, we run with the current along the shore of Mud Island, switching sides in unison. I imagine Nick sitting in between us keeping cadence, with one of the big drums we beat with our fathers in Indian Guides, before we were even Cub Scouts, a strange thought that chills and reassures. I almost tell Garret my dark secret, then paddle faster, watching the stone foundations of the bridge to Arkansas loom larger until the bridge fills my field of vision and we rush into the half-light under the span.
The house on Vinton is a beautifully built twenties Tudor divided into upstairs and downstairs flats like so many of the fine old homes from Memphis’s glory days of high cotton. The trees are the only thing the city can brag about, as Mama says, and the tallest, the ones over a hundred feet, all the old oak species, are here in midtown, shading the remains of the city, circa 1890 to 1935. Dad grew up in this neighborhood, first in an apartment just a few blocks away, with his grandmother, mother, and older brother, his father having hightailed it while his mother was pregnant with him. Granddad Rutledge was the black sheep of his family, the son and grandson of Episcopal bishops, who left his wife in the Depression for a beautiful, wealthy woman with lumber mills in Arkansas. I never really knew Granddad Rutledge. He used to visit us once a year, when we were on Pawley’s Island. I think he paid the rent for the beach house. As a teenager Dad lived in a house a few blocks in the other direction on Peabody with the alcoholic doctor who married his mother. When they were boys, Dad and Uncle Ned must have wandered the alleys that parallel most of the streets in this part of town, separating backyards. Squirrels, rabbits, chipmunks, ringneck doves, robins, cardinals—wildlife flourishes in the old trees and hedges. Coyotes have moved in since Dad was a boy.
No moonlight makes it through the trees, so it’s pitch-black in the alley between Vinton and Carr. Dim house lights wink through hedges, but you can’t see your feet. Ray and I walk quietly behind Jonathan Seabiscuit-Eater, who ranges back and forth across the cobblestone and grass, patches of concrete, sniffing loudly. He stops and claws at something, whines quietly. Ray turns on a midsize Maglite that I bought him for his birthday. Seabiscuit’s on his hind legs, his front paws on a tree trunk, his nose and tail held perfectly straight, pointing up. Ray raises the beam of light into branches thirty feet high where an animal is frozen.
“Is it a coon, Cage?” Ray holds the beam steady with both hands. “Is it a coon?”
“I can’t tell, Ray. Might be.” I don’t want to disappoint him.
Seabiscuit starts barking and leaping around, scratching the trunk as high as he can reach.
“Sit.” Ray scolds the dog like I taught him, making his voice deep like a man’s. “Sit.”
Seabiscuit sits down at the base of the trunk.
“I think it’s another cat,” Ray says. The dog barks again and leaps at the tree. The cat screeches and races higher, out of the light.
“Come on, Seabiscuit.” I turn back toward our house. “Ray, you’re a good hunter. I think it’s nicer to hunt with flashlights than guns. I used to hunt a lot with my grandfather, doves and ducks mostly, and I don’t feel so good about killing those animals.”
“Just another cat,” Ray says. “I want to get a raccoon.”
Seabiscuit realizes we’re on the way back and starts to trot up the alley ahead of us.
“Maybe tomorrow night we’ll get lucky and bag a coon with your light.” I take him by the hand. A rusty wrought-iron gate le
ads to our backyard. We go several steps up onto a deck that I built against rent. Samantha has citronella candles burning in a mosquito-free halo around a lounge chair, where she lies looking up at the patch of stars between the treetops.
“The great hunters return,” she says, sitting up. “How many did you get?”
“Three cats,” Ray says, disappointed and proud.
“I think Jonathan Seabiscuit-Eater is not a redbone coonhound after all.” I pick Ray up, hold him in one arm.
Ray puts his hands around my neck. “No, Cage?”
“Nope. He’s a redbone cat hound!”
Ray and Samantha laugh. I think, This is it. This is what it’s all about. This is what you’ve been missing. It doesn’t get better than this.
1999
Harper
Walking down the corridor, I try to remember the times I’ve seen Dad’s brother Uncle Ned. Some holiday dinners at Cage’s Bend since Honeywell moved him from Baltimore to Nashville and then downsized him when I was in high school. Before that I don’t remember him. He never came to Baton Rouge. A sad fact of modern American life is that families are spread over such vast distances that relatives see each other seldomly. In the end you can look back and count the times on your hands.
The door to the room is open. Uncle Ned is sitting up in the bed, his back against a pillow, several tubes dangling down to one forearm, gazing at Dad and Mom on a sofa against the wall. On the far side of the bed, Ned’s wife, Aunt Rhonda, digs in an overnight bag on a table. Through the window behind her a gray sky hangs over a park of green trees and a full-scale Parthenon, just the way it looked in classical Greece, seventy-five yards of aggregate concrete pillars erected in the twenties to proclaim Nashville the Athens of the South. Over the trees somewhere is Parthenon Pavilion, a mental hospital where Cage stayed a couple of times when suffering paranoid delusions. No one is talking.
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