The Alumni Grill, Volume 2

by Tom Franklin

  “Why?” shouted the speaker, “Why do you suffer? Because of the Papist dictatorship in Rome. Because the Pope has his minions right here in these United States, and is, at this very minute, planning to overthrow our democratic government. Do you want to wake up one morning and find a dago priest in the White House? Do you know what he plans to do right here in Alabama? He’s got it all worked out. He is going to hand Alabama over to a nigger cardinal!”

  When he said that something inside me broke, and then all I could think of was poor Puddin cramped and afraid under the steering wheel of Pinion’s car. Suddenly I noticed that some of them had baseball bats and ax handles.

  “Are the people of Alabama—in whom flows the purest Anglo-Saxon blood—going to stand for this humiliation? How will we face the challenge of the beast in Rome?”

  Now I was beginning to suspect that I had actually won the bet, despite the orator’s limp. The voice sounded older, like that of a middle-aged man, and surely that wasn’t the vocabulary of a twenty-year-old footballer.

  “By banding together in noble communion. We will fight to the last drop, together, for freedom from oppression. We must band together to fight the devilish plot of foreign potentates—”

  I felt sick now. All that liquor and sugar had not settled well. “I don’t believe this,” I said, holding my stomach.

  “What, about the Pope? Of course not. This is all just muckraking nonsense.” Pinion scowled up at the speaker.

  “That’s not what I meant and you know it. Come on and get me away from these hayseeds.”

  “What did you expect, a Mardi Gras?” Pinion turned on me as if I had insulted him. “You’re the one who wanted to come here and get educated. Wait a second.” Pinion cupped his hand behind his ear. “He’s gone to preaching on evolution. I bet this guy is hell on Darwin.” Just as Pinion mentioned Darwin, the orator removed his mask and spread his arms as if trying to embrace the crowd. It wasn’t Bryant, but a stout man with a shock of dark hair. Pinion forgot about me and glowered at the platform. “God almighty damn.”

  “You know him?”

  “The bastard.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “No, I mean a real bastard. One of my uncles’s little indiscretions. The country’s thick with them. Dunwoody’s the worst. He goes around claiming we’re kin.” Pinion squinted into the distance. “I thought I’d run him off years ago, but that’s him. Wood’s a real bad penny, I’m telling you. He’s here to screw with me just like he did in school.”

  “In school?” I could see Pinion drifting away into a private world of vengeance. The expression on his face made him look as I imagined him in my novel, ruthless and cruel, and for a moment all that vicious country club gossip seemed justified. Pinion put his hand in the pocket that held the gun. “That’s him, isn’t it? That’s the boy you shot in school. You shot one of your own cousins and that’s why he’s a cripple.”

  Pinion grabbed my arm. “Who in the hell told you that?”

  “I don’t know. People talk.” I jerked my arm free and thought about slapping him.

  “He’s no cousin of mine.” Pinion lit up a Picayune and blew smoke at me. Suddenly, I was more sad than angry, more afraid than sad. For the first time all night, I felt the old loneliness creeping in.

  “Stamp it out!” roared Dunwoody. “Stamp out the worship of graven images just as we have stamped out the immorality and licentiousness in parked automobiles along our country roads and shameless nude sunbathing in this lovely spot right here.”

  “What kind of fool would want to do away with nude sunbathing?” Pinion asked, trying to start up with the mockery again.

  “I want to go home now,” I said.

  “So go.”

  Slowly I stepped forward and put my arm around his waist, just to see what it would feel like. “Please, honey, take me home.”

  Pinion look at me from the corner of his eyes, annoyed.

  “Please,” I said again. That was all I could think to say.

  “You know, Marla. You think you’re pretty goddamn smart, but—”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Your right. I’m sorry. Please, take me home.”

  *

  On the way home, wheeling down River Road, Pinion hit a man in a white gown. Like a startled deer, the gaunt little fellow flung himself out of the woods and tried to cross the road in a mad dash.

  “Look out!” I grabbed Pinion’s arm, but it was too late. The man’s body flipped up on the hood, and the next thing I knew, my head had bounced off the dashboard. Everything went black for a second, and when I opened my eyes I had a lap full of glass. The man on the hood of the car was bareheaded, and his glassy green eyes glared at me. His gown began to flood with jagged streaks of blood.

  “Oh, my God, he’s dead!” I shouted.

  “Shit.” Pinion opened the door and stepped out.

  As he did this, the man came to and sat upright, jerking forward like a marionette.

  “Are you all right?” Pinion moved to touch him. The man screamed as if Pinion were the one who had just come back from the dead. He jumped to his feet and screamed again and then ran toward Pinion as if to attack. Startled, Pinion balled up his fists but slipped before he could swing and fell onto the road. By the time I made it around the car, the screaming man had run past Pinion and fled into the woods, heading toward the river.

  “Jesus, are you okay?” I helped him up.

  “Yeah. How did he run away like that? How could he stand to move?”

  “Shock,” I said. “He could have broken every bone in his body and wouldn’t know it if he were in shock.” I didn’t feel sick anymore. I was high on fear.

  Pinion put his arm around my shoulders. “You’re shaking,” he said. “And you have a cut on your head.” He reached for his handkerchief and pressed it against my head. I let my body relax as he held me.

  “Is it bleeding?”

  “Not much. Here, keep pressure on it.” He took my right hand and gently moved it up to the cloth. Then Pinion walked around to the injured side of the car. “Goddamn it.” Not only was the windshield shattered, so was one of headlights. Worst of all, the right front tire was blown. “I hate to say this, but it looks like we’re going to have to hoof it back to town. You think you can?”

  I nodded, removed the handkerchief. The blood on the cloth reminded me of the blood soaking through the little man’s robe. “Who do you think we hit?”

  “I didn’t know him to look at him. And he was barefoot. What kind of sorry-ass Klansman can’t scare up a pair of shoes? Probably nothing but ringworm under that sheet.”

  It took me a second to put it all together. “No shoes. Pinion, that man wasn’t in the Klan. That was a patient at Bryce. He must have slipped over the gate and gotten loose.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “My God. What’s going to happen when he hits the river?” I wondered out loud.

  “Anybody’s guess. If he keeps going that way, he’s going to run into Dunwoody’s group. They could get rough on him. Those boys are pretty keyed up. On a night like this, they’re just looking for a reason to bust heads.”

  I imagined the little man, bloodied and bruised by pipes and baseball bats, the uncomprehending look of terror on his face as the Klansmen strung him into one of the tall oaks that lined the river. I closed my eyes and thought of the safest place I could imagine, my father’s study, with his volumes of Thucydides and Herodotus lined side by side on the shelves.

  “Marla,” Pinion put his arm around me and led me back to the car. He cleaned the glass off the seat and then sat me down, “Wait here, maybe I can fix the tire in the dark. We shouldn’t walk home in all this.”

  “Would you sit with me a second?” I asked, drying my eyes. “I’m scared.”

  He looked hesitant but then walked around to the driver’s side. I buried my face in his shoulder as soon as he sat down and cried hard. We stayed like that for a long time, Pinion’s arms around me, patting
my back and shushing me like a kid. But soon his other hand wandered down to my thigh. Pinion lifted my chin up in order to kiss me quiet. I started to open my mouth to kiss back but closed it again. Hadn’t I planned this? Wasn’t this what I wanted? But not here. “Wait,” I said. “Not like this.” But Pinion didn’t wait, and what could I do—go limp, fight, scream? Do people ever get what they really want, anyway? The hand on my thigh rose up to my breast. I started to ask him, are you crazy, are you out of your goddamn mind? But he kept my mouth filled with his sour-sweet tongue, rank with booze.

  My hands started moving too, from his knee to his belt. With my fingers, I found the revolver in his pants. He stopped kissing me long enough to draw the gun and place it under the seat. As he did so, the unclaimed silver dollar I’d won fell out of his pocket and rolled under the clutch. I thought about the handsome young Bryant, all his talent and courage and how I didn’t seem to have much of either. Pinion’s hand was under my dress now and I knew what he was about to do to me wouldn’t take long, not as long as it would take to fix the tire in the dark afterward. I knew that tomorrow I would regret this whole night. I knew that I would be more alone when I woke in the morning than in all the time since John had left. Maybe after I nursed the hangover, I would work on my novel. Maybe the Polish mercenary would return from the dead to finish his arson and burn down the whole damned town.

  As Pinion climbed on top of me, a stray shard of glass cut into my hip, but I didn’t care. There was a cold fire in my belly, and it made me wonder what it would be like to burn all over, to be doused with lamp oil and set aflame and burn mad-crazy forever. Soon my thoughts were eroded by the powerful sounds of crickets, tree frogs, and whippoorwills. It was just something I couldn’t get used to, how the forest around Tuscaloosa at night was so alive. I listened to the enigmatic music of the woods and watched the tiny stars glimmer through the open top of the convertible. The eerie orange light continued to pulse behind us in the distance. Pinion was on top of me now, pinning me to the seat, but I felt light, numb, and etherized. I couldn’t help sense that someone was spying on us from above, as if the stars I watched were watching back. Maybe the landscape itself had eyes, the stagnant marshes to the south, the mountains leering over us from the north, brooding over the town, bending all of us to strange purposes.

  No sooner had I thought this than I saw another flash of white, a figure spying on us from the edge of the road. Had the man we hit returned? Surely not. I yelled for Pinion to stop, but he paid me no mind. I beat my fists into his back as he groaned.

  “Someone’s here,” I screamed. I was sure that this time it was a Klansman with a horsewhip come to punish us. “They’re here. They’re here.” I said. I slapped Pinion in the face, hysterical. He grabbed my wrists and pinned them above my head.

  All about the car I heard footsteps. Not the orderly march of the parade, but a sound like wild animal hooves. Pinion moaned, grunted, and rolled off of me. Just then another figure in white ran past, a woman. She had wild hair, her breasts bounding up and down inside the white linen of her night clothes. Two men followed, both of them screaming with glee like boys released early from school.

  “Hell.” Pinion had one knee on the floorboard, desperately trying to pull up his pants and buckle his belt.

  I pulled my dress down over my waist and rose up on the seat. By then I could see them, maybe forty inmates running wildly, surrounding us from all sides, their eyes glowing in the lone headlight. Running together, their bodies appeared to be fused into a single white monster, a pale hydra of madness. Some of the inmates moaned in otherworldly agony; some squealed and chattered like jungle birds. Pinion’s hand lurched under the seat, looking for his gun but by the time he found it they had all passed, the tails of their nightshirts disappearing into the dark. They were running toward the river, toward the orange light on the horizon, toward the burning cross, leaving us alone in the terrible silence.

  WRITING THE REAL WORLD

  An essay by David Wright

  I am a writing teacher. I am black. After finishing graduate school, I took a job at a small, private liberal arts college in the Midwest—as an affirmative action hire, brought in, I believed, to enhance multiculturalism on campus—and what struck me most when I arrived was the “ghetto flava” of the place. Students wore baggy jeans hung low off their hips and big, loose shirts. Many had tattoos and earrings dangling from some body part, and the boys pimped rather than walked. When they drove by, I heard a pounding bass line before I saw the car, and it took me some time to get used to the expectation that the driver would be white, one of my students. Meanwhile, I was equally shocked by the lack of real diversity on campus—not merely racial, but also economic, geographic, and otherwise.

  The consequence of this lacking expressed itself in the students’ writing. In one essay my first semester, during a unit on language and the social construction of race, a young man described without afterthought how he and his family locked their car doors by reflex as they drove into black neighborhoods. No one in the class was critical of, or even surprised by, this but me. In fact, most had resisted the assignment altogether. They argued instead for a colorblind neutrality, insisting that the playing field has been leveled and that making racial distinctions merely provokes problems where none exist.

  The lesson was quickly borne home for me that this college was a sort of finishing school for the sheltered and the privileged and that, despite their jazzy MTV exteriors, few of them were willing to challenge the status quo. For obvious reasons. They were the status quo. Though no more comfortable with it, I was better prepared to address this attitude my second semester, and I approached my feature course, a creative nonfiction workshop I called Life Writing, as a chance to challenge my students on their uninterrogated notions about race and class.

  Peter Elbow’s ideas about “writing as discovery” greatly influenced the department in which I had taught as a graduate student and struck a chord in me. His words echoed ones written by James Baldwin, words I once held sacred. “Most people,” Baldwin wrote, “had not lived—nor could it, for that matter, be said that they had died—through any of their terrible events. They had simply been stunned by the hammer. They passed their lives thereafter in a kind of limbo of denied and unexamined pain.” Writing their memoirs—their “life stories”—would serve as a kind of Baldwinian exercise of “looking in a truthful mirror” and would, I felt, be particularly valuable to my very privileged charges.

  The class was composed of twenty students, pretty evenly divided between male and female. I also had two African-Americans which, at this college, was a good number for any single course. One of my seniors was the star of the football team, a two-year All-American and the All-American boy. He was not the “wigger” type but the opposite—a frat boy: blond hair, clean cut, an economics major. He was a little slower than most getting into the groove of the class, so when he showed up at my office hours just before Spring Break to talk about his in-progress memoir, I was both surprised and pleased. I had half expected he would be the one student (there’s one in every workshop) who just threw something together at the last minute, the night before the work is due. Here he had brought me ten typewritten pages to read and tell him if it was what I was looking for.

  I explained to Blake (I will refer to him as Blake) that I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, that writing is about discovery and that writing memoir may be even more so than most other forms. I also told him I wasn’t prepared to read with any depth something of that length while he sat and waited, but that I was glad he was getting into it and that I’d take it home and read it. We could meet the next day. Reading it that night, I was again surprised: Blake had put a lot of thought into his memoir. Although up to that point I wouldn’t have guessed it, my class had apparently been interesting him.

  His memoir was called “The Real World” (emphasis his). In it, he constructed a frame (an argument between him and his girlfriend), which he used as a spr
ingboard to launch himself into an exploration of certain memories of his childhood. In the frame, his girlfriend has just returned to their apartment, frustrated by her volunteer job working with at-risk youth. “I don’t know why you continue,” Blake berates her, “after a kid tells you to ‘fuck off.’ Good kids don’t tell their teachers to fuck off or that they are going to kill them.” He goes on to say that he had lived through some hard things, too, and look where he was now.

  Admittedly, I was uncomfortable with the by-your-bootstraps, Rush Limbaugh–philic agenda of his opening. Still, I was curious to read on. Narratively, the frame was working. The essay then flashed back through early childhood on a military base in Europe with his mother, stepfather, and brother—halcyon memories: playing with friends at a rock quarry; games of tackle-the-man-with-the-football. The shift came when Blake was twelve and his stepfather was transferred back and stationed at a coastal base in an urban area here in the States. His mother and stepfather soon divorced, and while his brother moved in with grandparents in a suburban community in the Midwest, Blake chose to stay with his mother.

  The Europe section of his memoir took up nearly eight of the ten pages; the frame had been almost a page and a half long. In the remaining, Blake had crammed his hard life experiences in the States: He and his mother moving in with an abusive boyfriend and, after one attack, moving out and being homeless for a time; being friendless at school and in the neighborhood. As a fairly seasoned reader of student writing, I recognized this second section as the place that needed fleshing out. I imagined he might also do more with his frame; in this draft, he returned to it at the end, but only to say to his girlfriend, “See?”

  “See what?” I asked him the next day. What was she to understand? He hadn’t told her; or, rather, he hadn’t shown her. And to show her was to show us, his readers. I explained to Blake that he seemed to be wanting to construct a kind of before-and-after piece, kind of like those Head-and-Shoulders commercials do to try to persuade us to believe their assertions about the product. As such, I said, you have to fill in the other half in order for the construction to work. He seemed disappointed, but didn’t look disheartened, and, again to my surprise, he seemed anxious to jump back in and write another draft.