The Alumni Grill, Volume 2

by Tom Franklin

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I raised my eyes toward the cruiser, trying to think of something horrible to confide in Fancy. I remembered only what Jesse had said about my just knowing impossibilities, but right then it sounded less than horrible.

  “I dated a doctor before Bunny. We weren’t in love.” Fancy glanced at me, smiled, then pursed her lips. She exhaled. “Being alone isn’t my strong suit.”

  Then Jesse was strolling across the yard. Fancy straightened herself on the bench, and when he came close enough to hear, she asked, “What’s the verdict?”

  “He doesn’t need to speak with Curtis,” he said. “But you’re going to prison. Forever.” He smirked at Fancy and she touched her cheek, then started fingering her cross, gazing away from him. Jesse raised his eyes to me, urging me to laugh or smile, but I only shook my head. He seemed a stranger to me then, and I wanted him to leave us alone. And maybe Jesse recognized that because he was stepping backward across the yard when he said, “That’s the verdict. That’s how all of this ends. Maybe Curtis will visit you on your birthday.”

  He turned and walked toward the Ranger with his father watching. After a moment Luis stole a look at Fancy, but averted his eyes when she noticed. Whatever had existed between them, I knew, was finished, and I saw that Luis wished things were different.

  I doubted Phillip Bundick had intended to shoot him, but only to scare him and make him feel sorry for things. I did not know how he learned we’d been in his house or that Fancy was with Luis. Possibly someone told him—possibly Fancy herself communicated it, though without words or voice—or maybe he just had a feeling that turned out to be true. I thought the possibility of Fancy’s leaving had eaten at him for some time and he had simply lost his sanity trying to stop the inevitable, which will drive anyone crazy. Already, I felt detached from them, as if I’d left Southport and was living in California near the redwood forest, where they would not make a difference in my life’s unfolding. Maybe no one would.

  “And yes.” Fancy paused as Jesse tried cranking the ignition. “It is my real name. I also have two sisters, Mary and Arden, but who knows where they are.”

  I said, “It’s a pretty name.”

  Fancy smiled a weak smile at me, then took my hand and ducked under my arm so that I held her like a little girl. Jesse continued to turn the engine, but it wouldn’t catch and soon Luis and the officer raised the hood and checked for the trouble. It was only the middle of the day, though it seemed late. Clouds had blown in and canopied that hard blue sky and I thought it might rain. I imagined Jesse enlisting in the army soon, and maybe flying his plane under bridges. Anything seemed possible to me then, and it gave me the floating feeling you get when you’re in a dark room and although everything is black, you suddenly realize your eyes are open.

  Fancy pressed her face to my shoulder, then relaxed, and I wondered what was on her mind. Maybe she was thinking of acting in a movie, or about her sisters or splashing in the Pacific Ocean, or about when she would next see Phillip Bundick. Or maybe she thought this: We are not responsible for other people, cannot be responsible for them. It was not a crazy thought, or unique or sad, just one that can occur in life, whether you’re young or old, alone or in love. Her breathing slowed. It occurred to me she might be falling asleep, and I didn’t want to wake her. At that moment I felt content, and I only wanted to let Fancy’s body rest against mine, for her to feel the breeze on her skin, in her blonde hair, and for both of us to stay still and, however briefly, close our eyes in the shade.

  THE REASON WAS US

  by Brock Clarke

  It was the spring of parties—of housewarming parties and birthday parties and Derby Day parties and Memorial Day parties and desperate, last-minute Sunday parties where the host warns the children of his guests to stay off his newly laid grass seed and where thirty-five-year-old women smoke the cigarettes they were supposed to have quit and no longer really enjoy except for the secrecy involved in smoking them in the shady, far-flung corner of the yard and where grown men drink too much beer again and make big, elaborate efforts to take up the long-forgotten games of their youth—and it was also the spring when Martin Prunty moved next door and began breaking into our house.

  This was in Shady Oaks, South Carolina. It was a Saturday in late March when Martin moved to the neighborhood. My wife, Lily, was out back with a wheelbarrow and a gardening book, trying to figure out which plant needed how much light. Our sons were in the front yard, menacing palmetto bugs with sharpened sticks. Me, I was drinking gin and watching Martin and his movers from our front bay window. Martin’s house, like our house, like all the houses in Shady Oaks, was a brand-new colonial with blinding white siding and replacement windows with the stickers still on them and an attached garage so oversized it could have been its own house. I scrutinized Martin as one will a new neighbor: with a mixture of distaste and fear and elevated expectation. It was true, for instance, that Martin looked nice enough: His face was red and hale; his hair was black and short on the top, distinguished and flecked gray on the sides; his clothes—pleated khaki shorts, green and red polo shirt, slightly broken-in running shoes—were properly understated in middle America; he had a gut, but it did not hang like a sack over his belt, nor did he seem inclined to rub it; he talked with the movers as they hauled his furniture into the house, but he didn’t seem to order them around or get under their feet or on their nerves.

  Other than the movers Martin was by himself, but I noticed the movers carting in a crib and a child’s bed, and this made me happy, because as mentioned we had two kids and naturally hoped their new neighbor would have children, too. All of this caused me to regard Martin with some good will and high hope. On the other hand, it was also true that the moving truck was not part of a fleet from some well-known national company, and was not really a truck, either, more of a dirty-white, elongated van. There was no lettering on the van indicating its origin or ownership, nothing at all except for the fading kelly green words “We Move U.” Martin’s house was at the very arc of the cul de sac, a position that seemed to suggest something about the prominence of its inhabitants, but the van’s legend gave me not a sense of royalty but rather of mental retardation. The furniture didn’t seem unusually shabby or second hand, but there wasn’t much of it, certainly not enough to fill the new house. When the movers were finished and the van pulled away, Martin got in his car. The car looked decent enough, but when Martin tried to start it the engine coughed and stuttered but would not turn over. Martin beat his head on the steering wheel a few times, then got out of his car and charged into his new house.

  “Are you watching the neighbors move in?” Lily asked, coming up behind me.

  “I am,” I said, turning to face her. Lily’s gardening book—Soil for the Soul—had hard sold her on the restorative powers of plunging your hands into the loamy earth, except the author must have had black dirt in mind, not our red clay, because the fingers of Lily’s yellow gardening gloves were blood colored. She looked like she’d just come from surgery.

  “What do they look like?”

  “Who?”

  “Our neighbors.”

  “He looks nice,” I said.

  “He,” Lily said, “Nice.” She wiggled her red fingers at me as she walked away.

  It should be said now that Lily and I had our share of problems, and like our neighbors, we had moved south to Shady Oaks to forget those problems. The Chisholms, for instance, who lived three doors down, had lived in Manchester, New Hampshire, until their five-year-old daughter died of liver cancer, and then they moved because they couldn’t stand the thought of redecorating her room, of driving past the park swingset she loved, walking by the neighbors whose names she mispronounced, pruning the trees she might have climbed. Lyle Heath, who lived next to the Chisholms, had run a dairy farm in Little Falls, New York, a farm with a perfect view of the Mohawk Valley, a farm that had been in his family for four generations and that, with the banks closing in, he had at last sold o
ff to developers and quickly moved with his family to Shady Oaks so that he wouldn’t have to see his barn torn down, his fences yanked up, the developer’s prefab three bedrooms hauled in on flatbed trucks.

  And then there was Lily and me. I had cheated on her, I’m sorry to say, then begged her forgiveness, which she did not give, not exactly, not ever, really, just one day, a month after my confession—a month of crying jags and marathon silences and furious, whispered truths—I came home from work and she said, “I bet South Carolina is nice. I’ll bet it’s easier to be married to a peckerwood there.” So we moved to South Carolina. I got a job in admissions at Clemson University, and Lily and I spoke to each other very gently, very carefully, and we treated the past like the disposable object we wanted it to be, and Lily sunk her hands into the good red clay and I drank gin slowly, tiny sips at a time, and looked out our front bay window as if keeping watch for the inevitable advancing hordes. And when we weren’t doing all of this, we went to our neighbors’ parties.

  *

  That’s when I saw Martin next: at Steve Yardley’s April Fool’s Party. All of our neighbors’ parties were themed. On Bastille Day at the Falvos’ we were forced to wear berets, and Alexis Falvo drew thin mustaches with a black makeup pencil on all the men. On Derby Day at the Arnolds’, the house was so full of people dressed like jockeys that it looked like a convention of lawn ornaments. But this was April Fool’s Day, and I could already feel the smoldering hot foots, smell the fake dog turds, hear the rude, happy tooting of the whoopee cushions.

  Martin was there when we arrived, surrounded by our neighbors, who were talking effusively about the weather, the congeniality of the natives, the fact that we could and did leave our doors unlocked at night; they assured him that he would love Shady Oaks as they did. All of this was happening outside, on the paving stone patio. Martin’s look was somewhere between longing and panic, and in it I must have seen something of myself, because I went straight for the drinks table, but Lily joined the throng around Martin. I could hear her talking about the flowering trees: “That’s a hibiscus,” she told Martin. “That’s a crepe myrtle. That’s a magnolia.” Because Shady Oaks was a brand-new subdivision, these flowering trees were still young and runtish. Plus, the Yardleys sprayed the plants with something that made the leaves and flowers permanently glisten; they looked more like artificial plants than real trees, and Martin looked at them dubiously, as though they were part of the April Fool’s. But Lily persisted. “It’s April!” she said. “In Buffalo” (we were from Buffalo) “there’d still be half a foot of snow on the ground by now. That dirty kind of snow.”

  “Dirty snow,” Martin repeated, the words guttural and from somewhere deep in his throat.

  “That’s a pink dogwood,” Lily said. “Oh, you’ll love it here.”

  “Sure I will,” Martin said.

  There were signs right away that he wouldn’t, in fact, love it. Martin drank six beers during Kristen Yardley’s twenty-minute harangue about the high quality of the local schools. He would not talk about his wife and daughters except to say that they were back in Acton, Massachusetts, and that he didn’t know when they would be joining him. He said he was a quality-control engineer for a tire and rubber plant down the road in Clemson, and when someone asked him what exactly a quality-control engineer does, he laughed bitterly and said, “I change the world.” And when Nina Stradling put a tack on Martin’s chair—she was putting tacks on everyone’s chairs—and Martin sat on it, he jumped up and screamed out, “Motherfucker!”

  “April Fool’s,” Nina said weakly.

  “Ha!” Martin said. “Ha! Ha!” He grabbed a beer out of the cooler, and left the party without saying goodbye.

  After Martin was gone, we attempted to keep the faith, and Kristen Yardley told an elaborate false story about the time she was propositioned by one of the lesser Rolling Stones, but our credulity had abandoned us and no one had much energy for April Fool’s any more, so we all went home.

  That night, after we’d put Eric and Peter to bed, and right before Lily and I went to sleep ourselves, I asked Lily what she thought of our new neighbor and she said, “He makes me sad.”

  “He wasn’t so awful,” I said.

  “I was afraid you’d say that,” Lily said. I rolled over on my side, but Lily didn’t turn off the light, and I could feel her staring at me—if her eyes were laser beams, then the back of my skull would have been so much scorched bone and runaway brain matter. But I didn’t roll over to face her, and finally she turned off the light and we went to sleep.

  A few hours later, a noise from downstairs woke me. I lay there in bed, waiting for a second noise to confirm the first one. I listened and listened and I heard nothing else.

  It was three o’clock, that awful time between night and morning when you’re either doing something you shouldn’t or you’re thinking about it, and I thought about the first time I’d cheated on Lily. It was with a co-worker and friend, Amy Vincent, who was the same woman I’d then cheat with a dozen more times. We were standing outside the Northside Tavern in Buffalo, where we’d been drinking for an hour or two after work, talking that bright, reckless, brilliant talk of working people happy not to be at work any longer, and while I had never noticed Amy’s neck before—she might as well not have had one—at that moment it was angled just so, sleek and lovely in the unlovely streetlight, and I remembered being surprised to discover that in one second you could be one sort of man, and in the next you could be another.

  Then I heard another noise, a cough or a groan, coming from somewhere and suddenly Buffalo and Amy Vincent and her neck disappeared and I was back in Clemson, the noise coming from downstairs, and so I decided to get out of bed and check the front door. That’s when I saw Martin.

  He was standing in the front entryway. The door was open behind him, and you could hear the bugs making their noises out there in the one plot of high grass and bamboo the developers hadn’t sold off yet. Martin had on a bathrobe, even though it was hot out and he still had his clothes on underneath the robe. His eyes were glassy, his face was a gray sheet, and it was impossible to tell whether he was asleep or awake. “Martin?” I said to him, softly. “Are you awake? Do you know where you are?”

  “It hurts,” he said. “Oh, it still fucking hurts,” and then he turned around and walked out the door, closing it behind him.

  *

  For the most part I avoided Martin over the next week. This wasn’t difficult. He went to work, and I went to work, and besides this was around the time when a university’s first choice for next year’s freshman class repels the university’s advances, and so I was busy calling the runners up and telling them that they weren’t losers, not at all, and that the Clemson University family loved them very, very much.

  Then there were the boys, who were having a hard time memorizing the pantheon of Civil War generals and battles as part of the school’s local history curriculum, and so Lily and I spent hours tutoring them on the difference between Stuart and Lee and insisting that Sherman’s March to the Sea was not an AIDS walk. And then there was Lily. She watched me; I knew this. I had done a horrible thing. I deserved to be watched. She watched me while I was doing dishes or playing catch with Peter or teaching Eric to tie his shoes; she watched me talk on the phone, after hours, to panicked parents of a prospective student about how much financial aid their child was or was not eligible for.

  Maybe Lily was looking for the me she once loved, to banish the me she didn’t; or maybe she was waiting for the me that had hurt her so to rear up again, so she could see that lousy me once and for all, commit me to memory, then leave me behind. I didn’t want to give Lily anything to see; and I sure didn’t want to talk about Martin, about him breaking into our house and me thinking about Amy Vincent, after months and months of not thinking about her.

  But at dusk, when Lily was watering her garden (it was, Soil for the Soul said, the time of day when plants and humans were most open to replenishment) and the
boys were playing their last, spastic round of whatever game they were playing before they went to bed, then I sat in my window and drank my gin and watched Martin’s house. His family still hadn’t arrived. Sometimes he wasn’t around at all; sometimes you could hear him hammering or sawing in the backyard, sometimes he was sitting on his front porch, drinking his own drink. I wasn’t haunted by him, not exactly, but I was looking for answers in him, the way Lily was looking for answers in me. Had he been awake or asleep that night he had broken into our house? Had he chosen our house for a reason, or could it have been anyone’s house? And what hurt him so badly? But his face, his drinking, his hammering and sawing gave away no secrets.

  I next saw Martin less than a week later, at the Ryersons’ Battle of Gettysburg party, because it was the anniversary of the great battle and because the Ryersons were Civil War nuts. In our invitations—scrolls of paper meant to resemble, I suppose, the one on which Lee had signed over the Lost Cause to Grant—we had been told to either wear blue or gray. Bill Ryerson occasionally fired a cap gun through a wet towel in impersonation of some far-off rifle report, and the stereo played martial music, and on the television there was an endless Civil War documentary with historians droning on about the bones of our dead boys. Every now and then Beth Ryerson, who was wearing an antique gray dress with a ripped bodice (if the party theme was based in history, there was always a woman with a ripped bodice), walked around saying jokey, sexy things to men about the condition of our weapons and whether we’d like her to unjam them.

  In every other way, though, it was the same as every party I’d been to in Shady Oaks. We all drank, but reasonably, and the conversation stayed far away from the political or scatological or the seriously taboo. Whenever the adult world of consequence and regret reared up and, for instance, someone started talking about a rock star’s recent suicide around the Liddons, whose nineteen-year-old estranged gay son had hanged himself back in Allentown, we had the party’s theme to retreat to—our safe haven, where we did not have to think about the ways in which we’d hurt and been hurt, where we laughed about the sorryness of our costumes or praised the ingenuity of our hosts or debated, in the case of the Ryersons’ party, whether or not smoked gouda was actually ever served and consumed on a Civil War battlefield.