The Philadelphia Quarry

by Howard Owen

  Whatever happened that night at the Quarry, twenty-eight years ago, I’ll never know, but both Alicia Simpson and Richard Slade definitely were the worse for it.

  Back at the paper, I blog a few paragraphs so our potential readers don’t have to actually buy the Sunday paper. I try to leave something really juicy out of the blogs to tease them (“Tune in to the Sunday paper, folks, for the full story”), but the circulation numbers tell me that’s not working so well.

  My cellphone rings. It really does ring, like a damn phone is supposed to. What is so cool about having your phone play “Billy Jean” or “Stairway to Heaven”? It’s like that singing fish thing that was so big a few years back. Funny once, maybe twice, then you just want to shoot it.

  It’s Peggy.

  “He’s gone again.”

  Les. This happens now and then, and I usually know where to look.

  I tell her I’ll be there in half an hour. I have a couple of hours before I’m expected at the paper.

  Les Hacker, the light of my addled mother’s life and the guy who saved my butt from being barbecued last year, has gone walking.

  We haven’t had to get him off the roof lately, but he is prone to occasionally wandering off. Les’s body is still in pretty good shape. The last time I got the cops to find him, he was all the way out of town, headed toward Williamsburg. When they stopped him, they said he looked confused, like somebody who’s just woke up from a dream.

  He reminds me of a comedy bit I heard once: “Grandma’s walking five miles a day now, and we have no idea where she is.”

  I always try to find him myself first. I start in the neighborhood, then expand my search into Blackwell and the Fan. I don’t want social services coming over and telling Peggy she’s got to put him in some damn home.

  When my mother opens the front door, I am temporarily overwhelmed by the sweet smell of wacky weed, but Peggy seems relatively coherent. The day is young.

  “He was right here,” she says, “watching that ESPN. I went to do the dishes and then took a shower, and when I got back, he was gone.”

  This time, it’s easy. I look in their bedroom closet and see that the old catcher’s mitt, remnant of his last pro baseball stop with the Richmond V’s, is missing.

  So, I get in my ancient but indestructible Honda and head toward The Diamond. It’s been more than twenty years since they demolished Parker Field, where Les once played, and built something with a newer, more hip name (even if the damn thing is falling down now). Hey, I’m no mossback, but things have to change names for about fifty years before I really buy in. Holding back the hands of time, one of our younger reporters told me once, when I was ranting about texting and tweeting, is a twenty-four-hour-a-day job.

  Sure enough, I find Les, walking up Boulevard, just past Buzz and Ned’s. I manage to pull over and park a block ahead of him and intercept him as he’s walking past, that 500-yard stare telling me he thinks he’s late for the game. I notice the first few snowflakes. Les has on a light sweater.

  “Hey, Les,” I ask him, like I’d just happened to bump into him there, “where you going?”

  He doesn’t seem to recognize me for about five seconds. Then he wakes up and looks around him.

  “I did it again, didn’t I?” he asks me. He looks as abashed as a kid who’s just wet the bed.

  “Big game today?” I asked him. He looks down at the mitt he’s carrying in his right hand, and we both laugh.

  He looks around and figures out where he is.

  “Can we get in the car?” he says finally. “It’s cold as a witch’s tit out here.”

  I bring him home. I can see Peggy’s neighbor, Jerry Cannady, looking at us out his front window. Jerry no doubt knows what’s happened. He’s always complaining about something Les has done, none of which has ever harmed another human being, to my knowledge. I give Jerry the finger, and the blinds snap shut.

  Peggy calls Les an old fool, asks rhetorically what she’s going to do with him, then hugs him.

  I stay around for a few minutes and let Peggy fix me a baloney sandwich.

  I ask her about her erstwhile tenant, the redoubtable Awesome Dude.

  “Oh,” she says, “he went walking a couple of days ago. He’ll be back.”

  The Dude, saved by Peggy from a life of homeless shelters, park benches and lean-to’s by the river, occasionally still hears the call of the wild.

  I note that her men seem to be prone to running away.

  “Go fuck yourself,” she explains. In Peggy-speak, “Go fuck yourself’ translates as “Let’s change the subject.”

  I ask her if that’s the same mouth she used to kiss me goodnight with.

  “I never kissed you goodnight,” she says, laughing. “You were too ugly.”

  “Did you hear about that Windsor Farms girl?” she asks me. I’m thinking, shit, the TV guys have got it, too. Usually, it would take a nuclear blast to wake them up on Saturdays, when the whole crew of most of our local stations seems to consist of VCU mass com students with good hair and empty heads. They probably got it from my blog. Talk about red meat for the on-the-airheads: Rich, blonde former debutante shot to death at a stoplight five days after the man she accused of raping her gets his “writ of actual innocence.”

  I tell Peggy about my day so far.

  “I guess it isn’t going to be hard to come up with a suspect,” Peggy says. “That poor boy. After all he’s been through.”

  Well, I suggest, it does seem as if Richard Slade might be a logical choice. If I’d just gotten back from twenty-eight years in the big house for a crime I apparently didn’t commit, I might have built up a slight case of resentment. I mean, just how many people in the city of Richmond did have a reason to shoot Alicia Parker Simpson twice in the face on her way to her morning workout?

  Peggy shakes her head.

  “That whole thing, even back then, seemed so bogus. I never did believe Philomena’s boy would’ve done that.”

  I have half a sandwich in my mouth and have trouble speaking until I wash it down.

  “Wait. What? You know Philomena Slade?”

  Peggy wipes her hands on a paper napkin.

  “Well, she was Philomena Lee back then.”

  I implore Peggy to tell me more. She has to circle around it. Eventually, though, I find out that Richard Slade is probably my second cousin.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Sunday

  There’s about an inch of snow on the ground, but the sun’s out now. Andi and I are headed down to Millie’s for brunch. I haven’t seen my daughter since Christmas. She gave me a tie and a fifth of Jack Black, which she probably got for next to nothing at her most recent stop in her apparent quest to wait tables at every restaurant and bar in the city limits. I gave her cash. That’s what she said she wanted, but it didn’t seem to thrill her that much.

  Andi probably will graduate from VCU about the same time she checks the last eatery in town off her to-do list. Like the tortoise, her progress is slow but steady, a course or two a semester. I hope that, like the tortoise, she crosses the finish line one day.

  As we make our way across town through the slush, my mind is still reeling a bit from Peggy’s latest bombshell.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about this before?” I asked after I’d finally dragged it out of her. Peggy has never had much of a filter between her brain and her mouth. She thinks it, she says it.

  “It wasn’t any of your business.”

  I told her that it sure as hell was my business, but she crossed her arms like some sulking little kid and told me to change the subject or get out.

  It isn’t exactly a big deal anymore to be of “mixed race.” Mixing the races might be the only thing that can save these Benighted States of America, although I’m sure we’d find some other reason to hate each other.

  Artie Lee, saxophonist and bon vivant, died when he wrapped a car around a sycamore tree while I was still crawling. I inherited almost none of his light-skinned African-
American physical characteristics. Growing up in Oregon Hill, which was as white as Minute Rice back then, that was probably just as well.

  I can vaguely remember Peggy taking me over a couple of times to visit a black family in Highland Springs, when I was still pre-school age.

  The family, it turns out, was the Lees.

  You know the Hillary Clinton thing about it taking a village? Well, the Lees were a small town, everybody looking out for everyone else’s kids, everybody closing ranks around their weakest, sharing what they could. Kind of like America is supposed to be.

  And one of Artie Lee’s first cousins was Philomena, who was twelve or thirteen when Peggy began “seeing” Artie.

  “She was so bright, so sweet,” Peggy said, before she refused to say any more. “She used to take care of the younger ones, like she was their momma.”

  Philomena and Peggy kept in touch for a while, and Peggy said the late Artie’s cousin once even ventured over to visit her in Oregon Hill.

  “But she said people were giving her the evil eye, and she didn’t come back.”

  Peggy said she hadn’t seen Philomena since probably 1980.

  “When her son was arrested, maybe three years after that, somebody else answered the phone, and said she’d moved. And I never tried to get up with her again.

  “But I just know Philomena Lee wouldn’t have raised a boy that would rape a girl like that. He was—is—her only child, too. Don’t know what happened to the daddy.”

  A lot of that going around, I want to say.

  In adulthood, I have never tried to run away from my heritage, but back then, when I was a kid, it was easier to be “us” than to be “them.” My friends knew, and some of my enemies suspected and, it being the South, fights ensued. It was easier to just let people think I was something exotic without any of that old Dixie baggage attached.

  Sometimes, though, the truth will out no matter how hard you try to bottle it up. Faulkner was right about the past. You can drive a stake through the son-of-a-bitch’s heart, bury it deep, and it’ll still rise up waving the Stars and Bars.

  I checked around last night, and my best cops’ source, the re-doubtable Peachy Love, told me that they were already questioning Richard Slade about his whereabouts early yesterday morning. He said he was at home asleep, and Philomena backed him up.

  “But she’s his mother,” Peachy said. “It’s just a matter of time.” She’s probably right.

  I am obliged to take another crack at Philomena Slade. Maybe, with my genealogy brought up to date, she will cut me some slack if I play the family card. The white sheep returns.

  We have a great meal at Millie’s, as always. We both prefer its frantic, pants-on-fire ambience and heartburn specials to the somnolent brunch buffets at the Jefferson.

  We at least have Millie’s in common.

  I ask her how school’s going, and she reminds me that the spring semester hasn’t started yet.

  “Well, then, how’d you do in the fall?”

  “I did OK.”

  I ask her if she might be able to expand a little on “OK.” Back in my college days, I remind her, when the earth’s crust was still warm, they actually defined a student’s progress with certain letters: A, B, C and such.

  Her grades come directly to her. That’s the way they do it now. The student is an adult, albeit one whose parents are writing the checks, and it would be an offense against the student’s privacy and dignity to send Mom and Dad any information as to what the second mortgage is actually yielding, education-wise.

  Andi’s a good kid, though, and I know she does appreciate my belated effort at parenthood. I missed most of the diaper-changing and wasn’t around for toilet training, so I’m trying to pay off my guilt with tuition and fees. Her mother and stepfather have enough bills to pay, and their two boys are fast approaching college age themselves.

  “I got an A in English and a B in psych,” she says. I do the math in my head and figure she might be above C-level overall by now.

  I ask her about the third course. She was very pumped, I seem to remember, about getting into this “very cool” course in African-American history.

  She frowns.

  “I dropped it, back in November. I thought I told you.”

  She probably did.

  “How come?”

  “I didn’t feel welcome,” she says, after a short pause. “I was the only white kid in there. I felt, you know, like it was all on me. Every time they’d talk about Nat Turner, or segregation or something, I felt like everybody was giving me the fish-eye.”

  Andi knows next to nothing about Peggy’s side of her family, just that her grandfather on her dad’s side died a long time ago. Jeanette’s never told her, and neither have I. Am I a racist? Doesn’t feel that way, but somehow Andi and I have never had that talk, the one where she finds out that she has more of a stake in African-American history than she knows.

  She’d think it was “cool” to be something other than blue-collar, white-bread Scots-Irish. But telling her now would also entail tacitly admitting that I hadn’t told her for almost twenty-two years. It’s complicated. Maybe I’ve been too hard on Peggy.

  “So,” I ask, slipping very gingerly into these shark-infested waters, “how are you . . . where are you . . .?”

  “When am I going to graduate?”

  I nod my head, grateful that I haven’t upset the delicate balance of this father-daughter get-together by asking an indelicate question.

  “If everything goes right, I should be through in a couple of years, maybe spring of 2013.”

  Well, I say, that’s not so bad, thinking to myself how seldom everything goes right.

  “You know,” she says, reaching across the table and laying one of her hands over mine, “we don’t have to do this. I’m making pretty good money. I can support myself. I don’t need a degree.”

  I shake my head.

  “No, sweetie. One day, trust me, a college degree’s going to be the difference. There’ll be a job somewhere, probably one that doesn’t relate to anything you’re studying. You’ll really want it, but the human resources assholes will decree that ‘the applicant must have an undergraduate degree,’ and some jerk with some bullshit major like psychology will get it instead of you.”

  “Dad,” she says, “I’m probably going to major in psych.”

  Oh yeah.

  “Well,” she says, as we slide out of our booth and head toward the door, “maybe you’re right, but the world’s changing. It isn’t all about the BA or BS anymore.”

  The world is changing, I tell her, but there always will be a premium on people who prove they can stay the course.

  I turn to her when I hear her snort.

  “What?”

  “Says the man with three ex-wives.”

  As we walk past the bar, I see a guy sitting there reading the Sunday paper, with my story across the top of A1. ALICIA SIMPSON SHOT TO DEATH. They had a hard time with the headline, I’m sure. Who was Alicia Simpson? Former rape victim? Rape alleger? Mis-identifier?

  I wonder how deep the cops are into Richard and Philomena Slade’s shit already.

  I ask Andi if she’d like to take a short trip to Richmond’s most exclusive club.

  “You’re taking me to the Country Club of Virginia?”

  “Much better than that.”

  I tell her a little about the Philadelphia Quarry on the way there—how it had been around since the 1930s, how the stone they cut out of there went to, duh, Philadelphia, where I guess they built something with it. Andi stifles her yawns.

  The Quarry’s secret membership list probably has always included a Prestwouldian or two. Some are shareholders. Some, like Clara Westbrook, are “summer members,” invited from year to year at the pleasure of the shareholders.

  When she first took Kate and me over as her guests, I could see my beaming bride’s eyes light up. Nothing turned my third wife on like the prospect of breaking into some club. Someday, the thoug
ht balloon above her head said, they’ll ask me.

  As Kate pumped Clara for more details about the place, I chose not to tell either of them that I’d already been to the Quarry, several times and uninvited.

  All the Oregon Hill boys knew the Quarry. It was almost a rite of passage to sneak into this place where only what we thought of as rich people were allowed. There was always a way to get around or through the fence, and nothing was more delicious on a hot summer night than skinny-dipping and pissing in the deep, clear, cold water of the well-to-do. We’d go over there from the Hill after midnight when we were old enough to drive and could get a car—me, Abe, McGonnigal, Goat Johnson, Andy Peroni, John Wesley Samms. Unlike Richard Slade, we never got caught, but it was close a couple of times.

  Alicia Parker Simpson’s rape gave the place the kind of notoriety its members would’ve paid dearly to avoid, but since the trial in 1984, it has slipped back into welcome obscurity. The Quarry has been on my mind ever since Richard Slade’s release from prison brought it back to the surface.

  We drive through the city, taking one detour so I can see the spot where Alicia met her demise. Yellow police tape surrounds the spot, and a handful of black kids have drifted over from the convenience store across the street to gawk.

  Once we get to Carytown, we take McCoy Street south, go past City Stadium and then over the expressway, and we’re in Windsor Farms. Coming this way, it seems like we should have to show our passports. It’s another world, the green, green grass of old money.

  I get lost once. Then, suddenly, we’re there. My intention was to find the place, show it to Andi through the barbed-wire fence, tell her a few stories about my misspent youth and be on our way.

  But the gate to the parking lot is open, although it’s four months and forty degrees from swimming weather.

  I drive in and see that some kind of maintenance crew is there. Two old guys in jeans and jackets are getting ready to paint one of the sheds. I guess they think we’re members, because they leave us alone.