by Howard Owen
“No offense. I mean, I’m sure you and Cully and Milo and all the guys are happy as clams down here. But you guys were jocks. You owned the place. There wasn’t any Speakeasy Code for little Jerry Prince. There was just the Jerry Prince code, which was to try to get out of Buster Gladden High alive. I looked at my junior class yearbook the other day, just to bone up.
“You know how many people signed it? Six. And three of them were kids, like ninth- and tenth-graders. I made a point that spring of not asking anybody to sign my yearbook until they asked me to sign theirs. I got tired of that look, like, ‘Oh, God, if I sign Jerry Prince’s yearbook, I’ll have to ask him to sign mine. And then people will think I’m queer or something.’”
“I signed it.” Jack surprises himself by remembering this.
Gerald Prince smiles. “Yeah, you did, bless your heart.” His mouth twists a little as he adds, “I don’t think I even had to ask you.”
Jack can recall the day the yearbooks came their junior year, although he’s not sure who won the last Super Bowl. He finds, more and more, that memory is a brimfull jar in which each new drop of liquid displaces not the old, fermented slop at the bottom but instead something off the top, something new and fresh that landed there itself only recently and might be worth keeping.
He was the cock of the walk his junior year, no clouds, no whispers. Everyone wanted him to sign their yearbooks, even the seniors. And then he saw Jerry Prince standing over by his locker, just staring, nobody near him, waiting to be picked on. And for some reason, he went through the crowd and asked the boy who lived down the road, the one to whom he hardly ever spoke any more, if he’d sign his yearbook. Hell of a thing to remember.
“Tell me,” Gerald says, “can you even remember what the goddamn Speakeasy Code is any more? I mean, do you all talk about it all the time? Has it been your Ten Commandments, the light unto your path?”
Jack surprises himself by ticking them off from memory: no lies; no bullshit (a whole different thing from lies); no backing down; no quitting (a whole other thing from backing down); no shortcuts; no stop ’til we hit the top.
It was a club within a club. The seven town boys who would be senior starters on the football team—Jack, Milo, Cully, Mack, Ray Bain, Puffer Sensibaugh and Bobby Witt—had come up with it when they were in ninth grade. They were sure they were something special. They’d always been able to beat the older boys in whatever sport was in season. They wanted something that would define and seal their specialness.
They swore each other to secrecy. They would give the sign when they passed in the hall, index finger and middle finger curved to form a rough ‘S’ The next year, when they were all 16, they went together to a tattoo parlor on the Jeff Davis Highway down in Richmond and each got a small red ‘S’ burned into their upper arms. Jack’s parents grounded him for two weeks when they finally saw it.
Their senior year, when the football team was attracting attention all over the area, unbeaten through nine games, it was Milo, of course, who let it slip. A reporter from The Times-Dispatch asked him about the tattoo, and he spilled the whole code. Mack McLamb didn’t speak to him for a month.
Somebody put it in the yearbook that year, on the page with the team picture. It was a bad joke by then to Jack.
“So,” Gerald Prince says, smirking, “have you been true to the code?”
“I haven’t thought about the code in about two lifetimes. It was a kids’ game, something friends do.”
He’s lying. He opened the yearbook, searching for some trace of who he used to be, the day he got back from that last long-haul trip. Looking back was not something he was prone to do. The book opened right to the page with the football team, and the code.
He thinks about Milo, well-off enough but still jumping from flower to flower at 48; about Cully, rich from all his real estate deals, but a guy even an old friend couldn’t truly and whole-heartedly trust; about Mack, who he hopes isn’t an alcoholic; about Ray Bain, who was going to join the Navy with Jack and then just didn’t show up that day; about Puffer Sensibaugh, who is supposedly now living somewhere in the New Orleans area and has made a point of disappearing from all their lives; about Bobby Witt, who never had a chance to betray the code.
And, of course, Jack Stone, Most Likely to Succeed, who stopped long before he hit the top.
“Well,” Gerald Prince says, “I’ve developed a code, too. I might have come up with mine about the time you and your buddies were inventing yours. Here’s mine: Look out for Gerald Prince, because no one else is going to.”
Jack wants to tell him that he’s got it pretty good, that from where he’s standing, it appears he’s done all right for himself. But he remembers the boy in grammar school, standing to one side, too shy to ask if he could play, too inept to be asked. He remembers all the teasing, books slapped out of his hands, lunches ruined or stolen. He remembers half-heartedly coming to his aid, just enough to keep him from getting killed. Not nearly enough.
Yeah, Jack Stone thinks to himself, that might be the code I’d have come up with if I’d been Jerry Prince.
“Are you all staying at your mother’s tonight?” Jack asks.
“Ah, no. We’ve gotten a room at the Hyatt, out by the interstate. Some place where we can have our own bathroom. We’re taking Mother to lunch tomorrow, and then we’re going to head back north. Got to get back to the kids.”
Jack tells him about his family. He says he’s sorry Gina didn’t come tonight, that he would have liked for them to meet.
“Some wives have all the luck,” Caitlin’s voice comes from behind him.
“Time to go,” Gerald says, looking at what appears to be a Rolex.
They walk outside together, the three of them. Jack stops and says he’ll send his manuscript soon, and Gerald says that’ll be fine. As the couple walk somewhat unsteadily across the parking lot, Jack can hear Caitlin’s laughter.
He goes back inside, where Martha Sue, whom he hasn’t seen standing still the entire night, is trying to orchestrate the clean-up detail.
By the time Jack crawls into bed, it’s almost 4 a.m.
Ray Bain came back to the school sometime after 2 and tried to get him to join everyone at the party, which had migrated to Cully’s new house, but he begged off.
“We’ve poured enough coffee in Milo that he can just about remember his name now,” he told Jack. “And Susan’s getting her second wind.”
Jack, who was putting some folding chairs back in the storage room, said, “Nah, I think I’ll head on home. I just can’t keep up with you young people any more.”
“I could use some help in here.” Martha Sue’s voice drifted across the empty cafeteria.
Ray Bain made an exaggerated effort at tiptoeing out the door he’d just come in.
They finished up sometime after 3:30. When Martha Sue gave him a thank-you kiss for being such a help, she surprised him by opening her mouth and exploring his with her tongue. Gina, he realized, hadn’t kissed him with that much enthusiasm in some time.
In Jack’s years on the road, he has become an expert navigator of temptation’s waters. He hasn’t strayed since Shannon was born. He was amazed, though, at how easy it would have been right then, how tempted and turned on he was. He has known Martha Sue Levens Bain since they were babies, and even when they were 18, there wasn’t much of a spark there. They had never shared more than a demure kiss. Why now?
He reached around by instinct and put his left hand on her still shapely ass, and then, at perhaps the last second short of embarrassment or insult, he pulled his hand and his mouth away. She pulled back, too, and began a distracted search for her purse. They found it, over in a corner where she’d put it probably 12 hours earlier. Jack kissed her on her forehead. She smiled and told him to drive carefully.
Jack slips out of his clothes, dumping them on the floor on his side of the bed, where he can properly hang them up in the morning.
He’s still awake, a little revved up from hi
s conversation with Gerald Prince and from Martha Sue’s kiss. He slides over next to Gina, who has not awakened and has her back turned to him. He smells the skin on the nape on her neck and slides closer, his erection touching her through his shorts and her panties.
He used to wake her like this all the time, in the middle of the night, after he himself had awakened and was aroused by her closeness, her smell. And she would, without saying a word, slide her panties down and push herself backward into him, moaning, and they would do it right there, lying on their sides, sometimes more than once. They often would do this without saying a word, their conversation reduced to incoherent ecstasy. Sometimes, he would fall asleep still inside her. Sometimes, best of all, she would be the one to awaken him, her hand sliding slyly up his leg and then stroking his instantly hard cock. They would never even see each other in the pitch-dark of their bedroom at the farmhouse.
Something, though, has changed the dynamics of all that. Jack figures he’s batting less than .500 on his midnight sorties since they’ve moved to Speakeasy Glen. More often than not, Gina groans rather than moans or thrashes about in her sleep, and he rolls back on his side of the bed. Not once, since they’ve moved, has Gina initiated what he used to refer to, at breakfast the next morning, as a dream-fuck.
He pushes harder, hoping. But she jerks away from him and mumbles something unintelligible but unencouraging. He sees his average sliding farther downward.
They still make love, although maybe it’s once or twice a week now instead of six or seven times, the way it was not that long ago. He is somewhat baffled, because their downward sexual spiral seems to have been exacerbated by the move from the old place, which Gina had truly come to dislike, with its antiquated plumbing and electrical system, its smell of liniment and age, to what she herself still calls her dream house.
She continues to say she’s fine, really, about his little mid-life crisis that continues to deplete their bank account. She tells him he has to do what he thinks is best, that she has faith in him.
Still, on a horny, sleepless night, he wonders.
CHAPTER SEVEN
He knocks, waits, then knocks again, louder. Brady’s music—it feels like Lynyrd Skynyrd—is vibrating the walls. Finally, after enduring the midday sun another hot minute, Jack uses his penknife to flip the hook-and-eye screen-door latch and walks onto the porch.
Jack’s grandfather built the house in 1920. His father, Kenneth, moved in with Ellen, his bride, in 1938. He was 20 and she was 17. Multiple generations of Stones have lived here, often three generations at once. It ends with Brady.
This morning, Sandy called early, or what seemed early to her brother, and told him they had to be out of the house by 2 p.m., had to have Brady out as well. Definitely have to have Brady out, because there was a prospective buyer.
No problem, Jack told her. We’ll have done all the visiting we can stand by then.
“Don’t be that way,” she’d beseeched him after a short silence, and he said he wouldn’t.
They are supposed to meet here at noon. Sandy is bringing a bucket of chicken, potato salad, whatever, and the three siblings are going to have a good old-fashioned picnic, cooked by some 15-year-old fast-food dropout, here at the old home place Mike and Sandy can’t wait to get rid of. Gina and Sandy’s husband were more than willing to let them limit the festivities to natural-born Stones only. Sandy said Brady was certainly welcome to join them, but everyone including Brady knew he wasn’t.
The boards creak under Jack’s feet as he walks across the south leg of the U-shaped porch. It was everybody’s favorite feature. The real-estate agent oohed and aahed over the way it surrounds the house on three sides, all but the west. There was always a cool place to sit or play when they were kids. The remnants of a hurricane three years ago took down the big maple in front, so this side doesn’t offer the relief it once did. Still, it’s quite a porch. Jack misses it. The deck at their new home doesn’t hold a candle to it. You need a porch, this far south, a screened-in porch. But decks are cheaper to build.
He reaches for the key he’s kept for most of his life, since they started locking the front door. He’s finally coaxed it into the keyhole and is pushing open the door when he realizes the music has stopped.
Before he can call out, he hears a metallic shuck-shuck, and his one and only son jumps out of the first bedroom on the right. Jack is staring into the barrel of a deer rifle. Behind it, Brady’s bald head and bright, fearful eyes shine out from the darkness.
“Brady!” is all Jack has time to scream, diving toward the kitchen door to his left as the darkness and quiet explode.
He lies there, halfway in, halfway out.
“Dad?” he hears, through the ringing in his ears. “Dad? Is that you?”
Jack assures him, as soon as he catches his breath, that it is indeed his father, and that he intends to do something foul and painful with the rifle as soon as he feels steady enough to stand.
Brady puts the gun down and rushes over to help him up.
“I’m sorry. Geez, I’m sorry. I mean, I was sitting in the bedroom, listening to music when I heard that lock turn. Wow. I thought it was …”
“Who? Who’d you think it was?”
Brady is silent for a few seconds. “I don’t know. I just thought it was somebody didn’t mean me any good.”
Jack is afraid there would be many suspects if Brady did turn up dead sometime, at the end of a dark Richmond street or off the side of some winding country lane, kneeling with his hands tied behind him, or even in his own bed, dried blood caked around his slick, shiny, ruined skull.
When Ellen was still living, after Jack and Gina moved to Speakeasy Glen, she would mention some of Brady’s friends. They did not sound like people Jack Stone wanted anywhere near his mother or his son. But Brady still needed some time to get his bearings. They grow up slower these days, Jack knows. And Ellen’s was about the best place, they all agreed, for him to stay. He could at least nominally look after his grandmother (although Jack was pretty sure Ellen had taken care of Brady more than the other way around, almost to the end).
And at least somebody in the family, he thought, was willing to stay out here and keep her company. Ellen could’ve spent plenty of nights with Jack and Gina, even if Gina didn’t exactly do back flips over that possibility. But when it started getting dark, the only place his mother ever wanted to be was home. The only comfort Jack gets now is in knowing that she didn’t ever have to leave. Brady found her one morning, cold and peaceful in her own bed, her eyes open and her head turned to one side as if she were still admiring the forsythias blooming outside the window.
Jack gets off the floor, brushes the dust off his pants and shirt, and looks up. There’s a silver-dollar hole in the porch screen, jagged along the edges. He tries to guess the probable trajectory and figures Brady didn’t hurt anything else except perhaps an oak tree across the road.
“Well,” he says, “I don’t suppose we have time to fix that before Mike and Sandy get here.”
“Please don’t tell them how it got there,” Brady begs him like a little kid. “Mike thinks I’m a big enough fuckup as it is.”
And your point would be? Jack is thinking.
“I guess we could tell them a woodpecker did a kamikaze into it,” he says at last. “Better put that gun up. Seriously, did you really think somebody was breaking in? And isn’t it just a little bit of a violation of your probation to be playing Rambo out here?”
“Well, you never know,” Brady says, and looks away, out across the raggedy front yard. Jack is almost certain that he does know, that his son has been smoking dope, something he promised he wouldn’t do. His pupils seem to almost fill his eyes.
“Jesus, Brady. You knew we were going to be here at noon.” Jack looks at his watch: 11:40. “Let’s see if we can’t get some windows open in here. Air this place out. They’ve got somebody coming to look at the place at 2. You’ve got to get your ass out of here by then, too.”
<
br /> Brady beats him back to the bedroom and starts hurriedly and sloppily cleaning up. Jack doesn’t really even want to see what’s in there.
He did such a piss-poor job of raising Brady. Ellen performed most of the parenting, and his guilt is only lessened by the knowledge that at least he did more than the boy’s mother, whom Brady calls Saint Carly, spitting afterward if he’s outside at the time. He’s seen her exactly once—one time too many—since his second birthday.
The sense of how little he’s done for Brady reaches out and pulls Jack back whenever he starts to, as Brady puts it, “play daddy.” If he didn’t finish high school, or find a job he could stay with, or a wife, if he got messed up on drugs, well, whose fault was that?
Jack looks at his son and sees a lot more of Carly and the Hamners than he does of him and his family. Brady is a little under six feet, with the wide, thick body of Carly’s brothers and the infectious smile, promising so much more than it can usually deliver, part of the charm that has kept him out of jail, off the streets and alive. So far.
He started shaving his head when he was 18, and it works for him, with his good skin that tans so naturally like his mother’s did. He’s got a great cleft chin and a little diamond earring in his right ear. He’s done bit parts in a couple of movies they filmed in Richmond and had roles in a few area theater productions. The women seem to be crazy for him, although Jack sometimes wonders about his taste in them.
Why the hell can’t you straighten your ass out? Jack always wants to ask him, and sometimes does. Mostly, though, he’s afraid of the answer, and he stays silent and useless.
Mike and Sandy get there just after noon. They’ve come together in Mike’s Cherokee. Probably wanted to huddle first and get their story straight before taking on little brother, Jack figures.
Mike’s been at Philip Morris for almost 30 years, a supervisor for the last 12. He’s hoping to retire in another three. He has Jack’s reddish, thinning hair, but he outweighs his younger brother by 30 pounds, and he smokes a pack a day. He doesn’t really look 11 years older. He isn’t so much well-preserved as soft, not fully validated despite his 59 years. He’s been on his own since his wife left him 10 years ago, the day after Raymond, their youngest, graduated from high school.
