“Isn’t that funny?” she said. “I was just lying here thinking about you.”
“What were you thinking?” Raleigh lay down on the bed, another strange bed, another unexpected ceiling.
“That you must be so worried something may have happened to Earley, that he may not be where he said he would.” She laughed. “Or that he will be there, chuckling his head off, and you’ll kill him.”
Raleigh closed his eyes. “You know what, Aura? I miss you.”
“…Then I’m glad about this whole crazy thing, because, honey, I’ve missed you for a long time.”
The Hayeses were still talking half an hour later when Gates came in the room and stood there juggling three hard-boiled eggs. Raleigh was telling Aura that with or without his father, he’d definitely get back to Thermopylae by Sunday in time to hear Caroline sing the solo at the Easter service.
“It means a lot to her, Raleigh, not that she wouldn’t die if she thought anybody thought so.”
“I know.…Aura, just a second, say hello to Gates, okay? Hold on.” He held the phone out, but his brother caught the eggs in air, and stepped back.
“Nah, man, too much water under the bridge. She doesn’t want to talk to me. Tell her, hi.”
“Come on,” Raleigh whispered. “Come on. Listen, Gates, if you can make me take on the KKK and the goddamn Mafia, I can make you take on saying hello to somebody that cares about you.” He shook the receiver.
Gates rubbed his thighs, his arms, his ears, and his mustache. Finally, he reached for the phone. “…Hi, babe. Long time, no see. How’s it going?…Uh huh.…Uh huh.…Right.…With us?” He cocked his head at Raleigh. “She wants to know how it’s going with us.”
“Tell her, ‘just fine.’ ” Raleigh took an egg out of his brother’s hand and bit into it. “Tell her we’ll call her tomorrow from New Orleans. Unless we go to jail or the truck breaks down.”
The truck broke down in Biloxi. “At least it picked a pretty place,” said Mingo as he climbed out of the back and pointed at the Gulf of Mexico. “Why don’t we go get some hamburgers and have a picnic on the beach? Want to come with me, Weeper? I saw a Denny’s about half a mile back.”
“A mile on my dogs? You should live so long to agonize with my bunions. Bring me a pastrami sandwich. And some Alka-Seltzer. My guts are killing me.” Berg walked across the shoulder and kicked his foot in the sand. “Who knew already there was so much lousy nature in the sticks outside New York? Crummy forests, crummy mountains, crummy sky, likewise look at this ocean, look at this beach, wasted real estate, who needs it? I could die from so much nature.”
Toutant and Gates struggled with the engine for an hour before they agreed to give up. “Think maybe we could float it to New Orleans?” Gates grinned. He unwrapped his head bandage and wiped his hands.
“That old wreck ought not to have even got this far,” Kingstree sadly admitted, as he sat down with the others on the beach. “Man, I tell you this. New Orleans sure is a hard place to get to. I see why Jubal was against it. I been trying thirty years.”
“You’re only three hours away. Don’t give up now. Here, have some more onion rings.” Mingo opened another large sack. “Gollee, Raleigh, it’s not the end of the world. We’ve still got the Cadillac. Right?”
“Right.” Back on the shoulder, they found a tan, sinewy young woman in khaki shorts and a Mickey Mouse T-shirt, taking Polaroid pictures of their truck. Her immense knapsack leaned against a tire. In a thick accent, she told them that she was a painter in exile from her native Kosovo, where she’d spent a year in prison for exhibiting dissident canvases. Now, she was getting ready to paint the meaning of America, as soon as she figured it out by walking across the country.
The young woman took their picture against the background of blue sky and green sea. The five men leaned against the side of the red truck in front of the letters “HIGH-TIME CIRCUS.” Gates in leather. Raleigh in a blue blazer. Mingo in his orange-striped velour sweater. Toutant in his peach-pink suit. And Simon Berg in black homburg, black overcoat, and round black sunglasses.
Mingo asked the painter if she would take another picture so she could send them one to keep for a souvenir. “With the most pleasure,” she replied. Mingo then asked if she would join them for lunch. “I have a big hunger,” she admitted. Mingo then asked her what the meaning of America was. The young painter held up her can of Coca-Cola. “And also freedom,” she added with a grin. “I am learning this. Freedom is here so much, nobody is even noticing how much they are free. I am amazing with it. It is very wonderful.”
“Nothing like it,” nodded Gates, and Kingstree brushed sand from his shoe.
While the travelers quizzed their visitor about her life (it hadn’t been easy), Gates drove the Cadillac out of the truck on the ramp (delighting the painter, who snapped more pictures), and went in search of a garage.
Mingo, checking his guidebook, discovered that only two blocks ahead, overlooking the Gulf, was the pillared plantation “Beauvoir,” where Sarah Anne Ellis Dorsey (best-selling authoress of the romance Athalie: or, a Southern Villeggiatura) had invited Jefferson Davis to come retire (an invitation he’d happily accepted, for “Beauvoir” was considerably more pleasant than the woods where he’d been hiding from Federal troops, and the dank fortress where they’d chained him after they caught him). Mrs. Dorsey had offered her services to the former president as ghost writer of The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, until his poor wife Varina—worn out by the general ups and downs of fortune and by jealousy of the Davis-Dorsey collaboration—packed and left for Memphis.
“She any kin to Tommy Dorsey?” Kingstree asked.
Mingo didn’t think so.
“Then I’ll sit this one out.”
In fact, despite their close ties to Varina’s “opals,” no one would accompany Mingo to see “Beauvoir” except the young painter, who erroneously believed they were going to President Jefferson’s Monticello. “Life, lebberty, and also the pursuit of the happiness,” she reminded the Americans with a farewell wave of her white Pittsburgh Paints cap. “You are the most luckiest pepples of the world.”
Her knapsack, stacked with bed roll, pup tent, cookstove, flashlights, Sony Walkman, plastic umbrella, Baltimore Orioles pennant, and a six-pack of blue toilet paper, stretched high above her head and reached almost to Mingo’s shoulder as the two trotted together up the sidewalk under the moss-hung oaks.
While they waited for Gates to return, Raleigh sat with his friends on the beach and watched the sun slip down into the sea. Simon Berg read the books he’d bought in Montgomery. Let’s Go: South America and Spanish for Beginners. Kingstree played Duke Ellington melodies on his saxophone. And Raleigh Hayes sat under the orange-ribboned sky and practiced what he might say first to his father, testing ironies and accusations: “Oh, hi, Daddy, what a coincidence.” “Don’t think this hasn’t been just a bowl of cherries.” “Where do you want Jimson’s bust? Sorry, but Knoll Pond wouldn’t fit in the trunk.” “The Reverend Hayes, I presume? Jubal Rogers says you can kiss his black ass.” “You owe me $2,997.35, including tax. Gas, $192.40. Hotels, $1883.26. Food…” None of these openings felt sufficiently satisfying. But even worse was the image of standing in Jackson Square and not seeing his father; of discovering that Aunt Victoria hadn’t been able to find him; of discovering that she had vanished as well. Raleigh returned to his calculations: replacement clothes, oil filter, dry cleaning, Flonnie’s radio, donation to the Sisters of Mercy (well, perhaps, as that was a tax deduction, he shouldn’t put it on the bill), ten dollars stolen by Hell’s Angels (well, perhaps his father should absorb Mingo’s loss as well), fifty dollars stolen by Gates to purchase flowers for Roxanne’s niece-in-law, two secondhand fencing foils…
At nightfall, Gates returned with a tow truck. By tenP.M., he had sold the tractor-trailer for six thousand dollars. By midnight, he’d had a luggage rack installed on top of the Cadillac. “Let’s roll,” he said. “Last lap, last tango, la
st picture show, and all that jazz.”
The white car had lost some of the luster of which Jimmy Clay had been so proud. After all, in the past two weeks it had been rolled into a pecan grove that was seared by lightning. It had been stripped by nuns, shoved by Marines through a swamp of cypress stumps, raced by Gates Hayes over rutted fields and residential lawns, banged in and out of a metal truck, and strewn with the debris of Mingo Sheffield’s insatiable snacking. The Cadillac was dented, scratched, dirty, and plastered with religious bumper stickers. And now it had an old trunk, cardboard boxes, and a bass fiddle lashed to its roof; it had suitcases, instrument cases, and souvenirs roped into its trunk. It looked more like the Grapes of Wrath than Jimmy’s “Stars and Stripes on Wheels.”
“Hey, man, don’t knock it. It runs,” said Gates, who sat with Weeper and Toutant in the back seat.
With Mingo beside him, Raleigh drove. He insisted on taking the wheel. He told the others that if there were anything they wanted to do, do it now, because he was not stopping again until he parked in Jackson Square. These last miles of the idiotic marathon, this last task of the whole insane scavenger hunt, he wanted to finish himself. He had run the race, and it was almost over, and he was going to enjoy each highway marker that told him he was drawing nearer and nearer to his goal.
It was a still, cloudless night, the sky extravagant with a million stars, blazing as if all the dead Hayeses were celebrating a Fourth of July Family Reunion, running around heaven with sparklers in both hands.
Shrimp boats had already hurried home, chased by pelicans and gulls. The lights of the offshore oil rigs flickered like stars.
Past Gulfport, past Bay St. Louis, over the bridge above Lake Pontchartrain, Raleigh drove in silence inland along the coast toward where the Mississippi met the sea. He glanced at Sheffield beside him, sleeping with his huge head tilted back, a bubble of saliva on his lips. He glanced in the rearview mirror at the others, asleep too, except for Toutant Kingstree, who looked out his side window and quietly hummed. Simon Berg’s chin bounced gently against his small chest. Gates’s cheek pressed against the window, his long lashes uneasily flickering.
“It’s over,” Raleigh Hayes said to himself. And then he laughed softly and whispered, “I’ll be goddamned.”
The most remarkable thought had struck him. He didn’t feel any of the ways he’d waited two weeks to feel. He didn’t feel triumphant or relieved or righteous. He felt almost sad, almost lonely, almost sorry. What an incredible joke. Here he was with four men, not one of whom he’d originally wanted to bring along, all of whom had caused him endless trouble and worry; none of whom bore the vaguest resemblance to his own “type of person.” And now, when he could already see the lights of the city where all their travels together would end, and their separate lives begin, all he could think was that he was going to miss them.
“Ha, ha,” said Raleigh to the sky of stars. “I’ve gone completely to pieces. Daddy did it. He drove me crazy. You know what I’ve been doing? I’ve been almost, almost…” He laughed. “…having fun.”
Toutant Kingstree leaned forward from the backseat. “You say something, Raleigh?”
Hayes kept on chuckling. “No. No. I’m sorry. I was just talking to my dead mother.”
“Oh. You do that, too?”
Chapter 31
What Passed between Our Hero and His Father IN NEW ORLEANS, THE LAND OF DREAMS, not everyone slept at two in the morning. On Bourbon Street and Royal Street, on Rampart and Toulouse, neon winked behind lace-iron fans as the merchants of dreams for night people peddled their old attractions, wine, women, and all kinds of songs. They peddled inflatable lovers in store windows, and roses in the cobbled streets. Tired waiters swept the evening out of restaurants. Tired strippers walked, invisible in clothes, past the drunks who had hooted and snatched at them an hour earlier.
Near the French Market, a block from Jackson Square, Raleigh Hayes sat alone in the parked Cadillac. Berg and Kingstree had disappeared down the narrow brick streets, Berg with his fiddle, Kingstree with his saxophone, toward the sound of jazz. Gates and Mingo had gone to find a hotel. When they returned, they begged Raleigh to come back with them to the place they’d chosen near Pirates Alley. Mingo’s moon-pie face bobbed in the car window. “It’s pretty old. It’s got inside balconies and fans and banana trees and a patio with a parrot. I bet you’ll like it.”
“I’m staying here awhile. Go on,” Hayes insisted. Finally, Gates gave up. “Specs, you’re one crazy bastard.” He grinned at Mingo. “But I love the guy. He’s just a little embarrassing, you know, to take out in public.”
“I just want a moment to sit here and think. I just want to get some closure on this trip.”
“Some what?” Gates spun his forefinger beside his temple.
“Never mind.”
“He needs to think, he’s always thinking, that’s the thing about Raleigh,” Mingo said, and Gates said, “Right, old Raleigh the Thinker,” and reached through the window to rub his brother’s hair.
Hayes combed his hair back in place as he watched the two stroll away with more suitcases. Then he stared at his hands on the steering wheel. The thumbs looked like his father’s; the palms looked like his mother’s; the gold ring had been put on his finger almost twenty years ago by Aura; the gold cuff links had been his last Christmas present from Holly and Caroline. Turning on the overhead light, he took out his wallet and carefully studied all the photographs he’d kept there so long that the crowded plastic cases were cracked and yellow. His mother cutting irises along the back fence. Aura graduating from nursing school; Aura reading under a beach umbrella at “Peace and Quiet.” Holly’s third- and eleventh-grade school portraits; Caroline’s third- and tenth-grade portraits. (She’d torn up all copies of this year’s pictures, claiming they were “super awesomely gruesome.”) A little black-and-white snapshot of his aunt Victoria in her WAC uniform was stuck to the back of a picture Reba had taken of Raleigh and Victoria at Raleigh’s wedding party. The two were seated at a table in the ballroom of Thermopylae’s Delaware Hotel. Blurred in the background at other tables, other Hayeses were frozen in the act of laughing, shouting, pointing, raising glasses or cigarettes or cake or coffee cups to their mouths. With their arms crossed, Raleigh and his aunt sat looking past the camera at something happening behind it. That something, Raleigh now remembered, was his father and Lovie Clay “entertaining” the guests with a drunken, dancing, burlesqued performance of “Making Whoopee,” “The Girl That I Marry,” and “Indian Love Call.” He remembered that for the last number Lovie wore napkins woven into green braids, and his father had taken off his shirt, painted his chest with lipstick, wrapped his tie around his head, and stuck in it feathered fern leaves from the flower arrangements. It was Victoria and Raleigh’s unexpected response to this folly that the camera had saved from the past. Caught off guard, they were both, in fact, laughing.
Sliding the snapshot out of its plastic case, Hayes held it up to the overhead light to peer at that thin twenty-five-year-old, justmarried man in his white dinner jacket, a rosebud in his lapel. How new and clean and unfinished he looked; his hair close cropped, his face unlined, his neck so straight and slender above the crisp black tie, his eyes so candidly certain that the world was going to make sense for him, because he was never going to make senseless demands on it. Because his requests would be modest and reasonable: a wife he loved, unblemished children, good health, a house, an income to pay for it, leisure to care for it, the authority to serve his community, and their respect for having done so well.
My God, thought Hayes now, what outrageous demands he’d made on Fortune. When at her indiscriminate whim, she could, and did, sweep away houses, love, children, position, health, and life, he’d asked for immunity. And he’d gotten it. Some rare, fragile, lucky—unparalleled lucky—fluke or grace had given him, for no earthly reason, like surprise presents, everything, absolutely everything, he’d thought he earned, and sustained by his own will, and d
eserved, and deserved more. Whereas, in fact, the world, or its creator, had not the slightest obligation to him at all. The world or its creator, thought Raleigh Hayes, was under no injunction to do a thing. It was not obliged to put the much-remarked petals on the lilies, nor keep its famous eye on the sparrow, nor reward Raleigh W. Hayes for his virtue, nor punish sinners for their vice, nor protect the innocent, nor judge the guilty. It created for creation’s sake alone— for no cause but infinitely that one, striping the zebra, spotting the leopard, making the eel glow and the deer leap—and it was not obliged to nourish or even preserve at all any of its creatures, species, planets, or galaxies. Given that this was so, thought Hayes, the truth was, it’s possible, one might say, assuming creation owed him no more debt than it owed the dinosaur, than an artist owed a doodle, then, all things considered, he, Raleigh Hayes, with his wife and children and health and house, had been an extremely lucky man. And he turned off the Cadillac’s overhead light to analyze this hypothesis.
The next thing Raleigh knew, he was jolted awake by a loud honking. He jerked upright and his knees smashed against the steering wheel. By the time he’d figured out that he was in a car, and why, and where, and that he must have fallen asleep because it was now almost nine in the morning, and that it was miraculous he hadn’t been towed or mugged or arrested, another car had passed and honked. Was he parked obstructively? Illegally? Hayes found his wallet and his glasses beside him on the plush red seat. In a while, a third car honked; this one, a Volvo, slowed down beside him, the woman in the passenger seat waving and grinning enthusiastically as she appeared for five seconds in and out of his life. On the rear bumper of her car he saw two stickers: One said, “READ THE BOOK.” One said, strangely enough, “FESTINA LENTE.” Hayes got out, walked to the back of the Cadillac, and stood there scratching at his unshaved cheek. Yes, that had to be it. The “HONK IF YOU ♥JESUS” sticker from Charleston. Well, at least it was just slap-happy Christians, and not the police.
Handling Sin Page 60
