by Peggy Webb
“I have work to do, McKenzie.”
She sighed then walked out the door. David stared at the empty chair where his sister had sat.
Once when he’d vacationed in Maine, many years ago, he’d watched a flock of Canadian geese wing their way south for the winter, heading for warmer lakes and balmier weather. Suddenly one of them, a straggler barely keeping up at the end of the vee formation, had turned and headed in the opposite direction, north where the lakes would soon freeze and snow would blot out every speck of green on the horizon. He’d wondered what made such a magnificent bird choose isolation and possible death.
Now he knows.
David won’t be eating chicken soup in McKenzie’s sunny apartment overlooking the Mississippi River. He won’t be seen at tailgate parties and county fairs making the acquaintance of thirty-year-olds.
He’s made his choice.
o0o
McKenzie drove home crying. The thing that broke her heart was that David had meant every word he’d said.
Her brother, the man who had been her hero all her life, had shut himself off from life for so long that he didn’t realize he still had a heart and a soul.
Sometimes when she thought about him late at night with nobody to keep her company except her animals, she cried so hard her eyes swelled up. When David was eighteen and a senior at Johnson Country High School, he’d been voted Most Handsome, which didn’t begin to describe his beauty. Before the accident his features had been so perfect, so astonishing that people used to stop dead still in the street to stare as he walked by.
McKenzie would have grown up with a complex if she’d been the jealous type. As it turned out, she’d been happy simply being in her brother’s shadow. She still was.
Only now the shadow he cast was dark. And all because of the dreadful isolation he’d endured over the years.
The psychiatrist he’d seen during the long days of recuperation after he’d returned from Iraq had told him it was survivor’s guilt that held him back from finishing his reconstructive plastic surgery, guilt that he’d come home when thousands hadn’t. David embraced the theory, but McKenzie thought it was only halfway right.
She believed the answer lay deep in David’s subconscious mind where late at night hand grenades exploded and guns barked. He used to shatter the night screaming, “I can’t save them,” while she raced down the hall to shake him awake and end his night terrors.
But waking never ended them: David carried the scars deep inside where nobody could see. His face was his scarlet letter, an outward symbol that matched his tortured soul.
As she drove home for her own lonely dreams of Paul and what might have been, she thought of her brother sitting alone in the dark. She knew what he would be doing: staying awake as long as possible trying to escape his dreams of the past. But there was no escape for her brother because he still had his memories.
Chapter Six
After McKenzie left, David sought the blessed oblivion of books. He enjoyed fiction and nonfiction, alike, but it was poetry that spoke to his soul. Once he’d been a dreamer. Having seen a wild hawk descend to the valley and eat from his sister’s hand, he’d believed that all things are possible. He believed in the greening of leaves and the inevitability of mountain flowers. He believed in rocks where blood faded to rust still sang of love. He believed in the legend of the dogwood and the heart-pull of mountains that held the colors of a million sunrises.
Back then, he’d still believed in love.
He skipped over the love poems and selected a slim volume by Melville. With the reading lamp providing the only light in his office, he let the book open where it would.
“All wars are boyish, and are fought by boys,” Melville had written in “March into Virginia.”
Suddenly David’s head was filled with screams…
“Get it off! Get it off!”
There was the sound of rubber-soled shoes sliding across tile, then a familiar voice. His night nurse.
“Get what off, David?”
“The sand. I’m buried in sand.”
“Shh. There’s no sand, David.” Her hand was cool on his brow. “You’re home now, baby. Just rest.”
Home. A room with drab green walls and a row of beds filled with the wounded and the dying. Windows so high you couldn’t see out.
Not that he wanted to see. He didn’t even know why he wanted to live.
The last thing he remembered was the explosion of the hand grenade, the sharp searing pain that enveloped his left side, the blood that bloomed out of his head and flowed red like the sea.
“God came down that day and Moses parted the waters,” the preacher was shouting.
No, it wasn’t the preacher. It was Moose, yelling at David to hold on. It wasn’t God who was coming, but the medi-vac chopper.
Or maybe it was God, after all.
David passed a hand over his face, one side perfect, the other a map ridged with scars and sunken with potholes, courtesy of the early Iraqi war. He tried to pull himself out of the past, but the floodgates were down and memories kept coming.
The day they took the bandages off and David first saw himself in the mirror, he vomited. That was not a man looking back at him but a monster, a ghoulish apparition with one eyebrow, half a nose, very little cheek on one side and a tattered ear.
“Plastic surgery can do miracles,” the doctor said.
David hadn’t believed in miracles then, and he didn’t believe in them now. Not for himself.
He went straight to window, pushed back the curtains and trained his telescope into the park, his lifeline. Elizabeth Jennings had arrived. Smiling and fresh faced and so very young.
David suddenly felt as old as Thomas Jennings who was engaged with his grandson in a game of I spy. Elizabeth squatted beside the boy to take his side.
“The bird, Nicky. Look, it’s a robin redbreast.”
“I spy a robin bedrest,” the boy shouted, and the old man laughed so hard tears rolled down his cheeks.
“You got me,” he said. “I don’t see him.”
“Did I win, Papa?”
“You won.”
“I won! I won!”
Nicky grabbed his mother’s hands, and the two of them did a victory dance.
“Hey, you can’t cut a rusty without me.”
Thomas Jennings grabbed their hands and pranced around with more energy than some men half his age. Suddenly Nicky plopped on the grass.
“What’s the matter, darling?”
“I’m tired. Me and Papa runned all over the park chasin’ Houdini.”
“Who’s Houdini? Papa?”
“That hoodlum who gave me the check.”
McKenzie would pop her buttons laughing. David even found himself smiling.
“If you don’t have a funny bone to tickle, you might as well be dead,” his mother had always said, and that’s the only thing David had brought back intact from Iraq. That and his brain. The package that held it together would send the likes of Elizabeth Jennings screaming for the woods. Fortunately, corporations didn’t care.
Years ago holed up in dark cubicles David had applied his brain--his genius, some said--to the burgeoning industry of computer technology. Good fortune landed him at Apple in California where he rapidly advanced to become part of Steve Job’s new management team that put Apple back on track. But the pull of the land his parents had loved called him home, so David returned to launch his own technology driven empire. And always, the lights around him were kept low.
Beneath his window Elizabeth gathered Nicky’s fire truck, the old man folded his tattered paper sack and the little trio left the park. David imagined them walking home holding hands, skipping when Nicky took a notion, occasionally slowing down so Thomas could catch his breath. He pictured Elizabeth in her run-down house telling the day’s events to her little family, glamorizing the customers who came into the bakery. Sometimes she did that in the park.
She’d made Mrs. Simpson Simmons, who
always wanted pink icing on her cupcakes, sound like a cross between Mother Goose and Glenda the good fairy.
McKenzie’s version was quite different. Dressed in her teenaged boy disguise, she’d spied on Elizabeth at the bakery.
“That mean old witch, Mrs. Simpson Simmons, walked out without paying for her cupcakes because the icing was the wrong color of pink. Elizabeth had to take the money out of her own purse. I’d have followed the old biddy and whopped her upside the head with my umbrella, but Elizabeth just smiled and told her to have a nice day.”
Then McKenzie had laughed. “After the old bag left, Elizabeth did flip her the finger, though. I’ll bet she’d be mortified if she knew I was looking.”
It was stories like that that sometimes made David wonder if he’d chosen the right path. He could have followed through with endless plastic surgeries. He could have looked decent enough to be seen in daylight without causing old women to faint and little children to run screaming for their mommas.
He could have married. Maybe. And had children. Definitely.
That was the thing he missed most about his life, the delightful upheaval of children, the little boy pranks a son would pull and the charming manipulations of little girls.
He’d seen McKenzie at the age of two charm their father into letting her wear yellow rubber boots to church on a perfectly sunny day. Most mothers would have had a conniption fit because the boots didn’t match the pink frilly dress she also wore, but Della Jean Lassiter was a rare breed, a woman who cherished independence and abhorred convention, even in her children.
The day she had died, she’d said to David, “Don’t you ever let anybody clip your sister’s wings.”
He hadn’t, either. One of the few times since Iraq that he’d gone out in broad daylight was to put the fear of the devil into her fiancé pre-Paul Matthews.
McKenzie had come to David with her cheek reddened and her right eye swollen.
“My fiancé slapped me, David. I was talking to some old friends at a party and he accused me of flirting.”
She wasn’t crying when she told David the story: she was mad.
“I threw his ring in the swimming pool, and I’d have beat him up if I weren’t such a lady.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll do it for you.”
“I knew you would.”
David had kept his word.
The thing he remembered most about that day was the boggle-eyed stares.
Now, David closed his mind to the past and his blinds against the outside world. Ordinarily he would have scanned the park eavesdropping on other people’s lives, looking for another person in need of a million dollar check.
Today he called his bookkeeper on the intercom.
“Has Elizabeth Jennings cashed her check?”
“No, she hasn’t.”
George Clark didn’t have to consult any records to find out. From the time David authorized the check, George tracked its progress through the banking system with the diligence of a blood hound.
Why were Elizabeth and Thomas Jennings looking for the donor of the check, and why hadn’t she cashed it?
David skimmed her file again, but apparently large chunks of her past were missing. Not the facts but the motives. Why she had left the Delta, why she hadn’t married Nicky’s father, why she lived in poverty when the Belliveaus had more money than God.
“Will you need me any more this evening, David?”
“No. Go on home, George. Spend some time with your wife for a change.”
David knew he had one only because McKenzie had relayed the information to him. He preferred to watch marriage from afar. In fact, he preferred to watch life from afar.
Except occasionally. Except on evenings like this when he felt a restlessness that had no name.
He watched at his window until dark, then took his private elevator down to the private parking garage. With his hat brim pulled low and the collar of his trench coat pulled high, never mind the heat, he climbed into an old Volvo that gave him the anonymity he desired then drove out of the garage and into the city.
As he passed the Peabody he remembered why he so seldom went out into the city, even after dark when he was relatively safe from the curiosity of strangers. He used to have drinks there with his fiancée and listen to a great pianist, or a very good combo playing the romantic old ballads.
That had been years ago, of course, back when he’d thought life would go on forever as it was. Food made with real cream and real butter and nobody tried to scare you about cholesterol, neighbors speaking to neighbors, and parents sending their children to school without worry over bullies and maniacs.
Seeing the Peabody was a poignant reminder of loss, not merely his personal loss but a collective loss. After Viet Nam innocence had fled in shame. Iraq and Afghanistan only added to the loss. Never again would there be a generation who viewed the world as David once had.
He eased past the horse-drawn carriages parked in front of the grand old hotel and tried not to think about the couples climbing in under the guise of touring the historic downtown district when all they really wanted was some heavy petting under the blanket the driver would throw over their laps to ward off the chill that rose up at night from the Mississippi River.
Something inside his body jolted, reminding him he was still a man, and he turned his head away. Across the street was the alley where the Rendezvous cooked up the best barbecued ribs this side of Heaven. David rolled his window down so he could inhale the aroma.
Inside the restaurant there would barely be room to stand while you waited for a table, and by the time you were seated you’d be so hungry from the delicious smell of Southern cooking at its best that you’d order twice as much as you wanted, then leave wishing somebody would come along and roll you out in a wheelbarrow. At least, that was the way McKenzie told the Rendezvous dining experience.
David wouldn’t know. He ordered his Rendezvous ribs take-out style, then called to thank the manager for a sumptuous meal. He’d have thanked God, too, but he’d lost the hotline number in Iraq.
Around the corner at the Orpheum “Wicked” was playing, and people were queued up outside trying to look natural and important at the same time while they cut their eyes around the crowd to be sure somebody else didn’t outshine them for the big evening at the theater.
More of McKenzie’s commentary. She was a born raconteur, and she was the main reason David could hole up in the Lassiter Building as if it were a separate planet instead of plopped right smack in the middle of downtown Memphis.
Across from the Orpheum was a renovated Beale Street that no matter how hard it tried would never be able to recapture its heyday when you could walk right off the street and see the likes of Jerry Lee Lewis kicking his piano stool aside and setting the keyboard on fire. Almost literally. Jerry Lee, who might have been King if he hadn’t married his thirteen-year-old cousin and if that upstart Elvis Presley hadn’t moved to Memphis with the guitar his mother had bought in his Tupelo, Mississippi birthplace. Beale Street’s history was so well documented, David felt as if he had witnessed the icons, himself.
He turned down Riverside where lights along the Mississippi illuminated the riverboat loading passengers for a trip down to New Orleans.
Everywhere people were going about their business, living ordinary lives. It had taken David years to adjust to the fact that he would never be one of those people.
When his fiancée had first seen him in the hospital, she’d screamed. And that was after David’s second round of plastic surgery.
David drove along Riverside, remembering…
“What have you done to your face?” That was the first thing Kelly Lynn had said to him. Not hello. Not how are you. Not even, I’m glad you’re alive.
He’d thought the patched- up ear looked fine. And the rebuilt nose. With Kelly Lynn cringing before him, he wanted nothing more than to crawl back into a fox hole and have the grenade finish the job.
“They’re not finish
ed yet, Kelly Lynn. The doctor says it will turn out okay.”
“I thought you could go to Betty Jane’s cotillion with me.”
“I won’t be dancing for a while. I don’t have my left leg, yet.”
He stuck his stump out from under the cover just for sheer spite.
“David, stop it! I can’t bear to look.”
David finally saw a living, breathing miracle--Kelly Lynn breaking track records as she sprinted from the room with her eyes shut and her arms outstretched. As if she were blind. As if she were the one who’d been blown to bits in Iraq.
“You forgot your flowers.”
David picked up the red roses she’d brought and flung them at the door. Glass shattered everywhere, water cascaded across the floor, red petals scattered like blood. Nurse Jenny Landsdell came running, her rubber soled shoes beheading the last of the roses that lay on the floor gasping for breath.
“I hate roses,” David said.
“So do I. Petunias are less fuss. Someday I’m going to raise them.”
She patted David’s hand. “Accidents happen, baby,” she said, and then she’d cleaned up the mess herself lest somebody else made a scene.
And that was why, years later, David had chosen her as the first recipient of a million dollars. That, and the cool hands she’d laid on his head when he first came to the hospital.
When David had finally located her, Jenny had been living in a retirement home in middle Tennessee. Pleasant Manor, inappropriately named according to McKenzie who said the only thing pleasant about it was leaving. Bereft of family and sidelined from her profession by a series of strokes, she passed her days watching a black and white TV with reception so bad it looked as if it were snowing in every old movie she viewed.
“To repay your kindness,” McKenzie told her when she handed Jenny the check.
“What am I going to do with all that money?”
“There’s a little house on the Cumberland River you might like to buy. It comes complete with a gardener and a housekeeper. The soil is just right for raising petunias, I’m told.”
The last he’d heard, Jenny was still living in her house on the Cumberland, and every summer when the petunias were in full bloom she invited the neighbors over for a garden party.
