Safe from the Neighbors

by Steve Yarbrough

  My cousin, however, had one thing I didn’t, and it was a source of pride for him, perhaps because it held so much interest for me. A deep drainage ditch—really, it was more like a canal—separated his house from the one behind it, and at certain times that waterway turned into a veritable river, with a swift current upon which a cheap plastic boat could do amazing things. We’d throw one in and then race each other through his backyard and his neighbor’s and out onto the little bridge that spanned the canal at the next street, usually just in time to grab the boat before it disappeared beneath our feet.

  The visit I’m thinking of now must have roughly coincided with two things—a big Mississippi rain and the 1964 Tokyo Olympics—because the canal was a raging torrent and both my cousin and I had recently become infatuated with a British athlete named Lynn “the Leap” Davies, who’d won the long jump by springing almost twenty-six and a half feet.

  Out there hopping around in the soggy yard, each of us made increasingly ridiculous claims about our own jumping prowess, my cousin boasting that the previous spring he’d jumped so far that the coach at Wingfield High School asked his grade-school principal if he could borrow him for his own team, but the principal said no, it was against the rules. I, in turn, replied that I’d once jumped over the “main road” that ran near our house—adding, for good measure, that halfway across I noticed a truck coming towards me, so I gave a little extra kick and soared right over the hood.

  At this moment, my cousin got a mean gleam in his eye. “How wide you reckon that main road is?”

  I modestly said twenty-five feet, careful not to upstage our new hero Lynn the Leap.

  He grinned and pointed at the drainage ditch, where a rusty tin can was just bobbing by, headed for the Pearl River and the Gulf of Mexico. “That ditch there,” he said, “ain’t but twenty feet across, so I don’t imagine you’d have much trouble clearing it.”

  At this age, I was not unresourceful. I’d even say I was a good bit more resourceful than I am now. I gestured dismissively. “That thing’s not worth jumping,” I said.

  “You can’t do it, so you’re scared to. It’s ten feet deep and there’s snakes in it. Big ’uns.”

  While he sneered at me, I studied the ditch. It didn’t look twenty feet across, and I didn’t believe it had snakes in it, either, because I’d never seen any. Furthermore, I knew perfectly well it wasn’t that deep, because it had been empty the last time I was here, and we’d climbed down and poked around in the refuse that littered the bottom, and I felt sure that my head rose several inches above the bank.

  The courage possessed by certain children is a curious thing. Fearful one moment and foolhardy the next, they lack the ability to logically assess risks. I backed up all the way to the wall of my cousin’s house. Then, while he watched with a fascination he couldn’t quite disguise, I took off towards the canal.

  Once his feet left the ground, Lynn Davies practiced the hitch-kick technique, making it look as if he were running in the air, so I did the same thing. I was still hitching and kicking when I splashed into the water.

  My head went under, and I got a noseful of filth. My ears filled up, too, and I heard chugging sounds and felt something cold and slimy against the back of my neck. Furiously, I flailed to the surface, then stroked towards the opposite bank. The current dragged at my legs, threatening to pull me back in, but I managed to get a handhold and then a toehold. While my cousin laughed his ass off and hollered, “Luke the Leap! Luke the Leap!” I climbed out into the neighbors’ backyard.

  Later that day, after I’d been hauled into the house, whipped and bathed and wrapped in blankets and warned not to even think of going outside, I heard my cousin rapping at the windowsill. I walked over and stuck my head out.

  “Hey,” he said, “watch this.” He backed up against the house, just as I had, took a running start and, when he launched himself into the air, gave a rebel yell.

  That he didn’t even make it as far as I had gave me enormous satisfaction. He dropped like a rock into the middle of the canal and, because he couldn’t swim at all, was carried swiftly towards the bridge, flapping and howling. The only thing that saved him from being either decapitated or drowned was an older boy who happened to be crossing the bridge just then. He reached down and grabbed my cousin’s arm and held on until a couple adults heard their screams and ran over to fish him out.

  I remember thinking that a person would have to be really stupid to make such a catastrophic mistake, right after watching somebody else do it.

  • • •

  Each fall, on a weekend in early November, there’s an event called the Mid-South Festival of Poetry and Poetics. My impression is that it’s not that big a deal—it’s staged by third- or fourth-tier schools like Delta State, Arkansas–Pine Bluff and UT-Martin—and the writers who speak and judge the student competitions are rarely people I’ve ever heard of. But Jennifer always goes, along with a couple other teachers and three or four students whose poems and essays have been selected as finalists.

  This year it was being held in Clarksville, Tennessee, and she left before dawn on Friday morning, picking up a colleague en route. I’d alerted Maggie ahead of time, and we agreed that we’d have dinner that night at Mann’s over in Greenville. My intention—assuming that a half-formed impulse qualifies—was to buy her a really great meal with plenty to drink and then, on the drive back to Loring, gently tell her that we needed to break things off. Where I’d find the words to say what only the most frightened part of me really wanted to say anyway—well, I told myself I’d deal with that later.

  Mann’s Eatin’ Place, if you’ve never heard of it, is something of an institution. In the shadow of the levee, in a clapboard shack with a sagging front porch, it serves the best steaks you can get anywhere. Bill Clinton frequently dined there when he was governor of Arkansas, driving one hundred fifty miles for the pleasure, and it’s not uncommon to see famous actors or musicians, either, though they’re usually ushered into the back room, where not even the reeking john can spoil the taste of that meat.

  Jennifer and I didn’t go there very often for one simple reason: you can’t get a steak there for less than fifty dollars, and our budget could seldom stand the stress.

  Greenville used to be the nicest town in the Delta, but in the last twenty years it’s gone to seed, the older members of the moneyed class dying off, their kids leaving for Atlanta, Nashville, Raleigh or the Redneck Riviera. Most of the stores that once lined Washington Avenue are now closed, and when you turn off onto the side streets, you’ll find yourself in a place where life is coming apart at the seams, people sitting on overturned washtubs around fires made of scavenged packing crates, a profoundly aimless look in their eyes.

  “Jesus,” Maggie said as we parked across the street in a dingy lot filled with pickups and cars, including two Lincolns and a Caddy, “I don’t remember the area looking anything like this.”

  “You’ve been here before? You didn’t tell me that.”

  “My dad brought us here on my eighth birthday.”

  “How can you be sure it was Mann’s? That was what—forty-five years ago?”

  “I’ve seen photographic evidence. My brother’s got a picture of me staring at my steak, and on the back of it my father wrote Mann’s Eatin’ Place, Greenville, Mississippi, May 2nd, 1961. That’s all the proof I need.”

  Crossing the street she clasped my forearm, which worried me a little since it was Friday night and by no means impossible that somebody from Loring might be there. When the elderly black watchman who’s always sitting on the porch hopped up to open the door, I managed to extricate myself by pulling out my wallet and handing him a couple bucks.

  Inside, the place was packed. The front room contains an enormous oven, before which the current proprietor—Short Mann, as they call him, is easily six feet tall, though a good six inches shorter than his father—stood with a pair of tongs, every now and then pulling out a sizzling slab of beef and throwing i
t on a platter. A couple of women, both black, labored over a silver bowl that must have been three feet wide, mixing up the watery salad nobody likes but everybody tolerates, and three or four waitresses hustled in and out of the hallways that lead out of the main room. Fortunately, I didn’t see anybody I knew. Walking across the street, I’d started feeling spooked.

  “Somebody’ll be with y’all in just a minute,” Short Mann assured us.

  Maggie leaned against me, squeezing my hand, her hair brushing my shoulder. “This reminds me of a place in Durham. But there it’s not steaks. It’s that tangy, vinegar-based barbecue.”

  A waitress finally led us down the hallway to the right, into the room where celebrities sometimes sit. It looked like a family reunion was in progress back there, four long tables lined up together to accommodate five or six guys and their wives and ten or twelve kids with the pug-nosed features of a pit bull. We took a small table in the corner, underneath a photo of George Jones, standing on the front porch with his arm around Short Mann. He’d signed the photo with a Sharpie and beneath his name scrawled Dam fine steak.

  After we were seated, our waitress, a washed-out blonde who’d been working there as long as I could remember, remained standing by our table with a pad in her hand. They don’t have menus, since if you know enough to go there, you know what they serve. “The thirty-two-ounce T-bone,” I said.

  Maggie looked at me as if I’d lost my mind. “Are you crazy?”

  I laughed. “It’s the smallest one they have.”

  “We got carryout boxes,” the waitress said.

  “I’m afraid we’ll need one,” Maggie told her. “Unless, of course, his appetite’s a lot bigger than mine.”

  Secreted away in the back room with an extended family that had hill country written all over them, I recovered my nerves. I was out on the town with my girl—for the last time, I reminded myself—so we might as well have fun. “My appetite,” I said, “will not let us down. We’ll take a couple of those liquid salads, the home fries and two Heinekens.”

  “How y’all want your steak?”

  “Medium-rare okay?” I asked Maggie.

  “Medium-rare’s perfect.”

  “The beers’ll be right up,” our waitress said. Her gaze lingered on me a little too long, and I realized that like a lot of people who serve others and hope like hell for a decent tip, she probably had a good eye for faces. “Steak’ll take a while,” she said, “but looks like y’all’s in good company.” She stuck the pencil behind her ear and hurried off towards the kitchen.

  Maggie leaned closer and said, “She knows.”

  “Knows what?”

  “What I’m not.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Previous experience. But I intend to hold my spot.”

  I knew that Jennifer had left her a message after the dinner at our place, suggesting they get together, but Maggie had neither replied nor written back to thank her for the recipe. When Jennifer mentioned it, I told her that Maggie, who after all had never taught school before, was probably just overwhelmed by all the changes in her life. A couple of times I’d started to raise the issue with Maggie, though I was reluctant to bring up anything that had to do with that particular evening. The image of her sitting there in her car with a cigarette clamped between her teeth still disturbed me, so for the most part I tried not to think about it.

  The waitress reappeared with two sweaty bottles of Heine -ken. “You look to me like you’d probably appreciate a glass, wouldn’t you?” she asked Maggie. Without waiting for a reply, she set down two plastic cups and took off again for the kitchen.

  Maggie eyed them. “That’s a glass?”

  “It’s what passes for one here.”

  “Well, I don’t care. I like where I am.” Again she squeezed my hand. “And I love who I’m here with.”

  I used to say “I love you” all the time. For the first few years of our marriage, I said it to Jennifer so often that she claimed I’d divested it of all meaning, like the Pledge of Allegiance. I said it to our daughters, too, and while Candace would always say it back, Trish had only done so once as far as I could recall, and that was the night the kid from Indianola got her shitfaced and left her in the cotton field. I told her I loved her when I found her out there on the turnrow, sobbing and smelling of vomit, and she said she loved me, too—though the next morning, when I reminded her of it, she shook her head. “Remember one thing, Daddy. I was really drunk.”

  That night at Mann’s I said, “I love being here with you, too.” Which isn’t really the same thing.

  We finished our beers fast, so I caught our waitress’s eye and signaled for two more. These she stood alongside the others. At Mann’s they don’t remove your empties, just leave them on the table as if to provide you with proof, should you need it, that you’re having a great time. I poured Maggie’s cup full, then took a swig from my bottle.

  “I wonder if this is the room we ate in back then,” she said, glancing around at the photos hanging on the wall. “In that picture my brother has, you can’t see much besides me and my steak.”

  “It easily could’ve been. I doubt this place has changed much since the day it opened.”

  “Did you come here often when you were a kid?”

  “I didn’t eat here until I was a senior in high school.”

  “Really?”

  “My family couldn’t afford it,” I said. “That first time, Ellis and his wife brought me here to celebrate after Ole Miss gave me a scholarship.”

  “You’re really close to him, aren’t you?”

  “A lot closer than I’ve ever been to my own father. Back when it mattered, Ellis was on the right side, and my dad wasn’t. That led to a fair amount of unhappiness between us.”

  “Because of the racial issue?”

  After what Ellis had told me about that evening back in 1962, I’d had a hard time facing my dad, because it was difficult to avoid the obvious conclusion: he’d talked Arlan Calloway into going to Oxford to keep a black student from enrolling at Ole Miss—looking out for my interests, as he’d put it—and then Arlan went back home, discovered something had happened in his absence that he didn’t like and killed his wife. Whether my father saw it like this, I didn’t know—only that when I’d said the name Calloway a couple months ago, he looked as if it was the last thing in the world he wanted to hear. “Yeah,” I told Maggie, “because of the racial issue.”

  She took a sip of beer. “It sometimes seems that’s all anyone here really cares about.”

  “In Mississippi, especially the Delta, it’s how you tell the good folks from the bad ones.”

  “So you consider your father a bad man?”

  I didn’t want to pursue that line of discussion because, for one thing, I had no idea if she knew her dad had gone to Oxford with my father that night—and I certainly wasn’t going to ask. “No,” I said, “but when the chips were down, he played the wrong hand.”

  “Aren’t the stakes a lot higher now, with your mother’s illness? How many men would do what you tell me he’s doing? Most people these days would just throw up their hands and cart her off to … well, whatever you want to call one of those places. Isn’t that what you’d do? If it were your wife?”

  The dunce cap, so long an object of ridicule, was originally designed by the thirteenth-century logician John Duns Scotus, who believed its conical shape would funnel wisdom into the gray matter of anybody who wore it. I must’ve had it on that night, even though the folks having their reunion looked over a few times and never cracked up laughing. I just sat there pondering what I’d do if Jennifer ever ended up like my mother. “I guess it would depend on factors beyond my control,” I finally said, “like whether I could still move around and handle taking care of somebody. But honestly, what’s the point in what-iffing? I’m not in that situation. If I ever find myself in it, then we’ll see what I’d do.”

  “I guess so,” she said. “Well, let’s hope that day
never comes.” She raised her plastic cup. “To Jennifer’s health,” she proposed, turning it up and taking a swallow.

  Our steak spilled off both sides of the platter and had to be at least two inches thick. Short Mann had made surgical incisions at various points, making it easier to tear the meat away from the bone.

  After ordering more beer, I pulled loose a chunk of porterhouse that could’ve been a meal in itself and served it on Maggie’s plate along with a mound of home fries. Then I took a piece for myself, still leaving more than half of the steak on that big white platter.

  We didn’t talk much while eating, just savored the meat. Sometimes it’s good to be reminded just how wonderful life’s finest moments can be, and whenever I consider the best times I’ve known, I always go back to that night at Mann’s with Maggie. I was eating a meal I couldn’t afford with a woman I couldn’t afford, either, with all her attention focused on me, and nothing ever seemed better. My notion to tell her our affair was over had dissipated, like a squall line that blows itself out. I would do it, I promised myself. Just not now.

  The party next to us broke up about the time we finished eating. As they were leaving, I asked the waitress to bring us a carry out box, and we stuffed a huge chunk of steak inside. “I’ll let you have this,” Maggie said, “since you’re on your own for a while.” I started to protest—I couldn’t risk Jennifer finding that box in the trash can with mann’s eatin’ place written on the lid in bright red letters—but she insisted, so I tucked it under my arm.

  In the car, I gestured at the dashboard clock. “It’s not even nine yet. Any ideas?” I assumed we’d go over to her place and crawl into bed, as we had so many times in the last couple of months.

  Instead, she said, “Let’s get a bottle of champagne and ride around.”

  So I drove back to the highway and, at a liquor store on the outskirts of town, bought not one but two bottles of Freixenet and asked the clerk for a couple paper cups. I popped the first cork in the parking lot, stood the cups on the hood and poured them full.