American Pop

by Snowden Wright

  “And how do you feel about the income and ad valorem tax?”

  They were progressive, equitable tax structures. “I hate them,” said Monty.

  While Four said, “Do you think Paul would agree?” Montgomery watched the other players wander around the parlor, their bodies leaving person-shaped tunnels in the cigar smoke, like ants digging through sand. Should he tell the truth? Monty figured that was the only way to respect Paul.

  “There’s no chance in hell he would agree.”

  Four grinned the same way he had earlier at the poker table. “Smartest thing you’ve said all night. Paul Johnson, ‘Champion of the Runt Pig People,’” he told Monty, incredulity adding a carnival barker’s bombast to his voice. “You and I both know our people are not the kind to own runt pigs. Question is, time comes, can you convince Paul to agree?”

  “And that’s why you need someone with a pair.”

  “And that’s why I need someone with a pair.”

  So then this was politics. Promise to betray your friend so that you’ll have the opportunity to betray your friend. Of course Monty knew what Paul would say. He’d say these people were not part of an aristocracy but a slavocracy. He’d say landowners in this region used phrases like fiscal responsibility, economic modernization, and corporate expansion when what they really meant was racial subjugation. He’d say these people were trying to reestablish their cotton kingdom. What Paul would never say, though Monty would, was that promises only have meaning when they’re given it. “Four, you have my word,” Monty said, his gut pitching with the lie.

  “You’re truly a gentleman and scholar.” Four clinked glasses with Monty. “I don’t know about you, but I could use some sustenance. Delia! Bring that tray over here.”

  From across the room, carrying a tray of ice studded with plump oysters on the half shell, walked the light-skinned girl. “Lemon?” asked Delia.

  “Oh, come now, sugar,” Four said. “You know a proper oyster needs a lemon squeezed over it. That’s the secret ingredient. Have at.”

  Delia did as she was told, rills of juice tracing the valleys between veins in her wrist, the occasional seed wedging itself among chips of ice. “There’s a good girl,” said Four. “Guests first, Mr. Forster.” Monty reached for an oyster, aiming for a small one because of the fracas that had recently begun in his stomach, but Four stopped him. “I said ‘guests,’ Mr. Forster. As my guest you should be treated as such. Delia, feed Mr. Forster.”

  A night that so far had been a good example of odd behavior became an even better one when Delia, acquiescing to the order with a look of annoyance, lifted an oyster from the tray, sighed through her nose, pressed her lips together, and held the oyster up to Monty’s mouth. Blank-faced with alarm, Monty shifted his gaze from the oyster to Four, who, consequently, opened his mouth as one would in an effort to get a baby to eat.

  “Think I can handle that myself,” Monty said as he took the oyster from Delia. He sucked it into his mouth and replaced the shell on the tray. “But thank you nonetheless.”

  After glaring at Four one more time, Delia nodded at Monty, turned away with such a smooth pivot she could have been standing on a lazy Susan, and walked through the room, stopping occasionally to offer the tray to the other guests. Four giggled to himself while he watched her work.

  “You two have an unusual rapport,” Monty said.

  “We’ve known each other a long time. And she is my sister, after all.”

  In the pursuant silence, Monty had no idea what to say or think, other than to think he had no idea what to say or think. Four, still watching his apparent sister across the room, glanced at Monty and, in his almost English-sounding southern accent, said, “Father was known for committing depredations with the help.”

  Montgomery supposed that gave new, loathsome meaning to “perquisites.” He’d have been tempted to say something to that effect if Four had not announced to the room, “Gentlemen, are y’all ready to begin again?” in response to which everyone started to lumber toward the poker table.

  Grabbing Monty’s shoulder, Four leaned into him and whispered, “One more thing. Call me a fool again in front of my friends and I’ll remove your kidneys via your esophagus with a pair of fire tongs I special-ordered from a blacksmith in Liverpool.” He kept his arm wrapped around Monty’s shoulder and walked him back to the table like a prom date who’d had five too many and was liable to fall out.

  “Who’s on the button?” Four asked.

  Peter Anselm said, “The left-in-it.”

  Over the next two hours, the hillocks of chips in front of each player rising and falling like time-lapsed photographs of soil erosion, Monty, who in college never had to write home for extra cash because he won more than enough in the basement of his eating club, kept his stack of chips level. He tried to distract from the threat he had just received as well as the pain in his stomach by listening to the other men talk. Practitioners of the sporting lie as much as the sporting life, southerners are only as good as their ability to tell a story, and the players that night, Monty learned, were excellent southerners. Patrick Doohickey, recalling an event from when he was thirteen, described how his uncle hired a remarkably affordable lady of the night to make his favorite nephew a man, only for said nephew to discover the lady’s affordability was due to an equally remarkable case of dysentery. “My sheets. Ruined.” Theodore Wimberley told a story about his youngest daughter, who, the first time they made breakfast together, said, “The pancakes are learning!” in reference to the fact each one cooked better than the last. All throughout the conversation, most of the hands were won by either John Dollard or Hernando Money—fitting names, Monty thought—to the obvious annoyance of Four.

  “Did I tell you, Mr. Forster, I knew your wife at the University?”

  Monty had not been expecting to hear mention of Sarah. “No, I was not aware,” he said to Four.

  “We even went on a few dates.”

  “That so.”

  “Yes, it’s true.”

  “Small world.”

  “We had fun. She was good.”

  In the middle of dealing a round, Hugh Dair froze, his hand hovering over the table with a card clutched in it, and two chairs down from him, a nugget of ash fell from Bart Peterson’s cigar, crumbling unnoticed on the felt. If everyone else hadn’t been so noticeably stunned, Monty might not have registered what Four had just said about Sarah. This was a silence full of alarm. “Come again?” Monty asked.

  “She was a good person, your wife. Always doing charitable deeds.”

  Hugh Dair dealt the rest of the round. Bart Peterson brushed at his spilt ash. During their courtship, a process that began when Sarah was a senior psychology major at the W attending a Junior Auxiliary ball on her mother’s orders, Monty appreciated his future wife for what she was not. She was not charming. She was not bright. She was not witty. Put in a different way, she was not Nicholas. On their wedding day, reciting vows that were so in name only, Montgomery stared at his bride and recalled a quip from her antithesis. “‘I just want you to be happy,’ chaps say when they’re trying to convince a lover not to end it,” Nicholas had said, “but they really mean, ‘I’m the one person on the bloody earth who can make you happy.’” As Monty lifted his bride’s veil, he understood he’d long ago lost his “one person on the bloody earth.”

  For that reason Four’s words about Sarah didn’t upset Monty. What upset him was how he could ever hope to control, or rather, not be controlled by, someone so small, petty, and cheap. The sound of the answer was the sound of chips tinkling across felt.

  Hit the man’s pocketbook.

  “Believe I’m like to pass out if I don’t get some shut-eye,” Peter Anselm said while standing from the table and collecting what remained from his losses. “I’ll be in the guest room with those creepy dolls. Y’all give a holler when it’s time for eggs and ale.”

  Each of the cards dealt to Monty calmed his upset stomach. What better way to keep t
abs on Four than to keep tabs on Four’s tabs! Planters throughout the Delta, it was a commonly known if not fully comprehensible fact, took pride in being in debt. The fools considered it a status symbol. Therefore, Monty figured as he studied his hand, a jack of clubs and nine of hearts, he could stop Four from extorting him to break faith with Paul simply by asking his associates at the Bank of Greenwood, Unions Planters, and Citizens Bank & Trust to take a hard look at their exposure.

  John Dollard said, “In for a thousand.”

  Even though he’d been drifting in a slipstream of thoughts, calculating as they were nostalgic, Monty had remained completely aware of the table. The flop gave up an ace of clubs, a ten of hearts, and a ten of clubs; Four raised by two thousand; and Hugh Dair, Patrick Doohickey, Hernando Money, and Theodore Wimberley folded, leaving John Dollard, Four, and Montgomery as the only players still in. The pot had climbed to $13,000.

  “King of clubs,” John Dollard said on fourth street, dealing the card. Monty studied his hand: club, club, club, club, ace high, ten low, queen of clubs shy of a royal flush. It was a long shot, he figured, ridiculously long, but to hell with it.

  “Is there anybody still in,” said Monty, digging through his coat pocket, “who doesn’t trust a personal check from me?” He unfolded a blank check onto the table. Both John Dollard and Four shrugged. Monty asked, “Any y’all got a pen?”

  Four took a fountain pen from his pocket and slid it across the ashy green felt to Monty. The lacquered brass barrel of the pen felt as sickeningly warm as a toilet seat shortly after someone else had been sitting on it. Monty filled out the check, dropped it in the pot, and said, “I’m in for five thousand,” which brought a new kind of silence to the room.

  After calling the bet, John Dollard still had a sizable stake left, at least seven thousand, according to Monty’s quick count, but Four, with his two-finger-high stack of chips, would have to go all-in or fold.

  “I ever tell y’all how Struck Pond got its name?” Four said, dribbling his chips onto the table, over and again. He told the story of how his great-grandfather, surveying the future plantation, got caught in a thunderstorm, and after a bolt of lightning struck a nearby cow pond, he watched in his soaked clothes as dozens of dead fish slowly bobbed to the surface. “Man took it as a sign of luck. And he was right. We’ve never had a short crop on that place. I’m telling you it’s a thousand acres of ice cream land.” Four paused. “Struck Pond is my call and my raise.”

  Montgomery had already gone all-in, so everyone turned to John Dollard. The cotton factor from New York City no longer studied the community cards but instead was staring at Four Everard in his tailored dress shirt. “‘Ice cream land,’” he said, shoving his chips into the pot with the thick side of his palm. “That’s another good one. I swear, you fellows. Language is fasc-in-a-ting.”

  Tilting back in his chair, exhaling loudly, pointing his thumb at John Dollard, Four shared a look with Monty, as if to say, This guy. Monty had to agree. Something was earnestly askew with John Dollard. Nobody at the table was able to give the odd man further thought, however, because the river had just been dealt, and there on her back lay the queen of clubs.

  What beautiful crown molding, Monty imagined her majesty saying.

  He studied the two people who were about to lose. John Dollard still had the bemused, childish expression of someone who didn’t comprehend serious money was at stake, whereas Four, who let a faint smile slip upon seeing the card that had been dealt, arranged his features into a hard grimace after noticing the bemused, childish expression on John Dollard. Monty knew what he had to do.

  “Four of one suit on the table,” said Four. “This’ll be interesting. Excuse me. This’ll be fasc-in-a-ting.” With his gaze fixed on John Dollard, Four laid down his cards, so gingerly he could have been placing them on top of a house made of fifty other ones, first a ten of diamonds, then a king of spades. He told John Dollard directly, “Tens full of kings.”

  The tension in the moment barely lasted a second, because John Dollard, while Four was proudly announcing his hand, had laid down his own: a ten of spades and an ace of diamonds.

  Monty figured Four’s heart must be located, half to each one, in his shoulders, because they sank dramatically at the sight of John Dollard’s hand, tens full of aces. Despite wanting to relish Four’s loss a few moments longer, Monty, realizing he was now under scrutiny, laid down his own cards. “All I’ve got’s a pair,” he said, nodding at his nine of hearts and nine of spades.

  “Does that mean I win?” John Dollard said. “Suppose that means I win.”

  As John Dollard reached over the table, his arms hooped to rake in the chips, Four, whose grimace now included arched eyebrows, providing his facial arrangement with a touch of the sinister, said, “Don’t you dare touch that pot.”

  John Dollard withdrew his outstretched arms, placing them in his lap, a third-grader reprimanded by his teacher. He looked around the table, from one face to another, but found on each the blank, obedient look of a good check dog. “I knew it was a bad idea to play a group of farmers,” he said, to which everyone at the table, in nearly perfect unison, responded, “Planters.”

  “Big Delia!” Four yelled. “The book!”

  How he said those last two words led Monty to surmise he was referring to the Holy Bible. Perhaps the hypocrite wanted to read scripture on the sins of gambling to the man who had just beaten him at poker. The book Big Delia handed Four, though, was a typical hardback, the kind Monty had often, while growing up, checked out from the Batesville library. The book was much thicker than the ones he used to read. On the dust jacket, too, there was no rendering of Magwitch raising his shackled fist at young Pip or Oliver carrying an empty bowl toward Mr. Bumble.

  Four turned to the first page. “Caste and Class in a Southern Town, by John Dollard,” he read aloud. He stared at the author for a moment and then flipped through a few more pages. “‘They say the only thing richer than the history of a person’s life is the history of their imagination. I say the only thing richer than the history of a region is the history of its people. The Mississippi Delta taught me that.’ Decent opening. Let’s try a little further on, shall we? ‘Wealth, whether one strives for it, runs away from it, or stays aristocratically, obnoxiously complacent with it, is the defining American characteristic, the first two varieties more than the last. Americans require the struggle to be different from and on occasion identical to their heritage. The Mississippi Delta is America the Beautiful, America the Ugly, America the Great, and America the Weak, embodied by the beautiful, ugly, great, weak Mississippi Deltans.’” After closing the book and tossing it on the table, Four looked at John Dollard, scrunched one side of his face, and said, “Bit purple, don’t you think?”

  “Eh,” John Dollard said. “Er.”

  With the approaching dawn, all the windows in the room slowly turned from mirrors back into windows, their prospect a navy sky hanging over ivory cotton bolls coruscating with dew.

  “Gentlemen,” Four said to everyone except John Dollard and Monty, “you all owe my family in some way or another. I’ll have you repay part of that debt with two deeds. One, please support the estimable Paul Johnson and Montgomery Forster in the coming election. I mean full-staff support. Two, remove this scum from my house. Pistols may be drawn at no offense to the propriety of your host.”

  The others appeared to assume, as Monty did, the second deed had been in reference to one of the subjects of the first, but after double-taking between speaker and supposed subject, they soon realized, as Monty did, the man Four had been referring to was John Dollard. Pistols were drawn.

  Once the guest had been removed—he showed newly discovered skills at the quiet game on his way out—Monty and Four were left alone at the table. Both of them sipped their drinks. “Mr. Forster, as an honorable man, I’m sure you understand that the triumphs of a dishonorable man are null and void.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Jo
hn Dollard did not win Struck Pond.”

  “He didn’t win Struck Pond.”

  “That’s what I’m saying.”

  Monty raised both of his hands with his palms toward Four. Slowly, exhibiting the patience of a magician, he slipped two fingers down his shirt cuff, removed a jack of clubs, and placed it next to the ace, king, queen, and ten of clubs on the table. He said, “I did,” then stood up.

  Before leaving Bluest Heaven, his blood muddied with just enough booze, Montgomery turned around in the doorway of the parlor and told Four that if he ever spoke ill of his wife again he’d yank out his kidneys through his esophagus and that he wouldn’t need a fancy instrument from England to do it.

  3.9

  Highway 16 Revisited—Turtle Soup Surprise

  At the Millsaps library, where he attempted unsuccessfully to finish a bit of research for his thesis, Robert started to understand, crouched in a carrel that had become his second home over the past few years, the reality of what had happened at the Magnolia earlier that day. His affair with Jane Marunga was officially over.

  Not that he wasn’t used to this sort of thing. Sometimes it seemed he was only whole when his heart was broken. In high school and college, regardless of the length of the relationship, every time a girl told him it was over, Natalie Stewart writing her reasons on a slip of loose-leaf from her Trapper Keeper, Beth Helmsley shrugging at him after he spotted her making out with a guy at KA, Robert would feel almost relieved by how much it hurt, as though brooding were his natural mental state, sulking his natural physical one. He’d often wondered if he sought out the pain as a subconscious way of proving he was capable of it. Did he push away Natalie, Beth, and all the others as some masochistic attempt at confirming he had a functional, breakable heart? It hurt to even consider the possibility, which he supposed might be the point.

  Then again, this instance was different from the others, wasn’t it? Instead of heartbroken he felt angry.