Safe from the Neighbors Page 7

  I sat there for a moment staring at the map. The towns were no more than seven or eight miles apart.

  I clicked the back button until the browser returned to the New River Valley News article about Arlan Calloway’s death. Then I went to the newspaper’s homepage and found a search box. Andy Owens produced no results, and neither did Andrew Owens.

  At Ole Miss, I once took a class with a professor who said, “If the historian isn’t careful, he or she can start to resemble the district attorney who, having to stand for reelection, becomes a little too willing to find connections where none exist.” The fact that somebody named Andrew Owens had lived close to Arlan Calloway in two different places probably meant nothing at all, especially since both Owens and Andrew are among the most common Anglo-Saxon names.

  • • •

  I turned off the laptop, went out, and got in my car to go home. But driving by my parents’ place I saw Jennifer’s Corolla parked in the drive beside my father’s van. I’d turned my cell phone off to keep her from giving me any more grief about the football tickets, so I knew immediately that Dad must have phoned the house. I pulled in behind her and jumped out.

  An awful odor permeated the hallway. I heard moaning and figured Momma must have freed herself from the wheelchair and fallen again. She had a pin in her right hip, and when my dad brought her home from the rehab center, against the advice of both her regular doctor and the surgeon who’d operated on her, they’d warned him that if she fell again and that pin broke, she was going to suffer indescribable pain.

  She was in bed, rather than on the floor like I expected, and was completely naked, her mouth wide open, her hands clawing at my father’s face while he leaned over the bed trying to hold her, whispering to her like she’d probably once whispered to me back when I was a baby. On the floor beside the bed stood a bucket, and over in the corner lay a bunch of shit-streaked sheets and bedclothes. There were big brown blotches on the mattress, and Dad’s shirt was soiled, too.

  I heard footsteps coming from the bathroom, and then Jennifer brushed by me. She walked over to the corner and picked up the smelly linen, and when she looked at my father bending over my mother, trying to give her the only kind of comfort available to a person who’d been betrayed by both body and mind, you didn’t have to be clairvoyant to know what she was thinking. Where do you find love like that?

  THE TWO HUNDRED and forty dollars turned into thirty pieces of silver, material evidence of my betrayal. But even as she stopped speaking to me unless it was absolutely necessary, she started going by my parents’ house every morning before class and most afternoons, too, helping Dad to change the diaper Momma now had to wear and to give her a bath. They were eligible for Home Health, but he was frightened by the medical bureaucracy, as he termed it, and believed that if he let its representatives into his house, they’d try to force him to put her back in the rehab center. So for all practical purposes, Jennifer was their nurse, even though nothing was more precious to her than time.

  I went there every day myself, usually after dinner, but was a lot less useful. Generally, what I did was wash dishes, carry out the garbage and pick up Dad’s bills, which I paid online when I did my own each month, so he wouldn’t have to write checks. Once or twice I sat with my mother long enough for him to take a shower. Every now and then she’d raise her head and look at me, and I’d fool myself into thinking she was about to experience a moment of lucidity, but as far as I could tell that never happened.

  Dad never really went to bed anymore, just slept sitting in a recliner near Momma’s bed, the various medications he took for high blood pressure and diabetes lined up on the floor beside the books piled there, mostly stuff he’d been rereading for sixty years—Ernie Pyle’s Brave Men and Richard Tregaskis’s Guadalcanal Diary—but a couple more recent titles as well, like Stephen Ambrose’s book about Eisenhower.

  One evening, I noticed a green spiral notebook at the bottom of the stack, a BIC ballpoint clipped to the cover. When I was twelve or thirteen, he’d caught me reading a journal of sorts that I’d found tucked away behind his tackle box in the smokehouse. After snatching it out of my hands, he cuffed the side of my head and swore that if I ever said a word about it, he’d whip my ass so hard I’d have to shit standing up. What I’d been reading was intriguing: I get to thinking about that girl in Manila sometimes and wonder how it would of been if me and her could of said more than just a few words and I had not of made a fool of myself by pointing like I did.

  Recalling that, I didn’t pick up the spiral notebook, but when he came back from the shower, still toweling his hair, I casually pointed at it and asked if he’d been doing a bit of writing.

  He balled the towel up and dropped it into the clothes hamper, then leaned over and pulled out the notebook and glanced at it before laying it on the dresser. “Yeah,” he said, “I been making a few notes.”

  “On what?”

  “The kind of stuff you historians get wrong.”

  “I’m not a historian. I’m a history teacher.”

  He laughed. “That’s like saying ‘I don’t speak English. I just teach it.’”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Well, the difference, whatever it is,” he said, “must be too fine for an old fool like me to grasp.”

  • • •

  THE CHECK ENGINE light on Maggie’s Mercedes never went off, and when she mentioned that at lunch the following week, I told her she’d better call Import Auto in Greenville and make an appointment. Whoever she spoke to over there said she ought to have it towed, so after school I hung around with her in the parking lot until the tow truck hauled it away, and then I drove her over to the Greenville airport, the closest place to pick up a rental. While we waited for the clerk to complete the paperwork, she asked if I’d like to stop by her house for a drink.

  I’d been planning to invite her to dinner, maybe with Ramsey and his wife and Ellis, but I figured I’d better wait until Jennifer calmed down. Her attitude had shown signs of softening in the last day or two, and the previous evening she’d walked into the living room with a student’s paper and said, “Listen to this from one of my little Republicans. ‘People that are down on Don Rumsfeld need to remember he was secretary of defense twice before, in the Reagan administration and also for President Bush’s father, and this means he knows what he’s doing’” She stopped reading. “Is that right?”

  “That Rumsfeld knows what he’s doing?”

  I wouldn’t say she gave me a half smile, it was more like a third, but it was still a lot better than the habitual frown. “No, that he was secretary of defense twice before.”

  “Just once,” I said, “under Gerald Ford.”

  She turned and left the room without saying anything else, but I knew my stock was rising and might soon be worth as much as two hundred forty dollars.

  There at the Hertz desk, when Maggie invited me over, I didn’t see any reason why not. It was Wednesday, so Jennifer had her night class, and I wouldn’t have to explain where I’d been. Besides, having a drink with a colleague didn’t constitute a crime. I’d done it before, though in the past the colleague had always been male. In fact, it had always been Ramsey.

  They gave her a full-size Buick, and I followed her back to the highway.

  It’s twenty-six miles from Greenville to Loring, a straight shot through the heart of the Delta, cotton fields on both sides of the road until you cross the Loring County line, and after that you start to see a few catfish ponds. I’d been driving that road, or riding on it while somebody else drove, for almost half a century, and during that time the scenery had hardly changed at all—except for those ponds, which were dug about thirty years ago. A cotton field in 2006 looked pretty much the same as it did in 1962.

  I don’t know why my life began to seem so monotonous as I drove that stretch, as flat and featureless, as devoid of color and distinction, as one of those ponds. But a pond teems with activity the eye can’t see, whereas the surface was
pretty much all there was to me. I was just a guy who’d never write a book or lead a boycott or take a stand against community mores or assault a beach or walk the streets of a bombed-out city. I was Mr. History. I read it and I talked about it, without ever once having done anything unusual enough to make it. Not even locally.

  The house Maggie rented isn’t actually in town but about a mile south of Choctaw Creek, surrounded by tall hedges intended to shield its inhabitants from the eyes of those laboring in the adjoining fields. The original owners had been wealthy farmers, but their luck ran out in the ’60s, and the bank finally took over. Since then it had been rented out again and again and by now was fairly rundown—the paint peeling off, the veranda sagging, the front steps beginning to crumble.

  She parked the Buick in the carport, and I pulled up behind her and got out.

  “Inside,” she said, “it looks a good bit like the Munsters’ house. My own furniture’s still in North Carolina.”

  “You know who used to live here?”

  “No, though I’m sure I came here at some point when I was a child. I remember the pool.”

  “I remember it, too, but that’s because the folks it belonged to started renting it out for parties in the late Sixties, when they needed money. You were gone by then.”

  “Who were they?”

  “You couldn’t put this in a book and get anybody to believe it. Their last name was spelled L-A-U-S-S. Pronounced Loss.”

  She touched my arm. “Carol Lauss! I haven’t thought of her in ages.”

  “Karen, actually. She was their daughter.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “Works at the Health Department. Both her parents are dead.”

  She unlocked the back door, and we stepped into the kitchen. It was big and had probably been state-of-the-art at one time, but now all the appliances looked old, the linoleum countertops and floor dated.

  “What would you like? I’ve got beer and wine in the fridge, and I think there’s a bottle of VO in here somewhere that came with the house.”

  “The VO sounds good, if you can lay your hands on it.”

  She opened the door on a cabinet above the sink. The VO was there, all right, along with twenty or thirty of those little amber-colored bottles that prescription medication comes in. They weren’t lined up neatly, either, just piled together like some monument to Eli Lilly. She stood on her tiptoes, and when she reached up her blouse pulled loose, revealing a strip of flesh, along with a good bit of black lace. She turned around, holding the bottle, and for a moment just stared at me. Then she smiled and said, “Want some Xanax?”

  There wasn’t much point in pretending I hadn’t noticed the stash. “Looks like you’re well stocked.”

  “Oh, if it’s a tranquilizer or an antidepressant, chances are I’ve got it. All of those prescriptions, incidentally, were filled a year or so ago in North Carolina. Most of them I never even tried, though maybe I should’ve.”

  “If you don’t use them, why bring them along?”

  “Well, you never know when you might need to be uplifted or subdued. At least I’m prepared.”

  I dropped my voice and said, “I don’t want a Xanax. But I’ll sure take the whiskey—assuming you’re prepared to let me have more than one drink.”

  “Oh, I’m pretty much prepared for anything.”

  “Anything?”

  There’s a guy I work with, an assistant coach, who I can’t stand. He drives to school in one of those pickups with struts that lift it about five feet off the ground, and there’s a weathered sticker on the tailgate that says HONK IF YOU’VE NEVER SEEN A SHOTGUN FIRED FROM A MOVING RIG. According to some students who play football, he always starts sobbing in the team huddle before the opening kickoff and then, even though he’s the faculty adviser for the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, turns foulmouthed, urging them to kick the living fuck out of those goddamn cocksuckers. None of that, however, is why I dislike him.

  No, it’s because whenever you go into the teachers’ lounge and find him in the presence of a female faculty member, he’s invariably flirting with her. He’ll drop his voice and say, “Is that a promise? Or a threat?” He wants them to think he’s got one thing on his mind, and he wants you to think so, too, and I do. And every time I see him acting like that, I start imagining how I’d feel if I ever caught him talking to one of my daughters.

  So I couldn’t quite believe it when I heard myself sounding just like him.

  She stood there with her back to the kitchen counter, staring at me, and I had the sense that if I was behaving exactly as she’d expected, I’d still disappointed her somehow, lessening myself in her eyes. “Ice?” she finally asked.

  “Straight.”

  She sloshed about two inches of VO into a water glass and handed it to me. Then she pulled a bottle of Chardonnay from the refrigerator and filled her glass right up to the brim. We took our drinks into the living room, which was empty except for a couch and a coffee table and a chair she told me she’d rented from Front Street Furniture, and sat down at opposite ends of the couch.

  Our recent lunch conversations had skirted the subject of her mother’s death. Consequently, while I knew that her husband had invested wisely in dot-coms and then wisely sold before the bubble burst, that they’d traveled all over the world, skiing in the Alps and climbing in the Andes, I knew much less about the time she’d spent here in the late ’50s and early ’60s. Every now and then I recalled something—like being in a car with her and her brother and their mother, going to vacation Bible school at Fairway Baptist—but then I’d start doubting the memory. Nadine, I was fairly sure, hadn’t been a churchgoer. I do remember they kept alcohol in the house back then, though Loring County, like the rest of the state, was bone dry. Baptists didn’t drink—or if they did, they hid it.

  As if she knew what I was thinking, she said, “You know, I never did forget you. Not once in all these years.”

  “I’m that memorable?”

  She sipped her wine. “I’m not saying you are. Just that you were.”

  “How so?”

  “You were such a pissed-off little kid.”

  That didn’t really jibe with the view I held of myself, in which I’d always been reasonably happy. “Well, I seem to recall that I almost broke my neck once because you tripped me end over end off the porch up at the old Fairway Crossroads store. That’s hardly something a well-adjusted child would do, so maybe you were the pissed-off kid.”

  “No. I did it because I didn’t like the look you gave my brother. And I didn’t like it when Mom hugged you.”

  “Why?”

  “She held on to you for too long.”

  “Jesus. Are you that jealous now?”

  “I don’t have anybody, or anything, to be jealous of.”

  “Were you when you did?”

  “Oh.” She shook her head. “When I had a fit of jealousy, Luke, you wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere nearby.” She was wearing a nice pair of leather sandals. She set her wineglass on the coffee table, then leaned over and slipped her left heel, and then her right, out of the straps. Leaving the shoes on the floor, she drew her legs up onto the couch.

  She was an excellent psychologist, and precious little escaped her. Ever had or ever would. Now, she saw something in my face that I wasn’t aware was there. “Know what I once heard your father tell my mother?” she asked. “After one of those meetings our dads used to attend?”

  The gatherings in question were always held on Monday evening. My father sometimes complained about missing The Andy Griffith Show—the only TV program he really enjoyed, and a mainstay of the Monday night schedule in those days. They usually took place at someone’s home—often Mayor Finley’s—but at least one of them, I’ve discovered, was right in City Hall.

  The Citizens’ Council had been formed back in 1954, in response to Brown v. Board of Education. The founders might not have been the best or the brightest, but they had sense enough to know that
the violent images that would eventually be beamed out over the airwaves—from sites like the Edmund Pettis Bridge—could only arouse the nation’s disgust and spell the end of official segregation. They were determined to use economics, rather than sheer physical intimidation, to maintain the status quo.

  According to my father’s membership card, he joined in the spring of 1959, shortly after Arlan Calloway returned to Loring with his family. By then the vast majority of white men in the Delta were already members, so I don’t know what significance, if any, his relatively late decision to sign up might have. I don’t know, that is, if it indicates he never was a true believer and joined only because not to do so, at that point, would have been financial suicide, especially since Herman Horton was one of the organizers. For all I know, he might have feared he was so low down on the social ladder that he would’ve been rejected. If that’s the case, it could be that Arlan Calloway shepherded him into the fold.

  At any rate, they always went to the meetings together. Sometimes Mr. Calloway dropped by our house to pick my father up, though he never came inside, just pulled into the driveway and hit his horn once or twice. Mostly, though, my dad went down to his place, leaving his pickup parked in their yard. As far as I know, they never went to town in Dad’s truck, probably because Mr. Calloway’s was much newer and had air-conditioning.

  Many times, after a meeting, my father would marvel at something his friend had said or done. I can recall hearing him tell Grandpa that another Council member—the father of a boy in my class—had made everybody mad by refusing to fire one of his tractor drivers. I don’t recall what that man’s sin was supposed to have been, but odds are he’d been caught talking to a voter-registration activist. When his employer, who himself wielded no small amount of influence in the community, said, “I hate to do it. I just really do hate to,” Mr. Calloway replied, “I hate to, you hate to, he, she and it hates to, too, but he, she and it have to, and so will you.”