Last of the Dixie Heroes Read online

  Muffled sounds. A long silence, the dead kind when a palm covers the receiver. Then Gordo said, “I want you to do me a favor.”

  “What?”

  “Find out if the call was what did it.”

  “What call?”

  “Fuck, Roy, the call to Pegram’s house. I told you the whole story.”

  “It wasn’t a factor,” Roy said, and thought, Oh, Christ.

  “Huh?”

  Roy sat up, switched on the light. “I meant-I don’t see what difference the call could have made.” Roy saw his face in the mirror over the dresser. The expression on it-calculating, tricky, dishonest-made him turn away.

  “How come?” Gordo said.

  “Unless you said something.”

  “I just asked him how are things coming along with the promotion.”

  “And?”

  “Roy? How come you said it wasn’t a factor, so sure and all?”

  Roy looked at his face in the mirror again, tried to make it normal. “What was Pegram’s answer?”

  “He said they’d have something for me soon.”

  “That was it?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “So? What harm could that have done?”

  “You’re confusing me, Roy. Harm got done, didn’t it?”

  If there was a moment to tell Gordo the truth, it was now. Roy knew that, knew Gordo needed to know right now, would never need to know this badly again. So Roy started to tell him; the words were unreeling in his mind. Then he thought he heard that distant thunder, coming in over the phone. “Better get in your car, Gordo,” he said. “Go home.”

  “Why?”

  “Because.”

  “Because? What kind of reason is that? How do you know the call wasn’t a factor? What were the fucking factors if you’re so smart?”

  “Just go home, Gordo.”

  Roy heard another sound, the kind liquid makes coming from a bottle. “Why should I?” Gordo said. “I see the stars. I hear the rolling thunder.” The s ’s were starting to get like sh ’s. The line went dead. Roy called back and was put into voice mail. He switched off the light, tried to go back to sleep, gave up trying, left the light off.

  What’s the difference between the vision statement and the company plan, Carol?

  An important question, Jerry. What comes to mind when you hear the word vision?

  Seeing?

  And what is it we’re trying to see?

  The future?

  Right, Jerry.

  On the way to work a few hours later, Roy tried to get the difference between the vision statement and the company plan straight in his mind, rewinding passages of Curtis’s tape several times. It wouldn’t take, not this particular morning.

  6:59. Roy sat at his desk. B31, Gordo’s old cubicle? There was someone in it, someone new, tapping at the keys.

  P.J., hurrying in a minute or two late, struggling with his tie, saw too. “Fuck,” he said, just mouthed the word, really.

  Then came DeLoach’s voice, over the wall. “Speak to him last night?”

  “Yeah,” Roy said.

  “How’s he doin’?”

  “What you’d expect.”

  “Fuck,” said DeLoach.

  But that was about it. There was turnover, guys came and went, and nobody kept up with anybody after they were gone. A quiet morning, though: Roy could hear the tap-tapping in B31, lighter and faster than Gordo’s.

  On his coffee break-walk to the machine, walk back, time for a quick personal call-Roy tried Gordo at home: no answer, but the machine was back on. “Gordo?” he said. “You all right?”

  He went back and forth with Cesar in Miami over a container ship out of Mobile that Cesar thought was supposed to stop in Pensacola. “Any news up there?” Cesar asked at the end of his last message, when they’d finally straightened it out. What was going on with Cesar? Was this about Gordo? Gordo was just a name on the screen to Cesar. Roy was thinking of emailing back, “What kind of news?” when his phone rang.

  “This is Barry.”

  “Barry?”

  “Yeah, Barry. Let’s try to go a little quicker. Kid’s fucked up again at the school and they want someone over there. Like you, Dad.”

  “What do you mean, fucked up? Is he all right?”

  “Don’t know the details. Got to run.”

  “Where’s Marcia?”

  A pause. Then an odd laugh, more like a little explosion of air, having nothing to do with amusement. Then click.

  Roy called the school.

  “We have a strict weapons policy,” said Ms. Steinwasser.

  “Weapons policy?” said Roy. “Did something happen to him?”

  “In the sense you mean, no.”

  “What are you saying? Is he wounded? Did someone bring a gun into school?”

  “Please calm down, Mr. Hill. Your son’s not hurt. But the someone you’re talking about was him.”

  “I don’t understand you.”

  “Your son violated the weapons policy.”

  “That’s not possible,” Roy said. “Rhett’s got no weapon.” Unless, he thought, unless: Barry.

  “Better come down here,” said Ms. Steinwasser.

  “But-” Roy checked his watch. Then he slammed down the phone, maybe not slammed, but put down hard, without saying good-bye. Not like him at all.

  He crossed the floor, went up the stairs to the glassed-in office, took a deep breath; or tried to. Curtis was at his desk, writing on a legal pad. He waved Roy in with a smile.

  “Things settling down?” he said.

  “What I-”

  “Got a second to look this over?” Curtis said, sliding a glossy magazine across his desk.

  Roy picked it up: an office furniture catalog, open somewhere in the middle.

  “Bottom of the right-hand page,” Curtis said.

  Roy checked the bottom of the right-hand page, saw office chairs: the Cremona, the Portman, the Benchley. He looked up at Curtis.

  “Any of them strike your fancy?” Curtis said.

  “I-”

  “Because you get to choose your own chair, Roy, one of the perks of the new job.”

  No air. Roy’s hand was in his pocket, squeezing the inhaler.

  “Roy?”

  “I want this job, Curtis, I can’t tell you how bad, but-”

  Curtis frowned. It made him look much younger, made it easy to picture him as a boy. “What I said yesterday-sometimes I wonder if you’re even interested-is that what’s bothering you?”

  “No, I-”

  “Because it was ill considered. I apologize. I’ll tell you what I told Bill Pegram-you’re a nice guy, Roy, and sometimes people mistake niceness for a lack of ambition.” He paused to let that sink in, just the way preachers did when they came to a main point; a pause that went on and on, at least in Roy’s mind. “We straight on this now?” Curtis said.

  “I’ve got to leave, Curtis, this minute.” An explosive little sentence that left Roy breathless.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Roy fought for air. “My kid. I don’t know what’s happening. This is a temporary… things are actually looking… in a little while, everything’ll be… but-”

  Curtis sat back in his chair. Roy had a sudden moment of clarity: it was the Portman, he could tell from the little brass things on the leather arms.

  “Another problem with your son?” Curtis said.

  The complicated explanation Roy had been working on, the one with an optimistic promise at the end, got bottled up in his struggling throat. He nodded.

  “We’re off to an unusual kind of start here, aren’t we, Roy?”

  Roy nodded again.

  “Why don’t you take the rest of the day,” Curtis said.

  Roy turned to go.

  “With someone covering, of course.”

  It was just like the last time, except now Rhett had a split lip instead of a black eye. “What’s going on?” Roy said, hurrying across the nurse’s office. “
I thought you said he wasn’t hurt.”

  “It’s not as bad as it looks,” said Ms. Steinwasser, “is it, Tanisha?”

  “Not so bad, no,” said the nurse, lowering an ice pack to Rhett’s mouth. Rhett batted it away, a violent little act that Roy didn’t like at all.

  Roy knelt in front of him. “What happened to you?”

  Rhett wouldn’t meet Roy’s eye, hung his head. The motion brought a quivering drop of blood to the edge of his lip.

  Roy, still on one knee, turned to Ms. Steinwasser. “What the hell happened here?”

  “Language,” she said, “please.”

  Roy stood up.

  “Your son,” said Ms. Steinwasser, backing half a step, “threatened to shoot another student.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “Nevertheless.”

  “Shoot him with what, for Christ sake?”

  “I asked you nicely.”

  “Shoot him with what?”

  “We’ll get to that,” said Ms. Steinwasser. “The fact that he had ammunition gave us every reason to take the threat seriously.”

  “Ammunition?” Roy said.

  “Which he says you gave him.”

  “Never.”

  “He got it from somewhere.”

  “Got what? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “This,” said Ms. Steinwasser, holding up a whitish thing Roy thought was some sort of thimble at first, and then recognized: Gordo’s Kennesaw Mountain bullet. What was there to fear from spent bullets?

  “That’s it?” Roy said. “That’s what this is about? A souvenir?”

  “Souvenir?”

  “A relic,” Roy said. “Spent. Harmless.”

  “I don’t know about the harmless part,” said Ms. Steinwasser, opening the door to an adjoining room. Another boy, the big, broad-faced boy-Cody, Roy remembered-was sitting on an examining table, holding a bandage over a cut on the side of his nose, or possibly the inner corner of his eye. She closed the door.

  “But you’d need a musket,” Roy said, “an antique, and there’s no-”

  Rhett looked up. “I threw it at him,” he said. He sounded fierce and defiant. The drop of blood rolled down his chin; another took its place in the split of his lip.

  “You threw it at him?” Roy said.

  “He said I didn’t have a real Civil War bullet, and even if I did it was geeky, and I threw it at him.”

  “This was after he hit you in the mouth?”

  Rhett shook his head.

  “Your son was the initiator,” Ms. Steinwasser said.

  “I thought that wasn’t supposed to matter,” Roy said. “And there’s still nothing about a gun or anything like that.”

  “I told him I’d shoot him,” Rhett said.

  “With what?”

  “He picks on me all the time.”

  “But shoot him with what?”

  “He rubs my face in it.”

  “Shoot him with what?”

  “I made up the gun part.”

  Roy faced Ms. Steinwasser, ready to make his argument about the nonexistence of a weapon.

  Then Rhett added, “Lucky for him.”

  Roy just stood there.

  “Have you read the parents handbook, Mr. Hill?” said Ms. Steinwasser.

  “Parents handbook?”

  “A copy is sent home with every student. The policy is very clear. No weapons of any kind. No knives. No guns.” She held up the oxidized bullet. “No ammunition.”

  “But-”

  “Must we bring the police into this?”

  Rhett got a one-week suspension. Roy drove him to Marcia’s in silence. Rhett took out his key, unlocked the door. No one home. Roy got some ice cubes, wrapped them in a dish towel. “Here.”

  They sat at the card table, much like the one at his father’s, but clean. The piles-dirt in the backyard, mail on the table-had grown. Rhett held the dish towel to his lip, gazed at nothing. Roy watched him.

  “You could have put his eye out,” he said.

  “You’re just like all the others,” Rhett said. “Taking his side.”

  “I’m not taking his side. You could have put his eye out.”

  “Good.”

  Roy made a decision, made it, he realized, on the basis of his vision, on how he saw the future, the way Carol said to do it: he would ask Marcia to move back in right away. Rhett could then return to his old school, never face the other boy again, get back on track. What better time? She’d understand.

  “When’s your ma coming home?”

  “Who gives a shit?”

  Roy laid his hand on the table. “Don’t you speak like that about your mother.”

  Rhett muttered something into the dish towel.

  “What was that?” Roy said. He reached across the table, pulled the towel away, not roughly, but he pulled it away. “What was that?”

  “Those stupid lips of hers,” Rhett said, almost inaudible.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Rhett looked up, met Roy’s eye; yes, fierce, defiant. This was new. Roy had no idea how to handle it.

  “You can go,” Rhett said.

  “I’m staying.”

  They sat. The bleeding stopped. Rhett left the room and didn’t come back.

  Roy heard a car, went to the front door, looked out: not Marcia in a taxi, but Barry in his Benz with the BARRY plate. Roy took out the inhaler, sprayed it down his throat.

  ELEVEN

  Barry came into the kitchen.

  ”Moving in?” he said.

  ”You know why I’m here,” Roy said, standing by the table, wishing some sarcastic put-down had come to mind.

  Barry dropped his briefcase, loosened his tie, shrugged off his suit jacket-there were sweat stains under both arms of his striped shirt-and hung it on a chair. “Bail the kid out already?”

  “His name is Rhett.”

  “Super,” said Barry, opening the fridge. Roy saw what he’d seen before-Absolut, yogurt, lemons-plus a few cartons of Chinese food. Barry removed one, sat at the table, began eating from it-round balls, possibly chicken, in a congealed orange sauce-with chopsticks. His soft, pudgy fingers handled the chopsticks with a skill that took Roy by surprise; he himself had tried chopsticks once or twice, out on a date in high school or college, but never actually learned to use them. Barry steered several of the little balls quickly into his mouth, suddenly looked up.

  “You’re with Globax, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Anything unusual going on there?”

  “Unusual?”

  “Here, sit down. Something to eat?”

  “No.”

  “You could throw it in the microwave.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “How about a drink?”

  “A little early for me,” Roy said.

  “Yeah? Woulda taken you for a bit of a shooter.”

  “Shooter?”

  “You know, guy who throws back a few, knows how to have a little fun.”

  “No one’s stopping you.”

  “Drinking alone’s not me. I’m a social animal.”

  Don’t I know.

  Barry plucked another chicken ball, started talking again before it reached his mouth. “You were some kind of football hero? Played for Tech?”

  “Georgia,” Roy said.

  “What position?”

  “Tight end.”

  “Yeah? You weren’t on the small side?”

  “That’s the way it turned out.”

  “Played high school myself,” Barry said. “Offensive tackle. Screwed up my knee or I would have gone a lot farther.”

  Roy said nothing. Barry popped the chicken ball in his mouth, reached for another.

  “So now we have something in common, what’s the story at Globax?” he said.

  “Story?”

  “Stock’s been behaving strangely the past week, ten d
ays.”

  “In what way?”

  “Some big blocks changed hands, bing bang bing, in the millions-starting to make a move, right? So I took a position, and when I take a position I don’t dick around. Then what happens? Poof, it all goes soft.”

  Roy didn’t really know what he was talking about.

  “Something’s going on, I got it from several sources.” He waited for Roy to tell him what it was.

  “They changed the name from Chemerica,” Roy said; he couldn’t think of anything else.

  Barry gazed at him. “Hard to get, huh?” He kept chewing, but slower, more thoughtful. “Suppose I made it worth your while. Say some little nugget of information came your way, why couldn’t we work out a mutually beneficial arrangement, you and I?”

  “About what?”

  “I don’t blame you for being careful. Total discretion guaranteed, up front. I’ve got an offshore setup, if that eases your mind.”

  Roy missed the significance of that. “What kind of information?”

  “Could be anything-anything that’ll let me know what’s going down. It’s all about knowing the future today.”

  “That’s what Carol says.”

  Barry stopped chewing. “Who’s Carol?”

  “No one you know.”

  “She wouldn’t be on the financial side, by any chance?”

  “Financial side?”

  “At Globax. That would be sweet, a contact on the financial side.”

  Roy shook his head. They watched each other. Roy had no idea what Barry was thinking. He himself was having a thought he knew was arrogant and unworthy, but couldn’t help: I can see why she’s coming back to me.

  “When do you expect Marcia?” he said.

  Barry finished eating, pushed the carton aside, leaned back, clasped his hands behind his head; the sweat stains had spread. “Familiar with the term POV?”

  “No.”

  “Point of view. I only know it from my Hollywood connections. Why I bring it up is I’m starting to see things from your POV.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Just that now she’s diddling me,” Barry said, “the way she diddled you.”

  That sent a jolt through Roy. Had Marcia told Barry that she and Roy had slept with each other again, that they were getting back together? Roy could think of no other explanation, but why would she do that? A horrible possibility struck Roy: to make Barry jealous. Why make someone jealous unless you were still interested? Roy ruled it out. The man across the table wasn’t jealous. Neither was he angry, bewildered, humiliated, crushed: none of the things Roy had been when he’d found out about Barry. So Barry didn’t know Marcia was leaving him, at most had sensed something and was fishing for information.