Last of the Dixie Heroes Read online

  “Maybe I’m not bright enough to see it,” said Earl. “Bragg chases them down the night of September twenty, smashes them up”-he set his tin cup on the map, hard enough to slop a little whiskey over the side-“then there’s no Lookout Mountain come November. No Lookout Mountain means no march through Georgia, no Atlanta goin’ up in flames. What we call a turning point, like fucking Little Roundtop, curse the name.”

  “That’s debatable too,” said Jesse Moses.

  Earl’s voice rose. “You saying we take Little Roundtop we still don’t win that fight?”

  Jesse nodded. “It was unwinnable. Lee should have decamped the night of the first.”

  Earl sat back, folded his arms across his chest. “And gone where, you don’t mind my asking?”

  “Where he ended up going anyway, back over the Blue Ridge-but before they’d jammed his tail between his legs,” said Jesse.

  “And how’re you supposed to win a war like that, always runnin’?”

  “Ask Ho Chi Minh,” Jesse said.

  “Don’t start that shit.”

  Jesse gave Earl an unfriendly look. Earl gave one back. Then he blinked, turned to Roy. “Sorry, Roy, things get a little heated sometimes. The nature of war, you might say.”

  “No problem,” Roy said; they’d lost him from the start.

  “Wouldn’t mind hearing your opinion,” Earl said.

  “About what?”

  “Chickamauga,” said Earl. “Meaning specifically Bragg’s failure to pursue the Army of the Cumberland after Longstreet’s breakthrough at the Brotherton Cabin.”

  “I know nothing about it,” Roy said.

  “No?” said Earl. He raised his cup; the others did the same, Roy too, to be polite. “Victory,” said Earl, emptying his cup in one gulp. Gordo and Jesse did the same. Roy drank a lot less, not even half, but it went to his head anyway. “Refill, Private Coker, if you please,” Earl said.

  Gordo refilled the cups. Actually looked all right in his uniform, and what was more, seemed to move in a different way, almost with a swagger. Gordo caught Roy’s glance, gave him a wink. Regional supervisor, area manager: Gordo thought the job was his. “Tennessee sipping whiskey, Roy, twelve years old,” Gordo said. “Authentic.”

  “Except for the twelve-year-old part,” said Jesse. “The boys drank rotgut.”

  “Beauregard as a for instance?” said Earl. “You saying Beauregard drank rotgut?”

  “Beauregard was hardly one of the boys.”

  Earl and Jesse exchanged another unpleasant look. Roy wasn’t sure what they were arguing about, was also confused by all the names-who was real and who was not, or rather who was living and who was dead.

  Earl took out a thin cigar, slightly bent, bit off the end, lit a wooden match with a flick of his thumbnail. The smell of smoke drifted through the other smells, rich, concentrated, like a bonfire in a tobacco field, packed tight. Earl smiled at Roy, wisps of smoke trailing from the corners of his lips. “Strikes me as pretty funny,” he said, “you not having an opinion on Chickamauga.”

  “Why’s that?” said Roy.

  “Because,” Earl said, “right there”-he jabbed at the map-“was your grandpappy. Reed’s Bridge, eighteen September.”

  “Not my grandfather,” Roy said. “I told you-it was much more distant than that.”

  Earl drained his cup again. “Practically the first skirmish of the whole goddamn battle. Bet he had an opinion. Bet I could even tell you what it was.”

  Roy took another sip of whiskey, gazed down at the map-saw markings that made no sense to him, names he didn’t know, like Thomas, Crittenden, Polk, Wheeler, blue rectangles here and there, mostly on the left, gray rectangles mostly on the right, a winding stream or river farther to the right. He didn’t see anything that looked like a bridge. “What year are we talking about?”

  Earl put down his cup. “You’re asking what year was Chickamauga?”

  “Yeah.”

  The uniformed men all looked at each other. “Eighteen sixty-three, Roy,” said Gordo. “You must have learned that in school.”

  “With the quality of education in this state?” said Earl. “Don’t count on nothin’.” He spat out a shred of tobacco leaf.

  Jesse took the jug, poured whiskey in Roy’s cup. “Look, Roy,” he said, leaning over the map. “Reed’s Bridge.” He pointed with his index finger: a long, delicate finger; Roy couldn’t help thinking of all those Jewish pianists and violinists, stereotypical or not. “And right here,” said Jesse, “where it says ‘Forrest’? That’s Nathan Bedford Forrest. Roy Singleton Hill-your ancestor-rode with him, that’s clear from the muster rolls and from when he was mentioned in dispatches,

  which is how we know he must have been there, September eighteen, 1863.”

  “This is about history,” Earl said. “We’re historians. Historians in action.”

  “And 1863 is our year,” Jesse said.

  “What do you mean?” Roy said.

  “It’s always 1863 in the reenactment world,” Jesse said. “By general agreement, North and South.”

  “Why?”

  “That was the year,” Earl said. “Been no year like it, before or since.”

  Or maybe he said ’fore or since. Roy wasn’t sure: not with the whiskey going to his head, and the smells, and the rain on the tent, and the hiss of dripping wax, and the creaking of the leather belts when Earl, Jesse, or Gordo shifted on the wooden crates; not with the flickering candlelight, and how it made that blue creek or river seem to move, just a little. All at once, Roy was out of air, but completely. He got up, mumbled something, stepped outside.

  Still raining, but not as hard. Roy stood near the cannon, took deep breaths. He checked his watch, gave it a close look, in fact, much longer than normal. A commonplace, utilitarian watch of no great value: but digital. He felt a little better.

  The rain stopped, the breeze died, but a mist thickened almost at once between the trees and down the line towardthe most distant tents. A soldier-a reenactor, Roy reminded himself-appeared out of the mist, walking briskly forward, an object under his arm.

  The man nodded as he went by Roy. The nod was curtailed, military, the man young and smooth-faced with two stripes on his sleeve and a single earring in one ear. He carried a long curved sword in its scabbard.

  “Colonel?” he said, standing outside the tent. “Light’s perfect.”

  Earl came out of the tent, took the sword. He had trouble buckling it on. The man helped him, spinning him around once like a top, which was roughly Earl’s body shape, and getting all the belts-Earl was now wearing three-in order. The soldier wasn’t tall-perhaps not even as tall as Earl-but lean, trim, the most soldierly looking reenactor Roy had seen so far.

  “Met Roy yet?” Earl said. “Roy Singleton Hill, like I was mentioning at the meeting. Roy, shake hands with Corporal Bridges. Sorry, Mr. Bridges, what with you transferring in so recently, your Christian name momentarily escapes me.”

  “Lee,” said the corporal, shaking Roy’s hand. Lee’s hand was small, smaller than Earl’s, but dry, and the grip was strong.

  Earl moved toward the cannon. A man dressed in jeans and a yellow slicker backed out of a tent, hunched over a camera on a tripod. Earl got ready in front of the cannon, one hand on the hilt of his sword, the other inside his shirt, like Napoleon.

  “Nice,” said the photographer.

  Lee stood beside Roy, watching. “He does a digital thing to make his pictures come out just like Matthew Brady’s,” Lee said.

  Roy was about to ask, Who’s that? when Earl said: “How about getting Roy in the picture?”

  Roy got in the picture, wearing Gordo’s hat and jacket, standing so the cannon obscured the rest of him.

  “Nice,” said the photographer. “Now why don’t we try just you two?”

  “Me?” said Lee.

  “And this gentleman,” said the photographer, nodding at Roy.

  “Don’t want me there?” said Earl. “I could stand in t
he middle, like this.”

  “How about we try that next?”

  Earl stepped out of the shot, Lee stepped in, posing with Roy behind the cannon.

  “They often put their arms over each other’s shoulders,” the photographer said.

  Roy put his arm over Lee’s shoulder; Lee put his arm behind Roy’s back. Roy felt Lee’s hand, a small hand, on his spine.

  “Yeah, just like that,” said the photographer. “Nice. Very.”

  Roy gave Gordo back his hat and jacket. “Say hi to Brenda before you go?” Gordo said.

  “Sure.”

  Roy followed Gordo to the fifth tent on the left-both sentries had got it wrong-followed Gordo inside.

  “Get your ass in here this minute, Johnny Reb,” Brenda said.

  And then, from her position on some sort of low camp bed on the tent floor, she saw Roy. “Oh my God,” she said, pulling the covers up over her breasts; the rough border of the gray wool blanket snagged for an instant on one nipple.

  Things get pretty hot in those tents. Some kind of transformation takes place.

  A strawberry-colored nipple. Her face was the same. “Ever heard of knocking?” she said.

  “Sorry,” Roy said.

  “Not you, Roy. I’m talking to the oaf here.”

  “How do you knock on a tent?” Gordo said.

  “I’ll show myself out,” Roy said, and stepped back through the opening, lowering the flap behind him. As he walked away, he realized that Brenda had looked good, probably better than he’d ever seen her. He’d never felt a twitch of desire for Brenda, until right now. He heard her laughter through the canvas.

  Roy walked back down the nature trail, past the silent sentry post-he could see the trash bag shelter still in place-and into the parking lot. The sight of his car was jarring for some reason, the sight of the Porta Potti truck even more so. Roy was opening the car door when he heard a light, muffled drumming, looked back up the path, saw a horse in full gallop, coming his way. The horse, big and black, bore down right at him, closer and closer, the rider reining in just a few feet away.

  “Easy, boy,” he said. It was Lee. He handed the umbrella down to Roy. “You forgot this.”

  “Thanks.”

  Lee patted the horse’s neck; the horse stood still. “Enjoy your visit?” Lee said.

  “Yeah,” Roy said. “Thanks.”

  “What did you think?”

  “It was nice.”

  The horse snorted. Lee gazed down at Roy. “I mean truthfully,” he said. “I’d like to know.”

  “What I really think?”

  “No risk,” Lee said. “I’m a big boy.”

  “It kind of reminded me of golf.”

  “Golf?”

  “Harmless fun in funny clothes.”

  “That’s a good line,” Lee said. But he didn’t laugh, didn’t smile, showed no emotion of any kind. “Probably true given what you’ve seen. Being as it’s only the soft-core version.” Lee had the heaviest down-home accent Roy had heard in a long time.

  “There’s another kind?” Roy said.

  Now Lee smiled, a quick smile, a flashing display of white teeth, small and even, quickly gone. And then he was gone too, wheeling the horse around in one easy motion without a word of command, and galloping back into the woods. The mist closed around him.

  Roy drove out of the lot and got back on the freeway.

  SEVEN

  ”Funny, the golf joke,” Gordo said, coming into Roy’s cubicle. “Everybody got a kick out of it.”

  ”Even Earl?” Roy said.

  “Especially. Don’t sell old Earl short. The dealership? Built from nothing, and that’s not the only iron he’s got in the fire.”

  “No?”

  “Fact is”-Gordo took a step closer, which brought him up against the desk, and lowered his voice-“if things weren’t all of a sudden so promising for me around here, I might be looking to hook up with Earl in one enterprise or another.”

  “Enterprise,” said Roy. “That sounds good.”

  “Want me to put in a word?”

  “No.”

  Gordo seemed a little surprised that Roy didn’t even think it over. “How come?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Gordo opened his mouth, closed it.

  “What’s the big secret?” Roy said.

  “I’m probably out of line.”

  “Go on.”

  “The thing is, Roy, realistically speaking…”

  “What?”

  “I really shouldn’t.”

  “Talk.”

  “It’s just that sometimes you come to a dead end in life.”

  Their eyes met. Gordo had deep, dark circles under his; Roy wondered if his own were the same way.

  “Know what I mean?” Gordo said.

  “Not exactly.”

  There must have been something in Roy’s tone, some edge that made Gordo hold up his hand and say, “Correction, not life. I’m talking about the job, that’s all. Don’t you ever ask yourself-Where is this job taking me? Not me, Roy, you. I’m in the process of lucking out, which just goes to show, because in terms of job performance, the truth is there’s not all that much to choose between us.”

  Roy’s turn to say something, but what? No, Gordo, you do a much better job. Couldn’t say that, not with what was coming down. Roy settled for: “I’ll be okay.” Right away, he wished he’d kept his mouth shut. How would that little sentence strike Gordo in retrospect, the day they announced the job was Roy’s?

  “Course you’ll be okay,” Gordo said. “Didn’t mean to horn in.”

  “You’re not horning in.”

  Gordo leaned over, squeezed Roy’s shoulder. “No offense?”

  “None.”

  Gordo’s face was close to Roy’s. “You’re a good buddy,” he said, then thought of something and smothered a little laugh. “Poor Brenda.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “She’s embarrassed.”

  “Nothing to be embarrassed about.”

  Gordo smiled, a confidential sort of smile. Roy smelled tooth decay. “You know what they don’t tell you about life back then?” Gordo said.

  “What?”

  Gordo’s eyes shifted. Curtis was walking by. Gordo straightened, said, “Thanks for the help,” a little too loudly, slipped a manila envelope onto Roy’s desk in what he must have considered a deft maneuver, and left the cubicle, knocking against the padded wall on his way out. Roy recalled how he’d moved in uniform, only the day before.

  He opened the envelope. Inside were two black-and-white photographs and a two-page computer printout entitled “Roy Singleton Hill-A Biographical Sketch.” The attached Post-it read: “Dug this up last night. Enjoy-J. Moses.”

  The first photograph: Roy and Earl posing by the cannon. Was this like a real Civil War photograph by Matthew whatever his name was? Not to Roy. He and Earl looked silly, that was all. But the second photograph, the one with Lee, was different. Roy and Lee stood side by side with their arms around each other, the way the photographer said the soldiers often posed. For some reason, this one wasn’t silly, not the photograph as a whole, not Lee, and not Roy, even though he was wearing exactly what he’d worn in the first shot, snapped only a minute or two before.

  Roy dug out a magnifying glass he had in the drawer, left over from when they dealt in printed labels. His own expression was the same in both pictures, that face he always wore in photographs, angled toward the camera like a cooperative subject, but uneasy. Roy was surprised to see that Earl looked fierce, his eyes hooded under the shadow of the huge brim of his hat, as though sending the signal-to Sherman? Grant? — that he was not to be messed with. Only Lee seemed unaware of the camera; his eyes gazed into the farthest distance, and as Roy examined them, he thought he detected something like battle weariness, as though Lee were a veteran of bloody campaigns that had changed him forever.

  “What have you got there?” Curtis, in the cubicle. For a moment Roy th
ought Curtis might have been talking into his headset; but Curtis’s eyes were on the pictures. Roy noticed for the first time the Confederate flag flying over a tent on the far side of the cannon.

  “That you, Roy?” He tapped a pencil on one of the photographs.

  “Not really.”

  Curtis looked down at him, his eyes narrowing. Curtis had this sense of dignity, didn’t like anyone jerking him around, even when sometimes they weren’t. But Roy wasn’t thinking about that: he was noticing the way Curtis’s narrowed-eye expression resembled Earl’s hooded eyes in the picture.

  “Not the real you?” Curtis said.

  “I was just visiting,” Roy said.

  “Like in Monopoly?”

  “It was one of those reenactment camps. I guess you could say a kind of a game.”

  “And?” Curtis said.

  Roy sensed he was being asked to say something negative about the reenactors, or the camp, or that stupid flag. He did think the whole thing was pretty stupid but he said nothing. He just wasn’t going to do it.

  “Kind of a game,” Curtis said. “Did you know they’ve got World War Two reenactors now? Some of the participants dress up in black SS uniforms.”

  “That’s weird.”

  “Is it?” Curtis said. His eyes shifted. He listened to something coming over his headset, pressed the button, said, “Malabar,” clicked off. He focused on Roy. “Heard of slave reenactors?” he said.

  “No.”

  “They’re out there too.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Playing the slave game. Would that be the term, Roy? Supposed to be a big contingent of slave reenactors going up to Chattanooga for some Lookout Mountain event. Never used to see the point of it myself.”

  “But now?”

  “Now?” Curtis said, and seemed about to go on when another call came over the headset. He nodded at whatever was being said, started backing out of the cubicle, then remembered something, came back, and handed an audiocassette across the desk.

  He’d been gone for ten seconds when Gordo looked over the wall. “What was that all about?”