Last of the Dixie Heroes Page 7

  “Did you know there were slave reenactors?”

  “Don’t start.”

  “Don’t start what?”

  “The war had nothing to do with slavery, Roy. Everyone knows that.”

  “Like who?”

  “Historians. Ask any reenactor, North or South. Talk to Jesse. Or Lee. He’s just as sharp, you get to know him.”

  “You’re telling me that if there’d been no slavery, there still would have been a war?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re starting to scare me, Gordo.”

  “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

  Gordo’s face, hanging over the partition, was flushed. “Got to get back to work,” Roy said.

  Gordo didn’t move. “What’s that tape Curtis gave you?”

  Roy glanced at the label: Managing in a Complex World: The Acclaimed Five-Step Program for Managers in the New Millennium, with Workbook, Internet Support and 24-Hour Hotline.

  “No idea.”

  “What’s it say?”

  There was nothing to do but hand Gordo the tape.

  Gordo read the label. “Why’d he be giving you this?” The accent was on you.

  “No idea,” Roy said again, but maybe not as convincingly this time.

  Roy popped the tape in the car player on the way home.

  Why don’t you like filling out the new weekly activity report, Jerry?

  Well, Carol, it takes too much time, and who reads it anyway?

  I read all the reports, Jerry, and so do the people at headquarters. How much time does it take?

  Half an hour, Carol, and that’s time I really can’t spare if I’m going to be a productive member of the team.

  In this interchange between Carol and Jerry, we see a common reaction to change, one you’ll probably be faced with sooner or later in your managerial career. What are Carol’s choices? The most common response is what we call the Roy’s mind wandered from the little office drama. His managerial career. Curtis wanted him to know something about handling people, to be ready. The promotion was real, and was coming soon: the tape was tangible proof. Knowing for sure that the future would be better than the present: what a feeling! The next thing Roy knew, he was on the cell phone calling Marcia’s home number.

  “Hello?” she said; her voice subdued, even tentative, not like her.

  “Doing anything special for supper?”

  She perked up right away. That was a good feeling too. “Why, no, Roy.”

  “How about I’ll get three steaks, throw them on the grill?”

  “Three?”

  “You, me, and Rhett.”

  Pause. “Right. Sounds good.”

  “Give me an hour,” Roy said.

  He stopped at the market on the way, bought three sirloin strips, a box of frozen French fries, a bottle of Chardonnay. He knew that Chardonnay didn’t go with steak, but Chardonnay was what she’d wanted the last time.

  “What’s your best steak sauce?”

  “This here Creole one. Can’t hardly keep it in stock.”

  “I’ll take two,” Roy said.

  Everything made sense. You worked all day, put good food on the table, sat down together, drank a little wine, the kid said something cute that made you smile at each other over his head, you relaxed, body and soul. Driving up to the house, he began to think about Marcia’s return, her actual moving back in. Should he suggest it, or wait till she brought it up herself? Roy had a funny thought-what would Carol do? Maybe better to think of her as “Carol.” Carrying the grocery bag into the house, Roy decided that this was probably one of those problems that solves itself: step six of the five-step managerial program. He was almost laughing to himself when he went into the kitchen.

  The answering machine was beeping. Roy let it beep while he put the wine in the icebox, turned on the oven for the fries, went out back and scraped the grill, rubbing it after with butter, a trick he’d learned from his mother. Then, putting the steaks on a plate and pouring on the Creole sauce, one whole bottle, he reached over and hit the playback button.

  “Message for Mr. Hill. This is Mrs. Searle, social services up at Ocoee Regional. We’ve got your father in here quite sick, Mr. Hill, maybe not expected to last the night, according to the chief resident, and your name is on the next of kin form. Our number here is-”

  She gave the number up in Tennessee. Roy called. Mrs. Searle repeated what she’d said.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Roy said.

  “I believe it’s his liver, sir.”

  Roy believed it too. He called Marcia, postponed dinner.

  “What’s wrong, Roy?”

  “Something’s come up.” He didn’t want to get into it, not with the way things were starting to go between them-maybe better than ever, that was his secret thought-and not with the weird scene his father had pulled the only time he and Marcia had met.

  “Too bad,” Marcia said.

  “Yeah,” Roy said. “Maybe we could-”

  “Oops, I’ve got a beep,” Marcia said. “Bye, Roy.”

  He put the steaks in the fridge, turned off the oven, got back in the car.

  Roy drove north on 75.

  It just seems like I’m taking all the risks and getting none of the rewards.

  Believe me, Jerry, I’ll do everything I can to make sure your efforts are appreciated. How would you like a special mention in next month’s newsletter?

  Jerry said something neutral but Roy could tell from his tone that he was starting to come around. The narrator came on and made some important points about managing, but Roy didn’t catch them all because he was wondering about that next of kin thing. He and his father hadn’t seen each other or spoken in ten years, and there was an even longer gap the time before, their relationship being mostly gaps. Maybe his father had simply written his name because it was the correct answer, him never remarrying, so far as Roy knew, and Roy being the only child. Otherwise-what? Some kind of deep-rooted guilt rising up in a dying man? Roy had seen things like that on TV but didn’t know if they happened in real life.

  He took the 411 exit, crossed the state line an hour later. Jerry caved in on the activity reports. Carol got him mentioned in the newsletter, page one. Jerry thanked her for everything she’d taught him. The narrator summarized what that was. There were seven points in all, subpoints really, since this all appeared to be part of the second step of the five-step program, but the narrator was still discussing the third subpoint-how to enlist the help of your biggest opponent-when Roy pulled into the visitors lot at Ocoee Regional.

  “Patient’s name?”

  “Hill.”

  “That would be three twenty-seven. You can go on up.”

  “I can?”

  Roy went up, walked along a wide hall, all harsh blue from the fluorescent strips overhead. Doors were open on both sides. Roy didn’t like what he saw: a man reading from a Bible to a bald kid, an old toothless woman with her mouth wide open, a man with something hard to describe covering half his face. Roy began having problems with his air supply, felt in his pocket, wrapped his hand around the inhaler, held on.

  The door to room three twenty-seven was closed. A transparent plastic bag full of dirty linen lay on the floor outside. Roy could see blood on the rolled-up sheets, lots of it. He glanced up and down the hall, looking for someone to ask a question he hadn’t quite formulated, but there was no one. He turned the handle, pushed the door open.

  A room for two, but an old shirtless guy had it to himself. The old shirtless guy had little stick arms, a hollow chest, a hard potbelly, a few long strands of rust-colored hair crisscrossing his bald head. He was spooning Jell-O into his mouth and watching Roy with pissed-off eyes. Pissed-off eyes: that was the giveaway.

  “You don’t look like you’re dying,” Roy said. That just came out. Sounded pretty bad, but he didn’t wish for it back.

  “I’m a fucking medical miracle is what they say.” A blob of Jell-O-the green kind-quivered on his lo
wer lip and dropped to the bedding. “Maybe if your ma had learned you some manners you’d know enough to hide your disappointment a touch better.”

  The deep-rooted guilt thing was out.

  EIGHT

  Roy’s father finished his Jell-O. “Seeing as how you’re here anyways,” he said, “maybe you could be runnin’ one or two little errands for me.”

  “Like what?”

  “I could use a few things from out at the place.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “My place? That what you’re asking?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Don’t know where my place is?”

  “Why would I?”

  “Why would you? You were born in that fuckin’ house, for Christ sake.” His father turned that pissed-off look full on him.

  “And then?” Roy said.

  They stared at each other for a moment or two before his father looked away, gazed out the window. Or possibly at the window itself: it was fully dark now and the glass reflected his TV program, cars going round and round a dirt oval. “Guess I fooled the shit out of them, anyways,” he said, after a while.

  “Who?”

  “Goddamn doctors is who. Know what they thought?”

  “No.”

  “I was a dead man less they stuck some new liver in me. Who’s gonna argue with the old one now?”

  Roy didn’t argue.

  “Know my number on the list?”

  “What list?”

  “Got to get on a list for every goddamn organ. I’m in the fucking thousands.” He squinted at Roy. “Want to hear what’s even more fucked up than that?”

  Roy said nothing: he had an idea what was next.

  “The liver they give you-it could be a nigger’s.”

  As he had expected. But Roy hadn’t heard the word in some time and it gave him a sick feeling in the gut, partly from the word itself, more from the fact of it coming from the lips of this man, his father. A nurse entered at that moment, didn’t say, “All done with your supper, now, Mr. Hill?” or “Got a visitor, I see,” or any other amiable remark Roy would have expected from the habitual cheeriness of her face. She just took the tray and left in silence. She’d heard, all right.

  His father turned to him. Roy wondered whether he was embarrassed. “Any case,” his father said, “it’s not far.”

  “What’s not far?”

  “My place, of course. They don’t listen where you come from? Key’s under the mat. What’re you drivin’?”

  “An Altima.”

  “One of them little Jap shitboxes?”

  Roy didn’t answer.

  “You’re working, right? Got a job of some kind?”

  Roy nodded.

  “What as?”

  “Shipping.”

  “Lumber yard, that nature?”

  “I’m with Globax.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “Used to be Chemerica.”

  “Never heard of that neither.”

  Roy offered no explanation.

  His father noticed a tiny bit of Jell-O on his plastic spoon, licked it off. “How’s the pay?”

  “Not bad.”

  “What’s that mean in dollars?”

  “It means not bad.”

  Roy’s father watched the cars racing on the inside of his window. “How’s that wife of yours?” He might have said yourn; Roy wasn’t sure.

  “Good.”

  Roy’s father raised his eyebrows. “Still together?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And the kid?”

  “He’s good too.”

  His father was toying with the plastic spoon, twisting it in his hands. “Why’d you go and give him a name like that for, anyways?”

  And they were right back where they’d left off ten or eleven years ago. Roy and Marcia, at Marcia’s insistence, had brought Rhett up to see his grandpappy. It was Marcia’s first meeting with him too: Roy’s father hadn’t made it to the wedding. The get-together, at the Pizza Hut off exit eleven on 75, had lasted forty minutes, about twenty minutes too long.

  “Why don’t you give me directions and a list of things you want and I’ll be going,” Roy said.

  “What’s wrong with the name we already got?”

  “Just write it down,” Roy said, finding a pen and an old envelope in his pocket, laying them on the tray table. His father wrote on the envelope, handed it to Roy.

  “You dint answer my question-what’s wrong with the name we already got?”

  Roy read the list: breefs, 3 bags cheetoz, 1 bottel (over sink). He looked up at his father. “A boy needs a name of his own,” he said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  By the time his father had repeated the question, louder this time, Roy was out in the hall. A doctor was writing on a chart. Roy waited for him to finish, introduced himself, explained about the call on his answering machine. “Glad it’s just a false alarm,” Roy said.

  “False alarm?”

  “With the way he’s sitting up, watching TV, eating.”

  “I rejigged his medication a bit,” the doctor said. “He seems to be responding well.”

  “So was the problem with his liver or the previous medication?”

  “I don’t quite get what you’re saying,” the doctor said. A phone beeped in the pocket of his white coat. “Excuse me,” he said, putting the phone to his ear. After a while, he said, “Is that the one with Johnny Depp?” Roy went out to the parking lot.

  Roy followed the diagram on the envelope. East on 40 in light traffic, north on 315 in almost none, second right past “prair hall,” and left on the first paved road, all by himself.

  The road climbed a hill, rounded a bend. Potholes appeared, more and more frequent until they became the road itself. Roy’s headlights picked out a tumbling black stream behind tall trees, an unlit house with a tarpaulin sagging from the roof, another house with a blue TV light glowing in the back. The climb grew steeper, the turns tighter; the road narrowed to a single lane. There were no houses now, just trees covering steep slopes on either side, and sometimes a clearing, one with a still, bear-shaped shadow in the middle. Roy flicked on the inside light, glanced down at the diagram. His father had marked an X at the end of the road, but there was no indication of distance. Roy kept going, higher and higher. It was far from silent, especially with the state of Roy’s muffler, but he felt silence all around him, just the same. He tried the radio; nothing he wanted to hear came in clearly. Roy settled for his management tape.

  It’s only fair I get a raise, Carol.

  Why is that, Jerry?

  Because Tony’s making ten percent more than me.

  Jerry’s right. Tony is making ten percent more. Carol knows Tony was approached by a headhunter promising a higher-paying job at a rival company. She raised his salary in order to keep him. She’d like to keep Jerry too, but Jerry is not as valuable to the company and she doesn’t believe he deserves a raise. How can she deny Jerry and at the same time keep him a happy and productive member of the team?

  Before Roy could learn the answer, his headlights shone on a wooden gate and the road came to an abrupt end. Roy stopped the car. stay to hell OFF was spray-painted on the worn, uneven slats of the gate; a strange gate with no fencing on either side, nothing to prevent someone from simply walking around it. Roy got out of the car, walked around the gate, across a dirt yard. Metal things gleamed here and there in the moonlight: a washer lying on its side, an engine block, a TV with a smashed screen, hubcaps. Beyond stood the house, a misshapen thing with a porch resting on cement blocks, duct tape on the window of the front room, a crooked chimney overhung by dark trees. Roy mounted the porch. It creaked under his weight. An animal cried out, not far away.

  Roy paused in front of the door. Born in this house, in this fuckin’ house: he waited for the door, its dark paint chipped and peeling, to prod his memory, the way inanimate things were supposed to do sometimes. He felt nothing, but that might ha
ve been his fault: it occurred to him that maybe he missed a lot when it came to the subtleties of life.

  Key’s under the mat. Roy bent down to somehow turn back a corner of the mat without getting any of the filth on him. His shoulder brushed the door. It swung open.

  Roy went inside. He couldn’t see a thing, but he smelled many smells, none pleasant. He ran his hand along the walls on either side of the door, felt a switch, flipped it. A light went on over a sink, and a second one, hanging from the ceiling. The room had kitchen things in it-sink, card table, two card table chairs, icebox, stove; but there were living-room things too-frayed couch, TV; and bathroom things-a seatless toilet in one corner. Roy saw a spark, heard a little pop, and the hanging light went out.

  Briefs, Cheetos, bottle. He’d seen the bottle already-Old Grand-Dad-on a shelf over the sink. There were two cupboards under the counter. One was empty, the other so full of Cheetos that the packages cascaded out when he opened it. That left the briefs. Roy went into the next room, the soles of his shoes sticking once or twice to the floor.

  A shadowy room. Roy got the feeling he wasn’t alone, went icy on the back of his neck and between his shoulder blades. At the same time, something soft brushed his face. Roy snatched at it-a cord or string-and pulled. A light went on, a strange red light, as though for some fantasy bordello. But this was no bordello, just a small bedroom with a lopsided chest of drawers and a narrow unmade bed, littered with crumpled Cheetos packages, an empty bottle of Old Grand-Dad and-and what? Something dark on the pillow, something that gave a twitch, a twitch of a long tail. A rat, the biggest Roy had ever seen. He made some kind of noise, startled and scared. The rat leaped off the pillow, flew across the floor, disappeared through a hole in the wall.

  When Roy got his breath back, he went to the chest and opened the top drawer. Didn’t most people keep underwear in the top drawer? Not his father. His father kept a jar of Vaseline and a magazine called Horny Black Bitches. Roy tried the next drawer, found a pile of socks and underwear that included a three-pack of briefs from Wal-Mart, still wrapped. He picked it up, uncovering a cigar box underneath.

  Roy told himself, Don’t touch that box. What are you? The box is none of your business. But he didn’t believe that last part.