Last of the Dixie Heroes Read online

  “Tinkling.”

  “Tinkling?”

  “Or clinking. The sounds in one of those movies where rich people are eating supper? Like that. How was I supposed to know they were eating supper-it was after eight. Should have hung up right then.”

  “But you’d already said your name.”

  Gordo turned to him. “Going psychic on me, Roy?”

  Traffic started moving but Gordo, eyes still on Roy, didn’t notice. An angry cop waved him ahead.

  “You know when everything’s all set and then you get the feeling that something’s going wrong?” Gordo said.

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “I don’t get that feeling,” Roy said. “The going wrong part always takes me by surprise.”

  Gordo laughed, then said, “Didn’t mean to laugh. Meaning Marcia, of course.”

  “Yeah,” Roy said, “although funnily enough…”

  “Funnily enough what?”

  Roy wished he hadn’t started, didn’t want to go on, didn’t want to jinx anything. “Things are looking up a bit in that department.”

  “The new guy’s not working out?”

  “Maybe not.”

  “Give you some advice, Roy. Don’t make it easy for her.”

  “Why?”

  They wound down the ramp under the building, out of the sunlight. “You don’t understand women too good, do you, Roy?”

  The garage attendant stopped them, which he never did, and checked them off the list. He wasn’t wearing his Braves cap; they’d given him a brass-colored uniform that looked uncomfortable and a police-style hat that said Globax.

  Roy and Gordo got in the elevator at sublevel five. Gordo hit the button, took a deep breath. He didn’t let it out till they stopped at sublevel one: Roy was watching.

  “Thanks, good buddy,” Gordo said as the doors slid open.

  “For what?”

  “Not asking any questions.”

  6:59. Roy sat down at his place in B27, Asia/Oceania, under the irregulars banner. He logged on, saw what was ahead. First, he tackled the phosphates problem. That meant exchanging emails with Kumi in Lahore. Kumi had his own way-or her own way-with the language. “What does dispotentialities mean?” Roy said.

  He heard someone-P.J. or DeLoach-over the padded wall: “That fuckin’ Kumi.”

  Roy thought: The promotion is great but I’ll miss some things. Then he had another thought, an unusual, complicated thought for him: the very fact that he’d had that first thought, about missing some things, meant in some way that he was probably ready. What had Curtis said? Bill doesn’t think you’re ready, but I do. Was Curtis right? Was Roy growing in some way? Was he about to move to a new stage in life? Were things going to get easier? Was it already starting-Marcia coming back, the promotion? Was this what it was to be on a roll? If so, I’m going to make them happy, Marcia and Rhett, I swear.

  Then he heard Gordo in the next cubicle: “Yes, sir, I’m on my way.” Gordo’s head appeared over the wall, a smile spreading across his face. “Hey, Roy,” he said.

  “Hey,” said Roy.

  “You’re a good buddy, man,” he said, fixing the knot on his tie, a green one with yellow stripes. “Sorry for dumping all that paranoid shit on you before.”

  “Hey,” said Roy again.

  Gordo tapped the top of the wall a couple times, pumped his fist, a little half pump, and started across the floor, walking fast. Roy’s gaze ran on ahead to the square dais with its raised glass-walled office, where Curtis and Mr. Pegram were waiting.

  Gordo climbed the stairs, knocked on the door, which was kind of strange since Roy could see they were looking at Gordo and he was looking at them. Gordo went inside, started extending his arm for handshaking-Roy could sense Gordo’s energy all the way from his cubicle-but no handshaking actually happened. Curtis’s lips moved and the three of them sat down: Curtis in his chair, Mr. Pegram on the edge of the desk, Gordo in the chair on the other side, his back to Roy. Curtis’s lips kept moving. Suddenly Gordo’s head tilted up, than snapped in the direction of Mr. Pegram. Mr. Pegram’s lips moved. Gordo half rose. Mr. Pegram’s lips kept moving. Gordo raised both hands, palms out like a supplicant. Mr. Pegram held up one of his, palm up like a traffic cop. Gordo subsided in his chair.

  Roy lowered his gaze. He heard P.J.’s half whisper: “What’s going on?”

  And DeLoach: “Didn’t I fuckin’ tell you?”

  Roy checked his screen. Messages were piling up. Two from Kumi, the first only three lines long but incomprehensible, with routing codes Roy had never seen and the word prioricity underlined, the second an incomprehensible correction of the first. Roy opened messages from Cesar in Miami, the Osaka subsidiary, customers in Singapore, Bangkok, Santiago-how did that get there? — someone else in Lahore, not Kumi, the tariff office on the seventeenth floor: all of them more or less routine, all suddenly as incomprehensible as the worst gibberish Kumi ever sent. Roy was thinking: How can she deny Jerry and at the same time keep him a happy and productive member of the team? He hadn’t heard the answer.

  Something made him take another look at the Miami message. Cesar sent email almost every day, but this one ended with: “How’s everything up there?” Had Cesar ever asked a question like that before, ever written anything personal at all? Roy was thinking of examining past communications in the mailbox when another message popped up, this one from someone he didn’t recognize-lbridges at an edu address. Roy didn’t know lbridges, never got messages from any edus, began to get the strange feeling that his screen was spinning out of control; and then Gordo was back.

  Gordo’s face was red; bright red, as though lit from within. He turned it on P.J., DeLoach, and finally Roy, a glowing red thing in the vast muted space of pastels, beiges, and grays.

  “What’s wrong?” Roy said. Gordo glared at him, or maybe unseeingly right through. “Is it about the promotion?”

  Gordo’s glare intensified, became ferocious, and there was no doubt he saw Roy now. “Promotion?” he said, his voice rising. “They gave me the boot.”

  “The boot?”

  “The boot, Roy, you dumb fucking cracker.” His voice rose and rose. Roy thought Gordo might vault the partition and attack him. “Canned, fired, sacked.”

  “But-”

  “Canned, fired, sacked.” Gordo was shouting now; his triple-bladed cut opened up and blood dripped off his chin. “I’m the dumbest fucking cracker of them all.” Gordo in his cubicle, kicking something: first, the partition went down, a whole L-shaped section, then another, and Roy saw that P.J.’s feet, under his desk two cubicles away but very close in distance, were clad in bedroom slippers. Then Gordo’s monitor was in midair-it went right over Roy’s head-and the mouse, trailing after like a kite tail, caught the irregulars banner and tore it from the strip lights. A crash on the open floor beyond the cubicles-some of the strip lights going down too-loud in a place where crashes never happened, and then security guards moved in, two from the receiving end, more from the elevator bank. Gordo whipped around, saw them coming from both directions, said, “Just try it,” screamed it at the top of his lungs, in fact, cords standing out white as bone under the stretched skin of his red neck, and reached in his pocket, as though for a gun, as though he thought he had a gun in there. But of course he didn’t. Then Roy was on his feet, had his arm around Gordo, turned Gordo away from the guards, started walking him toward the elevators, at the same time saying something soothing, he didn’t know what.

  “Get the fuck off me,” Gordo said, and tried to shrug Roy off. He kept trying until they came to the elevators, but Roy didn’t let himself be shrugged off. Elevator doors opened, a lucky thing because the security guards were right behind, issuing commands Roy’s brain didn’t register. Doors opened and out came Hector from supplies. He had an armful of toner cartridges he could hardly see over, but what he could see alarmed him. Roy felt a hand on his back. He gave Gordo a little push, past Hector-but not quite cleanly-and onto the e
levator, occupied by three or four women from maid service, their eyes widening. The doors closed.

  Roy turned back to the room. There was toner all over the place. Curtis and Mr. Pegram watched from behind the glass wall, far away, their faces featureless smudges, one black, one white.

  Roy worked late, all by himself on the floor, except for maintenance still rebuilding around him. He found the phosphates, lost them again, sorted through several new messages from Kumi, dated the next day. He received a long set of email protocols from the Globax office in New York. It included a warning about personal communications and a reminder that electronic traffic was monitored. He opened the edu message from lbridges.

  Roy-interested in a little black powder shooting?

  Lee

  Bridges. Roy had forgotten the last name. He was wondering whether to reply, and if so what to say, since he wasn’t sure he understood the message, when Curtis came in; walked through the opening, the wall still down.

  “Working late?” Curtis said.

  “Catching up to do,” Roy said. Curtis pulled up a chair. Could he read the screen from where he was? Depended on his eyesight; black powder shooting looked huge from where Roy sat.

  “Bill said to make sure you were properly thanked.”

  “For what?”

  “For how you handled today’s situation. It bodes well-his words.”

  Roy shrugged.

  “We’re going to wait forty-eight hours, let things blow over, before making the announcement.”

  “What announcement?”

  Curtis glanced around; a new wall snapped up in Gordo’s old space, no flag stickers on this one. Curtis lowered his voice. “The promotion, Roy. Your promotion. Sometimes I wonder if you’re even interested.”

  Roy lowered his voice in imitation, making their conversation seem intense, as though they’d slipped into italics. “Of course I am.”

  Curtis nodded. “I know that. Wouldn’t make sense otherwise.” He gazed at Roy’s screen, resumed a normal volume. “How about a drink? We could try that new place on Edgewood.”

  “Thanks, but another time.”

  “Or anywhere you like.”

  “I wanted to get home and give him a call,” Roy said.

  “Who?”

  “Gordo.”

  Curtis’s eyelid did its fluttering thing.

  “It hasn’t blown over for me yet,” Roy said.

  Curtis leaned forward. “He wasn’t part of the Globax future.”

  Curtis gave Roy a chance to respond. Roy said nothing.

  “Not to get too philosophical about it, Roy, but there are new forces on the loose. Whether you choose to recognize them or not won’t change anything.”

  Roy knew Curtis was right about those forces: he could feel them, like some kind of accelerator in a NASA g-resistance test.

  “Never fired anybody, have you, Roy?” Curtis said.

  The maintenance guy heard that: he hoisted two trash barrels instead of one, and struggled off.

  “No,” Roy said.

  “That’s going to change.”

  “I know,” Roy said, but he hadn’t, not consciously, until that moment.

  “The hiring makes up for it.”

  Roy hadn’t thought about that either.

  “New territory,” Curtis said. “But you’ve got the experience, you’ve got the instincts. Remember, when in doubt-there’s always the vision statement.”

  Roy’s memory of the vision statement was vague. He recalled a few of the headings as they applied to his department: on time, safety first, team.

  The maintenance guy returned, crumpled the irregulars banner and tucked it under one arm, grabbed the stepladder with the other, said, “Look all right now, Mr. Curtis?”

  “Better than new,” said Curtis.

  Roy called Gordo as soon as he got home. No answer; the machine didn’t pick up.

  Roy was restless that night. Forty-eight hours. Why hadn’t Curtis said a day or two, a couple days, a little while? Forty-eight hours made it sound like something from a James Bond movie; this was only a job. Roy went downstairs, tried to work on Rhett’s shelves, couldn’t concentrate. He thought of reading the vision statement, but couldn’t find a copy. He opened the fridge, not from hunger, just for something to do, and saw the steaks, still marinating in the Creole sauce. He checked the time; Marcia and Rhett would probably have eaten by now, but what was there to lose by calling?

  Roy called.

  “Hello?” said a woman; Roy didn’t recognize the voice.

  “Is Marcia there?”

  “No.”

  “Rhett?”

  “He’s doing his homework.”

  “This is his father.”

  “Just a sec.”

  Rhett came on.

  “Hi.”

  “Who was that?”

  “Jenny.”

  “Who’s Jenny?”

  “The baby-sitter.”

  “Ma out somewhere?”

  “That’s why Jenny’s here.”

  “Think she’ll be back soon?”

  “Who?”

  “Mom. Your ma.”

  “She’s in New York.”

  “New York?”

  “She’s going to bring me some souvenirs.”

  “Barry go with her?”

  “He’s here. Want to talk to him?”

  “No. Is it for work or something like that?”

  “He e-trades at night.”

  “I meant Mom. Your ma.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “When’s she coming back?”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “What did she… I mean, why all of a-”

  “Dad?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m watching The Simpsons.”

  Roy didn’t answer right away; he was having air supply problems.

  “Dad?”

  “I’m here. Done your homework?”

  “Most of it.”

  “Okay. Talk to you tomorrow.”

  “Bye.”

  “Love you.”

  But the last line was spoken to the dial tone.

  TEN

  A horseman with a smudged face bore down on Roy, saber flashing under the moon. Roy felt in his pocket for a gun, but of course he had no gun. Worse, he was wearing the ball and chain.

  Roy reached for the phone. “Hello?” The bedside clock read three something; Roy’s vision was blurry.

  “Sorry if it’s a little late,” said Gordo. “I can’t sleep.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “I’m handling it pretty good, Roy.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Except for the not sleeping part. Guess where I am?”

  “Uh-oh.”

  Gordo laughed, a laugh that went on a little too long, wavering on the verge of something else. “At the camp,” Gordo said.

  “What camp?”

  “Our camp, Roy. Seventh Tennessee. I’m on my cell.”

  “You’re out there now?”

  “On patrol.”

  “I thought the camp was only on weekends.”

  “Right. The tents aren’t up.”

  “Are you alone?”

  “I see the stars. I hear the rolling thunder.”

  “There’s no thunder.”

  “It’s from a song.” Gordo sang it: “ ‘I see the stars. I hear the rolling thunder.’ “ His singing voice surprised Roy: Gordo did much more than get the notes right.

  “ ‘How Great Thou Art,’ “ Roy said.

  “You listen to gospel, Roy?”

  “Not really.” “How Great Thou Art” wasn’t one of his favorites, didn’t do to him what “Milky White Way” did, but he liked how the drummer made a booming sound whenever the rolling thunder part came along. Could Sonny Junior make a booming sound like that, on his drum kit in the barn? Roy had the crazy idea of getting Gordo and Sonny Junior together.

  “Still there, Roy?”

  Roy thought he heard crickets. “Aren�
�t you a little cold?” he said.

  “Got my cape.”

  “Cape?”

  “Regulation cape. Part of the uniform, Roy.”

  “You’re wearing your uniform?”

  “And bucking for corporal.”

  Pause. Crickets for sure.

  “Maybe there’s no thunder,” Gordo said, “but the stars part is true.”

  “Must be nice,” Roy said.

  “No sign of life at all, life as we know it,” Gordo said. “The sky glows over in the east-I got that right, east? — but that doesn’t have to be life as we know it. Could be a distant fire. Like… like a wooden town going up in flames.”

  Roy remembered the long path up from the parking lot and past the cabins to the tents in the forest. “Got a flashlight?” he said.

  “Nope. Just my musket.”

  “Not loaded,” Roy said.

  “We just fire the powder, Roy, you know that. Although…”

  “Although what?”

  “Roy?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m about to tell you something very important.”

  Roy thought of the oxidized bullet from Kennesaw Mountain and got afraid. But what was there to fear from spent bullets?

  “Are you listening?” Gordo said.

  “Yes.”

  “This is the most un-fucked-up place I’ve ever been.”

  Gordo’s laugh that had wavered on the edge of something else? The something else was happening now.

  “Gordo?”

  “I’m not upset.”

  “Does Brenda know where you are?”

  “Let’s not talk about her. I’m not exactly persona whatever it is. She was going to cut back to part-time, with the p-p-promotion and all.”

  Silence. Roy heard crickets, and another sound, a rumble.

  “Hear that?” said Gordo. “Thunder.”

  Roy listened, heard nothing this time.

  “Know what it sounds like to me?” Gordo said. “The long roll.”

  “The long roll?”

  “What the drummer boy played, Roy-the call to battle.” Pause. “I’m gonna hold the phone up to the sky.”

  Roy listened, thought he heard something.

  “Well?” said Gordo.

  “Most likely the overnight cargo planes coming into the long strip at Fulton County.” Roy wished he’d said something else, anything but cargo planes.