Last of the Dixie Heroes

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 have 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.

Roy took out the box, slid open the top. There were three photographs inside. The first was a faded Polaroid of a young woman in a summer dress. She stood on some steps-might have been church steps, Roy couldn’t tell-laughing at something, maybe the way the wind was blowing her hair around. An attractive woman, with lean arms and shapely calves. It didn’t hit him at first that she was his mother.

She was in the second picture too, a better-quality print, standing beside one of those test-your-strength hammer machines at a county fair. The man with her was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt and making a muscle. She was feeling it with her fingertips and going, “Oooh.” His ears were identical to Rhett’s. He didn’t have that pissed-off look in his eyes, just a Budweiser in his free hand.

The third photo was clipped from a newspaper. “DeKalb Whiz Signs Intent Letter with U. Georgia.” Roy had on his high school uniform and the funny haircut all the seniors had worn that year.

Roy stared at the picture, stared through it, trying to get the dates right. Senior year meant fourteen or fifteen years after he and his mother had left Tennessee, and nine or ten years before the visit with Rhett, the only time he’d been back. He closed the cigar box. What was he supposed to make of the contents? Roy didn’t know. He shut the drawer.

And in closing the drawer, happened to glance out the back window. The yard sloped gradually uphill toward a low, massive shadow in the distance. Roy knew what it was even though he couldn’t really make it out: a barn, one of those cantilevered barns found only in these parts. This half sighting did things to his memory that the house had not. Whatever those things were, whatever was stirring, hadn’t risen to the surface before Roy saw a chink of light, the kind of narrow ray that might escape between cracks in old barn siding.

Roy left the house, started up the sloping backyard, more of a field, really, with stubbly vegetation and the shells of several cars. A strange sound came and went, a sound Roy couldn’t identify until it had gone: the beating wings of some heavy bird flying over his head. He glanced up, saw no bird, just the moon, so big and clear, its stony nature apparent. He came to the barn. Yes, one of those east Tennessee barns, as he had thought, and yes, a chink between the weathered planks. Roy put his eye to it.

His gaze swept almost unseeing past many things in the shadows-a tilted tractor missing one wheel, a battered demolition derby car with Sonny J written on the driver’s door, trailing flames, a set of drums, with Sonny J on the bass-and locked on the man in the center of the barn. The man, a big shirtless man with hair falling to his shoulders, had his back to Roy and was busy with something in front of him. At first, Roy couldn’t tell what that something was; then the man raised his arm and Roy saw it was a deer, hanging by its hind feet from the rafters. The man’s arm slashed down-only then did Roy see the knife-and the deer’s white belly split apart, spilling gore. A surprising amount of gore; at least, the man was surprised: he said, “Goddamn,” and spun around. Too late: Roy saw blood all over his thick chest, and a splotch or two on his face. At the same moment, the man’s eyes went right to the chink in the wall. Roy jerked back, as though he was afraid, but what was there to be afraid of? His memory, down at the bottom in the earliest part, was already making connections. They were cousins. Roy walked around the barn to the big double doors, said, “Sonny?” and pulled them open. “Sonny Junior?”

Maybe not. “Who the hell are you?” said the man, the knife not quite still in his hand, as though it had a pulse of its own.

“Roy.”

“Roy?” A moment or two, and then a smile spread across the man’s face. “Son of a bitch.” He came forward, almost trotting, shifted the knife-the blade must have been a foot long-to his left hand, offered the right to Roy. They shook hands, not the horizontal business handshake that Roy was used to, but the vertical kind he’d seen on the streets, a handshake in the arm-wrestling position. “Ain’t this the living end?” Sonny Junior said, not letting go. “Talk about a blast from the past.”

“How many years has it been?” Roy said.

“Don’t want to know,” said Sonny Junior, gazing down at Roy. Sonny Junior was about two inches taller, and in better shape than Roy had been on his best day. “Lookin’ good, Roy. Lookin’ real successful.” His expression changed. “Uh-oh,” he said. “You being here-did Uncle Roy… is Uncle Roy… gone?”

“He’s made a recovery.”

Sonny Junior shook his head. “Tough old bastard. Let me guess-he got you to come out here for booze.”

“You know him pretty well.”

“And Cheetos,” Sonny Junior said. “The Cheetos you can get away with. The booze they’re gonna confiscate unless you’re real smart.”

“I wasn’t going to bring him the booze anyway.”

Sonny Junior’s eyebrows went up; there were scars over both of them. “Why the hell not?”

“It’s his liver, Sonny.”

“So?” There was a pause. Then Sonny Junior flashed that smile again, patted Roy on the back, said, “Hell, you’re probably right, Roy. But there’s nothing to keep us two from throwing one back now, is there?”

“I’m not much of a drinker.”

“We’re not gettin’ wasted, Roy. It’s just a how-d’you-do, is all.”

Roy realized he was being rude. “A drink sounds good.”

“Now you’re talking,” said Sonny Junior, laying his hand, a big, heavy hand, on Roy’s back and guiding him into the barn. “Sorry if I was a little sharp there at first, Roy. I reckoned maybe you’d be one of them assholes from fish and game.”

“How come?”

“How come, Roy? Ain’t exactly hunting season, now is it?”

Roy hadn’t thought of that.

“But the truth is I’m innocent as a newborn babe. This critter was the victim of an unfortunate road accident up near Turtletown. I just happened to be the first lucky motorist on the scene.”

Roy found himself gazing at the big eyes of the deer; he had the crazy idea they were trying to tell him something.

“Do much huntin’, Roy?”

“No.” The truth was he’d never hunted in his life, never even fired a gun.

“Then this might interest you,” Sonny Junior said. He reached deep in the carcass, rooted around, and tore out a fist-sized bloody gobbet that Roy couldn’t make sense of at first, and then realized was a baby deer, tiny but perfectly formed. “Probably worth a few bucks,” Sonny Junior said.

“How’s that?”

“Up at the college. Genetic research.” Sonny Junior held up the fetus, gazed at it for a moment, then dropped it in a trash barrel. “Vodka all right? I got vodka and maybe whiskey.”

Roy saw a sleeping bag on a bare mattress in the cantilevered section. “You live here?”

“From time to time,” Sonny Junior said. “Need space for all my stuff. Want to see some of it?”

“Some of what?”

“My stuff, Roy.”

“Sure.”

Sonny Junior paused, bit his lip. “Shit, Roy.”

“What?”

“Family. What’s more important?” For a moment, Roy thought Sonny Junior was going to give him a hug. Instead, he opened a cooler, took out a bottle of vodka topped with one of those measuring spouts they use in bars, poured several measures into two paper cups, added water and a few spoonfuls of Tang powder. “Here’s to family.”

They touched paper cups. “What’s our relationship, exactly, Sonny?”

Sonny Junior paused, drink halfway to his lips, looked sad. “Ordinary circumstances, we’d of growed up together, Roy. We’re first cousins, you and me. Your daddy and my ma were brother and sister.”

“Were?”

“She passed.”

“Sorry.”

“Long time ago,” said Sonny Junior. “She had what Uncle Roy’s got, but worse.”

Roy didn’t know whether he meant liver disease, a drinking problem, or both. “What about your father?”

“Big Sonny? He’s gone too. Succumbed of an unlucky chain of events, down in Angola.”

“The prison?”

“What else they got down there?”

Sonny Junior took Roy by the arm, led him across the floor. “This here’s my last demolition derby car. Came second in it at the Waycross Fourth of July Invitational a few years back.”

“Still racing?” Roy wasn’t sure if racing was the term, but he couldn’t think of another.

“No money in it, Roy, believe it or not. Now over here, these rockets is what’s left from the fireworks stand I had up by Maryville. And this is my drum kit. We got a band plays once a week, once a month now, at a bar in Gatlinburg.” He sat down on the stool, picked up the sticks, started into something thunderous. Sweat popped out on his skin almost at once, sweat that mixed with drying deer blood, forming pink droplets on his chest. A crash of cymbals; silence. Sonny Junior beamed. “Recognize that?”

“I’m not sure.”

“The break from ‘Friends in Low Places,’ adapted a bit by myself.”

Roy drew a blank.

“ ‘Friends in Low Places’ by Garth Brooks, Roy. We play all his stuff. Had a singer sounded just like him, swear you couldn’t tell the difference, but he quit. I sing a bit myself, tell you the truth, just my own material.”

“You write songs?”

“I’ll send you a demo. Not in the music business by any chance, are you, Roy?”

Roy explained what he did.

“Any money in it?”

“Not a lot.”

“But steady work. You got a family, I recall.”

“Yes.”

“How I know is Uncle Roy goes on and on about the name you gave that boy.”

“He does?”

“Talks about you a lot. Football. But mostly that name. What was it, again?”

“Rhett.”

“Yeah, Rhett. Truth is, he don’t like it.”

“I know.”

“Thinks it’s a fag name.”

Roy said nothing. He’d thought something along those lines at first, but Marcia had insisted: it was the boy name she’d dreamed of from the day she’d visited the Margaret Mitchell Museum on an eighth-grade trip. Now Roy’s reaction to the name, the whole feeling it gave him, had changed completely: it was Rhett’s name.

“What’s he like?” said Sonny Junior.

“A good boy.”

“He’d be my nephew.”

“Cousin, I think.”

“Like to meet him,” said Sonny Junior. “Maybe pay back some for all the things Uncle Roy’s done for me.”

“He’s done things for you?”

“Such as letting me hole-stay here, store all my shit.” He reached for the bottle.

“No more for me, thanks,” Roy said.

“Don’t drink it, then-it’s a free country,” said Sonny Junior, filling Roy’s cup anyway but dispensing with the mix this time. “Tell me about the football star thing.”

“I wasn’t a star. One year on special teams at Georgia, that was it.”

“You got cut?”

“Just about. Had a concussion or two and the doctor wouldn’t clear me to play. Ended up losing my scholarship.”

“That sucks.”

“Worked out okay,” Roy said. A wife like Marcia, a son like Rhett, a house in a neighborhood like Virginia-Highland, seventy-two seven, before bonuses: standing there in this barn, Roy knew he’d come a long way.

Sonny Junior was watching him over the rim of his paper cup. “You grew up kind of sizable, Roy.”

Roy shrugged.

“Remember how we used to rassle a little in this here barn?”

“No.”

“Long time ago, naturally. I was probably about four, you must’ve been three.”

“I don’t remember.”

Sonny Junior nodded. “Place used to creep me out too-all this shit on the walls, hasn’t changed a bit.”

Roy glanced around, saw rusting farm tools hung on nails and hooks-hoes, rakes, scythes; something else he didn’t recognize.

“Know what that is?” Sonny Junior said, picking up on it right away.

“No.”

Sonny Junior rose, lifted whatever it was off the wall with a grunt, brought it back to Roy. “Ball and chain,” he said. “Sixteen pound.” He dropped it on the floor. It made a booming sound, cracked one of the old broad planks.

Roy thought at once of Angola and some connection to Sonny Senior, and so didn’t get it. “Check this out,” said Sonny Junior, sitting on the floor at Roy’s feet, very supple for such a big man, and fitting the leg clamp around Roy’s ankle. He closed the clamp. It had a long black key in it, a key Sonny Junior turned and withdrew. “Give it a try,” he said.

Roy tried to walk. “Jesus,” he said.

“Wicked,” said Sonny Junior. “Only way is to pick the thing up and carry it.”

Roy picked up the iron ball in both hands, took a step or two, the chain clanking between his feet. “I didn’t know they still used these,” he said.

“Huh?” said Sonny Junior, surprised enough to drop the key. It bounced once or twice and disappeared under the demolition derby car. “No one still uses them, Roy. How humane would that be? This one surely goes back to the old days.”

“What old days?” Roy said, his gaze on the shadows under the car. The ball was getting heavy. He put it down.

“Why, back to the original Roy, I guess,” said Sonny Junior.

“The Civil War hero?”

“Don’t know much about that part. But the original Roy owned this place, plus the old mill on the crick, a working proposition back then, and all the way up to the Mountain House.”

“What’s the Mountain House?”

“Just a ruin-all state forest back there now. But the point is, with the mill and owning all that land, he’d have slaves. Stands to reason, right?”

“I guess.”

“So that’s how he handled the bad ones,” Sonny Junior said, nodding at the big black ball on the floor. “Hell of a thing.” He drained his cup, poured more. “But you know what gets me, Roy, now we’re talking about this?”

“What?”

“From here all the way up to the Mountain House-any idea how much land that is?”

“No.”

“Square miles, Roy. Fuckin’ square miles. We were rich, back then, lords of all we surveyed.” He took another drink, still sweating a little from the drumming. “Who took it away from us, what I’d like to know,” said Sonny Junior.

“I don’t think it’s a question of that.”

Sonny’s eyes narrowed. “What’s it a question of?”

“It’s just… events, that’s all.”

“Events? Listen to the way you talk.” Sonny Junior gave him a long look. “You know you’re inheriting what’s left, don’t you?”

“I doubt that.”

Sonny Junior’s voice rose, just a little. “I’m telling you what I know.” Their eyes met; they held the gaze. Roy heard a quiet drip from where the deer was hanging.

“Got that key, Sonny?”

“Key?” said Sonny. “Oh, yeah.” He crawled under the car, wriggled back out with the key, unlocked the leg clamp.

Roy stepped free. He glanced at his watch. “Better be getting back. Work tomorrow, and I’ve got to drop his stuff off at the hospital first.”

“I’ll handle that if you want,” Sonny Junior said. “Going into town anyway.”

“Take you up on that,” said Roy. “Thanks.”

“Family is family,” said Sonny Junior. They shook hands again, that arm-wrestling handshake Sonny Junior liked. “Cousin Roy?”

“Yeah?”

“No good being strangers, is it?”

“No.”

Roy left the barn, walked down past the house to his car, parked by the gate. He could hear the creek now, bubbling faintly in the night. As he put the key in the ignition, he noticed the stain on his hand: blood, deer blood, a handshake imprint. His palm felt hot. That rasslin’ in the barn, when Sonny Junior was four and Roy was three? It started to come back to him now. On the way home, he tried listening to Carol and Jerry, but couldn’t make any sense of them, not until he saw the glow of Atlanta.