Lookaway, Lookaway (43 page)

“I’m sixteen,” he said, a minute after it began.

Michael stopped, then mumbled, “Oh well, too late now,” and kept going.

That should have been the end of it, but then Josh wanted to perform oral sex on Michael too, since it was an evening for firsts, so Michael leaned against the tree, invisible to the party, hearing Annie call Michael’s name from the back porch while Michael greedily held Josh by the hair and moved his head about for his maximum enjoyment. Josh wasn’t sure if he enjoyed doing it or not; he was fairly sure he was terrible at it but Michael quickly finished up, kind enough to withdraw before he ejaculated.

“Michael! Where arrrrre you?”

Josh dared to peek up at the house; Annie retreated inside and closed the door. As they both zipped up, Joshua saw Michael wasn’t meeting his eyes and was beginning a whole “Wow, didn’t see that happening” speech, when Josh cut him off:

“I’ll never tell anybody, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

Michael reached out to touch Josh’s face. It was all Josh could do not to kiss him, melt into him. “Weird. I can’t help but noticing. You and your sister sort of taste alike.”

“You should break up with my sister.”

“I keep meaning to do it, man.”

“End of term, maybe?”

The rest of that party was spent watching Michael hang all over Annie and Annie, later on, confiding to her baby brother in the kitchen that she and Michael might go to New York and live together after UNC-G.

Joshua heard two weeks later they were broken up.

*   *   *

Josh was cleaned out—20K in the hole. Though despondent, he was able to hug his father at the end of the Skirmish and tell him what a triumph it was. His father intended to camp another night. He too had brought an antique flask with some fine sour mash, a single-barrel bourbon distillation in a Sauternes cask, which he and Major Badger and Colonel Haslett were going to sip, sitting by the fire and reminiscing about the glories of re-enacted battle … or was it Colonel Badger and Major Haslett?

Josh’s father wondered if he might ask one more favor. Could Josh call a taxi on his cell phone (once out of the historical zone)? His Uncle Gaston was hammered. That would be a fifty-dollar cab ride easy.

“Wait. I’ll be happy to drive him,” Josh volunteered.

Joshua got Uncle Gaston to his rusting Toyota, with the help of some moonshine distillers. Josh winked at General Lee who looked on with hauteur from a nearby tent. By the time they reached Myers Park, his uncle had had a good thirty-minute nap. Joshua reached over to gently shake him.

“Home already?” he slurred.

“Uncle Gaston,” Josh began anew, walking his uncle to the front door. “There must be a long line of greedy relatives and acquaintances always asking for a handout but I fear I have to add myself to that long line, and I wish—”

“How much you need, my boy?”

Josh needed $18,000 to finish off Berma’s bond. But he blurted out, “Twenty-four thousand.” But it was not because of greed or anything he hoped to spend on himself. Well, not directly.

“Hoo hoo hoo,” said Gaston, standing up straight, looking rumpled like he’d slept on the streets. “Twenty-four big ones. I know you didn’t get a girl in trouble.”

Joshua smiled. “Most assuredly not.”

Uncle Gaston fumblingly opened up his house and careened inside. “You’re not being blackmailed, are you?”

Josh followed. “You remember Calvin Eakins, the city councilman?”

“Charlotte’s very own race man. Big loud shakedown artist, went on to become one of the crookedest amid the crooked Raleigh Democrats—which is saying something.”

Josh explained how he had bailed out Senator Eakins’s son and how Calvin Jr. had betaken himself to Jamaica and how he owed Berma Bigglefield the forfeit of the bond.

“Come to the kitchen. We’ll see if we can find which room I left my checkbook in.”

Josh, like many visitors before, was struck with how desolate the undecorated first floor of the mansion remained. He was escorted toward the kitchen-dining nook and there resided proof of residence, mail stacked in piles, manuscripts and galleys—sent for his blurb or review or goodwill—stock statements, corporate brochures, the kinds of things people with money and investments receive. Dishes in the sink, about a score of whiskey glasses abandoned in various corners of the room, catering and delivery boxes from the upscale bistros and brasseries that deliver.

Josh felt he had better gush. “Oh thank you, Uncle Gaston! I promise never again to pay anyone’s bond.”

Uncle Gaston chuckled. “Except if I need you to pay mine one day.”

“You go commit all the crimes you like. I’m your bail.”

“I doubt you’d have the money for the kind of crimes I may yet commit,” he groused, searching the cluttered tabletop. “Still have a mind to burn down the
Queen City Times.
”

Josh’s heart was lightened, he felt infused with helium, needing to be affixed to something earthbound before he floated skyward.

“Here we go!” Uncle Gaston lurched for the dining room table and bent over the surface to write the check, which also allowed him to stop swaying. “Twenty-four thou, you say.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do I make this to that bail woman or to you?”

“To me,” said Joshua quickly, not wanting the extra six thousand to land in Berma’s lap.

“Does Miss Berma look anything like her billboards or is it like with your sister Annie, a wholly created computer fantasy?”

Josh laughed. “Berma looks more like the picture on her billboards than Annie resembles her billboards. Have you been down I-77? And seen the billboard for Lookaway, Dixieland?”

“No, can’t say that I…” Uncle Gaston froze.

“They’ve started advertising for the place. Big fuzzy shot of a Southern antebellum mansion through the mists, exclusive homes starting at five hundred thousand and above. And there’s a faded cannon imposed over the left half … Uncle Gaston?”

There was a full thirty-second silence. “Lookaway, Dixieland?”

“That’s the name of the gated community on the Catawba that Dad and Mr. Boatwright are developing. They’re going to keep the area around the trestle as some kind of memorial park with plaques and, one day, a monument. Though I don’t think anybody died there.”

“Lookaway, Dixieland?”

“Corny as hell, but they’re going for that Old South hokum theme. Dad came up with the name.”

Uncle Gaston was still as a statue. “He did, did he?”

Joshua saw that something was amiss. Uncle Gaston had written the check but not signed it. Now Uncle Gaston was staggering toward the kitchen counter for a new glass and in the cabinetry below was a liter bottle of Four Roses bourbon. A stop at the fridge to gather a few ice cubes, and then a healthy pour, and then he teetered toward the telephone on the kitchen wall. He swigged, he dialed, he dropped the phone, he tried to pull the receiver close to him by reeling in the tangled cord only to drop it again.

“Can I help?” Josh asked. He stared at the unsigned check. He reached down and tore it from the checkbook. “Um, Uncle Gaston, if you could finish this out.”

“It was just so he could stick the knife in,” his uncle mumbled. “All the friendliness, the camaraderie like old times, just so he could…”

His uncle was unwell. “Okay,” said Josh, sounding stupidly cheery to himself, “let me get you to write your name on this and I’ll leave you to do whatever you are, um…”

But Uncle Gaston had stormed from the kitchen to the nearly barren living room. There was a conventional phone there on a small table against a far wall, one of two pieces of furniture in the whole long chamber. Uncle Gaston began to dial, then stopped, then stumbled toward the hard-backed chair (the other item of décor) and collapsed into it, murmuring, “No … no, I’m not going to give him the satisfaction of…”

Josh stood in the doorway with his unsigned check. He circled back to retrieve the pen from the kitchen and approached Uncle Gaston timorously.

“You were going to sign this, Uncle Gaston.”

Uncle Gaston stared into the far wall, his face drained of color. “Who do I make this out to?”

Josh realized he thought he was at a book signing. “Just a signature will do … right here, on the line…”

Uncle Gaston mumbled, “I’m not … This signing is over. Norma!” he called out.

Josh backed away. Josh wasn’t good with mental health episodes. He would bring back the check another time, perhaps.

He let himself out. Josh stood near his Toyota and looked up at the empty, lightless two-story mansion surrounded by giant oaks. They could be a hundred miles out in the country except for the nightglow of the metropolitan sky. The turret at the end, the mansard roof … this may have only been built in the 1990s but it was a good candidate for being a haunted house on a Hollywood back lot. Just then the trees took up a breeze, swaying and rustling, an impermeable wall of shifting darkness surrounding the creepy old house.

Josh reflected that he didn’t deserve his uncle’s money. He abused his uncle’s overblown neo-Confederate novels, privately judged him, hated his politics, and mocked him about his sex life from a tidbit of information which might have been untrue, but he and Dorrie continued with the libel anyway, and, what’s more, whispered it to anyone in Charlotte whom they wished to entertain and scandalize. And yet, here he was, shamelessly begging for the man’s money which he generously gave—almost.

He felt bad about his uncle’s sad life and he felt bad about his own disloyalty, but he didn’t feel bad about the check. Josh was still holding the pen. He had seen his uncle sign a million books. He had his uncle’s autograph back at the house on some book on some shelf, he was fairly sure. Yes, he was going to forge this and cash it and if his uncle accused him, he would thank him profusely as if nothing were amiss, or protest and remind him how drunk he was.

*   *   *

A few weeks later in May.

Dorrie had a key but she had never come into his apartment alone without it being an emergency before.

“Hey,” said Josh, entering his apartment, clutching a bag from Pier 1. “What’s up?”

“Nonso.”

“Huh?”

“He’s coming to America and you’re bringing him, right?”

Dorrie was good on the surprise attack; Josh couldn’t lie well under pressure. “Well. Heh-heh. You see, he got into a program for African nationals at Johnson C. Smith. So yes, he’s coming. How did you know?”

“Back at Chapel Hill, you wrote that final World Lit paper on
Things Fall Apart
and then I borrowed it to write
my
final English paper … and then a few months ago you were over at the house going through disks and boxes of papers trying to find ‘something’ and I wanted to know just what you were hunting for, and you finally tell me it’s that ten-year-old term paper and I ask myself, I say ‘Dorrie, why would Josh need an old term paper about a Nigerian novel unless he was applying for grad school or something,’ and then it clicked. You were applying for our little smiling friend.”

“Um, it worked. They accepted him.”

“And you filled out his application and wrote him an essay about his hopes and dreams. You’ve seen the guy’s English. What? You’re gonna write all his term papers for him so he won’t flunk out?”

Josh thought a minute. “Once he’s here they’ll work with him. Even Carolina had all kinds of lame foreign students who could barely speak English. They have tutorial services—”

“And so he lives
here,
with you? And you run him down to J. C. Smith every day? You feed him, you clothe him, like a pet, a little Nigerian boy-doll. And he’s totally dependent on you?”

“There are other African students there. He’ll make new friends—”

“And you’ll sleep with him and … it’ll be just like slave times. Thank you, Massa, for bringin’ my jet-black ass over from the Dark Continent so I can better m’self among allllll da white people. Would Massa like me to warm his bed tonight?”

“Aw come on, that’s … that’s a little harsh. I’m trying to help him out.”

“Uh-uh. That’s not what you’re doing. Have you thought for two minutes how this affects me? Aside from dealing with his backward African dumb ass all the time, you won’t have any money for vacations, for film festivals, for our going to New York. All our beautiful world will be sacrificed so you can…” She didn’t finish because she didn’t want to have a friendship-ending fight with Josh. She fished around for something neutral to say. “What’s in the bag?”

Josh sighed and reached into the crumpled Pier 1 bag and slowly brought out one of the contents: a long elegant blue candle. There were five blue candles in the bag of various widths and scents.

Dorrie looked askance. “Thought I smelled bayberry.”

“Look, I’ve talked with him on Skype, with the camera, he’s … He’s so sweet. I’m just trying to give him a chance to be gay in a country that doesn’t persecute him for it.”

“Oh yeah, you’re a regular Peace Corps. So how much was the ticket? Presumably, you’ve booked him a ticket.”

“No,” Josh said with fervor, like his buying a ticket would truly be a step too far. “His older brother is going to pay for that. The deal was if he got into an American school, his brother would buy him a plane ticket. I offered but he said no.”

Dorrie cocked her head sideways, squinted, almost said something, then pursed her lips, shook her head.

“What, Dorrie?”

“Oh my darling innocent boy…”

“What?”

“It’s a scam. A romance scam. The internet is full of them and Africa is the capital of them, usually Nigeria.”

Josh thought he knew what she was referring to. “No. I’ve talked to him with a webcam. He’s not just a photo some con man put up online.”

“I wonder how many old queens, sitting with their lapdogs, nursing a G and T, around the country are online with this boy, agreeing to help him out. You haven’t sent him money yet?” There was enough hesitation that Dorrie pounced: “So you have. He wouldn’t take an airline ticket from you because he couldn’t get cash out of that. So what was it? Money to bribe an official?”

Josh sat down, setting his candles gently on the table. “Nonso said to get a passport in Nigeria there’s nothing more to it than handing some government guy a bribe.”