No Defense (3 page)

Eddie looked at me and smiled-not a real
smile but an “isn’t that typical of your father intruding in our
lives” smile.

“We’ll survive, Daddy. We always have,” I
said, although I wasn’t so sure.

“You haven’t always had three children under
the age of four, no help, and no money.” My father grabbed my upper
arm and stopped walking to emphasize his point. Everyone else
stopped with us.

“You know how he loves to take care of you,”
Mother said lightly.

“And how she loves to be taken care of by
you,” Eddie added with a slight edge to his voice.

“Why doesn’t Jessie come stand next to me
for this one picture since our outfits match?”Jane asked when we
were assembled in front of the entryway. She stood with her lips
pursed and her hands on her ample hips, waiting for an answer.

“Scotty was in charge of these pictures last
time I checked, Jane,” my father said sharply, shaking his
head.

Jane pretended not to hear what Daddy had
said, but I caught the hurt look in her dark brown eyes. She
quickly turned away and busied herself with running her right hand
across her bouffant hairdo.

“It’s okay,” I said. “Go on over next to
your aunt Jane, Jes.”

Jessie, who adored her aunt Jane, hurried
over and stood in front of my older sister. From a distance, anyone
who didn’t know better would have assumed that they were mother and
daughter. Save for the minor differences in dress waists and shoe
heels, they were dressed in almost identical outfits, down to their
navy velvet headbands.

This was not a coincidence. Just a few days
earlier, Jane had sent Jessie the matching outfit specifically for
this occasion. If Jane’s doctors ever managed to get her pregnant
and keep her that way, I wondered whether her fierce attachment to
my child would abate.

“Oops,” Scotty said. He snapped his fingers.
“Everybody relax a sec while I put in some more film.” He removed a
roll of film from the camera, leaned over, dropped it in his black
camera bag, and took out a new roll. He was about to reload the
camera when he stopped to talk with a man I’d never seen around
Tallagumsa.

“Now what’s Scotty doing?” Eddie asked.
“Let’s go, how ‘bout it? Chat on your own time, Scotty!” he
yelled.

Scotty shook hands with the stranger. The
man was almost as tall as Eddie and slightly bigger-boned. He had
sandy blond hair, dark eyes, and a pleasant smile. A camera hung
from a strap around his neck.

In a small southern town it wasn’t hard to
tell who fit and who didn’t, and this man didn’t. His khaki pants
and burgundy polo shirt weren’t made of polyester or a double knit,
and his hair-like Eddie’s, just long enough to touch his back shirt
collar and cover the tops of his ears-was considered fashionably
long in Birmingham or Atlanta but didn’t conform with Tallagumsa
notions of style.

“Y’all don’t mind if this reporter fellow
takes a few pictures too, do you?” Scotty asked us.

“Happy to have him,” Buck answered for
everyone. “Right, Mayor?” he asked my father.

“Where you from, young man?” my father
called out.

“Washington, D.C.,” the man said. “I write
for the
Washington Star
.”

“You aren’t one o£ those fellows Woodward or
Bernstein, are you? You know, from the Watergate thing?” Buck was
thrilled at the prospect. “Come to think of it, you look kind of
like Robert Redford.”

“Wrong paper, Sherlock,” Eddie said.

“I think it’s more likely he’s that reporter
friend Junior Fuller’s been talking about,” my father said. “Ben
something or other.”

“That’s me. Ben Gainey.” He gave us a little
salute. “Is Junior around? He said I should meet him here, but I’m
afraid I’m a little late.”

“He’s at the reception already,” Buck said,
“at the Tallagumsa Steak House down First Avenue, that-a-way.” He
pointed to his right.

“Lucky Junior,” Eddie said. “I’ll be
dreaming about Steak House food tonight; I’m obviously never going
to get any today.” He folded his arms across his chest and looked
annoyed.

“Mr. Gainey, I’m Buck Newton,” Buck said,
“and this is the future governor of the great state of Alabama,
Mayor Newell Hagerdorn. Looks like Paul Newman, doesn’t he? Don’t
you think that’ll be an asset in the next election?”

“Buck!” my father interrupted: “How many
times do I have to tell you not to talk about that?”

“That you look like Paul Newman?” he
asked.

“You know damn well what I mean,” Daddy
said, seething. “It’s not the time or the place.”

“Just trying to help.” Buck grinned,
oblivious to how mad Daddy was at him.

Buck had been my father’s campaign manager
in the last mayoral election, and he relished the possibility of
running his gubernatorial campaign.

“Pleased to meet you, Mayor.” Ben Gainey
hurried over to shake my father’s hand. ‘junior’s told me all about
you and your town. I’m looking forward to interviewing you for my
book if you have the time.”

“Happy to oblige,” Daddy said. “just let us
know. We’ll do anything we can to help you.”

Like most successful politicians, my father
was able to sound sincere regardless of his true feelings. He’d
told me earlier that day how concerned he was about this reporter
friend of Junior’s portraying Tallagumsa in an unflattering
light.

“You’re at the top of my list, Mayor
Hagerdorn,” Ben said.

“Not that it’s unusual, but is everybody
here going to suck up to your father all day long?” Eddie whispered
to me.

“Stop talking, y’all, and smile,” Scotty
yelled as soon as Ben Gainey rejoined him. Ben raised his camera to
his eye, and he and Scotty snapped several pictures. In between
photos, we talked.

“Who is that guy, Newell?” Eddie asked.

“A friend of Junior’s from law school who’s
a reporter now. He’s writing a book about the New South and
thinking about featuring Tallagumsa in it,” my father said. “If he
decides to write about us after visiting this week, he’ll move here
next month.”

“That would be incredible good luck,” Buck
said. “He could give us a big step up-I mean, give you a boost,
sir. Bring national attention to your campaign.”

“Come on,” Eddie said incredulously. “He
wouldn’t know the real South if it walked up and bit him. I can
look at him and tell you he’s just another South-basher come to air
all our dirty laundry and remind the rest of the country what
racist hicks we are. No reporter comes to this town to write about
the state college. They come to write about Jimmy Turnbow and Leon
Johnson. That’ll really do you a lot of good, Newell.”

“Goodness, Eddie,” Mother said. “You must
have gotten up on the wrong side of the bed today.”

“I’m sorry, Gladys, but I’m tired of this
Yankee holier-than-thou attitude toward the South. They’ve got
plenty of their own problems. I’ve had enough of this South as a
bastion of evil crap.”

“You’ve done a lot of cartoons critical of
the South yourself,” I pointed out.

“As a Southerner, I’m allowed,” he
replied.

“Just one or two more shots,” Scotty sa1d.
“Go over to the fountain and sit along the edge. Don’t jump in,
Jessie,” he joked.

We dutifully crossed the landing to the
fountain and sat one by one along the broad ledge.

Daddy detoured toward the Confederate
statue, took his jacket off and hung it on the soldier’s bent left
arm, then joined us.

Smiling, we all looked toward Scotty and Ben
Gainey.

“Mr. Gainey’s not interested in our past,
Eddie,” Jane said after the first snapshot. A gust of wind blew the
collar of her sailor dress up over her face. She forced it down
with her palm and continued. “Junior said he wants to focus on all
the progress we’ve made, the changes, the good things. And he does
too think the state college is important.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Eddie
said.

“Do I detect a note of jealousy?” Buck
asked. “I bet you’d give away LuAnn to be the political cartoonist
at the
Washington Star
.”

“I’m not his or anyone’s to give away, Buck.
And leave Eddie alone, would you,” I said.

“I for one think we’ve put those dark days
behind us,” Mother said.

“I hope not.”

“Oh, LuAnn,” Jane said. “What is that
supposed to mean?”

I couldn’t see Jane’s face since she was in
front of me, but I was sure from her tone that she was
grimacing.

“Cross your left leg over your right,
Gladys. And smile, Jane!” Scotty said, confirming my suspicion.

“Just that lately everyone seems so anxious
to sweep the civil rights movement under the rug and pretend
nothing horrible happened here or anywhere else in the South,” I
said. “I don’t think it’s right. I also don’t think it’s smart or
productive.”

“I agree with LuAnn’s last point one hundred
percent,” my father said.

“Big surprise,” Jane said, too quietly for
Daddy to hear her.

“Everybody look that way and smile.” Scotty
pointed at the fountain.

As we complied with his request, Scotty and
Ben Gainey raced to the other side of the fountain and took the
last few more pictures.

“So, what are y’all sitting around for?”
Scotty finally asked. “Get on over to the Steak House-everybody’s
waiting on you.”

“Ever thought about comedy as a line of
work, Scotty?” Eddie asked.

“No. Have you?” Scotty replied,
grinning.

CHAPTER
TWO

My family and I, and the few remaining
stragglers from the courthouse dedication, made our way down First
Avenue toward the Tallagumsa Steak House. When the light turned
red, I grabbed Jessie’s hand and tensed for the dangerous
confrontation that crossing streets in downtown Atlanta had become.
I looked both ways. Two cars were making the turn; both stopped.
The woman in the first car smiled and motioned us to walk ahead. I
relaxed and released Jessie’s hand.

How nice it would be not to have to worry at
every downtown intersection about life and death. One day in
Atlanta, on the way to Jessie’s day care, I had to jump about two
feet backward, jerking Jes along with me to avoid being crushed by
the speeding car that turned right into us. I couldn’t imagine that
my children would ever be old enough to cross Atlanta’s busiest
intersections alone.

Of course, in defense of my fellow
Atlantans, I understood that these Tallagurnsa drivers were so much
more courteous and less likely to try to kill a person, at least in
part, because they had less cause to be rude: There was no such
thing as a traffic jam here, and the concept of a rush hour was
ridiculous.

When I left Tallagumsa for college in 1969,
I’d hated its molasses-slow pace of life. Back then I dreamed of
men and women in designer clothes rushing from one momentous
meeting to another, hailing cabs, passing through the revolving
doors of towering buildings, and waiting in front of elevator banks
that would take them to the sixty-fifth or seventy-second floor,
where they would conduct business of earth-shaking importance. I
fantasized about packed expressways and busy downtown streets. I
desperately wanted a city full of strangers who didn’t know
everything about me
and
my family, who’d pass me on the
street and not recognize me, a place to get lost when you wanted or
needed to be left alone. I wanted challenge, action, excitement,
and anonymity.

What I once found romantic about city life,
however, I now found inconvenient, unsafe, tiring, or simply
irritating. A recent string of unsolved burglaries in our Atlanta
neighborhood worried me whenever we left our apartment, and a walk
through downtown Atlanta left me longing for clean air, peace and
quiet, and open spaces.

We walked two and three abreast the two
blocks to the Tallagumsa Steak House. Mother and Jane were in the
lead; Buck and Ben Gainey were close behind them. Jessie, feeling a
bit frenzied from the courthouse-dedication ceremony, the waiting
and the posing for pictures, ran up and down the sidewalk, circling
us and the parking meters in a series of giant figure eights. She
sang over and over the only lines she knew from the “Sesame Street”
theme song: “Sunny day chasing the clouds away. Can you tell me how
to get to Sesame Street?”

Smoking a Salem, Eddie followed a few feet
behind my father and me. At least he wasn’t muttering to himself
or, worse, shouting in anger like the Glad Bag Man near our Atlanta
apartment.

The Glad Bag Man was an elderly homeless man
who kept his belongings in a green plastic garbage bag that he
somehow balanced upon his head. He passed the day screaming at all
who passed his park bench. His verbal barrage of curse words and
stream-of-consciousness conspiratorial plot lines tying together
hell, President Carter, UFOs, and Patty Hearst had given Jessie
more than one night of bad dreams.