One More River (2 page)

He took a deep breath, as he’d run out of air. Although a salesman of some skill, accustomed to spinning a spiel tailored to the situation at hand, he found himself at a loss in this woman’s presence, and he could only guess why. Laura Anne Needleman put two incredibly soft fingers against his lips.

Hush. I am not interested in your aunt Missy. Everyone in the county knows a Sassaport or two. I take it your mama’s another one? And Levy. Why, there are Levys sprinkled about in every corner of the South. I don’t know if it matters much which ones yours are. I am sick of all this focus on the ancestors!

Mickey Moe considered for a moment that Laura Anne Needleman might have a rebellious nature. The thought excited him. The idea that he—a man of questionable family history on his daddy’s side—might escape the culture’s obsession with lineage, made him tongue-tied with gratitude. So he said, Pardon me?

My, oh my. That did come out funny, didn’t it? I only mean I like to find out first about the person settin’ right there in front of me, not all the old ghosts. When I say tell me about your people, I want to know about the ones closest to you in blood. What are they like? What do they do? I mean your mama, your daddy. Your siblings. You have siblings?

He told her about his three elder sisters, which didn’t take long, because the first two, married and living out-of-state, didn’t interest him and the third, whom he loved, lived at home and never seemed to interest anyone else. He told her about his mama and how it was his job to take care of her ever since his daddy died in the Battle of the Bulge.

She asked him the question he most dreaded. And before the war? What did your daddy do?

Buying time before he answered, Mickey Moe Levy looked down. He played with the blades of grass under his hand and sighed and told her what he knew and then, because he was a goner, what he’d come to suspect in his heart.

My daddy, he began, was a man of mystery.

Laura Anne straightened up at that. She leaned in close to him, giving him an intoxicating whiff of her scent, one of lavender soap and fresh linen dried outdoors in the sun. She regarded him intently. The gold flecks in her eyes glittered. There was a fierce heat in her gaze. It was like being watched by torchlight. When a sudden breeze passed by, her honey-colored hair lifted so that a few silky strands escaped the fetters of her sunhat to graze his cheek. It took all he had to keep himself from grabbing her right there in front of everyone and planting a smack, hard and wet, on that sweet little mouth this close to his own. To cover evidence of his struggle, he paused, mopped his brow and neck with a pocket handkerchief, and continued.

Daddy claimed he came from a prominent family in Memphis, but only three cousins of his, two male and one female, were in attendance at the wedding. Mama’s family thought that pretty odd. He explained it away. Told them his mama and daddy had not finished the year’s mourning for his granddaddy and would not attend a celebration, even their own son’s wedding. Now, Mama’s people had never heard of such a ban, but they assumed the Levys were more observant Jews than they were. Daddy told them his people were from somewhere or other along the Rhine, which from the Sassaport perspective, bein’ of Portuguese descent, was so foreign a place the river might as well have flowed through China. In those days, people didn’t have long engagements. Once a couple declared their affections, you married them off right quick before they had a chance to dishonor themselves.

Laura Anne shook her head in vigorous agreement. A wise program, she said.

Mickey Moe shot her a mischievous glance. Think so? he asked, wondering if her blood was hot.

She blushed, clamped her upper teeth against a plump lower lip. His hopes soared.

When my sisters and I were born, Daddy’s family was invited for the name days and the bris, but no one showed. They sent letters and bank drafts, but that’s it. Mama put it about that they were dismayed he’d married a girl out of their sect, a notion the Sassaports accepted, remarking it was a dang shame his people were so hard. Twice a year, Daddy traveled to Memphis to visit them, but he always left us home. Mama said he was pavin’ the way, pavin’ the way for our eventual presentation, which I believe she put some faith in. She shouldn’t have. It never happened.

Then the war came. Daddy got killed sittin’ in a foxhole half-froze to death. His buddy told us he saw that Nazi comin’, but his fingers were so numb he couldn’t pull his trigger.

Laura Anne reached over and pressed his knee in empathy, which felt so good Mickey Moe longed for her to keep it there. He swallowed hard to embellish his misery. He dipped his head to make his forelock graze his eyes, a pose he knew women found difficult to resist, and dropped his voice to a soft, sad, seductive hum.

. . . Mama hired a detective to track down Daddy’s family so she could let them know their son and heir was dead. It was a considerable expense for a war widow with a sparse income, but she was hopin’ for an inheritance. They wrote back and said they had no idea who she was talkin’ about. There was no Bernard Levy in their kin or ken. Mickey Moe slapped his thighs with both hands in a gesture of finality.

So you can say everything I know about my daddy is a lie. I don’t know who he was or where he come from. I only know the falsehoods he told. I don’t remember him. But I have a feelin’—and there’s some fact to this, because when I was a bit younger I looked into things—those Memphis Levys lied, lied as outright as my daddy, about who he was and where he’d been. He was one of them alright, but one of them they did not care to acknowledge. Why, I do not know. I like to think maybe he was a bootlegger. That’d explain a lot. Explain his so-called trips to Memphis and why the flow of money stopped once he was gone to war.

Laura Anne frowned and gave a little shrug in response to his conclusion, as if nothing more could possibly be said. Her eyes looked sad and damp. He was gratified his story moved her. Mickey Moe rose to his feet and threw up his hands, pointed them toward the moon that had begun to rise in the afternoon sky, boldly asserting itself just below the bright and burning sun.

I am a child of mystery, he said, but I am as easy to decipher as a semaphore waved from the deck of a riverboat on a sparklin’ day in spring. I might take a little study, but there is no deception in me. I’ve made my life a devotion in plain talk and honest proposal to atone for whatever drops of my daddy’s lying blood flow through my veins. Do you find this upsettin’?

And because love, wherever it happens, whenever it happens, is a miracle even when it is the most natural thing in the world and obvious to every fool in its purview, Laura Anne said, No. I do not. I rather think it makes me like you more, Mickey Moe Levy. A whole lot more.

Fates have been sealed on less.

Stuck in the heat of a Vietnam about to erupt in its first full-scale battle, Mickey Moe was reluctant to let go of his memories of meeting his wife. Reliving them brought her so close a sudden waft of tropical breeze felt exactly like her breath against his neck. It sounds like a fairy tale now, he thought. Who would have thought that summer day amid the sweet tea and little cakes that tribulation would be born? It should have been all Saturday night dinners and drive-in movies, but what we got were the sufferings of Job himself. Blood, agony, and loss all tied up in a bow. He shook his head, then smiled. It turned out alright, though, even if she did find out she was pregnant the day before I shipped out. We made it through the backwoods. We’ll make it through this. But who would have thought? Who?

Crackah Mick! Crackah Mick! Wake the fuck up! his buddy called out. We’re on the move!

Mickey Moe shook himself and snapped to with a big country grin. Sorry, Wiry, he said. I’m comin’.

He knew the boys thought him slow-minded when he was only a dreamer. Most of ’em were Yankees or city boys who couldn’t figure him out with a map. Seemed to him they had very peculiar ideas of what a child of the South might be. When he was polite in speech, they called him a pansy-assed born-again. When he emphasized no, no, he was a Jew and proud of it, sometimes they just laughed, half unbelieving. When it came to things like skinning a wild pig someone shot to improve on the cees, they gave him the task of butcher when he’d never touched game his whole life. No one noticed how he’d tuck his head into his chest to hide the retch he choked down when he split some critter’s hide, or how putting his hands into steamy innards made his eyes tear up. They jumped to conclusions. They thought him a good old boy, hard to blood and guts by birthright. He took on that role with courage for the sake of the unit, but in his heart he knew he was never anything but a good old boy, more or less. He wondered if he ought to set them straight, if their misperceptions made him a danger to others. In wartime, a man has to be who he is, no bullshit, stand up or stand down. Lives depend on knowing what another man is going to do and how he’s going to do it. It wasn’t his fault, he figured, that these Yankee blacks and Midwest whites stuck him in a round good-old-boy hole he didn’t fit, a square-peg Southern Jew in the middle of a war no one understood, least of all him.

On that day, as they marched single file up the side of the latest godforsaken hill, he saw a woman in distress stopped by the side of the trail they patrolled, her belly big with child and a broken wheel on the cart she pulled. He left his line and walked toward her calmly, patting the air with his palms to reassure her, smiling, nodding his head and showing his teeth so she wouldn’t be afraid.

Mick! his buddies yelled. Get your Jew-ass back here!

He waved behind himself to let them know he didn’t care what they yelled, he was going forward and sure, it didn’t make much sense, but after his reveries he wanted more than anything to fix the woman’s wheel as a way of making up to Laura Anne that she was pregnant and on her own. What did the hippies call it? Good karma.

So he smiled huge with plenty of teeth just as he hoped people back home smiled at Laura Anne, when suddenly the Cong mama pulled an automatic out from under a bundle of rags in her cart. That’s where he thought it came from anyway, but Oh Lord, he really didn’t know where she pulled it from, it was that quick. Showing him her own pointy little teeth to scare him, she grinned then screamed a yell as hard, as high as any rebel yell his ancestors marching to Vicksburg ever let rip and shot him. He didn’t even know where, it happened so fast.

Then everything got real slow.

He sank to his knees, keeled over on his side, and his eyes, weighted with iron bars, started to shut against all the will he had left. Before everything went dark, he watched her body flail helplessly about with the impact of his buddies’ payback fire. Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop. Her legs went in all directions, her arms pinwheeled, her torso seemed to have a thousand joints as it bent unnaturally to one side and then the other. Drops of blood fanned out around her in spirals of fine, long threads as she rose up in the air then fell down in the dirt. Like firecrackers, Mickey Moe thought, on the Fourth of July or New Year’s.

Stay with me, Mick, someone far away said.

How can I? Mickey Moe tried to answer from the dark, I’m here, and you’re not. But his mouth didn’t work or if it did, he couldn’t hear himself.

From where he was, he wondered where the baby went, where the Cong baby went, because last he saw of its mama flip-flopping on a current of gunshot, she didn’t have a baby-lump anymore. Maybe it was never there at all. Maybe he just imagined it, because he was that fresh from conjuring Laura Anne. Or it could have been where the gun came from. He pondered the options awhile, there in the dark, in the nameless dark. Why was it so dark in the middle of the day anyway? he wanted to know. And then he decided he liked it, this quiet dark place, this warm, pulsing cave you could burrow into deeper and deeper without moving a muscle. He hadn’t known such quiet for the longest time. Certainly not since he landed in Saigon. He might have stayed there forever, but the medic injected him with some kind of happy juice and the drug took instant effect. Light broke through dark, and the world came back to him. He was in it again but apart also, as if he was watching from somewhere else. His buddies barked orders at one another and moved around very fast, going nowhere except in circles around him. Then he noticed that he could not feel his legs, which were covered in bandages leaking blood. He wondered if the cause of his paralysis was the injection or if two dead limbs would be his ticket home. Somethin’ extreme has happened to my extremities, he tried to tell the boys as a joke, but all that came out of his throat was a high-pitched, hysterical laugh like a crazy person’s. Then he heard the whup-whup-whup of the helicopter arriving from somewhere far off to evacuate him. On hearing it, whup-whup-whup, faint like wings of a bird in a summer’s still meadow, his head, wherever it was, sang Laura Anne, Laura Anne, Laura Anne. The sound of her name made him feel that she was there beside him, and because she was so near he spoke to her. No, darlin’, he whispered. Do not worry. I am not going to die here. You are not at all my mama. And I am not my daddy. We are ourselves. We could never be those two.

B
EATRICE
D
IANE
S
ASSAPORT’S LIFE DID
not turn out in the manner she anticipated. The privilege and promise of her youth encouraged her to have expectations. First off, Mickey Moe’s mama was hands-down the beauty of the Sassaport family, and beauty is its own calling card, embossed in gold. Beadie’s eyes were Tartar eyes, hazel and widely set, framed by a pair of arched eyebrows delicate as a Japanese brushstroke. Her face was oval-shaped, sweetly rounding at the chin as if the hand of God had cupped it in its formative stage. Her nose was straight, assertive but modest enough to allow her cheekbones and mouth to make more prominent statements. Such remarkable harmony was enhanced by a head of hair considered a marvel of shining black density too well behaved to frizz up in the heat. Her parents kept her out of the sun. Her skin was a rich amber and if six rays of sun got to her at the same time, her complexion went a shade darker than was prudent for a girl-child to sport in Guilford, Mississippi, at that time. From the cradle on, her family called her the Infanta as she looked a proper princess of Portugal, from whence her people had come to the South more than two hundred years before. She developed the figure and carriage for the evocation as she grew. Under the weight of constant praise, she could not help assuming a regal manner. The woman had airs. Etiquette was for her the very substance of civilized existence, what separated man from beast. If she experienced a situation for which none of the customary cues of proper behavior applied, she became so distressed, she invented her own with determined and startling creativity.