Peachtree Road (102 page)

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going, but she’ll call her mother, or at least write, when I give her the word that we’ve told her.”

His thin face lit briefly.

“Good for her,” he said, smiling. The smile was gray and wounded, like the rest of him. “Good for Mal. I want her happiness very much. I’ve never seemed to be able to show her that, though. Somehow, everything I had went to Lucy.”

“So you think it’s safe to tell her?”

“Oh, sure,” he said. “Like I said, that fire is out. Whatever they did at Central State cooked it right out of her. You can tell her anything. There’s no danger anymore. No matter what I said a minute ago, I almost wish there was….”

“Do you want to be with me when I do?” I said.

“No. Do you mind? I’m not afraid. I’m just”—and he grinned, hearing his own words—“tired. I think I’ll go back to bed for a while.”

He slept for most of the day. Lucy herself slept until noon.

When she awoke, she surprised me by wanting to walk around the lake by the sun-dappled dirt road that encircled it. It was our old walk, a smooth and pretty one, but long.

“Can you make it?” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “I can if we take it slow, and stop along the way. Let’s do it, Gibby. Let’s stop by all the old places, and take some sandwiches and have a picnic up in the meadow. Oh, and bring your clarinet—is it up here?”

“The old one is,” I said. “The one I learned to play on.

Rusted solid, probably. But I’ll bring it anyway.”

And so we set out, Lucy in blue jeans and a loose old plaid shirt someone had left in her closet, looking, if one did not lean too near, rested and almost young and very close once more to being beautiful. She walked slowly, and she leaned on me, and she did tire, so that we made 802 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

frequent stops, but when we were seated in the deep shade of a hickory grove, the tawny bowl of the mountains walling us in under the clarion blue of the first autumn sky, she was as delighted as she had been as a child with the old places where so much of our magic and mischief had been wrought, where so much still seemed to hover.

“Tell about the Fourth of July parade, Gibby,” she cried, and I spun it out for her in the sunny silence, that joyous long-ago procession of children and adults and teenagers and babies and dogs and banners and bunting and raucous, braying musical instruments.

“Tell about us swimming,” she said, and all of a sudden there we were, as thin and supple and slippery as young otters, yelping soundlessly in the hot sun and cold water of the little indigo lake, and there was small Sarah Cameron, pinned against a cobalt July sky in the highest arc of a dive, as beautiful as a young gull.

“Tell about the night the deer jumped over me,” she said, and the day darkened into that long-ago magical and terrible night, still and star-struck and moon-dappled, and ahead of me on this very road a will-o’-the-wisp little Lucy Bondurant ran blithely into a pool of utter, soulless blackness, and the spectral shadow of the leaping deer fell down straight upon her like an evil fairy’s curse.

I shivered with that one, and not wanting to invoke any more of the small, lost ghosts of Tate, moved with her out into the sun of the high meadow, and played as well as I could on the squawking clarinet that had, so long ago in this same long grass, spilled out “Frenesi” for me like crystal water. I played “Frenesi” again, and “Amapola,” and “In the Mood,” and several of the other songs we had grown up dancing to, the Pinks and the Jells, on the polished wooden floors of half a dozen clubs, and I finished up, as those vanished dances had, with “Moonglow.”

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Lucy lay quiet, stretched out on her back in the last of the slanting sun. It gilded her face and struck fire from her dark hair.

“Thank you, Gibby,” she said at last. “It was as good as going back.”

“You’re welcome,” I said.

I told her then, told her about Malory, told her with my heart in my mouth and my eyes riveted to her still face and mild blue eyes. But after I was finished, and had fallen silent, all she said was “Oh, Gibby, really? Isn’t that wonderful!

Tell me about him.”

I did.

“Will he be good to her?” she asked.

“Most wonderfully good. Good to her always.”

“Then that’s okay. That’s all that matters.”

She was silent, and when I was sure she was not going to speak again, I said, “Lucy…I don’t think any of us should go. I’m not going. It’ll be just his family.”

“Oh no,” she said, looking up at me with her clear, bottomless blue eyes. “I didn’t expect to. I don’t deserve to go.”

My heart hurt, suddenly and simply and powerfully.

“Oh, honey,” I said. “Oh, Luce. It’s not that….”

“Oh yes,” she said matter-of-factly, and there was in her rich, bronzy drawl nothing of pathos but more than a little of the indomitable small girl who had stubbornly abjured self-pity. “It is that. I was awful. I know I was. I drove her away. And I don’t deserve to go to her wedding. But that’s over, that part of me. Maybe after a while she’ll see that, and she’ll bring her…husband…home to us.”

“She will,” I said. “She’s already said she wanted to.”

Lucy grinned at me. It was, suddenly and fully, her old grin, quicksilver and devilish and wonderful to see.

“I promise, when she does, to keep my panties on,” she said.

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“I love you, Lucy Bondurant,” I said. I did. I did, in that moment, as much as I ever had in my life.

“I love you, too, Gibby Bondurant,” she said.

We sat in the high meadow and watched the sun drop, red and swollen, over the shoulder of Burnt Mountain. Away to the south the coppery cloud of smutch that was Atlanta belching and simmering in its own effluvia came clearer.

Lucy pointed to it.

“Do you still love it?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “I guess I never did and I don’t even like it anymore now. It’s no kind of city that I know or care about.

It’s loud and it stinks. It’s fifty times too big. It has no grace anymore. But I need it, if that makes any sense. You don’t have to love something to need it. Dimension and need can come from lots of other things…hate, or fear, or anger…. I couldn’t tell you how, but I know that’s so. I just…need it.”

“You don’t have to tell me,” she said. “I know. It isn’t my town anymore, either. But it has something, Gibby. It has…oh, resonance. Passion, energy, and a kind of…not noticing quality to it. A carelessness. Impersonality. It doesn’t give a shit what you are or what you do. And power-lots of power. I might have amounted to something in a town like that. But I don’t love it. I guess I didn’t the other one, either, if you get right down to it.”

She lit her last cigarette, and inhaled a long, deep lungful of smoke, and let it out into the lavender air of evening, looking through it down into the sour copper breath of the city to the south.

“But, oh Lord,” she said, smiling faintly, “it was a wonderful town to be young in, wasn’t it?”

Three weeks later, on the first Saturday night in October, the shrilling of the telephone brought me out of a deep, PEACHTREE ROAD / 805

still sleep. It had been hot the past week, as hot as August, and I had turned on the window air conditioner in the bedroom, so that struggling up to the surface of wakefulness was like trying to swim up through pounding black surf. The room was totally dark and without context, and I knocked the telephone from the receiver before I managed to get it to my ear. I had no idea what time it was.

“Gibby?” Pause. Great, indrawn inhalation, deep sigh of exhalation. “It’s Lucy, honey.”

“Lucy,” I mumbled. “What time is it?” My eyes found the digital clock on my bedside table then. “Jesus,” I said. “It’s almost four o’clock. Is something wrong?”

I knew that something was. The time, of course. Her nightly calls almost invariably came between ten and eleven, after Jack had drowned in sleep. But a wincing, clinching part of me had known when she spoke. The rich, slow voice sang with the honey of the old madness.

“Gibby, did you know Malory was getting married? She’s getting married next weekend!” Lucy said in a pouting child’s voice.

“Well, yes, I did, Luce,” I said carefully. “So did you. Remember, I told you up at Tate two or three weekends ago?

We talked about it a long time.”

“Well, you obviously told somebody else besides Malory’s mother, because it wasn’t me. I didn’t hear a word about it until Jack Venable just happened to mention it tonight, on his forty millionth scotch. I’m real mad at him. You, too, if you knew and wouldn’t tell me.”

A vast, trembling, bottomless fatigue settled slowly down over me, like a great, drifting net of cobwebs. I thought it must be what Jack Venable felt a good bit of the time. Oh God, please not again, I said soundlessly.

“I did tell you, sweetie,” I said. “I wouldn’t not tell you.

You said you thought it was wonderful and you agreed that none of us should go because Peter’s family is 806 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

so poorly off, and that you’d be very happy to see them when they came home after the wedding. We were awfully proud of the way you took it.”

“Took it, shmook it,” Lucy said in fretful annoyance. “You got the wrong lady, toots. I don’t think it’s fucking wonderful at all. That baby isn’t old enough to get married! She hasn’t even talked to me about it—I could tell her a thing or two about marriage. I don’t know any fucking Peter in fucking Maine. I fucking well did not agree we shouldn’t go. Of course I’m going! In fact, that’s why I called you. I want you to come out here and get me and take me to the airport. I’m almost packed. No thanks to Jack Venable, I might add. He absolutely refused to take me. He got awfully abusive about it, Gibby.”

Her voice slid into an injured child’s whine. Something ran lightly up my spine, claws of ice digging into my flesh.

“Put Jack on the phone, Luce,” I said neutrally. “Is he awake?”

There was a long pause and then she laughed. The sound tinkled in my ears like shards of crystal ice.

“No,” she said gaily. “I don’t think you could say he’s awake. In fact, I’m fairly sure the sonofabitch is dead. I just shot him in the head with that old gun of his. Not take me to my own baby’s wedding! Jesus!”

She had, in her madness, told so many lies about Jack’s abuse of her that my first instinct was to hang up on her.

But the eerie finger of ice along my spine would not let me do that.

“Are you telling me the truth, Lucy?” I asked. My voice sounded high and silly in my ears.

“Oh yes,” she said. “He’s bleeding like anything. It’s a real mess. That’s another reason I want you to come on out here, Gibby. I can’t clean this up by myself.”

A fine trembling started up deep inside me, and spread from my stomach into my arms and legs, so that I PEACHTREE ROAD / 807

sagged from where I had been standing, naked and perspiring beside the telephone table, down onto my rumpled bed.

Even my head shook, and my lips, so that I could not speak for a moment.

“Lucy, I’m going to come on out there as soon as I can,”

I said very carefully, around the ridiculous, waffling mouth.

“Just let me get some clothes on. Now listen—don’t call anybody else until I get there. Have you called anybody else?”

“Of course not,” she said indignantly. “I don’t have any friends in this one-horse hick town. Nobody out here even bothered to get to know Malory. I wouldn’t let anybody out here take me to the airport to go to my baby’s wedding!”

“Well, don’t make any more calls,” I said. “Tell you what you do. You get dressed, and put on some coffee, and then you sit down and wait for me. Can you do that?”

“Well, of course I can do that, silly,” she sang. Delight had crept into her voice, and gaiety. “I’m not paralyzed! You’ll take me, then?”

“I’ll take you,” I said, around the roaring that had begun in my head.

“Oh, Gibby, I could always count on you!”

It was the voice of the delivered changeling, huddled into the corner of a narrow iron bed in a dim attic atop a great, graceful house in a small, beautiful, vanished city, waiting for me to come and vanquish nightmares.

“I’m on my way,” I said.

The night was thick and hot and still. No lights showed in the big house. Up on Peachtree Road, winking through the yellowing leaves of the woods around the summerhouse, the eternal cold white lights of the great, hovering buildings burned, useless sentinels of a long-victorious army. The traffic, as I idled at the foot of the

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driveway, was steady and brisk, as heavy as it had once been at high noon. I found a break in it and slid the Rolls out into Peachtree Road, marveling at my own expertise with the smooth, heavy old wheel. I drove carefully over to the 1-85

South ramp at Piedmont, and took that into and through the white-lit city, and then bore off left on I-20 East. Out on the Interstate, once the diminishing lights of the suburban fringes of the city dropped away, the parched October country flowed steadily past in blackness. Only an occasional all-night filling station or motel lit my passage. I bowled silently toward a smudge of lightening gray on the horizon; I was driving east to meet the dawn.

I made a little song as I drove. I sang it over and over, just under my breath, feeling my stiff lips making the nonsense words, hearing nothing but the high roaring in my head, as though a hot wind keened there. I sang it to the tune of

“Jada”: “Liar, Liar, Liar-Liar-Lie-Lie-Lie. Liar, Liar, Liar-Liar-Lie-Lie-Lie.” I think that I sang it all the way to sleeping Lithonia and through it to the turnoff down which, nearly a mile distant, the farmhouse lay.

It was only when I drove out of the tunnel of thin, scabrous woods into the rutted yard and found the house ablaze with lights that I realized I had hoped and halfway expected to find it dark, and Lucy and Jack safely fast in banal sleep. My heart gave a great, sick lurch and dropped in my chest. The song died on my lips. As I got out of the car and shut the door, precisely and softly, and walked on unfelt feet up the sagging steps, I whispered, desolately, “Liar, liar, pants on fire.” Looking back, I think that in that moment I was no saner than Lucy.