Spinning Dixie (12 page)

I turned into a fountain of sweat. The room spun out from under me, and I fell back on my bed trying to appear as if I was sitting down by choice.

“My, my, my, I did it now,” Elijah said. “You didn't know, didja?”

“Know what?” I gagged out.

“About J. T. Hilliard.”

“No.”

“Well, I'm sorry, son. You were gonna run into that boy sometime.”

Everything is in the hands of its enemies.

My turbocharged engine for longing is equipped with an exhaust system. Let's call it the Eastman Rage-o-matic. For all of my protests about my grandfather being a gangster and my having a warped childhood in casinos and hideouts, there is a beast inside of me capable of petty and vicious thoughts. I have long feared that this quality will someday turn me into Mickey, but, outside of becoming cold and distant, I've never lashed out at somebody innocent. The closest I've ever come to unleashing the beast has been a few schoolyard fights, where I won the reputation of being one of the smaller kids who would actually hit back even if, in the end, I lost the fight, which I almost always did. Some bullies didn't tangle with me, not because they weren't confident they could take me (they could), but because they knew there was a small chance that I would do something outrageous during the fight that would cause them to lose face.

Usually, the rages turned inward and pounded me down into a sluggish state, not unlike the way I had been feeling after I met Claudine. When I got depressed, I'd got scared too, scared that I'd do something completely crazy, either to myself or somebody else.

J.T.

I envisioned him as one of those Main Line guys I so feared Claudine falling for on the night I met her. I despised him in his unknown blondness and breezy command of his universe, but I despised Claudine worse for bringing me down to be tortured.

Having not slept at all, I rose early. Elijah had left a note for me on the door indicating that he would be at the church. He had beautiful handwriting.

The inside of the church was cool and damp. There were metal poles, not unlike for clotheslines, running horizontally above the pews and across the sanctuary that caught my eye.

“What are those poles for?” I asked Elijah.

“Those are supports for earthquakes.”

“But they're so skinny. How could they help?”

“They can't. They just make white men feel like they've got control over something they don't.”

Elijah cackled and left. I saw where he had begun stripping the paint off of the inside walls. I got to work, furiously. My anger resurfaced. I hated paint. What was paint but another scam to fake out people from knowing what something was made of? In the next half hour, I had scraped off the doors. My eyes were running like a school-girl's and I was sweating through my clothes.

Claudine approached on her broom.
With
a broom, actually, but I knew she could fly it if she wanted to. I glimpsed her face out of the corner of my eye and flinched. Whenever I saw her after even a brief period of separation, I was startled by her looks. A trick by a spiteful God.

“What are you doing up so early?” she warbled.

“Oh,” I said casually, “Just starting my job.”

“You don't have to start yet.”

“Lots to do.” I couldn't look at her.

This summer would be about work. Labor would be my sublimation. I would not confront Claudine about J.T. Then I'd seem like a eunuch. I could envision what Claudine would say already. It would be the “How dare you be angry that I date others” speech. I had no tolerance for this, and suspected that maybe Deedee was on to something when she said that women like Claudine want to want to be loved. Watching casino dramas unfold, I had grown to feel less sorry for the showgirls—Marilyn Monroe clones who wept volumes about looking for love when there seemed to be men everywhere that loved them. Maybe the Marilyns didn't want love, they wanted the passion of impossibility. If I had half a brain, I would be on the next train back to Philly and look up Jamie at the Golden Prospect, or Lisa and Deborah, who actually liked my poem about Claudine.

Claudine stood and watched me work for a few moments. “Elijah said you'd need something to sweep up with.”

Yeah, I need to sweep up what remains of me.

“Great. Thanks.” She was even prettier with a broom.

“Jonah, what's wrong?”

“I'm just a hard worker.”

“No, really. Did Elijah say something?”

“We talked a while. Interesting guy. I learned a lot of neat stuff about this place, about Will Polk, J.T., and the Mecklenburg Resolves, the Liberty Bell, J.T., how good the Polks were to their slaves.” I kept scraping. “What do you suppose is under all this paint? J.T. It's hard to get through, you know?”

“Jonah, get over here.”

I dropped my scraper and proceeded to the pew where Claudine had pointed. She took my face in her hands, which reminded me that I hadn't kissed her since my arrival, and here I was sweating.

“J.T. and I have dated off and on for years. Our families are friends. We're off now.”

“Now?”

“I went to the prom with him a few weeks ago, but all I've been thinking about since I met you has been you. He's going to Vanderbilt, too, this fall, just so you don't find out from someone else.”

“I'd duel, you know.”

“Are you insane?”

“You have no idea.”

She threw her arms around me and kissed me. She didn't back off when a lone bead of sweat fell from my eyebrow onto her nose. The image made me think of a TV promo for ABC's
Wide World of Sports
, which featured a ski jumper hurtling down a stilted ramp, skiless. The voice-over said: “The agony of defeat.”

I didn't know where the rage went, but it abandoned me. Had there been a minister here, I would have married Claudine whatever her denomination.

“Elijah,” she whispered, “doesn't like J.T. for beans. He thinks he's a good ole boy and has his father figured for Klan, which he's not.”

“Hey, don't be too hard on the Klan. They burn a mean cross.”

“Jonah!”

She kissed me again until I had the brilliance to blurt out a question: “What's Rattle & Snap's business now? How do you keep all of this, pay people like me?”

Claudine sighed. “Do you know how much five thousand six hundred acres is? A lot. Over the years we've sold off land. That's kept some money coming in. And we grew a ranching business, here and in Texas, that did all right.”

“I'm not a business whiz like my grandfather, but it must take a fortune to live like this. I've met some pretty rich people in my life, but this—”

“Jonah, you mustn't say anything to anyone.”

“I won't.”

“We're running out. We don't own everything we live on. These businesses don't do so well anymore. We've still got land, but we've had to sell most of it. It's like water flooding around an island over time, making the island smaller and smaller.”

“Who buys it?”

“Investors.”

“I don't see a lot of building going on.”

“No.”

“Why would someone buy all this land? If farming isn't big money, and ranching and horses aren't that big, what are the investors buying?”

Claudine stammered, “I don't know,” and then she pulled me toward her and kissed me, more, I thought, to change the subject than out of affection. I didn't care. She gripped the back of my head with her fingers fastened in my hair. Her grip was superhuman.

“This wasn't how it was done in the old days, courting,” she said.

“How was it done?”

“Fans. If a girl liked a boy at a dance, she would hold her fan down away from her face. It was a signal to come on over. If she didn't want him to come on over, she'd hold her fan up over her face.”

“Geez, that's nothing like what they do in Jersey. Where I'm from, if you like somebody, you go, ‘Yo! Get over here'.”

“What if you don't like somebody?” she asked.

“Then you go, ‘Ey, ya mind?” I performed this with the requisite ticked-off, De Niro expression.

“Ey, ya mind?” Claudine said.

“That was pretty good.”

I pulled her upstairs to the choir loft. We kissed for an hour on an old bench.

“I feel heinous kissing in the church,” Claudine said.

“Why?” I asked like a moron.

“It's a church, Jonah. What would your minister say?”

“I don't have one right now.”

“Weren't you raised in a faith?”

“Yes, yes I was.”

Showtime. Dodge, bob, and weave some more.

“Which one? Presbyterian? Methodist?”

“No.”

“Catholic? Are you Catholic?”

“No.”

“Disciples of Christ?”

“Uh, no.”

“You're not a Christian Scientist, are you?”

“I'm an Indian,” I said, tickling her.

She squinted. “Like
‘How!'
Indian? She held up her hand in the Indian greeting. The question evaporated in the humid morning kisses in the choir loft.

“I've heard about Indy Four from Elijah. Will he be back soon?” I asked Claudine, as I scraped up linoleum in the mansion's kitchen.

“This morning.”

“What does he actually do out there?”

“He's waiting for General Sherman to return. Or maybe he's digging for the gold some Confederate troops supposedly buried here. Jonah, a word about my grandfather. He's preoccupied with the Lost Cause, fighting for the Confederacy—minus slavery, of course.”

“That makes no sense. How can—”

“I know. Sometimes he thinks he's George Washington.”

“George Washington Polk?”

“No, the big guy. The first president. You'll be liable to think he's crazy.”

“I thought he was obsessed with the Civil War, not the Revolution.”

“He's not always specific. But, Jonah, just understand that he's only half-crazy. He's a smart, smart man and I love him dearly.”

“Was he always half-crazy?”

“No. When my father was alive, he was completely crazy. He became half-sane after Vietnam, and he had to become a father to us.”

A loud crash echoed through the mansion. It was a door slamming and ancient china shivering.

“Eastman!” a voice boomed.
East man
.

I instinctively took a step back. The ghost of Claudine's father coming to kill me. We had kissed a lot in a
church
.

“Don't be scared,” Claudine said, taking my hand. “It's Indy Four. Seek him out. Don't wait for him to come to you.”

I pushed the kitchen door open. Standing in the archway of the dining room was a giant with sunlight kicking in a chorus line around his head. He was shaking his right hand loosely, as if to relieve a cramp that had been caused by having just written the Bill of Rights. He held a riding crop in his other hand. Khaki pants were tucked into his tall boots. A white, short-sleeved cotton shirt was, in turn, tucked into his pants. Its flawless whiteness offset his tan face, which was deeply lined and divided by an immense handlebar mustache that had begun to yellow at the sides. Rimless glasses shielding screaming green eyes, and white hair parted in the middle further decorated the Mount Rushmore head of Independence Polk the Fourth.

I stepped toward him, sensing that with each step I was climbing higher, like “Jack and the Beanstalk.” When I extended my hand, he shook it firmly, not letting go. Now I felt like a munchkin from the Lollipop Guild in
The Wizard of Oz.

Indy Four, imperious and unsmiling, bent down toward me, still gripping my hand. He then grinned broadly, displaying imperfect Chiclet teeth with many gold fillings.

“Eastman,” he thundered, “You sly dog! Six just told me all about your arrival.
You're
our stable boy? Hah!”

“I'm sorry I was less than honest with you.”

“Less than honest? My whole life is made up, son! Did they tell you I was a few tulips short of a patch?”

“I have heard it said, sir.”

Indy Four's eyes flashed wild.

“An honest one,” he said to Claudine, who had since appeared in the dining room. He let go and put his hands on his hips. “Tell me, do you call bringing a horse down to a plantation to a woman you don't know to work for a family you've never met the act of a lucid man?”

“Not exactly.”

“Then why did you do it?”

“Because of a girl.”

He appeared to be touched. “Sounds crazy to me.”

“Not to me, sire, eh, sir.”
Dammit, Jonah
.

Indy Four put one eagle wing around me and another around Claudine.

“He believes in you, Claudine. If he has you, and if you have him, the world will be at peace. Ah, we believe what we believe when we are young…. You're from near Philadelphia.” This was an accusation.

“I am.”

“My old cousin, President Polk, had a vice president from Philadelphia. Mr. Dallas.”

“Really?”

“Yes, sir. I even know the campaign slogan used by his opponents. They'd sing:

“Catchy,” I said.

“Boy, did they ever taunt James. The Whig party had a chant they'd yell at rallies: ‘Who is Polk?' they'd say. One fine President, I'll tell you. Gave us the rest of the continent out to California. Taught the Mexicans and the Indians a thing or two. Gave us the Smithsonian, Annapolis. Started building the Washington Monument. ‘Who is Polk?' This,” Indy Four thundered through the mansion, holding his arms skyward, “is Polk!”

Suddenly, Indy Four took two steps out and plucked several grapes from a bowl. He stuffed them in his cheeks and tilted his head back.

“I never wanted this for you,” he said aping Brando in
The Godfather.
“I wanted Senator Eastman. Governor Eastman. There just wasn't enough time.”

God, he
was
crazy. Or he wasn't. He knew about Mickey, but how much? His name had been in the papers nationwide since the Kefauver hearings. Kefauver was from Tennessee.

“Well, what do you think?” he asked.

What could I say? So I said, “Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes,” another line from the film. He let out a gargoyle's roar, which I interpreted as a laugh, and disappeared into the afternoon shouting, “Henry Clay, my arse!”

Claudine said, “He's still upset about an insult he never witnessed a century and a half ago.”

Feeling I could dodge the issue no longer, that evening I snuck upstairs and left a poem on Claudine's pillow that mimicked her bedtime prayer.