Spinning Dixie (14 page)

Claudine told me before dinner that J.T. might come by later. I knew she had been having a rough time, so I told her that I understood and was behind her. I was impressed by my capacity to engage in my Supportive Boyfriend fraud at the same time I was trying to locate implements with which to impale myself. Claudine was, nevertheless, petulant throughout dinner.

Elijah wore a mask of sorrow. He said nothing throughout the meal. We all just made small talk about the weather. Indy Four asked me what I planned to study in college and I answered with something vague, mixing English, political science, and economics as if they were the same discipline. I heard words fall out of my mouth and roll around the table like marbles. I didn't even know what we were eating, other than it was being sliced on what Petie called a “ham table.” Uncharacteristically, I took Petie's reference to the ham table as some sort of attack on my deep and abiding devotion to kosher rituals. Like eating bacon on Rosh Hashanah, which I had done at least six times I could remember. Murray's Delicatessen in Margate didn't have a ham table. I longed for home.

“Howdy!” a self-assured Southern voice boomed after a screen door audibly shut. The Antichrist.

“What a nice surprise,” Petie said, blowing a kiss to J.T., which reminded me that I had a loaded thirty-eight-caliber Smith & Wesson in my duffel bag. The rage again. No, I could not kill J.T., not because murder was immoral, but I didn't want to martyr the bastard. Perhaps I'd shoot myself and say J.T. did it.

J.T. was tall, with sandy brown hair, built like a high-school athlete, and had a pronounced jaw. Was that his biggest flaw? Dunno, keep looking, Jonah. Build a catalogue of flaws. Darwin requires that we find some feature in our sexual adversary to certify his lack of legitimacy. No, the jaw wasn't that bad. His nose was a touch broad for his face. I decided to home in on that. No, he was a good-looking guy, but his looks were almost corny. He had toxic little eyes, but his movements were princely and fluid. The Polks—Elijah, too—appeared to shift back from the table as J.T. bored deeper into the house. The avoidances weren't deferential—the way someone would move aside for Indy Four—there was another reason for it that I couldn't process. It was as if a dozen pirates had preceded J.T. with severed heads dangling from their hands, reminding everyone what could happen if we all didn't pay homage.

I stood, shook his hand feeling like an engorged toad, and smiled as sincerely as I was able. He did the same. Indy Four and Six greeted him perfunctorily. Elijah didn't even look up from his platter. I loved the guy.

J.T. kissed Claudine on the cheek and she half-smiled, more smile than I had hoped for. Once J.T.'s eminently white rear end hit the seat, Key lime pie glided in from Petie's kitchen. Before I took a bite, I decided to fire a volley of diplomacy. “So, J.T., what are you doing this summer?”

“Thanks for asking, Jonah. I'm working at the family's business, Hilliard Valley Energy. We're mostly drilling for natural gas. With these shortages going on, that's where it's at.” He said the name of the company like I'd know. Like everybody knew. Like he, J.T., had sucked the ground dry himself. The soft sons of self-made men always think they built the family fortune, only the Hilliards were Old Money. These types rarely bragged.

J.T. punctuated his comments with a broad grin. His appearance was suddenly less corny. His handsomeness was unequivocal. Crestfallen, I could envision Claudine with him in a photograph that made sense on a mantel. My hate cycled all the way through and dissipated down a cosmic drain until all I could think about was how much I missed my mother.

A powerful revelation transmitted from Eros whispered at me from beneath the table: There was a sexual hierarchy—an objective one with rank and everything—and this schmuck was at the top of it.

And not me. Or maybe not me. I wasn't sure.

“So business must be good, with the gas crisis and all,” I said.

“It's not a bad time at all. Senator Baker—he's an old friend of the family—thinks the Russians will calm down if Reagan gets elected. So we win either way.”

I momentarily thought Marxist thoughts, a first for me. This guy was living in Xanadu when the rest of us were running scared. I wondered if he had even bothered to register for the draft as I had.

J.T. said, “I understand you're staying out where the old slave quarters were. For us, it's rich justice seeing a Yankee staying there.” He laughed. No one else did, and I was glad. Elijah looked especially wounded, and Six offered up a bored expression. Despite the remark, however, even the mighty Independence Polk the Fourth, self-imagined conqueror, remained silent. Petie winced a little while Claudine curled her upper lip at J.T.

“I had to stay somewhere,” I said, cursing myself for not coming up with anything witty.

This was a very unhappy moment for everyone in the room, for different reasons. Even J.T. appeared miserable. I suppose he was winning, but what had he actually won?

Suddenly, J.T. shifted in his chair and the legs dragged across the wooden floor, emitting a flatulent sound.

“Whoo!” I said, “You gotta cap that excess natural gas, J.T.” It just came out. My quip, I mean.

Indy Four, Six, and Claudine almost spit out their iced tea. I heard Elijah giggling from the kitchen where he had retreated after the slave quarters remark. Petie was not amused. J.T. used all of his hydraulic muscle to crank out a fake smile.

“A little third-grade humor, Jonah?”

Alive again, I said, “More like second grade, J.T. It's the level where I operate best.”

J.T. complimented Petie on the Key lime pie. I had brought myself down with my immature remark, so he couldn't take me any lower. Self-deprecation wasn't bad after a left hook. I had seen Mickey do things like this when questioned by reporters. He would sell himself short by criticizing his minimal education or slight build. “Oh, sure,” he told one reporter, “nations tremble with fear of a five-foot-three gambler from Romania who didn't graduate from high school.”

Dessert ended with Indys Four and Six offering J.T. a few hearty slaps on the back, Petie giving him an awkward kiss on the cheek, Elijah giggling at me from behind J.T., and Claudine biting her lower lip, gradually happy again. We all walked J.T. out to his brand-new golden Camaro Z28. The sight of it brought J.T. back to life and deflated me. I had gone from being in my arena as a smart-aleck outsider at the dinner table to being a dishrag against the might of this graven, but turbocharged vessel. The car had a smashed headlight. J.T. described with a chuckle how he had rammed it into a pole “horsin' around,” but the local cops just laughed “like a pack-a hyenas when they pulled up and saw who it was.” I got the message: Recklessness is the ultimate status symbol. J.T. roared out toward the sunset while I returned to the slave house to change into my overalls and get some more labor out of the way.

My mind was running half-crazy, half-analytical, but this was nothing new for me when it came to sexual matters. I was always posing legalistic questions trying to get at some empirical truth about sex, as if the Socratic method would resolve it.

When people say they're dating a few people, what does it mean they're doing with these few people?
Figuring out what to do with one girl was hard enough.

How many girls was I supposed to have kissed by eighteen?
The honest answer was three, including Claudine. Was this low or high? Probably low.

What was wrong with me that I didn't want to mess around with girls I didn't like?

If so many guys have and so many girls haven't, who are all the guys doing it with?

If, by doing it with me, Claudine liked it, would this incline her to try it with someone else, too?
Would I be playing this more shrewdly, then, by abstaining? But what did that get me?

At what point does doing it with a lot of people go from being “natural,” like Lex, the concierge at the Golden Prospect, had told me, to being gamy?
Men or women who got around made me think:
DISEASE
.

Do any of the girls that I think about so much ever think about me?
In that way?

How many guys had had their first encounter with a “cocktail waitress” dispatched by their gangster grandfather when they were fifteen?
Did this mean that said guy didn't have what it took to get a girl on his own?

What if I was sterile?

In the weeks since my arrival, it had been unbearably hard to spend too much time alone with Claudine. I sensed she wasn't as frustrated as I was. Until tonight. Her mood after my dinnertime quip had been pure filly—snappy, strong, and sexed-up mean. It actually scared me a little. I slipped back to the carriage house to evaluate how I'd rip the old doors down.

Upon inspection, I give up quickly. I'm a good workhorse with this kind of thing, but Elijah was the brains of our plantation repair duo. There is nothing else to do at the church until all of the paint arrives in. I sit on a pile of hay and stare at the doors like a nitwit. Claudine appears in the glow of a fading sun.

“Hey, where ya been?” I asked her.

“Talking to Mother.”

“On friendly terms again?”

“Oh, yes.”

Claudine climbed up to the loft and sat beside me.

“You Confederates have an interesting approach to handling family conflict.”

“And what's that, Dr. Joyce Brothers?” Claudine replied.

“Retreating to your tastefully-appointed private hells and shoving the decaying skunk carcass under the canopy bed.”

Claudine's eyes flashed fury. Rebel defiance. Sexy.

“How does
your
family deal with all its problems?” she snapped.

“We blame everything on anti-Semitism then go out for Chinese food.”

Warmth flooded back into Claudine's eyes. “Well, that's one approach.”

“It's worked for five thousand years.”

We collapse upon hay, my stomach growling. Claudine laughs as I fall against her. Self-conscious, I sing:

We both laugh. A tangle of limbs. Snaps unsnapping, hooks unhooking. Like a farmhand in a made-for-TV movie, I had worn no T-shirt beneath my overalls. I think she likes this. Jungle gracelessness on both our parts. Relief at the identification of a horse blanket behind the swinging door. Because the hay hurts. Ravenous mouths retreat with stunned gasps above and below Mason-Dixon lines.
Is this happening?
Sweet struggle in the carriage house. A seminal reminder from Mickey about “condos.” The grandson isn't stupid. Sometimes. Four wide eyes in the golden light the remaining sun throws. Claudine inhaling through her teeth. Me, not believing I am here. Potential echoes through the little cabin; Claudine, aware of consequences, muffles with a bite against my collarbone. A nuclear-era Polk devours a Jersey Shore gangland spawn; Eastman discovers America, for seconds anticipating descendants: Leonidas Eastman—we'd call him Leon. A staccato laugh misinterpreted by the mistress as alpha-male joy. It is terror. My heart gradually slows. She traces her fingers along the outline of my lips.

“Claudine?”

“Yes?”
Ye-esss,
whispered.

“Where did you stop in Delaware before we met?”

“Fort Delaware.”

“What was there?”

“It's where they held some of the Immortal Six Hundred. Confederate men like Independence Hilliard Polk. He was the youngest captain in the Confederate Army. He was raised at Rattle & Snap by his parents, George and Sallie.” I winced internally at the name Hilliard. “Sallie would wait on the porch night after night for him to return home from the war. The Immortal Six Hundred were singled out by the federals to be used as human shields. Some of them were placed around Union batteries so that when the Confederate army shelled back, Southern men would be killed.”

“What happened?”

Claudine sprouted a wise-guy twinkle in her eye.

“The Confederate Army fired anyway. For weeks they fired. The Southern men didn't die, at least not at that battle.”

“What about Independence? Did he return?”

“Yes, he did, Jonah. Opened a ranch in Texas. The sheriff of Laredo tried to rob him while he slept.”

“What happened?”

“Indy shot him stone dead. He was Indy Four's grandfather. He told Indy that story when he was little. See what happens when you do something bad to a Polk?”

“Have I done anything bad?”

“Why you're just about the sweetest thing.”

“I'd probably shoot a sheriff for you.”

“You don't strike me as the shootin' type…. You know, back in Civil War times, it was considered promiscuous for a woman to show a man her ankle.”

“Well, I don't think I saw your ankle tonight.”

“You're clever with words and thoughts. That'll make your fortune someday.”

“I love you, Claudine.”

I felt her honey, iced-tea breath, perhaps from a gasp. She rested her head on my chest. “Oh, my.”

Claudine and I, outside, dancing on the antebellum dirt path, spilling kisses. We float apart, she toward Corinthian columns, I back to the carriage house.