Spinning Dixie (23 page)

 

The Polk and Price gangs said good night on the mansion's porch. The Hilliards briefly returned. Mickey and Smoky exchanged a few words, which seemed cordial enough. The way Smoky was bending forward to hear Mickey made me wonder why he didn't just pick Mickey up and put him in his breast pocket. After everyone left, Mickey and I remained.

“Smoky seemed scared when you called him the wrong name,” I said.

“I get mixed up sometimes.”

“No, you don't, Pop. What did you talk about when you were alone?”

“Small talk. Just two gamblers inspecting each other for tells.”

“Tells?”

“Signs. Vulnerabilities. Things you pick up when you play cards.”

“What was Smoky's tell?”

“When he's hiding something, he winks. Like he's holding a royal flush. He winks at the bluff. Right eye. When he's being humble, he doesn't wink, his face is calm. He's a smart man.”

“Have you ever been wrong?”

“Certainly. With Castro. I thought we had a deal. I thought Castro was a smooth-talking punk until Che Guevara and his crew brought goats and pigs into my suite at the Sans Souci.”

“If Smoky didn't have a royal flush, you must have had something.”

“We'll talk when you're older.”

The porch lantern in Mickey's eyes gave him an aura of supernatural brilliance. Yoda.

Without uttering a threat or raising his voice, Moses Price had given Smoky Hilliard a cold rendering of his destruction. He suggested that all of us had something to lose when, apparently, the Hilliards had more to lose than we did.
You are so close. The downside.

During Mickey's brief sermon, Smoky envisioned TV news footage of his buffed son, the Hope, walking from the Columbia courthouse where he was being arraigned for a thuggish attack on a boy from out-of-state—a failed, ham-handed attack at that. A gangster's grandson? So what? Even better. The very whiff of scandal was a loss for Smoky and his clawing pursuit of genteel grandeur. If only I knew what Mickey was holding and what Smoky was hiding. Don't push him, Jonah.

“You were good, Pop,” I said. “I was proud of you. But I'm not running away from Claudine. I'm going to marry her.”

Mickey pinched my cheek. “You can marry her all you want. You can have a hundred kids.
After
you graduate from college.”

“You don't think we'll end up married, do you?”

“I say she ends up with that bag-a-donuts, J.T.”

“You don't know that.”

“No, but it's the way to bet.”

Early in the morning, as Claudine and I passed by the icehouse on our horses, we saw Mickey and Indy approaching on horseback from the southwest. As we drew closer, I saw that a caisson was attached to Indy's horse. I looked beyond them, in the direction of the Valley of Lava.

“Out protecting us from Sherman?” Claudine asked.

“Nah,” Mickey said. “The Russians.”

Mickey said to Indy, “Say what you will, they're something to look at.”

Once they passed, I asked Claudine, “What do you think they were doing with that caisson?”

“Beats me. Indy sometimes uses it to carry camping stuff back and forth.”

A half hour later, Claudine and I dismounted back at the house. It began to drizzle and I got depressed. Mickey and Deedee were leaving. A call had come from the Shore summoning Mickey back.

I felt like I had a soccer ball in my throat. We looked down at a newspaper, which had been set on one of the steps. The headline blared:

 

REAGAN IS NOMINATED AS VIOLENT STORMS KNOCK OUT POWER AT CONVENTION

 

I picked up the paper. I read the opening paragraphs hurriedly. A line of rain and windstorms known as
derechos
had ripped through Detroit on the eve of Reagan's nomination by the Republicans for the presidency. For a time, the convention center had lost power. The energy had been restored in time for Reagan to deliver his acceptance speech and announce George Bush as his nominee for vice president.

Everybody said Reagan was a warmonger. Since I had registered for the still inoperative draft, I thought I was going to be eating sand by year-end. I handed over the paper to Indy Four, who said, “Mickey, God's either asleep or very, very talky.”

“My bet is that, come this fall, it's going to be a whole different story,” Mickey said, having since cleaned up from his mystery trail ride.

Indy Four hugged Mickey. “You know, Mickey, I think you're a gentleman.”

“No, Indy,” Mickey said, “I am not a gentleman, but my grandson will be. That Indian trader Polk, that colonel of yours—they weren't gentlemen. They couldn't be. You can. You are.”

Indy took Deedee's hand and kissed it. She had on a tennis outfit. Not a warm-up suit, but an actual tennis skirt with white heels. She pushed her huge sunglasses down to the tip of her nose. Indy was speechless as he rose.

“Indy,” Deedee said, giving the mansion one last visual sweep, “two words:
closet space
. It's a helluva house you've got, but to win me over, you're going to need more closet space.”

“There will be a wrecking crew here by sundown,” Indy vowed.

“Fine,” she ruled. “I'll ditch these boys in Nashville and will be back by midafternoon. Jonah, give your grandmother, Olivia de Haviland, a kiss.”

“You look more like Billie Jean King,” I said.

“Bite your tongue with Billie Jean King. She looks like a prize-fighter.”

“All right, Chrissy Evert,” I switched.

“Better! Although she should have stayed with the other tennis player, with the temper. Connors. This thing with the British pretty boy won't take,
you watch
.”

When Carvin' Marvin loaded the last suitcase into the trunk, I asked Mickey where the wooden chest was, the one I had seen upon his arrival. “Wooden chest? Who are you, Captain Kidd? There's no wooden chest.” I considered the probability that I was insane. Mickey and Deedee shrunk into the car, and they rolled out the gates of Rattle & Snap. A heavy burgundy Lincoln emerged from behind a dog-wood and tailed them back to the Jersey Shore.

 

That evening, after a full day of work cleaning out the stables, Claudine and I waited until everyone was asleep. I told her that I wanted to meet her at the gazebo by the pond.

“What for?” she asked.

“I have an idea.”

We headed down to the pond at midnight using flashlights to see. I shed my overalls on the gazebo. I abandoned my body, and witnessed my audacity from above. I was not a guy who did things like this.

“Jonah!”

“Let's go.”

Her eyes conveyed surprise, but she, too, undressed under the stars, which hung in the humid sky like mobiles.

“You know what's weird?” I said. “I have never actually seen you.”

“Yes, you have.”

“No, I haven't. I've been with you, but I've never seen you. It's been dark.” She chose this moment to be shy and crouched beside one of the gazebo's wooden posts.

“Claudine, I want to see you. I go soon.”

The moon caught her profile and I saw the dimple northwest of her mouth.

“Please, step out. You can close your eyes. Just let me look at you.”

Claudine stepped toward me. Her eyes were closed. Mine, I thought. Look, God, mine. Within moments she turned away and descended the little knoll toward the pond and stepped in, drifting toward the silver-white reflection from the sky. I followed her in, oblivious to the temperature of the water.

“Have you ever done this before, swim with nothing on?” I asked her.

“No.”

“Why did you choose to now?” I asked holding her up off the bottom of the pond.

“'Cause I chose to, I suppose.”

“That's true, you chose. I guess people like us can do pretty much anything.”

“I guess we can. Anything at all.”

I thought for a moment. “Maybe not anything at all. Just things within reason.”

“No, anything at all,” Claudine insisted, and tried to dunk me. She failed because I was stronger, so I dunked her. She bobbed up, surprised. Claudine tried to dunk me again, and again she failed.

“I'm stronger than you are,” I said.

“Oh no you're not.”

“Yes, I am,” I insisted. Do you want to go to the carriage house?” I asked once she was against me.

“No, right over there near the geese. The grass is so soft.”

“Jonah, can I have a word?” Indy Four asked me on the mansion's porch one morning before Labor Day. His eyes were red and flat. He seemed preoccupied. “Upstairs, please.”

He had never done this before. My breath felt short. There was no breeze.

I followed Indy up to his bedroom. He shut the door behind him and sat beneath the portrait of Leonidas Polk, the Fighting Bishop. I didn't know where to sit because there wasn't another chair, so I stood. I shivered visibly and thought I might wet my pants. Indy Four pulled his cheeks down with his palms.

“Jonah, ah, Jonah,” he sighed and shook his head. “My ring is missing.”

“George's Masonic ring?”

“Yes, Jonah.” Indy glowered.

Do not lose bladder control in front of Leonidas
. I fumbled a step back and leaned against the bedpost.

“Did you look for it?” I asked.

“Yes, Jonah, I did.”

“Can I help you look more?”

“I'm sure you can, but I don't think we'd find much, do you?”

“Why not try?”

“Please don't make this harder for me than it already is,” Indy said. “Jonah, that ring has been in this family for more than a century and a half. Not many variables have changed around here. Pretty much the same players.”

Indy was being careful to stop short of a direct accusation, which angered me.

“Why would I take your ring?” I asked, doubting I was, in fact, here.

“I'm not a mind reader, Jonah. I'm just an old man without a ring.”

From his perch along the wall, the Fighting Bishop began to amass his troops. The battle itself would fall to his descendent, the untested Independence Polk the Fourth.

Unbearable heat shot across my back. Every time I tried to speak, short, powerful frowns overtook my face.

“I didn't take your ring. There are pl—” I stopped myself before completing a sentence in which I would have said, “There are plenty of people who could have taken it.” But there weren't. Who was I going to blame, Six? My embryonic political instincts told me that something larger was happening here.

“Indy, open your mind!” I said, immediately regretting my choice of words.

“Oh, now, Jonah, don't hold me hostage to my heritage,” he snapped irrationally. “We deserve better, son. You can only ask people to open their minds so far before everything they have, everything they are, comes spilling out. Sure, we keep our doors and windows open at night at Rattle & Snap, but we have screens, boy, or it would all be chaos.”

There was genuine anger in Indy's voice. The heaviness in his shoulders was so pronounced that I couldn't imagine that all of this anger was my doing.

“I didn't take it, Indy, I swear it.”

He waved me off.

“Your people call it a
schande,
Jonah. A shame. A scandal. Something you don't recover from.”

“
Schande,
yes. This is not a
schande
—”

“You are in no position, boy, to assess my shame.”

“You have to believe me, Indy.”

“Why, boy? Why do I
have
to believe you?”

“Because the truth is what matters.”

“Would you care to tell me the truth about what goes on in that carriage house hayloft when the sun goes down?”

It was ninety-six degrees outside, but I was freezing. I did not avert my eyes from Indy. I decided that I hated my face even though I could not see it.

“Tell me, Jonah, what happens in your grandfather's business when something of value is taken? You're a man now, you know what goes on.”

“Bad things happen—”

“Do you suppose,” Indy asked, his voice hoarse and leaden, “that your grandfather gives out a lie detector test to every man who is suspected of something untoward?”

“Not a lie detector test, but…What were you doing riding out with Mickey with that caisson anyway?”

“Jonah!”
Independence Polk IV thundered, rising beside Leonidas. I shuddered. I must have looked spastic, because the old man squinted at me curiously. His red eyes glistened through his glasses: “They do what they have to do for their way of life!” Indy's huge hands held my face as he whispered again loudly, perhaps to himself: “They do what they have to do for their way of life!”

 

I searched the mansion room by room for Claudine. Six was out somewhere. Petie was reading in the front parlor. She smiled unknowingly as I passed.

I found Claudine in the corral trotting Spilled Kiss. Witchy, she sensed my terror from fifty yards, because she dismounted and hurried toward me.

“What, Jonah,
what?
”

One side of my face felt light and springy while the other fell heavily, a cannonball inside my cheek.

“They know.”

“They know what?”

“About the carriage house.”

“How could they know?” Claudine asked truly skeptical. Two Machiavellis.
“You didn't!”

My mind captures Deedee standing like the Jolly Green Giant behind Claudine. Deedee is in her combat fatigues:
The bride IS too beautiful.
Deedee's spirit exchanges knowing glances with Spilled Kiss and vanishes. Deedee is the prophet. My rage at Claudine is hot. She believes
them
.

“Of course I didn't!”

“Then how—”

“The Hilliards win, Claudie.” I told her about the ring.

“You don't know it was the Hilliards.”

“Then who was it? Who gains? Indy didn't mention the Hilliards, but I know what I have to know. They win.”

“What do they win?”

“They win you, Rattle & Snap. Confederate gold in the columns.”

“My God, Indy! Mother!”

“What did you think would happen?” I yelled at both of us. The terror in her pupils conveyed that Claudine Polk was not at all at home with the downside.

“What happened to ‘people can do anything they want'?” I said, parroting back her skinny-dip speech.

“Stop it, Jonah!” She covered her ears. “Just stop it!” Her eyes were wet, broad, and wild. Her face was all angles, not gentle curves. She hated me.

“I'm leaving in the morning. I have to call home.”

Claudine's nuclear eyes pointed without firing. I backed away from her to test her reaction. A flood of prayers encircled my skull. Please step toward me. I love you even though I despise you. Let's fight it out like we did the night Pajamas killed Mr. Bruno. It'll be a fun fight, Shakespearean banter. I kept backing away. She did not stop me.

 

Deedee answered the phone.

“I can't talk long, Deed, there's trouble—”

“My God, are you hurt?”

“No. Not that way.”

“
Ava!
She did it to Sinatra, and now you!” Silence, and then a sudden calm and return to hypernormalcy from Deedee. “Okay, okay. You have to come home to pack for college. You have to pack, Jonah,” Deedee said, adding, “I'm not Joan of Arc.”

“What, was Joan of Arc a big packer or something?”

“I don't know, was she?”

“Deedee, you said that I have to pack. Then you said you're not Joan of Arc. What's the connection?”

“All I'm saying is that I'm not Joan of Arc. Why analyze it to death like an Ivy League know-it-all? I'll send a couple of gorillas down to pick you up first thing in the morning. I'm getting you out of there. Now you listen to me, Clark Gable—who I met, by the way. Just because you took a little voyage to the Valley of Goochie-Goo with Ava Gardner doesn't mean you know all about women!”

“I didn't say that I did—”

“Now, Jonah?”

“What?”

“Remember something. For later, when you'll understand it.”

“What's that?”

I could hear her sigh.

“Those who marry for money end up earning it.”

“Why are you telling me that?”

“Because, Jonah, I love you.”

As I hung up the phone, my nightmare unfurled from the kitchen window. J.T. was speaking with Claudine. There was no overt affection between them, but their familiarity made me catch my breath. I balanced myself against the counter. Just two young, good-lookin' Confederates shootin' the breeze. J.T., appearing hangdog, was doing the talking, sweeping golden forelocks from his eyes, his head tilted to the side, greeting-card style. A conveyance from Darwin: The alpha brute can do more than sire children, he can nurture them. It was the precise scene that moved me to spar with Claudine on the night we met, when visions of Biff, Hoot, and Dirk cartwheeled in my sight.

From what I could see of his face, J.T. appeared to be stricken. Clever bastard. My summer window was slamming shut. I could strike a grizzly with my belt, but not a panda. J.T. walked off, as if he was hurting, too. Claudine watched him. Autumn dangled like a noose.