Spinning Dixie (29 page)

The small plane took off to the east from Maury County Airport and flew over Rattle & Snap so quickly that I was unable to reconcile the landscape with my mental image of the place. Sitting on the right side of the plane, I craned my head against the window and watched the north face of the mansion shrink like a Monopoly hotel. I was struck by how small it looked, and how pregnant the region had become with new homes.

The Panamanian fired up his ever-present laptop in a seat across from me as I tried to take in every last bit of Wonderland. Once the fields below became a vague quilt, I felt Marcus's eyes on me. I told him about my discussions with Six, Claudine, and how Grace Slick had awakened me.

“I've finally nailed your vice, Jonah,” was the Panamanian's response.

“What are you talking about?”

“Remember when we were younger, the Reagan days, the guys would go out for happy hour after work? Not you. You didn't drink. Some of us would get drunk, troll around, take some girl home we'd never see again. Not you. No drugs. You were afraid of gambling, too. We used to sit around talking about you. What's Jonah's vice? What's his weakness, his kryptonite? We used to wonder if you went skydiving when nobody was around, maybe secretly defying death was your thrill. That wasn't it.

“I know what your jones is now: desire. Romantic passion, not sex even. It's sentiment. That's what Claudine played. A boy without parents or siblings, who lived with gypsy grandparents, either always moving around or fearing it.

“I did an undercover thing years ago. Ran into heroin addicts. I asked one guy who had a needle in his arm what he was thinking about as the heroin went in. He said, ‘The next fix.'

“Claudine played that addiction, didn't she, Jonah? That possibility of fairy-tale life on a plantation. Horses and all. Camelot. That's your white rabbit: Arthur and Guinevere. You'll follow that furry little bastard anywhere. She even threw in a new kid, a consolation prize—a family with a lineage. You love your own wife and kids, but you've still got that black hole in there, and that white rabbit keeps burrowing down in there, no?”

I felt the impulse to argue, to deny. That's primal, too. What did Adam and Eve do when they were caught? They covered up, denied.

The alpha and omega were upon me. I was too tired. “Well, Marcus, at least I know it. That's a start, isn't it? I built a real life, didn't I?”

“Yes, Jonah. Despite your handicap, you did.”

I closed my eyes to the rasp of Grace Slick admonishing:
“And if you go chasing rabbits, and you know you're going to fall…”

The whole campaign had been about a divorce settlement, no more, no less. If I had to give my debrief a title, it would be
Rattle & Snap: How I Started Another Civil War to Impress My Old Girlfriend.

To pull it off, I needed to do two things: Exploit a preexisting mind-set—validate the things that people insist upon believing—and leverage a lethal weakness of my adversary.

Modern American history is written by injured parties. Northeasterners harbor a bias that frames Southerners as bullies because of slavery. Nevertheless, there was something I was shocked to learn as an enraptured Southerner in 1980: Much of the South to this day sees itself as an injured party.

Contemporary Southerners did not, of course, support slavery, but they didn't like losing the Civil War either. As the generations passed, any hope of restoring the Lost Cause receded, but something else remained, coursing beneath the surface of the proud society: The specter of arrogant Yankees laughing at them, judging them, inflicting their progressive thoughts on them. As far as Southern life had come since Reconstruction, one sound bite of ridicule by a frizzy-haired Mount Holyoke professor (who just might adopt a Southern accent for her audience's amusement) could push a lot of folks back fifty years—not out of ideological regression, but outrage. There is a twitch in the human chromosome, a visceral antipathy that requires that we unite against a common enemy, fill our villain void, designate an oppressor even if one's differences amounted to
them
just not being
us.
The idea was to offend those who offended us and call it protest. The Confederacy was deader than Jeff Davis, but the politics of humiliation was thriving and in perpetual search of a designated oppressor.

This reservoir of outrage is directed now, as much of it was a century ago, against the federal government. My job: tap it.

The challenge was that I couldn't make it about any of the old Civil War issues—slavery, states' rights—per se. As I learned in the Nashville focus groups, I'd have to make it a coded, thematic, cultural snub: Us versus Them; people we like versus people we don't; tradition over fashion; honorable private citizens versus a rapacious government; relativism versus certitude; fashion versus values; atheism versus God; anarchy versus order; satyrism versus family; Hollywood versus Sunday school; quiche versus cornbread; chablis versus Jack Daniels; Volvos versus Chevy Blazers; “moving on” versus sticking with it; Sodom and Gomorrah versus Johnny Cash and Hank Williams.

There is something in the American psyche that demands just enough disrespect to get us revolting. Nothing will do that quicker than the ancient battle over property rights, who owns what. I remembered from my stay at Rattle & Snap the legends of hidden Confederate gold. What I had not realized was the hold that this folklore had over the huge community of Civil War buffs and reenactors. When I learned of Six Polk's expertise, I knew I had found my flash-point. Together we would fan the folklore and mobilize enough neo-Confederates to create a media spectacle around Rattle & Snap that would make one J. T. Hilliard very uneasy.

Claudine called Six in Texas, told him to vanish, but bring his cell phone and laptop. It was time for him to stop futzing around about the Civil War and actually ignite one.

Our stunt with the mountainside excavations: We used government satellites to identify mountains in the South that happened to have holes beside them. There were plenty. We then shared these particular computer-generated photos with Global News Network's Enoch Squibbes and other media, claiming this was a significant development. When the media inspected the sites for themselves, they indeed found them to match the satellite images, thereby verifying the pedigree of the information they were getting. We also provided these same reporters with computer-generated photos that purportedly featured the mountainsides one month earlier. These images—doctored, of course—showed that the ground had recently been intact, thereby lending plausibility to the notion that something funky was up. In one of those holes we allowed Squibbes to find the “Tecumseh Thunders” battle cry, which I wrote.

The Civil War historians featured in the news were Six's fellow travelers, who were eager to promulgate their worldviews, not to mention appear on TV.

Once the Confederates had been mobilized, I needed to ratchet up the stakes. We needed to provoke the rebels in order to validate that there was a real conflict brewing, not just nostalgia.

The U.S. government had no more interest in lost Confederate gold than they did launching an invasion of Epcot. Nevertheless, once antigovernment protests had swelled for news helicopters, the government needed to address in some way the grievances at hand, not to mention ensure public safety.

First came the arrival of the Tennessee National Guard. Then came the air force flyover, which had been a twofer. One objective was to incite the neo-Confederates. The ultimate purpose was to frighten J.T., to demonstrate to him that I could summon a greater power and place his coveted—and stolen—crown jewel squarely in the media and government crosshairs. Everything about the Hicksens/Hilliards was corrupt. From the way J.T. had swindled Rattle & Snap to how the family had made its money and fabricated its origins. As I had learned from Mickey years before, weasels don't fare well in sunlight.

Clever, yes, I know. I'm very clever, but not the cleverest, now am I? In the end, the great spinner had been spun: Claudine was slick enough to know that a man in my position—forty something, fatuously sentimental, professionally fallen—would be receptive to believing what I needed to believe. I was treading in that midlife desperation, waltzing with my limitations, where one has to fall back on the surrender of “Well, at least I've got my health.” Claudine had schemed out a fresh and mysterious new beginning, all linked to my proven kryptonite: A beauty who arrives in springtime—in this case a femme fatale who might be my own daughter.

The stinging reality was that Rattle & Snap was not my heritage but a daydream I once had; my grandfather was an old crook, not a wise man; my moment at the top of the great American mantel of Displayed Achievement was fleeting, and now over; and Sallie Polk Hilliard had dissolved into just another gorgeous twenty-five-year-old who would not be in my life.

Claudine and I were both romantics, but she, for all her brilliance, wasn't the type to beam it onto another person. Had I been her Last Hurrah before she boarded the bogus U.S.S.
Hilliard,
tied to the dock by her own hemp? Had I been a desperate adolescent strike against Petie? Or had Claudine loved me, as Six had told me in the pond, “as best she could?”

As the plane kissed West Virginia, I decided that the answer to Claudine Polk lay a short swim from South Jersey in the middle of the Delaware River on Pea Patch Island, where some of the South's Immortal 600 had been held before being deployed as human shields in the Civil War's final battles. The Immortals are very much alive in Claudine, and they hold her back from the mortals like me.

The spring and summer of 1980 was a time in my life I think of as Rattle & Snap, that delirious house and its inhabitants serving as a tidy agglomeration of optimism and operatic passion. My reenchantment with the South was the dream of renewal, of rising from ruins, reinventing my own history, playing up the pillared houses, and playing down the pilling green felt of Mickey's casino.

But for Claudine, Rattle & Snap
was
her history, her future, and her true love. Love is your history, that's all. I didn't know whether the antebellum South was the magical place Claudine thought it was, but after a lifetime, one's mental narrative becomes one's operational reality: the glorious Confederacy, its agriculture robust, and its slaves beaming at their good fortune to have been civilized by Christians. And, of course, all that hidden gold Out There to underwrite the Lost Cause. In the death struggle between what might have been and what is, what might have been maintains the perpetual edge.

Perspective marinated by time has a way of dulling some senses and sharpening others. The cast of characters in one's life tends to shift in their placement in that little theater we all have behind our eyes. The narrative of Rattle & Snap has only grown richer. It remains a love story, but the love object is my grandmother. Deedee had called everything right. She was a tactical romantic who stuck by her
gonif
husband and borrowed his methods when she needed to ensure the future of what she loved most in the world—me.

Imagine being loved like that.

Of course, this is the kind of love that goes unappreciated until time has stolen the actors. At some level, human beings are like crows: We dive for whatever shines up at us. The earth tones within our reach have a way of only gaining notice once we know what we're looking for, which is hard when there are a lot of shiny things out there.

Mr. Bruno's murder was the push that initiated my swift slide into the millennium. I think of him sitting lifeless in the front seat of his Chevy, his mouth wide open and dripping blood. He was mocking my generation for growing old in an age of electric gossip, knowing that he wouldn't see it.
My ride stops here, suckers.

Against the backdrop of volcanoes, ayatollahs, and yellow ribbons, the hot months of 1980 were the spark of America's midlife crisis, which is why I went back looking for direction from Her. It was the emergence of the Sony Walkman, the music device that allowed us to withdraw into our own amphitheaters. When the planet cooled, I read that eighty-two-year-old Ginevra King—the enchantress who once drove F. Scott Fitzgerald to madness but inspired masterpieces—jilted this life without fanfare or confession. And now, midlife: an unprovoked eruption, a sense of running out of gas, nonexistent lovers, taunts, ghosts, the impulse of gunplay—all set against the night sweats of record heat and Devo's “Jocko Homo” pulsing the question, “
Are we not men?
”

In the study to the west of the Oval Office, the president eased back onto the sofa. “I must tell you, Jonah, that thing you did to Senator Hunter—”

I recoiled on my end of the sofa, afraid of what was coming next.

“—was the high point of my presidency. Him hopping up and down in that airport security line. I wish I could pull that kind of stuff all day long.”

“Say the word, sir.”

“Aw, go on! So, when did you know there wasn't any gold?”

“When I read this in nineteen eighty. I made a photocopy of a page in George Washington Polk's diary I thought you'd like.” I handed it to him. The president read it aloud:

The president set the page down as if it were out of the Dead Sea Scrolls. “Well, well. Despite all this texture, was your old girlfriend impressed?”

“I'm not sure. She's not easy to impress, sir. But she has her home back.” I thought of President Carter's words describing the botched attempt to rescue our hostages in Iran: “Incomplete success.”

“W. H. Auden said, ‘Weeping Eros is the builder of lost cities.' Now your descendants will get to bask in its history.”

“I'm afraid not, sir. Sallie is not my daughter. Turns out, my only connection to Rattle & Snap is mental.”

The president held the fabric of the window curtain between two fingers. “But Claudine led you to believe that your bond might be something greater?”

“Yes, sir. She did. But I appreciate everything that you did. You were very accommodating. My demands weren't exactly reasonable.”

The president rubbed his eyes, “Claudie was always bewitching. Bewitched her father, too,” he said, light from the South Lawn lending him a ghostly glow.

I shivered. “Excuse me?”

“Her father, Jonah. Captain Polk.” The president let the curtain fall against the window. The natural light receded making him appear human again. “Take a look over there on that table,” the great man gestured. “You see my platoon? Khe Sanh Valley. Vietnam. The handsome gent to my right. That's Captain Polk, Claudine's father. Right next to old Dexter. Indy Polk and I had a certain bond. Yes, we did. We were the only two Southerners in that ornery crew. Both Freemasons, too. Talked about all those stories from the Civil War. The gold. General Buell saving his family's home—that whole Freemasons code. We lost Indy, as you surely know, in Khe Sanh. Never found his body to bring him back home. Always haunted me, having that covenant hanging over me. You know, the promises you make when your nerves are raw, the ones you never think you'll have to keep. I always felt it was a sacrilege to even talk about him.”

I felt cold pinpricks against my scalp. “Hearing this, sir, is enough to make a guy think this whole drama was put in play by someone more powerful than an aging debutante with liquidity problems.”

“Now, don't get too thinky on me, Jonah. As you once said yourself, ‘You can only spin a man who wants to be spun.'”

“You needed me on the outside to work this—”

“No, son. See, you're thinking too complex. Complex things never work in a world where human beings are in charge. Only simple things work. Things converge. Old promises get caught up in a dance that seems random. A man finds himself in an elbow-swing with a wobbly Supreme Court nominee and a public that could use a little kick in the overalls from a segment of the population that feels unappreciated—maybe rattle a senator or two into thinking twice about launching a Holy War. Then there's a do-si-do with your partner, an allemande left with an old ghost, and finally a big old promenade with a disciple and whoever he can rustle for one of his miracles, once the good Lord puts him in play. Yessiree, I could go a thousand presidencies without such a convergence.”

I searched the president's eyes for a betrayal of cunning, the blueprint of a master plan. I tried to work out the timeline, the exigencies.
He hadn't forced me to make that idiotic remark that put me in the soup.
“It seems like nonsense—”

“Of course it's nonsense, Jonah. The way things come together or fall apart in life. It's nonsense to mortals like you and me, that is. But it's not nonsense if you believe in a larger order that makes the nonsense happen at a given place and time. In which case, it's not nonsense.”

“Sir, if I may ask, who is your emissary to that larger order?”

“Aw, son, we've all got prophets who whisper to us in some form or another. This time of year, the Hebrews leave their doors open for Elijah. I can only assume that when Jesus had his Last Supper—some say it was a Passover seder—a door was left open. Who knows who might walk in? A prophet, the devil, God himself, or a spy for the children of Israel—the lovely young granddaughter of my beloved comrade—just outside these gates no less? Why don't you go on home, son, and pawn the whole thing off on Elijah?”

“As my grandmother used to say, ‘Enough already.'”

A soft cackle left the president's throat. “Or, as others say,
‘Dayenu
'”

 

Special Air Mission 14100 departed Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland thirty minutes later and touched down at a private airport in Salem County, New Jersey, twenty-six minutes after that. As I stepped off the plane, I had asked the copilot the call name of the mission. He checked his manifest and curled his lip in a manner reflective of Elvis. He showed me the clipboard. I laughed through my nose.

 

The rowdy spirits of the Polk boys trailed President Truitt's lonely footsteps along the White House colonnade as he ambled toward the grand but temporary residence. The upright lawman from Oxford, Mississippi, enjoyed a rare snicker celebrating covenants upheld and secrets kept upon being told by the military aide who was his perpetual shadow that Operation Enough Already had been safely completed at longitude 75.37630, latitude 39.66050 in Southern New Jersey. Riptide was home.