(2005) Wrapped in Rain (9 page)

With Rocco mesmerized by his own lust, Missy erupted. She collected her purse and stood up, but Rocco put a firm hand on her thigh and she sat back down with a defeated leash-stretching sigh and crossed her arms and legs. Dixie left in the direction of the kitchen, returned quickly with a small side plate of steaming cheese grits, and placed it and two spoons in front of the two of them. She took one spoon, carved out a small bite of grits, and held it up to Rocco's mouth as if she were feeding a child. Rocco opened and closed his mouth around the spoon without ever taking his eyes off Dixie. Missy threw her spoon in the creek. "Oh, and one more thing," Dixie said as she set the spoon in front of Rocco. "Coffee-which often accompanies grits and precedes tea-is not brewed; it's percolated. And you don't `make coffee,' you `put some on.' Most folks down here don't really get into cappuccino, but with a Starbucks on every corner, a few of us are moving into lattes." Dixie turned, took a step, stopped, and turned again. "Oh, and `dinner' is what you ate at noon. This is `supper."'

While Missy gnawed on her leash, Rocco enjoyed cheese grits for the first time in his life. Mutt smiled and eyed the kitchen door where a tray of food turned the corner like a steam locomotive. No sooner had the waiter put it down than Mutt dove in with a spoon and two fingers.

Smeared with cheese grits, grease, and tea, Mutt watched Missy sit frowning and tight-lipped as she looked out over the water. Rocco, unfazed by Missy, slowly dipped his alligator tail in the cocktail sauce and tried to get Dixie's attention, which she was giving liberally to two out-of-town execs sipping green-glassed beer at the next table. After several unsuccessful attempts, Rocco finally wiped his mouth with Missy's napkin and made for the men's bathroom.

Mutt finished his meal in about eight minutes and still hadn't heard the sirens. That meant dessert, and it required no decision. Not even the voices disagreed with key lime pie. He ordered two pieces, downed both, and watched Rocco slip behind Dixie at the napkin station and then return to Missy with a smile pasted across his face. Dixie, happily folding napkins, slipped the hundreddollar bill in her back pocket and paid no attention to Rocco's cell phone number written across the back.

Mutt finished the pitcher and left two twenty-dollar bills-enough for the meal and a 241/2 percent tip. He walked past Missy and Rocco, but as a concrete thinker, he couldn't help himself. "Ma'am," Mutt said, pointing to Missy's necklace, "if you really want people to read your name tag, you need to put it on a shorter chain."

Mutt turned, said good night to Dixie, and then walked out onto the dock. He slipped a quarter into the turtle food dispenser and sprinkled it into the water, where the snapper turtles surfaced, jockeyed, and tried to drown each other en route to the rabbit pellets. When his hands were empty, he walked to the end of the dock and noticed the dusk and the absence of sirens. The commotion at the table next to him had been a welcome entertainment, but he knew he didn't have long before he wouldn't be able to hear himself think.

Mingling through six or eight kids diving off and swimming near the end of the dock, Mutt dove in, swam a few hundred yards along the north bank, and untied a yellow canoe owned by the marina. He climbed in, loosed the oar, and silently slipped along the bank northeastward, past Clark's, and then farther east into the fingers of Julington Creek.

By 6:15 p.m., Mutt was paddling like Osceola beneath the moonlight, where neither the darkness nor the shadows bothered him. Like the voices, he had befriended both years ago. A mile up creek-maybe half a mile as the crow flies-he heard the first of the sirens.

South of Abbeville, I popped four antacids in my mouth. Bessie was right-her coffee bordered on real bad. Lights appeared in my rearview mirror, along with the glint of a chrome dirt bike strapped atop a car. A minute later, the Volvo pulled up behind, hesitated, and then passed erratically while the driver gunned the engine. I took my foot off the accelerator and watched as the driver crossed my line and inadvertently sprayed my windshield with rainwater.

Bubble gum boy was lying in the backseat, apparently asleep. If the Volvo was out of place at Bessie's, it was really out of place on the highways of southeast Alabama. Not interested in me, the baseball-capped mother sped up, and the red taillights disappeared into the rain. I finished my coffee, swallowed the stale and crumbling cinnamon roll, and switched my wipers to low. On State Road 10, I turned head-on into the rain, slowing my progress even more. I was ready to climb in bed, but the rain wasn't cooperating. Compared to normal traffic, I was crawling. Fifteen minutes from the house, I downshifted, switched the wipers to high, and started rubbing the inside of the windshield with a dirty T-shirt.

The wipers squeaked across the windshield and brought me back to Alabama. With home around the bend, my thoughts led to Waverly Hall. The land of Rex. Scorched earth. The beginning and ending of most thoughts. The epicenter of hell.

Unlike hell, Clopton, Alabama, is a map dot-and little more. There is no stoplight and no stop sign. Just a potholed and graveled intersection marked by a boarded-up corner grocery store, a faded mailbox, and an abandoned tobacco warehouse built with slave labor from chipped brick glued together by weeping mortar. Were it not for the mailbox, the word "Clopton" would probably not appear on most maps. Actually, were it not for my father, Clopton would have died long ago.

Born to a high-flying duo that worked with the traveling circus, Rex Mason grew up hard, fast, and with a talent for making money. Rex worked everything from the Tilt-a-whirl and the merry-go-round to guessing people's weights. He was good at it too. He could size up anybody, give or take three pounds. In his late teens, Rex put two and two together and discovered how to make real money-the kind that when you had it, it made you better than those who didn't-by selling blackmarket cigarettes and liquor to underage kids.

With a thick wad of Franklins in his pocket, it didn't take him long to figure out that he was finished with both his parents and the circus. He thumbed his nose, pulled up his collar, and never looked back. By the time he was twenty-five, Rex owned seven liquor stores and was looking to buy the distribution rights for Atlanta. At thirty, he owned the rights for all of Georgia and was negotiating on a trucking company that included a fleet of fifty trucks.

By thirty-three, he was transporting liquor through eleven states-from Virginia south to Florida, west to Alabama, north through Louisiana and Tennessee, and everywhere in between. And he didn't care what type. If they would drink it, he would sell it. The more the merrier, and his margins were never conservative. There were few highways his trucks didn't travel. In his midthirties, he was worth ten or so million and headed for what the Atlanta Journal and Constitution called "dizzying heights." They were right, because by the time Rex turned forty, he was worth more than fifty million. For his birthday, he gave himself the architectural plans for a sixty-story downtown Atlanta high-rise. Four years later, he moved his office to the top floor.

Soon thereafter, he paid cash for fifteen hundred acres in Clopton, Alabama, where he dug a rock quarry in an outcropping of oddly displaced granite, sold the stone, and used the proceeds to renovate the property's old plantation-Waverly Hall. He told the paper it was to be his summer home, his retreat from the hustle and bustle of the city, a place to prop up his feet, scratch the dog's head, and enjoy life.

Nothing could have been further from the truth.

Waverly Hall became Rex's twelve thousand square foot monument to himself, and if there was a design scheme, it began and ended in Rex's head. He began his "renovation" by borrowing some dynamite from the masons at the quarry. He wrapped the sticks in a bundle, placed them in the oven, lit the fuse, and ran out the front door laughing. When the pieces settled, he bulldozed what remained and built what he wanted.

Rex used his own granite to build the foundation, basement, and first floor and then brought in Alabama bricks to build the second and third stories. The weeping mortar that glued it all together spoke volumes about the entire process.

Rex prized the fact that his tile, fabrics, and furniture rode the slow boat from Italy, France, and the Orient. The farther away, the better. And that his carpenters and painters came from as far away as California and New York. Truth was, few locals would work for him. The house towered above the landscape. Ceilings on the first floor measured fourteen feet high, shrunk to twelve feet on the second, and a mere ten on the third and in the attic. The floors on the first floor were an odd conglomeration of both Italian tile and Spanish marble, while the second and third floors were hand-cut Honduran mahogany. Scattered throughout the house were eight fireplacesfour of which were big enough to sleep in. I know because I did. He never thought to look there.

Rex stocked his wine cellar with dusty bottles, his liquor cabinet with a dozen different single malts-even though he preferred bourbon-and his gun closet with ten matching sets of gold-inlaid side-by-sides and over-and-unders imported from the same countries that sent the tileGermany, Spain, and Italy. On a gently sloping hill behind the house, he cleared and terraced a pasture, surrounded it with a hand-peeled cedar fence, built a ten-stall, state-ofthe-art barn, and filled it with ten state-of-the-art thoroughbreds. Next door, he bricked a separate servant's cottage and connected it to the house with a covered walk so that he wouldn't get wet when he woke up whatever servant happened to live there at the time.

If Rex wanted to isolate himself and us in the south Alabama woods, he had done a good job of it. We had few neighbors to begin with, but just to make sure none of them ever popped up uninvited offering a fresh-baked pie and ten minutes of kind conversation, he built an entrance to Waverly. A massive brick and wrought iron gate, set several car lengths off the county road, towered over visitors some fourteen feet in the air. Due to its sheer weight and the settling earth beneath, it leaned forward like the Tower of Pisa. Rather than fix the root of the problem, Rex anchored it with cables and long corkscrew spikes that bound it to the earth like a circus tent. With the taut cables set to snap during the next thunderstorm, it stood much like the threat of Rex's fist-ever-present and not something you wanted to mess with.

Once through the gates, the drive led down a winding half mile that snaked to the house like a water moccasin skimming the surface of the water. It wound beneath tentacled oaks and weeping willows, around old camellias, and over fresh winter rye before coming to rest at a circular drive framed by eight Leyland cypress that spiraled upward like the stoic soldiers at Buckingham Palace.

When finished, Waverly Hall, the once stately Southern-plantation turned pseudo-French chateau, looked like a bad marriage between a bricked tobacco warehouse and the Biltmore Estate. It was as out of place in Clopton as a McDonald's in Japan. As I grew older and the photographer in me began bubbling to the surface, I tried to stand back and let the picture fill the viewfinder. No matter what lens I used, I saw it only as a shadow of something dark, where the light was difficult to read.

When she first came to work for Rex, Miss Ella tried to plant some color at the base of the gate, a few impatiens mixed with daylilies, thinking Rex would like it. But Rex didn't like it. He whacked them down with a closed umbrella, stomped them with his Johnston and Murphy heels, and poured diesel on the roots.

"But, Mr. Rex, don't you want people to feel welcome?"

He looked at her like she had lost her mind. "Woman! I'll let them know whether or not they're welcome. Not the blasted gate!" Needless to say, not too many strangers made a wrong turn.

When I was six, Rex appeared on a Tuesday morning, which was unusual, in a black Mercedes, which was not, and walked up the front steps with a suitcase in one hand and a dark-haired little boy in the other. Rex stayed just long enough to fill his glass twice and speak to Miss Ella. "This is Matthew ... Mason." Rex wrinkled his nose and gulped from the crystal, as if the admission was painful. Two more big gulps and he said, "Apparently, he's my son." He then drove toward the barn without uttering a single word in my direction.

Mutt's birth certificate said he had been born at Grady Hospital in Atlanta six months after me. His mother's name had been skillfully omitted but was listed as "Female, Age 29." Mutt had olive skin, suggesting she had been of foreign descent. Maybe Spain, Italy, or Mexico. And between all of Rex's "help"-house help, office help, yard help, and bedroom help-only Rex knew who she was and would ever know the truth.

Before he left, Rex checked on his horses and dogs and then drove down the driveway. I watched him through the window and, when the coast was clear, opened up my toy chest and held out a toy soldier and a wooden rubber-band gun. While we dug through the bottom of the toy closet, Miss Ella called us together.

"Tuck?" she said.

"Yes ma'am."

"Today is the day you learn to share."

"Yes ma'am." She grabbed my two-holster belt off the end of the bunk bed and sat on the floor next to the bed. "Matthew," she said, looking through her right eye like she was trying to size him up, "which hand do you color with?" Mutt looked down at his hands, turned them over, and then held up his left. "Good, that makes it easier." She pulled a pair of scissors out of her apron and cut the stitching that held the left holster to the belt. She grabbed a leather dress belt out of the closet, looped the belt through the holster, and snugged it around Mutt's waist. "There," she said. Mutt looked down, adjusted the belt, and then reached up and threw both arms around her neck. The first words I ever heard my brother say were "thank you." Miss Ella wrapped her two skinny arms around him and said, "You, young man, are welcome." Those arms might have been skinny, but they held a lot.