Brambleman (6 page)

Charlie walked past the half-bath, switched
on the kitchen light, and glanced down the hall. The master bedroom
door was closed. He tiptoed down the hall and stepped into his
office. He was relieved to see that his computer hadn’t been
confiscated. He shuddered at the image Susan had seen, and wondered
if the dispute over it would end their marriage.

The trouble had begun the previous afternoon
while Susan was out shopping for post-Christmas bargains. Charlie
was working on a freelance article about Clint Brimmer, a violent
racist recently freed from prison. That morning, there had been a
newspaper article about Brimmer, once a candidate for governor of
Georgia. More recently, he’d been convicted in the cold-case 1965
bombing of an AME Zion church in Montgomery, Alabama that blinded
the janitor. After serving ten years, Brimmer had been released
from jail on Christmas Eve. Charlie figured he could interview the
villain for a magazine article.

During his Internet search, Charlie stumbled
across the
Forbidden Speech
website, which contained links
to neo-Nazi, skinhead, and Klan sites. And to interracial porn, as
well. It was amazing. He’d found a website that featured both
racist propaganda and black-on-white sex to taunt the bigots—was
the Web great, or what? Out of curiosity, he opened the link for
Jungle Fever
, thinking he’d see something from film director
Spike Lee. Nope. Still, it required further investigation.

Charlie slipped a movie in the DVD player for
the kids to watch in the family room, then locked his office door,
still intending to do more research on Brimmer. But first,
Jungle Fever
. The website was fascinating for about ten
minutes, and then, inevitably, it became boring and shameful. Just
as he lost interest, he heard the garage door opening, thumping and
rattling on its chain drive. Charlie clicked away from the site,
signed off the Internet, pulled up his pants, turned off the
computer, and went to help his wife bring in packages.

After cooking dinner, eating, and clearing
dishes, Charlie went out to the garage. And that’s where he was
when he’d heard Susan yelling.

Several hours had passed since then, so maybe
she had calmed down at least a little. Charlie closed the office
door and returned to the kitchen. He opened a can of Alpo for the
old golden retriever. Sirius gobbled from his bowl.

Now for a change of clothes. Charlie slipped
into the master bedroom, where Susan snored lightly.
Perfect
, he thought.
Sleeping through the breakup of our
marriage
. Then again, she could sleep through anything. He
grabbed sweat pants and a clean Henley from a chair in the corner,
then fumbled around in his dresser for white socks and underwear.
He changed in the kids’ bathroom.

“Is that you, Daddy?” Rebecca called out from
her bedroom at the end of the hall.

“Yes, sweetie.”

“Will you sing me a song? I need to go back
to sleep.”

“My clothes are wet. Let me change.” He threw
wet garments in the hamper, then checked on Benjamin, destroyer of
glasses. The boy breathed softly as his father bent over him and
stroked the hair off his forehead before kissing it. In her room,
his six-year-old daughter lay under a huge pile of covers, staring
up at him with big round eyes.

“You’ve been asleep, haven’t you?” he asked.
“You haven’t been waiting up, I hope.”

“I woke up when Sirius barked. What time is
it?”

“It’s still nighttime.”

“Why’d you go away?”

“So you
were
up.”

“For a while.”

“I needed time to think.”

“Are you mad at me for calling the
police?”

“Oh.” He slumped down on the bed. “
You
did that?” He stroked Beck’s long brown hair. “Why did you think
you had to do that?”

“You and Mommy were yelling at each other, so
I prayed and God told me to.”

“Really.” It was just like someone with
Cutchins blood in them to bring the Almighty into a domestic
dispute.

“Are you still mad at Mommy? I think she’s
mad at you.”

“Mommy and I have problems.”

“She says you did something bad, but she
won’t tell me what. What did you do?”

“Nothing. Really.
Nothing
. Look, you
need to sleep.”

She propped herself on an elbow and gazed
steadily into his eyes. “Are you going to leave us?”

“Sweetie, I will never leave you.” He poked
her gently in the chest. “Even if I go somewhere, I will always
come back.”

“I don’t want you to go. Christina’s daddy
left. He has a cellphone but he’s never
anywhere
.”

“Don’t you worry, sweetie. Now get some
sleep.”

“Sing the Bramble song.” Her favorite as well
as Ben’s, even though it was one of the odder offerings in Mother
Goose.

After he finished singing, they kissed and
hugged and said good night, even though it was morning.

Charlie pulled a blue-and-gray quilt from the
hall closet and bedded down on the family room sofa. He’d tried
sleeping in exile back in July, when Susan cut him off, but he’d
found that not having sex in a queen-sized bed was preferable to
not having sex on the couch. (For the record, Charlie considered it
perverse on his wife’s part to first deprive him sexually, then
complain when he looked at porn.)

Sirius padded in and lay down beside him. As
Charlie drifted off to sleep, he thought that maybe, just maybe,
Susan would come to him and tug his sleeve, like she used to. Then
everything would be all right, and he could laugh with his woman on
the way to the bedroom and tell her, “The strangest thing happened
last night …”

But this was not to be.

* * *

Susan, picking up where she left
off—mercifully, without two cops to shout between this time—stood
over Charlie in her frayed pink bathrobe, hair pulled back in a
ponytail, face worry-worn. “What the hell’s wrong with you?” she
said. “You need psychiatric help.”

“Good morning to you, too.” He looked at her
groggily and came up on his elbows. “Is that what you told the
police?”

“I didn’t call them. Beck did.”

“I know. She told me. That wasn’t the
question.”

She put her hands on her hips. “I’m not
pressing charges, you’ll be happy to know.”

He grimaced in distaste. “For what?”

“The officer said there wasn’t room in the
Georgia Dome to hold everybody who had porn on their computer. They
said they’d have to build a hundred new prisons.”

“That’s because it’s normal.” He swung his
feet to the floor and sat up.

“It’s not normal. It’s sick. Depraved.
Especially that stuff. It should be illegal.”

“What, interracial?” He shook his head in
disgust, grasping at that rare opportunity to simultaneously appear
morally superior and in favor of porn.

“That woman was being abused. That’s what I’m
talking about.”

“I stumbled across it when I was working on
an article about a racist, that’s all.”

She laughed in his face. “Yeah, right. That’s
your story and you’re sticking to it.”

“Don’t want to argue about it anymore. But I
have a right to know what you told the police.”

“There
is
an incident number. They
made a report.”

“Do you think that’s a big deal? You act like
that makes me some kind of criminal. Wait a minute. What exactly
did
you tell them?”

“I don’t know that they wrote down
everything.” A classic Cutchins response.

Once sassy, now shrewish. “What
might
they have written that would come back and bite me on the ass?”
Charlie asked.

She plopped down on the coffee table, took a
deep breath, and put her hands on her knees as if to say,
Where
do I begin
?

“Do I have to guess?” he asked. “I heard you
say I knocked you down.”

“Then you already know.”

“I was trying to get by you and you shoved
me. I didn’t knock you down. I brushed past you. I was just trying
to get away from your yelling.”

“I hit the wall hard. You could have hurt
me.” She gave a little pout. “You didn’t care.” The briefest of
pauses, then: “I told them you were mentally ill and violent, all
right? Holding that hammer that way.”

“What way? Come on, cut the shit. You were
the one acting crazy. So why are you out here now, other than to
continue hostilities?”

“I just can’t accept the way things are with
you anymore.”

“Amen to that. As far as I’m concerned, our
marriage is over. Actually, it was over on the Fourth of July.”

“
Right
,” she snarled. “The Confederate
flag ruined our marriage.”

Actually, he thought it had. “Well, I—”

“There was a lot of patching up to do, in
case you didn’t know. Oh, that’s right, you were too busy calling
everybody names to notice.”

“They almost had to patch me up.”

“Pappy did not shoot
at
you. Quit
claiming he did.”

Pappy, also known as Isaac “Ike” Cutchins,
was Susan’s maternal grandfather and patriarch of her clan.
Although well into his nineties, Pappy kept a loaded shotgun in his
house, and he was still at least semi-adept at using it, as Charlie
had seen firsthand.

Charlie took a deep breath. “You humiliated
me in front of your family, and you were on the wrong side of a
moral issue. You did everything you could to make me feel like shit
about it, even freezing me out in the bedroom. That’s worse than
porn. It’s as bad as an affair, in my book.”

“What book?”

“Cheap shot.”

“You’ve been writing for six years with
nothing to show for it. And it’s not my fault we haven’t slept
together.”

“You want me to leave.”

“Like that’s going to happen,” she said with
a sneer. “Where would you go? You don’t have any family. You tried
to leave last night, and guess what? You’re
back
.” She sang
the last word.

“You win,” he declared and stood up, holding
up his hands in surrender.

She paced back to the master bedroom. He
staggered into the kitchen to make coffee. Sunshine flooded the
window above the sink, bathing his face in light. He rubbed the
stubble on his chin, feeling weary, but also clever and lucky.
Rarely does a guy get a chance to snap off his life so cleanly,
with a twist.

Contradicting him, Beck appeared in her white
bathrobe, yawning, stumbling, and stretching her arms, her hair
tousled and tangled. “You shouldn’t fight,” she said.

Ben followed in his red pajamas. “’Bout
what?” he asked as he sat down.

“They fought last night and Daddy left and
then he came back but they’re still fighting.”

“Over what?”

“I don’t know. Daddy did something bad.”

Ben was mainly curious. “What bad?”

“It wasn’t anything,” Charlie said.

“They were being stupid and hateful,” Beck
explained.

The kids wolfed down Corn Pops and dashed off
to play with those Christmas toys not yet damaged or destroyed.
Susan returned, still in her robe, and plopped down across from
Charlie as he sat at the kitchen table sipping coffee.

“How many orgasms a day you up to? Sheila
said men only use that stuff to masturbate.”

Charlie didn’t want to be reminded of Susan’s
older sister, whose second husband, Phil, had barely survived the
recent raccoon attack. Two months previously, Sheila had arrived at
Thornbriar “to calm things down” with a Glock pistol grip sticking
out of her purse. After she refused Charlie’s request to head back
to Forsyth and mind her own business (and Susan backed her right to
bear arms in his house), Charlie temporarily vacated the premises.
When he returned after midnight, Sheila was still there, waiting
up, playing the part of Susan’s guard dog. She left at dawn—only
after Phil called to demand that she come home and pick him up some
breakfast on the way. “Your childless sister, the expert on male
sexuality.”

“Don’t even go there. What happened with
Jerry wasn’t her fault.”

That much was true. Nothing involving
Sheila’s first husband had ever been anyone else’s fault, including
his violent death. (He needed killing, as it turned out.)

“In answer to your question, eight,” he said
brightly.

“Ick.”

“On school days. On weekends it’s none. As
you well know.”

“Hard to believe it’s humanly possible.”

“As we both know, I’m not human.”

“At last something we can agree on.” She
paused. “Just to let you know, I’m not paying for pornography.”

He held up his hands. “Fight’s over. I’m
moving out.”

“The hell you say.”

“The hell I do,” Charlie said. “This morning,
in fact. I got a job and a place to stay.”

“You got a job in the middle of the night,
dressed like a … I don’t know what.” She sniffed and squinched her
face, no doubt catching a whiff of Trouble. “Did you sleep in a
Dumpster?’

“The job’s been waiting for me. I’ve already
been paid.”

“
You’ve got a job and a place to stay and
you’ve already been paid
?” Susan put her hand to her forehead
as if she would faint.

Charlie retrieved the checkbook, along with
some bills. Susan watched in disbelief as he paid the mortgage and
Visa bill—more than the minimum, less than the balance. He figured
that left him enough to live on for a month, if he was frugal.
“Don’t mail these yet. I haven’t made the deposit.”

“Could I see the check?” she asked.

He showed it to her. It was drawn on an
account at TransNationBank—her employer. “I don’t get it. Who’s
Kathleen Talton, and what is it for?”

“I’m editing a man’s book.”

“Is that like a men’s magazine?”

“No, but thanks for playing. His widow is
paying me to fix it up and get it published.”

“Where are you going to live?”