Last of the Dixie Heroes (13 page)

FOURTEEN

7:17. Roy drove out of the parking garage under the Globax building. The day was still young; a fresh springtime breeze was blowing the brassiness out of the sky, turning it blue. Carol and Jerry were talking about Jerry’s promotion, and how to apply the vision statement in his new job.

In your memo, you asked me to develop a new perspective, Carol. What did you mean by that?

Roy tore the tape out of the deck, rolled down the window, almost threw it out. But not quite. Throwing the tape away would be tantamount to . . . what? Roy didn’t know, didn’t even know exactly what
tantamount
meant, only knew that whatever the statement was, he didn’t want to make it.

But he wanted to do something. All that readiness inside him, all that eagerness, was still there. Not in its original form: what remained was the revved-up energy, like some animal force with the head cut off. What he wanted to do was make everything right immediately, to get to his desk, his new desk or his old desk, or some other one, to get back to work. How? His first thought was to turn around, to march up to the seventeenth floor, to say the right thing to the right person. But what was the right thing, who was the right person? He knew no one on the seventeenth floor, not even casually, now that Mr. Pegram was gone. And the decision hadn’t even come from the seventeenth floor; it had come from New York, from headquarters, about which Roy knew nothing.

Miami? Rightsizing? What did it mean? Did it have anything to do with the name change? What had DeLoach said the very day chemerica had come down and globax had gone up? Roy couldn’t remember. All he remembered was his own reply:
it’s just a name change
. He should have asked Curtis more questions. The reasons for what had happened were already slipping away from him, threatening to leave him stranded in some meaningless place. He couldn’t live like that, like one of those people with a “Shit Happens” bumper sticker, or their unknowing counterparts with the “Grace Happens” reply. Roy’s life had meaning, made sense.
You worked all day, put good food on the table, sat down together, drank a little wine, the kid said something that made you smile at each other over his head, you relaxed, body and soul.
That thought, coming back, made him squirm inside. Marcia was coming for dinner that night. He was going to tell her all about the promotion, the seventy-two seven, the bonus on top of that. Roy threw the tape out the window.

At that moment, the tape still in midair, he realized something important: under all this pressure, the worst pressure he had ever felt, he was thinking on a new level, deeper, smarter. Had his brain ever come up with connections like that shit-grace thing before? No. But now it was racing, and in this racing mode maybe reaching some potential that was always there. They were right to promote him. He could do the job.

Could have done the job. This firing had nothing to do with him. Maybe it made sense on one level—although Roy couldn’t see how anything that put all those men out of work and left a big empty space in the building could make sense—but it didn’t make sense in terms of him. He had the goods—some goods, at least—and someone somewhere would want him. He stopped at a red light, looked around, saw he was lost.

Not lost, because he’d lived in the city so long, but in the kind of neighborhood he normally would avoid, somewhere south of Abernathy. A big black guy came lurching toward him, the kind of black guy people would still be leery of if he were white, just not as much. Roy didn’t roll up the window: he hated the way car windows went up in this kind of situation.

“Lose somethin’, chief?” said the black guy, bending down, his face in the open window, a sweet alcohol smell already wafting in.

“No,” Roy said.

“Then what’s this?” said the black guy, holding up the tape.

“Nothing.”

“Don’t look like nothin’. Looks like music.” He tried to bring the label into focus with his red and blurry eyes, failed. “I’m guessin’ Perry Como, maybe, or Engelbert Humperdinck.”

“It’s not music.”

“Then what is it?”

“Advice.”

“Valuable advice?”

“I don’t know.”

The black guy stuck his head in, glanced around. “Don’t know what’s valuable?” he said.

“Everything has some value,” Roy said.

“Who tol’ you that, chief?”

“Listen to it,” Roy said. “You decide.”

“Sure will, on my shiny new sixty-three speaker Bose built-in system wit’ the woofer under the floor, you just give me a little help on the down payment.”

The light turned green. Roy had a few one-dollar bills in the ashtray, could have handed over one of those, but fell for another idea. He took out his wallet, found more ones, a five, and a ten. He gave the ten: a bet on the future.

“My lucky day,” said the black guy. “Runnin’ into Mr. Big at last.” He shambled away without another word. Roy went home to work on his resume. The leftover energy dissipated. He emptied the inhaler on the way.

* * *

Roy wrote down his name:
Roy Hill
. The resume form asked for his middle name. He wrote:
Roy Singleton Hill
. And stopped right there. Maybe this wouldn’t be necessary. He’d played high school football with the shipping manager at Georgia Chemical in Marietta. Roy reached for the phone, his hand trembling slightly in the light coming through the window, as though he’d suddenly developed Parkinson’s or aged in a hurry.

“Don’t tell me, Roy,” said the shipping manager at Georgia Chemical, a ferocious five-foot-five, one-hundred-and-eighty-pound nose tackle who’d screamed his head off for sixty minutes every game, then lain inert on the locker room floor, “not you too?”

“What do you mean?”

“Your guys have been calling all morning, twenty or thirty of them by now. Just got off the phone with a real asshole. DeLoach, maybe? You know him?”

“And?”

“And I told him what I’ll tell you, only I don’t feel good telling you. There’s no jobs here, Roy. We’re hiring nobody. Fact is, although word’s not out yet, we’re licensing Globax’s software next month, the V-trak, meaning better efficiency, meaning layoffs of our own. Otherwise I’d take you on in a minute.”

Roy didn’t know what to say. He just stood there with the phone to his ear. A crow flew past the window with something shiny in its talons.

“How’s your boy?” said the shipping manager.

“Good.”

“Playing football?”

“Pop Warner.”

“I’ve got a daughter.”

“I know.”

“Looks just like me,” said the shipping manager. “Same body type. Ain’t that a hell of a thing?”

* * *

Roy got back to work on the resume. He filled it out, wrote a list of possible employers in north Georgia, addressed envelopes, hit Kinko’s and the post office. Then what? It was barely noon on a working weekday. He could go home. Home, where the pile of bills waited on the kitchen table, almost a living thing, stacked up against him. He could go to a diner, a bar, the gym. He could curl up in a ball. He could look in on Rhett.

He looked in on Rhett. Roy had his reasons, good—an eleven-year-old shouldn’t be home alone on a school day, or home alone with someone like Barry—and not as good—seeing Rhett might be a comfort, not to Rhett, but to Roy, might calm him down. Was that using Rhett in some way, or just the kind of thing that happened in good families? Roy hadn’t made up his mind about that by the time he pulled into Marcia’s driveway, and parked beside another car already there, not Marcia’s or Barry’s, but a black Porsche with New York plates; New York plates with MD before the numbers. He pictured Barry and his doctor friend huddled over Barry’s screen upstairs, trading stocks. But the only car he saw through the window of the closed garage door was Marcia’s.

Roy went to the front door. Nothing was growing in any of the planters; a Chinese menu lay in one of them. Roy knocked, waited, knocked again. No one came. He thought of Rhett inside, lying on his bed, hand between his knees, face to the wall. He tried the door. Locked.

Roy walked around the house. The dirt pile in the backyard was even higher than the last time. Roy glanced into the pit, expecting to see sawed-off pipes or twisted cables. There was nothing down there but a football.

He mounted the deck, put his face close to the sliding glass door, looked in. He saw a big tile-floored room, empty except for a sunken hot tub, bubbling away; and superimposed, his own reflected eyes ringed in shadow. Would he have tried this door too, if it hadn’t been open a crack?

Roy widened the crack and went inside. Something red lay at the bottom of the hot tub but Roy couldn’t identify it until he’d found the switch and turned off the jets. The surface of the water hissed and went still. A bikini top took shape, the kind with very thin straps. There was a name for those straps but it didn’t come to him. Roy followed the damp tracks that led from the hot tub across the tile floor, around a corner, down a hall, up the winding stairs. They’d dried out by the time he came to the third door in the upstairs hall.

The door was closed. This, Roy remembered, was the room with the big-screen TV, the desktop computer, and the king-size bed. The next room was Rhett’s. Roy stood outside the third door. He knew it was the wrong door. His business was down the hall. He might even have kept going, had he not heard a sound inside, an indistinct sound, low and muffled, but resembling, at least to Roy’s ear, the sound someone makes when they’ve tasted something good. Roy’s hand went to the doorknob; one of those old-fashioned glass knobs—he could feel every facet. Then the door was open, silently open.

The big-screen TV, the desktop computer, the king-size bed: a naked man Roy had never seen sat on the edge. Marcia, wearing red bikini bottoms, was kneeling on the floor between his legs. It was like a scene from a pornographic movie except one of the performers was the mother of his son. The next moment it wasn’t like a movie at all, not even like life. Life broke up. The laws of physics seemed to fail. Parts of the visual world vanished; other parts—Marcia’s eyes seeing him, especially—appeared with a clarity he’d never experienced. Marcia’s eyes seeing him, the naked man fumbling the sheets over his fleshy thighs, her new lips: all that much too sharply clear, like some photo lab trick, and then Roy was in the room, raw things surging through him, air supply problem gone, powered up with oxygen.

He took Marcia’s arm—he was so hot her skin felt like ice—pulled her up.

“Hey,” said the man with the sheet wrapped around him, or “What the hell,” or something like that, or maybe he just thought it, and then he was flat on the bed, bouncing off the wall, actually, thumping it with his head, sagging back down, his fancy haircut all messed up.

“Grant,” Marcia said, trying to go to him, but Roy wouldn’t let her.

“With Rhett in the house,” he said.

“He’s not in the house.”

But Roy didn’t hear. “With Rhett in the house.” Roy led her out of the room. Not led: it wasn’t gentle like that. Out in the hall, he closed the door, let the whole house feel its closing, down to the foundation.

“He’s not in the house.”

Roy heard it that time, in the silence that followed the closing of the door, the whole house trembling.

“You sent Barry out with him?”

“Stop it, Roy.”

“You sent Barry out with him so you could, so you could . . .” The words,
blow job
and others, stuck in his throat.

“Barry’s in Houston,” Marcia said, trying to tug free. “Rhett’s at school.”

“Lie to my face?” Roy said, his hand suddenly so strong it could squeeze right through her arm. “He’s suspended.”

“They let him back.”

“What do you mean—they let him back?”

“I asked them.”

“You asked them?”

“Let go of me.”

He wouldn’t let go.

“Don’t spoil it, Roy.”

“Don’t spoil what?”

“How I think of you.”

“Is that supposed to be funny?”

Marcia shook her head. “If you hadn’t canceled dinner the other night . . .”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“That’s when Grant called.”

“So?” But he started to remember, remember how he’d canceled the steak dinner after hearing the message from the hospital, how Marcia had got a beep as they were saying good-bye.

“It might not have happened, Roy. But it did.”

“What did?”

“We went to New York.”

It came together in his mind. “He’s your doctor?”

“Yes.”

“The one who gave you the new lips?”

She nodded.

“And now he’s putting them to use.”

With her free hand, she hit him in the face, a raking blow. He didn’t stop her. She started to cry, very ugly, with cawing sounds and snotty nose. “I have a right,” she said.

“What right?”

“To be happy.”

Roy didn’t say,
We can be happy,
or
I can make you happy
. That belief was dying, dying, dead. He let go. She covered her breasts. The name came to him: spaghetti straps. “What were you doing with me, then?” he said.

“That’s what I don’t want you to spoil.”

“I don’t understand.”

“What happened between us at the end, it made it like that movie where they always have Paris. We’ll always have that other night, and that day at the gym.”

“You think that makes sense?”

“Grant’s fellowship is up next week. I’m going back with him to New York. I’ve never felt anything like this before.”

“You keep saying that. Go.”

“I’m taking Rhett.”

“You’re not.”

“I am. I’ve already called my lawyer.”

“I’ll call mine.”

“It won’t do you any good. I have custody, and they look at what’s best for the child. Rhett’s going to be living in a four-story brownstone in Park Slope, with all the advantages. A good steady job like yours is not the same as a doctor’s salary in the eyes of the court.”

The bedroom door opened at that moment and Grant appeared in a shirt and boxer shorts. Overweight, like Barry, but much shorter, with monogrammed initials on his chest and a Porsche in the driveway. Roy thought,
good steady job,
and pushed him back in the room. Thump. And closed the door. Bang.