Last of the Dixie Heroes (23 page)

“Same as you?”

“Course, a common name,” said Ezekiel. “Now say it was Schwarzenegger, wouldn’t that be weird?”

Roy didn’t answer.

“Seein’ as Schwarzenegger ain’t exactly a common name. That’s the joke. Course you got to explain a joke, it’s not funny.” He glanced at his wrist; there was no watch on it. “No escapin’ work ethics, is there, Roy?” He picked up the machete. “Don’ suppose you’d be wantin’ to make a bulk purchase at a surprisin’ discount?”

Roy shook his head.

“Then I guess it’s
hasta la vista
,” Ezekiel said. “Careful on the way down, now. On the way down’s where ninety point nine percent of accidents happen.”

Clouds came, first small and fluffy, then big and dark. Lee buckled her belt, straightened her hair, picked up her gun, looked more like a man. They started down the mountain. It was raining as they crossed the creek, raining harder as they descended though the thick woods, the path now sometimes a stream. There was nothing to hear but the rain and the squishing of their boots.

“This is what it was like,” Lee said.

“Not so bad,” said Roy.

After that it really poured. An hour or so later, they stopped by a boulder twice their size to drink from the canteen. As Lee passed it to him, Roy took her wrist, thinking of pulling her closer for a kiss, thinking if not now, when? When would the next one be? At that moment they heard a squishing sound like the ones they’d been making, and Sonny Junior came around the boulder, almost at a jogging pace. Roy jumped a little; so did Lee, or maybe that was just the force she used to jerk her hand free.

“Hey,” said Sonny Junior, his eyes going from Roy to Lee, back to Roy. “You scared me.” He didn’t look scared. “Saw your car, Roy, and thought I’d spring this surprise. How do I look?”

Sonny did a little pirouette, which could have made a man his size look silly, but didn’t. He was in full Confederate uniform, with sergeant stripes on the sleeve.

“What’s this all about?” Roy said.

“That’s what I’m gonna find out,” Sonny said. “I’m signing up.”

“Where’d you get the rig?” Lee said.

Sonny smiled down at her. “Hopin’ we can be friends, little guy,” he said. “Specially now that I outrank you. Bought it off a buddy of mine who’s goin’ away for a spell and won’t be needin’ it.”

“It looks all right,” Lee said, “except for the weapon.”

“The AK?” said Sonny. “Hell, I know that. My buddy’s bringing his musket around tomorrow. But meanwhile I didn’t want to come up here with nothin’. What kind of soldierin’ would that be?”

“We have to clear all new recruits with the commander,” Lee said, “but I’m sure there won’t be a problem. Welcome to the Seventh Tennessee Cavalry.”

“Much obliged,” said Sonny, rain dripping off his slouch hat. “The fireworks, the snake show, even the demolition derby—all nothin’ compared to this. I know that already.”

“You had a snake show?” Roy said.

“Did I leave that out?”

They walked down together. Sonny Junior had bagged a deer on the way in. They found it strung up on a branch, dripping blood that the rain pinkened and washed away.

“I’m totally psyched,” Sonny Junior said. “This time we’re gonna win.”

TWENTY-FOUR

Back home, Roy couldn’t sleep when he was in bed, couldn’t sit still when he was up, couldn’t drink the water from the tap, couldn’t eat the food from the cupboard. And home was a misnomer.

He walked from room to room in his underwear, didn’t shave, didn’t shower. The mail that came all had messages on the envelopes like
final notice
,
immediate reply required
, and
do not ignore
. Roy tossed it all into a trash bag, swept the mail from the kitchen table into it too, flung the bag into the alley out back. That left the kitchen table nice and clear, except for the diary, the Old Grand-Dad bottle, and the Old Grand-Dad bottle that came next.

The air? He couldn’t breathe it. He used his inhaler, first a little, then a lot. After a few days, he went to the drugstore to get more. The clerk came back with his credit card.

“Sorry, sir. Better call Visa.”

“Keep it,” Roy said, and walked out.

He made calls: to Lee, and got no answer; to Gordo, and got the machine; to Rhett, and got some woman with an accent.

“They gone,” she said.

“Gone? Rhett’s gone?”

“Bermuda cruise,” she said. “Back soon.”

Bermuda cruise. Roy couldn’t get the phrase to make sense in his mind. He said something, something that probably didn’t make sense either.

“I can put you to his voice mail,” the woman said.

“Whose voice mail?”

Beep. “Hi, this is Rhett Hill. Can’t take your call right now, but if you leave a message I’ll get back to you.” Beep.

Roy opened his mouth to leave a message. The message was:
I miss you
. He didn’t say it, didn’t say anything. He did call back a few minutes later, maybe just one minute, to get into the voice mail again. Not that he said anything this time either; he wanted to hear Rhett’s voice. It wasn’t for the way he sounded so grown-up all of a sudden—that was a negative, if anything. It was to hear him say: “Rhett Hill.”

Roy almost did it again.

He walked around the house, the bottle of Old Grand-Dad dangling from his hand. He opened some drawers, found a sewing kit, a hair dryer, the wedding album. She’d left it behind. But why not? Made more sense to wonder why she’d left the sewing kit and the hair dryer. Roy turned a page or two of the wedding album, stared at a few pictures, opened the nearest window, threw it out. What was it, day or night?

Night.

Night was a good time for watching the Pop Warner tape, over and over. Fifty-six did all the things he did: ran into the huddle at full speed, helped chase down the ball carrier, picked up the fumble, took it in for six, felt joy. The man on the sideline watched with no expression on his face. He did shout, “Run,” that one time, but the camera wasn’t on him then so there was no telling how he looked. Stupid, probably—the man knowing better than most that the players couldn’t hear a thing outside the game.

Over and over.

Then it was day. How long did Bermuda cruises last? No harm in seeing if Rhett was back. Roy picked up the phone, dialed the number unsuccessfully several times before realizing that the line was dead. He tried the other phones in the house: all dead too. On his cell phone, he called the phone company and reported service problems. Then he used it to try Rhett. No one answered this time. A recorded voice told him to press one for Grant, two for Marcia, three for Rhett. He pressed three, or maybe not, because the next voice he heard was Marcia’s:

“You’ve reached Marcia. Please leave a message.”

Nothing unusual about that, except for the way she pronounced her name. Now it had three syllables instead of two—Mar-see-ah—and sounded European, or like something from MTV or maybe Hollywood, Roy couldn’t think what.

“Where are you?” he said; and angrily, when he hadn’t meant to leave a message at all. Maybe not angrily, he hoped not angrily, called once more to check. But of course he didn’t hear his own voice, couldn’t hear messages in someone else’s voice mail, that wasn’t the way it worked. He’d got all mixed up about voice mail there for a second. He paced around the basement—what was he doing down there?—trying to get the elements of voice mail straight in his mind. There was voice mail, voice recognition, email, e-commerce, digital, analog, broadband, viruses, spam, and the little bulging trash barrel in the bottom corner of the screen. They were all the same, just a bunch of electrons, organized by a bunch of electron organizers who knew all the things he didn’t. Roy was sick of electrons. That was the good thing about Old Grand-Dad, no electrons. He drank some to make sure; only a test. No doubt about it: they’d stripped the electrons away, probably the secret to the entire distillation process, right there.

He calmed down a little, now that he’d reached this understanding, was getting a grip on the basic forces way down deep. While he was calming down and figuring out the physics of his difficulties, if any, the cell phone buzzed, still in his hand for some reason.

“Rhett?” he said.

But it was someone from the phone company, answering his call about the service problem. “Your line has been disconnected due to lack of payment.”

So what? He had his cell phone. The joke was on them. A technological solution existed for every technological problem. He’d learned that along the way, where exactly he couldn’t remember. Had Jerry said that? Or Carol? He kind of missed them, wondered if they ended up getting married, maybe on the last tape. That brought the wedding album to mind, out the window. And in that wedding album would be pictures of his mother. He needed them, hardly having any, his ma being the type who didn’t like having her picture taken and always said, “Oh, no, not me.” She also said: “Will you look at that sky, Roy—blue as your eyes and not a cloud in it!” But he’d never taken her advice, never really looked at the sky until Chickamauga.

Roy went to the nearest window, checked the sky: hazy brown, like some storm was blowing in off a desert. Roy had never been to the desert, had no desire to. He liked it lush—was just realizing that about himself now. Meanwhile, was this the window where he’d jettisoned the wedding album? Roy opened it and climbed out.

Bad planning.

He climbed back in, got Old Grand-Dad, climbed out again.

Roy was in the little yard in front of his house. He walked across it a few times, saw that the grass needed cutting, weeding, liming, fertilizing, didn’t see the wedding album. That walking back and forth had made him thirsty. A sip of Old Grand-Dad took care of that. A jogger went by, gave him a look and then another, speeded up. The speeded-up part might have been his imagination, but the trash cans lined up on the sidewalk were real, everyone’s trash but his. Pickup day: he had a problem. Didn’t have to be good at filling in the blanks—and Roy knew he wasn’t—to piece together what had happened: wedding album out the window, scooped up by some passerby, dropped in a plastic barrel.

But which one?

Made sense to start with the nearest, didn’t it? Perfect sense. Roy went to the nearest trash barrel, pried off the round plastic top, checked inside. Empty cans of dog food, sections of the
Journal-Constitution
, crushed milk cartons; Roy pushed all that aside, dug down beneath kitchen-size white plastic bags—no sense looking inside those, no one would have packed the wedding album away like that—down and down to a level that was sticky and moist. Roy withdrew his hand: red, red, red. But not blood: one quick taste proved that. Ketchup. He caught a glimpse of bent paper plates, french fries, partial hamburgers, the meat coated in congealed white fat. Below the paper plates lay the promising white corner of something. Roy picked up the trash barrel, dumped it out. There was a little explosion, but that was just a passing car running over an empty economy-size bottle of Coke that was rolling around out there for some reason. The promising white corner? Must have been that Sharper Image catalog, now coming to pieces out in the street.

Roy moved on to the next barrel. And wouldn’t you know it? Right on top, first thing he saw: the wedding album. He glanced around, saw that others had witnessed this little triumph, shook his head at the irony of it all, sharing a rueful moment with his neighbors, although he didn’t actually recognize anybody, before crossing the yard and climbing back in through the window.

Roy looked through the wedding album. He didn’t see his ma anywhere. For a minute or two he reasoned along the lines of her camera shyness. Then he remembered something key: his ma had died a few months before the wedding. How had he forgotten a fact like that? He smashed the bottle of Old Grand-Dad against the wall. Luck was with him: he had another, although how that had come about wasn’t clear.

No pictures of his ma, but plenty of Marcia, smiling from every page. Roy crumpled up some newspapers, tossed them in the fireplace, piled on some logs, or maybe not logs but pieces of broken furniture he happened to have lying around, built a roaring fire. He flipped the wedding album in on top. The flames crackled and rose higher. Roy watched it burn, felt the heat, thought: Atlanta.

Not the time of year for fires, of course, made the room much too hot. Roy went down to the basement, much cooler there. Must have been the temperature change that did it, causing an air supply problem. Roy took the inhaler from his pocket, squeezed it into his mouth. Empty. Hadn’t he got some new ones? He sorted through drugstore memories, got nowhere, winged the empty inhaler across the room, not hard, just winging, but it hit one of the street-level windows. Smash. Tinkle.

The basement had indoor-outdoor carpeting, the color of a putting green. Roy lay down on it for a rest. He started dreaming right away. He was at the top of the waterfall; Lee was down below on the rock, fishing with her hands the way she did. She leaped up suddenly with her catch, not a brown fish this time, but a brown human head. Then came a horrified little shout, and Roy woke up, covered in sweat.

Something was digging into his leg. Another inhaler? He took it out. The cell phone.

Almost before he knew it he was calling Lee.

“I’m at home,” he said.

“Yes?”

Roy hadn’t worked out anything to say. “I wondered whether you’d like to come over.” Silence. “Or go out for coffee or something.”

“Outside 1863?” Lee said.

“I’m sorry?”

“Seeing each other not in the context of 1863, is that what you mean?”

“I guess so,” said Roy.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea right now,” Lee said.

“Why not?”

“I think you know.”

“I don’t,” Roy said. He followed that with something that shamed him as he said it, something he would probably have never uttered if that dream hadn’t shaken him up: “I thought you loved me.”

“I do.”

Roy waited for her to elaborate. She said nothing. He waited. Was she waiting too? What for? He clicked off.

The phone buzzed right away. She was going to clear this up. But it was Gordo, not Lee.

“Hey, Roy, been trying to reach you. Did you know your home phone’s out of order?”

“Must be some mistake.”

“Roy? Are you all right?”

“As rain.”

“You don’t sound too good.”

“Battery’s getting low.”

Pause. “Guess where I’m calling from, Roy?”

“Chickamauga.”

“Why would I be there now? I’m at Sippens Isuzu.”

“Trading in the Altima?”

“No, Roy, although I might, sooner rather than later—be getting a good deal now. I’ve started on the service desk.”

“You’re not making much sense, Gordo.”

“The job I was telling you about—Earl’s hired me.”

“He’s one lousy goddamned leader,” Roy said.

“Are you kidding?” said Gordo. “Sippens Enterprises made an after-tax profit of three million dollars last year—Earl showed me the books.”

“Who gives a shit?” said Roy. “I’m talking about in the field.”

Pause. “You all right, Roy?”

“What did I say the last time you asked?”

“Right as rain, something of that nature.”

“I’m saying it again.”

Roy heard Gordo take a deep breath; maybe he was having air supply problems too. “The thing is, Roy, I have it on pretty good authority that if you gave Earl a call he might be amenable to doing something for you too.”

“Lost me.”

“Call Earl,” Gordo said. “He’ll give you a job on the service desk.”

“And who would I be servicing?”

“Who would you be servicing? I don’t get you, Roy. The customers, the ones who bring their cars in for— Roy? What’s that?”

“What’s what?”

“Sounds like it’s coming from your end.”

“I don’t hear anything.”

“An alarm maybe.”

Roy heard it now. He went upstairs. A high-pitched sound. Roy followed it into the living room, which was on fire.

“Roy? Roy? Everything okay?”

Or some other annoyance. Roy tossed the cell phone into the conflagration. Burn, he thought, burn until there’s nothing left but ashes, and out of the rubble would rise . . . what? Roy couldn’t find a good answer to that question. Then came a little vision from the future: Rhett’s face as he listened to the story of how the house he’d grown up in burned down.

The next thing Roy knew he had the garden hose pulled in through the window and trained on the fire, nozzle turned to maximum pressure. That got the flames angry; they swelled up, assuming individual personalities. Roy got angry too. He strode in among them, attacking the most belligerent first, shooting them down with water until they all flickered and died away. Smoke boiled up, filled the room. Roy ripped out the smoke detectors to stop the hideous noise, closed all the doors and windows, went into the bathroom.

He gulped water from the tap, splashed some on his face, glimpsed some disgusting loser on the shiny silver faucet. Could it be? Roy straightened, looked in the mirror, took in the shocking sight: a disgrace to the uniform, the heritage, the memory.

Roy stripped off his smoky, filthy underwear, had a long hot shower, shaved, had another shower, longer and hotter, then dried himself, combed his hair, shook on some powder, checked the mirror again. Better, but a long way from right. He put on the uniform: much closer. The disgusting loser was gone; the face, so weird before, was hardening into something he could live with. Roy left the bathroom—already moving in that free and easy way he had in his uniform—and smelled smoke in the hall. The intellectual part of him knew it was all that remained of the fire, now out. The soul part, to use Lee’s expression, recognized the smoke of his personal Atlanta, burned to the ground. He’d smelled this fire ahead of time, up at the Mountain House. Roy stuck his finger in the little hole in the jacket, worried at the threads. What else had she said about the soul part?
Unconquered, unoccupied, waiting.