Last of the Dixie Heroes (8 page)

“He’s made a recovery.”

Sonny Junior shook his head. “Tough old bastard. Let me guess—he got you to come out here for booze.”

“You know him pretty well.”

“And Cheetos,” Sonny Junior said. “The Cheetos you can get away with. The booze they’re gonna confiscate unless you’re real smart.”

“I wasn’t going to bring him the booze anyway.”

Sonny Junior’s eyebrows went up; there were scars over both of them. “Why the hell not?”

“It’s his liver, Sonny.”

“So?” There was a pause. Then Sonny Junior flashed that smile again, patted Roy on the back, said, “Hell, you’re probably right, Roy. But there’s nothing to keep us two from throwing one back now, is there?”

“I’m not much of a drinker.”

“We’re not gettin’ wasted, Roy. It’s just a how-d’you-do, is all.”

Roy realized he was being rude. “A drink sounds good.”

“Now you’re talking,” said Sonny Junior, laying his hand, a big, heavy hand, on Roy’s back and guiding him into the barn. “Sorry if I was a little sharp there at first, Roy. I reckoned maybe you’d be one of them assholes from fish and game.”

“How come?”

“How come, Roy? Ain’t exactly hunting season, now is it?”

Roy hadn’t thought of that.

“But the truth is I’m innocent as a newborn babe. This critter was the victim of an unfortunate road accident up near Turtletown. I just happened to be the first lucky motorist on the scene.”

Roy found himself gazing at the big eyes of the deer; he had the crazy idea they were trying to tell him something.

“Do much huntin’, Roy?”

“No.” The truth was he’d never hunted in his life, never even fired a gun.

“Then this might interest you,” Sonny Junior said. He reached deep in the carcass, rooted around, and tore out a fist-sized bloody gobbet that Roy couldn’t make sense of at first, and then realized was a baby deer, tiny but perfectly formed. “Probably worth a few bucks,” Sonny Junior said.

“How’s that?”

“Up at the college. Genetic research.” Sonny Junior held up the fetus, gazed at it for a moment, then dropped it in a trash barrel. “Vodka all right? I got vodka and maybe whiskey.”

Roy saw a sleeping bag on a bare mattress in the cantilevered section. “You live here?”

“From time to time,” Sonny Junior said. “Need space for all my stuff. Want to see some of it?”

“Some of what?”

“My stuff, Roy.”

“Sure.”

Sonny Junior paused, bit his lip. “Shit, Roy.”

“What?”

“Family. What’s more important?” For a moment, Roy thought Sonny Junior was going to give him a hug. Instead, he opened a cooler, took out a bottle of vodka topped with one of those measuring spouts they use in bars, poured several measures into two paper cups, added water and a few spoonfuls of Tang powder. “Here’s to family.”

They touched paper cups. “What’s our relationship, exactly, Sonny?”

Sonny Junior paused, drink halfway to his lips, looked sad. “Ordinary circumstances, we’d of growed up together, Roy. We’re first cousins, you and me. Your daddy and my ma were brother and sister.”

“Were?”

“She passed.”

“Sorry.”

“Long time ago,” said Sonny Junior. “She had what Uncle Roy’s got, but worse.”

Roy didn’t know whether he meant liver disease, a drinking problem, or both. “What about your father?”

“Big Sonny? He’s gone too. Succumbed of an unlucky chain of events, down in Angola.”

“The prison?”

“What else they got down there?”

Sonny Junior took Roy by the arm, led him across the floor. “This here’s my last demolition derby car. Came second in it at the Waycross Fourth of July Invitational a few years back.”

“Still racing?” Roy wasn’t sure if
racing
was the term, but he couldn’t think of another.

“No money in it, Roy, believe it or not. Now over here, these rockets is what’s left from the fireworks stand I had up by Maryville. And this is my drum kit. We got a band plays once a week, once a month now, at a bar in Gatlinburg.” He sat down on the stool, picked up the sticks, started into something thunderous. Sweat popped out on his skin almost at once, sweat that mixed with drying deer blood, forming pink droplets on his chest. A crash of cymbals; silence. Sonny Junior beamed. “Recognize that?”

“I’m not sure.”

“The break from ‘Friends in Low Places,’ adapted a bit by myself.”

Roy drew a blank.

“ ‘Friends in Low Places’ by Garth Brooks, Roy. We play all his stuff. Had a singer sounded just like him, swear you couldn’t tell the difference, but he quit. I sing a bit myself, tell you the truth, just my own material.”

“You write songs?”

“I’ll send you a demo. Not in the music business by any chance, are you, Roy?”

Roy explained what he did.

“Any money in it?”

“Not a lot.”

“But steady work. You got a family, I recall.”

“Yes.”

“How I know is Uncle Roy goes on and on about the name you gave that boy.”

“He does?”

“Talks about you a lot. Football. But mostly that name. What was it, again?”

“Rhett.”

“Yeah, Rhett. Truth is, he don’t like it.”

“I know.”

“Thinks it’s a fag name.”

Roy said nothing. He’d thought something along those lines at first, but Marcia had insisted: it was the boy name she’d dreamed of from the day she’d visited the Margaret Mitchell Museum on an eighth-grade trip. Now Roy’s reaction to the name, the whole feeling it gave him, had changed completely: it was Rhett’s name.

“What’s he like?” said Sonny Junior.

“A good boy.”

“He’d be my nephew.”

“Cousin, I think.”

“Like to meet him,” said Sonny Junior. “Maybe pay back some for all the things Uncle Roy’s done for me.”

“He’s done things for you?”

“Such as letting me hole—stay here, store all my shit.” He reached for the bottle.

“No more for me, thanks,” Roy said.

“Don’t drink it, then—it’s a free country,” said Sonny Junior, filling Roy’s cup anyway but dispensing with the mix this time. “Tell me about the football star thing.”

“I wasn’t a star. One year on special teams at Georgia, that was it.”

“You got cut?”

“Just about. Had a concussion or two and the doctor wouldn’t clear me to play. Ended up losing my scholarship.”

“That sucks.”

“Worked out okay,” Roy said. A wife like Marcia, a son like Rhett, a house in a neighborhood like Virginia-Highland, seventy-two seven, before bonuses: standing there in this barn, Roy knew he’d come a long way.

Sonny Junior was watching him over the rim of his paper cup. “You grew up kind of sizable, Roy.”

Roy shrugged.

“Remember how we used to rassle a little in this here barn?”

“No.”

“Long time ago, naturally. I was probably about four, you must’ve been three.”

“I don’t remember.”

Sonny Junior nodded. “Place used to creep me out too—all this shit on the walls, hasn’t changed a bit.”

Roy glanced around, saw rusting farm tools hung on nails and hooks—hoes, rakes, scythes; something else he didn’t recognize.

“Know what that is?” Sonny Junior said, picking up on it right away.

“No.”

Sonny Junior rose, lifted whatever it was off the wall with a grunt, brought it back to Roy. “Ball and chain,” he said. “Sixteen pound.” He dropped it on the floor. It made a booming sound, cracked one of the old broad planks.

Roy thought at once of Angola and some connection to Sonny Senior, and so didn’t get it. “Check this out,” said Sonny Junior, sitting on the floor at Roy’s feet, very supple for such a big man, and fitting the leg clamp around Roy’s ankle. He closed the clamp. It had a long black key in it, a key Sonny Junior turned and withdrew. “Give it a try,” he said.

Roy tried to walk. “Jesus,” he said.

“Wicked,” said Sonny Junior. “Only way is to pick the thing up and carry it.”

Roy picked up the iron ball in both hands, took a step or two, the chain clanking between his feet. “I didn’t know they still used these,” he said.

“Huh?” said Sonny Junior, surprised enough to drop the key. It bounced once or twice and disappeared under the demolition derby car. “No one still uses them, Roy. How humane would that be? This one surely goes back to the old days.”

“What old days?” Roy said, his gaze on the shadows under the car. The ball was getting heavy. He put it down.

“Why, back to the original Roy, I guess,” said Sonny Junior.

“The Civil War hero?”

“Don’t know much about that part. But the original Roy owned this place, plus the old mill on the crick, a working proposition back then, and all the way up to the Mountain House.”

“What’s the Mountain House?”

“Just a ruin—all state forest back there now. But the point is, with the mill and owning all that land, he’d have slaves. Stands to reason, right?”

“I guess.”

“So that’s how he handled the bad ones,” Sonny Junior said, nodding at the big black ball on the floor. “Hell of a thing.” He drained his cup, poured more. “But you know what gets me, Roy, now we’re talking about this?”

“What?”

“From here all the way up to the Mountain House—any idea how much land that is?”

“No.”

“Square miles, Roy. Fuckin’ square miles. We were rich, back then, lords of all we surveyed.” He took another drink, still sweating a little from the drumming. “Who took it away from us, what I’d like to know,” said Sonny Junior.

“I don’t think it’s a question of that.”

Sonny’s eyes narrowed. “What’s it a question of?”

“It’s just . . . events, that’s all.”

“Events? Listen to the way you talk.” Sonny Junior gave him a long look. “You know you’re inheriting what’s left, don’t you?”

“I doubt that.”

Sonny Junior’s voice rose, just a little. “I’m telling you what I know.” Their eyes met; they held the gaze. Roy heard a quiet drip from where the deer was hanging.

“Got that key, Sonny?”

“Key?” said Sonny. “Oh, yeah.” He crawled under the car, wriggled back out with the key, unlocked the leg clamp.

Roy stepped free. He glanced at his watch. “Better be getting back. Work tomorrow, and I’ve got to drop his stuff off at the hospital first.”

“I’ll handle that if you want,” Sonny Junior said. “Going into town anyway.”

“Take you up on that,” said Roy. “Thanks.”

“Family is family,” said Sonny Junior. They shook hands again, that arm-wrestling handshake Sonny Junior liked. “Cousin Roy?”

“Yeah?”

“No good being strangers, is it?”

“No.”

Roy left the barn, walked down past the house to his car, parked by the gate. He could hear the creek now, bubbling faintly in the night. As he put the key in the ignition, he noticed the stain on his hand: blood, deer blood, a handshake imprint. His palm felt hot. That rasslin’ in the barn, when Sonny Junior was four and Roy was three? It started to come back to him now. On the way home, he tried listening to Carol and Jerry, but couldn’t make any sense of them, not until he saw the glow of Atlanta.

NINE

Next morning. Gordo’s turn to drive. He’d cut himself shaving again, a triple-bladed Mach-3 gash this time, under his chin.

“Name Pegram mean anything to you?” he said.

“Seventeenth floor?” said Roy.

“Correct,” Gordo said, glancing at Roy. The car sagged across the lane. Someone honked. “How’d you know that?”

“One of those names that floats around the building,” Roy said, a slippery reply that gave him a bad feeling in his gut.

“Nice way of putting it,” Gordo said. “Those guys on the seventeenth floor—are they that much smarter than us, Roy?”

“What makes you think they’re any smarter?”

“Can you read them, Roy? I can’t read them.”

“What do you mean—read them?”

“Don’t play dumb with me, Roy.”

They rode in silence, wedged between eighteen-wheelers. “Sorry,” Gordo said after a while. “Thing is, I called Pegram at home last night. Ever call one of those guys at home?”

“No.”

“Not a good idea, right? Never call them at home unless it’s a big bang somewhere.” Gordo made a big bang sound, but soft. “Don’t you wish sometimes?”

Roy kept quiet.

The truck ahead of them took the next exit, opening a sudden view to the northwest, and there was the building, brass-coated in the distance, the Globax sign fully in place now, the word bigger and brighter than Chemerica had been.

“I wanted to know,” Gordo said. “Is that so terrible? Course I’d had a couple pops, bad idea again, right? But I can’t stand the way they make you hang, hanging all the time. Next thing my finger was on his number in the company directory. Guess what I heard in the background.”

“Background?”

“At Pegram’s house, while I was waiting for him to come to the phone.”

“I don’t know.” Roy didn’t want to know, just wanted to be at his desk, plugged into the monitor, but there was construction ahead and they’d come to a stop.

“Tinkling.”

“Tinkling?”

“Or clinking. The sounds in one of those movies where rich people are eating supper? Like that. How was I supposed to know they were eating supper—it was after eight. Should have hung up right then.”

“But you’d already said your name.”

Gordo turned to him. “Going psychic on me, Roy?”

Traffic started moving but Gordo, eyes still on Roy, didn’t notice. An angry cop waved him ahead.

“You know when everything’s all set and then you get the feeling that something’s going wrong?” Gordo said.

“No.”

“No?”

“I don’t get that feeling,” Roy said. “The going wrong part always takes me by surprise.”

Gordo laughed, then said, “Didn’t mean to laugh. Meaning Marcia, of course.”

“Yeah,” Roy said, “although funnily enough . . .”

“Funnily enough what?”

Roy wished he hadn’t started, didn’t want to go on, didn’t want to jinx anything. “Things are looking up a bit in that department.”

“The new guy’s not working out?”

“Maybe not.”

“Give you some advice, Roy. Don’t make it easy for her.”

“Why?”

They wound down the ramp under the building, out of the sunlight. “You don’t understand women too good, do you, Roy?”

The garage attendant stopped them, which he never did, and checked them off the list. He wasn’t wearing his Braves cap; they’d given him a brass-colored uniform that looked uncomfortable and a police-style hat that said
Globax
.

Roy and Gordo got in the elevator at sublevel five. Gordo hit the button, took a deep breath. He didn’t let it out till they stopped at sublevel one: Roy was watching.

“Thanks, good buddy,” Gordo said as the doors slid open.

“For what?”

“Not asking any questions.”

6:59. Roy sat down at his place in B27, Asia/Oceania, under the irregulars banner. He logged on, saw what was ahead. First, he tackled the phosphates problem. That meant exchanging emails with Kumi in Lahore. Kumi had his own way—or her own way—with the language. “What does
dispotentialities
mean?” Roy said.

He heard someone—P.J. or DeLoach—over the padded wall: “That fuckin’ Kumi.”

Roy thought: The promotion is great but I’ll miss some things. Then he had another thought, an unusual, complicated thought for him: the very fact that he’d had that first thought, about missing some things, meant in some way that he was probably ready. What had Curtis said?
Bill doesn’t think you’re ready, but I do.
Was Curtis right? Was Roy growing in some way? Was he about to move to a new stage in life? Were things going to get easier? Was it already starting—Marcia coming back, the promotion? Was this what it was to be on a roll? If so, I’m going to make them happy, Marcia and Rhett, I swear.

Then he heard Gordo in the next cubicle: “Yes, sir, I’m on my way.” Gordo’s head appeared over the wall, a smile spreading across his face. “Hey, Roy,” he said.

“Hey,” said Roy.

“You’re a good buddy, man,” he said, fixing the knot on his tie, a green one with yellow stripes. “Sorry for dumping all that paranoid shit on you before.”

“Hey,” said Roy again.

Gordo tapped the top of the wall a couple times, pumped his fist, a little half pump, and started across the floor, walking fast. Roy’s gaze ran on ahead to the square dais with its raised glass-walled office, where Curtis and Mr. Pegram were waiting.

Gordo climbed the stairs, knocked on the door, which was kind of strange since Roy could see they were looking at Gordo and he was looking at them. Gordo went inside, started extending his arm for handshaking—Roy could sense Gordo’s energy all the way from his cubicle—but no handshaking actually happened. Curtis’s lips moved and the three of them sat down: Curtis in his chair, Mr. Pegram on the edge of the desk, Gordo in the chair on the other side, his back to Roy. Curtis’s lips kept moving. Suddenly Gordo’s head tilted up, than snapped in the direction of Mr. Pegram. Mr. Pegram’s lips moved. Gordo half rose. Mr. Pegram’s lips kept moving. Gordo raised both hands, palms out like a supplicant. Mr. Pegram held up one of his, palm up like a traffic cop. Gordo subsided in his chair.

Roy lowered his gaze. He heard P.J.’s half whisper: “What’s going on?”

And DeLoach: “Didn’t I fuckin’ tell you?”

Roy checked his screen. Messages were piling up. Two from Kumi, the first only three lines long but incomprehensible, with routing codes Roy had never seen and the word
prioricity
underlined, the second an incomprehensible correction of the first. Roy opened messages from Cesar in Miami, the Osaka subsidiary, customers in Singapore, Bangkok, Santiago—how did that get there?—someone else in Lahore, not Kumi, the tariff office on the seventeenth floor: all of them more or less routine, all suddenly as incomprehensible as the worst gibberish Kumi ever sent. Roy was thinking:
How can she deny Jerry and at the same time keep him a happy and productive member of the team?
He hadn’t heard the answer.

Something made him take another look at the Miami message. Cesar sent email almost every day, but this one ended with: “How’s everything up there?” Had Cesar ever asked a question like that before, ever written anything personal at all? Roy was thinking of examining past communications in the mailbox when another message popped up, this one from someone he didn’t recognize—lbridges at an edu address. Roy didn’t know lbridges, never got messages from any edus, began to get the strange feeling that his screen was spinning out of control; and then Gordo was back.

Gordo’s face was red; bright red, as though lit from within. He turned it on P.J., DeLoach, and finally Roy, a glowing red thing in the vast muted space of pastels, beiges, and grays.

“What’s wrong?” Roy said. Gordo glared at him, or maybe unseeingly right through. “Is it about the promotion?”

Gordo’s glare intensified, became ferocious, and there was no doubt he saw Roy now. “Promotion?” he said, his voice rising. “They gave me the boot.”

“The boot?”

“The boot, Roy, you dumb fucking cracker.” His voice rose and rose. Roy thought Gordo might vault the partition and attack him. “Canned, fired, sacked.”

“But—”

“Canned, fired, sacked.” Gordo was shouting now; his triple-bladed cut opened up and blood dripped off his chin. “I’m the dumbest fucking cracker of them all.” Gordo in his cubicle, kicking something: first, the partition went down, a whole L-shaped section, then another, and Roy saw that P.J.’s feet, under his desk two cubicles away but very close in distance, were clad in bedroom slippers. Then Gordo’s monitor was in midair—it went right over Roy’s head—and the mouse, trailing after like a kite tail, caught the irregulars banner and tore it from the strip lights. A crash on the open floor beyond the cubicles—some of the strip lights going down too—loud in a place where crashes never happened, and then security guards moved in, two from the receiving end, more from the elevator bank. Gordo whipped around, saw them coming from both directions, said, “Just try it,” screamed it at the top of his lungs, in fact, cords standing out white as bone under the stretched skin of his red neck, and reached in his pocket, as though for a gun, as though he thought he had a gun in there. But of course he didn’t. Then Roy was on his feet, had his arm around Gordo, turned Gordo away from the guards, started walking him toward the elevators, at the same time saying something soothing, he didn’t know what.

“Get the fuck off me,” Gordo said, and tried to shrug Roy off. He kept trying until they came to the elevators, but Roy didn’t let himself be shrugged off. Elevator doors opened, a lucky thing because the security guards were right behind, issuing commands Roy’s brain didn’t register. Doors opened and out came Hector from supplies. He had an armful of toner cartridges he could hardly see over, but what he could see alarmed him. Roy felt a hand on his back. He gave Gordo a little push, past Hector—but not quite cleanly—and onto the elevator, occupied by three or four women from maid service, their eyes widening. The doors closed.

Roy turned back to the room. There was toner all over the place. Curtis and Mr. Pegram watched from behind the glass wall, far away, their faces featureless smudges, one black, one white.

Roy worked late, all by himself on the floor, except for maintenance still rebuilding around him. He found the phosphates, lost them again, sorted through several new messages from Kumi, dated the next day. He received a long set of email protocols from the Globax office in New York. It included a warning about personal communications and a reminder that electronic traffic was monitored. He opened the edu message from lbridges.

Roy—interested in a little black powder shooting?

Lee

Bridges. Roy had forgotten the last name. He was wondering whether to reply, and if so what to say, since he wasn’t sure he understood the message, when Curtis came in; walked through the opening, the wall still down.

“Working late?” Curtis said.

“Catching up to do,” Roy said. Curtis pulled up a chair. Could he read the screen from where he was? Depended on his eyesight;
black powder shooting
looked huge from where Roy sat.

“Bill said to make sure you were properly thanked.”

“For what?”

“For how you handled today’s situation. It bodes well—his words.”

Roy shrugged.

“We’re going to wait forty-eight hours, let things blow over, before making the announcement.”

“What announcement?”

Curtis glanced around; a new wall snapped up in Gordo’s old space, no flag stickers on this one. Curtis lowered his voice. “The promotion, Roy. Your promotion. Sometimes I wonder if you’re even interested.”

Roy lowered his voice in imitation, making their conversation seem intense, as though they’d slipped into italics. “Of course I am.”

Curtis nodded. “I know that. Wouldn’t make sense otherwise.” He gazed at Roy’s screen, resumed a normal volume. “How about a drink? We could try that new place on Edgewood.”

“Thanks, but another time.”

“Or anywhere you like.”

“I wanted to get home and give him a call,” Roy said.

“Who?”

“Gordo.”

Curtis’s eyelid did its fluttering thing.

“It hasn’t blown over for me yet,” Roy said.

Curtis leaned forward. “He wasn’t part of the Globax future.”

Curtis gave Roy a chance to respond. Roy said nothing.

“Not to get too philosophical about it, Roy, but there are new forces on the loose. Whether you choose to recognize them or not won’t change anything.”

Roy knew Curtis was right about those forces: he could feel them, like some kind of accelerator in a NASA g-resistance test.

“Never fired anybody, have you, Roy?” Curtis said.

The maintenance guy heard that: he hoisted two trash barrels instead of one, and struggled off.

“No,” Roy said.

“That’s going to change.”

“I know,” Roy said, but he hadn’t, not consciously, until that moment.

“The hiring makes up for it.”

Roy hadn’t thought about that either.

“New territory,” Curtis said. “But you’ve got the experience, you’ve got the instincts. Remember, when in doubt—there’s always the vision statement.”

Roy’s memory of the vision statement was vague. He recalled a few of the headings as they applied to his department:
on time, safety first, team
.

The maintenance guy returned, crumpled the irregulars banner and tucked it under one arm, grabbed the stepladder with the other, said, “Look all right now, Mr. Curtis?”

“Better than new,” said Curtis.

Roy called Gordo as soon as he got home. No answer; the machine didn’t pick up.

Roy was restless that night. Forty-eight hours. Why hadn’t Curtis said a day or two, a couple days, a little while? Forty-eight hours made it sound like something from a James Bond movie; this was only a job. Roy went downstairs, tried to work on Rhett’s shelves, couldn’t concentrate. He thought of reading the vision statement, but couldn’t find a copy. He opened the fridge, not from hunger, just for something to do, and saw the steaks, still marinating in the Creole sauce. He checked the time; Marcia and Rhett would probably have eaten by now, but what was there to lose by calling?