No Defense (6 page)

“Stop!” Eddie shouted. “Turn right
here.”

“Why?”

“Just do it,” he said.

I turned right onto Old Highway 49, a
two-lane highway rarely used since the expressway was built. “This
is the long way home. There’s nothing on this road, Eddie.”

“How quickly they forget.”

“What?”

“The memorial, the tree.”

My shoulders sagged. “What do they have to
do with any- thing?” I asked quietly.

“You used to believe they had to do with
everything.”

“I meant, why go there now? Jessie’s asleep.
I’m tired.”

“I want to remind you of what the people
here are capable of”

“Sometimes lately I think you’re losing your
mind. The town did not kill them, Eddie.”

“I guess those boys shot themselves that
night.”

“
Someone
shot Leon Johnson and Jimmy
Turnbow. It wasn’t me or anyone I know. I grew up here with a lot
of fine people. Look at me. Am I a bigot?”

“When we met, I had my doubts, but I saved
you from all that, taught you some of the things they don’t teach
people around here.”

“Don’t flatter yourself.”

“Come on. You were an incredibly naive
country girl who’d never even met a black person who wasn’t your
maid or gardener, LuAnn. Not one. You had no inkling of the world
outside the narrow-minded one of Tallagurnsa, Alabama. Who got you
involved in the civil-rights movement? Who got you interested,
active in the antiwar movement?”

“It was 1970, Eddie. I think I might have
found my way without you.”

“Are you claiming that organizing the
memorial fund for Leon and Jimmy was your idea?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Here we are. Pull over.”

“No!” I shook my head and set my eyes on the
road ahead, determined that we wouldn’t stop at the memorial “This
has nothing to do with our problems, Eddie. It’s past four now; I
want to get home. I’m not interested in thinking about tragedy
right this minute.”

He grabbed the steering wheel and turned us
sharply onto the side of the road.

I slammed on the brakes.

“What happened? Where are we?” Jessie asked,
waking up. “Are we home?”

“Daddy needs to stop. Everything’s fine,” I
said.

Our car stopped not far from the huge old
pine tree that bore a large barkless gash a few feet from its base.
The tree. No one had expected it would live after taking the full
force of a head-on collision fifteen years ago when, not long after
Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, two young black men
were shot driving to the state university a few hundred miles to
the south. The school was under a federal court order to integrate,
and had they made it there, Jimmy Turnbow and Leon Johnson would
have been the first black students to attend a white Alabama
college.

They never got there. Leon was shot in the
head and died instantly, crashing his car into the tree. Jimmy was
shot crawling away from the wreck.

“Let’s get out and look at the memorial,”
Eddie said. “Maybe it will jar your memory.”

“No, thanks.” I locked my door and left my
seatbelt on.

“I want to see,” Jessie said.

“You’re really being a shit, Eddie,” I
said.

“I think it’s important to see the tree and
the memorial and remember what happened here, because I know you
and I know you want to take your father up on his offer-the
restaurant, the house, Jolene. I understand that the Steak House is
an opportunity for
you
, but moving here is the wrong
opportunity for
us
. You can’t just pretend that Tallagumsa
is the perfect little place to live and raise a family; it’s not.
You can’t ignore all the bad things that have happened here. Didn’t
I hear
you
say something along those lines today? Or was
that just to irritate Jane and Gladys?”

“Maybe you don’t know me at all anymore if
you think I need to listen to this stupid little lecture,” I said.
“My point was that I want to honor the past, but that doesn’t mean
I can’t look to the future, that I can’t see how much has changed.
The county has doubled in size over the last fifteen years, and
look at the state college. Teachers from all over the country would
not be here if Tallagumsa was the town it used to be, if Alabama
was the state it used to be. That’s why that reporter Ben Gainey is
here. The New South, Eddie.”

Eddie got out of the car, came around
to
my side, and waited.

I gave up, got out, and unhooked Jessie from
her car seat.

We all walked to the tree.

On this lonely stretch of roadside, the dirt
closest to the road gave way to clumps of grass and dandelions. Old
beer cans cluttered the landscape. Down the road a ways was a
house, a barn, a shack, and more farmland. Adjacent to the tree
were several acres of land that had recently been turned in deep
furrows for planting, probably corn or alfalfa. In the distance
were the green foothills of the Cumberland Plateau.

Jessie picked a dandelion, blew on it, and
watched as its seeds sailed away, carried into the air by a light
breeze.

Near the tree was a large commemorative iron
plaque on two waist-high steel posts. I didn’t have to examine the
raised metal letters on the plaque to know what they said. A young
college student home for the summer in 1972, I’d organized the
effort to raise the money to purchase and install the memorial.

The simple but compelling inscription had
been suggested by Leon’s mother: “Leon Johnson (1943-1963) and
Jimmy Turnbow (1944--1963). They had a dream.”

CHAPTER
FOUR

I was a college junior and Eddie a senior
when we moved in together. In 1971 living together was still
regarded by most of the adult world as “living in sin.” In the
college community, however, it was common, and with our friends
Hildy and John, we moved into one of the furnished apartments owned
by Violet Crawford and her mother, Iris Ann Crawford. Over the next
two years, Hildy and I exerted enormous amounts of energy hiding
the true identity of our roommates from our parents.

Unlike our parents, Violet and Iris Ann
didn’t give a hoot about marital status. The sole qualification for
moving into one of their five decaying Victorian homes in the
Little Five Points section of Atlanta was a southern birthright.
“Where were you born, dear?” was the first question Violet, a
frail, elegant woman in her fifties, asked each of us when we
answered the newspaper ad about the apartment. A good portion of
the former Confederacy was represented by the four of us, and at
the end of the interview we were invited to join the other college
and grad students who rented their units.

The Crawfords had subdivided their houses
into apartments with an eye toward minimizing cost and maximizing
rent-generating units. The result was that each of the furnished
apartments was peculiar in one way or another. In carving up the
house we lived in, they’d transformed the dining room by adding a
closet, a dresser, a vanity, a bedroom light fixture, and a double
bed, then advertised the unit as a two bedroom. The front door of
the apartment opened into a living room, which was not unusual. But
all the other rooms-the kitchen, the bath room, the other bedroom,
the truncated hallway-were accessible only through this ersatz
bedroom. Hildy and John and Eddie and I were so happy to find an
apartment we could afford and a landlady who would have us that we
gladly overlooked this design flaw. We drew straws to determine who
got stuck with the walk-through bedroom and who got the bedroom
with privacy. Eddie and I won. Six years later we were still in the
same bedroom.

Jessie now occupied the walk-through room
that had once been Hildy and John’s. There was no third bedroom for
the twins, who would have to reside in bassinets in the corner of
our bedroom until we figured out something better. Knocking out the
flimsy wall that separated our apartment from the second floor, the
stairs, and the hallway and taking over the entire house was
Eddie’s latest plan for handling our impending space needs. I saw
several flaws in this approach: He hadn’t broached it with the
Crawfords; we didn’t have the money to pay for the extra space; and
the upstairs was home to Adrienne and her six cats.

Adrienne, the only one of the Crawfords’
present tenants older than we were, was a thirty-year-old flower
child, a veteran of Haight-Ashbury’s Trips Festival and Be-In, who
had arrived here via Sweden and Drop City, Colorado. All Violet and
Iris Ann cared about, though, was that she’d been born in
Charleston and that her mama’s maiden name was Davis. It turned out
that they actually knew Adrienne’s mother’s brother’s wife.

Adrienne made ends meet answering phones at
Radio Free Georgia a few blocks from the apartment and doing
astrological charts for friends and friends of friends. Not long
after she moved in a year earlier, she did my chart in exchange for
a pair of Grateful Dead tickets a co-worker at the City Paper had
given Eddie. Eddie and I briefly toyed with the idea of going to
the concert, but felt too old, too tired, too married, too
busy.

So I gave the concert tickets to Adrienne,
who was a Dead Head, and one evening a few weeks later she invited
me upstairs to look at the ten-page astrological chart she’d
prepared. In her living room, by the light of the thirty or so
candles she preferred to light bulbs, I read about houses, squares,
past lives, retrograde planets, and ascendants.

Somehow Adrienne had gleaned from this star
and planet data that I was idealistic, romantic-though I would have
only one true love, she predicted-impulsive, proud, energetic, and
hardworking. I put those attributes in the positive category. On
the somewhat negative side, Adrienne had written that I was
stubborn and loyal to a fault, that I held a grudge far too long,
and that I should learn to let well enough alone.

It was dusk. The muted light of Adrienne’s
candles illuminated her second-floor windows as Eddie, Jessie, and
I pulled into the driveway. After the initial argument and the
detour to the tree and the memorial, neither Eddie nor I had spoken
of the possibility of moving to Tallagurnsa and taking over the
Steak House. I had the sense, though, that my father’s offer had
become a living, tangible thing. I could almost feel it hovering
over us in the car, as we walked up the front steps, and as we
stood on the front porch.

While I searched through my purse for the
front-door key, Jessie sat in one of the wicker porch rockers and
Eddie, his tie stuffed in his shirt pocket, raised the lid of the
small metal mailbox hanging to the right of the front door. He
pulled out a bunch of mail. A Salem hung from the corner of his
mouth while he shuffled through the pile: two bills, a magazine, a
catalog, and a letter. He put everything but the letter back in the
box.

“Here it is!” he said, holding up the letter
to his face as if he might be able to read what was inside without
opening it.

“Universal Media?” I asked.

“Who else?” he said. “
They
write me,
they
ask for all my latest work,
they
tell me how
great syndication is, and then
they
ignore me for a month.
But here it is. At last.”

“Open it, Eddie,” I said, laughing. “Come
on, come on, come on!”

He stood there studying the envelope. His
jaw muscles tightened.

“Don’t you want to know?” I asked.

“Yes, and no.”

“Well, give it to
me
then.” I put my
hat, Jessie’s toy bag, and Eddie’s jacket on the empty porch
rocker, took the envelope and ripped it open. How our lives would
change if Universal Media made Eddie a good offer. I began to read.
I didn’t have to read too far. I sighed heavily and looked at him.
He could see the rejection in my face. I wished that I hadn’t
opened the letter, but I had been absolutely sure the envelope
carried good news that would make Daddy’s Steak House proposal
irrelevant.

“Let’s go inside,” I said dully. I inserted
the key in the lock, turned it, and pushed open the front door.
“Come on in, Jessie.”

Jessie leaned back as far as she could in
the rocker, then rocked forward forcibly and flung herself out of
the chair.

I shook my head. “You’re gonna fall right
smack on your face one day, young lady.”

She ran past us into the apartment.

Eddie hadn’t moved from his spot in front of
the mailbox. He took a drag on his cigarette and looked at me, not
a trace of feeling in his eyes. “I give up,” he said.

“Oh, Eddie, come on. You’ve only tried two
syndication groups in two years. You can’t give up-you’re too good
and you know it.”

“Maybe not,” he said. “Maybe they know
something I don’t.” He leaned against the wall and stared out at
the street.