Safe from the Neighbors (10 page)

They gave her a full-size Buick, and I followed her back to the highway.

It’s twenty-six miles from Greenville to Loring, a straight shot through the heart of the Delta, cotton fields on both sides of the road until you cross the Loring County line, and after that you start to see a few catfish ponds. I’d been driving that road, or riding on it while somebody else drove, for almost half a century, and during that time the scenery had hardly changed at all—except for those ponds, which were dug about thirty years ago. A cotton field in 2006 looked pretty much the same as it did in 1962.

I don’t know why my life began to seem so monotonous as I drove that stretch, as flat and featureless, as devoid of color and distinction, as one of those ponds. But a pond teems with activity the eye can’t see, whereas the surface was pretty much all there was to me. I was just a guy who’d never write a book or lead a boycott or take a stand against community mores or assault a beach or walk the streets of a bombed-out city. I was Mr. History. I read it and I talked about it, without ever once having done anything unusual enough to make it. Not even locally.

The house Maggie rented isn’t actually in town but about a mile south of Choctaw Creek, surrounded by tall hedges intended to shield its inhabitants from the eyes of those laboring in the adjoining fields. The original owners had been wealthy farmers, but their luck ran out in the ’60s, and the bank finally took over. Since then it had been rented out again and again and by now was fairly rundown—the paint peeling off, the veranda sagging, the front steps beginning to crumble.

She parked the Buick in the carport, and I pulled up behind her and got out.

“Inside,” she said, “it looks a good bit like the Munsters’ house. My own furniture’s still in North Carolina.”

“You know who used to live here?”

“No, though I’m sure I came here at some point when I was a child. I remember the pool.”

“I remember it, too, but that’s because the folks it belonged to started renting it out for parties in the late Sixties, when they needed money. You were gone by then.”

“Who were they?”

“You couldn’t put this in a book and get anybody to believe it. Their last name was spelled L-A-U-S-S. Pronounced
Loss.”

She touched my arm. “Carol Lauss! I haven’t thought of her in ages.”

“Karen, actually. She was their daughter.”

“What happened to her?”

“Works at the Health Department. Both her parents are dead.”

She unlocked the back door, and we stepped into the kitchen. It was big and had probably been state-of-the-art at one time, but now all the appliances looked old, the linoleum countertops and floor dated.

“What would you like? I’ve got beer and wine in the fridge, and I think there’s a bottle of VO in here somewhere that came with the house.”

“The VO sounds good, if you can lay your hands on it.”

She opened the door on a cabinet above the sink. The VO was there, all right, along with twenty or thirty of those little amber-colored bottles that prescription medication comes in. They weren’t lined up neatly, either, just piled together like some monument to Eli Lilly. She stood on her tiptoes, and when she reached up her blouse pulled loose, revealing a strip of flesh, along with a good bit of black lace. She turned around, holding the bottle, and for a moment just stared at me. Then she smiled and said, “Want some Xanax?”

There wasn’t much point in pretending I hadn’t noticed the stash. “Looks like you’re well stocked.”

“Oh, if it’s a tranquilizer or an antidepressant, chances are I’ve got it. All of those prescriptions, incidentally, were filled a year or so ago in North Carolina. Most of them I never even tried, though maybe I should’ve.”

“If you don’t use them, why bring them along?”

“Well, you never know when you might need to be uplifted or subdued. At least I’m prepared.”

I dropped my voice and said, “I don’t want a Xanax. But I’ll sure take the whiskey—assuming you’re prepared to let me have more than one drink.”

“Oh, I’m pretty much prepared for anything.”

“Anything?”

There’s a guy I work with, an assistant coach, who I can’t stand. He drives to school in one of those pickups with struts that lift it about five feet off the ground, and there’s a weathered sticker on the tailgate that says
HONK IF YOU’VE NEVER SEEN A SHOTGUN FIRED FROM A MOVING RIG.
According to some students who play football, he always starts sobbing in the team huddle before the opening kickoff and then, even though he’s the faculty adviser for the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, turns foulmouthed, urging them to kick the living fuck out of those goddamn cocksuckers. None of that, however, is why I dislike him.

No, it’s because whenever you go into the teachers’ lounge and find him in the presence of a female faculty member, he’s invariably flirting with her. He’ll drop his voice and say, “Is that a promise? Or a threat?” He wants them to think he’s got one thing on his mind, and he wants you to think so, too, and I do. And every time I see him acting like that, I start imagining how I’d feel if I ever caught him talking to one of my daughters.

So I couldn’t quite believe it when I heard myself sounding just like him.

She stood there with her back to the kitchen counter, staring at me, and I had the sense that if I was behaving exactly as she’d expected, I’d still disappointed her somehow, lessening myself in her eyes. “Ice?” she finally asked.

“Straight.”

She sloshed about two inches of VO into a water glass and handed it to me. Then she pulled a bottle of Chardonnay from the refrigerator and filled her glass right up to the brim. We took our drinks into the living room, which was empty except for a couch and a coffee table and a chair she told me she’d rented from Front Street Furniture, and sat down at opposite ends of the couch.

Our recent lunch conversations had skirted the subject of her mother’s death. Consequently, while I knew that her husband had invested wisely in dot-coms and then wisely sold before the bubble burst, that they’d traveled all over the world, skiing in the Alps and climbing in the Andes, I knew much less about the time she’d spent here in the late ’50s and early ’60s. Every now and then I recalled something—like being in a car with her and her brother and their mother, going to vacation Bible school at Fairway Baptist—but then I’d start doubting the memory. Nadine, I was fairly sure, hadn’t been a churchgoer. I do remember they kept alcohol in the house back then, though Loring County, like the rest of the state, was bone dry. Baptists didn’t drink—or if they did, they hid it.

As if she knew what I was thinking, she said, “You know, I never did forget you. Not once in all these years.”

“I’m that memorable?”

She sipped her wine. “I’m not saying you
are
. Just that you
were.”

“How so?”

“You were such a pissed-off little kid.”

That didn’t really jibe with the view I held of myself, in which I’d always been reasonably happy. “Well, I seem to recall
that I almost broke my neck once because you tripped me end over end off the porch up at the old Fairway Crossroads store. That’s hardly something a well-adjusted child would do, so maybe you were the pissed-off kid.”

“No. I did it because I didn’t like the look you gave my brother. And I didn’t like it when Mom hugged you.”

“Why?”

“She held on to you for too long.”

“Jesus. Are you that jealous now?”

“I don’t have anybody, or anything, to be jealous of.”

“Were you when you did?”

“Oh.” She shook her head. “When I had a fit of jealousy, Luke, you wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere nearby.” She was wearing a nice pair of leather sandals. She set her wineglass on the coffee table, then leaned over and slipped her left heel, and then her right, out of the straps. Leaving the shoes on the floor, she drew her legs up onto the couch.

She was an excellent psychologist, and precious little escaped her. Ever had or ever would. Now, she saw something in my face that I wasn’t aware was there. “Know what I once heard your father tell my mother?” she asked. “After one of those meetings our dads used to attend?”

The gatherings in question were always held on Monday evening. My father sometimes complained about missing
The Andy Griffith Show
—the only TV program he really enjoyed, and a mainstay of the Monday night schedule in those days. They usually took place at someone’s home—often Mayor Finley’s—but at least one of them, I’ve discovered, was right in City Hall.

The Citizens’ Council had been formed back in 1954, in response to
Brown v. Board of Education
. The founders might not have been the best or the brightest, but they had sense enough to know that the violent images that would eventually be
beamed out over the airwaves—from sites like the Edmund Pettis Bridge—could only arouse the nation’s disgust and spell the end of official segregation. They were determined to use economics, rather than sheer physical intimidation, to maintain the status quo.

According to my father’s membership card, he joined in the spring of 1959, shortly after Arlan Calloway returned to Loring with his family. By then the vast majority of white men in the Delta were already members, so I don’t know what significance, if any, his relatively late decision to sign up might have. I don’t know, that is, if it indicates he never was a true believer and joined only because not to do so, at that point, would have been financial suicide, especially since Herman Horton was one of the organizers. For all I know, he might have feared he was so low down on the social ladder that he would’ve been rejected. If that’s the case, it could be that Arlan Calloway shepherded him into the fold.

At any rate, they always went to the meetings together. Sometimes Mr. Calloway dropped by our house to pick my father up, though he never came inside, just pulled into the driveway and hit his horn once or twice. Mostly, though, my dad went down to his place, leaving his pickup parked in their yard. As far as I know, they never went to town in Dad’s truck, probably because Mr. Calloway’s was much newer and had air-conditioning.

Many times, after a meeting, my father would marvel at something his friend had said or done. I can recall hearing him tell Grandpa that another Council member—the father of a boy in my class—had made everybody mad by refusing to fire one of his tractor drivers. I don’t recall what that man’s sin was supposed to have been, but odds are he’d been caught talking to a voter-registration activist. When his employer, who himself wielded no small amount of influence in the community, said, “I hate to do it. I just really do hate to,” Mr. Calloway replied, “I
hate to, you hate to, he, she and it hates to, too, but he, she and it have to, and so will you.”

“That Arlan,” my father concluded, “he’s resourceful. And that turns him into a
resource.”

More than forty years later, sitting there on the couch beside Arlan Calloway’s daughter, whose bare calves were drawn up onto the cushions just inches away from my hand, which I could suddenly find no use for, I said, “My father? Your mother? What are you talking about?”

So she told me, and I have to admit that she evoked the scene well.

It’s early summer, and she’s been in bed with Nancy Drew when she hears her father’s truck pull into the driveway. She lays her book aside and bounces out of bed, like she always does when her daddy comes home. He’s usually got something for her, a piece of candy or a hug, and either one’s as good as the other.

That night, for some reason, he doesn’t cut his engine, just sits there in the driveway, the motor idling while the passenger door opens and my father gets out. He’s left his own truck parked there and heads over to it. Then her dad puts his pickup in reverse and backs into the road. Later on, she’ll hear him say that somebody had been siphoning gas from his tractors and he was going to check on things.

She presses her face against the window screen, not understanding why her father’s leaving. It’s a small thing, but of the sort that could puzzle a girl her age. While she watches my father open the door on his truck, she hears another door open and the porch light comes on.

Her mother steps into the yard, into that circle of light. She’s wearing a pair of white shorts and a long-sleeved blouse with the sleeves rolled up, and there’s a drink in her hand, as there so often is at this time in her life. She takes a couple of steps
towards my father, who’s standing there with his hand on the truck door.

“Hey, James,” she says. “Y’all been out stirring up trouble?” She’s against those meetings, as she’s told her husband many times. She’s told her kids the same thing, arguing that change is going to come whether people like it or not, so they might as well welcome it with open arms. And she’s got her own arms wide open now. “Come here,” she says, “and give me a hug.”

So my dad meets her halfway between the truck and the porch, and they wrap their arms around each other, and the girl with her face pressed to the window hears my father say, “Lord, if you ain’t something.”

“T
HE FIRST HUMANS
were whittled out of driftwood,” the man who used to run our Western Auto liked to say. He’d pause, then slyly add, “According to Norse legend, anyway.”