Son of Destruction (13 page)

If unpacking the business of that old, bad night is on Chape’s agenda, Bobby thinks, bring it on. He starts. ‘About this Carteret kid.’

Chape cuts him off. ‘That’s not why you’re here.’

‘Chape, I saw him. He’s got to be Lucy’s . . .’

‘Don’t.’ Chape rakes him with a look sharp enough to cut him off at the knees.

Bobby finishes anyway. ‘. . . son.’

‘I said, don’t.’ There are things they never talk about. They aren’t going to talk about them now.

Bobby goes cold. ‘Then why am I here?’

‘Yeah, well.’ Amiable Chape mends it all, with that familiar, polished grin. ‘I had to get you here somehow.’

Bobby shrugs. ‘I’d have made it sooner or later.’ They both know this is not necessarily true.

‘OK. It’s Brad.’

‘Brad!’

‘He’s out there somewhere, raving, puking drunk.’

‘So what else is new?’

‘He’s supposed to be hosting this great big fucking party at the club.’

‘You got me all the way out here for this? For another stupid party at the club?’

‘No. For Brad. For the Famous Five.’ The tired tagline makes Bobby flinch. They are both embarrassed by what Chape says next. ‘I thought maybe you could help us, you being A.A. and all.’

‘How did you know?’

Chape shrugs. Everybody knows everything in this town. ‘Buck is checking the bars on Baywater Drive and Stitch is covering the beach dives as we speak.’ He adds, to make Bobby feel better, ‘You might as well know, Buck isn’t doing so good.’

‘What’s the problem.’

‘Depression. He’s scared shit he’ll catch it.’

‘Catch what?’

Chape gives him a you-know look. ‘What Darcy had.’

‘Suicide isn’t catching . . .’ After Darcy’s funeral the Colemans took Buck away sobbing, but Bobby and Chape and the others got crazy in the parking lot, cackling with relief. Next day they brought Buck out here to the shack and they all got loaded – survivors, same as it ever was. It’s funny how easy it is to get over a thing, when you have friends. He falters. ‘. . . I don’t think.’

In that spirit Chape offers, ‘Stitch has prostate cancer.’

‘Men die with it, not of it. He’ll be fine.’

‘He hates to sit down. Says he feels all those radioactive seeds, sliding around.’

‘Ow.’

Chape is studying him. ‘You look good.’

Bobby approximates a smile. ‘You said dress for the club.’

‘With Cecilia dead, the girls are throwing the engagement party for Brad’s girl. Grand ballroom, silver everything. The works.’

‘Brad has a daughter?’

‘Somebody has to do it,’ Chape says.

‘You got me here for a party?’

‘I know how you feel about the club, but we’re all going, for Brad.’

‘You got me all the way over here for a party?’

Chape adds with a stern look, ‘Even you. Re-entry.’

‘I should have known.’ He understands what’s happening here, at least part of it. With Chape, it’s never just the agenda. There’s always the hidden one.

‘Brad needs all the help he can get.’ Chape falls into one of his rhetorical silences that he thinks of as a significant pause.

During the beat, Bobby does not say eagerly,
Whatever you say!
He narrows his eyes.
OK then. Show me your hand.

Here it comes. When he thinks the pause has done its work Chape adds, ‘If you can find him.’

‘What do you mean
you
, white man?’

‘Given the . . . you know.’

He sighs. ‘A.A.’

‘Give me a little bit of credit, Bob. It’s more than that. You know that girl Brad kidnapped in college? Hauled her off the Chi Psi front porch screaming, Fourth of July in our junior year?’

‘Secret marriage, Mrs Kalen’s opal ring.’

‘Valdosta was just a story,’ Chape says. ‘It cost the Kalens plenty to keep Brad out of jail.’

‘I was away.’ Every summer Bobby fled his parents’ expectations; he can still see that sad, hopeful pair, blinking like frogs whenever he came into the room.

‘But you’re the only one who ever saw the woman. Remember, Labor Day?’

‘Brad’s Georgia girl.’ Everybody has to come home sometime. He fills his cheeks with air and lets it out through tight lips. ‘I did.’

‘He had you out to his secret place, wherever he was keeping her,’ Chape says.

‘He did.’

‘God only knows why you went.’

Because Chape has made clear that they aren’t going there, he keeps the worst memory at bay. ‘I had to see if she was OK.’

She looked OK when Bobby met her, pretty but the kind of girl who has sharp elbows, cheap clothes – not the kind whose parents call 911 when she doesn’t come home; he saw Mrs Kalen’s gold slave bracelet riding just above the long bruise on her skinny arm as she flashed the ring. Given Brad’s history, were those K-mart rhinestones or was that a real wedding band? Kalen clamped her to his side maybe a little too tightly but he was proud and smiling, like this was the most important thing he’d ever done: ‘Bobby, meet the wife.’

Even so, Bobby whispered to her while Brad poured him another of whatever they were having,
Are you all right?
She lowered those spiky eyelashes and touched Mrs Kalen’s diamond lavalier with a sly smile. There were roaches running on the Formica and flies buzzing in the plastic curtains in that
awful place
but she was laughing and Brad seemed happy, maybe the only time he was allowed to be, but the Kalens put out enough money to make it all go away. Later he married Cecilia Parker. ‘Her mother was an Arnault,’ Bobby’s mother wrote him, ‘third generation in Fort Jude, charter member of the Junior League.’

Knowing how that one ended he asks uneasily, ‘Did Brad ever tell you what happened to that girl?’

‘There are things you don’t need to know if you want to stay friends.’ In a tone loaded with reproach, Chape takes Bobby where this meeting is going. ‘You’re the only one who knows the place.’

‘It was a trailer.’

‘Now you need to show me where.’

‘Oh, hell,’ Bobby says, and he means it on several levels. ‘Don’t make me go back.’

‘The man is passed out in his own vomit somewhere, with that poor child waiting for him at the club. Now let’s go find our friend and pick him up and scrape him off.’

‘Sorry, I can’t.’

‘Won’t, you mean. Harvard didn’t do you all that much good, did it?’

Bobby shrugs.

‘Look. If you won’t show me where he kept her, at least tell us where to look.’

He shakes his head. ‘I can’t. It’s all freeway now.’

It’s as if Chape hasn’t heard. ‘OK then. One way or another, we go out there and find the bastard. We have exactly one hour to do this and get him to the club.’

It’s still fun thwarting Fort Jude’s expectations, so for the biggest party the Lunch Bunch has mounted,
ever
, Jessie sidesteps the pudgy prospect they picked out for her and teams up with Wade Pike. She needs backup for this one.

And oh, they do turn heads, coming in. Jessie chose a simple red silk sculpted to her best self – plus diamonds, all high end and stylishly low-keyed, and bless him, Wade looks almost elegant in his bespoke linen suit. She sees people’s heads snap around as they enter, and thinks,
OK. Fine.

In a way, it’s kind of funny, her new best friends’ eyes glistening with envy, their tight smiles.
Look at them all, looking at us
. She elbows Wade, who hasn’t noticed. ‘We clean up real nice, don’t we?’

For Pierce Point trash.
Fort Jude society never says these things out loud, but that’s what these ex-girls said behind her back, from first grade through high school graduation week and on until she left town. She came back
somebody
, and that changed. They pretend there was never any difference between them, and for complicated reasons, Jessie lets it play. She is, after all, one of them now. She almost forgives, but she never forgets. In first grade she fell down in the lunchroom and it was horrible. Girls giggled and boys and scraped their fingers at her because her mom didn’t so much wash her clothes and
eewww
, she smelled. It was so bad that she got up and socked Brad Kalen. The fat little shitass started it, but Jessie’s the one who got sent home for two weeks.

When you get up fighting, you get strong. From then on Jessie scrubbed out her underpants in the sink and later she shoplifted a little bit, so she’d never have to go out dirty ever again. She worked at K-Mart afternoons and the early shift at Mook’s Tavern, although she was underage. She handed over grocery money, but she kept back enough for makeup and cute things. She turned heads in tank tops, hoop earrings and flippy skirts, and fuck the snots from Coral Shores, they were just girls. Jessie did what she had to, and mostly it was fun, until life boiled over and she got the hell out of Dodge.

At the time she swore she’d never come back and she didn’t, not even to bury her mom. With Pierce Point behind her, she swore to God she’d make something of herself, and she has. She never intended to come here even though she could buy and sell those bitches, but Fort Jude has a way of calling you back, and here she is.

She’s known the Pike brothers since forever, she and Wade used to play together in the dirt. In first grade they got bussed in to Northshore Elementary along with Walker, something about testing better than Southside Elementary kids. Walker was in second grade. He was handsome and broody and in fifth grade Jessie was sort of in love with him because he slouched around under a shadow, all,
don’t bother me
. At recess he paced the playground like a captive wolf and Jessie yearned. Boy, did she yearn. If the Pike boys had a mother, she was gone. Wade never said what happened. Either he didn’t know, or he didn’t want to say. Wallace Pike put chicken wire over the doors to keep his babies in the house while he worked, and they crawled around filthy until Walker was big enough to take Wade outside. Mr Pike was a mechanic, running his business out of a shack, and the boys had to work in the shop. They came to school with black grease under their fingernails and raw, stained hands.

Jessie hated how the Coral Shores girls flirted with the Pike boys, smarming up against them in the halls, all excited and shivery:
Oh, you dirty boys.

Wade’s come a long, long way since their white trash days. He’s not as interesting as Walker, who got a scholarship to MIT, but unlike Walker, he moves in the best circles in Fort Jude. With a shove from Coach Askew, Wade played football at F.S.U. and pledged Sigma Chi, and now he hangs with the good old boys. He started at Coleman Chrysler before Buck and he rose fast. After all, growing up in a body shop, the man knows cars. When Mr Coleman died, Wade was senior so Wade runs Coleman Chrysler now.

She’s proud of him, standing here like an A-list contender in his Palm Beach suit. He looks a hell of a lot sharper than Sammy Kristofferson that the girls keep pushing at her, plus, unlike Sammy, Wade has kept his hair. The Kristoffersons may be a first family, but in the realm of survival of the fittest, Wade’s the comer now. He, and not Sammy, will probably be the next Commodore of the Fort Jude Club.

Smiling her brightest smile, Jessie takes Wade’s arm. Together, they’ll work the room, where Fort Jude’s nearest and dearest plus friends and relations from as far away as Atlanta are here in their best, making a party for little Patty Kalen.

Which is, of course, the problem, and for Jessie, it’s big. Sooner or later, the creeping slime mold on the backside of the scuzziest sector of the rank, stinking universe, will have to come. The Father of the Bride.

He’s also a problem for the good old girls in the Lunch Bunch, who seize on her with frantic smiles. With three bars set up and banks of white flowers and silver streamers in the ballroom, with the Tony Crimmons orchestra tuning up, the F.O.B. is nowhere around. Sallie Bellinger grips her wrist. ‘Jessie, have you heard anything from Brad?’

She jerks away. ‘Why would I be hearing from Brad?’

‘Wade, we have to borrow Jessie for a little bit.’ Betsy Cashwell separates him from Jessie with an expert sweep of the hand. ‘Girls, we have to rally.’

Through locked teeth, Sallie says, ‘When Brad comes in, we’re reading him the riot act!’

‘
If
he comes in,’ Kara Coleman says. ‘The boys are out looking for him.’

‘He is, after all, the father of the bride.’

Jessie is a pageant of mixed emotions. ‘And we’re going to . . .?’

And in a frenzy of social innocence, Sallie grins, motivating like the head cheerleader. ‘Why, we’re going to make this the best night of Patty Kalen’s life!’

Steffy would rather lurk in the gold chairs babysitting Grammy Henderson than talk to her mom right now. The woman she used to think of as pretty much OK is up the wall and halfway across the ceiling tonight, and it’s weirding her out. Something happened with Dad, and Mom is a different person now.

The way she dragged Steffy into this party all girly and giggly, you’d think she was back in high school and this was her fucking prom. ‘Are we early? Is my hair all right,’ she chattered nonstop. ‘Does this dress make me look fat?’ She hissed, ‘Stephanie, don’t slouch, I can see your boobs,’ instructing through her teeth with that heinous party smile, going on as though she and Steffy are girlfriends, not mother and slave. ‘Oh look, the Greenes are here but I don’t see Mr Kalen, isn’t everything beautiful,’ she said falsely, ‘I did the tables last night, don’t you love all the white-and-silver, is my hair OK?’ and the whole time her hand was jittering up and down Steffy’s arm like a tarantula. ‘Oh God, there’s Kara Coleman, at least try to smile. Take care of your great-grandmother . . .’

‘Mom, let go.’

‘. . . and for God’s sake, if your father shows up, come get me.’ Then she jumped into the party like a cliff diver into a shark-infested pool.

It’s a lot safer here on the shore by the bandstand, where the town’s oldest old ladies are beached in gilded bamboo chairs. They sit with tilting champagne glasses stuck in rigid hands so their old, old kids and middle-aged grandkids like Steffy’s mother can pretend they’re enjoying the party, at least a little bit.