South of Shiloh (3 page)

The boys reminded her of Andre.

Jenny concentrated on driving. Andre was the last one she’d tried to save before moving to the suburbs and switching to general ed.

The house was still there, just like it had been six months ago. That time she’d dropped Paul off at the airport for a business trip to Cleveland. Peeling paint, Paul would say. The small green bungalow needed some attention…

Then,
oh cripes
! She stabbed the brakes when she saw him sitting on his front porch steps, talking to another man.

“SO YOU JUST HAPPENED TO HAVE THE 500, HUH, RUNNING THROUGH
backyards, scaling a fence?” asked Perry MacNeil, acting photo editor of the
Pioneer Press
.

“What’s your point?” John Rane said.

“One of the cops who ordered you to stop said he drew his gun because he mistook the lens for a weapon.”

“Oh c’mon, I identified myself,” Rane said.

“But you didn’t stop, you kept going. Except you dropped the 500…”

“I didn’t
drop
it, Perry. I set it down, carefully,” Rane said.

“Right. And somebody swiped it. The only 500-millimeter lens the staff has. That’s what got you suspended, losing that lens.”

Rane shrugged. “I had to strip down to get in tight with the 80–200; you know what Capa said…”

Perry knew Robert Capa’s maxim: if your pictures aren’t good enough you’re not close enough. Capa’s penchant for getting in close got him killed in Indochina before it became Vietnam.

They were sitting on Rane’s stoop halfway through their cans of Bud Lite. MacNeil had dropped in to check on the usual rumors. The
Star Trib
across the river was interested in cherry-picking the best spot news shooter in the state.

Again.

He could go anywhere, set his own terms; but he stayed based in the Twin Cities. He was a funny guy.

To MacNeil, Rane resembled a 9/11 hijacker who didn’t care about landings and takeoffs. He just wanted to fly the plane. In Rane’s case, he just wanted to make the shot. The more difficult the better. And it had to be the exact perfect shot. If he decided the picture wasn’t there, he’d blow off the assignment.

This inattention to the basic requirements of his job made him impossible to supervise. Rane was a maverick perfectionist who could always fall back on a cushion of independent income from the books: photo essays augmented by substantial narrative.

Perry appraised the braid of scar tissue around Rane’s right eye. His method was controversial: to immerse himself in a subject before shooting it. His latest book,
Cage
, an inside look at Ultimate Fighting, could have blinded him. Plain dumb. A man on the downside of thirty-five, with 20/10 vision in both eyes, training six months in a gym, getting in the octagon ring, and fighting no-holds-barred, bare-knuckle.

And winning the bout.

Perry shook his head. “I heard Magnum approached you to do a tour in Iraq…”

“C’mon, Perry. I was in the original movie in ’91. Watching my country march off a cliff doesn’t grab me, know what I mean,” Rane said.

Perry didn’t know what he meant. Iraq would be perfect for him. The picture that resulted in Rane’s latest suspension had run on network and cable news and most front pages in the country. The
Pioneer Press
had sold a slug of them and was not displeased with the attention Rane had generated.

“You really yelled at the guy?” Perry asked.

“Seemed like a good idea at the time,” Rane said.

After slipping through a police cordon and ignoring warnings to stop, Rane had documented a tense SWAT situation with the big handheld lens. Then he set the 500 aside and worked in close enough to surprise and distract the erratic, barricaded shooter. In the split second before the shooter turned his shotgun on himself, he had aimed it directly at Rane. Hell of a picture: the mad, hopeless eyes; the muzzle thrusting forward, veins corded on the guy’s neck. Furious that Rane had put himself and several officers in extra jeopardy, a number of cops deeply regretted the guy didn’t punch a deer slug through Rane’s face before he stuck the muzzle in his mouth.

“The
Chicago Tribune
…” Perry said.

“I ain’t going anywhere,” Rane said.

“Yeah, I know. If you were going to make a move you would have done it already, when you were younger,” Perry said.

They finished their beers and Rane asked, “So, you want to slap my hands, take my gear and ID?”

“Naw, keep it. You kidding? You’ve scored another unpaid vacation. In fact, it wouldn’t break my heart if you nosed around and maybe found something we can use later.”

Rane was nodding to Perry when he caught the peripheral movement two houses down the street; a red Subaru Forester jerked to a stop then accelerated. As he watched the car go past his house, he marked the profile of the female driver and his chest tightened.

“What?” Perry asked, seeing Rane frown.

“Nothing.”

After a few more snippets of small talk, they stood up and shook hands. “Stay in touch,” Perry said. Rane watched him get in his car and drive away. Then his eyes traveled down the street in the direction the red Subaru had turned and disappeared.

JENNY STARED STRAIGHT AHEAD, BOTH HANDS ON THE WHEEL,
reining in her runaway heart. After a dozen blocks she rationalized that he hadn’t seen her.

Don’t kid yourself. Never could have worked.
The man was the pure opposite of careful.

You did the right thing. For Molly.

But, then, as always, came the echo.
But did I do the right thing for me?

She hurried from the neighborhood and accelerated down the ramp onto I-94, swung north on 35E, and was soon on her route home. On surer ground, her breathing returning to normal, she joined the commuter stream racing east on Highway 36. Finally she saw the king stack of the Excel plant jut like a beacon on the horizon, marking the St. Croix River. The car tires fell into familiar grooves, the predictable tracks of her life that took her from her home to Stonebridge Elementary—Molly rode the bus—to Cub Foods, Kowalski’s, and the health club.

She turned off 36 onto Greeley, took another left, and passed Happy’s Garage, took another left and parked in the health club lot. She got out from the car, slung her bag, went in, chatted with the receptionist, turned over her membership card, and received a towel and locker key. She waved at several women and paused to talk with one of them, who had a girl in her class. Then she entered the locker room, changed into her suit, walked to the pool, pulled on her cap and her goggles.

Jenny had been a swimmer; pretty good but not great, at the U of M on a swim scholarship. Since the move from St. Paul, she’d returned to the pool, pushing herself through grueling sets that left her a lean replica of her younger self. Her mom had been a swimmer, and she always remembered her dad telling a friend, with a satisfied grin, “Marry a woman who swims and you’ll always be happy.”

Molly broke the pattern and recoiled from the water. Molly played soccer with a flock of friends, studied the piano, and danced at the Phipps. Jenny remembered a T-shirt she’d seen on a swim kid,
IF SWIMMING WAS EASY THEY’D CALL IT SOCCER
. Running back and forth, following the herd. Can’t blame her, Jenny mused as she lowered herself into the water and pushed off the wall in a tight streamline, for doing what I did.

An hour later, standing under a hot shower, she stared at a grid of gray-green tile. The tile was the color of John Rane’s eyes. Probably he’d seen her.

He missed nothing, saw everything, always.

2

THE WEST ALCORN THURSDAY-NIGHT ALCOHOLICS
Anonymous group met at six p.m. in the back room of a Baptist church on the outskirts of Theo, Mississippi, located off Highway 72 about midway between Corinth and the Tippah County line. Alcorn was a Baptist-majority dry county, except for beer in the Corinth city limits, and you had to be serious about staying sober to be seen walking into an AA meeting there.

The tall stranger showed up six months ago with a court-ordered voucher in his pocket, which had to be signed as proof of attendance. He’d sat quietly self-conscious on the margin of the group, surrounded by a cloud of gossip and drama.

Now, finally, he was ready to break his silence. He looked around at the pale pine-paneled walls, and then dropped his eyes to the scuffed linoleum. He avoided eye contact with the other eight people, who sat on gray metal folding chairs arranged in a circle. The style of the meeting was informal. After they joined hands and said the Lord’s Prayer, they read the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous.

“Not sure if I’m ready to start on this,” the stranger said in a halting baritone.

The other members of the group were not quite ready for him, either. A whiff of cheap cosmetics, sweat, and even a touch of manure circulated in the close room. In an attempt to fit in he wore faded jeans and a T-shirt, but his boots were of good leather and buffed to a low gloss. His fingernails were manicured and his dark, curly hair had recently been styled. Despite his humble posture he radiated a sleek, muscular health, and the tan that colored his face and forearms was clearly not a working-blister tan. Looked more like easy vacation. Looked like golf.

Two women in the group had decided after he first showed up that he looked like one of those mournful, too-handsome preachers who get in trouble with the married gals in their congregations.

The men noticed his soft hands and were prepared not to trust him. But they were all here for a reason and the fact was, their perceptions had tended to serve, not temper, their addiction before they washed up in AA.

“I need some time,” the stranger said. “An’ I’ll take feedback. My name is Mitchell Lee and I’m an alcoholic. I did court-ordered treatment at Timber Hills and I been sober now for almost six months.”

One of the women raised her hand and wagged her finger. “You’re the boy who started the radio show over in Corinth. I recognize your voice.”

“Yes ma’am,” Mitch said. “I am.”

“You raised the money to build that monument for the Confederate dead at Kirby Creek,” she said.

“Well,” Mitch said, eyes lowered. “Fact is, I had some powerful incentive, like two hundred hours of court-ordered community service.”

“You grew up around here, didn’t you?” a weathered older man in overalls, sitting across from Mitch, queried, studying him carefully.

“Yes sir, I did,” Mitch answered.

“Tommy Lee’s boy, ain’tcha?”

“Yes sir,” Mitch said.

“I knew your daddy back in my white-lightning days. Him and Towhead White, Pusser too. Never thought we’d see you again after you married Banker Kirby’s daughter.” The old man, named Marlon, scratched his whiskered chin. “Yeah, we all know who you are and what you’re going through.”

One of the women gently stirred the pot. “We read the stories in the
Daily Corinthian—
how Hiram Kirby suffered the stroke driving back to Corinth from his estate.”

“Yes ma’am. What I want to talk about.”

People set their faces, composed themselves in their chairs, and waited.

“The old man has taken a downturn,” Mitch said slowly, leaning forward in his chair, elbows resting on his knees, eyes fixed on his clasped hands. “Now they got him on a machine, doing the breathing for him.”

“What do the docs say?” Marlon asked quietly.

“Well, it’s, ah, not good. When they found him on the road too much time had passed. Way the body works in a crisis, it protects the wheelhouse, the heart and lungs.” Mitch sighed. “Blood gets diverted from the brain. Now they’re saying he’s in this…” Mitch pursed his lips, “…persistent vegetative state.”

“Let go and let God…” one of the women whispered, more to herself than to Mitch.

“I was up there to see him at Magnolia Regional today. They got him laying in a bed all snarled in these tubes like this astronaut; got this big one stuck down his throat. Machines…” Mitch’s deep voice broke and the tears that welled in his eyes were genuine. “That old man changed my life, was like a father…”

“Times like this,” Marlon said gently, “it’s important to keep things in perspective; remember this is happening to him, not you.”

Mitch squashed a tear from his cheek with his palm, inhaled, and let it out. “I know. Just that the goddamn monument was put up today out there in front of his house and now it looks like he ain’t going to see it.”

One of the women leaned forward. “How’s Miss Kirby doing with it all?”

Mitch sat up straighter. “Ellie’s at the hospital most of the day.” He shook his head. “Been rough on her. First her brother, now her dad. Then she runs. Guess that’s the way she’s handling it. Goes out and trains for her marathon. Kinda worries me, her out on the back roads like that.”

For the first time Mitch raised his eyes and directly engaged the circle of faces. “Thing that gets to me is there’s people who still say I been out to take advantage of the old man’s kindness. Gets almost like I feel guilty going to the hospital.”

Now Marlon, the old moonshiner, spoke up. “Folks know all about that, Mitchell Lee; how Deputy Kenny Beeman got that subpoena to go through the monument bank account you set up. How he implied you was skimming money.”

“And how nothing come of it,” one of the women sniffed.

Marlon raised an index finger. “People on this side of the county gonna remember that, if Beeman gets a mind to run for sheriff like some folks think he might.”

“’Appreciate that, Marlon,” Mitch said. Just then his cell phone jingled in his back pocket and his imagination leaped.

Christ, was it the old man? Already?

“Excuse me,” he mumbled as he quickly whipped out the phone. But it wasn’t Ellie. He saw his cousin Darl’s number on the display and thumbed the pad to end the call. He replaced the phone and finished up: “Whatever else, I still have almost six months sober, so I thank God for this program.”

Then he sat back in his seat and kept an attentive look on his face as he listened to several other people recount the difficulties they’d traversed during the week, thinking, Man, these are some white-knuckle bubbas just making it hand-over-hand one day at a time across the snake pit.

After the group ended, they all stood in a circle, holding hands, and recited the Serenity Prayer. Mitch stayed behind with Marlon, folded the chairs, and volunteered to sweep out the room. Then he said good-night, went out, and got in his truck.

Marlon stood in the parking lot with another man, named Luke. He inserted a pinch of Skoal in his lower lip and watched Mitch’s taillights recede in the dark.

“So whattya think?” Luke asked.

“Ladies’ man,” Marlon shrugged. “The gals go for the smile and his voice like a radio commercial. But you look in his eyes, it gets kinda cold and slippery.”

“Uh-huh. What I heard was, when he married that banker’s daughter she kept her own name,” Luke said.

Marlon spit on the gravel and said, “The way I heard it, Mitchell Lee was always a demon for work, never did drink much before he pulled that drunk stunt. Had him a hot-shit Corinth lawyer got him throwed in treatment to beat jail time.”

“Uh-huh,” Luke said.

“The way I heard it,” Marlon continued, “his little drinking spree got him out of going to Eye-rack with the National Guard. Yep,” Marlon stroked his chin, “that boy’s way smarter than his daddy.”

MITCHELL LEE NICKELS GREW UP WEST OF CORINTH, MISSISSIPPI,
near the small town of Theo, sweating like hell in Liberty overalls, cutting pulp wood for his keep on the Reverend Leets’s farm. He was three when his grandpa on his momma’s side came into his life. Mitch didn’t remember his mother. What he remembered was the smell.

On the hot August afternoon when the McNairy County deputy found him in the back-road shack outside of Selmer, Tennessee, Pearl Leets was swelled up on the bare mattress, hatching bluebottle flies. She had a hypodermic needle protruding from her tied-off, puffed-up arm, and the deputy figured Mitch had been in there two days wearing the same diaper, living off stale potato chips and warm Dr Pepper.

The reverend, being the white sheep of the outlaw Leets clan, did his best to steer his grandson clear of trouble. Mitch kept busy working on the farm, going to school, and regularly attending church. He was sixteen when two events altered his life. First, he discovered that girls really liked what he did for them. The downside of this revelation was that his grandpa caught him behind the tractor shed, minus his pants, with the older neighbor girl’s heels banging around his ears. Mitch expected a beating but instead the reverend thrust him into the old Chevy truck and drove him through a rainstorm to the ruins of a honky-tonk on old Highway 45 going south of Corinth. Leets, a Primitive Baptist minister, was famous in two counties for his powerful pulpit presence, so, in lieu of the beating, he delivered a single scathing sentence:

“Mitchell Lee, you got bad blood like your daddy.”

After the rebuke, the preacher left him alone in the rain to think about it. Which is what Mitch did, hugging himself, meditating on that oil-slicked cement slab where his father’s blood had leaked out on another rainy night, two months before Mitch was born.

According to the local lore, this was where Tommy Lee Nickels, a bootlegger and murderer, had been mysteriously gunned down. The authorities attributed the shooting to another of the fatal squabbles among the state-line mobsters who’d infested the region. But everyone agreed it was Alcorn deputy Clarence Beeman who’d killed Tommy Lee for reasons that would never be known. Old Clarence had gone to his grave neither confirming nor denying the allegation.

The second event was much drier and more positive. The FFA oration banquet was held that year in the Corinth Coliseum. When Mitch’s turn came, he got up to the podium and recited a long passage from Faulkner. Even back then he had a great voice and could string out words soft and sly as clear water trickling over pretty-rock bottoms. Effortlessly, he captured the rhythms Mississippians remembered from their childhoods. And that night the perfect acoustics in that old hall showcased his precocious baritone.

Sitting in the audience, banker Hiram Kirby had noticed the roughneck kid with the great speaking voice and the notorious family pedigree. The banker was given to quirky streaks and took an interest. That summer he gave Mitch work clearing brush to maintain the old battlefield on his Kirby Creek estate. The downside to this fortuitous turn of events came in the form of the banker’s son, Robert, who resented this smooth-talking redneck intruding on his summer and on his father’s affections. Mitch had acquired his first lifelong enemy.

The banker’s vivid tomboy daughter, Ellender, however, had an opposite and more hormonal reaction to the interloper. She had inherited her father’s long jaw but also his earthy sense of humor. She initiated Mitch into the mysteries of shooting her dad’s antique Civil War rifles, so he returned the favor with a few mysteries of his own. When she gave it up, Ellender surmised that every Southern princess had to kiss at least one nasty old bullfrog to see if it would turn into a prince. “Ellie,” Mitch had replied in all sincerity, “this ain’t no frog.”

“Don’t say ‘ain’t,’” Ellie had sighed tartly, “you aren’t in Theo anymore…”

That was for sure. When Mitch peeled her pants off, it was on the heirloom horsehair couch in the library of the fine old antebellum house. But after that one time, just like a slumming princess in a fairy tale, Ellie Kirby danced beyond his reach.

The banker arranged for Mitch to attend Corinth High School, where Mitch encountered his second lifelong enemy, who was Kenny Beeman, the son of the county cop Clarence Beeman who everyone said killed his daddy. Robert Kirby tended to fight with words he stuck in Mitch’s back. But Kenny Beeman and Mitch were destined to collide by events that occurred before either of them was born. They fought regularly to a draw, with their fists.

So Mitch commenced on his twenty-year battle with gravity. Everybody in town was saying Hiram Kirby better watch himself sponsoring Mitchell Lee, that the apple don’t fall far from the tree. The constant drip of gossip only made Mitch more determined to fly that apple all the way to the big house on the hill at Kirby Creek.

And that is exactly what he did by dint of hard work and after-hours schooling. He had risen to loan officer in the bank when he eloped with Hiram Kirby’s daughter, Ellender.

Couple years back, his cousin Darl put it this way: “Hey, Mitch, I seen you and your trust-fund wife in
Southern Living
magazine.” The only reason Darl had occasion to read
Southern Living
was because the magazine was opened to the article about Mitch and Ellie’s remodeled antebellum Corinth house when Darl found it on the coffee table in the McMansion he was ripping off in a posh Memphis neighborhood.

And so, finally it occurred to Mitch that if enough people tell you the same damn thing long enough, you just might wind up believing them. He probably did have bad blood like his father. Once he accepted that fact, the rest came easy.

DRIVING EAST ON HIGHWAY 72, BACK TOWARD CORINTH, MITCH WAS
a little pissed that Darl would call him during his group. They were supposed to be exercising a modicum of caution. Like the saying goes, you can’t choose your family. With a sigh, Mitch flipped open his cell and called Darl, who answered on the second ring.

“Darl, man, I told you never call me during that meeting.”

“Sorry. Got excited, I guess.”

Darl thought AA was a hard sell in West Alcorn, where some folks were convinced the air was still part moonshine and part gunpowder. And there it was; the conflicted reluctance in his voice.