South of Shiloh (6 page)

It was Billie’s loose lips that had set all this in motion. And Billie Watts understood utterly how Mississippi’s Conspiracy Statute could be liberally interpreted to constitute a mere meeting of the minds. So Billie knew just enough to be real fuckin’ scared; which, since he couldn’t really be trusted, was the only way to control him.

Mitch started right off, feeding the fear. “Hey, Billie. Wanna hear something spooky? Beeman pulled me over tonight west of town. Musta followed me to my AA meeting.”

“Jesus,” Billie muttered as he turned his head and scanned the dark lawn around the center, like he expected Beeman to pop out from behind a tree like Wile E. Coyote. “You think he suspects…”

“Hell, he always suspects. Hounded me all through the monument project, didn’t he…”

“You came out of that clean,” Billie said, knitting his brow.

“Yes I did. So what’s on your mind?”

“Your cousin Darl. Is he watching me? He showed up at my son’s Little League game last night…”

“Billie,” Mitch said patiently. “Darl’s oldest boy, Toby, is in Little League. Darl’s an assistant coach. Could it be your kid’s team was playing his kid’s team?”

“I just don’t want him around my wife and boy,” Billie said.

“Uh-huh. You just want him on twenty-four-hour call to deliver toot to your condo at Harbor Springs, when you’re banging those teenyboppers two at a time…”

Billie stood flatfooted, his face working; a snapshot of intelligence and breeding losing big-time to unregulated appetite. “It’s just…everything’s happening so fast,” Billie finally said.

“And it don’t concern you, does it? Go home, Billie. Keep your head down and your mouth shut.”

5

EVERYTHING WAS HAPPENING FAST. THAT WAS
the point. When Hiram Kirby suffered his disabling stroke, the people around him froze in place like abandoned pawns on a chessboard. Not Mitch; he started scooting around like Pac-Man.

But he was driving slowly now, along Waldron, into the downtown section of Corinth; killing time with one eye out for Kenny Beeman. He was not real keen on going home and dragging through a conversation with Ellie, all the time counting the minutes till he could get free and meet with Marcy.

As he cruised past the county courthouse, he glanced up at the statue standing vigil over the quiet streets. Colonel Rogers, hero of the failed attempt to storm Battery Robinett during the Battle of Corinth.

My statue’s better, taller, more detailed, he thought.

Obscure in darkness behind the courthouse loomed the Crossroads State Bank. Mitch averted his eyes from the shadowy pillars.
I tried it your way, old man; I really did.

Working like a frickin’ hamster running a treadmill in his cubicle. When the old man retired after cancer claimed his wife, Robert took over and had Mitch scrambling like hell just to stay in place.

Year after year he’d played the line from
The Godfather
over and over; another scenario in which a sister had married beneath her in the eyes of a powerful brother. “
Give him a living,” Sonny Corleone said, “but keep him away from the family business.”

Mitch correctly believed that the old man had allowed his marriage to Ellie to stand because the Kirby family needed an infusion of new blood to produce an heir. Bachelor son, Robert, had neglected the task. The Kirby family tree had thinned out to a last fork with Robert on one spindly branch and Ellie on the other. Despite Mitch’s best efforts, Ellie suffered three miscarriages. Robert privately quipped that the Kirby DNA rejected Mitch’s gold-digger seed.

Mitch circled around the courthouse, headed west on Foote, and turned north on Fillmore. He came up on the white, two-story, wood-frame house behind a screen of magnolia, plum, and flowering dogwood. The street directory by the curb stated that General Pierre G. T. Beauregard had sheltered in the “Kirby House” during the Siege of Corinth.

Way too much house, people said, for a run-in-place loan officer.

He turned into the driveway.

It was her goddamned fault, really; there should have been tricycles in this driveway, a basketball hoop. Ellie and her damned tipped uterus like a broken egg-basket.

He thumbed the garage opener, saw that she was home, and slid the Ford in beside her Lexus. He closed the door behind him, shut off the truck, and sat through a moment of quiet rage, listening to the hot tick of the cooling engine.

Marcy Leets called Ellie the “titless mouse,” but that crack had more to do with Ellie giving up on her hair and cosmetics. Aside from not having much on top, she was tough as a wasp; deadly fast from the hips on down; the fastest white girl ever at Corinth High. All-state track three years running.

At Ole Miss she’d been a standout on the archery team. Small tits evidently gave her an Amazon advantage when it came to pulling the bowstring.

Mitch heaved from the truck, took a deep breath, and padded in through the sun porch, past dust-covered furniture and plants turning to brittle crepe. He wondered if she was consciously letting all the plants die; slowly, they were shriveling, inch by inch, going brown to gray to dust. She’d given the plants a do-not-resuscitate order. No extra measures. Practicing for the decision she had to make about her daddy.

He entered the remodeled living room that had looked so elegant in the photograph for
Southern Living
. Now it was heaped with stacks of paper, plastic shopping bags tossed haphazardly on the Oriental carpet. Her cast-off clothes littered the couch. A pile of unfolded towels occupied a chair.

Distracted, Ellie had let the cleaning lady go.

Mitch was a fastidious man; he ironed his own shirts and shined his own shoes. Coming through the dining room, he spied a stack of magazines and books teetering on the table in an inverted pyramid. It drove him insane, the way she piled little items on the bottom, bigger things on the top.

He had heard of the “Twinkie defense.” He wondered if there was a “clutter defense.”

A metallic grinding came from the kitchen, sounding like a dentist’s drill, but it was just Ellie whipping up one of her damn veggie drinks in the Osterizer.

He walked into the kitchen and stared at his wife of seven years.

Ellender Jane Kirby, Corinth’s premier charity-czarina, leaned against the kitchen counter between stacks of unwashed dishes, dripping copper-freckled sweat. She wore road-blasted Nikes, red running shorts, and a purple halter. Her somewhat long face had the unnerving quality of looking really attractive only when you were groveling and looking up at her. Most people would say, diplomatically, that Ellie was a striking redhead. She was certainly excessively fit and gaunt now from the constant running.

Her blue Kirby eyes, patrician nose, and full lips were underslung by half an inch too much jaw. This piranha-like set to her features enabled her, Mitch suspected, to detect one part of Marcy Leets in a million parts of air. And at such times, Ellie’s jaw muscles bunched and she looked like she could bite through a steel bar.

“Hi honey, I’m home,” Mitch said, coming through the door, watching a trickle of sweat ooze down the defined muscles of her tight stomach and disappear into the waistband of her shorts. He imagined the tart sweat pooling down between her salmon-colored thighs. Seven years he’d labored after roses in that super-uptight briar patch.

Just trying to figure a way to get her to…unclench.

Might as well just forget the sex and stuff a lump of coal up there. See if she could bear down and piss diamonds.

After they buried Robert with full military honors in the family plot out at Kirby Creek, Ellie had cut her coppery hair short and started living in the gym like a crazed aerobic nun. After her dad had the stroke, the one that cut off the oxygen to his brain, she took to the roads.

“Where you been?” he asked softly. “I called from the station.”

She drowned out his question with a flick of the juicer switch and gave him the dentist drill again. Then she removed the glass beaker from the stainless steel contraption and poured the frothy orange mess into a tumbler.

“Running,” she said, raising the glass and taking a drink.

Mitch showed his teeth in a faint grimace. “At night? Where?”

She shrugged. “Out old 45, north of town.”

“Jesus, Ellie, that stretch is full of drunks at night.” He took a step forward. “I wish you’d cut back on the running. And eat more…”

She smiled tightly, held the glass aloft.

“Eat some real food, you’re too thin,” he said, thinking he should take the extra two steps and kiss her on the forehead. But he couldn’t bear the thought of ever touching her again. So he stood there as she placed the glass on the counter and turned to him and said, “I’ve employed LaSalle Ector to work full-time out at the house. He’s back from the hospital and, the way he is, they’re not going to give him his old job.”

Mitch nodded patiently but did a double take behind his eyes. LaSalle. Big nigger EMT drove an ambulance out of Magnolia Regional before he went to Iraq as a medic in the guard. Robert Kirby’s last gesture on earth had been to drag LaSalle out of an ambush kill zone.

“Before his stroke, Daddy remarked we should look after him, considering how he got wounded and all,” Ellie said.

“Fine,” Mitch said. Lot he had to say about it. She managed the finances from her trust fund and paid the bills. After he quit the bank, she gave him a monthly allowance.

After a pause, she went on.

“Mitchell Lee,” she said frankly, “they brought in another expert this morning. He’s the one who did the brain scan when they had Daddy down in Jackson. I confess, the tests he conducted were not exactly what you’d call scientific. They do this painful sternum rub and this thing called ‘doll’s eyes.’ You know how Daddy’s eyes kind of roll from side to side? Well, they move his head and check to see if his eyes normally adjust with the movement. He doesn’t appear to be able to acquire and track movement, an object.” To illustrate, she moved an upright finger back and forth.

She shook her head. “They say he’s in this sensitive gray area; a range between minimally conscious and a persistent vegetative state. And now he’s contracted pneumonia and they’ve pumped him full of antibiotics…”

Mitch narrowed his eyes. “Did Bob Watts bring in the expert?” The senior Watts, Billie Watts’s father, was the Kirby family lawyer.

“Well, yes.”

“He still have that lawyer with a notary stamp standing vigil round the clock outside Hiram’s room?”

Ellie nodded. “If Daddy wakes up just a little all he has to do is nod to transfer power of attorney to me. Daddy wanted to donate part of the estate to a research hospital for veterans. In Robert’s name…but he never got around to putting it in writing…”

Mitch nodded. “You mean Bob Watts wants to reduce the size of the estate before Hiram dies, to ease the tax bite.”

“That too,” Ellie said frankly.

Mitch pursed his lips, lowered his eyes, and nodded. Her fingers floated out and rested on his forearm. Inside, he cringed at her touch. Really wish you wouldn’t do that…

She said, “Cornel Wight at the bank says I have to prepare to make a decision about Daddy. He’s suggesting we convene a meeting with the board of directors. Mitch, look at me…”

He raised his head and engaged the full intensity of her driven blue eyes.

“…Cornel canvassed the board and says it would be all right for you to attend.” She tightened her grip, and for one almost sweet moment her blue eyes reached out to him. “I’d like it if you’d agree to ease back…into things.”

Startled by the sudden gesture of intimacy, Mitch started to pull away.

“Mitchell, honey, listen to me, they’re coming around. They know how Robert was always hard on you. No one’s surprised you started drinking. It’s different now; after all the work you’ve done. They know the monument is for Daddy.”

Gently, Mitch disengaged her grip. “Ellie, don’t give up on Hiram so quick. Give him a fighting chance. He could still pull out of this. No,” he shook his head with slow finality, “out of respect, I can’t go near this. You know what people say about me. It’s best I finish what I started, so I’m driving to Memphis in the morning. I reserved a room in a Holiday Inn. Might take two days to finalize the paperwork on the monument, pick up the last check from the Heritage Group, and see to the dedication plaque.”

“Really wish you’d stay home,” she said, the plea still in her eyes. “I’d like you to be out at Kirby Creek when the reenactors show up, so they don’t tear up the grounds again dragging in their cannons.”

Mitch averted his eyes from her watchful gaze. Shook his head. “Look, I’ll stop at the hospital in the morning on my way out of town and look in on Hiram.”

Then he opened the cabinet beneath the sink, stooped, took out a tall plastic juice container, straightened up, placed it in the sink, and twisted the tap.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

Eyes still downcast, he watched the water fill the container. “Going to water the plants out yonder,” he jerked his head toward the sun porch, “otherwise they’re going to die.”

6

MOLLY WAS ASLEEP IN HER ROOM DOWN THE HALL
and Jenny leaned back in the king-size bed, rubbing African Shea Butter into her arms and legs. As she smoothed the emollient into her skin, she studied the precarious stack of books leaning on Paul’s nightstand. Shelby Foote’s three huge volumes dominated the pile; so bulky, Paul joked they amounted to a public works project and took about as long to finish as the interminable road improvements on I-494. Then there was McPherson’s
Battle Cry of Freedom
,
Confederates in the Attic
,
The Killer Angels
, and, perched on top, a slim, fifty-year-old paperback Pocketbook edition of the
Red Badge of Courage.
A Union soldier was portrayed in raw watercolor on the cover, dashing past a ruined cannon. The style reminded her of the noirish paperbacks unearthed from an old trunk and laid out on a card table at the garage sale her mom held after her dad died. Except the cover art on those books all seemed to be variations of a tough Barbara Stanwyck–type babe with a Chesterfield jammed in her painted lips as her slip draped off her shoulders on top and hitched up her thighs on the bottom.

Paul read Stephen Crane’s classic over and over, as if it was a relic—a splinter from a purer time.

She understood that her husband was smart and sensitive and moving in emotional retreat from the twenty-first century. He’d concluded that he’d grown up in the last stages of a stable ahistorical bubble that existed between the end of World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now, he believed, the true forces of history were reasserting themselves, namely ancient religious and ethnic hatreds. He worried that Molly would grow up in a world full of shadowy suicide bombers stalking the malls alongside child molesters and computer-game-addled teens planning school shootings.

So he’d found refuge in the Civil War, where he believed what individual men did on a given day had determined the course of history.

Paul wanted to make a difference. He just hadn’t figured out how yet. They’d met as Wellstone volunteers, had intended to join the Peace Corps together and save the world. Molly changed their plans. Paul went into insurance to make some money so she could stay home until Molly started preschool. She studied nights to get her special ed degree, then set a more modest goal to save just part of the world in one inner-city school.

After four years of failing to make a dent in a reluctant parade of broken kids, she scaled her expectations down to saving just one of them from the streets. She wound up leaving to save herself. They moved to the “quieter demographics” of Stillwater, where she taught general ed to mostly white kids from intact families.

Starting to drift, Jenny stared at the cover of the
Red Badge of Courage
. Perhaps Paul would look like the illustration on Saturday, crossing a field in his accurate getup. She had the powerful impression that Paul was grabbing hard at a second chance for the boyhood adventure he’d missed growing up. That’s what the reenactors called their emulations of Civil War soldiers…

Impressions.

Maybe this was his way of making up for never having been in the military. In fact, none of the men in their new neighborhood had worn uniforms. Unlike her dad and her uncles, who, after a few beers in the backyard, would send the women away when the strange place names from Vietnam and Korea started cropping up.

She pursed her lips in a tight smile. The neighbor gals were mostly corporate housewives whose husbands worked at 3M; they gave Jenny decent marks for having good legs and subtracted points when her blue-collar petticoat showed. Her dad had been a wood-and-steel kind of guy down from the Iron Range, a business agent for the Typographical Union until the advent of cold type gutted the trade.

Abruptly, she was seeing Rane sitting on his front steps; his skin pale, his dark hair cropped close. Quiet. Self-contained. He took on careers as research projects. When she met him, he was a veteran back from the Gulf War, experimenting with being a St. Paul cop.

Then he took a side trip to research, falling in love.

Stay focused on Paul.

She could go months without thinking about Rane. But then she’d see Molly walk through a room in her loose-limbed amble. Or see a photo on the front page of the paper. Or turn on the TV.

Public TV’s Friday night news magazine; the same lean pale face, the tight mop of dark hair, the standard jeans and T-shirt augmented by a sports coat.

Rane sitting next to a coiffed female interviewer with her anchor voice so earnest…Christ, didn’t they watch tapes of themselves and see how pompous they sounded? This blonde with an Hermès scarf tucked to her throat and her smile pumped from holding up about two pounds of cosmetics. By comparison, Rane leaned back totally relaxed and bland.

“Tonight our guest is the always controversial Pulitzer-winning photographer, and sometimes writer, John Rane, who changes jobs the way the rest of us change socks. Really, John, at last count you’ve been fired by both the
Pioneer Press
and the
Star Tribune.
And you’ve quit the
Pioneer Press
twice. So why do they keep hiring you back?”

And Jenny watched Rane go into his famous Just Plain John Rane Act. With a slackening of his spare features and a skew to his eyebrows, he sloughed off his wiry handsome presence and became mild, blank, and totally nonthreatening. This innate mannerism reminded Jenny of the Australian phasmid, the stick insect who, when challenged, could imitate a dead leaf or twig swaying in the breeze. This quality of changing shape to avoid detection was prized by undercover cops, con artists, and men faced with a woman delivering an ultimatum about commitment.

Rane had blinked innocuously at his interrogator and smiled politely.

Jenny understood him completely. Rane was controversial because he simply did what he wanted to do. Period. If his current employer got in his way, he quit or got fired and pursued a story on his own. They kept taking him back because he was good and won them prizes.

“You’re a difficult man to categorize,” the interviewer had said, trying to keep the interview going, “you’re a photographer, but sometimes the writing takes over in the books. What’s the secret to going back and forth between mediums?”

Rane replied in his steady, slightly hushed voice: “Whether you’re using words or a camera the idea is not to tamper with the subject, not to leave fingerprints…”

Fingerprints.

Jenny hugged herself and felt the rash of goose bumps circle her arms. Why you hypocrite…You sure as hell left some fingerprints on me.

Rane had written three modestly successful books illustrated with his photos. He’d followed an ounce of cocaine from its inception in the Colombian jungles, through the twists of processing and smuggling, until it was cooked into crack and consumed in south Minneapolis. Then he’d put himself through smoke-jumper training in Montana and spent a whole summer in the mountains fighting fires. His last book was about mixed martial arts.

A bio on his publisher’s Web site noted that Rane was born into a musical St. Paul family. His mother and father, both concert pianists, died in a small-plane accident when he was twelve. Then he was raised by his aunt and uncle in rural Wisconsin. He became interested in writing and photography while attending the University of Minnesota as a music major. He dropped out his sophomore year, enlisted in the army, and was trained as a combat photographer. Following service in the Gulf War, he briefly joined the St. Paul Police Department before settling down to writing and photography. He was single and lived in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Heady stuff: following your dreams, living your first choice.

Jenny caught herself: from a few idle thoughts, she had started down the road of wondering what if…

So she set aside the moisturizing cream, stretched out, and smoothed her hands on the sheets. Exploring the cotton texture, she found a straight brown hair, plucked it up, and rubbed it between her thumb and forefinger. Light brown, dry, straight, and fine. Paul’s hair. Her own hair was deeper brown. And Molly’s was a dark, comb-mocking tangle verging on black.

“Nice,” she said aloud. Nice was an apt description for the intimacy contained within the four corners of this bed. She aimed a puff of breath at the strand of hair but it stayed on her fingertip. The shea butter reminding her that life gets sticky.

Nothing nice about the nagging, visceral thought:
I’m still young enough to have another child.
Molly had wondered more than once when she’d have a baby sister or brother.

They had discussed adoption; Paul had determined that the risk of taking on someone else’s wild-card genetics outweighed the benefits.

Jenny wiped off the hair on the T-shirt she wore to bed, lay back, and studied the pebble-beige ceiling, so subdued and easy on the eye. She and Paul had an upper-medium income and upper-medium expectations. Her life was set on medium cruise control. The scenery going by was a slow, comfortable smother in medium beige. Abruptly, she composed a vision of another ceiling. Older, yellowed like the thumbed pages of Paul’s paperback, stained with watermarks and fissures intersecting like the lines on an open palm.

For one instant, she could feel and taste the tickle of their cooling sweat and the taboo smell of the cigarette smoke rising in sinuous curls.

This was where her daydreams degraded into a version of
Crossfire
.

Forget it. He walked out on you.

You let him walk away. You weren’t willing to take a chance…

He was kinda a mess at the time, you’ll recall; back from the war, in trouble with his police job…

I thought that was your thing, wanting to deal with hard cases. You could have tried to get through to him…

Enough.

She switched off the light and reclined in the dark, listening to her heartbeat, to her lungs take in air, then let it out. She imagined parking the Subaru on Laurel Street, getting out, and walking up the cracked concrete steps. Raising her hand. Knocking on the door.

A teeter-totter of anticipation in the dark.

She pictured herself parking the car, getting out, and walking up those steps, over and over, until she fell asleep.