I walk warily at Harper’s elbow outside into the cold, watching for the hooded figures who will come to take me away. I see one standing in the shadows by a stone wall and I break for the parking lot, too scared to look over my shoulder. Behind me Harper yells, “Cage, what’s up?” I hear footsteps behind me and I run harder but my overcoat is slowing me down, so I shed it where the lot meets the street and turn right onto the sidewalk, heading for the lights of the Mississippi River Bridge. Harper shouts, “Cage, stop! Where are you going?” Ahead on the sidewalk the hooded men move slowly toward me, cutting off my escape. I slow down, looking right and left at the bare trees and derelict buildings. The footsteps behind grow louder, like hammers hitting the concrete, hammers that will smash my skull open and spill my brains over the sidewalk like a broken jar of jelly. Running is pointless. They will find me. They know where I’m going even before I do. I fall to the sidewalk and sit up on my knees, looking up at the few stars visible through the glow of the city lights. I beg for forgiveness but God is not listening. The footsteps are upon me now. I twist my head around expecting to see an angel of death but it is only Harper. He sets my overcoat on my shoulders and pulls me to my feet and hugs me.
“Cage . . . Cage . . . why are you running from me?” Harper looks into my eyes. “Why are you sobbing? Everything’s going to be okay. Look, your hands are bleeding and you’ve torn a hole in your pants.”
Behind him the three figures come out of the darkness. I whisper, “Harper, watch out!”
Harper turns and gazes at the figures, three old black bums, weaving unsteadily in a row, and says, “Merry Christmas!”
“Merry Chris’mas, chief,” says one in front.
“Looks like yo’ frien’ done had too much Christmas spirit already!” another says, tittering, and the others guffaw like a chorus.
“Running like he saw a ghost!”
“Christmas kind of a rough time of year, ain’t it, chief?” one of them says to me.
I open my mouth but no words come.
“Got the Christmas blues,” a bum croons. “Ain’t nothing sadder than the Christmas blues.”
“Gentlemen, we wish you a happy holiday.” Harper laughs. “But I must be getting my brother home.”
“He be your brother, huh?” One peers intently from Harper’s face to mine. “A brother be a lot of trouble sometime.” He looks at me hard. “You mind your brother, now. Don’t be running off into the street in the middle of the night.”
“Bes’ git ’im on home.” One of the black men offers a bottle toward Harper. “He don’t look right in the head.”
“How ’bout a little Christmas gif’ for three pilgrims on a cold night?” the tallest asks Harper.
“Yeah,” the shortest one says. “We ain’t even got a manger to lie in.”
Harper pulls out a wallet from inside his coat and holds out a ten.
“Merry Christmas, chief,” the tall one says, snatching the bill, his hand darting out from his ragged ski parka like a piranha. “And a happy new year to ya, too!”
The other two crowd in on the tall bum, the shortest yelling, “I’m the treasurer of this outfit, remember! We voted on it. I’m the only one can be trusted with cash.” Harper turns me around by the shoulder and we walk back to the church parking lot, the sounds of the bums’ argument fading behind us. As we reach Mom’s station wagon, Harper puts his arm around my shoulder and says, “What were you running from? There’s nothing to be scared of.”
“Nothing!” I shout. “Harper, if you think hell is simply some sort of symbol, then just look at me!”
W
e drive all the way home from the church in silence. Waiting for Mom and Dad, I turn on the cable and surf until I find some soft porn.
“What are you watching?” Cage asks with a horrified expression.
“Cinemax.”
Cage says, “It’s evil.”
“You’re right.” I start surfing through the channels aimlessly.
Cage ascends the stairs in slow motion, as if with each step he cannot make up his mind whether to go up or stay down. When he’s halfway up, I switch back to Skinemax. Watching two half-naked, fake-titted blondes kissing and fondling gives me the urge to go to the guest room and choke the chicken to memories of Savanna’s small breasts, her mouth on me. I resist for five long minutes and I’m about to scout Mom’s cabinets for some hand lotion when I hear the sound of the side door opening and Mom singing out, “Boys, we’re home!”
Ever since I was ten and Nick and Cage were both at college, the family has opened our gifts after the midnight service. I persuade Cage to come downstairs and join us in the living room, where old oil portraits of Rutledge preachers and Cage planters glower at us as if the latest generation of their progeny has bitterly disappointed them. Which one of them passed on the gene of Cage’s illness? I suspect it was the first Morgan Elijah Cage, who carved out a little frontier empire. Family lore says he was a generous man who donated land for a church and reared a Cherokee boy orphaned on the Trail of Tears. Then he lost it all in whiskey and poker chips. Must have had a lover or two if he was anything like the last Cage.
The Christmas tree, beautifully decorated as long as I can remember, even after Nick’s death, looks like Mom sort of threw on a few ornaments. Wearing a bathrobe over his pajamas, Dad sits in a wingback chair, sipping a glass of wine. Cage slouches on the sofa, staring at the reflection of the room in the window, and Mom, still in her church clothes, perches on the other end, holding a steaming cup of tea. The only sound is the crackle of the fire.
“Well.” I stand in the middle of the room. “Shall we begin?”
“Yes,” Mom says brightly. “Christmas brings back so many lovely memories.”
I start passing out the gifts. I think of Cage and Nick, before I was born, their matching bicycles and identical UT football uniforms, Granddad quarterbacking plays in the big living room at Cage’s Bend, the pictures of them sledding in the mountains of East Tennessee, the huge bonfires of Christmas trees they used to have in front of the church in Bristol, all photos in an album older than me. One Christmas in Baton Rouge, Cage stormed off because the bronze statue of a Labrador like his dog Trapper that Mom had given him didn’t measure up to the gifts his rich friends would receive. That was the rub of growing up Episcopal minister’s sons. We were thrown in with the wealthiest kids in any given community but we were basically poor by comparison. Cage was angry in high school that he didn’t have a car or a stereo or as many clothes as his friends. Was that simply adolescence or was the anger made deeper by the illness, years before it was detected, before it blossomed like a poisonous flower?
“I have a special gift for Cage,” Mom announces after the last boxes have been opened. She leaves the room, then returns with a large, baggily wrapped parcel.
Cage runs his hands along it, says, “I know what it is. But I don’t believe it.” His hands shake as he tears it open and reveals a wooden sled, a Flexible Flyer with red runners.
I laugh. “It never snows in Memphis and when it does there’s not a big enough hill to sled for a hundred miles.”
“You were so upset when we moved to Baton Rouge and left yours behind in the attic in Virginia,” Mom tells him.
“You’re trying to heal my inner child.” Cage smiles at the futility of the gesture.
I’m a little stunned at the absurdity of giving a thirty-year-old man a sled and saddened by the desperate logic of replacing something that they had taken from him a decade and a half before.
“Thanks, Mom,” Cage says hollowly. “I’ve been so scared.” He laughs with some of the old glimmer in his eyes. “The other day in Baton Rouge, Walter Fairfield sent me to a store to buy some ice for the Christmas party he throws for all his crews. There was a big black man behind the counter. I tried to speak and my voice came out all high and trembling, May I have a bag of ice? The man nodded toward a cooler across the room. I got a bag and set it on the counter. Walter had given me a twenty and I was worried that the man couldn’t make change for a dollar-fifty bag of ice, so I asked him if he had change. He looked at me as if I were mentally defective. He made the change, pushed it across the counter, and my voice came out a little peep, Thanks. He followed me to the door and said, Come back again, big money.
Everyone laughs at the sad little anecdote, grasping for holiday cheer.
On the first day of 1990 Dad, Cage, and I are watching a bowl game while Mom is cooking in the kitchen. During some commercials, Dad changes to CNN. An anchorwoman is talking about the execution of Ceausescu. Cage’s face is twisted with fear or horror, impossible to say exactly what.
“She’s watching me,” he says.
Dad and I look at Cage, then at each other, then back at him.
“No, son, she’s not watching you,” Dad says.
“Come on, Cage,” I say. “No one’s watching you.”
“You don’t know. You think you know,” he says, suddenly rising out of his torpor. “You think you know how reality works. But you don’t. I know. I can see it now. She’s watching me. She’s part of the Order.”
“There is no fucking Order, Cage,” I nearly shout. “Sorry for my language, Pop.” I’m sick of his obsession with the Order, the secret society of vengeful old families who control everything and are going to punish him for being a fuckup, for all the sins of his life. His conscience is turbocharged, out of control, its Sunday school morality taken to paranoid Old Testament extremes. The psychiatrist is dosing him with antipsychotics to dispel his delusions but apparently they take weeks to kick in. You can talk to him till you are blue in the face but you can’t break through.
“You can’t see it because you’re not a part of the Order,” Cage rattles on. “They spurn our family.”
“You know what I just figured out?” I look at him and Dad and at Mom, who came to the door of the den when I yelled. “His delusion is about not really belonging to his circle of friends in all the cities he lived in because he wasn’t as rich as any of them. He felt like he never really belonged. We never belonged. We weren’t as respected because we weren’t rich. That’s the root of it.”
“That’s very insightful, Harper,” Mom says.
“Yes, it is, son,” Dad says. “That could be it.”
Mom puts her hand on Cage’s shoulder. “Do you see, Cage? Do you see the root of your delusions? You were always ashamed that we didn’t have as much as your friends.”
“Oh, you just don’t see.” Cage shakes his head. “I can see because they are letting me in on it now. They let you know before they come for you. Part of the punishment. I’ll just disappear. You won’t ever know what happened to me.”
“Cage.” Mama is crying. She bends down and hugs him. “No one is going to come for you. Nothing is going to happen to you.”
Dad moans a deep animal sound of despair, changes the TV back to the bowl game.
I spend the next week with Cage, trying to get him to go outside and take a walk around the Chickasaw Gardens lake near the house. The most I can get him to do is go out in the backyard, which Mom in her grief over Nick turned into a lovely garden of azaleas, camellias, ferns, and shrubs. There is a moss-green statue of Buddha that was in the garden when they bought the house that she chose to keep. This is the first house that they’ve owned, the church having abandoned the rectory system for a mortgage allowance to give ministers equity in real estate. I try to get Cage to meditate. He will only talk about the Order. Every hour he thinks they are coming. He thinks the mailman is watching our family. He’s convinced that he has a womanly body, that he is a ninety-pound weakling, though he is a fit hundred and seventy-five pounds. He will be exterminated because he is so puny. He runs upstairs whenever the doorbell rings. Every football bowl game could be the occasion when they come for him. Every public holiday. Or the middle of the night. His obsession is endless, unceasing, his every waking hour hell.
Cage refuses to go with Dad to take me to the train station. At the kitchen door he tells me, “They’re going to take me after you go, brother.”
“No, Cage. I’ll see you on spring break. Or you can come down to New Orleans and visit me.”
He laughs grimly at the outlandishness of the idea that he will still be alive in March, shakes his head. “You don’t know.”
I hug him and he hugs back in a bear grip, still strong from all the carpentry and swimming of his long manic run. He whispers in my ear, “Be good, Harper. Don’t waste your life like I have. They could come for you one day.”
Back in New Orleans I get a single dorm room while I look for an apartment. I’m still sick over Savanna. Not an hour goes by when I don’t feel like screaming. I’ve never felt so low in my life. The nights are excruciating. But having a beautiful older woman love me for a time has given me new confidence. Now I realize girls find me attractive and I talk to girls I wouldn’t have dared approach when I was a freshman. They laugh at my stories of the horny old fishermen at the Chicken Shack. I think I’ve matured some over the last six months. I’m no longer impressed by the antics of the guys at the SAE house, the parties with strippers, the drinking contests. I drop my membership and focus on the books. For the first time in my life I’m getting all A minuses and B pluses. When studying philosophy, it’s easy to find a book of criticism that explains the text and then kind of plagiarize. I’m not proud of it but it works and I’m learning something. I sleep with a couple of girls, date a few, and spend a lot of time by myself. I start writing songs, imitating R.E.M. But I suck because I don’t play an instrument. An ad on a bulletin board advertising a band inspires me to go by the address, where four grungy-looking guys from San Antonio are hanging out on the porch of a run-down house. I vaguely remember seeing them around freshman year, when they were preppie.
“So what do you do, man?” one of them says.
“What’s the name of the band?” I reply.
“Body Count,” another one says. “What do you play, man?”
“I’m kinda learning guitar,” I lie. They sort of smile. “I write songs,
dude
.”
“Cool,” one of them says. I catch another glancing me up and down disdainfully. I’m wearing worn-out jeans and a red sweatshirt that says
Nantucket
in bold white letters. My hair is much shorter than theirs.