“Pick it up, Huck.” Garret has red hair and big square-jawed good looks. He was a college friend of Nick’s, once went camping with Nick and Harper and me, when Harper was about fifteen, and he used to run around Memphis with my cousin Rut. Several times Garret came by and tried to talk to me while I was hiding in my parents’ attic. Now he never mentions my madness and there is an unspoken sense that he’s looking out for me, that a bond of brotherhood was transferred from Nick to me.
“All right, Jim,” I drawl, and move faster through the sharp rocks to the river’s edge.
In the late light, out in the middle of the river, the surface of the water is a frothy pink. The wind and the slap of water against the fiberglass are the only sounds. The Memphis skyline looks like a flimsy set, a row of false fronts, perched on the top of the massive levee wall. On the other side a row of ragged trees, flood survivors, curtains off the marshlands of Arkansas. We paddle against the current, inching upriver toward Mud Island.
“You heard anything from Rut?” My cousin writes Garret from Africa about as much as he does his own parents but tells Garret more amusing stories. “Has he gone native?”
“He
says
he’s only fucked one girl in a year and a half, a white girl.” Garret stops paddling and looks in my face to see if I believe that.
“Why don’t we like black girls?” Sweating heavily now, I’m cooled slightly by a downriver wind. “None of us do. Everyone I went to college with at Sewanee, all Nick’s friends at Vanderbilt. None of us ever tried to fuck a black woman.”
Garret’s face is dismissive, like the answer’s obvious. Different colors.
“It’s because we were segregated,” I continue. “There were barely any blacks in the postintegration private schools we all went to. The only blacks we knew at all were our maids. Whoever wanted to fuck his big old fat maid?”
Garret laughs. “I know a guy.”
We paddle hard quietly for ten minutes until a river current swirling into the mouth of the cove on the north side of the Mud Island peninsula takes the canoe and we hold our paddles across our thighs. Coming out of the wind into the cove is like stepping into a steam room. The canoe stops in the middle by itself. It’s quiet. The C-shaped shore of the cove is a parking lot set on a steep slope. This is where the annual Memorial Day canoe race will start.
“Three hundred canoes,” Garret says. “Think we can take ’em, Huck?”
“Yassuh, Jim, I reckons we can.” I swat a mosquito on my neck. Clouds of gnats move in over our heads.
“How’s it going with Samantha?” Garret starts to paddle toward the mouth of the cove, out of the steam and bugs.
“Great. Going great. I moved in two weeks ago.”
Garret looks back over his shoulder. “Must be a relief to be out of the bishopric.” He smiles. “I always wanted to use that word. Bishopric.”
“That’s not a bishop’s house.” I laugh. “That’s his office.”
“Whatever. What about the kid?”
“Ray’s a kick. I got him a redbone coonhound, beautiful auburn puppy. ”
“What’s the dog’s name?” Garret spits, takes a slug of bottled water.
“Ray started calling him Jonathan, I think from the Bible. Then the dog loves biscuits, so I started calling him Jonathan Seabiscuit-Eater, after the racehorse my grandfather loved so much.”
“Happy little family.” Where the cove opens onto the mighty river, Stoval says, “Let’s see how fast we can make it to the end of the course.”
“Full speed ahead,” I say. Knifing the paddles into the water, we run with the current along the shore of Mud Island, switching sides in unison. I imagine Nick sitting in between us keeping cadence, with one of the big drums we beat with our fathers in Indian Guides, before we were even Cub Scouts, a strange thought that chills and reassures. I almost tell Garret my dark secret, then paddle faster, watching the stone foundations of the bridge to Arkansas loom larger until the bridge fills my field of vision and we rush into the half-light under the span.
The house on Vinton is a beautifully built twenties Tudor divided into upstairs and downstairs flats like so many of the fine old homes from Memphis’s glory days of high cotton. The trees are the only thing the city can brag about, as Mama says, and the tallest, the ones over a hundred feet, all the old oak species, are here in midtown, shading the remains of the city, circa 1890 to 1935. Dad grew up in this neighborhood, first in an apartment just a few blocks away, with his grandmother, mother, and older brother, his father having hightailed it while his mother was pregnant with him. Granddad Rutledge was the black sheep of his family, the son and grandson of Episcopal bishops, who left his wife in the Depression for a beautiful, wealthy woman with lumber mills in Arkansas. I never really knew Granddad Rutledge. He used to visit us once a year, when we were on Pawley’s Island. I think he paid the rent for the beach house. As a teenager Dad lived in a house a few blocks in the other direction on Peabody with the alcoholic doctor who married his mother. When they were boys, Dad and Uncle Ned must have wandered the alleys that parallel most of the streets in this part of town, separating backyards. Squirrels, rabbits, chipmunks, ringneck doves, robins, cardinals—wildlife flourishes in the old trees and hedges. Coyotes have moved in since Dad was a boy.
No moonlight makes it through the trees, so it’s pitch-black in the alley between Vinton and Carr. Dim house lights wink through hedges, but you can’t see your feet. Ray and I walk quietly behind Jonathan Seabiscuit-Eater, who ranges back and forth across the cobblestone and grass, patches of concrete, sniffing loudly. He stops and claws at something, whines quietly. Ray turns on a midsize Maglite that I bought him for his birthday. Seabiscuit’s on his hind legs, his front paws on a tree trunk, his nose and tail held perfectly straight, pointing up. Ray raises the beam of light into branches thirty feet high where an animal is frozen.
“Is it a coon, Cage?” Ray holds the beam steady with both hands. “Is it a coon?”
“I can’t tell, Ray. Might be.” I don’t want to disappoint him.
Seabiscuit starts barking and leaping around, scratching the trunk as high as he can reach.
“Sit.” Ray scolds the dog like I taught him, making his voice deep like a man’s. “Sit.”
Seabiscuit sits down at the base of the trunk.
“I think it’s another cat,” Ray says. The dog barks again and leaps at the tree. The cat screeches and races higher, out of the light.
“Come on, Seabiscuit.” I turn back toward our house. “Ray, you’re a good hunter. I think it’s nicer to hunt with flashlights than guns. I used to hunt a lot with my grandfather, doves and ducks mostly, and I don’t feel so good about killing those animals.”
“Just another cat,” Ray says. “I want to get a raccoon.”
Seabiscuit realizes we’re on the way back and starts to trot up the alley ahead of us.
“Maybe tomorrow night we’ll get lucky and bag a coon with your light.” I take him by the hand. A rusty wrought-iron gate leads to our backyard. We go several steps up onto a deck that I built against rent. Samantha has citronella candles burning in a mosquito-free halo around a lounge chair, where she lies looking up at the patch of stars between the treetops.
“The great hunters return,” she says, sitting up. “How many did you get?”
“Three cats,” Ray says, disappointed and proud.
“I think Jonathan Seabiscuit-Eater is not a redbone coonhound after all.” I pick Ray up, hold him in one arm.
Ray puts his hands around my neck. “No, Cage?”
“Nope. He’s a redbone cat hound!”
Ray and Samantha laugh. I think, This is it. This is what it’s all about. This is what you’ve been missing. It doesn’t get better than this.
W
alking down the corridor, I try to remember the times I’ve seen Dad’s brother Uncle Ned. Some holiday dinners at Cage’s Bend since Honeywell moved him from Baltimore to Nashville and then downsized him when I was in high school. Before that I don’t remember him. He never came to Baton Rouge. A sad fact of modern American life is that families are spread over such vast distances that relatives see each other seldomly. In the end you can look back and count the times on your hands.
The door to the room is open. Uncle Ned is sitting up in the bed, his back against a pillow, several tubes dangling down to one forearm, gazing at Dad and Mom on a sofa against the wall. On the far side of the bed, Ned’s wife, Aunt Rhonda, digs in an overnight bag on a table. Through the window behind her a gray sky hangs over a park of green trees and a full-scale Parthenon, just the way it looked in classical Greece, seventy-five yards of aggregate concrete pillars erected in the twenties to proclaim Nashville the Athens of the South. Over the trees somewhere is Parthenon Pavilion, a mental hospital where Cage stayed a couple of times when suffering paranoid delusions. No one is talking.
“Hey, y’all,” I say, coming in the room.
“Hah-puh Henley Rutledge!” Uncle Ned calls out in a deliberately exaggerated drawl. He’s thinner than I’ve ever seen him, but still a heavy man with large jowls. He calls out convivially, “Glad you could make it!”
“Hey, Uncle Ned, Aunt Rhonda.” I set my suitcase down and hurry to the bed. “I jumped on a plane as soon as I heard.”
“Look at you, boy. You worth a million dollars yet?”
“In stock,” I mouth silently. Careful of the tubes, I hug him. I feel the heat gathering in the corners of my eyes, the first tears start to slide down my face. “Uncle Ned.”
“Are you in pain?” Ned smiles. “I don’t get it.”
I smile back.
“Here you are, sir.” Ned hands me a tissue.
“I wanted to take you golfing in Hawaii. I wanted you to see me get rich.”
“I’ll see you, son.”
My cousin Lila comes out of the bathroom carrying a little blonde girl, Zoe, who looks around the room with a peaceful, expectant expression. Lila kisses me on the cheek. “Thanks for coming.”
“Oh, don’t thank me.” I hug her. “I didn’t know he was so sick. He never told us about the other surgeries.”
Lila smiles sadly and turns to her father. “Are you hurting, Dad?”
“No.” Uncle Ned wags his head back and forth. “The morphine’s taking care of that.” He looks at me. “So nobody knows where the High Plains Drifter is at the moment?”
I shake my head. “Safe, I hope.”
“Go look for him.” Uncle Ned sets his hand on mine at the edge of the bed.
“Uncle Ned, you know that I would. But if I find him, it won’t do any good. I’ll be powerless. He won’t listen. We have to let him bottom out. That’s what the pros have been telling the family for years. Tough love. I hope he doesn’t crash and burn.”
“Go find him.” Uncle Ned closes his hand on mine. “Promise me.”
I hesitate. I’m never sure when my uncle is joking. He glances at Lila and Rhonda. Lila is bouncing Zoe in her arms. Aunt Rhonda has a strained smile.
“Promise you’ll go after him one more time.” His voice is even, strong.
“All right, Uncle Ned, I’ll go after him.” I wonder if I will.
“Until you find him.”
“Dead or alive.” I smile out of regret for saying it.
Uncle Ned laughs. “You never learned to watch your mouth.”
“I’m going to miss you. I’m more like you than Dad, you know.”
Uncle Ned laughs. “He’s the better role model.”
“Har-puh.” Mom stands up.
“Hey, Papa.” I walk over and hug them. “Mama.”
Looking over my shoulder at Ned, Mom says, “Your nephew came all the way from New York.”
Uncle Ned nods and says, “He’s a good boy.”
“What do you remember now, Ned?” Mom asks.
Uncle Ned holds up his arms in a big V for victory. He looks around the room and says, “We’re a very close family.”
“We certainly are, Ned.” Mom tilts her chin high and smiles resolutely. She wears a wool skirt and matching jacket, a Junior League matron. I watch Aunt Rhonda answer the phone, trying to imagine her thirty-five years ago, the sexy stewardess she was when Uncle Ned met her. “It’s for you, Frank.” My father walks behind the women encircling the bed.
“Hello.” Dad speaks softly in the phone. “His kidneys aren’t working and he has a ruptured aneur— We’re here in the room.”
“Aneurysm,” Uncle Ned almost shouts. “Ruptured aneurysm on the aorta.”
Dad finishes speaking and hangs up.
“Franklin.” Uncle Ned raises his eyebrows, widens his eyes.
“Neddy?” Dad says.
“That’s the way you look,” Uncle Ned says. “Like you’re startled.”
My gaze drifts between my uncle and father, the younger brother by two years. Uncle Ned’s hair is gray, Dad’s white. Ned’s face is heavy from decades of drinking, his nose bulbous and veined, while Dad’s face, despite a large nose swollen by seventy years, is lean from decades of training and moderation.
“Why aren’t you in your dog collar?” Uncle Ned asks Dad.
“I didn’t want to wear black today,” Dad says. He’s in khakis, a tweed blazer, and a blue button-down with a white T-shirt showing at the neck. An old country theologian. “This isn’t official business.”
“Oh, but it is, Frank.” Uncle Ned smiles.
“Neddy was quite a boxer in the navy,” Dad says. “Everyone in Memphis knew that he could take care of himself.”
“Oh, come on, Frank.” Uncle Ned looks annoyed.
“I remember once we were in a booth, talking about Mother and Dr. Jacobson. There was always some kind of critical situation and Neddy and I rarely had any time together. A young man who was a contemporary of mine, a bore, came in and forced himself on us.” Dad cleans the lenses of his glasses with a handkerchief and chuckles. “He sat down and started chattering on and on. Neddy stood and picked up the man’s raincoat off the back of the booth and said, ‘Put this on and leave. My brother and I have private matters to discuss.’ Neddy just dismissed him.” Dad laughs. “I wanted to be polite. I felt sorry for him slinking out of the diner like a dog dragging its belly. But it was impressive.” He whistles. “Oh Lord, Lord. Oh gee.”
“Oh, Frank, good God.” Uncle Ned stares into space for a moment, then says softly, “Yeah, I remember that.”
Lila sets Zoe on the floor. The little blonde girl walks quietly around the bed toward her grandmother, Aunt Rhonda. Lila says, “Want some more water?”