Dead Low Tide (10 page)

By this time it’d been already decided that Unc would live with Mom and me, once we’d closed on the land. It wouldn’t be a single-wide he’d relocate to, we knew, but a big place, a place he’d need help navigating, and so it’d simply been seen as a done deal Unc would live with us, and that we’d have a place big enough to let him feel like he was living alone. Not to mention the ease and convenience of having me there to take him where he needed when I was home from school.

“You game?” Unc said to Mom. “You think we could pull off living out to Landgrave Hall?”

“Yes,” Mom said.

She hadn’t moved a muscle, only sat beside me, her black leather purse in her lap, both hands holding tight to it. She’d dressed up for the closing, had on a black suit with a purple silk blouse. She was smiling, her eyes straight ahead, so that I’d only been able to see this side of her face. She was still pretty, still petite, though the wrinkles beside her eyes were getting on past the point where you could call them laugh lines. But her eyes were still that same sharp green, her red hair still in its soft curls, that same spray of freckles across the top of her nose what somebody’d think was cute.

“Let’s go look at it,” she said. “Right now.”

“Sort of hoping you’d say that,” Unc said, and I could hear him move a little, then the quiet tap of him punching in numbers on his cellphone.

Of course we’d talked by then of different possibilities for the place we’d all end up living—everywhere from Kiawah to Pawleys Island to South of Broad itself.

But here Landgrave Hall had been served up, that mysterious land of secret wealth and importance. Kiawah and Pawleys were only cheap knockoffs of this place, the original enclave of the haves. Even South of Broad paled, made the neighborhood seem like a parade of dioramas for some giant science project, with its plague of tourists always wandering the streets and peering in windows of those homes.

Still Mom was smiling. But it was a different smile, I could tell, one I couldn’t remember having seen on her face before. “Landgrave Hall,” she whispered. She nodded once, said, “Yes.”

In this manner, the issue was settled.

I could see out her window the bus stop at this intersection, always a busy one being so close to the Piggly Wiggly. A couple dozen people out there at the curb, all waiting. Blacks mostly, but some Mexicans in there, and a few whites.

But there, right in front of them all, stood a white family: the father, a guy no older than me with a cowboy hat on, no shirt, and a pair of jeans; beside him the mom, in a rainbow-colored tube top and short shorts, long straight hair parted in the middle and down past her shoulders.

And in front of them, right at the edge of the curb and happy for it, him smiling and smiling, stood a toddler, three years old at the most, wearing nothing but a diaper and a pair of kid cowboy boots. He was looking back the way we’d come, watching like everyone else for the bus to come, and now he put his hands up, and clapped.

“We’re on, Judge,” Unc said behind me, and I looked in the rearview again, saw Unc with his cellphone to his ear. He nodded, said, “Tell Cousin Prioleau we’ll be there in twenty minutes, driving a tan Corolla,” and slapped it shut.

Still Mom smiled, her looking straight ahead.

A bus rolled up just then, filled her window, that family and everyone else gone.

Twenty minutes later we were turning right off of North Rhett up in Hanahan and onto a two-lane I’d never ventured on before, because I and everyone else who knew what lay at the end of this simple piece of pavement knew it led to a place some of us were allowed, and most of us weren’t.

Trees edged in thick on either side of the road, and I saw up ahead a white-brick gatehouse, a closed wrought-iron gate. And a person I thought I might recognize, someone maybe I knew, leaning out the gatehouse as we neared.

Jessup Horry.

The gate swung open.

F
ive weeks later, me home for spring break, I helped Mom pack up what little we’d be taking with us to the new house: a few things out of the fridge and pantry, my old kid stuff—books, models, a bit of old clothes—and nothing else. Everything in the house had been sold
with it, from the silverware in the drawers to the garden hose out back.

I’d watched as she’d tossed into garbage bags every bit of her clothes, from the least pair of those little footie-stocking things you wear with a pair of shoes to her series of ten sequined cocktail dresses, every one way too short for any mom to wear. Though they had cost half a paycheck each—she’d been a pediatric nurse at the Medical University for the last ten years by then—she’d worn each dress only once, to the annual Med U Christmas party. Ten dresses, stuffed into trash bags along with every other piece of clothing she owned, me the one to haul it all out to the curb.

Except for the nurse’s outfits themselves. These she’d set in a separate pile on her bed, and once all her clothes were gone, she’d gathered them all up, those sadly colorful scrub outfits with their balloons or flowers or rainbow pinstripes, and went out to the kitchen, then through the back door to the yard, where she tossed them in a pile, doused them with lighter fluid from a rusty can next to the hibachi on the stoop—we left the hibachi too—and lit them up.

We’d stood there in the backyard watching them all go, set atop the pile her two pairs of white nurse’s shoes, my mom hugging herself and smiling at the show of this all, and I looked at her.

Here were those freckles, that smile.

For a moment I’d felt good right along with her, just us two saying goodbye to the job she’d held all those years to make our lives here close to bearable, saying goodbye too to this life lived out next to the Mark Clark, a neighborhood where at any given moment you could hear from the freeway the shriek of Jake brakes on eighteen-wheelers, and where sometimes at night the smell of the paper mill a mile away was so bad you’d think a cat had crapped in your pillowcase.

The rest of my semester, with its failing grades in Biology and that History of the South course, the D’s I would get in my Spanish III and English classes, was still somewhere past the horizon but looming all the same. But suddenly I felt good. After all those years of our living
in this run-down neighborhood, with its cars up on blocks in the driveways, front yards rubbed to bare dirt, and random shootings at the Aquarius Social Club three blocks away or armed robberies at the Hot Spot gas station and mini-mart over on Murray, I saw we were going to escape. We were going to make it out of this place alive, and my mom was happy.

Black smoke wafted up from those burning clothes, the soles of the shoes curling up like they meant to start walking off and escape themselves. Mom looked at me then, still hugging herself and smiling—she had on a new top, a green silk thing with no sleeves, and new jeans, culled from the new wardrobe in the bags and boxes she had piled up in her bedroom, all of it from the boutiques on King Street downtown—and said, sweet as anything I’d ever heard her say, “Landgrave Hall.”

I’d only smiled back at her, then turned to the fire, watched the black smoke of those burning shoes and uniforms, her old life and the toil of it disappearing just like that.

I cut through a thin buffer of trees to the right of the cart path between the eighth tee box and the seventh green, and stepped out onto our gravel drive. Here stood our house a good fifty yards away, every light in the whole thing on, like a 4:00
A.M.
party set to start.

It was a big white clapboard colonial, a covered porch stretching the whole front of the house, all of it four or five feet off the ground, built over a crawl space. All the windows had Charleston Black shutters, the roof above the second story steep-pitched with three dormers. The gravel drive swept off to the left, on that side of the house the separate garage big as the house on Marie, just past it the dock out to Goose Creek. To the right of the house and a good thirty yards away lay the seventh green.

A place Unc wouldn’t be caught dead trying to golf, even if it was only putting. Because the chance existed he might be seen by
Mom herself, who, he feared, wouldn’t let such a ridiculous thing as a missed putt by a blind man go without comment.

The pride thing again.

Like every time Unc and I left for one of his nocturnal golf jaunts, the place had been dark save for the single flood at the peak of the garage, where all three of our vehicles and the golf cart were safely tucked away for the night, the driveway empty. But now every bit of the landscape lighting was on out here, the twin palmettos at the front corners of the house lit up like two torches blazing, the crepe myrtle and sago palms and Indian hawthorn that littered the front walkway all perfectly highlighted, little explosions of light and growth that charted the tabby path to the broad set of stairs up to the porch.

The lamps were on inside the windows on either side of the oak front door, too, the library on the right, the living room on the left, along with the porch lights blasting down on the wicker chairs and little side tables up there, outdoor furniture that cost more than all the furniture we’d left in the old house when we moved out. The upstairs windows were all lit, even the dormers, and I pictured Mom going room to room to room, flipping switches on everywhere. The landscape lighting all shut down at midnight, their timers inside the laundry room at the back of the house, so she’d had to go in there and make it a point to turn all of it on, too, and for about a second the idea crossed my mind that maybe she was afraid of something. Maybe she’d heard already about a body over at the Dupont place, and so she’d gone around and turned all this on in some attempt to fill time and quiet and being alone until her idiot son and her prideful ex-brother-in-law made it home to tell her everything would be okay.

Maybe she was afraid in there.

But the thought—a dumb one—only lasted just that long, because I knew my mom. I knew her.

I’ve already called your momma, Huger
, Mrs. Q had said not a
minute after she’d gotten to Judge Dupont’s.
She’s on her way as we speak
, she’d said.

Mrs. Quillie Izerd Grimball: mother of the Grimball daughter whose Prioleau husband had sold this fine house out from under her before the sale could be tied up in divorce court. Mrs. Q, the arbiter of good blood and bad, still riled and certain to be the rest of her days that her daughter hadn’t gotten this house, a clutch of rednecks soiling up the place instead.

And I knew, just like I’d known the first second I’d come through those trees to find this Roman candle of a lit-up house, that Mom’d turned on every light to make a point: she was up, and waiting to give Unc and me the hell we were owed.

I made it to the foot of the drive, peeled off to the right on the tabby walkway through the planter beds, then stopped at the bottom of the stairs, looked down. I closed my eyes, slowly shook my head, and thought,
What am I going to tell her?

We’d found a body? That the Navy was involved, and something called a master-at-arms and his sidekick had drawn their guns on us, ready to fire? That I was toting a set of night-vision goggles it seemed Unc was hell-bent on keeping close?

That we’d found a
body
?

Then I remembered. I opened my eyes, looked up to the porch and that oak door and whatever it was waiting to happen inside.

Hide the goggles
, Unc’d told me just before I’d taken off, headed here, to this moment.
Tell your momma we’ll all be all right
.

I could do that. Both those things.

I hitched the book bag a little higher on my shoulders, started up the stairs, the hollow slug of each step I made what seemed loud as a hammer in the quiet out here, and then I was on the porch and across it, my hand out for the bright brass door handle.

But the door opened, all by itself.

I looked up: Mom, her mouth and eyes open wide, and here were her arms up already for me, the trembling word “Huger!” out of her
like it was some tremendous gift she’d been given even to utter it, and I stepped in to her, closed my eyes and felt her arms around my shoulders and her crying now, and for a moment I knew that, yes, everything was going to be all right. That Unc’s words weren’t any sort of fake promise meant to placate either Mom or me. He’d given us the truth: We’ll all be all right.

Mom moved her arms, eased off, and started to step back from me, and I opened my eyes.

First, I saw her eyes and the wet of them, her quivering chin, and heard out of her the broken-up words “What took you so long? What took you so long?” and already I felt bad for whatever I’d caused her. That worry, that pain. She’d already known there was a body involved before I’d said a thing. I knew that, just from her chin and the way she let out these words to me.

That was the first thing I saw.

But then I looked up, past her shoulder, and saw next, there behind her and a few feet into the foyer, a man in a khaki uniform, smiling.

I tensed quick at him, a shot of cold surprise through me, and held harder to Mom in just that moment, nearly clutched her in to me.