The Last of the Savages (31 page)

I wanted to say something to Mrs. Felson, but couldn’t find a suitable opportunity. Under the circumstances, the family had decided not to compound the awkwardness with any further gathering of the bereaved.

My wife attended the service, though I told her it wasn’t necessary. Stacey is a conscientious person, strict in her observance of the decencies, whether a thank-you note or a visit to the hospital. Some years ago, she left her job at Chase Manhattan to devote herself to the kids and to a literacy program in Harlem; if this seems old-fashioned I can only say that her selflessness is genuine; her charities are chosen not for their social cachet, but from the heart.

“Of course I’m going,” she said, the night before, as we sat at the kitchen table. “He was your colleague.” And suddenly, unexpectedly, my eyes blurred with tears.

“Are you all right,” she asked, her forehead suddenly creasing with concern. She reached across the table and put her hand over mine.

In fact, I felt as though I were drowning in a flood of sadness, though I hardly knew for whom—Felson, his wife and kids, Stacey or myself. My lawyerly distance from my own life seemed, if only for a moment, to have deserted me.

“What is it, Patrick?”

When I could finally speak, I said, “You’ve been a great wife, Stacey.”

The day after my engagement to Stacey had been announced in the Sunday
Times
, my secretary buzzed me during a closed-door conference. “I’m sorry, Mr. Keane. It’s a Mrs. Cordell Savage. She insisted it was urgent.” Indeed, it was hard to imagine a casual call from Will’s brittle mother. Calling to congratulate me on my marriage might not be out of character for her, but it would hardly qualify as urgent. With no small sense of dread, I picked up the line.

She wasted no time on the pleasantries.

“Patrick, it’s about Will. You must come down here immediately.”

“Is he all right,” I asked.

“Of course he’s not all right. Why do you suppose I’m calling? I can’t even get him on the telephone, all those crazy people around him, and I’m not well enough to go down there myself. I just hope he’ll listen to you.” Even now, as she was calling on my aid, she was clearly exasperated that such a blunt instrument as myself might actually be efficacious in such a delicate family matter.

I immediately rescheduled the week’s appointments and booked myself on the afternoon flight to Memphis. I considered calling Taleesha but ruled it out until I could deliver a firsthand report. It had been months since I’d spoken to Will, which was in itself a bad sign; I’d heard he was having business troubles. Lester Holmes had been killed recently in a shoot-out; the
Times
had actually run a small obit. According to Mrs. Savage, Will had barricaded himself in his office, surrounded by armed minions, and refused to come out or to let anyone else into the building. Things had gotten so bad that old Jessie Petit had walked away, telling Will he wouldn’t stand by and watch him kill himself. It was Jessie who’d gone to Mrs. Savage.

Memphis was hellishly steamy. After checking into the Peabody I changed into jeans and knocked back a drink at the bar. Seeing the ducks in the fountain reminded me of how many years had passed since I first came south with Will. I wondered if any of them had survived from my last visit, years before. How long does a duck live, if it doesn’t get shot? How long, for that matter, would we keep on splashing in our respective ponds before they took us up the elevator to the roof once and for all?

At the pharmacy I bought half-a-dozen packages of Contac cold capsules and a small box of baking soda. My clothes were drenched with sweat as I approached the Gothic facade of Will’s building with its lurid gargoyles. Two black men in army fatigues and wraparound shades lounged inside the door, both wearing shoulder holsters with automatic pistols.

“Delivery for Will Savage,” I said.

“Leave it,” hissed one of the men.

“This isn’t the kind of delivery I can leave.”

“Orders is nobody goes up.”

I held up two plastic bags, one full of capsules and the other white powder.

“You ain’t the reg’lar.”

“He called me and said bring it up personally.”

“Got enough shit up there to kill a elephant already.”

The two sentries looked at each other, and through some telepathy which passed the impenetrable lenses of their glasses decided to let me up. The speaker jerked his head to indicate the door behind him. I hiked up a long wooden stairway. Opening the door on the first landing, I glanced into a large studio, empty except for a microphone stand and the shattered remains of a grand piano, which seemed to have been attacked with a sledgehammer; sprung strings swarmed out of the black wreckage in exclamatory coils. Assaying the next flight, I climbed toward the insistent bass notes that reverberated through the stairwell.

When I opened the door on the third-floor landing I was stunned by the tsunami of music—one of those lugubrious late-seventies synthesizer bands that new wave and punk was supposed to have already killed off: King Crimson, maybe, or Yes. Jack Stubblefield was standing in the middle of the rough-planked floor, his head rolled back, eyes closed, whipping the air with his limp tresses. At first I thought the noise was somehow emanating from his electric guitar; then I realized that it was a shotgun he was strumming. A football game was playing on a big TV set across the room. As the song climbed toward a garish crescendo, Stubblefield windmilled his right arm furiously across the stock of the gun. When the final chords had died away, several phones were ringing; Stubblefield shook himself off like a wet dog, lifted the gun to his shoulder and pointed it at an overhead light. Then he saw me.

“Goat boy,” he said.

“It’s Patrick.”

“I know who you are.” He walked over and turned up the volume on the television. “You’re not a football fan, are you?”

“Not really,” I said.

He snickered. “No, I guess you wouldn’t be. You’re never going to understand
the South if you don’t understand football.” His jaw was moving quite independently of the demands of speech and his eyes were starting to look dangerous. “Are you a Capricorn,” he asked.

“Where’s Will,” I asked in as delicate a tone as I could manage. I jumped when another phone started to ring.

He raised the gun suddenly and pointed it at me. “Ever heard about the goat and the stallion?”

I shook my head slowly, carefully.

“Say you got a really high-strung stallion, you know, one of those wild boys wants to kick the stall apart—well, you put a goat in the stall and he’ll calm right down. Old Jessie told me that.” He paused. “And guess what?”

I shrugged cautiously.

“I thought of you,” he said. Lowering the gun, he planted the barrel on his own toe. “You know what I’m saying?”

“Where’s Will?”

“He’s achieving Rainbow Body.”

“Is he in the building?”

“You’re not fucking listening to me, man. I hate it when people don’t listen.”

“I’m listening.”

“See, the being who is going to attain Dzogchen Rainbow Body, you got to be left alone in a cave for seven days. Nothing left but the nails and hair by the eighth day. I reckon Will’s been up there about a week now.”

Stubblefield abruptly raised the gun and walked toward me until the barrel was inches from my chest, his eyes vitreous as marbles, face glistening with a sheen of sweat.

“What you got there?” He was looking, insofar as he was looking anywhere, at the bag full of baking soda.

Cautiously, I extended my hand.

Laying the gun down on the floor, he crouched down to examine the contents.

I ducked back into the stairwell and took the stairs three at a time, then thrust my shoulder against the door at the top of the landing. The first thing I picked out of the cavernous darkness was Will, in three-quarter
profile, sitting at a desk, a bottle of cognac on one side and a mirror piled with white powder on the other. The desk was a dark, elaborately carved library table replete with griffins and unicorns and mythological beasts. From beyond the grave big Bukka White was singing “Fixin to Die.” I did not take this as an auspicious sign.

If Will was aware of my entrance, he gave no indication. I approached as you would a wounded buffalo.

“Who died,” he asked without looking up.

“No one yet,” I answered. “At least not that I know.”

“Presumably that includes me.”

“Looks like you’re working on it, though.”

Finally looking up at me, he took a swig from the bottle. “Lester’s dead and my brothers are dead, so why not me?”

“It isn’t for lack of trying.”

“That what you think I’m doing?” he said after a long interlude. “I’ve just been living faster than you. Besides, this is just one plane. I’m not afraid to move on to the next.”

“What happened to Lester,” I asked, easing myself into an armchair across from him. It seemed like a good idea to keep him talking; and for me, hearing Will’s familiar voice, edgy and hoarse as it was, somewhat alleviated the weirdness of the situation.

“What happened to Sam Cooke?” Will said. “What happened to the Scottsboro Boys? He got shot.” He dipped the long curved nail of his little finger, grown out, I supposed, for this purpose, into the pile of powder, raised it to his nose and inhaled. “I hadn’t seen old Lester in more than a year. He turned on me. Claimed I was ripping him off. Called me a white devil. Shit, I carried his lazy ass the last five years. Got him off with probation after he shot some pimp.” He nodded toward the mirror. “He had a little problem with the powder. Maybe he owed the wrong folks money. Or maybe …”

He left the thought hanging. Looking around, I could begin to make out the features of the room. Will was sitting directly beneath the apex of a pyramid-shaped skylight made of tinted glass and steel which extended perhaps another story above the roof of the building. Daylight was otherwise pretty effectively banished by the blackout shades which
covered the tall windows. On the wall behind the desk was an intricate diagram. At one edge of the posterboard was the name
JAMES EARL RAY
, from which locus dozens of lines branched out to other names. On the other edge of the diagram, connected via several routes through four or five names, was
CORDELL SAVAGE.

On the floor nearby were several jars full of liquid. A Tiffany lamp burned dimly on a table at the far end of the room, just barely illuminating the front end of what appeared to be an automobile.

“Is that a car,” I asked.

“Cadillac. Former property of the King himself. Colonel Parker gave it to me. Sixty-five Coupe de Ville. Had a bitch of a time getting it up here. That’s another one, Elvis. He’s dead. Course he died back in ’58 or so. The pod people got him. So, you want a drink?”

“Not right now.”

“A line? No, of course not.”

I’d never seen him so strung out before, and it was beginning to scare me. “Talk to me, Will.”

“You want me to pour my heart out while you sit there all sober and straight, judging me.”

“I’m not here to judge you.”

“Fucking Dink Stover, the All-American Boy.”

“All right, Slim, fuck it,” I said. “You want me to do a line, I’ll do a line. Okay?”

Back then, in ’81, people with regular jobs weren’t au courant with coke etiquette. Will showed me how to stick the rolled-up fifty-dollar bill in one nostril and block off the other. It scared the hell out of me, seeing my face suddenly loom up from the mirror. I braced myself for a violent alteration of consciousness, but I didn’t notice much at first except for the tickling and burning in my nostrils.

Will separated out another sinuous trail with his knife and snorted it himself. “I hear you’ve got a chick.”

“Just got engaged,” I said. “Stacey’s a great girl. You’ll have to meet her.”

He stared at me balefully. “Taleesha wants a divorce.”

I knew this and had been feeling bad about it for weeks. “You’ve been separated almost eight years,” I pointed out.

“Is that supposed to make me feel better about it?”

“She needs to get on with her life, Will.”

“Always the pragmatist.” He held the knife up to his nose and sniffed at it. “Don’t you ever get just a little bit tired of being practical all the time?” He laughed dryly, then frowned again. “Why does Taleesha want a divorce now? Who’s the dude?”

Taleesha had been seeing Aaron for several months, and I suppose it was my fault. I didn’t know how much Will knew, but this seemed like the time to come clean. “This guy she likes—he was my roommate at Yale.”

“That’s touching, Patrick. I’m really fucking glad you told me that.”

“He was the one who got those charges dropped in New York.”

“Who fucking asked him? I’ll face the motherfucking charges. Give me back my wife.”

“You know she’s been seeing other people. You both have. God, you and your little groupies. Come on, Will. You don’t expect her to wait forever, do you?”

“We talk almost every day.”

“What do you want from her?”

“I want everything.” He jammed the tip of the knife down into the surface of the desk.

“You can’t have everything,” I said reasonably. My teeth were starting to feel funny.

“Why the fuck not?”

“I refuse to be the parent here,” I said. Under the influence of the drug, wanting everything didn’t necessarily seem quite so crazy as it might have a few minutes before.

“What does she want from me?” He sounded bewildered, as if he could not begin to imagine why they weren’t together still.

“What if she wanted you to be normal,” I asked. “Could you manage that for her?”

“You think I
chose
who to be, like you choosing Yale?” He stood up and began to pace the room. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I could settle down and become an accountant.”

I had to laugh.

Still pacing, he lit up a joint. “What I’m afraid is I’ll ruin her life if I step back into it. What if she can’t save me and I only drag her down with me?” Taking a long pull of cognac, he said, “Remember that asshole I threatened to throw out the window that was hitting on Taleesha?”

“Yeah, the leisure suit.”