Rex measured himself, and everyone else, by the yardstick of control. And he only measured up when he had it. In a slight variation on Auntie Manic, Rex would stand at the dinner table, raise his glass, and tell his business partners-and newest best friends-"Life is a banquet, and most poor bitties are starving to death. Eat up!"
By the time I was six, Rex tired of Waverly Hall and his boys, so once a week became twice a month. Twice a month became month end. A year or two more and monthly became quarterly, and finally, once a quarter became hardly at all. During my eighth year of life, I saw my father one time. And in all my life, I have never celebrated a birthday or awakened on Christmas morning to anyone or anything but Miss Ella.
Having sold, built, conquered, torn down, and then torn apart, Rex turned fifty-eight and baptized himself in the three things he could not control: liquor, women, and horses. Mixed together, the resulting highball became his Waterloo. By the time I reached high school, Rex Mason woke each morning in his office in Atlanta to seven medications and downed them with eight ounces of twelveyear-old Jack Daniels. For the next ten years-having become too attracted to his own product-he existed on a liquid diet, until at seventy he met a lap dancer named Mary Victoria-the star attraction of the nightclub that leased the bottom floor of his building. She was a six-feettwo silicone beauty with an affection for shiny things. She filled his nights and his glass, and pretty soon Rex was using his cane to punch the elevator buttons at the racetrack, and Mary was covered in shine and picking all the numbers. Rex and Mary deserved each other-and both chose poorly.
By the time Rex hit seventy-five, Mary had spent most of what the IRS hadn't taken. And after more than thirty years of doctored returns, they got everything they could find. Mary moved out just after government agents hauled off Rex's files and posted an eviction notice. Rex rallied, sobered up for almost a day, dug up a few of his offshore Mason jars, which the IRS knew nothing about, and managed to keep two things: his Atlanta high-rise and Waverly Hall.
Waverly Hall may be the only wise choice he ever made. Rex had incrementally gifted his edifice to the two people who cared little for it-me and Mutt. I didn't know it until a few years ago, but by the age of ten, we owned outright everything we could see for more than two miles in any direction. It's a good thing he didn't tell us, because if he had, we'd have evicted him about two minutes later.
Since his days with the circus, Rex had controlled his consumption so that it continually produced the desired personality. When I got old enough to understand, Miss Ella told me that Rex's secret was simple-"his vigor's in his liquor." Like most demons, it caught up with him.
Now at eighty-one, Rex Mason is in the latter stages of Alzheimer's, can't count to ten, can't control the spittle that drools off his quivering bottom lip, and spends all day wrapped in an adult diaper and sitting in the crust of his own excrement in an old folks' home not far from Waverly.
Sometimes, when I think about it, it's a joyous picture.
Chapter 5
Two MILES FARTHER EAST INTO JULINGTON CREEK, Mutt stopped paddling and let the canoe silently slip across the water. The bank grew narrow, the trees tall, and precivilized canopy covered the water. The creek had snaked back and forth for the last mile, only occasionally falling in a straight line. Water dripped off the paddle blade while Mutt listened to the owls that had sung him to sleep for seven years. Overhead, an old bird with a deep guttural drone hooted from the top of a cypress tree. Another, farther south, quickly answered like a homing beacon. The two sent sounding pings up and down the creek for nearly a minute until a third chimed in from the west and both went silent.
Mutt glided along the water, stretching the paddle through his newfound freedom yet working feverishly to quiet the voices that were raging beneath the surface. He knew Gibby would send a boat up the creek, so he began looking for an outlet. Another stream of clear water poured over a downed tree in a small waterfall as a smaller finger flowed into the creek. In comparison to the black Julington Creek, the clear water caught his attention.
Mutt pulled the canoe up over the log and paddled up the clear stream. The waterway narrowed to less than six feet across then cut along the side of a huge cypress tree. Mutt pushed the branches out of his way, even lying down in the canoe to clear the limbs, and poled himself into a clearing. He looked for the continuation of the stream but saw none. He had paddled into a cul-de-sac, and the stream had disappeared. The headwaters, apparently. Either way, he had found the source and was now spinning in a slow circle above it. He pulled the canoe onto the bank, sat in the bottom, opened his chess set on the seat before him, and aligned the pieces. He carefully opened a Ziploc bag holding a single bar of soap and dipped his hands in the spring, turning the soap over and over and over as lather bubbled in the water. When clean, he rinsed and began playing his eight competitors. Sirens and boat motors sounded in the distance, but they'd never find him. Only one person would think to look out here.
Several hours later, a green-and-orange chameleon climbed up the side of the canoe and perched atop the bow, blowing its pink chin in and out like a miniature sail that flashed in the moonlight. Buried inside the base of a vertical bank of mud that rose four feet from the surface of the water, Mutt watched the sail inflate and deflate for an hour while the lizard bobbed its head and tried to impress a suitor. When no suitor appeared, the lizard sped off the railing, launched itself off the stern, splashed in the crystal water, and swam across the spring, using its tail as a propeller. Reaching the opposite bank, it climbed up an overhanging vine and disappeared into the tree above.
The mud covering Mutt's body served a dual purpose; it protected him from the mosquitoes and the cool night air. Mutt clutched his hands together and pressed his back farther into the mud, keeping the tremors at bay, but his face twitched as if wired to an electrical outlet and receiving intermittent signals. For three months, he had succeeded in quieting the voices. The longest stretch in ten years. But now, having been held back and denied a voice, they crowded in and rushed him like an angry mob. He closed his eyes and felt like he was standing on worn, warm tracks in a dark, dank tunnel and listening for the coming train. The screaming grew louder, and he knew that this time they were powerful enough to win. Somewhere they had gained strength, and their shouting told him that he could die right here. Paralysis set in, and not even the sight of a four-foot water moccasin slithering across his feet brought him out of his hypnotic trance. In the recesses of his mind, where the thoughts traveled less than a thousand miles an hour, where he hid the good memories, he found Tucker and Miss Ella. Mutt was not afraid to die; he just didn't want to go without saying good-bye. And it was there that he went to sleep.
Chapter 6
THREE MILES EAST OF THE CLOPTON INTERSECTION, VISIbility had dropped to less than ten feet, slowing the Volvo to fifteen miles an hour. Fighting the wiper controls, the woman in the red baseball cap turned around to look at her sleeping son, safely buckled in, surrounded by bubble gum. When she reached to pull the covers up around his shoulders, she inadvertently pulled on the wheel and steered into the soft shoulder on the side of the road. She corrected too quickly; rain and mud sucked the tires into the ditch, and the Volvo slid to a quick stop underneath the looming darkness of an Alabama forest. There was not a single light in sight. She rammed the stick in reverse and pegged the accelerator, but that only slung mud and buried the front end farther. She looked at her watch. 3:47 a.m.
Great, she thought, just great.
The face of her cell phone read, "No Service."
Oh, that's even better. With Jase sleeping peacefully, she leaned back, cut the engine, and thought to herself, It could be worse.
My windshield wipers were the only thing keeping me awake at a few minutes to four. Two miles from the Clopton intersection, the road dipped, bringing my headlights with it and causing them to reflect off the taillights of the Volvo. It sat at an angle, leaning peacefully in the ditch.
Can't be, I thought
to myself. Then I passed it and peered out my passenger window. Can too.
The thought of driving by, of pretending not to see, of playing possum did occur to me, but then I thought of the backseat. "I know-'Do unto others,' the good Samaritan, and all that stuff, but it's really late."
Don't you get smart with me. You're not too old for me to take a switch to.
Miss Ella had been dead almost eight years-well, seven years, ten months, and eight days. And she didn't give two cents about my career success-at least not on the surface. If she were here, she'd be proud but would never tolerate it in me. Pride was the very thing she wouldn't put up with. Not if the sins of the father really are carried down on the son. And according to the gospel of Miss Ella, they are. How do you argue with that? I just shook my head. "Yes ma'am."
I pulled off the road, backed up, and left the truck running. With the downpour growing more violent, the road rippled with two inches of water. I slid the umbrella from behind the seat, along with a Mag-Lite flashlight, and walked toward the Volvo. Consciously, I did not take the camera. After three steps, my shoes were waterlogged and squishing. I shined the light into the front seat and saw the lady driver leaning her head against the window, eyes closed.
I knocked lightly with the tip of the flashlight, trying not to scare her. I failed. Screaming at the top of her lungs and waving her hands like wings, she cranked the car, slammed the stick into reverse, and gunned it. She redlined the engine and turned the steering wheel left to right to left again. In the process, she sprayed me with a thick coat of Alabama clay that stung my eyes. I couldn't see a thing. I staggered back, spat mud, and wiped my face on the front of my shirt. Drenched, I put down the umbrella and let the rain wash my face. I regained focus and watched in slow motion as the crazy woman reached inside the glove box and pulled out a big, shiny revolver like something Dirty Harry would carry.
At the first glint of silver, I took three steps backwards and then crossed the road and launched myself into the opposite ditch. Still screaming, the woman blasted through the window, emptying all six shots into the woods above and behind me. Muffled by the torrent, I heard the hammer click several times on the spent cylinder. While she continued squeezing, screaming, and clicking, the Volvo-having now been redlined for almost two minutes-coughed, blew up, and froze solid, sending steam out the sides of the hood. With rain pouring in through the hole in her window, the woman tossed the pistol into the passenger seat and jumped into the back with her son.
With my inner voice telling me to flee evil, I crawled out of the ditch and studied the car from the far side of the road. "Lady, are you crazy? I'm trying to help you!" I crossed the street with my flashlight in one hand and the closed umbrella in the other. If she so much as moved my direction, I planned to thump her in the head and leave them both right there. Boy or no boy, bubble gum or no bubble gum. I shined the light into the backseat, where it reflected off the whites of four eyes and the barrels of two Roy Rogers six-shooters.
Seeing the boy with his guns and the woman without hers, I stepped toward the hole in the driver's side window. The boy looked sleepy and frightened out of his mind. The woman was about my age, and her eyes were sunk back in her head and surrounded by dark shadows. Her face was hidden because her hat was pulled down low and her collar was turned up. Her clothes were too big, too new, and looked like she'd been in them a few days. Khaki shorts and a sweatshirt that looked like she had bought them at a truck stop.
I shined the light but still couldn't get a good look at her face. Fast-food bags, used ketchup packets, and cold French fries littered the floorboards. Having just crawled out of the ditch, mud-soaked, wild-eyed, and draped in clay-smeared hair, I probably looked like what she thought she was shooting at-a crazed lunatic. I'm not sure Miss Ella would have recognized me. With this in mind, I tried to speak calmly. "Lady, I don't know you, you don't know me, and right now, I'm not sure I want to know you or what you're doing out here in the middle of the night, but if you need help, I'm offering. If you don't, I'm leaving." I grabbed the revolver and opened the cylinder, emptying the spent shells. I laid the pistol back down on the front seat and looked at her.
She pointed in front of the car, "We were ... going ... my ... my ... the car." She was shaking, incoherent.
"This storm will be around awhile, and you're nowhere near a gas station. You want to tell me what you two are doing out here"-I pointed at the pistol-"carrying that thing?"
She didn't say a word. Something behind her, either on the highway or beyond, had her scared. Scared badly. The boy too. She shifted, and when the flashlight lit up her eyes, I saw a flash of something familiar. It caught me off guard. "I live just down the road. You two can dry out and even sleep awhile. I have a guesthouse, but you're going to have to trust me more than you did when you started pulling that trigger."
She looked at the boy, at the hood of the car, then out at the rain. Garnering strength, which I imagined she had done a lot lately, she nodded.
"Lady," I said, speaking more softly now, "I need you to talk. Not nod. I'm not taking a nodding stranger with a revolver to my house. Can you speak?"
She swallowed, and determination replaced the terror in her eyes. "Yes," she whispered, "I can speak."
I reached in, grabbed the revolver, and placed it in my waistband. "For now, I'll keep this. We're all a little safer if you're not holding it." She eyed the revolver and unlocked the back door. She slid across the backseat and I held the umbrella over the door opening, although it did little good to shed the sideways rain. She scooped up her son, hung him on her right hip, and made sure to keep herself between him and me. Halfway to the truck, she began sobbing. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry .. ." We sloshed through the mud to the Dodge, where I put them in the backseat, and the boy said, "Don't cry, Mommy. Don't cry." I shut the door and returned to the Volvo.
I reached into their car through the broken window, pulled the trunk latch, grabbed a few bags, snatched the keys from the ignition, and returned to my truck. When I shut the front door, I turned and was about to say something, but I heard muffled sobs. I watched her hands shake as she pulled the hood of her gray sweatshirt up over her head. I handed her a towel, put the stick in first, and noticed that the boy was looking through the rear window back at the car. One look and I realized why.
Cold and chilled to the bone, I ran back to the car, unlocked the chrome dirt bike from the bike rack, and laid it carefully in the bed of my truck. When I finally got back in the driver's seat for the last time, the boy was tucked snugly under his mom's arm and studying me. She stared straight ahead, her face shaded by her hat and hood, and pressed her body firmly against the seat, as far away from me as possible.
Chapter 7
AFTER RUNNING FOR WEEKS, SCARED AND FAR FROM home or anything familiar, the woman's nerves were shot. She sat in the backseat, braced for the worst, and the questions grew: Who is this man? What if he's not what he pretends to be? What if we're now trapped? What if we've been found? What if ... She squeezed her hands into fists; her knuckles whitened, and her legs trembled.
She watched the man steer-his slow, confident, almost reassuring way, his kind expression smeared by residue from the ditch. It was dark in the cab. Her small son pressed his shoulders to her chest; he too was scared. She felt him tremble and breathe short, shallow breaths. The man turned off the highway and drove through an old bricked-up entrance, long run-down, decrepit, and leaning to one side. Vines covered most everything. Flashes of something familiar flooded over her, but she dared not trust anything-especially the past. The rain fell harder now. The man slowed, leaning forward, straining his eyes to see the road. She clutched her son tighter and checked the door to make sure it was unlocked, allowing them to escape quickly if need be. It was. The man drove down a long drive and around a large unlit house, which again shook the foundations of her remembrance, but she kept her focus on him, his hands, and where he was taking them.
She studied this man, his shoulders,
his hands, his measured breathing. Who was he? A local farmer? Someone hired by her ex-husband? A good Samaritan? He caught her looking at him in the mirror, and for a second their eyes locked. There, too, something familiar lurked, but she shied away. Too many men had tricked her, and-she reached up and felt the remaining puffiness beneath her eye-she had promised herself and her son it would not happen again.
I shook my head and drove the three miles to Waverly Hall, where the rain had killed the power. It was raining so hard now that I had to lean forward just to see the edges of the road. I drove around back to Miss Ella's house, carried the boy onto the porch, handed him to his mother, and then returned for the bags and the bike. The wind and rain were deafening, and both beat against the tin roof like a drum. I unlocked the door, and we stepped inside the single-room cottage, where it was no less quiet. The woman carried her son through the door, set him on the couch, and kept her face hidden in the shadows, behind her sweatshirt and beneath her hat. I searched for towels and a few candles. Finding both, I handed her one and lit the other. I placed the candle on the table and, for the first time, got a good look at her face. It took me a moment, and she had grown up, but there was no mistake. Not that face. The past flooded back, slammed me in the chest, and I took a step backwards.
"Katie?"
Her first instinct was to bury her face farther behind the hood, but seeing my eyes, she picked up the candle and held it closer to my face like she was studying hieroglyphics on a dark and ancient tunnel wall. She looked past the suntan, the wrinkles around my eyes, the mud from the ditch, the wet hair stuck to my face, and the three-day beard. Somewhere in there, the lightbulb clicked on.