SATURDAY AFTERNOON HE pulled up to the Cadillac dealership in Auburn. The manager’s face broadcast his horror: what redneck in his shit-jalopy Ford truck just pulled into my lot?
John Columbus wore his church clothes.
“Hey, partner,” he said to the manager. “Blew this tire out on my Sixty-Special. What it take to get me a new one?”
The salesman looked at John Columbus, and to his truck and back, and said, “I know every man who bought a Sixty-Special over the last three years within a hundred miles of here, and I know you ain’t one of ’em.”
“That’s ’cause I bought mine up in Atlanta, sir. And good to meet you, too, my name is John Columbus Swofford.”
The salesman uneasily shook his hand.
“Well, sorry about that, on account of your truck and them ’Bama plates I assumed you was from around here.”
“Can’t a man buy a car in one state and drive it to another? I know the answer to that. So what’s it gonna set me back?”
The salesman inspected the wheel and tire.
“You just sit in the waiting room. I’ll get the mechanic to take a look. And, pardon, but do you mind wheeling that truck behind the building? Don’t look quite right up against all my Caddies. I’m trying to sell cars here.”
“You just find me when it’s all done.”
Before pulling around back he walked among the half-dozen Cadillacs, sat down in one or two, smelled the new-car drug.
He was napping when the salesman rapped on the hood of his truck.
“Hey, buddy,” the man said. “I got you road-ready. That’ll be six dollars.”
John Columbus had planned on paying two dollars but he couldn’t really argue with the man now. He pulled the cash from his pocket and paid. For the next few days he’d be eating canned food out of the store—chili, franks, green beans. No bacon breakfasts at Mama’s Roadside and no chicken-fried steak dinners down at Earl’s. These were lean times until the end of the month.
SUNDAY MORNING HE drove slowly through the gravel parking lot of Opelika First Baptist, keeping his eyes out for the Sixty-Special. He felt like a thief when in fact he was the opposite of a thief, but he imagined it could go either way if someone saw him with the side panel of Mr. Howard’s car swung open and a wrench in his hand.
There sat a black Sixty-Special, but he’d remembered the plate number, 488-531 D, and this wasn’t it. In a lane opposite he spotted the car, parked between a Packard and an older-model Cadillac, the style he didn’t know offhand, but it paled next to the Series Sixty. He parked a few spots away. It was fifteen past ten and the Sunday schoolers were deep in their Bibles by now, and he had plenty of time before the rest of the congregation arrived for the service. The coast looked clear.
He used a shop towel to carry the wheel and the tire iron he’d use to screw the wheel back in place. He wanted Miss Annie Howard to appreciate this gesture, to recognize him as a gentleman, and to say yes when he asked her out for a walk downtown after the service, maybe a Coca-Cola at the fountain. He hadn’t been on a date with a girl since leaving home almost two years before. That foolish bow he’d offered her the other day still haunted him. What kind of imbecile bows to a woman? Next time politely shake her hand.
He slithered up to the passenger side of Mr. Howard’s car. He easily unlatched the spare compartment, a revolutionary design a few years earlier. He swung open the panel, and to his surprise there was a spare already affixed. He looked around, confused. He squeezed the tire, it had air. He checked the plates and confirmed that this was the right car. He started to sweat. Had he been set up? If so, for what? Set up to do a good deed? He had no choice but to get the heck out of there.
He’d wasted a week’s salary on a Cadillac tire for no one, for nothing. There would be no date with Annie Laurie. He couldn’t walk into that church and sit through a service. He didn’t like the preacher’s way with the Bible. What a way to spend a Sunday morning. He felt the pressures of class, he felt money laughing at him; he knew his jacket did not perfectly match his trousers, that anyone could see that.
He started to latch the spare compartment when he heard the crunch of shoes against gravel.
“Hey there, son,” he heard a man shout. “What exactly do you think you’re doing with my Cadillac?”
He turned to see two men in their fifties approaching quickly. They both wore fine linen suits and straw hats. He’d seen clothes like these in the windows of the finest men’s shops in Atlanta.
He noticed one of the men, the manager from the car dealership the day before.
“You must be John Columbus Swofford,” the man on the left said. “I’m Mr. Howard, father of Annie Laurie. This here is my good friend Tad Williams, who sold me my car a few years back.”
John Columbus nodded. “I am J. C. Swofford, and I’m acquainted with Mr. Williams.”
Williams gave him a wicked smile.
Howard said, “Well, son, I hear my daughter Annie Laurie got into a little bit of trouble and roped you into it. It sure was kind of you to replace my tire. A seventeen-year-old girl does generally find herself in a mess of trouble once she starts fooling with her daddy’s car.”
“Yes, sir,” John Columbus said.
“And sometimes a twenty-year-old boy finds himself in a mess of trouble when he starts doing favors for a seventeen-year-old girl.”
“Yes, sir,” John Columbus said.
“We got a preacher in there can preach. Why don’t you join us?”
AFTER THE SERVICE John took Annie for that walk he had been planning on. He got on well with the family. His lack of learning was evident to a painful degree to everyone, but his Bible knowledge could not be challenged by anyone at any table, not even Mr. Howard, who taught choral singing and hymn-writing at Auburn. In fact, more than once the professor had pulled the mechanic aside and asked for a critique of a hymn or some advice on biblical fact.
John and Annie were married in the summer and a few years later she was pregnant before Halloween, or possibly on Halloween. For a while the couple called the unborn baby Jack-o’-Lantern. Eventually they settled on John Howard.
Annie gave birth to my father and a month later she died.
10
Atlanta to Austin, Dead Swoffords, August 2010
I didn’t socialize much while living in Mount Tremper. One night I landed at a birthday party at a bar in Kingston and later that evening ended up in bed with a woman, but I forget her name and never saw her again.
Occasionally I traveled down to the city for sex.
There was the Budding Comedian: mostly she had a serious pill problem, which worked well for me given my state of mind. We chomped a lot of pills and snorted cocaine and ended each night in her bed, fucking and watching reruns of Celebrity Rehab. To watch Celebrity Rehab while totally high as a kite on pills and cocaine is one of life’s finer pleasures.
One Monday July afternoon I stumbled out of the Comedian’s apartment and on to the Bowery. I found the nearby International Bar and fortified myself with bourbon. I was not yet ready to return to my cabin in Mount Tremper, so I contacted a former fiancée of mine, the Boho Artist, and luckily she was free for dinner. I dumped my bag off at a friend’s house, and the former fiancée and I had a great dinner at one of our old romantic spots on the Lower East Side and then we went to her apartment and had sex and watched Charlie Rose.
The next morning, after she confessed to being involved with someone else, I returned to Mount Tremper. That night I sat on the couch for eight hours thinking about killing myself. I had the rope and the sturdy beam, or any one of thousands of trees to choose from. But I chose to live.
LATER THAT SAME week the Boho Artist was visiting friends in Kingston one afternoon and I picked her up. She had recently become a devotee of the teachings of Gurdjieff. I assumed that the man she was involved with was also a devotee or even a Gurdjieff Guru. Gurus get tons of ass.
I am not opposed to anyone’s spiritual development but I did
some reading on this Gurdjieff and he seemed to me a positively masterful con artist. I’d been reading a biography of the young Joseph Stalin, and Gurdjieff might easily have traded places with him. Perhaps in two thousand years Gurdjieff would be the new Buddha, but it seemed unlikely.
The Boho Artist and I talked about our past and the possibility of starting anew. We had once been engaged and then that hadn’t worked out, and the resultant mess still caused a bit of anxiety and animosity between us. It hadn’t worked out because I’d called it off. But still during the following two years we had had a lot of sex and had seen each other regularly. I thought we might work things out but I did have a serious problem with the fact that she had a boyfriend.
We had sex. I grilled steaks. We drank a 1999 Volnay. We had sex again, and again in the morning, and I took her to the bus station. At the bus station we talked about her boyfriend, how she had broken up with him for the week and he was waiting to hear from her a verdict. She asked me to come down and see her later in the week.
I had been down this road before, sexual relations with a boyfriended woman, and I did not like the feeling one bit. In the past there had been jerks who fucked my girlfriend, and I had been a jerk and fucked people’s girlfriends, and generally I frowned on the act. It was, as they say in the South, a messy affair.
Later in the week I did visit her. We ordered in, at her apartment on the Lower East Side. We had sex before and after dinner. She told me that she was still in contact with the Gurdjieffian but that she had not been able to come to a conclusion about the affairs, or which affair to end and which to continue. I finished my wine and left and never saw her again. She occasionally sent me nasty text messages but I never responded.
IT WAS LATE July 2010 and I was officially out of women to have hassle-free sex with in New York State. A novel I was working on had stalled. I’d grown tired of the beauty of the Catskills. I planned another RV trip with my father. This time I agreed to meet him in Atlanta and travel west with him as far as I could handle. Also, this time I would figure him out; I would crack the code on John Howard Swofford and thus crack the code on myself.
WE DROVE FROM one small west Georgia town to another and wandered around the cemeteries looking for Swofford headstones. Or, rather, I wandered around the cemeteries looking for dead Swoffords because my dad’s lungs were in such bad shape that he couldn’t get out of the RV. My dad knew these towns from his youth and he knew that people we were related to were buried all over these cemeteries, and for a reason I could not extract from him he wanted photos of their headstones. He’d pull the RV into a town, find the cemetery, and send me out.
“Who are these people, Dad?”
“I don’t know for certain. I musta known some of ’em. My old blind aunt. Um. You know, hell, Tone. They are your kin, Swoffords! Just go on now, take me some pictures.”
And that is what I did, in Villa Rica, Temple, Mount Zion, Bremen, Carrollton and Whitesburg, and other towns, at the little church cemeteries.
I remembered the Whitesburg cemetery from drives with Iris when my brother was dying.
It was one of those hot Georgia August days when you look into the sky and expect to see birds stuck in mid-flight, so muggy and thick is the air.
We relaxed in the RV and looked through photos on the camera.
“Yep.” He pointed at the screen. “That there, in Bremen. That is cousins of my aunt. So what does that make them to you?”
“Dead cousins of your dead aunt?”
“This is family history.”
I didn’t see it as family history. I saw it as my father bringing to life the dead Swoffords whom he knew he would be joining very soon. It didn’t really matter what their names were or how they were related or even if they were related. He wanted to jam his digital camera with as many Swofford headstones as possible. If here, now, decades after these forgotten people had died, an old man wandered around their old tired towns and cemeteries and instructed his son to take photos of their headstones, they were not forgotten, and thus he must believe that someday decades from now another man might do the same. In 2070 a man might drive his son around west Georgia and instruct him to take photos of Swofford headstones, and one of those dead Swoffords would be a John Howard Swofford. And the living men would not have known him but they would have taken the photo of his headstone and thus brought him back to life in 2070.
The next afternoon we pulled into Auburn, Alabama. The university town’s streets were tight and narrow. When oxygen-depleted, my father was unable sometimes to remember the names of his own brothers and sisters, unable to recall what year he’d lived in Seville or Tokyo, but with ease he glided his massive RV to the old whites-only cemetery in Auburn. I had been here many times as a boy and the place had always scared me. It was out of a movie set, an old white Southern graveyard, the stench of history so heavy about the place.
“This here is my mama’s grave,” my dad said.
“I know that.”
“Just so you know the importance. This ain’t like those anonymous Swoffords yesterday.”
“I understand. Do you want to give it a shot? Want to try to make it to her graveside?”
“Don’t think I can make it, Tone.”
“Do you know where it is?”
He hopped down to the curb and pointed toward a massive oak. “Right around there. Right near that big oak. One way or the other from it. Probably this way from it.”
I grabbed his camera from his hand and headed toward the oak. I walked with my head down. I was not here to read the names of other dead Southerners. I was here only to make it to my paternal grandmother’s grave and snap a picture. Once my father died, there would be no reason for me to truck around the South. I’d probably never be back. I knelt at the grave, a very simple stone marked with her name and the dates 1921–1941. I realized that if she had lived I would probably not exist. What did this mean? Nothing. The life of the animals. But I grieved for my father. I grieved for that cute little chubby boy who never knew his mother. He sat one hundred yards away from me in his RV and the wounds from July 1941 burned still today.
Back at the RV my father stared at the digital photo of his mother’s grave marker.
“Same as I remember it,” he said. “I’m gonna be buried here, Tone. There’s still a few spots in the plot, you probably seen. My cousin is looking into it. Looks like I probably got rights to it.”
“It’s probably the place for you,” I said, without knowing whether I believed this or not.
THE NEXT DAY we drove along the Gulf Coast. When my grandfather returned from World War II the family moved to Biloxi. I knew that my father’s years in Biloxi had been the happiest of his boyhood. We drove up and down the coastal strip in Biloxi for hours and my father looked for the ghost of the little boy John Howard. We also drove by the VA old soldiers’ home. It was one of my dad’s favorite cracks, to say he wanted to retire to an old soldiers’ home. We pulled up to the gates but they wouldn’t let us in. The compound had been destroyed by Katrina.
“You OK with me setting up in an old soldier’s home, Tone?”
I knew that what he wanted me to say was “No, I’m not OK with that. Come live with me.”
“I’ll visit you here in Biloxi,” I said. “I like the weather and the oyster po’ boys.”
NEAR HOUSTON WE saw a fuel tanker catch fire on the roadside. The flames shot a hundred feet in the air. We pulled into a roadside hotel and my father slept in his rig and I got a room for the night.
In the morning while my father took his medications I went for a long run. It was a hundred degrees and I was out of shape, and about three miles out, down a long flat road, I was pretty certain that I’d initiated a cataclysmic cardiac event. I thought: Jesus Christ, my sick old dad is in his RV sucking meds for his failing lungs and I’m going to have a fucking heart attack on the side of the road and die a week before I turn forty, in the middle of nowhere, in Texas, with an unfinished novel languishing on my lap
top. There along the deserted road in Texas I swore off drugs of all kinds.
An old lady in a powder-blue Cadillac stopped and asked me if I needed a ride and I took her up on it: I swear she looked something like Jesus. The air-conditioning in her car was the best I’d ever experienced in my life.
Over a lunch of canned soup, my father said, “Can you help me out with something I been trying to figure out?”
“I’ll give it a shot.”
“I don’t understand why you rented out that fancy New York City apartment and moved up to the woods to live in a shack.”
I’d been lying to my father. I’d told him that I was renting my Chelsea apartment to a friend and that I’d decided to move to the woods to escape the city for a while.
“I mean,” he said, “I seen photos of that Manhattan apartment, and I seen photos of that shack, and I don’t see why any young single man would choose to move to the woods when he got that bachelor pad in the city. Ain’t all the women in the city?”
“I can confirm that most of the women are in the city. But I’m not young. I’ll be forty next week.”
“It’s a private writer’s retreat, or something like that? I just don’t get it, Tone. Don’t make a lick of sense to me.”
I could not keep the lie going any longer.
I said, “In that letter you sent me a few years back you said that someday you would see me on my way down. Well, here I am, Pops. I’m on my way down. You got what you wanted. I’m in total and complete financial ruin. I had to sell my apartment to scratch up some cash to live on. I live in a shack in the Catskills because it’s all I can afford right now.”
“I never wanted you to fail,” he said. “I just wanted to point out to you that sometimes people make money and it changes them. And then they turn around, and they have nothing. Not money. Not family. Money don’t mean shit. You always got family if you don’t alienate them.”