Shocked by this tableau—son posed for patricide—I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing. In a moment the gun again was resting over his shoulder, and I wondered if my senses, still scrambled from the night, had conjured a hallucination out of the morning haze. Until I looked at Will’s face.
“If we’d only stayed out another hour,” he snarled, “we could have missed this fucking adventure.”
Coming ashore, Mr. Savage said he’d keep an eye on me and sent his sons into the adjacent blind with the guide. Both nervous and eager, I was determined not to disgrace myself. And finding it impossible to reconcile last night’s world with this morning’s, I opted out of choosing and gave myself over to the tutelage of Cordell Savage.
The chatter of invisible ducks drew closer. “On a passing shot,” he whispered, “pick your bird, start from behind, swing your barrel through him and fire. On an incoming bird, just try to put the bead below its beak.”
Beauregard’s cheerful panting increased in tempo. “Stay down until I give the signal.” Ducks called all around us, squawking in casual, interrogative tones. A loud, brassy invitation issued from the blind beside us—the guide with his call, trying to lure them in. Sky and water were now clearly distinct. Cordell peered intently through the slit of the blind and finally said, “Now!”
Rising, I looked into a sky full of violent wings—shots booming all around me—and fired into the maelstrom. The impact knocked me backward. By the time I’d recovered my balance, Mr. Savage had lowered his gun, and Beauregard was paddling in the water, where four ducks were floating.
“Got a double,” Elbridge called from the other blind. I was fairly certain that none of the birds was mine. My mentor saved me the trouble of pretending. “Don’t worry,” he said. “You’ll get the hang of it.”
For the first time I could take in my surroundings: I found myself in a Pleistocene swamp, a miscegenation of land and water for which “lake” seemed a dubious label.
Half an hour went by without any further activity. By now the sky was bright, the sun invisible behind low clouds. Mr. Savage pointed out a bald eagle wheeling overhead. “Benjamin Franklin opposed adopting the bald eagle as our national symbol,” he whispered, “he wanted the damn wild turkey—can you imagine?—because he said the eagle lived in part by killing other birds.” He snuffled in amusement, wiped his nose ostentatiously on his sleeve. “Seems highly appropriate to me.”
He sucked thoughtfully on his cigarette. “I know Will didn’t want to come out here today,” he whispered, glancing over at me. “Two years ago he was supposed to hunt quail down the Delta with me and some old boys. He was out late with this caretaker we had. I inherited Jessie with my marriage and I finally had to fire his ass on account of his trying to turn my boy into a goddamn juvenile delinquent. I swear to God it’s a wonder Will’s skin isn’t black as coal the amount of time he spent in the damn servants’ quarters and sneaking around Beale Street instead of asleep in his room.”
He raised his head above the edge of the blind in reconnaissance before resuming his story.
“Anyway, Will stayed in bed and I brought his younger brother along. We were hunting horseback. Charlie Ledbetter had taken his gun out of the scabbard for some damn reason when his horse stepped in a hole and went down. Gun went off. Hit young A.J. square in the chest. Lifted him right out of his saddle.” He fell silent at the sound of an approaching flight, which eventually faded to the east. “I think Will blames himself,” he said. “Which isn’t to say he doesn’t blame me.”
We were silent for some time again before he spoke. “He ever tell you that story?”
“No sir,” I said. “Not exactly.”
“Not a day goes by I don’t wish it was me on that buckskin mare.” He turned and looked at me seriously for the first time. It was a long searching look, a blatant appraisal, and I can’t imagine what he might have seen to please him, for I was nervous and hung over and tired all the way to the ends of my hair and to this day I can’t comfortably meet the sustained gaze of a man like Cordell Savage. But it was at that moment, I believe, he decided to deputize me as his representative to Will. He offered me a cigarette, a Lucky Strike, and for the second time in less than twenty-four hours I accepted a ritual smoke, though the two implied promises seemed incompatible and even contradictory.
My pact with Will’s father was sealed with my first kill. When a string of high fliers approached our blind from the south, he let me take the shot. I stood and tracked the lead mallard, swinging from behind and pulling the trigger as the bead cleared the outstretched green head. To my astonishment the duck folded neatly and tumbled out of the sky at a forty-five-degree angle, seeming to fall for many miles before crashing into the cattails on the island behind us. Beauregard was already thrashing through the rushes; I was right behind him, oblivious to the harsh abrasion of the saw grass.
Holding the limp, broken body of the mallard in my hand I was briefly touched with remorse. I stroked back the feathers of the bird and saw, amidst the forest of quills, three shiny lice writhing on the translucent pink skin. Sinking to my knees, I threw up, retching stealthily under cover of the cattails as Beauregard barked and licked my neck. When I was finally purged I heard them calling my name. Wiping my mouth, I stood up holding my trophy overhead, and slogged back to the blind, affecting a triumphant mien that became real once Mr. Savage clapped me on the back and said, “That was a fine shot, boy.”
“Come on, I wanna show you something.” Will was shaking me. I woke with a start in the shotgun seat of the Cadillac, apparently in the same neighborhood where we had dissipated ourselves the night before. In the fading light of the afternoon, three sullen Negroes in fedoras slouched in front of a dilapidated storefront, smoking and surveying us with suspicious insouciance.
I followed Will, who nodded and walked past them into the store. A pool table took up half of the room within; a couple of pinball machines and a card table with folding chairs completed the furnishings. The two men playing pool looked up. “If it ain’t my man Will,” said the small, white-haired man who’d been shooting. He walked over and exchanged a complicated, slapping handshake with Will, who in turn introduced him to me, sans hand jive. “Patrick, Jessie Petit. Jessie’s my chief operating officer.”
“That’s what he says.” His broad smile revealed a gold front tooth. “It’s the same old shit, the black man works his ass off, the white man sits on his and collects the take.”
“You could always,” Will suggested, “go back to work for my old man.”
“Well, there’s white men and then there’s white men.”
“Now I suppose you’re going to tell me what a bad week we’ve had.”
Jessie laughed an exaggerated, mock-servile laugh. “Well, now you mention it, Knife White hit the box this week and that set us back some.”
“Seems like somebody’s always hitting big,” Will said jovially.
They continued in this obscure vein until two young women entered and, upon seeing us, started to back out; but Jessie waved them in and shooed us away. “Get on out of here, you bad for business.”
Back in the car I asked what kind of business Jessie was in.
“Numbers,” Will said. “He runs it, I back it. I’m the bank.”
“You don’t look like a bank.”
I’d heard the phrase “numbers racket” but hardly knew what it meant; I was only partly enlightened by the explanation Will delivered as we raced at terrifying speed through the back streets of South Memphis.
“Jessie was the groundskeeper on our place. He was the one who turned me on to the blues. All the time I was growing up he said he could get rich if only somebody’d back him in a numbers game. They all play the numbers—it’s like, I don’t know, a lottery. Pick three numbers and if they come up you win, a few hundred, a thousand, depending on the bet. Jessie just needed a bank. So I went to my uncle Jerome and asked to borrow ten grand and told him I’d pay him back in a month with interest. Well
, old Uncle J., he gave me my first drink and my first cigarette and he was always crazy as a bedbug and hot on the idea of corrupting minors. So now Jessie and me got so much money we don’t know where to hide it.”
He threw the car into a hard left turn, which slammed me up against the door.
“Where do you get the number,” I asked after I had regained my balance.
“The Wall Street Journal. Last digit of three Dow-Jones averages—industrials, utilities, transportation. Bets close at three p.m. Memphis time. An hour later when the exchange closes in New York you got the number.”
This fact suggested an intriguing if tenuous linkage between the poor sporting blacks of Memphis and the financial barons of Wall Street, and explained Will’s unlikely subscription to the Journal.
Will and I sat quietly through dinner that night—leftover turkey—while Cheryl smoldered innocently and Elbridge tried to explain to his father why he was taking a poetry class.
“Seems like a damn waste of time and money,” Mr. Savage said.
“For a nineteenth-century southern gentleman,” Elbridge claimed, “having a dozen or two poems committed to memory was as important as knowing how to shoot.”
Mr. Savage turned to me. “Fine piece of wing shooting,” he declared. “Now you’re blooded.” Tired as I was, I believe I blushed. As soon as we could, Will and I excused ourselves and crawled upstairs.
“I’m so goddamned tired,” I declared, “if Cheryl Dobbs spread herself naked across my bed I’d tell her to go find her own place to sleep.”
“I don’t know that I’m quite that tired.” Will opened a window and took a pack of cigarettes from a bureau drawer. I shook my head when he offered me one. I’d done enough smoking for one year.
“She’s not so hot,” he said suddenly.
“Not so hot? Are you crazy?”
“She’s got no spirit, no soul,” he said, blowing smoke out the window. “She’s like a pinup.”
“Exactly,” I said. “That’s what I mean.”
“Two-dimensional.”
“That girl’s as three-D as they come,” I insisted. “What do you like, that scrawny little colored girl?”
He narrowed his eyes and looked at me. “Maybe,” he said. I couldn’t tell if he was serious or just trying, as he often did, to get a rise out of me.
Suddenly the door burst open and Elbridge bounded in. “Hey, what you faggots up to? Shit, Will, you better put out that butt before I call your headmaster.”
Elbridge plucked the butt from Will’s fingers and took a drag. Beneath his other arm he cradled several books.
“If you didn’t know better,” Will said, “you’d think L.B. was a redneck.”
“Don’t go blowing my cover,” Elbridge said. “Next you’ll be telling people I know how to read and approve of desegregation.”
“What have you got?” Will demanded, grabbing for the paperbacks under his brother’s arm. After a brief struggle, Will claimed the books—Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn and Richard Brautigan’s A Confederate General in Big Sur—which were apparently intended for him all along.
“Don’t go telling anyone where you got ’em, little bro.”
Will admired the volumes with undisguised relish. “Thanks L.B.”
“You boys up for a party in town,” he asked. “See some of the quality? I don’t want your friend to get the wrong impression of us, think we’re all a bunch of Negro musicians and dope fiends.” I was flattered that Will’s older brother seemed to care about my opinion. Minutes later, as we roared out into the night, I sat quietly in the backseat of the Cadillac with Will, watching Cheryl’s golden hair bouncing in front of me for miles like a prize that would always be just out of my reach. This reverie was broken when Elbridge pulled through a set of stone gates and drove up to a luminous white mansion floating on a wide dark lawn, its circular drive an enchanted ring of white Cadillacs, red Mustangs and a matched pair of British racing-green MGs. This looked remarkably like the world to which I wanted to belong.
Raucous knots of clean-cut revelers loitered in the two-story entry hall, which was dominated by a circular staircase. A boy in a crewcut waved from the stairs and called out to L.B., who bounded up to meet him. I felt I had walked into a movie set, but at least, in my chinos and button-down shirt, I looked like the other boys. My first impression of the girls was that they all came in pastel shades—turquoise, peach and pink. The boys were essentially unchanged from that breed William Tecumseh Sherman had identified a century before, in a letter to Lincoln, as the “young bloods of the South: sons of planters, lawyers about town, good billiard-players and sportsmen, men who never did work and never will.”
One of them was introduced to me as Spook Lawson. “You still up at that Yankee homo ranch,” he asked Will.
“Spook,” Will said to me, “was, as you may have guessed, unable to gain entry to any of the nonmilitary schools up east.”
Somehow Will disappeared and I found myself standing alone, acutely self-conscious, with Cheryl. I wanted to take the opportunity to impress myself upon her, to tell her who I was, to tell her that I was; she couldn’t possibly imagine the sheer vivacity of my being, the poetry of my fierce yearnings and fears, or she wouldn’t simply be standing, half ignoring me. If she were to register a fraction of my tortured essence surely she would throw her arms around me. But I was at a loss for conversation, and I found it difficult to look at her directly. Beauty often affects us like deformity; we are afraid to seem to notice.
“Nice house,” I said, swiveling the beam of my gaze around the hall and beyond.
She nodded. She was probably even more daunted by the surroundings than I was, though at the time I was aware only of my own awkwardness.
“You want a beer or something,” I asked.
“I don’t drink alcohol,” she said. “I’m a Christian.”
A Yankee, I was both puzzled by this non sequitur and stymied in my fantasy quest for Cheryl’s attention, for I couldn’t even imagine a girl yielding to me, except under the influence. Never mind that she was dating my friend’s older brother; I was able to conjure away such minor logistical problems. But sobriety seemed insurmountable; and I was running out of time.
“Hey, good-looking,” said an older boy in a dark suit who seemed to stand several feet taller than me. “Where’d you come from?”
“Hopkinsville, Kentucky,” she answered, taking him at his word.
I felt I should say something to assert my presence, to affirm my role of temporary chaperon, but suddenly another boy had approached, nudging me with his arm as he inserted himself into the company. “Don’t mind my friend here. Prescott goes to Dartmouth and doesn’t know how to behave around the fair sex. Pack of wild Indians, literally. Uncivilized brutes. Say the word, darlin’, and I shall forcibly eject him from the premises.”
Prescott grinned at this dangerous sketch of himself, while the newcomer bowed deeply to Cheryl: “Jim Cheatham at your service.”
Cheryl was blushing, and in her nervous excitement, she nearly curtsied, clutching the sides of her dress. “Cheryl Dobbs,” she said, looking at the floor.
“I’m Patrick Keane,” I said, holding out my hand.
“Pat, why don’t you get me a beer?” Cheatham turned away from me, deftly sliding toward Cheryl and cutting me out of the circle. At that moment I saw Elbridge approaching with several friends.
I turned and slipped away, chagrined at my dereliction of duty. Unable to find Will, I wandered through the house admiring the furniture and the art, studying the paintings—dour portraits, rural landscapes and hunting scenes—as intently as a visiting art historian. My tour led me into a parlor of sorts, occupied exclusively by couples, draped on the sofas and stuffed chairs, making out. Retreating, I found a refuge—a book-lined, masculine den which was miraculously empty. I scanned the titles: old leather-bound sets of Dickens, Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving and something called Tennessee To
rts.
“Careful,” said a gravelly, female voice behind me. “No one’s touched them in years. They might explode or something.” A girl about my own age was standing in the doorway holding a glass full of ice in one hand, a pack of Winstons in the other. Having so far formed an impression of Southern Womanhood as fair-haired and brightly clad, this specimen seemed unusually dark and angular, her straight, shoulder-length hair as black as her turtleneck. She dropped into an armchair, spreading herself like butter over its leather surface, and lit a cigarette.
“So what are you?” she said, leaning her head back to exhale a cloud of smoke. “An intellectual?”
I haltingly introduced myself.
“I’m Lollie Baker,” she said. “If you open that cabinet to your left, you’ll find a glass and some whiskey.”
I hesitated. “Are you sure it’s okay?”
“Well, if you mean would Daddy mind, he might, if he knew, but that’s what makes it fun.” She studied her cigarette as if it were an exotic insect that had just flown into the room and landed unexpectedly in her hand. “It’s like,” she added, “who’d bother to start smoking if you didn’t have to sneak them. That’s my philosophy. Anything worth doing’s usually prefaced with the words ‘thou shalt not.’ Except maybe reading.” Delivered with a drawl, these sentiments seemed particularly radical. She paused to reconsider. “Hell, even reading’s supposed to be done only in moderation in these parts. And of course, well-bred southern young ladies aren’t supposed to tax their pretty little brains. Southern gentlemen don’t like them too educated.” She examined the perilously long ash on her cigarette, then tapped it into the narrow throat of a bronze urn on the table behind her. “How about you? I’ll bet you just love these blonde belles with cotton between their ears?”