Peter Abrahams - Last of the Dixie Heroes

“Where’s her car?” Roy said.

“Sold,” said Rhett. “There’s a BMW waiting in New York.”

The driver honked again. Marcia got out. They watched her come up the walk, listened to the buzzer.

“I’ll see you before you go,” Roy said.

“And then what?”

“It’s two hours by plane,” Roy said. “Back and forth is easy.”

Rhett looked at the floor. Roy couldn’t get used to him without that tuft of untamed hair. Children had a kind of power they lost in adolescence.

The buzzer again: she kept her finger on it this time. Roy went to the door, opened it.

Marcia had new things too, including a diamond ring. Roy came to a decision, at least about the jewelry angle.

“I hope you explained his behavior is unacceptable,” Marcia said.

“I did not.”

“Does that mean you think it’s acceptable?”

“Rhett,” Roy called over his shoulder. “Go on out to the car.”

Rhett went out to the car. Marcia glared at him, but Rhett didn’t see it. He wasn’t looking at either of them.

“We’ve got to be civilized about this,” Marcia said, “for his sake.”

“What’s the real reason?” said Roy.

“What kind of remark is that?”

Roy stepped outside, so they were standing on the same level, down on the stoop. “I’ll have that necklace back,” Roy said.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

But she knew: he could see it in her eyes. “Try a more civilized answer,” he said.

Marcia bit her lip; that new habit, and the last thing to do her any good with him. “It’s gone,” she said.

“Gone?”

“I owed him a lot of money.”

“Who? You owed who a lot of money?”

“Barry.”

“You gave the necklace to Barry?”

“It’s partly your fault. If you’d of just steered him right on Globax, but oh, no.”

“Explain yourself.” Rhett and the driver were watching from the taxi. Roy said it again, more quietly.

“He thought the company was a mess and you didn’t set him straight when he asked you about it, so he ended up going short, with options this time, maximum exposure. All you had to do was tell him about the reorganization and he would have made the opposite play.”

“I don’t understand a word you’re saying.”

“For Christ sake, Roy, don’t you even know what’s going on at your own job? The stock’s gone into orbit. Barry lost the house.”

The house-this house, Roy’s house-felt funny when he was back inside: like a football field an hour after the game, when everybody’s gone. This house was lost too.

Roy took the key out of the patch box, tried it in the old trunk. But it was nothing like the key he already had, and didn’t fit. He replaced the key, sat at the kitchen table with the gun across his legs.

Gordo called. “Earl likes you,” he said.

Roy grunted.

“Remember I told you he had irons in the fire? He might have a job for me.”

“What kind of job?”

“At one of the dealerships.”

“You’re going to sell cars, Gordo?”

“Course not. This would be in the service department.”

“You’re not a mechanic.”

“Running the desk, Roy. He might take me on as a trainee for service manager.”

“What’s it pay?”

“I didn’t like to ask right off the bat,” Gordo said.

There was a long silence. Roy could hear the shopping channel on Gordo’s end. He sat with the gun on his lap.

“Tell me about this Chickamauga thing,” Roy said.

“That’s my man,” said Gordo. “Makes sense to get on Earl’s good side.”

But that wasn’t it.

Friday was his last day with Rhett. Roy knew he shouldn’t be thinking of it that way. Not the last day: flights were cheap if you booked ahead and he’d have a new job soon, all that back and forth on cheap tickets, making those jokes people made about the peanuts in the little foil packs, plus Rhett would come back for two or three weeks in the summer, Marcia had already said so, all of this adding up to not such a bad picture from a certain perspective. And in a few years Rhett would be in college somewhere, hooked to neither parent in particular, spending vacations where he wanted, and that might be good too: another not so bad perspective. So it wasn’t the last day or anything dramatic like that. It was just the last day when they’d all be living in Atlanta. The trick was finding those good perspectives and sticking to them. That was how to handle it, no question. But maybe not today, when for some reason Roy kept thinking about the night Rhett was conceived.

Rhett’s last day, or the last day they’d all be living in Atlanta, wasn’t a twenty-four-hour day, but ended at 5:45, departure time of the flight to La Guardia. Rhett was supposed to go to school until 10:30, something about saying good-bye and picking up his transcripts. The plan was for Roy to pick him up there and deliver him to the airport at 4:45. The hours in between were all theirs.

“Anything special you’d like to do?” Roy asked him on the phone.

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Something fun.”

Pause. “Drive the car.”

“What car?” Roy said, but even as he did, he understood what Rhett was getting at: he wanted a driving lesson from the old man. He was a little young, but why not? They could go to a parking lot at some mall and “Uncle Sonny’s car,” Rhett said.

Roy had gone wrong again. “Uncle Sonny’s car?”

“The demolition derby car. He said I could.”

Out of the question: that was Roy’s first thought. But what kind of a day was it going to be, just the two of them already separating in their minds, Roy trying to be cheerful, Rhett doing God knows what, the end of the day casting its shadow back on the hours before? What kind of a day was that?

“I’ll give him a call,” Roy said.

Roy pulled up outside the school at 10:15, just in case Rhett was early. He looked out the window at the playing fields, the swing set, all the swings hanging still, the chains gleaming gold in the sunlight against a background of green spring. A beautiful day, no doubt about it. It had been raining hard on that drive down to New Orleans the weekend Marcia decided the time for conceiving Rhett had arrived, a long drive with the windshield fogging up, Marcia leaning on his shoulder, giving him bites from her burger, the two of them holding hands while the backsplash from the eighteen-wheelers came like a monsoon. Roy didn’t want to think about it. He pressed play.

“I’m gonna tell my mother howdy, howdy, howdy,

When I get home,

Yes I’m gonna tell my mother howdy

When I get home, well, well, well.

I’m gonna shake my father’s hand

I will shake their hands that day

That’s where we walk, oh that Milky White Way

Lord one of these days.”

He listened to it a few times, more like just having it there with him, he knew it so well, and then a side door of the school opened and out came a kid, a boy, Rhett. Roy checked his watch. Ten twenty-five: good thing he’d come early. Rhett ran down the sloping lawn, his backpack bouncing along behind him, in the middle of all that sunshine and springtime green. The boy was going to be all right. That was what mattered. Roy tried to make his mind snap a lasting picture of that moment. He didn’t have the kind of mind that was good at things like that.

Rhett jumped in the car. Roy fought off the urge to pat him on the shoulder or, yes, give him a kiss, which was what he really wanted to do. “Glad to be out, huh?” he said.

“Out?” Rhett sucked on his knuckles; they were bleeding a little.

“Out of that school.”

“It’s not so bad,” Rhett said. He glanced at the school. “Let’s go.”