The Fortunate Ones

by Ed Tarkington

He glanced down at the book.

  “Propaganda,” he said. “Hey, what are you doing tomorrow afternoon?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Coach is giving us a day off from practice. Want to hang out?”

  “What do you want to do?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Drive around in the truck. Maybe get together with some people.”

  “You can drive already?” I asked.

  “I’m sixteen,” he said. “My parents held me back.”

  “Did you have bad grades?” I asked.

  Arch laughed.

  “No,” he said. “It’s just a thing people do. Most of the kids here get held back before kindergarten.”

  “Cool,” I said.

  Where I came from, no one was held back; on the contrary, the mothers were eager to get us into school as early as possible; reaching school age meant nine months of free childcare and lunch.

  “So do you want to come or what?”

  “My mom has to work tomorrow night.”

  “I can give you a ride home,” he said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s kind of far away.”

  “It’s not that far.”

  “You know where I live?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “East Nashville.”

  Overhearing conversations about summer camps and beach vacations and country clubs, I had dreaded the moment when everyone would discover that I lived in a cheap apartment off Gallatin Pike. But I wanted to know him—to be near him—badly enough to risk the shame.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Good,” he said. “Meet me in the quad after school tomorrow.”

  Like many of the Yeatman boys, Arch drove a truck. Arch’s was a black Ford F-150 with oversized tires and a white fiberglass camper top on the bed, a Grateful Dead steal your face sticker placed in the center of the rear window.

  We drove out of the lot, down the long, dark driveway, and out into Belle Meade.

  “You live alone with your mom?” he asked.

  “My aunt lives with us,” I said, as if my mother had taken in Sunny and not the other way around.

  “What about your dad?” he asked. “Where does he live?”

  “He died.”

  “Oh, man,” Arch said. “What happened?”

  “Vietnam.”

  “Man, that’s tough,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “He was a hero.”

  “I don’t know if he was a hero.”

  “Sure, he was.”

  Arch asked me more questions—about where my parents were from, how we’d arrived in Nashville, and so forth. I shaped my answers to hide the seedier aspects of my history. Instead of a runaway, my mother became an orphan, and Sunny, her only living relative. My mother had left college to get married. We’d once lived in a house. With each half-truth and outright lie, I realized how easy it was. Just as my mother always presented herself at Yeatman in what seemed to me a costume, I could write myself a role and act it out. I couldn’t hide where I lived or what sort of life I’d come from. But I could recast my story in a manner that made me seem less inferior than I felt. I was sure my mother would have no problem with Arch and the rest of the Yeatman people believing her to be a forlorn war widow, scratching and clawing to give her only child a leg up in the world. And I could be the son of a fallen hero instead of a bastard whose father had never known he existed.

  Arch’s house, on Glen Eden, was a Colonial Revival with a slate roof, three dormer windows, two brick chimneys, and a white-columned side porch facing out onto a large yard that sloped gently down to the street.

  He pulled around the back, in front of a two-car garage. I followed him through the back door into a kitchen with a ten-foot ceiling and a large island with tiled countertops. At the end of the counter sat a woman. She looked up and smiled.

  “Charlie,” she said. “What a pleasure to meet you.”

  Mrs. Creigh had bobbed silver hair. She wore no makeup. The pink reading glasses at the end of her nose made her seem too old to be Arch’s mother. Her shirt and wrists were faintly soiled; a pair of gardening gloves and a straw hat lay beside her teacup and newspaper.

  “There’s some chicken salad and pimento cheese in the fridge,” she said. “Do you like chicken salad, Charlie?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “I’ll make some sandwiches,” she said.

  “Thanks, Mom,” Arch said.

  What a thing it would be, I thought, to come home every day to such a house, to find your modestly elegant mother sitting at the kitchen table perusing the newspaper or the latest issue of Southern Living, waiting to ask you about your day and make you a chicken salad sandwich.

  I followed Arch through a hallway where the walls were covered with family photos: Arch and his older sisters at every age; his mother holding an infant, his eldest sister’s child; the whole family dressed in matching chinos and white shirts on a beach. The offshore wind blowing their hair just so. Arch’s mother looked more or less the same; his father looked much younger than his wife, with a thick head of golden hair and a smile identical to his son’s. The sisters were striking, in the way people with breeding can be.

  The hallway opened up onto a sun-splashed room with a sectional couch and a glass-top coffee table with a bright flower arrangement in a ceramic urn. A pair of bookshelves flanked an enormous television. On the opposite wall by the windows stood a pool table. Arch racked the balls and handed me a cue.

  “You want to break?”

  “You go ahead,” I said.

  He cracked the cue ball and set to work clearing the table. After a few minutes, Mrs. Creigh appeared in the doorway with plates holding sandwiches and little ramekins of fruit salad. She set the plates on the coffee table. Arch leaned his cue against the wall and opened up the cabinet beneath the television set to reveal a hidden bar refrigerator.

  “Want a Coke?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “Hey,” he said. “You want to go swimming later?”

  “Where?” I asked.

  “A friend’s house,” he said.

  “I don’t have a suit,” I said.

  “You can wear one of mine.”

  “All right.”

  After a few games of pool, Arch led me upstairs and down another corridor decorated with family photos, to his bedroom. He had a desk set strewn with books and school supplies, a queen-sized bed, a cabinet filled with awards and trophies, Pink Floyd and Grateful Dead and Rolling Stones posters on the walls. He disappeared into his closet and came back out holding a pair of yellow swim trunks.

  “My old Birdwells,” he said. “Size medium. Try them on.”

  “Where’s the bathroom?” I asked.

  “What?” he said. “Scared to get naked in front of me?”

  It felt like some sort of dare. I took off my shoes and pants. Eyes fixed on the floor, I slid off my underwear and stepped into the yellow trunks.

  “Fit all right?” Arch asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Thanks.”

  He stripped before searching his drawers for his swim trunks and a T-shirt. I was unused to being around another boy so at ease in his nakedness. This turned out to be the case for many of the Yeatman boys, conditioned as they were, from years in country club and private school locker rooms, to be unashamed of their bodies. It was easier for Arch, no doubt. He was tan and lean and muscled. I took my time tying my shoes.

  I followed him back downstairs into the kitchen. He grabbed his keys and sunglasses off the counter and walked out the back door.

  “Bye, Mom,” Arch called.

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “To the Haltoms’,” he said.

  Haltom—that was the name of the man sitting in the office during my interview with Dr. Dodd, watching over the whole proceeding like some sort of auditor.

  We drove through the leafy lanes until we came out onto Belle Meade Boulevard. Both sides of the street were lined
with houses too grand to be called such. I had difficulty imagining anyone actually lived in such places—that to someone, these places were home.

  “The Haltoms are old friends. Family, really,” Arch said. “You probably know Jamie. He’s a freshman too. His twin sister, Vanessa, goes to Steptoe. We’ve known each other all our lives. Jim Haltom is like a dad to me, especially since my own dad died.”

  “Your dad died?” I asked.

  “I didn’t tell you that, did I?” he said. “I forget sometimes that people don’t already know. Yeah, my dad died, when I was twelve. Brain cancer.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “At least I had him for twelve years, right? You never got to know your dad at all.”

  “I didn’t know what I was missing.”

  “I guess you could look at it that way. Anyhow, Uncle Jim was my dad’s best friend since college. He promised my dad he’d look out for my mom and me. He’s pretty much my best friend, to tell you the truth.”

  Even then, it did not occur to me that Arch Creigh being assigned as my big brother might have been more than a happy accident.

  Near the end of the Boulevard, not far from the country club, he turned onto a pea gravel driveway that led through a moss-covered stone gate and wound up past a lawn dotted with tall trees. At the top of the slope stood an enormous stucco manor home with a steep-columned porch and a slate roof lined with copper flashing turned a luminous green. We parked and walked up to the side door. Arch rapped on it. A light-skinned black woman in a white short-sleeved blouse opened it.

  “Hi, Shirley,” Arch said. “This is Charlie.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Charlie,” Shirley said. “Jamie’s out back. Y’all walk on through.”

  I can still see the great house on the Boulevard as I did on that first day: the drawing room, with the toile settee and the velvet Empire sofa and armchairs, and oil paintings of landscapes, and portraits of prize-winning horses and hunting dogs and distant ancestors, and the crystal chandelier descending from the high vaulted ceiling. The dining room, with its broad teak table, the inlaid sideboard with the silver tea set, the hand-painted wallpaper depicting scenes from medieval China. Outside the windows, the bright blooms of heirloom roses.

  I followed Arch out the French doors, onto the stone porch, and down through the rose garden, toward the pool and the small white house next to it. Across from the diving board stood a fountain trimmed with a tile mosaic. On the other end, a slate path led to the open doors of the pool house. Inside, someone hidden by the back of a large couch was playing Punch-Out!! on the TV.

  “Typical,” Arch said as we came in. “Beautiful day, sweetest backyard pool in Tennessee, and Jamie Haltom’s inside playing video games.”

  Rounding the couch, he snatched up a remote control from the coffee table and pressed the power button. The screen went dark.

  “Goddamn it, Arch!” a voice cried.

  Arch picked up a can of Coors Light from the tabletop and shook it.

  “Give me that,” the boy said.

  He stood up and snatched at the beer, which Arch dangled in front of him like a dog’s chew toy. I recognized him from school; we had two classes together—math and history. Jamie Haltom straightened himself and cocked his head.

  “Hey,” he said.

  We must have been thinking the same thing—that we were being set up, like a playdate.

  “Charlie, Jamie,” Arch said. “Jamie, Charlie.”

  He emptied the beer into the bar sink and tossed it into a garbage can.

  “Damn it, Arch,” Jamie said.

  “Shut up, dumbass,” Arch said. “Come on, you need a little vitamin D.”

  We had just come out of the pool house when she appeared: the loveliest girl I’d ever seen, emerging from the rose garden and traipsing across the yard in an oversized white T-shirt and a pair of white-framed Wayfarers, a thick paperback book under her arm.

  “Is this Charlie?” the girl asked.

  “I told her about you,” Arch said. “Charlie, this is Vanessa. Jamie’s twin sister.”

  “Nice to meet you, Charlie,” she said.

  “Hi,” I replied.

  Vanessa pulled her T-shirt over her head to reveal a two-piece seersucker bathing suit. She walked around to one of the lounge chairs and settled in to read her book.

  She was still very much a girl—just shy of fifteen—but she had emerged from the chrysalis. Were it not for their matching blond hair, no one would ever believe she and Jamie were twins. The only features that betrayed her youth were the braces on her teeth and a stray pimple near the corner of her mouth, which could have easily been mistaken for a beauty mark.

  “Whatcha reading?” Arch asked.

  “Sense and Sensibility,” she said. “Last of my summer reading books. The quiz is on Monday.”

  “Can’t be any worse than Black Boy,” he said.

  “It’s actually pretty good,” she said. “Did you do all of your summer reading, Charlie?”

  I nodded. I’d read the books the first week of summer and had scanned back over them every night, thinking about what kind of questions I might ask about them on the first day of class to show how carefully I’d read.

  “Which did you like best?” Vanessa asked.

  “A Separate Peace,” I said.

  “Oh, please,” Jamie said. “I’ve never been so bored in my life.”

  “I thought it was good,” I said.

  “You’re a terrible liar,” Jamie said.

  I did like A Separate Peace. It was about a prep school for boys. Every page seemed pregnant with precious intelligence. I regarded it less as a story than as a user’s manual.

  Jamie grinned and gave me a playful punch so I would know he hadn’t intended to embarrass me, or if he had, he wanted to walk it back.

  “Just messing with you,” he said.

  We didn’t do much of anything that afternoon, but it was all a dazzlement to me—splashing around in the pool, lounging on recliners, listening to the radio. Arch performing jackknife dives and backflips. Vanessa reading on her recliner. I was marveling at the fine shape of Vanessa’s calves when a shadow falling across the pool startled me out of my daydream. Mr. Haltom loomed over us in his shirtsleeves.

  “Hey, Uncle Jim,” Arch said.

  We climbed out of the pool to greet him.

  “Hello again, young man,” Jim said.

  “Hello, sir.”

  Feeling his powerful fingers squeezing my own, I found it unfathomable that Jim Haltom could ever have been a boy himself.

  “How are you liking Yeatman so far?”

  “It’s great,” I said.

  “Arch here taking care of you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He slipped his hand into the pocket of his suit pants. I heard the sound of jangling keys.

  “Hey there, son,” Jim said. “Good day at school?”

  “Yeah,” Jamie said. “I guess.”

  “Great. Say, kids, I’m meeting a few fellows downtown to go over a deal. Your mother wants to order in tonight. Would you mind calling the club, Vanessa? Ask Carl to run it over.”

  “Okay, Daddy,” she said.

  He turned and strode across the lawn. The moment his father disappeared through the French doors on the other side of the rose garden, Jamie went back into the pool house and emerged holding a beer. Vanessa let out a long, low sigh.

  “It’s just a beer,” Jamie said.

  Vanessa closed her book. “I’m going inside to call the grill,” she said. “Arch, are you and Charlie staying for dinner?”

  “Do you mind?” Arch asked.

  “Not at all. Charlie, what would you like?”

  “They have good cheeseburgers,” Arch said.

  “That sounds good,” I said.

  “Order some seasoned fries,” Jamie said.

  She slipped her T-shirt back over her head and started off toward the house.

  “I’ll be back in a few,” Arch said. />
  He toweled himself off and jogged after Vanessa. Jamie went back into the pool house. I walked in after him.

  “They’ll be a while,” he said. “You want a beer?”

  He held the can out toward me.

  “Okay,” I said.

  I sat down on the couch next to him. Jamie turned on the television.

  “So, Arch and Vanessa,” I said. “Are they—”

  “What?” Jamie said. “Boyfriend and girlfriend? Not yet. Arch just recently got interested, now that it looks like Vanessa’s going to turn out hot. I mean, we’re practically related. Technically it’s not incest, I guess, but it’s pretty close.”

  “Well, we are in Tennessee,” I said.

  Jamie let out a harsh, barking laugh.

  “So what’s your deal?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know. Your deal. Where are you from, what do you do, what brought you here to my humble abode? You’re clearly not a ringer.”

  “What’s a ringer?” I asked.

  “You know. A ringer,” he said. “A stud athlete meant to bring glory to the empire.”

  The fact that most of my nonwhite classmates were talented athletes had not escaped my attention. I remembered what Terrence had said about his cousin.

  “So what’s your special talent?” he asked. “All the scholarship kids are good at something.”

  “How do you know I’m on scholarship?” I asked.

  “Come on,” he said. “Where’d you get your shoes? Payless?”

  My face flushed hot. I took a big gulp from the beer.

  “I’m just curious,” Jamie said. “Are you a mathlete? A violinist? Did you build a nuclear reactor in your closet? You must be bringing something to the table.”

  “What do you bring to the table?” I asked.

  He rolled his eyes.

  “Look around,” he said.

  Jamie, at least, was always honest with himself. Most Yeatman boys—many who lived in similarly opulent surroundings—maintained the delusion that they had earned their places through their intrinsic merits. Jamie knew exactly what he brought to the table. He was neither proud nor ashamed; it was just a fact.

  “So what do you do?” he said.

  I thought about it. Did I have a gift? I’d considered myself a promising student, but after only a week at Yeatman, I had discovered myself to be decidedly mediocre. What else was I good at?