The Fortunate Ones

by Ed Tarkington

  “Who is that?”

  “I assume you mean the one on top?” Averett said.

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “Todd is an old friend of mine from Chattanooga. Arch got his number from me, actually. The amateur photography was Todd’s idea, but when he contacted me about how he might make some use of it, I thought, ‘What an opportunity.’”

  I felt dizzy.

  “Turn it off,” I said. “I’ve seen enough.”

  Averett closed the laptop.

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  “I want to go to Washington,” he said.

  “You’re not happy in Atlanta?”

  “Are you fucking kidding?” he said.

  “It’s a nice city,” I said.

  “Right,” he said. “Don’t you get it? Arch has a gift. He could go all the way. With the right people around him, of course. I tried to explain that to him before. If I’d been around, this would never have happened. He’s very lucky it fell into my hands. I’d like to fix things for him. But it won’t be cheap.”

  “Why are you telling this to me?” I said. “Why don’t you just ask him yourself?”

  Averett reached down under the table and brought out a folder.

  “Arch never wanted me to leave,” Averett said. “He knows he needs me. The lovely wife, on the other hand—well, let’s just say she’s not my strongest advocate.”

  “I don’t like you much either.”

  “Why don’t you open the envelope?”

  “Why don’t you fuck off and die?”

  “Just take a look,” he said. “For Vanessa’s sake.”

  I opened the envelope and slid its contents out onto the table. Averett sat back and smirked as I numbly absorbed the evidence of my own recent indiscretion—so recent that I could still smell her on my fingers when I covered my mouth with my hand.

  “I’d rather not have to share these with Arch,” Averett said. “And I’d really hate if they got into the wrong hands. But as you know, people will do pretty fucked-up things for money.”

  I resisted the urge to lunge across the table and choke the bastard to death. For one thing, I was no fighter—not yet, anyway. For another, Averett had me; he had both of us. Attacking him wouldn’t deliver me from the predicament, which was not mine alone to resolve.

  “Would you mind telling me how you got these?” I asked.

  “You should know, Boykin,” Averett said, “that I specialize in opposition research.”

  I nodded.

  “What do you want me to do?” I asked.

  “Tell Mrs. Creigh about our conversation,” he said. “As much or as little as you see fit. Tell her I’m coming back. If she gets in the way, I’ll be offering my services—and my resources—to the opposition.”

  “What should I say to Arch?” I asked.

  “Tell him to call me at his earliest convenience.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “He’ll wonder why you didn’t just call him yourself.”

  “No, he won’t.”

  I sat dumbly as Averett put the envelope and the laptop into his briefcase. He stood and buttoned his jacket.

  “Get yourself together,” he said. “Have a drink. Then go back to the office. I’ll expect a call by tomorrow afternoon.”

  He shouldered his briefcase. He paused as he walked past me.

  “A word of advice,” he said. “Next time, draw the blinds.”

  sixteen

  I left without bothering to find Jamie. My phone rang over and over. After the tenth call, I turned it off. I paid no attention to where I was going. I rolled down the windows and listened to the noise of the city as I smoked one cigarette after another. After a while, I stopped at a gas station and bought two more packs of Camel Lights and a tallboy of Pabst, which I drank from a brown paper bag.

  I drove and drove, following the lines of the road without care or reason. I drove through East Nashville, down toward where Montague Village once had stood. I drove across the river, down West End and up Belle Meade Boulevard, slowing down but not stopping in front of the great house. I drove past the stone columns marking the road up to Yeatman. I drove across the bridge in Bellevue, along the Natchez Trace, back down and over toward Leiper’s Fork. I was so lost in thought that it came as a genuine surprise when I found myself on the driveway in front of the farm, where my mother and Jim had spent their life together—where the first half of my life in Nashville had ended and the second half began.

  I was turning around to leave when the porch lights came on and the door opened. Jim came out, peering down at me from the top of the stairs. I cut the engine, stepped out of the car, and walked over toward him.

  “Charlie?” he said. “What on earth?”

  What could I say? It was nearly midnight.

  Jim looked me over. I must have looked ghastly.

  “Come in, son,” he said.

  I sat down on the couch, in the same spot I’d sat when Jim and my mother informed me that they were going to have a child together. Jim went into the kitchen. A short while later, he came back with two mugs filled with coffee.

  “How do you take it?” he asked.

  “Black is fine,” I said.

  He handed me a mug, set the other on the table, eased into a chair by the fireplace, and waited for me to explain myself.

  “I need your help,” I said.

  “I’ll always help you,” he said. “You know that.”

  “I don’t know where to begin.”

  “Try this,” he said. “Tell me about your day.”

  I must have been drunker than I realized; I told him everything. Not everything, of course—I left out the more graphic details—but I did not shy away from the facts, from Averett’s unsavory home movie to my visit from Vanessa the previous night and the evidence of that encounter. He took it all in quite calmly.

  “Let’s take a walk,” he finally said.

  We went out onto the porch and down the steps and into the field. The only lights came from the house. The sky was brilliant with stars. It was beautiful enough to make me weep.

  “You must feel pretty disgusted with me,” I said.

  He took a moment to consider before speaking.

  “No,” he said. “I’m not disgusted. Just a little disheartened.”

  “You’re not surprised?”

  “Not especially.”

  “You knew.”

  “Which part?”

  “About Arch.”

  “I’ve known Archer all his life,” he said. “You know how I feel about him. I love him as if he were my own. I know his strengths and his weaknesses. And I know Vanessa’s as well. And yours too.”

  Despite the darkness, I could see his face well enough to notice a wistful smile.

  “I never wanted Archer to go into politics,” he said. “You know about his father.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “That sort of thing runs in the family,” he said. “You’ve seen it, haven’t you?”

  “Glimpses.”

  “Arch is stronger than his father. His need to prove himself always seemed enough to hold back the darkness. But maybe not strong enough. And there’s the other thing. What’s the old saying? Don’t get caught with a dead girl or a live boy.”

  “Did you ever say that to Arch?”

  “Of course. But Arch stopped listening to me a long time ago,” Jim said. “Anyway, Arch made his own choices.”

  “Maybe that other thing isn’t really a choice,” I said.

  “Everything is a choice, Charlie,” he said. He looked up at the stars.

  There was no point in disagreeing with him; he would never come around to understanding anything outside of what he’d always known. “What do you want me to do, Jim?” I asked.

  “What do you want to do?”

  “I don’t want to do anything,” I said.

  “That’s not an option, son.”

  “I
know.”

  I tossed my cigarette on the ground and stamped it out.

  “I just remembered,” Jim said. “I have something for you.”

  I followed him back up into the house. I resumed my place on the couch. Jim went upstairs. A few minutes later, he came down holding a cardboard file box. He set the box on the table in front of me and sat back down in his chair.

  “Go ahead,” he said. “Open it.”

  Inside, I found stacks of letters, envelopes filled with photographs, and an old Zippo lighter, and a set of dog tags. I lifted the string up and held the dog tags in my palm. The name I saw was one I had not thought about for a very long time: John LaRue.

  I looked up at Jim.

  “That’s right,” he said.

  I sat in silent astonishment, flipping through photographs of the father I’d never known.

  “Five or six years after you left,” Jim explained, “your mother received a letter on US Department of Defense stationery.”

  Jim went on. A group of widows had launched a project to connect Vietnam veterans with their lost comrades’ families, with emphasis on MIAs. An attorney from Chicago named Norman Hatcher reached out to them, looking for my mother on behalf of his dear friend John LaRue, who, it turned out, was never missing in action, but in fact, had been killed in a covert operation in Cambodia. At the time, the Army was denying any activity across the borders of Laos and Cambodia, so the mission was kept a secret, and the KIAs were filed as MIAs until the Army could come up with a passable cover story. Norman Hatcher was with my father when he died, and promised him that he’d go back home and find his girl, Bonnie, and tell her that he loved her. The task turned out to be harder than he’d expected; he’d given up until he’d received word of the widows’ project. The widows, it seemed, were much more resourceful and determined than the men themselves.

  “We flew Norman Hatcher down here,” Jim said. “He stayed with us for a few days. He was a kind man. He talked a lot about Jesus. He’d become a born-again Christian. I think that’s why he’d wanted to find your mother, and you. That’s right, your father knew about you. It’s in the letters.”

  I struggled to hold the letters steady enough to read them. They were written in block script, surprisingly clear and nimble, given my impression of John LaRue. His words were not remarkable—plainspoken declarations of love, vows of devotion and determination to come home and rescue me and my mother, to live happily ever after and so forth. The sort of words any soldier in a combat zone would write to the girl back home, who had become the focus of all of his hopes in the midst of all of that terror and brutality. The thing that kept him going, perhaps even the thing that kept him sane. Nevertheless, they stirred in me a sensation too deep and powerful to name. For a short while, Arch and Vanessa and the quandary in which I had so foolishly implicated myself vanished from my thoughts. My father knew about me. I had existed to him before he died. Had he lived, I would have known him. Perhaps he’d have come home and married my mother. Perhaps I’d have lived an entirely different life.

  “We showed Mr. Hatcher your picture, told him you were doing well,” Jim said. “Your mother didn’t want to say where you were. I think she was embarrassed. She thought it might hurt poor Mr. Hatcher to learn that his dead friend’s boy had run away from home. She didn’t think she could make him understand. So we told him you were away at school, but we’d tell you about him, and you’d write if you wanted to speak to him yourself.”

  “Is he still alive?”

  “Norman Hatcher? I don’t know,” Jim said. “I imagine so. It wasn’t that long ago.”

  I picked up one of the pictures: a color shot of two men sitting on a wall of sandbags around a foxhole. I didn’t have to ask which one was John LaRue. I could tell by the eyes, and the mouth, and the crooked smile, which were mine as well.

  “Your mother was waiting for you to come home so she could give you all of these things and tell you what she’d learned, and how she’d felt,” he said. “But by the time you came back, she was too sick to remember. And I couldn’t think about anything else but her. We just let it slip our minds. I had all but forgotten about these things until just a few weeks ago when I was taking boxes out to put into storage. I would have called you then, but you were busy with the campaign. Anyway, there it is. Your history.”

  I flipped through the pictures, studying my father’s face, observing our resemblance and the differences between us, imagining how my mother would have been smitten to the point of recklessness with him.

  “She never really talked to you about your father, did she?” Jim said.

  “Not much,” I said.

  “She never told me much either,” he said. “Not until we heard from the widows and Norman Hatcher. I have to admit, I was very jealous. I loved your mother as I have never loved anything else in this world. So much that it pains me to this day to think of her with anyone else, or worse, to think of her loving anyone else. I have to remind myself that if not for John LaRue, and you, your mother and I would never have found each other.”

  I put down the picture and picked up the Zippo. The brass was smooth and burnished. My father’s initials—jtl—were engraved on its side.

  “I was so jealous of you,” I said.

  “I was jealous of you too,” he said. “You had her to yourself for so long. I think if I hadn’t been so jealous, I’d have tried harder to bring you back. When you told me to go fuck myself, down in Mexico, I was relieved. I didn’t want to share her with you. She loved you first, and best. Her heart broke when you ran away. She never got over it. Dolly helped, but that pain was always there.”

  “I am so sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” he said. “The past is as good as it’s going to get.”

  We sat in silence. After a while, I set the lighter down on the coffee table.

  “I think I could use a drink,” Jim said. “Would you like a drink?”

  “Oh, yes,” I said.

  Before long, I was good and drunk. I don’t recall how much Jim had to drink; much less than I, presumably, as he was steady enough to help me up the stairs to my old room and into my bed.

  The last hour or so was a fog, but I do remember this. After he’d put me in bed, before Jim left the room, he hugged me, and I reached up and held on to him. I closed my eyes, and I thought of my mother, and I knew Jim was thinking of her too. And as I held on to Jim, for a moment, I imagined that I was clinging not to my stepfather, but to my real father, John Truman LaRue, made flesh again, who had arrived at that precise moment, to tell me . . . to tell me what?

  seventeen

  When I came downstairs the next morning, Jim and Dolly were gone. So I sat in the kitchen alone, drinking coffee. A memory came to me. Royal Gorge, Colorado, near the end of a monthlong road trip with Arch and the twins the summer after he graduated from Yeatman. The trip had been my first experience of the vastness of this country: the desert and the plains and the great mountains of the West, the color and the light and the black depth of the horizon as the sky went from blue to pink and orange to purple to cobalt flecked with innumerable stars. The sweet scents of sage and fir, woodsmoke and black mountain earth.

  Arch wanted us all to kayak through the gorge; he said the experience would be life-changing. Even then, he was always trying to change our lives for us.

  We rented gear and arranged transportation at an outfitter in Salida. The night before the trip, Jamie ate a pot brownie and drank about fifteen Natural Lights; when we woke him up to leave, he barely made it out of the tent before heaving. So we left him at the campsite to sleep it off and drove to the put-in, about a quarter mile upriver from the first rapids. Arch left Vanessa and me with the boats and paddles while he drove to the take-out area, where he’d arranged for a ride back on one of the rafting company buses.

  Early morning, June, Colorado. Infinite sky. The canyon downstream, rocks scattered along the hills around its mouth, scattered patches of sweetgrass and yellow and purple w
ildflowers. The scent of piñon. Dirty-blond hair. Goose-bumped flesh along the slopes of narrow arms and calves. The faint trace of pale lip balm along the Cupid’s bow of her lovely mouth.

  Had we known the river was near flood stage, Vanessa and I would have been afraid. We should have remembered it was already Arch’s habit to lead us into things for which we were not properly prepared.

  A bus loaded with rafts pulled to a stop, Arch hopped out, and twenty minutes later we were on the river, speeding toward the mouth of the canyon, the sound of the rapids growing louder and more violent as the cliffs rose up and the shadows fell across the water.

  We’d paddled kayaks in the gentler rivers of Tennessee and North Carolina, and thought we knew what we were doing. Arch had coached us before we put in, reminding us how to bail out and swim if we flipped (only he knew how to “Eskimo roll” a kayak back upright if it capsized). We agreed that Arch would lead, followed first by Vanessa, with me at the rear.

  When we reached the first rapids, I didn’t even have time to be frightened. The current took over. After maybe twenty or thirty seconds of pure terror, we poured out into the flat and looked around for each other, our faces blanched with awe and relief.

  After that first drop, we settled into an easy, confident rhythm. The fear of disaster dissipated. Soon, the water picked up speed again as the channel narrowed and dropped between the rocks and turned to roaring froth. At the center of the run stood a large boulder almost obscured by the explosion of aerated foam and mist spewing up over it. Arch nimbly steered to the side of the rock and descended. Even if she’d been much more experienced, Vanessa wouldn’t likely have had time to follow Arch’s maneuver. The nose of her boat plunged over the rock, tilted up, and capsized, just as it sped toward a second, much larger drop. I had only a moment to look for her before I slid past the boulder and fell into the spume.

  I eddied out at the bottom of the run, below what paddlers call a “hole,” where the steepness of the drop causes the flow of the water to recirculate, creating a vortex capable of sucking a boat under. It was the only part of the river about which Arch had expressed any real concern. He’d urged us to paddle hard throughout and throw our weight forward at the bottom. Even though I was doing as I’d been told, I’d felt the hole sucking me down for a jarring, petrifying moment, grasping at the stern of the kayak before the current caught the hull and spit me out into flat water.