The Last of the Savages

by Jay McInerney

  Fresh from his appearance at the Peabody, Lash LaRue made a big splash with the Memphis hipsters—the cowboy from outer space. William Eggleston, the photographer, arrived in a hearse equipped with an oxygen tank, accompanied by the writer Stanley Booth. I remember seeing Eggleston, an anomalous, razor-thin figure in an elegant black suit, dripping anomie and looking askance at the hippies.

  Wading blindly through these legends-in-the-making, I spotted Stubblefield leaning against a wall watching the proceedings with stoned intensity.

  “Will around,” I asked.

  “Somewhere. How’s Yale,” he asked, drawing forth a long earnest answer from me before I realized that he couldn’t care less, that he was stoned out of his mind. “My old man went there and so did his old man,” he said, as if to drive home the point that I needn’t have bothered to yammer away about it.

  “So what do you do for Will,” I asked, with what I hoped was a discernible measure of contempt for all mere functionaries, subordinates and flunkies.

  I thought he hadn’t heard me, but finally he turned to me and said, “I ball all the chicks is what I do.”

  Finding no niche for myself in this bacchanal, I explored the edges until I found Taleesha in an office, curled up in a beanbag chair, improbably reading Samuelson’s Economics.

  “Hey, Patrick,” she said, looking up and grinning, scrambling to free herself from the grip of the chair. “Oh, shit! We were supposed to meet you, weren’t we? God, I’m sorry. Living with Will I start to get on his schedule, which is no schedule at all. Anyway, it’s good to see you”—she shook her head—“in this zoo.”

  I hadn’t seen her since the fire, and I was happy to discover that my residual guilt—about not having been there to prevent it—seemed to dissolve in her presence. I gave her a hug. “Happy New Year.”

  “Have you seen Will yet,” she asked.

  “I haven’t been so blessed.”

  “He’s doing his Buddhist Rasputin thing tonight. Come on, let’s find him.”

  We took the stairs to the basement, where a red sign glowed above a door: RECORDING! DO NOT ENTER WHEN LIGHT IS ON. Taleesha pushed on through. Dressed entirely in black, Will was sitting astride a stool in front of the console of a mixing board, one hand on the board, a huge joint in the other. Jessie Petit sat in the corner reading a newspaper.

  “Play that last track again,” Will said to the middle-aged man sitting beside him.

  “Will, it’s Patrick,” Taleesha announced.

  Turning slowly, Will registered me with a complacent look. Making a minute adjustment on the board, he stood up and held his arms open. I walked awkwardly into his fleshy embrace.

  “Dink Stover, I presume.”

  “I went to the hotel,” I said, trying unsuccessfully to keep the frustration out of my voice.

  Will nodded, as if misdirection were all part of a larger plan. “It’s good to see you, Patrick,” he said. He offered me the roach, which I accepted. “You gotta hear this,” he said. “This is cooking.”

  Later, after listening over and over to various takes of the latest song Will was producing, we were in the car and Will was driving very fast the wrong way down a one-way street. Taleesha was trying to convince Will that this was a bad idea, particularly since his license had been suspended recently for similar behavior. Besides, she said, Jessie was supposed to be Will’s driver. But if Will heard her, he gave no indication.

  Dozing intermittently in the backseat, I awoke when the car stopped, blue light flashing in the rear window.

  “Everybody be cool,” Will said, stepping out of the car. I waited with Taleesha and Jessie, none of us daring to speak. I had more than enough time to wonder what kind of controlled substances might be in the car with us, to consider the charged racial climate of the South, to contemplate how a felony conviction would look on my law school applications.

  Finally Will returned, slipped into the driver’s seat and eased the car into gear.

  “What’d you say,” I asked as we pulled away.

  “We talked some politics,” he said. “Each contest calls forth its own tactics. You follow your chi. Sometimes you thrust, sometimes you yield.”

  “Sometimes,” Taleesha said, “you just confuse the living shit out of everybody.”

  “And mostly, you just pay the motherfuckers off,” said Jessie.

  Back at Will’s hotel suite, shortly after dawn, I seem to remember Taleesha screaming at Will and slapping him, but I may have been dreaming.

  Waking up in the Savage suite, a sprawling set of grand, tatty rooms atop the Peabody, I stepped over several bodies in the living room. Crippled with hangover, I went back to sleep for several hours. When I woke next, it was to the sound of Taleesha’s voice.

  “Get the fuck out of here, everybody,” she screamed. “I mean it, get out!” When I finally emerged from my chamber, Taleesha was alone, sipping coffee in a kimono.

  “I can’t even remember the last time Will and I were alone,” she said.

  “I can leave,” I said, “if this isn’t a good time.”

  “Not you, Patrick.” She sighed. “Hey, what do you want? I’ll call down for room service.”

  That afternoon I watched football while Taleesha mastered economics. She explained she’d started taking classes that fall at Memphis State. Although the big windows looked out over the city to the east and the Mississippi and Arkansas to the west, the rooms had been customized and day-proofed to Will’s womblike specifications so that it was perpetually twilight within. The dark Persian carpets and the upholstery were speckled with burns. I sprawled on a fusty-smelling couch with a vicious headache, sucking down Cokes and tomato juice.

  Will appeared about four, wafting into the room in a dark blue kimono. “Happy new decade, my friends. Any signs of the dawning of the new era?”

  “There was a big old bodhisattva here looking for you earlier,” Taleesha remarked, “but he got tired of waiting.”

  When I saw the red welt on Will’s face I remembered the argument I’d heard in my early morning stupor.

  “Are we doing something today,” Taleesha asked. “I mean what’s left of today? If any damn thing’s dawning out there we’d never know it in here. We’re just like fucking movie stars,” she remarked to me. “We can’t go out in public. And even if we could, Will’s too busy playing tycoon.”

  As if to illustrate the point, Jessie Petit came and spent a half hour closeted with Will, who then talked for an hour on the phone, tending to his growing empire while we two students studied. Finally Taleesha, beckoning me to come along, walked into the parlor where Will was conducting his business and ripped the phone cord out of the wall.

  “Goddamnit, Taleesha.” He threw the useless receiver on the table.

  She looked over her shoulder at him with defiant, haughty mien as she disappeared down the hall and, after a moment, he followed. Back in the living room, I closed my book and stared at a football game in which I had absolutely no interest. At halftime, I went to my bedroom, ostensibly to get a book—or so I made a point of telling myself. It now seems comical that I would fabricate an excuse solely for my own benefit, even as I crept along the carpeted hallway in stocking feet toward their door, stopping just outside to listen to their syncopated grunting. Leaning close to the crack I had a narrow, vertical but no less startling view of brown and white flesh intertwined, rising and falling on the crimson spread.

  I determined that she was on top, her breasts hanging pendulously above his hair-stippled white chest. This seemed a fabulous inversion to me, as marvelously perverse as the juxtaposition of skin colors. Even more fantastic—Will’s arms were stretched back behind him—his wrists bound and fastened to something just out of the picture. To this day I don’t quite know how to interpret this partial composition, or whether to trust my memory, but I now understand all too well that you can never predict the geometry of appetite, or know for certain what secret passions may roil within the breast of even your best frien
d. Certainly the wife of my murdered colleague Felson must be pondering such matters at this very moment … Felson in his ill-fitting suits and his devotion to the driest regions of the Law …

  That evening Will went to the studio for a few hours. At eleven Taleesha and I were sitting on the floor of the living room picking at a room-service dinner.

  “So, what’s happening with your singing career,” I asked Taleesha, whose mood had brightened considerably once she reappeared from the bedroom.

  She laughed. “My singing career’s mainly a fantasy of Will’s—kind of a Josephine Baker/Ronnie Spector deal. I just got tired of it. Singing and dancing used to be the only way up, the only door open. I want to get my B.A. Then I’d like to do something … original. Something a black girl isn’t supposed to do.”

  “You already did that,” Will said, standing in the doorway, “when you married me.”

  “And look what a good idea that turned out to be.”

  Will bowed theatrically.

  “Irony isn’t Will’s strong suit—is it honey?”

  The tension between them had disappeared, and they suddenly seemed as carefree as they had been that first day in New York. While he was still in a good mood I told Will that I was planning to stop at Bear Track the next day to pay my respects to his parents. “You don’t need my permission, man.” He smiled. “My sympathy, maybe.”

  “Plus a heavy-duty suit of armor,” Taleesha said.

  “A garlic necklace,” Will suggested, grinning at his wife.

  “And a sharp wooden stake,” she added, walking over and kissing him, a kiss which was to continue on and off for the better part of the next hour, until I finally took the hint and retreated to my solitary bed.

  XV

  When I arrived at Bear Track early in the afternoon, Joseph directed me out back to the stables, where Cordell was conferring with a groom. A plump, jowly pink man sat astride his horse.

  “You’re just in time,” Cordell said, thumping me on the back, “to join us on a little afternoon shoot. Have you eaten? I can have some sandwiches packed for us. Cobb, this is my young friend Patrick Keane. Patrick, Cobb Hilton. Cobb owns the next piece over. His great-grand-daddy carpetbagged down from Ohio or some damn place after the war and picked it up for ten cents on the dollar. Now he’s got more prime land under cultivation than anybody in the whole damn Delta.”

  In response the man grunted and spit, his eyes buried deep in the pink recesses of his cheeks. I would have found him more plausible as a foreman or the proprietor of the feed store than as a planter.

  I was relieved to hear that the sport of the day was shooting rather than riding. But when Cordell said, “You take the roan gelding,” I realized I was not to be spared. I should probably have confessed that I’d never ridden anything except a pony at a petting zoo, but I think I wanted to present myself as the kind of guy who could jump right on a horse and take charge. As a direct result of my experience that day, my older daughter now takes riding lessons in Central Park.

  The groom helped me up into my saddle and adjusted the stirrups, asking me if they felt right. I managed well enough as we trotted over to a little cabin, where two pointers hurled themselves against the chain-link fence of their kennel, causing my horse to start turning in nervous circles. Cordell had dismounted to talk to a wizened old man with a disintegrating straw hat and gray-black skin. I’m not sure what provoked my horse to take off suddenly at a gallop. I tried to stay upright as I pulled back on the reins, but it didn’t seem to slow the horse, who I later learned had a “hard” mouth and was responding to the pressure of my knees clutching his flanks, which acted as an accelerator. I was maintaining an increasingly precarious balance; the ground was a blur, loud and hard and distant beneath his pounding hooves. Finally a drainage ditch accomplished what I could not, bringing my horse up short and throwing me down against his neck.

  When Cordell caught up, I had nearly recovered my composure.

  “Wait up for us older folks,” he said. “It’s five months yet to the Kentucky Derby.” Cobb Hilton bounced up like Jell-O on a stick. Noses to the earth, the two dogs traced manic figures in front of us. Cordell introduced me to Solomon, the straw-hatted dog handler, who rode over and slipped a double-barreled shotgun into the scabbard on my saddle.

  As we trotted out over the cut winter fields, my fear and unease started to slip away; my horse settled down and I began to feel competent—after all, at least I had managed to stay on the beast—and to see myself as a romantic figure, astride a fine-looking animal with a gun at my side, Nimrod on his steed. The furrowed fields were punctuated by stands of trees, hedgerows and giant rolling sprinkler rigs that looked to me like the vertebrae of some prehistoric creature. The vast Delta landscape with its huge cerulean dome seemed a canvas for heroic horseback deeds.

  “This is the richest soil on the planet,” Cordell announced. “Yank on your left rein, Pat, don’t let him walk you sideways like that. Give him a good pull—don’t be shy. He’s got a hard mouth.”

  I did as instructed.

  “Topsoil’s forty foot deep hereabouts,” he said. “Ever since the last ice age, the big river’s been collecting sediment from a watershed covering some part of thirty-seven states, then flooding its banks with blessed regularity and precipitating the very best soil right about here. Considering all we lost, I think it’s only right and meet that we’ve spirited away millions of tons of Yankee topsoil over the millennia.”

  Solomon chuckled, amused by this trope.

  “Only thing good ever come down from up north,” drawled Cobb, who seemed to have forgotten his own provenance.

  The two pointers appeared to be plowing a patch of tall grass with their noses.

  We were riding through a cornfield which had been left standing, the dry husks hissing against the flanks of the horses, when Solomon said, “Point,” in a quiet, urgent tone. One dog was locked in a rigid, quivering pose in front of a patch of scrubby cover; the other stood motionless behind him. We rode up to within some twenty feet, or, rather, most of us stopped at that distance; my horse kept on going, as I nervously squeezed on his belly with my legs, trotting inexorably to where the lead dog crouched.

  “What in hell’s he doing?” Cobb hissed behind me. I yanked back hard on the reins just as the covey broke—an eruption of wings, a dozen mad drumrolls launching as many blurred brown projectiles over the field. Although I knew the birds were there I was so startled by the rise that I nearly fell off the gelding. Watching them disappear, I wanted to follow them, to ride off and hide in the high grass and the cotton stalks and the lespedeza, eating bugs and seeds. I sat there staring out into the empty sky, then yanked on the reins again, gratuitously, almost viciously, in an attempt to share the blame.

  “Actually, Patrick,” Cordell said as he rode up, “that’s not quite how we do it down here.”

  At dinner that evening, I had many reasons to be inconspicuous. I was still stinging from the afternoon’s humiliation in the field, and the conversation was hardly calculated to put me at ease. Cobb Hilton had stayed on, and we were joined by two gentlemen from Arkansas. I gathered that a business deal might be pending. They were a good deal younger than their host, in their early thirties, young men who seemed impatient to rush all things, including their own middle age, even if the rest of the country was joining a cult of youth; proud of their new paunches and the boozy accretion of flesh around their faces, they were relentlessly loud, confident and eager to impress Cordell Savage, vying with each other to damn Washington, Wall Street and, for all I know, the Enlightenment. Cordell remained aloof, though I don’t think either Arkansan realized it.

  “What do you think of the wine, Patrick?” he said abruptly. “Mouton Rothschild 1928.”

  “Damn good” and “Excellent” opined the Arkansans. Cobb had refused the claret, insisting that bourbon and branch was good enough for him.

  “I don’t know much about wines,” I said, looking back into Cordell’s cruel
eyes. This was a quiz and it definitely counted toward the final grade.

  “I didn’t ask how much you knew about wines, did I? I asked what you think. I don’t know much about wines either, boy, but I know what I like.”

  We call this leading the witness. I had my clue. “It tastes a little sour to me, sir.”

  “Me too. It’s turned. Joseph, take this shit away and bring me that other I brought up.”

  The wine probably was off, though I suspect he would have sent it away even if it wasn’t. This was Cordell’s way of giving me a chance to redeem myself after the hunting debacle.

  “Beautiful silver,” said one of the boys from across the river. “I got a venison dish at home that’s the spitting image. Fellow in Savannah told me it used to belong to the Queen Mother of England.”

  Cordell directed a skeptical look at his guest in which anyone else would have read chastisement; you only had to look at him to realize that it was terribly common, as his wife might say, to compliment your host’s home furnishings.

  But the man from Arkansas was undaunted. “Where’d you pick it up?”

  “Well, I picked it up, as you put it, at the home of a friend from Yale. It had been in his family since the end of the war and before that it had been in my family. It’s an interesting story, actually. When I accepted the invitation to my classmate’s home in Boston, Massachusetts”—this last word pronounced, as it so often is in the South, with an overenunciated sarcasm—“I had no idea that on his mother’s side he was a Butler.”

  Cobb Hilton broke his corpulent silence with a grunt of distaste.

  “You may recall from your history, Patrick, that General Butler occupied New Orleans, among other distinctions. I can’t recall his Christian name just now, but down here we normally call him Beast Butler for reasons we needn’t go into at the table, or sometimes Spoons Butler on account of his tendency to confiscate the silverware and other valuables of prominent Confederate families in the course of duty.”

  He paused to examine the wine that Joseph had just poured for him, nodding toward my own glass. Joseph poured some for me, which I tasted and, with some trepidation, pronounced suitable. Cordell smiled and nodded his approval.