“General Robert E. Lee,” he said as he tipped his hat at me. “Pleasure.”
Whoa, Nelly. No wonder he had a dedicated email. It was uncanny! “Oh my God,” I gasped, peering at him in the dim light. “That’s amazing!”
General Lee gave me a wink.
Under his arm, I noticed a book that was about the same size as my grandma’s large-print Bible. On closer inspection, I saw it was Ron Chernow’s biography on Grant. The last time I’d checked, I was twentieth on the wait list for it at the library.
I tapped on the spine. “Is that why we’re here? Making contact with You-Know-Who?”
General Lee scoffed. Or maybe that was a guffaw. “Good God, no. I know all I need to know about my old enemy. I must say, Chernow has a very accurate, thorough, and interdisciplinary historical approach,” General Lee said thoughtfully. “My friend Grant was a truly complex man. I admire his struggles, both personal and professional. Shows a mighty fine level of character. How I do envy his horsemanship.” He looked somewhat glumly at the portrait on the cover. He sighed and tucked it back under his arm. “Pardon me, my friends. I’m going to have a brief consult with my lieutenants about our battle plan for this evening. I bid you a fond adieu,” he said with a slight bow.
And he ambled off with his saber rattling.
I turned to Elaine. “I mean . . .”
She snorted. “His real name is Jerry Slattery, and he sells real estate.”
Gabe sniffed next to me, scratching his forehead. “So what exactly are we doing here?” he asked.
“As I understand it,” she said, adjusting her earrings, “these guys are historically accurate down to how much coffee they put in their pan over the camp stove. But there is one important thing that nobody in this strange business of theirs really knows. It’s called the Rebel Yell.”
Thanks to Daisy, I had developed a knack for willfully forgetting historical trivia; the sheer volume that she berated me with meant I had to pick and choose. But this, at least, I knew I didn’t know. Because nobody did. “It’s a mystery, isn’t it? Nobody really knows what it sounds like?”
She lifted an expertly pencil-shaded eyebrow at me. “Correct. There’s a few short clips of it from some Civil War veterans’ picnic when film was new and the veterans were old, but it’s not enough to really hear it. These guys are telling me that when they come out here, to this battlefield, they have heard it.” Elaine dropped her shoulders and lifted her chin, as if she were moving into a yoga pose. “We’re here to try to see if we can make contact to hear the sound. You all are here to record it.”
“Fantastic,” Gabe said, smiling. He let his backpack slide to the ground and pulled out his low-light camera. “We’ll get some shots around the camp. We’ll set up the audio and visual. Then where do you want us?”
Elaine looked at the two of us, spinning her wedding ring on her finger. “As far away from me as possible, lovebirds,” she said and twirled away, linen flapping.
As far away as possible put Gabe and me between the parking area and the so-called provisions tent, which I’d found to be stocked with enough danishes, sweet tea, coffee, and doughnuts to feed, literally, an army. Elaine, as the medium, was sitting on the other side of camp in the captain’s tent, and we’d set up cameras to film her séance from every angle. Not even once had Gabe grumbled that our love waves had exiled us to the edge of camp, and now we sat together on a cooler behind the provisions tent in the cool summer darkness, listening to the drills and the shouted commands. A patch of light streamed out from a lantern inside the infirmary tent, and inside I watched a lady dressed up as a battlefield nurse wipe a glop of jelly off her crisp white apron.
Gunfire punctured the sound of the willows blowing in the breeze, and shouts and calls of Fall in line and Hep-two-three-four cut through the air.
“We’re one violin solo away from being inside a Ken Burns documentary,” I whispered.
Gabe snickered beside me. He leaned into me and put a kiss to my cheek.
I slipped my hand underneath his and gave it a squeeze. “OK. So forgive me for being such a noob, but if we don’t know what it sounds like . . .” I trailed off, looking at Gabe.
He answered me with a knowing expression. “Then how the hell are we going to know it when we hear it?”
I nodded. “Ding-ding-ding!”
“Exactly what I was thinking.” Gabe slipped his phone from his pocket, and I glanced around to make sure we were in the clear. Nobody had specifically told us phones weren’t allowed, but getting the Glare from Daisy had taught me a thing or two about behaving appropriately in a rigorously accurate historical setting. Cell phones were tied with corn syrup on the list of no-no’s.
Gabe boldly held his phone out in front of the two of us. I like a man who knows how to take risks! “Let’s see what we can find.” He pulled his earbuds from his bag and plugged them in. He gave me one to put in my ear, and he did the same with his. I watched him type “rebel yell” into his browser, and up popped the usual array of stuff that I’d expect with any vaguely historical internet search. Lord knew I was no stranger to those. Only the week before Daisy had tasked me with finding out “How did they get rid of ants in the 1800s?” Answer: they didn’t.
On the screen was the usual array of hits—Wikipedia, history.com. But the third link was something from the Smithsonian that looked very interesting.
“Very promising.” I tapped the edge of the screen.
Gabe clicked on the link, and up came an article explaining what the Rebel Yell was and what it sounded like, but none of the descriptions were particularly helpful. Colorful, yes! Helpful, no. “‘The battle cry to rally the troops before a fight, the Rebel Yell is believed to be influenced by the war cry traditions of Native American and Scottish warriors. It is sometimes described as a cross between a rabbit’s scream and a whoop, or wolf’s howl and a cougar’s scream.’”
It sounded just dreadful. Rabbits screaming? I felt like Clarice Starling trying to forget the sound of the crying lambs. Pass! “What does that even mean?”
“I’ve heard the wolf and the cougar, but the rabbit is beyond me. Look at this.” Gabe highlighted a sentence to draw my attention to it. He read aloud, “‘There are no audio recordings of the yell from the Civil War period. Archivists have, however, recently unearthed audio clips from the 1930s of veterans performing the yell at a Civil War reunion.’”
There, embedded in the middle, was a video from the Library of Congress. It had to be what Elaine mentioned earlier. The thumbnail was black-and-white and showed a positively ancient man in a uniform that was identical to the ones that the troops in the encampment wore. Gabe hit play on a very, very old digitized film. One Civil War veteran acted as a sort of impromptu emcee, standing in front of a microphone and introducing various other veterans, who each gave the Rebel Yell a try. The first one was hardly more than a single hoot—it was over in an instant. The second one was a little longer but certainly wasn’t enough to get a sense of what the sound really was. It was clear to me that the old veterans, and their old lungs, weren’t strong enough to sustain much of anything, and so in each case the yell was barely a second or two before they ran out of air.
Onto the stage hobbled a slightly more spry old fellow, thin and gangly. He stood in front of the microphone and gave it his best. This time it wasn’t a matter of mere seconds. It was just enough to make me realize I had heard that sound before. “Gabe!” I gasped.
Gabe turned to me. “Holy shit. Is that . . . Lily, that’s . . .”
All those years of bellowing about Vicksburg, all those shushes and bribes, all those endless fibs about the Union in surrender. It all made sense. It all finally made sense. Hallelujah! I clapped my hands on Gabe’s shoulders and gave him a shake. “That’s the Noise! The General’s Noise!”
37
GABE
Whatever progress the General and I had made the night before was totally undone by the fact that he was now convinced I was trying t
o kidnap him. “Unhand me, swarthy villain!” he screamed as I loaded his cage into the back of Lily’s van. The bars rattled, and the bottom banged. “Help! Police! Nine-one-one! Nine-one-one!” he said in a completely different voice followed by an eerily accurate whoop-whoop like a cop car making a traffic stop and the piercing eee-ooo-eee-ooo of an ambulance.
I hopped in the back of the van with the cage. A porch light from across the street popped on, and I heard the sound of a screen door squeaking open. “Everything all right, Lily?” someone called through the dark. “What’s all that ruckus?”
“Everything’s fine, Mrs. Weatherly!” Lily cooed. “Just doing some historical reenactment! Carry on! Nothing to see here!” she said and slammed the van doors.
Lily got into the driver’s seat, muttering, “I’m going to have to make her some brownies so she doesn’t call the ASPCA,” and fired up the van. I turned on the dome light above me as she put the van in reverse and then peeled out down the street. The General’s eyes were wide open, like stick-on googly eyes from a craft store, each with a clean white rim around them. “Bad suitor!” he screamed. “Bad suuuuuuuuuitooooooooor!”
“Have a potato.” I grabbed the baggie that Lily had put together before we pulled the sheet off his cage and carried it downstairs. I broke off a piece and tried to feed it to him through the bars.
He recoiled from the potato, flapping his wings. “Live free or die, sir!” he screamed. “I say, live free or die!”
He locked on to the door of his cage, giving it a firm rattle with his beak. Lily had used two twisty ties to secure it for the drive, but I wasn’t sure how long those were going to hold. He was putting together sentences, doing voices, and copying sirens. Two sandwich bag ties weren’t going to make shit for difference. Reflected back at me in the rearview mirror, I saw Lily’s panicked face. Time to get serious about this, I realized. Time to bring out the big guns. Abandoning the bag of potato slices, I pulled out my phone, made it so the camera was in the right direction, and started filming him.
The panic gave way to wide-eyed adoration as he stared at himself. “Hellooooo,” he said.
“Is he OK?” Lily screeched to a stop and turned around to see what I was doing. “Why is he so quiet? Please don’t tell me we’ve killed him.”
I held up a finger to quiet her, and her mouth dropped open when she saw what we were doing. “I learned this last night,” I whispered. “He loves it.”
“Oh my God, that’s brilliant,” Lily said, marveling at him and at me. She placed her palm to her mouth and let out a muffled laugh. “You’re a genius!” she whispered.
“Genius!” the General said to his reflection, with what looked a whole lot like a smile. “Hello, genius!”
Ten minutes and sixteen videos later, we arrived at the parking lot. Lily pulled into a spot and hopped out. I grabbed the front end of the cage, and Lily took the back. Together, we carried him through the camp like we were carrying an emperor in a sedan chair. As we walked, he made a low and ongoing “Aaaaah!” like kids do when they go over a washboard road. We carried the General to the captain’s tent, and I stuck my head inside. Elaine Corynn was flipping over tarot cards, seeming somewhat peeved. General Lee sat across from her with his hands clasped in prayer over the Grant biography. One of Lee’s lieutenants was eating a chocolate doughnut, reading a magazine with his feet up on the table. The whole thing had a low-budget carnival palmistry-tent feel. Not good television. At all.
But I knew how to fix that. In my head I heard one of Markowitz’s Idea Farts from long ago. Know what makes really good television, Powers? Talking animals!
I cleared my throat. “Sorry, I don’t want to interrupt, but I think we have someone you might want to meet.”
Elaine paused with a card halfway off the table. I couldn’t tell if she was relieved that I’d interrupted or annoyed. It made no difference to me at all. Lily and I knew the answer to the mystery, and we were damned well going to share it.
General Lee stood up from the captain’s table and pushed past me into the clearing with his sword jangling. “A parrot. We don’t need a goddamned parrot, son!”
Meanwhile, the General looked around at the men in gray uniforms who’d gathered around his cage. He puffed up his feathers like he did when he was on camera. The happy puff. “Hello.” He hopped around in a circle, making an effort to greet everybody. “Hello, how do you do? Hello!”
As the crowd of men grew larger, Lily came closer to me and gave me a little elbow in the ribs. She held one of the GoPros in her hands, and I could tell from the red light that it was already rolling. “OK,” she whispered. “Get him to do it.”
I approached the cage and bent down so I was at eye level with him. The General turned away. “Villain,” he snarled.
“Make the Noise, man,” I told him. “This is your big moment. Go for it.”
The General eyed me again and turned away. “Swarthy Yankee,” he hissed.
I glanced at Lily. I think she probably thought she was smiling, but I saw on her face a painfully uncomfortable grimace as she glanced around at the quickly growing group of grumbling soldiers around us.
It was time to up the ante. I needed the General to make the Noise, and I knew exactly how to do it. But that said, I also thought it was probably better if Lily wasn’t within earshot. This wasn’t exactly the moment I’d been waiting for all day, that was for goddamned sure. “Give us some space, will you?” I asked her.
She wrinkled up her eyebrows and cocked her head at me in confusion. But instead of asking me what and why, she just nodded and stepped back slightly. As she did, the rest of the circle did the same. Like they were widening the ring for a bare-knuckle brawl. I leaned in close to the cage. The bird let out his angry growl, and I flicked my chin at him to egg him on. But he stopped short and turned his face away from me yet again.
So I cleared my throat, placed my hands on my quads, and got right up close to him, damn near nose to beak. “Who do you love?”
“Lily,” he croaked angrily, refusing again to look at me. He snapped his head away, spoiled and snooty. “I love Lily.”
When he said it, I saw Lily smile. That meant she was close enough to hear what I was about to say.
Well, fuck it. But there was no better time than the now. Even if I had to say it to her parrot first, at least she’d finally know.
“So do I.” I glanced over the top of the cage at her. Her, who made my heart hurt. Her, who I wanted to be with so bad it ached. Her, who had begun to change everything for me.
Her eyes sparkled by the firelight. At that moment, it was just us. There was no battalion. There were no cameras. There was nothing else in the world besides Lily and me together.
Well. Except for the General. He puffed up his feathers, and then the growl got a little louder.
“I want her,” I told him, and the growl ramped up. “I need her,” I said, and the growl changed to a low roar. “And I love her,” I said, looking right at her as I did. And that did it. The roar changed into a whoop, and the whoop into a cry, and then the General let loose with the Noise at the top of his tiny but insanely powerful lungs.
In response, the battalion erupted in full-throated I’ll be goddamned cheers. And Lily mouthed I love you too.
Telling her how I felt made me feel possessive about her in a way I hadn’t expected to feel. It almost pissed me off that the troops wanted to hear the General do the Yell again and again. History was fine and all, but right then I had a woman to make mine. A woman to undo. A woman who needed to hear I loved her as I made her come again and again.
Finally the General tuckered himself out, hoarse from doing his demo, and we packed up our gear. I drove her van and she sat shotgun, holding my hand the whole way back to her place. We didn’t say much of anything as we drove, comfortable together even in silence.
Back at her house, Lily began to pull the cage out of the van, and I reached into my pocket for my truck keys. I could see her face by the d
im light of the streetlamp above, and there I saw that flash of disappointment again. But I wouldn’t make her feel it for long. “Aren’t you coming in?” she asked.
I took a step into her and let my keys drop back into my pocket. Putting one hand on each of her hips, I pulled her into me. The cage rattled behind her as she pressed against it. “I’m not coming in. Because you’re coming back to the house with me. Where you belong.”
She let out a shuddering groan. Her cleavage compressed against my chest, and I felt that bolt of need through my cock again. That feeling might’ve been inside me, but it belonged to her. And her alone.
“I love the way you talk to me.” She gritted her teeth and tugged on my belt. “Absolutely love it.”
I let her feel me hard against her. “We better do something about that. But you’re gonna make too much noise to stay here.” I dragged my tongue up the side of her neck and over the curve of her ear. “You’ll wake up half the block with what I’ve got planned.”
She hooked her fingers around my belt loops and pulled me into her even closer. “What is it that you’ve got planned, Mr. Powers?” She ran her fingertips up the back of my neck and through my hair. She got up on her tiptoes and teased me, tempted me, taunted me.
But no amount of her sexiness was going to distract me. I knew what I wanted, and I was damn well going to get it. “We’ll get him set, then I’m driving you back home.”
“Home?” she said, exaggerating the bow of her lower back to press her body into mine.
“Yeah. Home.” I slid my hand down her bare ass, under her shorts and panties. Then I leaned into her. “But I need you to get one thing from here first.”
“Name it,” she whispered.
“Your vibrator.”
She was so close that I felt her smile more than I saw it. “Which one?”
That’s my girl. “All of them.”
Do You Feel It Too? Page 23