Lookaway, Lookaway

by Barnhardt, Wilton

  “Nah, she don’t know,” Tyrell assured Josh. “Grams don’t think that way.”

  Whoa, and Josh thought his family was steeped in denial. Josh told Tyrell that he could not have sex with every sound being broadcast to Tyrell’s grandmother one thin wall away; Josh could hear her labored breathing even with Tyrell stomping about the room, moving piles of dirty laundry so they could have a small surface for lovemaking. Plus, Josh assumed a Dateline camera crew on the hunt for pedophiles would burst into the shotgun shack at any minute. Pudgy, unshowered Tyrell who hadn’t brushed his teeth in an age was truly disappointed—he probably hadn’t gotten anyone as far as the bedroom in years. Figured it’d be terminally hopeful/terminally horny Josh, thought Josh, who achieved this distinction.

  Dorrie squealed with amusement every time he relived this encounter. “And you know he uses his little cousin as his fallback. Heh-heh, you took a trip to Jim Trueblood’s cabin, yes you did.”

  Josh laughed too. But if Tyrell had been hot, Josh knew he would have gone for it, copulated quietly as possible, gathered himself up as well as he could and walked past grandma with an “Evening, ma’am.”

  * * *

  Calvin Eakins Sr. was an African-American Democratic city councilman representing District Three when Josh’s father was a Republican councilman. Unlike Duke Johnston, Calvin Eakins made a life in politics and moved on to being a state senator, then a powerful committee chairman in Raleigh, then a figure rarely off the front pages for rumors of corruption, graft, kickbacks, illegally obtained campaign contributions—but that was only the last few years. He was indicted early in 2007 and, as the case got harder for prosecutors to make, they started indicting his family members (in whose bank accounts he had laundered his ill-gotten gains) throughout 2008, in hopes of squeezing the truth out of the patriarch: his youngest daughter, his younger lawyer son, and his oldest son, Calvin, fellow alumnus of Mecklenburg Country Day, of no steady profession, unless you count low-level playboy.

  Calvin called Josh and left a message on his landline. They hadn’t spoken in nearly eight years.

  Driving uptown, Josh looked up to see one of Annie’s smiling, soft-focus billboards. Berma Bigglefield was another woman with a billboard: BERMA’S BAIL BONDS. You saw Berma coming off I-277 heading toward the Mecklenburg County Courthouse. Again, the airbrushed shot, the trademark photo haze that all self-employed women on billboards required for their likenesses to meet the public. It was hard to tell with black women how old they were. Berma could have been … late forties? Maybe sixty? He’d have to ask Dorrie, if he ever decided to tell her about what he was doing.

  He walked into a small bungalow, with a neon sign in every street-facing window: the one word blinking red BAIL and in the next window OPEN 24 HOURS, while in the one attic window a glowing blue neon that simply announced BERMA. And sitting at the crowded desk in a cheaply paneled room was … Berma herself!

  “I came down here ’cause I saw your picture, Ms. Bigglefield,” Joshua said. “You look even prettier in real life.”

  “Ain’t you sweet? What can Berma do for you, sugar?”

  Joshua had never been to a bail bondsman (or bondswoman) before. Calvin’s bail was $20,000, sort of a slap on the wrist. But neither his daddy nor his family was in any state to come bail him out. Obstruction of justice. Just $2,000 and Calvin could be released. Joshua figured—no, he knew, it was $2,000 down the drain. Joshua had a few IOUs that dated back to their days in high school.

  “Now if he fails to appear in court,” Joshua asked, “does that mean I owe all twenty thousand?”

  “That’s right, sugar. Berma’s gonna always get her money back.”

  “Where do I sign?”

  Joshua was then supposed to go to the lockup and present this to the assistant warden’s secretary. Sort of exciting, wardens and jails, all this official court lingo and big stone edifices of columns and judicial severity. Lawyers looking smart and stylish, and all the strapping, thuggish defendants in orange jumpsuits, the occasional media person, a camera crew setting up outside the courthouse steps.

  “Only you, Calvin, could come out of a jail looking like a GQ cover,” Josh said when his friend emerged.

  “Shirt needs pressing,” he said.

  They walked in the unseasonal February warmth to the parking deck. No one said anything during the walk but that was from overabundance of topics.

  “You still driving this piece of shit,” Calvin hummed, getting into Joshua’s 1996 Taurus.

  “I’ve kept it on the road for over ten years.”

  For what Joshua put into the deathmobile, Calvin explained, he could have leased. What followed was one of Calvin’s patented how-to-look-rich-for-no-money scams, how to legally welsh on a lease agreement, how to get out of a payment or two while being seen in a BMW. Joshua nodded as he threaded the car through the narrow concrete spiral ramps leading to the pay station. All this lifestyle savvy and inside dope had gotten Calvin nowhere. No job lasted very long, no good first impression was left untarnished.

  “Why’d you call me?” Joshua asked, interrupting a speech on how Josh was a fool to rent an apartment when he could own.

  “My brother and I aren’t speaking.”

  There was a pause, as if that were sufficient. “Well,” Josh prompted, “that’s one out of ten thousand people I would have thought you’d call before me. Mother?”

  “Total meltdown. When Dad got arrested she took to the bed.”

  “Why not someone on your dad’s staff?”

  “Shit, they’re all trying to keep out of prison themselves,” Calvin said lightly, showing no signs of worry or concern for his own fate. “Or they’re looking for new jobs.”

  “College friends?”

  “Too embarrassing. Bound to give my enemies satisfaction.”

  “Your little black book? What was her name…”

  “No no no. A girl gets you out of jail and then you’re really indebted. Almost like a marriage proposal. She sees her pathetic ass sitting by your side at trial, dabbing her eyes with your handkerchief.” Calvin pulled the seat forward, then bent it back to lie down, staring at the roof of the interior. “I’m not seeing anyone anyway.” An odd pause.

  “How about you?” Calvin asked.

  “Eh, nothing serious. Just a regular-sex thing.” For some reason, Joshua felt his heart race, wondered if his face was coloring. Was this a swoon? He wasn’t sure what a swoon was. “Maybe once a week—”

  “I envy that. Just a sex thing. Never could get that arranged with any woman. They wanted to marry me and reform me and generally domesticate me. Sad to say.”

  “So why’d you call me?” Joshua tried again.

  “I knew you’d come get me.”

  “We haven’t talked in about, what, eight years.”

  “But we’re still friends.”

  “Oh I still like you,” Joshua said, all smiles, “but friends keep up, don’t disappear for years at a time, and then only call to get bailed out of jail. Money I’m fairly sure I won’t see back.”

  “You didn’t have to do it. Why did you?”

  Just to see, Joshua thought. See what he looked like. Reintroduce a character back into his life, despite the surefire wear and tear and drama that hovered around Calvin. Who was left in Joshua’s life who remembered him from his rich-kid private-school goofy, nerdy, smart-kid, class-outcast, school newspaper, drama club, band-geek days? “I was happy to do it,” Joshua told Calvin, to keep the conversation going. “Where am I taking you, by the way?”

  “A motel, I guess.”

  “You have money for a motel?”

  “Nope.”

  Joshua pulled into a service station parking lot. No sense driving aimlessly. Calvin hopped out for cigs and a giant Coke. They dehydrated you in jail. The cell-block water fountain tasted funny—and God knows what you were catching, drinking after the scum of the earth—and then they barely air-conditioned the place. Calvin walked a few yards then circled back aro
und to Joshua’s driver’s-side window. “Uh, can you lend me a five?”

  Joshua handed a five over.

  I’m being used, Joshua thought as Calvin walked away. Used again, to be more precise. Big surprise, there. Take a number. Calvin had previously been the screwup of his family. Now, with State Senator Calvin Eakins Sr. under corruption and racketeering indictments, that distinction was a little harder to obtain. His father’s whole public arrest and downfall must come as a relief to Calvin. So much for living up to his daddy’s impossibly high standards. But still, as dysfunctional as Calvin is, Joshua thought, I must be more so to keep dealing with him. Joshua decided he wouldn’t offer Calvin his sofa. For one thing, Calvin might never leave. Joshua would end up the pathetic-ass friend in court, following the proceedings, dabbing his eyes with a handkerchief. Second, it recalled an old social desperation, dorky Joshua wanting to be friends with cool Calvin more than Calvin wanted to be with him. Oh for God’s sake, Joshua told himself, high school was a quarter of a century ago—offer the guy your couch!

  “I was going to quit,” Calvin said, bouncing into the passenger seat, shaking his box of cigarettes. “But what’s a racist show trial without a good smoke?”

  “So your dad’s innocent?” Joshua pulled back on the boulevard.

  “Hell no. I’m sure he was skimming just like every other crook in Charlotte or Raleigh, but you see how the SBI is only making a case against the powerful black state senator, right?”

  “They just convicted the white Speaker of the House, Jim Black. They’re putting a number of powerful Democrats in jail.”

  “Believe me, race is in the mix.”

  Joshua nodded. Dorrie’s much offered opinion on any celebrated black trial was that blacks had been railroaded and scapegoated through the decades for so much that they didn’t do, that if they could play the race card successfully to get out of a few things they did do, well, it’s sort of karmic redress. Still, a crook is a crook.

  “So, uh, Josh. Can I use your sofa for the night?”

  Joshua smiled a little.

  “Poor homeless black boy,” Calvin intoned melodramatically. “Nowhere to go … probably go down with ma brothas at the homeless shelter down on Tryon, get a urine-stained cot.”

  “Your family is twice as wealthy as mine. You don’t want to be with them?”

  “I want to be with my funk soul brother Josh-oo-a. Ain’t you my wigga?” Calvin crossed his arms like he was in a rap posse. “JJ is pretty fly for a white guy.” Calvin wove together several hip-hop phrases, all out of date. Joshua was more up on black music than Calvin, if anyone wanted to know. Calvin talking gangsta—that always played nicely with his white coterie in high school, Joshua thought. For a bunch of soft white innocents, Calvin was dangerous and uncharted racial territory, but if he tried to hang with Charlotte’s notorious Hidden Valley Kings? He’d be dead.

  “… and I promise not to have any crack ho’s over to your crib, dawg. I’ll turn my bi-atches out somewhere else…”

  “Oh Jesus.” Joshua tried not to laugh, or be charmed again.

  Calvin returned to his normal smooth baritone: “I’ll flush the toilet. You can keep a stack of separate glasses and plates so you don’t have to eat after me and get any of my black cooties.”

  “It’s already a little late for that.”

  Calvin went quiet. Joshua pulled to a stop at the light, then looked over to see if that remark was over the line. But Calvin was smiling slyly. He exhaled Winston smoke, keeping his level, inscrutable gaze on his friend. Big brown eyes of great mesmeric power, eyes that once moved the stars around in the sky. “Don’t go there, baby. That was a long time ago.”

  By making an allusion to their teenage homosexual experimentation, Joshua detected that he’d gained a little power, the power of the person who might say what was never said. “All right. But no running around in your little thong underwear,” Joshua pursued, extending his run. “No flopping out of your shorts, teasing the gay guy.”

  “I can’t help it if I’ve kept myself up, got the body of a twenty-year-old.” That he did. “But that was … you were the only one that kinda shit happened with.”

  “Now now. You can tell me about the fun you had in jail.”

  “I held the niggas off. Your boy is alllll man.”

  “I’m all man, too, Calvin.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I certainly do.”

  * * *

  Josh had achieved a mastery of getting out of family occasions.

  The store made for a good excuse. Josh had established the story that his temperamental boss, Mr. Mundy, was always calling him to work on weekends, at all hours of the day and night—Josh could invoke each branch around town (and miles north at Concord Mills) as a site of a crisis that required him to speed away and miss whatever family requirement he had begrudgingly committed to.

  “I believe I shall have to have a word with that slavedriver you work for,” his mother said once, quite cross when Josh skipped a Mint by Gaslight one year.

  Truth was, Josh worked exactly when he wanted; Mr. Mundy was a softhearted old queen who let him do as he pleased. Josh wasn’t sure the clothing store made any money at all. It was called Uomo Modal, and the flagship store which Josh managed was prominent in the South Park Mall. These stores featured mostly silk Italian-cut shirts and ties, plus terribly expensive faux-European accessories with Italian names, Bulgari platinum tie clips with an inlay of tanzanite—what was tanzanite? Josh sold that stuff without having a clue—Raffaello cuff links, Armani Executive sunglasses. Joshua assumed Mr. Mundy was independently wealthy and the stores were a front for importing something criminal … or a losing enterprise convenient to Mr. Mundy’s tax portfolio … or an excuse for constant trips to Italy, where a whole lavish vacation to Fashion Week in Milan might be a business write-off … or an excuse to hire and be surrounded by lovely, mostly indolent Southern gayboys who looked good in Italian clothes.

  Josh usually worked alongside Manuel, who dabbled in drag on weekends. He was just starting to compete in pageants. He barely had to shave and had that African-American lean smoothness which is the envy of the drag-performing world—no Adam’s apple, too. Manuel put on a wig and he was halfway there. A lovely young man, but not macho (or dark) enough for Josh to obsess about. Josh had heard that some clerks (i.e, Manuel) and branch managers had “grown close” to Mr. Mundy; some had even gotten to come along to Milan some years.

  Dorrie would say, “I’d get in the stream, if I got to go to Milan.”

  “Can’t do it. Can’t get in that stream,” Josh said glumly.

  At thirty-two years old, Josh felt the full weight of having no career to speak of. Maybe Mr. Mundy would let him take over the empire when Mr. Mundy retired. Maybe Josh would one day be the soft, overdressed old queen with too much cologne, wearing rose-pastel-tinted linens, silk shirts with cravats covering the aging throat, hiring young twinks to be clerks and cashiers. Josh played this scenario of life failure to goad himself to greater ambitions, but it never worked. Didn’t sound so bad, actually.

  Anyway, the Golden Age of Family Avoidance was done. After Jerilyn’s infamy as the Christmas Dinner Shooter, there had been lots of family interaction, a circling of the wagons and SUVs. Dad was on TV with regularity as the family front person—good Lord, his father was charming, that comforting buttery North Carolina accent soothing and explaining away every rough edge.

  “Your dad must’ve never lost a court case,” Dorrie said.

  And all the bad Jerilyn publicity had proven good publicity for the Skirmish at the Trestle Civil War Re-enactment coming up April 19, 2008. Dorrie, whose profession was setting up attractive webpages, was summoned to help Mr. Johnston expand and improve his event site, so people could register (with a credit card), commit to permitted commercial activities (hot dogs and funnel cakes, horseback rides for the kids), sign oaths not to shoot real ordnance, promise not to be drunk, use foul language—this was a
family event—and promise not to come as a Confederate general. That was a real problem in Civil War re-enactments, no one wanted to be a grunt, everyone craved rank—generals outnumbered privates at these things, if you didn’t curtail it. And no one wanted to play a Yankee soldier, because that would mean investing in a Union uniform, which was not how the ardent Southern re-enactor chose to spend his disposable income.

  The real estate tycoons and Mr. Boatwright, though they might be every bit the shysters and crooks that Annie made them out to be (and she would know), had done the Johnston family the great favor of revitalizing their patriarch. Josh loved to hear his father talking with the other committee members on the Catawba River Trestle Historical Preservation Society (a group of old Civil War–crazy codgers, like his dad), at the Charlottetowne Country Club, in the doldrums of a big Sunday lunch.

  “But that’s just it, Ben,” he heard his father tell Mr. Badger, “if the grounds were simply a public park with some picnic tables and a plaque, think of how it would be graffitied. Kids would come and drink beer there, gangs would make drug deals. But as a preserve within a gated community, the land is especially preserved. Anyone can be permitted to visit the historical park,” Duke added with animation. “School groups, historical societies—I have the developers’ word that the gatekeepers will let anyone through to a proposed small parking lot near the clearing, and the riverfront and trestle.”

  “Well, it would be advantageous to keep the riffraff out,” said Mr. Haslett, a man who wore his white beard in flowing nineteenth-century fashion. All the better to portray his many-times-removed ancestor General Jubal Early. With the passion for J names in the family, Josh was quietly happy not to have been named “Jubal.”