“Yeah,” said Josh, giggling, “it’s gotta be Uncle Gaston. He’s such a wreck.”
Dorrie smiled. “Who is surprised he’s some kind of perv? But the man knows his wine.”
“So,” Josh continued, “whenever we see someone we like, if we really really want them no matter what they’d demand of us, we say we’d ‘get in the stream.’”
“Y’all are nasty.”
“Oh come on, Manuel. If Sean Connery called?”
He thought about it for three seconds. “Okay, I would get in that stream.”
“Someone’s fording a stream?” It was Duke Johnston, suddenly upon them, all smiles, so proud, brass buttons and ceremonial sword, everything polished until it blinded. Dorrie, Manuel and Josh all jumped a little at the instantaneous appearance. Duke Johnston took Manuel’s hand and brought it to his lips. “And who is this vision of loveliness?” He kissed Manuel’s hand. “Colonel Joseph Johnston, at your service, miss.”
“Enchanté,” Manuel flirted back.
Dorrie raced to change all subjects. “Um. So, Mr.—Colonel Johnston, did the cannon people arrive?”
Colonel Johnston was on his way to the riverbank now to see the firing. Would they all like to accompany him? Josh quickly inserted himself between his father and his friends, feigning interest in cannonading, allowing Dorrie and Manuel to slip away. Manuel soon commenced pursuit of Robert E. Lee. Dorrie drifted across the field to the loom women.
Part of the cannon show was going to be the ten uniformed men whose job it was to roll the caisson up the riverbank on a little path, a gain of about thirty-feet of elevation, turn the cannon upon the high promontory by the trestle, aim for the imaginary Yankees, light the fuse, and boom. A drummer already stood at the promontory tapping out a steady martial rhythm.
They got about halfway up the path when one of the wheels fell off. The cannon (on its intact wheel) slid back down to the bottom of the bank with the men diving before it as human stops trying to keep the cannon from going into the water. Soon there were twenty uniformed men gathered, with rope, with tools, to reattach the wheel … and twenty minutes later, another roll up the hill was attempted when the wheel came off again. This time, ten men fell upon the cannon and kept it from rolling; the loose wheel, however, pretty as you please, bounded down the bank and into the river, where it flopped on its side and began fitfully, catching on rocks, to float downstream. A unit of another ten were dispatched to rescue the wheel while the other ten huffed and heaved the one-wheeled cannon up to the promontory.
“I only offered two hundred dollars online for a cannon,” Duke said soberly to Joshua. “I suppose this is the sort of cannon one gets.”
Half an hour later, the caisson’s missing wheel was jammed into place and it was time to fire the cannon. The men whose uniforms were wet from the river retrieval got the privilege of lighting the fuse. After an ear-shattering blast, the cannon flew backward and upended itself in a bank of kudzu and overgrowth; the loose wheel in a perfect repeat of its earlier performance rolled like a girl’s hoop down the embankment and halfway across the Catawba before falling on its side and floating, again, downstream.
“Oh well,” said Josh’s father, imperturbable, “we got the one, at least.”
The firing of Cannon One had taken nearly ninety minutes, so no one dispersed knowing it was nearly time to fire up Cannon Two on the other side of the river. No one in the planning had seriously considered just how wide the Catawba was at the ford. One had to squint to see the cannon on the other shore. This firing was bedeviled by trains. Duke’s research concerning train times on the trestle had proven fanciful; the tracks habitually groaned with freight every few minutes. No sooner had someone with a bullhorn announced to those gathered in the muddy marge of the riverbank that it was time to shoot Cannon Two, than another train would show up clanging along, blowing its horn, upstaging the military show. It would finally disappear and then they’d start again … and here came a train from the other direction, banging along, chugging, blaring its horn. All the kids in the crowd, in long skirts and little leather breeches, bonnets for girls and straw hats for boys, waved and waved to the conductor, who blared the horn even more and waved back. Finally, a railway respite. And then sprinkles …
“Thought it wasn’t going to rain,” Josh said, wondering how it would be to be trapped in damp wool for the rest of the afternoon.
The shower wasn’t serious and cleared soon enough but the powder had become damp over at Cannon Two. The fuse was lit and there was the muffled sound like a champagne cork followed by a wisp of blue smoke rising up. People were not aware that that was, indeed, what they had waited hours to see, and the man with the bullhorn broke the news.
Against all agreements and understandings, at four P.M., five Union scoundrels did run out upon the trestle whereupon the Charlotte Home Guard, now two hundred and some strong (possibly two hundred more than originally showed up to defend the trestle in 1865) started blasting away with their blanks. The Union re-enactors gamely fell on the tracks or staggered back to the ground away from the trestle before collapsing dramatically … before the excitement in the next five minutes of a train coming and the corpses making a quick retreat to the riverbank, with cheers and laughing applause all around.
“That’s it for this year,” said Duke, a little crestfallen, slapping his son’s shoulder. All this shoulder slapping and clapping was apparently the new official father-son gesture, Josh thought. “The trestle is soundly defended, son.”
“But the Yankees destroyed it in the original skirmish.”
“Eh, but we got ’em this year!” he said, returning to ebullience.
Joshua walked through the sutlers’ camp with his father, afterward, hoping to run into Dorrie.
Boy, there was no end of gun stuff. You could get actual Civil War–era formula gunpowder, antique weaponry, musket balls, and—whoa—Civil War–era unexploded bullets ready to be fired by a Civil War–era gun.
There were seamstresses who made the rounds of re-enactments in the South to sew on period buttons to period costumes. Most of the costumes (particularly for the modern fellow, who was much bigger than his nineteenth-century counterpart) were contemporary, made from blends of fabric as close to the period as possible. But that didn’t mean you couldn’t have the era’s buttons, medals, handkerchiefs, bootlaces. (How did they get the 1860s bootlaces?) And there was a brisk trade in tobacco products and antique pipes, pipe stuffers, cans of tobacco from the period (the pipe tobacco inside was fresh, presumably), and flints and lighting devices although the safety match was invented by the time of the Civil War, but these guys liked doing things as old-fashionedly as possible.
You could buy food—some stands advertised “modern” food, and some sold hardtack and biscuits and cured meat. Josh wondered if the people running the stands went out and bought a load of beef jerky for the occasion, but his father put him straight—everything was cooked on an old wood-burning stove or cured in a smoke-cured barn, just like it would have been in the 1860s.
“Did the barn have to be around in the 1860s,” Josh asked, “or is that pushing it too much?”
His father, unsmiling: “There is no ‘too much.’”
Then Duke Johnston wandered toward Gaston’s stall, receiving the handshakes, cheek kisses, the thanks of a grateful Confederacy for his masterminding of such a lovely afternoon.
Dorrie found Josh. “You’ll be happy to know Manuel and General Lee have undertaken a walk in the woods—toward the general’s mini-van.”
“Now you see there. If Lee hadn’t been in his tent getting blown by a black drag queen the third day at Gettysburg”—Josh now switched to his own overblown Southern accent—“I say, we might have won this war and spared ourselves the ruinous conflagration…”
“I got Harriet’s number. The loom lady.”
“I expect at least a scarf out of this. Hey, where did Calvin say he was going?”
“To his sister in Atlanta.”<
br />
“He doesn’t have a sister in Atlanta. The younger one lives here in Charlotte and the older one is married to an importer in Jamaica. What’d you say to get him to leave?”
Dorrie looked straight across the way at a blacksmith’s forge as she said lightly, “Saint that I am, I paid for his ticket.”
Josh appeared worried. “A ticket to Jamaica?”
“No, Atlanta. Calm down. He ordered it online and we used my credit card…” But now her expression was unsure.
“Did you actually see what destination he typed in?”
“Um, no. Well, damn, that was, I thought, a pretty expensive plane ticket to Atlanta. I figured he was going prime time, business class—it didn’t matter. I wanted his sorriness out of our lives.”
Josh felt his head go light. “Jamaica.”
“Who cares if his broke ass is in Jamaica? Whatever, wherever…”
“I’m out eighteen thousand dollars, that’s what.”
“Excuse me?”
Josh confessed that he had paid Calvin’s bail and the forfeit was $18,000 in addition to the $2000 he paid. Calvin was going to hide out until his father’s trial was over, unavailable to testify, in a country with limited extradition rights. The State Department was not going to move heaven and earth over a petty obstruction case, a son refusing to rat out his father.
Dorrie exploded. “How was I supposed to know you were doing a dumbfuck thing like that? Since when do you keep a secret like that from me?”
* * *
There were a number of things Josh never told Dorrie about.
Silas, for example, who among Josh’s stable was Dorrie’s favorite. He was goofy-cute, shaved head, one big pirate earring, slender with big hands going every which way as he told stories, totally cute in his Bojangles uniform, and his brother got him some of the best pot in town, which he’d also bring over. Dorrie and Silas whooped and carried on; Josh was often a bystander but this was like, he supposed, other people’s family gatherings, these were his loved ones and it pleased him to watch them laugh and dish.
He paid Silas. He never told Dorrie, and Silas would be mortified if Dorrie found out, but at one point Silas said, “Look, I’m gonna need a little something if I keep coming over here.” And so, Josh would stop at the ATM and, in some private hallway moment, would slip Silas the forty/sixty bucks and get a kiss for his trouble, as well as some certainty that Silas would not disappear; he’d be back for more sex, more fun, more money. Silas—was this just delusion?—seemed to care about Josh (and he loved Dorrie) but there were men out there who could slip Silas a hundred or more. A good-looking boy like that had a market value; it’s just what it was.
Josh heard from a Spanish exchange student once that most of the Mediterranean world worked like this, the richer man secreting the working-class lad some money for regular visits, but that didn’t mean it was impersonal prostitution, and those arrangements often lasted a lifetime with the benefactor giving elaborate presents when the boy got married, and the boy looking in on the benefactor when he got old and isolated. Josh thought of the tons of money he had never spent because he never dated women—the expensive dinners, Valentine’s, birthdays, anniversaries, the obligatory schedule of mercenary prove-you-love-me gifts. He decided he was getting off cheap with Silas.
And he knew Dorrie didn’t tell him everything, either. Josh knew all about one secret that didn’t stay very secret: Renee. Sometimes Dorrie tired of her months-in-the-making seductions and would simply go to Women’s Night on Thursdays at the Nickel Bar and Renee would be in place, waiting. Renee was Dorrie’s most egregious romantic detour. Renee was older and white but not powerful or impressive; she was needy, neurotic, clingy, hyper-emotional and in and out of recovery. She always advertised that she had “just club soda” in her glass but often it was something else clear. She was a fixture at the Nickel and Dorrie knew she was always willing, and if all else failed (and many of Dorrie’s seductions and strategems failed), Renee was there idling, sometimes even smug about it: “You know, Dorrie, you’re gonna end up with me in the end.” She was reportedly masterful in bed, not unattractive. It was the morning after when the clinging started and Dorrie would swear that she would never be so expedient again. Twice she’d had to change her cell phone number because of Renee filling her phone with drunken I-thought-you-loved-me messages. Twice she had tried to get to Dorrie by communicating with Josh, pouring her heart out to him. But Josh never passed any of it on to Dorrie since that knowledge would make things worse.
And there were things Joshua barely thought to himself for fear they might be telepathically perceived:
Josh was sixteen. The only open flirting he ever did was with a gay art teacher at Mecklenburg Country Day, but nothing would ever come of that. He was dying to be an adult, a gay one, free of the suffocations of being a Johnston. So he went up to UNC-G to visit Annie, to have a wild college weekend. Annie wagged a finger at him. “No drinking, it’s against the law … that is, if I see it.”
Annie had a party at her house, full of actors and History majors and artsy types. No parents anywhere! God, what freedom—why wasn’t every single night an orgy for university kids? He watched Annie flirt with all the boys, and they loved her right back. Annie, to tell the truth, annoyed him most of the time, but he wished he had her confidence. You know who was really nice? Annie’s boyfriend.
He must have been under some instruction to take Josh under his wing, make sure he didn’t get too drunk or dragged away by carnivorous females. That could have happened, too. “Your little brother is a doll! I just love him…” Lots of hugs, cheek kisses, breasts pressed into him … what a waste. Annie’s boyfriend was hunky but not really Josh’s type. Josh had his eye on a probably-gay black Theater major holding court in the living room.
But by two A.M. everyone was very drunk, drunker than Josh who had held back out of fear of embarrassing himself. No one else was concerned, apparently, with making a fool out of himself. Annie’s boyfriend collapsed on the sofa beside him, nestling into his arm. “You know what’s funny. You’re prettier than she is.”
And later: “If you were her sister and not her brother, we’d be out back doing something about it!”
Josh left for another room. Annie’s boyfriend’s directness and proximity made him nervous but also aroused. Josh rooted himself to the very public kitchen where nothing secret could happen. He saw the black Theater major leave the party with a redheaded boy, their arms around each other’s necks, which released some chemical of longing and recklessness into Josh’s being. After beer number five, Josh stumbled away from the noisy house, into the dark backyard woods for a pee, and suddenly he was joined by Annie’s boyfriend. He stood right beside Josh as he urinated, doing it in an exhibitionistic way, not putting it away when he was done, doing the “Sure am horny these days” line, which led to Joshua taking his own hand away to show that he was aroused. Next thing he knew, Michael—yeah, that was his name—was on him, pinning him to a nearby tree and giving him oral sex.
“I’m sixteen,” he said, a minute after it began.
Michael stopped, then mumbled, “Oh well, too late now,” and kept going.
That should have been the end of it, but then Josh wanted to perform oral sex on Michael too, since it was an evening for firsts, so Michael leaned against the tree, invisible to the party, hearing Annie call Michael’s name from the back porch while Michael greedily held Josh by the hair and moved his head about for his maximum enjoyment. Josh wasn’t sure if he enjoyed doing it or not; he was fairly sure he was terrible at it but Michael quickly finished up, kind enough to withdraw before he ejaculated.
“Michael! Where arrrrre you?”
Josh dared to peek up at the house; Annie retreated inside and closed the door. As they both zipped up, Joshua saw Michael wasn’t meeting his eyes and was beginning a whole “Wow, didn’t see that happening” speech, when Josh cut him off:
“I’ll never tell anybody, if that’s what you�
�re worried about.”
Michael reached out to touch Josh’s face. It was all Josh could do not to kiss him, melt into him. “Weird. I can’t help but noticing. You and your sister sort of taste alike.”
“You should break up with my sister.”
“I keep meaning to do it, man.”
“End of term, maybe?”
The rest of that party was spent watching Michael hang all over Annie and Annie, later on, confiding to her baby brother in the kitchen that she and Michael might go to New York and live together after UNC-G.
Joshua heard two weeks later they were broken up.
* * *
Josh was cleaned out—20K in the hole. Though despondent, he was able to hug his father at the end of the Skirmish and tell him what a triumph it was. His father intended to camp another night. He too had brought an antique flask with some fine sour mash, a single-barrel bourbon distillation in a Sauternes cask, which he and Major Badger and Colonel Haslett were going to sip, sitting by the fire and reminiscing about the glories of re-enacted battle … or was it Colonel Badger and Major Haslett?
Josh’s father wondered if he might ask one more favor. Could Josh call a taxi on his cell phone (once out of the historical zone)? His Uncle Gaston was hammered. That would be a fifty-dollar cab ride easy.
“Wait. I’ll be happy to drive him,” Josh volunteered.
Joshua got Uncle Gaston to his rusting Toyota, with the help of some moonshine distillers. Josh winked at General Lee who looked on with hauteur from a nearby tent. By the time they reached Myers Park, his uncle had had a good thirty-minute nap. Joshua reached over to gently shake him.
“Home already?” he slurred.
“Uncle Gaston,” Josh began anew, walking his uncle to the front door. “There must be a long line of greedy relatives and acquaintances always asking for a handout but I fear I have to add myself to that long line, and I wish—”
“How much you need, my boy?”
Josh needed $18,000 to finish off Berma’s bond. But he blurted out, “Twenty-four thousand.” But it was not because of greed or anything he hoped to spend on himself. Well, not directly.
Lookaway, Lookaway Page 33