Lookaway, Lookaway

by Barnhardt, Wilton

  “Said our women were of loose virtue.” Gaston swirled the ice in his glass. “I’ve regrettably not found it so.”

  “I believe I have found it so, just not lately. You were saying about rivers.”

  The James River and Chesapeake Bay in Virginia made for an ideal system of shoreside plantations which could get their crops to ports. Charleston in South Carolina as well, a tangle of bays and rivers, leading to prosperous plantations. A great place to get rich. And here is poor North Carolina surrounded by the Outer Banks, Cape Hatteras, the Graveyard of the Atlantic. Waters much to be avoided as the points of land would suggest: Cape Lookout, Cape Fear. Those shifting sandbars enclose the Great Dismal Swamp, as the colonists named it, dense, dark, dangerous, full of snakes and alligators, several mythical monsters including a fire-breathing giant raptor. The Old North State became the haven of escaped slaves from Virginia and South Carolina, escapees from the numerous shipwrecks off our coast. Better selling than Uncle Tom’s Cabin in its day was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s follow-up, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp about Dred, a fugitive slave preaching uprising and revolution. (Maybe she felt a little bad about creating the passive Uncle Tom.)

  “Indentured servants, debtors, petty thieves, seducers and bigamists, escaped prisoners—they all ran headlong into the swamp sanctuaries of our beloved state. They are our true aristocracy,” Gaston added, toasting them. “The tobacco magnates came later, of course. Just white trash made good.”

  “I don’t think you should share that theory with the benefactors of this fine university,” Duke had suggested.

  How was it that Gaston wished to deprive himself of their friendship? The ease and rich flow of conversation, the reading, the small investigations, the discovery of new bottled pleasures. Having dwelled in Arcadia, how could one leave? And how much longer, Duke would wonder, would they both be alive? Duke was coming up on sixty-four this very weekend, Gaston was five years behind him but looked older. Duke himself had neuropathy; his fingers and feet were often numb, he dropped and fumbled every device or medicine bottle he put his hand to. He was on a number of medications that weren’t terribly serious—for blood pressure, for cholesterol—and he had a regimen of mild blood thinners and aspirin to prevent the strokes that did in his father and led him to dementia. He could only imagine what Gaston’s ailments were, if he even went to a doctor.

  “Gaston and his money were our last hope,” Duke said, sounding pitiful to himself. “And I managed to set him off again.”

  “He likes being set off. If it wasn’t one thing you said, it would have been something I let slip. We were children to imagine he would follow through on that gift.”

  Duke heard their downstairs phone ring again. They had not left their warm bedroom to go unplug it.

  “My brother,” Jerene said calmly, “is in the late stages of alcoholism, the treatment of which is complicated by two or three personality disorders.”

  “I think that’s a low estimate.”

  “He likely needed counseling from the time he was fourteen, so.” It wasn’t a sentence that really needed a predicate.

  “I suppose, darling, you should prepare yourself. The end of this particular downward spiral might well be quite ugly.”

  “Norma will work something out,” Jerene said, out of more hope than knowledge.

  They both darkly knew how it could go. He would commit a fatal hit-and-run while drunk, wake up in an emergency room with the police handcuffing him to his bed. An alcoholic coma from which he does not recover. Wandering drunkenly in front of a bus. A tumble down his foyer stairs and, as he lies there, a coronary. His esophagus so raked by acids and alcohols that it perforates and he bleeds out into his throat. That, Duke remembered, is what happened to Gaston and Jerene’s father.

  Mortality, mortality. God, a birthday this Friday—how Duke hated it. He hoped it had been forgotten utterly but there’d be a dinner somewhere, some foolishness. Jerene’s hand had lost its tautness; she had fallen back asleep. He gently released her and turned over … now wide awake, of course.

  The talk of bodily deterioration made Duke think about his father, Major Bo. Duke never relived the beatings, replayed any of the unsettled grievances or the constant refrain of military-themed belittlement that he and his brother endured as boys. It was a part of him he rarely accessed, half shrugged off and forgotten, half retained in some locked part of the heart. But Duke had been thinking lately of his father’s physical decline. A series of strokes that made him bedridden, and finally, left him with dementia. Duke remembered the VA Hospital in Hampton was where he and his brother, Carry, took him but he had become so aggressive with orderlies, so unpleasant, that the VA shipped him briefly to a mental institution that specialized in violent dementia. After a spell there, he was calmer. Whether that was through drugs or electric shock, Duke did not investigate.

  Duke declared he had no intention of taking his invalid father into his home in Charlotte. After some soul-searching, Carry said he would at least try to take care of Dad, and moved the old man into his Maryland home. Duke, once he had broken off relations with his military father, escaped at university into fine clarets, whiskeys, the best cigars, indulgences like Civil War pistols and first-edition nineteenth-century books—the secular Southern-pagan world that beckoned with wine, women and song. Carrington escaped, too, but into a deeper religious faith and that led him to try to make a lasting peace with his father. So he moved Dad, stroke-ridden, his left side limp and useless, into his home with Rhetta and their three kids.

  Two weeks later, Dad was moved out again, into the Baltimore VA hospital.

  “He only had use of one side of his body,” Carry told Duke by phone, “but he managed to bloody Rhetta’s nose with the good hand. I went in to lay down the law and…”

  Duke heard a catch in his brother’s voice. Duke didn’t say anything, to give Carry time to tell what he needed to tell.

  “… and when the kids were at church, and Rhetta was at Circle, I went in there and said, ‘Look, you fucker. This is my house and your days of victimizing any of us are over.’ And he said some things.”

  “Of course he said some things, unforgivable things. That’s who he’s always been.”

  “And I punched, him, Joze. I punched my own bedridden father in the face. And it felt good enough that I did it again, and again. I think I was saying ‘How do you like that, old man?’ and…”

  “Carry, I couldn’t have lasted as long as you did.”

  “He just laughed at me. Anyway, he’s back at the VA.”

  And that’s where Major Bo stayed until he died.

  “You were braver than I was,” Carry would always say. “You committed to go to Vietnam and I was always the shirker, the soon-to-be draft dodger.”

  Duke knew he wasn’t the brave one. He thought the war was being badly fought in addition to not being worth fighting but he marched dutifully toward it, not able to imagine a world where he did not do as his father commanded, or live up to his ancestors. He didn’t have the courage not to go to war. He was hoping, in scenarios steeped in self-contempt, that becoming an officer might lead to survival, a desk to hide behind, a small command in Europe staring down at the Russians staring back, all of it far from Southeast Asia. He lay in that hospital bed after his football injury, emerging from his coma, and he breathed an easy breath for the first time in his life: Thank God, I am out of the war.

  Duke put on a good public show about not being able to serve his country but he was inwardly delighted. It was nothing less than spiritual liberation, a heavy door now flung open to all possibilities and unreckoned futures. He would not be a soldier, nor train to be an officer, nor be measured against his father’s heroism; he would not be killed or torn to pieces by land mines or ripped apart by grenades, nor would he have to kill anyone, for which he was almost as grateful. His life was his own. Now as a man on the eve of his sixty-fourth birthday, he wondered why he did not always see that his life was always h
is own. Perhaps a fatal pattern was set, though. Duty calling and an excuse presenting itself.

  What he dreaded was Christmas, going home to see his beloved mother and his father, always spoiling for a fight. Christmas 1969 was his last appearance. He had met Gaston’s sister by then, Jerene Jarvis, and among her many enchantments she had forsworn ever going back home for a visit again, dating from Christmas 1965. Gaston also had boycotted return visits—they had a little parents-hating club, almost.

  Solely to see his much put-upon mother, Duke summoned his will and drove to Virginia for the holidays. The year before, his father looked at Duke walking with his neck brace, his walking stick for balance when there was vertigo, and started in. “Don’t think because you fell down on a football field that you even begin to matter as much as those men who left an arm or a leg on the field of battle.”

  On the last Christmas that Duke appeared at their bungalow in Fort Hill, before the schism, before he told his mother he would not be coming home as long as his father was alive, he sat through a last long dinner where his father summed up the worthlessness of his sons for the table’s benefit. And when Major Bo got around to mocking Duke’s stylish walking stick, some nineteenth-century thing bought in a Durham antiques store, saying how he shouldn’t imagine his little sufferings were anything compared to the men who left an arm or leg on the field of battle, Duke looked up and said, “Why didn’t you leave one, Dad?”

  “What?”

  “There was a lot of carnage in Morocco, in Sicily, right?”

  His father stood up, shaking the table, sending his water glass on its side. His eyes already blazing. Duke would recall that look—that was the look that got Dad into the mental institution—deranged, pure uncontrolled hate and rage, flailing around for something to pummel. But that Christmas, Duke was determined:

  “Soldiers in Two Corps were falling like flies but you managed to stay out of harm’s way, didn’t you, Dad? Tell us. Did you hang back a little? Let the enlisted shield you a bit…”

  By that time, his father was on him but Duke got a blow in first. He remembered his mother’s cries, and Carry sitting there, still too cowed to move. There were a few back-and-forth blows before he pushed his father into the cabinet full of military awards and plaques. His mother ran between them to intervene, and Duke flew from the house.

  He would call his mother when he was sure his father would be at a veteran’s parade or a VFW event. He begged her to get in the car and meet him a few miles away at a restaurant for lunch, but she wouldn’t. She couldn’t lie successfully to his father, and if he found out … His mother was ground down like dust. Died suddenly. Both he and Carry got a call from his father, spitting out the news, a hint of blame in his voice as if maybe they had participated in their mother’s demise in some conspiratorial way. Duke did not go to the funeral. His mother would not be there and would not know he wasn’t there, so what was the point? Carry reported that his father was a wreck, crying, sobbing, maybe embracing for the first time a vision of how helpless and alone the remainder of his life would become.

  Duke and Carry made the arrangements to have the major buried at Arlington. Duke and Carry attended without their families. The army is good about this stuff—they ginned up some kind of crowd. There was a band, the caisson, an escort, and a few of his surviving buddies, who assured his sons, with still-strong handshakes, with tearful eyes, what a brave man their father was, such ingenuity at the Kasserine Pass, such fearlessness at Monte Cassino.

  “Glad at least someone got something good out of him,” Carry mumbled, on the way back to his car. Duke thought of how his last encounter was him accusing his old man of cowardice. Felt good at the time—didn’t feel so good now, walking amid the crosses of Arlington.

  “You take care, Joze,” Carry added, with a brief pat on the shoulder in what was almost a hug.

  It had been fifteen years, and the brothers had not seen each other since. Granted Carry has his kids, Duke doesn’t travel much. Oh they talk on the phone, holidays. And birthdays; he’ll probably call this Friday. And Duke was sometimes sad about it but he knew they would likely not see each other anymore until there was a summons from a wife, a dire scene in a hospital room one day.

  The phone rang again downstairs. Duke craned his head to see the alarm clock. Four-thirty A.M., now.

  * * *

  Duke (and Gaston in the old days) could get almost as worked up over hush puppies and barbecue talk as they could about Civil War talk. The closer to the coast you get, the more cakey and desserty the hush puppies get. Good Lord, Duke could remember Gaston declaring, the hush puppy should be savory, gritty with large-grain corn meal, fried to a crispy brown, NOT of a consistency “like a piece of deep-fried pound cake,” and never ever sweet. Now the coast itself—where hush puppies accompany fried seafood—often has exemplary hush puppies, i.e, Tony’s Sanitary in Morehead City, probably the best hush puppies made. Duke had been fishing with his law partners twice in his life, playing at being Papa Ernest, a charter boat out of Morehead, big talk of marlin and tuna in the Gulf Stream, the entire operation soaked in beer and, later, whiskey to avert seasickness. All Duke came back with was three sacks of hush puppy mix from Tony’s—two for his family and one as a gift for Alma, whose job it would be to re-create the hush puppy excellence in the Johnston kitchen. Gaston once said, “It is a hush puppy wasteland from Lexington to the sea with a few notable exceptions.”

  The twin ideals of North Carolina barbecue—the phrase “pork barbecue” would be a redundancy—divide down the line where the flat and sandy, piney coastal plain meets the rolling red-clay, deciduous-forested slopes of the Piedmont. Piedmont barbecue is pork shoulder, slow cooked, eight or nine hours over hickory coals in what’s known as “Lexington style.” Down east, they roast the whole hog on a spit in a smokehouse, letting the organs and marrow flavor the meat, which becomes more tender and delicious than any pork recipe known to man. The pork is light as ash on the tongue—a mousse of pork, aerosolized. Both methods are delicious—there is virtually no bad barbecue—but Duke and Gaston, after the requisite sticking up for their native Piedmont style, spent many a university Saturday in spring on forays into the flatlands of the east to go “whole hog.”

  Duke wondered whether he could patch things up with Gaston by proposing a two-day barbecue run to eastern North Carolina, stay overnight in some swank golf hotel … or more fun, some country club of a Podunk town, letting the old ladies swarm Gaston with copies of his books to sign, amusing themselves with the redneck fineries and parochial société.

  Slaw. Just as important for Duke and many North Carolinians is the slaw. In the Piedmont there is “barbecue slaw,” which uses the juices of the pig and vinegar and sometimes cracked dried chilies to make a red-tinted, spicy slaw of chopped cabbage. When combined with the chopped-up shoulder on a sandwich or just side by side on a tray, where one can intermingle the piles alchemically on one’s fork, well, you have as North Carolina patron saint Andy Griffith would’ve said, “Goooood eatin’.” Slaw down east is mayonnaisy cole slaw, which often, even in the greatest of barbecue shacks, can taste store-bought from the supermarket deli counter. Sadly the best slaw (the Piedmont) and the best pig (down east) are never found together in the same operation. And then you got South Carolina. They can cook pig south of the border, too (Kingstree, Manning, Hemingway), and they tend to cook whole hog over wood chips like the east. Some barbecue joints make a hash out of the coarse ends of the chopped barbecue pile which is then turned into a stew and served over South Carolina white rice … which is right up there for satisfaction with first love and winning the lottery. Anyway, they have a mustard-based sauce and that might not sound good but it is: creamy, tangy, sharp with a latent heat.

  On Nations Ford Road, right over the South Carolina line, Duke and his daughter Annie, in a red vinyl booth Annie barely fit into, were gorging themselves at Daryl’s BBQ Palace. The owner loved to see Duke coming because during the Skirmish at the Tr
estle historical re-creation (two more miles down the road), Daryl’s did record business. In fact, Duke was trying to wave and capture Daryl himself’s attention, but to no avail.

  Annie had a large chopped plate, red slaw, fried okra, a little bowl of Brunswick stew and some collard greens she loaded up with vinegar. “Dad, I feel guilty taking you out for barbecue. Cholesterol, salt, your blood pressure. I’m sure this is forbidden. Just as…” She reached for her Styrofoam cup of tea. “… my pre-diabetic state would forbid this glorious sweet iced tea.”

  The waitress came by and asked about dessert. They had blackberry or peach cobbler with whipped cream, except she didn’t say “whipped,” she said whup cream. Annie’s eyes sparkled as she and her father exchanged smiling glances. Annie asked for the banana pudding.

  Duke: “I’ll take an extra Lipitor and you shoot yourself full of insulin and just enjoy yourself, says Doctor Dad. Really, the whole glory of being alive right now is that they have pills for everything. You can be just like your grandmother. She eats a slice of chocolate pie at the Presbyterian Home and then stabs herself with an insulin pin. We’re paying doctors all the money in the world to fix what we broke, so we might as well make the pharmaceutical companies work for us.”

  Annie had missed the Friday birthday foray to a steakhouse, but had shown up Saturday morning, unusually, idling around the house, reading old magazines. She brought him a present—a navy blue Duke University hoodie, “like the cool kids wear,” she said, but perfect for his mandatory walk-round-the-block regimen of exercise on cool days.

  He began, “I keep seeing where Charlotte hasn’t had a downturn—”

  “Oh believe me, we’re gonna get it too. The banks at the center of this cluster … um, big steaming pile of … um, mess are in Charlotte so we’ll feel it last, but it’s coming. I can’t sell any of the properties I own, and they are losing value by the hour.”

  “I thought you just sold on commission. You actually own properties?”