Deadlight Jack

by Mark Onspaugh

  George shook his head and smiled, but there was sadness in his eyes. “You know, Jimmy, Renee Devereaux was one of those women you burn for—all curves and bedroom eyes and a smoky voice. You get lost in a woman like that, and her voice is as deadly to your sanity as those sirens that lured sailors onto the rocks. Maddy, she wasn’t like that at all. She had big eyes, and a big smile with not a trace of guile. She was willowy, not curvy, but she had a way about her, you know? I didn’t see it at first, and more the fool was I.

  “I told her I wanted a big old cheeseburger and coffee, and she insisted I get some onion rings because they were a house specialty. Well, they were big and greasy—and delicious. After that meal, I didn’t think I would be able to roll out, much less walk, but she talked me into a slice of pecan pie à la mode. When I mentioned I had been in the army, she convinced Fat Joe to buy my lunch—which he did.

  “I asked her if she would go to dinner with, me and she said I would have to talk to her father. So I called on her momma and daddy and they gave me permission to court her. Turns out they had moved to town about a year after I’d lighted out for New York, and knew my aunt, uncle, and little brother from trips to the soda shop. Maddy had already told her folks I was in the army, so her parents already held that in my favor.”

  George shook his head ruefully but then smiled. “Her daddy Harlan was one of the friendliest men I ever met, but I knew if I mistreated Maddy he’d show a whole other side, so I behaved myself…Wasn’t difficult, there was something about her—you didn’t want to risk breaking her heart, you just wanted to bask in that smile.

  “After a couple of weeks looking, I was still jobless and nearly out of my meager savings. I had resigned myself to being a ‘GD’ dishwasher and busboy when Maddy’s father gave me a job at his hardware store. It was good, honest work, and Harlan had white customers and black. He was fair and he knew the business. He taught me all about tools and all kinds of home-repair skills.

  “I kept seeing Maddy, and we ended up getting married in 1961. Harlan made me a full partner as part of our wedding gift, the other part being a down payment on a sweet little house in a quiet part of town. Maddy kept her job at the diner and I started running the family business under Harlan’s watchful eye.”

  The flight attendant came through with the drink cart and George got a vodka tonic while Jimmy settled for a Coke.

  “George Junior came along in 1963, just two months before Jack Kennedy was gunned down. Do you remember the first time you held Thomas, Jimmy?”

  Jimmy nodded. “I was afraid I might break him.”

  Now it was George’s turn to nod. “Until that moment, I thought I had been happy, that I had seen real beauty…But holding my baby boy, my wife in the bed next to me…Lord have mercy.”

  George wiped his eyes and took another sip of his drink.

  “I worked very hard at improving the business and we did well. Delphine came along a year later.”

  George’s face clouded for a moment, then he went on.

  “I had missed out on the Albany civil rights demonstrations of 1961, but having children, I…I wanted them to grow up in a better world, so I joined Dr. King on his march from Selma to Montgomery. Cracker hit me with a rock in the second mile and I woke up in a Selma hospital.”

  George took off his hat and rubbed at the spot where the hair had come out white since that day. It wasn’t so noticeable now, but it still pained Jimmy to know its evil history.

  “They had gone on without me, of course. When the hair came out white, Maddy called it a ‘badge of honor,’ but to me it was a sign of how far we still had to go—black and white.

  “That was ’65,” George said, “and we had another boy—Richard—a year later. I had managed to build up the business to the point that Maddy could leave the diner and raise the kids full-time. We had three beautiful children and were prosperous. I thought my happiness would never end.

  “Dr. King followed Jack Kennedy in 1966, felled by a coward’s bullet, and we named our fourth child Martin in his honor. By then I had a couple of white men I would call friends but still got hard looks if I went uptown.”

  —

  Jimmy thought again how insular his life had been in Yanut. He rarely saw anyone that wasn’t Tlingit or Haida until he had been in an accident and Thomas had placed him in the nursing home.

  He had hated it there until he had met his best friend, George Watters. Surely that was Raven’s work, and of that part of it, he was glad.

  “When 1969 came, the hippies were in full swing—everywhere but Albany, it seemed. Life at the Watters household went on, we had another girl we named Pearl. Lord, she was a tiny thing, and frail. Georgie—Junior—he and Delphine started calling her ‘Bitsy,’ like ‘itsy-bitsy,’ and the nickname stuck. By 1971 we had enough saved up to move to a bigger house, a nice two-story craftsman on Edderton Drive. Man, oh man, I was the happiest man in Georgia, maybe the whole damn country.”

  George shook his head ruefully. “That May, May 11, Georgie took his bike to the Green Jug liquor to buy comic books—he never came home.”

  George took another sip of his drink and looked at Jimmy, his eyes haunted by a heartbreak that had never healed.

  “Hit-and-run driver,” George said, his hand shaking. “Left my boy broken and bleeding in the street like…like a damn dog.”

  George took a last sip of his drink, which was now mostly melted ice. Jimmy put a hand on George’s shoulder. “Should have ordered a double,” George said, smiling bitterly.

  “I can flag down one of the attendants,” Jimmy said.

  George waved him off. “Best I get this out now…Georgie was rushed to the hospital but died in the ambulance. After that, it’s…hazy. I retreated into myself. He was my pride and joy, you know? I loved my other children but he was the first.

  “I didn’t do much of anything except take long walks or mope around the house. Maddy, who was as heartbroken as I was, kept our family together.” George shook his head. “She was a lot stronger than me. Maddy not only took care of the house and the kids, she made sure my employees at the hardware store took up the slack—even got her daddy to come out of semiretirement to oversee things. I know that must have been hard for her…that, and dealing with her father, who must have wanted to knock some sense into me.”

  “You were grieving, George, I’m sure everyone understood that.”

  “For two years?” George nodded grimly when he saw Jimmy’s face. “Yeah, I was basically MIA from my family until 1973. Some patriarch.”

  Jimmy didn’t know what to say. He had also “checked out” when Rose died, crawling into a bottle for what he called his “lost years”—but Thomas had already moved away and gotten married before that happened.

  “I don’t know exactly what moment brought me out of it,” George admitted. “Sometimes I think it was the love of my kids, other times the love of my Maddy—her love was like a force of nature.” George sighed. “Like a spring shower—soft and gentle at first, but next thing you know, you’re caught in a hurricane of…passion.”

  George blushed, something Jimmy had never seen in all their years of friendship.

  “Don’t goggle at me, Pushmataha, you look like a damned owl.”

  “Impressive reference,” Jimmy admitted.

  George saw one of the flight attendants and asked him for a ginger ale. They waited quietly while George got his drink, and Jimmy used the interruption as an excuse to use the restroom. He grunted getting out of the cramped seat, his knees sending out hot needles of pain.

  “You okay, Injun Joe?” George asked.

  “Seat’s cramped,” Jimmy said. “I’ll take something.”

  “You need to stay away from the cheeseburgers,” George cracked, but he was clearly worried.

  “Never,” Jimmy said, though he rarely ate them as it was. Jimmy moved as quickly as possible. George rarely opened up this much, and Jimmy had heard very little about his life before Golden Summer. Fortunately, th
ere was no line at the restroom and he was able to take care of his business straightaway.

  —

  When Jimmy returned, he found that George had gotten him a bottle of cold water and two Advil.

  “Thanks, George,” Jimmy said. He was tempted to call him “Uncle Remus” or “Kingfish” like in the old days, but people on the plane might misunderstand, and his heart wasn’t in that game anymore. He didn’t resent that George continued his joshing—well, not much.

  “Now,” George scolded, “if you’re through interrupting me…”

  Jimmy thought he was teasing, but George was serious.

  “Once I got out of my funk, I really tried to make up for lost time. I doted on Maddy and my kids and went back into the store with renewed enthusiasm—I even thought about opening a second store.

  “Then 1979 came along and so did Melissa. She wasn’t really planned, but we couldn’t have been happier. The death of Georgie had left a pall over that house, and Melissa was like an angel, all smiles and giggles.

  “I thought ‘Now we will all be happy, our house and our hearts are full.’ ”

  George laughed bitterly.

  “The very next year, Bitsy passed. It was like God wanted to punish me for being presumptuous.”

  George said nothing further, so Jimmy asked, “What happened?”

  “She was always so delicate. She came down with a bad throat infection and that developed into rheumatic fever. By then the disease was becoming quite rare in the US, but her frailty made her especially vulnerable, and she died in the hospital.”

  “I am so sorry, George,” Jimmy said, his own eyes clouded with tears. He had never known that George had lost a child, let alone two.

  “I went MIA again,” George said. “A new baby in the house and I just fucking checked out.” Jimmy thought that probably earned George another hard stare from across the aisle, but he kept his gaze on his friend.

  “Maddy rallied again and had Martin and Richard help out at the store after school. She worked like a demon to keep our family, home, and business all together, even though she herself had a secret…a terrible secret.”

  George put down his ginger ale and wiped his eyes with a handkerchief. When he spoke again, he had a faraway look in his eyes.

  “It was December 11, 1980, and Bitsy had only been gone four months. I was sitting on the porch, just staring out at the road. I couldn’t have told you if it was raining or fair, I was just staring out at nothing, thinking of nothing. Delphine, Richard, and Martin were in school, and Missy was in her playpen. I remember Maddy was making brownies, because all three children were good students and she thought they deserved a treat.

  “I was just sitting there, another day in the fog of my grief, and I heard a crash. Missy started crying and I had a vision of her cut and bleeding—that was enough to rouse me from my damn stupor.

  “I rushed in to find Maddy collapsed on the floor.”

  Jimmy could see on George’s face he was reliving the moment—the shock, the alarm, the feeling of helplessness. It was an alchemy of emotions he knew well, from his own time with Rose as she slipped away from him to a place he could not follow.

  “It was a stroke—she was in a coma for six months,” George said, his voice a whisper. “She came out of it, but she was never the same…We had to place her in a home.”

  Jimmy gripped his friend’s shoulder again, and now George collapsed against him. He held George as the man shook against him, letting out some of the grief he had held onto far too long.

  At last, George straightened up, wiped his eyes, and blew his nose. He took a long draft of ginger ale and said, “So there I was, a forty-year-old man with four kids.” He counted off on his fingers: “Delphine, seventeen, Richard, fifteen, Martin, thirteen, and Missy—Melissa—just two.”

  Jimmy wondered how he might have handled such a burden and was grateful he had never had to.

  George looked at Jimmy, his eyes damp. “As bad as it was losing George Jr. and Bitsy, losing Maddy felt so much worse. Does that…does that mean I’m a terrible father?”

  Jimmy shook his head. “So much grief in such a short period of time. I can’t imagine what I would have done if I had lost both Rose and Thomas.”

  “But I was a lousy father, Jimmy,” George said in a low voice, looking down at his hands.

  George almost never called him by his given name, and it sounded strange in Jimmy’s ears, like an unfamiliar word.

  “Between Bitsy and Maddy, much of our savings were wiped out in medical care,” George said. “I retreated from my children by spending as much time as possible at the hardware store. Most of the care for Missy fell to Delphine, because we couldn’t afford a nanny and had no relatives who could take on the responsibility of a two-year-old.”

  “George, what happened to your family is a terrible tragedy, but it’s not your fault. And I am sure your daughter was old enough to realize you couldn’t shoulder work and a family both, alone.”

  George nodded, but Jimmy could see it was more out of politeness than real acceptance.

  “It was hard,” George said. “I had to cut back on the staff at the hardware store so that I didn’t have to short my own pay. I would put in long hours, seven days a week.”

  George wiped his eyes and went on. “But there was always dinner waiting for me, and Delphine always packed a lunch for me. I knew she was hurting as bad as any of the kids, maybe worse—she and her mother were so close—but she never complained.”

  Jimmy said nothing, though it grieved him to see George in so much pain.

  “Then one of the big hardware chains moved into Albany,” George continued. “I couldn’t match their prices, and people cared less about service than a bargain. And their inventory was so much larger, more varied. Finally, I went out of business…to very little sorrow on the part of most of the community, I might add.

  “For a while, I did handyman stuff: light carpentry, painting, plumbing…All that stuff you seem so anxious to get me back into, Injun Joe.”

  Jimmy was going to protest, but he let George continue uninterrupted. This was an old wound that had festered far too long.

  “People were more comfortable having me as a handyman than a merchant,” said George ruefully, “but there’s only so much of that kind of work available, and, when you have four kids and an invalid wife…I stopped going to see Maddy—it was just…too much. Me trying to act cheerful and her sitting there slack-jawed, staring into space.”

  George wiped at his eyes.

  “Work dried up, and I would just drive my truck. I told Delphine that I was looking for work, but most days I was just wandering aimlessly, adrift on the back roads.

  “Still, if she knew, she never said a word. She was nineteen and had all her mother’s goodness and compassion. There were times I felt so low I resented her for being so good to me.”

  George stared out the window, and Jimmy knew he hadn’t heard the worst of it.

  “I had a friend, Vince Shackleford. He had gotten a job with Farmer’s Friend, a big ag-supply place that sold everything from seed and fertilizer to irrigation systems and tractors. Vince was now manager of the Albany store and offered me a position as a salesperson, with the guarantee that I’d be on a fast track to management. I was ready to take it when I found out he had a traveling sales position open, one that would cover the southern portion of Georgia and Alabama. I told him that’s what I wanted to do. Vince protested that that job was not a managerial fast track even though the pay plus commission was initially higher. I took it.”

  Jimmy thought he knew why but tried to rationalize it for George. “Of course you had to think of the money, your bills were…”

  “It wasn’t that, I wanted to be away. If I hadn’t had kids, I would have just lit out for parts unknown. But I could never do that…but I just wasn’t strong enough to be the kind of father they needed.”

  George looked out the window again and paused for a long moment. Jimmy though
t he was finished. Then George turned to him and his face was filled with guilt. “It was Melissa,” George said. “By now she was six, and every day she looked more and more like Maddy. All the children take after her in some way, but there’s a lot of me in there, too. But Missy, she was a dead ringer for her mother at that age, and I would just die a little inside when I saw her.

  “It was stupid and selfish, but there it was. It surprised me because I always thought Renee was the great love of my life. But you can ask me today what she looked like, what she sounded like, and I only have a vague recollection. But Maddy? It’s like yesterday, Jimmy. I can still hear her say, ‘Oh, George’ and snap a dish towel at me. Lord, we used to laugh sometimes. I would give anything to laugh like that again.”

  George sniffed as tears spilled down his cheeks. Though it was awkward in the cramped airplane seats, Jimmy hugged him again, and George cried.

  The flight attendant touched Jimmy gently on the shoulder, and he gave her a nod to assure her everything was all right. He knew people were staring, but he didn’t care.

  Finally, George straightened up and dabbed at his eyes with a handkerchief. “Damn, Geronimo, if they didn’t think we were a couple before, they do now.”

  “You know Geronimo was Apache, right?” Jimmy asked. He knew George, and the man would mask any awkwardness with humor until he felt like talking.

  “Really?” George asked sarcastically. “I thought it was just something paratroopers yelled.”

  “Apaches don’t like that, either. They find it demeaning. I think they have a point.”

  “You Indians are a touchy bunch,” George groused.

  “You have read at least one American history book, right?”

  George shook his head and laughed. It was an old argument that by now had become more of a well-worn joke routine between friends than racial epithets.

  Of course, Jimmy mused, George can call me Pocahontas or Geronimo or Injun Joe and only raise a few eyebrows, if any. On the other hand, were they to hear me call him Uncle Remus or Bojangles…Jimmy guessed that was progress, at least for black people. He looked forward to the day when people became as thoughtful and protective of Native Americans.