The Alumni Grill, Volume 2

by Tom Franklin

The letters arrived in Ansley Park on a Saturday. Betty Singleton had already been on the phone about it to her sister, Gladys, and what she told her was the return address said San Francisco and it had been written in a woman’s hand.

  The letters waited on a tabletop in the parlor where the butler left them.

  When Katherine first came down the stairs in her robe and slippers, she saw them. She knew the handwriting of her own address. She passed her hand across it. Only one other letter had arrived to say he found Korea fine and was not yet fighting but still at base camp and how he missed her and still smelled her and knew her sideways and backwards and had memorized the meaning of anything she ever said and the veins on the back of her hands. She’d read the letter and touched it until the ink was faded and the paper soft. None had arrived since. Now she fanned and counted twenty-one. She lifted her eyes to the parlor. She half wanted someone to come into the room and acknowledge them so she knew they were real. The grandfather clock chimed ten times behind her.

  She sat reading the letters on her bed. She smelled each one, saw where his hand had slipped, the hard or soft pressing of each pen mark. Each word seemed to be spoken by him to her in her own bed, the two of them lying side by side. She thought how he cleared his throat often because he spoke little and how his hands were rough and callused, smelling of pine and cedar. Once she found a small splinter on her thigh after she had been with him.

  After forty-five minutes, she read the last letter that said all the others had been only half-truths. The thing he thought of equal to the rest, the thing he saw as much as her skin and face and hair and eyes and lips, he had not yet written. He had killed a man. Not the men in the fields, hidden in holes and support trenches in the ground, hiding under grain and sows, in floorboards and garden soil, but a man in the city one morning when Siskell had been out all night and was still drunk. An unarmed man in a small cement room above a restaurant where he’d eaten the night before. Siskell had taken to carrying a knife in his civilian boot when they gave him a few days leave. Returning to the hotel, a man greeted him at the entrance of his room and Siskell, thinking him enemy or criminal, one sent there to bring him harm, stabbed him in the dark. The tiny room had no windows and he said he had not stopped, that he did not know how many minutes passed nor how many times the knife went in. He wrote that a Lucifer had crawled into his right arm and gripped the hold. The man lay motionless, not breathing.

  When Siskell stumbled out, he saw he had been in error. His own room was down the hall in a direction that confused him. The owner must have made every key the same to save money. Siskell washed his bloody arms in a hallway basin and did not return to the hotel again.

  Now he went to bed each night with hands whose motives he could not understand. Parts of him were secret warriors, liable to come out at a moment’s notice and create lawless anarchy, with his limbs at the helm. Each day, though his hands appeared lifeless, he felt the knife go in. And in again.

  He said he offended her, assuming the privilege of her love. For this, he could not return. Maybe it is easier to be where killing is considered good, he said. Perhaps war is home.

  She went cold as she read the words. Her mouth was dry. She read the last letter ten times over and once again. She saw the handwriting was still his and the words formed the way he talked aloud. She understood this was a rite of passage, darkness comes and one tastes it and if the taste is bitter, he will not fall again.

  She looked up to see Caleb, her kindest and oldest brother, watching her. She leaned against the bed board with the last page in her hand.

  He stared down at the letters and then raised his eyes to her. “He okay?”

  She shrugged and looked back down at the paper. “I guess I have to go out there,” she said. “I have to let him remember he is good.”

  Caleb came in and sat in the ladder-back chair at the table in front of the window. “I can go with you,” he said.

  She shook her head. “I’ll go alone.”

  He did not write again. He thought of the things he wrote in the letters with a deep parasitic shame that made his blood run thick and slow within him. He took to eating his meals with the landlady. She told him she came from the middle of Nevada, married to a husband she’d known her childhood through, but her husband was committed to an asylum two years after they were married, and she said she could not go home. “Back home, they think I’m still married, and he lives here with me and runs this place,” she told Siskell.

  He nodded.

  Grace stared out the window. Smoke traveled there. Siskell saw the lines of her face in the morning light. She was thirty-six. Her eyes narrowed. They traveled to a wasteland of memories he could not share.

  When she looked back, she smiled shortly, tipped her ash, and shrugged. “Loneliness is an affliction,” she said. “It rapes you.”

  He lay on his bed not thinking, staring into the light-filled room until the light fell and faded and then he slept, but only on the edge of sleep, always dreaming, always fitful. He woke to full dark. He slung his feet to the floor and put on his boots, walked out the front door and roamed the barren, sleeping city until daylight came.

  Often Grace was watching him out the window when he returned. She gave him fresh black coffee and they sat across from one another in the tiny kitchen, not speaking.

  After that one afternoon, they did not touch again.

  Albert Keys left the children with the babysitter and drove Katherine to the train depot in the Chrysler.

  She watched out the window, the town alive with a hot July Saturday, mothers with children, men standing in front of the drugstore talking up other men, brothers, neighbors.

  She wore a pale blue dress cinched at the waist by a sash and she held her handbag in front of her, the diamond still on her left ring finger. She had not told her father she was leaving. Caleb would do the telling, and receive the brunt of the man’s red rage.

  Albert parked the car in front of the platform where people stood waiting. He went around the car to retrieve her valise from the trunk. When he opened the door for her, she sat staring out the front window. “I know you want to wait for me,” she said.

  He set the valise on the pavement and kneeled on one leg to hear her better. She looked at him. She touched his hair and watched him. “Don’t,” she said. “I can’t help what I’m doing.” She felt wooden and breakable. He took her hand and raised it to his lips, kissing it dryly. He said nothing. In his plain brown eyes she saw pity and an absence of accusation. For one brief moment, it made her hate him.

  She used his strength for leverage and stood, straightening her dress and reaching for her gingham travel bag on the car floor.

  They stood side by side on the platform waiting for the train. She knew some but not all of the other passengers and they nodded greeting and asked her no questions. Albert held the leather valise in one hand, the other hand resting on the small of her back until the train came. Before she boarded the steps, he kissed her cheek.

  Settling herself in a window seat, she thought of Albert Keys no more. Losing Siskell had been like losing a limb. She had been left a kind of amputee, and she intended now to fix it.

  In Nashville, she changed trains. Tennessee blurred by. Oklahoma. She slept, and at Wichita switched again and rode on, not reading, not looking at or speaking to the other passengers. The rectangle window reflected her profile, witnessing running landscape.

  Eight days after Grace had sent the letters, Siskell stood in front of the medicine cabinet mirror and cut his hair with sheering scissors. He worked away at the bristly, coarse hair of his beard. The sink filled with hair. He ran water in the sink, and he studied himself, half hairless, bare skin showing through in patches. He lathered.

  Cleanly shaven, he stood in his underwear before the uniform. Taking it from the hanger, he put it on.

  The office was in the center of the city near the government buildings. A grainy day of indefatigable weariness—wind blew litter in the stree
ts end over end, and men wore their trench coats and held their hats, and women battled with umbrellas and held the hands of their children, ducking their heads against the wet, slanting onslaught.

  The man behind the desk was dry. He was an E5 sergeant, and he wore a starched cap. He had a skin condition that rendered him a paisley print of tan and albino white.

  He smiled when Siskell entered, and he rose and came around the side of the desk and offered him a chair. “Wet out there, ain’t it?” His drawl was Kentucky or West Virginia, Siskell couldn’t tell.

  The sergeant rubbed his hands together as if he himself were cold. “Mary take your coat for you?” he asked.

  “Yes, sergeant, she did.”

  “Mary’s a great girl.” The sergeant went back around the desk and picked up a pipe. He put it between his teeth. Then began the conversations about company and battalion, first sergeants and positions and names they knew in common. Finally the sergeant said, “What can I do for you, private?”

  “I’d like to re-enlist, sergeant.”

  The man raised his eyebrows. “Say you would,” he said enthusiastically. “You got some papers with you?”

  Siskell unbuttoned two buttons from the middle of his torso and withdrew a plastic sack. He pulled the papers out and passed them over the desk to the sergeant. The man leafed through them, still puffing the pipe, which smelled to Siskell like cologne burning, a rich man singed. “Well, okay,” the man said. “All right. You’re just out a month.” He looked up at Siskell and smiled broadly, the skin on his lips piecemealed pale pink and dark tan. The man sat and pulled out a drawer. He arranged the papers on his desk, banging them down first and flapping his palms over all sides. “You been out East to see your folks and all yet?”

  “No, sergeant, I never made it back there.”

  The man’s eyebrows raised, but he shunned the gesture with a quick running of tongue about his lips and said, “Okay, well, a man knows what a man wants.”

  He began to scribble, but the pen’s ink was out. He brushed the top with a flick of his tongue and commenced again.

  Grace was watching out the window when the girl came on a Tuesday at dusk. She knew who it was straightaway. The girl was thin as a bird and she had the glistening, flaxen hair and dark eyes the boy had spoken of in his letters. She carried a cloth traveling bag in one hand, a shined leather valise in the other, and she walked erect and purposeful to the rooming house door and knocked, leaning back to look up at the second floor windows.

  Her telegram had arrived three days prior and Grace had placed it in the straw basket in the front hall where guests received mail, should any come.

  The girl stood patiently and did not knock again. Grace drew herself from the rocker and walked across the room. She wore a green dress and bare feet and a white knit shawl around her shoulders. She stood face to face with the girl. “Yes,” she said. “May I help you?”

  “I’m looking for Siskell Evans,” the girl said.

  Grace opened the door wider and made an arch with her hand that the girl should enter. On closing the door, she was faced with the girl’s back. It was much like the back of a widow, before she is told of the death of her husband. The landlady started up the stairs. “Come,” she said.

  At the first room on the right, the landlady opened the door to a pile of light. There were three keys on the bureau top. It smelled of wood, smoke, and soap.

  “He was staying here,” Grace said.

  Alarm took some time to reach the girl’s face, and when it did, it knitted her brows and brought her lips trembling. “Where is he staying now?” the girl asked. Her eyes blackened and she stared at the landlady. Two bright pink patches appeared on her cheeks.

  “He’s gone back,” Grace told her.

  The girl’s eyes took a turn about the room and returned to the woman. “Gone back? Where?” she asked.

  The woman watched her. “War,” she said. “He’s been gone four days.”

  The girl stared at Grace. She studied her face, not her eyes but her chin and neck, her hair.

  Grace bit her pinkie nail and stared back. “Men are born of war,” she said. “And they go back there in real life or dreams, one.”

  The girl studied her. She placed her bags on the ground, took a step toward the woman and touched her shoulder. This so startled Grace that she jumped back, took the girl’s palm and held it aloft, as though the hand had been in the midst of robbing. “He stayed here twenty-nine days,” she said. “And every single one of them, he lived and breathed you. But people always think what broke them is what’ll fix them. He’s gone back.”

  The girl took her palm from the woman and rubbed it with the fingers of her other hand. She seemed to drift into the room as if crossing a threshold into an afterworld. She stood two feet from the doorjamb and stared at the bed.

  Grace spoke in almost a whisper. “No one else has used this room,” she said. She picked up the bags and placed them just inside the doorway.

  “Sheets still unwashed where he lay,” Grace told her. “Right around the corner is the basin, bathtub, I’ve cleaned none of it.”

  She watched the girl’s back; no sound came.

  “You come get me when you need me. He didn’t tell me much, but I’ll share what I know.”

  The girl did not turn. Grace closed the door behind her.

  It was cold in the room and Katherine saw the window across from the bed was wide open and screenless, as if someone had flown from the sill, jumped from it. The space rang with the silence of him, his smell, the feeling of him. She brushed her shoe sole along the floor where he had walked, ran her palm along the bureau top where he had touched the worn pine. There was an ashtray on the bedside table with one smoked Pall Mall still in it.

  She went into the bathroom and stood at the mirror before the basin, touched each steel fixture. A few short hairs lay there; she moved them with her fingertips. Turning the bath water on, she sat on the closed lid of the toilet seat, watching it. When she turned it off, the spigot still dripped and she returned to the other room. She pulled the top sheet and the bedspread down and she stripped off her clothes, letting the dress and stockings and silk bra and underpants fall at her feet. She stepped out of her shoes and climbed into the bed, naked, her hair a fan across his pillow, each part of her body touching where he lay when he had not slept, deep into velvet San Francisco nights like this one. Smelling the ash from his one dead cigarette, she stared out the open windows at a myriad of stars, each one as distant as the next, and she stayed there the night through, not weeping.

  TUSCALOOSA KNIGHTS

  by Brad Vice

  And that’s how it began. Three distant notes, high blasts on a bugle, then a drop of a minor third on a long, wailing note. It sounded like an English foxhunt. We heard them coming a long time before we saw them.

  “It’s the Ku Kluxers,” said Pinion, fanning himself with a ragged edition of the Atlanta Constitution. “They’re having a parade tonight. Going to burn a cross out at River Road.” He leaned back in his wicker plantation chair, holding his highball glass next to his ear at an angle, as if the whiskey were whispering to him.

  It was September, and it seemed to me that I had spent the better part of the long hot summer here, drunk on Pinion’s porch, waiting for my husband, John, to come back from Switzerland. John was the newest physician at Bryce, Tuscaloosa’s antebellum insane asylum, and Pinion had helped John tap into a hidden stash of state money to finish writing his book on suicide. It was five years since the stock market crash when scores of respectable bankers and businessmen had jumped from Wall Street windows to their death, and there was a renewed interest in the treatment of self-destructive impulses. When John received his under-the-table funds, he decided he needed to visit a famous sanitarium in Zurich to do the last chapters properly. Of course, I wanted to go, having studied German at school, but he said the stipend was too small. I was pretty upset that my husband planned to abandon me here in this dinky town with
nothing to do while he pranced across Europe.

  So John asked Pinion to entertain me in his absence. John and Pinion were golfing partners at the Riverside Country Club, where the small-town Brahmin gathered to socialize. I used to go too and swim in the pool, but after a while the gossip about who was running around on who got to be too much for me. So now I spent most of my days bored, reading magazines, smoking cigarettes in bed, and occasionally scribbling notes for a tawdry novel I was writing to amuse myself, something that would out-Scarlett Gone with the Wind. Somehow I felt lonelier with all those vapid, chattering women at the club than when I was really alone. Scribbling away in my bedroom, I looked forward to sunset when I knew I could visit Pinion on his porch and have a taste of something strong. Most weekends he was kind enough to break up the monotony and escort me to one of the University of Alabama football games, only there wasn’t a home game tonight, so I guessed the Klan was providing the town’s Saturday night entertainment.

  “Can anybody go?” I asked, leaning over the rail, trying to spot them. “Even a Yankee carpetbagger like me?” I took a long sip of my sugared bourbon and then pressed the cool glass to my throat. The evening sun had dipped under the horizon, and the clouds were verging from a deep mercurochrome pink to black. The old gaslights, now filled with filament bulbs, came alive and lit up the street.

  “Sure, Marla. Question is, why would anybody want to? Trust me, it’s no Rose Bowl.” A drop of sweat trickled out of Pinion’s thick black hair and down his cheek. He set down his glass beside the serving tray the housekeeper, Odetta, had brought out to us. Then Pinion wiped his face with the back of his hand and dried his fingers on the leg of his tailored trousers.

  I hadn’t liked Pinion much when John first introduced us. Pinion Knox was loud and blunt to the point of being vulgar. As the state legislator representing North Alabama, Pinion was in charge of institutional funding for Bryce and the university, and considering his manners I always secretly thought John only befriended him in order to advance his career. When I started my book, I even came to think of Pinion as the villain, a dark-haired, blue-eyed lawyer with a thirst for booze and women. But eventually I grew to like Pinion’s loud laugh and I figured that his bluntness was really a sign of affection, maybe because his job obliged him to tell so many polite lies. Most days since John left I’d try to work on a chapter for a few hours after lunch. I’d write another seven or eight pages that would end with the fictional Pinion cheating at cards or deflowering a virgin. When I was done, I’d take a walk down Queen City Avenue and find the real Pinion drinking on his front porch.