The Alumni Grill, Volume 2

by Tom Franklin

  “I’m surprised you’re not out there marching with them. What, did your washer woman forget to starch your sheets for you?” I turned and shook my empty highball glass, letting the ice chips jingle. Pinion reached for the crystal decanter standing between the twelve-inch block of ice and the bone china sugar bowl. “I thought you told me your grandfather was a big muckety-muck, a grand titan or poobah or something. I thought you said he was with General Forrest in Tennessee when he started the whole thing up.”

  Pinion filled my glass. “I did. My granddaddy was boss of the real Klan in North Alabama when there was a reason for it. This club you got here now hasn’t got any more to do with the real Klan than the Boy Scouts.”

  “I guess we’d better watch out,” I said, pinching his knee. “Didn’t I hear that last year they beat up some poor college boy for being alone with a girl in the backseat of a car?” As the guardians of white purity, the Klan not only hanged uppity Negroes, they terrorized anybody they deemed licentious—drunks, wife beaters, excited college boys fumbling under the petticoats of coeds. I’d even heard a story about a pair of careless adulterers who had been dragged out of bed naked and horsewhipped.

  Pinion raised his fists in mock combat. “I’d kill a few of them sum’bitches before they even touched me with one of their ropes, by God. The sight of all that white trash under the sheets gets me hot enough to shit fire.”

  Seeing Pinion get all worked up tickled me. I covered my mouth with my hand. That was one of the things that was attractive about Pinion, he didn’t sugar anything for me except my drinks. Pinion came from a long line of handsome politicians, all of them with a reputation for getting into scrapes. Like his congressman father, Pinion was a legendary brawler. Club gossip had it that when he was twenty, he suffered a year-long suspension from the university for being the first student in two decades to break the rule against dueling. It was said that he put a rival SGA member in the hospital when he shot him in the knee with an antique pistol. Others said that when he was in Montgomery, Pinion frequently challenged other state senators to “step outside” if they voted against him, as if the rotunda were just another roadhouse tavern where men gathered to drink and smoke.

  “Look at those bastards.” Pinion stood up and pointed out over the holly hedge. Underneath the towering elms, three horsemen robed in white rode down the middle of Queen City Avenue. As they passed under a magnolia tree, lamplight glistened off its waxy leaves, surrounding the riders in a misty halo. One of the horsemen raised his hood and blasted the same four mighty notes on the bugle. Behind the troika stretched a long watery line of white figures marching side by side like an army of ghosts, their shapeless garments shimmering in the night.

  Pinion stood up and took my hand. “Come along to the street,” he said. “I want to show you something.” Pinion had never touched me in a familiar way before, and I felt my face grow flush as he led me down the steps of the porch and onto the cobblestone walk. “Look.” Pinion pointed at the Klansmen. “You see their shoes? Invisible empire, my ass. I know everyone of them sum’bitches. Every one.”

  Moving at the hem of the white robes were pant legs and shoes, dozens and dozens of shoes. One pair of button-ups with terrycloth tops, another heavy-laced pair splashed with mud, brown work boots, canvas sneakers, congress gaiters—even a green pair with knobby toes swung past. Pinion chortled. Only the thick holly hedge separated us from the street and the long line of marching shoes.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Only Bobby Pate would have bad taste enough to wear green shoes.”

  I laughed because he was laughing. “Who’s Bobby Pate?”

  “Just some fool that clerks down at the county courthouse. And there goes his boss”—Pinion raised his voice—“the honorable Judge Harris.”

  A hooded figure with shiny black loafers turned to stare at Pinion and me still holding hands. It made my spine tingle, but fear only fueled the giggles.

  “That one over there will be teaching Sunday school in the morning.”

  That did it. I doubled over. I laughed so hard my bladder hurt. It was like laughing in class. You knew you weren’t supposed to, and once you got started there was no hope of stopping.

  A few more of the hooded figures turned our way, glaring at us through the hollow eyeholes of their masks. At the very edge of the long narrow row of shoes, there was a worn pair of saddle oxfords. Above them the sheets were twisted and out of whack. The left shoe stepped forward gingerly; the uncertain right shoe dragged behind in a dead limp. All of a sudden Pinion quit laughing. “I don’t think I know that one. I wonder— ”

  “Wonder what?” I was still laughing, knees together, both hands on my sides. My bare toes curled in the lush zoysia.

  Pinion shook his head and turned back up the walk toward the porch. “Nothing. Come on, let’s go finish our drinks. And then if you still have a mind, we’ll have a look at their damn cross.”

  In Pinion’s bathroom, I tried to fix myself up a little in the mirror over the sink. I pulled a brush out of my purse and frowned as I raked it through my freshly bobbed hair. I’d had it cut last week because of the heat. On a lark, I asked the lady at the beauty parlor to dye it ink black, the way I used to keep it in my old Vassar days. The lady at the parlor didn’t want to do it. You have such a purty color brown as it is, she said. I told her it was my birthday and that I was twenty-seven and needed a change. Finally I coaxed her into doing what I wanted but left angry because when I looked in the mirror I didn’t find my old schoolgirl self, just an old-fashioned flapper.

  For a while I told myself I was irritated at the beautician and the way she had made me work so hard to get what I was paying for. In New Haven or Poughkeepsie, if you had money to pay, people did what you asked—no hassles, quick, efficient. In Tuscaloosa everything was an ordeal. You couldn’t go into the drugstore for a pack of cigarettes without getting into a twenty-minute conversation about the football team or the weather or, worse, a lecture—once, right before John left for his trip, an elderly lady minding the register simply refused to sell me a pack of Viceroys because she said it wasn’t righteous for women to smoke. I was so angry, I went home and threw myself on the bed and had a conniption fit in front of John. He was sorting through his closet and he didn’t even look at me as I screamed and cried, he just kept picking through his long thin suits, trying to decide which one would make the best impression on his colleagues in Zurich.

  “You’re being a baby about all this, Marla,” John had said, pinching lint off the sleeve of a pinstripe jacket. “Be grateful I have work here. The people are not so bad. Besides, we could still be living with your father.” My father had been one of John’s professors at Yale. Even when we were courting, it had occurred to me that John’s interest in me wasn’t purely romantic, but in those days John had been gay and full of fun. We went to parties and danced around champagne fountains and shared bootleg gin with good-natured strangers.

  I stared at my own strange reflection in the bathroom mirror. When I’d given my hair thirty strokes, I put the brush back in my purse and gave myself a hard look. What do you think you’re doing, Marla? I asked. Just what in the hell do you think you are doing?

  When I returned to the porch, I found Pinion in his wicker chair reading the week-old newspaper he’d been using as a fan. “Look at this,” he said. On the front page there was an x-ray, a black-and-white photograph of a fibula with a hairline fracture. The previous Saturday, our team, the Crimson Tide, had played Tennessee. During the game, word spread through the stadium that one of the Tide’s injured players, a tight end from Arkansas, had asked to be cut out of his cast so he could take the field. The tight end scored two touchdowns and we bested Tennessee twenty-five to nothing.

  No one really believed the story about the kid having a broken leg at the time, but then on Sunday the Constitution did an entire article on him. The headline read: “Paul ‘Bear’ Bryant—First Place in Courage.” Bryant was the “other end”
opposite Don Hutson, Bama’s star receiver. Hutson and the quarterback, Dixie Howell, “the human howitzer from Hartsford,” made a powerful combination, and since I’d moved to Tuscaloosa, the duo had become the princes of the South. But right now, for a brief moment, all of Tuscaloosa’s attention was focused on the superhuman Bryant. Pinion had spent the last five days unfolding the newspaper like a map and telling anyone who would listen, “If this Bryant kid heals, we’re SEC champs for sure.”

  Pinion reached into the pocket of his trousers and produced a coin. “I’ll bet you this silver dollar that our lame Klansman there is this Bryant fellow. It’s just the kind of stunt those muckrakers would pull, pandering to the fans. They’re trying to run me out of office, you know.”

  I looked at the headline again: “Paul ‘Bear’ Bryant—First Place in Courage.” “No way,” I said. “I don’t think he’d do it.”

  “You’d be surprised what a poor college student will do if you wave a little money or tail in his face.” Pinion spoke as if he had had plenty of experience in such matters.

  I reached over Pinion’s lap and pilfered a cigarette from his pack of Picayunes lying next to the serving tray. “Well, only way to settle the bet is to go to the rally.”

  “I aim to.” Pinion fished out his lighter. I bent down to the flame in his cupped hands. “All we have to do is wait for Puddin to get back with the car.”

  Puddin was Pinion’s driver and had been his father’s driver before him.

  “Where is Puddin, anyway? You don’t think he’s in any kind of trouble, do you?”

  “No. He’s picking up groceries for Odetta. I sent him out over an hour ago. He can’t be much longer. Maybe he’ll come back with some mint for the bourbon.”

  Pinion prepared another glass for me. He swirled bourbon into the ice chips as I smoked. Picayunes are for people looking for a real smoke. Every drag felt like shards of glass settling into my lungs. By the time I had stubbed out the butt I was into a nice hazy buzz. Pinion handed me my glass and then I decided I’d better have a seat on the porch swing a few feet from the wicker chairs.

  I felt rather loopy by the time Puddin pulled up to the house in Pinion’s black convertible. Puddin was breathing hard and shaking when he pulled up into the drive, and it took some doing to coax him out of the car.

  “Did you see them, boss?” Puddin took his cap off and blotted sweat off his bald head with a blue bandana.

  “Yeah, Pud. We saw them.”

  As Puddin told it, he had just finished loading up the car with groceries when the nightriders passed. Puddin was the last customer before the clerk at Abernathy’s locked up. The door had just shut behind him when he heard the bugle sound. Puddin had quickly raised the top on the car and hid under the steering wheel, praying that nobody would spy him through the windshield. He was so frightened that he stayed there, cramped and numb, long after the parade had passed.

  “Poor fellow,” I said, patting Puddin on the back. “That’s terrible.”

  “I am too old for this aggravation,” said Puddin, putting his cap back on. He stooped to rub his knees. Pinion took the two full sacks of food from the backseat and put them in Puddin’s arms. “Go take the goodies into the kitchen for Odetta, Pud. Have her fix you a cup of coffee. You might ought to spend the night with us. I don’t know if you want to go home in all this.”

  Puddin nodded and headed for the kitchen door at the side of the house. He turned around when Pinion began to put the top down. “Now where are y’all going?”

  “Miss Marla here wants to see them burn that cross, Pud. You want to come too?” Pinion winked at me and my bourbon giggles picked up again.

  “No, thank you, sir,” replied Puddin, biting down hard on the word sir. “Why do you want to take Miss Marla into such a spectacle as that? You know something sorry is bound to happen.”

  “Don’t worry about me, Puddin, I’m a big girl,” I said, waving goodbye to him.

  Puddin shook his head. “Ain’t nobody big enough to be out with those crazy fools.” He turned his back on us and disappeared around the side of the house.

  Pinion just smiled. When he was finished with the hood, he opened the passenger’s side door for me. After he got behind the wheel, he reached across me to open the glove box. His shoulder brushed against my chest and I closed my eyes as he fiddled with the latch, trying not to blush again. When I opened them, Pinion was holding an ugly black revolver. He opened the chamber and quickly snapped it shut. Then he gave me a lewd grin. “Loaded,” he said. “Just in case we smell some trouble on the road.”

  Within a few minutes, Pinion had turned off Queen City and we were speeding down University Boulevard. The stars appeared to be far away, maybe because on the horizon there was a dim orange light growing in the northern sky. We rode past the edge of the university’s campus and turned left at Bryce toward the river.

  As we passed the beautiful old asylum with its Doric columns and cupola, I noticed a dozen or so inmates standing on the expansive lawn. Was something wrong? I looked up at John’s office window, which was, of course, dark. I imagined him up there smoking a cigar, writing in one of his green medical ledgers with the gold fountain pen I’d given him for Christmas. Below, most of the inmates were milling around barefoot in their night clothes; a few of them stood stone still, looking up at the night sky as if expecting a lunar eclipse or a fireworks display. Two stringy-haired women clasped their hands around the tall iron gates that surrounded the yard. None of them waved at Pinion’s car as they might have in the daytime. They didn’t seem to notice our passing at all. It was unnerving, and for the millionth time I wondered why John had exiled us to this tiny country town inhabited solely by football fans and failed suicides. Before I knew it, my fingers had found their way again into Pinion’s free hand.

  He looked at me in a sort of pleasant mocking way and said, “Hey, reach down on the floorboard and hand me the flask.” The flask was wrapped in the crumpled folds of the Constitution. The paper had also printed Bryant’s yearbook picture. Standing in his uniform, tall and handsome, he could easily pass for a matinee cowboy. We passed the flask back and forth, taking little sips as Pinion navigated the heavily wooded road.

  Then out of nowhere, Pinion said, “You know the Yankees burned down the university during the civil war, even the library?”

  I shook my head. “No. I didn’t know that.”

  “Yep, got all four of our books.” He winked, and I grinned back. “A Polish mercenary named Croxton torched it. He thought Bryce was the president’s mansion and ordered his men to burn it down too. Luckily the soldiers discovered that it was an asylum before they carried out the order. Can you imagine what that would have been like, a hundred or so madmen on fire and screaming?”

  I took a slug from the flask and handed it to him. “I think by the time you catch fire, you’re mad. At that point, it doesn’t matter where you’ve been living.”

  Pinion nodded. “True enough.”

  We continued down the road until we came to a large man-made clearing that gave a view of the Black Warrior River. On the shore, scores of cars were parked bumper to grill in a semicircle. Women and children sat on the hoods of these cars, some of them eating sandwiches. Men stood atop the running boards drinking soda pop. A few frat boys had brought dates. The boys had unfolded colored blankets down on the grassy sand and now held hands with their sweethearts through the handles of their picnic baskets.

  A ring of a hundred or so spectators, all men, crowded around the Klansmen, who were standing in formation. Down by the banks, there was a huge weeping willow, its body arched across the water. A mound of red Alabama clay had been packed in front of the tree and a tall lumber cross, more than twenty feet high, filled the night with orange flame. It shined over the murmuring crowd. The Klansmen nearest the cross must have suffered terribly from the heat; occasionally they held up their hands to shield their faces.

  It was similar to the grand bonfires the university built on t
he quadrangle for its homecoming pep rallies. I remembered the way Dixie Howell had addressed the crowd the previous fall and how the fans had cheered at just the sight of him, waving their crimson and white shakers in the air. I glanced down at the newspaper again and the handsome young Bryant looked back up at me.

  Pinion let the car idle in the back of the makeshift parking lot for awhile. When he finally killed the engine, he said, “Stay sharp, I want to be able to leave quick if we need to.” I started to ask why, but then he took his gun out of the glove box and put it in the front pocket of his trousers. That alarmed me, but I kept my mouth shut. Pinion walked toward the crowd and I followed. A few yards from the weeping willow, there was a platform with a microphone. At the foot of the platform, four Klansmen held a banner that read “Klavern 117 Tuscaloosa Knights of the KKK.” The crowd began to applaud.

  “They’re getting ready for the speaker,” said Pinion. “Here we go.”

  Sure enough, the lame Klansman limped up to the platform and stood before the microphone. I cursed. Pinion gave me a quick smirk.

  But then came the booming voice, rich and powerful, spilling in waves over the crowd. I have to admit, for a moment I was spellbound: the hooded army, the ghostly speaker, the murmuring crowd, the burning cross silhouetting the soft green branches of the bent willow, and the black sheen of the river reflecting firelight.