Last of the Dixie Heroes
Peter Abrahams
Peter Abrahams
Last of the Dixie Heroes
ONE
Roy thought he heard his son crying in the night. He got up, went down the hall, opened Rhett’s door, smelled the emptiness inside.
And woke up. Must have been asleep until that moment. How else to explain it? Roy didn’t turn on the light.
Must have been sleepwalking, or something close to it, and dreaming uneasy dreams, because first, Rhett had never done much crying in the night, not even as a baby, and now he was eleven years old; and second, his empty bedroom had been empty for more than six months-Roy could probably have calculated the exact duration if he’d had a mind to. No need to turn on the light, no need to see last year’s posters left behind, outgrown clothes in the closet, how neat everything was. No one had switched off the air conditioner in the window. Cold air followed Roy back to his room.
Roy awoke for good a few hours later, alone in a bed meant for two. There’d been a time in his life, back when he himself was a boy and even after, when he’d awakened every morning with a bubble of happiness in his chest, when he’d actually jumped out of bed. He could remember that feeling; not bring it back, just remember.
Roy found an inch of coffee in the pot, left over from the day before, or maybe the day before that. Heated it up, drank it down. Alone in a bed made for two: a weepy kind of line that could have come straight from a country song, and not even a good one. Roy’s mother had loved country, he’d practically been raised on country, but Roy didn’t like it anymore. The truth was he’d begun listening to gospel when no one was around, a bit funny maybe, since he didn’t believe in God.
Six months, two weeks, seven hours. It was easy to calculate, because Marcia had walked out late on a Sunday night.
“What’s the meaning of this?” said Roy, climbing into the passenger seat of Gordo’s Altima. They took turns driving each other to work.
“Meaning of what, good buddy?”
Roy’s beeper went off; then Gordo’s. They checked the numbers.
“Do Mondays suck enough?” said Gordo. 6:09-not light, not dark, not warm, not cold. They pulled away from Roy’s house, drove a few quick blocks, hit traffic.
“The stuff in the back,” Roy said.
“Oh, that,” said Gordo; but he didn’t go on.
“Funny look on your face,” Roy said.
“Just the teensiest bit hungover.”
“Besides that,” Roy said. Gordo was the teensiest bit hungover most Monday mornings. “Kind of sheepish,” Roy said.
“Sheepish?”
Roy twisted around, had a good look in back.
What Roy saw: a strange-colored jacket, not yellow, not brown, something in between, with wood buttons; heavy gray wool trousers with yellow suspenders; a funny little cap, like the cops wore in those Inspector Clouseau movies Rhett liked, but gray; a belt with a big metal buckle and a black pouch hanging off it; and a long rifle with one of those tamping-down things at the end, Roy couldn’t think of the name. With some difficulty-it was much heavier than he’d expected and too long for the car-he wrestled the rifle into the front seat. A kid stared down from the back of a Range Rover. The kid’s lips moved. Her mother, talking on a cell phone at the wheel, turned to look down too. The light changed to green and the Range Rover turned up Peachtree; Gordo continued straight ahead.
“It’s just a reproduction,” Gordo said. “You have no idea what the real ones go for.”
“The real what?” said Roy.
“Enfield muskets. That’s an exact reproduction of the 1853 fifty-eight caliber. Made in London, Roy. London, England.”
“It was?”
“The originals,” Gordo said. “This is from Italy.”
Roy sniffed the muzzle. “Is it loaded?”
“Course not. We don’t fire bullets anyway. Just black powder cartridges.”
“Who’s we?”
Gordo glanced at him, still sheepish, but smiling now. “Seventh Tennessee Cavalry.”
Roy didn’t get it.
“CSA.”
“CSA?”
“For Christ sake, Roy-the Confederacy.”
Roy looked at Gordo: sheepish, hungover, sleepless. Despite all that, he seemed pretty cheerful, which wasn’t like Gordo on the morning commute. Cheerful, and unaware of the blood seeping from a shaving cut on his neck, forming a tiny bubble that would soon overflow and stain the white collar of his shirt.
Gordo took the northbound 75/85 ramp, nosed his way into the mass of cars, all poised to move but none moving, like grains of sand in the upper half of a blocked hourglass. Roy checked his watch. It was going to be close. It was always close. The sky was getting lighter, light enough to see there wasn’t a cloud in it. Not a cloud in the sky, but it wasn’t blue, more like the color of brass, one of those red brass alloys with a high copper content. Roy felt that tightness in his chest and throat, realized he wasn’t getting enough air. Headlights blinked out, first two by two, then by the hundreds, thousands. But no one moved. This was the moment Gordo would say Monday sucked again, or work sucked, or life sucked; but he didn’t.
“Ever been up to Kennesaw, Roy?”
“Sure. With you-that charity golf thing. It was only last-”
“I mean the battlefield.”
Roy thought, Was there a high school trip? He had a clear memory of Mrs. Sangster, the history teacher, asleep on the bus, head back, mouth open, bad teeth; and a vague memory of headstones. Roy himself had good teeth. He brushed twice a day and flossed once. That had been one of his mother’s rules: Don’t you go ruinin’ that smile on me now. “Maybe,” Roy told Gordo.
“They had a reenactment up there this weekend,” Gordo said.
“Reenactment of what?” Roy’s mind had wandered: the thought of high school had brought Rhett to mind, Rhett who’d be getting ready for school at that moment. Roy could picture him getting dressed-it still took him a while to tie the laces of his sneakers, and there’d be that little shock of hair standing up at the back of his head no matter what he did.
“Not the real battle,” Gordo said. “There weren’t any Union men, not this time of year. It was more like educational-drilling, firing the artillery, that kind of thing. Anyway, it being Sunday, with Brenda’s ma in town-”
“Meaning church,” Roy said.
“Right. So I kind of drove myself on up to Kennesaw. And before you’d know it-boom.”
“Boom what?”
“I’m enlisted.”
“Enlisted?”
“In the Seventh Tennessee. You’re not listening, Roy.”
“It’s real?”
“The Seventh Tennessee? Fought at Chickamauga-what’s realer than that?”
“I meant now.”
“Course we’re not at 1863 strength, nowhere near, but everything’s as close to the same as it can be. Check out that shell jacket-identical down to the thread count. Just there’s no bullets and no horses, excepting the colonel’s.”
“And they gave you all this stuff?”
“Gave? You have to buy it off the sutler.”
“What’s that?”
“Like a store, but in a tent.”
“How much?”
“Eleven hundred.”
“Dollars?”
“Plus tax.”
“You were carrying that kind of cash?”
“Don’t be dumb, Roy. They take Visa.”
“The official card of the Civil War?” Roy said; wouldn’t ordinarily have said that aloud, but he wasn’t dumb.
Gordo looked at him from the corner of his eye, then laughed. “I’ll have to pass that on.”
“To who?”<
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“The boys in the unit. They’ve got a good sense of humor about all this.”
“Does Brenda?”
“She doesn’t exactly know yet.”
Gordo didn’t look quite so cheerful anymore. Roy knew Gordo couldn’t afford that kind of money for funny-looking clothes and a reproduction musket. No more than he could. They worked the same job, made the same money: $42,975 a year. Roy tried to figure in his head what percentage 1,100 was of 42,975. That kind of thing didn’t come naturally to him, but it was good practice. He’d noticed that people who got promoted at work always had a head for figures. Traffic started moving. Gordo picked that moment to honk in frustration, so it must have been at Brenda, or something like that. Roy came up with a figure around four percent, but that didn’t seem right.
Their building appeared in the northwest, just off the connector. It was a shiny brass-colored tower, not unlike the color of the sky at that moment, with the word Chemerica in red letters at the top. Except this morning, when all it said was: hem.
“What’s going on?” Gordo said.
“Putting up bigger letters,” Roy said.
They parked in the employee lot in sublevel five under the building, got into an elevator containing two execs. “Up five-eighths already and it’s only-” one was saying. He stopped when he saw Roy and Gordo. Roy noticed that the execs had their weight on the balls of their feet, like sprinters. The elevator couldn’t go fast enough for them.
Roy and Gordo got off at sublevel one. A right turn led to shipping, left to receiving. Roy and Gordo turned right. No actual shipping or receiving took place in the Chemerica building; nothing went in or out but product orders, the weights, volumes, packaging protocols, routes, carriers, tariffs, handling instructions, and state, federal, and internationally mandated warnings, all coded in digital transmissions. Roy and Gordo worked in the Asia/Oceania section, a cluster of a dozen cubicles in the far corner of the floor. A sign overhung their section from one of the strip lights: the irregulars. The sign had been slung up at a Christmas party several years before by a shipper fired not long after. The name remained.
6:59. Roy entered his cubicle, B27. It had shoulder-high padded walls, a chair, a desk, a monitor, a keyboard, a shelf holding the reg books- tariffs, carriers, customs, rates, routes, safety-and a framed photo of Rhett in his Pop Warner uniform. Next to it was an empty rectangle of unfaded wall padding. Marcia’s picture lay in the bottom drawer of Roy’s desk.
Roy checked his screen. He had a ton of KOH from Mobile due at their subsidiary in Osaka in a week; calcium carbonate, amount unspecified, to Karachi, P. of O. unspecified, date unspecified; two ounces of radioactive uranyl acetate to the Ministry of Science and Engineering in Singapore; three forty-footers and one twenty-footer of “Gentlemen?”
Roy looked up; got up, since you couldn’t see over the wall sitting down. Cubicles worked against you coming and going. Curtis was standing in the open area between Asia/Oceania and Central/South America (except Mexico). The shippers from the two departments, all men, all white, were looking at him over their walls. Curtis wore a wireless headset so he could communicate at all times with whomever he communicated with, a charcoal-gray suit, a navy shirt with white collar and cuffs, a deep crimson tie. He was probably the best-dressed employee in the building, including the ones in seventeenth-floor corner offices. That bothered a lot of the guys, but not Roy. Roy liked Curtis.
“Morning,” Curtis said. “There’s been a little-”
P.J., B33, two cubicles behind Roy’s, came hurrying in late from the elevator, knotting his tie-they all wore ties, a Chemerica rule-saw there was some kind of meeting, slowed down, tried to look inconspicuous, not easy at his size. Roy noticed that P.J. had a shaving cut too, worse than Gordo’s.
“-screwup,” Curtis continued, not even glancing at P.J. “Email on this was supposed to go out from New York last week, with activation set for next week, but A didn’t happen and B seems to be happening ahead of schedule. Like today. Anyone see anything different on the way in?”
No one had.
“No one noticed the company name descending?”
Roy had, of course: he just hadn’t known that was what Curtis was after. He’d been too busy listening to the way Curtis talked; long sentences and big words just rolling out of him, like he should have been a preacher.
“Fact is,” Curtis said, “as of today, there is no Chemerica.”
Roy saw something flash across the computer screens, looked down at his, saw that Chemerica had been replaced by Globax.
“Welcome, gentlemen, to Globax.” Curtis paused, appeared to be listening to something. “A new name, more in tune with the reality of our position in the world economy. Everything else stays the same.” He looked around. “Any questions?”
“This mean raises all around?” said DeLoach, B30.
“You won’t believe how big,” said Curtis.
No one laughed.
“And in the real world,” Curtis said, “the stock was up a couple ticks in the overnight.”
No one said anything about that. Roy himself owned no shares of Chemerica, Globax, or anything else.
“New ID tags’ll be down by three.” Curtis turned to go, paused. “And P.J.?”
“Yeah.”
“Stop the bleeding.”
Curtis walked away toward his office, a big glass-walled room built on a sort of square dais in the center of the vast space. As he did, he spotted something on the wall of Gordo’s cubicle. It affected his stride for a moment, as though one leg had gone fleetingly numb. After he was gone, Roy stood up to look. Gordo had stuck a tiny flag on his wall, the red flag with the crossing blue bars and the white stars.
“Stop the bleeding?” said P.J. when they were all back in their cubicles. He spoke in a low voice, but Roy could hear him. “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’ve got a shaving cut,” Roy said, not looking up from his screen. Three freight cars of ammonium nitrate had gone missing somewhere between Shanghai and Chongqing. He clicked on Maps.
Voices rose over the padded walls.
“And your ass is on the line,” said DeLoach.
“Fuck you,” said P.J. “And that’s pretty funny, what with him taking a shot at New York. Curtis is New York’s blue-eyed boy.”
One weird way of putting it, even if true. There was a long silence. Then Gordo spoke, almost inaudible. “Ain’t going to be no jobs for nobody.”
“What are you talking about?” said DeLoach.
“Globax,” said Gordo. “Can’t you see what’s happening?”
“It’s just a name change,” Roy said.
He stared for a moment at the map on the screen. Shanghai, Chongqing, Osaka, Karachi, Singapore: he’d never been to any of those places but he kind of knew their quirks. That was one of the things he liked about the job. What else? He liked the guys. And there was opportunity for promotion-Roy had seen lots of men get promoted from his floor, transferred to jobs all over the world. At Curtis’s suggestion, he’d signed up for an industrial management course at Georgia Tech one night a week, to make his chances a little better. As for the negatives: the hours, seven to four-thirty, which always meant five, Monday to Friday; the vacation time-Roy was up to thirteen paid days after eight years with the company; the health plan Roy stopped thinking about it. Every job had negatives.
He got back to those three overdue freight cars of ammonium nitrate somewhere between Shanghai and Chongqing. Ammonium nitrate was water reactive: that was the tricky part. Roy wondered whether it was raining in China and whether they’d made sure to use the watertight cars specified in the order. For a moment Roy, picturing what happened on the training films when moisture got into a load of ammonium nitrate, felt that not-getting-enough-air thing. He clicked back to his original order and found that he had indeed specified watertight cars. He took his hand off the inhaler in his pocket.
Roy sent thirty overdue gallons of methane sulfonic acid o
n a commercial flight to Kuala Lumpur; found himself in a misunderstanding with the Miami office over a container of assorted specialty chemicals and tried without much success to sort it out; sent a twenty-footer of methyl mercaptan to Manila via a freighter out of Oakland; tried again with Miami; failed to find the ammonium nitrate between Shanghai and Chongqing; went down to the cafeteria, came back with a burrito and a Coke-Coke ran free in the cafeteria, one of the perks-ate at his desk. He heard Gordo ripping the tinfoil off his fried chicken from homedidn’t have to look, he could smell it-and was thinking of saying something about that flag stuck to the wall of Gordo’s cubicle, when his phone rang. He thought: Cesar in Miami. But it wasn’t.
“Mr. Hill?” A woman; Roy didn’t recognize her voice. Ten years ago he would have said she was from up north, hadn’t been raised down here, but now, at least in the city, it was getting harder to tell.
“Yes,” said Roy.
“This is-” Ms. Somebody. Roy didn’t catch the name-a long one, maybe Jewish; which was odd because he was used to catching all kinds of strange foreign names. “I’m the assistant principal at Buckhead Middle School,” the woman said.
Roy caught everything after that. He said stupid things like “But I thought my wi- I thought Marcia-” and “What do you mean, incident?”, but he caught it.
He checked the time: 1:37. You didn’t leave work at Chemerica-Globax-at 1:37. Not on a Monday, not when things were this busy, not for personal reasons. It wasn’t part of the corporate culture. Roy called Marcia’s work, was told she wasn’t in today, tried the cell and home numbers, got voice mail each time, said nothing. Who else to call? There was no one. Roy rose.
Gordo glanced up at him over the padded wall. “What’s up?”
“Something with Rhett.”
“Like what?”
“Got to go get him.”
“Now? What’s wrong?”
Roy left his cubicle, crossed the floor, went up the steps to Curtis’s glassed-in office. Curtis had someone in there: a silver-haired guy, the kind who worked on the seventeenth floor. Roy hesitated outside. Curtis waved him in.
Last of the Dixie Heroes Page 1