“Thanks, Weep,” said Gates and squeezed his shoulder. But despite these assurances, he proceeded to unscrew the (admittedly distinctive) North Carolina KISSY PU plate off the back of the Cadillac and to replace it with the innocuous South Carolina plate on the minister’s old Ford, then parked in the garage. (As it happened, this switch was never noticed by the elderly clergyman, who very rarely drove and even more rarely paid any attention to what he was driving. A lady parishioner, on whom he paid a call the following week, did notice the scandalous license plate, but she was too embarrassed to mention it, so KISSY PU remained on the old Ford in the rectory garage until the day that decrepit vehicle received its annual safety inspection—long after the conclusion of this story.)
Weeper Berg shook his head sadly as he whispered to Mingo, “The boy’s paranoiac. The boy’s in a paranoiac crucible. He has talents, I give you, but he spooks when times get agonistic. Tell me they’re gonna snuff him over a lousy bagatelle of fifteen lousy gees?”
“I guess I don’t know what a bagatelle is,” Sheffield confessed.
“An unimportant or insignificant thing; a trifle,” Berg replied.
As hurrying Fortune would have it, the plan to hide out until Gates could recover his mother’s remains (and see Sara Zane again) went into almost immediate effect, when, before they’d driven too far out of town, they found themselves at a red light side by side with a Saab, out of whose passenger seat window a gigantic nose, surrounded by a flat platter of a face, suddenly started to yell, “UHHHHHHHHH. QUUUEP! HIMMMM!!!” It was a voice like a flushing toilet.
Gates Hayes (of whom it had often been said that he had the reflexes of an Olympic athlete) took an immediate shortcut to the right, across somebody’s lawn, mowing down, in the process, two little iron jockeys holding up lanterns.
“Jesus!” said Raleigh in the backseat.
“Jesus!” said Mingo, on the floor with the bass fiddle on top of him.
“Lose ’em!” said Berg, hanging out the window. “Attaboy!”
Gates swung into a residential road lined with new flowery fruit trees. The road climbed steeply; as did, clearly, the prices of the houses, for they grew taller and wider and farther away, and the grass grew brighter and the hedges higher, until finally Raleigh couldn’t see anything but treetops—or rather the blur of treetops, for Gates was traveling at his typical speed, and usually on two wheels.
“Cut it left!…Cut it right!” Weeper was navigating. “You got him! Cut in, cut in!”
Gates slung the Cadillac off the street through what, thank God, proved to be an opening in a block-long high brick wall. They roared down a wide gravel road.
“Passed us!” Weeper gloated. “Rubes!” He climbed back inside the window as the Cadillac bucked to a stop. Miraculously, his white mustaches were still on his face.
“Gates, this can’t go on,” said Raleigh, an odd green. “It emphatically cannot continue.”
“You’re telling me,” Berg agreed. “I’m a house of dry mud. I should live so long to die peaceful in bed like my brother Nate, may he rest in peace.”
Mingo crawled up from the floorboard and peered around. “Gollee,” he said. “This place looks just like Gone With the Wind.”
The four travelers found themselves not on a public road, but halfway down a gravel drive lined with two rows of immense live oaks that twisted to join boughs overhead. Lawn rolled beautifully away on either side, and at its end, white as snow, was a wide, high Palladian house whose white Corinthian columns soared from its portico to its second-story balcony—on which someone appeared to be standing at an artist’s easel. Between the travelers and the house, gaily fluttering on the rich lawn, were three large canvas canopy tents, red and white striped. Half-a-dozen black people in white clothes were running in and out of the tents carrying trays and chairs. On the other side of the lawn stood two little single-room brick houses.
“Awghh,” said Weeper Berg, “there’s peacocks on that porch! God, I hate these lousy Southern autocrats. Spare me the magnolias, please.”
“Y’ALL THERE! HELLO? YOOHOO!” An oversized handsome middle-aged woman in a glittery copper pantsuit came running down the porch steps toward the car. She had crinkled tan skin like expensive leather, gold hair with silver tips, she wore two strands of big pearls, and carried a cut-glass punch bowl in one hand, a paper cup of whiskey in the other, and clamped a long cigarette between her oversized teeth. She took it out to shout, “Y’ALL THERE! HELLO? ARE Y’ALL THE BAND?”
“YES, MA’AM,” yelled Gates, and drove forward to the crescent of gravel at the foot of the wide white porch.
“God damn you, Gates!” was all Raleigh had time to snarl before the woman was peering in one window after another, looking a little dubiously at the occupants, particularly Mingo’s teddy bear and Weeper Berg, who for some reason was pretending to be blind.
“But they said FIVE pieces! And a female singer!” The woman took a quick drink from her cup and dropped it in the punch bowl. “I swear I am losing whatever little rag of sanity I ever possessed and sincerely plan to hang myself before this day is through! Oh, what the hell! Y’all don’t pay me any mind if I tell you you aren’t a damn thing like what I was expecting the Dixie Troubadours to be! ETHAN, THAT IS THE WRONG CANDELABRA!” She was shouting at a large black man on the portico. “CARRY IT RIGHT ON BACK IN THE HOUSE, YOU HEAR! ETHAN, PLEASE, STOP KICKING THOSE FRENCH DOORS OPEN WITH YOUR FOOT! OH, GODDAMN, THERE IT GOES AGAIN!” Glass chinkled like loud chimes.
“Oyyyyy,” groaned Weeper Berg, rolling his blank eyes up into their sockets.
Gates now climbed quickly out of the Cadillac, firing upon the woman at close range the sudden impact of his extreme good looks and trendy clothes. It was enough to silence her long enough for him to confess that he’d misunderstood her question about the band. Of course they weren’t the Dixie Troubadours. How absurd.
“Uh oh,” Raleigh whispered and mentally clutched his parachute straps. Gates was speaking with a French accent.
“Ah no no, absurd, je m’excuse. I am but of course you know Jean Claude Claudel. The director? You have perhaps seen my cinemas in your beautiful country?”
The woman, who had never heard of Jean Claude Claudel, nodded in a daze.
“I am so pleased,” Gates bowed. “Permit me to make you acquainted with my colleagues.…Ah, but first excusez moi…one moment only.” For Raleigh, leaning out, had jerked Gates by the rear of his leather jacket back to the window, and muttered under his breath, “I’m not saying a word, you understand me, Gates, not a goddamn word!”
Gates continued smiling as he reached back to pry Raleigh’s hand loose. “Permit me to introduce my American colleague, Mr. Mingo, my…my…how do you say…designer.”
Mingo gave his shy, furtive smile.
“…And here is my…producer, Mr.…Raleighkov of…Czechoslovakia. I fear he does not speak one word of English. But he comprehends un peu. N’est-ce pas, Raleighkov?”
Raleigh growled.
“And,” Gates looked into the car. “The older gentleman.” Weeper Berg spasmed an unmistakable “No.” “But, pardonnez moi…I have not the liberty to tell you his name. He is a…a writer. Peut-être, un peu, um,” Gates searched for a word with his fingers. “…A little eccentric. It is his book you understand I am at the moment filming. A book about…” Gates glanced around. “…About your magnifique American Civil War.…It is called…um…Spare Me the Magnolias Please.…You have perhaps read it?”
“Why, my, no, but…” She lowered her voice. “Is the poor man blind?”
Gates peered into the car. “Comme ci, comme ça,” he said. “It comes and goes…with the Muse. And your name, chère madame?”
“Why, aah…oh my goodness!” Gates was kissing her hand, or more precisely the inside of her wrist, which no one had ever done before. “Lady Bug Wetherell,” she stammered.
“And Lord Bug Wetherell is your most happy husband?”
“Oh my, no,” she laughe
d hysterically. “Lady Bug’s my nickname. Nickname? Petty nomme? Lettice is my real name. And that’s my husband, Payne, up on the balcony up there.”
Gates laughed with his fingers. “Ah, Payne the painter, no?”
“Yes. I mean, no. I mean he was in fertilizer and farm machinery and ranches and all. But that was in Texas. He’s no longer actively engaged. He just paints for amusement.”
“Ah, madame, it is for amusement that art was born,” smiled wisely Jean Claude Claudel, offering his arm to lead her up the steps.
“Why, why YES,” spluttered Mrs. Wetherell, thoroughly hypnotized.
“I’m going to throw up,” Raleigh said.
“The boy’s good,” said Berg, still nothing showing but the whites of his eyes.
“You know,” bubbled Mingo, “he could have said we were doing The Optimist’s Daughter. That’s set in the South.”
Atop the wide curving steps, Gates had cupped one hand into a lens and with it was panning the house and grounds. “I am searching everywhere,” he smiled, “for a location for my film.”
An hour later, the four travelers were sipping piña coladas on a white wrought-iron table on the balcony. They had ostensibly joined Mr. Payne Wetherell for cocktails, but their host could not seem to stop painting long enough to enjoy a drink. His easel was looking directly out at his beautiful grounds. His canvas, however, reproduced in minute, if shaky, detail the postcard of Montmartre clipped to its edge.
Within minutes, the four were guests of the family, invited to make themselves at home for as long as they liked but not to stand on ceremony and not to mind the fact that on this particular day, “Wild Oaks,” as they called their little place, was “a bodacious mess” and its inhabitants “stark raving maniacs” over “Crystal’s coming out.” Raleigh thought immediately of Holly’s remark about Booger Blair’s “coming out” as a homosexual, but it appeared that the Wetherells’ daughter was coming out instead as a debutante. In honor of which auspicious occasion, they were “throwing a little shebang” this evening. To this “ittsy bittsy” celebration, the movie people would be welcome (indeed, exciting) additions. Indeed, the guests of honor. Indeed, Lady Bug admitted she could scarcely wait for her neighbors to hear that famous foreign celebrities were on her premises. “They’re gonna pure and simple drop dead!” she prophesied. “Imagine, ‘Wild Oaks’ in the movies! Have you been in the producing business long, Mr. Raleighkov? Can he understand me?”
Raleigh shook his head as Gates said, “Oh, I think so,” and gave him a Gallic kiss on the cheek. “We two, he and I, have been all our lifes longs like brothers. Have we not, Raleighkov?”
Hayes rubbed hard at his cheek. While doing so, he noticed a newspaper on the table near their drinks. This he quickly folded, as soon as he read, “OLDEST GLORY BOY ESCAPES. HEADS NORTH.” Below was a small picture captioned “Simon ‘The Weeper’ Berg,” although it bore little resemblance to at least any of the versions of the convict that Raleigh had seen. He slipped it to Berg, slumped in a corner, who peeked at it out of one blind eye.
Mr. Wetherell (like his wife, florid and oversized) wore old blue jeans, a brand-new red velvet smoking jacket, and a beret. Mrs. Wetherell explained that now that her husband had the leisure, he was determined to be everything he’d ever wanted to be during the years he was instead making millions of dollars selling cow manure. And one of the things he’d wanted to be was a French painter.
“Parlez-vous français?” Gates asked in some apprehension.
“Lord, no,” laughed Mrs. Wetherell, pouring herself a water glass full of bourbon and doffing it in a couple of swigs. “Lord, no! Payne doesn’t even speak American, unless he has to, do you, sweetie? He’s retired.”
Payne took his brush from between his teeth, smiled, and put it back. It did seem that while thoroughly affable in his facial expressions, Mr. Wetherell was no longer actively engaged in speech, any more than in fertilizer. All he said on the balcony was, “Glad to have you,” “Help yourself,” “Want another?” “Crystal in the dog shed?” and, in a gush of prolixity, “Not so long back, not a pot to piss in. So damn many now, need a map.”
His wife quickly put a stop to this outburst by singing over the balcony rail to the blacks below that they were setting the tables all wrong. Although professedly without a second to spare, the effusive Lady Wetherell more than compensated for her husband’s muteness, and, for that matter, for the sulky silence of Raleighkov and the wide-eyed paralysis of Mr. Mingo, by chatting on and on at the pace and volume of a cattle stampede. “The broad can beat the gums,” said Weeper Berg. “She can put the booze away likewise. Take a word of warning and don’t light a match near her liver.” It was later, of course, in the privacy of their guest cottage, that Berg made this comment. For now, he said nothing, but only sat in the corner on top of the newspaper, his blank eyes fixed on some inner Homeric vision. Or at least so Gates explained. “He writes, how does one say, inside his head. One sees a man absolutement engrossed.”
“Is that why he wears that old Confederate uniform? For atmosphere?”
“Awwggh,” moaned Berg.
“But, of course.” Gates helped himself to crustless quarters of chicken salad sandwiches. “He is now deep deep within Spare Me the Gardenias.”
“You mean ‘Magnolias,’ ” Mingo suddenly spoke up. “The Muse is forever revising,” explained the unflappable Jean Claude, his fingers dancing. Because she was in “a complete flapdoodle” over her approaching buffet, Lady Bug (for “call me Lady Bug,” she insisted) could now spare them only a few minutes for a quickie little tour of her eensieweensie house, which was not, she had to warn them, even finished, for she still had eight rooms to go. Even so, and even at a brisk pace, the tour took, to Raleigh’s swelling anxiety, a good half-hour; and not simply because the house was about the size of Monticello. Gates kept pausing to zoom with the lens of his hand down wide halls and through wide doors, murmuring, “Magnifique!” and “Perfecto!” Mingo kept pausing to ooh and gawk and dawdle and touch and say it all looked just like Gone With the Wind. Weeper Berg kept falling a room or two behind, ostensibly because of his blindness or visionary rapture, but more likely, Raleigh suspected—correctly, as it transpired—because he was, in his own parlance, casing the joint.
“Wild Oaks” was antebellum in every way but fact. It had been built two years ago. Payne had built it as a little ole present for Lady Bug. It was on the postbellum site of an antebellum farmhouse at which a division of Sherman’s Fourteenth Army Corps had once spent the night. Cold, cranky, and bored with ripping up the ties on the Augusta-Charleston line, the Fourteenth had amused themselves by tearing this farmhouse down to build bonfires upon which to roast the edible livestock. They had sung as they swung axes at the siding, and chased pigs around the barn:
My boys can live on chicken and ham, For everything that we do find
Belongs to Uncle Sam.
All the Fourteenth had left intact were the two rows of oaks. They were the only antiques on the grounds. Even the two little slave cabins were replicas. They weren’t really used as slave cabins anymore, of course. They were guest cottages. And, of course, the blacks running around among the tents weren’t really slaves anymore. Except for Ethan and the cook, who worked there full-time, and whom Lady Wetherell called “the house staff,” all the blacks were members of the Holcomb family and owners of Holcomb’s Homestyle Party Caterers.
But Mingo’s filmic instincts were impeccable. “Wild Oaks” was modeled in minute if shaky detail on Twelve Oaks, Ashley Wilkes’s plantation in Gone With the Wind. Apparently, another thing Payne Wetherell had always wanted to be was a Georgia slave owner. From its waxy parquet floors to its cantilevered stairway, from its gold damask dining room and white satin canopy beds to its red brocade music room and its overweight cook in the kitchen, “Wild Oaks” looked exactly like a movie set of an antebellum mansion. And, like a set, the illusion gave way on the backside to pure California. Behind the Wetherell house w
as a kidney-shaped swimming pool, a Mercedes-Benz, a jeep, a Peugeot, a golf cart, a go-cart, a bass boat, an electronic barbecue grill, and, in the dogshed, Crystal.
Crystal was the only Wetherell child at home. (Their son, Boone, had proved too much for the public schools to handle, and was locked up in the Citadel, a South Carolina military academy.) Crystal was the debutante, but she was not at all antebellum. She in no way resembled Scarlett O’Hara. Or anyone else in Gone With the Wind, except possibly one of the muddy soldiers retreating from Atlanta. Crystal was quite a big, strapping girl, as the travelers discovered when she’d stopped squatting in her gum boots among the two dozen bassett hounds and Brittany spaniels who were crawling all over her, and stood up to shake hands. She stood up to about six feet, not counting her old slouch hat. It was difficult to tell what else she was wearing, as it was all covered with mud (and dogs), but in general she looked far readier to set out with Lewis and Clark than to trip a Virginia reel at the cotillion ball.
Lady Wetherell laughed like a madwoman. “She is absolutely crazy about those goddamn dogs! CRYSTAL! I thought I told you to go take your bath hours ago! You are pure and simply NOT gonna be ready, and I am planning to throw myself in front of the first car that shows up in the driveway, you hear!”
“Mommy, come on. Just let me finish up here, will you?” The young woman was tragically named. She was as far from crystal as it was possible to get. She was as solid as brick, with long firm thighs and a wide firm face. She was not fat, just big; not unattractive, just uninterested. She did, however, politely shake hands with the visitors. She had a grip of steel. “Nice to meet you. Jumbo! Down! Get off them!”
Despite her mother’s continuing threats of suicide, the girl gave not the slightest indication of being eager to “come out,” even from the pen. All she wanted to do, as she later confided to Mingo Sheffield, was to go to an agricultural college to study veterinary medicine. She was clearly breaking her mother’s heart, as well as driving her to drink, for they left Mrs. Wetherell in her oak-beamed kitchen, belting down a coffee mugful of Wild Turkey.
Handling Sin Page 35