“Their own already,” said Berg. “You should share a john on the East Side with twenty other people, which is—I wouldn’t be surprised—why my bowels are in their current state; in three lousy freezing rooms and no hot water.”
“We didn’t have cold water unless it rained hard.”
Toutant Kingstree and Simon Berg had formed a friendship whose meeting ground was an exchange of familial and historical disasters. Raleigh listened. What could he offer? Once his basement had flooded, shorted out his freezer, and spoiled six hundred dollars’ worth of frozen meat? He sat and listened.
“Back in Mississippi, my mama and papa hired out, burning stubble, beating it down, you know, with pine branch. Dawn to dusk for a dollar a week when they could get it. The Man came up, told her her baby brother George had fallen under a freight at the depot and he was gone. But he was a union man and she found out how’d they’d shoved him under the train and then poured white mule all over his body to make out he’d been drinking. She found that out, she just let go. We carried her to the doctor. But after that, she never really came back. Early on, she was always singing, had a voice like a dove.”
“Irene Balashovich, my grandmother’s sister, God rest her, stood in her yard the day the lousy Cossacks rode through the shtetl and with her own two eyes she saw her husband Malachi at the gate, a simple hoe in his hand; so the bastards come by with their swords out, and then there he lies in the road with his head gone. So tell me what this world is like?”
“You from Russia, Berg?” Kingstree accepted an offered cigarette.
“Hereditarily…So from where is your family, Raleigh? Weed?”
“Thank you, no. North Carolina. I guess they’ve always been in North Carolina. I mean, ah, I suppose they were originally from England or someplace like that.” Raleigh was distracted by a noisy group of men walking into the snack bar. One carried a mock-up of a check, the size of a door. It announced he was the winner of the Big Peach Barbecue Pig-Out. A T-shirt and a cap with plastic pig ears also celebrated this event.
Kingstree spluttered his lower lip. “They ought not to make fun of pigs like that.…What business your folks in, Raleigh? They in the record business, too?”
“I’m not in…Well, my father was a minister and a band director.”
Berg said, “My uncle Vassily was a rabbi in Warsaw. Not a good place for such a job at such a time, however.”
“My grandfather,” Raleigh said suddenly, “lost his furniture business and meat store. He could never make himself ask people to pay their bills.”
The two other men stared at Hayes after this unprecedented personal disclosure. He blushed and went on. “He lost his legs to gangrene from diabetes, and then he had a stroke.…He was a very sweet man. His eyes were very…kind.”
Kingstree and Berg nodded.
“Ada Hayes, my grandmother, started work at the Hillston Mills when she was eight. She never got to learn to read or write.”
“Mine neither,” nodded Kingstree.
“Likewise mine,” Berg said, “never spoke English in America.”
They all nodded.
Outside the window, Gates Hayes held up his skates and banged on the glass. Beside him, Mingo Sheffield was straddling a bicycle.
Only Gates and Raleigh were going to the little picnic island at noon. By Cupid Calhoun’s stipulation, there were to be no outside observers at the field of honor.
“Not to worry,” Weeper Berg shrugged. “Two meshuggeneh goyim fighting a cockamamie duel? This I can live without.”
Kingstree agreed. “I don’t say no to that. Berg, let’s you and me go see the outhouse.”
Mingo planned to accompany the Hayeses on the bicycle he’d rented near the parking lot where they’d been asked to leave the red truck. He’d never been very good at bike-riding, and now he wanted to see if Life on the Road had given him the courage to speed up (which is what his friend Raleigh had told him countless times— thirty years ago—was all he needed to do to keep the bike from wobbling over on its side). “Here I go,” he gasped. Then down the road he flew, careening from curb to curb, but gritting his teeth and clamping his hands on the grips to keep them from grabbing the brakes.
Gates laughed. “Look at him go! Man, you can’t help but love that guy, right?”
Raleigh watched the voluminous Hawaiian shirt fluttering in zigzags down the shaded road. A trio of fishermen scattered, holding their rods high. Finally Raleigh said, “Right,” and nodded.
Now the brothers could have simply walked down the road and crossed the covered bridge to the island, but Gates wanted to arrive in style; a phrase that always appeared to mean arrival by some peculiar method of transportation. They went therefore to the Small Craft Marina, where they found Mingo consoling himself for having just missed his chance to take the big steamboat, by renting instead a little pedal boat. He was already in the water, paddling alone near the shore.
“Jesus, Gates,” Raleigh said, when told to jump in the front of a canoe. He hadn’t been in a canoe since the last time he’d gone fishing at Knoll Pond, and using one there had been—as his father admitted—just for fun, because anyone with half an arm could throw a rock across Knoll Pond and hit the tin roof of the little cabin beside it.
But here Hayes was now, gliding along past red cedars and Georgia pines, in the shadow of Stone Mountain. It was actually, come to think of it, a very peaceful feeling.
“Damn straight,” agreed Gates. “Lot more peaceful than the Mekong.”
When Hayes pulled the bow of the canoe ashore on the north side of the island, he saw a little boy sitting up on a cedar branch, watching him. The boy held a plastic tomahawk in one hand and a hot dog in the other.
“How, Kemo Sabe,” Gates called, his palm raised. “Me look for paleface with white stick. And Ugly Big Man with eyes of a buffalo and snout of a possum.”
The boy stared down at them. Then he pointed the tomahawk toward a grove of trees.
“May your spirit soar like an eagle, Little Brother,” Gates told him by way of thanks.
Under the trees near the cul-de-sac of the asphalt road, and hidden from the picnic grounds, they found C. P. Calhoun and his bodyguard seated in a golf cart. Calhoun, his eyes slightly less glazed today, was reading a book entitled The Art of Fencing, and Solinsky was crushing peanuts and spitting the shells out.
“Hey, Arnold, it’s twelve o’clock. That’s noon to you.”
“You wanna be dead, buddy?”
“Only my mommy calls me Buddy, Arnold. You can call me…Scaramouche! And I’ll call you…Scare-ah-yourself-in-themirror.”
Solinsky lunged. Calhoun swatted him back, and Raleigh hissed at his brother, “Will you please not make this any worse than it already is?”
The two parties met. The two principals shook hands. A great many bells began to peal, as if to commemorate the moment: actually, they were the seven hundred bells in the carillon spire, and they always played at noon.
While Gates laced up his skates, Raleigh told him, “Okay, I’ll do it, but I just hope you realize I’ve never been more mortified in my life.”
“Oh, Specs, you say that every day.”
And so Hayes, feeling like an idiot, offered both fencing foils to Calhoun, accompanied by the following speech in his best polysyllabic style. “I trust we are agreed on the rules, Mr. Calhoun. This engagement satisfies all grievances between you and my, between you and Mr. Hayes; serving as full and sufficient apology and restitution for any previous loss or, or, offense committed by my principal.” He waited. Calhoun bowed. “Second. The first to draw blood is the victor. On both parts, all proper care will be taken to avoid any serious injury. I presume you wish to proceed.”
Calhoun bowed, tossed Solinsky his book, whisked both foils at his sides, picked one, returned the other, then offered Raleigh his hand. “Understood,” he purred in his hushed silky voice. “I like your style,” he added.
The duelists made quite a couple. The romantic gangland he
ir was dressed in loose white trousers with a black sash, a ruffled shirt, and a white vest with a silk handkerchief in its pocket. (He bought most of his outfits at antique clothing stores.) Gates was wearing his soft white textured Japanese-looking apparel. (He bought most of his outfits at high-fashion discount stores.) The thin fabric fluttered now as he suddenly shot past them on one skate, swooped the fencing foil out of Raleigh’s hand, swirled back in a figure-eight, and, with the foil’s tip, flicked Solinsky’s orange tie out of his jacket. “En garde!” he grinned, skating backward, just out of reach of the purple-faced giant’s balled fists.
“Mr. Hayes,” Calhoun murmured. “No skates.”
Raleigh had to agree, and told his principal so. Gates then tied his laces together, crouched to his knees, and rolled toward them. “Like this?” he asked. “Fair?”
Calhoun shook his head. “No skates.”
“Oh, all right fine okay. Just trying to add a little color.” Gates put back on his white leather shoes, while Arnold Solinsky (held back by his employer’s foil) growled and shuddered.
“Come, sir, your passado!” Gates tossed the foil from hand to hand.
And so at the signal of Raleigh Whittier Hayes (namesake of a great Elizabethan swordsman, but never himself much of a fan of the sport), the duel over Mrs. Jefferson Davis’s so-called opals began in earnest. Hopping and whacking and circling and shoving, the two combatants had at it for ten hot noisy minutes, to the awed excitement of the little boy with the tomahawk who was hiding behind a trashcan. Neither man had ever fenced before in his life, and was relying for instruction primarily upon Errol Flynn movies seen on television. But Gates Hayes was not only—as everyone said—a natural athlete, he had also (1) played Mercutio in the Thermopylae High production of Romeo and Juliet, and (2) chopped his way with a machete through the thick jungle foliage of a war zone; and while he’d endeavored to put the latter experience in the old mental shredder, he nonetheless had the advantage of some experience over Cupid Calhoun, whose only steady exercise took place on a bed. Gates therefore was soon clearly ahead on points. He’d whisked Calhoun’s handkerchief out of his vest pocket, slashed his sash, and torn open his sleeve, when all at once Solinsky bounded forward, grabbed Gates from behind with a thick arm around his neck, and yelled, “Now! Stick him!”
Calhoun had been already lunging forward, and the foil bent as it stabbed into Gates’s shoulder. Shocked, Calhoun jerked it out. A wet red circle instantly widened over the white fabric.
“Gates!” Raleigh cried.
His brother wrestled free of the bodyguard’s arm, and looked down at his own. He grinned. “ ‘No, ’tis not so deep as a well.’ ” Then he wagged his finger at Calhoun. “But bad show, C.P.”
The slender man’s alabaster face was now splotched with pink. He strode furiously over to Solinsky and slapped the side of the foil across his wide face. It left a red streak. “You’re fired,” he shouted.
Solinsky’s response was truculent. “You can’t fire me. Mrs. Parisi fires me.”
“That’s good to hear.” Gates kept on grinning, but did so now through gritted teeth, for his brother was ripping his shirt off. “Hey, man, what are you doing to my Versace?”
Raleigh tore the cloth into strips. One piece he wadded and pressed into the wound. It turned red. He put another one over it. “Hold that!” He looped a strip around his brother’s shoulder and tied it in place.
Gates laughed. “It’s nothing. It’s nothing. A scratch. Two out of three, C.P.?”
His face livid, Calhoun stuck the foil in the dirt, where it stood quivering. “I forfeit,” he announced. “You were winning. The debt’s settled.”
At this moment Raleigh Hayes, running down to the lake edge to wet some cloth, had no idea that he was about to become a hero. But he was. The opportunity was coming in a broadside from Fate, who had been merely playing games when she set up the dueling accident: Gates’s wound, in fact, was only a scratch, albeit a very bloody one. Perhaps it was the sight of that red stain that quickened Fortune’s perennial bloodlust; at any rate, her next trick on the Thermopyleans was very deadly indeed.
It had upset Mingo Sheffield to hear he wasn’t allowed to attend the duel. The more he thought about it, the more it worried him to think how his help might be needed there. He particularly didn’t trust the bully called Big Nose. Consequently, all the while the combatants were negotiating terms, Mingo Sheffield was pedaling as hard and as fast as his fat legs could maneuver in the tiny pedal boat, down the lake toward the wooded island. He was almost there when to his terrified astonishment a motorboat suddenly buzzed by, inches away, splashing water all over his clothes; then the boat spun around, pounded back, and shut off right in front of him! Two burly men in windbreakers grabbed hold of his little boat. One of them said, “Out, Hayes,” and the other one showed him a gun.
Sheffield flung his arms up in the air. Tourists leaning along the rails of the big gaily painted steamboat merrily waved as they churned past. But Raleigh Hayes, on his knees at the lake edge dipping a shirt in water, was closer, more knowledgeable, and more paranoiac. He assumed that associates of Calhoun’s were taking Mingo hostage. While it was conceivable that his neighbor might crawl, as he was doing, voluntarily into a stranger’s motorboat, there could be no affable reason for one of those strangers to fist Mingo in the stomach as soon as he sat down, while the other one held a gun to his temple. Their boat spat into motion—slow motion, with its stern almost underwater, weighed down by the new passenger. It was passing very close to the island; so close that behind him Raleigh heard Big Nose Solinsky shout to his employer, “Hey look, C.P.! Couple of Neill’s men. They got that blob guy! He’s dead, huh, huh!” Raleigh heard Gates shout, “Neill? Neill! John G. Neill?!” He heard Gates and Calhoun shout at each other. “Coke…Why?…Kill…Hotel… You?…Ripoff…Told them what?!…Me? Me? I’m nobody!… What!…Outside Myrtle Beach…Hit…What! Sheffield?!…Oh, no!…Here?…Dead….”
Raleigh started running.
He saw glimpses of Gates’s bare back leaping ahead of him.
A family of picnickers was standing open-mouthed at their table when Raleigh streaked around them. Simultaneously, he and they heard a motor on the water splutter, then roar off. “That’s my boat!” squawked a man in a Georgia Tech sweatshirt, and squirted so much lighter fluid on his charcoal that flames whooshed over his head. An aluminum fishing boat bucked into view, with Gates standing at the helm, steering south with his good arm. Raleigh spun around and ran back to the cul-de-sac without slowing down or arguing with the Georgia Tech man who leaped around the fire screaming at his family, as if they didn’t know, “That’s my boat!”
Raleigh didn’t wait to argue with Solinsky either, when the giant yelled, “Hey, that’s our cart! You don’t steal that!” The Thermopylean leaped into the golf cart and whizzed toward the bridge. The big guard considered stopping the cart with his body, but when the machine accelerated as it headed straight for him, and when the driver kicked him in the chest, he changed his mind.
Clattering through the covered bridge and heading south, Raleigh tried both to steer and read the park map taped to the little dashboard. Robert E. Lee Boulevard ran between the narrow-gauge railroad tracks and the lake, and all three curved to follow the southern slope of the mountain. At one point, the road abutted a small inlet. That’s where he was headed. But the golf cart, despite his attempt to press the pedal through the floorboard, wasn’t fast enough. He thought he heard a shot, but he couldn’t be sure. There was too much noise: his motor, boat motors, the paddle-wheeler’s hoot, the chug of the steam locomotive coming up quickly behind him, and the seven hundred bells of the carillon pealing “Maryland, My Maryland.”
He was too late. By the time he reached the bend from which he could see the lake bank, the empty motorboat was banging against a rock. A quarter-mile ahead, two men in windbreakers were running across the road, pushing Mingo in front of them. They scrabbled up the incline to the tracks just as
the tourist train slowed at the curve. Leaping on the back steps of the bright caboose, they hauled the fat man up onto the moving platform with them. A whistling blast of smoke puffed from the engine, and away the train sped, with Raleigh in torment scooting down the road beside it.
Part of his torment was the infuriating slowness of the golf cart; no amount of yanking, pounding, or kicking would hurry it closer to Mingo. Part of his torment was an inability to convince himself that somewhere out on the lake, “everything was jake, folks,” with his brother Gates.
But actually Gates was doing, in the Hayes phrase, “just fine.” Surprisingly fine, considering that one of Neill’s hired guns had taken a shot at him and instead put a very large jagged hole in the aluminum hull of his borrowed boat. Without a thought to his captaincy, Gates abandoned ship, dived over the side and started swimming underwater. Despite his bad shoulder, he’d made it to shore by the time his boat, bubbling protests, sank.
Like his brother, Gates Hayes was in torment. He knew (vaguely) that the guy who’d paid him to make those pickups in “Easy Living” had had some (vague) falling-out with a powerful drug dealer named John G. Neill. Calhoun had quickly made it clear to him just now that the cocaine syndicate thought Gates Hayes was this dead man’s partner, that the syndicate planned on Gates Hayes’s being a dead man, too, and that they seemed to think Mingo Sheffield was Gates Hayes. All Gates could hear as he kicked under that water was “I fucked up, I fucked up, he’s going to get killed, he’s going to get killed!”
When Gates staggered from the weedy bank up to the road, far far off to his left he saw Sheffield being yanked inside the caboose door of a moving train. On the parallel road, his brother Raleigh was flying after the train in a golf cart. “Oh fuck!” gasped Gates. Across the road, a young bicyclist sat under a tree beside his helmet; he was reading Walden Two and eating a banana and alfalfa sprouts sandwich. The alfalfa hung out of this young man’s open mouth like moss as he watched a wet, half-naked savage covered with blood and lake slime steal his thousand-dollar Italian racing bike.
Handling Sin Page 56