Local Souls

by Allan Gurganus

  There’s a kind of wisdom that comes from this; but, me, I am still seeking that. I keep holding out for some factory rebate. Maybe I was destined to sell health, fire, life, property, and flood protection to Riverside’s most prosperous and therefore fully fearful?

  Red sat asking, “Doc sir, since you’ve told us what we got exactly, is there still no drug for it? What has science even been thinking about?”

  “No perfect solution yet, Red. If I were you two, I’d pop niacin pills about like chewing M&M’s. There’s a new product called MER/29 but I don’t like the side effect in pigs and rabbits. Cataracts, size of grapes. Those’d spoil your developing golf game for sure. —No, your boys’ ticket is regular exercise. But avoid Olympic trials, Red, got me? One study was done on folks with rheumatoid arthritis—seeing if aspirin could help their terrible pain. Didn’t, but cut their incidence of stroke and heart attacks by more than half. Sounds crude, but it’s cheap. There’s no literature yet. So don’t be telling anybody I urged an aspirin a day on you, all right? They’ll think me some quack. Cigarettes? even being near others’, deadly. Oh, and Red, I saw you having your way with the club’s fried chicken. That’s out now, hear? You’ll want more greens. Since both your bodies retain superfluous lipids and won’t relinquish even . . .”

  Roper noted Dad’s frown. An eighth-grade dropout’s dread of excess vocabulary. Like magic, Doc’s RX shifted, “See, Red? Is like this: Your body, when it comes to this fat? it’s all Savings and no Checking. So, we’ve just got to work at cutting down what’s being taken in. Your body can’t stop chucking every bit it finds right into Savings. Your cholesterol-account’s so overloaded it’s started clogging your heart. And, sad, our young Bill’s here.”

  I felt Dad, seated beside me on our shared exam table, nod; I almost heard Red’s heart-click of recognition. He’d finally understood in plainest terms our bodies’ strange and killing greed. Roper saw: only his simplest explanation had eased us both.

  And with us, father and son, still feeling uneasy even at being bare-chested (if only before Doc), with us each feeling scared of a curse that’d leave at least one of us alone and soon, Dad and I did allow it to happen just this once. We let my bare left shoulder touch Red’s right, then stay massed there, to warm it.

  I knew that Red would face his own incoming death with some forward motion of belief, acceptance. Time came, he’d rush clear out to meet it. He’d try converting it into some awaited friend.

  I sat here, shivery. Sat wondering—just as we held one disease in common—might I someday match him? I mean in pure simple spirit.

  Just then, to be honest, that seemed unlikely. And my fear of cowardice around our illness meant I’d earned myself a disease far worse than Dad’s.

  11

  TURNED OUT LATER, Bobbitt’s Hobby Shop downtown had been underwriting Doc’s exhibits. Why? The week his first show opened, shop business (according to “Bobo” Bobbitt) jumped 39%. Doc’s golfing chums lined up to learn any “art.” Even a few on-sale woman-craft macramé outfits got sold in plain wrappers. One well-known former Wake Forest linebacker bought a whole “Dolly Village” to take home and paint. The huge man asked, “Bobo, can I put snow on their roofs? ’Cause I like it when there’s snow piled on their little roofs.”

  Being only regular people, these fellows carried home ready-made “kits.” Roper’d assembled his à la carte. He’d gathered the best tools, first in Bermuda then via contact with other duck-nuts on what he loved to wink was truly these guys’ “World Wide Webbing.”

  “Doc definitely got that computer out of its crate,” I told my wife.

  MUST’VE BEEN AROUND then, Janet read to me from Parade magazine how a writer said way back, “There are no second acts in American life.” (Wasn’t my Red the exception? We guessed Roper hadn’t heard yet, either.) Doc still talked about the upcoming joys of a man’s middle-age. Imagine pretending that seventy-one was your Big Game’s halftime. Life span 142 years? Sounded reasonable for him.

  You started seeing his name in more newspapers than our Falls Herald-Traveler. Even the Raleigh one. He still looked handsome in his leathery laugh-lined way, hair a purer baby-powder-white. His smart chuckle could sound half-mean, and always that textured baritone my wife called his secret weapon. Odd, his kids now spent even their Christmases skiing Aspen or hitting the books at far-off Yankee grad schools. With Marge still looking thin and dark and pretty darned “good,” the Ropers seemed to be taking Excellence to some new high-water mark. They looked . . . well, national. Something a bit disloyal there.

  “Oh, face it, he’s always been a little bit of a secret show-off. Admit it,” Janet snapped my way one morning. I sat washing down, with decaf, all anticoagulants he’d long ago prescribed. I knew she meant well but her roundhousing on Doc just made me feel worse. He’d done okay by me, and even by Dad at the end. Whenever a good doctor retires, his patients must feel a little jilted.

  Was about then, us locals began collecting decoys. Coincidence? We all did live along a river, too. Whatever made us notice decoys, they soon became our minor craze hereabouts.

  Mallards, gadwalls, pintails, redheads. Real duck names sounded so funny and like toys, you’d want one of each.

  FADS REQUIRE DISCRETIONARY funds. And I guess Riverside had right deep pockets. Old farm-owning families had arrived in town to join the Fallen just after Sherman smoke-cured our county’s grander homes.

  By now our own friends’ kids were marrying, several per weekend, another sort of biologic fad. Our lovely daughter’s wedding I’d nearly paid off. She is so gifted a linguist, Middlebury tried to hire Jill her senior year there. If I start to boasting, I’ll never stop. Our age group retired early. Youngish lawyers with serious golf and rogue drinking hobbies showed a growing willingness to spend weekends cohabiting under and alongside hangovers.

  Certain made-up customs we enjoyed. Les Wilkins had spent much of his tobacco fortune on collecting antique cars. He’d filled an old family auction-house downtown and hired two black men to mind the fleet, keep it all tuned up. Every few months Les would drive another one up The River Road, taking kids for rides, pretending to try and pick up his friends’ wives. “Judy, you could have had me in this. Instead you chose to be with Ted who is now-bald? Say, Ted still got that trusty ’96 Taurus, does he?”

  Les was no stranger to bourbon but somehow Tennessee-Kentucky’s by-products always cheered him. He owned one grand limo that’d belonged to Gloria Swanson, a giant gleaming thing, all wicker panels and silver running boards. And, right before Christmas, after sufficient eggnog, Les would throw a wreath over its hood ornament; he’d ease along slow, honking its old-fashioned trumpet horn that, for some reason, played the first eight notes of “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles.” If we got near Christmas and hadn’t heard it coming down the road, we noticed, even fretted. These are the amusements of those of us who stayed. Everything becomes our own Fallen advent calendar. And in every window, one colorful local. Personalities, the clock chimes you could count on.

  Televised sports showed games local fellows used to play a bit less well than they remembered. We still loved the way our houses looked. As outlying mallside suburbs filled with crude copies of Riverside Colonials from the 1920s, our originals, themselves rushed copies, looked taller, more “historical.” But even our Lithium’s recreational waters bring us the stray unpleasantness.

  One evening Jan and I were cooking outdoors for our bunch from the club. Somebody looked off the deck and upstream past Roper’s studio, and wisecracked, “Think we’ve got a country guest. Who invited him, Bill?” It was a dead white Brahmin bull, floating. Thing was massive, pretty swollen-up, far-gone, and its male gear on show was either huge or distended. The beast had a set of long hooked horns; the end of one had somehow got its curve jammed into the crack of one rock. Over the mossy stone, water steadily flowed, shifting the poor creature’s front hooves as in some dance or seizure. Sure looked like he wanted to get loose. The bull appeared a
s tired of being seen as being dead.

  Jan gave me a stare that said, Take charge for once? Though I felt willing to put on hip waders, crank up my never-fail Evinrude, prod the beast loose with one oar, I instead suggested we move our nice picnic indoors for a change, what say?

  Next morning, merciful, he was gone. Then, scanning downstream, seeing no trace for a clear half-mile, I felt concern. Almost missed him.

  12

  YOUNG BLACK CADDIES at the club quietly instructed Red. At his invitation they kept offering Dad small hints at how he might seem more at ease here. Though Red was a legacy member, these new pals hinted he might quit using the establishment’s full name. Shorthand is one perk of membership. So Red abbreviated his usual, “Shall we meet then before our one o’clock tee-off at the clubhouse in the Nineteenth Hole Bar of the Broken Heart Country Club of Falls, then?”

  The Ice Age gave our club its name and odd emblem. On the cusp of one hillock rare hereabouts, nature once deposited a perfect igloo-sized stone. Seven feet tall, five wide, resting on its side, it was a giant accidental replica of the standard Valentine heart. Its twinned halves looked smoothed and rounded as buttocks at their best. Formed by chance, the thing must have busted in transit, maybe being pulled along what we now call the Lithium. Though elephant-gray outside, its inside surface showed a shiny jet-black all geode-angles. Long before Columbus, something split this thing into being a landmark the Tuscarora had navigated by. And since the 1600s, settlers had all called it the Broken Heart. You saw it inked in shorthand on our earliest English maps.

  Since then, many a risk-attracted teenager, including me and Janet, had smoked around the thing, puffing, squatting. Disavowing our country club parents’ hypocrisies and shallowness, we kids avoided rain by hunkering under its valved halves. We crouched for shelter near the gray sides like its own pink piglets. A broken heart so big seemed to call forth our rare tourists and the Fallen’s many lonely kids. The ground around our namesake Broken Heart was mulched with generations’ cigarette butts.

  When Colonel Paxton’s parents donated eleven hundred acres to become the course in 1901, once their family refused to let our club be named for them, this great boulder seemed the natural next-best. For locals, “the Broken Heart” referred mainly to this familiar geologic feature. Only out-of-towners ever thought the name odd for a carefree sporting institution.

  My wife’s sophisticated visiting college roommate Kaye sometimes ate with us there. She once asked, looking around our club’s 1920s raftered stuccoed dining room, “So. Are the broken-hearted the ones turned down? or you people actually paying dues for this?”

  INHERITING THE PAXTONS’ founders’ membership for free, Red chose to purchase used golf clubs. Why? He told Mom and me he dreaded other fellows guessing he’d never played before. “Chances are they’ll know, sugar,” Mother allowed herself the smallest of her cat smiles.

  “Oh. You mean when I try and hit it and all, they’ll guess?”

  “Maybe you should first practice, in the backyard . . . of Shadowlawn?”

  “Genius!” He admitted, “It’s just that our move up and ever’thing, well, it’s happened so danged fast. To be listed among the Fallen and then in Riverside to boot! And now, with ‘club’ this, ‘caddy’ that. Sometimes being in town full-time, I hit certain aspecks and just don’t know how to ‘do’!”

  Mom again warned him not to strain himself. In those years everyone still walked the course. With Red become a daily club regular, I—trying to fit in at grammar school then junior high—withered, picturing him.

  I’d been drafted into the ranks of the Fallen and had not volunteered. I tried keeping some of my country stillness. Jokester chatterboxes forever need new victim-listeners, right? My thoughts? Oh, they run fluent enough all day as you can hear, I hope, I hope. Only parties, just living groups of four or more, still tongue-tie me. At gatherings, me early, folks entered, smiled, called my name, nodded, speed-walked to the bar.

  But Red? Red sometimes sported too-new tartan golf caps ordered from catalogues. One had Saint Andrews stitched across its bill. He’d never been abroad, he’d clearly never played the mythic course. Surely others, knowing this, would spare him, not asking him to reminisce. I, hushed as ever but wide awake, found my father’s overstatements grueling. Right on cue for being fifteen.

  Red embarrassed Mom and me only when we caught him somewhat fudging. If Dad stayed just what he was—what all Mabrys were—he was hard not to love. I just ached to see him make wishes so blamed visible. But, for him, putting them out there’s what made them real. Hadn’t this already brought us sixty five thousand and a house in town? Me, I felt eager to help him learn to hide. Was I best at keeping my own dreams secret? or had I not yet fixed on one?

  Red kept slinging around those overused clubs. Kept dropping Roper’s name as if a school chum’s. Dad loved the Broken Heart so much he even praised their so-so chicken lunches. He believed the wives of his new dentist-friends all looked like certain movie stars. “Hiya, ‘Rhonda Fleming.’ You do, too. Just LIKE her.” He made himself pathetic, upbeat and therefore indispensable.

  Guessing he’d never be taken for a full-fledged Skull and Bones member, Dad gradually became—without quite knowing—a sort of rustic mascot. Most smooth Falls golfers had secret kinsmen hidden one or two counties away. Their uncle-farmers looked and sounded not unlike my dear clay-colored Red. So gents—by shaking hands with this new member, by accepting his very presence as the last of weird Paxton’s many pranks—felt slightly better about their secret country kin. Executives now decided they could tithe at Broken Heart. Now their own sun-cooked uncles and forty male cousins need never set a muddied boot onto the black-white-checkered marble foyer of an actual Riverside home.

  Black caddies gathered around Dad, grinning at his jokes regarding bulls and cows, town salesmen outsmarted by farm gals. Red wanted to know young caddies’ plans for some eventual education, better positions in out of the rain. Certain club members could always be counted on to slip bag-carriers a few bills and the same funny remarks. They often asked about the young men’s getting lucky on Saturday night, how lucky and what was her name? all that night’s names? Ha. Red seemed innocent of any difference between the Paxtons and their hired repairmen bag-boys. Since before George Washington, Paxtons always had the jobs to give, right? And poorer fellows needed work. Poor boys had been honestly paid to smooth things over, mop up after each smart-mouthed Paxton since 1610. Fair exchange of services. No shame in that.

  I once overheard a golfer fondly quip, “Well, you know what ole Red says . . .” I also heard Dad called “Yosemite Sam, over there.” Times he made me want to either blend in fast or fade away completely. Having arrived among the Fallen without heightened expectations or faked confidence, I mostly kept to myself. Poor health reinforced that. “No roughhousing ever,” they’d told me on the way to first grade. So I tried to look tempered, naturalized. If a high school fad for madras pants broke out, I made sure to be among the last to buy my pair. Mom resembled me in this. We kept tucked-back safe.

  One Sunday Dad was driving us to First Presbyterian when Mom announced she’d reaffiliated Baptist. Her chosen church looked like our old country one. We’d liked it okay before Red’s craze for all things “town” landed us on Lithium’s shores.

  Mom found some perfectly nice women at Third Baptist of Falls. They worked as seamstresses and kindergarten teachers. And when they drove in to have tea with her, one admitted to writing down the River Road address beforehand, in case police stopped her, she could prove she’d been invited.

  I made friends too, quietly priding myself on talent-scouting the best folks, not the flashiest. (Doc was the only “famous” fellow I ever really cared for.) It so happens that some of the finer people on earth are forever—arms-crossed, shrewd observers—waiting there, off to one side. Always at the jury-box edge of things, silent for a thousand reasons of their own. Mom and I found few saints strewn among the Fallen. But those pal
s would, like my fact-loving face-saving Janet, prove lifelong.

  THOUGH RED WAS freed from farming, though he knew local stores didn’t open till nine a.m., he rose early and hit the shower. He counted on its metal stall to improve and echo his Tin Pan chorale. “High as an e-le-phant’s eye!” became my reveille. Mom and I stayed bathers, hiders, silent afternoon soakers, readers in the tub. Honestly, if it had been left to us, all Mabrys would yet sit fly-swatting on some hot rental porch midfield. We three would still be right out there rocking tonight, comforted by roosting chickens’ late-day placement squabbling, studying someone else’s tobacco acreage. Such land’s main beauty was the horizon where—for our inexpensive sidelined entertainment—an entire sun set nightly.

  Even groaning during Dad’s wake-up serenades, I’d come to half-appreciate his nerve. I, as the town boy who borrowed a record number of public library books, soon realized how much room there is on earth for one true believer. My very gift for camouflage let me see Dad plainer. Every club and lodge and church needs at least one Red Mabry. One who’ll make only positive remarks, one who always offers unfaked enthusiasm. Raw belief. In the value of believing. In what? What have you got? My father, a pure person, put forth nothing else but faith.