Southern Cross Page 26

  He paused to rethink and remember. I kept quiet and let him do it.

  “It was the end of the summer. Hot as Hades. Humid. It was like Milton’s ‘bottomless perdition’—I’d never lived in such weather before. We’d spent the week with families out in the countryside, sleeping on floors or cots but not really getting much sleep because every noise in the night might have been rednecks coming around to run us off or worse. We were exhausted, and exhilarated. Some days were depressing, but other days were glorious. People were coming out, people were signing up, people were being magnificent. The South was about to change. We could feel it.”

  He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes and laid his arms across his chest in the manner of a corpse. “It was Friday night. I finished up early and drove back to the rooming house in Columbia the SNCC people shared. I was determined to make one last plea to Jane Jean. To show her how I felt; to say or do something that would make her feel the same way about me. I showered and changed and went to her room. She wasn’t there, so I waited. I was reading—An American Tragedy, I remember. It got late; it got dark.”

  He stopped talking and listened, as though an ancient noise were traveling to him through walls of time and space. “After a while, I heard her drive up—her Mustang had a click, valves or something. I’d read eighty-three pages, I remember. I went to the window and looked out and saw her in the car, talking to someone sitting next to her. A man. A black man. I couldn’t see their faces, but I could certainly see their bodies. I could certainly see what they were doing to each other.”

  He sniffed and cleared his throat. “She was the aggressor, almost from the second she stopped the car. She put her arm around his shoulders and pulled him toward her. Her hands roamed his chest and back, then slid to his lap—it was obvious what she wanted. I was disgusted and aroused simultaneously—the thought of her stroking his cock was … anyway, after a while she unbuttoned her blouse, and he began to fondle her in turn. She put her hands on his and showed him how to please her: Rough black hands roaming soft white flesh—it was like something out of a stag film. It drove me crazy, Marsh. For the only time in my life, I was capable of murder. I screamed, I cried, I called them every vile name I could think of. If I’d had a gun, I think I would have shot them both, point-blank, and be relieved when they executed me for it.”

  “But you didn’t,” I said softly.

  “No, but I did something just as bad. The next day I went to Monroe and demanded that Aldee be fired. For reasons of principle, of course—compromise of the movement and all that. Monroe did as I asked, though not because of my tantrum, I realized later, but for reasons of his own.”

  Seth sat up. His eyes met mine momentarily, then ducked away. “I’ve spent the rest of my life living with the fact that I’m just as prejudiced as the crackers I’d been fighting that summer, creatures I’d despised as being less than human, people I’d regarded as craven cowards. The minute a black man took something I wanted, I became a raging bigot, too. It’s been hard to live with that over the years. Close to impossible sometimes.”

  “We all have feelings we’re not proud of, Seth. The question is what we let them do to us.”

  He waved away my essay. “I avoided Jane Jean the rest of the summer, went back to school, and failed the course in forgetting. I didn’t come back here to work for civil rights; I came to be near her.” He waited for his mind to switch to a more current track. “Is she involved with ASP, Marsh?”

  I hesitated before I answered. “No.”

  “I’m going to marry the woman, for God’s sake. You have to tell me if she’s responsible for this.”

  “Nothing I’ve learned should affect your plans, Seth. But I need to know one thing.”

  “About her and Aldee?”

  I shook my head, then said something I’d sworn just minutes before I wouldn’t say. “It wasn’t Aldee.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The man in the car. It wasn’t Aldee Blackwell.”

  “But it had to be. I’d seen them together that morning—he was wearing the same shirt. Besides, by that time the only black men on staff in Columbia were Aldee and …” His eyes ballooned. “No. Impossible. It couldn’t have been.”

  “I think it was.”

  “I don’t believe it. I won’t believe it. She told me it was Aldee.”

  Seth looked to be in shock, then moaned from the rip in his soul. “God. It almost killed me then, and it’s almost killing me now.” He regarded me with the hot hurt of new wounds. “I can’t deal with this anymore. I have things to do.” He searched the room for a diversion, then snatched a file from the corner of his desk and opened it without looking at its contents. “I’m busy. What is it you need to know?” he asked inanely.

  “Does Jane Jean have children?”

  His perplexity approached delirium. “Children? I don’t … What does that have to do with—”

  “Does she?”

  My intensity shoved him toward composure. “No. She doesn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I … she can’t. An infection or something; her tubes are blocked with scar tissue. One of those loop things, I think. But what does that have to do with anything?”

  “Ask her tomorrow,” I said, and stood up. “Two more things.”

  “What?”

  “I need the tape Alameda brought in.”

  He opened a drawer in the credenza behind him, extracted the tape, and handed it to me. “I’ll want it back,” he said. “In case the ASP thing blossoms into a harassment suit.”

  I put the tape in my pocket. “The Lincoln you drove to the park last night. The one we took to Johns Island later on.”

  “What about it?”

  “You told me you were going to borrow it from Jane Jean. But you didn’t, did you? You got it from someone else.”

  I was already out the door by the time he uttered the name of the man I was on my way to see.

  THIRTY-SIX

  The house was new and sumptuous, rebuilt since the hurricane the way nearly all of its neighbors had been, a bright new seashell washed upon the shore of Sullivans Island by the winds of a tropical depression. The flagstone path to the entrance was garlanded with flowers and shrubs and shaded by a row of stunted palms; the facade was a pleasing mix of clapboard and limestone and glass brick; the door was a copper-sheeted rectangle already beclouded by the elements.

  The woman who opened it was wearing short white shorts, a scarlet tube top, and white mesh sandals, redundant accessories to her organic allure. Her shoulders were brown and bare, her hair was loose and licentious, her lips were barren of all but a pucker of puzzlement when she saw who had come calling.

  “I’m here to see your daddy,” I told her.

  Her forehead folded with uncertainty. “Are you in some kind of trouble?”

  I shook my head. “Social call. I thought he might be in the mood for a chat.”

  “What is it you want to talk about?”

  “Old age, mostly.”

  Jane Jean frowned and looked beyond me. “Is Seth with you? Are you picking me up for dinner? I don’t understand what you’re doing.” As the sequence neared its end, her voice rose to the realms of panic.

  “Seth is still at the office. It’s like I said—I need to talk to your father.”

  “But what about?”

  “Life.”

  “Whose life?”

  “His and mine and yours and Seth’s.”

  She shook her head sharply, as though to relink a short circuit. A drop of sweat rolled down her neck, ducked between her breasts, and disappeared beneath the expanded band of elastic. I’d have been happy to crawl in there myself.

  “Daddy’s resting,” Jane Jean managed finally. “Plus, he’s with someone. You’ll have to come back tomorrow.”

  “I’m leaving town tomorrow. Maybe it will help if I list some of the people I’ve talked to today: Monroe Morrison; Aldee Blackwell; Forrest Bedford; Professor Mickelson
. Tell that to your daddy. Tell him if I don’t see him in five minutes, I’m going to hunt up a reporter and tell my tale to her. It won’t be as lyrical as Faulkner or Eudora Welty, but I think she’ll hear me out.”

  She had an urge to slam the door and shut me out, but in the end all she could manage was to stand in place and fidget. I took her hand to keep it from flying about her person like a butterfly. “We both know what this is about, Jane Jean.”

  “I have no idea what you’re referring to.”

  “I know what he’s been doing and so do you. He needs to know I know, and he needs to know what will happen if he doesn’t stop it.”

  She looked in my eyes long enough to see that I was serious, then withdrew her hand and stepped back, her charm and proficiency reduced to the mundane by the genesis of my demands. The shorts and top seemed suddenly too large for her, the house a cheerless cell.

  “Do you have to do this?” she asked, grasping my arm with red-tipped fingers to plead her case with the aid of her best weapon. “He’s not well, you know. He has heart trouble.”

  “I don’t know about his heart, but in his mind he’s a tough old bird. You know that better than anyone. He’s not going to stop unless I play my trump.”

  “Play it now. For me. I’ll make him understand what he has to do.”

  I shook my head. “You’re his darling daughter, and you’ve been trying to shut him down for months, but you haven’t been able to manage it. Then you tried to buy off Bedford, but that didn’t work, either.”

  Her lips firmed with naked loathing. “You … you foreigner. You come down here and poke around for a few days and think you know what we’re about. But you don’t know anything. Yankees are dumb as stumps.”

  I laughed. “I may not know everything, but I know enough to know that R. Montgomery Hendersen isn’t going to stop using ASP as his personal puppet until I call in some shock troops. If you’re as smart as I think you are, you won’t make me talk with the feds.”

  The evening darkened a shade before she spoke. “He’s out back,” she said resignedly, as though the coil of her life had unkinked. “With his new friend.”

  “I know,” I said.

  She canted her head. “How?”

  “Just a guess. She said some things.”

  “Seth doesn’t know, does he?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Will he have to?”

  “Not from me.”

  She sighed from deep despair. “That’s part of it, too, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “By both of them, I mean.”

  “I know.”

  “Poor Seth.”

  With a twitch of resolve, she thrust back her shoulders and threw back her hair, then marched down the hall to the kitchen and pushed through the doors that led to the porch that skirted the rear of the house. I had to trot to keep up with her.

  The porch was a kaleidoscope of flowered fabric and painted wicker atop a vinyl flooring that borrowed the colors of custard and used brick. The evening breezes were undisturbed by the silvered screens that were the only barriers to the sea beyond them. The hollow knock of wind chimes made it seem as if we were going to have fun, but like the rest of life in the Low Country, the indications were misleading.

  I looked beyond the dunes and marsh grasses to the waves that sidled toward us. Their edges glowed in the twilight like jagged lines of neon, sparkling hues of luminescence that advanced in easy eddies, then shattered on the sand and sank to some subterranean sinkhole. At the moment, they seemed metaphoric of a fractured friendship.

  Dressed in shorts and thongs and nothing else, R. Montgomery Hendersen was sitting in a padded wicker chair watching the pulse of the ocean as though he were its court-appointed guardian. On a chaise to his right, her left hand entwined in his and her other clasped negligently around a cocktail, Chantrelle Hartman reclined like a bikinied odalisque, her eyes not on the surf but on her man. In contrast to Chantrelle’s firm and burnished body, Monty’s bloodless flesh sagged off him like loose linens.

  “Daddy?” Jane Jean said from just inside the door. “Mr. Tanner is here. He needs to talk to you a minute.”

  He didn’t move his eyes from the vista that had clearly bewitched him for a lifetime. “Who?”

  “Mr. Tanner. Seth’s friend? You met him at Saracen the other day. Chantrelle, have you—”

  “We’ve met.” Chantrelle flashed a proprietary glance to her left, then curled her long legs under her. “Are you looking for me, Mr. Tanner? Has Daddy hired you to make me come to my senses and stop fucking this dirty old man?”

  “The only thing I want you to do is leave the room for twenty minutes.”

  She bristled. “You don’t have any right to march in here and—”

  “Mr. Hendersen and I are going to be discussing matters that neither you nor Jane Jean need be privy to.”

  “What kind of matters?” Chantrelle demanded.

  “Biblical matters.”

  “What?” She wouldn’t have been more surprised if I’d said we’d be singing some two-part harmony, then lip-syncing to the Platters.

  “Pre-Adamics,” I went on. “Canaanites. The Lost Tribes of Israel. Old Testament stuff.”

  Chantrelle looked left. “He’s deranged, Monty. Do you want me to call the sheriff?”

  Hendersen shook his head a single time. “Go.” He looked back at his daughter. “You, too, darlin’. Mr. Tanner and I need to set a spell.”

  “But …” The women sputtered the same word at the same time.

  “You heard me.”

  I looked at Jane Jean. “Is there a phone out here I can use?”

  She pointed toward a cordless unit on a table beneath a bouquet of fresh flowers.

  “How about a sound system?”

  She frowned, then pointed to some compact Sony components stuffed in a cabinet near the door, then turned to her daddy. “Don’t let him upset you. You know what the doctor said.”

  “Yankee hasn’t been made who could put a kink in my line, sugar lump. Now run on.” He looked to his right. “Chantrelle, sweetheart, it’s time to find a new toy.” He pointed to his chest. “Ticker won’t stand up to another ride, I don’t think; takes more out of me than boatin’ a marlin. Not that I don’t appreciate it.”

  Outrage embossed her eyes. She started to say something, then swore, then drained her drink and threw the glass at my face. As it shattered against the wall behind me, she gathered her clothes off a chair and ran for the door without looking back.

  After a moment of indecision, Jane Jean started after her. “I’ll be in my room,” she said on the way.

  “Seth deserves to know what happened,” I said to her bare back. “All of it, I mean.”

  She paused, then nodded, then was gone. The only residue was her scent, a hint of rose and lilac that was soon swallowed by the winds that swept in from the beach and occupied the porch with the assurance of a lifelong neighbor.

  “Liquid refreshment?” Montgomery asked me calmly, his eyes still on the surf. “There’s beer in the cooler. Imported.” He pointed toward an Igloo on the floor beside him.

  “No, thanks.”

  “It’ll get chilly in a minute; if you want, I can hunt up some cognac.”

  I shook my head.

  “Then I guess we’re off the high ground and down in the ditch. What’s on your mind, Mr. Tanner?”

  “Seth Hartman.”

  “Known Seth for a long time.” His squint turned sadistic. “Hated his guts for almost as long.”

  “I’ve known Seth a long time, too; he doesn’t deserve what you’re doing to him. Lots of other people don’t deserve it, either. Including Monroe Morrison.”

  Hendersen chuckled like the chug of a loaded dump truck but didn’t offer a response. I sat on the chaise Chantrelle had just vacated and trained my eyes on the sea as well, but its message was indistinct. It didn’t trust foreigners, either.

  “I got into this when I met Set
h at our college reunion,” I said as preamble, “and he told me about his troubles with the Alliance for Southern Pride. But before that, I’d been doing some thinking. Not about Seth—just about life. And one of the things I realized was that even twenty-five years after the fact, I still carried around resentments from my college years. Resentments against the school, and the faculty, even against some of the students I’d been close to back then, because I thought somehow they’d diminished my life. I was wrong, of course—my life is what I made it as it went along, not what someone did or didn’t do back then—but I still harbored resentments.”

  “I’m not a head doctor,” Hendersen said when I paused for breath. “I’m just a country lawyer. You’re going to have to tell me how your troubles up at some Yankee school have anything to do with me.”

  “The relevance is that you’ve got resentments, too. They’ve come to the surface not because of a class reunion, but because you’re getting old. In particular, you resent Seth Hartman and Monroe Morrison because of something that happened in the SNCC days. As you see it, they betrayed you, lessened your life forever, and their treachery is all the more painful now that you’re thinking about your legacy. The pain eventually got so bad that you decided to strike back, at people who took a large part of that legacy from you. There is something Biblical about it—you’re playing God, and Bedford is your archangel, dispatched to do battle with transgressors who have wronged you.”

  Monty exchanged his stereotyped persona for the gravity of an oracle. “I’d say Beelzebub is a closer analogy, wouldn’t you?” The cornball went out of his voice. “Now maybe you can get to the point.”

  “The point is that your gripe against Seth comes from two sources. The minor provocation is that Seth has displaced you as Charleston’s Clarence Darrow.” I paused. “It’s ironic, in a way.”

  “What way?”

  “You’re the man both Seth and I wanted to grow up to be when we were younger. Champion of the oppressed; defender of the weak and powerless; fearless advocate for truth and justice.”

  “Cut the bullshit.”

  “I wasn’t being sarcastic. The way Seth tells it, you were all those things, and I have no reason to dispute him. What I’m trying to say is that I admire you for what you were, and I’m sure you justifiably reveled in it. But righteous causes don’t come to you much anymore; most of them go to Seth. He’s made you irrelevant, and you can’t stand it. If he gets Morrison acquitted in the bribery trial, while your client goes to jail because you advised him to cop a plea, you’ll never see a major case again; they’ll say you’re past your prime. Which is why so much of ASP’s effort has been to frighten Seth’s clients into changing counsel—so you could take over his cases and get back on the fast track, jurisprudentially.”