Southern Cross Read online

  “When?”

  “Sunday. Fly back with me from here.”

  I looked at his white cotton sweater and his pale yellow slacks. “I don’t have the wardrobe for it.”

  “I’m serious, Marsh. Life’s too short not to go on a toot once in a while. We’re sneaking up on fifty, you know.”

  “I know that better than I know my bookie’s phone number, but I’ve already got my ticket home. The airlines don’t like you to improvise.”

  “I know a doctor. He’ll tell them it was a medical emergency requiring a physic of red beans and rice.”

  I offered a considered evasion. “I would like to see Charleston someday; I’ve never been to the Deep South before. Maybe next winter.”

  When Seth spoke again, the words came laden with insistence. “It would help if you could come now.”

  Seth’s blue eyes quickened with the intensity he used to display before an exam, the electric surge that would carry him through a night of cramming and the stress of the test and the partying of the next evening as well, all without the overload of exhaustion that turned the rest of us to stone.

  “That sounds like more than a casual invitation,” I said.

  Seth’s eyes darkened toward the color of good grapes. “That’s the only reason I came back for this,” he said. “To recruit you to help me out.”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I said, “I’m flattered.”

  Seth looked away uneasily. “But I don’t want to ruin your weekend. There’s no need to discuss the situation if there isn’t a chance you can come down and get into it. If you’ll agree to come, we can leave it where it is till we get home. If you can’t, just forget I said anything.”

  He looked at the neon beer sign blinking in the window, then beyond it into the depthless threat of night. “You can’t get a sense of what’s happening to me unless you come to Charleston, anyway,” he mused quietly. “Like most things in the South, it’s more a matter of feel than fact.”

  “What is happening, Seth?”

  He looked around the bar. What he saw didn’t cheer him. When he spoke, the words were as dry as the dust on the floor. “Someone’s trying to destroy me.”

  “You’re serious.”

  He nodded. “Remember the summer of ’66? When I went South to do voter registration work for SNCC?”

  “Sure I do. I’ve never forgotten your stories about being chased around the countryside by pickups full of rednecks and shotguns and coonhounds.”

  In the echo of the final word, Seth looked away again, this time toward the knot of people at the next table. “It got dicey a few times. For a lot of us.”

  “But what does that have to do with now?”

  “I’m not sure, but the thing that’s happening seems related to those times, somehow. Or at least to those issues.”

  “I guess I still don’t get it.”

  Moving as slow as Sunday, Seth took out his wallet and extracted a paper that had been folded and refolded and stuck in with the currency. After he spread open the square of cheap bond, he examined it for several seconds before he handed it to me the way he would hand me a rodent:

  NOTICE OF RACIAL JUDGMENT

  NOTICE IS HEREBY GIVEN that the ALLIANCE FOR SOUTHERN PRIDE has identified SETH HARTMAN as an ENEMY of the SOUTHERN WAY OF LIFE.

  Your advocacy and agitation on behalf of the DEGENERATE, WHOREMONGERING, RACE POLLUTING, ALIEN, ANTI-WHITE AND ANTI-CHRISTIAN forces that have been and remain dedicated to the DESTRUCTION of the SOUTHERN WAY OF LIFE make you, SETH HARTMAN, a TRAITOR to the SOUTH and a BETRAYER of the GREAT WHITE RACE.

  THEREFORE, BE ADVISED OF THE FOLLOWING JUDGMENT:

  YOUR SENTENCE: DEATH

  YOUR EXECUTIONER: The PURIFICATION BRIGADE of the ALLIANCE for SOUTHERN PRIDE

  YOUR SOLE SALVATION: REMOVAL of your PERSON from the LANDS of the NEW CONFEDERACY

  Sentence is suspended for 60 days to allow you to depart the jurisdiction. But BE IT DULY NOTED that failure to remove yourself within the allotted time will result in your RACIAL SENTENCE being duly executed FORTHWITH.

  FIELD ORDER # 7

  THE ALLIANCE FOR SOUTHERN PRIDE

  SOUTHERN PRIDE = WHITE POWER

  SAVE THE SOUTH

  “This is serious, isn’t it?” I said as I handed the paper back to Seth, my mind awash in images of white sheets and burning crosses and the men who made use of such symbols.

  He nodded. “I think so.”

  “What’s behind it, do you think?”

  Seth rubbed his eyes and shook his head. “That’s the problem—I don’t know. But I don’t want to go into it now, Marsh; I just need to know whether you can help me get to the bottom of it.” His voice broke at the end of the entreaty; I had never seen him so abject.

  “I don’t know, Seth. I’ve got clients and—”

  He gathered himself with effort and managed a crooked smile. “Since the Notice of Judgment didn’t do the trick, maybe this will convince you.”

  Seth dug in his wallet again and handed me a news clipping that described a local fund-raising event:

  The main drawing card is the opportunity to watch a cow defecate on a high school football field. Not only do the parents, students, and supporters have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to witness this display firsthand, they are also afforded the chance to place bets on where this historic event will occur: The field has been subdivided into numbered squares for ease of wagering.

  When I’d finished, I looked at him and grinned. “Carolina, here I come.”

  FIVE

  Seth didn’t realize it, but his efforts to get me to Charleston had touched a nerve more likely than any other to recruit me to his cause. The nerve was guilt, and the root was civil rights—the defining social and political movement of my youth, the heroic wrenching of the nation out of the pit of apartheid onto the road to racial justice. That the racial wound still festered, and was more septic today than only a few years earlier, diminished neither the nobility of the quest nor the courage of those, like Seth, who once pursued it at their peril.

  Seth had asked me several times to go down with him and work for SNCC that summer. I’d given it much thought, but ultimately demurred. I had to earn money for school, I needed to spend time with my family, I wasn’t good at canvassing or recruiting or any other organizational skills. True but insufficient: I should have done my part but hadn’t.

  Why I hadn’t done more to advance a cause I fervently believed in is a question I’d thrown at myself more often than was healthy over the years, because the answer invariably included elements of sloth and cowardice. But that was then and this was now. That Seth’s death sentence from the Alliance for Southern Pride constituted a belated opportunity to redeem myself was a myth I eagerly embraced.

  Gil showed up at the Jabberwock just as I was leaving. Without being told, both he and Seth knew where I was going when I bid them a brief good-bye, and they teased me as I hurried toward my rendezvous.

  As I drove toward the campus, thoughts of Seth and the South began to fade, and Libby Grissom—not the current Libby but the one I’d loved and lost—materialized in their place. When I began the hike down the slippery slope toward the tennis courts—a dimly lit oasis of Hopperesque geometry in the spring-crisp shroud of night—blood was thick in my veins and my breaths were high in my chest. By the time I reached the bleachers, my brow was iced with sweat.

  But she wasn’t there. More disappointed than I expected to be, I stood by the bleachers and warred with a persistent squadron of mosquitoes as I watched a succession of far-off silhouettes stroll toward the wooded arboretum on secret trysts of their own. That the only privacy the school afforded lovers was the same it afforded field mice was one of its supposed charms.

  In less than a minute, I’d decided Libby’s decision was a wise one: Nothing good could come of this. Whatever attraction we might have had for each other if we had met this week as strangers, our past made us forever estranged in some sense that
was both minute and ineradicable.

  “Sorry I’m late.”

  The voice was small within the cloak of night, crimped with cold and nerves.

  “I decided you’d decided not to come.”

  “Were you disappointed?”

  I opted for candor. “Yes.”

  She lingered in the shadows, her most visible aspect the orange trim around her shoes. “I did decide that,” she said softly. “And then I decided that standing you up would be petulant and immature. And then I decided that meeting you would be more … provocative than I ought to be. And then I decided, what the hell. But Linda Barnard wanted to tell me about her photo safari to Kenya, and Gladys Sandstrom wanted to talk about estrogen therapy—I had no idea there was so much controversy about … Anyway, better late than never. I hope. Sorry to keep you waiting.”

  “It’s all right; I’m pretty good at it, as it happens.”

  “Because of your work, you mean.”

  “My work. My life. Whatever.”

  Her lips went prim with irritation. “You’ve gotten stoic in your old age. I’m not sure it suits you.”

  “Sorry about that,” I said, irritated in return at both her attitude and her accuracy.

  “I would like to hear more about it sometime, though. Your work, I mean.”

  “Why?”

  She shrugged. “It seems romantic. And dangerous. And … inevitable, somehow.”

  “I’m not sure you’re right about any of that, but we can go into it if you want.”

  “Maybe later.”

  During the preliminary skirmishing, Libby seemed to reach a decision. With the boost of fresh resolve, she walked to my side and planted a kiss on my cheek, dry and cool and casual, the dutiful buss of former lovers. “Hi.” Above her snow-white sneakers, she wore jeans and a POWDERMILK BISCUIT sweatshirt and a hat that would have fit a fishing trip.

  “Hi.”

  “So what have you been doing since dinner?” She sniffed. “I think I smell beer.”

  “The Jabb.”

  “Bonding with the boys?”

  “Seth, mostly.”

  “Did you find out what was on his mind?”

  “What was on his mind was convincing me to go to Charleston with him when the reunion’s over.”

  “Well? Did he?”

  “I think so.”

  “How?”

  I shrugged. “I’ve blamed the South for a lot over the years; it’s time to make sure I was right.”

  “What if you weren’t?”

  “Then I guess I’ll have to apologize.”

  She laughed. “To whom?”

  “Maybe that’s why I voted for Jimmy Carter.”

  Libby put her hands on my chest and shoved. “You’re as weird as you ever were,” she charged, then tugged me to the bleachers and sat me down. “Anything else of interest happen?”

  “Not much. How about you?”

  “Memories, mostly.”

  “Me, too. When you got here, I was thinking about the night we broke up.”

  She slid down the bench, a further foot away from me. “I’ve replayed that tape a couple of times myself this evening.” She sighed. “I’ve been divorced twice, and watched my father die of cancer, and nursed my kids through some rough spots, too, but that’s as miserable as I’ve ever been.”

  “We were pretty vulnerable right then. Senior year; another transition coming up; both of us about to be thrust into the cold, cruel world from the fuzzy womb of this place.”

  Libby nodded thoughtfully. “You’re right about that part. I was in absolute panic, I remember, because I didn’t know what to do with my life. I thought I was supposed to have a plan that covered the next forty years, and I didn’t have one that covered the next three days.”

  “Plus, going with you was the first time I envisioned myself with a spouse and a child and a mortgage and the rest of it. Then we broke up, which suggested emotional life was going to be even more complicated than academic life had been.”

  Libby nodded. “The night before the breakup, I stayed up all night talking to Marcia Wells about marriage, and careers, and my needs and obligations as a woman. One thing I decided was that having a man in my life would keep me from fulfilling my destiny.” Her smile warped. “At this point, it seems arrogant to have assumed I even had a destiny.”

  “Maybe you were right—maybe I would have held you back.”

  “Or maybe having you in my life was more my destiny than anything.” The rue in her laugh made me sad. “But probably not—I don’t seem to have been cut out for eternal bliss.”

  “Me, either.”

  “I blame the school, a little. For my troubles with men, I mean.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of how they isolated us. Talk about segregation—boys on one side of campus, girls on the other. Now the sexes share the same floor, even the same bathrooms if the rumors are true. Back then, we weren’t able to get to know each other, to learn how the other sex thinks and feels and reacts. I think it was harder on the men than the women.”

  “Why?”

  “Because so many men our age really don’t seem to get it. What women are about, I mean. It might have been different if there were a tribe of us living down the hall for four years.”

  I agreed and told her so.

  Beyond the tree line, someone squealed with pleasure. Libby looked toward the sound as though it had been offered in a foreign tongue. “Are you in a relationship now?”

  I thought about my friend Betty; I looked at Libby in the moonlight; I lied a little. “Not really.”

  She laughed. “That’s what someone on the make would say.”

  As I reddened, I hoped it was too dark for her to notice. “If what you’re asking is whether I still find you attractive, the answer is yes.”

  “It wasn’t, I don’t think, but thank you.” She raised a foot and examined her ankle. “My legs should have come in plain brown wrappers, you told me once. I think it was the first night you saw me naked.”

  We found things to look at other than each other.

  “What did you come back for, Marsh?” Libby asked after the moment had cooled.

  “To see what made the difference, I think.”

  “Between what?”

  “Success and failure, I guess. For want of better terms.”

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “We had such grand plans in those days—Richard Williams had a strategy for getting himself appointed to the Supreme Court, I remember. And some people actually achieved them—Bill Grayson is on the cutting edge of biotech; Jason Stevens made a mint in real estate, then started a foundation to build low-income housing; Lana Maxwell is a congresswoman.”

  “And Sally Lincoln is a grandmother.”

  “And I’m a private eye, with emphasis on private. I’m not in any clubs, I don’t have any employees, I don’t even have a family. So what happened? Why haven’t I made a dent in the world? What’s the difference between guys like me and guys like Grayson? Talent? Luck? Genetics?”

  “A little of all of those, I imagine.”

  “I’m not sure. Some of it has to do with motivation, and some with energy, but a lot of it has to do with maturity, I think. Basically what I do for a living is play hide-and-seek. I feel like a kid a lot, the one outside the candy store with his nose pressed against the glass, wishing he was inside with the grown-ups but not knowing how to get there.”

  Libby nodded. “I feel that way, too, sometimes. As though everyone else has found the answer, but I’m still asking the questions. It’s like there’s a book out there that everyone’s read but me, some required reading that I haven’t heard about and keep failing the exam because of it. I have dreams like that, sometimes—everyone knows about the test but me, and by the time I find out, it’s too late to do anything but flunk.”

  She felt for my hand and took it. “You don’t really consider yourself a failure, do you, Marsh?”

  “I don’t
know. Maybe that’s why I’m here.”

  I squeezed her hand and pulled it to my lap. After a cozy moment, Libby extracted her fingers and walked to the fence that defined the courts, then turned and leaned against it. “I’m not sure this … recapitulation … is good for us. The examined life can take its toll.”

  When I didn’t say anything, she looked toward the distant bulge of the arboretum and the high hulk of the nearest dormitory. “Well, here we are—free, white, and twenty-one, as we used to say. What do you want to do about it?”

  “You used to ask me that a dozen times a night—what did I want to do.”

  She met my eye. “And the answer was usually sex.”

  “Hey. I seem to remember a joint venture.”

  “Oh, I wanted to, too. Most of the time. It made me feel fallen as hell, but I was in heat as well; of course I was. Maybe that was the problem—we paid too much attention to our bodies and not enough to our minds.”

  “The body’s signals tend to be more audible at that age.”

  “Easier to accommodate, at least.”

  “As long as we climaxed by curfew.”

  She walked to me and wiped something off my cheek. “Curfew,” she repeated. “No wonder we never grew up.”

  She took my arm and tugged me toward the hill that climbed to the central campus. “So how come you never called me?” she asked along the way.

  “I suppose because I thought it might complicate your life.”

  “If you’d called in the eighties, I wouldn’t have even noticed—my life couldn’t have been more complicated if I’d been running for president.”

  “Like what?”

  “Complications? A drug problem with my son. A health problem with my daughter. A fidelity problem with my husbands. And a career problem with me.”

  “I don’t even know what you do.”

  “What I wanted to do was interior design. What I do do is be a surrogate wife to a bunch of Baltimore businesswomen.”

  “Which means?”

  “I’m a caterer. Hors d’oeuvres for the lady vice presidents who have the sales force in for cocktails before the awards banquet at the Marriott.”