Beach Music (100 page)

“John Hardin,” I said. “Did you notice that this is a hospital? That Mom’s a bit under the weather?”

“Mr. Goddamn Big. Mr. I-live-in-Europe and fuck-anyone-who-lives-in-America. Mr. Chef Boyardee, don’t-faggots-have-more-fun-wearing-aprons. Mr. Bullshit-on-rice trying to tell the
little fella what to do. It’s always open season on the mentally ill, Mom. You heard it from me first and now you’re getting a live demonstration from your worthless sons.”

“You’re my sweetest boy, John Hardin,” Lucy said, taking him by the hands and drawing him toward her. “They don’t understand my baby boy, do they?”

“They don’t know a thing,” John Hardin said, his voice breaking. “They represent the normal world and that’s so scary, Mom. It’s always frightened me.”

“I’ll make them be nice to you, honey,” Lucy said, winking at the rest of us, holding John Hardin close.

“We’re the only kids in America punished for not being schizophrenics,” Dallas said.

“The Dark One is jealous,” Tee said.

“Green grows the Dark One,” Dupree agreed.

“Let’s clear out of here,” I said. “Mom needs to rest.”

“One of us’ll be here at all times, Mama,” Dupree said. “We’re working out the shifts right now.”

“They’re leaving me out, Mom,” John Hardin said. “Me, the one who loves you the most. I don’t get to sit with you in your time of greatest need.”

“The nurses’re scared to death of John Hardin, Mama,” Dallas said. “Everybody in town remembers the standoff at the bridge.”

“I was hearing voices then,” John Hardin explained. “That wasn’t the real me.”

“It sure looked like the real you, bro,” Tee said. “Sounded like you too when you forced all your poor brothers to leap naked into the river.”

“I’m a victim of a dysfunctional family,” John Hardin said. “I’m not responsible for the actions I commit when the voices are in control.”

“So, if you barbecue poor Mom one night,” Dupree said, “carve her up like a Christmas hog, and serve her up at the homeless shelter in Savannah, we can’t get pissed at you.”

“I have a mental illness,” John Hardin said proudly. “It’s documented.”

“Jesus Christ,” I said. “Family life’s too exhausting for any American to bear.”

“Put John Hardin on the night shift,” Tee suggested. “The boy has problems sleeping.”

“Midnight to seven,” Dupree said to John Hardin. “Think you can handle that, John Hardin, or do you want one of us to stay with you for company?”

“You guys aren’t company,” John Hardin said. “You’re just birthmarks I’ve got to put up with.”

“This won’t be pretty twenty-four hours from now,” Lucy said weakly. “This stuff may kill the cancer cells, but it’ll come pretty close to killing me too.”

John Hardin studied the ominous plastic bag filled with the foul-smelling liquid now being released into Lucy’s bloodstream. “This shit don’t work. It makes the doctors rich, the drug companies rich, and it’ll kill our poor wonderful mother. Vitamin C is the only thing that’ll cure leukemia. I read it in
Parade
magazine.”

“Thank God, we’ve got Mr. Wizard on our side,” Dallas said.

We gathered around Lucy’s bed and the five of us kissed her until she begged us to leave. Tee began to cry and said, “I love you with my body and soul, Mom. Even though all of us recognize you did all you could to totally fuck my life up.”

In the laughter that followed, Lucy sent us away before Tee took up the first watch. We had begun our vigil, and we timed our lives from that moment on around the cycles of her chemotherapy. I looked at my boisterous, free-spirited brothers and knew not one of us had done the hard work needed to face the next thirty or forty years without Lucy. In our own ways each of us had come to terms with life’s impassivity and cruelty, but now we faced head-on the prospect of arising one morning to a sunrise not only impersonal, but one that was Lucy-less as well.

Outside in the waiting room, within its haze of tired cigarette smoke, we lingered for a final roundup of fears and thoughts. We all had seen the fear in Lucy’s eyes.

“I’m the only one here who thinks Mom’s gonna be alive ten years from now,” John Hardin said. “The rest of you boys have given up, haven’t you?”

After a few minutes of forced banter and reassurance, Tee said, “I’ve got the first shift. Relieve me at midnight, John Hardin. The rest of you country boys get some sleep.”

“Did you know that leukemia’s the only cancer directly affected by the human emotions?” John Hardin asked us, his voice faintly disapproving. “I’m the only optimist in this dark bunch. Mom needs us to be sunny, not surly.”

“If I go nuts and beat John Hardin’s brains out with a tire tool, how long would I spend in the big house?” Dupree asked Dallas.

“First offender? You’d be iced for four years max with time off for good behavior.”

“Can you do this?” I asked John Hardin, my arm across his shoulder. “We can’t afford any screw-ups. You’ve got to earn our trust.”

“Why? No one’s ever trusted me before. With anything,” John Hardin said. “That’s why I’ve got such a bone to pick with the whole universe.”

At midnight, while Waterford slept and the tide was moving out of the marshes and estuaries, John Hardin relieved Tee. Half-asleep himself, Tee gave John Hardin a quick hug then shuffled down the long shiny linoleum floor, forgetting to tie his shoelaces.

When a nurse came in at half past midnight to hook up a full bag of chemotherapy, she reported that John Hardin was tense but friendly as she checked Lucy’s temperature and took her blood pressure. When Dupree arrived at the hospital at seven the next morning, he discovered that John Hardin and Lucy were missing. At a side entrance to the hospital, Dupree found the wheelchair that John Hardin had used to transport Lucy out of harm’s way. He had left a note beneath her pillow that read, “I refuse to let them kill my poor mother with their poisons. This will also prove to my mother that I’ve always loved her a lot more than my asshole brothers. Some may call me a madman, but my mother will know, at last, that I put her
número uno
over all the mothers of the world.”

When we heard the news, we gathered at the judge’s to discuss strategies and apportion blame. Dallas scowled at Dupree and seemed more prickly than usual while Tee opened a beer and threw his cup of freshly brewed coffee down the sink.

“In a time of stress, alcohol is the drug of choice and caffeine is what you turn to when you’ve got to sober up,” Tee said.

“Once again, I’m the laughingstock of this town because of my damn family,” Dallas said. “You guys don’t get it. People seek legal advice from pillars of the community. I look like the fire hydrant where the neighborhood Chihuahuas mark their territory. I shouldn’t’ve listened to you guys.”

“Mom insisted that we include John Hardin,” Tee said. “It was a slight error of calculation. Next time Mom’s dying, we’ll do it a bit differently.”

“Her doctor went apeshit,” Dupree reported. “He screamed at me for a half-hour. Dr. Pitts wasn’t overjoyed either.”

Dallas said, “She got enough chemotherapy in her to make her sick as hell, but not do her a single bit of good.”

“He took Mom’s car,” I said. “When he calmed down, Dr. Pitts told me all the food’s missing from Mom’s pantry. No liquor in sight. Blankets, sheets, and towels gone from the linen closet. I checked the tree house when Dupree called this morning and they’re not there.”

Dupree said, “He doesn’t have a credit card or much money to speak of. Everything was still in Mom’s purse. There’s no place for him to go. The highway patrol’s been alerted and they should spot Mom’s car soon enough and bring her back.”

“John Hardin’s got a few screws loose,” Tee said. “But he’s smart as hell. The boy’s got a plan. That I’ll guarantee you.”

“You know why we’re in this mess,” Dallas said. “Easy. Because our parents raised us up to be liberals in the South. They taught us to trust in our fellow man and to believe in his basic goodness. No one else in the world would let a psycho like John Hardin watch over their dying mother except us. If we’d been raised conservative like every other decent white Southerner, we’d never’ve let this nutbag near our mother.”

“I would be a conservative if I’d never met any,” I said. “They’re selfish, mean-spirited, egocentric, reactionary, and boring.”

“Yeh,” Dallas nodded. “That’s exactly what I aspire to.”

“Guilt,” Tee said. “I see Haiti, I feel guilty. Somalia, total guilt.
El Salvador, bone-chilling guilt. Guatemala, guilt on the half-shell. The teeming streets of India, guilt.”

“Losing Mom,” Dupree said.

“Guilt,” the four of us cried out as one.

“We should’ve seen it coming, bros,” said Tee.

Dallas countered by saying, “How’re you supposed to tell what a madman’s gonna do?”

“He’s not a madman,” Dupree said. “He’s our brother and we’ve got to find him before Mom dies. We can’t let her die out there with him. John Hardin couldn’t handle that.”

“I’ll search the back roads,” I said.

“I know he still hangs out at Yesterday’s in Columbia,” Dupree said. “Tee and I’ll talk to them. Why don’t you go to Charleston and see if he’s been spotted up there, Dallas?”

“Yoo-hoo, boys. Real job here. Real clients who need me to be in the office. Secretary to pay. Overhead. This ring any bells for you folks?” Dallas asked.

“Mom’s Cadillac is rose red,” I said. “John Hardin’ll look like a pimp on holiday rolling down a South Carolina back road.”

“Bet you miss Italy, don’t you, bro?” Tee asked.

“Chi, io
?” I said.

“I wish I’d been born Italian,” Dallas said. “Then I couldn’t speak a word of English. I’d be completely in the dark. In this family, it’s the only safe place to be.”

“Call my house at six tonight,” I suggested. “We can use Dallas’ office as headquarters during the day. Where’s Dad?”

“Drunk,” Dupree said.

“Gee whiz. I’m shocked,” Dallas said. “My papa overindulging. It’s so unlike him.”

“He drinks when there’s pressure,” Dupree explained.

“The only other time he drinks is when there’s
no
pressure,” I said.

Though much can be held against the smaller states like South Carolina, they provide a sense of intimacy and balance to their citizens. In less than twenty-four hours, the whole state was on the lookout for a 1985 red Cadillac Seville driven by a mental patient
carrying a terribly weakened woman who had completed only two fifths of her latest chemotherapy treatments.

While Tee was checking hotel and motel reservations around the state and Dallas called all the sheriffs in the most rural counties, I sat in the newsroom of the
News and Courier
in Charleston making calls to editors trying to get front-page space describing Lucy’s disappearance. When Dupree returned to Columbia he began searching out friends of John Hardin’s in the scruffy speakeasies located on the fringe of the university. Alcohol was the first hermitage John Hardin sought when his mind grew disfigured and gauzy. In bars, he found nonjudgmental friends who listened to him patiently as he listed the forces arrayed against him. In those mirrored rooms, there was comfort in the vacancy of strangers adrift in the same fool’s paradise John Hardin retreated to when panic-stricken or broken by the free-falling suffering that was his birthright.

Dupree knew about John Hardin’s night circuit and had often answered calls from bartenders when his brother had drunk too much to walk home. Dupree was always moved that John Hardin had discovered a community of mislaid, churlish men and women who had also found life unbearable at times. When they heard about John Hardin’s disappearance with his mother, they opened up to Dupree and gave him the telephone numbers and names of other friends. On the third day, Dupree found the one friend who could tell him where John Hardin had gone and how to find him.

Vernon Pellarin was wandering among a lineup of drugged depressives bumming cigarettes two hundred feet from Dupree’s office on the grounds of the state hospital. Vernon was light-headed with his own drugs and he cheerfully told Dupree that he had given John Hardin the keys to his family’s fishing lodge on the Edisto River. He thought it was about two weeks ago at Muldoon’s bar near the capitol that he gave him the keys. The lodge belonged to Vernon and his brother, Casey, now that his father had died, but Casey lived in Spokane, Washington. John Hardin had revealed that he needed to find the most private, secluded spot in America because he wanted time to compose an essay that would change the course of contemporary society. Vernon was anxious to further a
brave advance in American letters. The cabin was clean, simply furnished, and comfortable. However, it could only be reached by boat.

The following morning we put two bateaux into the Edisto River just downstream from Orangeburg. Tee and I were in one, Dupree and Dallas in the other. We needed to get Lucy back to the hospital, but we had to make sure that we did not hurt our most fragile brother in the process—or get hurt by him. When John Hardin turned to violence, he could terrorize an entire town, a fact that Waterford knew well and had experienced many times.

We let the current take us down the swift, rain-swollen Edisto. Oaks on the two shores leaned out over the water, touched branches, and exchanged birds and serpents, passing them almost hand to hand from one to the other. Water snakes eyed our two boats as we passed beneath the low-hanging trees. Dallas counted seven snakes wrapped around branches of one water oak we passed under.

“I hate snakes,” Dallas said in a subdued voice. “What kind are they?”

“Cottonmouth moccasins,” Tee said. “They’re deadly poisonous. They bite you and you’ve got thirty seconds to make your peace with Jesus.”

“They’re water snakes,” Dupree said. “They’re all right.”

“I don’t like going under a tree and noticing fifty living creatures sizing me up for a meal,” Dallas said.

“The snakes’re fine,” Dupree said. “John Hardin’s our problem.”

“Maybe we’ll catch him in a good mood,” I said. “Tell him we’ve got great tickets for the next Rolling Stones concert.”

“I doubt it,” Dupree said. “He’s late for his shot. He’s probably been drinking and he’ll be agitated because he thinks the doctors’re trying to kill Mom. We’ve got to be flexible when we see him. If we can talk him into letting us have Mom back, that’s great. But we’ve got to get her back to the hospital one way or the other.”