Beach Music (99 page)

“Stand at attention when you talk to my old man,” I said to the general. “Ever talk to him like that again and I’ll mop the fucking floor with your cheekbones.”

The gavel hammered again and my father said, “You’re out of order, Jack. The general made an excellent point.”

“I’m very sorry for that, Johnson Hagood,” General Elliott said.

“The heat of battle,” my father said generously. “No harm done. Apologize to the general, Jack.”

“Sorry, Rembert,” I said, calling him by his first name for the first time in my life. “Got carried away.”

“I like the thought of you wiping the floor with Rembert,” Celestine said, and Mike laughed out loud, cutting some of the tension that had built up.

“I’ve missed you, Jordan,” Capers said, rising out of his seat and approaching the priest cautiously from the opposite side of the stage. “I can’t get over that y’all think I betrayed my best friends. I can’t think of myself like that. It goes against the grain. Shyla died without ever speaking to me again. I wrote her a letter once. Telling her I loved her, loved all of you. That none of us was responsible for what happened at Carolina. Shyla sent the letter back, unopened. Jack still can’t look at me without hating my guts.” Capers looked over at me and said, “Don’t deny it, Jack.”

“You hear anyone denying it?” I said.

“Shyla thought you loved her, Capers,” Ledare said. “A couple of us made that mistake.”

“I was bad news for you, Ledare,” Capers said. “Every time I looked at you, it reminded me of how much I’d lost.”

“Small potatoes, dear. All I gave up was my twenties and my belief in matrimony,” Ledare said. “Otherwise I came out without a scratch.”

“I’m sorry. Please forgive me,” Capers said.

“That’s enough, Capers,” Betsy said. “Don’t crawl. It doesn’t become you, darling.”

“Whoa!” Mike said. “Pure ice, Betsy. An Eskimo girl couldn’t have said it better or served it up chillier.”

“I’m sorry, Ledare,” Capers said. “When I left you I had started to notice that my life had gone wrong.”

“Please save it, Capers,” I said. “Hypocrisy makes me weepy.”

The gavel again—Dad. “Jack, if you can’t bring yourself to make
peace with one of your best friends, then what hope does Jordan have with his father? How do we resolve this?”

“The film’s running down. We need a wrap, people,” Mike said.

I looked at my father and understood what was required of me this night, so I got up and faced Capers, who was still standing.

“I’m sorry, Jack. So sorry,” he said to me. “I wish I could do it all again. I’d make everything right.”

“When you’re governor, I’m sending you all my parking tickets,” I said.

We shook hands and when we both felt that we meant it, we embraced.

The general stood up and both Capers and I took our seats. He approached Jordan, who watched him come close without emotion.

“You said this was a mock trial,” the general said to Mike. “I would like to cast my vote on the guilt or innocence of my son.”

“Good,” Mike said. “But I’m the producer and the director. I’m casting mine first, General. But hell, you understand the chain of command better than anyone. Not guilty.”

“Not guilty,” Ledare said, followed by Celestine saying the same thing.

“Not guilty,” the abbott and Father Jude said. “Not guilty,” said Betsy and Capers.

“Not guilty,” said my father, the judge.

“Now it’s my vote,” the general said, and I thought I heard his voice crack.

Celestine said to her son, who was meeting his father’s stare, “It’s not in him, Jordan. Love lies too deep for him. He can’t get to it.”

“I can get there for him, Mom,” Jordan said. “It’s easy for me.”

“I’m sorry, son,” the general said, but it was a father who was speaking now, not the general.

Jordan covered his father’s mouth with his hand, with great gentleness. “No need for a vote, Dad. I know what it is. What it has to be. I came here to make it right with you. I’ve got to walk off this
stage with a father in my life. I’ve proven that I can’t live without one.”

“I can’t help who I am, son,” the general said when Jordan’s hand dropped.

“Nor I who I am,” Jordan said.

“Tell me you were wrong.”

“I was very wrong, Dad,” the priest said. “My hatred of you got in the way. I should’ve followed the path you set for me. America’s a good enough country to die for even when America’s wrong. At least, for a boy like me. Raised the way you and Mom raised me.”

“That’s far enough, Jordan,” I said. “It was a lousy war. Don’t make him rub your nose in it anymore.”

“What can I do, Dad?” Jordan said, waiting for his father’s judgment.

“Turn yourself in,” the general said. “If you do this, I’ll back you all the way. I’ll fight for you.”

Jordan bowed before his father, assenting to his will. The two Trappists rose and walked toward him, both gaunt, prayer-weathered men. Jordan knelt and received both their blessings. The abbott then said, “Jordan had me call General Peatross at Pollock Island early this morning. I told him, General, that you’d be delivering your son to the provost marshal tomorrow at noon. General Peatross would like you to come by his office first. He says he knew Jordan as a child.”

There was a muffled sob as Celestine Elliott left her seat and ran toward the darkness at the rear of the stage. Jordan followed her and we could hear him comforting his mother while the camera crew began to break up the set as the rest of us stood up in the middle of our actual lives. I watched my father walk over in his robes to comfort the general, who looked defeated and bereft after doing the only thing he could do.

T
hat evening, we ate dinner at Betsy and Capers Middleton’s beach house on Sullivan’s Island. I set up shop on the deck looking out to the ocean and grilled onions and eggplant, hamburgers and steaks and shrimp until everyone was full and happy and Mike and Jordan had to run out for some more beer. The Trappists had made
their way back to Mepkin Abbey and my father had driven the general back to Waterford. Celestine chose not to attend the party, but the rest of us felt great relief in the gathering at the Middleton household. Ledare’s children, Sarah and young Capers, were glad to see their parents under the same roof, talking casually, and Betsy proved a good hostess as we gathered around the dining room table regaling each other with stories from the past. It was still strange for me to see Jordan out in public without looking over his shoulder or checking to see if someone had followed me to a secret rendezvous. A strange sense of freedom had come over him. He could not get enough of us. He drank us in, he fed on our spirits to the point of satiety. We gave ourselves to him and let him have this night completely.

After midnight, everyone had gone to bed somewhere in the sprawling house but Jordan, Capers, Mike, and me. We found ourselves walking along the beach of Sullivan’s Island as a ship passed out of the harbor, Asia bound. The harbor pilot’s boat met the ship when it reached the open sea and we walked in silence as we saw the smaller boat return toward the city.

“What now?” Mike asked. “I don’t think I’ve ever been happier.”

“What about Hollywood?” Capers said. “You have the pick of the starlets. You live like a king. That sounds better than eating burgers on a South Carolina beach with a bunch of high school assholes.”

“Not to me,” Mike said.

“Me neither,” Jordan agreed.

“What about you?” Mike asked me.

“I hate to ruin the evening here,” I said, “but I still think Capers is something of a scumbag.”

“Oh that,” Mike said. “You’ll get over it.”

“Time passing,” Jordan said, his eyes casting upward toward the stars. “It’s the big surprise in life. It might be the only one. It feels like we’ve been on this beach forever. Like we never lost each other.”

“That reminds me,” Capers said, snapping his fingers, and running suddenly back toward his house. When he returned he was
carrying a surfboard over his head and we cheered when we saw it. We stripped down to our underwear and plunged into the warmblooded, air-cooled Atlantic. The waves were calm and halfhearted as we swam out toward deep water.

“You call these waves?” Jordan said. “You call this an ocean?”

“The Jordan summer,” Mike said, remembering.

“Never forgot it,” I said.

“Remember my long hair?” the clean-cut monk said, laughing.

“Waterford’s first hippie,” Capers said. “My God. You were the first omen of the sixties. We should’ve tarred and feathered you and sent you back to where you belonged.”

“Have sons, have sons,” Mike cried happily.

“Where are the porpoises?” I asked. “We need porpoises, Mike.”

“Get me special effects,” Mike called out. “Call Warner Brothers.”

“It comes back to this then,” said Capers.

“Life doubles back. It takes you by surprise,” Jordan said.

“Like a good movie,” Mike said.

“Where were you going to send me, Capers?” Jordan asked. “Where is it you think I belonged?”

We were floating in the Atlantic, holding on to the surfboard, with another summer ending and the warm wind soft against the surface and the taste of salt in our mouths. We drifted in the deep currents on a moonless night and because we were low country boys we were not afraid. Then Capers summed it up by reaching out and rumpling Jordan’s hair, saying, “Here. You belong here. With us. Always.”

E
very son will have his time in a room like this, I thought, as I joined my brothers in our watch over our mother’s bed. The smell of chemotherapy was familiar, the metallic scent leaving its trace on the membranes of my tongue. Its business was to slaughter the white blood cells that had multiplied in Lucy’s bloodstream, those white cells that moved with the thrift of herds, crowding the red cells to the point of extinction. In my mind’s eye, I saw my mother’s blood turning into a deadly snow. And when I looked at her, I saw for the first time terror in her pretty blue eyes. Every cell in her body was lit up with the unnamable fear.

“If you really loved Mama, Jack,” Dupree said, “you’d be out in your workshop finding a cure for cancer.”

“That’s what I hate about my brothers,” John Hardin said, walking to Lucy’s side. “You heard that, Mama. We should all be trying to make you feel like a million bucks and stupid Dupree starts in with his jokes.”

“Tell us how we go about making Mom feel like a million bucks, “ Dallas said. “We seem to lack your genius for bedside manners.”

“Go ahead. Mock me, Dallas,” John Hardin said. “I realize I’m an easy target. I know you laugh behind my back. Make fun of me. Write about me in the latrine while you’re taking a piss. I see those
things you write about me. I recognize your ugly, repulsive handwriting.”

Dallas shook his head and answered, “I’ve never written a word on a bathroom wall in my whole life.”

“You don’t even have the guts to admit it,” John Hardin said. “You and your kind are so despicable.”

“I agree,” Tee said. “Dallas and his kind’re beneath contempt. What can you say about a man who won’t own up to his own graffiti?”

“You write worse things about me than Dallas does,” John Hardin said to Tee. “But I’ve got you boys back good. I told Mom all about it. I told her everything. Mom knows, assholes. Mom’s gonna take care of business as soon as she’s on her feet. Right, Mom?”

“That’s right, John Hardin,” Lucy said weakly.

“You’re dreaming, John Hardin,” Tee said, puzzled. “What did I write about you?”

“You wrote ‘Call J. for the best blow job in town,’ ” he said. “Then you wrote down my telephone number.”

“You don’t have a phone,” Dallas said. “You live in a tree, same as a sparrow.”

“I’m too sharp for you guys,” John Hardin said. “I’m always thinking way ahead of you guys.”

“Quit picking on John Hardin,” Lucy said. “I read about Jordan’s arrest. It was in the morning paper, honey.”

“He should’ve stayed put,” I said.

“The past is the hardest thing to run from,” Lucy said. “I think Jordan got tired of running from a person he never really was.”

“Look, Mom still loves Jack the most,” John Hardin observed. “It’s not fair to prefer him just because of the stupid birth order.”

“I was a child myself when Jack was born, John Hardin,” said Lucy, touching my face with her left hand. “I never had a baby doll to play with as a girl. So I pretended that Jack was a doll baby some stranger had left under a Christmas tree. I had no right to be raising up a child being so young myself, but Jack couldn’t know that. When I breast-fed him for the first time, I didn’t know the first thing about what I was doing. But Jack seemed to go along with
everything I did. He made it easy for me. Jack and I grew up together. He was the first best friend I ever had and I knew he’d never leave me.”

“I guess living in Italy was Jack’s way of staying close,” Dallas said.

“I wouldn’t go to Italy if the Pope himself invited me to eat a Ragú dinner with him,” John Hardin said. “Italians’re the scariest people in the world. They’re always taking blood oaths and selling drugs to black people and killing each other with shotguns. The men comb their hair with pig fat and the women all have big tits and say the rosary constantly and eat food that ends with vowels. The Mafia’s been there so long it surprises me there’s a single Italian left alive.”

“I got an idea,” Tee said. “John Hardin just proved what Hollywood has done to the image of Italians. Why doesn’t the Mafia quit killing police informers and concentrate on murdering Hollywood directors and producers?”

“Mama’s getting tired,” Dupree said. “Why don’t we come back into her room later.”

“She’s just tired of your sorry ass, Dupree,” John Hardin said. “But who isn’t?”

Dupree shook his head and whispered to no one in particular, “I can’t believe I’m taking abuse from a psychotic.”

“You hear that, Mom?” John Hardin said, pointing an accusatory finger at Dupree. “That should get you at least a month’s restriction and no allowance at all. Ha! That’ll teach you to make fun of a helpless schizophrenic. All my problems stem from a toxic gene pool that tadpoles couldn’t grow in and a flock of shitbird brothers who’ve got no empathy for the disadvantaged among them. You assholes all picked on me when I was a little kid. Guess you hate me spilling the beans in front of Mom, huh, losers?”