Cage's Bend (44 page)
“Harper. I thought it was you, surrounded by beautiful women.”
“Hey, Camille.” I stand up long enough to kiss her on the cheek. “This is Betsy. And Caitlin.” Betsy and Caitlin’s mutual hostility is suspended for a moment by mutual suspicion of Camille’s open, disarming smile. Caitlin’s friends look on impassively like animals grazing in a field.
“I’ve known Harper since kindergarten,” Camille shouts. “He was an ancient third-grader.”
“Camille had the curliest hair I’d ever seen,” I yell. “I can still picture her back then.”
“So you straighten your hair?” Caitlin shouts.
Camille doesn’t hear or ignores her. “I used to think Harper’s daddy was God. He was so handsome and so kind.”
“How could God sire such a devil for a son?” Betsy asks.
Camille yells, “A difficult theological question.”
“He deserves the Inquisition,” Betsy shouts.
Caitlin looks like she’s trying to think of something to say. She turns to grab her drink. I slap a couple of twenties down on the bar, spin back around on the chair, and ask Camille, “What are you drinking?”
“I’m at a table with some friends. You think I cruise these places by myself? See you tomorrow night. Pick me up?” She kisses me hard on my lips, then smiles at Betsy and Caitlin. “Nice meeting y’all!”
As Camille turns away, Caitlin pours a tall glass of tomato juice in my crotch and walks off. I’m too tired and ashamed to feel any anger. I say softly, “So long, Cait.”
Betsy and the bartender are laughing. I ask him for a towel and he hands me a bunch of napkins. Betsy shouts, “The chicks came home to roost.”
“I imagine you have a few”—I’m tempted to say cocks—“roosters out there.”
Betsy forces a smirk into her anchorwoman look of deadly seriousness. “I thought we had something more.”
Are you crazy or kidding? I almost ask.
Betsy suddenly looks very sad.
“I love you, Betsy.” I hug her and say, hoarse from shouting, “I’m there if you need me. I’m there if you’re blue. But it’s not love with a capital
L
. It’s not the union of souls, caring more about the other than yourself. We’re just two people who are very fond of each other, who both love sex. That’s why we’re so comfortable together. That’s it.”
Betsy pulls loose and looks at me with tears in her eyes, then glances away. The bartender sets two more greyhounds on the counter and says they’re on him. Betsy picks hers up and turns the glass in her hand. I drape my arm around her shoulder and she shrugs it off. I tell her, “My mama used to say, ‘All good games end in tears.’”
T
he ceiling is white, blank, big as a cinema screen waiting for light to throw images upon it in a pantomime of life. Lying on my back in the middle of the old king-size bed where my mother was born, I can almost project the picture of Nanny, half my age, bringing her into the world, or fast-forward some twenty years to the scene of Mama arriving here from the hospital in Thebes with me, a child who smiled long before most, as if my happiness which began prematurely would spend itself prematurely and plunge the family into more sadness than anyone had ever dreamed, bearing the legacy of violence which the Cages brought to Tennessee, a curse of blood which would reach forward through time and seven generations to haunt the innocent soul of the firstborn and the last to carry the family name. Will the curse die with me, die with the name? I will not procreate, not I, a half man, hobbled back from the West to hide in the home of an old woman, nor will Harper, a serial lover whose mildly unhappy childhood left him with no desire to perpetuate the absence of the fathers. Is it evolution taking its course, the weeding out of bad genes? Was I simply hastening the natural process when I loaded the shotgun next door in Granddad’s study? The screen of the ceiling replays the scene—the twin black caves of the barrels enclosed by my trembling hand—the end of one act in a lifelong play of flops, theater of the absurd, for even then I failed to achieve the goal.
“Cage!” Nanny sounds like some rare tropical bird. “Coffee’s on!”
“Coming!” I pull on yesterday’s khakis and plaid wool shirt, then go into the bathroom. “Hello, Mr. Bipolar. How are you today?” the face in the mirror says. “Got any big plans? Going to the office? Just going to cower and skulk?” I don’t answer. I brush my teeth, throw some water on my face, and walk down the wide staircase, then pass through the dining room into the thin winter light spilling through the kitchen windows.
Nanny, small and pear-shaped in a blue winter jogging suit, is breaking eggs on the side of a big iron skillet. Nanny’s lived through the First World War, the Great Depression, the Second World War, the cold war, an alcoholic husband, the deaths of her grandparents, parents, husband, one grandchild, and nearly all her contemporaries, and now, a ninety-something in the new world order, she is as peaceful and content as any Buddhist monk. She believes in Jesus, forgiveness. She is not afraid to die. Appalled by the relentless cascade of violence and crime on the news, she mourns the days when you never locked the doors, has no illusions about the human capacity for weakness, addiction, excess, pure incomprehensible evil, and she always sounds like a sweet, cheerful child. Turning at my footsteps, she smiles and says, “Good morning. It’s a beautiful day. They predicted rain but I don’t think it’s going to rain.”
“Morning, Nanny.” I come into the circle of brighter light around the stove. “Let me do that.”
“No, no, I’m almost finished.” Her hands, gnarled like old roots, stir the skillet rapidly with a spatula that I seem to remember from my childhood. “Pour us some juice, please.”
In the breakfast room, set through double lattice doors off the kitchen in the back corner of the house, filling the juice glasses from a carton of Tropicana, I see a crow fly through the mist and land on a bare branch close to the window. Nanny glides to the table in slow motion with her slippers never leaving the floor, carrying the skillet. She peers through a dead stranger’s transplanted corneas out the window at the crow and says, “Good morning, Sam.”
Caw, caw, caw
, Sam calls.
“Here, Nanny,” I say, taking the skillet.
“Thank you, son.” Nanny sits down by her bowl of Grape-Nuts and a slice of grapefruit.
“Granddad would have liked Sam.” I carry the skillet back to the sink. “I remember how he put suet out for the woodpeckers.”
“Morgan loved wildlife. One cold fall Sunday he found a little hummingbird just lying on the back steps, alive but half frozen. I went off to church and he took it up to your room, where the sun was streaming in through the windows, and revived it with a mixture of sugar water and whiskey from an eyedropper. When I got back, it was flying around in the bright light. The day had warmed up and Morgan opened the window and out it flew. We hoped that it would catch up with its kin migrating south. Morgan was a kind, gentle man.”
Women always forget what they don’t want to remember, and remember what they don’t want to forget. In the end the dream is the truth. I wonder, “Did you have many suitors?”
She seems to stare over my shoulder back into time. “Oh, yes, I had many beaus.”
“Why’d you pick Granddaddy?”
“I liked him the best.”
“When did Granddad resurrect the hummingbird?”
“Oh, it was long after the girls were gone.” Nanny brings her gaze to my face and smiles. “Probably in the sixties. You know, Cage, time means so little to me anymore. Time flies by so fast now. I’m so lucky. Most old people sit around with nothing to do. I don’t have time to catch my breath. There is always a chore around the house or at my desk. It seems like Christmas was yesterday and tomorrow will be Easter.”
After breakfast, as I am scraping the bits of egg and toast on top of last night’s collard greens and chicken bones into a plastic bucket, Nanny asks with a slightly tentative note in her cheerful voice, “Do you want to feed Sam this morning?”
I laugh loudly at my pitiful condition. “You mean since yesterday was the first time in three months I was able to make it all the way out the door and down the steps and across the yard?”
“It’s good to hear you laugh again. I missed that sound. You had the most wonderful laugh as a little boy. You were the most merry little elf, more than all my grandsons.” Nanny sets her hands on the table and slowly pushes herself up.
I set the plates in the sink and pick up the bucket. “Wish me luck.”
“I’ll come as far as the back steps.” Nanny takes down Nick’s old Kappa Sig windbreaker off the hook by the door to the back porch. “I want to see the February gold.” I slide the two chains off the heavy wooden door, then unlock the glass storm door and hold it open for Nanny to step into the shadows of the back porch, where the screen walls are shuttered for the winter.
“Oh, how beautiful, how gorgeous, my, my.” Nanny shades her eyes with one hand, looking at the golden field of daffodils stretching back a hundred yards toward the wide black lake and then the gray wooded hills at the bottom of the blue sky. “Like a golden cashmere blanket. You know they’ve been here forever. I think as long as the Cages. I planted some in the thirties, but they were here long before.”
I smile and walk through the yard. Coming around the corner of the house, the crow sees me and dives off its perch, calling,
Caw, caw, caw!
It lands on a sycamore, screams and flies again, circles me twice, and touches down on the top of a cedar that resembles a tall green flame. At the edge of the lawn the strands of old barbed wire are barely visible, running through young cedars and dogwood along the property line. Screaming, the crow dive-bombs within an inch of my hand on the bucket handle. I pour the scraps at the bottom of a fence post, where a few bones remain from yesterday. Hidden by the wall of bristly cedars, something bounds through the woods, crashing through the thick bush. Startled, I clench the bucket and restrain the urge to run. Breathe in. Breathe out the paranoia. It’s just deer. Shivering in the cold, I jog across the yard, back up the steps, and into the house.
“Did you chain the door?” Nanny asks from her heavy electric reclining chair by a big, ugly gas heater set in the fireplace of her sitting room.
“Yes, ma’am, but even if I hadn’t, I think we’re pretty safe at dawn way out here in the country.”
“Cage, there have been
invasions
. Not a mile away, some young men just burst into a home and robbed the family on a Sunday morning,” Nanny says urgently as if to a stubborn child. “With so many people on drugs these days, nowhere is safe.
You must always lock the doors
.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Nanny nods and looks back at CNN, where Senator John McCain says, “Remember all the establishment is against us. This is an insurgency campaign. I’m just like Luke Skywalker trying to get out of the Death Star. They’re all coming at me from everywhere.”
“Nanny, would you like for me to drive you into town?”
She smiles and her eyes light up as if she’s just witnessed a miracle. “Why, Cage. What a wonderful surprise.”
“Yeah. I feel like Forrest Gump today,” I say. “Brave enough to face Wal-Mart.” Every citizen of Thebes, every pedestrian, every shopper and uniformed employee, will be watching me, judging me, aware of what a freak I am, but I will breathe through the terror, dispel the delusions like bad breath, and walk on down the aisle.
Nanny laughs delightedly as the recliner back rises with an electric whir. “Oh boy, I won’t have to wait till Thursday to pick up a new humidifier.”
I
wake up around five about to wet my bed from the gallon of water that I drank to dilute the coming hangover. There is a dream vivid in my head. My great-grandmother Madora was behind the wheel of a Mercedes convertible. I was overjoyed to see her because she’s been dead for so many years. I jumped in and hugged her, saying, I’m so happy to see you. And I started crying. I noticed in her handbag a book that said
Hannibal
on the spine, saw it twice, once up close, like a camera zoom.
She said, You can’t know someone in death.
No? I asked.
She shook her head and said, But I’ll be your little friend.
I got the sense that she would always be there to comfort me. In the backseat was my grandfather Rutledge, stooped over, like when he was dying of cancer, but with black hair that I’d only seen in old photographs. When I leaned over the seat, he sat up straight and said, I’m growing now. Madora waved as they drove off, leaving me in a Baton Rouge bar called South Downs, where the dream turned suddenly to black-and-white. The bar was full of high school friends, and Nick’s friend Rowan Patrick was there with President Clinton. I joined a greeting line and spoke to Clinton in the flash of many cameras. Caitlin and Betsy and five other girls I slept with surrounded me in plastic raincoats and I knew they were vampires and I left and was suddenly back in Technicolor in my father’s two-story paneled office and I went to his desk and saw two signed and rubber-stamped letters. I picked up an embossed stamp and impressed the letters, feeling I was doing something wrong, then I walked out a big arched window onto the balcony with the view of the Mississippi and the two humps of the bridge outlined in twinkling lights and Isabella Ballou was there in a fifties Sunday dress. She looked up at me and smiled and said, I thought you would never come.
The lights of the bridge changed into the lights of all the cities of earth far below. Isabella and I were in a gigantic Concorde, which I understood to be a sort of staging area for death. We had just died. The flight attendants wore futuristic plastic uniforms and little caps like the ones in Kubrick’s
2001
. I asked one, So there is no consciousness after death? That’s right, she said pleasantly, adjusting my seat belt. But you have nothing to fear.
An old man originally from Atlanta who went to seminary at Sewanee before studying Jungian analysis in Switzerland, Dr. Pearce has a kind, bearded face and a fondness for western string ties. He never takes his eyes off me as I read my dreams from my Palm. This is my favorite hour of the week. It’s better than the grind of work and the mindless pursuit of excitement in nightclubs and always feels somehow cleansing. It is my confession. Dr. Pearce pulls the unlit pipe out of his mouth and asks, “So what do you make of it?”
