City on Fire (60 page)

Mercer thought of the crippled detective. He did his best to stand up straight. Porchlight from beyond the screen door flooded the spaces around him. “Nossir. I’m just visiting.”

“You don’t have to talk so loud. I hear fine.”

“The TV’s on,” he said, helplessly.

“You got rid of that moustache, I see.”

Mama and Pop were different this way; with her, the pressure was broad and constant, a kind of floor you learned to walk across, whereas with him, it was a thumbtack hiding in the carpet. Mercer was finding it hard not to look at Pop’s missing foot. But Mama chose this moment to come in from the porch and whatever she’d been affecting to do there. “Your brother’s sorry he couldn’t be here to greet you. He’s gone to Valdosta to see about some stereo equipment. He’s starting a mail-order business, you know.”

Since C.L.’s discharge from the treatment facility, she’d talked about him becoming a pilot, a soybean trader, a personal-injury attorney, and some other things Mercer couldn’t quite recall from their phone conversations. How could there be so many different careers for which one person was uniquely unqualified? “You let him drive?” He looked to Pop for some acknowledgment that this was a legitimate question, but on the subject of C.L., Pop was still evidently mute. “Forget it,” Mercer said. “I’m going to sleep off this jetlag.”

It seemed to be in everyone’s interest now to respect his conceit. But the flight had only been three hours and had never left the Eastern time zone, and later, after his folks had gone to bed, he would still be lying awake studying the slantwise paneling of his bedroom ceiling. It was temperate enough out to keep the windows open; the breeze smelled like damp asphalt and rare earth metals, coppery but not quite. Every great once in a while a truck would pass by on the highway, an all-night express he could hear from a mile or two off. But in the gaps in between, there was only his brain, like a radio with the knobs busted off, broadcasting the questions from which coming down here had been supposed to free him. Would he ever see William again? And if so, what would they say to each other? Would anyone else ever find him attractive? Would he be able to trust them? Would he ever make love again, or even want to? And why love things you were destined to lose? Why let yourself feel things if the feelings were doomed to die? (And away on another channel: Was it possible that the basic unit of human thought was not the proposition, but the question? What was the logical content of a question?)

On and on it went, even as something in his chest softened and the claustrophobic world around him—his Encyclopedia Americana and his shelf of picture-books and the framed picture of him and C.L. flexing their little-boy muscles at Atlantic Beach and the palm-sized rocking horse Hercule the farm manager had whittled shortly before his cancer diagnosis—began to melt into multi-hued moonlight. He tried to keep from making any sound that might leak through the floor to the room where his parents now slept because Pop hadn’t been able to climb stairs since the accident. If you could call it an accident. The morning after, the morning of the bonfire and the north pasture and the sacrificial pig, C.L. had been high on PCP. As he probably had been when he’d run the harrow over Pop’s leg, said the doctor at the state mental hospital. This was not to mention the self-reported abuse of cocaine, hasheesh, and the sedatives the V.A. had prescribed. Basically, the doctor told Mama in a soothing voice Mercer could just hear from the hallway, C.L. had spent the last two years trying to burn out his cerebral cortex. The things these kids saw over there.… Then a truck was approaching on the highway, or maybe a car. Or one of each, the low engine and the high commingling. As they came into range of Mercer’s window, he could make out the thump of disco. Even unto Ogeechee County this foursquare beat had penetrated.

Just when they should have started to fade, the vehicles turned in toward the house, carrying enough speed to slip around on the driveway. He heard oyster shells kick up and hit an undercarriage, saw rhomboids of light distend on the ceiling. A door slammed, but the headlights hung there overhead for what felt like forever as the radio pulsed on. Love to love you, baby. In the old days, Pop would have got up and run whoever it was off with a pitchfork. There were voices. Finally, the lesser of the two engines pulled away. Mercer could hear C.L. stumbling up the stairs. The next thing he knew, the light on the ceiling was morning, and someone had stuck his brain in a paper sack and smashed it with a hammer.

ONE OF HIS MOTHER’S ANTIQUATED BELIEFS involved the curative power of manual labor, and though she framed it as a favor he could do for her, he knew she was thinking of it the other way around when she asked him, at breakfast, to mow the north pasture. They were down to one cow now, and the grass was knee-high, she said, an eyesore. An eyesore for whom? Well, for folks—the same ones, presumably, who would have been scandalized if it turned out one of her boys was light in the loafers and the other one sick in the head. These folks were imaginary, it was true (the nearest neighbors were white people who hadn’t much spoken to the Goodmans since Pop had wrangled his loan for the land all those years ago), but they were, for Mama, a necessary fiction. They answered the problem of how to keep oneself upright, given the horizontal eternity that awaited us all just over the figurative rise.

As he drove the mower over the uneven acre—he could actually feel the dullness of the steel blades when they whacked into a patch of wildflowers—Mercer fantasized about insurrection. But the house was too small to contain even the two men already fighting over it. Anyway (whack; he accelerated toward a ragged patch he’d mown twice already, weeds that were simply playing dead), Pop was at least talking to him again, which meant that he was still in compliance, the good son.

Afterward, he left the mower in the meadow, in case Mama spotted a patch he’d missed, and went in search of water. The footpath wound over the hill, past humid green ditches, fields rented out for usufruct now that Hercule was gone and the dream of self-subsistence Pop had brought back from his own war had collapsed. Green bonnets of cotton peeked from the ridged dirt; soon they’d be the size of medicine balls. Cresting the little slope by the rope swing, he heard a sound like nails being pounded into wood. It was a basketball, caroming off the side of the utility barn where Pop had mounted a netless rim. From this distance, the person chasing down the rebound didn’t resemble anyone who’d ever played here. He was heavier, for one thing. His hair was blown out in a huge ’fro his blue bandana couldn’t contain. And he was barefoot; cowboy boots sat side-by-side under a shade tree. Nor was C.L.’s jumpshot the pure ecstatic arc Mercer remembered, objective correlative for all his brother’s unattainable perfections. It was a flat line-drive lacking innocence or English. Though it did, to be fair, go through.

Without saying anything, Mercer slipped in and started guarding him. Soon they were grunting, banging. C.L.’s cheeks dimpled like a kid’s when he smiled. He was a step slower, thanks to the beer-gut, and Mercer beat him for a couple of easy layups, but he pulled even with a jumper from outside, and when Mercer checked the ball to him on the next possession, he fired it back almost too fast for Mercer to catch. Those dimples. “What, Negro? I thought you were a city boy now.”

Mercer never did have much of an outside shot, and with this grin right up in his face and whatever chemicals C.L. was sweating out of his system clouding the air, he had no confidence he could sink a fifteen-footer. He dribbled and dribbled, trying to remember his brother’s weaknesses, and to guess which of them remained. He head-faked right and drove left, wheeling at the end to protect the ball. He was about to toss up a baby hook when C.L. fouled him—hard—retrieved the ball, and stepped back to drain a j. “That’s game,” he said, still with that idiot grin. The skin of Mercer’s forearm tingled, a phantom sting where C.L. had slapped it. There were two options—call the foul or don’t—and either way, he would lose, but there was a thrill here in this moment when actual combat might have replaced the shadowboxing he’d been doing for months now with every last person he loved. They squared off, breathing hard. Then C.L. reached out exploratorily, touched the arm, and, when he saw Mercer wasn’t going to react, extended himself further, a one-armed hug that was inches from a headlock. “Aw, you still got it, Brother.”

“Got what?” Mercer asked.

“If you don’t know, I can’t explain it to you. Come on.”

This was less an invitation than a command, as the arm on Mercer’s shoulder doubled as a yoke. They ended up on the shady side of the barn, where dew still clung to the ground. There used to be great curved divots left by the horses that had stabled here, but that was back when Pop was one of the first black men in Georgia with this many acres, and he and C.L. had towered over Mercer like some more enviable species. C.L. threw the barn door’s sprung lock near Mercer’s feet. The door fell into histrionics. The square of barn it disclosed was as dark as a tunnel but blessedly cool. “Watch for snakes.” C.L. must have come here often; a couple of carpeted shipping pallets had been dragged near the door, and on the ground were beercans pale with age. To refuse C.L.’s invitation to sit would have looked precious, so they plunked down on adjacent pallets and gazed out the open door. All of their father’s Arcadian designs, his soil-management systems, all the changes he’d wrought on this land disappeared in the prospect: grasses and skies and a small bitter crabapple tree.… C.L. lifted his pallet and fetched from underneath a Mason jar he began to unscrew. A lighter snicked. C.L.’s face flared orange in the dimness, and then a familiar smell cut through the rich animal aura of the vanished horses. He extended his fingers.

“Acapulco Gold. Not that seeds and stems shit you get up north.”

“I don’t guess you’ve got any water squirreled away out here,” Mercer said.

“Come on, Merce. B-ball and a little weed, helps get the toxins out.”

“Toxins?”

“Why you think you want water? They put all kinds of chemicals in that shit to keep you hooked.” C.L. took another toke, continued talking without expelling breath. “This here comes straight from the earth. A guy I know knows the guy who grows it.”

C.L. had brought back from his war a head full of these idées fixes, like a trunk whose contents had been jostled in transit. Worse, he assumed you shared them. Refusal to go along would only make him angry, and you didn’t want to make C.L. angry. As ever in the family Goodman, someone would have to swallow feelings here, and it was easier that it be Mercer. Besides, the eventual horror of that night had not erased his memories of smoking marijuana on a balcony with William’s sister. If anything, it made them dearer to him. He took the joint, comfortable now that he could once more find an approach to his brother. A cough swelled inside.

“That’s good, coughing will get you higher. Take another toke if you want.”

When he focused on it, Mercer could feel his mind ballooning outward, sort of, and tight little bundles of tension in his joints relaxing. He inhaled again. How long had it been, since that night at the Hamilton-Sweeneys’? The in-between was contracting, bringing closer things he hadn’t wanted to think about, but there was no urgency anymore; he had all the time in the world. He handed back the joint. “You happy, C.L.?”

“As a pig in shit. Speaking of which, how’s Carlos?”

“Carlos? Carlos is kind of a nightmare.”

“Yeah, that he is, isn’t he?” C.L. laughed. “But then, you lived with me all those years, so that can’t be why you moved out on him, can it?”

“What are you talking about?”

C.L. was doing something to the joint, fixing it so it would draw better. “Mama told me you found a new roommate. Let’s not bullshit each other, Little Bro.”

Mercer looked around. There was no way anyone could hear. But the walls could, and the earth, and the ghosts of horses, and the state of Georgia.

“Honestly, I don’t care what makes your prick stand up, Mercer. There were a couple brothers in my company known to share a sleeping bag over there in the war. We’re out God knows where in the dark, listening to mortar rounds coming down, wondering which one’s got our names on it, and I start to think, at least these guys have each other. Turns out there are atheists in foxholes, but still, craving pussy wasn’t helping me none.” He put a finger to his lips, held up two fingers vertically, then jabbed them toward the back of the barn and the house beyond. “And the ones who do care would be telling you what to do regardless.”

“Oh my God. Do they know?”

“If they did, they’d never know they knew. But that’s why Mama hates you being up there, getting out from under her. She knows you’ve always given your heart away too easy.”

Mercer grabbed for the joint again, stood up. He was thinking for some reason of that picture in his room, the trip to the beach when he was a little kid, all that beautiful flesh gleaming in the sun. C.L., already adept at hurling himself into things he couldn’t control, had stood waist-deep in the chest-deep water, explaining to Mercer how to bodysurf. How to bend the knees and crouch and wait for the moment when the wave started to take you. But Mercer could never time it right; he was always a second behind the break, and would end up stranded on the sandbar, watching his brother’s long ride in to the shore. “We lived together for about a year before he left me. William, is his name.”

“He white?”

“Jesus, C.L.”

“He is, isn’t he? Damn. There’s your problem right there, trust me.”

“It’s not that. It’s … Listen, what do you know about heroin?”

“The drug? Bad shit. Hard to kick. People try to take it away, you resent them.”

“But you’re clean now.”

C.L. licked his fingertips and pinched the end of the joint, producing a tiny sizzle of extinction. “Never cleaner.”

“Hey. You don’t have any more of that grass handy, do you?”

“How many days you staying?”

“ ’Til Sunday.”

“We might have to make a little run.”

His brother lifted again the pallet he’d been sitting on, only without fully rising, an Archimedean feat. Mercer’s eyes were now like a cat’s, able to see into the hole that had been hollowed out beneath. “What’s that?”