Safe from the Neighbors (31 page)

All that organization amounted to, Mr. Calloway told him, was a fucking civic club. Didn’t my father have enough gumption to know that?

Well, he had more than most folks knew. He understood perfectly well that the Council was a civic club.
And like’s the case with most clubs not being in it could hit you in the pocketbook and mine was too thin to absorb much of a blow. I said to him hell Arlan I thought we was fighting for racial supremacy. And he says how in the hell is the white race so damn supreme when we live in a place that’s got three or four of them for every one of us? I’m just trying to conduct my business in the most efficient way possible he tells me, that the day doing business means saying yes sir to colored folks I’ll say it just as sweet as can be. That day’s not here yet. He says people have to adapt James and that’s what I’ve been
trying to show you. I got half a mind to turn around and head back. We’re not going to accomplish nothing up there tonight except maybe getting ourselves killed
.

Heading back was the last thing my father wanted. Or to put it another way, it was the last thing he could afford. If they went back, he said, they’d just look like a couple of windbags.

Nobody would know, Mr. Calloway observed, unless he ran his mouth.

My father lied and said he’d already run it, that the operator had asked if they were going to Oxford and he’d said yes.

Well Arlan says to me like he’s being philosophical, that means it’s in the public domain
.

Highway 6, at that time, didn’t bypass the town of Oxford as it does today. Back then it ran straight into the square, with the university off to the right. When they got there, the western edge of town seemed surprisingly quiet, given that a battle supposedly was raging just a couple miles away. My father noticed a rundown gas station on their left, a bunch of used tires stacked up on a spoke where anybody who wanted to could steal them, the door to the service bay wide open and somebody’s tool chest sitting on the floor. A hundred yards or so ahead on the right, there was what appeared to be a construction site, a broad expanse of newly poured concrete with absolutely nothing around it—in all likelihood, the foundation of the strip mall where the Jitney-Jungle stood when I was a student.

At first he wondered if maybe the news going out over the radio was an exaggeration. The highway ahead looked empty and dark. Then, over the drone of Arlan’s engine, he became aware of the noise: small-arms fire. He rolled the window down, and it got a lot louder. There was a weird odor in the air, too.

“Reckon you know what that stink is,” Arlan said. “Navy give you any training with gas?”

The navy had offered gas training, but that was when he’d been in the hospital with pneumonia, about to die, and then they shipped him out without forcing him to make it up. “I know how to put the mask on,” he said. “We had ’em on board.”

“Yeah, well we ain’t got ’em on board now.” Arlan pulled to the side of the road, got out and grabbed something from under the seat. While my father sat and watched, he walked around in front of the truck, into the glare of his own headlights, carrying a couple of towels. He stooped down next to the road ditch. Then he climbed back in and laid the soaked towels on the seat.

I told him it looked like he come prepared and he put the truck in gear and said that when folks started shooting it was best to be. I asked if he’d been shot at a lot and he said that a lot or a little it didn’t make no difference, it was like fucking, do it once and you get the gist
.

Arlan pulled back on the road, and the truck topped a rise. Up ahead half a mile or so, they saw flashing lights and uniformed men running back and forth, hundreds of them. They were members of the Mississippi Highway Patrol, and my father thought, as any sane person would, they were setting up a roadblock to stop people like him and Arlan from reaching the campus. In reality, the police were on the verge of mounting an attack themselves. They’d just decided to storm the Lyceum and kill every last marshal if they had to. The attack was averted, according to William Doyle’s book, by a visit from Paul B. Johnson, Jr., the lieutenant governor, who told them: “Don’t go up there fighting with those federals.”

When he saw all them folks Arlan pumped the brakes but didn’t actually stop, he just looked at me and asked what I wanted to do. Said for me to make the call
.

This was not, my father knew, in Arlan Calloway’s nature. Though he didn’t say so in the notebook, he must have realized that his friend was acting out of character, and this, in and of itself, should have given him pause. But it failed to—he must have been pumping adrenaline, his heart pounding, his face and
neck hot. In his side-view mirror he saw headlights on the road behind them, several more vehicles streaming into town. They could all get together and try to force the roadblock, he guessed, or a group of them could engage the highway patrolmen while the rest took off through the woods ahead on the right. That would’ve made a certain kind of sense, assuming anybody felt like doing so that night. But he wasn’t much interested in concerted action. “Let’s park right up yonder,” he said, “and see if we can’t slip through them trees.”

“I get it—a little flanking maneuver, like Jackson at Chancellorsville?”

I knew damn well he was mocking me and I figured I deserved it like the whole damn state did and that this time next week Meredith would be sitting in school on a campus I’d never seen and probably never would, not that I wanted to because by then I didn’t. And I still don’t. Yeah I said, like Jackson. So he pulls off the road and says he guessed I knew what happened to old Stonewall a little while later in that battle. And I said yeah, that he got shot by one of his own, a Tar Heel confused in the dark. Then I said what I knew would get him good and I was right. I said if he was scared to go with me he didn’t need to. I said I got a lot less to lose than you do. You can go on back home and take care of your kids. And that great big beautiful wife
.

He’d known Arlan Calloway longer than anyone else. He knew what his face looked like when he was mad, how his mouth used to get smaller when a teacher embarrassed him or a town kid taunted him, the corners of it drawn together so tightly that it no longer looked like a mouth at all, but more like an asshole. It certainly did that night.

“I can take care of my wife,” Arlan said. “Do
not
fucking besaddle yourself with any worries about that.”

Besaddle
, my father felt fairly certain, wasn’t an American word, just a set of sounds Arlan had put together to disguise his despair, and this marked a turning point. Feeling in control for
the first time all night, my father opened the door and climbed out of the truck.

Arlan sat there looking across the seat at him while the handguns and rifles kept going off and a column of smoke rose into the black sky. Finally he threw Dad one of the wet towels, then grabbed his shotgun and jumped out.

When he thought back on that night, my father always remembered how he and Arlan lingered at the edge of the woods, each one waiting for the other to take the first step. Neither of them carried a flashlight, a major oversight they normally wouldn’t be guilty of. It was as if they both understood that the business at hand could only be transacted in the dark.

My dad tripped on a log or stump but managed to right himself. Undergrowth broke beneath his feet, and when he stepped into a soggy spot the mud made a sucking sound. “Reckon the rattlers are out tonight?” he said.

“They got ’em up here?”

“Hell, I don’t know. I ain’t even set foot in Oxford and don’t know much about this part of the state. If we don’t get killed, though, I reckon we could ask old man Horton. He went to school up here. Him and that fellow that runs the newspaper.”

Mr. Calloway didn’t respond. The woods smelled of ammonia, onions, rotten wood. The gunfire got louder as they moved towards campus, and by then there would have been no shortage of it. My father recalled hearing the droning noise of chopper blades slicing the air, and somebody hollered something over a bullhorn. A moment later a cheer went up, like you’d hear at a football game when the home team scored a touchdown.

“Sounds like maybe they just put a rope around Meredith’s neck,” my father said, and it occurred to him, once he said it, that this was as far as he needed or wanted to go, that right
there in the middle of the woods was where he and Arlan ought to do whatever they were going to. The same realization must have struck Mr. Calloway, because when Dad stopped pushing through the undergrowth, he did too. They just stood there in the woods waiting for something to happen, and before long, my father recalled, it did: above their heads they heard the
thunk
of a stray slug tearing into a tree.

And right then is when he says to me I withdrew my bid on your land last week. Says I guess nobody told you. Or maybe they did and it don’t matter. Could be you think that me placing that bid took a few inches off your height or lopped off the end of your dick. I don’t know and I don’t care. I thought I had to when I did it, but I was wrong. I ain’t about to tell you I’m sorry though because you won’t believe me no way. You got your mind made up. But he was wrong about that. My mind wasn’t made up. It was when I placed that phone call and when I got in the truck and it was still made up back there on the road when I got out and started tromping through them woods into what was sounding more like a engagement between armies. It was not made up now because all I wanted was to keep a roof over the heads of my wife and boy and if Arlan didn’t aim to take it away then there really wasn’t any big problem. Which was not the same as saying we’d ever be friends again because we wouldn’t
.

My father’s eyes were starting to burn—from the gas, he thought, though later on he wondered if it might not have been something else. “Why’d you do it, Arlan? What in the name of God made you want to take what little I call mine?”

He could see him over there in the dark—his small, trim outline—and the muzzle of his shotgun, which was not, Dad noticed, pointing at the ground.
He was holding that thing waist high with the stock near his navel and the barrel jutting out from his rib cage like a extra arm. And though I didn’t know it till then my own right hand had worked under my waistband and wrapped itself around the butt of that Colt Python like it had gone there on its own without no help from me
.

Arlan Calloway laughed. “What you
call
yours? Yeah, that’s
about right. You might call that house and land yours, but they’re not and you shouldn’t ever forget it. My land actually is mine, but you don’t see a problem with standing in
my
front yard and throwing your arms around
my
wife and telling her, ‘Lord, if you ain’t something.’”

At first my father didn’t know what he was talking about. Then he remembered Arlan dropping him off in front of his house that night after the Council meeting and then going off to check on things, that he’d seen Nadine standing there and made that remark. But Arlan couldn’t have heard it. His engine was still running and he was already backing out of his driveway. “Do
what
?” Dad said.

And that outraged Arlan. “Don’t you dare say
do what
. Nadine’s daddy used to talk like that, and he’s a dumb-ass redneck.”

It came to me right then that’s exactly what the both of us was. Only dumb-ass rednecks would be trying to settle their private scores while half a mile away folks was shooting at one another and maybe even dying to keep a air force veteran from going to school where he wanted to. I knew it was wrong to keep him out and though I didn’t want him in I wouldn’t of fought to keep it from happening. And it seemed to me then like it does now that me and Arlan had some disease in common though I’ll be damned if I know what to call it
.

He heard himself laugh. “Is there such a word as
benignant?”

“I have no fucking idea,” Arlan told him. “I have to look all that shit up in a dictionary. And if there is such a word, I don’t need it here tonight.”

“I’m pretty sure it’s a word. I believe it means when something’s not dangerous, that it’s okay.”

“Things between you and me are not okay.”

My father probably tried for the jocular tone guys will use when discussing things they think only a man can understand. “My Lord, you thought I was trying to make time with your wife? Why?”

“I knew somebody was, and at the time you were the only one that came to mind.”

Somewhere behind them, a bullet pinged off a tree. “Because I said wasn’t she something?”

“I wouldn’t tell
your
wife that.”

“Well, my wife’s not exactly the kind of woman that makes anybody want to say that.” My father immediately regretted that comment. “Listen, don’t get me wrong,” he added, “I wouldn’t trade her for—”

“I don’t give a shit if you’d trade her or not. I got half a mind to shoot you, James. Nobody’d ever know I did it, not with all this hell that’s breaking loose. I could say we got separated in the dark and the marshals or the National Guard or somebody else must’ve shot you. But you know that. It’s why you wanted us to come up here in the first place. You meant to lead me out into the woods and shoot me, James, and that plain ain’t right. I might’ve taken your house—hell, there’s no might to it, I damn well would’ve if I needed to—but I wouldn’t have tried to kill you.”

I wasn’t safe from my neighbor but my neighbor, he was safe from me. I might of used the Python fifteen minutes earlier or fifteen years later if I ever needed to to protect my wife and boy. But I couldn’t use it then and there was nothing I could do but hope that Arlan knew it
.

Evidently, he didn’t. While my father stood there suddenly awash in sweat, Arlan Calloway brought the muzzle around.

The sound, when Dad heard it, was right behind him where, as far as he knew, no living creature ought to be. A quick rustling followed by a couple thumps—of feet whacking the ground?—and then something dark and frantic darted past. Arlan swung his shotgun in that direction, and my father expected the night to explode, but it didn’t. Whatever it was had bolted through the woods towards the road—the dark form leaping forward, rising four or five feet into the air—with both of them staring after it.