South of Broad (54 page)

“So Hugo rose out of those waters and twisted himself into bizarre and funneling shapes and he began his fearful trek to Charleston, holding a single tear from God’s eye. When he reached Charleston, he crushed the city. His weapons were the winds and rains and tides of God. He chopped down houses and blew away roofs and flooded streets. The only place that Hugo did not touch was the grave of Sheba Poe, which was as dry as a prayer book. Every flower ripped from the gardens of Charleston fell from the skies to honor her, sent to her grave by the hand of a loving and merciful God.

“This merciful God spared the lives of some people who waited out the storm on Water Street. He let them live for reasons all His own, and we will never begin to understand them. One of them was the lovely Molly Rutledge, who was born a princess in the Holy City and who grew up to become one of its queens. Her childhood was a cakewalk and a dream, and she had most loved her summers spent at her grandmother’s house on Sullivan’s Island. Queens often feel things that normal people are not allowed to feel. Molly feared for her grandmother’s house, for Weezie’s house. She went out to her stable and grabbed a peasant boy named Leo, who worked in the stable taking care of jackasses and chickens. She grabbed Leo by the ear and demanded he find a boat and take her to the island. Leo ran to commandeer a boat stolen by an evil police captain.

“As the crisp air rushed through the queen’s golden hair, she looked back at her hurt city with tears in her eyes. Then she smelled something foul and thought to herself that the peasant boy smelled exactly like a jackass. At the same time, Leo thought this queen smelled like tea olive or jasmine. As they neared the island, something stirred in the water. Molly found her boat surrounded by a magnificent but troubled school of porpoises. When she asked the porpoises what was the matter, a solemn voice called out that the pod had lost their queen during the storm. The queen was stranded on dry land but they could hear her crying out. Molly made a solemn vow to help. When a queen makes a pledge, it carries the rule of law.

“The boat rode the waves into the place where Weezie’s house had once been. Molly wept when she saw that the storm had taken Weezie’s house. But she called to the peasant boy, Leo. They ran together and found the stranded porpoise lying on a white couch in the ruins of a flooded, imploded house. The porpoise’s name was Sheba, and she looked lost and forlorn and abandoned. She had given up all hope of rescue and had resigned herself to a slow death in the fog now lifting off the waters. But another queen and a peasant boy who smelled like a jackass placed her on a piece of wood, and they struggled and grunted as they staggered beneath the weight of that lovely mammal. They tripped on sand dunes and their muscles spasmed in agony as they made it finally to the waves.

“The school of porpoises was watching the effort and began applauding. They danced across the waters with their tails; in a language that was not interpretable, a language known only to animals and very small children, they commanded that Molly and Leo remain strong and save the pretty monarch.

“In the ocean, Queen Sheba stirred to life. Then her king appeared beside her, and her honor guard rushed around her in the ecstasy of her survival. Molly cleaned the sand from her blowhole. Arching her beautiful tail, Sheba dove out into the great ocean, which was both her palace and her home.

“Queen Molly took Leo home and left him with the jackasses and the chickens; she went to her castle. She thought that the loss of Weezie’s house was more than made up for by the recovery of the porpoise Sheba. ‘Always choose life over possessions. Always!’ Queen Molly said, as she climbed into her bed for the night.

“Good night, Hugo. And farewell.”

As soon as I bowed my conclusion, Sarah announced, with conviction: “Twelve percent.”

“What about the goddess of the storm part?” Fraser asked. “That was my favorite part.”

“I’ve already written that,” I say. “What’s important is that a story changes every time you say it out loud. When you put it on paper, it can never change. But the more times you tell it, the more changes will occur. A story is a living thing; it moves and shifts. If I had each one of you tell me the story the same way I just told it, no one could do it. Now, is it time to get you rascals to bed?”

“No!” the kids chorus.

“Past time,” Fraser says.

When I go to bed on the couch, I find myself agitated and sleepless. I pour a glass of Grand Marnier and quietly tiptoe past the bedroom where Mother and Trevor sleep. The moon is out and it proves a bright comfort as I walk the road higher up the mountain until I find a shelf of exposed granite I can sit on to think about the rest of my life. I am thinking about the awful way Sheba died when a penny hits the rock beside me and bounces into the mountain laurel forest below.

“For your thoughts,” Molly says, sitting beside me and hooking her arm through mine. She takes the snifter and drinks a sip. Her breath grows orangey and sweet, like it was the night in San Francisco when she came to my bed.

“Sheba,” I say. “I wonder if she really wanted to marry me or was just joking around.”

“She thought her career was finished, Leo,” Molly says. “She wasn’t a big fan of Hollywood men. She wanted a kid. She wanted to settle down.”

“Sheba settling down? I don’t believe it for a second.”

“Me, neither. She had a restless spirit. A tormented soul. And a dreadful end.”

“You don’t know how dreadful.”

“Speaking of endings,” Molly says after a moment, “thanks for your story. I guess I can quit worrying about how to tell you. You let me know you already understood.”

“The queen always goes back to the castle,” I say. “I always knew you’d never leave Chad. And if it helps anything, I think it’s the right thing to do.”

“Please don’t go noble on me, Toad,” she says. “I can’t stand that. But I belong with Chad. I belong with my house and children. I belong where I was born to be.”

She isn’t telling me anything I didn’t already know, and I just nod. We sit there another moment in silence, then I bring our brief glimmer of forever to an end with, predictably, a joke. “If Chad ever beats you up or farts too loudly or just wakes up with bad breath and body odor, you can always come to me, Molly.”

She smiles, but her smile is sad. “If I leave, then your story won’t be true. And your story is true,” she says. “One hundred percent true.”

Molly kisses me, then walks back down the hill crowned by moonlight, now a goddess of these hills.

CHAPTER 29
Locked Doors

I
return to a hurt city with the sound of chain saws echoing over the alleyways and cobblestones. Squat brown Dumpsters line the streets of the old town as workers fill them with waterlogged furniture. Whole libraries have died on their shelves and bookcases. Paintings of the founders of the colony find themselves tossed on junk heaps, sodden beyond recognition or hope of restoration. The shrimping fleet of Shem Creek has disappeared from the face of the earth. The corpses of sleek yachts lie marooned in the green flanks of the great salt marsh. A red fire truck lies upside down in the marsh behind Sullivan’s Island. Insurance agents who have lived quiet, low-key lives find themselves the busiest, most harried people in town, spending sleepless nights.

The reporters at the
News and Courier
do not lose their early grit and resolve. I consider myself lucky to have lived through my paper’s finest days. We hit the ground running every day and deliver the goods to our readers the following morning. Before, reading the
News and Courier
was a perfunctory, sometimes compulsive habit to start the day. But after Hugo, it has become a necessity, a road map to survival in the humid, haunted days that have followed the storm.

In the first week, a decadent, putrescent smell hangs over Charleston, caused by the rotting of sea life that Hugo had tossed ashore in its great tidal assault, stranding all varieties in ivy and honeysuckle vines. Molly finds a five-foot sand shark behind her guesthouse, decomposing in the bright sun. Some sewage lines have broken and the smell of excrement adds itself to the air we have to breathe. As I walk the city from north to south, east to west, covering all the neighborhoods, looking for human interest stories, I become conscious of a slight nausea I can’t shake. The bloated corpses of dogs and cats, raccoons and possums, seagulls and pelicans, add their decomposing stench to the miasma of foul smells that have hung over the city like a mist for a week.

On Monday morning, South Carolina Electric and Gas makes heroic progress in restoring power to the city. Because the telephone lines are mostly underground, the phone service returns with astonishing speed. After finishing my column, I check on the progress of the work crews who are cleaning up the houses of my mother and my friends. I drive to my mother’s house just in time to see the bed and mattress where my brother and I were conceived hurled into a Dumpster. The begrimed workers are making significant progress at the Rutledge mansions on East Bay Street. But as I walk up Water Street toward Niles and Fraser’s home, I smell the foulest odor I have encountered yet. I introduce myself to the crew chief, who is waiting outside the house, sitting in his idling pickup truck. He motions for me to get in the shotgun seat. I am grateful he has his air conditioner running on high.

“How’s the work going, Mr. Shepperton?” I ask.

“Not worth a damn,” he says. “I sent my men home early.”

“Why’s that?”

“You want to work in this stink?” he asks. “I’ve had two men throwing up today.”

“Where’s it coming from?”

“Not sure,” he says, looking over the steering wheel and holding on to it as though he were driving. “These houses are packed so tight, like Vienna sausages in a can. But we think it’s coming from that shed in the back of Niles’s yard, and a neighbor is missing a collie. Thing is, Niles has it padlocked—we can’t get in.”

“Break it down. Find out what it is.”

“Got to hear that from Niles or the missus,” he says. “Or even Miss Molly, if she’s around.”

“She’s not coming back till Wednesday. Can I authorize it?”

“No, sir, you can’t. And I can’t do any good for anybody till we get that dead animal out of there. Might be a raccoon.”

“Smells like a whale rotting on the beach.”

“Get Niles to call me.”

Walking to my house on Tradd, I notice that a brand-new civilization has sprung alive on Church Street as a small nation of contractors and subcontractors begins a long and fruitful season of renewal and salvage. The interior of every house on the street hums with the concentrated activity of repairmen of every stripe. Painters and roofers stare out at me from high scaffolding as I pass them in the street below. A friendly city at the worst of times, Charleston’s innate cordiality informs its sensibility after the disaster. People wave and shout greetings to one another, whether an apprentice carpenter or a descendant of a signer of the Declaration of Independence. It is a fine time to renew my love affair with the city, which I do gratefully as Charleston begins its irrepressible resurrection in its kingdom of mildew and rot. When I get home, I call Ike Jefferson at his office, no easy task. He does not return my message for more than two hours, and when he does, his voice is lifeless and exhausted. “Hey, Toad. Sorry it took so long to get back to you. How’s my family?”

“I got to see them in the mountains. That’s the good news. The bad news is that they’re all dead.”

“I don’t need this, Toad,” he snaps. “I just don’t need this shit right now.”

“Sorry,” I tell him. “I got letters from everyone. I’ll take them by tomorrow and put them on that rocking chair by your front door.”

“Everybody else all right?”

“Couldn’t be better. How’s Betty?”

“Working her ass off. Just like everybody else. This is a hell of a time, Toad.”

“I agree. I was over at Niles’s just now. Something is stinking up the place bad.”

“I’ll get somebody to go by and check,” Ike says.

“Do the best you can. Can I do anything for you?”

“Come over and cook me and Betty something good whenever we catch a break.”

“It’s a date,” I say. “Consider it done.”

“Thank you guys for taking care of my family.” I can tell Ike’s bone-tiredness has made him emotional. “I love you, Toad.”

“I wish I felt the same way about you,” I say, then hang up the phone.

T
he next afternoon my office door opens and Ike Jefferson walks into the room carrying some unspeakable disturbance in the deep pools of his brown eyes. He slumps into the visitor’s chair. For several moments I think he has fallen asleep at that very spot.

“Liquor?” he finally asks, eyes still closed. “I need a pop.”

Later, I learn that he has not gone off duty since two days before the arrival of Hugo, and that he has eaten, showered, and shaved in his office.

I remove a bottle of Maker’s Mark from my top drawer, pour a jiggerful, and pass it across my desk. He eyes it with the appreciation of a whiskey priest over his morning portion of wine. In a swift motion, Ike downs it with pleasure and asks for another. I refill the jigger and the motions repeat themselves. When he’s done, he takes my measure with the concentration that has always seemed like a form of thirst to me.

“I sent a cop over to Niles’s house—rookie woman cop. Too young to know it was a bullshit assignment.”

“Was it coming from the tool shed?”

“Yep,” Ike says. “There was a man inside.”

“That’s impossible. How could anyone get in there? It was locked.”

“When was it locked?” Ike asks.

“I don’t know—Niles went out before the wind got up. About six, I think. Molly and I went out to look at the storm.”

“Idiots.”

“He was afraid of looters,” I tell him. “He didn’t know someone had hidden out in there—why wouldn’t they come to the door? God, this is all Niles needs,” I mutter, and Ike apparently agrees.

“Can you take a little ride with me?” he asks, getting to his feet.

“Let me type a last sentence.” I type it fast, then follow him out.

We drive slowly south on King Street. Ike asks me about his parents and his kids, his manner shell-shocked and somber as he pulls his squad car into the parking lot of the Sergeant Jasper Apartments. Several other police cars are lined up nearby, and Ike salutes the on-duty clerk as we walk to the elevator bank. We ride one to the top floor without Ike giving away a single clue as to the purpose of this visit. When the elevator doors open, he walks me toward an apartment where a crime team is still at work.

“Don’t touch anything,” he says, “and don’t ask any questions. Just look around, then tell me what you think later.”

I gasp as I take in the strange decor: the room a virtual shrine to the career of Sheba Poe. One whole wall is covered with publicity shots, taken at various stages of her career. There are Sheba Poe ashtrays and match boxes and pillowcases and a bedspread. Sheba Poe lamp shades from all her movies surprise me, because I never knew that my friend’s career had induced such a bizarre degree of fanaticism. In the bathroom, I find bars of soap with her picture on them, Sheba’s shampoo, her mouthwash, and her photograph on a row of hand lotions. The room is obsessional, and bizarre in the extreme.

Ike hands me a dime-store photo album filled up with photos taken by a camera with a long-range lens of Sheba getting out of cabs and limos, entering and exiting streets and hotels, holding hands with dates and boyfriends, many of them world-famous actors. Ike hands me another album. “Brace yourself,” he says.

In the album are the police photographs of Sheba after someone had butchered her, mounted with special care. Evangeline Poe, in her frightful vacancy, is posed on her bed holding her knife, covered with blood, making me shiver. When I come to the final and most macabre photograph, I shiver: there is the wicked effigy of the smiley face with its lone tear, immaculately rendered. I put my nose to the bloodied image and smell the fingernail polish.

Ike grabs my elbow and takes me to a window that commands a splendid view of the Ashley River. I see my house and Sheba’s house and Peninsula High School and police headquarters and The Citadel. I even see the rooftop of Ike and Betty’s house. When I have taken in the full strategic importance of this view, Ike makes a noise that I interpret to be an invitation to follow him away from this grotesque crime scene.

Wordlessly, he drives us to his house, then goes upstairs and showers. I go to the refrigerator and pull out a couple of beers. I am sitting in his den when he comes out wearing the bathrobe he wore as a cadet and Citadel-blue flip-flops. He sits in his reclining chair, and opens the beer I brought him. He drinks it with eagerness, then falls asleep a moment. When he wakes up, he asks me what I am doing there, then goes back to sleep and sleeps for another hour. It is dark when he wakes up, and I am cooking bacon and eggs to go with cheese grits and an English muffin that I’d toasted, slathered with peanut butter, and topped with a banana crushed with a fork. We eat in silence like evacuees from a famine.

“Let’s get drunk,” Ike says when we’re done, going over to the bar. “You can spend the night in Little Ike’s room.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

“Tell me what you’re thinking,” he says, and I don’t bother stating the obvious.

“How did you find him?” I ask.

“The guy who drowned in the tool shed,” Ike says. “We found a key in his pocket. It was on a key chain that said Sergeant Jasper Apartments.”

“Fingerprints?”

“They match the ones we got from New York. Same guy. But we still don’t know his name. We found six passports, all with different names. Six credit cards. Three driver’s licenses from three states.”

“Should we get Trevor down for an identification?”

“Nothing to identify. The autopsy says he drowned. His lungs were filled up with stinky seawater. His face was unrecognizable—the rats got to him before we did. He had two handguns, both thirty-eights. Enough ammunition to kill half the city. I think he planned to kill all of you once the hurricane got going good. In all that noise, no one would’ve heard a gun going off.”

Thinking hard, I try to recall the events of the day when Hugo came to town. “Fraser!” I say. “He must’ve followed her when she got Trevor and wheeled him down to her house.”

“My theory too,” Ike says. “He was normally a clever planner, a good strategist, but he was also an opportunistic son of a bitch. He learned about my parade at The Citadel from your column. Because he always knew what you were doing, he also knew what the rest of us were doing too. We found a golf bag in his closet and a sniper’s rifle hidden among the clubs.”

“The view from his apartment?”

“Perfect. A nice assassination lair, if it came to that. His neighbor said he was a courteous man who was away for large stretches at a time. Thus, the Los Angeles photographs. The neighbor claims he had a beautiful Southern accent.”

“He wasn’t Southern,” I say.

“How do you know?”

“Because he’s too damn grotesque, even for the goddamn South.”

Ike didn’t agree. “You ought to be a cop for a while, Leo. Nothing too strange for a human being. A human being is a fucked-up concept. Humanity is best described as inhumanity.” He pauses, then adds, “Another thing in the autopsy: he had stomach cancer. I think he was wrapping things up. In his pocket, they found a bottle of fingernail polish and a key to Niles’s house.” He shakes his head at that, and says, “There might be other stuff to tell you. I can’t think of it now. But the paper will report that an unidentified man was found drowned in a tool shed south of Broad. Police speculate that he was taking shelter during the storm.”

“What was his name?”

“Bill Metts,” Ike says, and confesses, “I did something bad at that apartment house. The presence of Sheba everywhere shook me up, so I stole a photograph from the crime scene. I’ve never done anything like that before; it’s a terrible breach of professionalism. But I couldn’t help myself.”

He stands and shuffles over to his uniform jacket and pulls out a photograph encased in a small silver frame, and brings it back for my inspection. It is a picture of the twins, Sheba and Trevor Poe, captured in their inimitable beauty when they were five or six years old. They look angelic, rapturous; a stranger would think they were the happiest children on earth.

“What would my life be like if they’d not moved across the street?” I ask.

“Not as fun. Not as exciting. They were like prophets who brought the news of the outside world to the rest.”