The Last Girls (33 page)

“They're ruining the grass!” Catherine wept. “Russell,
what
do you think you're doing?”

“Saving the tree,” Russell answered grimly. He nodded to the blond boy on the tractor, who took off his bandanna and waved it in the air above his head. Engines roared. The drivers started backing up. The cables quivered. Everybody strained forward to see. The great tree shook and groaned, losing leaves and even branches as they pulled it up. Half the maple shuddered, split, and fell. “Keep it coming, boys, keep it coming,” Russell yelled over the noise even though no one could hear him. He had always wanted to yell something like this.

“I can't watch.” Catherine ran inside.

Slowly, groaning and creaking, the big tree rose. The crowd
cheered. More men ran out to secure the cables. People came across the yard to shake Russell's hand. The man from the newspaper interviewed him. Later, Russell would receive a citation from the Arbor Society. He would become a local hero. For the next four months, he watered the tree every night, all night. His water bill averaged $595 a month. He didn't care.

For the tree still stands: in fact, it is flourishing. Russell drinks his coffee out on the porch every morning so he can look at it, which gives him great pleasure. A big new shoot just popped up from the base this past spring.

“Travelwise, it's a pretty good day across America,” Susi Sergi says now, above the noise at the Calliope Bar on the
Belle of Natchez
. Susi Sergi turns from side to side as she sweeps the pointer in a wide arc across the weather map. But wait a minute! Russell leans forward on his bar stool. Either Susi has gained some weight, or—damn! Susi is pregnant again! That red dress and jacket is actually a maternity outfit. “Susi, you slut!”

“Pardon, sir?” The bartender wheels to face him, with concern.

“I'll take one more …”

“Sir, I hope you'll excuse me for saying this, but maybe you've had enough for right now.”

What do you know about it, you little—, Russell wants to say. Instead he says, “You may be right.” Relieved, the bartender smiles at him. “You may be right,” Russell says again, with more conviction. He could get into this. And it's true that he wants to control his anger, he wants to live a long time, to grow old with Catherine, to grow old, old, old, filled with concentric ever-expanding circles like a tree. Russell has already lived a long time. He's seen most kinds of weather, from floods to rainbows to New England blizzards to hurricanes in the Caribbean to the Santa Ana wind in California and sun dogs over the desert. But he has never seen the famous green flash just at sunset, over water. He'd like to see that sometime. Hey! Why
doesn't he take Catherine to an island next winter?
Carpe diem
. “Better grab the wife, buckle up the kids, and make that trip to Grandma's,” Susi advises everyone, “before these storm systems collide beginning June 12, next Thursday.”
Seize the day
. The cables are holding up pretty good but there's a helluva lot of weather still out there, Russell thinks as he pays up and leaves the Calliope Bar to go in search of Catherine.

Mile 364.2
Natchez, Mississippi
Tuesday 5/11/99
1205 hours

“E
VERYTHING'S GOOD HERE, ACTUALLY
. Frances Barker runs a great kitchen. I try to stop in every chance I get.” Pete leans across the pink-linen-covered table in the Magnolia Grille where he and Harriet sit on the screened porch. Downriver, the
Belle
rides at anchor, flags flying, big red paddle wheel glistening in the sun. It looks like a floating party. Harriet looks at everything except the Riverlorian, right across the table from her. Close up, Pete Jones is disturbingly large, disturbingly male, he even has hair growing out of his ears which Harriet has read someplace—she thinks it was Marilyn vos Savant's column in Sunday's paper—is a sign of lots of testosterone or too much testosterone or something. She tries to read the menu.

“May I recommend the crab-cake sandwich?” Pete has a gallant old-fashioned manner of speech.

“Fine, I'll take it. I love crab cakes.” Harriet's voice sounds squeaky in her own ears. Who was that hippie killer? Squeaky Fromme.

“Maybe a stuffed artichoke to start off with? That's one of Frances's specialties.”

“Fine, I'll take it. I love artichokes.”

“And what if I also ordered you a blackened catfish and a chicken pot pie?”

Finally Harriet looks straight at him.

“Would you take those, too?” He's smiling at her, well, he's just some old guy, after all.

“No, I …”

Pete puts his menu down and touches her hand. “Hey, I'm just pulling your leg, just funning with you, as my daddy used to say. Actually, I'm pretty harmless.” But he keeps smiling at her. Why, he's got a gold eyetooth, of all things! Harriet can't believe she didn't notice it before. She smiles back. “The stuffed artichoke and the crab cakes sound delicious,” she says. “You'll have to excuse me, too. I'm a little bit out of my element here.” To put it mildly, she does not say.

“What element is that? What do you mean?” Behind the glasses, Pete's eyes are sharply blue.

“Oh, I teach school, I live very quietly, so this is all new to me.” Harriet sips her water. “I guess I'm a little bit nervous.”

Pete orders their lunch from Frances herself, who calls him “hon,” and pushes her hip against his shoulder as she writes it down. She's a big woman with curly black hair, wearing a tight pink pantsuit. “So what do you teach?” Pete hands their menus back to Frances.

“Oh, you wouldn't be …”

“Sure I would.”

“Well, I guess you'd have to say I teach English, but it's not literature or anything, though it's not just grammar either. I work with these returning students—”

Pete leans forward while she explains; by the end of her recital, Harriet is exhausted, but she actually feels interesting.

“I used to teach school myself,” he surprises her by saying. “High school history, like my father before me.”

“Where?”

“Cairo, Illinois.”

“Why, I've been to Cairo!” Harriet says. “We stopped there the first time I went down the river.”

“Oh, you've traveled with us before?”

“No, I was on a raft with a lot of other girls, it was the summer of 1965. This trip we're on right now is kind of a reunion for some of us.”

“Well, I was wondering about that, trying to put you all together. You don't look like sisters, or like you might be having a family reunion—we get a lot of those. A raft, you say?”

The stuffed artichoke is good and so is the Chablis he ordered to go with it, but Harriet barely touches her appetizer while she tells him about the raft trip. She's embarrassed when Frances comes over to clear away Pete's appetizer plate and flashes her an accusing look. “And what about
you?
” Harriet asks him. “I mean, I was wondering how you—how a person, I mean—just up and becomes a Riverlorian. It seems like such an unusual occupation to choose.” Now she sounds like a fool.

But he smiles—Harriet loves his big square teeth! “Well,” he says, “the truth is that I fell into it by accident, the way most people fall into things.” Do they? Harriet thinks.
Do they?
“Here's the way it happened.” Pete leans back in his chair, nodding at Frances who brings in his grouper and sets it down before him with a thud. “I grew up right there in Cairo, then went down to Ole Miss and played a little football, then hurt my leg and turned to history. I always liked history. Went into the navy, then went back to school and got a master's degree. Married my childhood sweetheart Lois and settled down to live in Cairo for the rest of my life, five streets over from my parents'. Finally had a little son, Clifton, named for my father. Loved Clifton, loved Lois.” Inadvertently, Harriet glances down at his hand: wide gold wedding band,
oh no.
“Lived like this for years and got used to it. Used to having her there every evening, when I'd get home from school …” Pete was also the football coach, so that took up a lot of
time. “My boy played football, too, grade school through eighth grade. He was a real chip off the old block in those days.”

Oh no
—in her peripheral vision, Harriet sees the girls peeping around the screen door at the restaurant entrance—damn them! Why did she ever tell them she was having lunch with the Riverlorian anyway? Catherine puts her finger to her lips in an exaggerated “ssssh” gesture, Courtney wiggles her fingers in a little wave, while Anna tiptoes over to the rest room, looking outlandish in a huge African print dress.

Pete leans back and laughs. “Yes, I see them,” he says without turning around. “Just checking up on you, I guess. Want to give them a little shock?”

“Well,
sure,
” Harriet has scarcely said it when suddenly Pete leans forward across the little table and grabs both her hands and kisses them. Or she
thinks
he's kissing them, there's something wet going on, so he must be, but mostly it just tickles. He's got that Mark Twain moustache. When Anna comes out of the rest room, they all scuttle out of the restaurant like crabs, eyes big as plates.

“That got 'em!” Pete says.

Harriet, flushed and laughing, does not withdraw her hands. “You were saying—”

“I was saying I had a life, a good life, there in Cairo. It was so good I never thought about it, if that makes any sense to you”—Harriet nods, it does—“Me and the missus, we owned our own home, she had a nice little C.P.A. business downtown, doing people's taxes and such. On the weekends we'd ride up and down the river here in my Boston Whaler, maybe we'd fish a little. Lois liked to fish, too. Our boy was doing good in school, oh, he got in a few scrapes, but nothing unusual for a teenager. Got into skateboards, then into dirt bikes, that was okay by me as long as he kept up his grades and stuck with the football. I guess I thought of life in terms of football in those days, this must sound simpleminded to you. I reckon those early years
were the hardest, but they were the most exciting, too, when we were building the football program from scratch, building the team. Then in 1975, 1977, 1980, 1982 and '83 we were conference champions. Nobody could touch us. You know, high school football means a lot to people in a town like Cairo, people that work all day long in a mill, say, or a factory, or in a machine shop. They come out to a game on Friday night and they can leave all that behind them. They can
win
. And of course they've all got an opinion as to what the coach did, or what he didn't do, they've all got something to say about it. Well, it means something, is what I'm trying to say. It means more than what it is. But I was so wrapped up in it, I didn't even understand that until it was over.”

“What happened?”

“Lois was diagnosed with multiple myeloma in the summer of 1986. I didn't know what hit me. I didn't really have time to take it in. Five months later, she was dead.” Pete shakes his head, looks down.

“Oh, I'm so sorry.”

“You think, oh, there were so many things we were always going to do, you know, but we just never did get around to them, like go to Nova Scotia, Lois always wanted to go to Nova Scotia, don't ask me why. We were going to remodel the kitchen, too. I know that sounds stupid, but there's these little things that come back to haunt you in a time like that. But that Lois, now—she was sweet, she was something, a fellow ought to pay more attention to a woman like that.”

“I'm so sorry,” Harriet says again. These crab cakes are delicious, but it would be trivial to mention it now.

Pete wipes his moustache with a napkin, then pours himself another glass of wine. “All hell broke loose after that,” he says matter-of-factly. “Some of it was my fault, and some of it wasn't. Bottom line was, my son got on drugs while Lois was dying. See, she was over there in the hospital and so I was over there, too, every minute I
could spare from school, I wasn't home much, I reckon. And then I was one holy mess after she did die, and I swear I never even noticed what was going on until the police showed up knocking at my door. They had caught him red-handed, him and some other boys breaking into a 7-Eleven to get money for drugs. Old story. It was crack cocaine, what it was. He was selling the stuff, too.”

“Good heavens,” Harriet says, though she has heard similar stories from the women in her classes. “What did you do?”

“Well, it was all out of my hands by then anyway. But I was hard, too hard, on him. They jerked him out of school and shipped him off to rehab, and when that didn't work, I sent him off to another rehab, but he turned eighteen while he was there and said he wanted to come back home, and I wouldn't let him. I said he had to stay. To make a long story short, he left anyway, and bummed around for a while, and got back on the stuff, and shot somebody, and ended up in federal prison in Atlanta. Wouldn't see me while he was there. Said if I didn't want to see him, he didn't want to see me. Now this would have broken his mother's heart, thank God she didn't have to know it.”

“Where is he now?”

“I don't know, that's the hell of it, though he sends me a postcard from time to time.” Pete takes a billfold out of his back pocket and opens it and unfolds a postcard with a Montana postmark on it. The postcard is folded in fourths. “Hey Dad,” it reads, “Hope you are okay, I'm hanging in. Big sky out here. Yours, Cliff.” Pete looks at it for a minute. “Lois saw to it that he had good penmanship,” he says. Carefully he folds the card back up and puts it back in his wallet. Pete looks at the river while a younger waitress—not Frances, maybe Frances has given up on him—clears their plates. “Dessert?” she asks. “Oh, I couldn't,” Harriet says, and Pete says, “None for me.” He looks really far away now.