The Last of the Savages (11 page)

“
You break forth
,” a dozen voices responded. “
Praise the Lord
.”

The minister surveyed the congregation and nodded approvingly. “The more excited you get the more God gonna give you an excited crop. The more you act reserved is the more you gonna get a reserved crop. The more all fire excited you are the more it gonna break forth to the left and to the right. Where’s it gonna break forth?”

“
To the left and the right.
”

“All around you brothers and sisters. Now the devil, he want us dignified. He don’t want us excited. He don’t want us filled with the Holy Ghost. If we complain in the house we gonna get a crop that’s a complaint. As long as we just sit here and complain that’s all we gonna get is a failure of crop. The more we praise God the more crop we gonna get in the house of God. It’s gonna break forth in my church and it’s gonna break forth in my home and when I go to my home I’m not gonna go complaining and when I go home it’s gonna break forth in my home.”

The woman beside me was crying beneath her white veil; looking around I could see tears on other cheeks. I’d never heard a sermon delivered with such conviction—except perhaps when Father Ryan was railing against sex—nor had I heard a congregation talk back like this one did. Beside me, Will was less animated than anyone in the church, and yet he seemed utterly rapt.

“The Lord know you too well. And the devil he know you gonna go home and turn on the radio and you got to tell him he don’t know you.
I want you-all to keep praising God when you go home today and tomorrow and the next day and all the days of your life. Brothers and sisters, let me hear you say ‘Amen.’ ”

The congregation crowned the sermon with a chorus of
amens
, and then the choir rose to sing, the voices washing over us like surf. Along with the others I started clapping. A sweet, powerful voice persistently soared above the rest, and eventually I recognized the tall, elegant girl it belonged to as Lester Holmes’s niece. I nudged Will quizzically but he refused to look at me. The volume swelled as those around me joined the singing. Will stood stock-still as the congregation bobbed and swayed around him.

When we were driving home I asked him what was the point of attending that kind of church if you were just going to stand there like a pillar of salt. When he didn’t answer I said, “Was this about the girl? Is that why we went?”

“I think she’s got a future as a singer,” Will finally said.

“Have you been talking to her?”

“Colored folks, when they say, ‘You been talking to her?’—they mean, ‘Have you been fucking her?’ They say, ‘I ain’t been talking to her. No way.’ ”

I wasn’t going to let him dodge my question with this nugget of anthropology, but then I saw his expression. I saw, to my amazement, that he was in love. Far from enraptured, though, he looked ill, like a man who has just been given the opportunity to confess to a terrible crime.

That afternoon and evening we drove up and down Route 1, along the river, “looking for music,” as Will put it. Will would turn off the main road and cruise slowly down the side streets, stopping whenever he saw a cluster of lounging black men. Then, after chatting about the weather and the crops, he would ask whether they knew any musicians. Climbing back in the car, where I was happy to sit reading, he’d scribble in a spiral notebook. Finally at one little town we stopped in front of a boarded-up storefront from which we could hear the muffled wail of the blues,
PLAYBOY LOUNGE
was painted in crude letters over the door.
As we watched, a man staggered out of the place, blinking in the low sunlight, and fumbled with a pack of cigarettes.

“You coming,” Will asked.

“Someone has to notify your next of kin.” I’d had my fill of juke joints for the moment.

I locked the doors behind him and tried to concentrate on my French, but I kept wondering what I would do if Will didn’t come out. Actually, at that time—’66—Will was fairly safe, beneficiary of a feudal system which was, despite recent challenges, still in place. After nearly an hour, he emerged in a state of high excitement, having learned that one of his blues heroes was living nearby. “He was recorded by Alan Lomax back in the forties,” he explained. “Everybody just figured he was dead.”

As the evening drew on we drove out into the middle of a cotton field, stopping in front of a tiny unpainted shack on cinder blocks. A wizened old black woman in a dirty pink dress answered the door. Between her accent and her thorough lack of teeth I couldn’t make out a word she said, but I gathered from Will’s responses that she didn’t know where her husband was.

“Damn,” he said. “Says he’s on a drunk and she hasn’t seen him in three days. I can’t believe he’s been living not ten miles from Bear Track all these years.” Will’s eyes glittered with a sense of quest, like a collector in pursuit of a rare piece of porcelain. He proposed that we conduct a town-to-town, juke-to-juke search for the missing singer, but I persuaded him to drop me off at Bear Track first. As the sun disappeared over the levee, Will dropped me at the house and set off into the cool Mississippi night.

T
he firm is in a quiet uproar. This morning’s tabloids are shrill with lurid details of Felson’s murder. The motel where his body was found murdered was a notorious haunt of homosexual prostitutes, and Felson was apparently a regular patron. A variety of gay pornography and sexual paraphernalia had been discovered in the room, which explained several of the questions the detectives lobbed at me when they came to my office. A few hours after they left, I was brooding about the whole sorry business when I remembered something I could have told them. One morning—it must have been six or seven years ago—I rode up in the elevator with Felson and noticed that he had a black eye. And then, a few months ago, when he was working on a trust for one of my clients, he came in with a bruised and puffy face, which he explained as the result of a mugging outside his apartment building. I don’t know, I suppose it doesn’t matter now. But I wonder, Didn’t his family notice anything? Didn’t they wonder?

My wife, Stacey, is on the board of the Metropolitan, and opera has become a regular feature of our evenings. Last night was
Carmen.
Naturally, the plight of lust-addled Don José led me to thoughts of Felson. How did he manage? Where did he find the time? I hardly have the time for my weekly squash game, and I try to devote weekends to my girls.

My attention drifting momentarily back to the opera, I found myself entranced by a song in which Micaëla, Don José’s childhood sweetheart, prays to heaven for protection:
Je dis que rien ne m’épouvante …
and some quality in the voice and inflection of the soprano reminded me of Taleesha’s gospel performance all those years ago in that Mississippi church. My God, could it really be almost thirty years ago now?

Returning to school after my interlude at Bear Track, I was astonished to learn Will got a grade of A on the previous term’s American-history paper, although his other grades were unimpressive. For his part, Will would have been no less surprised had he known that I’d exchanged several letters with his father that spring, sending cheerful news of our academic idyll, mythologizing our prep school days in the Booth Tarkington manner and receiving in return wry and philosophical missives from Memphis.

One night Will slipped soundlessly into the room and caught me reading
Stover at Yale.
“Dink fucking Stover,” he repeated again and again, after lights-out, emphasizing a different syllable each time and inventively giving each of these three words an ugly new inflection with each repetition. “Dink Stover.
Dink
Stover.
Man
, I am so disappointed in you.”

Finally Matson opened the door and told us to be quiet.

“Tell
him
,” I said.

“Tell
him,
” Will mocked, as soon as the door closed. I stayed awake for what seemed like hours, furious with Will and with myself.

“
Dink
Stover and
Doug
Matson,” Will whispered, long after I thought he was asleep. “Cute couple.”

A few days later I came back from class to find Will smoking a joint. “Are you crazy,” I hissed, grabbing the joint and throwing it out the window. Then I tried to fan the smoke from the room. “You want to get us kicked out of here?”

He looked slowly up at me with amused detachment. “Gosh, that would be terrible.”

“What’s the matter with you?”

“Obviously I’m crazy,” he said.

“Well I’m not.”

“Don’t worry, Patrick,” Will said. “Nobody’s ever going to accuse you of that.”

He was right; I couldn’t afford to be crazy; that was a luxury my children might have.

And so we went our separate ways that summer, me to work at my uncle’s Chevy dealership. By day I washed cars, changed oil and swept the service bay clean. Every night at six I scrubbed the grease from under my fingernails, then at six-thirty I ate dinner at the kitchen table with my parents and my grandmother, whose meat I would dutifully cut. Afterward I would retreat to my basement room.

“What the hell is it you do down there,” my father demanded one night, his tone and my mother’s sudden blush implying that it could only be solitary sexual vice that kept me so busy and sequestered. In fact I would have rather admitted to the masturbation which occupied a portion of every evening than to have been caught in the performance of my other chief activities, which were reading poetry and writing to Will.

Satirizing my life in Taunton seemed the best way to distance myself from it. I wrote grotesque descriptions of the troglodyte clientele of my uncle’s car dealership, suggesting unctuously that when the revolution came it should ban madras shorts on fat people, although my best and fiercest letter was inspired by a visit from my cousin Jimmy and his accordion. I neglected to tell Will, however, that I spent weekends playing lacrosse with some kids from the local Jesuit school; I had learned the previous year that the lacrosse team was essentially a fraternity composed of exactly the kind of careless blue bloods I wanted to count among my friends.

Will reported that he was cruising around Memphis and the Delta, scouting for musical talent. Once liberated from school, he informed me, he intended to start a management company and maybe even his own record label. The next letter came from the family’s camp in Ontario, a long tirade against his parents and their lakeside compound, which, to me, in my subterranean particle-board-paneled redoubt,
sounded like paradise. He enclosed the lyrics to “All Along the Watchtower,”—not yet released, and evidently obtained by some Woodstock samizdat—and underlined the phrase “Businessmen they drink my wine.” This seemed to be an oblique reference to his father, whom Will described elsewhere in the letter as an “authoritarian reactionary pig. Speaking of pigs,” he continued, “former creep veep Richard Nixon came for a few miserable days along with some other hideous Republican Nazi types. Nixon and my old man are undoubtedly planning a right wing coup.” By Will’s account the former vice president was a lousy fisherman with a great store of dirty jokes. He closed on a more inspiring note. “Cheryl ‘baton’ Dobbs arrives tomorrow for a week. Now, if I can just arrange to drown L.B.”

In July the Savages returned briefly to Tennessee, then hied themselves to the mountains of North Carolina; our correspondence accelerated until we were writing every other day. And so, after a week of silence on Will’s part, I wrote: “Fall down the stairs and break both wrists? Post office burn down? Hit by a car and suffering from amnesia? Well, just to refresh your memory, my name is Patrick Keane and I’m still waiting for a response to my last missive.” Ten days later I was unable to disguise my sense of grievance: “If our correspondence has become wearisome you might at least have the decency to tell me so.”

Finally, as I was packing to return to school I received a note from Cordell Savage.

I waited a week before calling Memphis. As from a vast distance, Will’s mother told me he was doing well but was unable to come to the phone;
she wished me luck at school and would tell him I had called. Repentant about my earlier peevishness, I wrote lighthearted epistles intended to distract and divert the convalescent.

It was strange returning to school without Will. The bed on the other side of the room lay empty. In Will’s absence I decided to take advantage of other social opportunities. For example, I made the lacrosse team. I spent most of the season on the bench, but after I proved that I was willing to put up with a certain amount of gratuitous physical abuse in practice and that I was willing to share my class notes, I was allowed to take meals with my teammates. I aped their shambling posture, cultivated the almost imperceptible sneer of the loutish patrician. When I set up James “Trey” Bowman III for the winning goal against Hotch-kiss he actually congratulated me. Trey was team captain, and in this, his senior year, he was the king of the campus. His father, James II, managed the Wall Street empire founded by his grandfather, James I; James III had grown up in a huge apartment on Park Avenue and gone to Buckley before following his forebears to our school. That he was also tall and athletic hardly seemed fair, but most of us were willing to overlook these flaws in exchange for a smidgen of his attention and approval.

“Whatever happened to your friend Savage,” he asked one evening in the dining hall. “Get his hair caught in somebody’s zipper?” Everyone at the table laughed, myself included, although I didn’t get the joke—to my deep shame—until later that night.

“We were beginning to wonder about you and Savage,” Trey said. “The way you guys homoed around together.”