Wrote For Luck (7 page)

H
is uncle, old Spencer Van Hart, had come back from Vietnam with a Master Sergeant’s stripes and two fingers missing from his left hand, and though the army gratuities didn’t pay so well in those days he walked away with a pension and a two thousand dollar disability benefit. For a time he wondered about investing in a plantation or buying some real estate out near Lafayette, but it turned out that tobacco growing was in slump and Spencer didn’t like the look of the Nashville lawyers who ran the real estate business, so he put the money into the café at Brownsville Junction. The previous owner had only been gone six months, but Spencer fixed on doing the thing properly. He put ads in the
Cook County Sentinel
, fitted in chromium-plated soda dispensers along the rickety bar, and because he was a Louisiana boy who had gone through most of South East Asia with a stars and bars insignia in his forage cap there was a neon sign that read ‘The Rebel Den’.

Even at the grand opening, when they had a couple of country bands playing on the open forecourt and Spencer’s buddies from the National Guard sat on the porch drinking root beer, the omens didn’t look good. Brownsville Junction lay on the western side of Choctaw Ridge at the point where the pine forest ended and the railway lines came snaking in from Nashville and the Gulf: a dusty main street and a strew
of log cabins that led on to the trainsheds and the abandoned freight yards. For a while the old timers who remembered Spencer’s father came out at the weekends to stand in the asphalt car park trading reminiscences, but then in the mid-Seventies they cut back the railway service and Spencer found himself serving to a handful of local farmers and the odd hobo who’d fetched up in Choctaw forest. But he stuck it out. ‘Taking a dip in Van Hart’s trashcan,’ Barrett the journalist used to say when the talk turned to some conspicuously underfunded local amenity. Towards the end he turned into one of those ramrod-straight middle-aged men who live off their pride and no-one would dare offer a hand to, so it wasn’t until he was off in hospital at Johnson City and there was a FOR SALE sign up over the door of The Rebel Den that people started saying that it was a shame and what did Spencer’s folks reckon they were doing anyway?

There was no close family. Spencer’s parents were both dead and his brother had left home years back, but a couple of nephews showed up at the funeral. They were fruit farmers away in Kentucky, people said, and neither of them had set eyes on Spencer since the day he left for the training camp at Fort Sumner. There was a third nephew called Ron who worked as a film stunt man out West and whose name sometimes appeared in the credits of Al Pacino films, but he hadn’t been seen in Cook County for twenty years and it was left to the fruit farmers to smoke dollar cigars on the church porch and talk to Spencer’s lawyer about legacy duty and probate.

I was working down near Choctaw that week on a photography project for the State Forestry Board, so I didn’t get
to see Spencer’s funeral, but Barrett stopped over one night on his way from a track-club meet at La Grange to fill me in. ‘You didn’t miss anything my man. Two Kentucky strawsuckers in K-Mart sneakers and pantsuits, looking like they couldn’t wait to collect. Reverend Daniels hadn’t hardly finished his oration before they were off to get the will read. You never saw anything like it.’

I said it seemed like a lot of trouble to take over a rundown café that nobody wanted to buy. Barrett smiled that lazy, ornate smile that made him look like a Southern gentleman in an ante-bellum TV drama. ‘You got it my man. Leastways, those two bullet-heads walked out of the attorney’s office with a couple of unpaid electricity bills and Spencer’s collection of army cap badges. Last thing I heard, they were still arguing about who was paying for the train fare.’

As it happened, Spencer’s nephews turned up two or three times in the next month or so. They ate prawn platter lunches with the real estate salesmen at Brackus’s bar and diner or had themselves driven out to the Junction where they stood inspecting the plywood shutters that had been put up after old Spencer got taken to hospital. ‘Kind of desperate,’ people said. They put ads three weeks running in the
Cook County Sentinel
real estate page offering the café at the same price Spencer had paid for it in 1972, but there weren’t any takers. Summer stretched on into September. The brothers went back to the farm twenty miles outside of Lexington, the grass curled up under The Rebel Den’s boarded-up windows and Joe Brackus cracked his old joke about the Kentucky dirt farmer who tried to reach his dog
to write but then stopped when he found out the dog was smarter than he was.

It was a wet fall that year. The rain blew in early from the Gulf and covered the back roads with a four-inch coating of mud, and the river burst its banks over by Degville Gap. Working down in the pine woods, taking shots of the felled timber or following the environmental department guy around to snap pollution damage, I got used to sheltering behind the big trees waiting for the wind to drop, or staring out over the canvas roof of the foresters’ pick-up at the angry sky. Then on a particularly bad day, when it had rained for four hours clear and ruined two waterproof Nikon cameras, Barrett turned up in a borrowed convertible, wearing the three-button Fox Brothers suit the paper made him put on when he had to interview a state congressman or an assistant secretary from the DA’s office. There was no-one around – the forestry board manager was vacationing in Florida and the two girl assistants had taken the day off – so I figured on showing Barrett round the site, but he wasn’t interested.

‘Forget it my man. I seen enough trees to last me a lifetime.’ He looked shrewd for a moment. ‘Lee-Ann around here any place?’

Lee-Ann was the younger of the two girl assistants, a forestry graduate from Tennessee State University and way out of Barrett’s league.

‘Gone to visit her daddy over in Marin County. You want to leave a message?’

Barrett shrugged. ‘Can wait. Hey, guess who turned up in town the other day?’

I suggested the ex-county Treasurer, who’d gone down under an embezzlement charge six months back, but Barrett smirked and pressed the tips of his fingers together in that way he had. ‘His parole don’t come up for a fortnight. No, Ron Van Hart showed up.’

‘Spencer’s nephew?’

Barrett flicked me an impenetrable look in which awe and derision grimly contended. ‘He’s a big star my man. Maybe you don’t get to see his name at the top of the credits, but he’s up there with Pacino and Hackman. You ever see that inferno scene in
Escape from Alcatraz
, the one where the guy leaps out of the burning building on a pulley rope? Well, take it from me, it sure as hell wasn’t Clint Eastwood.’

It was a characteristic of Barrett’s that he never explained how he came by his information. I watched as the convertible jerked away towards the low line of trees, their tips blown back and wavering in the wind. After this Ron Van Hart turned up a lot, a burly conspicuous figure in the gathering October gloom. He stood at the bar of Brackus’s blowing froth off his moustaches and buying drinks for grey-haired fifty-year-olds who claimed they remembered him from way back. Barrett wrote him up for the
Sentinel
, a lavish photo spread that featured Ron shaking hands with Richard Dreyfuss and doubling as Luke Skywalker on the set of
Star Wars
, and gradually people woke up to the fact that they had a celebrity in their midst. There was a two-year waiting list at the Stonewall, the gentleman’s club where the tobacco planters gathered on Saturday nights to play stud poker and drink juleps, but he had dinner there on his second evening and people started
saying that Ron Van Hart was all right, not like some of your Hollywood actors that wouldn’t give the time of day to the folks they were brought up with. Meanwhile the FOR SALE board stayed up over the shutters of The Rebel Den.

As usual Barrett put his own gloss on the local gossip. ‘Of course, my man, wasn’t always this way. Let me tell you, twenty years back they nearly ran Ron Van Hart out of the county. Car stealing, mostly. Folks who came into town on a Saturday night used to leave their doors unlocked in those days and Ron, well, he just used to help himself. Not that that would have got him run out of the county, but the guy had a mean streak. Wouldn’t think it to look at him maybe, but he busted a girl’s head open with a bottle back in ’68.’

‘Why would he want to do a thing like that?’

It was a simpleton’s question, but Barrett only grinned. ‘Who knows? Maybe she wouldn’t come across. Maybe she made too many jokes about pig-shit. He worked on his daddy’s farm, you see, and people used to piss themselves about it. Anyway, Ron laid her out cold. If his daddy hadn’t played in a poker school with the DA’s brother-in-law he’d have been lucky to keep out of jail.’

Whatever the truth of these allegations, no trace of them remained in Ron’s current behaviour. Kind of weird, people reckoned – he had a habit of staring at you and not quite listening to what you said – but pleasant with it. You saw him doing the rounds of the roadside diners and barbers’ shops, shaking hands with folks who’d known Spencer. Come late October he disappeared – out West, people said, doing a movie with Dustin Hoffman – but then a fortnight later he
was back again and a contractor’s firm from Jackson came and took down the shutters from The Rebel Den and started re-laying the split pinewood floor.

November dragged on and the light faded away into mid-afternoon shadow. The wind started bringing down trees over by Choctaw Ridge and there were a couple of hurricane warnings. The ex-County Treasurer emerged from the state gaol at Dyersburg and announced that he was suing the DA for malversion. I was busy around that time, checking through slides with some field biologists over in the forestry department at Johnson City, so I didn’t get to see what was happening out at The Rebel Den, but Barrett kept me informed. Around Thanksgiving his voice came crackling down the portable telephone we used out in the camp at Choctaw. ‘Seems as if Ron’s opening up the Den again my man. Grand re-opening party, transport laid on and a zydeco band from New Orleans, you name it.’

‘Any particular reason?’

‘Beats me my man. Just pouring dollars into the swamp is the way I look at it. Said something about respect for his uncle, but you want my opinion he’s out to spite those two strawchewers from Lexington…’

There was a pause as the wind whistled over the wire.

‘Jesus,’ Barrett went on. ‘You hear the news? Hurricane Tony’s due in from Tampa Bay in seventy-two hours, they reckon. Lee-Ann about these days?’

‘Off sick.’

‘Ain’t none of my business,’ said Barrett. ‘But if I were you I’d check up on that girl one of these times.’

I was driving out near the Junction the next day, as it turned out, so it wasn’t hard to check out Barrett’s account. In late autumn the place had a dreary, downcast look. Only a dozen or so of the cabins were occupied now, the smoke drifted up out of the tumbledown chimneys and the main street was a lake of dirty water. At The Rebel Den there were a couple of glaziers putting in a new plate glass window and a roller flattening the bumpy forecourt. Ron stood in the doorway clawing at his chin with quick, uneasy movements, but when he saw me he grinned and beckoned me over.

‘Hey. Photographer, ain’t you?’

When I nodded he went on: ‘Could use you in a couple of nights’ time, if’n you’re agreeable. Take some pictures of my party.’ He pronounced it ‘par
tay
’. There’s some big stars coming in you know. Maybe you could sell to the newspapers afterwards.’

I smiled, although it struck me that he was just looking through me, that he saw something else way back twenty yards from where I was standing. Then I headed off, only stopping to confirm what I’d suspected as I drove in: that the pink Chevy parked by Van Hart’s forecourt was Lee-Ann’s.

Lee-Ann turned up at the site two days later with a bruise on her arm that everyone tried to avoid noticing all through the grey, windy morning. That night Hurricane Tony blew in, bringing three larch trees and a power cable down across the foresters’ cabin, so I missed the re-opening. Barrett, who struggled in through the gale and had his windscreen busted by a falling branch, reported that it was a weird party. ‘No-one
you
ever saw my man, and if Pacino was there it was a grade-A
disguise. And Ron, Ron kind of flipped. Just sat there and talked about the guys he knew in Hollywood and how he once got to use Stallone’s Jacuzzi.’ The wind gusted on through the night. Next morning a squad car called at the Rebel Den, but Ron had already disappeared and the storm had taken the roof right of and laid it over the newly flattened forecourt. Later Barrett filled me on the details, about how Ron hadn’t worked in Hollywood for five years and was wanted for a string of unpaid hotel bills and a couple of assault charges.

They found the body a week later, sprawled over the disused railway line. There was an old photo of Gene Hackman in the pants pocket and a putdown letter from an agent dated four years back. ‘Taking a dip in Van Hart’s trashcan,’ Barrett said jauntily when I bumped into him at Brackus’s that night. Lee-Ann was sitting at right angles from us so she missed the wink that Barrett gave me. Ron’s two brothers had a bulldozer come and clear the site – they had plans to sell it to the county amenities department now – and I stood in the clearing where the line of log cabins met the trees, turning my head against the force of the wind, and thinking that it was nothing you could complain about, that all of this – Spencer, Ron, The Rebel Den and the picture of Gene Hackman – just wasn’t something you could expect a fruit farmer from Kentucky to understand.

—1991

S
outh of Chelmsford they lost their way in a tangle of B-roads and ended up in a lay-by looking at the map. The sun, dormant until now behind hedgerows, climbed suddenly into the sky and drenched the car’s interior in blinding white light, so that, twisting round to look at him from the passenger seat, she could see only a glare of reflected surfaces, orange swirls and dense, aquarium shadows. Outside dragonflies bounced against the windows. ‘Where are we?’ she asked.

‘Not far from Thorpe le Soken,’ Douglas said. He was staring at the map with what she realised was a characteristic grimace: the way at any time over the last ten years he had stared at CD players that refused to function, documents that declined to yield up their intent: peevish, momentarily affronted, but innately confident in his own resourcefulness.

They cruised on for a while through fields of green sedge, eight-foot lanes engulfed by cow parsley. The smoke from Douglas’s cigarette dribbled out of the wound-down window. In the distance grey stone rose beyond small, densely packed trees. The air was turning fresh.

‘Where did Alain get this place anyway?’

‘Some friend of his mother’s. Just for the summer while he roughs out that treatment.’

There was an edge to the way Douglas said
treatment
. It was his usual way of referring to friends’ accomplishments: Toby’s
novel
; Greg’s
first night
; Nick’s
piece about Mrs Thatcher in the Economist
.

‘Silly question, I suppose, but what are we going to do when we get there?’

‘Watch it, of course.’

‘Watch what?’

‘Have you been living on Mars for the last fortnight? The football.’

Actually
, Alexandra wanted to say as they negotiated a winding gravel drive, hemmed in by lofty rhododendrons,
I might just as well have been
. There was a weekend colour magazine lying in the pile of detritus at her feet with a picture of Gascoigne on the front and she picked it up and looked at it with faint incredulity. Once, not long ago, she had seen him on some lunch-hour chat show and marvelled at, well, what exactly had she marvelled at? The absence of any kind of inner resource? The capitulation of everything – every question, every idea – before an overwhelming, bedrock chirpiness. He was like something out of a cartoon, she decided, every response hypertrophied into burlesque. How could you take him seriously, what he did seriously? Even more, how could you take seriously the people who were impressed or even just interested or amused by him?

Douglas’s voice came floating through the ether. She realised guiltily, but not perhaps as guiltily as she might have done, that he’d probably been talking for a minute or more.
‘… And so Roger said that what with all the arts supplements expanding and the
Independent
taking on people again, there was a good, no a
strong
chance, that…’

The gravel drive was thinning out now into not much more than a cart track. Great clumps of rhododendrons grew close to its edge, sometimes threatening to obliterate it altogether. Tipping her sunglasses back onto the bridge of her nose, she looked upward and found only inert grey sky, a plane tracking slowly along the horizon’s edge.

‘This is the real back of beyond,’ Douglas said. He was turning faintly irritated now, she realised. ‘Where did you put those directions?’

They pressed on through the rhododendrons until finally the track swung left to meet a high flint wall. Slowly and incrementally the house took shape before them.

‘It’s quite something, isn’t it?’ Alexandra said. Together they contemplated the troughs and cornices of weathered, salmon-coloured brick. ‘Almost
Brideshead
-y.’

‘Of course,’ Douglas said seriously. ‘You have to realise that Alain could never actually afford to live somewhere like this. He can’t earn more than twenty thousand a year.’

Which is more or less what you earn, Alexandra acknowledged. Another thought struck her. ‘What’s this girlfriend of Alain’s called?’

‘Claudia… No, Candia.’

‘What does she do?’

‘I don’t know. Works for some newspaper.’ Douglas looked at his watch. He was definitely cross about something, Alexandra divined, some lingering slight not yet confided to
her. ‘Come on. If we don’t get a move on we’re going to miss the opening ceremony.’

Later they had supper in a large white-walled kitchen with red tiles on the floor and a view out over rows of neatly planted apple trees. Cats came in through the open door and sat grooming themselves on the inner steps. Silent at the far end of the long oak table, Alexandra ate
salade niçoise
and French bread and listened to the football talk.

‘Did you see that free kick against Egypt? And then Wright’s header?
Magic
.’

‘And Platt’s one against Belgium? Gazza loops the ball over, he’s got his back to goal, but he just turns round and
wham
!’

There were times, Alexandra thought, when it was possible to believe that all this knowledgeability, all this
expertise
, was wholly bogus, assumed in the same way one might put on a fashionable piece of clothing. People who knew about football, she suspected – and she knew nothing, she was happy to admit that – would trip the likes of Douglas up, overturn him and leave him sprawling on a mat of exposed limitations. She wondered if this was what was making her irritated – and she was irritated, she could feel annoyance rising in her like mercury – and decided that it was not the sound of Douglas and Alain talking about football, not even the faintly absurd and self-conscious attitudes they struck while they were doing it, but the long-term memory of their lavish but somehow unfocused enthusiasms. She remembered Douglas ten years ago in a college bar or a pub in North Oxford expounding some theory about pop music, something about Pink Floyd and punk rock, and almost bit her lip at the pain it caused
her, all that ghosted seriousness about something which in the last resort you had no serious interest, the attitudes of a college tutorial taken out into real life.

Glancing along the table, she stared hard at the two of them in an attempt to work out what that decade had done to them. Made them more self-possessed? Less? Physically they seemed unchanged, or rather more defined. Ten years ago they had been clever middle-class teenagers moving confidently into their twenties. Now they were clever middle-class twenty-nine-year-olds moving a little less confidently into their thirties, spending a July evening in 1990 talking about the genius of Paul Gascoigne.

There was more food arriving now, bowls of fruit and yoghurt, and the movement made her shift her gaze. Candia, Alain’s girlfriend, sat opposite and a little to one side: a plain, square girl of about twenty-five with what Alexandra had the nous to realise was a prohibitively expensive designer haircut, a kind of savagely inept Eton crop with tendrils escaping down her cheeks. Sphinx-like until now, Candia suddenly caught at something in the conversation and gave a tiny rap with her fork on the table top.

‘That’s interesting,’ she said. ‘You just – forgive me if I didn’t get it all – used the word
aesthetic
about this, this
game
. Now, allowing that the people playing it create something that can be described in these terms, how far do you think they’re aware of what they’re doing?’

‘What do you mean?’ Douglas asked.

‘Well, what’s his name? – Gascoigne? – scores a goal, let’s say. Now, to you watching from the stand – well, from your
armchair maybe – I can see that there’s some pattern to it, some, well,
architecture
. But how do you think Gascoigne sees it?’

‘Pure sensation,’ Douglas said briskly. ‘If you really want to know, I see Gascoigne as a kind of human racehorse. The beauty’s all in the eye of the person beholding him. I mean, I don’t see Gascoigne articulating it in any way, do you?’

‘That might be an articulation problem, not a perception problem. Who can tell what Gascoigne thinks when he scores a goal?’

‘He’s a thick Geordie who left school at five or something. He’d probably be on the dole if he couldn’t play football. I don’t see the distinction.’

‘And yet you admire him? I mean, all this stuff he does, it’s an
achievement
of some kind?’

‘Of course it is. How couldn’t it be?’

‘Thanks,’ Candia said, ‘I just wanted to know.’

Listening to this exchange, which struck her – at least on Candia’s part – as angled or even premeditated in a way she could not quite comprehend, Alexandra found herself thinking of a boy in her primary school class called Gary Nichols. Coming from the middle-class end of a socially mixed collection of eight-year-olds, Alexandra had not exactly been forbidden to associate with the likes of Gary Nichols, but a certain amount of circumspection had been unobtrusively enjoined. She remembered … it would be difficult to say what she did remember. Gap teeth, certainly. An unfailing good humour in the face of what even at that age was a large amount of official asperity. Mild exhibitionistic tendencies. Chronically
limited social repertoire. Oddly, Alexandra had rather liked him, even to the extent of inviting him to her ninth birthday party (he hadn’t turned up), and had regretted his eventual departure to a special school on the other side of the city. But there was no doubt about it. In her eyes, Gascoigne and Gary Nichols had been forged in the same crucible.

Moving into the sitting room she heard Douglas saying, possibly to himself but perhaps to the room at large – as if there were some doubt about his fervour which he wanted to rebuke – ‘We’ve got to win this one. We’ve just got to.’

‘Why? Why have we got to win it?’

‘It’s Germany again. Like in 1966. 1970. Surely you can see the historical significance of playing Germany. I mean, surely you can remember what you were doing that day in 1966?’

‘I burst into tears,’ Alain said seriously. ‘When Weber equalised. I threw myself on the floor and burst into tears.’

‘My dad gave me a pound,’ Douglas capped. ‘Can you imagine? A whole pound.’

‘I was five,’ Alexandra volunteered. ‘We must have been in Hong Kong. I don’t remember anything about it.’

‘1966,’ said Candia, coming in through the doorway with a tray full of coffee mugs. ‘I was in my cradle. What is it about this sporting nostalgia?’

Sitting in front of the widescreen TV, drinking coffee and smoking what Alain described as ‘some high-grade Moroccan stuff, fresh off the boat’, which Alexandra thought was incredibly juvenile but still consented to go along with, she heard that there were various preliminaries – warm-ups, handshakes, loudspeaker introductions – to be got through before the
match began. Somehow this annoyed her even more, on one, abstract, level because it lashed a yet more complex and many-layered wrapper around the meagre kernel of these twenty-two hooligans kicking their ball about; more immediately because it gave Alain and Douglas a chance to proceed from the Football Talk and its lesser variant the Football Nostalgia Talk to what Alexandra always thought of as the Absent Friends Talk. Leaning back in her chair, watching the line of haggard, crop-haired men in white shirts being presented to a fat person in a blazer, she listened dreamily to the familiar fragments of rumour and disparagement.

‘… Got fifteen thousand from Chatto & Windus, but Peter says he doesn’t think he’ll ever finish it.’

‘Peter said that? If it was Peter he wouldn’t even start it.’

‘… When I last saw him he said the
Statesman
had stopped running his strip because they thought it was too depressing.’

‘Oh it wasn’t for that. Karl’s never liked him since he used to go out with Julia at Cambridge …’

‘Gracious,’ said Candia. ‘What a lot of people you seem to know.’

Fortunately this turned out to be an overture to Alexandra, and they had a companionable little gossip themselves about two or three mutual acquaintances dredged out of the world of print journalism and the TV fringes. Here Candia, whom direct questioning revealed as a researcher on
Newsnight
, proved so frighteningly knowledgeable that Alexandra felt rather non-plussed, like a veteran coach offering a work-out to some promising club athlete only to find herself unceremoniously steamrollered into the track. Lounging back in
her chair again, as the figures crossed and recrossed on the fizzing screen, she felt suddenly chastened by the picture of herself that this conversation had thrown up, a kind of sadness in which, she realised, Douglas, Alain and the consciousness of past time each played their part. If, as occasionally happened, anyone asked Alexandra what she had been like at nineteen, she invariably smiled and offered only that ‘I was very naive’, something that Douglas – who had been the chief beneficiary of that naivety – always affected to find funny. In fact, Alexandra secretly thought she rather liked the nineteen-year-old she imagined herself to have been: innocuous, kind-hearted, docile. It pained her to think that she might be turning into one of those bright, brittle thirty-year-olds she had once regarded with such awe.

And contempt, of course. Something had happened onscreen, some player had keeled over or something, and Douglas was softly murmuring ‘Bastard, bastard’ under his breath. Alexandra couldn’t tell whether he wanted this to be taken seriously, or whether it was part of the web of male complicity he and Alain were spinning over the evening.

‘Butcher,’ said Alain, with immense gravity, ‘is amazing.’

‘Totally amazing.’

‘To take all that punishment and then just … get up.’

‘Did you see him that time on the touchline after they’d carried him off? Before he had the stitches?’

They were a bit like an alternative comedy routine, Alexandra thought – not exactly funny, but encouraging the audience to despise their lack of self-awareness. For a moment, as the white phantoms surged back and forth over
the green turf, she thought hard, very hard and seriously, about why she liked Douglas and decided – rather forlornly, for she had hoped that there might be other things that would leap out and surprise her – that it was to do with this lack of self-awareness. Somehow a Douglas who knew about his shortcomings and discussed them in the avid, guiltless way that people did on American talk shows would have been intolerable. In some ways, she decided, it was his ignorance of what he was that gave him charm.