Homeplace Page 9

  “Hasn’t Tex-Mex caught on down here?” she asked idly.

  “Tex-Mex?” DeeDee said, puzzled.

  “There weren’t any cars back at that taco place,” Mike said, wishing she had not started the conversation. Her fatigue was nearly paralytic.

  “Oh, the Spanish place in the mall. No, Spanish is real popular around here. There are two places at home, a Taco Bell and a Mr. Tortilla. People don’t go to that particular one because the manager is a queer and all the help he hires is the same way. There’s been a good bit of trouble there … fights and things, and we hear he was involved in some kind of child molesting back wherever it was he came from. Nobody from home goes there.”

  “The gentrification of Lytton,” Mike murmured under her breath. They did not seem to hear her.

  They were passing through a vast, treeless plain in what Mike knew had once been an area of farms and small communities of white frame general-merchandise Stores and gas pumps and a few three- or four-room houses, but now was an endless diorama of small, seared, shrubless brick and wrought-iron subdivisions and condominium villages, scanty office parks, and raw new freeway construction. Atlanta, to the north and east, had sprawled out over its borders to engulf everything in its path, as the kudzu once had.

  Duck leaned far back in the driver’s seat and gestured expansively at the featureless plain.

  “The whole area’s on fire,” he said. “We’re not the sleepy ol’ South anymore, we’re the Sunbelt, and a man smart enough to see which side his bread’s buttered on is gon’ be a rich man. Watch out, New York. You’ll be eatin’ our dust before long.”

  He elbowed Mike genially, and his thick fingers grazed her breast quickly and lightly, a touch like a reptile’s tongue. She turned as if to study the burgeoning Sunbelt.

  “Would that I were eating it now,” she said, but she did not say it aloud. How did DeeDee bear this troglodyte?

  There was another space of silence, and then DeeDee cleared her throat as if she were preparing to chair a meeting.

  “There’s something we need to tell you before we get home,” she said. She hesitated, as if to select her words, and then went on, her voice picking up cadence until it reached chirruping canter.

  “It’s likely to be just a tempest in a teapot, but Daddy is real upset about it, and nobody can calm him down. The state Department of Transportation wants to build an access loop through the old homeplace property, and it will mean tearing down the house and outbuildings. Daddy says he’ll see them all in hell before he’ll sell it; he says the rest of the property will lie there like a ripe peach for anybody who wants it, and he won’t accept the DOT’s offer for the buildings and the little bit of land they’ll need for the road. We’re real worried about him. So is Dr. Gaddis.”

  “What would anybody want with the land?” Mike said, genuinely puzzled. It was comely land, she remembered, sweetly canted and deep forested, having gone back to the wild when her grandparents could no longer farm it, but it was isolated, untouched by an egress and ingress except the seldom traveled, pitted, two-lane U.S. 29 and a few double-rutted farm and wagon tracks. No water, sewer, or gas lines ran near it.

  “Oh, he thinks somebody might want to develop it or put a subdivision on it, or something,” DeeDee said dismissingly. “He’s really hipped on it. He’s even hired a lawyer, if you can call him that; some upstart white trash from Birmingham, of all places, who hasn’t been in town but a little while; hasn’t even got furniture in his office yet. Daddy’s going to fight the DOT tooth and nail. We’re afraid it’s just going to kill him.”

  There was another silence, and Mike realized that they expected her to make some comment. She did not know what they wanted to hear.

  “Is it a good offer?” she said finally.

  “Real good,” Duck said. “Real generous, for the government. Land prices down here are starting to take off. Hell, John could open up that land, once that old eyesore is down and a good road’s in there, and make himself a killin’.”

  “I don’t guess he needs another killing,” Mike said acidly. She did not care about the homeplace and had never understood her father’s reverence for the land of his forebears, but she recoiled at the easy presumptuousness, the sheer venality, that lay beneath Duck’s words.

  “No,” DeeDee murmured. “I guess that’s one thing he doesn’t need. Poor Daddy, he loves that silly old house and land. It’s a shame. The damned state government, just grabbing whatever it wants, and from a sick old man … it makes me want to upchuck. It’s not worth what Daddy’s putting himself through, though. I wish he’d just go on and sell it so he could get it off his mind, before it kills him. He’d have close to a hundred acres left. It’s not like he’ll ever live in that awful old house, and I sure won’t …”

  She stopped and skewed her eyes at Mike.

  “I hope you aren’t going to feel bad about it,” she said, not quite meeting Mike’s eyes, “but Daddy has left that land to me. He knew you wouldn’t … that you were taken care of, and your life was somewhere else …”

  Where? Mike thought. Where is my life? Not where I thought. I guess I have an extremely portable life. The anxiety spurted from under the edges of the drug’s blanket.

  Aloud she said quickly, “Oh, Dee, of course. You should have it. You’ve taken care of him all these years; you’ve been the one who stayed. I wouldn’t have it on a bet. You’re right, my life is somewhere else. Will you keep it … you know, when it comes to you?” She did not want to say “when he dies.” She could, and did, talk about John Winship’s eventual death easily and without appreciable feeling in New York; at that remove in time and space, he seemed almost a figure of legend, without substance, someone in a story told long ago, without the claim of blood. But she could not do it here, not to her sister, not in this projectile hurtling her toward the moment when the legend became clothed in decaying kindred flesh. No more than she could call him “Daddy” or “Father.”

  “I don’t even like to think about that,” DeeDee said. “I’d rather have Daddy alive and well than all the land in Georgia. But yes, I mean to keep it in the family, for Claudia and little John, because that’s what Daddy wants. For me to keep the land, I mean. But that old house is different. The upkeep on it is just bleeding him dry; he can’t find anybody to stay on the place; not even a Negro wants to do that. And of course, Daddy can’t go down there every day like he used to, to see about it, and it’s gotten to be a real mess. We’ve been trying real gently to get him to change his mind about selling it. For his own sake. But he gets so upset we don’t talk about it anymore. Maybe he’ll listen to you. We really need you on our side. Mikie, will you try and help us make him see reason?”

  “What makes you think he’ll listen to me?” Mike said. “I’ll bet he’ll throw me out of the house again if he can. Oh, of course, Dee, sure, if I can. I see what you mean. That house is a white elephant for everybody, I guess.”

  “Good girl,” Duck boomed, moving to pat her again. She shrugged away from his hand and he dropped it. He beamed at her, ferally.

  “This time the Yankees are in the fight with us,” he said. “We can’t lose.”

  “Don’t bet on it,” Mike said. “Does he even know for sure that I’m coming?”

  “Oh, yeah.” Duck nodded vigorously. “You bet he does. Looking forward to it. He asked for you when he first had the stroke, several times.”

  Mike lifted her head and looked at him, and then at her sister in the backseat. DeeDee flushed dark red.

  “Stroke?” Mike said.

  “It’s not such a bad one,” DeeDee said placatingly, her words tumbling over themselves. “He’s a whole lot better now. He can move everything just like he always could, except for his legs, a little. He can talk as well as he ever could, and there’s nothing but a little kind of drag to his mouth. You wouldn’t even know he’d had it, Mike, except that he uses a wheelchair some, but that’s mainly because he’s weak from the chemotherapy, you know. His mi
nd is as good as it ever was. Nothing wrong with his mind. Even better, I think. He’s really feisty now, really sharp and snappy, and before he just kind of sat there all day looking off into space and not saying anything. We’re going to help you find a nice, strong Negro girl to come and stay during the day and until after dinner, to do the lifting and heavy stuff, so you won’t have to do anything except sort of keep the house running along …” Her momentum faltered and the stream of words pattered to a stop. She looked down at her hands and then out of the window.

  “Dr. Gaddis stops by all the time, too,” Duck said, catching up the flag where DeeDee had dropped it. “He says John’s doing just fine, getting better every day. Be up and around before you know it. You won’t be there by yourself with him hardly any at all. That lawyer of his is in and out all the time, and Ba—”

  “Dr. Gaddis said to tell you specifically that there was nothing to worry about,” DeeDee chimed in again hastily. “There’s nothing wrong with Daddy that a little time and not worrying so much about that darned old house won’t cure.”

  “Nothing wrong but cancer, you mean,” Mike said levelly, looking at Duck and her sister. “Cancer and now a stroke. Why didn’t you tell me about the stroke, DeeDee?”

  “I was afraid you wouldn’t come,” her sister said, reddening again. “I was afraid you’d think he’d be too much for you, with a stroke on top of the cancer. But he truly isn’t a burden, Mike, and he’s not even in any pain to speak of from the cancer yet. Dr. Gaddis says that sometimes they aren’t, even up to the end, and he’s a long way from that yet.”

  “Yeah, he might even beat it, tough as he is,” put in Duck. “Why, you wouldn’t even know he had the cancer, and like DeeDee said, except for the wheelchair—”

  “Are you sure he asked for me?” Mike broke in. She looked at DeeDee.

  “Yes,” DeeDee said. “He did.” Her face was turned away.

  Duck drove for a space in the silence that had fallen within the Pontiac’s cold blue interior and then switched on the radio. Crystal Gayle wailed forth. Mike flinched, and Duck glanced at her under his plushy, veined lids (Mike had thought of him immediately when she had studied nictitating reptilian eyelids in high school biology, she remembered) and turned the volume down. They were silent again.

  “Are you mad at us?” DeeDee asked presently. Her voice fluted like a child’s, fearful of reprimand.

  “No,” Mike said. “But you should have told me about the stroke.”

  “We should have, you’re right,” DeeDee said sweetly. “I’m glad you’re not mad. You used to have an awful temper. I just didn’t feel like I could go through one of your spells right now.”

  “I haven’t had a spell, as you put it, since I left here,” Mike said waspishly. “I can’t afford temperament in my work. You can take that off your list of burdens, Dee.”

  “Well, you don’t need to snap,” Dee said tightly. It was a tone that reverberated with porcelain clarity in Mike’s mind. So did her own. DeeDee’s persimmony sufferance rang through their childhood, as did her own irritable response to it. She could not remember snapping at anyone in all of her adulthood. Even during the worst of the battles-with Richard, even during crises with temperamental cameramen and stupidly obstinate minor officials, even in those last charring moments of betrayal with Derek Blessing, Mike had not niggled or carped. She had either retreated into icy calm or, far more rarely, shouted. She prized her professionalism second only to Rachel. Her reputation for calm and absence of temperament were near legendary in a field ripe with swollen, glistening egos.

  I sound like a bratty thirteen-year-old, she thought. I’ll be damned if I’ll turn into one just because I’m back at home.

  “No snapping,” she said. “Truce. I’ll treat you like an adult if you’ll treat me like one.”

  DeeDee smiled, mollified. Mike thought, unkindly, that in her vast petal blue and white, with the small, curly smile wreathing her stretched shiny pink face, her sister looked like something in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade.

  They turned off the access road and onto old Highway 29, the doughty, potholed old blacktop paralleling the Atlanta and West Point Rail Road tracks that had been the only link with the world beyond Lytton when Mike had left. Immediately the countryside sprang back into another South, one of fierce, eroded red-clay banks and sharp green second-growth pines; asbestos-shingled drive-ins selling Dr. Pepper and filling stations advertising red wigglers and tackle; sun-baked automobile lots running heavily to pickups and Kubota tractors. Mike knew it was the road to Lytton, but she could not place where they were on it. No familiar landmark loomed. They might have been in Alabama, Mississippi, North or South Carolina, Louisiana. They could not, however, have been anywhere but the Deep South. Mike could not explain this sharp particularity of place, but knew it to be true. Her journalist’s mind began to worry the concept and then dropped it, seeming to lose the sense of it in a dense, soundless blanket of fog. She realized that she could not think clearly. She realized also that she could not seem to feel.

  I must be feeling something, she thought. If ever a situation was ripe for feeling, this has to be it. Coming back to all this, after all this time, after all that happened … My mind ought to be like some kind of chemical experiment with a cap on it, smoke and vapors roiling around like mad in there. But nothing seems to register. How do I feel?

  She made a heroic effort to peer into herself, past the Xanax. Anger? Surely, there must be anger in there. Long-festered anger at her father, anger at Priss Comfort; fresh anger at her editor, her landlord, at Richard, at Rachel; anger at Derek Blessing … Annie Cochran had said when she wrote the prescription for the Xanax pills that they were for short-term help only, that Mike needed to face her anger. Derek had said that there must be enough anger in her to power a continent. A normal person, then, would be feeling anger now. But she could detect nothing in herself except a rather perfunctory annoyance at DeeDee and Duck and a profound wish to be asleep, unconscious. Could you be angry, really angry, and truly not feel it?

  Fear crawled again, and she rubbed wet palms together. Was that what it was about, then, this crippling fear that had dogged her for the past several days? Anger? Was she afraid on some deep level that this homecoming, this meeting with her father, would activate a savage, long-denied rage that would boil free and … what? Cause her to shriek? Weep? Do violence? The very notion of these was too absurd even to entertain. Mike Winship did none of these things, had not, in memory, done them. She could not imagine ever doing them.

  Pain, perhaps, then. Fear of those near-mortal, long-ago losses finally welling up from their ice crypt and overwhelming her; fear of coming home to this place that had dealt her so much anguish? Fear of what this terrible, sunlit world might do to her again?

  Mike was not accustomed to looking into herself. She had, instead, fine-tuned her ability to read other faces, other minds and hearts. She had always taken a workmanlike pride in the detachment and perceptivity that this skill demanded. Now, in herself, she met nothing but the stale, faintly nauseous calm of the drug and beneath it, far beneath it, the leaping, impersonal viper tongues of the fear.

  She closed her eyes and rubbed them hard with her forefingers, concentrating on the wheeling aurora borealis of dull red and flaring white against the blackness. She wished she could take another tranquilizer. She would do so the minute they got home …

  “Well, here we are,” DeeDee said. “Welcome home, prodigal daughter,” Duck Wingo said. Mike opened her eyes and looked at Lytton.

  At first glance it did not seem to have changed, sleeping in the spell of the early June sun. The stark, shadowless play of light on the red-brick store facades might have lanced out of another sky, a decades-old sky. The twin brick freight depots beside the railroad tracks, the phallic white thrust of the World War I monument, the beetling, lopsided old cedar with the wounded gap where the power lines went through, which had served through her childhood as a municipal Christmas tree, s
tood wavering with heat beside the highway that became, for the space of three blocks, Lytton’s main street. Taller buildings and new, alien shapes registered dimly in her sight then, and she got an impression of many more cars; of unremembered bustle and density on the sidewalks; of glass and plastic and neon and smart wrought iron where once there had been only dingy red or cream brick and tin awnings. But the essential Lyttonness of it was the first thing that struck her. In some indefinable way it had not changed; would not change, perhaps could not change. She would have known where she was if she and the town had been set down, unwarned, in the middle of Ohio or Kuala Lumpur. Duck slowed the Pontiac to a crawl, grinning broadly at her, and Mike stared at Lytton sliding by.

  “Well, what do you think of it?” DeeDee caroled, leaning on the front seat. “You wouldn’t even know it was the same place, would you? How does it feel, Mikie, after all these years?”

  “It feels like I’ve always known about it but never seen it,” Mike said. “It feels like I’ve heard stories about it all my life, but never visited it before now. Or like something in an old children’s book. Somehow it doesn’t seem real.”

  “Well, it may not be Paris or Rome or London, but we like it and it sure is real.” DeeDee sniffed, choosing to be offended. “I sure hope home is a little realer to you, because it’s right over there behind the church and the post office. If you remember those.”