Homeplace (11 page)

She patted Mike awkwardly on the shoulder, and the young DeeDee was back again, fleetingly, in the touch. Mike turned and smiled at her.

“It’s not that much of an imposition, Dee,” she said. “Rachel’s with her father this summer, and things are going to be slow for me until fall. If I was ever going to come, this is as good a time as any. And I’m glad if it will give you a breather. To tell you the truth, I really came because I’m hungry for some of your cooking.”

I am not going to tell her I came because there was nowhere else for me to go, she thought. I am not going to tell her about the awful, ridiculous week my life blew up. These’s a core of DeeDee in this woman somewhere, but there’s somebody else in there who likes the smell of my blood too much.

Her sister laughed, the pretty chime that had always so captivated their father.

“Well, you’ll have some of that soon enough,” she
said. “I’ve left a hen and some dressing for you and Daddy to have tonight. It’s about all he seems to want anymore, chicken and that combread dressing Rusky taught me to make. You eat every bit of it, too. I can see your ribs clear through that shirt.”

“That’s not all I can see,” Duck said, and poked Mike’s thigh with a large red finger. Mike’s face and chest flamed. She knew that the damp cream silk of her shirt was glued like tissue paper to the sheer scrap of bra, and that her nipples were standing out in the freezing blast from the air conditioner like bas-reliefs on a frieze. She crossed her arms over her chest and looked straight ahead, saying nothing. He had not changed appreciably since she had last seen him, those twenty-odd years ago, except to acquire blinding white ersatz Gucci loafers and belt and a great paunch. His hair was as thick and pompadoured and pomaded as ever, the same tawny-blond pelt, crawling down his bursting neck now in sideburns, and his hooded eyes still roamed like spiders or the eye stalks of crabs. They played over Mike’s body and then slid up to her face, and he smiled his famous one-sided smile.

The silence from the backseat bit like adders. Mike was glad of the Xanax calm that hummed in her head and idled softly in her pulse. She called up a skill that she had acquired through the days of tumult and sometimes even mild danger over the years, the days in Los Angeles and Chicago and other cities where the cusp of crisis had called her; she shut him as cleanly out of her mind as if she had sheared him away. She turned her head and looked out of the blue-tinted window at the countryside flying by. She had never liked Duck, not from the very first. But she had been somewhat comforted in the beginning by DeeDee’s obvious adoration of him. Now, though, DeeDee did not look at Duck adoringly whenever he spoke, or reach out to touch him
for no reason at all. She looked at him little, Mike had noticed, and touched him even less.

Neither would I, Mike thought with a shudder. It would be like touching a dead frog.

Unlike Duck Wingo, the landscape had changed. Whenever Mike had thought of the country of home, which she seldom did, the images that sprang to her mind were old, softened, sliding ones: hills like the curves of a woman’s body melting into one another, blurred by the inevitable black-green pine forests; wave upon wave of tawny broom sedge; fields starred with jimsonweed and blackberry tangles; white frame and asbestos-siding farmhouses slumping into the tired, soft-red earth of swept yards, surrounded by gently sagging barbed-wire fences and tippled outbuildings; weather-silvered corpses of unpainted Negro shanties; blurred piles of orange-rusted automobile carcasses in rutted side yards and blind-gaping white refrigerators on front porches; Jesus Saves and palm readers’ and Burma-Shave signs; herds of rough-coated cattle all facing the same way under pecan and walnut trees; great, virulent green shrouds and seas of kudzu surging across entire fields and rights-of-way, engulfing abandoned houses and telephone poles and stands of spiky trees, so that entire acres of the earth became demented green sculpture gardens.

But the land outside the Pontiac’s window now was a sharp-edged quadrilinear suburbanscape. They flashed past a white concrete shopping mall gleaming like a city of tombs in the savage light. Arrows of fire glanced from the roofs of thousands of automobiles lapping at its fringes. Across the new four-lane access road on which they had turned from the Interstate, a support mall, panting treeless in the heat, offered a Big Star and a Treasury Drug, tax services and real estate offices, a discount video warehouse, a Catholic church incongruously occupying a commercial building, and a small village
of fast-food outlets. Mike counted Burger King, Arby’s, McDonald’s, Del Taco, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Long John Silver’s all within a few feet of each other. All except the Del Taco were doing a thriving late-lunch business; AMCs and bestial big-tired torpedoes crawling with spoilers and pickups with bumpers boasting I ♥
THAT COUNTRY SOUND
and
SUPPORT YOUR NRA
were bellied up in sun-stunned parking lots. It might have been anywhere in the country; they were whirling through vistas that Mike had driven through in rental cars from airports in a dozen different cities across the United States. The alien terrain was made even more unsettlingly anonymous by the cold, ghostly blue of the glass she was looking through. It was impossible to tell even whether it was winter or summer, except for the showering fullness of foliage and something inexorable in the slant of the light.

“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 mind 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—”