Rock of Ages Page 10

  “I don’t have all day,” Georgia says. “Now, again: What do you want? I …”

  “What I want,” he says, turning to face her, “is for you to leave me the fuck alone.”

  “What …?”

  “You talked to that sheriff, that Wade Hairr. I didn’t steal no goddamn ring off of Miss Jenny. I wouldn’t of done that.”

  “I didn’t say you did. I just said it was missing. I wondered where it had gone to.”

  Pooh gives a short, humorless laugh.

  “They sent Pooh to the work farm once. She set me up. They always tryin’ to set me up. Ain’t goin’ back again. No ma’am.”

  He leans closer to her and almost whispers it.

  “You understand me, bitch?”

  Georgia feels a chill raising the hairs on her arms and the back of her neck, but she’s damned if she’s going to be intimidated on her own land, by some tub-of-shit inbred second-generation bully.

  She takes a step back.

  “Now you listen to me,” she says. “I don’t think your father would appreciate what you just said, and if you don’t get the hell out of here right now, I will have you arrested.”

  She hears footsteps behind her.

  “Georgia? Everything OK?”

  “Fine,” she says, but the tenor of her voice causes Kenny to come into the back yard, too.

  “Pooh,” he says, his voice not hard and not soft, as neutral as he can make it.

  “This is between me and her,” the big man says. “Ain’t got nothing to do with you.”

  “He thinks I’m accusing him of stealing Jenny’s ring,” Georgia says, shaking her head. This sudden violence has ambushed her the way the summer thunderstorms used to. She feels flustered and out of control.

  “She just wanted to find out where it went, Pooh. That’s all,” Kenny says.

  “Wasn’t no cause to get the sheriff on me. Him and Daddy are buddies, and now Daddy thinks I’m a thief. Because of her.”

  “Nobody thinks you’re a thief,” Georgia says.

  “We looked out for that old lady,” Pooh says, beating one of his meat-heavy arms against his thigh. “We was her family.”

  Georgia can’t stop herself. It’s just too damn much.

  “And now you’ve got her house and her land,” she says. “I think you all made out pretty well. What did you do for all that—buy her groceries once in a while, come by and see her every month or so? You keep this crap up, and I’ll show you some real trouble. There’ll be lawyers inside your shorts.”

  Pooh moves toward her, his face so red in the dying light he looks like some comic-book devil.

  “It’s my house!” he screams at her. “First you accuse me of stealing from that old lady, and now you want to take my house. Goddamn you!”

  Kenny steps between them, but he is backhanded to the ground by Pooh’s left arm. Georgia is backpedaling toward the porch steps. Behind her, she hears her son open the screen door, his yelling merging with Pooh’s and her own.

  She half-falls backward and is sitting on the second step from the bottom. Justin steps between her and Pooh, who throws him aside.

  Then Georgia, trying to get up, sees Pooh’s head go back slightly, his slitted little eyes suddenly bulging out from all that fat, visible at last. And then she sees the small flash of metal, shining in the kitchen light. First star I see tonight.

  Kenny has to stand on tiptoes to reach around the big man and hold the carpet knife effectively to his throat—found somehow in the rolls of fat—while his other hand pulls back hard on Pooh’s scruffy black hair. Pooh’s arms flail uselessly at his sides, and then he is still. Perhaps he has been in this situation before. He seems to understand the gravity of it.

  “Now,” Kenny tells him, “I wish I had my gun with me, so I could shoot you dead on the spot, Pooh, but this’ll have to do. If you don’t get the hell out of here, right now, I’ll make you wish I had’ve shot you. I’ll make you bleed to death right here in this lady’s back yard, and I won’t do a day in jail because of it, I can assure you. I’ll let you die before the police even get here, so nobody will ever hear your side. Now, make up your mind, Pooh.”

  He says it calmly, oblivious to the trickle of blood running from his nose.

  Pooh nods his head, as much as he can.

  “OK? Now, I’m going to let you go. I’ll decide later whether to have your ass arrested or not. Assault. Trespassing. Whatever. We’ll at least get a restraining order. Enough to make your parole officer sit up and take notice.

  “But what you’ve got to decide is whether you want to stop there or go for the big prize. Gotta decide whether you want to go all the way. I’m gonna walk you over to your truck, and you’re gonna get in and drive yourself off this lady’s property, and you’re not going to bother her any more. Am I right?”

  He asks it twice, pulling a little harder, pushing the knife a little deeper. Georgia thinks she sees the first trickle of blood.

  Pooh nods, short and quick.

  “And assume,” Kenny says, “any time you see me from now on, that I’ll be armed.”

  He walks the big man over to the truck like that, a strange, violent dance in the fading light, the two men in murderous rhythm.

  There is a moment when Pooh might have tried to take the knife away from him. Kenny has to push him forward, toward the truck door, releasing him from the blade’s threat. Pooh could have taken his chances then, maybe even pulled a gun from beneath his front seat. If he has one there, he doesn’t go for it, and he doesn’t charge Kenny.

  He wipes the blood from beneath his chin as he starts the engine and rolls down the window.

  “It ain’t over,” he says, staring hard at Kenny Locklear. “Ain’t no damn Indian going to treat me like that.”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” Kenny tells him. “It ought to be over, but it probably ain’t. Don’t make me do this, Pooh.”

  There is no answer, and the big red truck backs, fishtailing wildly, out to the circular drive, then roars away, throwing wet sand into the night.

  The silence is overwhelming. It used to be quieter, of course, before you could hear the distant swoosh and grind of cars and trucks on the interstate. But still, Kenny would live here just for the quiet.

  “Well,” he says, retracting the carpet knife blade, “I think I’ve done enough damage for one day.”

  Georgia falls against him, almost knocking him over, because, truth be hold, he’s a little shaky himself. She’s crying. Justin stands back a little, holding Leeza.

  “Where …” Georgia says, between sobs, “where did you get that thing?” She points to the pocket to which he’s returned the knife.

  “It’s just something you carry around,” he shrugs. He doesn’t want to tell her about Saturday nights in the Lumbee bars and nip joints, something he doesn’t do any more, but it’s where he learned his manly etiquette. There were a lot of Indian carpet-layers, and somehow the light, deadly, nasty, cheap little tool became the thing any grown man had in his pocket, just in case everyone wasn’t as sweet-natured and fair-minded as he was. Sometimes, you just couldn’t depend on justice to be as swift or sure as a carpet knife. There was something mature about it. It wasn’t like some kid just pulling out some toy of a gun and spraying the room, killing two or three people he’d never even touched. If you were driven so far as to use a carpet knife, you were committed. You didn’t cut a man’s throat or slit his gut on a whim.

  And now, he knows he’s going to have to start carrying a gun, something he hasn’t done in years, something he thought he had left behind when he went away to college, when he moved out into the longed-for solitude Littlejohn McCain has afforded him.

  “I’m sorry I got you into this,” Georgia says, still crying. “What in the world are we going to do? Why did he do that?”

  He did it, Kenny tells her, because he’s a sick puppy, always has been. The two years he did for rape should have been more, but there were only two of them out there, and W
illiam Blackwell used all his clout, and maybe the girl broke her own cheekbone and left arm in the throes of passion. The jury didn’t believe that, of course, but they believed enough of it, blamed the girl for even being in a pickup truck with Pooh Blackwell.

  “This place is crazy,” Justin says, his arm awkwardly around his mother now.

  “Nah,” Kenny says, shaking his head. “It’s no more crazy now than it was yesterday. It’s just Scots County on a Saturday night. Everything’ll be better tomorrow morning. Old Pooh will probably come by and apologize.”

  When my pigs fly, he thinks to himself.

  CHAPTER TEN

  November 14

  Georgia is sure she slept no more than three hours. The monkey had a good night.

  Now, lying on her back in the stillness of Sunday morning, with the storm passed and a weak sun illuminating the curtains beside her bed, she wishes she could skip church.

  Why the hell not? She’s 51 years old, and she’s skipped church on a regular basis for much of the past 15 years. When Justin turned 12, she and Jeff told him it was up to him whether he wanted to continue going. No more nagging. They hadn’t wanted him to reach adulthood completely ignorant of the possibility of a Higher Being, unaware of the Golden Rule and the Ten Commandments. Georgia thought there was even a literary aspect to it. Like most children growing up when and where she did, she received most of her spotty classical education from the Bible.

  Justin went more than they did, to Grace Presbyterian three blocks away, but he quit entirely after their marriage broke up, as if that failure was brought about by some structural flaw in the church, some fallibility by the Infallible.

  Still, Georgia thinks joining the Peace Corps after college and grad school was a kind of church for him, a way of meeting God halfway.

  These days, she thinks that Justin, with his ready-to-pop-any-minute girlfriend, his dope she’s sure they’ll be smoking again as soon as the baby is born (please, God, not before), and his lack of reverence for the church of his fathers, is more godly than she.

  Which, she knows, is damning him with nearly inaudible praise.

  She has been in a sulk equal to the one that led to Justin abandoning organized religion. After years of sleeping late on Sundays, she had become an important part of the little Methodist church Phil and his family attended, singing hymns amid a congregation so elderly that she and Phil were part of “the young folks.” But, after March, she felt she had a right to be pissed off at Whoever is in charge. After the funeral, she never went inside his old church again.

  Why, then, not roll over and give sleep a chance in broad daylight?

  The answer, she supposes, is Forsythia Crumpler.

  The real answer, she worries, is that she is still, after 51 damn years, too eager to please, still a slave to praise. If she worships a graven image, if she has broken that commandment, too, on her golden calf is chiseled the word “Approval.”

  On Wednesday, in the process of them making their peace, her old teacher had asked her if she was coming to church on Sunday. Happy to be back in the good graces of her oldest living mentor, she had said yes.

  Truth be known, she does enjoy some aspects of the services.

  The Reverend Weeks is the kind of pastor that a church like Geddie Presbyterian—older even than Phil’s was, and much more needy—tends to get. He seems a good enough man. He is in his mid-40s, five years into the ministry after abandoning a career in hospital administration. The kind of light he must have seen, grumped one of the deacons after a sermon during which two elders began snoring at separate times and had to be elbowed awake by their wives, was not exactly the wattage of the one that blinded Paul on the road to Damascus. “It seems more like a night light,” the deacon muttered to his wife on the way home.

  In addition to being an uninspiring speaker, he does not have the natural gift for remembering names. Even after two years at Geddie, he struggles when greeting his small, ancient flock after services.

  But there are other elements of Georgia’s few Sundays at the church that almost salvage it for her. She does find a peace that passes at least her understanding in going through the routines, not changed much since she was a girl here, fidgeting and flirting. The church had been larger then, with many more young people, and there was a social aspect to it.

  She falls into the rhythm of the call to worship, the Gloria Patri, the reciting of the Apostles’ Creed, the tithes and offerings, the small choir’s thin, enervated musical interludes and all the other stops on the way to a 10-minute sermon that always seems longer. (An asterisk beside each hymn asks, “Those that can, please stand.” Georgia wonders if it is meant to be puckish. Considering Reverend Weeks and his wife, who produce the program, she thinks not. Most but not all in the congregation are still able to rise.)

  The service reminds her of t’ai chi, which she found gave her an inexplicable rush of well-being when she embraced it after her first divorce and her father’s death. There was no logical reason why it helped her. But it did.

  She also wonders if it isn’t just nostalgia.

  The three of them have established a routine in which everyone gets his or her own breakfast and lunch, with dinner their only truly communal meal, even on Sundays. (The older people here still call it “supper;” dinner is the large meal they used to eat in the middle of the day, sometimes starting before noon, when they were all farmers or farmers’ wives.)

  Getting everyone to the table at the same time was difficult before nightfall, and it led to unnecessary friction. Georgia would rise late for Leeza’s eggs. Leeza and Justin would oversleep Georgia’s French toast.

  Today, Georgia finds the house empty when she comes into the dining-living room at 8:45, looking for cereal and orange juice. Dirty dishes, glasses, and silverware sit in the sink, and Justin’s Toyota is gone. She is still a little shaky from last night, and she considers calling Kenny. He left soon after Pooh did, probably in the service of one of the young women who seem to occupy his time. He said to call him on his cell phone if there was trouble, quick to add that he was sure there wouldn’t be. The rest of them ate a dispirited meal, then watched TV for a while, stricken mostly mute by the attack they could neither predict nor defuse, wondering if Pooh was coming back.

  Justin, she feels sure, was and is upset that he could not protect his mother adequately, that even with his hard-earned Guatemalan calluses, he still needed Kenny and his carpet knife. And Leeza has tended, as her first child’s birth looms, to expect smoothness and treat the bumps as personal affronts.

  Georgia regrets getting Kenny into the middle of something so idiotic, yet so threatening. She fears that this is one of those situations she remembers from her youth here, in which logic and patience always seemed to get drowned out by some bloodlust, the dimensions and protocol of which she has never really understood. Part of what she found appealing about the leafy, corduroy-jacketed world of academia was the absence of such explosions. Her colleagues might harbor grudges and turn pettiness into an art form, but there was never the necessity to carry a carpet knife.

  She played it over in her mind endlessly after Pooh’s departure, and she continues to do so this morning. What did she do wrong? How had this gotten so out of her control? Should she go see Pooh, or William? Should she—and she can’t believe she’s even considering this—get a gun?

  She realizes that she needs a local guide, the same one who rescued her last night.

  She decides, finally, that she should wait. Kenny might be a late riser, especially on a Sunday morning. He might not even be alone. She’ll call him after lunch.

  She does feel better after her two hours at the old church. Even Sunday School, taught by a sweet-natured young woman who stumbles so hopelessly over the lesson plan that Georgia wants to snatch the book from her and do it herself, is at least bearable.

  Several people ask her how the yard sale went, and they seem impressed that so much of the house’s furnishings sold.

 
“I hope you didn’t let that Jimmy Cole come up at the end and get everything for nothing,” Murphy Lee Roslin says loudly. He says everything loudly because he is mostly deaf. Georgia wonders why he doesn’t make this much noise when he sings.

  “Well, Mr. Roslin,” Georgia says, forcing herself to speak up, “he did get a few things, but you know, it isn’t like we were going to take them up to Sotheby’s and get a million dollars for them.”

  She gets puzzled looks from Mr. Roslin and others within earshot, but nobody asks her what she’s talking about.

  Sotheby’s, she thinks. Jesus. She wonders if she will ever relearn the language down here, if she ever knew it at all. Even as a teenager, and certainly as a college student, she found so much of what she said was, to the ears of Geddie Presbyterian’s faithful, a string of non sequiturs.

  And then, there’s the cursing. She’s always had what her mother would have called a trash-mouth. She’s never really considered four-letter words to be the devil’s instruments. When she uses the F-word in public, she thinks of herself as colorful, sassy, irreverent, uninhibited—traits that do not seem to command respect in East Geddie.

  When she came out of Sunday services three weeks earlier and saw that one of her tires had gone flat, she exclaimed “Shit!” before she even thought about it. There was an uneasy silence behind her before two of the deacons came over and helped her put the spare on.

  She hasn’t mentioned last night’s confrontation. She is so uneasy with it that she doesn’t even feel comfortable talking about it among these quiet, peaceful people.

  She does talk with Forsythia Crumpler, though, as they are both going to their cars.

  Forsythia asks if she has found out anything else about Jenny’s ring. She asks it in a low voice after the others are out of earshot.