Up Jumps the Devil dk-4 Page 21

  “I don’t know, shug,” he said doubtfully. “I’m almost afraid I might break it.”

  “Hey, I’ve got an idea,” said Stevie. “Deborah could drive y’all’s car and then you wouldn’t have to ride all scrunched up.”

  “But how’ll you get home?” asked Isabel.

  “Don’t even think about it,” I told him.

  Stevie laughed and just stood there. He knows he’s my favorite nephew.

  I sighed and handed over my keys. “If there’s the least little dent, the tiniest scratch, I will personally come over to Chapel Hill and bang you out with a rubber mallet.”

  We transferred my things to the capacious trunk of Haywood and Isabel’s living room on wheels, a ten-year-old Mercury Grand Marquis with broad leather seats and lots of legroom, which is a real necessity since Haywood has lots of leg.

  As we drove through Dobbs, Haywood and Isabel asked if I’d heard anything more about Billy Wall.

  “Nothing except Dwight’s pretty sure he lied about paying Mr. Jap. They can prove he has a lot more cash than he ought to have.”

  “But he ain’t said he did it?” asked Haywood.

  “No. And they let him out on bond.”

  “Poor boy,” said Isabel. “He’s really messed up his life, hasn’t he?”

  It was hard to talk and drive, too. The fog was as bad as I could ever remember, thick and soft and cottony white. Visibility was severely limited and I couldn’t relax till we finally got off the two-lane road and onto Seventy East’s four lanes. Even then I didn’t feel comfortable enough to go faster than fifty.

  “Hope they don’t cancel our plane,” Isabel said anxiously from the backseat. “Zach says Adam’s worried they may cancel his.”

  “Might not be a bad thing if they did,” said Haywood. “Something’s eating on that boy. I believe he loved congregating together with us this visit, but I got the feeling his life’s real flusterated right now. You don’t know what it is, do you?”

  “What do Daddy and Seth think?” I hedged.

  “They think the same thing,” he answered obscurely.

  “He’s probably been out in California too long,” said Isabel. “People out yonder just don’t think like we do. It’s probably messed up his judgment, don’t you reckon?”

  Somehow California and its citizens got her off on the people moving into a recently built subdivision over near Robert and Doris.

  “I never saw such long names as is on those new mailboxes. Half of them’s nothing but vowels and the other half’s all consonants. They need to shake ’em up in a box and start over.”

  “You think maybe Adam’s got a health problem?” said Haywood.

  “—and of course Doris could find fault with Jesus Christ if he came back to earth, but it bothers me, too, to see people out cutting their grass on Sunday morning. ‘Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.’ That means going to church. It don’t mean cutting grass or building garages or painting porches. Somebody needs to tell them that’s not the way we act down here.”

  I resisted asking why the Sabbath injunction never seemed to include cooking a big Sunday dinner and washing up the dishes afterward. Cooking and doing dishes probably fall under the ox-in-the-ditch exemption.

  “Maybe it relaxes them,” I said. “Some people like to cut grass better than play golf.”

  “I just hate to see our ways changing,” said Isabel as she rummaged in her gold purse for the little notebook she uses to record their gambling wins and losses. “You see that in the paper how they’re going to plunk down a Food Lion over by the Interstate, just four miles from us? And one of them new people said she was counting the days ’cause she has to drive twelve miles to shop right now. Like twelve miles is a trip to China! How come she didn’t move to North Raleigh if she wants to live next door to a grocery store?”

  “Or maybe things ain’t like they should be between him and Karen,” said Hay wood. “You know, they ain’t been back home together in a long time.”

  “Nadine said one of ’em came into the Coffee Pot the other day, ordered a breakfast plate and thought that the grits were cream of wheat. Wanted to know how he was supposed to put milk on ’em and them laying there on a flat plate. Can you believe that?”

  “ ’Course it might be his work. I hear tell they’s lots of people losing their jobs these days.”

  “Tink Dupree told Nadine he was going to get him one of those T-shirts that say We don’t give a fig HOW they do it in New York, only he didn’t say ‘fig,’ if you know what I mean.”

  A little desperately, I said, “Everybody in favor of stopping for some barbecue, raise your hand.”

  My family will drop every other subject to discuss food. We were still about five miles from Goldsboro and one of the three most popular barbecue houses in eastern North Carolina and I figured it would take them that long to decide on whether they wanted to go inside for a plate or get sandwiches to go.

  “Doesn’t matter to me,” I said. “Y’all are the ones catching a plane.”

  More conferencing.

  Their plane wasn’t due to leave till five. (“Course we’re supposed to get there and get checked in.”)

  The Kinston airport was less than forty miles away. (“Say another hour at the rate we’re going?”)

  “But if there’s a big crowd we might have to wait and—”

  By then, I was pulling into the parking lot and the smoky aroma of grilled pork laced with vinegar and red pepper, not to mention the smell of deep-fried onion-flavored hush-puppies, decided them.

  “We got plenty of time to go in and set down,” Haywood said happily.

  Kinston is about a hundred miles east-southeast from the Raleigh-Durham Airport and visibility seemed to be better there. Radio reports said that RDU was canceling and/or diverting all flights. Not so at Kinston Airport

  “Hell, yes, we’re going!” said a jovial white-haired man who seemed to know Haywood. He was also wearing an identical golf-green jacket. (“Money-green,” says Haywood.)

  In feet, I saw four more solid green jackets and at least twenty more gold purses.

  There was a festive air at this particular gate. The revelers ranged in age from mid-fifties to late seventies and came from all over eastern Carolina. Down East accents mingled with Low Country as the regulars greeted one another.

  As soon as they started boarding their chartered plane, I went and called Kidd and told him to expect me within the hour.

  26

  « ^ » … The earth is rendered rich and delightful by the fine rivers and streams which glide through them.... It is incredible to think what plenty of fish is taken both in their salt and fresh water rivers…“Scotus Americanus,” 1773

  New Bern, at the confluence of the Trent and Neuse rivers, is the second-oldest town in North Carolina. As the name implies, it was founded by Swiss, English, and German colonists under the leadership of Baron Christoph von Graffenried in 1710. There were actually more English in the party than Swiss, but since the Baron was Swiss and since it was his money bankrolling the settlers, he got to name it. As a result, every gift shop in town sells souvenirs embellished by the black bear, symbol of the original Bern, and the town hall’s red brick clock tower is thought to duplicate Swiss clock towers.

  Despite the attempt to underline its Swiss connection, New Bern draws more tourists for its eighteenth-century English connection. Tryon Palace, the seat of royal colonial government, was built in 1770, burned in 1798, and has now been restored—overly restored some purists say—well past its original glory. Even so, this river town is an appealing mixture of old and new. Evergreen live oaks, spring-blooming dogwoods, and August-blooming crepe myrtles line the quaint streets. Expensive sailboats and sleek cruisers line the modern marinas along the badly polluted rivers. Resort hotels and restaurants fill in around the edges of the historic district to serve tourists and sailors alike. Summer can be pretty bad here, hot and humid and mosquito-laden unless the wind is blowing, but the o
ther three seasons are pleasantly temperate.

  New Bern itself is only thirty miles further east than Kinston, but since I always get lost when I try to take Kidd’s back-road shortcuts, I had to go into town, cross over the Neuse River and then backtrack west a little ways until I found the dirt road that winds through the trees to Kidd’s cabin on the north bank of the river.

  It really is a log cabin. Kidd built it himself with the help of some friends from a kit that used passive solar design. It’s warm and sunny in the winter and cool and shady in the summer. The front door is on the same level as the gravel drive, but the land drops off sharply in back where a wide plank porch runs the entire length of the cabin. Viewed from this height, the Neuse is broad and deceptively beautiful.

  Kidd was laughing as he came out to meet me. “I thought you were a lost insurance salesman,” he said. “This is not your father’s Oldsmobile, is it?”

  That first kiss after long days and longer nights alone is always sweet. He’s the best kisser I’ve ever known anyhow, a man who takes his time and gives it serious attention.

  Eventually we did get around to taking my garment bag and overnight case out of the car.

  He had left the sliding glass doors to the porch open on either side of the stone fireplace; otherwise the night would have been almost too warm for the fire crackling on the hearth. The damp river air made it welcome.

  The cabin’s decor is very definitely masculine, but without the spare bleakness of Mr. Jap’s house. Kidd likes stone and wood and glass, but he also likes comfort and color. The sectional couch that wraps around the fireplace is a deep wine red and tossed across one corner is a bright patchwork quilt his mother pieced together when he was a little boy. Framed posters advertising various coastal attractions are clustered on one wall, another holds enlarged photographs of local birds. A musket that his great-great-grandfather carried in the Civil War hangs over the fireplace. (And carried is the operative word. According to Kidd, he spent three years in uniform and only shot birds, squirrels and rabbits for the regimental cookpot.)

  In front of the couch, a low table held champagne flutes and an ice bucket.

  “Are we celebrating something?”

  He grinned. “Whatever you happen to feel thankful for.”

  “I’m sure I’ll think of something.”

  We drank champagne and ate grilled sea bass in front of the fire, and later we made love there, too.

  Later still, wrapped together in his quilt, we drank the last of the champagne and watched the fire die down to coals while the running lights of boats drifted past, far down on the river.

  “Yes,” I murmured sleepily.

  “Yes, what?” His lips brushed my brow.

  “Yes, I am thankful.”

  Thanksgiving Day dawned mild and foggy again with a brightness that promised sunshine by noon. Kidd’s a morning person and when I slid a foot over to his side around nine-thirty, he’d been up so long that my toes found no residual warmth from his body.

  But the low murmur of his voice floated up through the open window and I saw him sitting on the porch steps, talking to the dogs as he gave them a good brushing. Occasionally he’d pause to scratch their heads and gaze out over the river where the fog hung in hazy layers.

  “Don’t look all the pretty off the morning,” I said. “Save some of it for me.”

  “Better hurry up then.”

  “I’ll be down in ten minutes.”

  Four minutes in the bathroom, one minute to straighten the covers, another two minutes to throw on jeans and my favorite Carolina sweatshirt, and I was down the stairs with three minutes to spare, ready for coffee and juice and for standing in the kitchen with Kidd’s arms around me.

  Like the dogs, I need the physical contact of hands and face. I want to nuzzle and be petted, to hug and be hugged back. Next to life itself, having someone to love, having someone who loves you, is the luckiest thing in the whole world. Love doesn’t have to be sexual, but it does have to be physical—touching, kissing, feeling warm skin against my skin. Or like now, standing with my head against his blue flannel shirt, feeling the beat of his heart beneath my fingers.

  We seldom plan anything when I come down and we spent the morning lazing on the porch, enjoying the sun when it finally burned away the fog, and talking of this and that.

  “How is Amber?” I asked dutifully when he mentioned his daughter in passing.

  “Fine. Growing up too fast, though. I’ve got her new school pictures.”

  He went inside and brought back a handful of color prints.

  The face that looked back at me was truly beautiful: masses of dark curly hair, flawless fair skin that showed no adolescent pimples or eruptions, intensely green eyes that crinkled a little like Kidd’s in the one picture where she was smiling. Otherwise, I gathered that she generally favored her mother, a woman I hadn’t met.

  “She’s lovely,” I said truthfully, “but she looks more like eighteen than fourteen.”

  “Tell me about it,” Kidd said, shaking his head as much in pride as in rue. “The phone never stopped the whole time she was here last weekend. I told her I didn’t know why she wanted to come out when we couldn’t talk ten minutes without one of her friends or some boy calling.”

  I knew exactly why Amber had wanted to keep him from spending the weekend with me, but not by the slightest frown or raised eyebrow would I let him know what she was up to.

  So I cooed over her pictures and as Kidd talked of his daughter, I smiled and made appropriately interested noises until the conversation moved on to other topics.

  After lunch, we took the dogs for a long walk along the river.

  “When I was a boy,” said Kidd, “the Neuse was full of fish up this way. And the brackish water a few miles down used to be so thick with crabs we could catch two or three at a time on a single chicken head.”

  Sunlight sparkled on the water, but instead of a fresh woodsy smell, the humid air around us held something vaguely fetid today.

  Kidd tossed a pebble and the dogs perked up their ears as it plinked and sent ripples across the surface. “This used to be such a beautiful river, but now it’s dying and it’s killing the estuaries as well.”

  The troubled coastal waters were at the root of that murder down at Harkers Island where we first met.

  “I see where the state’s just authorized another study on the Neuse,” I said. “Be simpler if we could just bus the whole legislature down here and make them swim for an hour.”

  “Won’t happen,” he said. “Too many politicians up there in Raleigh, not enough statesmen. Greed and ignorance. They send us all their mess downriver—raw sewage, hog lagoon spills, runoffs from agri-industries— everything but the laws and the money it’ll take to clean it up. We get another commission to do another study while the state spends millions to shore up the millionaires’ beaches on Bald Head Island.”

  He plinked another pebble. We found a low spot almost level with the river and our mood lightened as we began skipping stones. I got six skips, but Kidd’s a show-off and routinely got eight or ten skips out of his pebbles before they sank.

  “Some of us have real jobs,” I said, when he teased my lack of proficiency. “You, on the other hand, have clearly wasted too much time working on your rock-skipping skills.”

  The day had turned out blue-sky beautiful. As we walked through the trees, we saw several hawks kiting on thermal currents overhead. Down on the ground, the wind was such that we walked right up on a small herd of deer. Unfortunately, the dogs saw them at the same time we did and their sharp barks sent the deer dashing for the underbrush, white tails flying.

  “My nephew Reese is dying to bag a nice buck,” I said.

  “So what’s stopping him? The deer population’s so swollen he shouldn’t have any trouble. Or is he a bad shot?”

  “No time to hunt. Now that his dad’s stuck in a wheelchair, more of the work falls on him.”

  “Reese. He’s the one with th
e fancy truck, right?”

  I laughed. “Right. And you don’t even have your scorecard.”

  When I first started introducing Kidd to my family, he had such a hard time keeping everybody straight that I made him a chart. He has most of my brothers and a lot of their wives down pat, especially those that live around the homeplace, but my nieces and nephews still blur together.

  “You sure you don’t want to come meet them all on Saturday? We’re having our Thanksgiving get-together out at Daddy’s.”

  “You sure you don’t want to come backpacking around Mattamuskeet?” he countered.

  “Swamp water and mud in my boots? Mice stealing my food at night? A million ducks and geese squawking in my ear?”

  “No worse than a million Knotts.”

  I grabbed up some pine cones and pelted him, then turned and fled when he lunged at me. His legs are longer, though, and we went down in a tangle of dead grasses and fallen leaves. The dogs thought it was a game and joined in, tails wagging, to lick our faces and jump on our backs.

  That evening, we drove down to Cherry Point for a Thanksgiving steak at one of the lounges with a bluesy piano. Not only does Kidd kiss good, he listens good, too. All through dinner, he listened to the developments in Mr. Jap’s death since we had last talked; and on the drive back to his cabin, I curled up next to him on the van seat and told him my fears that some of my family might be involved.

  “Reese must have seen something he’s not telling me.”

  “Or somebody.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, you and your family do use those back lanes like turnpikes, don’t you?”

  “They started out as real shortcuts, but these days my brothers shuttle equipment back and forth that way every time they can—combines and tractor rigs—even when it might be quicker to go by the public road. They get a little tired of honking cars, and getting the finger from impatient commuters. Urban people move to the country and it’s like, ‘Gee, you mean farmers live in the country? And they’re going to be cluttering up my road with hay balers or gang disks? Who the hell do these rednecks think they are?’ Pooling equipment’s the main reason Daddy and the boys are still able to make farming turn a decent living.”