A Perfectly Good Family (26 page)

  Mordecai lifted me from my seat by the waist and swirled me to the pavement with a flourish of chivalry; maybe having sway in important matters was not overrated. He clumped ahead and held the door. I'd worn a skirt, a rather short one; as I passed, Mordecai whistled softly and said I had mighty fine legs. Ordinarily I found anything related to finance an ordeal, but I was starting to enjoy this.

  A gangly man who introduced himself as Claude Richards shook hands and led us back to his office. He was one of those scrawny men who'd had a few too many chicken-fried steak specials, but the weight he'd put on had consolidated in a discrete bump above his belt and hadn't spread an ounce to his thin, indefinite face and underdeveloped limbs. He looked like a boy acting an older part in a school play with the aid of a throw pillow. I noticed a wedding band. Envisioning the woman who had singled out this nondescript from all other men and their ensuing ardour stretched my imagination beyond its capacity.

  'Have a seat. You probably don't remember me, Mordecai, but we were in the same class at Leroy Martin.'

  'Sure I do!' Mordecai geezed. 'Clyde Richards, what do you know. Trig, right?'

  'No. Social Studies, with Mrs—'

  'Townsend!'

  'No, that was the fast-track class,' he said, with a trace of acid. 'Seventh grade, before they put the whiz-kids in one group. Mrs Gordon. She hated you.'

  'That's because she couldn't make head or tail of my papers,' said my brother, putting his feet up on Claude's desk. 'She circled all the ten-dollar words and wrote I was using vocabulary "beyond my years" that I didn't understand. So I looked them all up in Webster's and wrote out the definitions. Took the essay to Mr Hawkins, and he made her change the grade from a C to an A. That put a chip on her shoulder the size of a pine tree.'

  'Can you blame her? I remember that story—you told everyone, and made her look like a dolt to all her students.'

  Mordecai was unmoved. 'She was a dolt. A dolt adult—hah-hah.'

  I was rolling my interior eyes. If Mordecai wanted to ruin his chances of getting a mortgage by boasting over seventh-grade conquests, fair enough, that would simplify my life enormously.

  'I don't remember seeing you at Broughton, though,' Claude noted. 'Did you go to Sanderson?'

  Mordecai grinned. 'I took early retirement from the public school system. Wasn't sixteen yet, so had some shrink verify that I was nuts. Sent that poor meathead to the dictionary a few times, too. Personally helped him fill out the diagnosis: delusions of grandeur, narcissistic personality disorder, with a little paranoia thrown in for salt. It was a scream. Sort of sad when our sessions ended—I was working up my psycho deferment for the draft.'

  I kissed our mortgage goodbye.

  But Claude seemed intrigued to have snagged this specimen from the past in the middle of another drab banking day; he handled Mordecai with care, like an antique. 'You were the one printed that underground newspaper, weren't you? The Butt End. Signed, The 'Shroom.'

  Mordecai raised his hands. 'You found me out, bro. So did Jesse Helms.'

  An overweight, tiny-eyed J. Edgar, Helms had gone straight to the Senate from being the regular Channel 5 commentator for WRAL. Though we McCreas had our differences, Jesse Helms had long been the family scourge, on whom even Truman's antipathy would converge. Mordecai had savalged a mimeo machine from Leroy Martin's dumpster, tinkered it into working order in his basement, and used the school's own purple drum to roll out The Butt End: a hodgepodge of teacher-baiting, editorials on dress codes, erotic cartoons and the usual anti-war, workers-unite rant that Helms singled out in one of his TV editorials as pinko propaganda. How a grown-up television commentator came into possession of Mordecai's stapled lavender handouts, or how the man could spend five minutes of the public's time on a junior high school newspaper and still go on to assume the chairmanship of the Senate foreign relations committee, I'll never know; all I do know is that that broadcast was the highlight of Mordecai's life.

  'He accused me of "fostering the festering red corpuscles of communism in the blood of the Southern young". From the nattering-nabobsof-negativism school, but I never thought Helms had Agnew's flair. Never could figure how a clown with a room-temperature IQ got elected to the Senate even in North Carolina.'

  'I voted for him,' said Claude.

  Mordecai shrugged. 'Guess that's the way it happened then. Son of a bitch must be desolate without the Cold War. Thank God for school prayer.'

  'Well, all those beads and bangles seem a long time ago now,' Claude submitted equably.

  'No,' said Mordecai. 'They don't.'

  Mordecai was right. It didn't seem long ago at all. If we had grown up in a country that was divided, it was still divided. However shifting or elusive the line between two tribes in this culture, Mordecai and Claude lived on either side of it. I hadn't a clue how we were going to get money out of the geek at this rate.

  'Maybe it seems like yesterday to you—' Claude eyed Mordecai's pigtails. 'But you have to admit that at a distance all that peace and love, drugs and group sex seem pretty silly.'

  Mordecai tilted his head at Claude's fuzzy short red hair and tortoiseshell spectacles. 'You don't look like you got in on much of that group sex.'

  Claude laughed, and for the first time I liked him. 'Even if I did, you'd better not tell my wife. Now, let's get down to business.'

  As he loaded our file on-screen, Claude was easy to picture as a teenager. In film and fiction, his era was portrayed as wall-to-wall radicals, but in truth Nixon's 'silent majority' had persisted in force—most of the girls wore saddle shoes and shaved their underarms and dabbed nail polish remover on nylon ladders; most boys never came to school without a belt and wore noxious deodorant. North Carolina's hell-no-we-won't-go brigade formed a tiny, persecuted, if sanctimonious corner in otherwise straight-laced, docile student bodies, of which Claude would have been an inconspicuous member. He made B-minuses. He believed smoking marijuana led to heroine addiction; at pep rallies, he knew all the words to the school song and nudged recalcitrants next to him who refused to stand for the national anthem. No one sent him valentines. Reminiscence about the Sixties with Claude was almost wicked; retrospective versions of his generation left him out altogether, and he was left out enough at the time.

  'There's one thing that bothers me here, Mordecai,' said Claude. 'Your books and your tax filings don't square.'

  'Of course they don't,' said Mordecai. 'I'm an American.' My brother had come to patriotism late in life.

  'Which am I to believe?'

'I'm a businessman. You figure it out.'

'That does leave us with a rather unorthodox—'

  'You're going to tell me,' said Mordecai, lighting a roll-up under the no-smoking sign, 'this is the first time you've come across discrepancies of this kind?'

  Claude smiled. 'Hardly. If these books are correct, you've got quite a net turnover. Pretty impressive.'

  'Damn straight,' Mordecai puffed. 'Fuck the peace armband shit, Clyde, I'm a company man now. A productive member of society. Which is more than I can say,' he added, 'for my brother.'

  'Who is also a co-owner of this house, I see?'

  'For now,' said Mordecai coolly. 'He plans to move out.'

  'Mordecai, I—'

  'He just doesn't know it yet,' Mordecai cut me off.

  'So the house is up for auction in—'

  'Just over two weeks. Chance we can get it for less than the appraisal, if the public competition's not too stiff.' Mordecai cocked his hard-hat, no longer The 'Shroom, but a hard-nosed good-old-boy capitalist—which is, underneath those pigtails, what he was.

  'And your inventory is worth—'

  'Two hundred grand. At least. But I'd like to expand. Use Blount Street for my offices, and you've a picture of the house there, it's presentable. Good location, right downtown. Plenty of those Reconstruction shells converted to commercial premises already; zoning's no problem. There's some machinery I'd like to invest in, which is why I'm asking for such a sizeable mortgage.'

  'How sizeable?' I asked.

  Claude turned to me. 'I thought you were a co-signer of this application.'

  'Sure, she just forgot. Two-fifty, remember, Core? There's a lot of audio work in the Triangle, and I need the wherewithal to cash in. Hire a bigger crew, take on more than one contract at a time. That dough will come back in spades.'

  My mouth was hanging open. 'But Mordecai,' I whispered, 'doesn't that mean I'd be responsible for—?'

  'It's a dead cert, Claude. And you know Oakwood; even if my expansion didn't pay out, that property's going to keep appreciating. Any trouble, sell the place off in a couple of years and make a wad.'

'But the whole point,' I objected, 'is to keep the house in the family—'

  At last Claude paid me attention. 'Now, Ms McCrea, your source of income is—?'

  'She works for me,' Mordecai intervened.

  All right, so it wouldn't help our case for me to be making $4.75 an hour at Crabtree Valley. I shut up.

  'You'll also note—' Mordecai leaned forward and mashed his rollup on his boot sole. 'My sister and I have $140,000 each, clear, inheritance from my parents. Of course we don't want to tie it all up in real estate, but the money would cover mortgage payments for the next several years. Pretty safe bet, Clyde. Offered to me, I'd take it.'

  Claude rubbed his chin. 'You're pushing your luck, Mordecai,' he said appreciatively, tapping at his terminal. 'That's a fair proportion of the value of the property, but…let's see what we could do with a 25year term.'

  As Claude entered figures into his computer, I began to panic.

  'Listen, I—Mr Richards, I don't have to sign anything yet, do I?'

  He shrugged. 'Of course, nothing's binding until you acquire the property. But in a public auction, you've got to have financing right up front—that is why you are here.' He looked at me as if I were a dolt adult.

  'You'll be in touch, then, on February 5?' Claude shook hands with my brother. 'Have to say, never would have thought my bank would be lending The 'Shroom two bits. Life sure is funny.'

Mordecai gave me a friendly pat on the rump as I hauled myself into the truck. 'Quarter of a mil. Not bad for an afternoon's work.'

  My mind was churning. The entire transaction had been conducted over my head. Large amounts of money intimidated me, and I tried to keep out of the clutches of financial institutions just as I avoided the long arm of the law. Now I was potentially snared into owing that little Tudor gingerbread $250,000.

  I tried to take it slowly. 'Say the house goes for the appraisal. We own half of it—'

  'So we pay off the do-gooder and the do-nothing with $205,000,' Mordecai finished for me. 'Leaving you with your $140,000 untouched, with which you can contribute half of the mortgage

payment every month, and buy yourself a few chocolate-covered cherries to boot.'

  'But if Wachovia gives us two-fifty, there's $45,000 left over. What happens to that?'

  'I pay off the lease on my Prolinea 4/66, for a start.'

  'It all gets sunk into Decibelle? Wouldn't half of it be mine?'

  'Technically,' said Mordecai, clicking his eye teeth together with an edge of irritation. 'You could become one of my investors.'

  'What would I get out of investing in your company?'

  'Or you could take your damned money, but I'd say that was pretty ungrateful.'

  'For what should I be so grateful?'

  'You can't imagine that our friend Clyde would give you a mortgage for two-fifty on the basis of that job framing kitty cats in Crabtree Valley. Without me and Decibelle, the best you could hope for would be to get on his Christmas card list. So, yeah, I think you should be grateful. Still want your money?'

  I folded my arms. 'I'll sleep on it. I have to remind you, this whole proposition is hypothetical. I haven't decided to buy the house with you. I haven't decided what I'll do.'

  Mordecai gunned the motor in exasperation. 'Well, you've got eighteen fucking days to make up your mind, baby. For Christ's sake, Corrie Lou, how can you live in that mealy head of yours? I'd shoot myself.'

  I pouted, silent and purple like my mother, staring pointedly out the window and tugging my skirt as close as it would come to my knees.

  'Hey, loosen up,' Mordecai cajoled. 'Sure it must be pretty tricky, you being True's big buddy and all. I'll put in a little work, you get freshened up, I'll take you out to dinner and we'll talk all this through. Wear something slinky, huh? We're gonna show this punk town a pair of legs.'

'Why are you getting so gussied up?'

  'Karen's is chi-chi. For Raleigh, anyway.' I fastened my mother's pearls. The way Truman was glaring you'd think I had a date with Jesse Helms.

  Yet by the time I had finished dabbing a bit of perfume behind each ear, repairing my eyeliner and working the grey heel

smudge on my white hose into my satin pumps, Truman's antagonism had given way to disconsolation. His face slackened much as it had when I hobbled down the front walk to my first prom. My mother reported that as I swept my Lurex gold formal into the waiting Mustang, Truman had collapsed on the stoop and announced with chin in hand, 'I've lost my sister.' Melodramatic, but he was right: once I hit sixteen, I bounced from boyfriend to boyfriend, and didn't give my little brother the time of day. If this evening he was only losing me to his older brother, the dynamic of desertion was if anything compounded.

  I kissed Truman on the forehead and promised I wouldn't be late. Mordecai was waiting—in a clean white shirt, turquoise bolo tie and freshly shined boots.

  'Happy chicken thighs!' I shouted out the door, relieved to escape the monotony of perfect nutrition for one night. As I clambered into the adjutant's seat, trying to protect my pantyhose, the incongruity of my slit-skirted hot-pink silk in Mordecai's army truck was lost on neither of us, but then Mordecai looked on all ceremony as satire.