South of Broad (12 page)

The quickness of it, the brutality, and the fact that I knew an ambush had occurred frightened me to the point of paralysis. His strength awed me. His quickness and complete mastery of the attack took me a moment to comprehend. When I had recovered enough to scream, his hand covered my mouth, a hand that felt like a first baseman’s mitt. Then I felt a knife at my throat, and not the fun kind of knife that kids throw at trees.

For a minute, he satisfied himself with the tactical accomplishment of his bold assault. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I could see he wore a cheap Halloween mask with the eyeholes cut out larger. The mask was black, and I could smell spray paint. Then he whispered to me,
“‘Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed’”

No words any stranger could utter would cause me such surprise and terror. Because of those words, I felt certain the man was going to butcher me in that alley. No one without the most intimate, diabolical knowledge of my past would know the indescribable impact those words would have on me at such a moment. I was most likely the only rising senior in the American South who realized that the man had just uttered, in a voice filled with mockery and grotesque insider knowledge, the first line of
Ulysses
.

“So, Leo, my boy, you and your parents love to go to church every morning. Isn’t that nice? So goody-goody. So pious. So true to Roman Catholic doctrine.”

My mind sped up, and I thought a Klansman with a college degree had tracked me down. His knife played across my jugular vein. His breath was fresh and his voice polished as I smelled a trace of Listerine as well as the scent of English Leather aftershave.

“‘Riverrun,’
Leo,” the man whispered, taunting me with the first word in Joyce’s silly-assed novel
Finnegans Wake
. “I could cut your mother’s throat, Leo,” he added. “She’s alone in her office a lot. Or your father’s. That’s a nice little lab he has set up in the house. Or your new friend, that nigger Jefferson you work out with every morning. You choose, Leo. Which one?”

Too paralyzed to speak, I was having difficulty breathing when he continued. “Or how about you, Leo, right here in this alley? I could end your life now and no one, not even you, would know why you were killed. Or, let’s get creative: suppose I dig up the bones of your brother, and you wake up one morning sleeping next to his bones? I like that one, Leo. You like it? No, I didn’t think you would. Let’s make a deal: I watched you fucking your new neighbor the other night. Let’s not have that happen again. Is that a deal, Leo?”

I nodded my head.

“Tell anyone about what happened here, and I kill your mom and dad. I’ll take my time and do it slow. Then I’ll come for you. Now hold still, Leo.”

There was a sudden click of a flashlight, blinding me, and the knife went away. I heard it moan back into its sheath. Then a greater fear than I had yet felt overwhelmed me as I smelled the distinctive odor of fingernail polish and felt the man painting something on my forehead. He took his time. When he was finished, he said, “Don’t move for five minutes. Promise me, Leo. Say, like Molly Bloom,
‘Yes I said yes I will Yes.’”

“‘Yes I said yes I will Yes,’” I said, strangling on my own black terror as the man rose and walked calmly down Stoll’s Alley, leaving me with only the last line of
Ulysses
to keep me company.

For more than five minutes, I waited. Not until it was daylight did I move and walk my bike to Church Street. Moving toward a Mercedes-Benz parked on the street, I studied my face in the rearview mirror. My left eye was red, but it probably wouldn’t blacken or close. The left lens of my glasses was shattered. But the disturbing sign was the one I was expecting—there on my forehead was the death’s-head stigmata of the smiley face, with the single exaggerated tear beneath the left eye. With one of my remaining newspapers and my fingernails, I scraped off the disfigured painting on my head, then walked into a customer’s spacious garden, turned on the spigot, and washed my face. Because of the threats made by the attacker, I could not tell anyone what had happened. To explain my broken glasses, I would have to fabricate an accident on my bike. I wondered what blighted, unspeakable world I had entered by accident.

M
y idea to entertain the twins after the frightening night they had been through was spontaneous and full of holes, but my father agreed to help me form a coherent plan. I called him from the Poes’ house the day after my secret attack in the alley, and detected a quaver in his voice when I asked for his help. It was a quaver that nearly broke my heart; for in it, I could hear his eagerness to help, his earnest father’s hope that even the slightest sense of happiness might be jaywalking across the street, heading in his only son’s direction. He grasped my plan easily, and promised to have everything ready.

“Can I borrow your convertible, Father? The ’57 Chevy.” I knew I was asking a huge favor. “I’ll take good care of it. I promise.”

“Didn’t I tell you? I don’t own that car anymore, son. I got rid of it.”

“When?” I was outraged. I had thought my old man would have sold my mother and me into slavery before letting his favorite car out of his sight. “Who’d you sell it to?”

“I didn’t sell it to anyone. That car’s too precious to sell. I’m giving it to you, son. I was always going to give it to you, but I have to wait until you get off restriction. You can borrow it; it’ll be washed and ready to run when you get home.”

I hung up without saying good-bye. I could not utter a word, not a single word, not at that time, not to anyone on earth. My father’s approach to the world was narrow-gauged and shot through with modesty and diffidence; he lacked flashiness, boldness, and flair. Each day he approached as a formula he would study with assiduousness and solve with aplomb. His affection for swank, fast cars was an oddity for him, the one misfit sentence in a textbook of boilerplate, scientific prose. Never had he purchased a brand-new car off the lot, but waited with his granite-like patience until a car had aged enough to fall into the price range of a high school science teacher. He was now driving a black ’56 Thunderbird convertible that he had pronounced a classic the moment he laid eyes on it, when it made its debut on the Charleston streets, now more than a decade earlier.

When Sheba and Trevor appeared in our yard, I was shy around Sheba. Trevor’s lighthearted presence, however, made being with her a little less formidable. My father had apparently put aside his distrust of them, and seemed happy to entertain the only two people in town who had not heard the twenty-five canned jokes he carried in his measly repertoire. He chatted amiably with them while I ran to put on my bathing suit, a Citadel T-shirt, and an Atlanta Braves baseball cap Father had bought me when we caught a double-header the summer before.

When I came to the garage door, Father threw me the keys high in the air. I made the imaginary gesture of removing a catcher’s mask, adjusted my glasses, and made the catch near my mother’s prize camellia bushes. The twins cheered. My father bowed, then loaded a large inner tube into the backseat and instructed Trevor to hold on to it tightly as the convertible sped its way toward James Island.

“Does Mr. Ferguson know we’re coming to his plantation?” I asked him.

“He does, and he knows why you’re coming. I told him we’d pick up the Chevy tomorrow.”

“Make sure you meet us when we make it to the Ashley,” I said.

“I called Jimmy Wiggins at the marina. He’s lending me his Boston Whaler. I’ll be doing a little fishing when you come out of the creek.”

“You fishing for whales?” Sheba asked.

“No, sweetie, that’s just the name of the boat.”

When I started the car, I had one great worry, but I had a plan for how to deal with it. I’d still told no one about the man in the alley, concocting a bike wreck to explain my bruised face. Since my attacker had taken on an aura of omnipotence and mystery, I worried about him following us, trailing after us like a mako shark following the scent of a wounded grouper through the grottoes of a coral reef. But if this man pursued us on this day, he would have to know the streets of Charleston as well as I did. I was both a native of the city and a paperboy to boot, so a map had imprinted itself on my brain.

I gunned the car down Lockwood Boulevard, then made a sharp right and shot through the streets beside the city’s hospital before swinging left on Ashley Boulevard, checking my rearview mirror as I turned sharply down each street. By the time I reached the Savannah highway, I was certain we were not being followed, and I relaxed and joined the twins in their animated conversation as I turned south, psycho-free and happy to be a teenage boy, at long last.

I was light-headed as I listened to the twins talk nonsense. Trevor leaned between us from the backseat. When he felt me relax, he invited me into their country of delicious, ridiculous banter. In the life I had lived, the free-flowing chatter of teenagers was unfamiliar. I found it joyous and liberating as we made our way across the Ashley River Bridge and headed out toward Folly Beach Road.

“Leo, it’s my thought that Sheba should marry Elvis Presley next year.”

“Isn’t Elvis married?” I asked.

“A mere inconvenience. One glimpse of Sheba and Elvis would be sprinting toward the nearest divorce court. I’ve never met the man who could put up the slightest resistance to my sister’s pagan charms. Except for a man like me, of course. You know what I mean, Leo? Surely you know that I’m drawn to other compass points.”

“Compass points?” I asked. Though I was desperate to be sophisticated, I lacked the foggiest notion of what he was talking about.

“Leo is a pure innocent,” Sheba said. “You talk good, but you never know what you’re talking about. And I disagree about Elvis. I don’t see myself as a home breaker. More like a nurse or a goddess.”

“Ah!” Trevor said. “She lays out her life in all its simplicity.”

“I was thinking about marrying Paul McCartney. I can tell by his eyes that he’s a soul mate. Through him, I could jump-start my acting career, play Juliet on the London stage, and meet the queen of England. I’d love to meet the queen. I sense her loneliness and it’s obvious that Prince Philip was a marriage of convenience, not of passion. I could keep her confidences while guiding Paul into making the right career moves.”

“I live for beauty,” Trevor said, apropos of nothing. “I will always go where beauty leads me.”

“I admire beauty,” Sheba answered him, “but art is what drives me. I want to be the leading actress of my time. I’d like to marry three or four of the most fascinating men in my era. But I want to make the whole world laugh and cry and be happy to be alive because my acting has touched them so deeply.”

“Well spoken,” Trevor said. He turned to me and asked, “What are your grandest ambitions, Leo? Hold nothing back. You and your father took up arms to protect us the other night, so you’ve become heroic in our eyes.”

Tongue-tied and uncomfortable, I found myself inadequate to utter a word to these otherworldly twins. My dream of being with Sheba again one night was beginning to seem like the most absurd thing on earth. Should I tell them that I planned to wed Sophia Loren or become secretary general of the United Nations or take my vows and become the first American Pope? My mind raced as we sped out on James Island and I thought about some burning desire to be an astronaut, to study the mating habits of blue whales, to convert all of China to Roman Catholicism. All of these half-baked lies clustered around my tongue when I finally said, “I’m thinking about being a journalism major in college.”

“He can write about us, Sheba,” Trevor said, his voice animated. “He can spread our fame far and wide.”

“We’ll give him scoops,” she said. “That’s what a journalist needs more than anything: scoops.” At that moment, I had entered the whimsical, make-believe world of two kids whose lives would have proven all but unbearable if they had not set their imaginations free. It was a world where all the rules of civilized life had been smashed into shards and remade.

Though I had never been to the Secessionville Plantation, my father had given me precise directions, and I easily found the dirt road that brought us within sight of the mythic plantation. It was set on high ground, presiding over a vast acreage of marshlands that stretched for miles, the length and breadth of James Island Creek and the Folly River. Mr. Ferguson waved from the porch and gave us a thumbs-up sign; his pretty wife called down to see if we needed anything before we began our adventure.

Trevor’s bathing suit was so skimpy it looked as though it were made by sewing two yarmulkes together. “It’s European,” he explained. Sheba’s bathing suit was a flesh-colored bikini revealing enough to make me believe she could have her pick between Elvis and Paul McCartney, had either been lucky enough to join us that day.

“Do you like my bathing suit, Leo?” she asked.

“What bathing suit?” I answered, and both twins laughed.

For the first time in my life, I set foot on the floating dock where my parents had fallen in love well over thirty years before. Since my father had revealed the story of their courtship, I started planning to make this watery trip alone. But I wanted to share it with two new friends, one of whom had pocketed away my virginity forever. I threw the inner tube into the retreating tide—it was the exact hour that the moon had issued the recall papers to all the waters of the marsh. As we stepped onto the dock, the tides turned, exactly as I had planned it. We dove into the warm, sweet waters and came up to the inner tube laughing, then began our long, slow-motion float out toward the Atlantic, which in its immensity and silence, waited for all things.

In the summertime, the saltwater that floods the creeks and bays and coves of South Carolina is warm and sun-shot and silken to the touch. It did not hurt or shock to enter the water, but soothed and washed away the frazzled nerves of our runaway week. The creek was dark with the nutrients gathered in the great salt marsh; you could not see your hand if you opened your eyes underwater. We were swimming in a part of the Atlantic that the state of South Carolina had borrowed for a while. Now the tide was hurtling back, drawing the essence of its marshes, the blue crabs lying in wait for stragglers who would soon be prey. As the tide receded, the oysters would be locked tight, retaining a shot-glass-ful of seawater that would hold them until the next full tide; the flounders hidden in the mudflats; the mullets flashing in quicksilver sea grass; the small sharks nosing around for carrion; the blue herons straight-legged and heraldic in their motionless hunt; the snowy egrets—the only creatures in the Low Country whose name invoked winter—staring at the shallows for the quick run of minnows. I let the twins take it all in, and we remained wordless for the first hundred yards, remarkable only in our stillness and the rightness of the moment.