Spinning Dixie (30 page)

A familiar surrender onto a worn couch. The urgent union uncovers bodies lean from training, not youth. These are not the bodies of colts anymore, but aging workhorses that have done all right by time. I feel a hint of panic.
How'm I doin'?
In olden times, there was no tabulation, just feral senses in gyroscopic motion. She feels less illicit than she did once, perhaps because life had since grown from this act, whereas it had once been mischief and sanctuary. The bride is too beautiful, I think, this time in a good way. What's so bad about a beautiful bride?

As horses grind grass between their teeth outside, what happens inside confirms for me that I love her. I know she wonders as she falls onto me,
How'd I do?
She did fine, better than I did. I'm still alive, Pajamas! I worship her after she falls momentarily asleep.

“Oh, you again,” I say to my wife when she opens her eyes.

 

We awake to an unfamiliar whinny. It is a higher-pitched sound than the ones our quarter horses made. I run outside. A dapple gray filly bobs her head wildly in the corral. Yes, yes, yes. I know this animal, don't I? Whoever had dropped off the horse was gone. I approach her slowly and stroke her nose. The sunlight catches a gold plate around her neck. I read it, taking a few moments afterward to collect myself.

My family comes out and marvels at the horse. I disclose our benefactor. Claudine means nothing to the kids, but Edie nods, keeping her protests buried down deep, perhaps with all that Confederate gold.

Ricky sits down on the porch to read his ever-present almanac with Edie. His profile is his mother's. Lily spins wildly in a tire swing with a neighbor's boy. She is wearing a cowgirl getup: short shorts, a white hat, a yellow-gold vest, an Indian belt holding two toy guns that she made out of Legos—and a pair of slick, white Western boots with nasty heels. Her auburn hair flies up around the brim of her hat as she shouts something at the recoiling boy.

“I don't know where she comes from,” Edie says, bewildered.

I do.

Lily will make you bleed if you cross her, but no one bleeds more than she does when she's at war. Lily and the boy are spinning and spinning in the moment as Deedee did so long ago at the dance at Rattle & Snap. She is unaware that someday when she is grown the arc of this boy's life may enrapture her, not because they are destined for each other, but because they are a part of each other.

I turn back to the new horse, and take the gold plate around her neck and see that it reads “Miserlou,” the name of the klezmer song we once danced to. On the flip side, there was an engraved verse:

September 1980

The gangland war over Atlantic City took fifteen years and two dozen deaths to play out before Angelo Bruno's once mighty Cosa Nostra was reduced to a handful of street-corner hotheads. The leading theory is that Tony Bananas killed Mr. Bruno because he was told he'd be installed as boss by his benefactors in New York in exchange for a greater percentage of the Golden Prospect “skim.” An informant later testified that a New York boss called Nunzi had stroked Bananas' vanity, leading him to believe he'd replace Mr. Bruno, only to deny having given the order before the ruling Cosa Nostra commission. The double cross yielded Nunzi Bananas' lucrative New Jersey rackets upon his car-bomb assassination, which left him in pieces. It was a ludicrous gambit, and, if true, meant that the most brutal mob war since prohibition was sparked by a terrible delusion.

The hit on Tony Bananas occurred the day I drove up to Dartmouth with my grandparents in a tan Chevrolet station wagon. As I later determined, Mickey's accompaniment was more than familial support for my matriculation: I was his alibi. We were being shadowed by a nondescript van containing a heavily armed Carvin' Marvin and Fuzzy Marino.

“Just in case” was all Mickey said when I saw them looming in the rearview mirror when we pulled out of the Golden Prospect.

The leaves reddened as we cruised through Vermont. I had a queer thought that the redness may have been due to the planet's embarrassment, but dismissed it, concluding that I was not capable of rational thought by the time we crossed the Connecticut River into Hanover, New Hampshire, and Dartmouth College (longitude 74.63883, latitude 43.70337).

I was so distracted by all of the activity on campus that I drove right by the Hanover Inn. Looping back, the one-way streets brought us face-to-face with the columned façade of Webster Hall. “Again with the pillars,” Deedee snapped. Later, walking up Main Street with my grandmother (who was
not
-impressed-with-the-shopping-here-
let-me-tell-you
), we engaged in our final dialectic about Claudine. “I don't know, Deed, I'd always worry that whenever she was out of my sight she'd be cheating on me.”

“I have news for you, kiddo, with a girl that pretty, there's always cheating. Either she cheats because she's got all these options, or the man she ends up with cheats because abandonment is the only thing she respects. Knowing you, you'd love her, and she'd never forgive you for it. What I don't teach you, life will.”

I nodded as if I understood.

Mickey awaited us on the porch of the Hanover Inn wearing a T-shirt that read
BIG GREEN
, Dartmouth's incomprehensible “mascot” ever since they kayoed the Indian in the 1970s because of concerns about racism. Seeing this gutter goblin proudly displaying his collegiate shirt struck me as being poetic, a nuanced irony that most people would miss, but would have registered with F. Scott Fitzgerald or another channeler enamored of the American saga.

“Jonah, why is this school so hung up on green?” Deedee asked, shaking her head ruefully at her husband. “It's an awful color for a woman, honest to God.”

“Dartmouth only let women in a few years ago,” I explained. “Maybe as the place gets more women, they'll change the color.”

“What color does that Princeton place have?” she asked.

Mickey got annoyed: “Orange and black. You'd look like a pumpkin.”

“What, do I look fat?” To Deedee, fat was on a par with leprosy.

“No,” Mickey argued. “Orange and black are colors for Halloween.”

“But I'm not getting fat, am I?”

“No. So you wouldn't look like a pumpkin, you'd look like a witch.”

“A
witch
I can be. When you're asleep, I'm going to throw you in a-a-a pot and boil you. I already turned you into a bat. Look at you, all wrinkled.” Deedee turned to me. “Jonah, I always thought I should have ended up with Peter Lawford. Who I knew, by the way.”

A tall girl, hair the shade of autumn, the lingering kiss of windburn on her cheekbones from a late summer sail, walks up holding two unwieldy floor lamps. My heart flutters, and I read it as a betrayal of Claudine. Were my erotic obsessions so cheaply transferable? Was it possible that I was not a romantic at all, but a flake who had bought into his own adolescent histrionics, love sanctified by nothing more than neon? I replayed the wonder in Claudine's eyes when we rode up the Golden Prospect's elevator to meet the Wizard of Odds last spring. I mourned the possibility that Claudine had swooned for the casino's bells, with its Rat Pack patina, and I had been collateral to her core infatuation. It was the first time since I left Tennessee that I began to entertain the possibility of my own survival.

“
You,
with the eyes!” Deedee shouted to the tall girl. With the eyes.

Me?

Kill me now.

“Yes, you,” Deedee said. “C'mere. You should be a lighthouse up on a beach with those eyes. This is my grandson, Jonah, and that's Moses. You know Mount Sinai?”

The stunned girl reluctantly said yes.

“Well, honey,” Deedee snapped, “He thinks that was him. You should know my grandson.”

The poor girl set down her lamps and identified herself as a freshman named Diana.

“
Those
are what you call
eyes
. Gorgeous eyes!” Deedee emphasized adding, “I'm really shallow that way, honey. Now, Jonah, help this beautiful girl with the lights. And be good.”

Deedee walked into the Hanover Inn. I buried my face in my palms. When I looked up, I promised Diana I would help her as soon as I finished up with Mickey. She started across Wheelock Street.

“Jonah, of all the things my enemies have tried to do to me over the years—bombs, Castro, tommy guns, poison—she, your grandmother, was the lowest trick in the book!”

“We've both taken shots from women this summer,” I said.

“Well,
boychik,
I can't stop you from thinking about your little friend down there. We all think about somebody, I suppose. But you don't want a girl like that. You need to pick a girl you can do business with.”

“Do you think you can do business with Deedee?”

“It's been a good deal, actually. In a good deal, it's a draw. With Claudine Polk, you were the mark.”

That one burned.

“What did you have on old Smoky, Pop?”

“You remember Mel Sletsky from back home?”

“A little.”

“When he sold his sporting goods store and moved from Atlantic City to Stone Harbor, he changed his name to Sinclair. Sinclair,
mein tuchus
. Twenty-five years ago, Smoky Hilliard was Elmer Hicksen from Pulaski. The sticks. J.T. may not know this. The Polks probably don't; they're not the kind of people that go digging. Not anymore anyway. Those old Polks—did you see the eyes on Old Will in that painting? Shot in the face and kept swinging. If Will had lived a few hundred more years, there'd be blackjack tables all over that plantation. Anyhow, Smoky still is who he was. He wants to go back to Pulaski with the other cross burners like Joe Kennedy wanted to go back to running hooch after he had tea with Churchill.

“These investors you told Irv were buying up this plantation—it's Smoky Hilliard. He's got the Polks by the short hairs. He wants this place, preferably with your girlfriend in the boxed set. He's also got some kind of disposal arrangement for chemicals with my friends in New Orleans, too. Works with a law firm down there that does a lot of work for, uh, you know, guys like me. Waste from his plant that should be carted far away is dealt with some other way. Who knows? I just tweaked it. Like me, Jonah, he did what he had to do to get what he's got. He wants Love Canal on his docket like I want Kefauver to come back from the dead. That's what I got from his tell.”

I could not think of anything to say, at least not anything intelligent. I just made a pensive face. “Are you going to grab something to eat?”

“Nah, I recently had a banana split,” Mickey said, flicking a bug off his wrist. It took years for his pun to register with me. “Now, go help that nice, fancy girl with all the lights.”

I cross Wheelock Street glancing backward. The campus green is a whirling panorama of pillars.
“Look!”
Mickey admonishes from the front steps of the Hanover Inn, pointing someplace unspecific out in front of me. This is the abbreviated version of Mickey's patented “pay attention” lecture. The tall parents of other freshmen give Mickey the novelty mien of a cartoon magician. If they only knew, I think.

On the corner of Main and Wheelock, the Dartmouth Aires, the school's a cappela vocal group, are welcoming one thousand men and women to the college of their choice with a riff on Skynyrd's rock anthem, “Free Bird.” Mickey takes a cigarette out of a dull gold case and flips it into his mouth. He frisks himself for a lighter. No luck for the Mad Hatter. Carvin' Marvin emerges like a thundercloud from behind a white post to light the cigarette for him. Twenty years since the surgeon general declared tobacco a killer, and this old killer isn't scared. The Arieses' incarnation of Skynyrd echoes against pavement:
“And this bird you cannot change.”
Mickey's demeanor hardens as the cigarette begins to ignite orange like the afterburner of a fighter jet. As smoke whispers from his teeth, Marvin, having done his duty, retreats back to the cool shadows, where gangsters and jackrabbits live. My grandfather winks at me as if he knows where treasure is buried.

As Mickey's ash falls to the pavement, my phantom youth goes on the lam.

I'm in play.

Amon Carter Evans, who owned Rattle & Snap for more than a quarter century, was generous with his time and insight. Deane Hendrix, curator of the plantation during the Evans era, was a valuable source of historical information. I also gleaned lots of data from history books such as William R. Polk's
Polk's Folly
. Author Charlotte Hays set me straight on how things work below the Mason-Dixon.

Chris Myers and his Mississippi Mafia have provided a strong foothold for my literary efforts in the Deep South (I'm not talking about South Jersey).

My heartfelt thanks go to old friends in Tennessee who shall remain nameless because their warmth and hospitality so long ago should not be met with unwarranted speculation because of the daydreams of an obsessive adolescent. They may embrace or deny me privately as they wish.

My editor, Sean Desmond, has championed
Spinning Dixie
since well before he was in a position to publish it. Every writer should be so lucky. My new editor, Erin Brown, brilliantly shepherded the book to market. Kris Dahl at ICM gave me permission to shift into a new writing genre, allowing a youthful fantasy to become an actual book. Bob Stein felt the book's sentimental pull in the days when a book contract was just a delusion.

My wife, Donna, and children, Stuart and Eliza, are always my guiding lights. My equestrian partner Eliza was especially helpful with horse knowledge.