The Last of the Savages (6 page)

Ronald was slapping his thigh. He pocketed his dollar and told Will he’d better leave before Lester returned from out back.

“I’m not worried about Lester,” Will said, and he probably wasn’t. “But my friend here’s tired.”

We breaststroked our way through the humid murk. Belinda caught up to me on the porch and tried to convince me to stay, or to take her wherever we were going. She kissed me wetly and ran her hand between my legs, but Will was revving the car and in the end I was a little afraid—of her, of sex, of the mysterious chasm of race. I told her, improbably, that I’d come back for her tomorrow and jumped in the car.

We peeled out, spitting gravel back across the lot, and raced away with the windows wide open.

“That was wild,” I howled over the rush of the cool air.

Will nodded. He was silent, withdrawn.

Finally I shouted, “What the hell did you say to that girl, anyway?”

He kept driving as if he hadn’t heard me, and it would be years before I heard the punch line.

L
ate at night, there are two kinds of errant sons—those, like me, who try to sneak in quietly, and those who defiantly jam the brakes and slam the doors as if to insist they’ll never stoop to stealth. Will was the latter. He slammed the car door twice for good measure, possibly in the hope that the sound would carry up the hill to the little house where the lights were glowing ominously.

It seemed as if I’d just finished undressing and fallen backward onto the bed when I was startled bolt upright by a pounding on the door of my room and a series of shrill squawks. Finally I recognized Mr. Savage’s voice between the duck calls. “Rise and shine. Coffee’s on the stove and the ducks are on the water.”

It was still pitch dark when we piled into the station wagon. Elbridge rode shotgun, while Will and I collapsed groggily in the backseat with Beauregard the lab, who was as excited as Will was sullen.

The external world seemed incredibly strange: the cold morning air freighted with smells of leaf decay and wet dog fur, the cinematic flashes of landscape scooped up fleetingly in the cone of the headlights. Drunk and stoned, within minutes I fell asleep.

Later, I was prodded awake by Will and presently found myself on the
edge of a dock, looking out into the blackness. At Mr. Savage’s instigation, I stepped uncertainly down into the varnished ribs of a boat that resembled a large canoe with a flat stern. Our guide—a silent, camouflaged figure—huddled over what looked like a lawn-mower engine.

Will’s father sat beside me as we spluttered across the water, Will and Elbridge following in a second boat. Now and again, like a wading giant, a dark cypress would loom up out of the oblivion. “This was all dry land here,” Cordell announced over the gurgle of the engine, “and then round about 1811 there was an earthquake, maybe the most violent earthquake on this continent ever. Felt the tremors all the way to Boston and New Orleans. At the time this was the hunting grounds of the Chickasaws. A clubfooted chief named Reelfoot was their top dog, and according to legend he stole a Choctaw princess for his wife, whereupon the Great Spirit stamped his giant hoof, crushing the old clubfoot and creating this lake.” He laughed. “Or so they say. There was a white settlement across the river called New Madrid, and when that earthquake hit they figured it was Judgment Day for sure. The earth rolled like a storm sea and belched out sulfur and smoke. Darkness fell for a week. Right out of the Book of Revelation—all fire and brimstone and sulfurous stink.”

He was interrupted by a thump on the bottom of the boat as the stern rose and fell over an obstruction in the water.

“Cypress knee,” he said. “And there’s still stumps from the forest that was here before the quake. The land downstream rose up and the land here dropped fifty feet. They say the Mississippi ran backwards for three days, which is how the lake was formed. God knows how many Indians drowned right underneath us.”

All at once I could see the dead warriors, fish nibbled and bloated in their buckskins, rising from the muddy bottom. I almost leaped out of the boat when we hit another cypress knee.

When we passed close to a rectangular blind rising on stilts out of the black water, he observed, “Plenty of white men have died since, disputing the fishing and hunting rights.” Something in the way he said it suggested that this was a different order of mortality.

Twenty minutes later I was shivering in a duck blind situated at the
edge of a spongy island which was an ancient Chickasaw burial mound, clutching a 12-gauge Winchester pump. Will’s father had explained its operation, but I had no idea if, when the moment came, I would remember what to do, or if I could stand up to the kick. Cordell was still in the boat with the guide, laying out decoys. Gradually their silhouettes grew more distinct beneath a pewter sky turning pink to the east. And suddenly Will, who I thought was dozing in the corner of the blind, raised his gun to his shoulder and aimed it directly at his father’s head.

Shocked by this tableau—son posed for patricide—I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing. In a moment the gun again was resting over his shoulder, and I wondered if my senses, still scrambled from the night, had conjured a hallucination out of the morning haze. Until I looked at Will’s face.

“If we’d only stayed out another hour,” he snarled, “we could have missed this fucking adventure.”

Coming ashore, Mr. Savage said he’d keep an eye on me and sent his sons into the adjacent blind with the guide. Both nervous and eager, I was determined not to disgrace myself. And finding it impossible to reconcile last night’s world with this morning’s, I opted out of choosing and gave myself over to the tutelage of Cordell Savage.

The chatter of invisible ducks drew closer. “On a passing shot,” he whispered, “pick your bird, start from behind, swing your barrel through him and fire. On an incoming bird, just try to put the bead below its beak.”

Beauregard’s cheerful panting increased in tempo. “Stay down until I give the signal.” Ducks called all around us, squawking in casual, interrogative tones. A loud, brassy invitation issued from the blind beside us—the guide with his call, trying to lure them in. Sky and water were now clearly distinct. Cordell peered intently through the slit of the blind and finally said, “Now!”

Rising, I looked into a sky full of violent wings—shots booming all around me—and fired into the maelstrom. The impact knocked me backward. By the time I’d recovered my balance, Mr. Savage had lowered his gun, and Beauregard was paddling in the water, where four ducks were floating.

“Got a double,” Elbridge called from the other blind. I was fairly certain that none of the birds was mine. My mentor saved me the trouble of pretending. “Don’t worry,” he said. “You’ll get the hang of it.”

For the first time I could take in my surroundings: I found myself in a Pleistocene swamp, a miscegenation of land and water for which “lake” seemed a dubious label.

Half an hour went by without any further activity. By now the sky was bright, the sun invisible behind low clouds. Mr. Savage pointed out a bald eagle wheeling overhead. “Benjamin Franklin opposed adopting the bald eagle as our national symbol,” he whispered, “he wanted the damn wild turkey—can you imagine?—because he said the eagle lived in part by killing other birds.” He snuffled in amusement, wiped his nose ostentatiously on his sleeve. “Seems highly appropriate to me.”

He sucked thoughtfully on his cigarette. “I know Will didn’t want to come out here today,” he whispered, glancing over at me. “Two years ago he was supposed to hunt quail down the Delta with me and some old boys. He was out late with this caretaker we had. I inherited Jessie with my marriage and I finally had to fire his ass on account of his trying to turn my boy into a goddamn juvenile delinquent. I swear to God it’s a wonder Will’s skin isn’t black as coal the amount of time he spent in the damn servants’ quarters and sneaking around Beale Street instead of asleep in his room.”

He raised his head above the edge of the blind in reconnaissance before resuming his story.

“Anyway, Will stayed in bed and I brought his younger brother along. We were hunting horseback. Charlie Ledbetter had taken his gun out of the scabbard for some damn reason when his horse stepped in a hole and went down. Gun went off. Hit young A.J. square in the chest. Lifted him right out of his saddle.” He fell silent at the sound of an approaching flight, which eventually faded to the east. “I think Will blames himself,” he said. “Which isn’t to say he doesn’t blame me.”

We were silent for some time again before he spoke. “He ever tell you that story?”

“No sir,” I said. “Not exactly.”

“Not a day goes by I don’t wish it was me on that buckskin mare.” He
turned and looked at me seriously for the first time. It was a long searching look, a blatant appraisal, and I can’t imagine what he might have seen to please him, for I was nervous and hung over and tired all the way to the ends of my hair and to this day I can’t comfortably meet the sustained gaze of a man like Cordell Savage. But it was at that moment, I believe, he decided to deputize me as his representative to Will. He offered me a cigarette, a Lucky Strike, and for the second time in less than twenty-four hours I accepted a ritual smoke, though the two implied promises seemed incompatible and even contradictory.

My pact with Will’s father was sealed with my first kill. When a string of high fliers approached our blind from the south, he let me take the shot. I stood and tracked the lead mallard, swinging from behind and pulling the trigger as the bead cleared the outstretched green head. To my astonishment the duck folded neatly and tumbled out of the sky at a forty-five-degree angle, seeming to fall for many miles before crashing into the cattails on the island behind us. Beauregard was already thrashing through the rushes; I was right behind him, oblivious to the harsh abrasion of the saw grass.

Holding the limp, broken body of the mallard in my hand I was briefly touched with remorse. I stroked back the feathers of the bird and saw, amidst the forest of quills, three shiny lice writhing on the translucent pink skin. Sinking to my knees, I threw up, retching stealthily under cover of the cattails as Beauregard barked and licked my neck. When I was finally purged I heard them calling my name. Wiping my mouth, I stood up holding my trophy overhead, and slogged back to the blind, affecting a triumphant mien that became real once Mr. Savage clapped me on the back and said, “That was a fine shot, boy.”

“Come on, I wanna show you something.” Will was shaking me. I woke with a start in the shotgun seat of the Cadillac, apparently in the same neighborhood where we had dissipated ourselves the night before. In the fading light of the afternoon, three sullen Negroes in fedoras slouched in front of a dilapidated storefront, smoking and surveying us with suspicious insouciance.

I followed Will, who nodded and walked past them into the store. A pool table took up half of the room within; a couple of pinball machines and a card table with folding chairs completed the furnishings. The two men playing pool looked up. “If it ain’t my man Will,” said the small, white-haired man who’d been shooting. He walked over and exchanged a complicated, slapping handshake with Will, who in turn introduced him to me, sans hand jive. “Patrick, Jessie Petit. Jessie’s my chief operating officer.”

“That’s what he says.” His broad smile revealed a gold front tooth. “It’s the same old shit, the black man works his ass off, the white man sits on his and collects the take.”

“You could always,” Will suggested, “go back to work for my old man.”

“Well, there’s white men and then there’s white men.”

“Now I suppose you’re going to tell me what a bad week we’ve had.”

Jessie laughed an exaggerated, mock-servile laugh. “Well, now you mention it, Knife White hit the box this week and that set us back some.”

“Seems like somebody’s always hitting big,” Will said jovially.

They continued in this obscure vein until two young women entered and, upon seeing us, started to back out; but Jessie waved them in and shooed us away. “Get on out of here, you bad for business.”

Back in the car I asked what kind of business Jessie was in.

“Numbers,” Will said. “He runs it, I back it. I’m the bank.”

“You don’t look like a bank.”

I’d heard the phrase “numbers racket” but hardly knew what it meant; I was only partly enlightened by the explanation Will delivered as we raced at terrifying speed through the back streets of South Memphis.

“Jessie was the groundskeeper on our place. He was the one who turned me on to the blues. All the time I was growing up he said he could get rich if only somebody’d back him in a numbers game. They all play the numbers—it’s like, I don’t know, a lottery. Pick three numbers and if they come up you win, a few hundred, a thousand, depending on the bet. Jessie just needed a bank. So I went to my uncle Jerome
and asked to borrow ten grand and told him I’d pay him back in a month with interest. Well, old Uncle J., he gave me my first drink and my first cigarette and he was always crazy as a bedbug and hot on the idea of corrupting minors. So now Jessie and me got so much money we don’t know where to hide it.”

He threw the car into a hard left turn, which slammed me up against the door.

“Where do you get the number,” I asked after I had regained my balance.

“The
Wall Street Journal.
Last digit of three Dow-Jones averages—industrials, utilities, transportation. Bets close at three p.m. Memphis time. An hour later when the exchange closes in New York you got the number.”

This fact suggested an intriguing if tenuous linkage between the poor sporting blacks of Memphis and the financial barons of Wall Street, and explained Will’s unlikely subscription to the
Journal.

Will and I sat quietly through dinner that night—leftover turkey—while Cheryl smoldered innocently and Elbridge tried to explain to his father why he was taking a poetry class.

“Seems like a damn waste of time and money,” Mr. Savage said.

“For a nineteenth-century southern gentleman,” Elbridge claimed, “having a dozen or two poems committed to memory was as important as knowing how to shoot.”