Under the Mercy Trees (5 page)

He flipped to the next piece in the stack. The picture, from ten years earlier, was of North Carolina's favorite son, Deke Armstrong, shaking hands with a grinning Andy Griffith. The caption celebrated a coup by the North Carolina film commission. A movie Martin had never heard of would be shot entirely in North Carolina.

Deke Armstrong. A man who had dumped Martin with such bruising finality that Martin, usually shameless with acquaintances who had money, had never bothered him for a loan.

“I saved it because you knew him at college,” Bertie said. “Do you ever hear from him?”

“We haven't kept in touch.”

She straightened the papers in her folder into right angles, then got up. “I guess I'll go to bed.” She stopped in the doorway and studied his face. “It's good to have you here, Martin. You know, you don't have to change houses tomorrow. It'd be easier if you just stayed here.”

“Sorry, Bertie. I'm more scared of Eugenia than I am of you.”

Bertie left and Martin looked out the window. He had forgotten how dark the country was at night. No streetlights for miles, not even car headlights from this side of the trailer. And the sounds. No ocean sound of city traffic. Insistent scrapings of insect legs, dogs howling, and every shuffle, every flush, every step of the other two human beings in the trailer. The walls might as well have been made of cardboard. If Bertie and James had conversed in whispers in their bedroom down the hall he would have been able to discern every word. But they didn't talk.

He turned back to Bertie's folder to see if there were any more articles about himself. There was a brief mention when he graduated from college but nothing else. Deke Armstrong had gone on to a respectable career in Hollywood, making sure that he returned to North Carolina often enough to preserve his place as the big fish in a little pond. Martin's fleeting career as a playwright hadn't made the news in Willoby County. He picked up the picture of Deke again. Grainy newsprint softened Deke's sharp cheekbones and jaw, but the haughtiness Martin remembered was still there.

*  *  *

At the end of Martin's first week as a freshman at Chapel Hill, brain-tired from five days of classes, he took a seat in the second row of the Playmakers Theatre for the drama group's organizational meeting. Twenty other students sat around him. At a table in front of the theater's stage, a pretty blonde and a thin, pale-faced boy watched the clock for the time to start. Also at the table, reading while he smoked a cigarette, was a dark young man who looked older than everybody else. As Martin watched, the man's cigarette burned down, a bridge of ashes arching over his book, until Martin was sure it would fall and singe the pages. At the last moment, the man took it out of his mouth and flicked it into an ashtray to his right. His dark eyes evaluated the gathering audience. Martin looked away before the man's gaze reached him. The blonde called the meeting to order.

The girl named Margaret who had signed Martin up slipped into the seat beside him. “Hiya, playwright,” she said.

As the blonde went over preliminaries, Martin asked Margaret, “Who's that fellow in black?”

“Deke Armstrong,” she whispered.

He tried the name out in his mouth.

“He saw action in Korea,” Margaret said. “He's brilliant onstage. He played John White in
The Lost Colony
this summer.”

The thin boy took the floor. “We're holding auditions for
Tartuffe
in three weeks. I have scripts for anyone interested. If you want to work on costumes or scenery, see Bess after the meeting.” He pointed to the blonde. “The other thing we're putting on this semester is a series of student-written one-act plays. Submit them to Deke before September fifteenth if you want your work considered. No suicides or people waking up at the end of the play to discover it was all a dream, please.”

Martin blushed. The play he'd written for Mr. Samuels,
Fortunate One
, featured a suicide. He started to rewrite it in his head.

“And now, to get us all in the dramatic mood, Deke Armstrong has agreed to do a reading for us from Shakespeare's
King Lear
.”

With so many people fawning over him, Deke could have been pretentious. Martin watched him, ready to snort and poke Margaret in the ribs as a homely substitute for Liza if Deke seemed too impressed with himself. But Deke gave an easy smile and rose. “Let's see if I can do the Bard justice.”

“ ‘Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!' ”

Except for his own play and occasional movies in Whelan, Martin had never seen a dramatic performance. Deke's smooth voice reading old words, the way his jaw muscles flexed as he read, riveted Martin. At the end of the passage, when Deke spoke the last lines and closed the book, Martin couldn't move.

That night he dreamed that the Playmakers were hazing him in a fraternity initiation. He ran naked with his pledge brothers through a canopy of hands and feet that kicked and punched. He slipped on cold grass and looked up to see Deke. Deke's hands on his shoulders lifted him up, then slammed him back down hard on the ground. Deke's hands didn't rest on him any longer than any other brother's hands, but the shock that went through Martin at Deke's touch was like nothing he had felt before. He woke up alone in his bedroom at Mrs. Bowen's, embarrassed at his physical response.

He reworked
Fortunate One
and left it in Deke's mailbox in the Playmakers office. In October the temperature dropped into the thirties. Martin excused his thin coat by telling people he was warm natured. On a miserably cold day, as he walked through a wind tunnel between class buildings, he heard someone call his name.

“Owenby! Hold up.” Deke finished a conversation with another student and walked over to Martin. Martin hadn't thought Deke knew his name. “Your play,” Deke said.

Deke had the play in his hand. Martin could see the flimsy watermarked paper he had used, the lower case
e
's from Mrs. Bowen's typewriter all filled in with ink. Deke had read his play.

“You have potential.” Deke walked beside him, less than two feet away. Martin could smell him, a cold smell like air before it snows. “The cause and effect bit, sin and retribution, is juvenile. When you've lived a little you'll learn that sinners go free and the innocent suffer all the time.” Deke's smile twisted bitter for an instant. “Anyway.” He handed the play to Martin. “See my edits, and if you can live with them, we'll put on your play.”

“Great,” Martin said, ever the brilliant man of words.

He wished he could write to his high school teacher, Mr. Samuels, to tell him about the play, but Mr. Samuels had moved away right after graduation, and no one knew where he had gone. Instead Martin wrote to his mother and told her that the Carolina Playmakers were putting on his play. She wrote back, in her even, sweet penmanship, telling him how proud she was and sending him ten dollars to buy a new shirt for the performance. She must have saved the money out of the stingy bits Martin's father gave her for the household. Martin washed his old shirt and pressed it with Mrs. Bowen's iron. At a second-hand store he ran his fingers over used coats, imagining what it would be like to be really warm in one instead of just pretending. He chose a dark brown calf-length wool coat from the 1920s that had the flair of a costume so he could claim he bought it used on purpose. He wore it out of the store, hoping to air out its camphor smell. With his hands in his pockets, he was warm for the first time that fall.

The upperclassmen who would direct the student plays invited him to a working meeting at the Carolina Coffee Shop, near campus. He could tell his star had climbed. When he entered the smoky coffeehouse, group members looked at him with interest. Deke waved him over to the booth where they were sitting.

“Nice coat,” he said.

“It costed a whole ten dollars,” Martin said, as if ten dollars wasn't a lot of money.

“Cost,” Deke said, correcting his grammar. “It
cost
ten dollars.” Before Martin could feel embarrassed, Deke moved over and made room for him. When others arrived after that, Martin had to move closer still, until his leg pressed against Deke's and Deke's arm jostled him when he tapped his cigarette in the ashtray. Deke didn't try to move away. Martin relaxed. This was how he had always imagined college, sitting around with intelligent people, exchanging ideas. Thanks to Mr. Samuels's recommended readings list, he sounded as though he knew more about philosophy and literature than he actually did. He nursed a cup of coffee, his stomach growling.

Deke sparred with the thin boy who had run the Playmakers meeting. Their argument over whether writers had to live dangerously in order to have anything worthwhile to say progressed to a discussion of the parallels between Homer's
Odyssey
and Hemingway's
For Whom the Bell Tolls
. Martin listened, remembering the spring he turned twelve, when his father found him under a tree, buried in a boy's version of the
Odyssey
. His father made him put the book down and gave him a bag of peas to plant. Martin pressed peas into exactly three holes before the characters in the book started to call to him like sirens. He dug one big hole, poured the rest of the peas into it, covered them up and went back to his book. When his father asked him if he had planted the peas, he said yes. In the spring, when the peas came up in a tangle and died, his father beat him with a belt so badly he had to miss school for two days. Lying in bed, trying to find a position that would ease his bruises, Martin ran pictures through his head of Odysseus's adventures and told himself it was worth it.

“Great literature requires suffering,” the thin boy insisted.

They wondered why Martin laughed.

A waitress brought two baskets to the table, each holding a burger and fries. Deke took them and passed one to Martin. “I've got this,” he said quietly. No one at the table noticed the charity. Martin ate ravenously. The next time Deke tapped a cigarette from the pack he'd set in front of him on the table, Martin reached for one and lit up, waving away the disappointed face of his Baptist mother, who thought smoking was a sin. To his left Deke's body seemed to radiate heat.

Liza couldn't come to the performance of
Fortunate One
because of exams, but caught a ride from Greensboro to see a rehearsal. Martin took her to the theater. They slipped into seats and listened to Deke give directions to the two actors playing the hero and heroine. Martin had wanted Deke to play the male lead, a young man remarkably like Martin himself, but Deke preferred to direct. Stoney, the fellow he'd picked for the part, was unimpressive, but homely Margaret, who had won the role of Martin's female lead, was talented enough that they soon forgot she wasn't pretty and worth falling hopelessly in love with.

“This is great!” Liza whispered. She nestled against him. “I've missed you.”

Martin slouched happily in his seat, proud to have Liza there. Up onstage, Deke's hands cut the air, moving the actors around as if he had them on strings. His voice echoed through the theater, sometimes calm, sometimes biting. Martin tried to catch his eye, but Deke didn't look his way.

During a lull when the actors were walking through scene 2 for the fourth time, Liza whispered, “Daddy asked me to tell you that your mother doesn't look well. He'd like to examine her, but she keeps putting him off. He thought you might at least be able to talk your father into letting her get some rest.”

Martin had no hope of his father excusing his mother from working. “I'll write to her. Maybe I can convince her to go visit her sister.”

At the front of the theater, Deke called it a day. “Dress rehearsal next Wednesday.” Martin led Liza down the aisle to introduce her. Deke shook Liza's hand, looking bored. Martin saw Liza observing Deke, trying to figure him out, but Martin was too giddy at being around Deke and having his play produced to be concerned about Liza's keen eye.

Snow began falling early the day of the performance. Martin watched, anxious, as it accumulated on his bedroom windowsill, afraid the play would be canceled, but when he got to the theater an hour before showtime, the Playmakers were in place. Deke was as cool as ever.

“You can watch from backstage if you want,” he offered.

“No.” Martin wanted to sit anonymously in the middle of the theater to gauge the audience's reaction.

The theater filled with students who shed coats and hats and jiggled the seats in front of them with booted feet.
Fortunate One
was the second play to be performed. Martin suffered through the first piece, not hearing a word. After a brief, torturous intermission, the lights dimmed again, and Margaret and Stoney took the stage. Martin stopped breathing. He listened in terror for yawns or muttered remarks from the audience, but heard only a respectful hush and a few inevitable coughs. He relaxed and concentrated on the action onstage.

Even dress rehearsal hadn't prepared him for the real performance. Sitting in the dark, he stopped reciting lines along with the characters and eventually forgot he had written the play. When it was over, too soon, he saw that several girls around him were wiping their eyes. He was sure that the applause for
Fortunate One
was louder than the applause for the first play. When Margaret and Stoney came out to take a bow, Deke came with them and motioned for Martin to stand where he was. “The playwright,” Deke told the audience. Martin basked in the admiration of the people around him, pocketing their congratulations to savor later.

Backstage, the Playmakers spiked orange juice with vodka and smoked in a crowd until a faculty adviser told them they were going to set the theater on fire.

Deke's hand brushed Martin's elbow. “Let's get some air.”

They left the theater. Campus walkways were deserted. Their feet squeaked on pressed snow. A few flakes still danced in the moonlight.