A man in full, p.2
A Man in Full, page 2
The deep worry was lit up like an inflammation. Couldn’t let that happen … not on a perfect morning for shooting quail at Turpmtine. So he returned to the subject of his father.
“It was a whole different world back then, Inman. A big Saturday night was going to the jookhouse up near the—”
Charlie broke off in the middle of the sentence. Up ahead, Moseby, the dog trainer, had stopped and looked back and lifted his cap. That was the signal. Then his low voice came rolling across the sedge:
“Poi-i-i-int!”
Sure enough, over there was Knobby—Duke’s Knob—in the classic pointer’s stance, his nose thrust forward and his tail sticking up at a forty-five-degree angle like a rod. He had gotten wind of a covey of quail in the sedge. Out beyond Moseby, Whip—King’s Whipple—was in the same position, backing Knobby’s point.
The wagons came to a halt, and everyone grew quiet, and the two shooters, Charlie and Inman, dismounted. Luckily for Charlie, when you mounted or dismounted, your left leg bore the weight as you swung yourself over the horse’s back, and his right knee didn’t have to go through the ordeal. He had barely dismounted when one of his boys in the yellow overalls, Ernest, arrived on horseback and took the reins of his horse and Inman’s. Charlie withdrew his .410 from the leather scabbard and slipped two shells into its twin barrels and began walking through the sedge with Inman. He realized that the knee had stiffened and he was limping, but he was not conscious of the pain. The adrenaline took care of that. His heart was thumping away. No matter how many times you went hunting quail, you never became immune to the feeling that came over you when the dogs set the point and you approached a covey hidden somewhere nearby in the grass. The quails’ instinct in the face of danger was to hide in the tall grass and then, all at once, to explode upward in flight with incredible acceleration. Everybody used the same term for it: explode. You didn’t dare have more than two shooters at a time. The little birds rocketed upward in every direction, scattering in order to confound their predators. In the excitement, hunters swung their guns about so wildly that three or more shooters would pose more of a threat to each other than to the quail. It was dangerous enough with two. That was why he made his help wear the yellow overalls. He didn’t want some idiot guest with buck fever cutting loose with a load of bird shot in the direction of one of his boys.
Inman took a position off to Charlie’s right. The understanding was that an imaginary line ran between them, and Charlie could go after any birds to the left of it. It was so quiet, he could hear his own breathing, which was too rapid. He could feel the pressure of all the eyes now fixed upon him, the guests’, the mule drivers’, the outriders’, Moseby’s, his wife’s … He’d brought quite a little army out here, hadn’t he—and he’d opened his big mouth and announced he was going to shoot only the males—and bet Inman a hundred dollars, within practically everybody’s hearing.
He had the stock of the .410 up near his shoulder. It seemed to take forever. In fact, it was no more than twenty seconds—
Thrash!
With an extraordinary pounding of the air the covey burst up out of the grass. The sound seemed suffocatingly loud. Gray blurs hurtled at every angle. A patch of white. He swung the .410 to the left. Keep the barrel moving ahead of the bird! That was the main thing. He fired one barrel. He thought—didn’t know. Another white patch. Swung the barrel almost straight up. Fired again. A bird came peeling down out of the sky.
Charlie stood there holding the shotgun, conscious of the sharp smell of exploded gunpowder, his heart hammering away. He turned toward Inman.
“How’d you do?”
Inman was shaking his head so hard his jowls were lagging behind his chin and flopping around. “Shit—’scuse me, ladies”—his wife, Ellen, and Betty and Halbert Morrissey and the Stannards had climbed down off the buckboard and were heading toward the two shooters—“I missed the first one. Didn’t lead the sonofabitch.” He seemed furious with himself. “I might’ve gotten the second one, but I ain’t even sure a that, goddamn it, ’scuse me.” He shook his head some more.
Charlie hadn’t even been aware of Inman’s gun going off.
Inman said, “How’d you do?”
“I know I got the second one,” said Charlie. “I don’t know about the first one.”
“Got both, Cap’m Charlie.” It was Lonnie, one of the dog handlers on the kennel wagon.
“Better be bobs,” said Inman. “Either that or you better have a picture of Ben Franklin handy.”
Soon enough the retrievers, Ronald and Roland, had fetched both of Charlie’s birds from the underbrush and brought them to Lonnie, who in turn brought them over to Cap’m Charlie. Quail seemed so small, once you actually had one in your hands. Their bodies were still warm, almost hot. Charlie turned up their beaks with his forefinger, and there they were, the white patches on their throats.
A surge of inexpressible joy swept through him. He had done it, just as he said he would! Shot two males from out of that rocketing bevy! It was an omen! What could go wrong now? Nothing! He didn’t even dare to let himself smile, for fear of revealing just how proud and sure he was of himself.
He could hear a buzz of conversation between the mule drivers and the outriders and among the guests about how Cap’m Charlie had called his shots and made them, with a hundred dollars riding on the outcome. Inman came over and put his hand down on one bob and then the other.
Now Charlie allowed himself a smile. “Whatcha doing, Inman? You think me and Lonnie’s got a couple of old birds stowed away to trick you with?”
“Well, I’ll be a sonofabitch,” said Inman glumly. “I didn’t think you could do it.”
And now Charlie let himself laugh from deep inside. “Don’t do to doubt me, Inman, not where quail’s concerned! Now how ’bout introducing me to that pal a yours you were talking about, Ben Franklin!”
Inman thrust his hands down into the pockets of his khakis, and a sheepish expression came over his face. “Well, hell … I didn’t bring anything out here. I didn’t come out here to shop, f’r chrissake, and I sure as hell wasn’t gonna buy anything at that plantation store a yours.”
“Oh brother!” said Charlie. “‘Didn’t bring anything out here’! I’m gonna file that one along with ‘The truck’s broke down’ and ‘The cook took sick’! ‘Didn’t bring anything out here’?” Charlie looked around at Ellen Armholster and the Morrisseys and the Stannards and beamed. “Juh hear that? It’s easy to bet blue chips when you ain’t even got table stakes!”
Oh, this was rich stuff. Now he looked around at his mule drivers and outriders, all his boys in the yellow overalls, to make sure they were in on it, too, and at Moseby, who had ridden back toward them, and at Serena—
—but where was she? Then he spotted her. She was still way off, maybe seventy or eighty yards away, out in the field, Serena and Elizabeth Armholster, too, still on their horses, which were side by side. They were chatting and laughing up a storm. He couldn’t believe it. The two young women, with their wild hair and loamy loins, hadn’t paid the slightest attention to what had just gone on. Couldn’t have cared less about what two … old men … had or hadn’t accomplished with their shotguns. He was suddenly filled with a rage he didn’t dare express.
Just then Serena and Elizabeth swung their mounts about and headed toward them, laughing and talking to each other the whole time. And now, still high in the saddle, they pulled up beside Charlie and Inman and Ellen and the Morrisseys and the Stannards. Their youthfulness couldn’t have been more obvious … the high color in their flawlessly smooth cheeks … the imperiously correct postures of two girls at a horse show … the tender curves of their necks and jaws … the perfectly packed fullness of their cloven hindquarters … as compared to the sagging hides of Ellen Armholster and Betty Morrissey and Cindy Stannard’s generation …
The ever-obliging Betty Morrissey looked up at Serena and said, “You know what your husband just did? He shot two bobs, and Inman owes him a hundred dollars.”
“Oh, that’s wonderful, Charlie,” said Serena.
Charlie studied her face. She hadn’t said it in any pointedly ironic way, but from the mischievous way her eyes, which were such a vivid blue, flashed beneath the black corona of her hair and from the little glance she flicked toward Elizabeth Armholster, he knew she meant it ironically. He could feel his face turning hot.
Elizabeth looked down at her father and said, “How’d you do, Daddy?”
“Don’t ask,” said Inman in a glum voice.
Teasingly: “Oh, come on, Daddy. ’Fess up.”
“Believe me, you don’t want to know,” said Inman, twisting his lips in a way that tried, unsuccessfully, to make it seem as if he were making light of his miserable performance.
Then Elizabeth leaned way over in the saddle, causing her long, light brown hair to cascade down either side of her face, and put her hand on the back of Inman’s neck and rubbed it and puckered up those full lips of hers and said in a babyish, coquettish voice she had obviously used on her father before:
“Oh, golly gee, Daddy didn’t shoot anybody in the whole quail family?”
With that she flicked a glance of her own toward Serena, who compressed her lips as if she was making a determined effort not to laugh in the two old shooters’ faces.
Now Charlie’s face was red hot. The whole quail family ! What was that supposed to mean? Animal rights? Whatever it was, it was intentional heresy—the two of them peering down from the eminence of their steeds upon the old parties below and sniggering and exchanging glances of conspiratorial superiority—why, the … the … the … the impudence of it! According to a tradition as old as the plantations themselves, a quail shoot was a ritual in which the male of the human species acted out his role of hunter, provider, and protector, and the female acted as if this was part of the natural, laudable, excellent, and compelling order of things. None of this could Charlie have put into words, but he felt it. Oh, he felt it—
Just then a burst of static came over the radio on the buckboard, followed by some words in a deep voice Charlie couldn’t make out.
One of the mule drivers yelled over: “Cap’m Charlie! It’s Durwood. Says Mr. Stroock called from Atlanta and wants you to call him back right away.”
A sinking feeling ran through Charlie. There was only one reason why Wismer Stroock, his young chief financial officer, would ever dare try to track him down in the fields of Turpmtine on a Saturday morning during a quail shoot.
“Tell’m—tell’m I’ll call him later on, after we get back to the Gun House.” He wondered if the quaver of concern in his voice had been detectable.
“Says it’s urgent, Cap’m.”
Charlie hesitated. “Just tell’m what I said.”
He looked down at the patches of white on the throats of the two dead bobs, but he could no longer focus on them. The birds’ bellies looked like a reddish-gray fuzz.
PlannersBanc. The mountain of debt. The avalanche has begun, thought Cap’m Charlie.
chapter I
Chocolate Mecca
FOR A WHILE THE FREAKNIC TRAFFIC INCHED UP PIEDMONT … inched up Piedmont … inched up Piedmont … inched up as far as Tenth Street … and then inched up the slope beyond Tenth Street … inched up as far as Fifteenth Street … whereupon it came to a complete, utter, hopeless, bogged-down glue-trap halt, both ways, northbound, southbound, going and coming, across all four lanes. That was it. Nobody was moving on Piedmont Avenue; not anywhere, not any which way; not from here; not for now. Suddenly, as if they were pilots ejecting from fighter planes, black boys and girls began popping out into the dusk of an Atlanta Saturday night. They popped out of convertibles, muscle cars, Jeeps, Explorers, out of vans, out of evil-looking little econo-sports coupes, out of pickup trucks, campers, hatchbacks, Nissan Maximas, Honda Accords, BMWs, and even ordinary American sedans.
Roger Too White—and in that moment this old nickname of his, Roger Too White, which he had been stuck with ever since Morehouse, came bubbling up, uninvited, into his own brain—Roger Too White stared through the windshield of his Lexus, astonished. Out the passenger-side window of a screaming-red Chevrolet Camaro just ahead of him, in the lane to his left, shot one leg of a pair of fiercely pre-faded blue jeans. A girl. He could tell it was a girl because of the little caramel-colored foot that protruded from the jeans, shod only in the merest of sandals. Then, much faster than it would take to tell it, out the window came her hip, her little bottom, her bare midriff, her tube top, her wide shoulders, her long wavy black hair with its heavenly auburn sheen. Youth! She hadn’t even bothered to open the door. She had come rolling out of the Camaro like a high jumper rolling over the bar at a track meet.
As soon as both feet touched the pavement of Piedmont Avenue, she started dancing, thrusting her elbows out in front of her and thrashing them about, shaking those lovely little hips, those tube-topped breasts, those shoulders, that heavenly hair.
RAM YO’ BOOTY! RAM YO’ BOOTY!
A rap song was pounding out of the Camaro with such astounding volume, Roger Too White could hear every single vulgar intonation of it even with the Lexus’s windows rolled up.
HOW’M I SPOSE A LOVE HER,
CATCH HER MACKIN’ WITH THE BROTHERS?
—sang, or chanted, or recited, or whatever you were supposed to call it, the guttural voice of a rap artist named Doctor Rammer Doc Doc, if it wasn’t utterly ridiculous to call him an artist.
RAM YO’ BOOTY! RAM YO’ BOOTY!
—sang the chorus, which sounded like a group of sex-crazed crack fiends. It took a Roger Too White to imagine that sex-crazed crack fiends could get together and cooperate long enough to sing a chorus, although he did correctly identify Doctor Rammer Doc Doc, who was so popular that even a forty-two-year-old lawyer like himself couldn’t completely shut him out of his waking life. His own tastes ran to Mahler and Stravinsky, and he would have gladly majored in music history at Morehouse, except that music history hadn’t been considered too great a major for a black undergraduate who wanted to get into the University of Georgia law school. All of that, compressed into a millisecond, blipped through his mind in this moment, too.
The girl swung her hips in an exaggerated arc each time the fiends hit the BOO of BOOTY. She was gorgeous. Her jeans were down so low on her hips, and her tube top was up so high on her chest, he could see lots of her lovely light-caramel-colored flesh, punctuated by her belly button, which looked like an eager little eye. Her skin was the same light color as his, and he knew her type at a glance. Despite her funky clothes, she was a blueblood. She had Black Deb written all over her. Her parents were no doubt the classic Black Professional Couple of the 1990s, in Charlotte or Raleigh or Washington or Baltimore. Look at the gold bangles on her wrists; must have cost hundreds of dollars. Look at the soft waves in her relaxed hair, a ’do known as a Bout en Train; French, baby, for “life of the party”; cost a fortune; his own wife had the same thing done to her hair. Little cutie, shaking her booty, probably went to Howard or maybe Chapel Hill or the University of Virginia; belonged to Theta Psi. Oh, these black boys and girls came to Atlanta from colleges all over the place for Freaknic every April, at spring break, thousands of them, and here they were on Piedmont Avenue, in the heart of the northern third of Atlanta, the white third, flooding the streets, the parks, the malls, taking over Midtown and Downtown and the commercial strips of Buckhead, tying up traffic, even on Highways 75 and 85, baying at the moon, which turns chocolate during Freaknic, freaking out White Atlanta, scaring them indoors, where they cower for three days, giving them a snootful of the future. To these black college students shaking it in front of his Lexus, this was nothing more than what white college students had been doing for years at Fort Lauderdale and Daytona and Cancún, or wherever they were going now, except that these boys and girls here in front of him weren’t interested in any beach. They were coming to the … streets of Atlanta. Atlanta was their city, the Black Beacon, as the Mayor called it, 70 percent black. The Mayor was black—in fact, Roger and the Mayor, Wesley Dobbs Jordan, had been fraternity brothers (Omega Zeta Zeta) at Morehouse—and twelve of the nineteen city council members were black, and the chief of police was black, and the fire chief was black, and practically the whole civil service was black, and the Power was black, and White Atlanta was screaming its head off about “Freaknik,” with a k instead of a c, as the white newspapers called it, ignorant of the fact that Freaknic was a variation not of the (white) word beatnik but of the (neutral) word picnic. They were screaming that these black Freaknik revelers were rude, loud, rowdy, and insolent, that they got filthy drunk and littered the streets and urinated on (white) people’s lawns, that they tied up the streets and the malls and cost the (white) merchants millions of dollars, even that they made so much noise they were disrupting the fragile mating habits of the rhinoceroses at the Grant Park zoo. The mating habits of the rhinos!
