When the police left, my father and I returned home exhausted by the emotional night we had shared. Mother poured a shot of bourbon for her and my father, and made a cup of hot chocolate for me. As we sat at the kitchen table whispering about the events of the night, my mother motioned upstairs and said she had put the Poe family to bed in the extra rooms my father had once rented out.
“Something terrible has happened to that family,” she said quietly. “Something traumatic. They think someone came to that house to kill them.”
“Not likely,” my father said. “It might be a random break-in.”
“Leo,” Mother said, “be nice to these kids. Be as nice as you can, but don’t let them into your heart. You don’t know how mean the world can be. You’re so innocent, you don’t know the dangers.”
“Were you scared tonight, Leo?” Father asked as I finished my hot chocolate.
“Terrified.” I stood up to return to bed.
“You didn’t show it,” Mother said.
“That’s because my father was with me.”
It was just after three when I went back to bed and the neighborhood was quiet again. Sleep came easily. I had traveled far into a dream when I felt a girl’s lips touch mine, and I saw a naked Sheba Poe move into bed beside me. I had never been on a date or alone with a girl in a car, yet here I found myself naked with the most beautiful girl I had ever seen, her hands moving up and down my body. Slowly, she brought my lips to her breasts, then she took my hand and placed it inside her, and I learned how a woman could smell like earth; that her wetness felt like a place where fire could be born and brought to sublime life. Her tongue went down my throat and my chest and she taught me in minutes all the places a tongue could go, all the places I had ever dreamed a tongue could go. When I entered her I did it with her direction; I had never imagined the pleasure one body could derive from another. On top of me, she rose and pitched like a small well-made boat in a storm-tossed river as her hair came over her shoulders in soft, hot waves. She kept thanking me in a throaty whisper. When she came to me I was dreaming, then she pulled me into a life that was far greater and more sublime than any dream could be. After I came inside her, with her hand over my mouth to keep me from screaming, she slid out of my bed and disappeared into the night. Wordlessly, I lay awake, intoxicated by the life I was starting to live. As the sun rose out of the east, I thought of nothing but Sheba. Later that morning, I thought of her face with every copy of the News and Courier I threw onto the porches of Charleston. It would be years before I learned that my mother had witnessed Sheba Poe’s withdrawal from my room that night. And my mother was not the only one.
On Sunday evenings, my parents made a domestic tradition of sitting on the screened porch off their bedroom to watch the sun set over Long Lake and the Ashley River. Though they could be steely-edged and ruminant to a fault about the life of the mind, I found them both loopy and unapologetic about their own sappy romanticism when it came to their love for each other. Whenever they put on their Johnny Mathis or Andy Williams albums after dinner on Sunday, it was time for me to skedaddle to the comforting solitude of my room. It caused me a high level of anguish to know that my parents took pleasure in each other’s bodies, long before I knew anything of my mother’s career path as a nun. After my single night with Sheba, it seemed like an abomination. Because of the Catholic Church, I would always feel paroxysms of guilt at any thought of sex, peckers, vaginas, intercourse, and the whole shebang. The teachings of the Roman Catholic Church would cover my soul like a condom for the rest of my life. Already, I could feel nothing but guilt for luxuriating in the pleasures of Sheba Poe’s heaven-sent body, even as I wrestled with a great desire to see her again and tell her honestly, sincerely, and from the very core of my being that I loved her. It was an essential truth that I had been too thunderstruck to tell her that night; one that now shouted to be told. Loving her would square the guilt, ease my conscience, and go a long way in that futile Catholic exercise of Making Things Right.
My guilt seemed to have been contagious, as my parents called me out to the porch that morning soon after they were seated, their faces unusually serious and distressed. Facing me, Mother said, “We’re worried about you, Leo. We think the Poe twins are in trouble. Your father and I are concerned about the whole situation.”
I turned to my father, who was usually the voice of reason, but even he was thoughtful. “The break-in at their house the other night—it doesn’t add up. Except for the broken window, the police found no sign of forced entry,” he explained. “There were no footprints around the house except for yours and mine, and the mother has been so drunk they can’t get a signed statement. Even the twins are vague. And that smiley face at the door? It was fingernail polish. They found the same shade in both the mother’s room and Sheba’s.”
He paused then, till Mother prodded. “You’re not telling him everything, Jasper.”
“They found a bottle of the same fingernail polish in Trevor’s room,” Father added. “It seems he paints his toenails.”
I listened with a rising fear and a wholly selfish desire to defend Sheba. “They’re nice kids,” I argued. “They’ve had a hard life.”
“You don’t know what a nice kid is, Leo.” The sternness of my mother’s voice irritated me. “You’ve never had a friend.”
I stood up and began to pace the porch, like a lawyer at the bar defending a client. “That’s not true. I had Steve, and I’ll never have a better friend. I’ve made lots of friends in the past couple of years. Because of the drug thing, none of them are my age. That’s my fault, and I’m not blaming anybody but myself. But the people I meet every day, the ones on my paper route, Harrington Canon, my shrink—they all like me. The orphans and the twins don’t know about the cocaine, but I can tell they want to be friends with me. So does the coach’s son, Ike, now that we’re getting to know each other. You’re wrong to say that I have no friends. I’ve spent my whole life lonely, but I’ve got some friends now. I plan to keep them. My whole life, I plan to keep them, and love them as long as they love me. I’ll even love them if they quit loving me.”
“That’s our point,” Mother said. “We’re afraid the orphans and the Poe kids will use you.”
“They won’t,” I said. “They need me. They need my help, just like those rich kids who got busted for drugs. Just like Coach Jefferson and Ike. I don’t mind being needed. I don’t even mind being used,” I said, feeling a small strength that I’d picked up from Sheba, an unaccustomed boldness. “I’m sick of being lonely. I never mean to be lonely again.”
I turned at that, and bolted off the porch and back into the house, half jogging to my room. Though I was close to tears, I fought them off and became resolute instead. I reached to my bedside table and pulled out a rosary, blessed by the Pope, that Monsignor Max had given me on the day of my First Communion. I tried to pray, but all the words turned to dust for me. Going to my closet, I retrieved my collection of Topps baseball cards. I kept my priceless card of Ted Williams on the top of one of the piles in the box, while Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, and Mickey Mantle crowned the other three. The box also contained the only photograph I had of my brother, Steve, and me. After his suicide, all photographs of my brother disappeared, as though his extraordinary light had not once illuminated the spirit of our household. As I lifted the photograph out, I noticed how it seemed to grow more fragile with the passing of time. But there I was in the snow-white suit of my First Communion finery with my brother’s arm draped around me in a fierce, protective gesture. When my prayers rang truest to me now was when I prayed to Steve. Since his death, I had come to think of him as some fearless, irrepressible angel who watched over me, part Rottweiler, part guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and part seer who would one day unlock the mystery of both our lives. In my worst moments, I could pray to Steve and not to the God who had stolen my brother and left me to face a terrifying world without my greatest ally by my side.
In the great
timepiece that was my life, my dance card was filled up every hour, my routine as set as a well-made cake. I awoke when my alarm went off the next morning and performed my morning toilet in ritual and darkness, then pedaled my bicycle down toward Colonial Lake and watched as Eugene Haverford’s News and Courier truck pulled up to our appointed corner and four bundles of newspapers were heaved to the sidewalk. His cigar smoke was the first proof of my being alive each morning; that, and the blood surging through my thighs and the warm air, thick as marmalade, and the first traffic sliding down Rutledge Avenue. Paper route, daily Mass, breakfast at Cleo’s, five new vocabulary words: my life was overencumbered by habit.
As I took my wire cutters and freed my stacks, I breathed in the odor of fresh ink and could smell the richness of the shallow tidal broth thrown off by Colonial Lake. I worked fast to fold my papers as tight as furled flags. Inside the truck, I heard Mr. Haverford cuss the president, Mayor Gaillard, Chief of Police John Conroy, and the Atlanta Braves. Not a morning went by when Mr. Haverford did not cuss with inflammatory gusto all the major and minor players who appeared for his court of disapproval in the morning paper.
Off I went into the deep Charleston darkness, flinging the news of the world to the people of my route. Still, I thought of little but Sheba Poe, and the night she came to my room. Crossing Broad Street on the fly, I took a left on Tradd and did not work up a real sweat until I hit Legare Street. I would be back to some of these houses this very evening to collect for the delivery of next month’s newspaper. I would learn the gossip and secrets and off-kilter and off-centered and off-putting history of my city. I was bound in a deep connection of appreciation and community to every reporter, editor, typesetter, secretary, ads man, publisher, columnist, and deliveryman who worked in producing the News and Courier every day. By tying my destiny with this newspaper, I had given myself permission to pursue a career I hoped to find deeply satisfying.
In a complete reverie, thinking of Sheba, I steered through the streets and could hear the mansions and the turned-in row houses whisper their stories to me. Toward the end of my route, I turned up Stoll’s Alley, so I could do the south end of Church Street. In my life already, I had fallen in love with shortcuts, alleyways, secret passageways, and cut-through easements like Stoll’s Alley and Longitude Lane. Often I came to Stoll’s Alley because of its mystery and inwardness; its narrowness was like a form of perversity or flawed design, making it my favorite getaway in the city. The sun had not yet fully risen, and it was as dark as a confessional booth as I made my way with caution. A large man stepped suddenly out of a doorway, surprising me by blocking the lane. Then he shocked me by almost knocking me out with his fist.
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.
My 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 restricti
on. 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.