A Bunch of Fives - Stories by James Roderick Burns (47)

Red Dirt Road

RED DIRT ROAD

HE SCARCELY NOTICED when they left.  The outside screen-door settled back into its frame with a tiny, even hiss.  The sound of the car rounded the driveway and the far side of the house, then disappeared.  His room was silent.  Though the pain in his arms and legs had faded a little, the sickness remained, unshakeable and sticky-sweet as a shower of summer rain.  His stomach lifted and turned in heavy flops; sweat stood out on his brow, despite the alien cool of air-conditioning.  It dampened his T-shirt, pooling on his neck and shoulders.  His mouth grated like cinders.

It always seemed to happen like this.  He would work for months on end, earn beyond question the right to a holiday, then collapse like some Heath-Robinson contraption the moment the pressure was off, all his carefully-pinned masks and professional gestures exploding into so much string and chewing gum.  It happened on their honeymoon, again on the trip they took back to Britain to meet his family; there he’d felt the prickles of incipient fever before they even left the airport.  It was as though his mind was perpetually jacked-up in work mode, the simply handle cranked to the topmost turn, and couldn’t find a way to wind itself down.  Instead, something came along and kicked it out from under him.

He wiped his forehead with the damp cloth his wife had left and turned over in bed.  Outside, bright Georgia sun was lancing through the tree trunks, picking out specks of red dust and grit on the window sill.  This was his first time in the south, and before the sickness arrived, he had enjoyed their first few days driving down from Atlanta.  Her parents were away on a trip hunting for antiques, weren’t expected back till the end of the week, so they had felt free to take their time.  They dawdled through the back lanes in the enormous rental car, laughing out loud at the price of petrol, stopping in out-of-the-way towns for catfish dinners and gigantic cokes, making detours to roadside stands selling boiled peanuts and watermelon.  Somewhere they stopped on a bridge crossing a slow-gold stream, and he wrote her name, a corny love heart and arrow in the reddish dust, as the sun touched the horizon.

He looked at the late-morning sky.   His wife and her parents had gone out for the day, first to Plains and Americus, small towns associated with Jimmy Carter, then to the huge civil war POW camp at Andersonville.   They would be back towards the end of the afternoon.

‘Will you be all right?’ she’d asked, tucking the quilt up under his arms.  ‘Because if you won’t, I don’t need to go, you know.  I can stay in the house – ’  Her voice trailed off into unenthusiastic silence.  Though she didn’t particularly want to spend the day riding around in a hot car looking at monuments, he knew she was keen to leave the house while she had chance.  Each time he was ill she ended up by his bedside, running errands and watching the holiday evaporate like a glass of water spilled over hot concrete.  He could see the will to break that pattern in her eyes.

‘No, go on. I’ll be fine.’  And he had been, for a while at least.  A new crime novel had kept him occupied, even taken away some of the sting from constant stumbling trips to the toilet, but it was beginning to lose its hold.  He lay back against the stacked pillows, their faint dampness cool against his neck.  A sense of disappointment – then resentment – came into his mind.  Not about being ill, particularly, though there was always that, but about their constant shifting moves towards imagined future improvement, the yellow brick road they were always running down to some brighter tomorrow.  More often it seemed they were running away from something, rather than towards it.

They met in graduate school, and immediately hated the smug, shabby air of intellectual superiority given off by many of their peers and faculty, as well as the stifling suburban setting of the campus.  They would have to leave, and soon; of that they were certain.  Getting out of the suburbs and into the city became a driving force, and for a while, as he finished his thesis in the bowels of the public library and she put hers on hold to take on more teaching, it was enough.  The freedom of the city drove clean lines through their frustrations, unwound their bitterness like a shroud.  Then the cutbacks came, and the impossibility of his finding a suitable job – any job – without the right papers and contacts, and they decided to leave America for Britain.

London was an obvious first step.  He had friends from university, possibilities, connections; she wanted to dive into history and spread her fingers into the substance of books and movies.  Neither of them noticed the shift in the poles.  New York to London, metropolitan power bases switching from an island pointing north like a compass to the flat, watery lands of the south.  Nothing much struck them beyond relief.  His qualifications and demeanour – perhaps, too, that meeting over a few whiskies with a member of his old school – secured him a job, and the hole in the bank balance began to close.  Occasionally he thought of city towers, piercing the sky like metallic darts, and she laughed (or sneered) at some sentimental British whimsy, but they thought they could, possibly, be happy.

It took a while for London to really register in their minds, but when it did they snapped to simultaneously: the rub and pinch of endless, needless expense, the stink of over-consumption.  In a dockside coffee bar they waited twenty minutes for a crumb-scattered sticky table, then balanced sections of the Sunday paper on their knees while £4.00 coffees gripped the sticky wood.  The buses began to grind on his nerves, so he stayed later at work – through the patronising banter of his aspirational colleagues, the silence of stooped immigrant cleaning crews – to avoid the packed journeys.  She tried an interview or two, even picking up her thesis in the British Library, but they found themselves exhausted before they had really accomplished anything.  London was busy, bustling, but dirty and ill-kempt and bursting with self-satisfaction.  Through the smeared window of the bus it began to look nameless and dead, a listless corpse on the banks of the Thames.

Distracting herself with the travel section one Saturday, she came across an offer for cheap tickets.

‘You interested?’  She waved the paper in his direction.  He was trying to decipher a contract-letting manual and didn’t look up.  ‘Hey – flights, coupons?  A holiday?’

‘Oh, sorry.’  He lifted his eyes to hers, a slight downturn crinkling their edges.  ‘Yes, that would be nice.’  So she clipped coupons for a couple of weeks and booked them on a flight to Glasgow: a Rennie Mackintosh exhibit, the People’s Palace, perhaps meeting a friend from graduate school who’d found work at the university.

On the bus from the station they shook off the capital’s dust, surprised by friendly greetings instead of darting, cut-away eyes, and with the white cloud-caps and blue lines of the coast still in their eyes, set off around the new city.  Instantly the buildings laid hold of him.  Rising from the ground in long structured streets, gridded out and penetrating, they spiked the sky and rode over the hills like frozen locomotives.  He loved the grey-black bruising of the sky, the inevitable rain peppering granite and sandstone, even the wind cutting down long streets.  He steered her by the elbow into a bar.

‘Whiskies, please – doubles.  Laphroaig.’  In a wooden booth they sat back and stretched their legs.

‘Let’s move here.  Now – right away, out of London.  I don’t give a shit about it anymore.  It reminds me of the suburbs, whereas this place reminds me of Manhattan.’  And she’d said yes, clinking her thick tumbler against his hard enough to slop a little whisky over the side.

He rolled over again, smiling broadly at the memory.  But the movement upset something in his stomach.  With a plunge he felt his bowels begin to give, and heaved himself up and into the bathroom.  He flicked the light switch and the bulb blinked on, an extractor fan whirring into life.  As he sat down he remembered the disappointment when he’d learned there were no openings in Glasgow – another kink in the dream – but he’d persisted, and a few months later there had been an opening in the Edinburgh office.  He had applied, concentrated like never before on the interview, shone and succeeded.  They gave up their tiny flat in London and drove through the night to make a crazy deadline.  That had been six months ago, and things were working out well.

He stood gingerly, hitching up his loose pyjama trousers as the plumbing flushed and gurgled through the empty house.  His head felt heavy, shiny-bright and weighty as a waterlogged rubber ball.  The fan’s whirr was muffled through his cottony ears.  He turned off the light.  The afternoon sun pencilled the slats, and he twisted the rod to let in more light.

At the back of the house a scrubbed, patchy lawn led down to a red dirt road which stretched into the woods.  The sun was fierce, relentless, battering, cutting the garden into dazzling strips and blocks of shade.  He thought he saw movement near the road and leaned forward. There was movement – a figure lurching down between the trees, coming closer with heavy steps.  He ran a hand over his brow, pressed it to the glass.  It was a man in blue cotton overalls, seemingly without a shirt, his brown skin taut and liquid.  He looked from left to right as though he was being followed.  His mouth was wide open and there were dark streaks cutting his face and arms, marking his bare red feet.  He seemed to scream in silence, then a moment later disappeared behind a tree trunk.  The sun shone unbroken where he had walked.  A few puffs of red dust rose then fell back to earth.

Confused, his thick head spinning, he staggered back to bed.  The pain gripped his scalp like a clamp; his heart drilled and corkscrewed away.  He fell asleep half under the covers, face in the wet sheet.

Later, with the house silent but for the click and hum of the air conditioner, he woke and walked through to the kitchen for a glass of water.  He felt a bit better for the rest, mind calmer as it sometimes was after a cup of coffee in the morning.  He poured water from a pitcher and went into the living room, thought about retrieving his book from the bedroom but sat down instead, unwilling to make the effort.  He sat still for a moment, the small ticking of the house loud in his ears.  Then he leaned towards the coffee table, where a stack of magazines had been carefully arranged.

Southern Living, some gardening magazine, another about local history and the Ocilla Star.  He leafed carelessly through the stack.  At the bottom was a thicker volume – an oddity, the Philadelphia Weekly, with a couple of interesting photos on the cover.  He picked it up and flipped through the pages.  Most were still stuck together, unread and heavy, but it fell open in his hands to a feature near the middle.  An interview with African American veterans of the second world war.  “These local veterans survived segregation and World War II, only to face their greatest obstacles at home.”  Underneath were credits for author and photographer, then an opening sentence about the ubiquitous red dust blowing down the roads of Georgia.

When he got to the next line his heart stuck in his throat.  “Falsely accused of raping and murdering a white woman in Irwinville, Ga., the man had been chased by hounds and captured on the road between the small towns of Ocilla and Douglas.”  Chased by hounds. His stomach roiled, turning over in fear; his eyes jumped down the page.  1930, a festive lynching.  “They cut off certain parts and displayed them.  His fingers and toes were right there in the front window, in the front showcase where you display your wrenches, your tools, your things you’re going to sell.”  He sat back in the chair, arms rigid, and watched it unfold on the screen of his imagination.  The needle-pointed city towers turned upside down and stabbed his flesh.  He felt all his petty resentments explode into ashes.

Then the house filled with footsteps, behind them the muted sound of a car door.  He had an instant to arrange the magazine, re-bury it at the bottom of the stack, but couldn’t muster the energy.  In that moment he felt a rush of anger, then a wave of overwhelming love.  As his wife came into the living room, he reached for her and held on as though he would never let go.  When her parents followed they patted his arm, asked how he had been – would he like a drink? – and put down a paper souvenir bag on top of the pile of magazines.

First published in Light and Dark (May 2018)

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