Wings to the Kingdom Read online

Page 15

 

  “No, not yet. ”

  Rudy saw him looking and hastily said, “If you want to swap out and take your mother’s room, I understand. I only took it because it was the big one with the bathroom, and there wasn’t anyone else here anyway. ”

  “No, that’s okay. I don’t care. My own bed’ll be fine. ”

  “I imagine it gets hot in there. I’ve got an extra fan I kept in the kitchen; you take it into your room and turn it on yourself at night so you can sleep. ”

  “Air-conditioning still broke?” Pete asked, though the answer was obvious enough and it had been broken long before he’d been in prison.

  “Haven’t had the money to see about fixing it. ”

  “I figured. ”

  “You know how it is. ”

  “Yeah, I do. I think I’ll go ahead and take that fan now, if you don’t mind. The chicken’s weighing heavy on me, and a nap out here in the quiet would feel good. ”

  Pete took the fan and plugged it in at the foot of his bed, turning it on full blast and letting it swing back and forth to blow away the worst of the heat. When he sat down on the mattress it squeaked and sagged. The bedding hadn’t been washed in God-knew-how-long, but Pete didn’t really care.

  All things considered, he felt pretty lucky.

  His sister had long since wandered off into the sunset to make trouble for someone else; Allie was busy cheating on some other guy; and the only roommate he had to worry about at the moment was his mother’s older brother, who was possibly the nicest man in the world.

  Or maybe he was being nice because he was afraid that Pete would claim the house for himself and throw his aging uncle out—but Pete didn’t think so. Rudy never thought that way. Calculated self-preservation had never come naturally to him, any more than it came naturally to Pete.

  “We’re a bunch of half-assed suckers,” he said to himself. “We don’t get good ideas of our own, so we don’t know how to sort out the bad ones when we see them. ”

  Later that night the two men sat in front of the television with its foil-wrapped bunny-ear antenna. The local news came in fairly clear on one station, so they watched that instead of fiddling with the antenna to see if they could find something better.

  “Damn shame,” Rudy said.

  “About the battlefield?”

  “Yeah. That ain’t right. ”

  Once again—for the second time that year—vandals had raided the battlefield, spray-painting monuments and defacing the old buildings that still stood. Park rangers were complaining about how they’d only recently finished cleaning off the last of the previous graffiti, and now it was going to cost thousands of dollars to clean up the new mess.

  “They never seem to make it to Snodgrass Hill though, do they?”

  “What?” Pete asked.

  “Snodgrass Hill. The kids with the paint, they never make it that far. They always get chased off. You know why, don’t you?”

  “Sure. It’s Old Green Eyes. ”

  Everyone knew Old Green Eyes kept an eye on the battlefield. Pete always wondered why people ever went there at all when they weren’t supposed to. Besides risking the wrath of the local boogeyman, why bother pissing all over a bunch of statues? What was the point?

  Rudy rose and flipped the television off with the back of his hand. “It’s offensive, is what it is. It’s not right. ”

  “Nope. Hey, someone in our family died there, didn’t he? At Chickamauga, I mean. Didn’t we have a grandfather or somebody who died in the war?”

  His uncle turned around and almost glared. “The Bufords sent half a dozen boys to war, and only got two of them back. And one of them, yes, was killed at Chickamauga. That’s another reason it’s so wrong. You don’t dishonor the dead that way. Not our dead—and not theirs either,” he said, meaning the Union soldiers too.

  The way he said it, Pete imagined that his uncle thought there was no way on Earth any good Southern kids could be up to this sort of badness, and the culprits must be the spawn of Yankee transplants.

  “It shouldn’t be this way,” Rudy breathed, popping the top on another Coke.

  “What way?”

  “This way. ” He waved his hand in a circle big enough to encompass the living room, the house, the town, the whole state. The whole South.

  “It’s not so bad,” Pete almost whined. “The house needs some work, I guess, but we’ll fix it up now that I’m back. ”

  Rudy snorted.

  “There shouldn’t be any need for it. We ought to still be living off money from our great-great-grandparents. We should’ve been richer than those bastards who waited out the war on top of the mountains in Chattanooga. ”

  “They got hit up on the mountains too, though. ” Pete thought he remembered something from school, a trip to a house on Lookout. A guide had told him a story about the way both sides had fought, back and forth, using the house as a point of reference to gauge their progress.

  “I guess. ”

  Pete crooked his head. “Well, what do you mean, then? When was anyone in our family rich?”

  “Never. ” Rudy reached like he meant to turn the TV back on, then changed his mind. “But we were close. And we almost had…it was something like an inheritance. It should’ve been ours. ”

  “An inheritance? From who?”

  “From Jefferson Davis himself. ” Rudy said it with finality, but he stood by the kitchen door and clutched at the frame like he might say more if Pete waited long enough.

  “You never said we were related to him,” he offered weakly. He knew there wasn’t any relation, but he wanted to say something anyway. In general, if Rudy wanted you to know something, he told it to you without leaving you to wonder; so Pete didn’t want to ask any questions. But Jefferson Davis? That wasn’t the sort of name you dropped if you didn’t want someone else to pick it up.

  “You heard me. It was a trust—between the people of the South and the men who tried to set her free. And we were in on it. We should’ve reaped those rewards, even after. ”

  “After? Oh. ”

  “Yeah, you know what I mean. After. ”

  Pete shifted himself and stood. “I guess I’ll get another Coke. ”

  “I’ll get it for you; I’m going back in there anyway. What kind you want?”

  “Do we have any Mountain Dew left?”

  Rudy bobbed his head. “A couple. Hang on. ”

  A minute later Pete heard the click and fizz of a tab being pulled. He probably didn’t need the caffeine so late at night, but he didn’t let that stop him. He took the can when his uncle brought it out.

  “There’s a story to it,” Rudy said simply, taking a swig off his own can of soda. He glanced down at his nephew’s Mountain Dew and added, “You won’t be sleeping for a while. You want to hear it?”

  “I think I do, yeah. ”

  “I can’t believe your mother never told you. Well, then again, I don’t know how much she ever knew about it. But they were her kin too. My own mother used to tell me about them before bedtime at night, on Fridays when we didn’t have to get up and go to school the next day. ”

  “Them who, Uncle Rudy?”

  He took another swig and came back into the living room, sitting himself down into the chair opposite the couch. The elderly springs groaned beneath his weight, and a small puff of polyfoam filler escaped the armrest.

  “The brothers. ”

  8

  The Midnight Run

  “I thought you didn’t want to go,” Jamie reminded me. He pursed his lips prettily and blew on the froth of his half-fat soy latte, not because it was hot, but because he was flirting with a girl who was standing in line at the coffee bar. He was in full on, loose-bloused Casanova mode, and it would have been amusing if I didn’t need his attention.

  I flicked my middle finger at his elbow. “I didn’t. But now I think I do. ”

  Benny w
as sitting at the table with us, peering down through his glasses at his sketchbook, as usual. “Why? What changed your mind?” He scratched a finishing flourish with his pencil and set the book aside.

  I retrieved the notes I’d made in the library and leaned in closer to both of them. “I’ve got a theory. ”

  “A theory? You going to share this theory with us?”

  I opened my mouth to spill, but then I wasn’t sure. “Well, it’s not so much a theory as a good starting point for a theory. ”

  Jamie licked foam off his upper lip and sat his mug down. He actually gave the photocopies a cursory inspection, which implied that the girl in line must have been ignoring him. “What do you mean by that?”

  “Exactly what I said. Do you want to hear it or not?”

  Both of the guys nodded, so I filled them in.

  “These ghosts, the ones that are popping up like dandelions all over the battlefield—we’ve never seen anything like them before because of Green Eyes. ”

  “I thought you didn’t believe in Green Eyes,” Jamie accused. He sneaked a glance back at the counter and was apparently disappointed by whatever he saw there.

  “I never said that. I professed a healthy skepticism regarding the subject, that’s all. ”

  Benny opened up his backpack and dropped his sketchbook and pencils inside. “What changed your mind?”

  What the hell. I figured I may as well join the ranks of the initiated and fess up. “I saw him. That’s what changed my mind. ”

  “Isn’t that something?” Jamie half-sighed a laugh. “Everyone else is seeing ghosts, but you of all people see monsters. ”

  “When did you go out to the battlefield?” Benny asked.

  I shook my head. “I didn’t. ”

  “Then where did you see him?”

  “You guys aren’t going to believe this, but I saw him out at Moccasin Bend. ”

  They widened their eyes and glanced at each other, then back to me. Benny asked the question they both had waiting on deck. “So how did you know it was Green Eyes? I thought Green Eyes never left the battlefield. That’s pretty much his chief identifying feature, except for, uh, the eyes. ”