"Cruel Radiance" by Mark Powell, excerpted from Grievous Angels

Mark Powell is the author of six novels, including Small Treasons (Gallery/Simon and Schuster 2017)--a SIBA Okra Pick, and a Southern Living Best Book of the Year--and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Breadloaf and Sewanee Writers' Conferences, and twice from the Fulbright Foundation to Slovakia and Romania. In 2009, he received the Chaffin Award for contributions to Appalachian literature. He has written about Southern culture and music for the Oxford American, the war in Ukraine for The Daily Beast, and his dog for Garden & Gun. He holds degrees from the Citadel, the University of South Carolina, and Yale Divinity School, and directs the creative writing program at Appalachian State University.  His other books: Lioness (West Virginia University Press, 2022), Firebird. (Haywire Books, 2020), The Sheltering (Story River Books, 2014), The Dark Corner (University of Tennessee Press, 2012), Blood Kin (University of Tennessee Press, 2006), and Prodigals (University of Tennessee Press, 2002).

Cruel Radiance

Excerpted from Grievous Angels

The night before he left for what he had decided to call home, for what he had come to suspect he would call forever, David James met Camilla at a bar near his flat in the Condessa neighborhood of Mexico City. He’d gotten the email that morning from a cousin back home in the mountains of South Carolina: Hey cuz, Harlan had written, I’m sorry to be emailing with news like this but it seems I don’t have your number anymore. Or maybe you just ain’t picking up... David James’s father was dead, and though he had missed the funeral, there would be a memorial service in four days’ time at the Tugaloo Church of the Risen Christ where his father had pastored for thirty-nine years. David found a flight online, and after packing his camera and lens and what little clothes he had, carried an armload of books to the youth center on Lomas de Santa Fe. Cioran and Kierkegaard. Robert Capa and Gilles Peress. Things he’d carried for years just to have something to carry.

But not anymore.

He put the books in the donation bin but couldn’t bring himself to walk back to his flat, at least not yet. To walk back would put in motion all manner of things. To walk back would mean facing all manner of things, not least of which the fact that he hadn’t seen his father in four years and hadn’t spoken to him in three.

He looked around him.

The day was warm. The street busy.

He would face it all, just not yet, and instead of going back decided to walk.  

The neighborhood was a tangle of jacaranda trees and wrought iron, sidewalk cafés and buildings painted in primary colors. Everyone young, everyone radiating a bohemian good health. A neighborhood of microgreens and microbrews, of flowers carts and patisseries.

It felt spacious.

It felt safe.

It felt possible, he had realized over the past few years, not just to never leave the expanse of Mexico City but to never leave the Condessa. It was a dodge, of course, a way of denying the existence of the greater world. But having for so long engaged with such, he felt justified. David had spent twenty years as a photographer of violence—Afghanistan, Syria, Ukraine—cataloging the aftermath of airstrikes and suicide vests, of children torn into quarters and eighths and lesser fractions not to be considered, and his mind was a vault of suffering. An old woman in Waziristan covered with a blanket but pretty much just a torso and head after a 2.75 inch rocket had come through the tin roof. A fourteen-year-old girl killed on a footbridge in Donbas, hair dyed purple and drifting like floss in the dark water. The disappearance of forty-three college students in Guerrero had brought him to Mexico and he had never left. He made his living now working for glossy magazines, photographing fashion and food, profiles of young politicians and even younger online influencers. He’d met Camilla on just such a shoot. In Parque España he stopped to text her—a straightforward message, no pretense, no games—and kept walking.

It was late afternoon when he got back to his flat. He fell asleep and woke just before dusk having crawled beneath the duvet without realizing it. He was soaked with sweat and stripped the sheets. Showered, got dressed, and went out.

It was a lazy summer evening and he followed Avenida Ámsterdam beneath a canopy of leafy green. The skateboarders were out, the dog walkers. Children on playground equipment, their parents staring down at phones. The boutiques were closing but the bars seemed to vibrate with neon and noise. La Clandestina. Gin Gin Condessa. Deleted Souls.

He turned into a bar on Tamaulipas, graffiti and silver stools, lucha libre masks on the wall, the place happily loud. No sign of Camilla but a hand went up at the bar and he walked over to take the stool by Laurence, an expat he’d drank with once every few weeks for the last three years.

  “What we drinking, David?”

“You tell me.”
            The bartender put glasses of mescal in front of them and Laurence raised his in salute.

  Like David, Laurence was a southerner. A few years older. Late-forties, David thought. Perpetually sunburnt, perpetually unkempt. Reading the Karls, Rahner and Barth, which made him not unlike any number of expats who were many things but always grievously eccentric and mildly alcoholic. He sat with his gray Crocs hooked on the rail.

“You look even shittier than usual,” Laurence said.

“Found out today my father passed away.”

  “Oh hell. You’re lying.”

  “I wouldn’t lie about that.”

  “I don’t know if you would or you wouldn’t. Let’s get us two cervezas and figure it out.”

  He raised a hand to the bartender while David told him about the message.

“Your daddy was a preacher I tend to remember you saying. Baptist, I’m guessing.”

  “Non-denominational, actually.”

  Laurence nodded as if he’d expected as much.

“A little country church then. Lots of time in the sanctuary. Revival, Bible school. Still, I don’t see you hauling yourself over every sabbath morn.”

  “I never took to it.”

  “Ten years old and already the existential hero with his camera up between him and the world.”

  “It sounds stupid as shit when you say it like that.”

“Which is what makes me think maybe it’s true.”

  “Is that the metric, stupid as shit?”

  “That would be the metric,” Laurence said, “yes sir.”

  Eventually, the bartender brought over two more and David stood to look around. He didn’t know who or what he was expecting to see. Yes, you do, he told himself. You’re looking for her.

  “Tell me about Iraq,” he said when he sat back down.

  “Iraq, shit.”

  “The Chaplain.”

“The Chaplain.” He looked at his hands. “Brother David, I do believe you know that story.”

“Remind me then.”

“I do believe you know it by heart.”

“You said he’d lost his faith.”

Laurence took a long swallow.

“If you know already you don’t need me to tell it.”

“Like an old sock.”

  “You were serious about your daddy weren’t you?”
            “Got the email this morning. Died three days ago.”

  “Jesus, man.”

  “Apparently they had some trouble tracking me down.”

  “Jesus God.”

  “I’m on a plane in the morning.”

  Laurence nodded, finished his cerveza, and raised his hand to signal the waiter.

“At the time I was a Captain in the 322nd  of the Georgia National Guard. Support battalion,” Laurence said. “Tell me when you want me to fast forward.”

“Just tell it, please.”

“Is this some kind of mourning thing?”

“Just tell it.”

“I was five or six years in the guard and had never done a thing more than riding around St. Simon’s once after a hurricane and then suddenly—boom—9/11. And double boom—I’m called up. Had a contracting company at the time. Pretty damn successful too, but all at once it’s no more building lake houses around Lanier, no more condos in Buckhead. No sir. I’m deployed to this massive tent city, a sad place. Just goddamn heat and more heat, you know? Sun, dust, babies too weak to cry. And it was there I met a man who had simply given up on God.”

“Our chaplain.”

“Our chaplain indeed. Howard Agnew, a light colonel in the US Army Reserve. Tell me something though. You really going home to all those America for Americans assholes?”

  “I guess so.”

  “You should know it’s a different place than what you remember. These days you got to be willing to die for your country, at least the parts that wind up on postage stamps. Presidents, rare birds.”

  “Mount Rushmore.”

  “Playful kittens. Victory in the Pacific.” He lifted his beer. “You planning on coming back?”

“I’d prefer it to be round-trip.”

  Laurence nodded.

“Attached to the camp was a field hospital whose sole mission seemed to be watching infants die of dehydration. This after the cruise missiles and smart bombs had destroyed the highways, the power grid, the goddamn municipal water plants or what have you. But this chaplain, he was always there, pacing, praying, touching the heads of the children. And maybe that was where his faith went, into the hair and skin of these dying babies, out of his mouth with those fruitless prayers. Because if you can't pray for your dying child—he told me this, this is the crux of the story, I guess—if you can't pray for your dying child then you cannot pray. Period. Tells me this one day, puts his hand on my shoulder and I realize it’s the first time I’ve seen him touch any American, and I remember thinking how odd that was, that he had saved himself, his presence, for the Iraqis, the mothers, all them dying babies. But then that didn't seem odd at all but exactly right.”

Laurence held his beer up to the light.

“Then what?” David asked.

“You know what. Very slowly, like he was afraid he might scare me, he takes his hand back off my shoulder and looks around the floor and says, I seem to have lost it. And I ask lost what? And he says back, plain as day, my faith.”

“‘My faith.’”

“You see the good Lord in his blessed assurance or wisdom or whatever had sent Chaplain Agnew to a field hospital jam-packed with armored SUVs and pallets of shrink-wrapped cash but the only thing the good chaplain could see was pain. Pain everywhere. You smell it, you taste it. What’s the Arabic for suffering? Now give me another word for it, now give me another, cause the first one, the second—it isn’t goddamn enough. The dust. The rebar. You know what I’m saying? The husks of cars and the husks of people. And everywhere the helicopters overhead—zoom. The silver jets unzipping white contrails just like zoom. And below that, the children, the babies. All dying, and God saying not a word, God lifting not a finger.”

He put down his beer.

“All those dehydrated children drinking Pedialyte while their mothers prayed and begged and overhead passed the Blackhawks and Little Birds as if to acknowledge that while God or Allah might be not be watching, the US military sure as hell was. You’re right about the sock though, the way he looked around the floor for it.”

“And you went home.”

“Actually, I took my mid-tour leave and went to Spain. Stayed liquored up for a week. Someone’s looking at you.”

David looked down the bar to see Camilla approaching.

“That’s your girl, right?”

“Finish the story. You went home.”

“Eventually, yeah. Went home and sold every-damn-thing before I could drink it away. Gave the wife both houses not that she cared. She just wanted to see the backside of me, poor miserable woman. Cashed out and came here.”

He pointed with his drink.

“Here she comes.”

David watched her approach, tentative on heels. She came over and stood two steps off his shoulder, hesitant Camilla.

“I’ll get moving.” Laurence stood and put his hand on David’s shoulder. “Word of parting advice? You should probably quit with the chaplain.”

“What, thinking about him?”

  “Thinking about him, asking about him. The entire world’s about three or four years from killing each other over cobalt and you’re fixated on this poor son of a bitch. You’re revealing pathologies, David.”

  “That sounds harsh.”

  “Vulnerabilities. Psychic wounds. I don’t mean it to sound harsh.” He took his damp hand from David’s shoulder. “Take care of yourself. I hope I see you again.”

Camilla stood for a moment at his shoulder and then slid in beside him.

“I didn’t know if I should,” she said.

“Should what?”

“Sit down. Meet you. I don’t know.”

“Yet here you are.”

“Here I am.” She looked away and back at David. “Is it true about your father?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“And you’re going back?”

“That too.”

They wound up back at her place. Like a thousand other nights. Only not that many, David thought. It had been a few years but their days together were scattered in between everything else, coins in a wishing well, bright, but surprisingly few. He stood at the open window, the curtain barely moving, and watched the street. She’d said something when he got up from bed, shifted her sleeping self to mumble some garbled Spanish, naked and drowsy, gorgeous and, he thought, resentful. But past him too, already past him so that what was left to him was ahead, or behind maybe, depending on how one measured such.

He measured such in loss, and thought of his parents, his dead mother, joined now by his dead father. How nights she would read to him from an illustrated children’s Bible. The Parting of the Red Sea. The Tower of Babel. Noah’s Ark—the story of the Ark had comforted him. That there was refuge, that you might float above the spilled chaos. When she died, when she refused all treatment excepting prayer, excepting the laying on of hands, when the cancer ate all but her eyes, he imagined that Ark as running aground, taking on water so that he washed onto the shores of abandonment there in his twenty-fourth year, lost, marooned, but knowing too if he could just get free of such, if the waters could lift him he would be saved. As dramatic as that sounded, as ridiculously dramatic as that sounded.

But being dramatic, being ridiculous doesn’t necessarily make something untrue.

It can, in fact, be a guarantor of truth.

Like Laurence’s metric: that it sounded like stupid bullshit meant it probably wasn’t. The world being what it is. We humans being what we are.

He looked at the smooth shape of Camilla’s back, the swell of her shoulders up to the gloss of her hair. She’d spent her twenties and thirties on a Mexican telenovela and now, in the first blush of middle age, spent her days on the board of a human rights NGO. She was a remarkable woman, and it was possible he loved her. Still, he was going. He was giving something up, but then he had spent his life giving things up. He would regret it, but knew that he didn’t really have a say in the matter. The chaplain and his sock, the way you could discard something with such ease you wondered if you ever possessed it in the first place.

He didn’t wake her and was in the Uber on the way to airport before he realized what it was she had said in her sleep:

On to the next tragedy.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

There was no one to meet David in Atlanta and he took the tram to Concourse T where he waited in line for his rental car. The Atlanta heat felt no different than that of Mexico City but the drive was something else. The drive was all manner of association. Atlanta had been the lodestar of his childhood, the big city, the place he longed for.

Watching Dale Murphy at the old Fulton County Stadium.

Dominque Wilkins at the Omni.

The Lenox Square Mall where you took the Marta downtown to the World of Coke. He’d come with his parents back then, his mama still alive, he and his father still talking, still acknowledging each other. The rifts, the drift—that had all come later, after his mama was in the ground, after David had quit believing, or pretending to believe. Simply after as he’d come to understand it. He merged onto I-85 and realized he’d always thought they’d patch things up, had never doubted it because in his mind there was always more time. But of course there isn’t, there never is.

He was near Lake Hartwell and the state line when his phone went off. It was his cousin Harlan, the same cousin who had sent the email.

“I left the key on the shelf above the washer around back, figured you’d want to see your old room.”

“I appreciate it.”

“Service is Sunday at the church. I guess you still remember the way?”

“I guess I do.”

Harlan laughed, uncomfortably. Cleared his throat, also uncomfortably, David thought.

“Hey, David,” he said. “I really am sorry.”

“I appreciate it.”

“I know it had been a while, you and your daddy and all.”

“Yeah.”

“Just the entire circumstances of things.”

“I appreciate you leaving the key.”

“Sure, absolutely. Listen though, think you could come by mama’s tonight? She’d love to see you.”

“Let me see what time I get in.”

“Just for a minute. She keeps asking.”

“Let me get settled and I’ll see.”

Highway 11 after that. The gates for golf courses and RV parks. Convenience stores and a giant Phantom firework stand. He made a left in Germantown where the road began its incline past the city pool and the Last Chance, past Frasier’s General Store and the Highway 28 overlook. Another left onto Whetstone Road into the early summer green, the asphalt buckled with heat shimmers and marked by the occasional roadside cross.

The left by the Dollar General onto Tamassee Ridge brought him home. The house and the shed. The walnut trees and a yard of broken hulls. He cut the engine and sat taking it all in. The faded sideboards, the brick extension tacked on in the late 70s. His parents newlyweds then, or near to it. His mama carrying him like bundled laundry while his father and uncle poured the foundation and laid the block. They’d gained an extra bedroom but lost the symmetry. Something for which his father never seemed to forgive him.

He got out, stiff from the drive.

The yard crab grass and weeds, patches of wine-colored clay where the rain had pooled. He surveyed it all, the house and carport. The metal frame of an old swing, chains almost grazing the dirt. The swing itself—he couldn’t remember what had happened to the swing. The shed with its roofing tin unmoored and sloped toward the earth. Across the road, behind the house, everywhere really—what hadn’t been pasture had been apple orchard. Then the blight came in ’87, the bulldozers in ’88, and everything changed. The old packing house now a recycling center. You could just see it from the porch. Open containers the size of railroad cars spilling plastic onto the gravel.

He looked back at the house, at all the memories contained therein. The Christmas mornings and summer evenings. The thousands of days made holy by their sameness. And then one particular day, that day in the kitchen, a few weeks after her funeral, when it was just the two of them, David and his father. When it was finally clear from now on it would only be the two of them and he’d stared his father down across a span of Formica.

“You said yourself the only proper response to God is silence. Yet you keep getting up there.”

“Talking,” his father said.

“Talking. Every Sunday, yes.”

“And you’d have me do what?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well that right there’s the problem, son. I don’t know either.”

Twenty-four years old and trying to wreck what little remained to them, too damn young, too damn stupid to realize time would take care of such soon enough. And what, ultimately, had been his grievances? That his father had not forced his mother into some sort of treatment. That he had gone on believing. That he did not die in her place. That day—it occurred to him that he alone now remembered such. When you are the last to carry a memory what becomes of the memory itself?

It was a question for his father.

He had never asked.

And now he couldn’t.

Maybe he never could.

But you see things differently through time. Neither person means to do harm, yet neither seems capable of anything else. Except that wasn’t exactly true. David had meant great harm, grievous harm, and while you can repent of it, while you can regret it, you can’t take it back.

The key was exactly where Harlan had said it would be, above the washing machine, behind a box of Tide, the spilled crystals and airy bits of dryer lint. He unlocked the back door and waited. That sense of fissure, of what is and what will be. One more step and you moved from this world into the next.

Finally, he took it.

Inside it was all the same, only older, sadder too. The same furniture, the same photos tacked to the paneled walls. Musty, forgotten. The house overheated, like an oven slow to cool. The kitchen table seemed smaller than he remembered but of course it would. Places not set for three but worn to a dull gloss. A cloth napkin covering the biscuits. A plastic pitcher of sweet tea. Sundays you could smell the pork loin the moment you came in from the noon service, the Crock Pot simmering. He touched the table and remembered those summers days eating bologna sandwiches on Bunny bread. Lay’s potato chips. The half-moons of cantaloupe spiraled across a paper plate.

His daddy’s old La-Z-Boy in the living room.

He thought of texting a photo to Camilla but why, really?

Instead, he turned on the window AC unit and went back to the car for his bag.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

At dusk he drove over to his aunt’s house, Harlan’s mother.

He pulled in and knocked softly on the carport door. His father’s sister. Eighty-four years old, aproned and tired, but eyes still bright, arms still strong when she hugged him.

“Look at you. How long has it been, honey?”

“I don’t know, Aunt Clary. A while.”

But he knew how long: since his last fight with his father, four years more or less. Which struck him now as impossible, though he knew it wasn’t.

“I know you got to be hungry,” she said.

“I could probably eat.”

“I fried some chicken and put some beans on the stove. Looks like to me you’ve lost some weight.”

They sat at the table, David eating, his aunt across from him, watching. He’d sat like this on countless nights. He’d drive Harlan home from basketball practice and his Aunt Clary would sit them both down, milk and cornbread, country ham. You’d be too hot to eat but you’d eat anyway just so you wouldn’t hurt her feelings.

“You know I believe I’ve seen just about every photograph you’ve took over the years,” she said. “Harlan’s got a subscription to these magazines like you wouldn’t believe. Things most folk wouldn’t know existed. Look here.” She hefted herself up and walked into the bedroom, came back carrying a copy of the Spanish language edition of Vogue.

“You’re kidding me.”

“Some sort of TV star. Can’t read a word of it but sure like seeing your name in there.”

He took the magazine. It was Camilla, that very first day they met.

“Yeah,” he said, “she’s on a Mexican telenovela. Used to be, at least.”

“A pretty woman.”

“Harlan subscribes to this?”

“You think I’d know where to buy some fancy Mexican magazine without him? We’ve all kept up with you.”

“Thank you.”

“We’ve all missed you, David.”

“I’ve missed y’all too.”

“Long time you’ve been gone.”

He kept his eyes on his food, could feel her looking at him. Could feel what she wasn’t saying, and then she did.

“They’ll be a service for him Sunday at the church.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I hope you’ll come.”

“It’s why I’m here.”

“Good, I just…It ain’t my business, I know, but I just never understood what happened between you two.”

“I know.”

“Do you though? Do you know?”
            “Not really.”

“I figured that. Your daddy didn’t either. He never said anything but I knew he didn’t. You two were always too much alike. Prideful.”

“I regret it.”

“Both of you prideful and pigheaded as could be.”

“I regret it, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

She patted his hand.

“I’m not getting at anything. Like I said it ain’t my business no how. Can I ask you a question though?”

“You know you can.”

“Do you believe in the Lord, David?”

He blushed.

“What I’ve always loved about you, Aunt Clary—”

“How I don’t have much use for small talk?”

“That would be it.”

“I’m sorry, honey, but I’m still asking. Do you?”

“I don’t know. Some days. Probably.”

“Do you believe you’re in His care?”

“That would be a tougher one.”

“That He has his hand on you?”

“I think that would be a tougher one to say yes to.”

“Well,” she said, and reached again for his hand, “good thing you don’t have to believe it or not for it to be so.”

“I do agree with that.”

“That we don’t have much say in things?”

“That we maybe don’t have any say in anything.”

She let her fingers slide away.

“Well,” she said, “you eat up. Harlan’ll be here in a minute and want to take you off to that restaurant of his I’m sure.”

“He’s doing well with it, isn’t he?”

“Lord, that boy. I guess you know they serve alcoholic drinks over there. Hard cider they call it.” She stood. “I’ve made my peace with it.”

“You ever go over and have you a cold one, Aunt Clary?”

She waved this away.

“You shush.”

“Do you though?”

“You stop, David. You know I’m about too old to even get out the door feels like.”

“I ask because it actually looks like you’re the one who’s lost weight.”

“Please.”

“The figure of a young lady.”

She laughed and took his empty plate.

“Harlan brings supper by most nights. I pick at it so he doesn’t worry. You wouldn’t know it to look at him but he’s a good boy. Misses his daddy more than he’d ever say.”

“Yeah,” David said, “I guess we all do.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Harlan came in a little later.

“There he is! There he is, mama! You trapped him with biscuits I see.”

“Good to see you, Harlan.”

He knocked away David’s hand and pulled him into a bear hug.

“Good to see you, cuz. Good as hell to see you.”

“Harlan!”

“Sorry, mama. But it is.”

They rode in his big pickup, his cousin poured over the seat, a bull of a man in khaki pants and a pink polo that stretched over the blimp of his stomach. Cell phone clipped to his belt. Goatee around the wide smile parting his wide head. He was three years younger and two inches shorter than David but had at least sixty pounds on him.

“Damn, it’s good to see you!” he said, and slapped David’s thigh. “Mama feed you?”

“Chicken and biscuits.”

“Woman can cook.”

“Yes, she can.”

They were going ninety-three along a back road that wound over the hills and past long stands of pines. Shadow country, old barns and pastures and the greater nothingness that held them. The tires only marginally in contact with the asphalt.

“Right up here,” Harlan said. “You remember the old Whitaker Place?”

“The orchard?”

“The orchard, the house, all of it. Wait till you see what we done with it.”

It was impossibly dark. No streetlights, no houses. A darkness David had come to associate with foreign countries, the Hindu Kush, the Sierra Gorda. Places lawless and vast and incomprehensibly dark. Peopled with outliers, but only barely. How quickly he’d forgotten that he’d grown up in such, which was why, he supposed, he’d felt at home in so many places that weren’t.

“We’re open seven days a week with hardly a one less busy than another,” Harlan said. “Had somebody do a write up in Garden & Gun, one in Southern Living. Our bar menu is pure organ meat and cheese so expensive it might as well be helicoptered in from Provence. I say to folks: you can get the hanger steak or a used car but I can tell you right now it’s the steak you ain’t gonna regret. Hold on. We’re right up here.”

Over the next rise the darkness gave way to a lane of fairy lights and beneath them Harlan slowed and hung one meaty arm out the window.

“We got cottages for rent down there. A wedding venue. You’ll see the cidery when we get up here to the big house.”

“The big house?”

“Renovated and expanded, cuz. Shit was falling in when we bought it.”

The Whitaker house looked lifted out of some Civil War fantasy, Tara updated for Trip Advisor. The cobbled drive, the stained glass. They slowed by the front doors.

“You know what this is called?” Harlan asked.

“A porte-cochère.”

“Damn. You even say it right, you classy son of a bitch. Why you smiling?”

“Am I?”

“Didn’t think ole Hognose Harlan had it in him, did you?”

“I never doubted.”

“Shit. Come on. I’ll give you the grand tour.”

The valet. The white columns and a vast wrap around porch. Out on the deck men with eye-work sat across the candle-lit tables from their second wives. You could hear the silverware, the whispered voices. Inside, the bar was paneled. Thick upholstery and bronze fixtures. Bartenders in black vests over their white button downs.

“Classy, right?” Harlan said. “You were expecting some redneck shit, I know. Miller Light and neon. Ole Hank on the jukebox.”

“No, I’m just…”

“I know you, cuz.” He slapped David’s shoulder. “Can’t believe old Harlan’s got so much southern charm in him. You were expecting Bubba Gump and here I gave you the Biltmore House. But I’ll tell you. Got a design firm out of Charleston. Cost I ain’t even saying how much but worth ever red cent.”

They took their bourbons to a side table. A half hour to closing and the place just beginning to empty.

“This is really nice,” Harlan said. “Sitting like this. Been too damn long, David.”

“I know.”

“Whatever beef you had with your daddy—I ain’t going to pretend to understand it—but whatever it was. You stayed away too long.”

“I know. I’m sorry about that.”

Harlan waved away the sentiment.

“I’m not accusing. We all navigating the best we can. “

“Yeah.”

“Life’s damn hard. No one tells you that when you’re young. How much of it will be hard, how much of it will be boring. It’s a goddamn disservice is what it is, the way we hide things from our kids.”

  “You tell it to yours?”

  “Shit. Of course not.” Harlan turned to wave over two more drinks. “You know me, I’m all talk.”

  “Doing just fine for all talk it appears.”

  “Yeah. I’m honestly surprised somedays. I wake up thinking I’m fourteen and coming home from football practice to pack apple crates or get up some Saturday morning thinking I need to help daddy Bush Hog. Instead I’ve got a text from my broker telling me some EV stock is about to take off and do I want in on the ground floor.”

  “How’s Lori?”

“Got some VIP pass to Dollywood. Up there half the time.”

  “She’s all right then?”

  “Fine, great. I’d guess you’d say that. Running past me I sometimes feel like. The children too. I’m goddamn grateful and goddamn exhausted at the same time.”

  “It’s strange that way.”

  “What?”

  “Life.”

  “Life, yeah. Damn strange.”

  “Mr. Pettis?”

  The waiter stood smiling beneath a handlebar mustache, drinks on a serving platter.

  “Thank you, Joel,” Harlan said. “I will most certainly take those.”

  He passed one to David and they drank quietly while a few more patrons trickled out, nodding to Harlan as they passed. Only a single table left occupied. A few men laughing too loudly in the sudden emptiness. David finished his drink and put his hands flat on the table.

  “Where’s the restroom?”

  “Back corner there, cuz. Try the sugar scrub.”

  David looked at him.

  “I’m not kidding. We got this high-end sugar scrub. Give you hands like a baby.”

  “All right.”

  “I ain’t shitting you.”

  “I believe you.”

  “Take a look at the walls back there too.”

  “The walls?”

  Harlan smiled.

“You’ll see em.”

  And he did, in the hall outside the bathroom, framed and tacked to the oak paneling—photographs, his photographs, surprising enough that it brought on a moment of disorientation. He recognized them but also didn’t. But of course, he did: black-and-white with a small placard that gave his name and the location. Numbered prints of photographs he’d taken in Bogota and Guanajuato, Helmand and Liberia. Sold through his New York gallery at no small price. Pictures of suffering but out of context they appeared beautiful, the light almost ethereal, the act almost holy. The wet heat of Kinshasa. The smell of diapers and diesel at a shanty town in Colombia. The mound of fishheads at a market in Liberia.

  He stepped closer.

Felt duration was the term for it—that sense that the moment went on before the frame just as much as it extended past it, that sense of captured time, that sense that a photograph embodies a precise now that is otherwise lost in an eternity of such: he’d never imagined his work embodied it but standing there he saw that it did. The world as it was, unadorned. He saw something else too: what James Agee called ‘the cruel radiance of what is’. You could mistake it for the obvious and you wouldn’t necessarily be wrong. But the obvious was only one aspect, and what he saw was composed of many.

  There was a crowd at the table when he got back, the men he’d heard across the room. Harlan stood talking to one who was vaguely familiar though David couldn’t quite place him. At least as wide as Harlan but solidly built, muscle piled on a broad frame beneath a thick black beard, Bollé sunglasses on a cord around his neck. An American flag pin, AFA below the field of stripes. Behind him stood two other men. One tall and gaunt, the other younger, scruffy and wiry, underfed and angry. HELP ME tattooed on his hand.

  “Here he is,” Harlan said. “Man of the hour.”

  “David,” the giant man said and extended his right hand. “Been a while I know, bud. Just wanted to say how sorry I was to hear about your daddy.”

  “Thank you.”

  “He was a great man, a true Christian Patriot even if he didn’t realize as much.”

  The younger man giggled but went silent, almost bashful when the giant man looked at him.

“Harlan says you’re home for a bit,” the bearded man said. “If you need anything, please come see me.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Barring that I’d love to just sit down and catch up. Good to see you, brother Harlan.”

  David and Harlan watched them cross the room, the giant in front, the gaunt man at his shoulder, the younger not so much laughing as cackling.

  “Who was that?” David asked.

  “You don’t remember?”

  “No.”

  “Think about it.”

  David shook his head.

  “Come on,” Harlan said. “You really don’t know?”

  “No.”

  “That was Mason Steed.”

“Mason Steed, Jesus. From high school?”

“He was what, two years ahead of you?”

“Three.”

“Huge part of your life as I recall.”

“I wouldn’t say huge.”

“Bullshit,” Harlan said. “You practically worshipped the guy.”

“What’s he doing now?”

  “You really don’t know, do you? He’s like a star now. Country music.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

“I kid you not, cuz. Writes songs about Biden and Hillary and all that. How the working man can’t catch a break. He went to law school, joined the army. Now he’s like the darling of right-wing radio.”

  “A Christian Patriot he said.”

  “Yeah, I think he was giving you a little bit of shit.”

  “What did he have to do with daddy?”

  “Nothing. Which was the problem. Your daddy was a saint around here, doing unto others and all. Mason wanted his blessing and your daddy wouldn’t give it. Got on his bad side, I’m inclined to believe.”

  “I can’t imagine my daddy getting on anyone’s bad side.”

  “Well, Mason had his good side surgically removed so…”

  “What’s the blessing part?”

  “Oh, for his militia. God and country and all.”

  “You think he’s dangerous?” 

  “I think he’s a pompous ass with a great voice and he’s figured out how to get rich off it. Walking around with a Glock on his hip and singing about the Federalist papers. They call themselves the Patriot Rifles. Red-pilled to a man but also pretty damn toothless. Like AFA-this, and AFA-that, but it’s all internet talk.”

  “AFA?”

  “All that America for Americans shit. President Mitch and all. Got some sort of compound out in the woods. Your daddy—God bless him—wouldn’t have nothing to do with it.”

  “Maybe I will go see him.”

  “Sounds like a good way to get your ass beat.”

  “I thought you said he wasn’t dangerous.”

  Harlan shrugged.

“Let me hit the head and we’ll get out of here.”

David wandered out to the porch where servers were moving tables, stacking chairs and folding table clothes. Mason Steed had indeed been three years ahead of him in high school, and David remembered him as intense and charismatic, sometimes cruel, always sincere. They’d all been young enough back then to believe in the idea of the ubermensch, young enough to believe themselves to be the embodiment of such. Mason most especially. He listened to Black Flag and the Bloodhound Gang, read Nietzsche and the fascist philosopher Carl Schmitt. From the distance of two-and-a-half decades it was all embarrassing, an angry lost boys cliché. But at the time, they weren’t clichés, they were ways of being in the world.

The day had cooled. It was night now and beyond the porch lights a paling blue gave way to a nothingness, to birds and breeze. Crows like darker scratches in the dark grass. Past that the shapeless orchard. The sound of water somewhere downhill. You could hear it uncoiling, some sort of irrigation system that suddenly swished to life. He stood listening until he heard what sounded like a fog horn and walked back inside to find Harlan talking to his manager while a bartender counted the drawer.

  “You ready?”

  Out in the parking lot Harlan stopped, put a toothpick in his mouth, and pointed down to the cottages.

  “I got one set up for you.”

  “One what?”

  “A place to stay.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “Got all the amenities, a five-star rating online. I even turned on the pay-per-view for you.”

  “I’m just planning to stay at home.”

  “Bet you didn’t even know pay-per-view still exists?”

  “I’m serious.”

  “Shit. Serious or not, your daddy—bless his soul—he wasn’t much of a housekeeper.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Suit yourself. But it’s there if you need it.”

  They were almost to Harlan’s truck when they heard the fog horn again. It was the men from inside. The gaunt one was wearing a Boba Fett helmet while the younger one blew into what appeared to be a ram’s horn.

  “Crazy sons of bitches,” Harlan said. “But they all right.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

That night David slept in his childhood bed, around him the childhood walls and ceiling and shadows and shapes. The childhood everything. With the windows open, he smelled honeysuckle. Heard the occasional truck downshifting on the highway. Then long periods of silence, long periods of nothing beyond the cicadas. There had been a time he’d been afraid of the night, the sounds, the swallowing absence of a darkness that was near total. So afraid that he’d kept his window shut and his room had wept heat. So afraid that his parents had taken turns sleeping with him. Too old for such, but there one of them would be, night after night, sweating atop the comforter he sweated beneath. Those nights he would tell himself he was tucked aboard some great Ark. Perhaps not Noah’s, it needn’t be Noah’s. Something more local, he thought, something that held him, that allowed him to float atop the great turbulent sea that waited on the other side of the glass pane. At some point they’d gotten the window AC unit. Kept it on all night so that its glacial air drifted down the hall, reached around the corner, and into his room. His mama’s insistence, the window unit, or so he’d always thought. But lying there, sleepless, he realized he didn’t actually know. That he’d fabricated whole parts of his childhood. Not the events so much as his understanding of such. And now they would stand no correction. They would simply go on, his lone memory, his lone understanding. Which may or may not have made what he remembered true.

 He could hear deer out in the yard.

 There are countless reasons to love a place but you need only one.

Deer in the field, deer in what were left of the hedges.

Love is encompassing, he thought. Love is all around you.

It’s regret that sneaks up on you, regret that comes at you from angles.