3. Rhodes
THREE
Rhodes
Old-Growth Cypress: Cut from Louisiana swamps and dense enough with resin to turn away rot and termites for a century, cypress was called the eternal wood. Builders spent it on sills and framing, the parts of a house nobody would ever see again once the walls went up.
The berm trail runs the top of an old drainage cut for a quarter mile. There's a solid pine wall on the left, six-foot drop into black ditch water on the right, and the far turn goes loose right where you'd want it to hold.
I slide back down into second gear out of the yard, third by the gate, and then I open it up on the straight where the ruts smooth out. The front wheel goes light over the whoops, and everything that was in my head this morning goes out the back of it.
That's the whole point of the thing. Sixty miles an hour on dirt, and there's no room left over to think about capital funds, or adult responsibilities. There's the trail and the next rut and my own breath loud inside the helmet, and that's it. That's the entire world, and it's enough.
Coop's behind me on the old CRF I keep for him. That one is really his at this point, since he's the only one who rides it.
I can hear him back there when I let off, that lumpy idle we still haven't gotten around to tuning.
I hit the straight and pin it. The pines turn into one green smear, and the ditch comes up on the right where the trail necks down.
I set up for the far turn the way I've set up for it two hundred times, weight forward, trail the back brake, let the rear step out on the loose stuff and ride the slide through the whole arc of the corner with the drop sitting right there off my boot.
It comes out like a dream. That is the rush I live for. My teeth are rattling in my skull from the ruts, and I'm grinning like an idiot inside the helmet. I roll off and coast and wait for him.
He comes around the turn a lot more sensibly than I did and rolls up alongside and flips his visor, not grinning.
"You're gonna put yourself in that ditch one of these days."
"Haven't yet."
"That's not the flex you think it is." He kills the engine. Mine's already off. The quiet drops down over both of us the way it only does out here, no highway humming under it, nothing but wind moving through the tops of the pines and the tick of two hot motors starting to cool.
He works the helmet off. His hair is flat and dark with sweat.
He gives me the look he's been aiming at me since we were nine years old and riding dirt bikes together.
His chin is down, eyes level, the one that means he's decided to be the grown-up in this again.
"One of these days I'm not gonna be around to fish you out. "
"You have never once fished me out of anything, dickhead. Stop trying to act like you're somehow more mature than me."
"Lake Pontchartrain, freshman year. You told everybody you'd make the pier. Did you forget that, Evel Knievel wannabe?"
"I made the pier."
"I swam out and got you halfway to the pier."
"That's an escort." I thumb the kill switch back and forth just to have something in my hand. "You escorted me. Completely different thing."
"You were doggy-paddling and cussing. And you ruined your bike."
"Strong current that day."
"There was no current, dipshit. It's a lake." But he's laughing now, and it knocks the hard look clean off him. For a second, he's just Coop, river mud drying on his boots, no dead mother in his face and no plane ticket in his pocket.
Any afternoon out of a hundred, we've burned out here since he moved to New Orleans for college. And before that, summers when the family would come out for vacation with us. That was back when the biggest thing either of us had to decide was whether we had the daylight left for one more loop.
He shakes his head at me. "You remember when your dad brought us out here and made us dig the whole first section of this trail by hand?"
"He said it'd build character."
"It built blisters. I couldn't hold a fork." Coop wipes his forehead with the back of his glove. "Then he rode it once, told us we'd put the drainage on the wrong side, and made us do it again."
"That's about right." Robert Stone never once let a thing be seventy percent right when it could be redone the whole way.
Especially when he wasn't the one doing the manual labor.
I spent a lot of years reading that as him being hard.
Standing out here on a trail I dug twice, I don't read it that way anymore.
"Last loop," Coop says, dropping his visor. "Then you're buying me a beer."
I let him lead it back. He takes the ditch turn at a civilized speed, and I sit in behind him and take it the same, not stepping the back end out.
I can't say exactly why, but it bothered him, and the bother of it stuck to me somewhere I couldn't scrape it off.
Maybe it is about time to grow up a little.
The cabin's a low cypress box with a tin roof that sounds like a standing ovation when it rains.
There are twenty acres out here that my family's owned since before I was born.
We leave the bikes ticking and cooling in the yard while I unlock the door, walk to the refrigerator, and pull two beers out.
We drop into the two chairs that were on this porch before either of us could walk. Coop puts his boots up on the rail and kills half his beer in one long pull.
Cooper Maybank does not drink fast unless he's working up to a hard thing. So I don't help him get there. You learn that with the quiet ones, the ones built like my old man and Coop's. You leave the silence sitting open and let them walk into it in their own time.
I put my boots on the rail next to his and turn my bottle up, looking around at the empty property.
"Ran into Tallulah last night," I say after a while, when he doesn't respond. "At the Boot. I was surprised to see her there. It was weird running into her there, for some reason. I almost forget she lives here now."
Green dress turning around, my own voice in my own mouth saying the thing I'd give a year of my life to reach back and grab before it got out. I keep my face doing nothing and drink my beer.
"How'd she seem?" he asks.
“Fine,” I answer a little too quickly.
Fine. That's the word loaded and ready. She was fine. What I saw was a girl who still stands like she plays, weight up on the front of her feet the way she's stood since she was twelve years old, in a green dress, in a bar full of people who don't know one thing about her.
“That’s it? Fine.”
“She was good, Coop. What do you want me to say? She’s sharp as ever. Gave me hell the entire time." I leave out the part that she knew immediately I was suspect of what she was drinking.
Coop nods at the bikes parked in front of us, and something moves across his face that I don't much like. "She's real good at seeming good."
"She wasn't seeming, Coop. She ran laps around two frat guys hitting on her and me inside of five minutes."
"That's exactly what I'm saying." He rolls the bottle between his palms, back and forth.
"She had it handled the whole month before Virginia, too.
Straight A's, never missed a class. Nobody knew one damn thing until Mama found the—" He stops and puts his boots down off the rail before picking the sentence back up somewhere safer.
"She's got a version of herself where everything's fine and running smooth, and that's the one she puts out.
I've watched her run it my whole life. She could be drowning, and you'd get straight A's and a smart mouth right up until she went under. "
I don't answer that. There's a stubborn thing sitting in me that wants to defend her, but the truth is, I had the same worry when I saw her last night at The Boot.
"I'm thinking about not going," he says.
"To Spain?"
"Yeah. I just think with Tilly being here for her Freshman year, Mom,” he pauses. “Since Mom just died, it's just too raw, too soon. She's supposed to move into my apartment, and I just don't think she should live there alone in the middle of all this chaos."
I turn the bottle on my knee. It leaves a cold, wet ring on the denim. "You've been building Galicia since sophomore year. You took three semesters of aquaculture credits just to qualify. You sat in a language lab and actually learned Spanish, which I personally watched nearly kill you."
"I know what I did. But making sure she's safe is more important. The timing is shitty."
"Your mama made you promise you'd go."
His throat works. I know that promise got made even though I wasn't in the room for it, because I know exactly how Lizzy Maybank spent her dying, propped up in that four-poster with the window over the creek, wringing promises out of her kids one at a time like she was rationing them out for a war she knew was coming.
Hell, she did it to me. I can still hear her. "Keep living. Do the things. Mind the beds."
Out past the treeline, a woodpecker starts hammering and then quits. The quiet after it is louder than it was.
"She did," Coop says. "She specifically made me promise I'd go. She told me—" He doesn't finish that one. He's not going to, and I'm not going to reach in there after it. So I look at the toe of my boot and give him the room to leave it unsaid.
"She made me promise to go to Spain and make sure Tilly is okay. That's the whole problem right there. I can't keep go-to-Spain and look-after-Tilly, not with an ocean in between. And I can't exactly call her up and ask which one she meant the most."
"So go," I tell him. "I'll make sure Tallulah is okay."
It comes out of me the way the ditch turn comes, no gap at all between seeing the line and taking it.
My mouth was already through the corner before the careful part of me catches up to check the math.
He set the thing that's weighing on him down on this porch, and I want to be the one who reaches over and picks it up for him.
He looks at me. "Rhodes."
"I mean it. What's the actual job? Somebody close by, somebody who clocks it fast if she's off, somebody who's just around.
I'm fifteen minutes from Tulane. She can take the second bedroom at my place.
It's sitting there empty. Then you're not floating two rents, she's not living alone, and you're not lying awake in Spain at three in the morning wondering whether your sister's by herself. "
"I don't want to ask you to do that."
"You're not. I'm offering it."
He finishes his beer without a word, keeping his eyes forward.
"It's Tallulah," I say after a few minutes. "She's practically my sister, too. Your family's my family, man. I'm responsible enough to make sure she comes home at night, isn't getting herself into trouble, and goes to class."
The beer's gone warm in my hand somewhere in there. I don't drink it.
He's quiet for a long moment. Then he sets his empty bottle down on the rail and puts the heels of both hands against his eyes and lets out a breath with a crack running through the middle of it.
"You know, that isn't a terrible idea."
I smile, satisfied with myself. I look at the woodpecker's tree, studying the little holes he's drilled into the pine bark.
Neither one of us says a single word about the fact that he's crying a little on my porch, or that I'm fighting back the frog rising in my throat.
My old man never had a word for it either, and Granger raised his kids and half-raised me the same exact way.
So we just sit in it, and let it be a thing that's happening, and wait for it to pass.
"I trust you," he says, once the voice comes back level. "I've run every version of me leaving in my head for the last week, and your idea is the only one where I might be able to go and not worry myself sick."
"Thank you, Bro. You can trust me."
He drops his hands. His red eyes are dead serious. "Let me think about it a little, but if you're serious, I might take you up on it."
"I'm serious as a heart attack."
He nods slowly, like something is settling back into place. "You know our families have always stepped up for each other, right? Looking out for Tilly is exactly what my folks did for y'all."
I don't answer because that's exactly what happened. Of my five brothers, I was the closest to the Maybanks.
My mother died when I was four. I don't remember her, not really, just the stories other people tell about the two of us before she was gone.
What I have instead is the Maybank house. Lizzy set me a place at a table that was already crowded. Granger pushed a rod into my hands and told me not to embarrass him on the water.
And when somebody murdered my father three and a half years ago, making me an orphan for real, the Maybanks closed around us again without anyone asking.
Cooper's right. It's just what we do for each other.
"How about this? I'll talk to her this weekend about it. Fair warning, though, brother, she is going to be hot about it."
"She gets all twisted about everything. I know how to handle her."
He grins, tired and hollowed out and lighter by half all at once. "Good luck. She's gonna eat you alive."
My phone buzzes twice against my knee. I turn it over.
The first one's from Reeves, one of my five older brothers. I'm glad he's finally back close to the family, so we get to see each other more. Mostly, we come out here and ride dirt bikes. He left for the military as soon as he graduated from college and didn't look back.
See you in two hours, dickhead.
Two hours puts us both downtown for the capital allocation meeting, all six of us in a room on the fiftieth floor to raise our hands about a number that got settled before anybody walked in the door.
For most of my childhood, Reeves was a signature on a Christmas card, and that was about the extent of our relationship. He's now out of the Navy for a couple of years and living an hour outside the city with his girl, Charli, and their two kids, which is nice having him closer.
Of the five of them, he's the one I've got the most in common with, which mostly means neither of us talks, and we would both rather put our hands on a thing than sit down and discuss it. We repointed the chimney at the cabin together last summer, and I doubt we traded forty words in two days.
He's also the only one who has never once looked at me like I'm the baby.
The second text is from Ridge.
Stay after today. I want ten minutes with you.
I read it twice. There's the family, and there's the business, and I have never once in my life been kept after either one.
I put the phone back on my leg without answering it.
We finish one more beer, load the bikes onto the trailer, and say our goodbyes. He takes off. I stand there a while, watching the taillights swing down the long gravel drive and vanish where the trees close over the road, and then head back to the city to play businessman with my brothers.