Rhodes
TWENTY-SEVEN
The Permit Record: Every application, letter, and inquiry filed with a review board becomes part of a public file that outlives whoever filed it. Nothing is ever taken out of that file. Things are only ever added to it.
The truck is already doing seventy when the on-ramp straightens out.
I don't remember choosing the interstate. I think about how I left Tallulah asleep in my bed. Now the concrete is under me, and the city is falling away in the mirror. My hands are at ten and two the way Vin drilled into me at fifteen.
The tires change their sound on the seams, thunk, thunk, thunk, steady as a clock. I take my phone off the console. I thumb Reeves, click call, and press the speaker button. It goes straight to voicemail again. His voice is flat, telling me to leave a message.
I hang up and toss my phone onto the passenger seat.
The lanes empty out past the airport. It's Saturday, early, and nobody is going east but trucks and men who couldn't sleep.
The sun isn't all the way up yet. The misty light comes at me gray and pink through the windshield where the interstate lifts onto the long stretch through the marsh, cypress standing black in the water on both sides.
I keep the needle where it is and let the mile markers come.
Then the twin spans, five and a half miles of open lake with nothing on either side of the truck, the water flat and pewter under the new light and a shrimper working out toward the north shore.
Slidell comes up off the far end of the bridge. I take the phone off my leg and call him again, but the same greeting comes after no rings.
I hang up.
The exit for the cabin road goes past on my right, and I don't even turn my head. Usually, getting off there is on autopilot.
I put the phone back on my leg and keep driving toward Bay St. Louis.
The only thing I let stay in my head is her.
I put myself back to last night, Tallulah at the counter with the paper towel bunched in her fist. She sent him an email about every single call she made.
And then, after holding all of it up alone for so long, after her mother, after every one of them putting a hand on her reins, she finally cried, in my kitchen, against my shirt.
I let that stay. Everything else, I drive.
Mississippi comes, and the pines start, red in the low sun. The shoulder turns to sand as the exits get farther apart.
I take the Bay St. Louis exit. I come up their street and slow at the mailbox before turning into the drive.
There's a bike in the yard lying on its side.
I park and sit there for a minute, wondering if it's too early to show up here like this on a Saturday morning. At least the sun is up fully now. He has two little ones, so surely he's up by now.
I check my watch. It's 7:29.
When I knock on the door, Reeves opens it with a kitchen apron and no shirt. His hair is flat on one side, and he takes one look at me standing on his front porch, looking more surprised than I am that I'm here like this at this hour.
He doesn't ask.
"Come in and eat."
He turns back into the house. I follow him through the front hall and into the kitchen. It smells like batter and coffee.
Charli's at the counter in one of Reeves's shirts, and she lifts her chin at me. There's a bassinet by the window with the baby in it, still, one fist up by her ear.
"I called you twice," I say to Reeves.
"His phone's been dead since yesterday." Charli doesn't turn around. "He won't plug it in for some reason only Reeves can understand."
I don't get two steps in before Benjy comes off the couch. He hits me around the waist and climbs my legs like I'm a ladder, one bare foot on my thigh. He's like a monkey, getting an arm hooked around my neck, and pulls himself up. I grab him around the back and give him the last boost up.
"Uncle Rhodes. Uncle Rhodes. Is that your black truck? Is it a diesel? Dad's is a diesel."
"It's a diesel." I keep my arm wrapped around his back so he doesn't crack his head on the counter.
"How fast does it go?"
"Fast enough to get in trouble.”
"Have you ever broken a bone?"
"Yeah. See my pinky?" I hold out my left hand, where my pinky curves unnaturally to the left. "Never been the same since."
He goes still with the seriousness of it, chin dug into my shoulder. I bite back a smile.
“How did you do it?"
"I went too fast on my dirt bike, and hit a rock, and BAM! That’s why you should always go slowly.”
"Whoa. Did it hurt?"
"Yes. It was awful." I set him down on a stool. He climbs right back up my arm.
"Do all your fingers point wrong?"
"Just the one."
"Did you cry?"
"A little."
"Benjy." Charli slides a plate onto the table. "Let him breathe."
Reeves flips the last pancake onto the stack and carries it over. Everybody sits, and I join them even though no one told me to, because there's a plate in front of me.
Benjy keeps going with his endless questions. I answer him. Sometimes I pull his leg with a fib just because I can, like when I say the truck is a nine-cylinder, which isn't a thing. He squints at me, and Reeves catches it but keeps his mouth closed.
Charli's watching me over her coffee. She saw it the second I came through the door but doesn't ask. Refilling my cup instead, she then pushes the syrup closer.
The pancakes are good. I say so, but it comes out too flat, and there's a small quiet where my usual ease usually goes.
When I finish the pancakes I didn't even realize I needed, I set the fork down.
"You got time to walk?"
Reeves opens his mouth to answer, but Charli beats him to it.
"Go on," she says, standing, gathering plates. "Both of you. I've got the dishes."
"You sure?”
"Absolutely. Ben and I want to paint, and the baby will be out for at least an hour. Go ahead."
She kisses him before he unties the apron and hangs it on a hook beside the pantry. Then he grabs a shirt off the back of his chair on the way to the door.
We walk down the street to the path at the end. It's paved and narrow, the trees leaning in close on both sides so the light comes down in pieces.
We're not twenty feet past the last fence post before Reeves says it.
"What's going on with you? College kids don't wake up this early on a Saturday and drive an hour out of the city for pancakes."
My boots are loud on the pavement. A dog barks somewhere off to the left and quits. "I fucked up."
Reeves keeps walking without looking over. That's how talks with Reeves go. He doesn't ever make it easy or pull things out, making me give it to him.
"A while back, Cain copied me on an email with a guy at the Corps of Engineers, the federal agency that manages wetland preservation.
We had a development going in next to one of our facilities, and Cain wanted it slowed until they sorted out an erosion issue.
This guy got the right people looking at it immediately. "
"Uh, huh."
"I thought I'd see if I could do the same for Tallulah." Saying it, I hear how simple I made it in my head. "So I found his contact and emailed him about Oak Moss."
"You didn’t?”
That wasn't a question, even though his inflection sounds like it should be one. I don’t answer. The beach opens up in front of us. I bend down and untie my boots and roll up my pants. Reeves kicks off his flip-flops.
"You fucking called the feds about the Maybank property you told me about last week?"
I nod.
"And now Tilly hates you?"
"She doesn't know. She only knows the shit's hit the fan and her family is blaming her."
"What the fuck, Rhodes?"
"All I know is they wrote a letter to the Charleston District questioning the delineation. Apparently it worked."
The path bends. Sand starts coming up through the pavement in little fans.
"I thought if the development pressure went away, she'd have room." I don't finish room for what. He doesn't ask.
"I wasn't trying to win her the land or beat her own case. I thought I could take the development question off the table for a while and give her air."
"So what's the problem? What do you mean the shit's hit the fan?"
"The letter didn't just freeze the development. It froze everything on that property, including rebuilding the sill, and the plantings she wanted to do to recapture what they're losing. And on top of that, the leases and oyster farming have been halted, too."
Flat brown water laps at our ankles. It's low tide. The gulls pick down the wet line, taking off as we approach.
"Shit, bro. That's bad. And she has no clue it was you?"
"None. I stood in my kitchen and held her while she cried about being blamed for the exact thing I did. And I said nothing."
We stop, and Reeves looks out at the water instead of at me. He looks pissed, but not surprised by me. Somehow that's worse.
"What are you going to do?"
"I want to fix it. I don't really know, to be honest. My plan is to call him Monday to see how we can withdraw this. That's two days, though, and I have no idea how I will sit in a house with her and not tell her."
"Time could be on your side. Maybe things will settle down over the weekend, and after you pull the troops back, it will all blow over."
The gulls lift and settle.
"We should head back," Reeves says. "I want to help when the baby wakes up."
Somewhere around the twin spans, going back over the lake, I get the words into an order I can live with.
It isn't a speech. It's one sentence. I'll tell her I did it, that I made a call and it set off the review. She'll be pissed. Then I'll tell her I'm calling Monday and I'm going to undo it.
The house is dim when I come up the front steps. I turn the key slowly because the deadbolt still likes to catch. This time it doesn't, and the door gives without a sound. I keep the keys in my hand instead of the bowl so they won't jangle.
Down the hall, her door is open a crack with yellow light in the gap, and her voice comes through it low, in the shape of a phone call.
"No, I know. I'm not saying it's perfect." She listens. "Libba, I know how it sounds."
I stop in the middle of the hall.
"I've got a list. I'm calling the district office on Monday, then the trust lady, and I'm going to actually read the whole thing before I let anybody tell me what it says.
" She's quiet a little longer this time, and then her voice drops.
"No. I know. But Rhodes is the only comfort I have in all of this. "
I stand there with the keys biting into my palm. I'm her only comfort in all of this. Fuck. Monday, I'll make the call. I'll undo it before she ever has to know I was the one who did it.
My hand loosens around the keys.
I go back to the foyer, open the door loud enough to be heard, and hang the keys on the hook.
"Hey."
She comes out a minute later, phone in her hand, hair down. "Where'd you go this morning?"
"Reeves's. I couldn't sleep, and I didn't want to wake you, so I had pancakes with Benjy. Then I went to the gym to work them off."
"You disappear like a cat," she says. Even though her voice is soft, it cuts more deeply than she realizes. She leans in the kitchen doorway. "I made a list."
"Yeah? What kind of list?”
“More like a game plan. I’m going to read the actual review instead of letting Dad summarize it at me." She rubs her eye. "I might be able to figure out who filed it."
Don't.
"Good," I say. "That's smart."
She crosses and puts her ear on my chest for a quick second, then steps back like she didn't.
The smell of her hair lingers, and both my hands come up out of habit before I put them back down. Wanting her while I'm lying to her is its own kind of sick, and it doesn't slow me down one bit.
"Thanks for not making it into a thing last night, for just believing me."
"I will always believe in you." That, at least, is not a lie.
She heats up leftovers. We eat standing at the counter. She talks through Monday and every name on her list. I nod and don't add one damn thing.
She falls asleep against me on the couch while we watch Yellowstone, then stumbles to my bed and is gone the second she's down with one hand curled under her chin.
I don't sleep. I stay hard in the dark a long time. The guilt clearly hasn’t put a damper on that. All I can think about and hope for is getting this weekend over with so I can fix this.
If I can't, then I tell her.
It's nine on the dot, and I'm in the back row of the Loyola lot with the engine off and my books on the passenger seat, where I put them so I'd have a reason to be here instead of home.
The consultant picks up on the second ring.
"Mr. Stone. Good to hear from you." He sounds glad, the way a man sounds about a client who pays on time. "I was just thinking about that Stono parcel last week. How's the family?"
"Fine. Thank you. Listen, I'm calling about the inquiry, actually."
"Sure, sure."
"I need it withdrawn."
He pauses.
"Well, here's the thing. There's nothing on our end to pull back.
We sent a technical letter that raised a fair question about where the wetland line got drawn.
That's all it was, a question. But once that landed at the Charleston District, the Corps opened their own review of it. It's their file now."
I watch a kid cross the lot with a coffee.
"So call the Corps," I say. "Tell them the question's answered."
"That's not really how it works once they're in.
" He's still being kind about it. He thinks he's teaching me something useful.
"You can't un-ask it. What has to happen now is somebody answers it.
Proper delineation by a credentialed person, then a formal determination request filed with the district. "
"Fine. Have your people file it."
"Can't be us." He says it like good news, like he's saving me a step. "Can't be Stone Intermodal, either, or anyone acting for the family. A determination request has to come from whoever holds title to the ground. Whoever's name is on the deed. That's the only person the Corps will take it from."
Whoever's name is on the deed. That isn't Granger, and it isn't anybody holding a lease. It's Banksie.
"Once your title-holder gets a delineator out there and files the request, it moves. But it's got to start with him." I hear paper shuffle on his end, a chair. "Anyway. Glad you called. You let me know if the family needs anything else out there, all right? Happy to help."
"Thank you."
"Take care, Mr. Stone."
The line clicks.
I sit there with the phone against my jaw a second before I lower it. My thumb doesn't move. I don't scroll or dial.
Call Monday, take it back, nobody ever knows.
The Corps has the question now, and the only person who can move the thing forward is Banksie. To get him to file it, I have to explain how I know it needs filing. Which means Banksie will have to know, which means Granger will find out.
Which means eventually she will know.
There isn't a version of this where I stay quiet and it gets fixed.
Class in nine minutes, but I can't move.