They called themselves “the Yankee invasion,” and according to Chris Quinn, who fancied himself a Civil War buff, they were enlisted in an enterprise under the heading of Grant Moves South after a Bruce Catton book, but none of the others appreciated the reference, at least not yet, too early in the evening although later after they’d gone through all the booze at the open bar they probably would be giving a cheer for Grant.  Didn’t he currently reside in New York City, after all?

Who’s buried in Grant’s tomb?

In point of fact, they didn’t all reside in New York City now.  They had come to Jimmy Purdy’s rehearsal dinner not just from the Empire State but Pennsylvania, California, and even one bunch, the Timothy Walsh clan, from south of the Mason-Dixon Line in Georgia, which they’d acknowledge with a sigh and the rolling of eyes and a bitter smile.  All of them, though, descendants of or married to descendants of old James and Anne Purdy, had begun life in the Rockaways, that little collection of villages strung out along the isthmus of south Queens between Jamaica Bay and the Atlantic.  Instead of blood, they had the sands of Rockaway Breach in their veins, and when they gathered at wedding receptions and Christenings and in taverns after funerals, they’d sing “Rockaway Beach” by The Ramones, which they were not surprised to find missing from the juke box on the second floor of Slim Benny’s Blues Club, just off Beale Street, in Memphis, Tennessee, they had to keep reminding themselves.  Memphis!

They could not say the name of Jimmy Purdy’s bride-to-be—could not even think it—without being reduced to giggles.  Tara.  Tara from Tennessee.  Priceless.

Declan Purdy, the Jimmy’s brother but only a groomsman, sidled over to Jimmy, prepared to lay him low with something devastatingly apt from Gone with the Wind.

Why, Scarlet, do you mean to tell me that land, that you don’t love the land . . .

Something like that.  But it needed “Tara” in there to be effective.

It’s Tara from which you take your strength, Scarlet.  

Better.  “Tara” was in there, he was pretty sure, but how did it go, exactly?

Unable to arrive at something sufficiently hilarious incorporating “Tara,” Declan sidled away.

The Rock Rock Rockawayers had taken command of the jukebox and bar area, leaving a narrow corridor of access to the latter for those few Tennesseans who weren’t teetotalers.  Through this gap in the defenses Declan slipped, acquired a Yuengling, and sipped as he continued to mull over the “Tara” gambit.

A thought occurred to him.  “At least ‘Tara’ is Irish,” he was surprised to hear himself announcing.

One of his many, many cousins, Fred Purdy—an egregious stickler (he should have been a priest, all agreed)—began to blink rapidly as was he wont to do when he was about to utter something corrective.  “True, but the last name is ‘France,’ which I’m told is a corruption of ‘Francioni,’ Italian, so who’s to say they’re not as ethnic as any of us Micks from Rockaway?  See, I know what you’re thinking, I know what you all are thinking,” he said, wagging a finger in Declan’s face.  Declan tried to grab it but missed.

“You blinking bastard, Fred.  Why aren’t you passing out communion wafers somewhere?”
Fred had been similarly insulted his entire life and was unfazed.  Indeed, since his priestly fastidiousness was the one thing that distinguished him from the common herd, he took smirking pride in it.

“But it should be a communion of a kind, shouldn’t it?  I mean, two families are about to be joined in the sacred rite of matrimony.  We should all be coming together, Declan.  But look, they seem almost frightened.”

Declan peered over the heads of those crowding around the bar—at thirty-six he was the oldest of the cousins and at six-foot-three the tallest—to where the Frances and their ilk were gathered in the far corner.  In fact, they did seem to be cowering.

“Don’t worry about them,” said someone near, not Fred.  “The second the buffet opens they’ll charge through us like Jeb Stuart’s cavalry.”

Declan looked down to see, not Fred, but his sister, Mary Ann, standing next to him.  How long had she been there?  How long had Declan been there?  He looked down at his Yuengling.  It seemed to be at about the same level as a moment ago.  But was it really only a moment, and was this really the same Yuengling?

“I think maybe I’ve had a bit too much to drink,” he said, and Mary Ann came back with, “What, you mean you’re working on your second?” because one of the two things Declan was known for was his inability to drink.  The other was that, along with his brother, he was one of the only two of his generation of cousins to sail into his thirties still single.  Of Jimmy, they’d say, “Well, a playboy has to play,” but of Declan, they’d say, “Well, it just hasn’t happened for him yet.”  And lately—his Irish-red hair growing thinner and thinner, his self-conscious stoop more pronounced—they seemed to be dropping the “yet.”

He watched Jimmy and Tara, standing in the No Man’s Land between the Yanks and the Rebs, holding hands and smiling fatuously.

Then Tara released her fiancé and disappeared into the huddling mass of Frances, among whom was that pretty one, Tara’s younger sister, Jordan.  Jordan.  Yes, those insipid, trendy names for girls, appropriated from the males—Jordan, Madison, Sydney, he’d even met a Henry with an ‘i’—had made their way to the sunny South.  Thank God the Rockaway Irish had so far held the traditional line, mostly Kevin, Stephen, James, and John for the men and Margaret, Teresa, Mary, Maura, Molly, and Kathleen for the women.  His own name, Declan, he didn’t care for.  Too ostentatiously Irish.  He might as well affect a brogue and carry a shillelagh at port arms.

He decided he disliked “Jordan” even more than “Tara.”  The name, not the person.  How could you dislike someone you’d never met?  Wait.  They had been introduced earlier in the evening.  She was one of the bridesmaids as he was one of the groomsmen, and he had said to her, “Wow, I hope I get to walk down the aisle with you.”  No, not said but thought.  He wasn’t good at saying things to women.  He always thought of the thing to say after the moment had passed.  Now, he was very glad he hadn’t said that ridiculous line earlier.  He’d never have lived it down.  “Sumatra,” he declared, meaning he would have had to move to Sumatra.  He looked around.  Fortunately, no one seemed to have heard him.  

He looked back at Jordan.  Pretty.  Very pretty.  Striking, it would not be totally ludicrous to say.

He found himself easing into No Man’s Land toward the Frances but stopped when he heard a voice say, She’s too young  for you.  He eased back among the Purdys, McShanes, Quinns, and Walshes, began contemplating Jordan’s likely age, judged it to be around twenty-one, more or less.  A bit young for a thirty-six-year-old, “But remember, Scarlet O’Hara married Charles Hamilton, about as inappropriate a match as ever conceived, yet no one batted an eye, so what’s a few years’ difference compared to that?”

“I don’t follow you,” Chris Quinn, munching peanuts at the bar, said.

Flustered, Declan said, “Not following me is good policy, my friend,” and edged away.

Certain officious souls began moving tables and chairs and urging people back from the center of the room, apparently in preparation for dancing.

“But we haven’t even eaten yet.  What about the buffet?” someone behind him complained, and an interloper from the Tennessee side of the room judging by his quaint drawl added, “Shee-it!”

Declan eyed Jordan, considered the possibility that it would only be polite for a groomsman to ask his counterpart among the bridesmaids to dance.  He turned and eyed the jukebox, currently standing mute.  But then, rising up from the bar below, faintly but unmistakably, there came Etta James’ throaty “At Last.”

Declan wasn’t the only one to hear it.  “There you go, there you go.  That’s what you want to hear on Beale Street,” some McShane said.

“But that’s not the blues.  A torch song, maybe, but ‘At Last’ is not the blues,” Declan protested.

“I never said it was,” the McShane said.

*

An under-strength battalion of Rock Rock Rockawayers were marching up Beale Street in search of sustenance.  Declan, who’d had between three and six Yuenglings, couldn’t remember the exact circumstances, but it had something to do with the buffet, which, when it finally arrived, comprised a variety of “inedible slop,” in someone’s words, perhaps Declan’s.

Their movements were paralleled by a similar troop on the other side of Beale Street, Tennesseans, by the corn-fed look of them.  Among them was Declan’s Jordan, a rose among brambles, her blonde hair shimmering in blue, red, purple and green highlights from the neon signs proclaiming earthly delights, this wonderland of earthly delights.

Following Jordan’s angelic progress out of the corner of his eye, Declan stepped off the curb and twisted his ankle.

“Mother of God!”

He came back up on the sidewalk making a heroic effort not to limp.

“You could talk to her.  You could just go talk to her,” Mary Ann, who, as it happens, was walking beside him, said.

Had she read his mind?  Had he been so obvious?

Nonplussed, Declan forgot to try to not limp, limped, then when he realized it, to distract from the various humiliations that were assailing him broke into a sort of gamboling canter, snapping his fingers and chanting,

Doin’ the Beale Street Walk,

Doin’ the Beale Street Walk,

Doin’, doin’, doin’, doin’,

Doin’ the Beale Street Walk.

Laughter erupted from the foragers on both sides of the street.  Declan decided to interpret this as a good thing although it was a close call.

The Yanks came to a halt.

Mary Ann nudged him with her elbow:  “Go talk to her.  What are you so afraid of?  What do you have to lose?”

“I’m too old,” he said, making a face and trying to say it in a clownish way but managing only to appear to be recovering from a stroke.

“You’re only thirty-six, you stupid ass.”

He didn’t even try to make it funny:  “Once you get to a certain point, your life starts going in a certain way, and from then on, that’s just the way it goes.”

“What are we going to do now?” someone said, but not to Declan, for which he was grateful.  He was tired of talking and decided not to do any more of it.

“We passed a dozen places where we could have eaten,” someone else said, and the first person said, “Yeah, and they all looked like the food would be just about as good as that Slim Benny’s crap.”

“There are some good places to eat south on Main,” Declan said, breaking his vow of silence.

They were in fact at the intersection of Beale Street and Main.  The Yankees, joined now by a sprinkling of Tennesseans, looked rather dubiously south.

“It’s safe, it’s safe,” Declan said.

“Well, it was earlier today, anyway,” Mary Ann said.

“No, it’s safe, it’s safe,” Declan repeated and took off south on Main, gratified to find himself no longer limping and even more gratified to hear Kevin McShane say, “Lead on, McDuff,” as he and, judging by the clumpety-clumpety-clump of footsteps, many others followed.

Declan’s confidence in the safety of south Main Street derived from an incident earlier in the day when he, Mary Ann, and her husband, Phil, had ventured down Main in search of The Blues Hall of Fame, hoping to find someplace for lunch along the way.

A couple of blocks past Beale Street, Declan had stopped, held his arms out like a school crossing guard, and said, “Uh oh.  I don’t like the looks of this.”

In the distance, a knot of people were blocking the sidewalk.

“Looks like a street gang to me,” Declan said, pointing.

Phil squinted down in that direction.

“A street gang?  What makes you say that?”

“An educated guess.  Memphis has a very high crime rate, way worse than New York City.  I know, I checked before I came.”

“I’ll just bet you did,” Phil said, rolling his eyes.

They weren’t buddies.  Phil thought Declan was “an old woman,” had said it more than once, just not in his wife’s hearing because Mary Ann was so pathetically protective of her big brother.  Phil would make an effort to be congenial but couldn’t take it when Mary Ann went into her “mother hen” act, which obviously was becoming her Memphis m.o.  Hence Declan had seen little of his brother-in-law after lunch, which, as it happened, they had indeed eaten on south Main because after venturing on they found on closer inspection that the “street gang” were a dozen or so yuppie types sipping their lattes and chocolate mochas on wrought-iron tables outside a coffee shop, the only encumbrance being an over-friendly collie that wrapped its leash, the other end attached to a parking meter, around Mary Ann’s legs.

By what process of transformation Declan had become, in his own mind at least, the hero of the affair isn’t clear, but Yuenglings can do that to a guy.

Northerners and Southerners, together at last, ventured on down Main with Declan, hero, walking point.  Was Jordan back there among them?  The possibility thrilled him, frightened him.

As he was trying to summon the courage to look back for Jordan, someone said, “Uh oh,” and the clumpety-clumpety-clump of footsteps behind him faded to silence.

Then Declan saw why.  A half-block ahead, three black men were standing under a streetlight.  Or rather two of them were leaning up against a storefront and the other sitting at a little table.  It was, surely, the coffee shop from earlier in the day.  Declan almost laughed.

“It’s all right, it’s all right.  Come on, follow me,” he said, waving them forward.

He walked on and the others followed, not quite so eager, evidently, judging by the widening gap between him and them, a good quarter of a block by the time he reached the black men.

“What the fuck are you staring at?” the one at the table—not one of the cute little wrought-iron tables, Declan now saw, but an overturned garbage can the man had not been sitting at but on—said, rising.  Very big, very black.

“Friend,” Declan said, raising his hand palm-outward in the universal gesture of peace, “we’ve come from the far north to free you from the yoke of—”

The man took one lunging step forward, and his hand shot out, and he stabbed Declan right over his belt.

Declan went down on his knees, clutching his belly, tried to scream.

He heard the black men walking away, snickering.  “Pussy,” one of them said.

Everything went black.

*

He came to still clutching his guts.  He looked down.  No, he was not holding a double-handful of innards, slick as eels wriggling in slime.  There was no blood.  He had not been stabbed.  “An uppercut,” someone said.  “Yeah, a good one, too,” another seconded.

They were all there—he did not look up but assumed they were all there ringed around him as he bent over his knees, face millimeters from the sidewalk.  Was Jordan there?  He did not look up.

What had happened to his life?

You follow where your life takes you like a puppy dog on its master’s leash, sometimes lunging ahead, sometimes hanging back to lift a leg, but ultimately going where the master leads.  He had known that and thought he knew after thirty-six years of it where it was going and where it was not going, but—how could he not have realized it until now?—you never know.  Anything can happen to you, anything, and at any moment.  The revelation filled him with consternation, fear, then finally—and this was the shock of his young life—something like hope.

---

Dennis Vannatta is a Pushcart and Porter Prize winner, with essays and stories published in many magazines and anthologies, including River Styx, Chariton Review, Boulevard, and Antioch Review. His sixth collection of stories, The Only World You Get¸ was published by Et Alia Press.