Charlie looked at the Wiz, sitting there on the other side of the tupelo desk, beneath N. C. Wyeth’s painting of Jim Bowie at the Alamo, and he said to himself, “My motto is ‘Ready, fire, aim,’ and you give me lectures and make sly fun of me about that. But yours is ‘Ready, aim, aim, aim, aim, aim, aim, aim …’”

  He turned away and looked out the window and let the surf of the engines roll over his nerve endings. Down below … Startled, he put his nose up against the window and stared. It was breathtaking! A glorious cloud of pink seemed to cover the earth. A peach orchard … in full blossom … a huge one, gorgeous beyond belief … We must be down around Thomaston … Wonder who owns it? …

  Gwenette reappeared with his glass of Jack Daniel’s and his two ham biscuits and the Wiz’s glass of carbonated water and set them down on the desk. Charlie noticed the way her plump lower abdomen, which was about at his eye level, swelled out against her navy skirt. How old was she? Twenty-four or -five, he figured.

  As soon as she headed back to the galley, he said to the Wiz, “How many warehouses we got in the food division? Seventeen?”

  “That’s correct. Seventeen.”

  “What’s the payroll?”

  “For all the warehouses? For the entire division?”

  “Yeah, the entire division.”

  “I don’t have the number on the tip of my tongue, but I can do a back-of-the-envelope calculation.”

  He produced an HP-12C calculator from the side pocket of his jacket, and the ditch down the middle of his forehead deepened, and he began pecking away. That damned HP-12C was the Wiz in hardware form. It was the wizard’s wand of the technogeeks. Charlie couldn’t stand the sight of it, because it utterly baffled him and made him feel how cut off he was from the new generation coming out of the business schools. Curious about the thing, he had once asked the Wiz to let him try it for a second. He tried to enter 2 + 2. He couldn’t get 4! Couldn’t get 2 + 2 = 4! Turned out that with this damned machine, you had to enter +2 plus +2. It worked backward or something. Only people with MBAs from Wharton could even get it to function.

  In no time the Wiz looked up and said, “Two hundred and seven million, three hundred and seventy-five thousand, in round numbers, give or take twenty-five thousand.”

  “Jesus, that’s a lot of money. Am I right?”

  “That’s true.”

  “What if we cut the payroll by 20 percent?”

  “How? What type of initiatives? Across-the-board layoffs?”

  “Right. What would we save?”

  “Well, $40 million. But I don’t see how we could do it. I’m not aware of any inefficient fits in the employment situations in the warehouses, and the Teamsters would go crazy. They’re all Teamster shops.”

  “I can deal with the Teamsters. They have a practical streak.”

  “Are you serious? Twenty percent? I don’t know, that’s an awfully deep cut, Charlie.”

  “The restaurant business is way down, volume is way down, and I don’t recall any layoffs to speak of.”

  “Maybe, but I’ve never gotten any indication there was any real slack at the warehouses.”

  “Well, let’s find out. Let’s try it.”

  “I don’t know, Charlie. Twenty percent. That’s twelve hundred people.”

  The word people, as opposed to the words they had been using, payroll and employment situations, jarred Charlie for a moment. “You’re probably right,” he said. “That is a lot. What about 15 percent? We’d still save $30 million—right?—and we’d be talking about only nine hundred layoffs, which is fewer than a thousand. It won’t look so drastic, and it’ll impress the hell out of the bank. You know why?”

  “Why?”

  “Because banks can’t stand paying money to employees. To them, giving money, that sacred thing, money, giving money to people, just to spend on themselves, that’s practically immoral. Layoffs are right on their wavelength.”

  The Wiz arched his eyebrows and rolled his eyes but said no more. He looked out the window, and Charlie followed his gaze. Down below, amid a swath of orchards, you could see a house on a low rise with a long, long, long curving driveway leading up to it. The driveway was bordered on both sides by a parade of dogwood trees, planted so close together that their profusions of blossoms created two glorious trains of white, stretching on for what must have been half a mile. Christ! Must cost a fortune to keep up a place like that, and—bango!—you could lose it all before you knew it!—and then where would all those heavenly bowers be?

  Now, while the Wiz continued to stare out the window, Charlie looked at N. C. Wyeth’s painting of Jim Bowie, which made him think about his mama and his daddy and the shack he’d grown up in … Baker County had been so rural, there had been only one town, Newton, big enough to make it onto the Esso road map … There hadn’t been many places for poor white people to work in Baker County other than the plantations and the pulp mill. His daddy had worked at Ichauway, the plantation owned by Robert Woodruff, the president of Coca-Cola, right there on the Flint River, and at Turpmtine and two or three other places, none of them stayed for very long, and then he went to work at the pulp mill. He’d lost the index finger of his right hand working in the pulp mill. That was the worst job in Georgia. Just going over to the mill to see his daddy was like going to see a horrible freak show of men with fingers and eyes missing. A bunch of Teamsters working in a modern warehouse for twelve or fourteen dollars an hour, with forklifts to do the heavy lifting and OSHA regulations and God knows what else—Croker Global Foods was a country club compared to real work. Just as if it were yesterday, he could see that godforsaken pulp mill, and he could hear it, with the saws and the rippers screaming and whining and the geysers of sawdust spewing up from the blades and the chips flying and those poor crippled bastards working like dogs, his daddy among them. Some of them had an eye and a finger or two missing. He could see the pitiful stumps—

  Aha! Was that the real reason he had suddenly thought of his daddy and the pulp mill—the missing fingers? He could feel his lips compress and his face turn red just thinking about the insolent sonofabitch with the chin giving him the finger and making the crack about losing four fingers in the war. He had seen men with missing fingers, his own daddy for a start, and he’d actually been in a war … In the early years of the war in Vietnam he’d won the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star with a combat V, and he was willing to bet money that the cute guy with the big chin had never even served in the armed forces. He’d have the Wiz or Marguerite or somebody check the guy out. He was tempted to say something to the Wiz right now about that sonofabitch and who had or had not experienced combat, but he restrained himself. Nobody wanted to hear war stories from a sixty-year-old man.

  The two of them sat in silence a moment longer, ruminating. Just then the door to the cockpit opened, and the chief pilot, Lud Harnsbarger, came out and beamed at Charlie and said, “Well, Cap, everything okay? ’Bout to begin the descent.”

  “Yeah, everything’s fine, Lud.”

  Charlie liked everything about Lud Harnsbarger. He was from over in Cobb County, near Marietta, which he pronounced “May-retta.” He was one of those big, tall, blond Georgia boys who are lean and strong but have such thick, fair Anglo-Saxon skin you don’t see any muscular definition. He was wearing a short-sleeved white shirt and a navy necktie with the Croker Global logo embroidered on it in neat rows, and the sunlight lit up a furze of reddish-blond hair on his big forearms. Charlie always liked that, the way that ever-so-delicate furze of hair lit up like spun candy on his pilot’s big, thick forearms; although it was the kind of thing you couldn’t mention to anybody. Lud had spent four years in the Air Force flying transports. Fighter planes would have been better, but the main thing was that he was a good old Georgia boy who had put in his time in the armed services. Charlie liked the way Lud looked at him and spoke to him. Lud didn’t fawn, but Charlie could always tell that he respected him as … a man, not just an employer.

  “I jes talked to Durwood on the radio, Cap. The Range Rover’s broke down. So he’s gon’ come on out to the strip and pick y’all up in the Suburban. Auntie Bella’s gon’ have some kale and sausage soup and some hot biscuits ready when you git there.”

  “Well, that’s great, Lud,” said Charlie.

  And now Gwenette was standing beside him again. “Git you something else before we land, Cap?”

  “No thanks,” said Charlie.

  “How ’bout yew, Mr. Stroock?”

  The Wiz just shook his head no.

  Gwenette’s hips and forearms were at Charlie’s eye level, and once more he was aware of the way her lower abdomen swelled out against her skirt. She was pretty plump, but her skin was lovely, absolutely smooth and flawless. It looked like milk, the way milk looks when you milk a cow and it comes right out of the udder. He had never noticed that before. She was stout … a real country girl … There had been an animal vitality about these broad-beamed country girls when he was growing up … something marvelous and robust … The juice really flowed …

  Pop. He forced himself off that train of thought. What the hell did he think he was doing? Suppose he made a play for the likes of Gwenette? How long could that last? Twenty-four hours? Twenty-four minutes? And then he would have lost a good stewardess … Gwenette was heavyset, like Martha …

  A little wavelet of guilt and remorse … Twenty-nine years he’d been married to Martha … before Serena … Christ! Serena … not even thirty yet and already tough as whit leather … Tough as whit leather … How the hell had that expression floated into his head? … His daddy used to say it all the time … Never could figure out what whit leather was …

  He closed his eyes and thought about Peaches and hoped he’d feel a tingle in his loins. He had a theory … If you lost your sexual drive, you lost everything, your energy, your daring, your imagination. He kept waiting for the tingle … Instead, he felt an electrical jolt in his solar plexus. Suppose it happened! Suppose they took everything from him! They could wipe him out. He was sixty years old, and this time they could wipe him out—utterly!

  Desperately he looked up at the bulkhead again, at Jim Bowie on his deathbed … A brave, brave man, brave as they come, and he never said die … Yeah!—and a few minutes later he was dead as they come, with a Mexican bayonet through his heart. And no doubt they took everything he had, including the Bowie knife, while they were at it.

  Beneath his sternum, Charlie Croker’s heart was hurrying as if it had an urgent appointment somewhere else.

  Lud was banking the ship toward the east. They were coming in to Turpmtine. Down below, for as far as you could see … stands of soaring longleaf pines with riots of white dogwood blossoms running through them … tawny fields of sedge, just beginning to turn green, interspersed with copses of already brilliant green spreads of beggarweed, Egyptian wheat, rye, oats, peas, and corn … huge groves of live oak, only just beginning to burst into leaf, so that you could make out the arthritic trunks and branches and the shaggy garlands of Spanish moss strung through them in immense ghostly gray strands … and, in the middle distance, a swamp, eight thousand acres of it, glistening in the sun where the water broke clear of the stands of cypress and tupelo maples and the tangled thickets of cane, holly, greenbriar, and God knew what else … Even from up here, at this altitude, looking out the window of an airplane, you could tell that it was spring and that the swamp was … coming alive … The branches of the cypress and tupelo maples were swollen with buds about to explode into foliage …

  He glanced at the Wiz. The Wiz was looking down, too … through his titanium frames … Just what the bar-code scanners must have seen down there he couldn’t imagine … The outdoors … home of insects, snakes, and other irrational and undependable elements … Probably left him feeling nothing, except a dermatitic itch … Charlie wanted to reach across the tupelo desk and take him by the shoulder and say, “Wiz! Look at it! Twenty-nine thousand acres, and it’s all coming alive! The sap is rising! The eggs are hatching! The seeds are germinating! Snakes, puppies, foals, and little babies are being born! You think you’re such a realist—well, that’s real life, what you see down there!”

  Now the G-5 turned south again and came down even lower, and he could see the pale, sandy dirt roads running through the pines … He could see the sheds … there … there … and way over there, deep in the plantation … the ones he built for feeding and sheltering the mules and the horses during the quail shoots … And now he got his first glimpse of the white fences, miles of them it looked like, enclosing the vast clearing where the horses were turned out … fifty-nine horses, and they all had to be turned out every day, and some had to be segregated to keep the troublemakers, particularly the stallions, from kicking or biting each other to bits … The pastures were that same brilliant green … And over there! Two foals, no more than two weeks old, kicking up their heels!

  He couldn’t resist any longer. “Hey, Wiz! Take a look right over there. See what I’m talking about, those two foals? I bet they’re not more than two weeks old! I think one of them’s”—one uv’em’s—“First Draw’s!”

  You could just begin to make out the Big House in the middle of a grove of live oaks, pin oaks, and Southern magnolias, some of the oldest of them eighty feet high, which would put out such a towering profusion of white blossoms two months from now, he sometimes traveled to Turpmtine in the middle of the summer just to see them. The house itself was not the sort of Greek Revival palace with the Ionic columns and the entablatures that the plantation parvenus had built just before the Civil War. The Big House at Turpmtine had been built in the early 1830s, with the low lines and deeply shaded wrap-around porches and white clapboard siding and floor-to-ceiling double-hung windows of the true antebellum Old South. It wasn’t even on high ground, because hills scarcely even existed in this part of Baker County. But what a show it was! The driveway, a broad dirt road with a sandy composition so fine and pale it looked almost white, curved for a mile through the pines before entering an avenue of live oaks planted so closely on either side that a month from now they would create a cool, dark, dense, green tunnel of foliage. Then it emerged into the clearing and made a grand loop, bordered by ancient boxwood, in front of the house. The flower beds were ablaze with vivid red horseshoe geraniums, yellow bayberry bushes, violet-mauve masses of Ithuriel’s spear, orange Kaffir lilies, crimson-and-yellow Japanese quince, and the flower he loved above all others, the early-blooming Confederate rose, which now, in the afternoon, was still white but which by nightfall would be a deep rose, in mourning, folks said, for the blood shed by brave Confederate lads in the Lost Cause.

  It was breathtaking—breathtaking! Charlie felt a catch in his throat.

  The G-5 was now beyond the Big House. Lud was bringing it down close to Jookers Swamp before swinging about and heading into the glide path to the landing strip. Down this low, and with so little foliage on the trees, you could clearly see the stands of cypress and black tupelo maple rising out of the water … You could see their huge swollen knees just above the waterline … And there was the Jook House, a big white clapboard structure on stilts, cantilevered out over the water, which he had built as a twelve-bedroom guest house … Cost $2.4 million … Oh, how flush he had felt! … way back then …

  The landing strip was an alley of asphalt cut through a pine forest. It was almost a mile long, so as to accommodate a jet this big … What with the landing lights, the maintenance hangar and its asphalt apron, the fuel pumps, and the access roads that had to be built, the whole thing had cost him $3.6 million. He thought about that as the pines whizzed by in a blur on either side, and they glided in and touched down for the landing.

  When they reached the hangar apron, Durwood was out there with the big Chevrolet Suburban, as promised, and Rufus Dotson, the black man who was in charge of the crew that maintained the runway and the hangar, was standing beside it. As soon as Charlie slid himself out from under his tupelo desk, he could tell his right knee had stiffened. He didn’t want to be seen hobbling down the stairs, not even in front of Durwood and Rufus, but it couldn’t be helped. His knee hurt so much he had to hold on to the cable that served as a railing. When he reached the bottom, Rufus was right there waiting. He was a short, squarely built man, in his fifties—or his sixties—Charlie never had known his age for sure—with dark skin and gray hair that stuck out on either side of his head. He wore an old-fashioned cap, like a golfer’s cap, that covered the top of his head, which was bald. He touched the cap’s little visor, respectfully, with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand and said:

  “How you doing, Cap’m Charlie? Lemme give you a hand.” He reached out with his big, powerful right hand. He was wearing a long-sleeved gray work shirt of a sort you seldom saw anymore, buttoned at the wrist, and a pair of jeans.

  “Aw, ’at’s all right, Rufus,” said Charlie, who would rather have died than be helped down those stairs, “it’s jes’at damn knee a mine, from playin’ football.”