Lana broke up with her professor right after he told her how he’d chosen his specialty. Pelham called it his field of specialization. After she’d done it, Lana had a hard think over what had repulsed her.  

        They’d been sitting on a picnic blanket. They had come for the Sunday morning bluegrass lineup and even then the park was a mob scene. Everyone brought blankets and boldly unfurled them in a land grab. So Lana and Pelham’s blanket abutted four others in this big patchwork. Pelham made friends with the spotted puppy one square over, and Lana poured a couple of bloody marys in clear plastic cups. It was like beach time, the forward-facing multitude slung low and close. In every direction Lana saw just upper halves, heads, backs, bellies, long arms coursing and wagging. Pelham was asking her what she thought of bluegrass.  

        “What do I think of it. I think it’s what my father and my grandfather and my great-grandfather played,” she said. “This is not a thinking.”  

        They’d had three dates, this being the third.  

        “In Boston we have less bluegrass,” said Pelham. “I sincerely mean no offense when I say it all sounds the same to me.”

        “All the same.” 

        “All of it.”   

        “In that case the tribal drum music you played in class,” said Lana. “All the same.”  

         Pelham dropped his jaw and reeled away with his eyes half-shut, a pantomime of being struck.  

        “No. Not the tribal drum music,” he keened.  

        He let his head loll heavy and sad, let it drag him down until it landed on her leg. He arranged himself to lie there, eyes up, with the bloody mary steadied at his chest.  

        Lana looked down at his face, made smoother and more boyish in this posture.  

        “You have come to this park all your life,” he said.  

        She helped him sell houses, and getting a college degree would not stop that. Her morning drive to Georgia State traced a line along the CSX tracks on the left side, where freight cars sat throbbing in place or heaving themselves forward impossibly; on the right side, front yards with piles of rusted coils and tangled metalwork might be scrap collections or sculpture gardens. It was hard to tell. Abundant graffiti bloomed along concrete embankments. Every left turn off this road led under the railroad tracks, past auto-repair shops and generations-old dinettes, to southern neighborhoods stocked with two-bedroom Craftsmans to rehabilitate. Lana could move to a town with more self-awareness and identity, with cleaner edges, like Savannah or Charleston. But she was growing into understanding that she preferred giant Atlanta, spreading miles in every direction without clear definition or even the economic prudence to become conscious of itself. The city, too, seemed to be in its early twenties, receiving, unblinking, uneven, unrecognized. 

         She said, “This is where we came Sundays. This was before Midtown was Midtown. All these strollers here?”—she lifted her free hand, palm up, fingers outstretched—“Come on. Men would be paired off together behind the azaleas. My father would say, ‘Don’t look, Lana.’ ”  

        Pelham brought his head up from her leg by inches and carefully drew the cup to his lips. Lana saw the move hunch his shoulders inward and compress his torso into a crescent. He had to take a small sip. It made him look feeble, and then, as his knees lifted reflexively off the blanket, at once he looked like an infant. Lana looked away. The park was ringed with dogwood trees in full bloom, and over the thousands of crowns of heads she could see their frilly white tops. The smell of the blossoms was everywhere, a sexual smell so forward it was embarrassing.  

       “I like that,” said Pelham. “You here on Sundays, helping your father turn ribs on the grill. A Southern family spurning the church habit.”  

       Lana shifted her hips. Pelham held onto his drink with one hand and rolled a little to jack himself upright with the other.  

        “But there is still a serious vagrancy situation in this park,” he said. 

        With Lana taking college in small doses over time and Pelham a junior hire in the department, just a few years separated them. Their first date had started at the anthropology majors’ annual pizza party and continued into the night inside Pelham’s office. He had produced a bottle of moonshine from the bottom drawer, saying, “I’ve waited for the right moment to try this.” Their second date had started with the Wednesday night show at a club down one of those left-hand turns, down Flat Shoals Avenue. Lana’s friends in the headlining band were starting at half past midnight, or whenever the middle band’s strewn Krispy Kremes, bread slices, and confetti could be cleared from the stage. Her friends played their instruments hung so low they had to concave their chests to reach the strings, while the mic was situated so high that the singer needed to tilt his chin upward to meet it, as if in supplication. Against the back wall of the smoke-filled room, as they held their cups of beer, Pelham compared the set to a fertility rite, explaining to Lana the representational nature of the guitars, their role in suggesting mating capacity. The artistry is an offering, he said, to attract a sexual partner. They have to make themselves vulnerable. It might not work; they might be rejected. People forget, he told Lana, gesturing to the singer who seemed to be sobbing, that rituals can result in the initiate’s failure—they’re big enough to contain that. Lana led him, then, through the back door that led to the green room, such as it was, covered in scrawl, so stacked with instrument cases that the evening’s musicians crammed the narrow hallway instead, by turns giddy and surly, relentlessly recapping the evening with each other—this was a good night at the club. Lana and Pelham threaded through, emerging on the back steps leading down to the dark parking lot, inhaling fresh air at last, lighting a cigarette to share. The date had ended with Lana leaving Pelham’s bedroom, glancing back to see the bad shape she’d put him in, Pelham peering over his shoulder in the mirror and wincing at raised red trails that streaked the length of his back. She slipped quietly out the screen door and onto the front porch of his house, skirting the glass tumblers on the dusty planks where earlier they had sat, ice cubes long melted into warmed-up liquor, and stood in a humid darkness clamorous with insects hollering. Sweat ran down her hairline and jaw but she remained still, breathing out here like sucking through a hot compress. She was alone and alert at four in the morning with the still-burning citronella. She drank the rest of one glass, then the other. Close in, left and right, was luxuriant tangled undergrowth, honeysuckle and forsythia reaching long brushy arms onto the porch and over the yard. Above, no stars, no sky, only thick clotted treetops surging down and down to protuberant veins in the dirt. In heels she stepped carefully over and around them to get to her car.  

       Under hot sun in the park the bloody marys were staying cold in the thermos Pelham used for coffee on school days. Lana filled their cups again.  

        “I was robbed once,” Pelham said.  

        “We never had problems.”  

        “Not here. In Congo-Brazzaville.”  

        Pelham always used the full name of the nation that was his specialty.  

         “I was leaving a restaurant with another American, a student—okay. A student. We had gone to an Indian restaurant where you would not believe. How good this food was. How cheap.” He sipped from his drink.  

          “She says it’s safe to walk downtown at this hour of night.” He was miming the words with the tip of his index finger.  

          “So we walk. We don’t hail a minibus or jump on a bicycle taxi. We walk. We round the corner of the bus park and then we are swarmed. No—I’m swarmed. I don’t know how many, it was hands everywhere. Hands in my pants, hands in my pockets, hands in my shirt. Hands in my hair—I’m thrashing, thrashing. Finally I break free. I take off running.”  

           “The student.”  

           “Well no one touched her,” he said. “I was a quarter-mile away before I got it, Oh. She’s still back at the bus park.”  

            Sun was burning off the morning softness. The spotted puppy on their neighbor’s blanket was panting. The bluegrass surged louder and Lana looked toward the stage; four frontmen in buttoned long-sleeved shirts and brimmed hats took a step forward as one and opened their mouths. Then came the electric stun of men’s voices in lockstep, the clean sure charge of their harmony. Lana knew the song from childhood, from summer nights when men came with their wives to her father’s backyard. They would set their children loose at the tree line and move easy and warm with their drinks, warm and weaving around each other and the torches burning on wooden posts. They gave her sips. She wouldn’t go down where the children were but kept vigil as co-host, joining the adults’ talk where she could or making her appearance to spark some. When the singing started after dark and their faces took on sweat, firelight, and shadow, Lana would sit quietly in the circle and laugh when they laughed.  
          Cross-legged, Lana pressed down the ridges in the blanket around her and watched them rise back up.  

           “Maybe your student would have liked it if you hadn’t run so far,” she said.  

           “Maybe I would have liked it if she hadn’t led me into a thicket,” said Pelham. “Maybe if you travel someday to Congo-Brazzaville you will understand what I mean.”  

            He leaned stageward onto his free palm. He unfolded his legs left and right to stand, and for a moment the long crossbeam of Pelham’s arm flexing down and his rear end lifting off the blanket reminded Lana of athletics, of a man ready for discus. Then Pelham was up, yawning and stretching, elbows knobby in the air.  

            “How did you end up there,” said Lana, squinting at him.   

            “In Congo-Brazzaville. No one had picked it yet.”  

            “How do you mean.”  

            “I mean no one had picked it. So I did.”  

             Elbows up, Pelham corkscrewed side to side, then folded forward in a toe-touch exercise, bouncing lightly.  

              “Let’s go back to teacher and student,” said Lana. In the long pause that followed, she turned and looked again along the line of lacy white blooms edging the crowd. Then she felt a tug beneath her, a serious, determined undertow. Lana stiffened and threw her hands down for bracing, drinks spilled and puppy barked and Pelham was pulling the blanket out from under her, tipping her over like a dumb doll, his arms cycling furiously to reel in the yards of material to his chest. With her cheekbone in the bristly grass Lana found her arms and legs and righted herself. Pelham leaned down and hissed over his bundle: “Scratch up some other fool, puss.” Then he went high-stepping through the patchwork and was gone.   
 
*   *   * 
 
           Lana’s real estate practice had made her a woman of means. At twenty-one she bought a house to show her clients such a thing could be done. Her clients were friends from high school. They were impressed and she found houses for them too and suddenly life—the flesh of it, these friends and friends of theirs—was transfigured as income. She still saw bands at night and kept her hair platinum. She kept her makeup dark and sharply drawn, startling, while word of her pragmatism spread. People came up to her in clubs. Some early mornings after late nights Lana was out in heels, stepping delicately over train tracks and kudzu, heading up to a nineteen-twenties bungalow with a bleary-eyed fellow clubgoer stumbling behind. They would drink their coffees and have a cigarette on the front porch, smoke curling out to meet a morning haze as fine and shimmering as stockings on skin. They’d talk about the night, the bands that played. Her father would be inside somewhere, steady, silent, at work. He got there at sunrise. He alone knocked out walls, installed wiring, laid brickwork, plastered ceilings. Lunch stayed in a brown paper bag on the front seat of his truck until it was time to eat. And with the cicadas a dry thrumming orchestra outside, Lana would show the house.  
         

          The thermos was still here. Lana stretched an arm to the edge of the bare patch to retrieve an upended cup and poured the last of the drink into it. With her knees drawn up and arms wrapped around, she sank into the heat of the day, made it the state of things. The voices of the men in the bluegrass band were not showy, nor meant to be; what mattered was for each to know a range well, directly sound the note, and hear the spectrum as one. They stood still and straight, restrained, as if offering a sturdy medium to channel the ferocity of their playing, as lightning relies on loblolly pines. Their song fell from them like a rainstorm set to a meter, clear notes dropping orderly in their places, drops falling faster than seeing. It had happened fast, but around Lana, neighbors understood that a wrong had been done to her, and they judged from her dry eyes and composure that she didn’t need their recognition, only for them to let her go on—handle it.  

          No one had picked it so Pelham had. Lana had ended it before she thought about ending it.   

          She knew she hadn’t acted out of solidarity with the people of that nation and anyway what would the gesture have done. She could get rid of Pelham but Congo-Brazzaville never would.  

          Sunshine was piercing hot on the part of her hair. She wondered if this was how sunshine fell over there. Lana hadn’t ever left the United States, but Pelham’s words hadn’t stung; she would finish up the drink, wash out the thermos, and quietly set it outside his office door. No, what was intolerable about Pelham was something else, something earlier.  

          In the splashing mix of music and voices Lana heard new ones approaching from behind, a woman, and the soft murmurs of a child. They were coming up slowly.  

           “Ice cream was what you wanted.”  

            A pause.  

           “I carry it.”  

           “You will have to all the way back.”  

           The dry bristling of footsteps on grass; they stepped into Lana’s square and she felt them close in. Then they were in view, mother and daughter, mother tall in front, girl at Lana’s eye level. The girl walked carefully, incrementally, as if trying to hold steady a broken pedestal. Her light-colored hair was gathered into spiky ponytails. The woman reached the corner of the square and wheeled around.  

            “You took us so far from our blanket. Didn’t you.”  

            The girl was moving like she’d parsed the task before her into manageable pieces. First take stock of ice cream cone; next take step; correct wobble; take stock once more. A melted rivulet ran down the back of her hand. She ignored it.  

           “Chloe. You are blocking the lady’s view.”  

            Startled, the girl’s eyes shot up and she spun toward Lana to follow her mother’s look and in her swinging motion the top of the cone lopped off. The girl didn’t see the ice cream fall but with the sudden shift in weight her arms sprang up unburdened. Then she connected the useless thing in her hand with the pile on the grass and registered the loss. She dropped her arms. She dropped the cone, like a finale, and looked up at her mother, stricken.  

           “It was too big for you. Next time you will know. I think you will know.”  

            The woman stepped forward, bent, took the girl’s hand. The girl did not look back as she was led away with her hand held above her head and eclipsed in the crowd.  

             Lana watched until the woman disappeared too. Alone on the grass she drank her drink and hugged her knees. Her white-hot hair swept up and into a barrette burned along with the sun; fallen strands over her eyes were blazing. The bluegrass was swelling louder now, rich and deep to meet a wakeful crowd. As Lana drank the heat from within rose to meet the heat from without and they became the same, became something she was light in. Behind her knees sweat trickled down. Her father would lead songs in the circle, sometimes the one the band was singing,  
 
         She walked through the corn leading down to the river  
         Her hair shone like gold in the hot morning sun  
        She took all the love that a poor man could give her 
        And left him to die like a fox on the run 
 
Lana closed her eyes, felt herself rocking, an urgent rocking, in the fuller surround of music and voices. And in her private darkness the voices on blankets all around grew richer and spread their reach; they took on deeper tones, became the voices of grownups, grownups and their music in her father’s backyard, the party going long into the night—the bluegrass jam from which Lana had been sent. Lana rocked, looked at bright brown sunlight behind her closed lids. They gave her sips; then she was sent from it. Why—  

       The laughter carried, the song rang out; she heard her father singing clear and loud in the night, and as she was no longer in the circle and her cheek was pressed to the bedroom windowscreen she listened to the song leave the musicians below and become pure message and cool echo in the treetops above. And rocking on her patch of hot grass Lana was made itchy by the notion of another lapse on her part, a thoughtlessness, a failure of consideration for which she could be reproached. 

       Then came a rare cooling breeze, blowing the smell of the dogwoods redolent on the crowd. She lifted her face into it. Sun in her eyes, she realized: A man does not pick his line of work out of the bit parts left by others. What was wrong with him. If he didn’t know better than that, then—  

        But she’d liked the brassy way he was seducing her. Pelham had closed the office door behind them and switched on the desk lamp, bringing the room into low gold light. Opening the dusty-looking bottle of moonshine: “So what you’re telling me is I’ve got an Atlanta girl in my office.” They each sipped the drink from paper cups borrowed from the hallway water cooler. He recoiled and coughed in one long gasp, his lower lids drawn down in alarm. She patted him kindly between the shoulder blades, nodding. Then she set down the paper cup and said, “That’s the first time I’ve had it too. When you grow up down here, it’s a bit too close. To take an active interest in, I mean.” 

       “That’s understandable.”  

        “You can; you’re from Boston. But here, it’s a relic of another time.” 

        Pelham held the bottle to the desk light and tipped it, peering warily at the clear liquid. “And place. From something called a holler.” 

         Lana laughed. “That’s right. But the New South needed respectable stimulants.” 

         “Well. That would be tobacco. And cocaine.” 

          “One for industriousness,” she said. “The other for sophistication.” 

          Pelham smiled, set the bottle on the desk. “Like I said. I waited for the right moment.”  

          He reached over and tuned the radio to the campus station. This evening hour was the domain of the student disc jockey whose conceit was to juxtapose honky-tonk with death metal, with one kind of song, then the other, alternating for the entire program like twinned voices of despair: plaintive, then punishing, then back again. Presently, Hank Williams was moaning, and they both knew what would come next. 

          “Another foreign object,” said Pelham, gesturing helplessly to the radio, “that I don’t understand. Please explain.” 

          The songs switched; now guitars, it was difficult to tell how many, made the noises of gears grinding, like CSX freight cars stripped of any reassuring low throaty rumble, leaving only gnashing metal on metal.  

          Lana considered. “You feel off-center, yeah. A little sick.” 

           Drums came in, a fusillade like video-game warfare, and a menacing voice made staccato croaks in time with the beat. 

           “Sings like demon spawn,” said Pelham. 

           “He’s probably a dad with three kids in Jonesboro. Works for Delta.” 

            Pelham spread his fingers wide and brought up both hands to pretend to cover his ears, pretend to scream wildly.  

            “But then again, this city is really and inexpressibly strange. A program like this,” Lana said, tilting her head in the direction of the radio, “comes close.”

           Pelham shifted his weight to the front of his chair, took Lana’s hand in his. He slowly kissed it. “I sincerely mean no disrespect to the burgeoning intown Atlanta real estate market,” he said. “But I hope you get a doctorate.” 

           And be his advisee, thought Lana, with the empty thermos in her lap. She hadn’t stopped in time. She twisted the lid shut.  

          The concert was finished. Crewmen were disconnecting microphones, winding up cords, hanging heavy coils on their shoulders. The players were holding their instruments by the necks, and with the other hand, mopping their faces with towels. They pushed up their hats to wipe their foreheads, then set the brims down again. They were showing their first smiles. There was a loyalty Lana had run past, headlong, though it should have stopped her cold. She rose to her feet, brushing grass from the back of her legs, and as people turned away and headed for 10th Street, she walked toward the stage. 

Lyrics from the song "Fox On The Run" are used with the express permission of the songwriter, Tony Hazzard.