If you think you’re too classy for Memphis, Cordova, or Bartlett, you live in Germantown. Think you’re too classy for Germantown, you live in Collierville, one burg farther out. Too classy for the planet, you live in Meadow Woods. Nominally, legally, administratively part of the city of Collierville, Meadow Woods drew a line, distinguishing itself. ‘Now Entering Meadow Woods’, said a brick-and-stone sign, ringed in meticulously maintained monkey-grass and blooming irises, a rig that couldn’t have cost less than my annual income. Fitting—some of those lots were large enough they’d be a chore to walk across, and some you’d be tempted to drive. If Germantown had “gated communities,” I thought, this one would have machine guns and concertina wire. All, of course, correctly landscaped.
Somewhere back at city hall, these houses had street numbers. Out here, though, they had names. The Briars. Cotton Hill. Levee Reach. Clayton McCorkle’s Winter Bayou, I saw from the copied plat I’d scooped from Collierville’s planning department, was the only number on its street. A street I’d not be driving, I saw. The iron gate would have looked formidable if I’d been driving a tank. How he’d scooped private possession of a whole city street for his own was anyone’s guess. But, then, there’s a lot goes on in Memphis that has to do with extraordinary privilege.
I hadn’t come to see Barbara Jean, wasn’t intending to go in. I just wanted to see the place for myself. And couldn’t quite. Not from the gate, which gave a view of a curving rock wall and another inner gate. And security cams, on poles and trees—moving cams, I noted. I backed Mitzi out, guessing my picture had already been taken at the outer gate, looked for another viewpoint, and found it, finally, on the north side of the property, where some horticulturally horrific disease had evidently struck a stretch of hedge and left its limbs bereft of leaves. I parked, struggled up a rise, clambered to the top of the stone wall and over the crest of the rise where the wall ran lower than elsewhere. And, through the hedge’s barren limbs, saw.
The house loomed out of the hilltop, about the size of an aircraft carrier. A house built less for its style than for its brute visual weight. Not necessarily handsome, architecturally. And certainly not what you’d call beautiful. Impressive, yes—in the way a gigantic warehouse is impressive, when you see one for the first time. Imagine a McMansion—the kind you see in GeeTown and Collierville. You know how they assemble those. A French farmhouse roof here, white columns there, over here three dormers, there an eyebrow window, now a gable. A dog’s breakfast. “Architectonic,” you might say—a borrowing from every period, movement, regional style, and every bit of it faux. Like an ignorant, angry kid who stole every Lego piece in town and all he wanted was to make whatever he was building big.
Clayton McCorkle had made it big. In construction, mostly—not surprising, given the acres of square-footage I was staring at. I’d scouted him out at the Crescent Club, on the say-so of a couple of buddies who hung about the fringes of local wealth. The fact McCorkle met people at the Crescent Club—three, four times a week, the bartender told me—said a lot. If you were old money, if you had pedigree, you’d more likely meet at the University Club in Midtown, where you’d still hear, straight-faced, the term respectability, in accents that harkened back to an imagined Old South. The kind of respectability, incidentally, that meant the only black people on the premises were “servants.” And called that.
The Crescent Club, though, perched atop the building that lent its name, an elegantly anonymous late-eighties edifice that defined the east end of the Poplar-240 split. A building of vaguely styled “consultants,” a building of new-money brokers who’d made it on new-money clients and therefore could sport golf shirts and sockless, open-toed sandals in the office—the grown-up, monied equivalent of Memphis State frat boys sporting backwards ball caps and thinking themselves original, defiant, their own men. The Crescent Club took anyone who could write the cheque—more modest than the term private club might make you think—and didn’t actually smell. They’d even taken MacDonald, whose card I used at the door, my thumb over his picture.
Three times that week, I’d sat near Clayton McCorkle and his buddies—a breakfast and two lunches. No need for disguises or subterfuge—in a club, you’d expect to see the same people. I heard laughter. A couple of dirty crony-jokes. And a guy deeply into construction, construction people, and not much else. One day, he came in brushing dust off his khakis, which bore another, darker stain. “Guy on a site,” he said to the trio who’d been waiting too long and decided they’d best get on with lunch. “Not mine—a subcontractor’s guy. Half cut his thumb off with a skill-saw. I hadda take him to Collierville Baptist. Poor bastard got no insurance, so we’re gonna take care of him.” He sat, wrote the name out three times on his own business cards, handed them around. “Put this old boy in your prayers, y’all. Grace a God, nerves in his hand won’t be all fucked up.”
The Crescent Club was one thing. Clean. Air-conditioned. Safe. Out here at the house…I moved along the wall…