JEZEBEL'S BLUES

by Ruth Wind

  He nodded, chewing popcorn. “What’s your name, granddaughter?”

  “Celia.” She glanced at the nearly empty bowl. “You made short work of that popcorn. Are you hungry?”

  “Celia Moon.” His drawl and the ragged edge of his voice made her name sound beautiful. “I’m Eric Putman and I’m starving.”

  She tossed him a box of crackers and found the peanut butter. “That’ll have to do for a little while.” His name sounded vaguely familiar, but when she couldn’t place it, she let it go. There weren’t many names she hadn’t heard on her grandmother’s lips at one time or another. For a nice old woman, she’d been the world’s champion gossip—not mean, for there was always an undercurrent of understanding in the way she told her stories, even when the preacher of the Methodist church fell in love with the choir director, who was then only seventeen, and ran off to Louisiana with her. “You must be from around here,” Celia commented.

  “Born and raised.”

  A harsh undernote told her he’d been glad to escape. A common attitude. She was the only one who’d run to Gideon instead of away. And the funny thing was, they were running to the very places she had left behind, places whose very names promised glamour. “You’ve been gone awhile,” she said.

  “Yep.” He dropped the peanut butter and crackers into the box with the other food. “You have any other candles? I can get some blankets and stuff if you’ll tell me where to look.”

  She dug in a drawer, and just as she was about to light the candle, a massive flash of lightning shimmered over the sky, a pale electric blue that seemed to hang for minutes in the darkness. On its heels came a crack of thunder so loud, it rattled the dishes.

  As if a hole had been cut in the sky by the violent thunder, the noise of the rain suddenly doubled, then tripled. Celia gasped. “I didn’t think it could rain any harder!” She went to the window and looked out, laughing lightly. “It looks like there’s a thousand garden hoses going at once.”

  Eric grabbed the candle. “Where are those blankets?” His voice was gruff.

  “Under the stairs.” She pointed vaguely. Her attention was focused on the deluge. It excited her. A part of her wanted to run outside into that beating, pounding rain, just to feel it and taste it. Nature run amok, she thought. Humans were helpless in the face of it. A savage kind of joy raced through her at the thought.

  “Come on, woman,” Eric growled. “Won’t take Jezebel long to flash her eyes now.”

  Of course, she probably wanted to live through whatever was coming. Time enough to observe the drama when everything was safely prepared.

  Celia tried to ignore the ripple of excitement that passed through her at the thought of observing the drama with Eric Putman nearby.

  Chapter 2

  It took more than an hour to prepare the attic. They made several trips up and down the long flight of stairs, carrying water and blankets and food. Eric insisted they drag up a mattress from one of the beds, and evidently Celia finally understood the gravity of the situation, because she gathered a box full of photo albums and letters, and a metal file box he assumed held important papers of various kinds.

  Eric’s last trip was to fetch his backpack and shoes, which he’d left downstairs when he changed.

  Water was seeping in under the front door. Feeling the cold water on his bare toes, Eric froze for an instant. A paralyzing fear shot through his belly, and his mind flashed back to that other night, so long ago, when the water had crept under the front door and up the windowpanes—until the pressure shattered the windows, and water had rocketed through the openings. There had been no attic in that house, only a roof to cling to. He’d clung. Sometimes he could still taste the silt in his mouth, feel the slime on his arms and under his feet.

  Flood. Jezebel was rising. Down the hall, the toilet gurgled ominously. Staring at the water pushing through the crack below the door, he knew what he had to do. First he grabbed the bottle in his pack and lifted it for a long swallow. Then he crossed the room and yanked open the door.

  A cold press of waiting water swirled inside, rushing across the floor all the way to the couch against the far wall. Gritting his teeth, he sloshed through it to the windows. Methodically, trying not to look at the sea beyond the house, he rounded the lower floor, opening all the windows.

  He returned to the foot of the stairs and paused a moment, holding his candle aloft. The room was as warm and inviting as a June morning. Wallpaper with tiny blue-and-silver flowers covered one wall, and an arrangement of framed botanical drawings hung above the fat, rose-colored sofa. Small tables littered with magazines and knickknacks and lamps were scattered around the room. Eric let his eyes rove from one corner to the other, imprinting in memory what would soon be swept away, then he hiked his pack onto his shoulder and climbed the stairs.

  Celia was crouched by the window tucked under the eaves of the attic, a single candle burning nearby. He was struck again by her fey beauty, so fitting to her name. Everything about her was as ethereal as moonlight. Her hair was fine and weightless, so blonde it was nearly white, and skimmed her fragile-looking shoulders in a straight line. She wasn’t short, but her body was slim of breast and hip, and she had long-fingered, graceful hands.

  But downstairs, when the lights had flashed on suddenly, it had been her eyes that riveted him, in spite of the fact that they’d been filled at that moment with fear and distrust.

  Never had he seen a face so dominated by eyes. They were enormous, fringed with lashes unusually dark for one with such light hair, and the irises were pale gray, almost silver.

  Fey.

  Now he saw more—a mouth as ripe as peaches and a pointed, stubborn chin. He grinned, feeling relieved. She was just a woman, not some specter from another plane. “Some rain, eh?” he said with a grin.

  “Amazing. I’ve never seen anything like it.” She frowned. “Are you nipping at a bottle? You smell like whiskey.”

  “Guilty.” He tugged the fifth of Jack Daniel’s from his pack. It was nearly full. “I carry it for emergencies.”

  She wryly glanced out the window. “This qualifies, I guess.”

  “You want a little?”

  “I hate whiskey,” she said bluntly. “Go ahead, though, if it makes you feel better.”

  “No.” He put it away.

  An awkward silence fell. Eric dug into his pack for oranges and tossed her one, then kicked his feet out in front of him. Weariness settled into his joints as if they had been waiting for him to get still. His hands ached with the wet and the long hours clutching the steering wheel, and his legs felt rubbery from slogging through the water. A chill squeezed his lungs as he remembered the last creek he’d forded.

  “Damn,” he said aloud. “I really almost drowned out there.”

  “What happened?”

  “Tree branch knocked my feet out from under me and I lost my bearings.” He closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the wall. The pounding of the rain overhead filled the room.

  Water in his mouth, his nose; his hair tangling in the branch…

  He started, realizing he’d almost dozed off with all his earthly goods stuffed soaking wet inside his pack. Blinking, he pulled it over. “You mind if I spread some things out? It’s all soaked and it’ll mildew if I don’t get it dry.”

  “Of course not.”

  There were jeans and socks and shirts. The underwear gave him a moment’s pause, but the thought of doing without the next day or two made him spread it out along with everything else. A sack of oranges, a sodden box of cookies, several tins of Vienna sausages and a bottle of water followed. “This’ll all come in handy,” he commented.

  Celia picked up the soggy cookies. “Too bad. Oreos are my favorite.”

  He grinned. “Mine, too. Can’t go anywhere without ’em.”

  “Maybe they’ll dry.”

  “They’ll taste like catfish now—like the bottom of the river.”

  Celia laughed. Her smile was filled with the k
ind of teeth that had been professionally polished every six months on the button. Pretty, he thought, nudging an empty space in his own mouth with his tongue. Expensive, too. There had been no one to pay for things like dentists for Eric and his sister. At least he’d been able to get hers fixed before she’d started to lose them. There was a conglomeration of other things in the pack—cards and dice for long nights or afternoons stranded in truck stops; scissors and soap; a saturated towel; string and hooks for makeshift fishing. Celia watched him sift through everything without saying anything, but when he pulled out the last item, he heard her make a noise. Not a gasp or a groan, but something in between.

  “Something wrong?” he asked, holding the rubber-banded paperback in his hands. He glanced at it, and grinned as the truth came home. “Your dad, right?”

  “Right.” There was something less than enthusiastic in her voice. “Please tell me I’m not stuck up here for heaven knows how long with one of his groupies.”

  Eric laughed and then licked the spot on his lip when it started to bleed again. “Don’t make me laugh. It hurts.”

  “If you regale me with stories about how my dear departed daddy changed the way you looked at things, I’ll tell every joke I’ve ever heard.”

  Eric pressed the dishrag she’d given him to the cut. “I promise.” He tossed the book aside with an inward chuckle. Jacob Moon was his favorite writer, and for a lot of reasons. Obviously, his daughter had heard all of them before.

  She stood up and matter-of-factly spread a blanket over the mattress. “You can sleep now, if you want to. You look beat, and I’m a night owl, anyway.”

  Eric admired the rounded contours of her rear end briefly as she smoothed the blanket. His gaze fell with greater hunger to the pillow, however, and he nodded wearily. His mouth and hands hurt, his legs would barely hold him and he had driven so hard to get to Gideon that he’d had no sleep in thirty-six hours. “Much obliged,” he said. As soon as his head sank into the downy recesses of a clean-smelling pillow, his brain spun away.

  * * *

  Along toward morning, there was a break in the rain. Celia had slept curled against the wall below the window, her head pillowed on the sill, her body wrapped in a blanket.

  The cessation of noise was what startled her into wakefulness. No rain pounding overhead, no lightning and thunder flashing and roaring. She blinked, disoriented at first, then remembered the past eight hours. It was impossible to see much outside in the predawn darkness, although a little light pushed at the horizon. Another cloudy day, she thought with a groan.

  Eric still slept, and even in the darkness she could see that it was the utterly unconscious sprawl of exhaustion. She crept past him quietly and tiptoed onto the landing just outside the attic door.

  A silt-heavy smell of water hit her nostrils, and the air was heavy with moisture. If the sun came out any time soon, Celia thought fuzzily, they were in for scorching weather. She fumbled for the banister and found it, then headed down the stairs for the bathroom.

  Beneath her bare feet, the wooden stairs were almost slimy with dampness. A shudder of unease whipped over her spine. A collection of unfamiliar noises began to penetrate the fog of awakening—a splash and trickle, a queer echoing. Below all that was a minute groaning, like the hull of a boat at sea.

  She froze for an instant. Then, propelled by horrified curiosity, she continued down the steep flight of stairs, gripping the banister fiercely. Another splash sounded just as her toes hit icy cold water. Celia scrambled backward for an instant.

  Alter a moment, she stepped back onto the submerged step, and holding with all her might to the banister with one hand, squatted and reached out with the other hand as far as she could. Water.

  What had she expected? That somehow ankle-deep water had pooled on the twelfth step down?

  A noise she couldn’t identify sent her scurrying backward up the stairs, her heart pounding in her throat, her mind filled with thoughts of snakes: water moccasins, copperheads, cottonmouths—and whatever other kinds there were. It seemed as if she had learned the names of more evil snakes every day since her arrival in Texas. The noxious creatures were the one blemish on a landscape she otherwise loved.

  Inside the attic room, she found an old tin bucket in a corner and carried it out to the landing, closing the door for privacy. For a moment, her nose filled with the river smell and her imagination with the triangular heads of snakes, she wondered if it might be easier to just hope Eric didn’t awaken. Only the thought that he, too, would have to attend to the business of nature decided her. It was better than nothing—and a person couldn’t go forever without using the bathroom, after all.

  When she returned to the room, a gray dawn had begun to fill the long room, illuminating aging trunks shoved under the eaves. An old bicycle hung from the rafters and a long oval mirror reflected the wan light. The boxes of supplies were clustered near the door.

  In the middle of the wide room was the mattress they had dragged upstairs together, and upon it slept the man who had appeared so suddenly on her doorstep. Eric Putman, she thought, cocking her head. Last night, her impressions had been hurried, a little blurred, and she’d awakened with the feeling that she had dreamed him.

  He slept on his back, a hand splayed on his chest, his long, long legs sprawled. He looked, she thought, as though he’d been knocked out in a fight and dragged, unconscious, to sleep it off.

  His hair was every bit as black as it had looked the night before, and it was too long, curling around his muscled brown neck with abandon. His jaw was grizzled with black beard, and the painful-looking cut on his mouth made his already full lower lip swell.

  My Lord in heaven, Celia thought. Her eyes crept over his thighs in the too-tight jeans that had belonged to her grandfather, slid over his lean hips and his broad-shouldered torso. Not a flaw. Not a single one.

  She sighed softly, leaning against the wall, not quite sure whether to be thankful or distraught.

  It was then that her gaze caught on his hands. They were as big as the rest of him, and just as lean—the kind of hands that gray-haired piano teachers exclaimed over in children—gracefully shaped and long fingered; strong and beautiful, like the man himself.

  But the hands, unlike the man, were flawed. Thin ribbons of pale scar tissue criss-crossed the elegant lines of bone and marred the exquisite line of his fingers. One hand held the other in a loose grip, as if it had been aching while he slept.

  A faraway rumble of thunder dragged her attention back to the here and now, and she crossed the room to peer out the window.

  At the sight that greeted her, Celia felt another primeval shudder. The river ordinarily looped behind the farmhouse on a sleepy, muddy path to the Gulf. And on the far bank, Celia could see things were pretty much as they always had been—a meadow of thick grass met a stand of heavy trees. In the soft gray dawn, the scene shimmered with rain.

  But on the farmhouse side, Jezebel had leapt her boundaries with hedonistic abandon. Thick-looking water swirling with tree branches and debris buried the cultivated lawn around the house. The oak and pecan trees around the house had been swallowed to the juncture of their branches and appeared to float eerily above the water.

  And even as she watched, rain began to fall anew, pattering and plopping into the inland sea as if on a gentle springtime mission.

  “Quite a sight,” Eric commented behind her. The graveled sound of his voice purred over her spine and she turned with a little shock. The voice, too, had been real, she realized with a touch of wonder.

  “It’s terrifying,” Celia said.

  He glanced at the sky with eyes blue as summer twilight, then to the waterlogged landscape beyond. He pursed his lips for a minute. “I don’t think she’s quite finished with her little temper tantrum, but I reckon we aren’t gonna drown, either.”

  “I started to go downstairs,” Celia commented, crossing her arms over her chest at the memory. “There’s probably three or four feet of water down th
ere. I wonder how it got in so badly.”

  “I opened the windows and doors,” he said, and she felt him move away from her. “Otherwise, Jezebel would have just smashed her way in anyway.”

  “Oh.” She felt daunted suddenly by all she didn’t know. Gideon had seemed like a safe, dependable refuge from the insanity of her parents’ constant, restless travel. In the space of twelve hours, that refuge had been snatched away.

  Some of her dismay must have shown, because a big, heavy hand landed comfortingly on her shoulder. It rested there only an instant, but Celia felt the lack of its strength when Eric took it away. She turned suddenly. “You know, it scared me when you showed up last night,” she said, “but I’m glad I’m not alone in this.”

  A slow, lazy smile spread over his dark face. “Careful, sugar.”

  Her own mouth quirked in a wry smile. “I have an instinct about these things,” she returned. “I had to.” She stuck her hands into her back pocket and cleared her throat. “I—uh—rigged up a sort of latrine or whatever you want to call it out there on the landing.”

  His grin broadened. “Something tells me you would have been just fine by yourself up here.”

  “I didn’t mean to imply I needed help,” she said. “Just that it’s easier not to have to face it alone.”

  “Okay.” He gathered up a few belongings from the floor and ducked out to the landing. The door clicked closed behind him.

  A rumble sounded in her belly and Celia knelt by the boxes of food. She’d kill for a cup of coffee right now. It was such a deeply ingrained part of her morning routine that she didn’t know how she would shake the fuzziness it usually cleared.

  The lack of coffee made the rest of the provisions look utterly unappealing. Peanut butter for breakfast? Nope. Vienna sausages? Forget it. Finally she found what she sought: a box of strawberry toaster pastries with sprinkle frosting. She settled on the bed with the box in one hand, an orange in the other and forced herself to stop dreaming of caffeine.

  Eric returned in a few minutes. His hair was combed, and he’d changed from her grandfather’s clothes into some of his own—a red flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows and very old jeans, soft as the flannel in his shirt, worn colorless. And obviously, Celia thought with a jolt, they had always been his jeans. They cupped and caressed and clung in ways that might have been indecent if—