by Cameron Judd
Chapter Nineteen
ELI SPENT MOST OF the night in a chair beside a darkened window that gave him a good view of the driveway and some of the road. It had been a long day and he was tired, but the jolt of having actually seen Rawls Parvin’s hateful face overwhelmed his need for sleep. For the first hours, anyway.
When Rawls Parvin failed to come back, when no heavy foot sounded on the outside stairs or kicked in the door, guard duty became dull and stupifying. When morning came, Eli awakened to find himself no longer on the chair by the window, but stretched out on the sofa, still fully clothed except for shoes. Melinda, also clothed, was asleep beside him, her arm across his chest. He was so surprised he jolted up and nearly tumbled both of them off the sofa like silent movie comic actors.
Melinda for maybe two moments also seemed perplexed by their situation, but she fast pulled herself and her thoughts together.
“Rawls never came back,” she said. “And you went to sleep in that chair and looked so pitiful all slumped over there that I decided to get you to the couch. Yesterday was a long day. You needed your rest.”
“How did you get me over here?”
“I carried you.”
“No you didn’t. No way.”
A laugh. “I shook you about one-quarter awake and persuaded you to come to the couch by telling you I’d lie down with you. You kind of sleep-walked over and collapsed. You looked kind of … I don’t know, abandoned, lying there. So I just lay down beside you for a few minutes, fell asleep instead … and now here we are.”
Eli rubbed his eyes and face. “At the moment I don’t think I even remember yesterday. Except for the Rawls Parvin part.” He mulled over the fact they had wakened in each other’s arms. “Melinda … did we … ”
“We’re both completely dressed, Eli. No, we didn’t do anything except fall into a dead sleep.”
“Well, I never have been that good at recognizing and taking advantage of life’s opportunities.”
“If you’d tried, I’d have slapped the crap out of you, and you know it, big boy.”
“Yeah. Yeah.” Eli shook his head fast, trying to come back to life. “Funny … yesterday is such a blur. And last night is mostly a blank. You’re absolutely sure we didn’t, you know for sure that … ”
“Eli, I hate to think that you believe something like that could have happened and you’d describe the memory of it as a ‘blank.’ Surely I’d make for a more memorable experience than that!”
“Yes indeed.” He looked down at his rumpled, day-old, fully intact clothing. “Yeah. It’s obvious. We did nothing.”
“You have coffee, my dear window guardian?”
“Upper shelf near the sink. The coffee maker is on the counter.”
“Be a happy little ray of morning sunshine and make us some, then. Fortunately we woke up early enough to get ready for the day.”
“What will you wear? Your clothes are as rumpled as mine.”
“Do you have an iron?”
“A hand-held steamer. Bathroom closet. My iron burned out three weeks ago.”
“I’ll steam out what I’ve got on and wear it again. If anybody notices I’m wearing the same thing I had on yesterday, it’ll just have to be put down as one of life’s little mysteries.”
“You’ll need to take those things off if you’re going to steam them. May I help?”
“You never quit, do you! I can handle it all myself, in the bathroom, with the door closed. That’s the steamiest thing that’s going to happen here today, my friend: me steaming the wrinkles out of my clothes.”
“Aren’t your folks going to wonder why you didn’t come home last night?”
“I called home from the extension in the kitchen last night, late, and told Mom I was at Amy’s house. You’ve heard me talk about Amy, right? My good friend? It’s not uncommon for me to stay over at her house, or her to stay at mine. I’ll talk to Amy today and bring her into our little conspiracy. She’ll go along.”
Eli, for the moment having had the fears and tensions of the prior night mostly washed away in the sunlight of morning, grinned at his girlfriend. “Can’t I tell people I slept with you?” he asked. “Because, technically, snoring on the same couch with you has to count as – ”
“You most certainly cannot say you slept with me.”
“But we just now woke up together, so … ”
“Eli … ”
“I know. I know. I was just kidding anyway.”
“We’ve got a working day ahead,” Melinda said, glancing at her watch. “We’d best get started. You want the shower first?”
“We could save time and water if we both – ”
“Oh my gosh, Eli. Give it a rest. Please!”
“I wish you weren’t so straight-arrow, Melinda. Would it really by the worst thing in the world if … ”
“Not going to happen, so shut up. You want the shower or not?”
“You go first. You’ll need more time to dry your hair and all that. Fresh towels and cloths are in the linen closet just inside the bathroom. Go ahead and get started … I’ll make the coffee.”
Five minutes later, Eli was pondering the very bizarre reality that, in his own bathroom at that very moment, one of the most beautiful young women in the entire region, one in love with him at that, was taking a shower. And all he was doing with that situation was sitting and drinking coffee.
“Time to turn in my Man Card,” he muttered to the kitchen table.
NO FURTHER DAMAGE HAD BEEN done to the Rambler out in the driveway overnight, and Melinda’s Bronco was still safely parked where she’d left it in the church parking lot, untouched except for a knockout rose tucked beneath one wiper blade. It had been taken from a bush in a nearby yard. “Rawls used to do that when we were dating,” she told Eli as she flung the rose away like it carried disease. “He’d leave me flowers on my windshield like this. It seemed kind of sweet at the time. Now it just gives me a chill.”
Eli stared at the rose lying on the pavement. Deliberately he walked over, put his foot on it and ground it into red and green fragments.
“We’re not going to let him ruin what we have,” he told Melinda. “We’re not going to let some low-life get control of our lives and divert our attention.” He pointed at the key scratch on his car. “And he’s going to make that right. Somehow or another I’m going to see to that.”
“Don’t get into a war with Rawls Parvin, Eli. He’s the kind to do whatever it takes to win. He was sacked in a game once, and the guy who did it talked trash to him. He found out where the guy lived, went to his town, and slashed two of his tires with the car parked right in the guy’s driveway. After it was all over with Rawls and me, I started learning things about him and his people, things my friends hadn’t wanted to tell me because I had liked him. Even Amy, my best friend, knew some things. After the breakup, she admitted to me she’d been keeping a close watch on Rawls and me, looking for any sign that he might have hurt me. She told me she had learned, from people she trusted, that Rawls had taken part in the gang rape of a girl, and probably more than one.”
“You think that was true?”
“Amy was completely confident of it, and she’s a tough-minded person, not a gullible easily-misled type. The rape she said she was most confident of having really happened had been a molestation engineered by older cousins and uncles of Rawls. His father, too. A real family party, huh? They lured a naïve Minnesota teenager, a black girl, away from her family’s campsite at the Israel Kincheloe Birthplace Park State Historical Area. They used liquor and pot and flattery and their own version of ‘Southern charm’ to bait her. After they were done with her they turned her loose near the campground after and made her vow never to tell what had happened, because they had kin in Minnesota who would hunt down her family and kill them all. One phone call would do it, they told her. Apparently the girl was gullible and kept quiet, because nothing official ever came out of the rape incident. No arrests, police reports, charges, investig
ations. But word got out here via the redneck grapevine … you know, macho hillbilly drunks bragging to each other in bars about what big, virile men they are.”
“And Rawls was involved in this? No question about it?”
“He was definitely involved, according to Amy. Though apparently it was his father and one of his uncles who were the ring leaders, so to speak.”
“Do you think it might be just rumors, the kind of talk people spread about families with poor reputations?”
“Maybe. But after the way Rawls attacked me right in my own home, even though I was someone he cared about, I don’t doubt he could have done worse to a girl who meant nothing to him.”
“Personal question, I know, but do you think Rawls actually had it in mind to outright rape you that night your father walked in on him and you?”
“No doubt at all about it. The evidence was right out in the open, so to speak.”
Eli said, “Okay … I get it. And I have to say, hearing that makes me wish your father had shot Rawls in the head instead of the leg.”
Melinda shuddered. “I’ve heard my dad say the same thing, when he’s thinking about it. So I’ll tell you the same thing I tell him: I understand and, in a way, appreciate the sentiment behind that wish, but if he’d killed Rawls it would have been something never to be gotten past the rest of his days. There would have been consequences, legal ones and otherwise, with lifetime ramifications. I’d not have wanted Rawls killed. That’s not the way my mind works.”
“You’re mature beyond your years, Melinda,” Eli said very sincerely. “A lot of people in situations like that forget to think with their brains and start following impulses and emotions and preconceptions.”
“You’ve just described my father.”
It was a perfect opportunity to ask the question that had been hanging in Eli’s mind for too long. “Melinda, why have you not had me over to meet your parents?”
“You’ve noticed, huh?”
“Yeah. It makes me wonder if there’s something about me you think they’ll not like.”
She drew a slow breath and let it out with a sigh. “No, not that. It’s the other way around. I’ve been a little worried about how you might react to them … to Dad, specifically.”
“Because … “
“Because Dad can be very … intense. He has strong opinions and attitudes, and he clings to them. And shares them freely and dogmatically.”
“Well … we all have opinions.”
“Yes, but we all don’t act like we expect the whole world to instantly jump in line behind us and … ” Another sigh. “You’d just have to know him to understand.”
“Not much chance of that if I don’t meet him.”
“Exactly. Which is why it hasn’t happened. I’m sorry if I sent the wrong signals or made you wonder about things. Obviously I’m just going to have to bite the bullet and let the big meeting take place.”
“I’ve also had relatives with ‘intense’ personalities and ways, Melinda. I watched my father handle them when I was a kid, and he taught me an important lesson: There’s not many people you can’t get on with if you just exercise some basic courtesy and keep yourself calm and collected no matter what.”
“I suspect that’s true. I’ve come to the conclusion, though, that my dad has a particular capacity to rile even the rile-proof. I can give you one tip that’ll help you out with him. Just be aware that, in Dad’s vision of things, every problem in the world is created by some or other group of people he doesn’t like: the liberals, the unions, the ‘seklar hoomanists’, the Democrats, the Civil Rights crowd, the ‘Bible disbelievers,’ the ‘Hollywood lefties,’ the women’s libbers, the liquor industry, the evolutionists, the gays … no, wait, I mean, ‘the homa-sekshals.’ That’s his vision of reality: All he finds bad in this world he sees as the fault of somebody else. He can’t function without an enemies list. At least he isn’t anti-Semitic.”
“I’ll try to steer clear of touchy subjects when I meet him.”
“You won’t succeed, because he’ll bring them up if you don’t. He’ll tell you what he believes, then he’ll look at you and say ‘Don’t you think so?’ And if you don’t give full-out assent and agreement right away he’ll frown at you and say, ‘What? You don’t believe that? Boy, I sure do!’ Then hang on, because it’s off to the races at that point.”
Eli replied, “My dad always told me to say, ‘You know, you could be right,’ in situations like that. It’s noncommittal and non-challenging. It usually throws water on the fuse before the flare reaches the dynamite.”
Melinda mulled that over a moment. “That’s good advice. I’ll probably use that myself.”
Eli said, “And by the way, just to be fair to your dad: there are a lot of people out there who are a polar opposite to him, but just as knee-jerk in their reactions. And they can be just as strident and inflexible, and just as guilty of thinking from the gut rather than the brain. I encountered plenty of them in my university days, a lot of them young students. Some of them aging professors with far less excuse for being that way.”
“I know. I know. And now I’m wondering if maybe you’ll get on better with Dad than I’ve been thinking you would. You’re not a raging Moral Majority right-winger like he is, are you?”
“Just a bland old moderate. Someone who can’t see why the ‘correct answer’ to every issue necessarily has to lie either to the far left or far right of the spectrum.”
“That makes sense to me, Eli.”
“What’s your mom’s take on the things that stir your father up?”
“Much milder, much easier, much less intense. She tolerates differences better, and in general is not so dogmatic. I think that, if she felt free, she might even let herself enjoy a glass of wine every now and then. Dad, you see, is adamantly against alcohol. Adamantly. It’s his pet topic, a no-compromise issue for him and he attaches far more importance to it than it should actually possess. It’s his identifying cause. He would have fit in well in the Prohibition era, and in fact one of his great-grandfathers worked with Billy Sunday, the anti-liquor evangelist who helped set the stage for Prohibition. On the other side of Dad’s family, his great-grandfather was a drunkard who beat his wife without mercy, to the point she developed a brain aneurysm that eventually killed her. Those two lines of family heritage came together to create alcohol-hating Ben Buckingham, my dear, intense daddy.”
“But you were raised in his household and I know for a fact you enjoy your beer … ”
“That’s for us to know and Dad never to find out. Never ever. Got that?”
“Yes, but this isn’t right, Melinda. You’re a grown woman, old enough to have your own thoughts and opinions, and to make your own independent decisions without having to hide them. You’re past the age of being obliged to require daddy’s approval on everything you think and do. You shouldn’t have to dodge around in hiding like a little girl who sneaked a cookie from the jar.”
“I know that. Dad doesn’t. He thinks he can still dictate the rules of my life, and he always will think that. And even if it shouldn’t be that way, like you say, Dad still has the power to make me miserable, if and when he chooses. He perfected his technique with years of practice, at least where certain hot-button matters are concerned.”
“He’s that uptight, huh?”
“You have no idea.”
Since they were already talking on touchy matters, it seemed the right moment to go ahead and settle a second question Eli had been carrying around with him. “Melinda, may I ask you about another, unrelated thing?”
“Uh … of course.” She sounded wary.
“Your aunt who was killed in the car crash, the one whose face you saw in the crowd in that big photograph on the wall at the newspaper … I wanted to learn more about what happened, so I tried to find the newspaper with the accident story in the archives. I couldn’t find anything, and when I asked people, nobody seemed aware she ever existed, including people who personal
ly know your family.”
Melinda’s face had blanched the moment Eli mentioned her aunt, and she seemed for a moment unable to speak. “Eli, it was … at that point I didn’t want to tell you … I was trying to steer you off-track because … oh Lord, how could I not have realized … ” She realized she was merely stammering and shut up.
“Melinda, what did you really see in that photograph that upset you, and why did you feel like you couldn’t tell me the truth?”
She was silent a few moments. “Did you get a good look at Rawls Parvin when the headlights caught his face last night?”
“Good enough. I’d know him now if I saw him on the street.”
“In that case, look at that old photograph again, closely, and you’ll find your answer as to what upset me.”
“Unless my grandparents are peeping around a corner, I won’t know anybody in a picture that old from a town I wasn’t raised in – ”
“Just look, okay? And now I have something I need to ask you, Eli. Nothing nearly so dramatic and nothing to do with family. Something a lot more comfortable to talk about.”
“Okay … ”
“I’ll be expected to file a brief at the station about the bicentennial meeting. Probably nothing for broadcast, just for the ongoing files, and to demonstrate I’m keeping up with my beat. The whole business about Mr. Darwin’s historical drama and you being buttonholed as the writer … what do you want me to say about that?”
“I hope you’ll say the same thing I’m going to, which is only that a proposal for a local historical drama has been put forward by Caine Darwin, who says he is willing to provide financial backing, and that issues including finding an appropriate outdoor theater location and a writer for the project are to be explored. I see no reason to say anything more specific at this point.”
“Off the record, just you and me: are you interested in writing that play?”
“Melinda, the first thing that came into my mind when he put my name out as a possible writer was a mental image of our dear old Hodgepodge building. That’s a concrete example of what happens when a job is done by an unqualified person. I have no more business trying to create a professional-grade historical drama than Mr. Carl’s grandson did trying to wrap an office complex around an old motel and restaurant. I have no wish to have my name attached to a public embarrassment.”
