Small Town Trouble

by Jean Erhardt

  I bit off the end and spit it into the weeds. She looked impressed. She handed me the Bic. I flicked and the cigar began to catch.

  “Mmm,” she said, “I love the smell of a cigar.”

  Maybe things were looking up after all.

  I got a nice even burn going and together we smoked peacefully, gazing up at Mr. Moon and taking in the sweet, grassy scents and summer soundtrack of rural Fogerty. Things went on like this for a good long time. Then Amy said, “You were smart to get out of Fogerty, Kim.”

  “So were you.”

  Amy snorted. “Moving across town doesn’t really count.”

  The way she said it made me feel sad again. It made me want to pack up the Lexus and drive off into the sunset with her, except the sun had probably already set in more ways than one for both of us.

  I tried to cheer her up.

  “It’s not like I took off for Morocco. Gatlinburg is a small town in its own way.”

  She lit another cigarette and looked up at the stars. “At least it’s hundreds of miles away from here. I’d like to come visit some time,” she said. She turned to me and smiled. The smile was a beautiful, lingering smile, full of longing and dreams that hadn’t come true.

  “Any time,” I said, meaning it. In another story, this would have been the perfect moment for a kiss. But in this story Amy was Mrs. Smith and she was, no doubt, straighter than Cupid’s mighty arrow. In this story it was the absolute right time for me to get up and go look for crawdads. I grabbed up a rusty can that had beached itself in a tangle of roots. Then Nat Sherman and I prowled around for crustaceans or the Loch Ness monster, whichever came first.

  “You know, Amy, with a little salt and lemon, crawdads make a tasty appetizer.”

  “Remind me never to eat at your place.”

  Amy leaned back against the bank and watched me poke around. “Can I ask a personal question?” she said.

  “If I can ask one after you.”

  I had a good idea what was coming, I just wasn’t sure where it was going.

  “You’re gay, right?” she said.

  I let the water run through the holes in the can and drain back into the creek. “Yep, and you’re not, right?”

  Amy just smiled. I don’t know exactly how, but I knew that she was thinking back on our youthful experiments in the hayloft.

  “Are you, involved?”

  Involved was a great word for it. “Yeah, sort of.”

  “I’ll bet she’s gorgeous.”

  “In the right light.”

  “She treats you well?”

  “Occasionally.”

  Amy smoked her cigarette down, then put it out.

  “What’s her name?”

  “Her name’s Nancy.”

  “Nancy, huh? What does Nancy do for a living?”

  “She’s, uh, a social worker.” It wasn’t exactly a lie. I probably could of just gone ahead and told Amy the truth. She wouldn’t have believed it any way. Sometimes I didn’t believe it myself.

  “Hey, Kim?”

  I was hoping we were through with the Nancy line of questioning. “Yeah?” I said, with a bit of trepidation.

  “That sure was a really great summer.” She didn’t have to remind me just which summer she was referring to. I held out my hand to help her to her feet. Amy’s eyes were a dreamy, heated, green Olympic-size swimming pool and I had just taken a swan dive with no degree of difficulty into the deep end.

  “Yeah, it sure was.”

  Hell, on most nights this would be plenty for a girl to go on. But that night I was wearing my better judgment hat, so I just held her for a moment. It kind of surprised me that I still had a hat to put on.

  Chapter 13

  At the top of the creek trail Amy and I paused to catch our breath. Amy shined the flashlight up the road. It cut a beam about three miles wide. I’d have to put one of those babies on next year’s Christmas list.

  “The farmhouse is just around the corner,” she said.

  I’d remembered. “Any current residents?”

  “Just the rats.”

  “Well, then, shall we?”

  Amy wrinkled up her cute, altered nose and stared off in the direction of the old Delozier place. “Why not?” I could think of a whole bunch of reasons why not, starting with the rats, but I wasn’t going to be a big weenie and bring them up. Neither was Amy.

  We left the car parked where it was. Amy led with way with her monster flashlight and, like real Girl Scouts minus our sit-upons and knapsacks, a-wanderin’ we went.

  The house was a creaky, collapsing wreck. It looked like the Psycho house, only worse. The front porch was busy with the process of caving in, so we went around back. Amy had a key, but there was no need for it. The back door was swinging on one weathered hinge.

  The Delozier place had never been much to look at, but things had fallen into a sad state. There’s something seriously unattractive about rampant decay. Amy hadn’t been kidding about the rodents. I could hear them romping through what was left of the walls. It sounded like there was a rat soccer match going on.

  “I hope Larry White was planning on doing a little remodeling,” I said.

  Cautiously, we made our way through the old house, batting away cobwebs, sidestepping the gaping holes in the floorboard and piles of shattered glass. There were beer cans and fast-food trash strewn in the corners, probably left by kids screwing around, but even the garbage looked old.

  “God, this is depressing,” Amy said.

  She had that right.

  “Should we check out the barn?” she said.

  “Absolutely.” I pushed open the squeaky back door. The Delozier barn had shifted dramatically to the left, not unlike my better judgment hat, but somehow it looked more intact than the house. Maybe there was just less of it to fall apart.

  We shoved one of the heavy sliding doors open, and Amy let her big beam wander around the dark interior of the barn. More rodent scrambling. Some unidentifiable farm equipment rusted away in the back corner of the barn.

  The place still held the smell of hay and dust and animals and curing tobacco. Quite an aphrodisiac.

  Amy’s beam lit up the hayloft ladder.

  “Dare ya,” she said.

  “I double-dare you.”

  “Oh, brother.” She turned and started for the ladder.

  When she was half way up the ladder, she turned and peered down at me.

  “Hey, who’s the big weenie now?” she taunted.

  Not that I needed much of a nudge, but that really did it. In a flash, I was right behind her.

  We sat down together, high above the barn floor, and dangled our feet over the edge of the loft, just like old times. It was unbelievable, really.

  “I don’t think I ever did master the art of the French kiss,” Amy said, looking at her shoes.

  “That’s a shame.”

  “I take it that means you did?” she said with a sly grin.

  Would somebody please just come along and knock the fucking hat off my head? “Something like that.”

  Amy elbowed me playfully. “You’re funny. You know that?”

  I was feeling a lot of things, but funny wasn’t one of them.

  “I’ll bet we’re sitting in the middle of some damn rat’s nest,” Amy said, reluctantly shining the light around the hayloft.

  Something skittered for the far corner. For a moment I thought I felt something squirm under my butt.

  “Well, what do you wanna do now?” Amy said.

  I refrained from truthfully answering the question, something I should learn to do more of. Amy studied me like I was a mildly amusing riddle.

  “You know,” I said, definitely having just felt something wriggle underneath me, “you might be right about the rat’s nest.” Then something most certainly rodent-like shot through the hay, not two inches from our behinds.

  “Holy crap!” Amy screeched and scrambled for the ladder.

  Once again, I was right behind her.
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  Chapter 14

  After we’d caught our breath, Amy noted the hour and said she thought she ought to be getting back to the Tudor.

  We hiked it back to her Lexus and she dropped me at Sparkie’s Lounge for a rendezvous with my Toyota.

  “Guess we didn’t find out much,” I said, climbing out of her car.

  “Yeah,” she smiled, “but it was fun.”

  I had to agree.

  It seemed like a two-Hobart night so I pulled another Nat Sherman out of the glove box and thought how silly it was to still be calling the thing a glove box. I lit up and rolled out of Sparkie’s lot.

  Lately, I’d been going through cigars like potato chips. It worried me a little because, if I ran out while I was in Fogerty, I’d be stuck smoking Swisher Sweets, not that they aren’t the perfect smoke for a high school freshman. As I recalled, they were especially nice with a tall glass of lukewarm cherry vodka from someone’s parents’ liquor cabinet. Probably mine. It made me more than a bit nauseated to remember. You’d think even a fifteen-year-old would have better taste.

  I popped Percy Faith’s Greatest Hits into the cassette player. The tape was a gift from Ted. He’d intended it as a joke, but I was actually starting to like it. Maybe it was the cigar.

  Percy Faith was dead, long gone, but his lush, neon-lit, string-flecked orchestration filled the inner chamber of my car with, appropriately enough, A Summer Place, as I attempted to bring myself up to date.

  What I knew so far was that someone calling himself Larry White wanted WFOG and the Delozier farm, and he wanted them badly. It made me wonder what else he wanted. And while I was in the mood to wonder, I wondered why I was spending all of my free time with married women.

  I pulled in the drive and saw that Tara was lit up like a Christmas tree. Maybe Evelyn was throwing a Gone with the Wind Party and hadn’t invited me. Or maybe she was doing her spring cleaning a little late in the year. Or maybe she’d had too many Manhattans and lost her needle in the haystack.

  I found my mother in her bedroom feverishly throwing clothes into a suitcase.

  “What do you think you’re doing, Evelyn?”

  “Don’t try to talk me out of this, Kimberly.” She tossed another suitcase onto the bed and began to stuff it with shoes. Bunky slinked back under the bed. “I’ve just got to get away for a while. This WFOG thing has me so churned up I can’t see straight.”

  “Think the Manhattans might have anything to do with that?” It wasn’t hard to tell that she’d gone well over her quota for the evening.

  “Very damn funny.” She slammed down the suitcase lid. “Now please, Kimberly, you handle things. I’m terrible with money business, you know that.”

  I had to ask. “And you’ll be where in the meantime?”

  “The South Pacific.” She was on her way to the closet for a third suitcase.

  “Who’s paying?”

  “MasterCard.”

  It was hard to believe she still had a credit card in her possession, but that’s America.

  This had always been my mother’s M.O. Duck and run when things got complex, but I was going to make damn sure that she didn’t get away with it this time.

  “Oh no, Evelyn.” I snatched the empty bag from her. “No way.”

  “Give that back.”

  “No.”

  “You will give me that bag back right now.”

  “No, I won’t.”

  “You will.”

  “I won’t.”

  “How dare you try to play hardball with me?” Her lip started to quiver. “Now give me that damn suitcase.”

  Evelyn was doing her best to scramble, but I managed to grab the rest of the suitcases from the bed before she could get to them. Then, while she squealed like the Three Little Pigs, I tossed the bags, one by one, back into her Scarlett O’Hara walk-in closet. Mission accomplished, I banged the closet door shut.

  “Forget it, Evelyn. No Bali Hai, no Disneyworld, nowhere but right here. This time you will ride the pony. We’re gonna spend the next however long it takes until we get things straightened out.”

  Her bloodshot eyes practically bugged out of her head. I thought she might jump on my back and ride me like a pony around the bedroom. At that point I didn’t care. In fact, I was kind of hoping she’d try it.

  But instead, my mother let out a wail of Vivien Leigh proportions and flung herself across her king-sized Clark Gable bed. She pounded the pillows, cried, then pounded some more.

  This was an overly familiar ploy. It had generally worked on my father throughout their marriage. With A.C., all she’d needed to do was threaten to fling herself and he’d capitulate, but capitulate wasn’t even in my vocabulary anymore where Evelyn was concerned.

  “Give it up, Evelyn.”

  “This is the way you treat your own mother?” she sobbed.

  “You’re lucky. I should hog-tie you and hang your butt from a ballroom chandelier.”

  This brought on one last round of pounding and wails. Then, after some highly dramatic coughing and sniffling, Evelyn passed out cold.

  It was extremely doubtful that my mother would come to anytime soon, but I wanted to make sure she didn’t skip out. With the half-ounce of energy I had left, I shoved a heavy bookcase in front of her bedroom door and hid her car keys. Then I collapsed like the Delozier porch into bed. As Robert Goulet sang in Brigadoon, “What a day this has been, what a rare mood I’m in.”

  I didn’t know which part of it had gotten the best of me. Before breakfast even crossed the fifty-yard line, Bud Upton had thrown a forward pass with a monkey wrench into the WFOG deal. Then there was the failed fact-finding stomp around the Delozier farm and a trip down the twisting waters of steamy youth with Amy, all of this, topped off with a bout of mud wrestling with Evelyn’s inner child, who was probably much more like a prehistoric raptorial bird than an inner child should be. Nancy Merit hadn’t called and a killer was still on the loose.

  Just when I was about a step this side of dreamland, the phone rang.

  Chapter 15

  “Guess what?” It was Ted.

  Dreamland slipped over the horizon and dropped out of sight.

  “Whattaya mean, guess what?” I said.

  “Aren’t we cranky.”

  “Cranky doesn’t get close.”

  “Well, this ought to cheer you up.”

  I looked over at the clock radio. Almost one a.m. “It’d better.”

  “So, you haven’t heard?”

  “Heard what?”

  “Oh, goody. I wanted to be the first.”

  “Ted, please.”

  “Guess who got arrested?”

  “You?”

  “Better than that.”

  “Ted, you’re killing me.”

  “Dickhead.”

  “Dickhead?”

  “Dickhead. It was on the evening news. Guess somewhere after the blackberry cake Dickhead tried to choke Dan Dandrich.”

  “What about, Nancy?”

  “Hopefully, she choked both of them.”

  I let Nancy’s phone ring. If Dickhead answered, I wasn’t going to hang up this time. With any luck, they’d already locked him up with Shelley Winters in the brig of the U.S.S. Poseidon Adventure.

  After about fifty rings, Nancy picked it up.

  “You all right?”

  “My, news travel fast.” She let out a sigh. “Yeah, I’m okay.”

  “Where’s Dickhead?”

  “In a motel.”

  “I was hoping you’d say a cage.”

  “This is possibly the most humiliating experience of my life.” Nancy sounded pissed off with a capital P. “My ever-so-charming husband tries to strangle the man who may very well be the next president of the United States. If my ratings go down over this, I’ll kill that sonofabitch.”

  “I’ll help. What the hell got into Dickhead, anyway?”

  “He’d had a little too much scotch and Dandrich insinuated that Dickhead had been cheap with his cam
paign contribution.”

  “So Dickhead choked him?”

  “Not before Dickhead accused Dandrich of trying to come on to me all night long, in front of Patsy, no less.”

  “Did he?”

  “Did he what?”

  “Did Dandrich try to come on to you?”

  “Well, of course he did, but that’s hardly the point. Dickhead’s lucky that Dan isn’t pressing charges. It probably helped matters when he had a change of heart about the size of his campaign contribution.”

  “Ah, so we’re almost back to being one happy family again.”

  She sighed again, then she laughed a tired laugh. “Come home, I miss you.”

  I liked the way she said home. I liked the rest of it, too.

  “Soon.” The tone of my voice was not particularly encouraging. I gave her the rough outline of recent events. She agreed that the picture in Fogerty did look a little fuzzy. And, after some prodding on my part, to which one hates to resort, Nancy did admit that she felt a little jealous where Amy Delozier was concerned. But it seemed to blow over in about six seconds.

  I tried to count sheep, but sleep wouldn’t come. After a quick check to be sure that Evelyn was still Prisoner of Zenda, I headed downstairs to the kitchen and rustled up a fried egg sandwich. A fried egg sandwich is the ideal late-night snack. It also goes well with a hangover, which obviously gives it honorary status. Ted liked Dim Sum with his hangovers, but I’d take a fried egg sandwich and a stiff Bloody Mary any day.

  I sat down at Evelyn’s kitchen table with my egg sandwich and a Diet Coke and watched the moon duck in and out from behind some Bunky-shaped clouds. I really hated Diet Coke. How could Evelyn drink the stuff? Make mine a Classic Coke.

  I decided that, fuzzy picture or not, first thing in the morning I’d get on the phone to Bud Upton. I’d stop screwing around playing Nancy Drew and her sidekick George with Amy Delozier. If some guy wanted to call himself Larry White and waste a bunch of money buying up Fogerty, what did I care? Tomorrow I’d tell Bud that we’d take the check and say thank you. All I wanted was to put Evelyn back on the right track and go home to Gatlinburg and get on with my own mess.