Painted Dresses

by Patricia Hickman

  Delia was not lying. A brown spider trolled softly down from the ceiling to land on Mr. Grady Elvis Shirt’s head. It seemed he did not like bugs. He slapped at the brown recluse but only got spider silk.

  “Careful, they’re poisonous,” I said. I had heard that a person could die or lose a limb from a brown recluse bite. Or maybe it was black widows.

  He swayed back and forth, but the silk was anchored well. The spider trounced a bit but, undeterred, stayed the course, drawing closer to him when he yanked further. He yelled like a little girl. The gun spun on one finger.

  I laughed.

  Delia said, “Let’s go!”

  I couldn’t think as fast as Delia. She was out the door. Grady Elvis Shirt grabbed at me. But it was not a productive move. The gun fell onto the carpet. I swung like I knew what to do, even though that was far from the truth. The gun spun away. He had to let go of me to go for the gun. Then I ran out the door and finally caught up to Delia. She had my car keys and my purse. We climbed into the Neon and drove out of the parking lot before Mr. Grady Elvis Shirt could get his bearings and make it out the door.

  “I’ll bet you’re hungry. That Grady ate every bit of your lunch. He’s a pig,” she said. “Hah!”

  12

  WE STILL HAD NOT looked up Truman Savage Senior’s murder on the Internet. Since Freeman’s hit man was intent on finishing Delia and, through association, me, he would be right on us. He would follow us straight out onto the interstate. I invented the beginning of a strategic escape. “Grady Elvis Shirt would not think to look for us in a library,” I said to Delia.

  “Let’s get out of town.” Delia moaned; her cheek had swelled up like the tip of an egg.

  “If we keep driving this car, remember what Dill said. Only a hundred miles or so, and then trade her in. We break down, we’re out of options.”

  “I need an ice pack. That Grady will burn for this,” she said.

  Delia’s sense of justice weighed on me. “What about Sophie?”

  She was mad at me again. “What do you mean?”

  “Mother of four, marriage falling into ruin,” I said. “Shot by her husband’s girlfriend. Could you burn for that?”

  She buried her head under her arms. She was all arms and legs as she tried to find a comfortable position to settle into. “Find a country music station, will you?” She wanted to sleep.

  I turned on the radio. Delia pulled the blanket over her. She yawned and told me to wake her up for supper.

  “Where is it you think we’re going?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.” She fell asleep.

  The only library outside of Wilmington and out of searching vicinity was in Southport, right outside of Boiling Waters. There was no car on my tail, no reason to believe Grady Elvis Shirt had caught up to us. I pulled onto Highway 17.

  Southport was one of the last towns before driving straight into the Atlantic Ocean. Movies were made in Southport; artists sold paintings down on the oceanfront. Large container ships, so big they looked like little cities floating past, ferried through the inlet.

  I woke Delia. She lay in the car a few minutes staring through the windshield at the sky over the ocean.

  The town’s librarian led me to the public computer station. A homeschool mother was trying to help her daughter with an assignment. But the girl’s little brothers were climbing onto the chair next to them, right where I was supposed to sit. The librarian led me to another station.

  Delia walked up, raking the hair out of her eyes, and said, “I’m going to the CD aisle.” She left me.

  I key-worded the name Truman Savage. Up came an obituary. I expected it to be the death notice of Truman’s daddy. But instead it was his father’s wife who had died. His father was listed in the next-of-kin record. Next to his name was his son’s name, Parson. Truman Senior, it said, was from Pasadena, Texas.

  I printed off Mr. Savage’s address and phone number. I called the number and was answered by a machine. Mr. Savage had a friendly voice. “Thank you for calling Truman Savage. Please leave a callback number.”

  Delia skipped up carrying a stack of CDs. “They got the Grateful Dead,” she said. “I’m getting them.”

  “What if we leave the state and don’t come back for a while? You’ll owe fines.”

  She turned to take the CDs back to the music aisle. Then swiveling on one heel, she said, “Did you find Truman Savages murder?”

  “He’s answering his own phone. That doesn’t sound too murdered,” I said.

  “Where, here?”

  “Pasadena, Texas. You got your driver’s license, don’t you?” I asked.

  She dug through her purse. “I left it out at Daddy’s place. I forgot.”

  “You have to have identification for a plane ticket. We’ll have to go home.”

  “Not home,” said Delia.

  “We’ll hurry.” She kept digging through her purse, but she had definitely left it back at Daddy’s house.

  “If Grady finds us, he’ll not let us get a-loose a second time,” said Delia.

  I returned to the computer and checked flights. Delia joined me, whining about her hunger.

  “How does Texas sound?” I asked.

  I drove into Boiling Waters, expecting the fifty-year-old tinsel Christmas bells to be hung along the streetlights. But the bells, all replaced with green Christmas banners welcoming the yuletide festivals, were in no way, form, or fashion displayed. Sadie Farnsworthy’s clothing boutique and bait shop was gone, a convenience store in its place. But the starkest change came slowly to me. I reduced speed, staring at the once-wooded acreage down Fifty Lakes Drive. Boiling Waters was home to the centuries-old longleaf pines. According to my father, the town once smelled of the turpentine and tar extracted from the trees’ natural resin, a white tar. I had seen the sap flowing down a tree trunk like mother’s milk. The longleaf-pine resin was the essence of the state’s Tar Heel name, rising up from local history’s primal puddle.

  But the trees, so old they had gone to crown, were wiped from the land as if translated into some Christmas heaven; in their place, stark lots ready for subdivision development.

  “Delia, wake up,” I said.

  She came up out of the seat. “What are you staring at?”

  “The trees are gone.”

  “Oh that,” she yawned. “Say, I’m up for coffee. You?”

  We drove into the gas station for the only coffee bar in town. Forty-something couples stood around in Nikes and Lands’ End hoodies. At the front of the convenience station, flipping through a boating magazine, was Laudus, Daddy’s cousin. He lit up when he saw us. “Come see, come see!” he said, laughing and holding out his arms.

  I handed Delia a ten spot, and she went for the coffee line.

  “I was hoping you hadn’t left town for good,” he said.

  I stuck out my hand. He drew me close and kissed my cheek. His hair had turned white. It was as if I had sleepwalked through the days surrounding my father’s burial. Suddenly nothing looked the same, not even Laudus. “Town’s changed,” I said. “I must have been in a daze the week of Daddy’s funeral.”

  “It’s seeping in with the money. Any place on the water draws those Birkenstocks and their Beamers,” he said.

  “Fifty Lakes Drive looks like a desert,” I said.

  “It happened almost overnight. Started by a woodpecker.”

  I knew about the woodpeckers. As a girl, I woke up to their ritual hammering most mornings.

  “Appears we were the sanctuary for a rare bird,” he said, nearly in a whisper.

  “Woodpeckers aren’t rare.”

  “This one was. They took a liking to our longleaf pines. The birds took so long to make their holes down in the tar bellies of the trees, they passed them on to their offspring.” He waved at Delia who was still in the checkout line. “D
on’t know why the birds won’t nest anywhere else, but they won’t. They’re disappearing with the tar trees.”

  “So we’re a bird sanctuary.”

  “Town got wind of it, that a moratorium was coming down to keep the trees from being cut. People had bought up extra lots to sell, send their kids off to college. Next thing you know, the whole towns gone nuts. Trees older than the country’s flag were being felled. It was sad to watch. Everyone walking around mad, neighbors mad at neighbors.”

  “The town looks naked,” I said.

  “Took the character right out of the place,” said Laudus, a sad melancholy in his small, delicate eyes.

  “I got me a mocha,” said Delia. She greeted Laudus. “You ever had one, Gaylen? Like, chocolate and coffee mixed?” She handed me a foam cup.

  I looked around the convenience store. I did not know a single person. It was like the old Boiling Waters had drifted away. A substitute town had taken its place, bringing in a hunger for things I had taken for granted.

  “Towns lost her soul,” he said.

  I had never seen a whole town raped like that.

  I drove up Daddy’s driveway half-expecting to find Aunt Renni with her hand shoved into the mailbox. But the place was as dark as the day we left. Delia ran up the steps to the porch, digging frantically for her keys. She threw open the door. “Hey, we’ve got a gun!” she yelled, as if scaring off ghosts.

  I went into the kitchen to wash my hands. Then I ran to my mother’s bedroom and took three photographs from her bureau drawer. I tucked them into my purse. Delia wouldn’t care about them anyway. When I ran back to the kitchen, I saw that the phone was yanked out of the wall. The back door was ajar, the lock bolt standing out from the door, wooden splinters on the floor. Mr. Grady Elvis Shirt had come calling.

  “Someone’s been in the house, Gaylen! Run!” Delia ran out of the house. I went to the door and worked the lock until I could get the door to close. I fastened the phone back into place. He had come and gone, I was sure. But the thought of it caused my neck hairs to stand up.

  I ran out of the house as quickly as my sister.

  Since I bought the plane tickets online while at the library, we made it to the airport and found a place to hide the car in the remote parking lot. Delia was giddy hopping onto the shuttle, it being her first trip by air.

  She wheeled her little red suitcase up to the curbside check-in. We had one hour to spare before the flight from Wilmington to Houston. I led her to a travel shop, the kind that sold T-shirts and refrigerator magnets. She bought a celebrity rag and a bag of seashells she justified by saying, “For my turtle I’m going to buy.” Then she reminisced, lamenting her trailer pets. “I’ll bet Porters forgot all about me by now.”

  I bought two cold drinks and a bag of sugared pecans. Then I checked my phone. It had been off since I had gone into the library. I turned it on and a message was waiting. I hit the redial button and got Kimberly.

  “Mrs. Weymouth dropped in,” she told me. “She’s tried to call you all morning. You’d best call her.” Kimberly sounded cool, as if she had reached the end of trying to explain me to the tenants and to my boss.

  Weymouth was a nervous woman who wanted me to carry a pager, even into church, she said, although I had not gone in years. I sighed.

  “My family is in a crisis,” I said, not knowing what to do about the lump in my throat. I could hear my father berating me from the grave for not being responsible. Then Braden jumped into my head and nagged alongside Daddy. I had been letting go of that place since Braden had been letting go of me, yet the dogged Syler nature had me clinging to a shipwreck of a job. Finally I said, “Kimberly, I think that it’s only fair to tender my resignation.”

  She was quiet except for her sighing. “Mrs. Weymouth asked if I’d like your job,” she finally told me. “I felt awful.”

  “So you told her no, right?”

  Delia held up a T-shirt. The artwork was of a lusty sailor holding a nearly naked woman. “Lets get matching shirts,” she said, gushing.

  I shushed her, trying to shoo her back to the souvenirs.

  “You just said you wanted to resign.” Kimberly was defensive, her tinny voice so loud I could hold out the phone and still hear her.

  “But you didn’t know that I was going to resign,” I said, grasping. “Are you telling me you took my job?”

  “If you had not taken off without so much as a good-bye, I’d not have been so mad at you,” she said. “You’re not yourself, Gaylen. There’s something wrong, I just know it.”

  “It’s Delia,” I said, the words not coming out as I had planned. “She’s got her usual problems.”

  Delia looked up from the T-shirt rack. She turned and stormed out of the airport shop.

  “I have to go,” I said.

  Delia was running through the Wilmington airport, dragging the red suitcase sideways off its coasters.

  “Stop and listen to me!” I yelled.

  She kept running, the shop bags flapping at her side. I could see her running alongside Sharon Creek, her bare feet brown from the bank mud, splitting the grasses open, with me running behind her yelling oaths and apologies. But she could never run as fast as me.

  I caught up to her in front of a bookseller. “I didn’t mean it like that,” I said.

  “You never paint me good to any person. Like I’m the retarded sister you got to look after.” She dropped her things beside a bench and then planted herself on the seat.

  I was winded. A security guard was running toward us. I looked down. “I’ve just stolen two soft drinks.” I held up the bottles to the officer. “I’m sorry, sir! I ran out to find my sister.” I pulled out some bills and handed them to him, one, two, three, four, “And keep the change,” I said.

  He hesitated but then took the money and returned to the souvenir shop.

  “There you go again,” she said. “You take off with store merchandise and blame me for it.”

  I sat beside her and handed her a cold drink. She was an easy mark for blame, I had to admit. “You’re not the only one with resentment. I resent the fact I got to spend my life chasing after you,” I said.

  She opened the bottle and swigged it.

  “Delia, I don’t want to tell people anything about you at all. I’d rather tell them you’re off in Zimbabwe or some such, saving orphans.”

  “Hah!”

  “You act like I want to tell people that you’re always in trouble. I don’t.”

  “You’re ashamed. Say it,” she said.

  “Make me proud then!”

  “What for?”

  I was finally catching my breath. I thought about her question and decided right then and there that I was going to stop blurting out easy fixes for Delia. They had not helped before and would not help now. “That’s what families use for bragging rights. It’s a code or something,” I said. I had spent my life trying to make the Sylers proud, so what made her so special that she could just lie down and let life wash over her effortlessly? I had been hanging on to a job I hated, evicting single moms and poor students. I had gone back to school just so my father could tell his buddies at the Masonic Lodge his daughter had a university degree. But for what, I did not know. I was a wife without a husband. A student without a degree. I was a pilot who forgot how to fly. I laughed. “Honest to Pete, Delia, I don’t know.”

  We had thirty minutes left to get to our flight terminal.

  The stopover in Atlanta gave Delia time to calm herself. I took her into a jewelry shop. She tried on a pair of sterling silver earrings. You would have thought she was wearing the crown jewels.

  “Nobody ever bought me such a thing,” she said.

  A sad melancholy settled between us. I tried to picture my father standing over a jewelry counter purchasing a gift of jewelry for Delia or my mother. It was time he did. “Let’s sa
y this is from Daddy,” I said.

  She hesitated.

  “No lectures,” I promised.

  I paid the clerk and walked out onto the concourse between airport shops. The air was full of the smell of hot pretzels and the tire rubber from the carts used to wheel disabled people between terminals.

  “Do you ever buy yourself anything?” Delia asked, snapping the earrings into place.

  I looked at her, surprised.

  “Daddy’s not breathing down your neck,” she said. “Indulge.”

  “I can if I want,” I said. “It won’t kill me to buy something, if that’s what you mean.” I went into a bookstore. I thumbed through several books, selected a novel and then a bookmark. I went next door to a sportswear store and tried on a pair of running shoes but said, “They’re cheaper at the mall.” The leather was soft, cradling my feet. “I’ll take them,” I finally said to the clerk without much more thought.

  Delia dragged me to a Burberry clothing boutique. The models in the window posters flaunted pricey knits and pants. We went inside. I coaxed her into trying on a black blouse with black and white pants. She had never seen herself in that degree of style. She pulled out the shirt tag and gasped. “Four hundred dollars, oh my gosh, Gaylen!”

  I checked my watch. “We’ve got to run and catch our flight,” I said.

  She dressed back in her own things.

  The clerk was hanging up the pieces for Delia when I walked up to her and asked, “Can you bag those up pretty quickly?”

  Delia ran out of the store, holding the designer outfit in a hanger bag and nearly hyperventilating. She followed me onto the plane snorting and laughing.

  We accepted the late afternoon snack from the flight attendant. Delia was disappointed the drop-down monitors did not offer a movie.

  “That’s only on long flights,” I told her.

  She disappeared into the bathroom. She emerged wearing the Burberry outfit. “I got to get some boots to go with this now,” she said.

  “That’s the way it starts,” I said. “You buy one thing, then you have to buy another.”