The Southern Cross

by Skip Horack

  Of course he wouldn’t. Not one bit.

  They hit the interstate just after dark. Cassie perched her brown legs on the dusty dashboard of his old Bronco and leaned close to spin the radio dial. For laughs, she settled on the local AM broadcast of a high-school football game, then, fifty miles down I-10, Landon broke for gas next to an outlet mall that sold nurse uniforms and towels by the pound. He was filling the tank when she walked out of the station with a six-pack of Budweiser tall boys. Back on the road, the football game tied, Cassie offered him a beer and bet him twenty bucks that Port St. Joe would beat Carrabelle in the second half.

  They were just outside of Panama City when Port St. Joe sealed the win with a two-point conversion. Landon dug two tens from his pocket but Cassie pushed the money away, would only accept the cash if he agreed to let her buy him a drink. Landon nodded and Cassie smiled as she slid her cigarette through a crack in the window. In his rearview mirror, he saw the Marlboro hit the asphalt and explode, bounce, and explode again before disappearing altogether.

  He pulled off at a locals’ bar on the north side, the pine-tree-and-boiled-peanuts side, of 98. The place was crowded with miniature-golf pros and charter-boat captains, airbrush artists and lifeguards. Cassie brought the house down singing karaoke “Bobby McGee,” and the bouncer gave her a plastic orchid so that later—after she had talked Landon out of fishing and they’d crossed the highway to walk the beach—she was wearing that fake flower in her chocolate hair when they made love in the dunes on a blanket of broken sea oats.

  They finished up and lay there together in the sand for a long while. Cassie whispered stories in his ear while he smoked her cigarettes and watched ghost crabs wage their moonlight campaigns. “Have you ever come close to drowning?” she asked him.

  Landon thought on it. “Not really,” he said. “I was caught in a rip tide once but I got out okay.”

  “Everybody has rip-tide stories.”

  “I guess.”

  “When I was little, one pulled me from the shallow water right off Miami Beach”

  “Yeah? How old were you?”

  “Seven, I think”

  “Jesus. What happened?”

  “That’s the funny thing,” said Cassie. “Even as I was watching everyone on the beach panic and fade away I knew to just relax and ride the current”

  Landon leaned over and kissed her forehead. “Smart girl,” he said.

  “But my father almost died swimming after me.”

  “I bet.”

  “We met up on the beach after it finally spit us both out” Cassie sat up in the sand. “Want to know what I asked him?”

  “Tell me.”

  Cassie let her voice rise into that of a little girl. “Daddy, can I do it again?” She laughed and the woman was back. “Can you imagine?”

  Later, Landon would remember that story and realize that she had been breaking up with him from the beginning.

  A waitress was wiping down tables when Landon shuffled into the restaurant and apologized for being the late customer on a slow night. He offered to leave but the pretty girl just slapped him sweetly with her towel, then flipped the sign on the door. “Nice shirt,” she said.

  He was wearing the red Hawaiian that Cassie had bought for him. “Thanks,” he said.

  “Makes you look like Jimmy Buffett.”

  “All right.”

  She laughed. “Have a seat wherever. My name’s Sunny.”

  Landon settled onto a stool at the empty bar and hoped that might make things easier on her. He asked for a beer and she poured him a draft with a grace that he recognized along with her cutoff khakis and T-shirt. She had dark eyes and dark skin and dark hair. “I think I saw you earlier,” he said, “with a cast net on the dock.”

  “You staying next door?”

  “Yeah”

  Sunny handed him a plastic menu with sharp edges. “Then I think I saw you watching me from your window.”

  “Not just you.”

  “Fine. Not just me.”

  “You’re good with a cast net. I can appreciate that.”

  “Oh yeah? Where you from?”

  “Alabama. Fairhope.”

  “Roll Tide”

  “You’re from ‘Bama?”

  “You know Atmore?”

  “Yeah, I know Atmore.”

  “I grew up on the Poarch Creek Indian Reservation. Daughter of the chief himself.”

  “No kidding?”

  “I wouldn’t lie.”

  Landon watched her head off and was glad she was working because she was young and pretty and cheerful, and that helped take the edge off being semi-drunk and alone in a quiet restaurant. When she returned he ordered the special and after a short while she brought him a plate loaded with fried mullet and coleslaw and cheese grits. She placed his dinner on the bar, and he stopped her as she turned to leave again. He was eager to talk all of a sudden. “How’d you wind up here?” he asked.

  “I got married to a Marine.” Sunny refilled Landon’s beer from the line of taps behind the bar. “I’m living with his parents until he comes back from Afghanistan.”

  Sunny rapped at the bar with her knuckles, and Landon glanced at the thin gold band on her hand. He wasn’t a kid anymore. At this point in his life he should be noticing these things. “How long’s he been over there?” he asked.

  “Close to a year now.”

  “That’s gotta be tough.” What a perfect thing to say. Landon shut up and finished his meal while she washed glasses at the sink behind the bar. On the television in the corner, the Braves were playing the Padres out on the West Coast and putting it to them. He sipped on his beer and watched the ballpark crowd dwindle.

  Sunny finished with the glasses and fixed herself a vodka rocks. She sat down across from him at the bar and rubbed her neck with her left hand as she drank with her right. “So how about you?” she asked. “What brings you to Apalach?”

  “Gulf sturgeon”

  “Fish?”

  He nodded and told her all about the Gulf sturgeon project, how at midnight the coordinates of the released tags would be forwarded to his cell phone. For the first time in a year, he would know whether his sturgeon had returned to the Apalachicola to spawn. Whether his fish were even still alive. Whether the project had been worth all the trouble.

  Sunny frowned at him. “So for the past year you’ve been waiting around for this day?”

  “Pretty much. The satellite can’t locate or read the tags while they are underwater.” Landon shrugged. “I’m here on faith.”

  “In what? Technology or sturgeon?”

  “Both, I guess.”

  “Tell me something.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Couldn’t you have just stayed in Tallahassee?”

  Landon tore a wet corner off the napkin pinned beneath his sweating glass. “I had sort of planned to meet someone here,” he said. “We were supposed to celebrate the end of the project—or at least this part of it”

  “A girl?”

  Landon allowed a thin smile.

  “I take it she’s not in the Marines.”

  “Not quite. But you never know with her.”

  “She coming?”

  “No.”

  Sunny raised her drink and their glasses clicked together.

  The Braves did win. They won big, in fact, and after the game, a white-toothed man opened the late news with a story from Iraq. The talking head went heart-attack serious as the camera cut to a grainy video of a reporter begging for his life. Landon saw Sunny look away and so he grabbed for the remote control resting on the bar.

  He killed the television, and Sunny thanked him softly. She trembled as she poured herself another vodka, then caught him watching her for the second time that day. She walked out from behind the bar. “Come on,” she said. “There’s something I want to show you.”

  “What?”

  “A surprise.” She took his hand and pulled him toward the door.

  The re
staurant opened out onto the water. Landon followed her to the edge of the fuel dock, and they watched in silence as the moon rose clean and bright over the Apalachicola. After the moonrise Sunny retrieved a cardboard flat of crab bait from the dock cooler, then began tossing frozen scraps of menhaden into the river. Landon was confused until he saw a collection of tarpon appear in the marina, rising and falling as they sucked down the oily fish in great gasps. Sunny worked the tarpon closer, and the largest of them surfaced alongside the dock to take a frozen pogy directly from her hand. Sunny laughed like a child, and for a moment—looking at her backlit by the full moon, reflected by the silver flash of a rolling tarpon—Landon could not imagine her as anything but the Poarch Creek princess she had claimed to be.

  The marina’s tarpon fed, Landon walked Sunny across the clamshell parking lot to her truck. She leaned against the side of an old blue Dodge and glanced at her watch. “Less than two hours until midnight, you know.”

  Landon nodded.

  “Stop by the next time you pass through Apalach,” she said. “Let me know how your project turned out.”

  “I will. I promise.” Landon opened the door of the pickup for her, but she just smiled and watched him for a moment. Long enough that he could no longer meet her gaze, and so he stared instead at his flip-flop, drawing chalk circles in the shell dust.

  “You’re going to be okay,” she said. “Both of us are.”

  “Yeah, I know.” He looked up at her. “We’ve still got our fish, right?”

  Sunny laughed and leaned in close to him until her hands were flat against his chest. She kissed him on the cheek before sliding into the cab of her truck. The door closed shut behind her, and Landon backed away as the diesel shuddered and then started. The pickup was pulling off when Sunny stopped and rolled down her window. “In another lifetime?”

  Landon smiled. It was something Lauren Bacall would say, something Cassie would say in her own husky rhythms. He called back to Sunny. “Yeah,” he said. “In another lifetime.” But he didn’t say it in any bitter sort of way. Watching her drive off, he knew that she was exactly what he’d needed on that night in that lifetime.

  A map of the Panhandle coastline was spread out across the table, and Landon confirmed that four of his tags had surfaced in the Apalachicola—two just beneath the big dam near the Florida-Georgia line, another two within a few miles of where he was now sitting.

  But the fifth tag confounded him. That fifth tag contradicted everything he knew about predicting the tendencies of Gulf sturgeon. Those last coordinates fell far off the chart. Landon consulted another map and realized that Bertha had strayed three hundred miles west of her home stream. In fact, as of midnight, she was just north of New Orleans and traveling up the Mississippi River.

  A week later, on the last day of spring, Landon took his johndboat north of Tallahassee and fished a far, empty corner of Lake Jackson. Push-poling through the water hyacinth at dusk, he bumped a pair of wood ducks that flew off squealing to roost in a distant cypress swamp. They were local birds—ducks somehow born without the instinct to migrate north—but in a few months the teal would return to join them in the lake, and soon the widgeon and other big ducks would follow.

  A ridge of hardwoods ran along the north shore of the lake, solid save for a wide fairway of lawn that plunged like a scar from the foot of an eggshell mansion on the hilltop. Black men in white jackets floated through a linen crowd scattered across the great lawn. A slight shift in the evening breeze carried piano music across the water, and to Landon it sounded like glass breaking gently.

  He worked his boat closer to the party as he cast his spinner bait. Tucked among cypress knees was a boathouse where he and Cassie had once trespassed and made love. She was a fool for that kind of thing. He supposed they both were.

  Landon thought back to the late-night phone message Cassie had left while he slept in the Apalachicola motel. It had been a bar-parking-lot sort of call, and she sounded a little drunk as she asked how the project had turned out. There were a lot of things Landon wanted to tell her, entire conversations he had practiced after dissecting her message—but in the end he just left it alone, never returned the call.

  And so he never told her how the depth and temperature data showed that Bertha had left her home stream too soon. That she was forced into the deeper waters of the Gulf when Tropical Storm Bonnie blew across Apalachicola Bay in August. That at least one of the five journeys had been an anomaly, the wanderings of a lost and confused creature. No, he would never share this with Cassie. Landon kept all that to himself because finally he decided that the Gulf sturgeon project really didn’t have anything to do with her. It was, after all, his dissertation.

  Summer

  Junebelle

  I sit staring out the window, waiting for Patience. “We have a lake, ma’am,” she said on the first day we met. “Did you ever go fishing when you lived in New Orleans?” Now there was a king question. I most certainly did not. That’s exactly what I told the silly girl.

  I’ve been living in this so-called retirement community for a full week now, and I still can’t believe Patience ever asked me such a thing. It was almost worth the humiliation just to see Selby and Edward wince—although it’s something that they were probably laughing about as soon as they drove back out through the sliding electric gate that seals us in here at Witness Oaks. My daughter is a funny one. “Lord,” she would say, “can you imagine Mother sitting in this July sun with a cane pole?” And then the two of them would head over to Baton Rouge Country Club in that shiny black tank of theirs. Selby would read a paperback by the pool while Edward played golf. Golf. My Jack never played a day in his life. I didn’t know how good I had it.

  This lake they have here, by the way, is a pond. I can see it from the tiny sunroom of my apartment. It’s pretty enough—what with the lily pads and the cattails—but if it’s a lake, then I’m a Vanderbilt. Between meals I now spend my days gawking at that hot brown puddle from the armchair in my sunroom. The shallow-water edges get steady visits from herons and egrets, and the evening music of the frogs almost drowns out the cars passing along the other side of the red-brick fence that surrounds this place. So that’s nice. I’ll admit that—but the turtles seem to be at plague level, and just this morning I counted close to thirty of their little black heads. I mention this to young Patience when she finally comes to check my blood pressure. Her uniform is so white against her dark skin that it hurts my eyes.

  “That’s a lot of turtles, Miss June.”

  “Too many,” I say. “They’ll eat all your fish up.”

  Patience puts the cuff around my arm and smiles to herself when I say that. That makes me think that all the staff here have been talking, that there’s been some sort of memo passed around instructing them not to ask Miss June anything about fish or fishing. You can say whatever to the people working here and they’ll just grin back at you like children. As she’s a colored girl, Patience has never seen the inside of Baton Rouge Country Club, I’m sure—but it’s not really all that difficult for me to picture her there, sitting beside the pool with my pretty daughter and laughing, filling Selby in on everything that her pistol of a mother did that day. Spies, I see all of them as spies.

  “Turtles eat fish?” asks Patience.

  Her hair is shaved close to her head like a soldier’s, and I’m studying on the perfect smoothness of her skull. “Never mind,” I tell her.

  “You know they’re having a picnic tomorrow?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “So you going then?”

  “That’s what they tell me.”

  Patience nods and then pins the stethoscope in her ears. I close my eyes and wait for her to finish pumping on that blackbulb. The cuff tightens and that hurts a little. I guess Patience sees me flinching because she starts rubbing gently on my shoulder. ”We almost done,” she says. Finally I hear Velcro tearing and she rips the thing off. ”Wonderful,” says Patience. ”You doing real good
, Miss June. Real good”

  My apartment has two doors: one that leads outside to the fishing grounds and another that opens up into a wide and carpeted hallway. I didn’t realize how many of us were living here until I first walked down that hall. Door after door after door. And that’s just the South Commons. They’ve got three other big buildings, not to mention some standalone homes and townhouses sprinkled here and there through the live oaks and the magnolias and the pines. Then there’s the Health and Wellness Center. Most all of us will graduate to a bed there someday. I overheard my smart-aleck grandson calling it the Death Star. He thinks I can’t hear through all his teenage mumblings.

  At one thirty I start shuffling toward the dining room for my lunch. I go late by design; by now it should be mostly empty and they’ll be able to give me a table by myself. As I’m walking I pass other residents who are heading back to their apartments holding styrofoam clamshells of leftovers. They say hello to me and I say hello to them. A lot of them somehow know my name already, but I still don’t know but three or four of theirs.

  I’m turning the corner when I hear that loudmouth Professor Winston coming my way. I met him at lunch on my second day here. Right now he’s leading a pack of about ten biddies and I just catch the tail end of his story. He’s saying, “I called the boy into my office at LSU and told him he’d never make a lawyer—twenty-five years later his name’s on the ballot and I’m voting for him.” The ladies trailing after him cackle and laugh. “So that shows what I know!” he says.

  Here the hallway widens into a sitting room and so I step aside to let them all pass. The professor is wearing a cream linen suit and holding a straw boater. He lifts the hat to his ear when he sees me and gives it a wobble. “Good afternoon, June,” he says, and I hear two or three of the ladies give little clucks.

  “Good day to you all as well” I say. The you all catches in my throat and I almost say y’all. I’ve been living outside the piney woods of Mississippi for more than sixty years now, but that still trips me up on occasion. There’s the common words I think and the proper words I say. Sometimes they collide in my throat. It’s been that way ever since I left home.