The Merry Wives of Maggody

by Joan Hess

  Dahlia twisted back far enough to thump Kevvie Junior’s head, then turned to glower at Estelle. “ “Is this your private property? It’s a county road. I’ve got as much right to park here as you do.”

  “You may have the right, but you must have been in the basement when God was passing out brains,” Estelle countered. “You run along home and let me take care of this. What sort of detective has three kids in the backseat?”

  “I don’t know what you think you are, all gussied up like a striptease dancer, but you sure ain’t no detective. This is about my husband, not yours. Why don’t you run along home yourself and paint your toenails?”

  Estelle put her hands on her hips, but Dahlia ignored her. She tried another tactic. “How about you go on and I solemnly swear to tell you what I find out? This could be the day Kevin goes straight home. If you’re not there, he’ll be worried sick.”

  Dahlia realized there was something wrong with that, but she couldn’t quite figure out what. After sucking on her lower lip for a moment, she said, “Maybe we should join forces. You wanna use your car or mine?”

  Now Kevvie Junior was bawling because of the thump, and Daisy was wailing because she was being ignored. Rosemarie scowled as she applied peanut butter eye shadow. If they’d been adults, they would have been ankle deep in juice cartons, cookie wrappers, mutilated tabloids, bald Barbie dolls, and washrags that reeked of sour milk and other unpleasant things. Crumbs were sprinkled on the top of the dashboard like laundry powder.

  “I’ll get my purse,” Estelle said hastily.

  In his office inside the SuperSaver, Jim Bob erased all evidence of the porn site on his computer, then shut it down. It was tempting to page Kevin over the loudspeaker, but the last time he did, the idiot was spraying produce. Eula Lemoy had not appreciated a full-frontal dousing while she was sniffing melons. Not to say that she didn’t deserve it, since Jim Bob had seen her plenty of times eating grapes as she pushed around a shopping cart.

  He went out to the front, stared at the checkout girls just to make ’em twittery, then looked at the helluva fine boat and trailer chained to the pole out in the parking lot. His mouth watered. It was so damn sleek and sexy. It was aged whiskey on a summer night, a fine cigar, a voluptuous woman in a naughty black negligee. He felt his privates beginning to throb.

  “Hey, Jim Bob,” Kevin said as he shuffled up in a dingy apron, “you want I should stack the canned peaches? I’m beginnin’ to get the hang of it.”

  “Hell, no. The last time you tried, you nearly killed one of those Lambertino brats. The last thing I need is a goddamn lawsuit. Go put your apron in your locker. We got to get going in a minute.”

  If Kevin had possessed a forelock, he would have tugged it. “Golly, Jim Bob, I was thinking maybe I ain’t cut out for golf. No matter how hard I try, I cain’t even hit the ball half the time. You ought to get somebody else.”

  “Like who, you dumb shit? Toadsuck Buchanon, even though he’s blind on account of drinking a bad batch of ’shine? Diesel? He’d take it right kindly if I barged into his cave up on Cotter’s Ridge and asked him if he wanted to play golf, so kindly that he’d rip off my ears and toss ’em in his skillet. His brother Petrol, who’s shacked up with Dahlia’s granny? Just who’d you have in mind, boy?”

  Kevin’s mouth went slack, as it always did when he was confronted with a direct question. “I dunno, Jim Bob. What about those ol’ boys at the garage over in Hasty? Some of ’em are so gosh darn big they could whack a ball clean over the top of a mountain.”

  “The boat stays in Maggody,” Jim Bob said tightly. “That’s why I paid your damn registration fee out of your next month’s wages. Get your sorry ass out to the loading dock in five minutes.” He held up his hand, fingers splayed. “You can count, can’t you?”

  “Yeah—I mean, I guess so.” Kevin nearly ran into a rack of tabloids as he hurried toward the back of the store.

  “The boat stays in Maggody,” Jim Bob repeated under his breath. “Whatever it takes, the boat stays in Maggody.”

  Three

  Darla Jean McIlhaney sat on a concrete picnic table in front of the Dairee Dee-Lishus, batting at flies on a dried soda spill. Heather Riley and Billy Dick MacNamara, her two bestest friends, pulled up in Billy Dick’s ancient pickup. The surly Mexican fellow who owned the place glowered at them, then slammed the window and disappeared, but not before they heard him cussing.

  “Why’s he got a tamale up his ass?” asked Billy Dick.

  “My fault. I asked him if he’d tape up a flyer about the golf tournament. He wadded it up and threw it at me. I guess that meant no.”

  Heather giggled. “No way, José. Why do you care about this silly tournament, anyway? Bunch of grown men in really bad clothes, molesting innocent golf balls. Once they get it to fall in a cup, they pick it up and do the same thing all over again. Give me a break!”

  “Feel free to run over to Mrs. Jim Bob’s house and give her your opinion,” Darla Jean said. “She’ll most likely give you a pair of gloves and order you to pull up all the poison ivy in the pasture. You better wear jeans and boots. Copperheads are fierce this time of year.”

  “I’d sooner face a copperhead than Raz. Waylon and I was up by Robin Buchanon’s old shack a couple of days back. Raz came out of the bushes like a rabid coon and began screeching at us to get our asses off the ridge. You’d have thought we was trespassing on his private property!”

  “What were y’all doing?”

  “We weren’t doing nothing but looking for wild strawberries. My ma wants to make jam.” She launched into a highly fanciful story about the hardships that accompanied the search, tossing in descriptive passages about mud, hornets, thorns, concealed tree stumps, and other perils. She had just reached the part about the rumble they’d heard from inside a cave when she realized nobody was listening except the Mexican fellow, who’d come outside to wash the window.

  “You seen the bass boat?” Billy Dick sighed dreamily as he thought about the fiberglass hull and the Evinrude E-TEC. “Those things are so damn fast. The seats are upholstered with real leather. Built-in coolers for beer. I can see myself drifting in the middle of some lake, listening to music and smoking weed. Y’all can come, too, if you wear thong bikinis and open beers for me.”

  “Your wet dream, my worst nightmare,” Heather said, swishing her long blond hair for emphasis. “Don’t you agree, Darla Jean? Please don’t tell me you’d go out on a boat with this pimply pervert.”

  Darla Jean’s limp brown hair never swished, but at least she didn’t have crooked teeth like Heather. “Only if the lake freezes in July. Want to hear something hysterical? The tournament registration was really slow until Mrs. Jim Bob made her big announcement about the boat. It picked up after that and grew to nearly sixty. This morning a bunch of the local men signed up. Mr. Lambertino came by and gave me a thick envelope filled with their fees and registration forms. He made me promise not to tell a soul. An hour later, Mrs. Lambertino brought me another envelope with the local women’s fees and registration forms. She made me promise not to tell, too. I almost wet my pants trying not to laugh.”

  “So who’s registered?” asked Heather.

  “They’re almost all married couples, which makes it even funnier. My ma and pa, as well as yours. Yours, too, Billy Dick. Jim Bob and Mrs. Jim Bob. The Lambertinos, obviously. Earl and Eileen Buchanon, Tam and Crystal Whitby, Ruddy and Cora Cranshaw . . .” She took a slurp of cherry limeade while she thought. “Kevin, but not Dahlia . . . oh, and Bopeep Buchanon and her new boyfriend, Luke Smithers.”

  Heather licked her lips. “He is so hot.”

  “Have you ever seen him without his shirt on?”

  “I’d die on the spot.”

  “I almost did.” Darla Jean imagined Luke in a leather kilt and strapped sandals instead of the grubby jeans and sneakers he was wearing while he tinkered with her father’s tractor. “I thought I was in the Coliseum, watching the gladiators parade around court. He l
ooked like Russell Crowe.”

  “I am so totally horny I could pass out,” Heather said. “Call an ambulance.”

  “His abs are so tight you can see the muscles.”

  “My pa’s never set foot on a golf course,” said Billy Dick, ignoring their girlie histrionics. “He doesn’t have any golf clubs stashed away in a closet or the garage, and he refuses to watch it on TV. The only game my ma can play is canasta.”

  Darla Jean came back to earth and flinched at a yellow jacket crawling toward the spill. “Same here. I’d be surprised if any of ’em know how to play. You know, my ma’s been acting kinda odd lately. She says she’s going shopping, but she never comes back with anything. My pa’s been late for supper every night. His excuses are lame. I guess they’re pretty serious, though. I’ve got to go to Farberville in the morning to deposit another four thousand dollars in the tournament account. It’s not going to be a secret very long.”

  “Thank gawd Miss Estes didn’t sign up,” Heather said. “Can you see her trying to hit a golf ball? She’d be more likely to teach her home ec classes how to turn ’em into a tasty and nutritious casserole. She’d write the recipe on the blackboard and say, ‘Now sprinkle the top with one cup of crushed potato chips and bake for forty-five minutes, girls.’ ”

  “Serve with a green salad,” Darla Jean added in a high-pitched, nasal voice.

  “Are you serious?” Billy Dick said, mystified. “Golf balls?”

  The girls laughed so loudly that the Mexican fellow threw a bucket of gray water at them. Somehow, that made it even funnier.

  Within an hour, the ugly truth began to spread through town, and by suppertime the tension in some households was thicker than corn syrup. The Lambertino children didn’t know what to make of their ma and pa, who weren’t speaking to each other. Darla Jean hid out in her bedroom because her ma and pa were speaking to each other (but not at all nicely). Bony was disappointed when he realized there would be no bountiful supper served at Uncle Earl and Aunt Eileen’s house. He made himself a sandwich and sat on the front porch. Frederick Cartier eased his car out of the garage, where Mrs. Jim Bob had insisted he park it, and drove to Farberville to track down an old buddy that he’d met at the Hot Springs racetrack decades earlier.

  Kevin Buchanon was home alone. Dahlia, the younguns, and the car were gone. When he’d called his parents’ house, his very own ma had said she didn’t know where they were and slammed down the phone so hard his ear still ached. He went to the refrigerator and rooted around until he found the leftover meatloaf. It seemed kind of wrong to heat it up, so he ate it cold.

  After a convoluted argument that made no sense, Crystal and Tam Whitby had retreated to different rooms in their house in the treeless subdivision out past the high school. Crystal spent the rest of the evening on the phone with her mother in Lead Hill. Her mother agreed that Tam was a self-centered bully, and cheerfully pointed out that she warned Crystal back in high school not to go to the prom with him.

  Bopeep Buchanon loomed over Luke, reminding him who had a job and who lounged around on his lazy butt and drank beer all day. When she came at him with a potato peeler, he hightailed it out of the trailer at the Pot O’ Gold. In the trailer next to it, Eula Lemoy smiled as she watched him leave. He was passably handsome, but he was responsible for the whiskey bottles and beer cans cluttering the grass. Eula hoped he was gone for good. Since most of Bopeep’s boyfriends lasted only a few weeks, it was likely.

  “Just what in hell’s name are you gonna do with a bass boat?” demanded Ruddy Cranshaw as he slammed his fist on the arm of the recliner. “It ain’t like you can bait a hook without getting weepy.” Cora grabbed the remote and sprinted for the garbage disposal.

  Audley Riley hurled a can of tuna fish across the kitchen. “If I win this boat, you’ll never set foot on it! I’ll sell it on eBay in a split second, and use the money to remodel the kitchen.” The can bounced off the refrigerator door, leaving a noticeable dent. “And get new appliances,” she added darkly as she reached for a can of chicken noodle soup. Rip deflected it with a skillet, thinking he might make a better badminton player than a golfer.

  Big Dick MacNamara sat in his truck, using a rag to mop the blood running out of his nose. Lucille’s left jab was nothing more than a fluke, he consoled himself. He didn’t know why she’d turned crazy when he’d said she could barely walk across a room without tripping on her own shoelaces. He’d been trying to be helpful, that’s all.

  Earl Buchanon pointed out to his wife that she couldn’t operate an electric can opener, much less an Evinrude E-TEC. Eileen suggested what he could do with an Evinrude E-TEC. It was highly colorful but anatomically impossible. The conversation went downhill after that.

  Roy Stiver, who was blessedly unwed, searched through his kitchen cabinets. After the first two phone calls of desperation, he’d put the fillet back in the refrigerator and was now wondering if he could make Hamburger Helper with canned sardines for his exiled guests. The phone rang again.

  Over in Farberville, things were calmer. Tommy Ridner finished a steak sandwich in the bar at the country club, then ordered another drink. In spite of the real estate slump that was playing holy hell with his income, he was feeling good. Two under par that afternoon had been worth three hundred dollars, most of which he was in the process of spending on rounds of drinks for the members at other tables. He was thinking about his brilliant chip shot at the twelfth green when Dennis and Amanda Gilbert joined him.

  Tommy beckoned the waitress. “Put their drinks on my tab, honey,” he said grandly.

  Amanda ordered a brandy and soda. “Are we celebrating something? I saw Natalie Hotz on the eighteenth green. Did she finally give you the time of day? You’re so tedious when you drool from a distance.”

  “We bumped into each other on the first tee,” Tommy said. “Someone in her foursome was late, so she let us go ahead of them. I don’t think either of us asked about the time. She’s playing in the tournament this weekend.” He winked at Dennis. “Maybe one of these days she’ll thaw just a tiny bit.”

  Dennis laughed. “You believe winning this crappy tournament is going to break the ice? She’s encased in a glacier. You’d need a blowtorch and fifty years to get to her.” He squeezed Amanda’s hand. “Not all women are hot for you, Tommy boy.”

  “I can vouch for that.” Amanda withdrew her hand to pick up her drink. “You’d better keep your voices down. The glacier’s sitting at a table near the door, and the temperature just dropped fifteen degrees.”

  “I don’t give a shit who wins the tournament,” Tommy continued loudly. “The bass boat’s a whole ’nother story. The sun in my eyes, the wind in my hair, the rod in my hand. I’m thinking I’ll rent a slip at the Prairie Gulch marina. Takes about thirty minutes to drive up there, but the fishing’s good. Lots of college chicks hang out on the weekends. I’m sure some of them would be up for a boat ride to a secluded cove.”

  “You’re such a pig.” Amanda took out her compact and inspected her face as if she might have contracted trichinosis from breathing the same air.

  “Why are you so sure you’ll win the boat?” asked Dennis. “A hole-in-one isn’t all that common, you know. You’ve made what—eight in the last twenty-five years? I’ve never made one, and I’ve probably played fifteen hundred rounds. That works out to”—he paused to calculate—“twenty-seven thousand holes. I guess I’m due one, since the odds are one in twenty to thirty thousand.”

  “You wanna make a little bet?” Tommy said.

  “No, he does not.” Amanda deftly clicked the compact closed and dropped it in her purse. “You’re both being ridiculous. If you’ve got money to throw away, why don’t you donate it to the famished golf widows? They can use it for prosciutto and white asparagus.”

  Tommy chuckled. “Don’t be a wimp, Dennis. What’s the harm in a friendly bet, especially when the odds are in your favor? Tell you what—if I don’t make a hole-in-one, I’ll pay you a thousand dollars. If I d
o . . .” He thought about it for a moment. “If I do, I get a night of hot, steamy sex with your wife.”

  “How dare you!” she said, her face turning redder than her hair. “You really are a pig, Tommy Ridner. I’m not chattel to be bartered, like some biblical slave. Furthermore, I wouldn’t sleep with you if you paid me a million dollars. Dennis would never agree to such a vile bet. I ought to slap your face!”

  “A thousand dollars,” Dennis murmured. “Hardly seems worth it.”

  “Dennis!” Amanda shrieked.

  “Okay, good buddy,” Tommy said, “let’s make it five thousand.”

  Her head swiveled. “You bastard!”

  “Calm down, dear. Everyone’s staring.” Dennis lowered his eyes while he considered. “How about ten?”

  “Seventy-five hundred,” Tommy said, winking at Amanda.

  She knocked over her chair as she stood up. “I cannot believe either of you! I am leaving—alone! Dennis, find your own way home. Better yet, find your own way to a motel or sleep on a sofa in his filthy sty. And don’t bother to call me. I’m going to my yoga class tonight, and tomorrow I have aerobics, a hair appointment, and a lunch date with Chantry. If you so much as step foot in the house while I’m gone, I’ll have you arrested for trespassing! Do I make myself clear?” She stormed out of the bar with the subtlety of an Abrams tank flattening the countryside.

  Her audience of two dozen or so, including the waitress and the bartender, stared in awe. After a moment, they pretended they hadn’t been listening and resumed their quiet conversations. Amanda was not known for moderation in alcohol or gentility.

  Tommy waited until she was gone. “She didn’t sound pleased.”

  “No, she didn’t,” Dennis said.

  They ordered another round of drinks.