Sweetheart Deal

by Claire Matturro

  “We can’t figure out how in the world she didn’t set this room on fire,” Dan said, bravely digging into the tissues and pulling up a frayed electrical cord to an ancient lamp. “Lord looked out after her, is all we can figure.”

  But it was the dented mattress with the darkened, stained sheets that got me—why she either couldn’t, or wouldn’t, buy a new mattress and put clean sheets on the bed was beyond my comprehension.

  “It’s a firetrap, all right,” Dan said, as I held my hands tight against my sides and listened to my heart pounding, rat-a-tat, in a chest that seemed suddenly to have a great weight pressing against it. I took to swallowing again.

  “I’ve got to get some air,” I said, and literally jumped through the doorway and skidded around the corner, aiming for the great outdoors. In the living room, I bolted past Patti and into the front yard, Dan behind me.

  After I gasped a few lungfuls of clean outside air, I asked, “Have you called our father? See if he can help?”

  Dan shook his head. “I did, and he didn’t want any part of this trouble. Said he couldn’t help us anyway.”

  “What else did he say?”

  “That since Willette kicked him out a long time ago he wouldn’t be coming down from the lake to help her. We’re on our own.”

  “We always were. On our own, I mean.”

  “Not while we still had Grandmom,” he said. “And Granddad, till, you know, he got too…too tired and all.”

  Yeah, too tired. I translated that: Till he drank himself into a man nobody could count on. As I stood there with my brother, I wondered what mutant gene made Dan too polite to speak the truth.

  With so much to do, I didn’t want to get maudlin or mad, and if our father wasn’t going to help, then I wondered for half a second if our brother, Delvon, might come back. Being of strong back and sound stomach, he’d be handy in cleaning out the house.

  But quickly I put that thought away as too risky. In Bugfest, there were outstanding warrants on Delvon for things that could put him into jail for a long time. Besides, I didn’t want to have to listen to Delvon and Dan bicker, or referee their fight if it came to blows. Delvon was fine where he was, living in Florida with his new lady friend, Lenora the saint.

  “You need to get appointed her guardian, as soon as possible,” I said, putting away the thought of Delvon. “Do you by chance know a judge? I mean, personally?”

  “Nope. Judge Parker doesn’t go to the Methodist Church like me and Patti, he goes over to the First Baptist.”

  I sighed. “Okay, do you know a lawyer? I mean, besides me. I’d do this in a heartbeat but I’m not licensed in Georgia, and a local attorney that the judge knows would probably work better anyway.” I’d been away too long for home-court favorite status, and, frankly, I’d never heard of Judge Parker and had never set foot in the First Baptist Church. My guess was that in a formal courtroom, I’d play out before him like a big-city upstart heathen. Dan needed local talent to whip this guardian thing through in a hurry. “Do you know a local lawyer Judge Parker likes?”

  “Yeah, I know just the lawyer to call. Bobby’s girlfriend’s momma is a lawyer, and everybody likes her. She’s real nice.”

  “Go call her.”

  “What’s the hurry? It’s after office hours, and, I mean, Willette’s in good care, and—”

  I felt frustration pinching my trapezius muscles in a spasm that would probably out-twist any Advil. “Go, please, call her. It’s important that you—we—act quickly. You need to have that legal authority. To get her the best doctor, to make a deal with Demetrious and the city attorney, to get her into a proper institution, and—” I sputtered out in my fatigue.

  After a beat, Dan nodded and started back inside Willette’s, and I turned my back to the house and stared out at the street, making mental notes of all the things I had to do. Before I got to the part that included, say, food or sleep, Patti Lea came stomping out of the house, aimed right at me. A paroxysm of pain shot through my shoulders and up my neck when I saw her expression and that she was thrusting something from inside Willette’s den of dirt at me.

  “You better take this,” Patti said, handing me a gray metal box. The lock had been crudely pried open. “It’s important papers, some legal stuff, copies of everybody’s birth certificates, stuff your dad drafted. The deed to the house, some stuff about your grandmother’s place, insurance policies. She had it hid good up in the attic. You wouldn’t believe the mold and filth on this box. I figure you being the lawyer, you should look through it.”

  Mold and filth? I dodged as Patti thrust the box at me.

  “Would you just take it?” she said in that at-wits-end tone of voice I’d used myself a few thousand times thus far in my life. “Look at the stuff inside, okay, and let us know if any of it’s important.”

  Yeah, after I sprayed it down with Lysol and boiled it first.

  While I gingerly held the box, Dan came trotting back to us.

  “Guardianship?” I asked.

  “Got the lady lawyer on the phone right off. Going by first thing in the morning to talk with her. She’ll get right on it.”

  “Right on it,” in Bugfest time, could mean next week, or next month, so I added prod Dan to my list of things to do.

  “Look, you’ve had a long day, what with driving up, and you can’t get started on this…this, er, project until you get coveralls and gloves and stuff, so I reckon the best thing for you to do is to go on back to our house, clean up, and make yourself at home,” Dan said. “And take Patti, she’s all whipped out. You can take my car. Me and Bobby’ll come on later, nice night for a little walk.”

  Clean up was all that soaked into my brain at the moment.

  I stashed the metal box under the front seat of Dan’s trusty old Ford for the time being, and watched Patti yank off her coveralls and face mask before she climbed into the passenger side, her movements stiff from work and exhaustion.

  Neither of us said anything.

  The minutes of non-talk stretched out as I drove. In the silence, I opted for engaging my sister-in-law in conversation about herself, to ease us past the awkward moment. “So, how’s the business?”

  “Oh, I had to shut it down for a bit, you know, after Willette…went into the hospital. Sam, he’s a good man, but if he goes off his meds, he’s likely as not to scare off the customers and wreck the place, so I couldn’t leave him with all that stress, and I called his sister, and she said, sure, she’d invite him over to Dothan to stay with her for a vacation, because if I wasn’t around to watch him…”

  Patti stopped and turned to me. “Sorry. You don’t know Sam.”

  No, I didn’t. Instead, what I knew was that Patti Lea was as nervous about being alone with me as I was with her. In all the many years she had been my brother’s wife, we’d carefully avoided much one-on-one time. But it was typical of what I knew about her from Dan that she’d hire the otherwise unemployable as help in her small-engine repair shop. I wanted to say something to ease the weirdness between us, but couldn’t think of anything. So, okay, failing that, I tried to find out something useful.

  “Where’d Ray Fussele work?”

  “At Big Lonnie Ledbetter’s appliance store. Ray was, I don’t know, some kind of assistant manager or something. You remember Big Lonnie, right? Had that one hit song a while back. Pretty good song, you ask me. But now he runs that store and is on the county commission.”

  Yeah, and practically stole my grandmother’s house from Delvon and me, I thought, but didn’t say. “So Big Lonnie owns the store where Dan ordered the refrigerator?”

  “It wouldn’t be Dan’s first mistake,” Patti Lea said, “but you know they were in school together, and that’s how it is.”

  I sighed, Patti sighed, and we pulled into the driveway. I practically knocked her down in my mad dash to the guest bathroom, where I showered until I ran all the hot water out of their tank.

  Then I called Bonita and made sure she’d canceled everythin
g for the rest of the week, especially anything with a judge involved, as I didn’t trust another attorney with court appearances, even on paltry motions. After she assured me she had already done that, especially since I had told her to do all that before I even left Sarasota, I asked, “You got a draft of that motion to withdraw done yet?”

  “Check your e-mails. It’s waiting on you to review, change, print, sign, and overnight it.”

  “I’ll drag out my laptop and do it now,” I said. Fast as I could, I wanted to get as far away from the case of the Idiot Client who had altered his records.

  Blah, blah, blah, about other legal stuff, and I said my thanks and good-bye.

  “You be careful,” Bonita said, as if I were in Miami instead of Bugfest, a town of some eight thousand people, mostly of the Baptist or Methodist persuasion.

  “Don’t worry, nothing much ever happens in Bugfest.”

  Hey, so, yeah, I got that wrong, but a law degree doesn’t make me psychic.

  chapter 7

  In south Georgia, the earth is lush and never idle, regardless of the time of year.

  In winter, the pine trees never drop their needles, and the old-timers have collard patches and cabbages, dark green against the brown and gray fallow fields. Rye grass covers the pastures and hills with rich color that looks like a child dashed a bright green crayon across the landscape. And the camellias, my word, the camellias bloom all winter in a profusion of reds and pinks and whites.

  In spring, stand back, nature does this whole baroque thing, showing off with lavender wisteria drooping off the trees, their vines tenacious and hardy. On the sides of the road, crimson clover blooms red, and the landscape is dazzling with jasmine, azaleas, and the snow-white petals of the famed dogwood. And when the honeysuckle and the magnolias bloom, and I stand still and inhale, I know instinctively what heaven smells like.

  In summertime, the region has rain-forest-type weather, and vegetation will take over in a season. Kudzu will consume whole buildings, and if you stand still too long, it will shoot a few tendrils up your legs. Bamboo will go from fernlike sprouts to treelike forests in a single season. And poison ivy will replicate exponentially while you stand and watch it.

  And in early autumn, all that summer poison ivy turns a glorious red, and purple and yellow flowers spring up from the earth and wave in the cooling breezes.

  So, naturally, in a place where the plants never once slow down, rather just trade momentum with each other, Willette’s property had the wild look of a place nature was busily reclaiming as her own sole province.

  Which was all right by me in a general sense, but as I floated the beam of my flashlight through the lush growth in Willette’s backyard, I couldn’t help but wonder: How in the world had the neighbors let her get away with this? Didn’t they have zoning enforcement? But then I took in the thick hedge of privet around the property. A living privacy fence that protected Willette’s yard from prying eyes and the neighbors from the sight of Willette’s backyard.

  And from the sight of the tree house that had lured me back out in the night.

  Moments earlier, in the bed in my brother’s house, where I was pointedly not sleeping, I had thought I could somehow conquer the combined pangs of hunger and insomnia by chasing my childhood ghosts across yellow pine planks. So, I had crawled out of bed, dressed, and walked down the safe, quiet streets of my hometown, and had come to my mother’s place.

  In the beam of the flashlight, I could see a kind of a path I hadn’t noticed earlier. Not something anybody had mowed, mind you, but the kind of track that develops from regular foot traffic. A narrow walk right up to the tree house.

  Who was I not to follow this inviting dent in the assertive undergrowth?

  Mere seconds later, I tugged on the planks nailed to the tree, forming a crude ladder. I gauged the distance I would fall if one didn’t hold, and told myself a smart person would wait until daylight. No, a smart person wouldn’t climb the tree at all. But I was caught in a web of memories—Delvon and me, and Granddad, hanging around in a tree, hiding from everyone else, playing country music on a transistor radio, Granddad telling us stories and drinking, Delvon and me learning all the words to our grandfather’s music, Johnny Horton and Hank Williams, when other kids were learning the Lord’s Prayer and the Twenty-third Psalm—and smart had been driven out. I wedged the flashlight into my shirt pocket to free both hands, and, for reasons I couldn’t explain, I began to climb.

  Once in the tree house, I tested the flooring and flooded the small space with light. The first thing I thought was how much smaller it was than I had remembered. The second thing I thought was that somebody was still using it—oh, like the footpath hadn’t hinted at that? A thick sleeping bag opened across the flooring, a cooler sat in the corner, and a trail of unlit candles rested along the railing, heavy, round candles, ones not likely to fall or blow off. I tiptoed across the floor of the tree house, and the bottom felt solid and safe. I peeked into the cooler: junk food and Cokes. I touched the cans—cool, but not cold. Then I picked up the fake-ice pack—still cold, but not frozen.

  Somebody had been using the tree house recently.

  But how recently?

  So, how long did one of those fake blue ice things stay cold, I wondered.

  Again, I swept the area with the flashlight until I spotted a small ashtray in the corner, and I went toward it, and sniffed it, and though there was no roach or marijuana joint in it, I could still smell the pungent odor of pot. I poked around under the sleeping bag and, sure enough, found a small metal pipe, and I sniffed it. Pot, definitely. The pipe itself was an ornate little dude that looked costly and well-used. I put it in my pants pocket.

  So, Delvon’s and my old tree house was now somebody’s hideaway, somebody who drank Coke and smoked pot.

  Judging from the tales Delvon had told about his thriving home-based business—thriving, that is, until the Georgia Bureau of Investigations and their pot-sniffing dogs showed up and put him out of business—that narrowed it down to about every teenager in town, and a goodly portion of the twentysomethings. Probably a bunch of baby boomers out there, too, who hadn’t completely given up the habits of their wild youth.

  Maybe the pot smoker was closer to home. The fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree and all that—assuming the tree included Delvon and me.

  But I had other things to worry about besides whether my nephew was experimenting with marijuana. I turned off the flashlight and sat down on the sleeping bag, so I could be comfortable while I allowed my anxieties to roam free through my mind. In the cool November night air, I shivered, I watched the stars in the clear sky, and I wondered what in the blue blazes was going on.

  When the anxiety-produced adrenaline kicked at my heart, my fingers itched to write down and number the things I needed to do. But lacking pen or paper, I started making a mental list to calm myself. Things to do tomorrow, I said out loud: Overnight the motion to withdraw, which I had already read, rewritten, printed, and signed; follow up with Dr. Hodo; clean house for Patti; find something organic and naturally green that I could eat; figure out this deep-freeze thing; make damn certain Dan got the paperwork done to be Willette’s guardian; look at the ER records; talk to the hospital nurses; et cetera, et cetera.

  My eyes had long become accustomed to the dark when I heard the distinct and unwanted sounds of someone else crossing the lawn and stomping through high grass and weeds toward the tree house.

  Just an insomniac neighbor, I reassured myself.

  Or not.

  Nothing like being in a tree house late at night with no weapon to evoke a certain level of paranoia.

  With no way out except the way the intruder was coming in, no place to hide, and the flashlight too small to make any kind of weapon, I looked up.

  Straight up.

  Into the dark tree branches, as the tree house was roofless.

  Yeah, I used to be quite the tomboy.

  But I used to be quite young when I was a to
mboy.

  It’d been twenty years since I’d had my last tree-climbing adventure. One didn’t much need to climb trees to be a trial attorney in Sarasota, and I’d been negligent in letting my tomboy skills languish.

  I looked down at the advancing shape of a man.

  I looked again at the dark green branches above my head, and way, way above the ground.

  Hey, tree climbing was like riding a bike, wasn’t it?

  Thus, with my risk-benefit analysis over, I scrambled up on the railing of the tree house, half jumped and half climbed up on that first limb, found my foothold, grabbed at a branch above it, and started climbing up into the big tree in the dark.

  chapter 8

  A peacock is the male bird of the species called peafowl; they are kin to pheasants, they hail originally from Southeast Asia, and they happily eat cat food, berries, and cracked corn. Peacocks roost in trees, and you better not wake them up.

  Most of this I learned later from Eleanor.

  The thing about roosting in trees and not waking them up I learned like I’ve learned most of the valuable lessons in life. The hard way.

  That is, I woke one up. Suddenly.

  I was so busy making sure I climbed onto sturdy branches, didn’t fall to my death or injury, and didn’t make loud noises alerting the man climbing up the plank ladder into the tree house I was a few feet above him, that I just happened to overlook the large, dark shadow of the bird perched on the last limb I climbed onto.

  The peacock, however, noticed me. It woke with a loud scream and a great flapping of its big wings, and it aimed its beak right at me.

  Naturally, I took quick evasive action to avoid being pecked upon by a large bird in the middle of a tree in the middle of the night.

  But ducking and running takes on a wholly different quality in a tree. Which is why I fell, butt-first, down through the leaves and branches of the great live oak and landed with a thud, not gracefully at all, at the feet of one surprised man. With a peacock right on my tail, chasing me like some avenging angel of the fowl world.