IN SPACE NINETEEN, Asa leapt from his cot before dawn with the energy and determination of a young man ready to go to war. He threw open the door. The wind ruffled his greying dreadlocks so they shook like a jester’s motley. “Verily I say unto thee, Lord,” he whispered, “Satan and his minions ride these winds like sweaty whores ride drunk customers.” He smiled at his pretty phrase. The wind rippled the pages of his Bible and the pages of pornography, filling his trailer with a flickering peepshow of womanly parts. He was blind to it, though. It was time for his own ritual of observance.
It was Sunday, the Lord’s day, when he had more than just Postum and prayer to accomplish. He walked to a wall stacked high with sin. He stuck his hand in a hole. The hiss that escaped his lips might have meant a rat had bitten him, or it might have meant he’d successfully located his sock full of money. He stashed it in the bib pocket of his overalls, and found his shoes. Well, he found two shoes. They didn’t match, but he was shod after a fashion.
Asa slipped into the darkness and the wind, walking the highway miles to Ochre Water.
He entered the 7-11 like a prowler, loaded his arms with all of it he could carry, then heaved it on the counter like a pile of meat.
The clerk pulled back a bit. “You planning a party, here, Mr. Strug?”
Asa’s baleful eyes silenced him.
He went from convenience store to convenience store. The road home was a hard one, loaded as he was with all the pornography and Postum he could carry. Asa staggered into his door, kicked it shut behind him, threw the new pile on the old pile. He wouldn’t look at it again. He bought it so that others wouldn’t, a ministry of prophylactic purchasing. No one knew that, of course. Those neighbors who bothered to pay him any mind thought Asa Strug was a religious nut with a strange taste for multiple issues of Gent and Hustler. But Asa didn’t care. It was a hermit’s lot to toil in obscurity.
He headed outside. It was getting light, so he wasted no time in posting his verse.
They sell the innocent for silver
And the destitute for a pair of shoes.
—Amos 2:6
He stood back and smiled, knowing he walked the path of righteousness.
He had God on his side, after all.
MELVEENA STRANGE AWOKE and pressed her nails into her palms. Just outside her window, an old dog made a percussive bark. The air conditioner’s hum added a mechanical harmony. She lay there and knew she’d give all ten of her perfect ceramic nails to hear the slick-green croak of an Arkansas bullfrog. She was not in Arkansas, however. She was in her bed, breathing the bone-dry air-conditioned atmosphere of Ochre Water, early on a Sunday morning.
Sunday morning meant church at six and nine o’clock Coffee Klatch at Minah’s.
She rose and moved through her beauty regimen. Scented water, arched brows, plum-stained lips, lingerie pretty enough to wear over her clothes, and a visit to the closet that was one of her two great joys in life. Whatever she chose would fit her to perfection. Shoes, of course, a scarf tied round her handbag, not her neck.
She opened her jewelry box and sighed at the heap. Every bit of metal had the capacity to stir up an image, so she had to be careful how she touched it. Elbows and fingernails transmitted less than fingers, so with the tip of a pinky nail, she sorted through the promise rings that held the flintiest chips of diamonds, the strings of pearls, gold bangles, dainty pendants on chains, dress watches encrusted with more gems than a wedding set, seven gaudy cocktail rings, a small fortune of pavé.
The ring she sought gleamed red among the diamonds, a drop of pure, coagulated pain. She speared it out, held it tight it in her palm, closed her eyes and summoned the face of the woman who’d given it to her. That ring had belonged to a neighbor woman, the wife of the bank’s president, young and lovely and lonely. She was from Tennessee. She didn’t like Arkansas. She had haunted her own home like a ghost. She had only come to life when six-year-old Melveena had visited her, or when her young black gardener was there, singing and smiling and trimming her magnolias, coming into her kitchen for a cold drink with his shirt off, looking at her with dark eyes full of an entirely improper and intangible “something” that made Melveena feel alive, too.
One night, the neighbor had come to Melveena and pressed this ring into her seven-year-old palm, whispering, This is to remember me by, Melveena. Then she’d disappeared. So had the gardener. The town closed over this shameful escape like still, green river water closing over a thrown stone. But all Melveena had to do was hold the ring and she was there.
She returned the treasure to the box and closed the lid with an undertaker’s finality.
Melveena had to pass the greatest mistake of her life on the way to the kitchen. It was unfortunate but unavoidable. She turned up what little bit of a nose she had, perked herself a cup of coffee, added just one small splash of Kahlua and took a sip. Perfect. She leaned a hip against the kitchen counter and drank her breakfast.
Over on the couch, her greatest mistake shifted a little, snored, and emitted a gentle eructation. Then he raised his hands, sawed them from side-to-side, and let them drop. He was probably dreamed of filing down newly-installed brake pads with a rasp, because fingerprints would make a glaze. Melveena supposed that even a woman’s greatest mistake was capable of dreaming. She considered her own occasional dreams of friction, heat and glazing. She assumed hers were not quite the same as his.
He did have a name. It was stitched over the left-hand breast pocket of the Chevron uniform that he wore day and night. Clyde. In that same pocket, over his heart, he kept the one thing that mattered most to him in the world. That, of course, was the television remote control. He switched channels repeatedly, as if there were a contest to see how many times he could do it in a minute. It was the only thing he did ambitiously. In all other areas of his life, he was as torpid as a sunning possum.
Yes, they were married, though she retained her maiden name because Melveena Strange Groth was simply too hideous a name to bear. Clyde was her greatest mistake and her apparent penance, so she would never leave him.
As a teenager in Toad Suck, Arkansas, Melveena had a perfect smile, perfect legs and nearly perfect scores on her SATs. Between breaking male hearts, she busied herself as a cotillion deb, a pom-pom girl, and first runner up in the Miss Arkansas Pageant three years running. Her father grudgingly allowed her to take literature classes at the University of Little Rock. Melveena’s appetite for literature was ferocious. So was her appetite for a few other things.
Her family “got wind” of certain goings-on. Melveena was brought home until such time as she learned to comport herself like a groomed and pampered accessory for a man with a future. After all, one wife of an Arkansas lieutenant governor had risen to the position of first lady. Why not Melveena?
She tried to rein it in. She gave up her studies, returned to church, went to meetings of the Ladies Aid Society. She accepted and returned several engagement rings over the next few years. She seemed to have calmed down, so her father let her go back to school and finish her degree. Finally, Melveena seemed to settle on a man who pleased her father. He was a State’s District Attorney, a widower, and it seemed that the impeccably groomed and pedigreed Melveena Strange might be just the perfect life running mate for him. She accepted his proposal and his two-carat diamond ring, putting him off until her graduation (with honors) was accomplished.
With the help of a breathless aunt, she planned a Southern wedding to end all weddings. The night before she as set to walk down the aisle of St. Theresa’s church, she got good and drunk and skipped town with the tallest man in Toad Suck, a redheaded auto mechanic named Clyde. She chose him not because he he’d take good care of her, but because he’d take good care of the Cadillac she had inherited from her grandmother.
Their Arkansas exodus was fueled by bottle after bottle of Jack Daniels. Clyde seemed like a perfect example of taciturn and traditional blue collar masculinity as he handled that car. With the wind in her hair and
the road dust in her teeth, she tasted freedom, too drunk to understand that her traveling companion was silent because he was a borderline moron.
She was still over the legal blood alcohol limit when she stood in front of a justice of the peace in Las Vegas and said the vows that would change her name to Melveena Strange Groth. When she sobered up and realized that her glorious gesture had backfired, she was trapped in a limbo of pride. She couldn’t go back. Having made such a terrible misstep, she had also lost faith in her ability to go forward. There she was, stuck in her lavender bungalow.
“Clyde,” she said softly and persuasively, careful not to wake him. “Clyyyyde. When I get home, you’ll be gone. Yes, yes you will. You’ll wake up and realize that I’m serious when I tell you I want you to leave. And you’ll pack up your truck and go see Rhondalee about renting a nice little trailer in the Park. One with a satellite dish.”
He grumbled, frowned, and rolled his lanky frame away from her.
When she stepped outside, her neighbor, Wheeler, looked up from a perpetually malfunctioning lawnmower and tipped his cap. With simple-minded awe, he watched her walk. I hope he fixes that mower soon, she thought, imagining how annoyed Clyde would be at the sound. He’d really have to ratchet up the volume on that dreadful television of his.
She shut the door of her grandma’s car, a mauve 59 Caddy convertible with lethal fins. Her other great pleasure in life. She folded her hands on the wheel. For one long moment, her proud head leaned forward as if humbled. Despair was an indulgence. She had a fine appreciation for indulgences, being both Catholic and Southern, but Melveena knew they were best applied sparingly. Time to lift the head, insert the key, fire it up and slide it into gear. Time to leave behind her greatest mistake, if only for a few hours.
She checked her watch. She’d missed church, and probably would for a while, but she could to make it to Minah’s for Coffee Klatch. She should have made that community meeting. It would have been the prudent thing to do.
AS BEFIT THE circumstances, over in Space 48, the LaCours were wide-awake. Well, all except for Annie Leigh, who had to catch a few winks at one time or another. She slept wound up in her dirtied sheets, dreaming of road kill.
Her grandparents had not slept a wink all night. Tender sat across from Rhondalee. He’d come back into the house with an appetite. He’d announced his hunger. Rhondalee had done nothing but glare at him. He’d known she was angry, then. To refuse to cook for him?
Very angry.
He’d poked through the kitchen cabinets with an air of damaged dignity, then scrambled himself some eggs. She’d watched him take every bite, punctuating each swallow with a question. She asked the same question she’d been asking non-stop since Memphis left.
“Are you going to tell me?”
His voice held nothing but patience. “I told Memphis I’d wait until nine to talk to you about it. So just look at the clock. On the stroke of nine, I’ll tell you. I will, Rhondy.” She’d sat across from him, arms folded, lips compressed, eyes squinted up like BBs. He finally announced, “I’m going to bed.” Rhondalee huffed off to her recliner and found a religious station to occupy her.
He couldn’t sleep. He lay awake, listening to nothing but air, charged and violent. The roar of evil that had built to a pitch last night had mercifully lessened. Today, he listened to the sound of his own desire. It was a torment that robbed him of sleep and dignity and pride, sent him wandering out under the stars, composing song after song after song to a woman who had never done more than wave at him. He closed his eyes and saw her in his wife’s place on that bed, the honeyed banquet of his every carnal desire. He could summon her sound, her skin, her smell, her smile, at any moment.
It was killing him.
Rhondalee was asleep in her recliner when he finally gave up on the idea of sleep and left the bedroom. He stepped out the front door and retrieved the paper from his mailbox with the parade of chickens painted on the side. Next to it was her mailbox, rusted, dented, natural and plain. She touched this every day with her sweet, soft hand. Tender stood for a moment, transfixed by the beauty of that thought.
Of course, he stood there a little too long. Long enough to see Randall Stagg tumble out of the trailer, looking like he’d spent the night being hit over the head with a mallet. “Evening, Tender. Or morning, or whatever it is.”
Tender swallowed. “Hello, son.” Randall stumbled up the street, grinning like a fool.
Music always helped with the pain.
Back in his own bedroom, Tender went through the closet, which was full of Rhondalee’s shoes, why were there so many shoes around here when he himself only had one pair of boots that he could never find anyway? He hauled out two cases, the guitar and the banjo. The banjo was a happy, rollicking instrument, one that rarely suited his frame of mind. He needed to hit high, aching notes of despair. Only the fiddle would hit those, and his brother had taken both fiddles with him when he left over twenty years ago.
He opened the guitar case and sat alone on the bed, tuning and humming, brushing his fingertips on the strings with a touch as gentle and forbidden as a lover’s.
At nine o’clock, he would tell Rhondalee that the Reverend had been murdered. And when she took herself out the door to tell the rest of the world the news, to call it from the rooftops, to squawk and holler and harangue and shriek, the Park’s town crier, he’d be alone with his suffering heart. His house would be quiet, and maybe, just maybe, he would allow himself to cry.
AT A LITTLE before nine, Memphis drove over to the Clubhouse and parked.
For the past four months, through a financial arrangement with the Rhondalee, the Clubhouse had served as a provisional meeting place for the First Church of the Open Arms. The residents openly despised the Open Armers, who were all from Bone Pile. It wasn’t their barefoot women, their lice-ridden kids, their holy rolling, their youth ministry or their tambourine shaking that put everyone off. It was their parking.
The Open Armers came down from the hills every Sunday, lit with the love of the Lord and a little genetically transmitted leftover uranium from the mines in the hills. They could have parked outside the gates. After all, from the main gate to the Clubhouse, it was only four blocks. But the Open Armers treated Sunday morning like a furiously competitive parking derby. There were ten spaces marked “visitor” in front of the clubhouse. These filled quickly, and the overflow traffic traveled up and down the paved lanes and gravel streets of the Park, rucking up grass and plowing through flower beds, displacing gravel, knocking over garden gnomes, blocking driveways and upsetting tenants.
By seven AM on a Sunday morning, all ten spaces were usually full with a variety of beat-up cars. Cups of coffee from ancient Thermoses, stale doughnuts and fried fruit pies purchased with food-stamps from the baked goods outlet store were passed back and forth amongst the lucky ten families who made it there early. Kind of like a tailgate party, thought Memphis.
Today, except for the one he occupied, all the spaces were empty.
At 9:10, he got out and stretched. He looked up gravel streets and down paved lanes. All he saw were the sleepy faces of the other tenants, come to stand in their front yards and verify the truth of it with their own disbelieving eyes.
Not one primer-painted Ford truck. Not one Buick station wagon with a missing headlight and a wired-shut door.
All was quiet in the Francie June Memorial Trailer Park.
THE COFFEE HAD worn off. The adrenaline had, too. Memphis sat in his cruiser and radioed the office. “Hiram? I’m 10-76 to Space 13. Call me if or when you hear from either Forensics or the Coroner. Do you copy?” Silence. “Hiram?”
“A 10 what?”
He sighed. “I plan to talk to some people. Will you study those codes today?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Thank you.” Memphis drove the two blocks to Space 13. The aluminum screen door wavered before his eyes, shining and sliding and teasing him with the memory of a lazy stream where he and his br
other had fished as very young boys.
He shook his head and knocked.
The door opened on faces that were handsome, cunning, and hard with the infamous Bone Pile contempt for the law. Hiram had taken down the names. He read them out. “Bartholomew MacIver, Hackett McGillicutty, Shadwell MacPherson, Leverton MacAuley, and Keegan MacLean, Angus MacPherson.” Memphis didn’t bother to establish identities. “Where’s Garth?”
“Asleep on the couch,” said one, barely moving his lips. Shadwell McPherson, he thought it was, though it might have taken DNA testing to tell some of these characters apart. He was handsome like a reptile.
Shadwell, he decided, was the de facto spokesperson, and he would direct his questions to him. “Could you tell me if Gator Rollins was with you boys for the entirety of yesterday evening?”
“We’ll have to think on that, Sheriff.”
“Don’t you know?”
“We get mighty forgetful around the law.”
Memphis shook his head. “Well, if you boys plan to throw in your lot with Gator Rollins on that talent show, you’d best be open to the idea of the law watching every single move you make.” He watched the men trade glances as subtle as the movement of a tongue in the mouth of a snake. “Yes, I’m mighty interested in Gator Rollins. I don’t trust that man. He’s what my grandniece calls a Bad José. I track his every coming and going. You let him join you, I can tell you, I’ll see every time you spit, every time you sneeze, every time you shut your door and every time you open it.” He stood there and stared at them all. They were too proud and too mean to drop their eyes, but he knew they’d heard him. “Now, I have another question. You boys are all Open Armers, aren’t you?” He had to wait full twenty seconds for the affirmative nod, but it did come. “Did any of you plan to go to service this morning?”
“Sheriff, we all planned to go. But that man asleep on the couch over there said he’d shoot us if we opened the door.”
Karen G. Berry - Mayhem 01 - Love and Mayhem Page 9
