by Baxter Clare
“All the time,” Frank admitted.
They touched in the gentle and private way that lovers do when words are too much or not enough. This was so different from Maggie. Maybe because Frank was so different. She felt older, more stable. There’d always been so much excitement with Maggie. Big melodramatic fights ending with one of them stalking out, then sheepishly coming back, and lots of great make-up sex. They learned a lot along the way, but with Gail it felt like Frank was taking what she’d learned and putting it to use.
Gail murmured, “What would you say if I said I was falling head over heels in love with you?”
Frank continued caressing the warm skin. It was such a lovely distraction from the fear fluttering inside her chest.
“I’d say that was a wonderful thing.”
“But you wouldn’t say you were falling in love with me,” Gail fished.
I couldn’t, Frank wanted to say. Flirting with the thought was so much easier, and safer, than admitting it, than actually saying the words. Frank remembered Tracey tapping her on the chest.
“Maybe,” she hedged, “I’ve already fallen.”
Gail didn’t press for specifics and Frank was grateful. It was so much easier to show the doc how she felt. They made love softly and slowly, feeling each other’s heartbeat when they returned to words.
“How’s your hand?”
“Fine.”
Frank kissed the head against her chin, marveling at the range of emotions she’d had in less than twenty-four hours; her anger and curiosity as she picked up the thing in rags, the subsequent alarm and puzzlement when it disappeared, the shock and pain of the dog bite, relief in the hospital, and finally safety in Gail’s bed. And again now in her arms. Safe harbor after rough passage.
And that was the thing Frank was dancing around. It wasn’t the dog mauling her or the stitches nor the considerable blood loss. That was rough but not extraordinary. What made her want a safe haven was what she’d seen while she was sitting on her butt staring at the frenzied pit bull. The vision of the relic laughing in the Mother’s voice had been frightening enough, but the clarity of the deja vu that followed was inexplicable and bordered on terrifying.
In the hospital she’d dismissed it as a brief but intense hallucination brought on by shock and stress. The explanation had worked for a little while, but Frank ultimately had to admit it was no hallucination. What she’d seen and heard had been real, as real as Gail in her arms. Not only that, the moment had felt as familiar as coming home at night and stepping into her house. That sense of normalcy, of time unfolding in its ordinary pattern was jarring. It scared Frank that a moment so intellectually alien could be so physically real.
Frank murmured into Gail’s hair, “What’s predestination?”
“Hmm?”
“What’s predestination mean? Like in psychic phenomena or religion.”
“Gee, let me think. I’m not used to theology quizzes in the midst of my afterglow.”
“What are you used to?” Frank grinned, tilting Gail’s lips up for a kiss.
“Something more along those lines,” Gail said rolling onto her elbows. “Well, the Christian definition is that God has ordained the future as well as the past. Everything that’s happened to you, and is going to happen is writ in stone. Even who gets to be saved and who is damned.”
Gail said “damned” with an eerie conviction.
“Do you believe that? About being damned?”
“No. Being damned is committing the same senseless actions over and over again. We do that right here on earth. People that don’t grow and learn from their mistakes, that keep repeating them over and over and stay mired in their misery, that’s hell.”
“What’s heaven?”
“Love,” Gail said instantly.
Frank smiled, tucking the doc’s bob back behind an ear.
“Everything’s so simple for you.”
“It is now but that doesn’t mean it didn’t take me a while to get here. Why are you asking about all this?”
“I don’t know,” Frank evaded. She hadn’t told Gail about the freakish occurrences during the dog attack and didn’t plan to. “So basically predestination is fate. Do you believe in fate?”
“Actually fate was the Greek version of predestination. I think there were a couple goddesses responsible for determining human destiny. See? There’s another word for you. Predestination, fate, kismet, karma—a rose by any other name is still a rose. Every culture has their belief in divine rule.”
“So you believe all that.”
“To a certain extent. I believe we choose the lives we’re going to live and the choices we’ll be confronted with. If we choose loving choices we grow and evolve. If we choose safe, comfortable choices, we stay stuck in our quagmires. They may be perfectly comfortable quagmires, too. A lot of us don’t even know we’re in them. I didn’t, before the cancer.”
Another subject Frank was less than eager to talk about.
“You ever had a deja vu?”
“Yeah,” Gail nodded. “Is that what this is all about?”
“They’re kinda weird, huh?”
“I think they’re fun. I can count on one hand how many times I’ve had them, but they’re always so bizarre. It’s like a veil gets pulled away and until it’s dropped back into place we’re seeing a world we’re not supposed to know anything about.”
“What is it you think we’re not supposed to know?”
“What happens when we die and before we’re born.”
“Why aren’t we supposed to know?”
“I don’t think we’re emotionally or intellectually capable of dealing with it. We’re too enmeshed in our corporal comforts. I think cosmic truths go against our biological imperatives for survival.”
“I love it when you talk dirty. Could you say that in English?”
“Meaning our body and mind have evolved to keep us alive. Physically safe. It’s a temporary situation, and inevitably we all lose. We all die. Our biological drives are counterintuitive to what our souls know—that our bodies are only temporary structures. They die, but our spirits don’t. Our bodies are just rentals our souls use to drive from spiritual lesson to spiritual lesson.”
Frank had to laugh, asking, “Why did I even open this can of worms?”
“I’ve been wondering that same thing,” Gail said.
The conversation shifted to mundane matters and for a while longer Frank was safely anchored at harbor.
22
Her family still teased her about marrying a man named Helms, but Jessie’s sister never took part in that foolishness. Crystal was long on vision but short on humor, as serious most times as a bullet to the brain. The only time she loosened up was when she sipped tea in Jessie’s cramped, sunny kitchen.
With a sharp eye Crystal watched Jessie add pinches of valerian and skullcap to the chamomile. She poured boiling water over the herbs and pushed the brew toward Crissie. Fussing with the strainer, as if that would make the tea steep faster, Crissie said, “Marcus told me that poh-leece woman come by here.”
Always uncomfortable with words, Jessie just nodded. She marveled how one minute her sister could sound like a lawyer and the next like some old do-rag off the street. Crissie’d always had a way with words, easily mimicking her clients to put them at ease or testifying in front of a jury as if she had a PhD from a back-east college.
“What she axe about?”
Jessie lifted a shoulder in answer.
“I wasn’t home. Wardell talked with her.”
Her sister’s face clouded.
“Wardell!” she bellowed. “Come in here right now!”
A moment later Jessie’s husband loomed over the kitchen table. A big, loose-jointed man, he was as affable as his wife and sister-in-law were stern.
“Woman,” he sighed, “why you holler at me like that in my own home?”
Crystal demanded, “You talk with that police woman?”
“Yeah, some,” he
nodded. “She axed about you.”
“And what you tell her?” the Mother snapped back.
He raised his big hands.
“Nothin’, Crissie. Just talked mostly about ol’ times, is all. Wasn’t nothin’ to it.”
“Wardell Helms you ain’t got the sense Spirit done give you and you tell me ain’t nothin’ to it.”
The Mother shoved a chair away from the kitchen table, jerked her head at it.
“You set right down and tell me every word that passed between you two.”
“Aw, come on, Crissie. The game’s on.”
She flapped a hand.
“I don’t care nothin’ ‘bout no foolishness on the TV. Now sit down!”
It was his house and Wardell Helms was a big man, but he left his beer warming by the recliner and took the hard chair pushed toward him.
23
The bar was busy for a Sunday afternoon, most of the patrons sitting with their heads tilted up at the TVs. The Raiders and Broncos were brawling it out and as much as Frank wanted to watch the game, she had to concentrate on writing her notes.
Bored with resting and being nursed, albeit by the loveliest of nurses, Frank had run out to Eagle Rock hoping to talk to the Mother’s other sister. She’d been initially disappointed that Jessie Helms wasn’t home, but her husband, Wardell, was pretty talkative when he realized Frank didn’t have a grudge with him. He’d offered her a beer—she’d demurred—and he’d settled back into his easy chair keeping half an eye on the morning game.
Turned out he grew up with the Mother in a little suburb outside of Compton that got buried under the Artesia Freeway. She let him talk about growing up, gently leading him where she wanted him. They all four of them, Crissie, Jessie, Olivia and Wardell, used to hang together catching crawfish and frogs in the ditch behind their house and chasing dragonflies with mayonnaise jars. They hung out in the same gang, the Black Swans.
“Nothing like the gangs today,” he’d chuckled. “Lord, the things we did back then.”
That’s when the Mother had really started making her mark, mojoing rivals and hexing their girls. Crissie was arrogant and strong-willed, and Olivia whetted her budding piety on her sister’s transgressions. Jessie, the quiet one, went her own way, and while not as good looking as her sisters, she was kinder.
“She a good woman and I’m still proud to have her on my arm.”
Wardell had sipped on his beer, continuing, “Now you take Olivia. There’s a woman whose love of the Lord has turned her bitter and close-minded. And Crissie, she started off with religion, their folks raised ‘em right, but she took off on her own path.”
He’d heard stories about her on the street. What she did in that church of hers. Dark things. Things he wouldn’t listen to anymore and didn’t want to believe were true.
“Like what?” Frank had asked.
“Naht—” He held up a meaty palm. “I don’t mess with that. Jessie don’t tell me nuthin’ and I don’t ask. I do not want to know,” he stressed.
“How come?” Frank pushed, looking perplexed.
“I hear, rumors, a’ight? ‘At’s enough for me. At’s more ‘an I wanna know.”
“How ‘bout her business?”
Helms shook his big head.
“Crissie married into money. ‘At’s all I know. How she runs her affairs ain’t no concern a mine.”
“She married into money?”
The big man nodded, taking a long pull off his Coors.
“Right outta high school.” He smacked his lips. “Married Old Man Love. Her daddy was dead by then. He’d a never stood for that. You know ML Laundries? Off Manchester and another to 76th, 77th Street? Those were his. And that old warehouse she livin’ in? He won that in a game a low-ball. Can you believe that?”
Helms shook his head again, as if awed by the inequities in life.
“Pretty lucky guy,” Frank agreed.
Helms snorted, “Not that lucky. Old Man died before his and Crissie’s first anniversary.”
“What’d he die of?”
“Old age? I don’t know. Said it was natural causes. Natural enough a man his age couldn’t keep up with the likes of a gal Crissie’s age.”
“How long before she remarried?”
Helms thought hard.
“It was some while. Before she took up with Eldridge, she was with a fella named Roosevelt. Lincoln Roosevelt. I always remembered him ‘count of he was named after the presidents.”
“Nice guy?”
“Line? He was tight. Kinda close-mouthed like Crissie. She got that church from him. He was a preacher too, if I recall correct. But she didn’t bring him around too much before he went off to Kansas or someplace like that.”
“He just gave her the church?”
“Yeah, I don’t know.” Helms waved a big hand. “You’d have to ask Jessie about that. All I know was he was gone and she got the church. And that fine Cadillac she still driving. That’s a good car, Cadillac, uh-huh, way they made ‘em back then.”
“So who’d she take up with after Roosevelt?”
“I don’t know that there wasn’t anybody serious ‘til Eldridge. Crissie fell for that man,” he chuckled. “I mean hard. And God Almighty what a hustler he was. They was a perfect match those two. Mean as a nest of baby rattlesnakes and twice as hungry. Both of ‘em. ‘At’s when she fell in with those Panamanians.”
Helms tensed, his face locking into the mask of someone who realizes he’s said too much. Frank didn’t want to lose him so she eased into another area.
“Did she marry Eldridge?”
“Uh-huh,” he said, tracking a shovel pass on the large screen TV.
“That’s how she became Jones?”
“Uh-huh.”
“What about her boys? Who’s the father?”
“That’d been Eldridge,” he answered. “They’re good boys. Rough, but respectful.”
“Yeah, they seem pretty devoted to their mother.”
“Uh-huh.”
“What do they do?”
“For work you mean?”
Frank nodded.
“Little a this, little a that. They mostly help Crissie run her businesses.”
“Did she have other kids?”
“Just the twins. Didn’t want no more after that.”
“What happened to their father?”
“Eldridge?” Helms wagged his head again. “He got sent up to ‘Dad. Got himself shanked in there. Aryan Nation done it, what I heard. Made a circle around him to keep the guards out long enough for him to bleed to death.”
“Crissie”—the name felt strange in Frank’s mouth—“she musta been pretty upset.”
“Nah, she’d left him by then. Had no more use for that snake.”
“She pretty mad at him?”
Helms grinned at her.
“Leave it to say I’m glad I wasn’t Eldridge.”
“Let me guess. He left her bank too?”
“No, he was different from the other ones. He didn’t have much to start with. Worked the streets some, drove an old Lincoln, but he didn’t have much to leave behind.”
“She married him for love?”
“Much as that woman can love, yes, I believe so.”
“So why’d she boot him?”
Helms chuckled again.
“You gotta understand, Eldridge was a player. Crissie couldn’t keep that boy chained to her bed too long, see?”
Now it was Frank’s turn to shake her head.
“What’d he get busted on?”
“Oh, he wasn’t no good, old El. Got caught with five pounds of coke in his trunk. Uncut. Sent him up for dealing the stuff.”
Satisfied with what she already had, Frank gambled, “And it was probably Crissie’s all along.”
“I ain’t sayin’.” Helms shrugged.
“Don’t have to. Your sister-in-law’s record’s longer ‘an your arm. What about that fortune-telling stuff she does? How long she been doin’ that?”
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“Oh, a long time. Crissie been doing that since we was kids. Always good at. She has her mama’s talent. It runs in the Green women’s blood, you know.”
“She read the tea leaves for you?” Frank joked.
“She definitely has a gift for prophecy,” Wardell mused. “She can see things before they happen. Between you and me,” he confided, “that business makes me nervous. Jessie does it too, some, and I tell you, I don’t like it. Makes me nervous.”
“What about that church of hers? Do you ever go?”
“Lord, no,” he chuckled. “I ain’t much of a religious man and even if I was I don’t think I’d be going to that church. Uh-uh.”
“Why’s that?”
“Not my cup of tea, Lieutenant.”
“Does your wife go?”
“Not her cup, neither,” he sniffed.
“What exactly goes on there?”
Wardell’s head swung from side to side.
“I do not want to know,” he emphasized again. “But I don’t think it’s anything good.”
“Why do you say that? I mean, if you’ve never been?”
“I hear things. They ain’t good things.”
Frank could sense Helms entrenching himself so she fed him easier questions.
“Like devil worship? That kinda thing.”
“On a level with that.”
“That’s pretty harmless, isn’t it?”
The man looked at Frank as if gauging her sanity. Maybe he deemed it questionable because he just sucked at his beer.
“Well, isn’t it? I mean, if they’re just in there mumbling about the devil and lighting black candles where’s the harm in that?”
Wardell remained fixated on his can.
Frank bent her head closer to his.
“That’s all she’s doing, isn’t she?”
“You know, I ain’t never been. I really can’t say.”
“But you hear stuff.”
“It’s talk. That’s all.”
“But you believe it.”
“Look. Let’s just say my sister-in-law has certain … talents. Things happen to her that don’t happen to ordinary folks.”
“Give me an example.”
“Just… things,” he shrugged.
“Well like what?” Frank grinned good-naturedly. “Is she sacrificing virgins on an altar?”
