Bone Valley

by Claire Matturro

  “Yeah. Got one Dave and me bought last time we went to Atlanta. You can just about buy anything there these days. Name’s Frank Straight on mine. His is Earnest Straight.”

  Again, I sighed. Yeah, security at the airport would be touch and go. At least he wasn’t conspicuously Middle Eastern, so maybe they’d let him on a plane.

  Over the phone, I heard slamming noises in the background, and then a braying noise, followed in short order by a Willie Nelson song about lost love. “Are you letting him bring the donkey in the house?” I asked.

  “Can’t stop him. It’s not near as messy as you’d think. And another thing, he plays that same damn song over and over again. I mean, I like Willie, but—”

  “Delvon, listen to me. You need to get to Atlanta, get on a plane, and come here as quick as you can. There’s a woman here who needs your help.”

  “Okay, why didn’t you jes’ say so? Takes about two hours to get to the airport from here. I’ll get the first plane out I can get.”

  “You got a credit card?”

  “Got about thirty of them.”

  “Thirty?”

  “Yeah. All in different names. Case I need to flee the country.”

  “Any in the name of Frank Straight?”

  “One.”

  “Good. Be sure to use that one to buy the ticket. You’ll need a picture ID to get through security. Try to look”—what? normal would be beyond the ability of a six-foot, two-inch man with sixteen inches of red hair—“like, you know, you’re not going to hijack the plane. Call me from the airport when you get to Tampa.”

  We said our good-byes, and I put up my cell and asked Lenora, “What can I do?”

  “Help me into the kitchen, would you?”

  Together we stood up, she staggered a bit and I held on to her, and then she made little dry-heave noises, but pulled herself together and we struggled up the steps, across the porch, rested in the doorway, and then eased into the kitchen, where she sat down.

  “Chemo,” she said, and that effort seemed to exhaust her.

  “You got any ginger ale? I’ll fix you a glass.”

  “Could you roll me a joint instead?”

  “Yes.”

  “Freezer,” she whispered.

  Delvon would have been proud of the speed at which I found the pot, rolled a joint, and lit it for her. I had to hold the joint for her at first, but then, as it soothed her, she took it and finished it.

  “Thank you,” she said. “It stops the throwing up better than any drugs they’ve given me.”

  “Let me go feed the birds. You just rest.”

  “I will be fine,” she said.

  “Sure. I know you will, but I’ve got the time to help out today.” A bit of a whopper, as I had a full day of worry and agitation planned, but I wasn’t about to leave her alone with all that raucous bird-hunger noise. I stood up and moved into the racket, grabbing the puppy food blend and a bowl of water.

  As I was stuffing food into the beaks of baby birds, I calculated how long it would take Delvon to get here, and whether I should ask Lenora today what she could tell me about Angus and Miguel, or wait until she was stronger. Maybe Miguel was the one who told her about Angus being blown up? But how would he get out here without his truck? And, if he’d come to see Lenora, how could he possibly have left her here, sick and alone?

  Such questions distracted me from the ick factor as I fed the baby birds. But then I stopped in front of the baby blue jay and contemplated skipping it since the same bird had previously bitten me. While studying on that, I heard a car drive up, and peeked out the window. Damn, a sheriff ’s department vehicle.

  I grabbed the jay out of its cage for my cover story.

  Officer Detective First Class Josey Something Farmer came right up the steps and into the room, and took a long, hard look at me, hard enough I must have squeezed the baby jay, because it squawked something terrible and then pecked repetitively at my hand.

  “Interesting,” Josey said.

  “What? Blue jays?”

  “You.”

  “Me?” I smiled at Josey. “I’m just a volunteer, feeding the baby birds.” I all but chirped myself.

  “You. Just popping up at the phosphate meeting. Now here. What with M. David having your bio in his pocket when he died, and Ang…er, is Lenora here?”

  “Kitchen.” Then I thought about the pot, the papers, and the roach, all on the kitchen table. “But she’s pretty tired. You wait here, right here, and I’ll go check on her.” Trying to block Josey, I ran into the kitchen, still clutching the pecking little bird monster, but Josey followed right behind me.

  Still hoping to block the pot from Josey’s vision, I stood between her and Lenora. “Lenora, I’d like for you to meet Officer Detective Josey, er…Farmer and—”

  Josey pushed past me in half a heartbeat, glanced at the marijuana roach, and said, “I’m homicide, not vice.” She looked right at me. “And Lenora and I have met. I brought her some wounded goats once and she nursed them.”

  Josey turned away from me and put her hand on Lenora’s back. “How are you?”

  “Fine. I will be fine. Lilly is helping me feed the birds.”

  “Why don’t you let me take you home?” Josey asked.

  “Tell me what to do,” I said, “about the others, I mean the animals. I’ll feed ’em, or whatever, and you can go home, rest.”

  “Thank you. But by the time I explained it, I could have done it. I’m feeling better.” Lenora slid back her chair and made a motion like she was going to get up. Then she saw the jay in my hand. “Strong little fellow. Didn’t have a feather on him when we got him, he was so young. He’s almost a brancher now, past infancy. Why don’t you take him home with you?”

  Why on earth would I want to do that? I thought, but held my tongue.

  “Take some of the puppy food mix, but you’ll need to wean him off the wet chow pretty soon. Right now, you’ll need to feed him four or five times a day—you can’t be leaving him alone and unfed all day. You’re lucky; when they are real little, you have to feed them every twenty minutes during the day, but nature lets the mother birds rest at night. He’s ready for seeds and bugs now.”

  Josey reached over to help Lenora while I contemplated mothering an ill-tempered blue jay.

  “He’s pretty close to being ready to leave the nest. You need to get him ready for that. Hang his cage near a window, or on a porch,” Lenora said. “Get him used to your backyard. Then in a week or so, move the cage outside. Feed him only seeds and bugs. When he starts flying around in the cage, leave the door open. When he’s ready, he’ll go. But keep putting food in the cage until he stops coming back. You have to keep feeding them until they learn to get it themselves.”

  I’d pretty much stopped absorbing the information at the feed-him-bugs part. How, exactly, was I to get said bugs?

  While I was still pondering the bug-food issue, I heard the peep of my cell phone from inside my purse on the table. The irate jay continued to squawk and peck in my other hand as I answered.

  “Midnight, coming into Tampa,” Delvon said. “Delta.”

  “Put your hair in a ponytail, and wear normal clothes,” I said, and glanced at Josey. “No contraband, you hear?”

  “Praise the Lord,” he said, and the line went dead.

  “I’ll go put him back in his cage and finish feeding the rest of them,” I said, hoping that when I was done with that, Josey would have left and I could ask Lenora about Miguel. But shoving mush down tiny throats wasn’t something I could hurry too much, not unless I wanted a casualty rate, and it was pushing late afternoon when I got done and went back into the kitchen.

  Of course, Josey was still there. That ruled out any questions about Miguel because I didn’t want to redline my connection to the man who owned the boat that blew up, killing Angus, in light of the fact that I had lied to Josey, an Official Person, about my presence on the dock.

  Besides that, the two of them had their heads
bent together and they weren’t paying me any attention. I heard Josey say, “Angus,” and saw Lenora nodding. Leaving seemed to be a good thing for me to do, and I eased out silently.

  But not silently enough.

  “Thank you, Lilly. And don’t forget to take the juvenile jay,” Lenora said.

  On the way out, I snatched up the cage and glared at my new charge. He screamed so insanely on the car ride home, I named him Rasputin.

  By ten-thirty that night, having fulfilled my evening agenda of fretting, I threw myself behind the steering wheel of my ancient Honda and headed north, toward the Tampa airport. The traffic was heavy, but a nice break from listening to Rasputin share his shrilly critical view of his new home.

  Naturally, Delvon didn’t get off the Atlanta Delta flight at midnight.

  I went to the official Delta counter where a frazzled young woman took a superior tone with me, but finally agreed that a Frank Straight was booked as a passenger on the flight, but had not boarded the plane.

  No, he wasn’t booked on any other flights according to her computer, she said, after I had asked. Type, type, type on her little Delta computer, then she looked up at me with an even less friendly look. “What exactly is your connection to Frank Straight?” she asked.

  Suddenly I decided to leave the counter, and did so without answering.

  Once safely out of sight of the Delta counter, I punched in the north Georgia apple farm number on my cell and let it ring until even the donkey must have been beside herself from the noise.

  Frigging great.

  A mean, bad man had drowned; an angry, good man had exploded; a tenderhearted, sick woman had too many hungry mouths to feed; I had custody of an irate juvenile jay; and now my brother was missing.

  Chapter 10

  Competing law clerks Jack Russell and Whitney Houston were perched in Bonita’s cubbyhole, waiting to pounce on me with tales of constitutional woes in the wayward world of fruit libel.

  Barely awake, I was not ready for dialogue, constitutional or otherwise. What with the pointless trip to the Tampa airport that returned me home at two in the morning and Rasputin the Jay’s insistent and piercing early-morning call for breakfast, sleep wasn’t something I had enjoyed.

  Then, during my breakfast, I had listened to the morning news and heard a quick report about an incident at the Atlanta airport involving an apparent religious zealot who had refused to take his shoes off and physically resisted the security police’s suggestion of a further body search. The reporter quoted unnamed sources as saying the man had exclaimed loudly that he expected to stand naked before his maker on Judgment Day, but damned if he was doing it in the Atlanta airport for some glorified SS sorts, and then he had run, triggering a manhunt, a bomb scare, and a security-alert shutdown. All flights were delayed for hours. The man escaped and information regarding his identify was pending, the reporter said, before moving on to other topics.

  Well, I guessed that Frank Straight driver’s license was useless now.

  Finally fully dressed, hair-fluffed and made up, off to work I had gone, raucous jay and all. I mean, okay, Lenora had been clear on the feeding schedule. I couldn’t just leave it at home to starve all day.

  Thus, my initial not-happy mood upon waking up from the sleep I hadn’t had enough of had substantially deteriorated by the time I got to the law office and Jack and Whitney pointed at me with their bright, young faces.

  Bonita immediately rose, as if to formalize her statement. “I am very sorry about Angus John.”

  “Thank you. We can talk about it later,” I said, not wanting to discuss it in front of the two law clerks. Bonita sat back down, and before I could say anything else, Terrier Clerk leaped.

  “We’ve worked all weekend, and we’ve got lots of law to tell you about,” he said. At first I thought he was literally jumping up and down, but when I looked at his feet, they stayed on the ground.

  “Yes, I’ve got some significant law to discuss with you,” Whitney said, still looking too elegant for normal society.

  “Well, good morning, er—” While I struggled with the name-remembering part of my brain, Rasputin squawked dementedly and we all turned to stare at the jay.

  “New pet?” Bonita asked.

  “Long story,” I said. I held the birdcage up and looked at the three of them, mentally gauging which one would be the easiest to badger into feeding Rasputin on an hourly schedule.

  “Jack, you look like a bird lover. How would you like to take over caring for Rasputin?”

  “Er, er…hum, George, I’m George. Eh, no, thank you. On the bird. See, I’m…allergic.”

  Allergic? To birds? Come on, I thought, he was going to need to master the quick excuse better than that to succeed in the world of tort litigation. Then I leaned back a moment and waited, wondering how long it would take before he fully comprehended that I was a partner and he was a law clerk, and that if he ever wanted to be anything more at Smith, O’Leary, and Stanley than a lowly law clerk, he had to do whatever I, the partner, asked him to do.

  Rachel caught on pretty darn quick. Before George spoke again, she reached out and took the cage from me. “I like birds,” she said, though her face didn’t beam with glee. “I’m not allergic to anything. I’ll take care of him.”

  George finished processing his full situation and reached for the cage. “No, I…I’ll do it. I can wear…gloves…or something.”

  For a moment, the two of them jerked the birdcage back and forth between them, in a brewing tug-of-war. Then Bonita, as the mother of five headstrong children and therefore, no doubt, well versed in settling sibling rivalries, stood up and reached for the cage. “Let me, please.” She sounded so sweet. “My daughter, Carmen, loves birds, and she needs a science project. This would be perfect.”

  George and Rachel both let go of the cage.

  Crisis solved. Lord, I loved Bonita.

  After some instructions on the care and feeding of Rasputin, I slipped into my office, with the eager George and the elegant Rachel in tow, all ready to educate me, no doubt, on the veggie-libel statute and how I could save my clients—though one was dead and the other missing—from the dreaded orange-defamation suit filed against them.

  “So, shoot,” I said. “What’d you find?”

  “You know, at least twelve other states besides Florida have such veggie libel laws. They came about after the alar apple scare and where, when CBS exposed the dangers of alar, the apple industry lost a great deal of money, so they sued CBS for telling people about the dangers of pesticides on the apples, but lost the suit,” George said.

  Well, if I were writing a term paper, that might be helpful.

  “Thank you. Put all that in your memo. Rachel?”

  “The constitutional issues involved in these veggie libel statutes are complex,” Rachel said. “First, no court has actually ruled upon whether these veggie libel laws are an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment’s rights to freedom of speech. But a good many law professors have written articles which argue that these statutes are unconstitutional.”

  Yeah, okay, that and three bucks would buy me a cup of Starbucks, I thought.

  “Most of these so-called veggie libel statutes punish clearly protected First Amendment expression—that is, speech on a matter of public interest, in this case the safety of our food. And the statutes make it far easier for the plaintiff to win against a food-safety advocate.”

  “Uh-huh,” I added to show I was still listening.

  “Certainly such laws lend themselves to abusive litigation practices,” Rachel said.

  Oh, yeah, like lawyers need help on that score.

  “So, what happens, basically, is that these veggie libel laws create a whole new tort, hand-designed to help big agribusiness win. It’s almost ludicrous. These laws endanger our safe food supply by shutting up people who would tell us about pesticides, bovine growth hormones, Frankenstein foods, and unsafe levels of who-knows-what.”

  When Rach
el stopped to inhale, I sensed a kindred spirit. “Good,” I said, and nodded in what I hoped was a judicious manner.

  Simultaneous with a light knock on my door, Bonita stepped into my office.

  “Don’t forget you’ve got to talk with Ms. McDemis, the insurance adjuster in Jimmie Rogers’s case,” Bonita said.

  Ah, yes, Jimmie’s case, the parrot-drops-a-lizard-in-a-bikini-top car-wreck case, the stupidest lawsuit of my career thus far. Ah, yes, the glorious life of a busy lawyer, I thought, and nodded at Bonita.

  “Okay, write it all up in a memo for me,” I said, after turning back to Rachel. “And let me call this insurance adjuster on another case.”

  After they shut the door behind them, I cradled my phone for a moment, then mentally summoned up dear Ms. McDemis’s phone number, dialed it, waded through the usual phone-recorded crap nonsense stuff before actually getting the woman, who was inappropriately nicknamed Sunny. Hello and hello, and all that.

  “That stupid cracker has only the minimum auto insurance required by Florida law,” Sunny said, setting a negative tone.

  “Pretty good for an unemployed man driving a clunker,” I said, thinking the fact that Jimmie bothered with any car insurance was a point in his favor.

  “If you think this insurance company is going to waste its resources defending him in that stupid lawsuit, you need to go back to law school.”

  Blah blah blah, the usual just-because-we-took-your-premiums-doesn’t-mean-we’re-going-to-pay-anything insurance company guff.

  After Sunny shut up, I asked her to hire a private detective for video surveillance on the plaintiff, as I was sure he was faking injuries from the minor rear-ender.

  Reluctantly, I called the green attorney, Jason Quartermire, the young man representing the man, the plaintiff, the stupid faker, who was suing Jimmie. Without the usual lawyer protestations and affectations, Jason agreed to see me that morning. Amazed that he didn’t yet know the game of playing hard to get to show how busy he was, I gathered my mental resources so that I might convince him to take the $5,000 on behalf of his client, the faker plaintiff, and go home. Then I could return in earnest to worrying about when, or if, Miguel, my client on the lam, and my errant brother, Delvon the religious terrorist who had shut down the Atlanta airport, would show up.