by Lee Lynch
“Darlings, I am sick.” He told them about his diagnosis. Neither let on that they already knew. “So you can stop your carping.”
“Don’t be peeved at me for telling you the truth, Rigo. Your spirit is trying to open your eyes.”
“To show me I’ve always loved the wrong men for the wrong reasons, including my father?”
Rigo looked furious enough to take their heads off. He said, “Is there ever a wrong reason to love?” He slammed the table flat-handed and stood. Zefer barked the whole time Rigo strode to the front door. Rigo flung it open and left.
They looked at each other.
“Redheads.”
“No,” Berry said, rising and running after him. “He’s a destroyed little boy with no idea how to use his precious life except to throw it away. We better see if we can stop him from doing anything dumb.”
“Like what?” asked Jaudon.
“Like hurt himself.”
“Not Rigo. He enjoys his life too much. He has plans.”
“People under extreme stress aren’t the same as their usual selves.”
They called Zefer and jumped into the van. Rigo’s car squealed onto Eulalia Road.
The van’s engine cranked and ground, cranked and ground.
Jaudon got out and kick started Zoom. That boy was not going to mess himself up if she had anything to do with it. She sped around an idling truck parked just south of Pineapple Trail and turned onto Route 60 two vehicles behind Rigo, who for once wasn’t driving like he was in a race with time. She smiled as she realized Rigo had to be careful: his father was no longer paying his speeding tickets.
By the time they hit Tampa she saw Berry behind her. The van must have come to its senses and decided to help. Berry passed her.
Rigo led them to the harbor. He pulled into a parking lot, got out, and went to sit on a piling above the docks. Pleasure boats came and went. Jaudon turned off her engine and glided to the van in silence. She lifted Zoom into the van and joined Berry.
“It was the fuse that’s always blowing,” Berry whispered into Jaudon’s good ear. “Thanks for putting new ones in the glove box. It was also my fuse blowing. It set Rigo off.”
“You spoke true, Berry.”
They waited and watched. Berry reached over and stopped Jaudon from rubbing the space above her upper lip, a quirk that, she assumed, grew out of her self-consciousness.
“His parents have a stormy marriage,” Berry said in a soft voice.
“I know. Do you think that’s that why he can’t settle down?”
“He’s young, Jaudon.”
“We’re as young as he is.”
Berry reached for her hand. “Some people need a lot of Laris.”
Jaudon hung her head, lips compressed till they hurt.
“He told me once he didn’t want to live like his mother and father,” Berry said. “He may be running less from Jimmy Neal than from settling down.”
After almost an hour, Rigo got in his car. He was oblivious to them as they followed his Camaro to the Skyway Bridge.
“Uh-oh,” said Jaudon. She realized she was rubbing the stone on her pinky ring to protect Rigo. “Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face. He’d punish his father by killing himself?”
Rigo pulled over before the bridge and sat again, engine running.
“Should we call the police?” Jaudon asked.
Berry’s silence was always a sign of her tension. “Not yet—that might rattle him more. It would be best if he works this out himself. Meanwhile, we’re on empty.”
They crossed the highway against traffic and stopped at the nearest gas station. Jaudon watched Rigo’s car and willed the pump to ding faster as it raced through the gallons.
Rigo drove onto the bridge. His brake lights came on as he reached the highest point.
“Berry,” she said and stopped the pump before hitting the ten dollars she’d prepaid. She ran to her seat. “Go! Go!” she said.
Berry’s heart beat hard, but she didn’t start the van. Zefer panted, her head between their seats. Jaudon strained to see Rigo’s car.
His brake lights cut off and Rigo drove forward, increased his speed, and made a U-turn at the other side of the bridge. If he saw their van as he passed the gas station, he didn’t acknowledge them. Berry pulled onto the road.
“Is he going to do it somewhere else? We’ll never catch up to him—he’s upped his speed,” said Jaudon, leaning forward to will the van faster.
“Did he figure out a better place than this bridge?”
“How can you be so calm, Berry? I’m white-knuckling this thing.”
A sense of peace came over her. “I think he’s going to be okay.”
When they cruised by Rigo’s apartment, his car was parked outside.
“Aw, jiminy, Berry, he’s packing to leave.”
“I’d rather have faith Rigo discovered where he belongs and went on home.”
Chapter Forty-one
Berry knew no one who believed in what she believed. Jaudon came closest, but wasn’t big-hearted toward people, the way Berry tried to be, and she didn’t blame Jaudon after she’d been treated like a freak of nature all her life. Jaudon shared Berry’s love of animals and her complete respect for the land and for living things—other than fish. It was wrong to hunt them for sport. She imagined the panic and pain that must come with the hook, the human handling, the time spent out of water before Jaudon let them go. Berry announced last weekend she wasn’t going in the boat anymore if Jaudon took her bait and tackle. In any case, Jaudon found little time for it, nor did she seem to miss it.
At age twenty-four Berry doubted she was any further advanced spiritually than she had been at eighteen or twelve. She’d stopped using the term Great Spirit for a while because she couldn’t get used to it—she started to use it again because it came closest to what she understood. If you couldn’t connect with your faith because of its name, what good was it? She was more convinced than ever that naming, making religious laws, envisioning faith as a Santa Claus figure in the sky, were incompatible with spirituality. Organized religion, to her, was a lazy way of celebrating life, but it seemed the concept of a Great Spirit—which could be nothing more than her own will to honor and caretake all of creation—was passed to her through her ancestors.
Whatever energy governed the world didn’t need a name. Berry did though. It was human nature to name the unknown, to give it a recognizable shape. How many years would she struggle with this?
Other people believed without question; they didn’t have to reinvent the wheel. She shrank from religions that were all about earthly judgment; it wasn’t up to her to judge. She chaffed at prim Protestantism; those denominations didn’t seem to have room for people who got out of line or had their own ideas of deity and prayer. She didn’t want to be Catholic, with their real estate and expensive pomp that she would turn into bread and housing for the whole world. Judaism was out for her because the men thanked their God that they were not women. Muslim women had to cover up because men didn’t control their lusts. Buddhism was appealing for its emphasis on serenity and oneness, yet throughout history, women were treated as inferiors in most sects. For all the religious study she did in college, she continued to fit nowhere.
Cullie told them not to let the chaos of the world keep them awake, but what about the chaos of the soul? Just that morning, she’d gone to her knees before an azalea bush so big and abundant with yellow blossoms she wanted to melt into it and stay in that heaven forever. There was chaos, but there was also this ecstasy of faith she could not, would not, deny.
Washing dishes, Berry struggled aloud to explain her quandary to Jaudon. “I don’t accept that there’s nothing. I want so bad for there to be something…”
Jaudon took Berry in her arms. “You’re a dreamer, Berry. Could be it’s not up to a person when she can do this spiritual thing right. Could be the way to get there is to put one foot in front of the other.” A few minutes later Jau
don got a call from one of the Beverage Bays and took off on her cycle to solve a problem.
She thought of Jaudon’s words about putting one foot in front of the other as she led an old woman to an examining room.
“We haven’t seen you in a couple of years,” she told Mrs. Fossler.
Mrs. Fossler smiled. She had a few teeth left. “Had no reason to. I’m strong as an ox and fit as a fiddle.” She wheezed at her joke.
“No health problems?”
Mrs. Fossler tapped her ear. “My hearing.”
“Is that why you came in today?”
Lizzetta Fossler was eighty-nine. Looking at her and her health history, she could be as young as seventy-five.
“I can’t lift this arm, child.”
“Did you fall on it?”
“Never.”
“Lift a heavy object?”
“Can’t help but do that.” She wheezed again. “’Course, anymore, I can’t lift a finger.”
“You’re right-handed?”
“I was.”
“May I examine your upper arm?”
“Be my guest. It’s not doing me any good.”
There was a well-defined lump there. She noted it on the chart and helped her change into a gown.
“No one came with you today?”
“My great-grandson dropped me off. I gave him fifty cents to go snare himself a crumb to eat while he waits. He’ll buy smokes, the sassy rascal.”
The doctor called Berry in later to start a referral for a biopsy of the growth. By the time they were done the great-grandson was in the waiting room, smoking. He leapt up to help his grandmother, first squeezing the glowing tobacco into an ashtray and depositing the stub into his shirt pocket.
“Doc says maybe cancer,” Mrs. Fossler shouted to the boy. He looked at Berry with obvious alarm in his eyes.
“Makes me no never mind,” said his great-grandmother with a chuckle. “Thank you, Lord. I will at last join you in your heavenly home. Come on, Junior. If it comes back cancer, I have things to take care of before I go.”
How did anyone accept the possibility of cancer or death with such grace and humor? It was hard enough to do that in everyday life.
She wanted to find a way to be like Mrs. Fossler.
No, she thought, disgusted with herself. Who was she, Berry Garland, to think she could know where she fit in this vast universe? Why did she think she was so important that she should be privy to what others conjectured, but no human knew for sure?
Jaudon, so practical, knew her dreamer: if it took forever, she needed to put one foot in front of the other till she got where she was supposed to go.
Chapter Forty-two
“Halloween is in the air,” Berry said as they went to their vehicles before work. “Even with Lari gone, this land is full of strange stories.”
Jaudon nodded. She was looking at their neglected tree house. She needed to trim the branches slapping and scratching at it.
Berry came to her side and held her hand. “It’s only supposed to gust up to twenty-one mph here today, but Eloise may hit the Panhandle hard.”
Jaudon looked at the sky. “We’ve been lucky this year. Eloise may not be the last we see of hurricane season. I hope the tree house can hang on till I get up there with hammer and nails.”
The paint was faded and mossy, the roof full of fallen fronds and branches. A large fern was growing up there. Jaudon was saddened by the sight of her childhood refuge and promised herself once again that she’d clean it, shore it up, and paint it.
The best thing to come of that tree house was Berry. She loved the delicate hand in hers, a bit roughened by gardening and repairs and constant washing at the clinic. What was she without Berry? A hoarse-voiced, mannish Southern Cracker working at a mom and pop business her Momma built up and now was running into the ground. She gave up being mad about it. As long as Berry stuck with her, none of that mattered.
Berry looked at Jaudon, not the tree house. To her, Jaudon’s mix of feminine and masculine created a handsome androgyny. She found the sunshine on Jaudon’s short light hair irresistible. She wanted to touch the shine of her all the time. Jaudon’s wiry muscles sent a flush through her whole body. The way Jaudon stood with her legs wide, firmly planted, her insolent walk, her commanding gestures—every move a challenge to detractors—she could not love her more.
As for her own weaknesses, she shucked them off whenever she was strong enough. The Great Spirit caught them and incinerated them to ashes.
They parted for the day, Berry babying the van, Jaudon inseparable from her noisy bike.
Pops stopped to see her at the store during the slow time of the afternoon. He paced and shook Eloise’s fringe of rain off his trucker’s cap while Jaudon waited on a customer.
“What’s got you so fidgety, Pops?” He was making her nervous.
Momma insisted that Pops wear suits and ties, but today he was in his work clothes, red-faced, disheveled and scrawny—when had he lost all that weight? What hair he had left was unwashed and uncombed. From the expression on his face, she expected him to tell her Momma said she was fired or had to give up their homestead.
His speech was way too loud and distinct since her ear injury, like he was spitting words. “It’s your Momma, Jaudon. She’s been so forgetful of late and walking and talking like a drunk woman. She gave in and let me take her to the doctor’s. He gave us her test results when we saw him today.”
Somebody might have thrown a bucket of ice water at her middle, Jaudon went so cold. “Did she have a heart attack or something?”
“Not exactly. He called it post-stroke dementia which, as near as I can tell, means she’s been having small strokes all along, so small I didn’t know. Add them up and they wiped out parts of her good, solid brain.”
“She’s lost her marbles?”
“She’ll look up from her desk, stare at me, at the room, and tell me she wants to go to her office. Daughter, she does this when she’s already in her office. She’s taken to calling me Daddy, like she did her father. Or she’ll be driving the Cadillac and we’ll be way the heck down Turkey Creek Road, she’ll turn east onto 60 and drive us halfway to Mulberry. I’ll ask where she’s going and she’ll try and cover by saying she’s looking for more places to put stores. Or she’ll arrange for a drop ship of women’s fancy blouses to all the Bays when we don’t sell clothes, meaning to order one for herself.”
Was it that night—the night she touched Lari and the cereal boxes fell on Momma’s head? Did her one lapse cause this too? She didn’t know whether to say anything—Pops might not know about that part of the incident and Momma had acted unhurt. She dismissed the thought for the moment.
She was unnerved because of Momma’s condition, but more so because it was plain that Pops was fear struck. She’d always thought she inherited his courage; to see it fail shook her up. She’d never before seen her father scared of anything but Momma.
“Did you tell Bat yet?”
“I made a family emergency call to the Army. When Bat called, I told him he needs to ask for a discharge, because Momma wants him to come home and take over the business.”
Jaudon looked away at this news.
“I know, Daughter. If your momma was a beach, she wouldn’t appreciate the sand.” His laugh wasn’t as hearty as normal.
“Why, Pops? Why is Momma so flinty toward me?”
Pops folded his arms.
“No, Pops. Don’t stand there and take her side. I need to know. Has she always had a little bit of dementia? Does that make her so cold?”
“I’m thinking, Daughter. Give me a minute.”
She opened a carton of cigarettes for shelving while he thought. Rain blew in through the exit door. She’d have Jimmy Neal keep that mopped up when he came in. The cigarettes were half put away when Pops spoke.
“Growing up, your momma had nothing. The first Batsons to settle the Florida frontier were cowmen, and never rose higher than that. The Vicker boys built
the house and hung on to their patch of land. Momma should have been born a Vicker, with her drive. How ambition chose her I don’t know, because the rest of the Batsons worked just enough to insure they had hooch and fishing poles.
“Momma wasn’t born to be lazy and self-indulgent. She hated going without. She hated being a poor nobody Cracker who was looked down on by everyone in Rainbow Gap including those with dark skins. It galled her. She didn’t have good looks or talent, but she did have determination. You got that from her.
“I was sideswiped by her iron will first hand. She decided to marry a Vicker. We weren’t rich, but we had property and held our heads high as a hard-working clan. I was her age and Momma set her sights on me. I never had a chance.” He smiled.
There was so much she wanted to ask. Did Momma make him happy? Why did he let himself fall into her net? Why was Momma so disappointed in her and Bat?
“She made these stores from nothing, Daughter. My trucking jobs just about kept us in milk and bread, but your momma squeezed every dime till it bled pennies, then used those pennies to make another dime. It took all she had to rise this high and I’m afraid the effort took her mind.”
He lifted his arms as if in surrender to Momma’s voracious will and to a world so hard it ate up the frail creatures that brooked it. “There was nothing left for love, Jaudon. You have to understand that she showed she cared for you and your brother with her accomplishments, by what she’s given you.”
“It’s kind of sad, isn’t it, Pops?”
He nodded. “She gave you all she had. Meanwhile, Bat and I don’t have your head for business. With him staying and staying in the service, I’d sell the whole lot of Bays, get by on interest income, and take care of Momma, but you live for these stores.”
“Sorry to say, Pops, Bat’s hopeless. He doesn’t want what Momma can give him. He loves being in the service. It’s Momma, without the out-of-nowhere, unpredictable disapproval. They make his decisions for him. They pay him and feed him and tell him what to wear. I love my brother and I might hire him part-time, or as a driver, because he’s my brother, but I wouldn’t let him manage one Bay.”
