Chasing Fireflies

by Charles Martin

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, last week, the day you were put in jail, he got a call from her. Two hours later he boarded a plane, flew out there, and brought her back.”

  “From Los Angeles?”

  She nodded.

  I looked up at the underside of my shower and listened as soapy shower water rushed through the exposed PVC drainpipe that dropped out of the floor and then fell alongside one of the timber supports inside the barn.

  “Don’t forget.” She began walking back to the kitchen. “Silver screen or not . . . that’s just a little girl up there. Nine years doesn’t change that.” She reached the back porch steps and added, “Oh . . . and Red called you a few minutes ago. Wants you to call him this afternoon.”

  The shower water cut off, and I heard the door squeak. I cranked Vicky, slid on my Costa Del Mars, and waited.

  Tommye had pulled her hair back and put on a T-shirt, baggy cargo shorts, and flip-flops—something we started wearing as kids. We seldom wore shoes, and when we did, they were something we could slip on and off with relative ease.

  Thanks to Unc’s Daddy Ellsworth, the road system inside the Zuta was better than that of some cities, but given the number of logging trucks hauling out timber the last year or so, the roads were in pretty bad shape. It hadn’t rained much lately, so the dust was up and the gumbo down. We took it slow and eased through or around the bigger holes. Vicky was so at home on the Zuta that I almost let go of the wheel and let her drive it alone.

  We drove around the pasture and up to the canal. The canal was Ellsworth’s coup de grâce—the main drainage that pulled the plug on the clogged Buffalo. The water level in the canal rose and fell with the tide, and at thirty feet wide and over ten feet deep it was one of the primary reasons the Zuta was so valuable. We stopped on top of the concrete bridge that crossed the canal and watched the water.

  Tommye leaned out the door of the Land Cruiser and watched the water pass beneath. Finally she sat back and shook her head. She stared up at the tall trees and then out over the gaping clear-cuts that were encroaching closer to the magnificent pines. “Jack’s sure cutting a lot of timber out of here.”

  The sight of it disgusted me. “I’m all for cutting, but when you don’t plant behind you, you’re just . . . taking without giving back.”

  She nodded, her face expressionless. “Jack’s good at that.”

  Sometime in high school, Tommye had begun referring to her father as “Jack.” Then and now, it struck me as odd—like a piano out of tune.

  “How’s the appeal going?”

  “Pockets filed it with the court. We’re asking for a ‘statutory way of necessity,’ but from a legal standpoint—” I shook my head. “Well, if we were on death row, we’d be down to the twelfth hour without a governor willing to sign a stay or pardon.”

  “That bad?”

  “Jack did his homework.”

  “Nobody ever said he was stupid.”

  “He know you’re on this side of the Mississippi?”

  She shook her head, lost in thoughts that stretched out across the brackish water.

  On the bank below, fiddler crabs scurried from mud hole to mud hole. At the water’s edge, a raccoon stood on its hind legs washing an oyster shell. We watched his hands move at lightning speed as he turned the shell over and over in the water.

  “He washes that thing any more, and I’m liable to eat it myself.”

  She laughed, leaned back, propped her feet up on the dash, and we eased off the bridge. We drove through some of the older sections of timber, then rounded a corner and turned onto Gibson Island. I pulled down to the launch, unloaded the canoe, and we pushed off. She wanted to paddle, but I told her to sit back and relax, which she did with little argument. The canoe slid across the top of the water as we wove among towering cypress trees.

  She looked up. “Wonder when he’ll get to these.”

  “He’s already started.”

  She looked at me. “He’s cutting the Buffalo?”

  I nodded.

  “Where?”

  “South. Won’t be long before we’ll be paddling in one huge golf course lake.”

  “You seen the plans?”

  I nodded and watched several wood ducks launch themselves like helicopters, reach the treetops, then disappear like Harrier jets. “Last county hearing I attended, he showed plans for three golf courses, two different gated communities, a landing strip big enough to handle a Gulfstream, a shopping center, and a K-12 school.”

  She laughed and placed both hands behind her on the rails of the canoe, soaking in the sun that had broken through the trees. After a few minutes she shook her head. “How much is enough?”

  I didn’t answer. We reached the landing, and I beached the canoe and helped her out. She hooked her arm inside mine and leaned on me as we walked on a quiet carpet of pine straw and sand. We walked an old path, one beat down over time, where the tender bamboo shoots reached up and brushed our thighs—it was the earth’s welcoming chorus. They were glad to see her too.

  Fifteen minutes later we reached our destination.

  The Sanctuary, a 250-acre virgin and uncut island of timber, sat smack in the center of the Zuta, surrounded on all sides by the Buffalo Swamp. On topographic maps it’s called DuBignon Hammock, named after the guy who sold Jekyll Island to the First Namers. It’s accessible only by canoe and spirals with towering virgin timber. Countless sprawling live oaks stretch out across the ground like giant octopus arms. Some of their limbs, bigger around than a man’s waist, bow down to the ground, touch, then arch back up. Palm trees shoot up at random. Bamboo shoots grow two and three feet tall, clipped clean at the tops by the deer that feed there.

  At the northern tip, planted in a neatly-orchestrated perimeter, grow trees which, when viewed from the air, look like a giant European cathedral. Ellsworth had designed and planted them some seventy years ago. During the war, he and his company lived for several months in a cathedral. The Germans had them pinned down, but they couldn’t penetrate the walls of the church or its catacomb. When Ellsworth bought the Zuta, he spent a few years planting trees to match the dimensions.

  To match the walls in his mind, he planted palm trees in two perfectly straight lines, each tree six feet apart and some three hundred feet between the parallel rows. Now most were nearly fifty feet tall and looked like columns at what might have been the end of each pew. Towering above the palm tops like a net are the canopy-like branches of sixteen water oaks—eight on each side—that, unlike the sprawling live oaks, shoot straight up nearly sixty or seventy feet, then mushroom at the top like a nuclear cloud. At one end, forming what might be the front wall, grow twelve Japanese magnolias and twelve Drake elms. In the middle of those, forming what one might call the narthex, are twelve orange trees butted up against eight lemon trees and then finally, two kumquat bushes. If the kumquats mark the front door, then four hundred feet away at the opposite end, forming the back wall, stand eight cypress trees, spreading at the base like a Victorian woman’s dress as she bows to curtsey. In the middle of those, where the priest might stand, grows one single giant magnolia, its massive arms spreading out beyond the windows of the church, reaching out over the water of the Buffalo.

  Unc said he’d started coming here with his dad when he was just a boy. When Ellsworth died, Unc kept coming. Judging by the fresh trimming of the palms, and the clearing of debris from beneath the trees and inside the borders, that hasn’t changed.

  Tommye looked around. “I can’t understand how Jack never liked it here.”

  Uncle Jack was never interested in the Zuta except for what it could get him. We both knew that.

  I smiled. “I’m glad Unc held onto it. It’s the only hang-up left in your dad’s development.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, it sits in the middle of twenty-six-thousand acres of prime development. Sticks out like a sore thumb. Unc’s not selling, so your dad has to, by law, give him acces
s. That puts a crimp in his development.”

  “Funny.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The thing he wanted least is now the thing he needs the most.”

  “It’s fitting.”

  Some time back, Unc had created a mock campground in the middle of the Sanctuary. Two logs, touching end-to-end in an L-shape, formed benches. It was midmorning when we arrived, and I built a small fire. I made some coffee, scrambled some eggs, and even managed to not burn the biscuits. I handed Tommye a warm cup of cow-boy coffee, and she leaned in and stared down into it.

  “You’ll make someone a fine husband one day. I could get used to this.”

  “It’s called the comfort of necessity.”

  She sipped, stirred the eggs around her plate, and asked, “Got any girlfriends?”

  “I got a few I go out with.”

  She raised both eyebrows. “You always had those. That’s not what I asked.”

  “I stay pretty busy.”

  “Hmm-hmm.” She wasn’t buying it, her smile told me that. She eyed her watch, pulled a small silver container from her pocket, and popped another pill.

  I spread some jelly on a biscuit and handed it to her. She licked the jelly spilling out around the edges and then bit into it.

  Her T-shirt read I LUV LA. I pointed to it. “I flew out there once.”

  “Where?”

  “L.A. . . . well, Studio City.”

  “When?”

  “About three years ago.”

  She calculated. “Why didn’t you call me?”

  “I did.”

  “My roommate didn’t tell me.”

  “That’s cause I didn’t talk to your roommate.”

  “Who’d you talk with?”

  “I talked with you. Or rather to you. Some guy picked up the phone, then held the phone up to your ear. You mumbled a few things I couldn’t understand, and then the line went dead.”

  She nodded, looked down into her cup, but said nothing.

  I prodded. “Is that what all the pills are about?”

  She shrugged, the honesty painful. “You do enough of the wrong kind of drugs, then sleep with enough of the wrong people, and these”—she patted her pocket—“become part of your life.”

  “You want to tell me about it?”

  “Is this why you brought me out here?”

  “It is.”

  She smiled, trying to lighten the air. “It’s sort of refreshing to be with a guy who just wants to talk with me.”

  She lay back on her log-bench, a leg on either side, and spoke to the clouds. “I found a few acting jobs, nothing of note. Couple of commercials. Couple of appearances on a B-level soap opera. Then this . . . opportunity came up. Seemed harmless. I thought it might be a back door into the business . . . but it was more like a trapdoor.”

  I stoked the fire. “One night about three years ago, I was eating some wings at Pete’s down on the water. This guy from high school came in. I knew his face, couldn’t place his name. He started laughing with some guys in the next booth, then he pulls this DVD from his briefcase, slips it into his laptop, and angles the screen so his buddies could get a closer look. That angle included me. I saw your name and the title roll across the screen, and then this guy walking down the beach in his birthday suit. I knew what I was about to see, and I didn’t want it in my brain. I dropped some money on the table and walked out.”

  She kicked off a flip-flop and ran her toes through the sand. “Did Uncle Willee tell you about coming to get me?”

  I shook my head. “Aunt Lorna told me this morning.”

  She sat up. “I need to tell you something.”

  I didn’t want to hear what she was about to say. “I don’t have to know everything.”

  “I know you better than that.”

  “I can lie every now and then.”

  “I know you better than that, too.” She stood from her bench and came to rest on mine alongside me. She leaned against me, resting her head on my shoulder. “I read a lot of your stories online . . . I’m surprised you haven’t been picked up by one of the bigger markets.”

  “They’ve called.”

  She nodded. “Uncle Willee told me on the plane. Said you had one more story to tell here.”

  I nodded, my eyes lost in the flames.

  “Can you let it go?”

  I shook my head.

  She probed. “Can’t or won’t?”

  “I’m getting closer. I owe him that.”

  She rested her head on my shoulder again and closed her eyes. “What if you don’t like what you find?”

  “’Least I’ll know the truth.”

  “Sometimes the truth can kill you.”

  Several minutes passed before either of us spoke. “What was it you wanted to tell me?” I asked.

  She closed her eyes. “It can wait.” She rested her head in my lap, and I put my arm around her, pulled the rubber band off her pony-tail, and ran my fingers through her still-damp hair.

  Have you ever been to the circus and seen those crazy men on motorcycles ride in small loops inside that metal spherical cage? Usually there are about eight of them, and they’re always about a millisecond from killing each other.

  That was a good picture of my mind at that moment.

  She sat up. “There’s something I need to do.” She took my hand and held it in her lap. “I want you to help me.”

  “Want . . . or need?”

  “Need . . . and want.” She half-smiled, spread her hand beneath mine, and ran her thumb along the line of my knuckles.

  Her emerald eyes shone green beneath the trees. And below the pain of history, I saw a sparkle. “Is that why you came home?”

  A minute passed before she answered. “Partly.”

  Chapter 6

  Being a farrier was not Uncle Willee’s first career choice. When he came home with Lorna, his options were limited. The business community of Brunswick had blackballed him, so he exercised a trade that would take him beyond the borders of Glynn County and allow him to put food on the table.

  Tillman Ellsworth McFarland had always shoed his own horses. Doing so taught him how to read them. Unc says he remembered many a day when his daddy pulled his horse’s leg through his and began scraping the V or pulling off a shoe and putting on a new one. Before he put on a new one, he’d hold the old up to the sunshine and read it—how it wore and where it was worn. “Horses are always talking. The shoes coming off their feet are akin to a scream at the top of their lungs.”

  Unc took this to heart, and I guess pretty soon he was reading more than just horses.

  Shortly after I realized this, I also got clued in to the contrast between Unc and his older brother, Jack. It was midsummer, hot as Hades in the shade, and a mile above us six or eight buzzards floated in wide circles, riding the heat rising off the earth. Tommye and I were swinging on the tire swing, our faces sticky with watermelon 60 juice, trying to stay away from Unc’s crazed pet turkey, Bob. Unc had just pulled into the drive, covered in horse smell, dirt, and honesty. He kissed Lorna and was repacking his trailer for the next day when Uncle Jack pulled in behind him. He drove a new dark-blue Cadillac and wore a striped silk suit, cuffed pants, Italian leather loafers, Armani tie, and gold cuff links through French cuffs. The town zero and the town hero—as different as sunshine and rain.

  Unc was working paycheck to paycheck, known around town as the prodigal who’d never come home and who’d robbed both his family and most of the town blind. The pardon had done little to change that. Upon his incarceration, Unc had been fired from the bank and Zuta Lumber, removed as a junior elder in the church, and kicked out of both the Rotary and the country club. Uncle Jack was the respectable one—president of the bank, president of Zuta Lumber, elder in his church, and founding member of the Glynn County Rotary, not to mention being rather wealthy.

  He’d come to pick up Tommye.

  At midnight the night before, Tommye had appeared at our kitchen door. And be
cause she was just eight, that meant she’d run across the Zuta through the dark to get to us. I stood in the bathroom, running her a hot bath and wondering, Ran across the Zuta? What could be worse than five miles of darkness and lightning? Whatever it was had written itself all over her face. She walked in, her hair streaking down over her face, her feet covered in gumbo clay, and her long flannel gown dirty and torn from falling.

  Aunt Lorna got her bathed and fed her some soup, and Unc put her in my bed and spread a pallet on the floor for me. I lay awake most of the night watching her twitch and listening to her talk in her sleep. The next morning the police showed up, sat Tommye on the porch, and started asking her a bunch of questions. She just sat there, said nothing, and looked at me. That same morning, the front page of the paper showed a picture of her dead brother. He’d had an accident, and a bullet went up through his head. The article went on to say that medics had to give Jack a sedative to calm him down. Witnesses say he was pretty distraught. The paper described him as “inconsolable.”

  Pretty soon Unc built bunk beds, and for the next several years, Tommye slept in the bottom bunk more nights than not. I don’t know if this heightened the strain between Unc and his brother or just brought it out of the closet, but at any rate, whenever they were in the same room you could cut the tension with a knife. I think Willee and Jack would just as soon forget each other, but the fact that Tommye spent more time at our house than her own forced an uneasy truce between them.

  Short of building a prison, Jack couldn’t stop his daughter from escaping their house. For some reason, the two of them were like oil and water. She—along with an older brother—were given to him by his first wife. After her, he’d courted four more—somehow escaping more children. He never made much of a fuss over Tommye not staying at home. As more and more women became his wives, matched by the number who quietly filed for divorce, he became less vocal about it. Maybe it was easier to not have to explain a little girl running around to future prospects.

  If Uncle Jack ever beat her, I never saw any signs of it. He was a lot of things—mostly a mystery—but violent was never one of them. And I looked. As did Unc—and I’m pretty sure if he had found any signs, that uneasy truce would have ended.