by Anne George
“We’ll get the bucket back.” Sister was laughing now.
“Oh, God, this is awful!” I put my head on the table and howled. “Poor Ed.”
All of us were laughing so hard we were gasping for breath when Sheriff Reuse came back in. I think he thought something was wrong. He came hurrying over.
“Sheriff,” Bonnie Blue said, “I think I just peed my pants.”
That made us laugh even harder. Mary Alice always cries when she laughs, so she was holding the shredded Kleenex to her eyes. “Me, too,” she gasped.
“Mr. Lamont, when you get control of yourself, I would like to see you in the kitchen.” The sheriff turned and walked stiffly away.
“He’s got the piles,” Bonnie Blue whispered. “Look at that walk.”
Sister bumped her head against the table, she was laughing so hard.
Henry scraped back his chair. We looked up and saw that he was not laughing anymore. “I’d better go,” he said quietly, seriously.
“It’ll be okay, Henry,” Bonnie Blue called after him. He gave a backward wave of his hand.
“That was certainly an unseemly show of emotion, Patricia Anne,” Sister said, wiping her eyes.
Normally, the way she said that would have started me laughing again, but it didn’t. I was watching Henry’s thin shoulders, the way he pushed against the kitchen door and disappeared.
Bonnie Blue wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “Well,” she said, “there’s just no telling.”
Sister and I nodded in agreement, assuming what she had said was connected to something. The laughter had drained out of us as quickly as it had exploded.
“That Ed was not a bad guy. I’ve seen worse.” Bonnie Blue traced a finger around a wet circle her Coke had left on the table. “Full of it, but not the worst.”
“Full of what?” Mary Alice asked.
Bonnie Blue looked at me.
“She’s usually quicker,” I said. “She’s just a lot older than me and a whole lot older than you.”
“She looks good.”
“Plastic. Everywhere.”
“Y’all cut that out,” Sister said. “Tell us about Ed, Mrs. Butler.”
“Bonnie Blue.”
“Mary Alice,” I said, pointing toward Sister, “and Patricia Anne.”
“Okay.” Bonnie Blue drank the last of her Coke, took the napkin that was wrapped around it and wiped the table. “Let me see. He bought the place from a man named Mullins, Sam Mullins. Used to have a filling station and bait shop here. Sold a lot of bait to people going to the lake. Called The County Line.”
“I remember that!” Mary Alice exclaimed. “He had an old tarpaper shack out in the back where he kept the crickets in cornmeal.”
“Sure did.” Bonnie Blue looked pleased. “Anyway, Mr. Mullins made himself a bunch of money and decided The County Line wasn’t uptown enough. So he tore it down and built this little shopping-center thing. He had the restaurant and his sister did catering and stuff. Lasted about two days. If there was anything on the menu had cornmeal in it or on it, people turned green.”
“You worked for him?” Sister asked.
Bonnie Blue nodded her head. “But like I say, it didn’t last long, and then he sold it to Ed. Went to Florida, I think. Grouchy old man. Should have stayed in the cricket business.”
Sheriff Reuse came out of the kitchen and called for one of the deputies. Bonnie Blue turned and looked at the kitchen door, then continued.
“That was about two years ago, did I say that? Anyway, I came in one day and here was Ed and Mr. Mullins just beaming, and Ed said he was going to turn it into a country-western bar called the Skoot ’n’ Boot; said he wanted me to keep on working. It took them about a month to get everything done, like the boots on everything and the dance floor. I went to see my sister in Detroit while they were working on the place and didn’t have any idea Ed would pay me during that time. But he did. Amazed me.”
Bonnie Blue glanced around. “All this stuff didn’t come cheap, either. Took them days to build that well. Didn’t seem to bother him, though. Even when business was slow at first, it didn’t bother him. I asked him one day point-blank was he rich, and he just laughed. Must have been, though. Maybe this was like a hobby.”
“You said Ed wasn’t the worst, though, like something was wrong,” Sister said.
“Honey, that man had PMS. I swear. You know Doris, the other girl worked here? I told her he had PMS, to watch and see if he didn’t. And she said no way, he couldn’t have any such thing. So I started marking it on a calendar and showed her. I made a believer out of Doris. We knew to start covering our butts beginning every twenty-six days. He’d get cranky and that would last for a couple of days and then he’d start drinking.
“Sometimes he’d get so drunk we would just lay him out in the storeroom and cover him up. And sometimes he would disappear and we’d know he was off somewhere, drunk. Mean drunk, too. What’s today?”
“The date? October tenth.”
“Well, that wasn’t why somebody killed him, then. He wasn’t due until next week.”
“Anyway, what would you do when he was, well, indisposed?” Sister asked.
“Actually, he didn’t do much of anything, anyway. Made his tattoo dance. Wasn’t much good as a bartender. Most of the help comes from the college. They have this restaurant course and even a bartending one. Long as they’re twenty-one, they can serve drinks. Most everybody just drinks beer, anyway. Henry would call asking for a bartender for a couple of nights. But they would know the call was coming. They have a calendar, too.”
“That’s the strangest thing,” I said.
“PMS, honey. Remember?”
“I certainly do remember. It hasn’t been that long.”
“What about girlfriends? Wife? Family?” Mary Alice wanted to know.
“Boobs resting on the bar. Lots of them.”
“What?” Sister said.
Bonnie Blue spoke slowly. “Women came to see him. They were hanging over that bar all the time, like Ed was a Moon Pie and they were craving sugar.”
“He looked perfectly resistible to me,” I said.
“Me, too.” Bonnie Blue motioned toward the kitchen with her Coke. “I told Doris, I said, ‘Listen, Doris, what is this? Is there something I’m missing? ’Cause I don’t think I’ve missed much.’ And she just laughed and said I wasn’t missing a thing if I meant what she thought I meant, but had I ever just watched Ed? And I said, ‘Watch him do what?’ And she just grinned and said, ‘Watch and you’ll see.’ So that afternoon, first woman came, I watched just like Doris said, and sure enough, I saw it right off.” She paused.
“Saw what?” Sister asked.
“He touched her hand,” Bonnie Blue said. “That’s all he did. A woman would come up and order a drink or be sitting at the bar and he would reach over and touch the back of her hand with his fingers. Just sort of rub them across her hand. That’s all. Those poor women would just melt.”
“From him just touching their hands?” Sister looked incredulous.
“It was like he was telling each one of them that he cared for them, that he understood,” I explained. “Of course, the booze didn’t hurt.”
Bonnie Blue frowned at me and then looked at Mary Alice.
“What your sister said. Doris caught on before I did; I was slow. Even Henry knew it. I asked him one day if he knew about this trick Ed had and he said, ‘Rubbing his fingers across their hands?’ Made me feel dense. ’Course, he never tried it on me. But I wasn’t leaning across the bar.”
“Maybe he didn’t stop there and somebody’s boyfriend or husband found out about it,” Mary Alice said.
“Could be.”
The three of us sat quietly for a few minutes. I didn’t know about the others, but I was thinking about the lonely women who had been comforted by the brush of Ed’s fingertips across their hands. It was a manipulative gesture. No doubt it had given him a sense of power. But I remembered his limp hand
shake and wondered how in the world the touch of that hand could be so appealing.
“There’s no accounting,” Bonnie Blue said.
“But so much loneliness,” I said.
“And violence,” Sister added. She pressed the tiny shreds of tissue against her eyes again.
Bonnie Blue eyed the kitchen. “I wonder what that sheriff’s doing to Henry.”
“Doing?” My breath caught. “You think he’s doing something to him?” I started to get up.
Bonnie Blue reached over and caught my arm. “I mean I wonder if he’s upsetting that child.”
I sat back down. “He better not be.”
Bonnie Blue looked at me, puzzled.
“Henry was Patricia Anne’s favorite student,” Mary Alice explained.
“That right? What did you teach that boy?”
“English. I was sure he was going to be the next Faulkner.”
“Give him time. Henry is gonna be all right.”
Mary Alice spoke up. “He told us about his little detour.”
“An accident.”
“He said he was selling drugs,” I said.
“Accidentally.”
I was wondering how a person could accidentally sell drugs when the kitchen door opened and the sheriff, deputy and Henry walked out.
“Uh-oh. What’s wrong with this picture?” Sister said softly.
What was wrong was that the deputy’s hand was around Henry’s arm and he was leading him to the front door. Henry, his head down, didn’t look our way.
“Henry!” Bonnie Blue cried, trying to get up. But she was too stuffed into the chair. By the time she was on her feet, Henry was out the door and the sheriff was standing by our table.
“Ladies,” he said, “we’re taking Mr. Lamont in for some questioning. I appreciate your coming out and know I can count on your cooperation. Mrs. Crane, I’ll let you know when we are finished here so you can make plans about the Skoot ’n’ Boot. In the meantime, if you could keep yourselves available.”
“How come you’re taking Henry?” Bonnie Blue hissed. The same height as the sheriff, she had her face so close to his that he backed up, bumping into a chair. She looked big enough to grab him by the shirtfront and lift him off the floor.
He straightened up. “There are some questions we need to ask him, Mrs. Butler. That’s all.”
“You listen. That Henry never did anything wrong in his life.”
“Then he has nothing to worry about.” The sheriff started to walk away. “Ladies, thank you again.”
“Is he going to need a lawyer?” Mary Alice asked, but Sheriff Reuse either didn’t hear or pretended he hadn’t.
“Damn right,” Bonnie Blue said. “You saw those handcuffs.”
“Call Debbie,” I told Sister. “Tell her something terrible has happened and we need her.”
“Who’s Debbie?” Bonnie Blue wanted to know.
“My daughter Debbie Nachman,” Sister said. “She’s a lawyer.”
“Call her,” Bonnie Blue said, reaching for the bottle of Tylenol that was still sitting on the table. “Lord, Lord.”
Four
Debbie said she would be waiting for us at her office. It took both Mary Alice and me to tell her what had happened. She thought her uncle Fred was dead somehow in a well, what with Sister’s babbling, and she was much relieved when I got on the phone and explained exactly what was wrong.
“You can tell me all the details when you get here, Aunt Pat,” she said.
“But Henry was handcuffed. I would absolutely stake my life that he’s innocent.”
“When you get here, Aunt Pat. I have to get back to my client now.”
I placed the phone back on the bar.
“She hung up on you, didn’t she?” Mary Alice was moodily bending a straw into shapes. “Do you think this looks like a swan?”
“Don’t be silly.”
“I don’t, either,” she said, wrapping the straw around her finger.
“I mean she didn’t hang up on me. That sweet child would never hang up on me.”
“Of course she would. She just does it politely.”
“She does not.”
“Did you get her?” Bonnie Blue ambled from the rest room.
“She’s meeting us.”
“Good. You tell her that Henry’s an angel.”
“I already have.”
“Too good for the ways of this world.” Bonnie Blue hoisted her purse (the twin of Sister’s) onto the bar. “By the way, somebody broke the mirror in the bathroom, Mary Alice.”
“Probably the policemen.” Sister’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t like that Sheriff Reuse.”
Bonnie Blue’s eyes narrowed. “Took that Henry out in chains!”
I listened to them bad-mouthing the sheriff and thought somehow we were missing the point here, mainly that a dead body had just been carted out with its throat cut. That didn’t happen just every day in a person’s life. I suddenly thought of a news story I had read the week before, about a woman finding her husband’s body. The reporter had written, “When she saw that his head was missing, she became greatly alarmed.” At the time I thought, Alarmed? What kind of a reporter would write something like that? Now I was beginning to understand how we can put horror in a little cubbyhole in our brains to deal with later.
“Let’s go see Debbie,” I told Sister.
It was good to get out of the Skoot ’n’ Boot. The warm sunshine was a pleasant surprise. As we approached the interstate, we saw a woman with long blond hair riding a horse across the field toward the big house we had admired the evening before. It was a lovely picture.
Sister turned the car onto the interstate ramp. “I’ve been thinking,” she said, slowing as a tractor-trailer rig thundered by, then pulling in behind it. “I think I may have jumped the gun buying that place like I did. I probably should have looked into it a little more.”
I wanted to say, “No kidding,” but decided the best thing to do was to keep my mouth shut. Which I did all the way to town.
Debbie’s office is in an old, remodeled Victorian house on Birmingham’s south side, where the wealthy lived a hundred years ago but which is now a neighborhood in transition. The huge old homes that were falling into disrepair are now being turned into smart apartments and offices. Debbie’s house is both; her apartment is upstairs. She thinks it’s wonderful, especially since it’s right across from a park where Richardena can take Fay and May to play every day. She actually says that, having obviously inherited her mother’s tendency toward rhyme. Mary Alice is suspicious of the neighborhood and the park, and if she sees two people talking together on the sidewalk, she is sure a drug deal is going down. Richardena, the nanny, is not beyond her suspicions, either, since she has had her own criminal tendencies.
“She shot him in self defense, Mama!” Debbie insists. “And she aimed for his foot!”
“Then how come she hit him about three feet higher?”
“An accident, Mama!”
At any rate, the judge believed Debbie, and Richardena escaped a prison tern just in time to get settled before the twins were born. She is a loving, gentle woman and May and Fay adore her. The fact that Richardena’s ex-husband will never sire children bothers no one but Mary Alice. And probably the ex-husband.
Which brings up another matter that bothers Mary Alice: the sire of Fay and May. One day Debbie had announced to her mother that she was thirty-five years old, wanted a child and had taken matters into her own hands, so to speak, and been artificially inseminated at University Hospital.
“Do you believe that?” Sister had asked me. “I’ll bet it was that Barney what’s his name who has hair growing across his nose.”
After the twins were born, Mary Alice was so enamored of them, I don’t think she even looked for stray hairs across the bridges of those precious little noses. She even sent a large check to University’s fertility clinic. She said it was in grateful appreciation. I figured she was planning on looking into th
eir records someday.
The little girls were taking their naps when we arrived at Debbie’s. Debbie was sitting on the front steps in blue jeans, eating a peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich and drinking a diet Shasta.
“My, aren’t you casual,” Sister said.
“I dress for court,” Debbie said, unperturbed. “Y’all sit down. Want a Coke or something?”
“If I get down on those steps, I’ll have to get up,” Sister said. She pulled a wicker chair over. “Where are the babies?”
“Taking a nap.”
“Richardena up there?”
“She’s gone to the store.” Debbie motioned to the monitor beside her. “I can hear them.”
“I don’t trust those things,” Sister said.
Debbie turned to me. “Hi, Aunt Pat.”
“Hi, darling.”
“What’s going on?”
Mary Alice and I both started talking at once. Debbie held up her hand. “Whoa.”
“You first,” I told Mary Alice. “It’s your crime.”
Sister started with line dancing and, almost without catching a breath, segued through buying the Skoot ’n’ Boot (which Debbie knew about), to our pleasant visit the day before and Ed clapping to our dancing to “Rockytop” and ending up in the well, to Bonnie Blue having a purse almost like hers that she probably hadn’t paid a fraction as much for, to Sheriff Reuse taking Henry away in chains.
She did a fine job of telling it all. Sister is a good one for details. When she finished, she looked at me. “Did I leave anything out?”
“The broken mirror in the bathroom.”
“Oh, yes. That’s another thing I want you to complain about, Debbie. Those policemen aren’t being careful at all with my property. I want you to be sure and get that on the record.”
Debbie looked at her mother and then at me. She took the last swig from the Shasta and crumpled the can up. (Her mother hates it when she does this!) “What?” she said.
“Those policemen are showing no respect for property.”
“What?”
“What do you mean, ‘what’?”
“The child’s confused, Sister.” I took Debbie’s hand. “What do you want to know, honey?”
