Cicada (8 page)

“If you’re interested in a goldfish, we’re having a special this week. Bowl, gravel, one bottle of food and one fancy goldfish of your choice all for three dollars,” she said, concocting the deal off the top of her head.

“Really?”

“Mm-hmm,” she confirmed through pursed lips.

From out back, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Jumbo barked ceaselessly as those two were wont to do.

Buckshot let his hand creep up to the wad of coins and the single one dollar bill burning in his dungaree pocket.

“How long that special gonna be for? Just the week?” he asked.

“Well...no. For the rest of the month, I do believe,” she answered cautiously, testing whether or not that would be ample time for the boy to acquire the money.

Buckshot didn’t pedal home as madly as he’d come. The disappointment of his fish-less predicament transformed his legs into leaden spaghetti, and, as a matter of fact, it was all he could do to keep his bike upright, so slow was his going. He wobbled back and forth with each lazy push against the pedals. At least twice he was honked at for so carelessly meandering along the shoulder of the road. As he went, his mind remained preoccupied with calculating just how many more days of his weekly allowance it would take to make up the difference he lacked between his three dollar goal and the one dollar and thirty-cents he currently possessed. The school year was over and so he couldn’t save his milk money anymore. The weekly allowance he’d been promised for helping around the farm full time was his only means of income. But that had yet to start coming in. A dollar a week meant his goal was at least two weeks away.
Two lousy weeks
.
An eternity
.

She’d not found sleep until the wee hours, and, as a result, when Frances eventually did manage her way out of bed earlier that day it was much later than usual. By that time both Buckshot and John had slipped away. Buckshot was gone off to be disappointed that his secret goldfish was still beyond his financial grasp and John had disappeared to spy on the funeral of Raymond Stout for reasons that even he had trouble comprehending.

Frances fretted over her son’s whereabouts and fumed as to her husband’s. She wandered into the kitchen with the intention of fixing herself a late breakfast, but after her distraction sent a coffee mug tumbling off the shelf and onto the floor, shattering into a blossom of ceramic shards, she collapsed down into a chair and became lost in thought. Around her feet the field of white ceramic slivers went ignored.

She and John had first met so long ago that she couldn’t recall doing so. It just seemed that he’d always been in her life, beginning as an obnoxious little boy pulling braids and leaving earthworms in lunch pails for girls such as her to discover. Although her earliest recollections were sketchy, with the passage of years the ephemeral memories of John coalesced in her mind and her memories of him became more pronounced. There had been the night when she was nine or ten, when he’d come to a church social with the chicken pox. The boy’s hands had been sheathed by his mother in an old pair of socks to deter his scratching, Frances still recalled. The other children had teased him, of course. A week later, Frances, as well as several of John’s previous tormentors, had also become speckled with his infection.

Of the other early memories Frances was most aware of the death of John’s brother, of course. Not surprisingly, that was the event that brought the girl’s future husband to her full attention. He was no longer the little boy who too often sat behind her, distracting her studies with his immaturity. Instead, he was the solemn young man who grieved a tragedy of romantic proportions. Or so Frances had once imagined. John had been transformed into a heroic figure in his brother’s passing.
Pitted small and alone against the cruelness of the indifferent world
; that was how as a girl she’d often romanticized him, a cord of her brown locks pressed between her lips. A simple and childish enough outlook, of course, but then again, that’s all she was at the time.

As if he meant to be true to Frances’s newfound imaginings, John Sayre did change after his brother died. He shed his childhood and childish ways in one unfortunate afternoon and never spent another day looking for where he’d left such behind. After the death of Walter, John’s mother no longer had to complain about clothes on the bathroom floor, or to finish his plate. No ridiculous radio shows squawked about masked crime-fighters or swashbucklers from the crackling family radio. One morning his comic books were in a box on the back porch. When asked, John said he was taking them to school to give to some younger boy. If the sports broadcast ran late, not once did he plead to stay up to hear the game’s conclusion. Even when his mother and father suggested he could, he shrugged the offer off and made for bed. And never again did his father have to threaten to be sure that John rose before the sun to see to his chores. He worked at his chores—and even things his father didn’t expect of him, when he saw they needed done—and he buried his nose in his studies. He didn’t carouse and sneak off to drink beers and try cigarettes as the others his age. And girls apparently were of no concern.

“It’s more like both of them died,” one young cousin remarked sardonically—and a bit too loudly—over that year’s Thanksgiving dinner at the Sayre’s. For his pithy insight, that garrulous boy received a sound thrashing at the end of his father’s belt strap once he and his family had returned home. Later that night, between the covers of their bed, that cousin’s mother and father had agreed with their boy’s observation.

But John was far from perfect. Besides his disinterest in the fairer sex—something that eventually would greatly trouble his parents—he at once became sullen and moody, given to long days of silence. He labored through what remained of his youth with an intensity that left three other classmates with black eyes or chipped teeth for their rude slights. After that, the other boys minded John’s boundaries. Had it not been for the fact that his studies improved greatly—he became a straight A student almost overnight—John might have been expelled for his volatile temperament. Also to his benefit, he brought his barely-bottled tempest onto the playing field. Throughout high school John was to be his many coaches’ favorite. He was captain of both his football and baseball team, and during his reign his teams were for the most part victorious, with much of the credit due to the young man who suffered little foolishness either on the field or off. It was a demeanor that made all the girls, especially Frances, swoon, but it was a passage of youth enviable only from the outside, only in appearance.

By his mid-twenties, John Sayre was a man admired, looked upon with countless approving nods as a man’s man. He was at once quiet and strong, of steadfast character and no-nonsense to the core. Who among them did not envy his character and wish that if not they, then perhaps their sons, might be more like him? The truth was, however, all of those admirable traits were sown from a ground of shame and guilt. At his foundation he was a coward with his horrible lie tucked away and buried beneath a façade. And this was undeniable because in his heart that was how he perceived himself. Not one but John Sayre knew that he was the saddest excuse for a man that most men would ever meet.

The truth of the matter was that John Sayre wasn’t dealing with the mere guilt of a hunting accident. He had loved his brother, yes, but he also at times had despised him; upon occasion he’d fallen bitterly jealous of him. John was forever in his brother’s shadow and knew he forever would be. The little brother. Their father swelled when he talked of Walter. There seemed none of that left over for John. The little brother. Girls looked past John. He was invisible behind the handsome and dashing Walter Sayre; he was lost in his big brother’s shadow. Walter, the one who could do no wrong. Walter, who had died in such a senseless, tragic accident.

But, no, not an accidently entirely.

For John knew the
whole story
regarding his brother’s death. The whole truth. He had never admitted that he had shoved his brother. No, he’d not come that far clean. Even worse, he’d spent years lying to himself, agreeing with the others…
what a senseless, tragic accident.
But in a far corner of his heart and the dark recesses of his mind the truth was always there.

The truth was John had seen those yellow jackets first, all along. The truth was he knew Walter was allergic to them. The truth was he had shoved his brother Walter into them…on purpose.

...

Fifty-two miles east of Melby—along a state road that saw very little traffic except for tourists—there nestled together a small conglomeration of businesses, two small motels, a gas station, and a greasy spoon diner. It was all the commerce that could be supported by the diehard Civil War enthusiasts who visited there to tramp over the several hundred nondescript acres of state park dedicated in memoriam to a skirmish that had taken place there nearly a century before.

The two motels were The Blue Motel, on the south side of the road, and The Gray Motel, on the north. At least once a month the desk clerk at one or the other was suffered to explain to would-be lodgers, busy-bodies, or know-it-alls, that the names were not in error, but that those were the directions from which the two armies had once clashed for two bitter winter days.

While that was true, an even greater truth was that the two opposing motel signs had indeed been erected in error, but at too great an expense to do anything but concoct the battlefield-clash excuse to remedy the blunder.

Invariably, even though the two nearly identical motels were situated in the Deep South, The Blue Motel faired a bit better in taking in guests since most that came to see the memorial traveled from one of the Northern states to do so. The Confederates had lost this particular confrontation and it seemed most self-respecting Southerners weren’t interested in such a reminder. So, in their own small way, even after the passage of so many years, the two little motels seemed to keep the great conflict alive. Or at least, so their patrons were led to believe.

Actually, if The Gray Motel was having a bad week, it was quite common for the desk clerk at The Blue to ignite the neon “No Vacancy” sign even when it still had rooms to spare, since what the staff of both motels knew—and what was never to be disclosed to the guests—was that the two establishments were owned by the same man, Hammond Marshall. Hammond didn’t like to think that the employees at The Gray had it easier on any given day, and further, he liked disappointing the occasional Yankee by sending them across the street to stay at The Gray Motel.

“I think the rooms over at The Blue are better. Don’t you?” Cicada said, sprawling out between the thin cotton sheets of the room’s queen bed. She was damp with perspiration and the linens clung wherever they met with her otherwise naked skin.

The air of the small room was stale from the uncomfortable odor of others, the endless nights of drunken conversations punctuated by cigarettes and spilt drinks. Cicada thought for a second time about throwing the single window open, only to remember that their one lonely pane was not only painted, but also nailed shut.

“I think I know now why they call this one ‘The Gray,’” she bemoaned with a snicker of disdain. “Like mildewed soot…or worse,” she went on chatting to herself while her companion in the bathroom either didn’t hear or chose not to reply.

The ceiling fan droned on, revolving in its one slow speed as it barely circulated the unpleasant air.

“Sorry, water was runnin’. What’s that then?” John Sayre said as his nude frame suddenly took up the open bathroom doorway.

“Everything alright?” Cicada asked.

She’d walked alone down the road, coming up from behind and unnoticed by John, who was seated alone in his truck. Now she was standing near the faded and cracked dividing line of a lonely county road. She normally wouldn’t have bothered to stop—especially out in the middle of nowhere as they were—but the truck wasn’t nearly off the road and was more askew than perpendicular. As she’d approached, she thought that perhaps the driver might have suffered some medical emergency that’d left the vehicle so peculiarly pulled to the side. The real explanation was that John had hoped to be found quickly following his suicide, before the heat and the passage of time disfigured him; the last of many odd considerations from a man intent on blowing out the back of his head.

For the rest of her life, when she thought of John Sayre—which she was compelled by the world about her to do from time to time—Cicada would usually begin by recalling that first meeting when she initially thought she must have surprised the stranger in the middle of some indecent act.

John startled, his cheeks a bloom of crimson, and his hands fidgeted wildly, concealed from view by the truck door.

“Oh, hey,” he blurted.

The sound of something heavy falling onto the floorboard was made even more curious by his lack of acknowledging it.

Drunk
, Cicada concluded silently to herself, imagining it was a bottle that’d fallen from his lap.

“I’m sorry...I thought...sorry,” she said, holding out a palm to stay him as she cautiously started to walk away.

Why he decided to suddenly get out of his truck he never knew, but when he looked back later on that first meeting, he considered it was mostly because even those who court death almost always grasp for any excuse to stay among the living.

“No, no…really…no, it’s okay,” John said, shielding his eyes as he stepped out and squinted about at the bright day. “Jesus, but ain’t it hot, huh?”

Cicada might have been more startled if he hadn’t been so handsome. But he was, and she was naïve and still sure in her innocence that no one so attractive could mean trouble. Instead of moving away—as such an encounter warranted—she not only stopped and turned to face him, but even took a tentative step in his direction. So then, from that very beginning they were drawn to one another.