Mesopotamia (27 page)
The piece was going to be the cover of the next issue. Because of the magnitude of the story, it would be coming out three days early, on September 3—as a special edition. After finishing the piece, I went back to the top and added Gustavo Benoit as the lead writer in the byline and put my name second. Without him, I couldn’t’ve and wouldn’t’ve done it.
The editor read the piece and asked me half a dozen questions, which I sensed were just more tests of my credibility. Afterward, he asked if I’d do some rewrites. It was one of the few times I was ever asked to expand a tabloid piece. When I finished my rewrites roughly an hour later, it was three times its original size.
“You’re a good writer,” said the editor inspecting my final copy. “You looking for work?”
“Always.”
“Joe says you have a drinking problem but he has always liked you.”
“I haven’t touched a bottle in over a year,” I lengthened my week of sobriety.
“Well, I’ll give you a chance. Assignments like this one come up every few months.”
I thanked him and left. Two hours later, after some quick shopping and a trip to my bank to deposit the check, I returned to Kara’s to make reservations on the next flight to Nashville. Then I told her the whole story, grabbed a bite, returned her borrowed clothing, took a quick shower, and was back out the door.
The short plane trip was surprisingly calm considering the pilot’s casual rambling that a new storm was brewing just south of Nashville. After landing, I picked my car up in the parking lot and drove two hours to my mom’s place. Bella and her kids had left, but Ludmilla and her mannerly clan were still packing.
“So, is your friend buying the place or what?” she asked impatiently as she and her boys loaded the last of the family photo albums and boxes of knickknacks into the back of her SUV.
“I still have to show her the place and go over the details with her. What’s the rush?”
“Another storm is coming tonight,” she said, “and the humidity is just playing absolute havoc with my hair.”
After about an hour, when she was done, she gave me the keys to the old castle and said goodbye. She was returning home to Atlanta. Assuming Vinetta would go for it, I was hoping that she could put the trailer park down as collateral and take out a mortgage for the house. Whatever the discrepancy might be, I could supplement it with the cash I had made from the Scrubbs scoop. As I drove the short trip to her trailer park in Daumland, the rain started falling.
S
he’s back!” Vinetta yelled out as I stepped out of the car in the darkness. A gathering of little people converged on me at the trailer door.
“Did you find ’em?” the eight-year-old asked. Vinny had acquainted the older kids with my plight beyond the Rio Grande. Though I was exhausted, I gave them the suspenseful ten-minute version of all that had happened, right up to selling the spicy photos to the highest bidder. Rain began pouring down more heavily as we shared rice cakes and Diet Cokes. When the winds kicked up, Vinetta turned on a radio and heard that the weather was supposed to get even worse.
“There’s no chance of us getting washed away, is there?” I asked half-jokingly as the rains pelted the roof.
Though she said we were just above the flood zone, only the storm cellar was up on the part of the property that seemed to have some real height. As the winds blew, the kids filled me in on their latest little victories and adventures. I tried not to act worried when water began dripping through the raggedy seams of the compartmentalized trailer. Vinetta and the kids made a game of putting bowls and buckets under the increasing leaks around the trailer. They had all been through this before.
“Floyd used to say being here during a storm was kind of like being in a leaky sub,” Vinetta commented as together we repositioned the beds. She tried to get the kids to lie down, but the lightning and thunder was a little too scary. Some of the younger ones started crying.
“Hey,” I said, “what’s the worst that can happen? We’ll all get a little wet.”
“What if a tornado hits?” one of the twins replied.
“We’ll just go into the storm cellar,” Mom said.
Around 11 p.m. the electricity went out. Shortly afterward, though, the storm seemed to blow itself out; exhausted, everyone was soon snoozing. Since I had been running up a sleep debt, I too slept like a log.
Early the next morning, Vinetta’s fumblings woke me up. I looked out the window, and, though the skies were clear, we appeared to be in the middle of a lake. When I went into the bathroom, Vinetta spoke through the door: “I can’t tell you how relieved I was to see you coming in last night.”
“I told you I’d be back,” I said, wiping.
“I really thought you had taken his money and gone south of the border.”
“I told you, he didn’t give me any money.”
“I thought maybe after spending the night with him, something had changed …”
“No. He said he didn’t do anything to Floyd and he refused to pay what he called extortion.”
“But when you called me from Mexico didn’t you say—”
“Before we go into all the details, let me ask you something. Roughly how much are you worth?”
“How much?”
“Yeah, this property? Any idea of its worth?”
“This place was purchased by a pig farm conglomerate.”
“Do you rent it from them?”
“We’re squatting here till they tell us to leave. But what does any of this have to do with anything?”
“I was hoping you could get a mortgage on this property and I could get you all a really nice place to live.”
“Right now, we just better find a dry place,” she said softly. When I came out of the bathroom, I saw Vinetta staring at what used to be the tiny laundry room. The wooden shed at the end of the trailer appeared to have floated away.
“I know where we can go,” I said.
“Where?”
“My mother’s home in Mesopotamia is up for sale. You can stay there.”
She put eight bowls down, poured cereal and milk, woke up the kids, and stepped back. After they ate, I helped them wash and dress while she packed a few things to take with us.
“Oh gee, I’m going to need more diapers,” she said as she walked ankle deep through water, bringing things out to her truck.
“I’ll get them,” I said and headed up to the storm cellar.
“Get two packages,” she asked.
“You better bring a flashlight if you’re going down there,” Floyd Jr. wisely advised, so I went into the office and grabbed one.
Barefoot, I headed through the shallow pond uphill to the rear of the property, then down into the storm cellar. The water there was also ankle deep. After a bit of fumbling and splashing, I grabbed two new packages of disposable diapers all the way against the far wall. Near the pile of new diapers was the lone filing cabinet pivoted against the wall that I had never opened. It had been bothering me since I first left it. Hauling it to one side, I was able to pull the top drawer out and tuck the flashlight under my chin. More papers. It when when I opened the second drawer that I saw them. About a dozen new bottles of cough medicine with singed and burnt labels.
“Fuck!” I yelled. Vinetta had lied to me. Pseudoephedrine, the magical ingredient in methamphetamine, is distilled from cough syrup. Floyd was cooking the stuff. Hearing the distant cries of the kids, I realized that this was just not the time. I grabbed the diapers and left the storm cellar.
Except for the two youngest, who Vinetta and I carried, all slogged through the brackish waters of last night’s storm to our vehicles, where we divvied up her clan and she followed me as we slowly drove down Makataka Road toward my mother’s place.
Despite their ridiculous youth, all Vinetta’s little urchins applauded when they saw the luxurious house in Mesopotamia that they had been so eager to leave just a week earlier. After the sinking bread box, I think they would’ve been pleased to be anywhere else. Once inside, the Loyd children raced and roamed through the empty rooms of the cavernous home.
“How long will we be able to stay here?” Floyd Jr. asked.
“Well, I have to ask my sisters, but I think you can stay until we get a buyer. It might be weeks, might be months.”
“The water around our home should drain in just a few days,” Vinetta said, as if to suggest that they shouldn’t get too comfortable.
That first night, I decided to just cut Vinetta a check for fifty thousand and be done with her forever. She could stay the rest of her life in her leaky, sinking trailer for all I cared. Tomorrow I had a long drive back to New York, where I had to rebuild my own life, which was still a sizable mess.
While Vinetta was dealing with the kids, I went into the store to say hi to old Pete. We chatted briefly, then he asked when I was next going to see Ludmilla next. I said I was heading to Atlanta to visit her tomorrow on my way back to New York. He asked if I could drop off some things she forgot to bring with her and handed me a large file of receipts and other accounting. My busybody nature led me to snoop inside. While inspecting the various records, I was stunned to see that the store had been earning roughly two thousand dollars a month of pure profit for the past several years. Rodmilla had always given me the impression that she was only getting by, not actually profiting.
Some of the older kids broke out of the house and began foraging in the store for treats. Vinetta soon followed the racing twins so I introduced her to Pete. They chatted a bit and discovered that forty years back, Pete had worked with Vinetta’s father at a local factory when they were both young men.
“You’re not buying the place here, are you?” he asked hopefully.
Vinetta smiled and looked down. Pete smiled too, a bit embarrassed. Leaving the kids there, Vinetta brushed right past me without making eye contact. I followed her out to the driveway.
“Why did you bring me here?” she asked as soon as we were alone.
“Because you needed a place.”
“You’ve been acting pretty weird since we left the trailer.”
“I found your little drug stash,” I revealed.
“What are you talking about?”
“The burnt bottles of cough medicine. That goddamn sheriff, Carpenter—they all told me! Snake didn’t do shit! Floyd blew himself up, didn’t he?”
“He was cooking drugs awhile back,” she said, “and there was a fire, I don’t deny it. But that was earlier. After that he stopped cooking. But we both know that if I had told you this, you wouldn’t’ve helped me.”
“Not acceptable,” I said coolly. “You used me to get money.”
“It was never about the money,” she said haltingly. “Not really.”
“Then what was it about?”
“It was about seven children not living with the belief that their father died making meth.”
“But he
did
make meth!”
“Not when the shack blew up!
They
did that. I only kept the cough medicine because I figured the kids might need it some day.”
“What are you saying?”
“He did it to make money to start this whole project. I mean, for the first time he seemed interested in something, buying the Elvis outfits and stuff; it pulled him out of a real funk and he finally started acting like a real dad … so …” She began weeping. “Look, I don’t want no money, okay?”
Hearing her pardon Floyd’s shortcomings by his improvement as a father revealed so much about her. Vinetta’s two oldest children were inherited from Floyd’s prior marriage. Two others dropped down the chimney when her sister suddenly died. Only three kids were actually hers, yet I never saw any difference in her concern or affection. She totally devoted herself to the life that fate had more or less bestowed upon her—the consummate mother. How could I fault her for having an idiotic husband? I brought Vinetta into the dining room and sat her down.
“Look, you have two choices. I can just give you fifty thousand dollars, as we discussed. Or I’ll make you a one-time offer. The store here, ZigRat’s, nets about twenty thousand a year—that’s all profit. What I’m thinking is, you can get a loan for as much as you can and I’ll lend you the rest to pay for this place. Keep living off whatever you have been living on, you can use the store’s profits to pay the mortgage, and whatever you have left over, you can pay me.”
“You know that no bank is going to gamble on our future.”
“I can cosign the loan with you.”
“How much is this place?”
“They’ll take about a quarter-million.”
“You’d cosign a loan with me for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars?”
“Actually, since I own a third of the place, you’d only need a loan for a hundred and eighty thousand. You can pay me back at your leisure.”
“So I won’t get the fifty thousand dollars,” she said.
“That’s true, but I’ll be taking the entire risk. So if you default, I’ll be paying five times that amount.”
“Sandra, I don’t think … What I mean to say is, with the kids and all, I just don’t know if I can run a store.”
“Pete’s getting older. He has maybe another five or so years, but that might be just enough time for Floyd Jr. and some of the other children to learn the business.”
“I gotta talk to the kids,” she said, and dashed out of the room.
I really couldn’t afford any Oprah-size acts of generosity—like loaning her the money myself—but I couldn’t abandon her either. If Vinetta hadn’t put me up and guided me along that Elvic rainbow, I wouldn’t have gotten the pot of gold at its end. I just couldn’t go back to New York knowing Vinetta and all those damn kids were living in that leaky, sinking bread box that they might get evicted from at any moment. As long as she slowly and steadily paid the bank back, I’d be fine. And if worse came to worst, I could cover her for months that she was in the red.
Suddenly, Vinetta and all seven kids rushed back into the room. “Tell her what you said,” she prompted little Floyd.
“Mom said you offered her a deal to live here and work in the store, and we all cheered. Then she said you were heading back up to New York City, but I remember you saying you lost your place, so I said why don’t you just stay here with us because to us you’re now kind of a co-ma.”