No Daughter of the South (22 page)

“The fishing trip! I really am sorry. Something came up,” I said. “Come on, let me buy you a beer or two, make it up to you.”

“I never let a girl pay,” he said.

“Suit yourself.” I shrugged, paid for my beer, took the bottle back to my corner.

Josh bought his and then, to my surprise, joined me. When I saw him coming, I put my feet up on the chair next to me so he had to take the seat across from me. As he took a long drag on his bottle, his face looked different, none of that arrogance, none of the stuff that gives a good old boy his good old boy look. He looked defeated and stupid.

“What’s the matter? It’s not a big deal that I didn’t go fishing with you because I know you don’t give a damn, really.” I remembered my warning to Walter on his machine, and the connection to Josh and his invitation clicked. “So how about you tell me what this is all about? ”

“Doesn’t matter. Turn us in, do whatever the hell you want. I’m out of it now. I don’t think you can prove anything on me. If you can, then, I’ll bite the bullet and be a man about it.”

I urged him on, “What’s the deal with the fishing trip that you wanted me to go so badly?“

“I couldn’t have done it.” Josh flushed and shook his head. “I wasn’t going to take you out there in the Gulf and dump you. Not Walter’s sister. Not after eating Momma’s food and being welcome at your home. When you didn’t show up, I was glad. You know, when I first got into it, it was fun. You go out in your boat after dark, you wait to get met by the big boat carrying the shit. It was like the games we used to play when we were kids. And hell, it was fun to be selling the stuff everybody wanted. Kind of like a public service. But it hasn’t been so much fun lately. I thought I knew what I was doing, but, since the heat has been on us, I really found out who I was dealing with.”

“Big time smugglers, right?”

He just looked at me, anxious and morose at the same time. “I’m not naming any names. And you don’t have anything on me. Nothing. It’s over.”

“Just tell me this. It was Forrest Miller, right? He wanted you to take me out on your boat and not bring me back?”

“Forrest Miller? That jerk? Hell, no. It was the guys I work for. We’ve had rumors that the feds were looking into us. You’re a lousy cop, you know that? You show up here, like a fish out of water, poking into everybody’s business, you think we’re that stupid?” He looked embarrassed. Ran his finger through the condensation on the table. He looked up suddenly panic on his face. “You’re not wired, are you?”

I laughed. “I may be a lousy cop, but you’re a worse criminal. Listen, someday soon you’re going to be real glad you got out when you did.”

“You
do
know something! I was right, you are a cop!”

“I am not. Don’t you have someplace you can visit for awhile? Get away from here? I think a change of scenery would do you good. And why don’t you make sure you take Walter with you.”

He looked more cheerful. “You think you could help us find something in New York?”

I laughed again. “I’ll try, Josh. Any friend of my brother Walter is a friend of mine. At least as long as he doesn’t dump my body over the side of his boat into the Gulf of Mexico.”

After Josh and I had parted ways, I walked down to the Main Street Bridge, needing to wait until I knew Forrest Miller was distracted or involved in the festivities. The parade had passed by a while ago; the crowd had dispersed to the park to wait for the next stage of the festivities. I climbed down under the bridge, took off my shoes, and sat with my legs over the sea wall, dangling in the tea-brown, brackish water. I could still hear, faintly, the music of the parade while it made its way to the end of the route.

I stirred the water with my legs and remembered the last parade I’d seen. I’d taken Annie and Sarah to the Gay Pride parade in the city. I’d planned on going with Sammy, but at the last minute she couldn’t make it. As always, the brash spectacle and the exuberant variety of human desire exhilarated me. Sarah had loved it, too: “Look at the tall lady wearing nothing but feathers! Oh, Look! It’s really a man dressed as a lady wearing nothing but feathers!” But Annie had been miserable. The raucous music blaring from the floats gave her a headache. She was embarrassed by the muscular guys posing in bikini briefs. She was frightened by the big men in drag. And she turned her head away from the women with their arms around each other.

I hadn’t been very understanding. Sarah and I had teased her, called her a stick-in-the-mud. But now I was thinking about how overwhelming it could have been to a young girl on the cusp of puberty. Where I saw freedom, perhaps Annie, daughter of a mother with an irresponsible, sex-obsessed lover like me, saw chaos.

I hoped I’d have a chance to show Annie that freedom can be tender, too. And maybe tenderness in love could be demonstrated by caring concern for the loved one’s child, just as much as by the sweet soft licking of the loved one’s salty, silken flesh. Or maybe not. I didn’t know. But I aimed to find out.

Later, I left my hiding place under the bridge, and wandered over to the carnival grounds. I watched some of the baby beauty contests, bought some blue cotton candy. Didn’t need to stop at the guess your age and weight booth; construction workers in the city are always giving me personal evaluations, free of charge. I felt no need to try the rides. The roller coaster, the octopus, the scrambler. I guess my adrenaline glands had had enough workouts lately.

I was turning away from a booth when I saw Terri. She noticed me in the same moment. Our eyes met, and she smiled in greeting, just as if she didn’t believe with all her heart that I was a sinner. That’s what I told her after we sat down at a picnic table with paper plates of fried catfish and grits and hushpuppies.

“But I love you, Laurie Marie! God loves the sinners, each and every one of us, and it’s His love pouring through that you see in me.”

“Right. Listen, Terri, are you going to the pageant?”

“Sure I am. I never miss it.”

“Doesn’t it bother you?”

“Bother me?” She was genuinely puzzled. I had confused so many people since I’d arrived in town that I was beginning to feel that I spoke a foreign language.

“You know, the whole racist nine yards.”

She laughed and picked up a hushpuppy. “Honey, you think too much. My brother, now, he’d agree with you. He wouldn’t come within a mile of it unless he was carrying a sign and leading a demonstration. I just don’t think it’s worth worrying over. The audience doesn’t think about things like that; it’s just a story to them. My parents always said, don’t worry about seeing racism everywhere, you just worry about behaving your own little self, and letting the love of God shine through you. Everyone’s equal in God’s eyes. But I have to run now.”

Now I was puzzled. “But, Terri, how are we gonna move towards that future you were talking about, you know, the kingdom of God on earth, unless we face the racism in our past, in this town, and in that stupid pageant?”

But Terri had already gotten up and was throwing away her paper plate. She turned, and called, “Don’t forget. Jesus loves you and I love you,” and then she was gone, back into the crowd.

A little later I saw Susan. She was taking a picture of Tom. He was going around on one of the little kiddie rides with the two youngest children. I watched them for a few moments. I’ll tell you this, for what it’s worth. They looked, at that moment, like a happy family. And she was right, you know. It was me that talked her into every one of those pranks in high school. All the while I was having myself a great time and it never occurred to me that she wasn’t. I had pressured her. I wanted her to be one way, and her father wanted her to be another, and, between the two of us, we’d nearly pulled her apart. Maybe life with dull Tommy was a big relief after that.

I felt so distant from her then, as if they were a Martian family I was observing. All the people all around me felt alien. The whole town I’d spent so much time not thinking about for the past dozen years. I’d spent a lot of energy trying hard not to be a person from Port Mullet. Did I really, secretly, believe that people in the city were morally superior? Didn’t the sheer numbers of investment bankers, lawyers, and muggers in the city illustrate the insanity of that idea? And every day, the inhabitants of the city, sophisticated city dwellers, stepped around people living on the street. Maybe the real reason we chose a city so big, so immense, so crammed with humanity, is that we thought it excused each of us from personal responsibility. Maybe that’s really what I like about the city. Maybe I left Port Mullet so I wouldn’t have to see what I didn’t want to deal with, those very things that I had been confronting the last few days. Why had I ever thought that leaving made me superior to those who stayed and did nothing? Had I thought that absolved me from responsibility?

There was a general movement in the crowd towards the little outdoor theatre at the edge of the park, over by the river. It was nearly time. I followed, pulled along by the energy of the crowd. Once there, I stepped aside, let the ones behind me climb up the bleachers. Instead, I stood over to one side, near a tree, waiting.

It was the tail end of dusk. Night was just about to fall. The sun was down beyond the line of trees, live oaks between the theatre and the river. The sky was rose and crimson over the trees, and dark above and behind us. The colors were fading fast. I could hear the humming and buzzing of the insects around us. People were slapping at their arms and legs, leaving little smears and blotches of blood. The brush under the trees was alive with rustling noises. I thought of darting lizards, and snakes, both rattle and coral. I had learned to identify them as a kid, like everybody else. The sound of the rattle is frightening, I was taught, but the silent coral snake is more deadly. Behind the trees, in the dirty river water, swam cottonmouths while alligators floated, disguised as partially submerged logs, or lay buried in the thick mud, just waiting.

Then it was completely dark. I was tired of self-examination, of soul-searching. I turned my irritation out to the crowd on the bleachers. The inhabitants of my home town seemed to me then to possess the heartless, mindless festivity of the audience at a lynching: their small talk as they waited for the performance, the way they slurped at the soft drinks and dug their hands into the greasy bags of popcorn, seemed to me ugly, crudely carnal.

The taped music came over the sound system, the lights dimmed, then a small oval of light centered on the semicircular stage area. From the deep shadows at stage right came a tall, slightly-stooped man dressed as a Spanish priest. The audience was silent, waiting.

In a moment the priest would enter, holding a scroll of parchment. He’d stand with his head bowed. This was the way the pageant always began. Then he would slowly unwind the scroll, and read the prologue.

I knew what would happen next. I had seen it so many times. The priest, Father Hernandez, would tell how he had set out with the Spanish captain, Don Fernando, his son Philip, and niece, Theresa, along with a handful of soldiers. Then Father Hernandez would roll up the paper, the lights would dim, he would leave the stage. When the lights came back on, the priest and the children would be captives of the Indians. The captain and his soldiers would have all been massacred. The chief, bedazzled by Theresa’s European beauty, would adopt her as his daughter. Another noble family would take Philip as their son. Father Hernandez, by the grace of God, would convert the entire tribe to Christianity. They would become good Catholics and abandon human sacrifice.

Theresa, renamed Tashima, would grow ever more beautiful and, of course, the braves would prefer her to the Indian maidens. As the chief’s daughter, she would be permitted to choose her own husband. The single young men would compete for her favors, but she would choose Philip, her kinsman. Together they would rule the tribe, after her adopted father’s death.

A jealous, rejected brave, would enlist the medicine man in his cause. The medicine man, bitter that the priest had turned the people against his superstition and magic, would gossip among the population, spreading rumors. He would say that it was wrong for the people to turn against the old ways, and point out signs of the gods’ disapproval: illness, poor weather, bad fishing, and hunting. The ignorant Indians would believe the medicine man and turn against Tashima and Philip, imprisoning her and sacrificing him, then holding his pulsing heart before her horror-stricken eyes.

At that very moment, a huge hurricane, the expression of the wrath of Father Hernandez’s God, would strike the village and destroy it completely with wind and rain. The grieving Tashima and Father Hernandez would be the only survivors. Tashima would die of a broken heart. The priest, sensing his own imminent death, would record their history on a scroll of paper, seal it in a bottle and leave it on the bank of the Tashimee River, before exiting.

I had seen it so many times, and I could see it now in my memory. But I wouldn’t be there to see it enacted this time, to watch the story they had fabricated for themselves and for the tourists. The Indians had been gone for hundreds of years, and now the land was completely tamed, the alligators fat on marshmallows, while here sat the Fiesta celebrants: a few descendants of the early settlers, some Italian families fresh from Queens, retired firemen from Detroit, and tourists on their way to Disney World.

But I gasped as the priest came in—Forrest Miller. He lifted his head and began to unroll his scroll. That was when I turned and slipped away through the dark.

I knew I was running out of time. I walked quickly over the uneven ground towards the river. I had expected to have to be careful, walking through the scrub in the dark. But I went easily, without a false step. Something in me knew the way. I had spent countless hours as a child playing there. The knowledge of every dip and marshy place, every tricky spot, was in my legs, and arms, and body, and some hidden part of my brain.

I followed the river to the bridge, climbed up the embankment, onto the sidewalk along Main Street. I hadn’t borrowed a car, because everybody in town knew everyone else’s and it might be remembered later. I knew I should walk, save my energy, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t wait any longer. I trotted, and I fought myself at every step to keep myself from going any faster. Quite apart from the consideration of avoiding fatigue, I was more likely to attract attention, running, and in boots, no less.

But there was no one on these quiet residential streets to see me. Almost everyone was at the pageant, or the carnival, or one of the parties in honor of the Fiesta. Then I started to run flat out, my boots pounding against the pavement, the sound of my blood pounding in my ears.

When I reached the corner to the Miller’s house, I slowed down. I turned at the service alley that went behind the houses. The air was heavy with a sweet, almost cloying scent. Was that honeysuckle? I wasn’t sure. I had spent so many warm nights at Susan’s house, but I didn’t remember this smell. And then I remembered, it had been twenty years. Twenty years is plenty of time for a small cutting to grow to a large plant, to cover a fence, to grow up a wall, to become the flourishing vine that could saturate the air with that overpowering scent.

My body still remembered the way. I crossed the large back yard, filled with rose gardens, and fruit trees, and patios, without even thinking about it. I found myself at the back door. I didn’t remember pulling the key out of my pocket, but, somewhere along the way, I had. I looked at it for a moment, surprised, and then I slid it into the lock.

It turned easily, so smoothly. I took one last look behind me, to be sure no one was watching. I couldn’t see anyone, but it was dark, and there were many trees, and dark, shadowed areas. Through the windows of the house across the back alley, I could see the strange blue flickering light of a TV.

I slipped through the door, closed it behind me. For good measure, I locked it.

I was standing in what Susan’s mother called the “garden room.” The floor was cool white ceramic tiles. A round table surrounded with white wicker chairs sat in front of the French doors, with a view of the rose garden. It could have appeared on the front cover of any house-decorating magazine.

I stood there for a moment, searched inside myself for any second thoughts, and I didn’t find any. I might not learn the truth, it might be too late, the evidence might be gone. But this wasn’t about the past. I had to know about myself. Was I really willing to make every effort to confront the truth?