A Gentle Rain (13 page)

I kept trying to study his eyes and mouth without being obvious. Very difficult. El Diablo Americano had had dark eyes and full, strong lips. So did Ben.

But so did a lot of men.

Whether a fantasy from my past or a fantasy of my present, Ben Thocco was so unexpected, so primal, such an old-fashioned hero in a world of metrosexual relativity, that he made me deeply uncomfortable and suspicious of my feminine vulnerabilities, a complication I didn't need. So I, of course, became defensive around him immediately.

I decided not to mention my El Diablo fetish.

There are no easy routes to friendship between men and women, according to Jane Austen, and no unfamiliar ones, either. All the emotional dances are instinctively regimented, and all the sexual reactions predictable. I didn't want to be a romantic lemming.

So I kept my infatuation to myself.

It wasn't easy.

As we finished breakfast-there was not a speck of frittata or a muffin left, and lots of happy smiles all around the makeshift dining table-a cell phone played the opening bars of Under The Sea, from Disney's Little Mermaid. Miriam grunted as she fetched the phone from a pocket of her mermaid-adorned blouse. She listened, then handed the phone to Ben. "It's Sheriff Arnold."

He put the phone to his ear. "Hi ya. What's up?" He listened. I didn't like the way his frown deepened. "I'll find out," he said. "Call ya back."

Ben Thocco looked at me in away that made my skin prickle. "Yes?" I asked politely.

"How come you're driving a stolen car?" he said.

Mortification was too mild a word. I produced the purchase papers for my hot hatchback and hoped the local authorities could confirm I hadn't boosted the ten-year-old fuel-efficient vehicle from some senior citizen.

Luckily, the used-car salesman in Atlanta vouched for me, though it seemed likely he had some vouching to do for himself, first, but at least he resolved my criminal status. Regardless, my car was a lost cause. It was now impounded as stolen goods. The hatchback might as well have been totaled in the encounter with the gray mare. Indeed, if it had been, I could have filed an insurance claim, at least.

Stranded. Stranded in the wilds of central Florida. I was hardly worried and far too distracted to care about the car. Plus, it quickly became apparent that fate, despite Ben Thocco, was working in my favor.

Ben

I stood in the ranch house kitchen, surrounded by the Karen Johnson fan club. Miriam and Lily.

"Ben, she ain't no car thief," Miriam said.

"I didn't say she is."

"Then how come you don't like her?"

"Don't like her? Who says?" Problem was, I lilted her too much, without kaiowiig a damned thing about her. "Who said I don't like her? I just don't want to take her to raise, that's all. Y'all are tallcin' like she's a kitten we gotta adopt."

Miriam grunted. "Did you take a good look at that pitiful pile of belongings she's got? She's got nothing but the clothes on her back and that weird harp and that big, weird bird. She says she was headed to the motel in Fountain Springs, but how come she's got a set of camping gear? She's like a gypsy or something. It's clear as a bell she hasn't got a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of. She's got no money. And now she's got no car."

Lily looked up at me like a worried hen. "And she's got no leather."

"Beg pardon?"

"No leather. Her ... her bags."

"Luggage," Miriam interpreted. "She can't even afford decent tote bags or a real pocketbook, Ben. Didn't you notice all those crappy old cotton and macrame things of hers?"

Lily nodded urgently. "She doesn't even have any plastic!"

"Now look, ladies-"

"And Ben, Ben-" Lily put her hands to her heart. "All she has to eat are Stuckey's pecan logs. I saw them."

I rubbed my face and leaned on a kitchen chair. Grub hopped up on the table with a little gray lizard in his smiling kitty mouth. He dropped the lizard, and it skittered under a pile of paper napkins weighted with a river rock.

Snakes in the storeroom, lizards on the table, money troubles, and Joey's future on my mind. The last thing I needed was a woman who didn't fit in, who wasn't likely to hang around for long and who might have a lot of baggage I didn't want added to my own burden. Plus I doubted she'd be interested in a few friendly hours of fornication in an un-air-conditioned cabin every Saturday night. I didn't want to get attached to her any more than I already was.

Lily tugged my arm. "Please, Ben. She's somebody's poor baby. You can give Karen half of my paycheck every week. How much is that?"

I patted her hand. "You keep your money. She's a grown woman, not a poor little baby. I know you got a soft heart, but this girl looks like she can take care of herself, to me. For one thing, she could sell that harp. It's probably worth more than her car."

"Joey likes her," Lily said, "and so do I. And so do Mac and Miriam. And the gray mare."

"Now, Lily-"

"She's got nobody, I just know it, I can feel it. Please, Ben. She can keep right on staying with Mac and me. I bet she doesn't eat much."

"Well, I don't know," Miriam said wryly. "She sure likes to cook. But I bet we can find plenty else for her to do around here, to earn her keep." Miriam arched a brow at me. "She's not hard to look at, Ben."

Lily held my arm tighter. "She's so sad. Something bad must've happened to her, Ben."

Aw, damn. Damn. Miriam waved a fresh toothpick at me. "What's the harm in offering?"

"Lemme think on it." I walked out on the porch. Karen Johnson sat under a tree in the yard with her big blue macaw on the weathered back of a big wooden lawn chair. Mr. Darcy, what a name.

He wasn't a bird you buy at a pet store; those big macaws are protected, so where'd she get him? Just one of many questions. She was deep in conversation with Joey, with her harp posed between her bare knees and her hands idly stroking the strings.

Mac and all the other hands stood near Joey, watching her like she might be from some other planet. Dale looked on the verge of praying. Maybe Dale thought we were entertaining angels unaware, like the Bible says to do.

I eased over to the scene, staying out of our angel's line of sight. Just listening.

"What kind of music does a harp play?" Joey asked her.

"The selections are endless. If it can be played on a guitar or other stringed instrument, it can be played on a harp. Bach wrote amazing concertos, etudes and sonatas for harp; Beethoven and Chopin created77

"Can you play something by Elvis?"

Pause. He's got you there, Red, I thought. But then she nodded. "Of course." She bent her head and lifted her hands to the strings. A few seconds later Joey-and everybody else except me-started grinning to a fast-plunked harp solo of Don't Be Cruel. When she finished, everybody applauded, and Joey whooped. He noticed me standing to one side. "Ben, Elvis is singing to us from heaven!"

"I expect Elvis's idea of heaven is a peanut butter sandwich with bananas and fried bacon." I paused. "Rotten bananas."

"Oh, ye of little faith," Karen Johnson said. She frowned up at me with her solemn blue eyes.

"We need to talk."

"Indeed."

I jerked a thumb toward the creek. "Come to my office."

Lilce I've said, the Little Hatchawatchee has a bridge across it from the main house. That bridge leads to the cabins and trailers where the hands lived. But I'd built a smaller footbridge downstream a ways. It was just wide enough for one person, and it only hopped across twenty feet of creek to a grassy island shaded by a live oak.

The oak was so old it hunched over like a grandma trying to hug the little hummock of land where it stood. Its exposed roots curled down to the dark water and disappeared like the dark hands of raccoons feeling for crawdads in the creek muck. The island was just big enough for the tree and a wooden bench.

Every time I sat on the bench, looking through the oak's curtain of branches and moss, I opened up my mind to a wide world of marsh and forest. Not a house in sight, not a road, just the way it must've looked to Pa's people before the white settlers came, and how it might even have looked a thousand years before that.

"My office," I said, and pointed to the bench. "Have a seat. You're `company,' as we say around here. I'll stand."

Karen Johnson didn't follow orders real well. She kept on standing alongside me, her eyes on the view. "Beautiful. Simply beautiful," she said. "To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, 'Beauty is a form of genius, and it makes princes of those who have it."'

She looked at me, her eyes haunted and misty. "Go ahead and laugh at my quaintness. But you clearly love this land of yours. This beautiful ranch. And therefore, you're a prince."

Looking at her, I felt a lot of things, but I can't say they were princely. "I like to quote Oscar the Grouch, myself. My brother's a fan of his."

"I know how I sound. A bit pretentious. Even where I'm from, I'm considered somewhat melodramatic."

"Around here we call that `puttin' on airs."'

"A bad thing."

"Well, depends. I'm not makin' fun of you. I'm just guessing you made it farther than eighth grade."

She blinked. "Well, yes."

"I didn't. But I like to read. Guess that counts for something."

"A reader is always a student of the world."

She sounded sincere. I wanted her to be sincere, but I wasn't used to women taking my mind seriously. I shrugged. "Ainazin', the stuff you can pick up in comic books."

She studied my Pollo-strangled neck. "You're getting a nasty bruise there. Does it hurt?"

"Naw."

"And your elbow? Surely it's suffering a few twinges from slamming into Inny Polio's Neanderthal forehead."

"Only hurts when I laugh."

"I appreciate what you did on my behalf, yesterday."

"I didn't do much. Mac came to the rescue. He gets kinda frantic when females are threatened. In a better world, he'd be a knight, like you called him. Me? I just tidy up behind the elephant parade."

"Can't you accept a simple compliment?"

I looked down at her. Sunlight dappled her through the oak leaves. "Awright, it's straight-talk time. I run my business and I take care of my people. Don't flatter me for doing the right thing."

"I have no reason to flatter you. But perhaps you don't realize you represent a rare brand of chivalry."

"Yeah, well, that and a buck'll buy a cup of coffee. Not even gourmet coffee, just convenience-store coffee. You got anything you need to confess? Just between you and me."

"I'm not a criminal."

"That leaves a lot ofleeway. Let's go through the list. You're a college girl?"

"Some years ago."

"You got family?"

"Yes.1)

"Up north, Miss Hepburn?"

4 'Yes."

"You out of money?"

She got a little shifty. "Not ... precisely. It's of no consequence at the moment. I have history I'd rather not discuss. But I'm not a car thief or any other kind of criminal, pervert, miscreant or n'er do well."

"What are you running from?"

"Nothing that need concern you. I ... I'm not running f 'rove anything. I prefer to think of it as `trying to find myself"'