A Place Called Wiregrass (7 page)

“Now, you need a Coca-Cola to help settle your stomach?”

“No, ma’am,” I said, knowing full well I had to tell it all now. But instead of dread, I felt protected. For a moment she didn’t say anything. She just sat there with her hands folded, looking down at her lace tablecloth. I was relieved when the air conditioner kicked on and provided background noise. The humming sounded soothing.

“Now what in the world was all that about? And just drop that old pride, Erma Lee. It’s me you’re talking to.”

Her soft hazel eyes did me in again. Before I knew it, I was telling all the ugly, tattered holes that were missing from the puzzle. The holes I’m sure she had figured out, but gave me the dignity of acting like she didn’t know.

When I began to describe the drunken attacks, the last night before I left Cross City, and what I knew about Bozo coming to town, I somehow felt silly. Nobody said anything about him wanting to kill me. Like always, I assumed the worst. Maybe because if I prepared myself for the worst, the truth never seemed so awful. I expected her to tell me I was making a mountain out of some little molehill, or some other silly expression that older people like to use.

She wiped her hand across the tablecloth as if she was scattering invisible after-dinner crumbs. “You can’t play around with men like him. You think he’d be so crazy to come here?” Before I could say anything, she verbalized my deepest fear. “Well, if he got liquored up, no telling.”

“I don’t know what to think anymore.” I pulled my ponytail over my neck and twirled the ends of my hair with my finger. “And just when things were going good…”

“We’ll call the lawyer directly. I just imagine he can get papers drawn up to stop that Bozo person from coming within any distance of you. You got a tag number for his vehicle?”

As I searched my pocketbook, fishing through tissue paper, female needs, and pieces of Juicy Fruit, I thought how wrong I’d been about Claudia Tyler the first time I met her. I assumed I could put her in a neat little box because she lived in that nice big house on Elm Drive. Miss Claudia would tear out of any box anybody ever tried to put her in. And I suspected she had done so before.

While she sat at the kitchen table and used her portable phone to ensure my safeguard, I could make out bits and pieces of the conversation.

“So the divorce papers were already served. I see.” Shaking her head, her hazel eyes locked on me. I knew my eyes were all big and scared-looking. In my mind, when those papers got handed to Bozo, he probably went slam nuts.

I could just see him driving to the Brown Jug and telling everybody how I kidnapped his grandbaby and how he would rot in jail before seeing me keep her. “Them papers say I’m her daddy by law,” he’d shout at no one in particular. Knowing full well he couldn’t raise Cher and she was better off with me. It was that pride thing he had. The same thing kept me from telling Miss Claudia about my black-and-blue past.

Once I confessed my fear and she made the phone calls, I felt stronger. I’d never leaned on anybody before and wondered if I was venturing on shaky territory by letting Miss Claudia get so wrapped up in my business. To be honest, at the time I felt like if she didn’t get involved, I very well might have one of Richard’s nerve attacks. I decided telling her about things that shouldn’t be discussed in public was better
for her in the long run. The other option was her seeing me run down Elm Drive in broad daylight screaming and pulling my hair out.

“Sheriff Thomas will handle things from his end too. He’s a good man,” Miss Claudia said and fingered her pearls. “You know, sometimes the law likes to look the other way at messes like we’ve been through.”

I stopped twisting the ends of my ponytail and looked up at her. “Well, you got to trust somebody, don’t you?”

She just offered a soft smile, and I hoped she was not about to tell me that the man who set her up with all these nice things had violated her in any way. Right then, I needed the image of a good and decent man. Wade Tyler’s picture hung in her bedroom and offered a glimpse of a soft man with a receding hairline and a shy smile. I imagined him running his department store and letting Miss Claudia take the limelight by fellowshiping with all the customers, complimenting a woman on this dress or flirting with a man over the new suit he was having tailored. I wanted to plug my ears and not listen. I needed that image of Wade Tyler.

She looked down and drew circles with her index finger on the white tablecloth. “I never will forget the time I called the law on my first husband. That Luther Ranker. We’d only been married two months before I knew I’d gone from one hell on earth directly to another. Funny, I don’t even recollect what the problem was. Me just a girl, don’t you know. But anyway, he set in to pounding on me for something I should’ve done or shouldn’t have done.”

Miss Claudia stopped drawing imaginary circles on the tablecloth. Instead, she squeezed the lace into a ball.

“The next morning after my beating, Luther went off in his boat, and I went straight to the sheriff’s office to file a complaint. I still remember how the sheriff’s fat chin glistened with sweat. He leaned back in his chair and put his big hands
behind his round head. The sheriff said he didn’t like to get in family matters. He asked me if I had talked to my folks about this yet. I wanted to yell at him and tell him my real daddy was dead. If he counted that no good Maxwell as my papa, I did not share his opinion. I thought at the time if he knew what Old Man Maxwell had done to me, he would’ve locked him up too. I was such a silly thing back then. Sitting in that hot office with the black iron fan rotating in the open window and thinking that if the sheriff locked Luther and Old Man Maxwell up, Mama, my baby sister, and me could all live in the big store on Main Street. But instead, I was a good girl and followed the sheriff’s order.

“Only problem was, Old Man Maxwell stood in the door to his store and told me in no uncertain terms that I made my bed and would have to sleep in it. I knew he was lying when he told me Mama didn’t want to see me. I tried to push my way inside the door. He grabbed at my breast and squeezed hard, pushing me out the door like some old drunk being tossed out of a saloon. ‘Get from here, before your mama sees you looking like some beat-up whore,’ he yelled and closed the store door. While I laid there on that nasty wooden sidewalk, I just didn’t know what was worse, getting that beating from Luther or being kept away from my own mama by the devil incarnate.

“I even wrote Mama about how I made a mistake marrying Luther. I never did go into details about the day before I ran off and the liberties Old Man Maxwell took with me. Some things are just better left alone, I decided. I just wrote about the current hell and begged Mama to contact the sheriff and get me some help. I worked on that letter every day for a week and planned on dropping it off at the store when Luther took me to town on Saturday. When I hid it in the closet, I had no idea Luther would be smart enough to find the letter tucked inside my shoe.

“Luther waited until we were riding in the truck on the way to town before telling me to give him my pocketbook. He claimed he had a piece of money for me and wanted to personally put it in my pocketbook. I don’t think I could’ve gripped that little black pocketbook that carried the letter I wrote Mama any tighter. After a few minutes of teasing, Luther yanked it out of my grasp and pulled over on the edge of the dirt road. It was right near Yorkshire Pond. I can still hear the locusts sounding off out in the pines.

“When he saw that letter, I never heard so much yelling and swearing in my life. Luther went plumb crazy. Telling me how I thought I was going to pull something over on him and how he was watching my ever move. Then, he just leaned against the driver’s door and started kicking with his boots. He only caught me with one good jab to my arm before my hand found the door handle and I jumped out. He screamed that I’d be six feet under before he’d let my mama get in our business. I didn’t see what he pulled from under the truck seat until the tree limb above my right shoulder dropped to the ground. Before the pistol smoke cleared, I took off running.

“I ran all the way around the pond and through the briars and underbrush. The briar bushes tore my legs to pieces, but I never felt a thing. It was only after I made it to Aaron and Missoura’s place that I noticed the blood on my legs.

“Aaron was hoeing in the garden when I came running up to him, crying and carrying on. Missoura later told me that I jumped right at his big chest like a little young ’un excited to see her daddy. He saved me that day and time and time again. A more gentle soul you never did know.”

Miss Claudia drew zigzag lines all across the tablecloth. Her face met mine, and she flinched as though she just remembered something she had to accomplish. “Oh, my goodness. Listen to me just rattle on. Not a bit of use in talking about things that are best left buried.”

She held the edge of the pine table and lifted herself up. I didn’t move to try and assist her. I remained at the table feeling embarrassed over how my own problems had somehow peeled away years of hurt that were draped with cobwebs in her mind. I could not for the life of me imagine this woman I was looking at putting up with the life she described. But then again, maybe she thought the same of me.

“But what I was getting at is our sheriff.” She leaned on her cane and lectured with her pointed index finger. “He’s not like that sorry excuse for a lawman in Apalachicola. Wiregrass’s sheriff respects a woman and will take her word. You got nothing to worry about, Erma Lee.”

I never was any good at taking care of myself. I was too busy caring for Cher or Mama or, until a few months ago, Bozo. And now I saw another purpose with Miss Claudia. I wanted to protect her from further heartache. Those early weeks with her had been spent worrying she’d feel sorry for me. Now that had all changed, and the feeling that came over me was strange, an aching for a person I barely knew that good. An aching for what she had lost at such a young age.

At such a young age…sixteen. Only a year younger than me when I married Bozo. Sixteen. The same age Suzette was when she got pregnant with Cher.

“We’re just all thimbles on the big Monopoly board of life,” my Aunt Stella used to say. That afternoon sitting at Miss Claudia’s kitchen table, I couldn’t help but wonder if the God Aunt Stella worshiped had sent me to Wiregrass for a reason after all.

A
s soon as Miss Claudia confirmed that Gerald Peterson was the best mechanic she knew, it made me feel a little more confident about advice from my spiky-haired neighbor. Kasi claimed Gerald Peterson was good, but she didn’t say how good-looking he was.

He pulled up to my trailer in a shiny black tow truck, and with a nod of his Auburn University baseball cap, he lifted the truck bed conveyer to rescue my ailing car. I caught myself pulling at that white polyester cafeteria uniform while he leaned over, hooked, and prodded all kind of equipment under the hood of my car.

Gerald was probably in his early fifties. He had a square build and a thick neck. I imagined him rushing down the Wiregrass football field decades earlier, scoring for the home team. A combination of curly blonde and gray hair stuck out underneath his cap. His mustache was still blonde with a few gray patches. He moved like a man determined to complete the mission before supper time.

Most likely he had a wife and kids to get to, I decided. Maybe he was even a grandfather. I caught myself embarrassed by studying his build for so long. Quickly, I glanced to see if Cher had noticed.

She stood by me with her hands on her hips, drawing rings in the sand with the tip of her big toe. She seemed to consciously ignore the other trailer-park kids who had gathered
on bikes and skateboards to witness the faded Monte Carlo’s elevation to the car ambulance. The humming of the tow truck’s diesel engine drew kids from every corner.

Looking at Miss Claudia’s big Lincoln parked in my driveway, I couldn’t help but think how out of place such luxury looked at Westgate Trailer Park. Half of my home was the same size as that car.

When I had shaken my head
no
to Miss Claudia’s first offer, she stood firm. “Mercy, Erma Lee. If I can’t do this, what can I do? Me with this bum hip, how much driving you think I’ll be doing?” With a toss of the keys she sealed the deal. “You’re taking the car, and that’s all there is to it.”

“Well, hey, Gerald,” Kasi said as she slipped through the growing throng of kids.

He nodded and, without looking back up, asked, “Where’s your old man hiding these days?”

She took a deep drag off her cigarette and bent down to the side mirror on the door of my Monte Carlo. “He’s working a job up in Huntsville. Getting paid time and a half. I told him just keep them checks coming, baby,” she said, stretching the ends of her platinum hair.

Gerald ignored Kasi, and she eventually slid over towards Cher and me. “Cher, baby, why don’t you run over and help Laurel get ready for skating?”

Cher looked at her and then glanced at me. I knew she didn’t want Kasi to know I had to give my permission first.

When she walked in front of the kids gathered on the street, Cher flung her hair over her shoulder and never said a word. I worried she was getting a big head because we had that shiny Lincoln parked in our lot.

Kasi stood next to me dragging on a cigarette and pulling at her denim miniskirt. The diesel engine of the tow truck hummed along with the crickets of early evening. The noisy mixture made me nervous, and I tried to think of something
to say to Kasi. I never did know how to act around women like her, the flirty kind that hid behind a pile of makeup and had big breasts that hung out every which a way.

“He’ll fix it up for you now.” She laid hard on the word
now
and took another drag. “Me and Ricky met him down at the Moose Lodge one night,” Kasi said while smoke escaped her black-lined lips. “He sure can dance. Gerald I mean, not Ricky.”

“I hope it won’t cost me a pile of money,” I whispered.

“He’ll do you right. He’s fast with his hands.”

I shot my eyes towards Kasi, wondering if she was talking from personal experience.

“Works on them cars day and night,” she added.

“I expect his wife gets tired of all that working.” I shocked myself by bringing up the mechanic’s home life. It was at times like this when I wished I was equipped with a built-in tape recorder and could recapture dumb words by pressing a rewind button.

Another long drag on the cigarette, and then her head flung backwards as though she was looking for the first evening star.
Oh great,
I thought.
Now she’s going to make it worse by asking me if I’m interested.
I hated games women like her played.

“You’re not going to believe this. He’s a widow,” Kasi said. Rings of smoke escaped with each word.

“Widower?”

“You know, his wife died. He won’t talk about it. And all Miss Trellis would say is that it was tragic.” Another long dramatic drag of nicotine. “You know how the old bat is, making you beg for answers. Well, she can kiss my tail before I beg anything out of her grubby little mouth. You heard what she done when Laurel rode her bike up by the office the other day? She went and…”

“I believe that’s got it.”

I didn’t even hear him walk up. He was wiping his hands together, I guess hoping the grease would somehow disappear. Fearing he heard my earlier comments about his marital status, I felt a streak of heat roll up my neck.

“You got my work numbers to call when it’s ready?” I was busy pulling my ponytail across the base of my neck. Not allowing myself to look at his walnut-shaped eyes, I looked down at the circle of dirt he was standing in.

When he casually walked away, he stuck his hand up in the air and cocked it forward. Skateboards and bicycles scattered to the shoulder of the pavement, and the shiny black truck departed with my worn-out car.

Cher was in the height of her glory riding with Laurel in the backseat of Miss Claudia’s big Lincoln.

“Where to, Miss Cher and Miss Laurel?” I knew I shouldn’t have encouraged them to act like big shots, but I tried to remind myself that you’re only a young ’un once.

“To the penthouse apartment, darling,” Laurel said a little too convincingly.
All those trashy soap operas she watched,
I thought.

“Onward to the club,” Cher said in a throaty whisper. She leaned sideways onto Laurel and giggled. Cher’s silliness comforted me. Her developing body had not evaporated my little girl yet.

Just because I wasn’t allowed to act silly doesn’t mean it will hurt anybody else, I decided early on with Cher. Maybe if Suzette could have escaped her problems in silly giggles and make-believe, she wouldn’t have had to escape her heartache with dope.

After the girls were dropped off at the skating rink, I found myself not wanting to go back home. Emptiness seemed to be sucked into my pores from the very air that spewed from the
air-conditioning vents. Would Kasi want to talk if I stopped by her place? But then the mental image of her getting all fixed up and spiking that hair out to go juking flashed across the windshield.

I was sure Gerald Peterson was out on some date too. I pictured him cleaned up and capless, sitting at a restaurant cutting his T-bone with those big powerful hands. After a big meal, he would go out to a club and dance. Maybe one or two beers, but he wouldn’t overindulge. He’d keep one elbow on the bar and turn his head to grin at all his friends.

As I turned up the soft echoes of the steel guitar on the radio, I tried to capture Gerald’s voice and guess what he would say to the girlfriend he may be with tonight. All I could think of was his hair and how wavy it was. For a second I caught myself wanting to put my hands in it. But who was I fooling? Speaking of hair, I remembered mine when he first laid eyes on me. Pulled back like some bald-headed fool with a ratty ponytail dangling down my spine. Gerald Peterson was the type of man who could only be with a brassy woman, probably some beautician who spent hours pulling out all her eyebrows and drawing perfect new ones on with a black pencil. I took my knocks, but nobody could ever call me stupid. I knew where I could be accepted.

“Now, I hope I’m not bothering you or nothing,” I said under the dim yellow light of Miss Claudia’s porch.

“Oh, don’t be silly,” she said, dressed in a long white silk robe with big butterflies and pink flowers. “I’m just in here looking at TV.” She held the front door open, and I entered with the McDonald’s bag.

“I went on a hunch here. You like chocolate milkshakes?” I held the bag up trying to entice her.

Whether she did or not, I would never know. She clamped her hand on her chest and closed her eyes. “It’s just what I needed right now.”

We decided to take our milkshakes in the family room. It was warm and inviting, with fashionable furniture. Old photographs of Patricia and Richard were scattered on the mantel and the coffee tables. A big built-in bookshelf took up one wall of the room, and I wondered if she’d really read all those books or just had them there for show.

“They tell me Gerald Peterson is just the salt of the earth,” Miss Claudia said when I updated her on my car. She paused to suck up the last remaining drops of milk chocolate from her straw.

“My neighbor Kasi, she said he works all the time.” I sat with my bare feet insulated under the sofa cushion, and rolled my eyes to see if my bait had been accepted.

“I expect he has to.”

“Does he have a bunch of kids to feed or something?”

“Erma Lee Jacobs. You ask more questions about him than I ever heard you ask about me.” She slapped the arm of her chair. “And here you are all propped up on my love seat. Are you wishing Gerald was here to share that love seat with you?”

I bolted my feet from under the cushion. “That’s a lie,” I yelled, trying to drown out her laughter. All I could think of was how I sounded like Cher teasing Laurel over some boy she had couple-skated with. “I mean, I was just wondering why he had to…”

“Oh, me.” She wiped a tear away from her eye. “You’re still a good-looking woman. You’re expected to notice men, don’t you know.”

I wondered if she knew her compliments got me every time. Whenever she made such a comment, and she did often, I always wanted to run and look in the hallway mirror to see if I could see the same qualities she claimed I had. But I usually just looked down or waved my hand, believing I could shoo away her silliness.

“To my knowledge, Gerald Peterson is still a single man. Or he was the last time I had my car tuned up.” Miss Claudia jiggled the straw in her cup. “He’s sure had some bumps along the way.”

Oh, Lord, here it comes,
I thought.
Prison, crackhead, most likely a womanizer.

“It’s probably been three years. His wife was killed in a most terrible car wreck out on Highway 431. They tell me she was coming back from prayer meeting when a drunk ran right into her head-on. Naturally the drunk survived.”

I thought of Bozo and all the nights he went on drunks and how I stayed worried not for his safety, but for the safety of everybody else on the road.

“After I heard about it at the beauty shop, I took a pot of chicken and rice over. That big giant man just sitting there with his hands on his head. Lord, it liked to tore my heart out.”

“He got any kids?”

“There’s a girl. I say girl, I think she’s married now. And a son. Gerald Peterson is a good man, Erma Lee. You like his looks, I suppose?”

“No, ma’am. I mean, he’s attractive and all.” I felt guilty for talking like this over a poor dead woman’s husband.

“I don’t want you thinking every man is like that Bozo person. It took me some time after Luther was lost at sea…well, before I could think of another man. Not because I mourned him, don’t you know,” she said and pointed the tip of her straw. “But because I was scared to death I was a magnet for meanness.”

“How did you get over all that?” I suspected there were more stories of beatings and ugliness. She was like me in that way. We pulled from our memory file and shared the first that came to mind, not necessarily the worst, but the most convenient.

She shook the empty cup and sat it by the edge of her recliner. “I have to credit the good Lord for healing those mental scars. I leaned on Him mighty heavy and Missoura for healing the physical scars. She was so sweet to me. She’d ever so lightly put the lard on my broken skin. I often think now what a terrible predicament I put Aaron and Missoura in by running to their house after I thought I’d be killed. After all, Aaron worked for Luther, and him being colored was just inviting trouble. But where was I to go? My mama was under a spell of doubting where her next meal would come from, and the sheriff left it all up to Mama. Well, there you go.” She tossed up her arms to emphasize the desperation, then looked down at her painted toenails.

I always hated times like these, not knowing whether to speak up or let the person catch their thoughts. The grandfather clock in the hallway chimed eight times. If she didn’t speak on the tenth, I would say something.

“To keep it from looking like he was involved, Aaron paid off Nettie, the lower quarter’s concubine. She let me stay at her place. Naturally Aaron paid an even higher price. Every day searching for oysters, Aaron had to listen to Luther tell him how disgraceful I was to live like the worst kind of trash. Like Luther was supposed to be better, mind you.

“But Aaron knew how to keep his nose clean by playing stupid. And him a hundred times smarter than that sorry Luther. So Aaron got by with offering a ‘Yez zir, boss man’ to Luther’s tirades about how horrible it was that I was living with a colored harlot. I reckon if Luther would’ve figured out Aaron was involved, he would have killed him right there on the boat and used him for bait.”

Miss Claudia dropped her chin and stared over the tops of her glasses. “So you see why I’m so crazy about Missoura? I was the same way by Aaron, don’t you know.

“Gracious, I saw and heard things in Crazy Nettie’s shack along Howard’s Creek that a girl had no business knowing. But I just chose to look the other way. You might as well say I had to. Missoura would take me to her house in the daytime, and then, before Aaron got home and Luther would have a chance to check up on me, I’d go to Nettie’s for bedtime. Luther said he’d kill every colored in the quarters if I didn’t go back to him. But the day he showed up to take me home, Crazy Nettie was standing on the gapped wooden porch holding two live water moccasins. She jabbered some mumbo-jumbo and claimed she put a spell on Luther. He yelled at her, ‘Get out of my way, you crazy whore.’ He hadn’t made it up the first step when Nettie threw those moccasins at him.” Miss Claudia slapped the arm of her chair and howled with laughter. “Luther fell over his feet trying to get away from there. He was so eat up with meanness the snakes wouldn’t even touch him.”