“Dat’s up ta da police ta decide.” Alonzo affectionately taps Lon’s knee. “No need fer you ta involve yerself. You leave dat ta da law.”
“Had to be someone he knew. Or someone who knew him,” Lon reflects. “They knew what they were after when they went into that house. It wasn’t some random break-in, Pop. And where’s Mr. Bentley’s team? Where’s the skull?” he slips.
“Da skull? Boy, what are ya talkin’ ’bout?” Alonzo shakes his head. “Gatas, I hope.” He chuckles nervously.
“Wasn’t a gator skull, Pop.” Lon slices the filleted mackerel into thick cuts for grilling. “We were down by Marsh Creek…paddleboarding.”
“Uh-huh, I know da spot. Go on,” his father encourages.
“Brianna found this skull. Pop, it wasn’t normal. It kind of looked like a human skull. But it was extraordinary. Had a tall crown. Like a cone head. And the eye sockets were huge,” Lon exaggerates, his arms flinging out to his sides.
Alonzo laughs a hearty chuckle. “I see…you an dat petite jolie blonde foun’ yerselves a alien skull,” his father pokes fun, disbelieving.
“I don’t know that it was an alien,” Lon’s voice trails off in a whisper with the
a
-word. “It wasn’t normal. That’s all I’m saying.”
“Normal? You know what a normal noggin looks like, son?” Alonzo eyes him peculiarly, sincerely interested in such science.
“Well yeah, Pop. We’ve been studying the skeletal system for years in school. Even studied a cadaver in advanced anatomy,” he answers willingly, proud with the possibility of impressing his father.
“A cadaver? Ya mean a dead body?” Alonzo looks at him, taken aback. “I don’ know dat I like da soun’ a dat. What kinda edge’cation Mama an me payin’ fer?”
“A good one, Pop. Thorough and practical,” he ensures.
“I don’ know what’s so pract’cal ’bout snoopin’ roun’ dead bodies.”
Splat!
Alonzo launches more chaw juice into the bayou. “Seems ta me da dead ought ta be laid ta rest…undisturbed.” He shakes the knife in his hand, free of threat, in Lon’s direction. “Probly best ya don’ tell Mama ya been disturbin’ da dead. An none a dat alien talk roun’ her either. She gets in ta all dat voodoo, ya know. Part a her her’tage. Already fancies herself half med’cine woman.” He chuckles at the thought.
“Ouch!” Lon yelps, his razor-sharp fillet knife cutting through his palm.
Alonzo swiftly grabs up a rag, holding pressure over the crimson blood trickling from his son’s hand. “If I toll ya once, I toll ya a hun’red times…cut
away
from yer hand, son,” he scolds tenderly.
Lon pulls his hand out of his father’s nervously, his mind flashing back to the sparkling emerald green cast aligning his blood and Brianna’s from their skull wounds at the creek.
“Lemme see,” Alonzo defends, removing the rag to inspect the depth of the cut.
“Whew,” Lon utters at the crimson red color devoid of even a hint of emerald green.
“Don’ look so bad,” Alonzo diagnoses. “Better go pour some Old Spice over it,” the classic aftershave serving as the senior’s cure-all for years.
“Yes, sir.” Lon chuckles, his most infantile memory surfacing of his father affectionately splashing the alcohol-based
smell good
over the torn flesh of his knee after an unfortunate athletic feat.
Later that evening nearing midnight, the screen door to the front porch opens and closes softly. Lon looks up from the book he reads, perched in the front porch swing. Quickly coming to attention, he stands with Brianna’s presence, surprised to see her at such an hour.
He clears the seat beside him on the swing. She declines, sitting carefully in the hammock chair that hangs from the other side of the porch. Once feeling secure in the swinging swaddle of cloth, she crosses her legs one into the other, looking out over the bayou, her eyes avoiding contact with Lon’s.
He follows her lead, sitting back down in the swing, his mind in turmoil over what to say to her, if anything at all. Minutes pass between them, no words spoken, only the soothing and probable spooky sounds of the swamp.
Lon looks back and forth from Brianna and the wetlands she views, attempting to read her interpretation of his
stomping ground.
She gives in, looking to him. He sits upright and forward, his elbows propped on his knees signifying his interest in her company.
Her affect flat, she says, “How long have we known each other?”
“Since preschool,” he answers, his expression soft and apologetic.
“Arguably most of our natural lives,” she concludes. “Why is this the first time I’ve ever been to your home?”
He shrugs his shoulders, dismissing, “We don’t have many visitors.” His eyes fall to the porch below him momentarily before returning to her. “What do you think? Of where I come from?”
“It suits you.”
“Simple and primitive,” he deduces, disappointment in his tone.
“I was going to say authentic and alluring.” She shrugs. “But if you wanna feel sorry for yourself, go ahead.”
Lon does not respond to her uncharacteristically ill-nature, sure it is a part of the grieving process.
“And I don’t need you to feel sorry for me either,” Brianna adds, diverting her glance from his, still laced with pity.
“What
do
you need then?” The words roll off his tongue, deep with sincerity. “Tell me, Brie. Tell me what I can do,” his pity quickly turning to desperation.
She looks back to him. “Just be my friend, Lon. The one you’ve always been. Daring and charismatic…real. Don’t go soft on me now.” She glances away, her arms circling around her middle. “Everybody has treated me soft all my life. Mama. Daddy.” Her lips quiver with the endearing and now dead terms. Clearing her throat, she recovers, “Allowed me to live in a fairytale. Where everything was good and light…easy.” She pauses. “Obviously life is not always easy.” Eyeing him straight on, she drives home her request, “But you’ve always treated me fair.”
“It will get easier, Brie,” he encourages.
“Maybe. But I don’t care to hear that right now.”
“Okay,” he reasons. “What do you want to hear?”
She shrugs. “Maybe a story. Something to take my imagination elsewhere. You got any good bayou stories?” She looks out over the calm night.
Lon raises his eyebrows, contemplating. “I have a Milky Way story,” he says, pointing up at the luminous ray arching across the dark sky. “You know how it got there?”
“It’s a galaxy, right? The galaxy that contains Earth. Galileo said it’s a conglomeration of individual stars. Appearing after the Big Bang, I think,” Brianna questions her science education, looking intently at the milky formation.
“According to science,” Lon leads.
“What else is there?”
“Myth.”
“Well, let’s hear it.” She settles comfortably into her hammock.
“The Cherokee have a legend,” he begins.
“Your mama’s people?”
“Yes.” Racking his brain, he pulls from its recesses the tale his mother recited to him as a boy. “How often have we tried counting all the stars in the sky?”
“A lot.” She nearly chuckles with the adolescent endeavor.
“And how’d that go for us?”
“Believe we always drifted off somewhere around a thousand,” Brianna huffs at the impossible feat.
“Mama says, a long time ago, when the earth was young, there weren’t many stars in the sky. The ancients could count them, keeping track of the numbers.”
“How many were there?” she interrupts with innocent curiosity.
Lon thinks momentarily. “Well, I guess I never thought to ask her that question. Anyway, there weren’t as many stars as we have nowadays. And back then, one of their primary food sources was maize…corn. Her people learned how to make cornmeal. They would hollow out a tree stump.” He points to a tall cypress tree. “Maybe like that one right there. They’d throw dried corn inside the stump and pound it with a long wooden pestle,” he uses his mama’s verbiage.
“A pestle?”
“Yeah. You know, kind of like a club.”
“Like a caveman?” she quizzes, trying to comprehend.
“Exactly!” His voice rises, pleased with her interaction, surely a helpful diversion. “They stored the ground corn…cornmeal…in handmade baskets to preserve it, to help make it through sparse winters. You know, making bread and mush.” Anticipating her question, he divulges, “Mush is like porridge.”
Brianna wrinkles her nose with the thought, happy to have arrived in the 21st Century where porridge is nearly extinct.
Lon leans back against the swing, its chain creaking as he continues. “One frosty morning, a man and his wife ventured out to their storage basket for some cornmeal, only to find someone or something had gotten to it first. This left them confused, as no one in the Cherokee village would steal from them. The wife pointed to the ground, where scattered remnants of the cornmeal resided, its powder milky white in color.”
“Ah,” she expels, the first reference to the astrological deity.
“And the plot thickens,” he encourages with a smile. “In the middle of the cornmeal dust was
giant,”
he grossly enunciates, “dog prints. Paw prints so large, the couple knew they could not be from any ordinary dog. Not of this Earth, anyway.”
Brianna playfully rolls her eyes with his chilling intonation, remaining quiet and alert, the only fuel required to propel Lon further.
“The couple immediately shared their revelation with the people of their village, who decided this creature must be a
spirit dog
from another world. Fearful there could be more, the villagers knew they must scare the spirit dog away before they were overcome with the supernatural beasts. So, later that night the entire village gathered round the cornmeal baskets, hiding out in the brush, armed with drums and turtle shell rattles.”
“How does a turtle shell rattle?” she interrupts.
“Well, you see, they would mount the shell to a piece of wood, then fill it with seeds or rocks, and shake it,” Lon explains so sensibly as if it were still modern-day practice.
“What about the turtle?”
He shrugs, giving his best guess, “Turtle soup.”
“Ooh!” she gasps. Quickly ready for a diversion from the unpleasant notion of any form of reptilian soup, she provokes, “Anyway…”
“So late into the night, after the villagers waited for hours, they heard a massive whirring sound from above. Like a flock of birds would make.” He stops swinging, his stillness adding to the intrigue. “The villagers looked up, and swooping in from the sky was a
ginormous
dog.” His arms flap out to his sides.
“A flying dog? Really, Lon?” she ridicules, yet wanting to believe him.
He nods his head, his exuberant expression convincing.
“Are you sure you’re not thinking of the Orion Constellation?” She continues to play cynic. “You know from Greek Mythology. Geryon, the
winged
giant who had a guard dog…Orthrus, the two-headed hound. Remember? Canine brother to the three-headed hell hound Cerberus?”
He shrugs. “Myth is myth, I guess. Maybe the story varies a bit from Greek to Native American tradition. But I’m referring to the Milky Way. Do
you
wanna tell it?” he defends playfully.
“No. Sorry. Go ahead.” She smirks, firmly pressing her lips together.
“Okay, so the giant winged dog emerges from the sky and starts gobbling down mouthfuls of cornmeal from their baskets.” He growls like a feeding giant winged dog may. “The villagers jump up! Beating their drums and shaking their rattles. The noise was so loud it sounded like thunder.”
At that very moment a deep rolling sound accompanies a bright bolt of heat lightning in the open Louisiana night, causing Brianna to leap from her hammock, bolting into the seat beside Lon on the swing. He welcomes her with a warm embrace, drawing their nestled frames into secure position, her back resting against his chest.
“Then what?” she whispers, completely riveted.
He collects his breath, his chest deeply expanding, not only from the excitement but from the euphoric feeling being so close to Brianna stirs in him. “The thunder scared the beast away,” he regroups, fending off his physical reaction to her closeness. “The villagers chased after it, the thunder following them. The dog ran all the way to the top of the mountain and leaped into the sky, the cornmeal spilling out the sides of its mouth. The beast kept running across the black night until it disappeared from the villagers’ sight.”
“But the cornmeal from his mouth, each grain became a star. Lighting up the night,” Brianna concludes keenly and happily amused.
“Yep,” Lon confirms, pulling her tighter to his frame as they gaze upon the luminous galaxy. “The Cherokee call it
gi li’ ut sun stan un’ yi,”
he pronounces it slowly, calling on his memory, having been years since he rehearsed the term taught to him by his mother. “It means ‘the place where the dog ran.’ And that, my sweet Brianna, is how the Milky Way came to be,” he finishes proudly.
“I like that story,” she indulges. “It’s so much better than what they teach us in school.” Her back fasted to his chest, the cadence of his heartbeat offers a comforting presence. “Thank you,” she whispers, pressing her lips to the back of his hand as it lies across her chest.
“Anytime,” he consoles, returning her affection, kissing her atop her blonde head.
The morning sun is hot and rising, now nearing noonday. Lon and his father, both in their Sunday best, sit side by side on the front porch swing. Lon wipes the sweat from his brow, wondering how a week has since passed in the death of Brianna’s parents.
“Pop!” he scolds tenderly at his father’s incessant knee-bouncing, intermittent and agitating in its contact with his own leg.
“Son, I can’ help it,” Alonzo snaps, pulling his handkerchief from his suit pocket, swiping it across the back of his neck. “Yer mama toll me ta
refrain,”
he emphasizes her exact word, “from dippin’ ’til we get back from da wake.”
Lon jumps up from the swing. “Well then, kindly
refrain,”
he emphasizes in turn, “from sitting beside me at the funeral home. You’re making me more nervous than I already am.” He paces the porch.