Leanne would tell about it many many times later on in psychic workshops and seminars in Florida, Georgia, and as far north as Ohio, get to the part, “You cain’t come here yet,” and there would be a chill in the room you could feel, people in the audience holding their arms.
• • •
T
he room where she opened her eyes that day was a different story. She said, “Where am I?” A nurse told her she was at Lykes Memorial in Brooksville, brought here close to death but now seemed to be doing okay. The nurse not too sympathetic or sensitive. So Leanne waited till Big came to visit. He was the first one she told.
“I had an out-of-body experience.”
Big had hold of her hand lying on the covers, giving it pats.
“I did. I drowned, but it wasn’t time for me yet so I had to come back.”
He said, “I want you to quit that job of yours.”
Leanne said, “Don’t worry.”
“I have a brick ranch house in the country on five acres, an orange grove, all kinds of palm trees, laurel oaks that tell it’s spring with chartreuse leaves, orchids growing everywhere, a big screen porch…”
Leanne said, “It sounds nice.”
“You want to marry me I’ll put in a swimming pool, you can be my little mermaid.”
Leanne said, “We hardly know each other.”
“I know you’re what I want.”
“Can I think about it? Right now there’s so much on my mind.”
“Have your own car. Go to big society parties in Palm Beach… Get some rest, sweetheart.”
Patting her hand, kissing her on the forehead.
He smelled nice of aftershave and wasn’t too bad looking. He was mature… She wouldn’t have to worry about her hair anymore or work in the gift shop or do the Birds of Prey Show, those huge things shitting all over the place. She wondered what the wife of a judge was called.
It was the next day Leanne heard voices in the hall and saw the black family walking past her room, come to visit somebody. One of them, she was bringing up the rear, stopped in Leanne’s doorway and stood there looking in at her. A little girl about twelve.
Later on Leanne would tell the psychic workshops and seminars from Florida to Ohio, “It was the same little girl I met in my out-of-body experience. She smiled and turned as if to go and I said, “Wait, please.’ She looked at me and said, ‘You be jes fine now, Leanne. I be back when you wants me.’ I said again, ‘Wait,’ but she was gone. I got out of bed, walked up and down the hall looking in every room. There was no sign of the little girl, or her family. As soon as I returned to bed I fell into a deep sleep. It was evening when I woke up, feeling completely refreshed and at peace for the first time since my drowning. But there was something else I felt, like a presence in the room. I looked around … it was on my bedside table. A crystal. It wasn’t there before and when I asked the nurse, she said she didn’t know anything about it or what it was. I didn’t either, then. I didn’t learn until later it was… Can you guess? Of course, a rose quartz. With its pink rays that focus on the heart chakra and usher in love, forgiveness, inner peace. But at the time I had no idea…”
• • •
A
t the time the judge hovering over her, his presence so close she could see the blood vessels in his nose afire, a glow over his face that wasn’t healthy, Big saying:
“‘I be back when you
wants
me’?”
“That’s what she said.”
“And you think she’s from the spirit world.”
“She must be.”
“Well, if she knows how to get here from the other side, wherever that is, how come she doesn’t know how to speak good English? She looked like the same one as in your dream, that’s all.”
“It wasn’t a dream.”
“Listen, I have trouble telling one from the other myself, and I see them brought up before me every day of the year.”
She said, “If you don’t believe me…”
And he was all sweetness again.
“Honey, you’re my little mermaid. I want to take care of you, buy you nice things, make you happy.” He said, “Look,” and showed her pictures of his home in the country, all the trees, the orange grove, the flower gardens and grounds maintained by work-release inmates.
Leanne said, “It looks so quiet and peaceful. A wonderful place to meditate, have a little dog to play with.” The only thing she didn’t like too much was that canal right next to the property, a wide ditch full of water. “Are there ever alligators in it?”
Big said, “Honey, you want it fenced off, I’ll have it fenced off. You want a little doggie, you got it, anything you want. Come home with me.”
4
E
very morning, if he got up early enough, he’d see her in the yard meditating: out there with her tiny dog Pokey, between the pair of Cuban petticoat palms she thought of as two women who’d been turned into trees—telling him that—though she had never heard or read of such a thing in any of her books. Christ, dozens of books on spirit communication, psychic enlightenment, aura reading, crystal healing, getting in touch with your chakras, channeling—which was what Leanne did to get hold of the little colored girl she called her discarnate entity, or sometimes her spirit guide. Ask Leanne how she did it, she’d tell you.
“Easy as pie. I raise my energy level to resonate with Wanda’s, see, then she’s able to use my energy channel to manifest herself through me.”
Oh.
“That’s her name, Wanda?”
“Wanda Grace.”
“How old is she?”
“Twelve.”
“That’s all? And she knows everything?”
“Age doesn’t matter.”
“But why her? Why not somebody more like yourself?”
“Wanda was killed by an alligator.”
Ask a simple question…
The time he did he saw Leanne get that scared look for a second, saw her eyes close, her eyelids flutter and now she was speaking in her little colored-girl voice.
“The gator drug me into the swamp and spun me round and round and round till I was drowned. Then what he did, he took me down to his house and lef’ me, didn’ eat me till I turn ripe. Tha’s the way they is, like you ripe.”
Leanne opened her eyes.
She said, “Wanda Grace’s little dog ran away. It was when she was down by the swamp looking for Pokey it happened. The same month, the same day and hour as my Experience, except Wanda passed over in the year 1855. She lived on a plantation in Clinch County, Georgia, as a slave.”
“Maybe,” the judge said, “you can get her to dust and do the windows.”
Oh, you didn’t kid about Wanda Grace. Leanne’s face would turn to stone and the judge would have to act innocent.
“Honey, I thought she wanted us to open our hearts and be happy, have some fun in life.”
Leanne said, “Your idea of fun is cruel. Sending people to prison, degrading those less fortunate. Wanda Grace was a
slave
. All her people died of the fever except she.”
What happened to the healthy girl who used to wiggle her tail and could smile underwater? Now she communicated with a spirit and played with crystals to improve her inner vision. Show you how much sense that made, she’d bury the crystals in the backyard every few days, in the
dirt
, she said to cleanse them and restore their energy. Get her in bed, she might just as well have her tail on. It was like doing it to a woman in a trance. Hey, where are you? He would never ask
who
are you, afraid she might answer in her little colored-girl voice. She never did it with the lights on or spoke while they were doing it.
When she did speak during the day, in her mild, airy tone, it was to pass on information.
“Big, Wanda says you need psychic counseling, maybe even alchemic hypnotherapy, have a specialist take a look at that negative ego.”
“I will if you’ll get your head examined.”
“Wanda says you need a good psychic cleansing, you won’t be so irritable.”
“Is that right? She ever take a look at the kitchen? The dishes piling up in the sink…”
“Some things, Big, are more important than others. I’m trying to help you.”
“Why don’t you go someplace else and do it? Like back to Ohio.”
“Wanda Grace says I have to keep trying, use my mediumistic gift to raise your vibration level and you’ll come to know your Higher Self.”
And on that note Bob Gibbs said, “Why don’t you tell that little nigger to mind her own business.”
So frustrated he was admitting her existence. Going on seven years of this because Leanne had been scared by an alligator.
He did get her a dog from the pound, a tiny brown-and-white hyperactive mutt that yipped and jumped up on your lap, a cute little pup Leanne named Pokey after Wanda Grace’s dog. (“I calls him Pokey ‘cause he like to poke his little nose where it don’t belong. I tells him he goin’ poke it in the wrong place sometime…”) He got her a car, too, a Ford Escort she drove to health food stores and now and then to Winn-Dixie when he hollered for meat and potatoes.
“Big, how can you eat the flesh of once-living things?”
“Easy, I chew each bite forty times.”
But he didn’t fence off the canal or put in a swimming pool or take her to any Palm Beach society functions where she might start talking like the help and embarrass him.
Was that the sign of a negative ego?
If it was, then maybe he’d better start thinking positive. Instead of not doing anything that would make her want to stay, work on an idea that would get her to leave. Of her own free will, without any hassle, legal complications.
And thought of a way to do it that made him smile it was so simple, sometimes wheeze out loud with delight as he entertained the idea and refined it. But then for months he continued playing with it, taking his time, not quite ready to commit himself…
• • •
U
ntil this morning talking to the little-girl probation officer, Kathy Bacar, he realized she was the incentive he needed to get going. Kathy
Baker
.
He wasn’t sure why at first, but this little girl raised his vibration level, got him feeling energized for the first time in almost a year, since his girlfriend Stephanie moved to Orlando and for a while there he enjoyed a few casual encounters. But, man, it was work getting them from drinks and dinner into the sack the same evening. One-nighters could kill you. It was better to have a girl right there you could count on. Like Stephanie.
The minute she appeared in his courtroom charged with indecent exposure, jogging topless in John D. MacArthur State Park, he knew this big redheaded girl would fill the bill. She’d said to him in court, “Your Honor, I was doing nothing lewd or indecent.” No, but he’d bet she would if given the chance, a woman he decided then and there had to be full of fun. He fined her two hundred dollars—had to—waited a week, phoned her and said, “How about a couple of hundred-dollar dinners to make up for what I put you out?” Their first date he learned Stephanie loved to drink as well as expose herself. He said to her, “I know where you can jog topless through a garden to your heart’s content, while my semi-estranged wife is at a seminar in Ohio.” What a picture it turned out to be: this big redheaded nymph, his Nature Girl, ducking through the laurel oak and cabbage palms, not a stitch on, her buddy the judge waiting with a Jim Beam in each hand. Simple pleasures were the best kind. Fond memories to store away—while you work on a new set.
Kathy Baker was a different type of girl, more virginal even though she’d been married. He hadn’t really noticed her till she spoke up in court and he decided to chew her out. But then talking to her after changed his mind, seeing this was a good-looking girl up close with a cute figure. She had spunk too. If she was Cuban, so be it; there was a lot of it going around. She might not want to run naked through his garden; still, the garden could be used to soften her up, thinking this little girl would be squirmy and fun in bed. There he was wondering how to get to her and she says she’d worked in mental health. Bingo. All he had to do after that was tell about Leanne, ask the little girl her opinion and act interested. Maybe a benign form of schizophrenia, huh? Yeah, I’ve thought about a psychiatric evaluation, but the idea of it—I have that done to criminals. Nodding, saying yes, uh-huh, and I hope we can talk about this some more. “I’ll be in the bar at the Helen Wilkes Hotel, five o’clock, if you have time for a drink…”
Where he was now and every evening at five.
He didn’t expect her, so wasn’t surprised or disappointed when she didn’t show up. The big kidney-shaped bar at the Helen Wilkes was a hangout for judges and lawyers, both sides, and some of the newspaper people. Knowing this, the little girl might prefer not to come rather than feel out of place. That was all right, he was cultivating patience. Trying to.
But three bourbon Manhattans later his vibration level had him out in the lobby at the pay phone, dialing a number in Belle Glade he’d looked up and memorized weeks ago. He said to the woman who answered, “I’d like to speak to Dicky Campau.”
She said, “You want frogs, we don’t have none.”
This woman would have to be the frog gigger’s wife, Inez. He had seen her once or twice out at the lake.
“What I want is to speak to the man of the house.”
That got a sound from the woman Bob Gibbs couldn’t identify. In a moment a male voice came on saying, “Yeah?”
“This is Judge Gibbs speaking. You know that hearing of yours coming up?”
“I believe it’s next week, Judge.”
“I’m moving it up to the day after tomorrow. How’d you like to do me a favor?”
There was silence on the line.
“Do I have a choice in the matter?”
Bob Gibbs said, “Why certainly,” sounding surprised. “You can be let off with a warning or draw a five-hundred-dollar fine and a year in the Stockade. Take your pick.”
5
T
hey crossed the middle bridge over to Palm Beach, Dale Crowe Junior driving, his uncle Elvin sitting back to take in the sights, what had changed in the ten years he was out of circulation.
On Royal Palm Way, Dale said, “Over here, they see you driving around at night in a pickup truck they’re liable to stop you. They don’t even need a reason.”
Elvin said, “I won’t worry about it if you won’t.” He was cool for a guy his age, close to fifty. He had on a straw cowboy hat he said was the Ox Bow model and three-hundred-fifty-dollar boots he said had once belonged to his big brother Roland, now dead. Went off to Miami and got himself shot by a woman. Elvin talked about his brother a lot, saying how Roland had worked for the Italians down there and was paid a good buck for his services, wore three-hundred-dollar boots and suits made in Taiwan China. This was while they’d stopped for pizza at a place on Dixie Highway and had two pitchers of beer. It was going on eight o’clock now, dark out.
Dale said, “I get stopped and have to take a Breathalyzer I’m fucked.”
“What’re you worried about,” Elvin said, “they might put you in jail? Tell them you’re about to do five years, have to catch you later.”
“Shit,” Dale said.
He had cooled down since yelling at the judge in court and they threatened to put cuffs and leg-irons on him, then let him go when the judge didn’t make a case of it. He had seven days to think of what prison would be like. Elvin, eating pizza, said he’d give him some pointers on how to jail. Since they’d be together this week.
Dale had let his uncle move in while his two roommates were finishing up thirty days for criminal mischief. Got freaked on crack and kicked in a guy’s windshield for no reason. Now Elvin was talking about staying on after Dale left. The house was in Delray Beach, a dump but only a few blocks from the ocean. Smell that salt air, Elvin said, it would clean the stink of prison off him. Dale said, well, his roommates were about to get their release, he believed either today or tomorrow. If Elvin wanted to stay he’d have to talk to them about it. Elvin said he’d had enough of roommates to last him. If he stayed, they’d have to leave. Like that, taking over. Dale had said, “You don’t know my roommates.” Elvin said, eating pizza, “And they don’t know me, huh? You don’t either.”
That was a fact. Ten years old when his uncle was arrested for murder and stood trial, Dale knew him more from photographs than face-to-face. Elvin in his airboat. Elvin standing with Dale Senior, the oldest brother. Elvin with Roland, both big guys, twins to look at them, except Elvin was a few years younger. When Roland was shot dead and Elvin sent to prison for killing a man he thought was the one had got the woman to kill Roland, nobody in the family seemed surprised.
Elvin was saying now, “This is a pretty street, you know it? Look at those palm trees. Those are the tallest palm trees I ever saw.” He said, “I wouldn’t mind living over here. It sure beats the shit out of Delray Beach.” He said, “Summer I’d go back to the Glades, though, get me an airboat.” He said, “Not too much traffic now, huh? The snowbirds’ve all gone home. I don’t know why anybody wants to live up north. I go even as far as the Georgia line I get a nosebleed.” He said, “Go on over to Ocean Boulevard and turn south.”
Now they were riding along next to the Atlantic Ocean, black out there all the way to the sky.
Elvin said, “Nice public beach but no place to park. So it becomes a private beach for all the rich people live along here behind their walls. It’s interesting how rich people fuck you and you don’t even know most of the time they’re doing it, huh? I had a cellmate my last year at Starke name of Sonny? Cute boy, use to work for a rich doctor. He’s still rich, only he isn’t a doctor no more. They took his license away.”
Dale said, “Right there’s where Donald Trump lives.”
Elvin said, “Is that right? Who’s Donald Trump?”
Before they ate and were driving around West Palm, Dale had pointed out the building Barnett Bank was in, its shiny black glass rising above old structures around it, and said, “You know what they call that building? Darth Vader.”
And Elvin had said, “Who’s Darth Vader?”
Dale could see how he might not have heard of Donald Trump in prison, but everybody in the world knew who Darth Vader was. Either one, though, was hard to explain, so Dale let it go. Elvin wasn’t interested anyway. He wanted to drive down to Ocean Ridge.
“What for?”
“The doctor I mentioned?” Elvin said. “He lives there,” and began telling about Dr. Tommy Vasco and Sonny, who was his cellmate up at FSP his last year.
“Actually it wasn’t quite a year. Couple of weeks before my release I sold him for two hundred dollars. Sonny had this blond hair you could see clear across the yard. I could’ve got more, but I let a buddy of mine have him.”
Dale stared at his headlight beams on the two-lane blacktop, trees now closing in on both sides. He could feel his uncle, the size of him, sitting there in that cowboy hat. Dale set his tone of voice to be casual, uncritical, saying, “Well, I ain’t getting into any of that. I’ll tell you right now.”
Elvin said, “I know cons that remain virgins, I’m not telling you it can’t be done.”
Dale shook his head at the road. “I won’t even talk to a queer.”
“Listen to me,” Elvin said. “I’m a person was never married on the outside. But you get in there, something happens to you. Soon as I was put in with the population I started looking for a wife. Generally speaking, you poke or get poked. They’ll fight over your skinny butt or you’ll fight to keep it your own. It’s got nothing to do with being queer, it’s how it is. Sonny come along toward the end there, I kicked out this puss I had and said that one’s mine, the cute blond. Don’t nobody even look at her. It was okay with Sonny. He’s the type goes along with whatever… Is this Ocean Ridge?”
“Manalapan,” Dale said. “Ocean Ridge is next.”
“Anyway,” Elvin said, “here’s this boy has to do a mandatory twenty-five on a life sentence and he’s I mean depressed, doesn’t think he can hack it. He needed somebody like me to cheer him up. See, he’d keep house, tend to my wants, and I’d take good care of him.”
Dale said, “What’d he do?” watching the road, seeing condos and big homes now.
“He killed a woman. Beat her to death and got first-degree.”
Dale said, “Was this in the newspaper?”
“It musta been, was about a year and a half ago. At the time, Sonny was living with this Dr. Tommy Vasco, being his little helper. Sonny’d get girls for the doctor and the doc’d write drug prescriptions using fake names and Sonny’d go out and sell the stuff, mostly Quaaludes and Xanax, make himself some money.”
“He got girls?” Dale said. “Whyn’t the doctor get his own girls?”
“He use to, when he was married and playing around. He was always drunk or stoned,” Elvin said. “Till his daddy swore he’d cut him off if he didn’t behave hisself. See, this Tommy Vasco was a fuckup all his life. His daddy sent him to medical school down on one of the islands, set him up after, bought him this big house… His daddy use to be a doctor, owns all kinds of property down in Miami, a rich tightass kind of guy, real strict and he has this fuckup for a son. You get the picture?”
“Wants the old man to think he’s a good boy,” Dale said, “so he pulls the shades down and does all his partying at home.”
“There you go. And has Sonny get the women and the dope, all different kinds. But now the women, that’s something else. The doctor was partial to big blond women, no Latins. They had to be big but not fat and have good-size titties on ‘em.”
Dale said, “How many women would he have at a time?”
“Oh, he’d have two or three there for a party. See, what Dr. Vasco liked was for Sonny to take movies of him and a couple women in bed doing it. Then after, they’d sit around drinking, doing the cocaine and watch themselves on TV. Well, this one night… I forgot to mention, the doctor’s favorite was a woman name Pola from Lake Worth. Big woman almost six foot and built. Sonny said she was bigger’n he was and Sonny musta been, oh, five eight or nine and kinda chubby. I’d call him that sometime, ‘Hey, Chubby, look at what I got for you.’”
Dale thinking, Jesus. Not wanting to hear about it.
“And I’d give him a candy bar for being a sweetie. Anyway,” Elvin said, “this woman I mentioned, Pola, come by one night alone, no other women there. They have their party, chop some rails, put a movie on. This Pola says to the doctor she bets his daddy would just love to see one of these movies, kidding with him. Sonny thinks she didn’t mean anything by it, but he says the doc started to go crazy at the idea. He slaps her and she hits him back. They get in a fistfight and pretty soon she’s beating up on him. So the doc yells at Sonny to help him. But Sonny, not being a fighter, picks up a poker from the fireplace and hits her with it. This woman he says come at him like a tiger and he had to keep hitting her till he give her a good one over the head and it killed her. So then the doctor tells him what to do. Put her in her car and drive up to Lake Worth. The idea, leave the car on the street with her in it and it’ll look like she was mugged and the guy went too far, so take her purse. Sonny does all this, he’s getting out of her car, when who drives up shining a light on him…”
Dale was nodding. Man, he could see it.
“The police. Sonny was charged, he had her blood all over him, and convicted,” Elvin said. “He tried to tell them it was Dr. Tommy Vasco made him do it. They looked into it but couldn’t put nothing on the doc except the fake prescriptions he wrote. He got like six months and can’t practice medicine no more, which he barely did anyway. Sonny got life, the mandatory twenty-five, and is now keeping house for this buddy of mine. Okay. You want to know something else?”
Dale said, “What?”
“The judge that convicted Sonny and the doc is the same one gave me ten years straight up, minimum, and gave you five on that dinky violating probation charge. Judge Bob Gibbs, he must be one busy son of a bitch.”
Coming to Ocean Ridge they had to stop at a light on A1A, dark and quiet out there, quiet in the pickup now, Dale seeing Judge Gibbs leaving the courtroom as he yelled at him. The judge walked out and now Dale tried to imagine a blond-haired guy hitting a big blond woman with a fireplace poker. As the light turned green and they started up again, he said, “You want to take a look at this doctor’s house, where it happened?”
“I want to see the doctor,” Elvin said.
“What for?”
“Sonny asked me to.”
It didn’t make sense to Dale.
“Like you have a message for him?”
“In a way,” Elvin said. “Sonny wants me to hurt him.”