Along with the new, there were a couple of things I found disconcertingly familiar. The names on the signs on the law offices, doctor’s offices, real estate offices. I recognized a lot of them. They were the names of the boys I’d gone to school with. In the city, most of my friends my own age or older were still struggling to become what we wanted to be when we ‘grew up.’ But while I’d been gone, my male classmates had had families and now they were fathers and husbands. They were grown-ups. It made me feel old, and, at the same time, unformed.
When I got past the old downtown, with the Baptist Church, and the bank and the post office and the old hotel, I noticed something else. The place had certainly gotten raunchier!—I cheered up at the sight of a tattoo parlor, and a boutique of leather wear. I was surprised to see a restaurant named Cantaloupes. It had the glossy, prefabricated look of a franchise operation. The sign pictured an impossibly curvy woman in a bikini holding a cantaloupe in each hand at chest level. Under it was the caption: “Guaranteed ripe and juicy.” Some things had loosened up, definitely.
I drove through a few miles of subdivisions, each house looking just like every other. Then the houses thinned out, I passed some scraggly fields, and turned right at the sign that said Piney Woods Road. There were maybe two dozen houses huddled together. There were a handful of unfinished houses, the weeds and bushes growing through the foundations, indicating that work had been abandoned long ago. Some of the others, obviously inhabited, could not really be called “finished.” Jagged plywood patched holes and covered empty spaces surely meant to be windows. A few houses were neat, with tidy lawns, but most had yards of sand, weeds, and trash. Kids, almost all of them dark-skinned, wearing shorts or underpants and not much else played in the discarded lumber, or under the rusting cars up on blocks.
I wondered which had been the house where Sammy’s parents had lived. And why any residents from that time would still live here in this depressing place. Surely whatever the case may have been twenty or thirty years before, they could now find better housing somewhere else. I was still reeling from my drive over, from all the brand new buildings and the signs offering new houses for thirty thousand dollars. Accustomed to the outrageous housing prices in the city, that seemed almost as good as free.
I’d had this idea that I’d just stop and talk to the residents. Ask around and see if I could find anyone who remembered Elijah Wilson. It struck me then what a stupid idea that had been. With my pale skin and city clothes, and driving my Momma’s big car, why would anyone tell me anything?
I tried knocking on a few doors anyway. The harried black women who answered the doors just shook their heads, said they’d never heard of Elijah Wilson and looked at me as if I were very lost.
I was ready to give up. My last try was going to be an old man I saw sitting in a tattered old armchair in the middle of a junk-strewn front yard. I introduced myself, tried to make small talk. That failed. So I just came out and asked him if he had known Elijah Wilson. He said no, he sure didn’t remember that, but then he was an old man, he said, and he had forgotten a lot of things. He was polite enough. I was polite, too; I turned and left. But I could have sworn I’d seen something like fear in that old man’s face when I mentioned the name. I was sure of it. Almost.
Whatever it was I was looking for, I hadn’t found it on Piney Woods Road. I turned the car around, and headed east on Night Lake Road. I figured that the farther inland I went, the fewer new developments I’d encounter. I hoped something was left of the countryside I remembered: quiet scrub, shaded springs and slow rivers.
I did find some new developments and a few strip malls, but my hunch had been right. It didn’t measure up to the chaos of the Gulf coast. I sometimes got the feeling that developers had a deep, pervasive fear that one lot would be left undeveloped when it could be the site of a fast food joint, a bar, or a mall. Such a fear seemed to me totally unwarranted by the evidence.
The highway department had straightened out the sharp curve around a hardwood hammock. As a teenager, I had loved to take that curve as fast as my car could handle. Now the trees were all gone. Now I missed the hammock and the curve, although I had not thought about them in all the years I’d been gone.
I was thinking about that when I noticed a sign. I’d seen a couple before: “This section of roadway has been adopted by the Kiwanis,” one read. There were a few more. Adopted by the Jaycees and the Lions Club, or something like that. I hadn’t paid much attention. But the one I passed there, right past where the highway used to curve, shocked me so that I nearly ran off the road.
“This Section of Highway 14 has been adopted by the Ku Klux Klan.” My heart started to beat faster, I felt sick to my stomach. Then suddenly I had to laugh. I laughed convulsively, uncontrollably, tears running down my cheeks. I pulled over onto the grassy shoulder and shut off the car. Hugging the steering wheel tight against my chest, I laughed for a long time, until my eyes burned and snot ran down my lips. Then I sat up, and wiped my nose against the shoulder of my shirt. I dug at my eyes with the heels of both hands.
Sammy and Annie and Sarah and Rachel. Anger burned in me as I thought how I would feel—and worse yet, how they would feel—if they were beside me. I had grown accustomed to the city abounding in every shade of skin, with every style of clothing, with dreadlocks and veils and turbans and saris, pierced noses and navels. And when I thought of the way Sammy and the girls looked, I saw them and myself as part of that bright mix. But I’d been fooling myself, had been believing what I wanted to believe, and that sign in front of me made that absolutely clear. I was angry for Sammy, and towards the girls I felt something strong and unfamiliar, an emotion so powerful that I was surprised my body could contain it. A vengeful protectiveness. I thought of Rachel jumping into my arms before I left, of Annie’s sweet self-consciousness, of Sarah’s stubbornness, and in that moment, I felt I could kill anyone who hurt them. I dropped my hands back to the steering wheel and opened my eyes. Enough of this shit, I thought. I’ve got work to do.
The day had been clear, but clouds were gathering at the horizon, and soon it would be dark. I suddenly felt a desire to watch the sunset at Deer Key. When I was a kid, Momma used to take us there after supper in the summertime. As I started the car, pulled across the road, and headed back toward the coast, the thought of not finding it didn’t even occur to me. I did make all the turns, but I had to look hard, and I almost missed a couple.
But once I turned onto the narrow spit of land that led out to the Key, it was lonely and desolate, and I knew where I was. When I pulled up to the beach, I saw that some improvements had been made: bathrooms installed, the parking lot paved. But it still looked pretty much the same. The beach was gray sand, with clumps of seaweed everywhere, and covered with tiny holes made by fiddler crabs. I took off my boots and socks and walked carefully along the sand. Hundreds of tiny crabs scurried to their holes far ahead of me. Small birds stood in the water, while the grey and white sea gulls circled and cried up above. Brown pelicans stood farther out. Large, dark, long-legged birds swooped down in the water and came up with struggling fish.
On one side of the small, cleared beach area was a marsh, and the other was wooded, with crooked, grotesque trees stooping over the water. I saw two large horseshoe crabs in the shallow water. I had always thought them ridiculous with their heavy armor, but I was happy to see them. It had been a long time.
There was the constant drone of insects, and the cries and splashes of the birds. I rolled up my jeans and waded in the warm water, breathing in the smells—salt, of course, but also the fertile, sexy smell of low tide, the decay and rot, the dead fish and the live eggs, and the seaweed. I could just make out the weathered, gray stilt houses clustered out in the Gulf, unlikely veterans of dozens of hurricanes. I couldn’t see, but could never completely forget, the nuclear power plant five miles up the coast.
The sun was dropping into the Gulf. I left the water and walked up to where the sand was dry, and sat down to watch the show. It looked to be a perfect, postcard sunset. A few cars had pulled up while I was wading. An old couple walked hand in hand along the beach. A young couple reclined on a blanket covering the hood of their car, facing the west. They leaned back against the windshield, sharing a can of beer. An old man and a young boy ignored the sun, and fished off the northern point. I was grateful that the wind had picked up, because it kept the mosquitoes just bearable.
I watched the oranges and reds to the end, hungrily, almost passionately. I had missed Florida, all right, but I had not known how to say it, even to myself. If I had said it to anyone I knew in Manhattan, they would have heard me saying I missed long afternoons on a white sand beach, rubbing myself with oil, or else going water skiing. But it was something else. It was partly the natural beauty—not the bland beaches, the perfect blue of sea and sky in travel ads, but the messier reality of snakes, alligators and sawgrass, the fishy smell of the marsh. And the way the Key had remained, miraculously, while almost everything else was bulldozed or paved over. There was something, too, about the lack of pretension. I mean my brothers and their girlfriends could actually wear polyester without shame or irony. People in Port Mullet didn’t seem to grub so hard at life. My friends in the city demanded so much out of their lives that life recoiled, withdrew, all generosity drying up.
Sometimes I told myself it was the destruction of paradise that I had left, that the coming of the malls and highways and the sub-divisions had driven me away. But I couldn’t let myself think that kind of sentimental junk. After all, I’d moved from Florida to an island completely paved over in concrete. Sometimes I think I just moved away so I could misbehave in a place where no one knew my momma and my daddy. And what does that do for my vision of myself as a fearless rebel?
This realization reminded me of the time I’d been parking out on Deer Key in Jethro Agee’s Mustang. We were rudely interrupted by a police officer knocking on the window. He trained his super flashlight on us right when we were experiencing the simple form of ecstasy that comes from the raw newness of sensations and not with the sophistication of the technique. Anyway, this officer demanded identification. He didn’t ask the question I was expecting, the stupidest of all possible inquiries: “What are you doing out here?” But he did ask the first runner-up. He asked, “Does your daddy know you’re out here?”
Meanwhile I had to get to work. I walked back over to the car, brushed sand off my feet, and started towards home. Or my parents’ home. Or the place I grew up. Anyway, I was on River Road when I had an idea. The Pirate’s Den used to be on River Road. And a lot of people I once knew used to spend time there. One of those people might still be hanging around, and that same person might be very useful to me. And even if that person wasn’t there, or didn’t want to be useful, I still appreciated the value of a little something to drink before my next encounter with my beloved family.
The parking lot was heavy on motorcycles, pick-up trucks, and those cars that appear to be a material manifestation of pure testosterone.
A few moments passed before my eyes became adjusted to the dark interior of the bar. The first thing that took shape for me was a man standing up at the bar—losing his hair, tall, in fairly good shape, but with that little paunch around the belt line men get as they approach middle age. His features were boyish and good-natured while his skin was lined and leathery.
I walked up to the bar, placed my order, and told the barkeeper, who looked vaguely familiar, to give the man another beer.
The bartender did as he was told and, right on cue, the man looked over at me.
I sat on the barstool as he made his way over. He set his beer bottle on the bar and took the stool next to me without a word.
The barkeeper was back, wiping the bar with a cloth. “Lucky guy,” he said. “Not so often a lady buys a gentlemen a drink around here.”
The man grinned.
“So happens,” I said, “that I’m not a lady. Furthermore, this is no gentleman, this is my ex-husband.”
The barkeeper suddenly found something he had to do at the other end of the bar.
Johnny laughed until he nearly choked. I took a long swig out of my bottle, and then I thought, what the hell, and I laughed too.
I got control of myself first. Johnny was winding down when he got the hiccups. Grabbing his beer, he took a long swallow, then said, “Your momma told me you were coming back for a visit, but I didn’t dream I’d be lucky enough to run into you.”
You have to love a man like that. After what we did to each other, you’d think he’d act like he didn’t care, that he wasn’t affected by me. I looked around the crowded bar, filled with guys I considered rednecks. Most of them wouldn’t let a woman know he appreciated her if she was down on her knees in front of him. And Johnny wasn’t ashamed to let me know he still cared about me, right off, before I even said a word. Damn. What was I doing in this place, this bar, this town, this state, this state of mind? What was I doing here, anyway?
Unwanted images filled my head. Johnny and me in bed, Johnny and me screwing in a rowboat, Johnny and me in a cow pasture searching for psilocybin mushrooms. My heart beat and my skin tingled. Then something in me clicked and my mind filled with a completely different set of pictures. Johnny yelling at me for not doing the dishes, me heaving a greasy frying pan in his direction, and it hitting the wall instead of him, leaving a ragged hole with splashes of dirty bacon grease all over. Johnny choking me the same night he called me a dyke the first time, and then Johnny sitting in the bathtub with all his clothes on, crying for days. That was the day I called his father, told him to come see about his son, then packed up and left town.
There sure as hell ain’t no place like home. And sometimes I feel that there aren’t any mistakes like the ones I make. Right then, looking up Johnny felt like the last in a long series of mistakes.
“Places to go,” I said, “things to see, people to do.” I got up off the stool. “Not leaving angry, Johnny, just leaving.” I turned away, and Johnny reached out his hand and touched my arm, gently, carefully. The contact reminded me of Sammy somehow. I stopped for a moment, completely still. Everything between me and Johnny was in the past. But me and Sammy, that was now, and I had promised her I’d do my best to find some answers. Just because I’d screwed up and broken promises before, that was no reason to let Sammy down now.
I turned around and faced him. “I’m gonna tell you something a long time overdue, Johnny. I’m sorry. I’m as sorry as a person can be about what happened between us, and I am fully aware that I behaved about as bad as person can, and a little worse than that, too. Which isn’t to say you didn’t do some pretty nasty stuff yourself. And you and I are never gonna really get over it.”
Johnny had dropped his hand from my arm. He just stood there, staring at me like I had grown another head or something.
I took his arm and led him over to a tiny table in the corner. He followed like a well-trained puppy dog. After I sat down, I looked at him and he seemed a little pale. “Are you okay, Johnny?”
“Am I okay? Are you crazy? You just go tearing up an old wound like that and you ask me if I am okay? Hell, no, I’m not okay.”
Well, I felt like a real jerk. Here I was thinking about Sammy, and I’d gone and made things worse for Johnny, like the two of us hadn’t suffered enough.
I sagged back in my chair, stumped. We sat that way in silence for awhile. I was barely aware of our surroundings, of the time, of anything. I was just tired, and overwhelmed by the futility of it all.
Then Johnny said, in this voice so weary that it scared me, “You think you were just being honest and generous with me, don’t you? Well, you weren’t. The way to do this, you know, was to have a nice, polite conversation between us here tonight. And maybe a phone call tomorrow. And we go out to coffee now and then and send each other Christmas cards, and we just act civil, good manners, you know, talking about nothing for years, maybe. And gradually, we’d get comfortable around each other. And little by little, we’d forget the bad stuff, and we’d be something like old friends, maybe, and that might help neutralize the pain a little bit.”
I tried to break in, but he just kept talking.
“But that’s too slow for you, right, Laurie? So you just cut to the chase. Remind me of things I’ve spent all my time and energy for years—it’s thirteen years, Laurie, thirteen years—trying to forget. Well, fuck you. Just fuck you.” He stopped and sat back in his chair and looked at me. In a soft voice, he said, “God, would I love to fuck you.”
“I need a drink,” I said. He didn’t say anything, so I walked up to the bar, ordered and drained a shot glass right there, and then walked back to the table with a pair of beer bottles. I put one down next to Johnny’s head, which he had down on the table, cradled in his arms. From that angle, I could see how his neatly cut, short hair was thinning on top. When I first met Johnny, he had long golden curls. Believe it or not, I’d called him my “angel of love.”
I sat there, nursing my beer, listening to the god-awful music and watching the locals. Finally, Johnny sat up. “Okay,” he said. “What is it you want? You sure as hell want something. That’s what this is all about, right?”
He stared at me and I felt my face redden with shame. “What is it?” he insisted. “What do you want from me?”
“I’m sorry, Johnny.” How many times could I keep apologizing? “I was wrong to do this. I don’t want anything from you, I really don’t. Let’s just forget everything.” I stood up to leave. Johnny grabbed my wrist. Hard.
“Dammit, Laurie. Let me do something for you. Don’t make me go on remembering that the last months between us were so bad. You’re right, I did some awful things, and that’s all I can remember when I think of you, and I can’t quit thinking of you. So let me do something for you. Come on. Please?”
I felt like I’d been hit upside the head with something hard. All those years we’d been apart, he’d been blaming himself? Part of my self-righteous rage every time I thought about our marriage had been my certainty that he blamed me. Not that there wasn’t enough blame for both of us, with a good helping left over.
“Okay,” I said, and we sat back down, and I told him why it was that I’d come back to Port Mullet. I figured he wouldn’t be surprised about the relationship between Sammy and me, given some of the things that happened during our short, but very eventful, marriage. I’d always been grateful that certain allegations hadn’t turned up in his divorce papers among all the other charges he’d made against me. And if he had told anyone else, not a word of it had gotten back to my brothers or my parents, or I was sure that I would have heard of it.
He listened, breaking in only to ask good questions. When I was finished, he sat back in his chair and drained the last of his bottle, then set it back on the table.
He looked calm, authoritative, in control. He didn’t look like a man who had been eating his heart out for twelve years anymore. “We can do it,” he announced.
“Who’s we, white man?”
“You can’t do it by yourself. You’ve been out of touch around here too long. And besides, you’ve got a reputation. Me, I’m the law around here. I can talk to the old-timers, find stuff out. No problem.”
He made it sound easy. Too easy. He said “I” as though he was my partner. He thought I needed him. Or his protection. He was taking over already. I might as well go home and deal with my family if I wanted this kind of grief.
“Forget it, Johnny. I don’t need you. I don’t know what I was thinking. Police Chief in a town where the Klan adopts a highway. That sounds like someone I sure as hell don’t need.”
He started to say something, but I was already on my way out. I was nearly to the door when I heard the wolf whistle. I turned, smiling, warmed by the thought that the locals had finally come to appreciate my charms. Then I saw who my admirer was. The years had not changed the smug grin, nor improved the mean features of Wallace Montgomery’s face. I’d gone parking with the asshole out of pure pity one Friday night in tenth grade, and he’d paid me back by informing the whole homeroom on Monday morning that I wore a padded bra.