Revenge of the Kudzu Debutantes (29 page)

“Oh my God,” she said.

“Second prize went to Uncle Homer’s Deep Fried Baloney Sandwich with Velveeta.”

“People don’t actually have to
eat
their recipes, do they?”

His arms tightened around her. “Well now, honey, of course they do. I’m sorry you missed it. Don’t worry, though. I’m thinking of making White Trash Breakfast tomorrow morning. If you stay, that is.”

“Well, I just might stay in spite of breakfast,” she said and he kissed her again and this time she could feel the kiss all the way down into the soles of her feet. He kissed her neck and said, “I really need to take a shower.” He picked her up in his arms and then set her down again. “I’ll be right back,” he said. “Don’t go anywhere.”

He switched the TV off and went over to a tall bookcase and pushed a button on the CD player. “Make yourself at home,” he said, watching her from the doorway.

“Okay,” she said. The feeling of having taken hold of a live wire persisted. Her body vibrated. Her pulse raced.
This is how I should have felt on my wedding night,
she thought.

She stood in the middle of his den listening to Jerry Jeff Walker sing about love and loneliness and sangria wine. She heard a door close, and the distant sound of water running. She walked across the wide hallway into his bedroom. His boots were on the floor. A
Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen
poster hung on the wall above his bed. He had the long windows opened a crack and a cool breeze blew through the room, chilling her as she undressed. She could see the hooks in the ceiling where they used to hang the quilting frames. A thick carpet covered most of the pine-planked floor. His bed was unmade and she climbed in, making a nest of the blankets to warm herself. A small fireplace stood on the opposite wall, with signs of a recent fire.
I’d like a fire right now,
she thought.
A fire would be just about perfect.

The bathroom door opened and she heard him padding down the hallway and into the den. The high ceilings of the house echoed his footsteps. “I don’t want to rush you,” she heard him say. Then, silence. “Nita!” he shouted, and she heard him go to the side door and open it.

“I’m in here,” she called, snuggling down in her warm nest, and there he was, standing in the doorway in a pair of gray sweatpants and a T-shirt. His hair was loose and damp against his shoulders.

“Will you make me a fire?” she said.

He walked around the bed slowly, wrapping his arm around the tall bedpost and looking down at her like he couldn’t believe she was really here. “Are you cold?” he said.

“Yes. But don’t close the window. I like the smell of wet leaves. I like the smell of wet leaves and wood smoke.”

He went out and came back in carrying a bucket of wood. She watched him lay the fire, watched the kindling take light. He pulled his shirt over his head. In the living room, Jerry Jeff sang about London and English girls and homesickness. Jimmy Lee came back to the bed, untying the string of his sweatpants. The fire crackled merrily behind him.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” she teased, opening the blankets for him.

“I think I’ve died and gone to heaven,” he said, reaching for her.

He got up later and went into the kitchen to get a beer and Nita rolled over on her side so she could watch him. She liked the way he could walk through the house naked, like it was the most natural thing in the world. He stood in the middle of the bedroom and said, “Whoee. Where’d you learn to do those things?”

“I read a lot,” she said, pulling the sheet up to cover her mouth.

He grinned. She was every man’s dream. The kind of girl who could do the things they had just done and still blush about it.

She sat up on her elbow and pushed her hair out of her face. “What time is it?”

“Nine-thirty. Why?”

“I promised Lavonne and Eadie I’d make it to the Kudzu Ball.”

He offered her the beer and she took a swig, and passed it back.

Nita looked up into his handsome face and thought about how those romance novels and sex manuals had the female orgasm all wrong, how they didn’t come close to describing it as it really was. It was birth and death and pleasure and pain all rolled into one big bang experience. It was the Creator’s little joke on mankind. Nita figured there wasn’t a whole lot she could be certain about these days; she wasn’t certain how her children were going to take the news of the divorce, or where they were going to live, or whether Charles would agree to her terms, and let her live in peace. She wasn’t even certain how her relationship with Jimmy Lee would work out, given the thirteen-year age difference and the fact she had responsibilities he didn’t have, and the fact that love affairs have a tendency to get complicated over time.

The only thing Nita was sure about was that, for the first time in a long time, she had a chance at happiness, and she was going to take that chance. She had a chance at happiness and she would never again have to sit at a Passion Party and listen to all those little Jeza-bells going off around her while her little bell stayed still and silent.

In the future she’d be doing plenty of bell-ringing herself.

L
AVONNE AND
E
ADIE
met Little Moses at the Waffle House parking lot at eight forty-five. Tradition called for the Kudzu Queen to arrive at the Kudzu Ball in the back of the Kudzu Kruiser. The Kruiser was the brainchild of Clayton Suttles. At the beginning of every summer Clayton covered his Bonneville convertible with chicken wire and parked it in his field at the edge of a good stand of kudzu. The day of the ball, Clayton cut the car loose and drove it into town. With its thick covering of greenery, the car was a strange and wonderful sight. It looked like a moving shrubbery. It looked like a giant Chia pet on wheels. The only mishap had occurred last year when Clayton forgot to mark where he’d parked the Bonneville and they’d had to go in there with a metal detector to find it.

Lavonne and Eadie and Little Moses stood out in the parking lot waiting for Clayton to arrive in the Kudzu Kruiser. Little Moses was barefoot and wearing the same blue tux he had worn to cater the firm’s party. Lavonne had insisted it would be perfect for the ball.

“Aren’t your feet cold?” she asked Little Moses.

He was wearing a baseball cap that read
Why Ration Passion?
over his dreadlocks. “Naw,” he said. “I’m okay.”

Eadie adjusted Lavonne’s wharf-rat stole around her shoulders. “Are you nervous?” she asked Lavonne.

“No,” Lavonne said. “Should I be?”

Eadie shrugged and took a pair of elbow-length gloves out of her purse. “I heard at the last Kudzu Ball the queen got so drunk she fell off the stage and broke her leg in two places.”

“Damn,” Lavonne said.

“She just sat there laughing and feeling no pain. They figured she must have drunk nearly a gallon of Kudzu Koolaid.”

“Well, that explains it,” Lavonne said.

The recipe for Kudzu Koolaid was a closely guarded secret passed down from one master of ceremony to the next. It was rumored to be laced with all kinds of potent ingredients, from cough syrup to ground-up sleeping pills, but Eadie was pretty sure it contained a goodly amount of Curtis Peet’s homebrewed corn whiskey. Curtis made it in the back of his greenhouse from an old family recipe passed down for generations. It went by the innocuous name of Old Bull and was said to kill head lice and take the stains out of concrete. “Just make sure you don’t drink too much of the Koolaid,” Eadie warned her, “and you’ll be okay.”

“Words to live by,” Lavonne said. She smoothed the front of her pink satin dress. “Okay, tell me again what to expect during this throw down.” It had been years since Lavonne did any public speaking and she was nervous she might have to make a speech after her crowning. Eadie had called a couple of the girls she’d worked with down at the women’s shelter to get the scoop on what to expect.

“It’s real simple,” Eadie said. “Clayton will pick us up here and drive us over to the Wal-Mart, where he’ll let us out in front of the tent. That’s the signal for the band to start playing “Kudzu Limbo,” which is the theme song, and the party’s on, baby.”

“So when does the crowning occur?”

“The crowning occurs toward the end of the evening after everybody’s gotten liquored up enough to throw their inhibitions to the wind,” Eadie said. “The debutantes go up on stage for the promenade toward the end of the evening, right before you’re crowned. Wendell decides when he’ll call everybody up.” Wendell Stamps was this year’s master of ceremony. Wendell’s daddy was a dentist and he had sent Wendell to one of the finest boarding schools in Virginia. Despite Wendell’s prestigious liberal arts education, he had come back to Ithaca to raise his family. This was his second tour as master of ceremony. “What name are you using?” Eadie asked her.

Somewhere along the line it had become tradition for the Kudzu Debutantes and their escorts to use false names. Over the years, these false names had become an art form in themselves.

“I’m going as Ima Badass,” Lavonne said. “And Little Moses is Bushrod daToilet.”

“I’m Aneeda Mann,” Eadie said, sticking out her hand. “Glad to meet you, Ima.”

“Likewise, I’m sure.” Lavonne shook her hand. “How about Nita?”

“You don’t really think those two are going to climb out of bed long enough to attend the Kudzu Ball, do you?” Eadie said, snorting through her nose.

“She better,” Lavonne said. “She’s part of my damn Kudzu Kourt.”

“I wouldn’t hold my breath,” Eadie said.

“What names are she and Jimmy Lee using?”

“Blanche and Cooter Benclipped.”

“That figures,” Lavonne said.

T
HE BALL WAS
scheduled to begin at eight o’clock, but when Lavonne, Eadie, Little Moses, and Clayton pulled up in the Wal-Mart parking lot at nine-fifteen, people were still straggling in. A big striped circus tent had been set up with a stage at one end for the presentation promenade of the debutantes, many of whom crowded the entrance and the parking lot dressed in their cheap ball gown finery with their heads wreathed in kudzu garlands. Their escorts, dressed in an assortment of overhauls, bad-fitting leisure suits, and camouflage gear stood with them. Some sported Billy Bob teeth and NASCAR caps. Up on the stage, the Mississippi Swamp Dogs were warming up with their rendition of “Daddy Was a Preacher But Mama Was a Go-Go Girl.”

The crowd had spilled out into the parking lot to await the arrival of the Kudzu Queen, and when the Kudzu Kruiser pulled slowly into the parking lot, they went wild. Wendell Stamps was waiting for them outside the tent. He was dressed like Colonel Sanders, all in white linen with a black string tie and a panama hat wreathed in kudzu vine. He held his hand out for Lavonne and she stood up, trying not to feel foolish at the applause and the attention, but feeling happy, too, and not just because she had a tidy sum of money waiting in her checking account and a good business plan and a feeling that her life was fixing to change in a very big way. She knew she looked good in her bridesmaid dress, size 14, and she felt good about that, too. Damn good.

“Good evening, your majesty,” Wendell said. He was wearing a nametag that read,
Hey, my name is
Uwuz Worned Aboutme—
what’s yours?

Lavonne gave him her hand. The crowd settled down respectfully to hear what she had to say. Someone thrust a wax cup filled with Kudzu Koolaid into her hand. Wendell handed her a microphone. She raised the cup, looking around the crowd. She only knew one toast.

“Love is blind,” she said, “but marriage is a real eye opener.”

The crowd hooted their approval. Wendell grinned, a wide slow grin that split his handsome black face into perfect hemispheres. The Swamp Dogs launched into the “Kudzu Limbo,” followed by “Drunk and Lonesome (Again),” as Wendell led Lavonne into the big tent, which had been strung with colored lights in the shape of shotgun shells and streamers and posters of Famous Rednecks from History. Wallace Spurlock, who owned the local Kinkos, had produced a number of computer-generated posters that showed the heads of famous people wearing camo caps superimposed on a pair of overhauls. There was George Washington and Queen Elizabeths I and II, Shakespeare and Amelia Earhart, and of course, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, among others. Tables sporting camo tablecloths and centerpieces that looked like miniature double-wides were crowded along one side of the tent. On the other side was a long buffet table stacked with dishes of fried chicken, squash casserole, mashed potatoes, collard greens, corn fritters, and every other example of good Southern cooking imaginable. Corporate sponsors had paid for the food, which was being catered by various restaurants, and Lavonne made a mental note to add the Shofar So Good Deli to the approved list for next year.

E
ADIE WAS OUT
on the dance floor with Little Moses when she saw Trevor sitting alone at a table over by the door. She hadn’t seen him come in and she had no idea how long he had been sitting there. He gave her a little wave. He was wearing a bright orange jumpsuit, the kind the prison trustees wear when picking up trash beside the highway, and he had his hair combed back with enough grease to deep-fry a turkey. “I’ll be right back,” Eadie said to Little Moses and began to make her way slowly through the crowd. He saw her coming and stood up.

“What are you doing here?”

“I think you know what I’m doing here.”

“Does the word ‘stalker’ mean anything to you?”

“Desperate times call for desperate measures,” he said, pulling out a chair for her but she didn’t sit down. “I need to tell you something,” he said. “Something I realized back at the Pink House, and if you’ll just sit down and listen, if you’ll just give me a few minutes, I promise I’ll never bother you again. I promise I’ll agree to whatever divorce terms you set and I won’t have you prosecuted for blackmail or extortion or whatever the hell it is you women call what you’re doing.”

“Insurance.”

“Okay, insurance. I won’t have you prosecuted for insurance and I’ll agree to any divorce terms, if you’ll just sit down and listen to me.” He put his hand on the chair but she stood there looking at him. The back of his jumpsuit read
Ithaca Correctional Facility
in bold letters. “Please, Eadie,” he said. She sat down.