The Cantaloupe Thief (5 page)

Her mind couldn't go back further than that. Maybe she'd had breakfast yesterday at that ol' mission church that looked like a grocery store, where they let men live but not women. What the heck was up with that? Everybody would tell you the streets were harder on a woman.

Maybe she'd go back there. There were all kinds of do-gooders around that place who would give you crackers, or canned goods with ring-tabs, if it wasn't time for a meal. Specially if you could find a time that Pastor Liam wasn't around. He'd want to talk about
re-hab.
You'd think
re-hab
was the gospel itself to hear that freckled freak go on about it.

She sat up and unzipped the dirty backpack she was using for a pillow. Was there a little something in there to get her going? Her hands grasped a bottle, but when she pulled it out, it was empty. And worse: a brown spider came with it and went scurrying up her arm. She flailed wildly, a screech erupting from her parched throat.

A head popped through the flap of the tent closest to her. “You all right, hon?” asked a heavyset woman, her head wrapped in a blue kerchief.

She nodded mutely, suddenly scared that she might be heard by Demetrius. She wanted to stay as far away from his swatting hands as she could get. She glanced around the campsite, but no one else was paying attention. At the far end of the shaded area, a small fire was going, with a grill rack propped on rocks, and a battered coffee pot on top. Two men, one black, one white, were avoiding its heat, trying to bring days-old coffee to a boil.

Her neighbor was chatty. “Elise and Slick got arrested last night,” she said, with a nod up the concrete incline to the plywood shack under the bridge's girders. Perched on no more than four feet of concrete ledge, it was tucked directly beneath the roadway. She blearily wondered how the builder had gotten the large plyboards up the incline without tumbling off.

“I bet you could use it while they's gone.”

Now her neighbor had her attention. “You think?” she said.

“Ain't no one else up there.”

She thought for a moment. The shack had a door she could peer out of, and even a roughly cut window, covered in plastic. From high atop this tent city, she could see Demetrius coming. Or the steep incline might keep him away altogether.

“I thank you,” she told her neighbor formally. She grabbed her backpack and her grimy tennis shoes, and made her way, crab-like, up the concrete to her new home.

Maybe she'd get even luckier. Maybe old Elise and Slick had squirreled away a rock she could fire up.

CHAPTER SEVEN

It was getting close to 5 o'clock by the time Branigan finished talking to Dontegan and a few other men about Vesuvius Hightower. That was more difficult than it sounded: many of the shelter residents knew little about the deceased man. Until Branigan told them, they didn't know his last name. Some didn't know his first name. When she explained that she was writing a story on the homeless man who had been run over, their faces cleared. “Oh, you mean V,” one said.

Liam had told her that everyone on the street had two names — sometimes a real one and a street name, sometimes a middle name used interchangeably with a first, sometimes, inexplicably, two completely different names. Liam suspected they were aliases designed to throw off the authorities, but even he wasn't sure. He had settled on one discerning question: “What does your mother call you?”

That worked fine for him, but Branigan needed more precision.

When she and the men agreed on whom they were talking about, she learned that Vesuvius/V was “not all there”, as the men put it, tapping their temples, but he was gentle and gracious. He was proud of his job running the laundry room, and strict about enforcing Pastor Liam's rule:
No chore, no laundry.
If someone refused to do a chore in exchange for having his laundry washed, Vesuvius would bring the sign-up sheet to Dontegan and point to the offender's signature. Then he would hang over Dontegan's shoulder until he was sure Dontegan had informed the offender of his transgression.

Branigan was pleased to be able to write a story about someone the news staff, and indeed the community, “looked right through”. As she clicked off her recorder, she asked the question with which she always ended: “Anything else you can think of that I didn't ask?”

Dontegan furrowed his brow. “Nothin' I know,” he said. “But you might wanna talk to Malachi. He let V stay in his cat hole a time or two.”

“Cat hole?”

“You know — a place you stay. Away from the po-lice.”

Branigan wasn't sure she did know, but she let it go for the moment. “What's Malachi's last name?”

“Don't know. But he be here tonight for supper.”

“Does he have a room here?”

“Naw. He stay up under the bridge.”

Branigan assumed he was talking about the Michael Garner Memorial Bridge. It was within walking distance of the mission, and Liam and Dontegan led their church partners on educational trips to see the settlement under it. She'd accompanied them more than once.

“Okay, I'll find Malachi soon.”

Since it was only Monday, she had plenty of time. As she pulled out of Jericho Road's parking lot, she turned away from the
Rambler
office and headed for home. There was more work waiting for her there than in the office: she had filled two boxes with copies of police reports on the Resnick murder and had them at the farmhouse. That's how she'd be spending her evening.

As usual, the fifteen-minute drive from downtown Grambling to her farm helped soothe away the puzzles of the day.

Her farm.

She loved the sound of that, even if it wasn't exactly true. Everyone else in the family still called it Gran and Pa's farm, and that was fine with her. Technically, she supposed, it wasn't a farm any more at all.

It was 200 acres of rolling pasture and lakes and woods that were once home to a hundred head of her grandparents' cattle. Gran and Pa Rickman were raised in huge farm families right here in northeast Georgia. They'd quit school in the eighth grade, and married not too many years afterward.

Like most farming sons, Pa had done his time in the textile mills that surrounded Grambling. But even in the town's textile heyday, he was too ambitious to work for any mill owner long. He saved his money, opened a machine shop, and invested in land. And when the time was right, he sold everything and bought his 200 acres of red Georgia clay.

Branigan and her twin brother Davison were four the year Pa had built a modern ranch house that made Gran the envy of her six sisters. The twins lived with their parents in town, two streets over from Mrs Resnick, in a smaller, two-story colonial that enjoyed the same leafy canopy as her loftier address. The children loved their neighborhood, with its sidewalk-cracking oaks and maples, and neighbors who waved as they rode their bikes. But the farm, Branigan thought, ran in their blood.

Gran and Pa were certainly part of the draw. Gran pampered them shamelessly, rolling out homemade biscuits and letting them select from a half-dozen jam jars at every meal. At night she and Davison would contemplate where to sleep. Branigan preferred the guest bedroom where she could open the window and hear the lonesome drone of long-haul trucks on US 29 a half-mile away. Headed past other farms where other little girls slept, they sounded as desolate as train whistles. She still heard those trucks in her dreams.

Davison preferred the fold-out couch in the den, because it meant Gran would serve them cinnamon toast and hot chocolate in bed the next morning; she didn't want them to miss a single minute of cartoons.

In the afternoons, Pa would take the twins to watch the cows, stunned by the heat of a Georgia summer and wading into lukewarm pasture lakes. Next stop was the barn, where bats hung like furry winter slippers from the rafters. Then on to the chicken houses, nearly empty when Pa introduced the yellow baby chicks, and full to bursting when the white adult chickens were ready to be shipped out.

The children's first paid labor came from picking Pa's cotton — an excruciating half-hour's work that netted them a dime each. Years later, Davison told Branigan it was Pa's way of making sure they chose college over manual labor. It worked. The memory of her hands, splintered and bleeding from the prickly cotton husks, sweat trickling down her itchy back, made an air-conditioned school room look positively inviting.

Still, the farm inhabited her reveries. It was home for a daughter of the South in a way no city street or suburb could ever be.

It took her decades to realize it. The summer she turned fifteen, she joined a youth group from First Baptist Church of Grambling for a two-week bus tour of the Southwest. They woke at six each morning to get on a charter bus for another day of riding through the treeless taupe of Texas and Oklahoma, headed for a church camp in the foothills of New Mexico. They visited the “must-sees” — the Gateway Arch in St Louis, outdoor dramas, the Alamo — but Branigan was quietly miserable. She thought she was homesick — for her mom and dad, certainly, and for Davison, who ducked the trip at the last minute. But as the trip wound down, and the bus sped through the Atlanta bypasses and reached the stretch of Interstate 85 where rolling green hills ran up to meet the asphalt, she began to cry.

She had no idea why, but the relief at being back on familiar soil, at seeing woods so dense and green and inviting after the arid landscape of the Southwest, was palpable.
Bizarre,
she told herself.
You live on a city street, for goodness' sake.

She didn't get it. And she didn't get it years later, when long after graduating from the University of Georgia and feeling stifled at
The Grambling Rambler
she accepted a job at the
Detroit Free Press.

Of course, she hated Detroit. She hated the cold. She hated the violence. She hated flying home for her cousins' weddings, then Pa's funeral, then Gran's. She hated not being there for her family, with her family. And no matter how much she denied it, she hated that she'd turned thirty-five then thirty-eight and wasn't married.

But surely all that wasn't Detroit's fault. So she dug in, and became very good at her job. She had so little else.

Then one night in April three years ago, she had been talking to her mother on the phone. They'd covered the weather — frigid in Michigan, balmy in Georgia — then a cousin's new baby, a merger at her dad's bank. “And oh, did I mention we accepted an offer on Pa's farm?” her mother said.

Branigan's hand froze on the receiver, and the wind whipping around her apartment building was suddenly the most forlorn sound she'd ever heard.

“Honey? Did you hear me?”

“You're selling the farm?” she asked.

“Yes, we got a very good offer from Mr Bronson. You remember him. He owns the adjoining pastures.”

“How much, Mom?”

“Now, Branigan.” Her mother's Southern breeding often battled her accountant's head for business. Branigan could almost hear the voices:
You don't tell your children about family finances!
one hissed.
You want your daughter to grow up helpless?
scoffed the other. She knew which one would prevail.

“How much, Mom?”

“Oh, all right. Nearly $700,000.”

“Wow. That's pretty good, isn't it?”

“Yes, it is. We're pleased. Rock and Bobby said that's more than they thought it would bring, and I agree.” Rock and Bobby were her mom's younger brothers and had inherited the farm along with her.

“Mom, don't sell it.” The words were out of Branigan's mouth before she had consciously thought them. “I want to live there.”

Branigan could already hear what her mother was going to say next.
Why, Branigan? You live 800 miles away!

Only she didn't. What she said was, “Would you really?”

Branigan confronted the truth of the statement with a jolt. “Yeah. I'm ready to come home, Mom.”

“Then you will,” Mrs Powers said quietly, and Branigan realized that selling the farm had not been an easy decision for her either.

“What about Uncle Rock and Uncle Bobby?”

“Don't worry about them,” her mother said briskly, and Branigan could tell her mind was already working to embrace this new order, to find a way to get around her brothers, to back out of the deal with Mr Bronson, to do whatever was necessary to get her daughter home.

Three years later, Branigan still marveled whenever she entered the oh-so-familiar house that she rented from its new owners: her mother and her Uncle Bobby. They had bought out her Uncle Rock's share and were glad to hold on to the farm for awhile.

As Branigan pulled into the driveway, her German shepherd Cleo bounded from the cotton field to meet her. She laughed to see a tuft of the purest white cotton on the dog's nose. “Could you get any goofier?” she asked, brushing the white wisps from the shepherd's regal black head. Branigan patted Cleo, and said “Walk?”, a word the dog understood. Cleo leaped happily up the brick steps, knowing Branigan would go inside first.

“Let me change clothes,” she verified. “Be right back.”

She yanked her flowered dress over her head as she walked through the den and adjoining kitchen, then to the bedroom where she kicked her sandals into the closet. Pulling off her rings, watch and earrings was a highlight of a work day.

She tugged on her most comfortable pair of blue and white striped running shorts, a sleeveless gray tank top, gray socks and well-worn Nikes. Her arms and legs were muscled and lean, and already tanned from an early spring. She caught her shoulder-length blond hair into a ponytail holder that Charlie had left on her last visit.

Cleo was sitting patiently as Branigan let the screen door slam, not bothering to close the wooden door behind it. She knew it wasn't the smartest thing in the world, but did it almost perversely, as a way of saying, “See why I left you, Detroit?”