Danger, Sweetheart

by MaryJanice Davidson

  The gas station? The Supertruck had three-quarters of a tank. The B and B? No thank you. Las Vegas? No thank you.

  This place, he thought, knuckles white on the steering wheel as he glared through the windshield. It grows on you like lichen on a tree. The tree doesn’t notice and, by the time it does notice, the lichen is part of it, and getting rid of it would be unthinkable.

  That is a terrible analogy. Get a grip on yourself!

  The appeal of Sweetheart, he decided, was more about what it wasn’t than what it was. It was not an impersonal city where you locked everything at night—and during the day, too, just to be safe. It was not a luxury hotel; no one was waiting by the phone to rush midnight hot-fudge sundaes to his suite. (They’d done that a few times, he’d come down at midnight for a snack and find Natalie there, and they’d have sundaes or fudge or that potato flatbread she liked, lefsa—which had a fascinating history!—and once they got to speculating about Margaret of Anjou’s sinister past until two o’clock in the morning.) There was none of Vegas’ “make wild revelry, for who cares about tomorrow” vibe.

  Things mattered in Sweetheart; the locals had bigger problems than how to hit three breakfast buffets by 9:00 A.M. with time left to gamble away the mortgage payment. The locals weren’t afraid to get dirty (except Garrett, but given Blake’s family’s business, he could not cast blame). Aside from losing their homes, they didn’t appear to be afraid of anything. They looked after the land, they looked after one another (the Darrel twins house-sat for Roger when he was off on his mysterious sinister vacations, and Roger watered their dogs when they left town for something called a Romantic Times convention).

  Everyone knew everyone else, and at first Blake had found that claustrophobic. He could feel the gazes on him when he went into town for errands, could feel their silent judgment. Everyone knowing everyone was kind of awful if you were Blake Tarbell and people knew you did your best to gut their town until Mommy grounded you. But it was something splendid when you needed a cup of sugar and any one of a dozen people would not only lend it to you; they’d also leave their front door unlocked so you could swing by and pick up the sugar whenever you like.

  It wasn’t that the people of Las Vegas were terrible. But they were all strangers to one another. That had suited him well until a month ago. And now when he thought of Rake in Venice, up to God knew what Rake-related shenanigans, instead of envy Blake felt worry. His twin was surrounded by strangers in a land where he was not known; Blake would fret until Rake returned. Whatever, and wherever, that meant.

  A rap on the window; Blake had been so deep in thought he hadn’t noticed the older man who bore a striking resemblance to Sir Ben Kingsley, CBE, if Sir Ben had close-cropped red hair and favored jeans and flannel shirts.

  He rolled down the window. “Hello.”

  “Hiya. Sandy Cort.” They shook, and Blake was so used to the burning pain in his palms he didn’t flinch. For a man in his early sixties, Cort had an admirable grip. “You’re that outtatowner feller, arencha?”

  It took Blake a few seconds to translate the midwestern patois. He considered, then rejected, telling him “fellow” was pronounced “fell-oh” and “out-of-towner” was technically three words, despite the hyphens, and “are you not” worked just as well as “arencha.” “I am. May I help you, Mr. Cort?”

  “Naw, Mr. Cort’s my dad and he’s long dead, that stubborn bugger; I’m Sandy. Just wanted to say h’lo. Me and Roger—you know Rog, he’s shacking over at the B and B?”

  “Yes, I have stolen his livestock.”

  Cort didn’t even blink. “That’s the one, yep; we tickle trout together.”

  Blake managed, just, to swallow the inappropriate giggle that wanted to leak out of his lungs.

  “Said you were a nice feller and I should say h’lo. So: h’lo.”

  “It’s nice to meet you.”

  “He said you talk like books.”

  “I suppose I do.” He was a bit taken aback, then decided there were worse ways to talk and warmed to the comment. “I read a great deal.”

  “Yeah, sure, t’be expected. Shannah’s boy, arencha?”

  “You know my mother?”

  “Oh, sure, her an’ all them Banaans.” Blake was surprised to hear Sandy pronounce it “ban-anns” instead of the more typical “buh-nons.” “She was always like that, even as a little ’un; the other kids’d be playin’ outside and she always wanted to hole up with four or five books. Not comic books, either!” he added, as if Blake were making ready to scorn his mother’s reading efforts. “Big books, for grown-ups. My dad got kicked out of the nursing home because of all the candy he kept sneaking to the diabetics, came home to die.”

  “I’m sorry?” And here he thought he had been following the conversation so well.

  “Howwcum?” Sandy fished around in his jeans pocket and extracted a pack of Hubba Bubba bubble gum, which he offered to Blake (who declined, as a stint with braces as a teenager had left him disinclined to anything sticky except honey). Between chomps, Sandy continued. “He wanted to be home; we wanted him home; he was on the porch or in bed most times, wasn’t any trouble. Knew he didn’t have long—if you don’t fight cancer with chemo, it’s not s’bad, he was just mostly tired, and the docs helped with the pain at the end. Your mama, she’d come over and read to him.”

  So difficult to picture the competent, uncompromising Shannah Banaan Tarbell as a little girl; when Blake tried he could only physically shrink his mom, not reduce the woman he knew to the innocent nature of a child.

  “Ah, Gawd, she read him all those Little House books; Dad loved those; he had a big crush on Karen Grassle, the actress who played Caroline Ingalls on the TV show—no? Never mind, doesn’t matter now. God, he wanted to get in her petticoats so bad.”

  “That’s adorable, Cort.”

  “Anyhoo. Your mama was sweet as sugar, and after my dad passed we found out he left her a thousand bucks! And he said she could do whatever she wanted with it, but he hoped she saved it for college or bought books with it.” Sandy grinned, leaning on the truck door and blowing a bubble almost as large as his head. “She didn’t save it for college, tell you that.”

  “The nook!” Blake cried, shifting so suddenly he blared the horn. Sandy, in mid-bubble, almost choked. “When we were little we had this tiny apartment in Vegas—this was before our father passed away, so she was supporting us on tips, more or less. It was a dreary two-bedroom apartment, one for my brother and me and the book nook, we called it. That room was floor-to-ceiling books, with shelves everywhere, books everywhere, even piled on the floor in stacks as high as her hip. There wasn’t room for a bed. Our mother slept on a hide-a-bed in the living room until my father died, because that was preferable to getting rid of the books.”

  Sandy chuckled, delighted. “Yep. Sounds about right.” Sandy leaned closer, as if confiding a great secret. “Y’know, it wasn’t her fault, what they did. It was her family, not her. Lotta people, they won’t get that. They think once a Banaan, always a Banaan. And maybe if your mama hadn’t ever left Sweetheart, that’d be true. But she did leave. So it’s not true. I know, because Sweetheart’s in trouble and she came on the run. She’s here, ain’t she?” A pause while he blew another bubble, snapped it, chomped, finished: “So are you.”

  Blake leaned forward, intrigued and almost dizzy with the influx of information. “What do you mean by what her family did?” No response. “Sandy?” The older man straightened suddenly, smile lines replaced by frown lines. Blake glanced to his left and saw Garrett Hobbes walking toward the truck in the company of a tall, thin elderly man he didn’t recognize.

  Oh, look. It’s Satan’s intern.

  “Hey, cripes, we were just talking about you!” Garrett jogged over to Blake, the twenty seconds of exertion bringing sweat to his brow, armpits, nose, chin, chest, and scalp, Blake noticed. The elderly man followed in Garrett’s wake, not rushing. He stared at Blake, which was nothing new in this town.


  “Sorry I’m all out,” Garrett wheezed, stopping before he ran headlong into the Supertruck’s cab. “Of breath. Just got done. You know. At the gym.”

  That explains the dreadful shiny suit and the wet shiny hair. “They were out of towels?”

  “Not a lot on hand this time of day. They’re not used to people being there this time of day,” he said with misplaced emphasis and an odd note of pride Blake found puzzling for four seconds.

  “How fascinating. I don’t—” And then he did. He saw it at once and shook his head, unsure if he was amused or annoyed. “You think scheduling an exercise regime during business hours will arouse envy in your fellow townspeople. That they will marvel at how you can break away from work for organized sweating on a treadmill. I regret being the bearer of bad tidings, Garrett, but it doesn’t arouse their envy. Just their annoyance, often laced with contempt.”

  “What the fuck do you know?”

  Blake almost missed the rebuttal over Sandy’s guffaw. The man actually slapped his knee, something Blake had assumed no one did outside of Westerns. Though Blake knew the futility of introducing people who knew each other, he was a slave to the lifelong habit of stiff manners. “Sandy, this is Garrett Hobbes. Garrett, this is—”

  “I know who he is, cripessakes. Look, when do you jog or lift or whatever? Big guy like you,” Garrett added almost resentfully, “you must be in there a lot. Prob’ly got big fancy gyms in Vegas, right? I might move there, if I don’t find anything good in L.A.”

  Mental note: Burn Las Vegas to the ground and never return. Possibly the entire state of Nevada. Cannot be too careful.

  “Really, Garrett? We’re still discussing your sweaty regimen? Since you’re so keen to know, I was a one-percenter, now cast into the other part of that equation, and I used the hotel treadmill—”

  “Don’t like jogging in the desert?” Sandy cracked, and slapped his knee again.

  “Good Lord, no. I’d be on the treadmill around two thirty A.M. And that’s because I was a) an insomniac and b) not an incurable ass.” Probably not an incurable ass. Well, not as big an incurable ass.

  “Fine, enough, don’t even know how we got on that topic—”

  “You brought it up. Don’t you remember? It was fifteen seconds ago.”

  “—but I’ve been thinking about you, stuck there with a bunch of jerks who want you to fail—”

  “Are we still talking about Las Vegas?”

  Garrett would not be deterred. “And I thought of someone who might be able to get you to see sense, and as it happened he was swinging by town today anyway, so I reached out and, you know.”

  “What?” Blake had no idea where this was going. The elderly man had by now joined them. He was slender going on emaciated, the weathered skin of his face stretched so tightly you could easily make out the shape of his skull. His neck was too long for his body, his shoulders too narrow. He was neatly, dully dressed in gray slacks with a black leather belt, a tan dress shirt, and black dress shoes. Clean shaven, with a head full of scrupulously trimmed white hair and pale brown eyes, almost sand colored. He held himself with stiff pride, and stared and stared at Blake and said nothing. His mouth was small and tight with … disapproval, perhaps? Disappointment? A recent lemon dessert? “I know what?”

  “This is your grandpa, Mitchell Banaan.”

  Over the sudden roaring in his years, Blake replied, “No, it isn’t.”

  “It is, though.”

  “Isn’t. My grandfather is dead, as are his wife and three of their four children, my mom being the fourth. It’s the reason my mom and I came to Sweetheart; it’s why she inherited the unholy mess of bankrupt farms. Ergo, this man is not my maternal grandfather.”

  “They gave up the farms,” Sandy explained, effortlessly inserting himself into private family business, or Garrett’s delusion, or both, “but not because they died. You thought they were dead? Who’d tell you something like that?”

  No one, he realized with startled dismay. Questions shoved aside, evaded, or not even asked were at once much clearer.

  Who died? he had asked, and Shannah had not answered directly, merely going on to discuss the farms she inherited.

  If they hadn’t died and left her the property headache, he had pointed out, we wouldn’t be out here. He had seen her puzzled expression and wondered at it.

  Died? I’m not getting you. They didn’t— He had wondered, but then Mom had cut Natalie off and it never occurred to him to revisit the question.

  Blake then did something he had never done before and hoped would never do again: he did what Rake would have called a “headdesk” on the steering wheel, hard enough to make the horn blare, and roared, “You colossal jackasses are alive? Because if that’s so, I am going to kill all of you!”

  Thirty

  “So. One of Shannah’s boys.” The old man

  (his grandfather the old man was his grandfather who is not dead for the love of all that is unholy and when did my life become a soap opera)

  sized him up with the warmth of a snake glaring at a robin’s egg.

  (what? stop thinking like a laid-back NoDak and reclaim your identity, your big-city cold, intense, soulless identity)

  sized him up with all the warmth Margaret of Anjou (the queen, not the hell-pony) had for Richard, the Duke of York. Whew! Better.

  “Which one are you, then?” This in a tone often used for questions like “paper or plastic?”: chilly indifference. Five seconds into their first meeting, Blake understood why his mother had fled Sweetheart.

  “Blake.” I suppose we’re to have a conversation now? Or something? “The oldest.” Because Rake is … not going to believe this when I tell him.

  “You don’t look like a Banaan.” The relentless frigid regard was getting difficult to bear. Blake imagined he would drop his gaze, soon, and direct his responses to his feet. “Not at all like Shannah, or me.”

  Then Blake pictured his mom, the generous kindhearted child who read twentieth-century literature to a dying man because that was a respite from her life, that was a wonderful warm experience compared to any interaction with her father, and just like that, the ancient troll’s evil spell was broken. Blake’s head came up and he took a step forward. His grandfather did not step back. Good.

  Keep not backing up, old man, let me get in there chest to chest. See what I did inherit from my mom.

  “We favor our father’s side.” Thank God. The nuclear option, while devastating, respected, if not loved, Shannah and adored the twins without condition. The moment she found she was a grandmother, Nonna bent her will to securing every advantage she could for Shannah and her sons. This man, now. This man was something else. “In almost all things.”

  “What are you doing here, boy?”

  Excellent question. And if there had been no easy answer half an hour ago, there certainly wasn’t one now. He stared at the man in mingled frustration and annoyance and finally came out with, “I don’t know.”

  A snort. “Typical. Your mother’s the same. She didn’t know what the hell she was doing; she just left. And then look! Got caught with you and your brother. Tell you what, she was a sorry girl after that. Told her. We said, ‘This is what happens when you turn your back on family.’ We said, ‘Being smart got you into this, better hope being smart can get you out of it.’”

  I cannot imagine the courage Mom used when she found she was pregnant and realized she needed her family. Asking this man for help must have been like asking for … for …

  His historical knowledge failed him. For the first time in his life (when he was sober, anyway), he could not complete the metaphor. Instead he reached out, found his grandfather’s shirt collar, twisted, pulled. They were close to eye to eye; his grandfather was two inches taller.

  “Old man, I have had a shit week and am giving serious contemplation to beating you to death.”

  “They teach you to push around old men in Las Vegas?”

  “No, they taught me to never b
et against the house in Las Vegas. Your daughter taught me! ‘No one is an unjust villain in his own mind.… Some of the cruelest tyrants in history were motivated by noble ideals.’* She taught me ‘those who are capable of tyranny are capable of perjury to sustain it.’ † She taught me ‘under tyranny it is right to be a rebel.’” ‡

  “What—”

  “The daughter you turned your back on helped me learn my letters, got me my first library card, showed me the universe as best she could, and never quit. You, though. You quit. That’s all you do, isn’t it? That’s why people pronounce ‘Banaan’ like it’s a curse around here. Your daughter wanted to be better than that. And she is. She’s worth fifty of you, old man, and you have no idea how badly I want to break your nose.”

  There was a snap! and they both looked to their left; Sandy Cort was popping his gum and watching with an avid gaze. “To think I almost didn’t head to town today,” he said, as if amazed there could be a universe where he missed the confrontation.

  “Piss off, Cort. This is family business kakk!”

  Kakk because Blake had tightened his grip. “You are not family. You turned on my mother when she needed you. You sulked when she left and punished her when she tried to return. Do you know what all of this means?” He took a deep breath and bellowed, “You’re the reason I’m in Heartbreak, you judgmental sack of shit! And coming to Heartbreak is both the worst and greatest thing to ever happen to me! Do you think I want to be beholden to you for anything? I would rather be Rake’s personal assistant for a calendar year!”

  “You’re busy,” Garrett said. “We can talk later.”

  Blake had forgotten him, too. “Busy, yes, and also, ‘Power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind.’”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “Not me. Ayn Rand. Do you even have a library card?”