Roger had been gathering up broken branches beneath the enormous elm tree that stood on the Sanders side of the line between the two properties, but whose branches reached over the line to the Grimes side. He’d snap the smaller ones in his hands or the larger ones over his knee and stuff them into bushel baskets, stopping occasionally to mop his brow. It was at that moment he’d straightened up to daub a trickle of perspiration from his forehead that he’d seen Geri in the window of her bedroom on the second floor of the yellow, Georgian-style house. The towel had just dropped away from her body and the glimpse of her milk-white breasts had sent a thrill of excitement through Roger’s body.
He’d watched raptly as she donned her dress and whirled around like a model at a fashion show, and even when she locked eyes with him and recoiled with revulsion, he’d been unable to take his eyes off her or wipe the grin off his face. For a minute they engaged in a sort of staring contest, then she broke it off, lowering her eyes and drifting away from the window. Suddenly Roger felt deeply embarrassed and foolish and returned to his work with a vengeance.
Geri trotted down the stairs on light feet and headed for the kitchen, drawn to the sound of her mother’s transistor radio. The kitchen and dining room constituted an extension of the original two-story, box-shaped home, an extension that Geri’s dad had built by hand a few months ago, just before he died. Geri never stepped over the threshold between the original house and the new part without thinking of her father, a strong, handsome, charming man taken before his time in a factory accident in Savannah. With him gone, responsibility for the family had naturally devolved upon Geri’s mother, but lately her mother had begun to show signs of . . . of what? Maybe it was her change of life or something. The woman showed signs of being unable to cope, of losing grip on herself, and therefore on Geri and Geri’s kid sister Alma. It saddened Geri, but it also made her uptight, because the woman had begun pushing Geri in Roger’s direction in the hope of making a match, a match that would bring a strong man back into the house and relieve her of the weight of responsibility.
Naomi Sanders had flung open the kitchen window as Geri tripped into the room, and was even at this moment chatting with Roger, who’d finished picking up the debris on his side of the fence and was now working on theirs.
“That’s very nice of you, Roger,” Naomi Sanders was saying in her most engaging manner, “but isn’t it too hot for that sort of work?”
“No problem, Mrs. Sanders,” Roger shouted back.
“Well, come in for a cold drink.”
“Thanks. Soon as I finish this batch,” the boy replied, delving into his work at double-time in anticipation of the double pleasure of refreshment and a chance to see Geri.
Mrs. Sanders shook her head as she turned away from the window. “Lord knows how Roger can work in this Godawful heat. They say it’s going into the nineties today. It feels like that already.” To emphasize this, she pulled the neckline of her brown dress away from her throat, to which it clung, as if to give vent to the steam that had accumulated underneath it. She smiled at Geri and held up her cheek for a daughterly kiss. Geri dutifully obliged, but it was too hot and sticky for an embrace.
Mrs. Sanders glanced one more time at Roger, then unconsciously touched her fingertips to the bun of grey hair atop her head. She was still a handsome, attractive woman and the expected presence of a man in her house stimulated her vanity.
Geri untied the knot of the towel around her own hair, which was still damp, rubbed her scalp briskly for a minute, then dropped the towel on the back of a chair and turned to wash the morning’s dishes in the sink. Together they listened to the news report coming over the transistor radio. “. . . main roads are badly flooded, many blocked by fallen trees. All power in the area struck by the storm is out. All phone service is dead . . .”
Geri bit her lip as she wondered whether the bus bringing Mick from New York would have any difficulty with flooded roads. For that matter, would she have a problem driving the car into town? The road to Fly Creek invariably flooded after a storm like last night’s, catching the overflow from the marshy western end of Fly Lake. How would she pick up Mick? How would he make his way to the house?
“Have you checked the garage?” her mother’s voice broke into Geri’s troubled revery. “I hope nothing got flooded in the shop.” Geri and her mother supplemented her father’s insurance settlement by selling antiques and bric-a-brac out of their garage.
“No, I stacked everything off the floor last night,” Geri said, rinsing the dishes. Washing dishes had always caused Geri’s mind to wander, and she soon found it concentrating on the image of Mick, whom she’d met at an antiques fair in Atlanta He’d obviously gotten stuck on her, but whether he felt the same way three months later—but of course he must, or he wouldn’t come all this distance, would he?
Again, her mother’s sharp voice intruded on her thoughts. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, the fridge is off too. All the food will spoil.” Geri looked over her shoulder and saw her mother standing chin in hand before the darkened box of the refrigerator, shaking her head. The woman sighed and quickly shut the door.
Her troubled eyes brightened as she seemed to notice her daughter for the first time today. “This Mick must really be something special,” she said, eyes roving over Geri’s frock. “This is the first time I’ve seen you in anything other than jeans and a sweat-shirt all summer.”
Geri felt her throat reddening, kissed her mother on the cheek, and picked up a dish towel. “Oh, mother, it’s just so hot. I wanted to wear something light.”
It was plain to see that her mother didn’t buy it. “Where in New York does he live?”
“Right in the city,” Geri replied, somewhat breathlessly. From all they both knew of New York, living right in the city struck them as a rather adventurous if not foolhardy thing to do.
“What kind of work does he do? Does he go to school?” Mrs. Sanders asked.
“He went to law school. Now he’s working as a clerk for a big law firm.”
Mrs. Sanders turned her nose up slightly at this information. “Your father never did have any use for lawyers.”
“Maybe if he did, you would have had something set aside,” Geri came back, just a tiny bit snappishly. Naomi Sanders glared at her daughter.
“Your father did the best he could. I don’t remember you ever going without,” she said, grabbing a dish towel of her own and polishing a plate to a gleaming shine. “Where’d you meet this Mick, anyway?”
“I told you. At the dealer’s show. He was browsing around.”
“And he’s coming way down here just to look for antiques?” she asked with a skeptical tilt of the head.
“No,” said Geri defensively. Then, “Well, partly. He gets five days off in the whole summer and he’d rather spend them down here in the country than the . . . mother, why are you asking?”
The question came so suddenly that Mrs. Sanders fumbled the plate in her hands and dropped it on the kitchen floor, shattering it. “Darn!” Geri stooped to pick up the shards as her mother covered her face. This was typical of how the woman had been behaving of late—jumpy and irritable. Then the mood passed with a deep breath, and she laughed. “All right, all right. I won’t butt in. Just don’t be too disappointed if he doesn’t come. I doubt if the bus can get through. You heard what the radio said.” She wrapped her hands around her arms, as if a chill wind had blown over her body despite the soaring heat of the morning. “My nerves are still jumping from that thunder. God, I never saw a storm like that. There was something . . . evil about it.”
Geri didn’t really hear her mother, for her mind was far away, had drifted magically over the miles to the bus bringing Mick, and had formed a picture of herself sitting beside him, holding his hand as the countryside whizzed past the window. “I think he’ll come,” she mused.
There was a low rumble in the pipes under the kitchen sink.
“Oh no!” her mother groaned. “What now?”
&nbs
p; They both knew what it meant. Geri twisted the faucets. The water sputtered and gurgled, faltered, then surged through the pipes once again with a troubled chugging sound. Soon there’d be no water, at least not till there was electricity.
It was hard for Geri to be concerned with running water for the problem of picking Mick up overshadowed all her thoughts. Finishing up the dishes, she left the kitchen for the coolness of the living room. As she entered, she looked out the window and saw something that transformed her troubled expression into one of almost beatific rapture. “You think Roger will let me borrow his father’s truck? I can cut through the woods and meet Mick on Route 41!” she said over her shoulder to her mother.
“I can’t wait to meet this guy,” came cynically from the living room. It was Alma, Geri’s younger sister, and she punctuated this declaration with a munch of apple. “You’ve been yakking about him all week.”
Geri peered into the dim living room where Alma sat on a couch chewing her apple and trying to read a copy of Cosmopolitan using the natural light filtering into the room through the gauzy curtains.
Alma Sanders bore little resemblance to her older sister. Her hair was darker, except for some reddish highlights, and was cropped in a shag cut. She was well built and fully mature for fifteen, but she was also inclined to pudginess, and it was hard to say if her weight problem was an adolescent phase or a permanent affliction. Since Alma resembled their father, Geri suspected the girl would go through life struggling to keep her body trim, whereas for Geri with her bird-like appetite, the opposite problem prevailed.
The girl wore a coral-colored playsuit, short pants with a matching blouse that tied around her waist. On her feet she wore the faddish cork platform shoes that all the kids were wearing these days—when they weren’t falling off them and breaking their ankles.
Geri didn’t take too kindly to her sister’s razzing about Mick, and simply glared at the girl as she entered the living room. Alma pouted, reached a long-nailed hand out for the transistor radio, and flicked on the rock station. There was an old Led Zeppelin song on, to which Alma mouthed the lyrics and plunged back into her article about the joys of white slavery.
Just then their mother came in complaining about the sink. “What else can go wrong here?” she said, though she knew neither girl was listening to her. She noticed Alma trying to read, holding the magazine close to her eyes, and snatched it out of the girl’s hands. “No reading until the lights go back on, young lady. That’s how you spoil your eyesight.”
Alma grabbed for the magazine but her mother pulled it out of reach. The girl groaned, then turned the music up as her mother plumped clown in her overstuffed chair in the corner of the room, picked up a half-finished woolen shawl, and started to knit. Alma was tempted to remark about what a fine one her mother was to talk, trying to knit in this light, but realizing that her mother would come back with some boringly predictable answer, she dropped it and sulked.
The three of them sat that way for several minutes, Alma brooding to her rock music, Mrs. Sanders knitting busily, and Geri preoccupied with the problem of picking Mick up from the bus. These long, slightly hostile silences had become more the rule than the exception lately, and Geri felt profound relief to know that Mick was coming to stay, even for a few days. The presence of a man around the house would do wonders for their sagging spirits, which were doubly depressed as summer entered the dog-days of August.
Of course, Roger, who hung around the Sanders’ residence, could also be considered a man around the house if you stretched definitions a bit, but somehow it wasn’t the same. Roger not only did not give comfort (except to Mrs. Sanders’ marital expectations for Geri), he took it away. He made you vaguely uncomfortable. He stared at you just a little longer than you liked. You never knew what he was thinking. Oh, one supposed he was harmless enough, but there are degrees of harmlessness. Roger was harmless like some big stray dog whose pedigree and training you don’t know. You could keep him for ten years and in the eleventh . . . well, who knows?
As these thoughts flitted over the screen of Geri’s mind, Roger shouldered open the screen door and clumped into the house, heavy workshoes muddy and caked with dead leaves. Mrs. Sanders jumped to her feet pointing at his shoes, and he made a gesture of recognition, went out and stomped his shoes and cleaned them on the doormat, then entered again, slamming the screen door with slight irritation. Mrs. Sanders smiled and went into the kitchen to get Roger the cold drink he’d been promised—though how cold it could be with the electricity off and the refrigerator slowly defrosting, she muttered to herself, Lord only knew.
Roger stood hesitantly at the entrance to the living room, staring shyly at Geri. He was still obviously embarrassed at having been caught peeking at her as she dressed after her shower. But Geri, eager to put him at his ease, smiled engagingly and gave no acknowledgment of what had happened a little while earlier. “Hi, Roger,” she chirped.
He grinned. His deep, dark, fathomless eyes, had they glowed more warmly than coldly, would have made him an irresistible catch for the girls of Fly Creek. He wore tight but well-worn and faded jeans and a white knit polo shirt out of which his muscular chest and arms fairly burst, and though he was perspired, he seemed otherwise completely unfatigued by exertions that would have caused most other young men to collapse.
Yet this big lad with the ox-like constitution seemed to turn to gelatin when Geri put her hands on his chest and said, “Can I ask you a big, big favor?”
He didn’t even hesitate, didn’t even raise the possibility her request might be impossible to fulfill. “Sure, Geri. You name it.”
Geri was over the hump, now. The rest was a formality. “I have to pick somebody up out on route 41. The roads are all flooded, but I bet I can make it in your truck.”
Roger beamed. His impression was that this “somebody” who had to be picked up was a cousin or an aunt or a girlfriend. It didn’t even cross his mind that it could be a man. “I’ll drive you,” he said genially.
Geri realized she was on dangerous ground. Once Roger, who fancied himself special in Geri’s life, realized it was a boyfriend she was going to pick up he’d be enraged. Roger’s rages were scary to behold, too, because unlike most people, who shouted, ranted, shook their fists, kicked things, stormed out of the room, cursed, or otherwise carried on, Roger simply smoldered. And it made Geri uneasy with him.
Geri fired a look at her sister that said, Keep your mouth shut. Unfortunately, though Alma was listening to the exchange, her eyes were up on the ceiling as she daydreamed and followed the tune on the radio.
Geri anxiously sought some valid reason why Roger shouldn’t come with her in the truck to pick up Mick, and finally came up with one that was feeble but better than nothing. “What’s the matter, afraid I can’t handle it myself?”
Roger shrugged and was about to reply when Alma suddenly came back down from the clouds and shouted, “Mother, where’s Mick gonna sleep? In Geri’s room?”
Geri glared so hard at Alma that if looks could harm, Alma would have been riveted to the couch by a thousand arrows. That bitch! Not only had she been following the conversation, but she’d been biding her time until she could set off the little bomb.
Roger looked like he’d just taken a shotgun blast full in the chest. Geri’s face was crimson, and her eyes were full of murderous rage for her troublemaking kid sister, who coolly took another chunk of apple in her teeth and gnawed it noisily. The situation wasn’t eased at all by Mrs. Sanders’ reply: “He’ll sleep on the cot in the extra room.”
Roger shifted his weight back and forth. Geri understood full well what it meant. That ponderous mind of his was slowly but certainly picking up momentum as it grasped the significance of this Mick fellow. Geri realized she had to move fast before the boy changed his mind.
“Roger, I promise to be super careful,” she said, touching his wrist tenderly and heading for the front door.
Roger wiped his mouth with the back of his hand,
then nodded slowly, like a bear. “Okay, you can use it,” he shouted after her as if it weren’t already a fait accompli. “But don’t upset the crate. I have a full shipment in there.”
Geri gave a high sign of acknowledgment and climbed into the cab of the rusty blue van. It was actually an old Dodge panel truck that Roger’s father had converted by building a customized wooden compartment to contain the crates of worms he carried into town for his bait shop or down to the other coastal towns in the areas. Painted sloppily in white on the cab door were the words: WILLIE’S BAIT, FLY CREEK, GA.
The keys were in the ignition but Geri forgot to depress the clutch when she turned the switch on. The engine emitted a weird wugga-wugga sound and the truck leaped forward. Geri looked back at Roger and tried to make light of this dumb move, which was scarcely calculated to calm his anxieties about her driving skill.
“Geri!” her mother was shouting from the kitchen window. Geri stuck her head out of the cab window and tilted it to pick up what her mother was saying. “See if you can pick up some ice at Kirby’s. Lord knows when the fridge will go on again.”
Geri saluted acknowledgment, then returned to the challenge of starting Roger’s truck. With great deliberateness, tongue flicking over her lips, Geri recited a sort of catechism of driver, education. Put the gear shift in neutral. Keep the clutch depressed to the floor. Pull the throttle out a bit. Now, turn the key.
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