The News in Small Towns (Small Town Series, Book 1)

by Moreau, Iza

  “Bong?” I said. Something about Dr. Morris’ story sounded familiar.

  He started laughing. “The country club had just replaced the old wooden markers with Chinese gongs. What a sound.”

  “Gongs,” I repeated.

  “Boy, was that guy on the tee pissed off. But the number of people using the driving range has quadrupled in the last week. They even have a new slogan: ‘Are you good enough to ring the gong.’”

  I was amazed. Benny had told me about those gongs; they were his invention. Benny had actually sold one of his inventions, or more likely, he had told someone about it and they had sold it. I had a lot more respect for the little guy. I was going to mention this to Dr. Morris when his beeper went off. He glanced at it, then told me, “Gotta go. Ambulance just came in with an emergency.”

  “Thanks for breakfast,” I shouted at his retreating figure. “Or lunch.”

  “My pleasure,” he shouted back.

  I gathered up my purse and book and made for the exit, where I almost got knocked down by a red-headed man about twice my size. As I looked after him, thinking of telling him about himself, a man that could have been his twin sent me spinning in the opposite direction.

  “I’m not a dreidel!” I shouted after him.

  “Surprisingly, the second man stopped, turned, and asked in a puzzled voice, “What’s a dreidel? Oh, hey there Sue-Ann.”

  I suddenly recognized the man as one of Donny’s half brothers. “Chad? What’s going on? Is someone hurt? Has something happened to Donny?”

  “Naw, Donny’s okay. It’s Pop. Tractor tire blew while he was trying to drive it out of a ditch and it fell over sideways, pinned him down. It was all Tad and I could do to lift it up and get him out. Broke his arm, maybe some ribs, too.” He looked around and saw that his brother was talking to someone at the main desk. “I want to help, but I guess there’s nothin I can do.”

  “Just let the doctor do his work,” I told him. “Come over here and sit down.”

  Reluctantly, the big man trundled over to a bank of maroon chairs and couches set in a rough rectangle, and parked his bulk on one of the couches. I sat nearby in a matching chair. “I’m sure your father’s going to be all right,” I told him. “He’s too tough an old bird to be hurt bad.”

  Chad smiled wanly, then said, “You didn’t have to pull him out from under that tractor. And darn it, I told him those tires were shot and not fit to drive on.”

  At that point, Tad Brassfield joined his brother on the couch, and even though they sat at the ends, they filled it. Both stand over six feet but look bigger because they each weigh over 300 pounds. Because of their weight, both wear overalls most of the time. Their tee shirts bulged in front and showed the dirt and sweat of having to dig their father out from under his machine. Tad is older and slightly taller; Chad weighs more and has a beard to go with his unruly red hair.

  Tad nodded at me. “What are you doin here, Sue-Ann?” he asked.

  “Fell and hit my head a while back,” I told him. “Got the stitches out today. Did you get your dad checked in okay?”

  “I guess.”

  “I’m sure he’ll be fine.”

  “I guess.” Tad sat for a while, then looked up at me. “You probably know that none of us have any reason to like the old man much.” I kept silent and let him continue. “But seein him lyin there, tryin to breathe, lookin up at me to help . . .” He shook his head. “And at the end of it, if he gets well and comes home, it’ll be the same all over again. He’ll probably even blame us for not gettin him out soon enough.” He stopped, gathering his words together in his head. “Sue-Ann, Chad and I, we don’t think much, don’t have the time, but I’ve been wonderin the whole time we were drivin over here, what if he dies? What are we goin to do if he dies?”

  “You’re grown men, Tad,” I told him. “You know the farm like the back of your hand. You’ll both be fine. Anyway, Ed’s not going to die.”

  From his corner, Chad spoke up for the first time since Tad had sat down. “We can’t let it be the same,” he said simply.

  “What are you sayin?” his brother asked.

  “I don’t know. We need to get Donny.”

  “Need to get him for what?” asked Tad.

  “We need to get him,” Chad insisted.

  “I’ll call him,” I said.

  “That’s not what I mean,” said Chad. “But yeah, I guess we should call him.”

  Donny was working a wreck on the other side of the county, but he said he’d get to the hospital when he got free. I sat with the brothers for another hour. We didn’t talk much, but I got the idea that this was a changing point—that they dimly realized that from that day forward, their lives were to be different in some way. It scared them and excited them at the same time. They reminded me of draft horses—used to pulling plows and wagons—who were suddenly faced with being saddled. When Donny came in, looking both pissed and worried, I got up and went to him. I nodded my head toward Chad and Tad, “They need you,” I told him. “I’ll call you later.” Then I got in my truck and drove toward Pine Oak. I had my maps on the front seat and I was on my way to The Courier offices to show Gina what I had found.

  I felt no sympathy for Ed Brassfield, but couldn’t help feeling sorry for Tad and Chad, who were both suffering. Well, if their father would die, they would be free. That’s pretty blunt, pretty harsh, but true, and, although I tried to keep it deep in the back of my mind where it belonged, I wondered if my father had felt the same way when Cindy died.

  To get my mind off the situation, I turned on the truck’s radio, set as always to the pirate station. I heard a few songs without paying much attention. Then my back went up as I heard the scratchy, whiny voice of The Creeper waffle up out of the speakers, sounding like fingernails on a saw. I turned up the volume.

  “Lot of people think they find supernatural beings in a church; or maybe they think they conjure up demons with black cats and bones. One or two think they have angels on their shoulders, yas, but all these people are wiggy like mice. You ask me where there are demons and I say they are in the swamps and the forests. You ask me where there are spirits and I tell you that there are spirits in the trees.

  “Don’t you fools go near the old dead oaks in the woods. They are the darkest; they hold the fiercest and oldest spirits of highwaymen and thieves; their bare branches are weapons. Some of them got hung in those branches. No, the dark trees you don’t want to mess with. The trees don’t got eyes, but they see you just the same.

  “Sometimes spirits can call up snakes to come out and eat you; sometimes demons ride white horses through the trees.

  “Magnolia trees hold the spirits of all little girls that died on their way to church, yas. The flowers the same color as their little dresses.

  “Cypress, now, they got lots of different spirits, but some of the spirits be sailors and slaves who died a hundred and fifty years ago. Know how they died? Demons got them.

  “You don’t know this, but I do: some weeds and shrubs got demons, too. Little demons, like bugs or chickens. Feel that thistle? That’s chickens pecking at you; that’s no-see-ums getting their chow down.

  “And those long rows of pines on your neighbor’s land? You see em? Yas, those pines have grabbed the spirits of dead soldiers so you can be safe when you walk through them. You can rest. You can lean on them. Those soldiers, they can rest now, too.

  Some say that when we die we come back as something else—a cow, a pig, a roach. But maybe we come back as mango trees.

  “And if my spirit is in a mango tree, maybe people, maybe birds, come to feed off me and I will be satisfied, I will provide.”

  Well, that was even stranger than usual, vaguely depressing but uplifting at the same time. And complicated and maddening. What did he know about snake spirits, stands of pines. Not for the first time, I felt that The Creeper could somehow reach out over the airwaves and read minds, see things that he shouldn’t be able to see. Yet he had enough of the
Delphic Oracle in him that I could never find anything concrete that would help to identify him or pin anything on him as precise as a prediction.

  Gina’s PT Cruiser was not in the parking lot, but I went in anyway. Betty was sitting in Gina’s desk, talking on the phone, but she hung up when I entered.

  “Hey, Betty,” I said. “Is Ginette out selling ads?”

  “She’s out all right, but out sick,” she said.

  “Did she say what was wrong?”

  “No, just that she wasn’t feeling well. Said she’d be in tomorrow.”

  “I’ll check back tomorrow, then,” I told her. Instead, I went across to the Piggly Wiggly and bought two cans of chicken noodle soup and drove across town to Gina’s house.

  I knocked at the door, but didn’t get a response, although I heard the sound of Gina’s guitar coming from a back room. I tried the door and it was open. I walked in, feeling pretty sure that I wasn’t interrupting an intimate meeting. The music was coming from the left and I could see Gina sitting crosslegged on a mattress, bent over a guitar. It was a different guitar than I had seen the last time I had been here—long and sleek and colored in a golden-brown sunburst. And, although she was playing it left handed, the pick guard was positioned properly at the bottom. The song she was playing was not country this time; it was more of a chant. I heard:

  You always were,

  you always are,

  and you always will be.

  You are everywhere,

  you are in everything.

  While she sang, I had the opportunity to look around the room. It was the simplest room I had ever seen: a king-size mattress was centered against the back wall, a nightstand held a clock and a lamp. There was a bare, but well-made dresser across from the bed, and on the wall a picture of an odd-looking old man with long hair and a hook nose. Doors led to a closet and bathroom, but both were closed. Gina herself was dressed in flannel pajamas and had her hair tied back in a ponytail.

  Gina looked up and saw me, but her eyes were expressionless, as they had been the first time I had visited her. I saw that she was in a funk, so I tried to cheer her up. “Does nothing ever surprise you?” I asked. “I mean, what if I was a thief?”

  “You are a thief,” she said.

  I was taken aback. “What have I taken?” I asked.

  “You know what you’ve taken, Sue-Ann. You’ve taken over mah lahf. Ah caint go out of the house without thinkin that maybe ah’ll catch a glimpse of you somewhere. Ah’ve put your number on my speed dial and have to slap mah own hand a hundred tahms a day to keep from callin you.”

  “I want you to call me,” I told her.

  “Whah? So you can screw around with mah mind?”

  I swear to you that I had no intention of replying as I did; it just came out, like water from a faucet. “I love you,” I said softly, and almost gasped at my own audacity. But Gina’s reaction was even more unexpected. She jumped up from the bed and stomped barefooted into the living room where she found a pack of cigarettes and lit one. I was left standing in the middle of her bedroom and she glared at me through the open door.

  “God damn it Sue-Ann,” she cried. “Can’t you see that you’re scarin the shit outta me?”

  “You don’t want me to love you?”

  “No! Yes. Ah don’t fuckin know!” she shouted, tears rolling down her cheeks.

  “I’ve never seen you cry before,” I said.

  “Fuck you, Sue-Ann. Just fuck you.”

  “That kiss in the woods that day didn’t mean anything?”

  “It meant everythin!” she wailed.

  “Then why . . . what did you say?”

  “Ah said it meant everythin. Everythin ah’ve ever wanted in mah whole lahf was in that kiss. But ah’m not you. Ah just can’t jump into boilin water without wonderin how bad ah’m goin to get scalded.”

  “I won’t burn you.”

  “Everyone that’s ever meant more than shit to me has left me hangin.”

  “I won’t leave you.”

  “How do ah know that?” She was calming down some. She wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her pajamas.

  “You’ve got to trust me.”

  “Ah want to, ah do,” she said, blowing smoke.

  “Here. I brought us some chicken soup.”

  “Ah’m not really sick,” Gina said. “Ah jist . . .”

  “I can see that,” I smiled. “But let’s eat it anyway.” I showed her the two cans of chicken noodle soup. “Just like mother used to make,” I said.

  “An granma, too,” she smiled back at me.

  Over the soup, which you should heat—contrary to the directions on the can—without adding any water, Gina started to brighten up. By the time I had recounted my adventure in rounding up Alikki, she was back to normal and wide eyed.

  “Sue-Ann!” she cried. “What was that girl Krista doin way out there?”

  “I expect she lives there,” I said.

  “And who was that awful-lookin man that was with her?”

  “I don’t know, but I’ma find out.”

  “How?”

  “I need to show you on the maps,” I said. I looked around for a place to spread them out. The dining room table was small and covered with soup bowls and stuff. I took the maps back into her bedroom and spread them out on the mattress.

  “These are the same maps I got from the Property Appraiser’s Office,” Gina said.

  “Right. But I’ve pasted them together to make one big map instead of two smaller ones so you can see how they intersect.”

  For the next hour I pointed out how the trail from Meekins’ Market, if you followed it far enough, would almost have to dead end at the west side of Krista’s Compound. The trail I had followed looking for Alikki came out at the south side. That meant that if I had followed the trail that had been mowed around The Compound fence, I would have struck the eastern trail. In other words, there was an actual, if serpentine, trail from Meekins’ Market to my own back yard.

  “Well, what are we goin to do next?” she asked.

  “First I’ve got to make sure I’m right.”

  “How?” she asked.

  “By following the trail to the end.”

  “To The Compound?”

  “To The Compound.”

  Gina had gone to the head of the mattress and folded herself into her lotus posture. I was sprawled out at the foot and my eye caught the picture of the man on the wall.

  “Who’s that, I asked.

  “Baba.”

  I thought I had misheard her. “Your papa?”

  “No, silly. Baba. He was a spiritual leader. An avatar.”

  “What, Hindu?” I guessed

  “Kahnd of a funny mix of Hindu and Sufi and Muslim.”

  “You’re, like, into mystics?” I asked carefully.

  “Naw, but Baba is kahnd of special to me.”

  “Why?”

  “Ah don’t know if ah kin explain it. . . did you know that Cal went to college in London for a year?”

  “No, I didn’t, but what—”

  “It’s somethin that was kinda lahk a crossroads for him. He made friends there, he did things he’d never done, he felt real free . . .”

  “My father did that!” I remembered, “Except that he studied in Florence.”

  “And does he always say things lahk,” she deepened her voice to a man’s timber and said, ‘Ah remember that back in Florence we were so pore that we had to eat the bark off the trees.’”

  “Or, ‘We rode a train for six days without getting off,’” I laughed.

  “Raht,” she smiled. “They compare everything they do now with what they did in London or Florence. Ah suspect that you’ll always be thinkin about bein in Iraq.”

  “It will be hard to forget it,” I admitted.

  “Well, ah’ve never been out of the U S of A, but ah have memories just lahk Cal has about London, except ah got mahn in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.”

  “South Carolina?” I
asked.

  “Ah spent almost six months in Myrtle Beach,” she said. “Didn’t ya know?”

  “Of course not. What were you doing in Myrtle Beach?” I asked.

  “You’re gonna laugh,” she said.

  “I won’t.”

  “Ah was at the Meher Spiritual Center,” she said.

  “Mayor . . . ?”

  “Baba,” she said. “You really never heard of Meher Baba?”

  “Vaguely, maybe. But back up, what were you doing in Myrtle Beach?”

  “Okay, lookit,” she began. “Back when ah got divorced from Jimmy, ah wanted to leave Pine Oak for a while. Ah tried college for a couple of years, but it wasn’t a success. So ah got in mah car and just drove around the country. Ah visited mah parents in Texas for a few days, but when ah was supposed to come home, ah didn’t. Ah wanted to see new things and didn’t know if ah’d ever git another chance. Ah went up into Colorado and got a job workin horses for a whahl. When that ended, ah drove up through Chicago and went to Boston and New York for a few days. Ah walked around Washington, D. C., and ah stood on the banks of the Potomac River. It was all new and excitin and ah was lonely as ah could be. Ah lived in Nashville for a couple of months waitin tables and listenin to music til three in the a.m. Ah wanted to play, too, but ah wasn’t near good enough and ah knew it. Ah still didn’t want to come back home, but ah didn’t have anything else ah wanted neither. Ah was livin out of mah car some of the tahm, tryin to save money, and ah was feelin real bad about mahself. Ah didn’t feel ah had any future. There wasn’t nothin ah was good at and everythin ah tried went sourer than milk left out in the sun.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. Listening to her story was fascinating, not because it was exciting or unique, but because it was so unexpected, so totally out of character from the Ginette Cartwright I had known most of my life.