Champagne for Buzzards

by Phyllis Smallman

  “You have a lovely gait too,” he’d said.

  “Now I know why you love me, the good ride, but don’t try seventy miles a day.”

  “You’re built for a pleasure ride, not distance.”

  “Mmm,” I’d said.

  I stopped at the road, waiting for an old compact to go by. Joey came up against the fence, bucking and jumping about in frustration at the end of our race. “Stupid animal,” I told him.

  In the rearview I saw the buzzards fly lazily towards me. “It’s this damn suit,” I told Joey. “I knew black wasn’t my color. They think I’m dead.”

  I turned right, going west to the coast.

  Clay’s ranch is tucked between two broad creeks, a private and safe place with only one road into it. To hit a major highway and get anywhere you have to go through Independence, a small town three miles from the ranch gate.

  The road ran through the Sweet Meadow citrus ranch, the next farm to Clay’s. Well over a thousand acres, the ranch was strung out on either side of the road. The long lines of citrus trees running away from the road were already in blossom. White blocks of beehives sat here and there among the rows of trees. There’s nothing better than orange blossom honey.

  For this short space of time in my existence I was content, delighted with my life and in no hurry to be anywhere else. I overtook two Mexican farm workers, wobbling along on bikes like accidents looking for a place to get down to business. Judging by their unsteady progress, riding bikes was a new activity for these guys, but they waved and grinned as if they really knew me and I waved back the same way. Small-town Florida is like that, something we seemed to have lost along the coast with all the newcomers brought in by the hyperdevelopment. I’d gone from knowing everyone in Jacaranda to wondering who in hell they all were.

  I slowed down to cross a narrow bridge over Saddle Creek. This narrow stream flows through the east side of town, drains into Jobean Lake at the southwest of town, and then rambles off to the Gulf of Mexico. Criss-crossing waterways birthed the town and now they protect it from highways and expansion.

  The town of Independence came into being during the Civil War when a group of ranchers pushed through the mangroves, heading inland along the rivers. Hacking the palmettos as they went, they settled among the bugs and gators of South Florida and raised food for the Confederacy. Barges laden with beef were poled down the rivers to Port Charlotte Harbor, near Punta Gorda, where the cattle and produce were loaded onto ships.

  After the war, a railroad was built along the western boundary to take produce and beef from the western side of Florida to the North. This railroad also brought tourists south to places like Boca Grande and Fort Myers and inland to towns like Independence. Large houses were built, winter homes for the rich coming down by rail from places like Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland and Buffalo. The men from the North, men who owned foundries and shipping companies, wanted winter homes like the ones they’d left behind. They built tall Victorian houses of brick and clapboard, making little concession to Southern ways and wisdom.

  Against all odds, these houses, Victorian Ladies, survived in Independence, although by the First World War tourists no longer came and these glorious relics fell into decline. During the Second World War an airfield was built to the west. Soldiers on leave filled the town. Many of the gracious mansions were turned into boarding houses for the personnel from the airfield. When the airfield closed after the Korean War, Independence fell on hard times.

  Now Independence was just a place that time forgot. The town didn’t seem to care. On this glorious March day, with the temperature hovering in the mid-seventies, it looked safe and nostalgic. Maybe Clay was right to spend more and more of his time out here.

  I stopped for an old black dog that ambled across the street, so tired he was hardly capable of holding his nose an inch off the pavement. Everything seemed to be in sepia tones and slightly dusty in Independence. Even the lawns were brown and dried out. Houses weren’t painted, cars had rusted out where they sat, and there wasn’t a hanging basket it sight. Here the stores all spoke to necessity, unlike the shops in a tourist town that said life was about consumption. The only color to catch my eye was the one neon sign in town. Made of red rope, it spelled out “Open” and flashed over the new gun store next to a pawnshop. When I was a kid, back in the eighties, every pickup truck had a gun on a rack across the back window. Guns have never gone out of style in small-town Florida.

  In front of the truck the dog stopped, lifted his head and sniffed the air. I did the same. Even I could smell something. That was it. Miguel wasn’t using my truck to pick up supplies anymore. The dog bayed.

  I used the horn. He gave one more long mournful sound and crossed the road to flop down in the dusty shade of a redbrick church, exhausted by his trip, but his head was up and he still howled.

  After the house of worship came five small weathered and beaten-down houses, leaning against each other for support. They protected the church from a bar called the Gator Hole, a rough sort of place that catered to farm workers and ranchers. Tully and Ziggy played pool in there late in the afternoons and brought back stories that made other bars seem like service clubs.

  There was a row of Victorian mansions before the town changed abruptly to country and with it the speed limit. I could hurry on out to the main highway, but on this sunny Friday morning I didn’t seem to be in any rush and for once there were no worries chasing me.

  On my left, a handmade sign said “Used Cows.” Used for what, and in what way, the sign didn’t say. Ranches, orange groves and thousand-acre megafarms growing all manner of things came after the rail line. In the corners of the monster farms, and along their edges, were small acreages of beatendown holdings with houses that hadn’t seen paint in decades. Resting on concrete blocks, the houses overlooked yards filled with bits of machinery and leftover cars. Every house seemed to have an outdoor living room consisting of plastic chairs and tables set out on bare earth under live oaks. Along here every property had a sign like “Wild Boar Hunting” or “Smoked Fish for sale” or even “Bush Hog for rent.”

  Twenty-five minutes down the road, at the boiled peanut and veggie stand, I made the turn onto the freeway and back into the modern world. It was like crossing a magic line from the past to the present. The thruway running north and south up the western side of Florida separates two realities: the high rise–high rent area along the coast and the farm towns to the east. I stepped on the gas to join the world again.

  CHAPTER 4

  I crossed the lift bridge at the north end of Cypress Island. The blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico were spread out in front of me. I bumped down over the iron grating and onto the main street of Jacaranda with a smile on my face. I was home.

  The palm-lined main street was filled with ice cream–licking tourists wearing wrinkled shorts and tee-shirts declaring what they loved. Under the banyan trees in the park a barbershop quartet was singing to a crowd of people sitting on folding chairs.

  Laura Kemp’s office was in an elegant Spanish building from the twenties. At the west end of the commercial district, her office was as removed from the crass bustle of the retail trade as it could be, not a tee-shirt shop in sight.

  I pulled into the municipal parking lot around the back and parked as far from the building as possible. No need for the pride of the Junior League to see the white splotches covering Big Red, or catch the decided whiff of something nasty that I smelled. I’d stop at the car wash as soon as I was finished with the decorating queen and then I’d pick up the champagne for the party.

  I was late. I started to hurry, and then reminded myself that ladies don’t run. “But what if the house is on fire, can they run then?” the silly person who lives in my head asked. I pulled down the jacket on my stupid suit and took tiny little steps, as if there were a giant elastic around my knees.

  Down the bricked alley and around to the f
ront on Main Street I minced.

  The windows of Laura Kemp’s Decorating Shoppe were tastefully done. Inside, it was cool and dim and crowded with furniture, lamps and small pieces to fill up your mantel. An elegant woman glided towards me and said, “May I help you?” This was quickly followed by, “Oh, Ms. Travis, I didn’t recognize you.” The suit must be working if I was unrecognizable, although in this straitjacket my own mother wouldn’t recognize me. Actually, my mother, Ruth Ann Jenkins, would say, “Oh honey, why you all done up like someone’s maiden auntie? No use hiding your treasures under a bushel basket, darlin’.” Ruth Ann always had her treasures well on display. And just to make sure everyone noticed them she covered them with rhinestones. Maybe rhinestones were just what this black shroud needed.

  “Come this way, Laura is waiting for you,” the elegant woman said. Was there a rebuke in those words, a slight disapproval? And when had I become so sensitive?

  Laura Kemp looked up from an antique desk. Blond and beautiful, she smiled sweetly at me. She stood and stretched out her hand. “Hello, Sherri.” Shit, why didn’t I leave the price tag on my suit? Oh, I remember now, suits like this didn’t have price tags.

  Laura was wearing a winter green linen suit, loosely cut and wrinkled, with elegant shell jewelry, big and chunky jewelry. Now that’s the look I wanted, but somehow I never could do elegant. Slut in heat, redneck ho and trashy tart were all looks I can manage easily, but understated elegance always escaped me. Naked, and with a really good pedicure, was the only way for me not to screw up being properly dressed. “May I get you an iced tea?” she asked.

  “No thank you. I’m a little pressed for time, got an important meeting.” Score one for me. I was learning how this social thing was done — get in first with the lie and insincerity. “Of course.” She waved a hand at a chair and I sat. Around the elegant, cultured women that Clay dated before me, my self-confidence plummeted. It was easier for me to deal with a crazy drunk or a crackhead than a woman wearing an Armani suit.

  “I’ll just show you the boards,” Laura said. “Clay has been a little undecided about this. I know you aren’t interested, since it is Clay’s house, but he did want you to see them.” Score ten for Laura and nothing I could say that was going to get me back to even.

  “These are the materials,” she said, bringing me a shallow basket filled with material swatches, all browns and beiges and other muddy colors.

  Laura Kemp glided towards the wall covered in pictures of furniture while I stared down at the basket full of shit.

  “Isn’t there any color?” I fingered the nubby, coarse materials. “You’ve seen the house, it’s Victorian.” The house had surprised me. Two stories tall with attics on top of that, it was fronted by a curved front porch enclosing two bay windows separated by tall twin doors. On each rounded end of the porch sat a half-dozen old wicker rocking chairs that came with the house. Gracious and welcoming, the ranch house had not been what I expected.

  “Victorians need color,” I said. Why was I arguing; what did I care? It wasn’t mine. I can never get over the feeling that Clay and I are temporary. A little walk on the wild side for him, a little bit of the good life for me, but transitory, even though I wanted it to be more than that.

  She turned to face me, raising one eyebrow in surprise, or was it disgust? “Oh? I didn’t know you were an interior designer.” She stretched her mouth. “Oh, that’s right, you aren’t. You’re a bartender.” She turned back to look at the pictures up on the wall. “I’ve gone for a mid-century look, updated Swedish modern, teak and steel, with the addition of leather.”

  Shocked, stunned and without words, I stared at the wall of pictures while she blathered on about her concept. She pointed to a couch with a straight back and set on aluminum legs. It looked like furniture from a union office.

  I rose to my feet and tried to get back into the game. “I can’t imagine stretching out on that,” I said, pointing to the couch.

  “I don’t think anyone will need to stretch out on it. This is the main reception area of an exquisite residence and not a homeless shelter.”

  “Just who are we meant to be receiving?” She looked at me, doing that trick with the one eyebrow again and said, “In your case I really can’t imagine.”

  Okay, bitch, enough of playing nice. What was the one thing that would twist the Kemp’s knickers? I handed her the basket. “This won’t do. We are planning on living in this house. It isn’t a show house but a family home.”

  Really I’d never once considered living on the ranch although Clay had suggested it over and over. I’m a city girl. Why did I care how Clay did it up? He could tart it up in pink ribbons for all I cared. “We are going to live there…” I hesitated and then added, in case she didn’t quite get the concept, “…together. It has to please both of us.” The subtext to this statement was “There ain’t no way you is ever going to get your skinny ass back in Clay’s bed. So give it up, bitch.”

  She gave a silent sigh and jutted a hip. “That’s not what I hear. I understood from Clay that I was to have free rein. He only told me to show you my design because he thought it might amuse you.”

  “Amuse me? Lady, you’re what’s amusing. And I’d tell you where to stick your mid-century-design shit but from the look of you, it might just pass for a good time and about the only action you’re likely to get.”

  This suit, my power suit, was really working for me, but my plan to show more class had gone down the toilet.

  CHAPTER 5

  I was on fire with indignation. Driving down Main Street, the big oops happened. How annoyed was Clay going to be with me for pissing off his decorator? And what about the seventy to eighty people coming for a party in one week’s time? A party in an empty house, which once upon a time would have been my ideal, wasn’t really the style I was going for. What was I going to do about a party in a house without furniture?

  Laura Kemp had already had the inside of the house painted top to bottom in a soft cream and all the old cypress floors had been redone. I dialed Marley. She was with a patient and wouldn’t take my call. Dental hygiene wasn’t as important as my problem so I headed on over to the office.

  Marley’s my best friend, has been since grade school, and she follows every trend going in home decoration, knows everything about it and loves to shop. Except these days she was recovering from the end of her love affair with David, a man she thought she was going to marry. She’d fallen into a huge pit of despair from which we couldn’t seem to drag her.

  Marley looked up from the open mouth of her patient. Her red curls had turned into a shrub from which her pale freckled face peeked. Her glasses, still new and startling, were as round and full as headlights. She pulled down her mask and said, “Where’d you get the suit?”

  “Same place you got the hair.” I turned and walked out of the room. She followed, closing the door behind her and snapping off latex gloves. “What’s up?” she asked. I told her. Marley went into a fit of laughter. “Clay used to date that bitch,” I said.

  “Was there anyone in the social register he didn’t date?”

  “I think he did it so none of them could tie him down.”

  “Well, if that story makes you happy. My bet is he was just horny and rich and could get away with it.”

  I slapped her on the arm but not hard enough that she was going to retaliate and lay me out in my new suit. “What am I going to do?”

  “I suggest you rent or buy some furniture.”

  “Will you help?”

  “Hell, yeah. Spending someone else’s money, how great is that? But where’s the money coming from?”

  “Good question. Buy now, pay later if it’s my money. But Clay will cough up the dough. He just might not see the need to rush out and do it in a hurry. But here’s what I figure. We can hire a bunch of chairs and tables with long tablecloths and pretend we left the house emp
ty on purpose. We can set some up on the porches too. I already bought lots of Japanese lanterns and fairy lights to twinkle in the trees. We only need to buy geegaws for the bathrooms and a few little things, just enough to tart the place up a bit.”

  Marley said, “Surprise parties never turn out well.”

  “If it isn’t a surprise there won’t be a party. Clay doesn’t like birthdays.”

  “Then why bother?”

  I thought about it for a second. “Truthfully, maybe being younger is the only thing I have on my side. I’m thirty-one and he’s forty-five in ten days. He hates being fourteen years older, puts him at a disadvantage, but he has money, class and all the good things, so it doesn’t hurt to remind him I have one thing he can’t ever have again.”

  “Wow,” she said, “you’re a bigger bitch than even I knew and I always gave you lots of credit for that.”

  “Thank you, it’s lovely to impress someone. Will you come out this weekend and help me decide what to do?”

  “Sure.” But Marley wasn’t looking at me as she said it. She was looking out the window. I followed her gaze. A turkey vulture sat on the roof of Big Red. Now, a turkey vulture isn’t something you see every day in downtown Jacaranda.

  “Shit,” I said.

  “What?” Marley said.

  “Something about Big Red, there were buzzards sitting on it this morning.”

  “Probably the suit, you look like you died and someone forgot to close the lid.”

  “Go back to torturing the guy in your chair.”

  “Oh, forgot all about him. I finish early today. I’ll pack a few things and come right out.”

  The turkey vulture had hopped down from the roof and was in the bed of the truck by the time I arrived. He was pulling at something, holding it down with his feet and grasping it in his beak and pulling hard. I waved my tasteful black clutch purse at him. He squawked in annoyance but took off, not far, just to the middle or the street, waiting to see if I abandoned whatever he had fallen in love with in the back of my truck. I looked to see what it was. It was a hand.