He shook his head, snorted, and returned his attention to his sketchbook. “I’m busy, Clarissa.”
Despite his full-frontal rudeness, she reverted to her tendency to try to make everything A-OK. “You need anything? Water or something?”
“No. They’ve gone to Natalie’s car. She’s got a cooler out there. She’s bringing us something.”
“They don’t have on any clothes.”
“One slipped on her dress. The other one is wearing your kimono,” he said, punching each word. He shot her a brief smile, which she interpreted as a smirk.
A cocktail—one part anger, one part humiliation, one part pain—singed her veins. Motherfucker. On top of everything else, he’s mocking me. And she could not call him on it, could not risk having an argument in front of the models. That’s all the gossip circuit would need. Clarissa didn’t know what else to do other than take the high ground, which meant acting as if her head were simultaneously up her ass and in the ground. “Well”—she held up the folder and smiled—“research for me.”
“Is that my fowking shirt?”
“No,” Clarissa lied, and before Iggy could protest, a squeaky voice wafted through the heat.
“This Tazo tea is terrific!”
Clarissa bolted through the door so swiftly that she closed it before the fly, who was a seasoned aerial acrobat, could sweep in. He buzzed, looking more like a mad little bee than a fly, at times throwing himself against the glass, risking serious injury to his thorax. He was just about to zip over to the kitchen to seek an opening there when, in his frenetic circling, he noticed a herd of mosquitoes enter the house through a gap at the top of the door.
“Bingo!” the fly would have said, swirling on stationary wings, if he could have talked.
Larry Dibble sat in the crown of the sentinel oak, getting the lay of the land. Now he knew why the tree was in trouble. That crazy black guy had been hacking away at it for nearly two centuries. Unlucky bastard. As for himself, Larry didn’t understand why he, being an angel who favored mischief and mayhem over all that goodness-and-light bullshit, had been sent to this stupid little village named, moronically, Hope. What did the big boys think he was going to do? Learn a lesson? Was this one last chance to prove he deserved those wings? Did they even have the balls to kick him downstairs? He stroked his beautiful long dreadlocks, picked an ant from his hair, and ate it. Who was the lucky one? He was. Those were some fine-looking lassies cavorting amid that snotty bitch’s roses.
Clutching the manila folder, Clarissa began to thread her way back to the library and got as far as the half bath when she was stopped in her tracks by voices inside her house.
“This rifle was used by my great-great-great-grandfather in the Battle of Blood River. Ncome River, we call it. My people defeated the mighty Zulus. It was one hell of a fight,” she heard her husband say, his Afrikaner accent fully engaged.
Christ.
“South Africa must be so beautiful,” said the model who did not squeak, the brunette.
“Every part of the country is beautiful. I mean, the kind of beauty that poets and artists spend their entire lives trying to capture. But it’s not our country. God rest my great-great-great-grandfather’s soul. He was a legendary warrior, a true hero. But in history’s great ebb and flow, we have to get back to what is right. The fowking white man should leave the entire continent. Racist bastards!”
Clarissa dropped the folder. She was shaking. So their first conversation, the one that happened eight years ago at a party thrown by a mutual friend, had been nothing more than his version of a pickup line? She knelt down, fought back tears—she would not cry over his sorry ass—and began gathering the dossier’s scattered pages.
“You are so brilliant,” Squeaky said, and then Clarissa heard the back door open and slam shut.
Dingbat, Clarissa thought, and what an asshole husband! Do not let it bother you, do not let it bother you, do not let it bother you, she chanted silently as she made her way to her library, where the fly lit on the handle of her machete, and she checked the clock: ten forty-five. Only six hours to go before she’d see Adams. She revised the sentence to if she saw Adams. If Iggy truly did intend to spend the evening in the darkroom, she wondered if she could—despite the horrible way Iggy was behaving—muster the nerve to go alone. Despite all that she had accomplished in her life, she was not a woman accustomed to doing things on her own—a fact about her basic nature that she loathed. It was turning her into a goddamn doormat. Independence, from her perch, was a scary but intoxicating proposition. “One day,” she whispered, looking at the clock, “I’ll be an independent woman and he’ll be sorry for the shit he’s pulled.”
She heard that laughter again—one fine trill—and then the sound of bare feet running across a pine floor. They sounded like short steps, the kind a child would make. She ducked into the chandelier room and gazed at the ceiling. The sounds ceased. Now all she heard was Iggy, those girls, and a bird, probably a mockingbird, chirping. It was hopeless. The old house was full of strange noises. There was no laughing child, no running child; the idea was absurd. She stepped back into the library and remembered that she still had roses in the sink. Oh well, no harm. They were in water and could wait.
The library was a good two or three degrees hotter than when she’d left it less than an hour before. She wondered if the air-conditioning was working at all. Perhaps global warming was descending even faster than all the scientists in the world (with the exception of one jackass holdout) were predicting. Eschewing the practicality of the library table for the comfort of the red silk fainting couch, upon which, predawn, three moths had feasted (a fact that, if she had known it, would have piqued her anger because she loved this couch, as it reminded her of how very far she’d traveled from that trailer park).
Determined to not care what her husband was doing, she stretched out—a human ribbon unfurling—wiped a fine film of sweat off her neck, gathered her long curly hair into a single tail, and braided it with nimble fingers. As she wove one strand over the next, she felt the morning settle into her bones. Sunlight filtered through her Irish lace curtains, and if she had stared at it—which she did not—she would have seen billions of bits of swirling dust, and this might have made her feel even more insignificant than she was already feeling that day; so it was her good luck that she faced away from the solstice light.
The fly zigzagged across the room and then lit upon the couch’s curved arm.
Clarissa opened the folder and was immediately taken by the engraving of Olga Villada. There the woman of the house stood, under the sentinel oak in Clarissa’s backyard, a map (of La Florida, Clarissa assumed) in one hand and a bullwhip (cows, snakes, what else?) in the other, looking defiant, brilliant, beautiful.
“Fantastic,” Clarissa whispered into the hot, hot air, her heart’s molecules rearranging themselves into a pattern reminiscent of love. She felt the shift just to the left of her breastbone and then a small quake. It rippled through her, head to toe, but she was so entrenched in refusing even the smallest of pleasures that she did not recognize that she might have just fallen head over heels. We’re talking platonic, of course. But did it matter? What was love if not an idea—abstract as wind, concrete as rain—an invisible homily so powerful that it propelled even the meekest souls to hold dear what they feared most?
She set the engraving on her chest and flipped through the folder, finding that it contained scholarly examinations (including an unfinished doctoral thesis written by a certain Rosa Piggot), land grants, newspaper articles, and a plethora of sundry scribblings—some in Spanish, some in English, some in shaky translation. She searched her memory bank about her day at the archives. While the librarian made photocopies of what Clarissa assumed would be flimsy documentation, skewed through the dusty lens of history, she had searched for a daguerreotype of anything pertaining to her house and had come up empty. She hadn’t known about the engraving until this moment.
She scanned pages qu
ickly, trying to get a broad overview before she delved into details. Olga Villada, the daughter of Spain’s most beloved flamenco guitarist and New World mistress to Florida’s Spanish governor, had apparently journeyed to a land of swamps, snakes, mosquitoes, and wildflowers just because she could. At least, that’s what the opening paragraphs of the thesis led her to believe.
The thesis, supported by other documentation, established that Olga Villada was at one time the largest landowner in what was to become Aucilla County. Under Spanish law, women were allowed to own land, something their sisters living under U.S. rule could not do. In her time, she owned hundreds of acres of fertile earth that—thanks to greed, ignorance, and curses cast by slaves whose hands bore scars inflicted by cotton’s mighty thorns—would be mismanaged by subsequent owners, becoming nothing but dust, depleted of its nutrients, in need of the care twentieth-century planters would eventually provide. But before the earth went dry and Florida became a slave-owning U.S. territory, Olga Villada raised crops and cattle and owned two sawmills. She also, with the help of her common-law husband, Amaziah Archer, designed and built the very house Clarissa called home.
Notes accompanying the thesis, scrawled in a left-leaning cursive script, claimed that Olga Villada’s husband was a free black man (free as in he had never been enslaved) who had once taught math in a one-room schoolhouse in Haiti and who, in Florida, enjoyed the benefits of living in a society that allowed Africans and people of African descent to be free, to buy their freedom if they were unfortunate enough to be enslaved, to own land, to sue people and businesses, to sit on juries, and to live—compared with what their brethren and sisters were experiencing in the U.S. territories—with dignity.
Clarissa sifted through the pages, reeling. One hundred and eighty-three years ago, her yard had been tilled, planted, and nurtured by Olga Villada. Her house was built on land that Olga Villada had tamed. Perhaps somewhere on this sprawling property—maybe in the attic or out in the barn—she would discover the woman’s bullwhip. She placed one foot on the floor. Even in this heat, the planks were cool to the touch. She imagined Olga Villada and Amaziah Archer’s strength, fatigue, and joy as they hewed the trees, planed the wood, and locked the house together via the very neat trick of tongue and groove. The very floors she walked were hewn from pine trees harvested on a patch of earth where the house now sat. But they had not touched what would have surely yielded the finest wood: the sentinel oak. Even back then, Clarissa mused, it must have been a grand tree.
Overwhelmed, she closed the folder. She couldn’t wait to get outside, in her yard, and explore, now knowing that she was walking in the footsteps of Olga Villada, a woman of fierce independence and obvious charm. Clarissa wanted to be just like her: businesswoman, snake tamer, lover to a man who knew what to do with a saw, a hammer, a nail. She laid her head on the couch and sighed. The happy and distorted sound of Iggy and the models talking swirled through the library, but soon their voices wafted farther out and finally could not be heard. Maybe they’re dead from heat prostration. If so, they could just lie out there and steam for a while. But seriously, Clarissa decided, as soon as the models left, she would reclaim her yard for herself and her new long-dead heroine. Clarissa shut her eyes and drifted. As her mind floated into a nonsensical state of ease—as is the case with time and planets—the light moved, rearranging the room’s shadows.
In the kitchen, the heat took its toll on one rose. Older and less vigorous than the others, the flower turned brown at its edges. In the future, near midnight, unseen by any human eye, the rose would drop three petals.
Change was happening everywhere. In the yard, the solstice sun edged ever higher, pulling the shadows from the earth, leaving the models more exposed than even Iggy liked, prompting him to pack up. The girls slipped on their clothes and headed to their cars and town, taking with them small bundles of roses Iggy had cut for them (it was fortuitous that Clarissa did not know this, because it would have only made the soiling of her kimono all the more egregious). Olga Villada wandered upstairs and played marbles with her son, who wanted to know when Papa would be home. The fly spied a few crumbs on a side table—the long-forgotten remains of a shortbread cookie. He snacked even as he stood guard over Clarissa. With no naked women to ogle, Larry Dibble grew bored, flew from his perch in the oak, and, whistling a melody whose words he’d long forgotten, wandered the streets of Hope, his new godforsaken home.
Perhaps it was the stress from the morning’s events or a prescient gift in light of what would transpire that day, but Clarissa, uncharacteristically, fell into a deep slumber, and immediately the fly, sensing this was his chance, lit on her cheek and then disappeared into her hair. Although her sleeping brain led her to believe the abandonment dream she was about to have lasted a very long time (hours, perhaps), that was not the case. In reality, the dream unfolded—omniscient and playful, like a wind that caresses as easily as it kills—in Clarissa’s subconscious in a matter of three seconds.
She stood in dream light at the kitchen sink, her hand trapped in the cavity of a plucked, ready-to-be-popped-in-the-oven hen, and gazed out the same window through which she had watched her husband and his models that morning. She leaned forward to get a better glimpse of the world. Her head touched the window, and the walls evaporated.
It was just Clarissa and the sink and the outdoors, and this seemed normal to her. She looked around. Exotic animals from various continents roamed her property: giraffes, ocelots, dingoes, polar bears, ruby-assed baboons; a bevy of water buffalo took mud baths where her rose garden grew. A fly flitted aimlessly through her hair. She was unfazed by these animals, and they, for their part, reciprocated her disinterest; many of them could have torn her to smithereens, but they didn’t so much as glance in her direction. Perhaps she was invisible.
And there was this curious fact: If an interloper wandered into her dream, he would have been surprised, it’s safe to say, that she didn’t give a whit that her right hand was permanently stuck inside the chicken (for all intents and purposes, her hand had become the hen’s giblets and the hen had replaced her palm and fingers as her primary appendage, rendering her lifeline obsolete). But phooey: All she cared about was her husband. When would he come home? Where was he? What was he doing out there, somewhere she could not imagine?
It felt to Clarissa as if aeons had passed since she’d last seen him. She waited and waited, ignored by man and beast, longing for some sign of that green Honda Civic, knowing that first she would hear music blasting because he always turned up the volume full-tilt. She hated that. How could he think straight with all that noise? That’s why he wasn’t returning home: He wasn’t preoccupied with an endless string of naked models; he was simply confused by that ever-pounding bass line.
After standing at the sink for a few thousand years, she took three steps back, and when she did, the sink crumbled into a pile of steaming manure. Her head became a giant screen door. She pushed it open, bruising the hen’s thin, pimpled flesh in the process, and stepped into the yard. A giraffe bumped into her and then walked through her. The animal smelled like tangerines and that made Clarissa hungry, but she knew that if she ate the giraffe, unpeeling its orange rind and tossing it in the air, she would die.
She raised her chicken hand to her brow (her face had returned; the screen door was the size of a thimble, and it resided in the center of her forehead: a third eye) and scanned the tree-stitched horizon as if she were a sailor searching the blue yonder. It had, after all, been so, so long since last he had held her or slid his hand over the swell of her hip or whispered her name into the soft, wild curve of her spine. But her effort was in vain. She stood there, the chicken pressed bravely to her forehead, for three hundred years. The Honda never arrived, yet she—unable to imagine a different life—remained tied to that spot, in the sun, her chicken hand bulbous and grotesque, waiting, watching: nothing.
Clarissa did not like this dream—it had a narrator and story line, neither of which she could c
ontrol. She struggled up through the layers of swift sleep, determined to put it all behind her. On her journey toward wakefulness, she heard that fiddle music—wild and syncopated, with hints of Africa and Spain.
When she opened her eyes, the first thing she saw was the fly; it was perched on the tip of her nose, mesmerized. “Uhhhh!” Clarissa mumbled, batting at it with both hands.
The fly scooted to her desk lamp. Its shape was definite and stark against the polished brass shade.
“Stupid fly!” Clarissa said, and then she yawned, stretched, and rather than feeling refreshed from her nap or rejuvenated by the discovery of Olga Villada’s story, she could think only that nothing was right. The room was too hot, the fly too forward, her husband too removed.
Clarissa looked at the fly. He stared back, his orbital eyes bursting with fresh pressure, which was as close as flies came to crying. That’s right. The woman’s beauty moved the little fly to tears.
The floorboards upstairs squeaked once, twice, and then she heard that familiar shuffle, shuffle, pause cadence. Ahh, Iggy. He was in his office, pacing. Shuffle, shuffle, pause. Shuffle, shuffle, pause. What did he have to worry about? she wondered.
The fly rubbed his front legs together, giving him the air of a greedy cartoon banker, but really he was simply enjoying the taste of her; it lingered on his legs and thorax.
Her skin still held the bristled memory of the disease-carrying pest tripping the light fantastic through her arm hairs, the tip of her nose. The memory, coupled with the sensation of everything being outside her control, made her shudder. But then, as life sometimes affords, she sensed an opportunity.
In her peripheral vision, she saw a folded, creased, and perfect (for her purposes) copy of the Tallahassee Democrat. Its butt end was extended like a handle from one of the chairs pulled up to her library table. Her husband must have left it there; perhaps he also had been engaged in battle with this fly. Had the fly tasted him, too? She suddenly hated the little cretin. It felt good, this hate. It was the kind of hate she could do something about.
How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly Page 7