A Place Called Wiregrass

by Michael Morris

  “Starts with a M, maybe. Anyway she works down at the Pink Palace. Smack next to that place I told you about. Decadence Inn.”

  I used the pay phone next to the apartment building to call the Shreveport police station. Two different people told me that they didn’t know anything about an APB for LaRue. I provided his name and a description of the van. “Please, please, send it out to your people,” I begged the second sergeant I spoke to.

  “What’s he wanted for?”

  “Umm, kidnapping.”

  “You the mama?”

  “Grandmama. Yes. I got custody of her.”

  “Oh, yeah. Okay. We’ll get the notice out for you.”

  The phone line went dead. I lifted my foot and finished crushing a piece of broken Budweiser bottle on the sidewalk.

  “These people just don’t get it,” I told Gerald and slammed the phone down.

  After spending the day driving around and around the Red River district, I decided that I must now know every fleabag motel clerk by name. The feeling of defeat settled deeper when we passed the Pink Palace. It was all lit up with white and yellow marquee lights. The image of Cher dancing around on tables for drunk men forced me to close my eyes and grit my teeth. The stinging that comes from lack of sleep rested behind my sockets.

  The motel room had two double beds, and if the bed had been made of feathers, I don’t think I would have slept any better. While Gerald called home to check on Donnie, I brushed my teeth. Any nervousness I felt about sleeping in a motel room with Gerald was washed away from the hours riding in the close compound of his truck. Before he could get out of the bathroom, I was sleeping, fully dressed, on the multicolored bedspread.

  I awoke the next morning with a beige blanket placed over me. Gerald opened the door with two paper cups of coffee and a bag of doughnuts. I jumped up thinking of the wasted time I was spending lying in bed. Time given to LaRue’s advantage, so he could run off with Cher forever.

  “Settle down. It’s only six-thirty,” Gerald said and placed the green-and-white paper bag on the table.

  Recalling the old saying that if you tell your husband your dreams before breakfast they come true, I ate my doughnut in silence, while Gerald held the map of Shreveport and outlined our search. Even though he was not my husband, he was the closest thing to a boyfriend I ever had, and I was not going to risk it by letting him know all the nightmares I had about Cher’s whereabouts.

  The Pink Palace lived up to its name. It was a stucco building painted a pink so bright it hurt my eyes when I saw it at the corner red light.

  “This place looks rough,” Gerald said outside the building.

  “Maybe you need to stay in the truck.”

  I looked at the top of the tinted-black glass door and saw two dead mosquito hawks hanging from a spider web. Secrets had gotten me to the point where I was. Now I had to lay it on the line for Gerald as well. “I’ve been in worse, I can assure you,” I said.

  Indeed, the darkness of the open room and the smell of stale cigarette smoke was similar to the places I had pulled Bozo out of during our thirty-plus years of marital bliss. Only difference was, this place had a small stage surrounded by mirrors. A crystal ball, like the one at the skating rink, hung from the ceiling. My eyes were adjusting from sunlight to blackness when I saw the outline of a skinny man carrying a brown box.

  “We closed,” the man said and placed the case on the bar. He looked about sixty, and his forehead was made high thanks to a sharp widow’s peak at his hairline. His black hair was slicked back with some type of greasy substance.

  Gerald moved forward, and I followed behind him. “Hey. How you doing?”

  The man pulled out a pocketknife and slit open the case. He looked up with his brow wrinkled and his mouth partly open. “All right. But we’re still closed.”

  I folded my arms and wondered if Gerald was tough enough to handle the situation I had put him in. While anybody could look at him and know his massive size would intimidate a skinny man like the thing that stood before me, Gerald lacked the harsh tongue that I imagined the skinny man had picked up from hard living.

  “We ain’t here for that.” Gerald pulled the photo I found in the dirt at the skating rink from his shirt pocket. Gerald laid the faded photo on the bar. “You know this feller? Some of his people’s needing him.”

  The man continued opening the case of Wild Turkey and squinted his eyes down at the photograph. “Man, do you know how many people walk through them doors?” The man grinned and shook his head.

  “One of the dancers here lived with him,” I said behind Gerald’s shoulder. Gerald half turned and looked at me.

  The man sighed, dropped his knife on the bar, and picked up the photograph.

  “He’s got short hair now,” I said. The man wrinkled his brow again.

  “Oh, yeah,” the man grunted in a way that made me think he wanted to laugh. “Sweet Magnolia. We put her down the road. She’s always picking up one stray or another here. Just got in the way of business.” The man pulled bottles of brown liquid from the case.

  “You know where we can find her?” Gerald asked.

  The man stopped and put his pocketknife back in his jeans pocket. “I ain’t her daddy.”

  I stepped forward. “We don’t want trouble with her. I just need to find LaRue. You know the man in the picture. It’s about my grand…”

  “Lady, I ain’t getting in the middle of whatever mess you got.”

  Gerald put his thumbs on the waist of his jeans. “We just need to see if that dancer knows where this other feller is. Now if she quit, it looks to me like you’d have some address on her for tax stuff.”

  “That’s it. Now go on and get out of here.” The man waved his arms at us like he was shooing cattle.

  When I turned to go, a loud thud and cussing rang behind me. The skinny man’s head was mashed down on the bar, and his arms were twisted behind him. Gerald straddled the man from behind and jerked the man’s arms. “You reckon you can remember that address now?” Gerald said through gritted teeth.

  We left the darkness of the Pink Palace with the address of Magnolia’s sister, written on a white cocktail napkin. As my eyes adjusted to the light, I wrinkled my brow and glanced at Gerald. I worried he’d erupt again if I looked at him too long.

  We rode in his truck three blocks before he said a word. “Don’t forget to buckle up,” he said and smiled at me. I put the seat belt on and felt his hand on my leg. “Be looking for that street on your right,” he said and gently patted my leg.

  Leaving the dancer’s sister’s home, I felt as low as any human could. The young girl stood in the paint-chipped doorway holding a baby dressed in diapers. A torn brown recliner sat on the front porch. Its yellow stuffing dangled at the edge of the rip. The girl couldn’t have been a day older than twenty-one and bit her lip when we asked about her sister.

  “Is she dead?” she asked and blew up at the wisps of black bangs that fell in her eyes. She had never seen LaRue before, but by the way she described her sister, she was definitely his type. She told us how her sister had been strung out on heroin for the past two years. How she always had boyfriends who furnished fresh supplies.

  Thinking I might not be able to stand, I put my hand on the flakes of white paint peeling from her door frame. “Do you know where she’s at?” I asked. A stream of drool dropped from the baby’s bottom lip.

  “Only place I know to tell you is that old motel next to Pink Palace. I heard they been selling out near the old fairgrounds too. She probably hates my guts. But you know, I got kids in the house and everything. I can’t be having that kind of stuff going on.”

  Gerald cranked the truck and, before he pulled away, I turned to get one last look at the house. Not really a house, but a shack that looked like spots of snow had stuck to the brown wood. “I’m so sorry to drag you into this,” I said, never looking at Gerald and not really hearing his words of encouragement. No matter what he said, I felt I had dirtied hi
s soul by introducing him to a way of living so foreign to his own. Maybe lies weren’t so bad after all. We continued to romp through the Red River section of Shreveport, searching for a beat-up white van.

  By the third day we had logged more miles and driven through more seedy motel parking lots than I care to count. The scenes of Shreveport were beginning to look the same. Although Gerald never said anything, I could tell by the way he would sigh and rub the corners of his mustache that he thought we were wasting our time. We saw every white van in Shreveport but, of course, each one was newer and had a proper tag. The one I searched for was driven by a loser and someone who most likely was halfway to Las Vegas by now.

  “You know, Erma Lee, she is fourteen,” Gerald said after we drove away from McDonald’s.

  At first I ignored his comment and continued to unpack our lunch. But by the time I scattered his French fries on the opposite end of his Big Mac, I was about to pop. “What does that mean?”

  He took a sip of Coke, and I could tell if he could come up with another topic he would have. “It’s going to be hard for the police to pin him with kidnapping when she left on her own free will.”

  I tore open the packet of ketchup and poured it on my hamburger, tossing the empty packet to the truck floor out of spite. “She most certainly did not leave on her own. He told her a pile of lies to get her.” I slammed the lid of the Big Mac shut and tossed the box back into the bag.

  “All I’m saying…”

  “I know exactly what you’re saying. Look, if you don’t want to be here, then just drop me off at the motel.”

  He sighed again and rubbed the corner of his mustache. “You know I ain’t doing that. I just don’t want you to get all disappointed if they don’t lock him up.”

  “You’re as bad as that old police sergeant. Didn’t you hear that girl’s sister say how strung out she is on dope? If the police pulled him over right now, I guarantee you they could get him on a drug charge alone.” I looked out the window. The trash that littered the sidewalk was easier to look at than Gerald. “And nobody asked you to come here. You decided and might as well say told me…”

  The sudden swerve of the truck slung me against the window. I heard a hard thump when my head hit the glass. Gerald’s truck suddenly was on the other side of the highway.

  “I saw him.” Gerald leaned over the steering wheel.

  “What? You sure?” I asked, rubbing the back of my head.

  “He passed right by us. He’s got that ladder on top, right?” Gerald floored the gas pedal.

  After constant disappointment, I was surprised when the nervous energy returned. When I saw the faded brown cardboard with the words Lost Tag on the back of the white van ahead of us, I liked to have jumped right out of the truck.

  “Don’t get too close,” I said, remembering a TV movie where the mother blows up a car to keep from having her children taken away.

  Evening was settling in when the white van pulled into a small motel connected to a flea market. An old rusty farm tractor surrounded by three black oil barrels marked the boundary between the motel and the flea market. A cloud of dust rolled over the van, and like a ghost LaRue appeared from the driver’s door. He was dressed in a sleeveless T-shirt and the same tight black jeans he had on the night I saw him with Cher. A girl with stringy red hair dressed in cut-offs and a yellow bikini top got out of the passenger side.

  We sat in the truck surrounded by silence, waiting and watching near the motel office. Lord, please give me Cher, I silently prayed. Without a care in the world or a sign of things to come, LaRue strutted inside the opened motel door.

  “That him?” Gerald asked.

  I nodded my head and looked down at my long nails. The vision of the same nails slicing LaRue’s face took over where reasoning left off.

  Gerald picked up the mobile phone and dialed 911. A man naked from the waist up walked out of the room next to LaRue’s. A silver belt buckle dangled below his big stomach. He walked around in circles, scratching his head and yelling. The man was a minor distraction to the pain and rage that was building inside me. Rage not only at LaRue, but also at myself for not confronting him when I had the chance in Wiregrass. Rage that I let my lack of self-worth stop me from doing what was right for Cher.

  “Let me see, this place is off Highway 71 just outside of town. Yes, ma’am.” Gerald was looking towards the motel office when I opened the truck door.

  “She’s run off,” I heard the fat man yell and scratch tuffs of hair on his head. The rolls of stomach fat shook when he stopped and looked inside LaRue’s open motel door. When the man turned to face me, I saw a scratch mark with fresh blood on the side of his face. His gray eyes looked wider and more glassy with each step.

  “Erma Lee,” Gerald yelled behind me. But I keep walking over rocks and sand, hearing more clearly the guitar jam that played inside LaRue’s room. “Erma Lee,” Gerald’s voice grew closer. I could hear his boots pounding towards me. The old tractor surrounded by tall weeds and barrels was ahead on my right. “Erma Lee,” Gerald yelled once more and I walked faster towards the ground-shaking music and the man with the drooping belly.

  “Grandma.” I stopped, thinking at first I had imagined the soft voice. I turned and saw Gerald running towards me and then looked in the direction of the rusty tractor. In between the high weeds and the tractor, Cher was crouched down behind one of the black barrels. Her lip was swollen, and the faster I ran, the redder the cake of blood looked on the corner of her mouth.

  When I reached the tractor, I saw the fat man running wild-eyed towards Cher. The man yelled with his arms outstretched. Cher screamed and used one hand to push backwards into the dense weeds. Her other hand was holding together the torn strap of her sundress.

  I tried to run faster, but it seemed like slow motion, watching the fat man’s outstretched arms move closer towards Cher. “No, no, no,” Cher kept screaming and crawling backwards. When the fat man reached down for Cher’s neck, I gritted my teeth and jumped forward, landing next to the barrel. I looked up to find Gerald’s hand pulling the man upright by his wiry hair. I was struggling to catch my breath when I heard Gerald hitting the man in the face, the crush of fist meeting bone.

  Cher was shaking uncontrollably. I could barely keep my arms around her. All I could think to do was rub my hands over her bare arms and tell her everything would be all right. Each syllable got caught in my throat. I knew if she could understand my words, she would know I was lying. The rattle of her teeth only stopped when I pulled her head into my chest and held her jaw shut. The twitching jawbone jarred the palm of my hand.

  Thinking the shakes must be a need for warmth, I lifted her. Her head twitched against my shoulder. Running towards the truck, I passed the fat man pinned down on the hood of the rusty tractor. Gerald’s bloody fist mechanically pounded the man’s face. “Gerald,” I screamed and continued carrying Cher towards the truck.

  I placed her in the passenger seat and saw the ripped bra straps. Her hand was glued to the torn strap of her sundress. She rolled towards the passenger door and whimpered a sound I’d expect from a wounded dog. “I’m here now, baby,” I repeated over and over.

  When I cranked the truck and turned the heater on, I saw LaRue standing outside his room, holding the inner portion of his arm. My eyes locked on his, and if he hadn’t moved so fast, I would’ve run him down. He jumped into the white van and spun dust around the tractor where Gerald was still pounding the fat man’s face.

  Anger took over where my common sense left off. I jerked the steering wheel and the truck spun around. Soon we were on the highway gaining on LaRue. The paint-spotted ladder on top of his van bounced with every dip in the road. The truck speedometer read ninety-five. Sweat formed from the heat and rage and ran down my neck.

  When he turned onto a county road, his right back tire came off the road and the ladder on his roof turned sideways. We flew past a road sign ordering forty-five miles per hour. I was so close to him, I could see t
he wavy hair on the back of his head and the evil in his eyes each time he glanced at me in his rearview mirror. All the words I had planned to say in court would be said here, on judgment day. I slammed my foot on the gas pedal even harder.

  I heard the sirens before I saw them. Two patrol cars were coming towards us in the opposite direction. Suddenly I saw the red in LaRue’s only working brake light. My feet pounded the brake pedal. And the scream of Gerald’s tires locking onto asphalt made me clinch my teeth and extend my arm to protect Cher from flying through the windshield. All I saw was a flash of the green pasture across the road when the truck spun to the left and crossed into the opposite lane. When we finally came to a stop, I was looking in the direction from which we had come.

  The sirens grew louder, and when I looked into the rearview mirror, LaRue’s white van was airborne, flying towards the side of a convenience store. Gerald’s truck vibrated when the red fireball erupted behind us. Cher screamed, and I pulled her head down towards the seat. The weight of my body landed on top of her. “I love you. I love you,” I screamed into her ear.

  Twenty-one

  The only time I cried was when I looked down at Cher in the hospital room. Deep asleep, thanks to the liquid dripping into her arm, she looked angelic against the white sheets and white hospital gown. Her brown hair was tucked behind her ears, and her swollen red lip glistened from the antibiotic cream.

  I sniffed and wiped away the tears with my palms. In the silence of the room, it was my chance to mourn her loss of innocence. The doctor said she had not been raped, but the fat man’s attempts and the blows she took from the struggle could not match the blows I imagined her heart had received. I had failed to protect her from the wickedness of this world. Wickedness that ran through her very blood.

  The tears fell on my T-shirt and temporarily released frustration and bitterness. The battle with the one thing stronger than whiskey in tearing my family apart was over. With Gerald at the police station giving his statement, it was my only chance to cry in private. I refused to let Gerald and Cher see me shed one tear.