Strawman's Hammock

by Darryl Wimberley

  Nothing like the doors on a school bus. Slap-slap. Jerry Slade nodded greetings and limp high-fives to the other sophomores in his class. There were no teenage spics on board, Jerry noted with disappointment, but a quartet of little señoritas, their hair tied in bright bows, their eyes deep and brown, always sat up front where Mr. Theo could keep an eye on them. And there was his special girl.

  “Get youself a seat, Jerry.” Mr. Theo was riding his ass before he got halfway down the aisle.

  Jerry flopped into a vacant, straight-backed chair. He opened the knapsack—

  “What you got, Jerry?” A gaggle of teenage boys stumbled over each other to see a full-length glossy of Brittany Spears.

  “She’s hot.” A pair of feral eyes beamed across the aisle.

  “Take it.” Jerry handed the poster across the aisle. It had not cost him anything. He had downloaded the pic from his computer.

  His peers preoccupied, Jerry plunged a hand into a canvas knapsack. He came out with a camera, a Sony Mavica. It was a digital camera. He had stolen it from a tourist in Pensacola. Stuck with the older VGA technology, the Sony did not produce the awesome detail you could get from pixel-based competitors, but, hey, it was free. It had a ten-power zoom. And the Mavica had one other feature which for Jerry’s purposes was very important: You could store the Sony’s pictures on standard floppy disks. That meant you didn’t need adaptors or SmartMedia cards or anything exotic to transfer your pictures from camera to computer. Just pop your three-inch disk out of the Mavica and slip it into a machine.

  You got a Mac? A PC?

  No problem. He could go either way.

  It was a total improvement over the Polaroid. No film to worry about. No photo lab, like the Polaroid. But also no delay. Well, not much. The-FD51 model he acquired took five seconds or so to save its images to disk. Jerry would have preferred his instrument to process instantaneously, gratification being best when it was instant, but for now five seconds would do.

  The teenager checked the camera’s lithium-ion battery. Good to go. He then slipped the Sony into a pouch on the outside of his backback and looked for his newest subject.

  She sat only three seats ahead. Isabel, he had heard the fifth-grader give her name. Like “Ees A Bell.” Jerry shook his head. If they couldn’t speak the language, why the hell let ’em in school?

  He peeked his canvas blind above the lip of the seat-back before him. The camera snugged into its velcro pouch peeked out through a hole which Jerry had cut for the purpose. The arrangement allowed him to take pictures unobserved. There was plenty of ambient light here. No need for a flash, which of course Jerry would not have wanted. He was pleased with himself. His arrangements. He could press the camera’s actuator without even having to reach inside its marsupial pouch.

  She was showing him her profile. He snapped a picture. Funny you still said “snap,” as if that archaic description of sound still applied. Jerry framed the girl, clicked. Another archaism. No buzz or snap or click with these cameras. No way. They were virtually soundless. So Jerry was not pleased when Harvey Koon, the class cretin, leered knowing and wise from across the aisle.

  “Hey, Slade. You gonna be the next Spielberg?”

  “Got a Sarah Gellar gallery for ya, Harvey.” Jerry lined up his next composition. “If you’ll shut the fuck up.”

  Isabel turned animatedly to one of her chums. A bow had come loose from her black hair. In the chatter of Spanish that followed she turned in her seat so that another brown-eyed girl could refasten that gay ligament.

  How sweet.

  Jerry eyed the scene through the wide display of his camera. You didn’t even need to sight through an aperture, which was an advantage. She stretched her little arms in delight.

  He selected the uncompressed mode for sharper resolution. Snap. Another picture destined for his hard drive. And then he could do anything he wanted.

  The school bus rumbled over a cattle gap, which spoiled Jerry’s clandestine session. Goddamn Theo. Couldn’t drive worth a shit.

  He could see her back firm and brown above her sundress. He needed to get closer. The next cattle gap, Jerry jostled foward.

  “Por favor?” He ignored the protest of a child across the aisle.

  Isabel turned. The bright smile melted. She had seen this strange, bleach-haired boy with his black pouch. She knew there was a camera inside. It took her a while to realize that she was being taken into its silver-lined lens. This made Isabel afraid. Pictures are not for strangers, she had been told. And her grandmother agreed—the camera could take your soul.

  Was this boy stealing her soul?

  “Mistah Theo!” Almost the first words she learned in English rose shrill, even above the bus’s multitongued racket. “Mistah Theo, Cherry’s taking picture!”

  “‘Cherry’!” Harvey’s laugh bellowed from the back and Jerry’s gut clenched into a knot.

  “Little bitch.” He moved forward another seat only to find Mr. Theo’s tired, gaunt face spying from the plattersized rearview mirror.

  “Put that thang away, Jerry.”

  “What thang’d that be, Mr. Theo?”

  “Awright, youngun, I’ve had about enough o’ you. We get to school, I’m a’turnin’ you over to the professor.”

  The school bus burst into laughter, this time at the driver’s expense. The professor! He meant the principal, of course. The local principal, Alton Folsom, who, scared for his job, intimidated by parents and slavish to the local board, never meted out discipline in any hard measure to anyone.

  “The professor!” Jerry clutched his heart. “Damnation, Mr. Theo, not the professor!”

  Another peal of derision in the bus. But Isabel’s brown eyes were wet. She fumbled, alone now, to fix the bow in her hair.

  * * *

  It was the first day she had pulled school bus duty in a long time and Laura Anne couldn’t get enough of it. She loved standing in the schoolyard, smelling the GMC’s exhaust. Their bright yellow, Bluebird chassis, their blinking white and yellow lights brought back all of the tangled memories that attend a teacher’s life interrupted.

  Even so, as a substitute teacher, Laura Anne could not feel quite bona fide. She was only subbing, after all, the Neverland occupation that comes with a “regular” teacher’s absence. And of the six classes Laura Anne would teach in her seven-period day, only two were devoted to music. The rest, math, health, and three classes of English, were unfamiliar assignments whose folders Laura Anne scanned, even as the students filed through the quadrangle and beneath the covered breezeways that led them to their newly constructed rooms.

  Laura Anne had forgotten how much she missed this, the first moments of a school day. It frightened her to think that the labor she had poured into the restaurant was an investment that forever barred her from teaching. And it bothered her that the resentment she thought she had buried for Alton Folsom still smoldered. Alton was essentially a coward. The principal was looking to hide from communal censure when on Laura Anne’s return from Tallahassee he used a budgetary fiction to deny Laura Anne her old job on Deacon Beach’s Consolidated Faculty. Alton’s decision forced Laura Anne to scramble for income. It was what had driven her to restore the restaurant. It was the only reason she was not still teaching music.

  Two years had brought some improvements to the school. Federal money added a new elementary wing to join the junior and senior high school complex. It was still a very small school. Grades K through twelve numbered fewer than five hundred students, smaller in its total population than many high schools.

  A Yellowbird Bus pulled up. Mr. Theo’s bus; Laura recognized her neighbor. He didn’t look happy. But Laura Anne could not help but smile as, one by one, boys and girls from childhood to puberty slouched or leapt or climbed down the steps to the sidewalk.

  The smells were the same. Straw on the ground. Heat on the concrete. A confusion of perfumes and colognes. Little kids with candy. Big kids with big-label shoes and Hilfiger jackets. The classroo
ms smelled of sweat and chalk. The odors wafted by passing children triggered memories that would seem totally unrelated: of the cafeteria. The bandroom. The promise of fresh-cut grass on a Friday-night football field.

  “Miz Raines, you on duty this mornin’?”

  This from Mr. Theo.

  “Theopolis. Good to see you.” Laura smiled to the deacon of her born-again church.

  “You too, ma’am. Got a chore for you. Sorry.”

  “That’s perfectly all right.” Laura Anne’s professional demeanor pulled over her face like a mask.

  “Got a young man here needs to see the professor.”

  Laura Anne recognized the teen with a knapsack over his back who slouched off the bus.

  “Can you tell me what this is about, Mr. Theo?”

  “Taking pictures of this little girl.”

  Laura Anne inclined her head to see the beautiful Latin child framed by the yellow doors of the bus.

  “Buenos días.” Laura Anne’s greeting to the child triggered an instant torrent of Spanish.

  “(Slow down, little one. We will talk inside. But slowly. With good manners.)”

  “Si, señora.” Isabel nodded and Laura Anne could see the recent trail of tears.

  “So,” Laura Anne said as she escorted the teenager and child to the office. “What’s this about, Jerry?”

  The boy scowled. He didn’t like the fact that she knew his name.

  “Taking pictures is all.”

  Laura Anne glanced at the technology in her hand.

  “It’s rude to take someone’s picture without her permission, Jerry. I’m sure you know that.”

  “It’s my camera,” he said sullenly.

  “And it’s her prerogative to refuse the cameraman, isn’t it?”

  He did not reply. Laura Anne took both children into Alton Folsom’s office. A wide, gray desk was swamped with the requirements of a state bureacracy dedicated to everything except results. A flock of Post-its fluttered as if to hide the principal’s computer screen.

  “What have you got now?” The sallow-faced administrator frowned as if it were Laura Anne who had been referred for discipline.

  She summarized the situation quickly.

  Folsom extended his hand for the Sony and turned to the brown-skinned child.

  “Did you give this boy permission to take your picture?”

  “Yes,” Jerry answered to her silence.

  “Mr. Folsom,” Laura Anne intervened. “I don’t believe she understood you.”

  Laura Anne turned to the little girl.

  “(Will you tell the truth?)”

  “Sí.” The girl nodded.

  “She said yes.” Jerry’s posture suddenly improved. “You heard her, she said yes!”

  “She said she would tell the truth.” Laura Anne forced eye contact with the boy before returning to Isabel.

  “(What is your name, little one?)”

  “Isabel.”

  “(Isabel. Did you tell this boy he could take your picture with this camera? Or with any camera?)”

  Her hair shook in its tangle of bows. “No.”

  “She gave no permission,” Laura Anne informed the school’s principal.

  “Thank you for your translation, Miz Raines.”

  Was there a hint of sarcasm there?

  “I’ll take it from here.”

  Laura Anne turned to leave the office and almost missed the next, tiny torrent.

  “(He takes in the girl’s room, too. When I pee.)”

  Laura Anne stopped short. Turned around.

  “What was that, Isabel?”

  “Miz Raines, I have enough…”

  “Excuse me, Mr. Folsom. Isabel, what was that you just said? Slowly.”

  “(I go in to pee. From the playground. He was there.)” She pointed to Jerry Slade. “(He took pictures.)”

  “Mr. Folsom.” Laura Anne tried to keep the tremor from her voice. “I think you’d better call the sheriff.”

  “The sheriff? What in the world?”

  Laura Anne repeated the girl’s accusation. Jerry Slade’s mouth went tight.

  “It didn’t happen,” he said.

  “I frankly don’t see how it could happen,” the principal blustered. “What would the boy even be doing on the elementary side of the school?”

  “I believe we have been told,” Laura Anne answered coldly.

  “There’s my camera, Mr. Folsom. All you got to do is download it. You could do it right here. In your office. Every picture I ever made’s in there.”

  And when he said that, Laura Anne knew that this teenager was lying.

  “It would be a good idea to keep the camera,” she allowed. “But Mr. Folsom—I’d be willing to bet that Mr. Slade knows full well that any picture he takes can be downloaded into any compatible computer and the file then erased. Do you have a computer, Jerry? At home?”

  “None of your business,” the boy sneered.

  “All right, that’s enough.” The principal rose briskly. “I’m going to give you back your camera, Jerry—”

  “Sir?” Laura Anne could not keep the outrage from her voice.

  “—but you better not let me hear anything about you taking pictures without people’s permission, you hear?”

  “Yes, Mr. Folsom,” Jerry replied meekly and turned to meet Laura Anne eye to eye.

  There was hatred there. Instant and adamantine.

  “I’ll get one of our assistants to take this little girl to her class.” Folsom returned to his seat. “You better hurry along, Miz Raines. You’ll miss your homeroom.”

  * * *

  Linton Loyd once said that he’d be happy living in a Quonset hut, but that the missus wouldn’t have it. That statement apologized for the mansion he soon built on a bluff overlooking the Suwannee River. About a half mile down from the Hal W. Adams Bridge on the Lafayette County side was a home unlike any other in the county, a seamless contour of concrete and glass self-consciously re-creating the art deco architecture of the ’20s and ’30s.

  You could imagine Hercule Poirot enjoying croissants and coffee on the marble-tiled lanai that looked from a high bluff over the river made famous by Stephen Foster. A coffee-brown swell of water carved sharply into the banks on the fast side, revealing sandbanks on the other with the river’s reduced flow—a deep, wild river bounded by water oak and pine and palmetto. It was cooler on the river; a breeze seemed to follow the Suwannee’s slow march to the Gulf.

  A patio above the lanai was built to catch whatever breeze was stirred from the river below. Its wide balcony was shaded with magnificent arms of oak trees that stretched almost across the patio’s broad expanse. Spanish moss fanned to and fro above that balcony in beards heavy with humid air. From its vantage you could see what Linton’s wife described ostentatiously as a carriage house where their son had his own quarters, a two-bedroom apartment built atop an open carport and removed from any view of the river.

  The balcony tiles were identical to those of the sun-room below, and it was on this open-air landing, with the river’s magnificent panorama before them, that Lou Sessions, Barrett Raines, and Cricket Bonet waited uncomfortably for the owner of the house.

  Linton emerged from French doors onto the balcony, his son trailing like a cur behind. A stray breeze caught the strands that never covered Gary’s balding head and wisped them about his skull.

  Like straw, Barrett thought.

  “Gentlemen. Lou. What can I do you for?” The elder Linton started off with an insult.

  “Need to ask Gary some questions,” the sheriff answered stiffly. “Concerning his whereabouts sometime in the last three to seven days.”

  “That’d cover some territory.” Gary spoke too loud. Bear wondered if it was the late heat that made him appear so pale.

  “Wouldn’t care to narrow it down some, would you, Lou?” Linton inquired, settling his compact frame into a deerhide chair out of place with the decor, pointedly allowing Lou and the other lawmen to remain s
tanding.

  “We found a homicide…” Lou began.

  “Strawman’s Hammock.” Linton pulled a wad of chewing tobacco from its leather pouch. “I know.”

  Lou flushed red.

  “Come on, Lou.” Linton chawed, taking pleasure in the sheriff’s consternation. “Anybody can monitor the police band. I must’ve had four hunters call me in the time it took your deputies to tell everybody they knew what was goin’ on.”

  “Then you heard about the tracks. Tire tracks.”

  “Tires? Tracks? I don’t believe so.”

  Gary laughed. More of a bark, really.

  “Why don’t you come on down to the station, Gary?” Lou turned to the son. “We can do the interview this afternoon.”

  “You can kiss my ass,” Gary snapped back, and Barrett instinctively moved to flank Sheriff Sessions.

  “Let’s keep this civil, all right?” Cricket Bonet’s was the calm, professional voice.

  “You don’t have any authority here,” Gary shot back. “And you, Bear—the hell are you doing here?”

  Which put Barrett in a bad situation.

  “You might have heard something or seen something important to the case, that’s all, Gary. If you did, I need to hear it.”

  “Well, you heard all you’re gonna hear.” Suddenly Linton was out of his chair, his jaw working the tobacco like a second baseman. “I’ve had you in my home at my discretion. You come again, it better be with a warrant.”

  “I don’t need a warrant to interview suspects,” Lou shot back, and Barrett knew there was trouble coming.

  “Suspect?” Linton shoved his lined, handsome countenance into the sheriff’s pockmarked face. “You tellin’ me my boy is a suspect? For murder? Off a pair of tire tracks?”

  “So you do know about the tire tracks!” Lou crowed in triumph.