by Lawton Paul
But right then, Angela just wanted to make it to the stairs without having to look at the big rug on the floor that hides a stain that won’t come out of the wood. But the rug doesn’t hide anything. She can still see it in her head. The rug just reminds her: here it is, here’s the spot where it happened. Bo tried to get her to sell and start over but just like the old truck, she couldn’t let go. All of this was hers and Walt’s.
She goes up the dark wooden stairs and it all comes back: the sound of the wood creaking under her feet, the light shining in from the hall window, six white doors, each with a glass doorknob. She stands at the top of the stairs, just feeling things out, like a cat dabbing a paw at an unfamiliar patch of earth. She takes a few breaths, decides she’s okay, and starts at room number one.
She pulls off the sheets, vacuums the hall, then the rooms, and when she’s done feels pleased that she can be there. She drops the big bundle of sheets at the edge of the stairs, goes back for the vacuum, then stops. She walks to room number six: the room she and Walt shared.
She runs a finger along the top of the hallway window ledge and there is the old skeleton key. She looks out the window and can see the sheriff’s truck is still there. He’s getting back at me by harassing poor Johnny, she thinks. Okay, just a quick peek, then I’m going to talk to the sheriff.
The room is just like she remembered it: big white bed, sunlight coming through the window, Walt’s razor still next to the sink. The floors are spotless and the room smells like pinesol. Bo’s been keeping it clean.
She sits on the bed for a moment, closes her eyes, hears seagulls squawking. Maybe Bo just dumped the shrimp heads. I’m here and not crying. She opens the closet. Walt’s shirts, most a shade of blue. His pants, all the same boring tan color. He said Einstein wore the same thing every day. One less thing to worry about freed his mind up for the good stuff. Is this acceptance? Just a dull pain that won’t go away.
On the bedside table is a card from Walt. I have always loved you. No matter what, I’ll always be yours. Let’s talk tonight.
She runs a hand along his clothes and something white falls onto the floor. It’s a small piece of paper, a receipt from the little diner that’s now the little bookstore run by Delecroix. Two eggs, bacon and a short stack for Walt, and a chamomile tea for me. There’s writing on the other side: M. Indica. Who’s that? She pulls out her phone and does a whitepages.com search for the name. Three Indicas pop up, two in Ohio, one in California. She puts the paper in her pocket, locks the door and goes back down. The sheriff is gone and Johnny is standing next to Carl peeling shrimp.
“What’d the sheriff want?”
“Nothin’. Just asking me about Mrs. Kaufman,” says Johnny. He looks strained, scared. The bastard sheriff can be intimidating. She gives Johnny a hug and says, “I pissed him off. It’s my fault.”
“No, Aunt Angie. You didn’t do anything. But thanks,” he forces a smile. She leaves it at that but decides the next time the sheriff comes he would have to go through her first.
She doesn’t have to wait long. The sheriff comes the next morning. Angela meets him at the back door. “Hey Sheriff, you come back for pancakes, or more official business?”
“Unfortunately the latter.”
“Unfortunately the latter,” Angela mocks him in her best Southern Belle impersonation, breathless and excited. He’s got bad news. There’s nothing anyone could do to hurt me. I’m already broken. “Why Sheriff, is that some attempt at a formal distance before making some pronouncement?”
“Johnny Rosencrantz,” he says. Oh, shit. That could hurt.
“No!” she stands in the doorway, the sheriff two steps down. Deputy DoRight leans against his truck, red lights on top and the Chickasaw seal on the side.
“I’m going to be kind to you one more time because I liked Walt,” he says. Don’t bring Walt into this! “If you get in my way I’ll throw your ass in jail.”
“Go ahead. I’m sure that’ll help win points with the voters. That kid didn’t do anything. Don’t punish him just because you are pissed at me.”
“This ain’t about you.”
And then Johnny walks into the kitchen. He’d been gutting fish on the other side of the house. He’s holding a long fillet knife in one hand and is wearing an armored glove. Angie moves back and the sheriff steps in. “Why don’t you put the knife in the sink, Johnny,” he says. Johnny’s standing there with a death grip on the knife. The veins in his arms are standing out and he’s breathing heavy. His eyes boring a hole through the sheriff. And then he looks at Angela and relaxes a little.
“Auntie Angie, it’s okay,” Johnny says. Then he says to the sheriff, “Can you give me a few minutes, then I’ll come out.”
“You got two minutes.”
Bo comes in with a toilet plunger in her hand and starts in on Johnny but he cuts her off.
“I gotta talk for a sec. Okay? Sheriff’s, uh, waitin’,” he says.
“But Johnny Boy you gotta get on the red bass. I just checked and you ain’t done yet.”
“I’m sorry, Bo. Y’all sit down.” Angela and Bo sit down and Johnny takes a deep breath. He looks like he’s about to cry. “I got something to tell y’all and I didn’t want the sheriff to say it ‘cause he’s gotta way a’ makin’ it sound like you did a terrible thing when all you did was just one little dumb thing you know you shouldn’t’a done.”
“What’d you do, Johnny?” says Angela. Johnny can’t look Angela and Bo in the eyes. He looks down, then through the screened-in back door where the sheriff’s truck is parked.
“Johnny, you didn’t do anything, uh, bad, did you?” says Bo.
“What are you talking about, Bo?” says Angela. She ignores Angela. “You don’t think?”
“What’d you do, Boy?” says Bo. He stands there for a moment, still clutching the knife, red and slimy, trying to make eye contact. Then his head drops down a bit and he can’t hold it any longer. “I took some money from Mrs. Kaufman,” he says, all at once.
“That’s all you did, right? Look at me!” says Bo.
“Yeah. It was in a box above her fireplace.”
“Oh, thank God,” says Bo. “I thought you was gonna say somethin’ else.”
“Bo!” says Angela.
“Aw, geesh, Bo. You know I didn’t do that,” says Johnny.
“Well,” Bo says. “I’m sorry, Johnny. I know you, yes, but I’m just old and seen too much.”
“Johnny, you know better than that. That’s not you,” says Angela. She gives him a hug. “I’m going to do everything I can to help you. Okay?” He nods.
Then she goes outside to talk to the sheriff. “I understand if you’re angry at me, Sheriff. But please don’t take it out on Johnny.”
“This ain’t about you. It’s about grand larceny, second degree.” Yes, he does have a way of making it sound bad.
“It ain’t lookin’ good for your boy. We found one of Kaufman’s little wooden boxes at his house with twenty thousand dollars in it. Plus I got his greasy prints all over the house. In places they shouldn’t be. I’m sure Delecroix would love to hear about that.”
“But that’s separate from uh, Mrs. Kaufman’s death, right?”
“Well, funny you should mention her. Because I’ve got a neighbor going to the media proclaiming foul play, and an ME poking a giant hole into my accident theory. So if we got us a murder here, then who do you think oughta go right to the top of that short list?”
“But Johnny didn’t do that. He’s just a kid. A good kid.”
“You think that boy is innocent because you know him? You don’t know that boy. He’s got two priors for petty theft and the judge let him slide both times. His father is a lifer. His mother is institutionalized. He ain’t got no money. I’ve seen murders for far, far less than twenty Gs in the city. People kill you for a pair of shoes or the eight bucks you got in your wallet.”
The sheriff leaves and Angela can do nothing. Johnny’s in the back of the deputy’s
cruiser, steel gate separating the front and back seats. He looks smaller, fragile, like a child. Johnny’s head is down and he doesn’t look back. This isn’t happening. This is my fault.
Bo is waiting in the kitchen. She goes for a secret stash of cigarettes. Lights one, takes a few puffs. “These are shit,” she says, reaches into the big freezer, the cold fog hovering over frozen red bass and shrimp in blocks of ice, pulls out a bottle of vodka. Starts to pour a shot into her coffee cup then looks up at Angela. “Naw. We both need our wits about us.” She goes to the cupboard, pulls down two tea bags and puts the kettle on the stove. A few minutes later Angela and Bo both have a cup of chamomile. The house is quiet. The weekend guests have gone. But Johnny’s not there. Dog comes and sits under Angela’s chair.
“Now I can talk. What are we gonna do?”
“I’m gonna solve the murder of Mrs. Kaufman and get Johnny Boy off the hook.”
“How you figure on doing that?”
“One step at a time. We’ll start with Jesus.”
Jesus, Part 1
The first part of the drive is easy, N on US17, then left on Dogwood, left again on a hardpack road marked by the rusting red shell of a riding lawnmower, but after that things get a little more dicey. Angela’s driving and Bo is staring hard at Carl’s hand drawn map. She cusses a little under her breath each time the truck hits a rut on the dusty dirt road and Bo and the map start jostling around in opposite directions, seat springs squeaking, the rusty truck creaking.
“Stop the truck!” Bo yells, finally. A big dust cloud engulfs the truck when Angela hits the brakes and Bo tries to roll up her window, but the vice grips that replaced the broken window crank fall off and hit the floorboard. “Well, shit!” she says. “Carl’s got some squiggly line off to the right we gotta take, but it ain’t marked. He wrote, ‘Gap in trees’.”
The dust cloud settles down and Angela takes a walk down the road. There are pines and palmettos on either side. It’s late September, but it’s hot and Angela starts to worry about Bo sitting there baking in the old truck when she sees a narrow path through the trees on the right.
The truck just fits and branches are scratching either side as they creep along the sandy trail. The holes are bigger and Bo’s got one hand on the dash and the other on the handle above the window. Walt called that the ‘Oh shit handle’. Big banana spiders hang across the path and by the time they’re blocked by a fallen oak tree they’ve got several of the big, yellow spiders crawling up the windshield. Bo goes for the window crank again to roll up the window and starts cussing.
“You didn’t have to come,” says Angela.
“Somebody gotta look after you. Last time you went off alone all hell broke loose. Sheriff got pissed. Johnny—” She stops there. Angela shuts off the engine and they sit in silence. The hot engine going tic, tic, tic as it starts to cool.
“I’m gonna fix this,” says Angela. But right then, lost in the woods with an oak tree blocking the truck, she didn’t feel anywhere close to fixing anything. She was just a woman with issues lost in the woods. Delacroix could write an article about her: Crazy Woman Lost in Chickasaw!
“We’ll work this thing out,” says Bo. “One step at a time. Now I figure Freakboy’s gotta have a house pretty close because were running out of territory. If we keep going in this direction we’re gonna hit Pottsburg Creek soon.”
They both squeeze out on the passenger side because a big clump of palmettos are up against Angela’s door. They make it over the log and walk along, ducking banana spiders, and pretty soon they see a sign: WARNING: FEEDING OR HARASSING ALLIGATORS is a violation of Florida State law. They stop, look around them on either side: just pines, oaks and palmettos. Angela sees a thick, brown something laying in the sand off to their left and they start sprinting for the truck but then from another angle it turns out to be just another log. So they get closer together and try to stay in the middle of the path. “Must be gettin’ closer to the creek,” says Bo.
A few minutes later they come to another sign with a big, green alligator in the middle: Caution $500 Fine. DO NOT: Approach, Feed, Harass.
“Maybe we shoulda brought the gun?” says Bo.
“Well I wanted to. But someone said, no.”
“Well, then at least we coulda brought Dog.”
“Yeah, he’d bark and give us away.”
They walk along, Bo clutching Angela’s arm. It’s midday and the heat is getting to Angela and she looks down at Bo, her shirt wet with sweat around the neck. Another sign looms up ahead. Private Property Line: Trespassers Beyond This Point Will Be Shot on Sight. Bo squats down on the safe side of the sign in the middle of the road, alligators hiding in wait on either side of the path and sure death in front.
“Let’s go back. We can bring your gun, the dog and Carl,” says Bo. She starts walking back to the truck.
“I’m going forward. Wait for me at the truck,” says Angela. She steps across the invisible line and feels naked and exposed. She stops, considers going back for the Winchester, then keeps going forward. Pretty soon she’s hit with a horrible, rotting smell. And around the next corner there’s a dead bird with giant black wings hanging upside down right about head high in the middle of the path. She turns back to run away and bumps into Bo. They both fall into the hot sand. Angela’s got her hand over her mouth, still crawling back away from the rotting bird, but the stench is overpowering. Bo puts a handkerchief up to her nose.
“What was that thing?” says Angela, once they get back out of the stink zone.
“Turkey vulture,” says Bo.
“I don’t think this Jesus guy wants visitors.”
“What do we do now?”
“We keep going. We’ll have to go around it. There’s a little space on the left side of the path so we probably won’t have to touch the damn thing.”
In the end they decide to hold their breath and make a run past it on the left side. At first, Angela thinks the bird is still alive. The ugly red, head is moving ever so slightly. For a second her thoughts go to rescue. Maybe they could cut the line? Then she sees she’s wrong: small white maggots are marching across it’s neck and head. The wings are spread out five or six feet across the path, the long flight feathers touch them as they pass by.
Thirty yards or so past the vulture they come up on an old yellow school bus under an oak tree, Duval County Schools written on the side. The tires are dry rotted and the windows are covered with dust and green algae. Smoke is coming up from a hole in the roof at the back. Suddenly Jesus pokes his head out of an open window. “What are y’all doin’ here?” he says in slow, North Florida redneck, tan face and long, curly brown hair. He steps out, stands there, thin and brown skinned, bare except for his dirty shorts. “Y’all lost? This here’s private property. Y’all can’t read?”
“We just wanna know why you’re always sneaking around Marlina’s place,” says Angela. Bo gives her a funny look, but Angela puts her hand on her shoulder and squeezes.
“I ain’t sneakin’ around Marlina’s. She liked my orchids. She let me plant a bog garden in her back yard. That didn’t work too good though ‘cause that boy kept mowing over it. Now ya’ll can go.”
“How come you don’t wear proper clothes?” says Bo in her loud, scratchy, old woman’s voice.
“How come you suffer needlessly, old woman?” his redneck accent slightly faded. “Leave your tiny, plastic world behind. Take off your clothes and run free,” he says, smiling.
“That’s a bunch of bull. Let’s go Angela. I got people coming.”
“They’re coming, aren’t they? They can’t really help it,” he says.
Then he turns to Angela and his smile disappears. He puts his hands up to his face like he’s shielding out the sun. “Most with auras so dark and faded are near the end. But here you are standing before me. How is this possible? Oh yes, it must be the unseen power. You live next door to her, don’t you?”
“Did she ever invite you in?” says Angela, tryin
g to change the subject, starting to feel like coming was a mistake.
“You don’t suffer as much because you are already mostly gone. A little push and you could escape, too. Isn’t that what you really want? To get out of here.” He waits for a response, his face quiet and calm like a monk. “Alcohol and drugs can’t hide the pain. You’re so close. Do you want me to help you? I can help you. You’re just stuck in this plane and there are better places to go. Far better places than the one you choose to exist in.”
“I don’t need…” Angela says.
“He’s waiting for you. You could speak to him again. Don’t you see him in your dreams?” I know he’s just trying to bait me, thinks Angela, but I do see him.
“Yes,” she says.
“Okay, cut the bullshit!” yells Bo.
“She doesn’t want to be with you, old woman,” says Jesus. Then he says to Angela, “I’ve got something to help you get there. Take the pain away for good.” He goes back inside the bus.
“Is he goin’ for a gun?” says Bo.
“Let’s not wait to find out,” says Angela, and they run back to the truck, right past the hanging vulture, past the signs, over the log and into the truck. They are both sweaty and dirty and Angela is amazed Bo was able to cover the distance back to the truck with so little difficulty.
Angela grabs the stick shift, throws it into reverse, the gears grinding for a second, hits the gas and the truck lurches backwards, a high pitch whine from the transmission. “Don’t want that skinny bastard to get us,” she says, looking forward, then back through the rear view mirror.