by Anne McAneny
“What a day!” Hoop shouted, showing off blinding white teeth, made brighter by his mud-caked skin.
“Every day’s what-a-day to you, Hoop,” Macy said, trying to resurrect a sunflower from its slumped posture.
“That’s because every day, Macy, I’m closer to getting out of this place. And I got every intention of taking you with me, so be ready.”
Macy smiled and waved away Hoop’s fantasy. “I ain’t going nowhere,” she said, resigned but not discouraged. “Gotta stay around and help Momma.”
Hoop dropped his bike to the ground, found a stick, and stabbed it in the ground next to Macy’s sunflower. “Your Momma doing any better today?”
Macy took a long look at Hoop, her blue eyes huge and compassionate. “She got out of bed to answer the phone, so that’s pretty good, but it ain’t like it is for you and me, Hoop.”
“Whaddya mean?” He pulled a piece of twine from his pocket—Hoop had an endless supply of everything in his pockets—and he tied Macy’s sunflower to his improvised stake.
“You and me,” Macy said, “we have good days and bad days—”
“Mostly good, I’d say.”
“Sure. But for Momma, it’s like the bad days got a hold of her and pulled her so low that she can’t dig her way out, at least not yet. Maybe not ever. Some days, it’s all she can do to get to the kitchen and eat a piece of toast.”
“Clinical depression,” Hoop said matter-of-factly while picking up a stone. “They got medicine for it.” He skipped the stone along a huge puddle that had formed where a rusty playground once stood. It had included a chipped yellow see-saw where he and Macy had met at age five. Hoop’s stone bounced twice, spurring Macy to grab a smooth, flat one shaped like a guitar pick.
“Clinical depression?” Macy repeated as her stone plunked into the water. “Where’d you hear a term like that?”
“My dad taught me. He might be half-drunk most days—and full-on drunk the others—but before he hurt his back, he taught math and statistics and such. Pretty smart guy.” Hoop got a triple skip and smiled. “But numbers don’t add up so good when you look at ’em through a bottle, so lately, the money going out and the money coming in, they don’t have an equal sign between ’em anymore.”
Macy grunted. “I know about that. We got another eviction notice yesterday, nastier than usual. Momma’s in there now talking to Quail. You know, he treats her the way he does and they came up together. Doesn’t seem right.”
“Business ain’t personal, Macy. It’s just business, and rent is his business.”
“Yeah, but Momma said even in high school, he was rotting as he was ripening.”
Hoop laughed at the description. “I believe that, but Quail’s got a weakness you can use.”
“He does?”
“The 14-carat carrot.”
Macy thought on that one for a second. “A gold carrot?”
“Yup. Gotta dangle it so it catches the light in his eye.”
“I don’t follow.”
“You gotta make Quail think you’re about to give him something better than what he’s expecting. That man cannot resist the promise of a payout. Got a bit of a gambling streak in him, you ask me.”
Macy harrumphed. “We got nothing to give him.”
“Neither do we. But he thinks my dad is coming into a big disability payment as soon as the insurance company rules in his favor.”
“Is he?”
“Not likely, but I dressed up the promise in some fancy language, threw in the name of a law firm, and made it sound all legitimate and such.”
“And that got Quail off your back?”
“I promised him half the settlement if he’d see his way clear to reducing our rent for a year.”
Macy shook her head. “Hoop Whitaker, I thought you never lied.”
“Never to you, Macy. Never to you. And besides, I didn’t really lie. My dad is due a big payout, but it’ll never come through. Those companies keep the cases in court till they fizzle out. But in the meantime, we’re paying seventy-three cents on the dollar of our usual rent.”
“Seventy-three? That’s real specific.”
“With the numbers I tossed out to Quail, that’s the percent it came to.” He grinned. “Had it all figured ahead of time.”
Macy gave up on skipping stones and dug around the weeds for a slingshot she’d made the month before. “Don’t know how you know so much, Hoop.”
“Spend your life with me, Macy. It’ll be a forever of learning things.”
“Ain’t you gonna be off charming snakes in the circus?”
Hoop looked at her like she was nuts. “Only for three years after high school. Then I’m getting full-on rich. Don’t tell my dad, but I can run circles around him when it comes to numbers, and I’m a damn sight smarter with money.”
Macy smiled. “Remember in third grade, you figured how many minutes till we’d be married, and how many seconds we’d spend together in our lives?”
“Remember? I got the clock ticking in my head right now. Six and a third million minutes till we’re married, then a smidge over 1.6 trillion seconds together, assuming we marry at twenty-seven like you want, and if I make it to average male life expectancy. Sound square to you?”
Macy grinned, never knowing how to react to Hoop’s wild predictions but ever enamored of his mind. She’d been hearing his numbers for years now, and once in a while, lying on her lumpy mattress with its faded purple sheets, she’d try to figure them out, but they always ended in a jumble in her head. “Sounds good,” she said, “except I’m planning to live to a hundred and ten. Gonna need a few more seconds than you.”
“Widow Whitaker, they’ll call you.”
Macy chortled. “It does have a morbid ring to it.”
“Gotta go,” Hoop said, as if an alarm had gone off in his head. “Snakes’ll be running soon.”
“Now that’d be a first.”
“What would?”
“Snakes running. Far as I know, they only got one way of getting around, and that’s slithering.”
“They swim like the dickens, too. But you wait.” He mounted his bike. “Someday I’m gonna get me two of the finest hoop snakes there ever was, and I’m gonna train ’em to stay looped and use ’em as bicycle tires. Gonna give you the first ride.”
Macy released a full-throttled laugh at that one. “Those snakes are only a legend, Hoop, and a crazy one at that!”
“No, ma’am,” he said. “Seen ’em with my own eyes. They bite their own tails and turn into wheels to escape an enemy or attack.”
“Thought you never lied to me.” She cast a big stone with her slingshot and hit a spot on a hickory that had seen its fair share of pings.
“I ain’t lyin’,” Hoop shouted as he pedaled away, turning his head back to shout. “I’d’a caught one already, but they roll away when they see me coming. Every. Dang. Time.”
His laugh echoed down the lane as he cycled away, his green and black shirt flying behind him like a triumphant flag.
It always seemed to be what-a-day for Hoop Whitaker.
Chapter 7
I’d decided to prep for my Richie Quail interview at home—immediately after my editor had ripped into me about how reporters should never become the story. Probably wouldn’t keep her from running those pictures of me attacking Boyd, but who could blame her? Conflict sold papers, or at least got more clicks.
I’d been moping on my back deck for over an hour already, toying with sentences for my article, but the humidity had glued the laptop to my thighs, and my writing had grown bitter: Boyd Sexton, Jr., the screaming asshole who sold the winning lottery ticket to the Lucky Four, hasn’t been so lucky recently. The suspected pervert is currently under investigation for kidnapping, murder, drug-dealing, and lifelong douchery. The sentences I’d already deleted had been far less charitable.
Giving up, I’d picked up the binoculars on the table next to me to search for the small alligator that usually hung out bet
ween two Bald Cypresses stuck in a permanent kiss. With no sign of my lazy friend, I scanned the area—and that was when I’d spotted the nose.
Thought it was a turtle head at first. They tended to do that, the turtles. Peek their heads out, on the lookout for food or predators. On good days, they’d mount a log, rest their innards, and sun their wrinkled skulls. On bad ones, they spent their time avoiding becoming the main ingredient in turtle soup. Used to feel sorry for turtles, confined to life in a stockade, but as I got older, I envied those shells—a place to curl into oneself whenever the world got too scary or realistic.
But no, it was not a turtle. Definitely a human nose.
I zoomed back in on the nostrils in the water. The lowering tide was now making a forehead visible. I knew who it belonged to. Had suspected it from the start. It was my neighbor, Mrs. Grace Elbee, one of the Lucky Four. Few would be surprised by this turn of events. Mrs. Elbee had struggled to stay afloat these last few years. Apparently, she’d lost. What a morbid day this was turning into. Now I’d have to venture into the water and protect the body until the troops arrived.
I gazed down one more time to verify her location. Her hand was now visible, lying across her chest. But what was up with her fingernails? Painted neon orange, they reeked of hedonism, like they should be topping the digits of a wild party gal—anyone but Mrs. Elbee. Had she decided that if she couldn’t romp on the wild side, random body parts should? Because those nails were out for an evening of gigolos and lime daiquiris, while their owner had spent the last few years wandering around town, lamenting a life that had never lived up to its promise. In fact, no one could have been less neon in outlook than Grace Elbee.
I grabbed my cell and called Chad. We had to get Mrs. Elbee out of there before the tide lowered anymore. Bugs, birds and vultures would be on her like pluff on a duck soon enough.
“Hey, Chloe,” said Chad’s weary voice through the phone. “The answer is no. We still don’t have results on the blood or the flannel.”
I’d already called five times for updates; both Sherilyn and Chad had opted to ignore my last two attempts.
“I’m not calling about that,” I said. “I found Mrs. Elbee.”
“Aw, geez. Is it what I’m thinking?”
“Sure looks that way.”
Grace Elbee hadn’t been seen for several days, though no one had noticed until yesterday.
“This is turning into some day,” Chad said. “Where is she? Black Swamp?”
“Of course.”
“Floater?”
“Looks like she settled on something. Alligator might’ve flipped her face-up.”
“A gator with no appetite for crazy?”
“Sounds about right.”
“You with the body?”
“No, but I’ll head out now.”
He sighed heavily. “Okay if we park in your yard?”
“I’d be disappointed if it ever grew grass.”
“Give me fifteen minutes. I’ll be there with bells on.”
“A bit jolly for you, Chad.”
“Didn’t say they’d be ringing.”
Through my binocular lenses, I caught a flash of unexpected movement. I needed to react. Response to movement was a critical survival tactic for swampers. It helped us avoid the prick of fangs carrying turbo-charged venom, or the clutch of jaws that could snap an arm like a twig. But the movement turned out to be Yoga Guy, my across-the-river neighbor, transitioning from Downward Dog to Modified Cobra. Our back yards faced each other, his in the kitschy, expensive area known as New Beulah, mine in what the New Beulah folks called Back Beulah, which translated to swamp.
Eight months ago, Yoga Guy had built a three-story, mostly glass monstrosity that put my shack-on-stilts to shame. We’d never met, but lack of a formal introduction hadn’t kept me from lusting after his muscular, lithe body the last few months when he exercised outside. Something about the way he held his Warrior Pose longer than expected, and the way his biceps and chest bulged out an extra inch. In truth, everything about him seemed just a tiny bit off proportionally, as if his parents had been poorly matched. But he came close enough to seriously handsome—and seriously mysterious—to stoke my voyeuristic tendencies.
Yoga Guy suddenly glanced in my direction. Although he couldn’t possibly see me from half-a-mile away, I jerked my lenses back to Mrs. Elbee. Half her body was now above the water line. I really needed to get out there.
I tossed the binoculars on the table and stroked my tattoo reflexively. Mrs. Elbee had found the guts to go through with it. The least I could do was show her some respect.
Chapter 8
I loved the swamp, but it could be equal parts beautiful and cruel. Some outsiders viewed it as the river’s garbage filter. Technically, they were right. The swamp sucked in pollutants from the river’s water, held them tight in its sediment, and magically converted all that waste into eel grass, orchids, bald cypresses, water tupelo, and swamp white oaks. Even provided enough nourishment for a thousand different plants and animals, from otters to muskrats, waterfowl to warblers, and crayfish to mussels, not to mention a rainbow of flowers and whatever was needed for mosquitoes to multiply at a staggering rate. They weren’t bad most of the year, but in the summer, look out.
We were part of a unique stretch of wetlands that included freshwater swamps, bottomland hardwoods, and marshes that formed where rice fields were once attempted. The history ran deep, with disputes over land use and aggressive logging operations, but in the end, Beulah had been blessed with a remarkable combination of features. Our area proved especially unique because Black Swamp merged with salty Crater Marsh not far from where I lived; I could enjoy the smell of pluff mud with its fusion of questionably delightful odors, along with the richness of the forested waters, all from the comfort of my deck.
Black Swamp was the original recycler, providing dignified death and bountiful life to so much, including me. Often, it seemed the only reason to stay around. And while it hadn’t been quite so kind to Mrs. Elbee, it would have recycled her, too, given enough time.
I donned old black waders and pulled back my long, straight hair. Retrieving a corpse wasn’t the best way to distract myself from the investigation at Boyd’s, but it would have to do. With my first step into the water, I felt a slithering pressure along my leg. I shrugged it off. To the snakes below, I was nothing but a moving tree stump, maybe a cypress root. I pushed through the water as the soft, pliable bottom yielded to my weight. Thirty yards out, when the water reached my waist, I glanced around, hoping that Old Bastard and his ilk hadn’t ventured out for an early lunch. Nope, no rows of dark gray scales surrounding me. No suspicious-looking rocks with ready jaws and lazy, marble eyes.
Five minutes later, I came upon Mrs. Elbee, plain as day, dead as dead, and more bloated than I’d realized. She looked relaxed, almost kind. Not at all like the real Grace Elbee. The real Mrs. Elbee had honed the edges of her personality to a weary bluntness—a chipped, dull blade that would press and irritate rather than slice and scar. Suspicious of all people and everything new, Mrs. Elbee would blurt out complaints and accusations to anyone within earshot.
Twelve years ago, at the lottery award ceremony—an event reeking of manufactured pomp and panache—a mustachioed official in a navy suit had handed each winner an oversized check for four million dollars. Mrs. Elbee had scowled, glancing from the man to the check, even reading hers upside down when forced to pose for photos. Then she rubbed her hand along the front of the cardboard until finally crying out, “Is this real? Doesn’t look the least bit real to me.” The official had winked at the audience like a cheesy game show host before informing her that the giant check was merely for show, and that the real one would have taxes taken out. She’d sneered knowingly before casting it to the stage floor and stomping away. Not until she and her husband had moved into their 5000-square-foot home and put serious miles on their new cars and boats, had she believed in the winnings. Even then, she’d snarled her wa
y through the next decade, worried about her son’s inability to cope, her husband’s inability to stay sober, and her conviction that their good fortune could be wiped away at a moment’s notice.
Now, she’d tossed it all away herself, with a helping hand from Black Swamp. Black Swamp was obliging like that.
I drifted the body to a pleasant rise of mud that offered enough space for two people, and eased her gently atop the aggressive bottlebrush grass, smoothing a patch for myself while awaiting Chad’s arrival. The last few years had seen Mrs. Elbee walking around town, carrying random objects that spoke to her from the beyond. The recent candlestick had been particularly troubling but seemed to give her comfort. After her husband’s death from drinking and boating, she’d poured her remaining winnings into her son’s rehab stints. He, in turn, had poured them down his throat.
“This is an awkward way to meet,” said a male voice with such a rich timbre that I was convinced God himself was welcoming Mrs. Elbee at the gates of heaven.
I whipped around, my hand flying to my chest. It was Yoga Guy. Hadn’t even heard him approaching.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to startle you.”
“Startle? How about frighten the living daylights out of me? You were quiet as a snake.”
He climbed out of the water, naked from the waist up, and there, in the flesh, were those pecs and arms and that weird little muscle around the waist, just above the hip bone, that I thought only existed in airbrushed magazines.
“Not the first time I’ve been compared to a snake,” he said with a grin. Those teeth might jut, but they worked wonders on his overall appearance. The smile made everything fit. And that nose, despite its wandering dominance, suggested a confidence and masculinity lacking in most Beulah men. Meanwhile, the bushy eyebrows . . . well, still disturbing, but at least they took after the lustrous mix of dark waves and curls crowning his head.