“You really missed out,” she said.
“Obviously,” I said.
“Back when we were seeing each other,” she said, “why didn’t we—I mean, we saw a lot of each other and I just thought we were heading toward that type of intimacy. Why didn’t we?”
“A lot of reasons,” I said.
“I did make it clear to you that I thought I was ready, didn’t I?”
I nodded.
“I seem to remember offering myself to you and you rejecting me,” she said.
“It wasn’t rejection,” I said.
“It was gentle and kind and you did it for me, but it was rejection.”
“It sounds corny, I know, but I was honestly trying to figure out the best way to love you,” I said. “To do what was best for you.”
“Do you think it’s a sin?”
I shook my head. “I’m no Puritan,” I said, “but it certainly solidifies emotional entanglements. I didn’t want you to end up getting hurt.”
“But I did.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “But wouldn’t it have been worse if we had become that intimate?”
She shrugged. “I can’t know, can I?”
“And you never were really specific about your past,” I said.
“Why I was still a virgin in my early thirties,” she said.
I nodded.
“You’re a good man,” she said.
“I’ll drink to that,” I said, holding up my nearly empty glass.
“Seriously,” she said. “And I’m glad to see you loosening up a bit. You put too much pressure on yourself. What you did was sweet, but you can’t go through life avoiding emotional entanglements—and not truly connect with anyone.”
She was right. I certainly needed to be more open, more willing to get down in the sometimes messy pit of personal relationships, but that wasn’t the issue here.
We were silent a long moment, Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris singing a duet in the background.
“How sure are you it’s him?” I asked.
“Who?” she asked. “Taylor? I don’t know who else it could be.”
“What has he done?”
“He’s following me,” she said. “It’s more a feeling than anything, but I know he’s there—not all the time, but a lot. Especially at night. He spray painted the words ‘cunt’ and ‘bitch’ on my car. He calls and hangs up in the middle of the night. And I think he killed my dog. I didn’t suspect him at the time, so I didn’t think anything of it, just buried him, but he was young and healthy. I don’t know. I just think he did it.”
“Did he stay outside?” I asked. “Bark when someone came into the yard?”
She shook her head. “He was an inside dog.”
I nodded, thinking about what she had said.
“What is it?” she asked.
“If he did it,” I said, “it’d be one thing if he was trying to get the dog out of the way so he could come into your yard to watch you, but it’s another if he really had no utilitarian reason to do it.”
“Why?”
“Makes him far more dangerous.”
Jack Jordan’s annual birthday party at Potter’s Landing was the social event of the year in Potter County. He was a popular sheriff and there was free food and booze for as long as there were people to consume it.
Laura, who was sticking very close these days, accompanied me this year. Merrill and I were taking turns following her during the day and she was spending most nights at my place. We had tried on a couple of occasions to have a little chat with Taylor Price, but he was proving elusive.
Nearly a thousand people had crammed into the small landing, which was little more than a boat launch into the Apalachicola River. Dad’s deputies, one of whom was my younger brother, Jake, had set up large halogen lights at the four corners of the landing, and built a large bonfire at the center. On the back of a yellow low boy trailer, a local band was covering country tunes, in front of them, the end of the gravel road had been swept to make a dance floor.
Light from the work lamps pierced the rising smoke from the bonfire and barbeque pits illuminating the undersides of pine, cypress, and magnolia trees casting foggy shadows onto the gray night sky. In the silence between songs, the sweeter songs of crickets could be heard against the rhythm track of the flowing river, the cool currents rising off of it delivered the fragrance of magnolia and gardenia blossoms.
People swarmed around the landing the way bees did in this same location during tupelo season—twenty-five couples or so were on the dance floor, the deputies and their families were preparing food over barbeque pits and portable gas grills, and another couple of hundred sat or stood around the pavilions. The others wandered around lazily as if floating down the river beyond them on innertubes, with a bottle of beer in hand, greeting each other with the warm familiarity of friends who were just a little loaded. All the others sat on their tailgates and in the back of their trucks they had parked in the landing for just such a purpose.
Upon arriving, I was greeted by the friendly citizens of the county who had been known as Dad’s since he was elected sheriff the first time nearly thirty years ago. All the people of my dad’s generation greeted me as, “Jr.” while those from mine called me “JJ.”
When Dad saw us, he motioned us over.
Ordinarily a quiet and reserved man, Jack Jordan became attentive and charming the moment he saw Laura.
“Son, why don’t you go fix this lovely lady a drink, while I introduce her around to everyone?”
“Sure,” I said, as if I didn’t have a drinking problem and needed to avoid the bar.
The people I encountered on my way over to the bar were as eclectic as north Florida itself. Beach people in colorful tropical shorts and shirts with deep tans and sun-bleached blond hair moved among small-town people in faded jeans and t-shirts, many of which sported beer-logos. County officials, like Dad, with khakis and but-ton-down oxfords, kept their distance from the river people in halter tops, Daisy Dukes, and soiled wife beaters.
When I neared the food tables, Jake yelled, “Hide the liquor. The whiskey priest is here.” It got a laugh, but only from Jake’s red-neck buddies who didn’t get the reference any more than he did. He had heard me use the term in a vulnerable moment of reflection on my identification with the weakness of Graham Greene’s character from The Power and the Glory. He had used it against me ever since.
“You didn’t bring your nigger, did you?” he added. “We all left ours at home.”
Again, the laughter was only from his friends.
Though openly and unapologetically racist, Jake’s comments were said for my benefit. He knew how much even subtle forms of racism bothered me.
I walked over to him.
“Were you talking to me?” I asked.
“You been drinkin’?” he asked. “Hell, I can smell it on your breath,” he added, his own breath smelling like the beer he was drinking.
“Were you talking about Merrill?”
“If the color fits,” he said.
“Why don’t you and I ride over and ask him if he’s a nigger?” I said.
“He’s not supposed to know it,” he said. “You are. Why does he fight all your fights for you anyway?”
“He doesn’t,” I said, and punched him square on his obnoxious, racist mouth.
The punch was all a punch should be. I had pivoted my hips and slung my shoulders into it. It was hard and it connected well. Jake went down. And didn’t get up.
As his friends started gathering around me, Jack Jordan, the man of the hour, stopped the band and, using the microphone said, “John, wherever you are, could you come up here, please? I want to thank all y’all for comin’ to my party. I consider myself to be a very fortunate man, indeed, to have so many fine friends and to have the honor of keepin’ y’all safe. Thanks again for comin’. Now, as you know, one of my boys is a preacher and he’s moved back down here from the big city, and I sure am glad. I want him to say a blessing over our
food before we start eating.”
As I climbed up on the trailer and took the microphone, the noisy crowd grew quiet. I noticed several of the men taking off their baseball caps and cowboy hats. I felt out of place and unworthy of this honor, guilty for punching Jake and drinking so much lately, but as I took in a deep breath and let it out slowly, I felt the calming presence of grace—unexpected, unbidden, undeserved.
“Let us pray,” I said. “Father in heaven, thank you for giving me such a good earthly father. Thank you that he has been able to be a father to our entire community. I ask that you continue to bless his life with health, happiness, and fine friends. And help us all find a way to thank him for taking the life you gave him and giving it to us. Please be with us all tonight. Keep us safe and bless the food and our time together… . ”
When I finished, the noise started again, and I found it comforting. I looked over in Jake’s direction. He was on his feet again, heading my way. I stepped off the trailer to stand with Laura and Dad.
“I think we better go,” I said.
“So soon?” Laura asked.
Dad nodded, then turning to Jake, held up his hand. “Not here,” he said.
Jake glared at me. “This ain’t over,” he said. “Not by a goddam long shot.”
I nodded. “I look forward to resuming our conversation,” I said.
When Jake walked away, Dad said, “I told Missy here that I’d be happy to help take care of her, so just let me know what you need.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“Thank you, Jack,” she said, hugging him. “And happy birthday.”
“Sorry about …” I said, nodding in Jake’s direction.
“I wish you boys would get things worked out,” he said.
It was as if he couldn’t see just how deep our differences and animus went, as if his love for both of us gave him selective sight and long-term memory loss.
When I slammed the door to my truck, I gunned the engine and began barreling down the landing road, racing toward the Jack and Coke that would sooth the feral beast banging on my breastbone.
But Laura had other ideas for calming the creature inside.
Unbuckling her seatbelt, she leaned over and unbuttoned and unzipped my pants, my body responding immediately. Pulling down my underwear, she grabbed me hard with her hand, then brought me to her mouth, taking me in, going down deep, the warmth and wetness of her mouth enveloping me.
With amazing adroitness, she expertly used her hand and mouth to quickly, if temporarily, satiate my hunger and calm my rage. When she raised up to whisper what else she wanted to do to me and what she wanted me to do to her, I could smell myself in her mouth.
By the time we reached my place, I was ready to go again, and we didn’t waste time getting out of the truck or our clothes.
The next afternoon, while I was still a little hung over, Merrill and I played in a two person charity golf tournament at the Killearn Country Club in Tallahassee, and though both of us were athletic, neither of us were golfers, a fact we were often reminded of as we attempted not to surrender all of our dignity to the tiny white ball.
On the third hole, Merrill sliced the ball on his drive and it ricocheted off a pine tree near a house before splashing into the swimming pool.
“Tell me why the hell you signed us up for this again?” he said.
He was wearing long navy Sean John shorts, a long, untucked, light blue shirt, white socks blue Nike flip-flops and a white Miami Heat had on backwards, and receiving more than a few stares.
“Seemed like a good idea at the time,” I said.
He shook his head.
“It’s a good cause.”
“I’ll give’em a donation,” he said. “Hell, they can have my entire check. Anything but my pride.”
When we reached the house where the ball had bounced into the pool, an elderly white couple was out on their patio looking as if we had dropped an olive in their champagne.
Merrill walked up as if they weren’t there and dropped another ball just inside the fairway.
“There goes the neighborhood,” I said to the couple, as Merrill swung the club as if he were playing baseball rather than golf. This time he hooked it in the other direction, but it managed to stay on the fairway and land just this side of the green. He then turned to face the disapproving couple and bowed deeply, sweeping his arm in exaggerated fashion.
The lady began shaking her head as she eyed Merrill with even more disdain. Her husband looked away. “Y’all not even safe out here no more,” Merrill said. “Tiger Woods done opened up the door and all us darkies’re pourin’ through it like they’s free fried chicken at the end of every hole.”
He slung the club back into the bag and walked toward the green.
“Caddies these days,” I said, when I walked past the couple. “Don’t know their place anymore.”
When Merrill reached the green, he didn’t stop. When I caught up with him in the lounge of the country club, he was draining a cold beer out of a bottle, a glass of orange juice sat across from him.
“Not feeling very charitable anymore?” I asked.
He laughed.
A slim girl with a dark complexion and straight black hair that hung to her bottom set two bottles of beer and two glasses of orange juice on the table between us. Her enormous breasts bounced around as she moved, and she leaned over and put them in my face as she served us.
“You got some vodka you can pour in these?” I asked.
“Sure, sweetie,” she said, turning and giving me the titty treatment again.
“That’d happen more often, you leave your collar at home,” he said when she left.
I shrugged.
“This where we should’ve been all along.”
“Can’t argue that,” I said.
Of the three other people in the lounge, only one was a woman, and I noticed that the waitress didn’t put her breasts in her face.
“Seems sort of sexist to me,” I said.
“Uh huh.”
The woman, a white lady who looked to be in her mid-fifties, was seated at the bar having oral sex with a martini while a tall, skinny white man in his twenties, with greasy black hair plastered to his skull, was obviously trying to pick her up. Greasy looked desperate, and she looked disinterested, but not just in Greasy. In life. She wore heavy makeup, but even in the under-lit lounge it couldn’t hide the deep lines and harsh boredom on her face.
An elderly man with a round paunch both above and beneath his belt line was slumped in a seat at a table near the bar with his pants undone and laid open. When the waitress gave him the boob treatment, he actually wiggled his head like a new born trying to find a nipple.
“Why can’t they do a charity wet T-shirt contest?” Merrill asked. “Lotta money in T and A.”
“Always has been,” I said. “Of course it depends on whose T and whose A it is.”
The waitress made her way back over to us, placing a couple of vodkas on the table in front of me, then giving Merrill the boob job.
I sighed deeply. “I thought we had something special,” I said.
She smiled, but didn’t say anything, then walked away.
I mixed the OJ and vodka and started in on the first one.
“Been a while since I seen you do that,” he said.
“Tired of drinking alone,” I said.
He nodded.
I knew he was concerned, but he didn’t let on, and I felt no judgment from him.
“You need help climbing back up them steps,” he said, “let me know.”
Taylor Price moved in the self-conscious manner of a man being watched. It wasn’t that he was aware that Merrill and I were following him. It was his belief that everyone in his vicinity would want to watch him. He scanned the crowd the way some celebrities do, expecting to be recognized, paid attention to, desired, envied.
We had been following him for less than two hours and I knew everything I needed to about him except his arrest r
ecord— which Dad should be calling with soon.
As Taylor stepped off the escalator and into the parking garage beneath Governor Square Mall, he was carrying bags from stores that specialized in expensive clothes and the self-indulgent gadgets of the good life.
When he used his keyless remote to unlock his feminine-looking sports car and pop its small trunk, the noise it made was loud, showy, and annoying.
“This is going to be fun,” Merrill said. “Five Franklins says he wets his pants before we finish with him.”
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