by Liza Nelson
And a truth-teller. “Your instrument won’t let you lie if you’re a genuine musician which I certifiably am,” she’d explain with that little smile.
Who else could I possibly have gone to?
Of course, there was no way of knowing that six months later I’d be the only white person at Evie’s funeral; not one member of the music department showed up. Which is a whole other story, except that after all her lectures about not letting anyone get in the way of her music, she had let that very thing happen, and in the worst way.
Not on purpose, of course. Evie was not expecting anything like death. Home in Little Rock for Thanksgiving break, she’d walked to the corner store to buy her mother some chicken parts. There was a robbery.
“Always a lot of them the month before Christmas,” Evie’s brother explained, carrying me into town from the airport in the beat-up taxi cab he drove for a living. In the trunk were three not-very-full boxes of Evie’s clothes and books from the apartment, and her violin in its small black casket.
I should have learned my lesson then. Once the gun went off, there was no retracing of steps. Evie, so sure yet so lost.
“That’s why I stay away from men,” she’d said, secure in her self-protection. “They are a threat to my artistic selfhood.”
Threat comes when you least expect, doesn’t it?
LIKE LAST Wednesday afternoon. A normal autumn day at Gulfside, no hint of incoming fire, not a cloud in the sky, not a dream to disturb my sleep the night before, not even a call from Joe Rainey to upset my psycho-sexual balance—he does keep calling, and I do keep wondering if friendship with a man is possible. Louise Culpepper and I went out again after work. Wednesdays were becoming our day to play. This time I’d suggested The Oyster Shack, a sawdust-on-the-floor, whiskey-at-the-bar joint down by the marina with the best oysters you have ever tasted. I couldn’t believe Louise had lived in Esmeralda her entire life without once stepping foot inside The Oyster Shack, although I guess it’s not a restaurant where you’d go with the family after church for Sunday dinner, which is the main meal most Esmeraldans eat out.
“Darryl won’t touch an oyster,” Louise explained. “He says he choked on one once as a child and never got over it.”
“Really?” I leaned forward across the varnished wood table scratched with penknife initials and littered with torn cellophane and squeezed-out lemon rinds. The smoke from my Pall Mall wavered up in a thin line above the platter of empty oyster shells the waitress was clearing away. “But you eat them?”
“Oh my, yes.” She nodded gaily. “The sweetest in the world can be found right around here; everyone knows Gulf oysters are the best. I used to gather buckets full with my aunt Sally up near Apalachicola. We would not even bother to rinse the shells, just clean off the barnacles, then roast the oysters over a wood fire as soon as we got back to Sally’s house, but only for a minute or so to make it easier to pry them open. Then we’d sit on Sally’s screened porch and eat dozens at a time, stirring them around in a special horseradish catsup Sally mixed. I swear we got drunk on those oysters, laughing away as we scooped them up on our little forked plastic spoons. We’d swallow them down so fast they hardly tasted more than salt and bitter and sweet.”
“You know oysters are aphrodisiacs?”
“Well, no. Are they truly?” She sounded interested but not shocked. Even as a small child I think Louise knew—and this is what I do appreciate about her, that she knew and was happy in her knowledge—that what she was doing was extravagant, decadent, sensuous. All those heavens people give negative words to once they’re too old to accept them pure and unadulterated.
We ordered our oysters and looked around. Every table was filled. In the middle of the afternoon. Burly men in business suits, shrimpers in ball caps, even a few yachtsmen from one of the boats that occasionally put in at the marina which the town had recently voted to spend a ton of money fixing up in order to attract more tourists. Probably thanks to Cleo’s lobbying.
“You know I do not recognize a single soul,” Louise said with amazement.
“No kidding.” I had to smile. It was obviously a revelation to her.
“I cannot think of a time,” she went on, “at the grocery store or Shoney’s or the public library, when I haven’t had to nod hello or small talk my way past acquaintances.”
“You know your layer, but even in a place as small as Esmeralda, there have to be other layers above and below yours that never intersect.” Not a great metaphor but she knew what I meant. “Coming in here, you’ve jumped layers. You’re not used to being anonymous.”
As if I were. I’m used to the stares and whispers, not necessarily flattering either, I get everywhere in Esmeralda, especially in a male domain like The Oyster Shack. I’d felt the eyes at my back earlier as we followed the hostess across the room.
“Enjoy it while you can,” I said and laughed, lifting off my hat to unfasten the barrette that held my ponytail in place. “Someone’s bound to show up you do know, even in here.”
As I shook my hair free, I caught a young shrimper at the next table staring. He was all wiry muscle in his Dolphins T-shirt and tanned a golden caramel that stopped just short of his sleeves and collar to show narrow bands of vulnerable, white skin.
“Do you come here much?” Louise asked me. If she noticed the shrimper she gave no clue, and I wasn’t about to let him know I had. There was a time when I would have, but no more.
“Every so often. It’s a nice change of scene.” I turned my attention to the platter the waitress set before us. I speared an oyster onto a saltine, dabbed the oyster in horseradish, squirted it with lemon and threw my head back to swallow it. Then I drank down the juice left in the half shell. Louise took an oyster on her fork and did the same. The oysters were small but very fresh, as salty-sweet as the best. I turned the platter clockwise so we each had a new oyster in front of us. We forked and dabbed and swallowed. I turned it again and we repeated the routine, six times until the platter was empty.
“I could easily eat another dozen oysters, but what an extravagance that would be on my salary,” I said and took out a Pall Mall. Louise began fiddling with my plastic lighter trying to balance it on its edge.
“I stopped smoking three years ago,” she said.
“I suppose I should. God knows, it’s out of keeping with most of what I believe about how we should live our lives, but hey, as an artist it’s my right don’t you think. A little inconsistency is energizing.” A thought of Joe Rainey flashed across my inner eye.
I let Louise keep playing with my lighter and instead struck a match from the pack that said THE OYSTER SHACK over a picture of a shrimp and an oyster jitterbugging. The waitress was clearing away the shrimper’s empty plates. She held out the coffeepot, but he shook his head so she took his cup, too. He stood up, dug into his pocket for tip change, slapped on his cap and grabbed his check. As he headed to the cashier, I took a drag off my cigarette and studied his walk. Not bad.
When I turned back I realized Louise was blushing a bright crimson. She had noticed him after all, and noticed me noticing him, too. We looked at each other and cracked up.
We were still feeling slightly naughty a few minutes later as we drove away from The Oyster Shack in Miranda. Rolling down my window, I signaled a left turn with my arm because Miranda does not have blinkers.
“What would your friends think if they saw you putter past in my beat-up Volkswagen van, complete with yellow daisies painted on each door?” I asked.
Louise threw up her hands with a carefree toss of her head.
“Well, they probably won’t.” I wasn’t sure if Dylan was pleased or not that I was becoming friends with Cass’s mother. When I’d suggested that the four of us might want to get together for a mothers-and-daughters dinner one night, Dylan had shrugged, noncommittal.
“Oh,” I remembered out loud. “I have to stop at the Quick Mart. More apples for Dylan. All she’ll eat these days are apples and vanilla yogurt. Here
we are in Florida and she won’t touch an orange. Says the acid is bad for her skin.”
“Her skin is lovely.”
“Yes, but you know kids. I have to keep reminding myself this is just a phase Dylan’s going through. Like her new interest in Baptists—no hard feelings, Lou.”
“No hard feelings.” Louise grinned. “I admit I was a little surprised to see her at morning worship last Sunday.”
“Right up there beside Elvira Brasleton I bet.”
For all I knew Louise considered Elvira Brasleton her best friend, but I doubted it. Elvira was too nice to be trusted, even for a preacher’s wife.
“Actually, Elvira did mention to me, probably because she knows Dylan and Cass are friendly, what a fine girl Dylan is. She told me she and Reverend Brasleton hope Dylan joins the youth choir as a soprano to take Mitzi Grabler’s place now that she’s off to college in Tallahassee.”
“She was trying to feel me out through you, huh?” I could just hear that wheedling voice of hers. “Worried that I would raise some opposition.” As if I would stop Dylan from anything she really wanted to do, even joining the Baptist choir.
I was driving a block from Quick Mart, past the post office when Louise sheepishly mentioned that Darryl had asked her to get him stamped envelopes three days ago. “I hate to ask you,” she said.
“No problemo. We both have our errands to run for the ones we love.” Without missing a beat, I whisked Miranda into an empty parking space in front of the post office and came along with Louise into the building.
It was empty as usual. Mr. Peden, who’s run the post office ever since he lost his eye in World War II, started talking to Louise about Disney World. Mr. Peden is a bachelor. The rumor is that his girl dumped him while he was overseas, but that is always the rumor, isn’t it? As long as I’ve lived here, Mr. Peden has directed all his unused affection toward Disney World. Every weekend he takes one group of kids or another with him to Orlando. Dylan knows my opinion of Disney World and has never asked to go, thank the gods. The smell of desperation is too strong on that man to make me comfortable, although the kids always seem to come back in one piece and happier for their vacation. I suppose he is doing a good service, especially when he takes children who could never afford to go otherwise.
Evidently, he was just back from Epcot and eager to describe the space exhibit to Louise.
“Despite my being a good Christian and all, I have to say I can’t help holding out hope there is reincarnation in heaven.” He leaned over the counter and almost winked in Louise’s face as he went on. “You won’t tell the Pastor, but I like to think I’d be an astronaut. I truly do.”
As he talked to Louise I wandered over to the stamp machine and began studying the commemorative choices up on the wall by the photographs of missing children. My glance drifted to the wanted posters, drifted away, then snapped back, hooked like a fishing line on the big catch. There was Hank.
My Hank. In the first flush of recognition I did not consider, did not even completely remember Dylan’s connection to him. I saw his face and thought, “My God, Hank, what are you doing here?” When I looked back and forth fast enough, I could swear that what Hank was doing was staring intently at Mr. Peden’s freckled bald head while Mr. Peden laboriously counted out change for Louise.
It was too bizarrely comic. I stood in the middle of that ugly brown room laughing to myself, dying to get out of there, but warmed with a certain tenderness, too. Hank, that’s whom the young shrimper had reminded me of, like a physical, in-the-flesh premonition. But of what? Of seeing Hank’s picture on a wall? How many years, yet that face was as familiar as the palm of my hand. I could still feel the hollow under his cheekbone in that dank church basement where we had talked and talked as I have never talked to another human being in my life. Talked and touched as if they were the same thing. I knew those eyes, that chin, those lips. I slipped the poster from the ring-bind holder.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” I half-whispered as Louise walked up to me stuffing a dollar bill in her purse.
“Have you taken sick?” She looked at me with friendly concern and already the fact of Hank’s face folded in my shoulder bag began to change shape like molten glass on the blower’s pipe.
“Only in the head.” I grabbed Louise’s arm and pulled her through the door so hard she almost dropped the envelopes for Darryl.
“This is really strange. I mean, I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry.” I was walking to the car fast, dragging her along.
“I need to take a long ride to nowhere.”
Louise did not speak. I did not expect her to. “Can you come along? I think I need the company.”
“Darryl is with the boys at Scouts until at least seven.” That’s all she said, but it was all I needed.
We stopped at the Quick Mart as planned, but instead of apples and yogurt, I loaded the cart with a twelve-pack of Miller Lite, a carton of Pall Malls and two family-size bags of barbeque-flavor chips. Louise followed me up and down the aisles. God knows what she was thinking. God knows what I was thinking.
“Hell, Louise, we are friends, aren’t we?” I asked as we headed up Gulf Road.
Louise nodded. “Sure.”
“Then why don’t you ever ask me the juicy questions I’d ask if I were you?”
“Like what?” Out the open window, the breeze had picked up among the scrub pines. Dust and sand and the rotten-egg odor of the paper-mill stacks blew through the car, across my cheeks and down under my collar.
“Like where is Dylan’s father?”
“Well, I guess I figured he was someone you’d rather not talk about.”
“The truth. Come on, out with it, girl.”
“The truth? I assumed we needed to be better friends before I brought up painful subjects like divorce.”
“Good point, well taken.” I snorted and hit the accelerator. Louise gripped the edge of her seat. We were going close to sixty-five miles an hour, and Gulf Road was narrow and curvy. Finally I slowed down some, took a deep breath and reached for a fresh pack of Pall Malls.
“I’m sorry if I’m acting a little strange.” I took another deep breath and pulled the car over to the side of the road. I see now that I should not have been so quick to share my own little truth, but I was bursting, wild with the strangeness, a little out of my head. And I had already decided I wanted to trust Louise. I realized that, in many ways, she was your conventional Southern woman, the kind of woman who pressed her husband’s jeans. Still, I sensed a yearning to break out of her rut if someone would only show her how. Someone like me. But even in my crazed state, I saw the risk I was taking, guessing what a friendship can weather, especially a baby friendship like ours.
“I just saw Dylan’s father for the first time in almost seventeen years,” I blurted out. “At the post office.”
Louise stared at me. No one had been in there besides the two of us and Mr. Peden. I knew she was racking her brain, wondering if I’d had one of my visions, wondering probably if I was psycho.
“What do you mean?” she said finally.
“On a wanted poster.” The words rattled out like nails.
“Good Lord, what did he do?”
“I haven’t had time to find out yet.” It was true. I had been so absorbed in his face, I’d not bothered to read the words under it. I reached into the recesses of my bag lying on the seat between us and pulled out the wadded page of printed paper.
I’m not sure why I handed it to Louise, but I did. She smoothed out the page on her lap. I wanted to study her reaction to what she was looking at: two not very clear photographs of a man in his early twenties, good-looking in a scruffy, rough way. Hard-eyed, with a birthmark between his long thin nose and his rather full lips. No mustache or beard, but coarse dark hair that hung down almost to his shoulders. Not someone Louise would ever have brought home or introduced to her folks as her fiancé. The name printed under the pictures was Henry Howard Fierstein. The paper shook gentl
y between Louise’s fingers. Three or four aliases were listed as well.
“Well, what’s the bad news?” As if I weren’t reading along with her.
“A bombing.” Louise could barely get the word out. “Conspiracy to bomb, it says.”
“Does it say what he bombed?”
“No, not that I can tell.”
“Does it say when?”
“Nineteen seventy-one.”
“Well, back then it didn’t necessarily mean all it does now.” I reached an arm over the seat and pulled out two cans of beer from the Quick Mart bag. “In the sixties we all did things that seem dangerous now.”
“Dangerous? That’s not exactly the word I would have used.”
“No, I guess not.”
Louise fell silent. At The Oyster Shack she’d mentioned that she did not like beer’s thick, sour taste, but now she took one long swallow after another.
“I cannot imagine holding a wanted poster of Darryl,” she sighed.
“Try,” I said.
She shook her head and looked out the window. I assumed she was angry at the question.
“Well, he was in the service before we got together,” she said eventually.
“Vietnam?”
“No, Germany. He was lucky. Someone had to be posted to Europe I guess. Anyway it is not impossible that he could have done something, a prankish theft or even a little experimentation with drugs, but nothing like this. Darryl is my husband, the father of my children, my life.” She looked at me apologetically. “An ex-husband is different. Less devastating I suppose. But my heavens, a terrorist?”