Rainbow Gap

by Lee Lynch

  “I know what you’re going to tell me. It’s your mother, isn’t it? You’re going to be in a heap of trouble.”

  Jaudon held up her hands in peace. “She won’t make a scene in front of you, but don’t be surprised if she inspects the store and finds things to criticize while you’re on duty.”

  “I have to hand it to you, Ms. Vicker. You’re a brave child to hire me on. People like your mother have been rude to me longer than you’ve been alive, but I know my worth. Mr. Ponder works at MacDill and I worked at the BX there for years. The budget cuts came and I was laid off. I am honest, reliable, hardworking, and know how to follow instructions. If it would help with your mother, I can go after a written reference spelling it out.”

  “Sure, if it’s no trouble. Not so much for me as for you if you ever need to stick up for yourself. I don’t expect it to come to that, Olive, but I understand if you’re disposed to give this job a pass.”

  “I think I can give Mother Vicker a run for her money at least as well as you, sugar. She didn’t raise me.”

  “Lucky you.”

  “Poor and black, coming up in a tar shack?”

  “I take it all back. Lucky me.”

  They worked together over the next weeks. Olive was steady and deliberate in her duties, seldom making an error, good at catching them and asking for help. She was nimble with heavy or light cartons on the dolly and neat in her shelving. The vendors asked for Cal, but Olive put them at ease. She knew how to cash out the register and volunteered to replace a high fluorescent bulb because she was taller than Jaudon. Olive was eagle-eyed at rooting out old stock which she left in the cooler for Jaudon to deal with. Some items smelled so rancid Jaudon gagged. Olive Ponder went from part-time to running shifts without a hitch.

  “You’re so capable I’d vote for you for president,” she told Olive.

  As much as she commended herself for hiring such a gem, Jaudon picked a time Momma wasn’t in her office to drop off the references Olive provided. She girded herself for Momma’s reaction and skittered away. It was bad enough Momma kept asking her what she and Berry got up to in the tree house and why they spent so much time there.

  One night after she and Berry came down from the tree house, and she watched Berry go up Stinky Lane, Jaudon went into the kitchen with the stump of the candle they’d used. Momma was standing by the stove with folded arms. She’d expected Momma to be in bed by this hour. Jaudon quailed at what was to come.

  “You better not burn down the woods,” was all Momma said before turning and walking to her bedroom.

  Jaudon bit her lip to keep from showing a reaction. She was relieved not to be given Hail Columbia over hiring Olive. She and Berry would never be careless enough to start a fire, though they might rock the tree house or break through the floor. Theirs was the lovemaking of two slight, innocent young women, whispering and falling into fits of laughter and sharing touches light as the breeze from a handheld fan. As Berry said, “How is what we do wrong?”

  Momma showed up at the store the Friday after Jaudon delivered Olive’s paperwork. Olive said Momma parked outside and entered while Olive was hustling to serve two customers. Olive never saw Momma up close before and said she hadn’t expected her to be so much taller than Jaudon.

  From pictures of Momma and Pops, Jaudon knew Momma was never the prettiest girl in town. She had those furry, dark eyebrows—two upside-down Ls over her eyes—their tips not quite touching. When she started wearing wire-rimmed glasses, Momma’s countenance turned all the way stern. Her hair looked like she was struck by a lightning bolt that flattened and scorched a path, gray as ash, front to back over the top of her head, dark hair frizzing the rest of the way to her earlobes.

  “Yeah, I’m the runt of the Vicker litter, Olive, no getting around it.”

  “You don’t resemble your momma one bit, Jaudon. For one thing, I can’t see you in a feathered black hat perched on your head with hat pins.” They laughed. “Oh, my, she was a surprise. In black head to toe, down to her low heels. I assumed she was a poor lost widow woman looking for directions.”

  “Pops says she wears black to downplay her hip size.”

  “You could have knocked me over with a feather when she introduced herself, nice as pie. I kept on working while she watched me. She asked if I needed help with anything and I told her I was fine. She left without another word. You hear from her yet?”

  “No, and that’s unlike her. I’m leery,” she told Olive, looking over her shoulder. “I sense a black bear stalking me, out of earshot.”

  Olive tittered at her. “No, honey, you mean a big white bear dressed in black.”

  “Aw, heck. I put my foot in it, didn’t I? I regret my words, Olive.”

  “Thank you, Jaudon. But I wish I had a mirror to show you your once-white face. You’re redder than some apples I’ve sold.”

  “It’s bad enough we have to go up against other people’s prejudices without having to root it out of ourselves.” She didn’t know if Olive had figured out yet about her and Berry, or if Olive needed some rooting out herself.

  Chapter Four

  Jaudon liked to study at a particular carrel in the Cloud Christian College library. Most of them were set at the open ends of aisles, but this one was blocked from view. She saw nothing to distract her and she was hidden unless someone turned that corner.

  “Studying isn’t my greatest talent,” she’d once reminded Berry.

  They were on their mattress at the time, enjoying a freshly laundered velour bedspread from Goodwill. Berry pressed one of Jaudon’s hands against herself. “I know what your greatest talent is, angel.”

  Jaudon tried not to turn vain when Berry said this sort of thing. She did admit to having a talent for making Berry happy that way.

  She massaged where Berry placed the heel of her hand. “I don’t care about being a great student. I have a job waiting for me once I graduate. I want to learn everything I can to run the Beverage Bays someday. Momma’s paying for my education and she always demands her money’s worth.”

  Berry came again, holding tight to Jaudon. When she caught her breath she said, “I’m not a natural A student, Jaudon. I work myself hard for good grades because I want to be able to keep my scholarships and grant. I also need to stay on the honor roll to pick and choose my specialty and my employer.”

  Business and math were what Jaudon wanted to learn. Days when she was preparing for those classes she let her mind travel where it wanted, which was usually to the tree house and Berry and what they did up there. She called Berry her sweet swamp flower, thinking of the peach-colored hibiscus blooming by the house. Berry was like the hibiscus, petals open wide. When she touched Berry with her fingers and eyes, no thoughts, no worries, no mockery—nothing existed outside their elevated lair. She imagined a lifetime of pleasures for them both: work they loved, a real house of their own someday, and each other in the warmth of Florida.

  At the carrel she was having trouble concentrating. She ran through some homework calculations and drifted to a memory from last Sunday when they’d walked the two miles to the town center for fun. A train came and they watched the old box cars stop at the two small shacks which constituted a depot where Lemon Street met Eulalia Road. Rainbow Gap’s downtown consisted of an Elks Lodge, the small but active community theater that housed a one-room branch of the Lecoats County library, an insurance agency in a tiny old stucco building, a semiretired dentist, and a store that sold bait, fishing gear, pop, candy, a bit of hardware, and anything else that would turn a dollar. Mudfoot’s Fish Camp Restaurant sat off by itself, and across the tracks was a hairdresser in a private home. A white woman in curlers smoked a cigarette on the hairdresser’s front porch, talking to someone who leaned out the doorway. The post office was a converted 1930s vacation cottage, painted plain white, up on stilts.

  Berry said, “The way the population’s growing, with so many Northerners buying summer cottages and investing in retirement land, the county will so
on have to build a new post office and sell this.”

  The town itself was smack in the middle of marshy lake land, but it was cleared and more habitable than where they lived. Some owners kept up lawns and personal orange, lime, lemon, and avocado trees, swimming pools and garages. The whole town flooded in heavy rain.

  What was it about Florida, and Rainbow Gap, she loved so much? It was tangled up with Berry, with loving her and being loved—and possessed—by her. It was something to do with the hot sogginess of the land, the mysterious overgrown, intertwined, thorny underbrush, the yellow bouquets of glowing daisies offered from the earth. For Jaudon, the heat was home itself. While others complained, she prided herself on her endurance. She hoped never to be cold. Everyone thought hell was hot; any hell she went to would be bone cold.

  The air got so heavy you swam through it like in a dream and an hour later the same air turned dry and seared your throat with every breath. Berry thought Florida should be inhabited by the Eddie Dills of the world, the ones who hunt and are hunted, as well as by prehistoric bugs, birds of impossible colors, massive plants, and Banyan trees with grasping roots.

  Berry told her that bush hogging to clear land and pour cement over the Florida wilderness was suffocating evil. She said the evil would not die and predicted wild growth breaking through with concrete chunks for teeth.

  They lay together after studying in Jaudon’s room one night, listening to the house sounds. Berry said Vicker-style Cracker homes were fragile, built with boards stolen from struggling trees that groaned and creaked in misery to this day. It was true, the trees were dried and swollen by turn in the torrid heat and soaking rains. Jaudon told Berry she had a vivid imagination and was a poet; Berry shushed her.

  Shushed or not, Jaudon had asked why Berry loved a place she described as she might a nightmare. Berry looked away. It had become a habit, this covering up the evil in herself and in her outlook, believing she drove off Ma and Pa.

  “To me,” Jaudon told her, “it’s not a nightmare. It’s a mystery.”

  In the college library, she refocused on her textbook, but no more than a minute later she just about leapt out of her skin.

  “Ah!” Jaudon squawked, starting up from her seat.

  “I didn’t plan to frighten you to death.” A husky guy with a head full of long loose coppery curls which should have been on a girl’s head stopped in front of her. “I wanted to introduce myself. This is my favorite spot too.”

  She stood and held out her hand. “Jaudon Vicker. Do you need the seat? I can move.”

  His handshake was more like a leaf falling into her outstretched palm than anything she’d call a grip.

  “No, no, darling. It’s sweet of you to offer. For a moment I took you for a handsome boy. Just my luck.” He hurried to the next carrel, his arms cradling textbooks.

  “Me? A handsome boy?” She was confused for a moment—shouldn’t she be upset? Why no, he’s a fairy, she realized, amazed. A real live grown up sissy boy. She picked up the package of M&M’s she was nibbling to keep herself awake and offered them. He practically bowed when he thanked her.

  “Say, what’s your name?” She bent toward him in her chair, legs wide, hands splayed flat on her thighs so he didn’t take her question the wrong way.

  He lowered himself to his chair, crossed his ankles, and seemed to search her face. “Even your name could be a boy’s. I’m Rigoberto Patate—Rigo. Do I know you?”

  “Not really. I remember you because you got teased at least as much as me in grammar school.”

  He looked at her more closely and arched his eyebrows. “You’re the she-male they told me I’d grow into. I have to tell you, darling, I’ll take your looks over mine in a heartbeat.”

  She laughed. “That’s a deal if you give me your hair.”

  “You can have it. I’d rather be blond like you.”

  Blond would look as striking as red against his skin color, which she knew would be called olive, but not any olive she ever saw.

  They were whispering because they were in the library, but someone told them to hush anyway.

  “Can you take a break?”

  She looked at her watch. It was Pops’s big Hamilton from the Korean War. Momma gave him a new fancy watch with an alarm when they opened the fifth store. He liked to socialize and tended to run late.

  “Let’s give it an hour and meet out on the front steps. I have a report due for a five o’clock class.”

  Berry was late to the tree house in the evening, harried from studying. Jaudon greeted her with the open-armed enthusiasm of her discovery.

  “His dad is Cuban,” she told Berry, bouncing on her toes in excitement. “Rigo’s mother was a performer in Miami. She refused to move to Cuba. Rigo visited his dad’s sugar plantation summers when he was a kid, but one year when his dad came to Florida for a visit, he got word the Commies took over his plantation and would kill him if he ever got in their way.”

  “You like this boy?” Berry’s face was no longer harried, but blank, the way it looked when she was upset.

  “You’re kidding, aren’t you? He’s one of us, Berry. He mistook me for a cute guy—it’s why he stopped.”

  “You are my cute schoolboy.” She kissed Jaudon on the cheek. “Tell him hands off—you’re all girl. My girl.” Berry surprised herself with her zeal; no one was taking Jaudon away from her ever.

  *

  Rigo, Berry, and Jaudon took to going to art movies on campus together and having sodas at the student café. Rigo’s presence gave them the freedom to be seen in public, which they were timid about. His humor left them with tears in their eyes. His father, who had always kept his money in American banks, supplied Rigo with a red Camaro convertible. They went for rides along the Gulf Coast at twilight. He showed them certain spots where men sought one another out. Jaudon and Berry insisted on speaking to Rigo in Spanish, which they were all studying in school, Rigo for easy As, the girls because they expected to need it for their jobs.

  They showed Rigo Rainbow Gap. He rolled his eyes.

  “Swampland? Orange groves? Strawberry fields? Phosphorous pits? Train tracks next to your property? You girls need to move into town.”

  “Why?” Jaudon demanded. “We love the bellowing whistles. The long trains going by at night have lulled me to sleep since I was a baby.”

  “And oranges,” cried Berry. “Strawberries too. In season there can’t be better perfumes on this planet.”

  Jaudon thrust her head between them from the backseat. “Schools around here used to run on a strawberry schedule, open July to December when the farm kids picked strawberries. Now the farmers hire migrant workers. When the berries are ripest we go out at night to a field up the road. They’re warm from the day’s heat.”

  “We come home with red faces”—Berry licked her lips—“dripping with luscious strawberry juice.”

  “The farmer has known me since I was not much taller than those noisemaker stakes in his field. He told me he’d rather I got the overripe berries than critters that tear up the plants. You should see the heaps and heaps of starlings that will cover an acre of ripe plants.”

  “We leave plenty for them. Critters need the food more than us.”

  Rigo imitated Berry, licking his lips. “Look at the luscious berries outside the feed store. Do farm boys always hang out here?”

  Jaudon hit him on the shoulder. “Those are Harold’s boys. He hires high school kids to stock the store and load customer rigs. Always uses yellow-haired football players.”

  “Tasty. I have a yen for some fertilizer.”

  “You’re so bad, Rigo. You know there’s three boys in the nursing program?”

  “Oh my God, Berry. You waited to tell me this—why?”

  “I don’t know if they’re our kind. The one in my class went to elementary school with us, Jaudon.”

  “Who?”

  “Jimmy Neal Skaggs.”

  “A bully going into nursing? Those poor patients.”


  “I adore male nurses,” Rigo said.

  “Rigo, you adore anything male.”

  “Jaudon, I must admit truer words were never spoken.”

  Berry was happy as a lark. Rigo was great fun, Jaudon was great fun and sexy. Watching a playful Rigo and Jaudon together was even greater.

  On another of their drives they tried to convince Rigo this area, called Hanker Pond a century earlier, was once known for its cotton plantations and, later, its celery fields. He scoffed at them.

  “But I would have loved to be mistress of a Southern plantation.” Rigo ran his fingertips through his shining hair. “Servants to fan me in the heat, cooks to feed me, a master to dominate me. That would be the life. As soon as I get my inheritance, I’m going to Sweden for a sex-change operation.”

  “How much would that cost?” Berry asked.

  Jaudon gave her a sharp look. Berry had once wondered aloud if Jaudon might have an easier life if she was male or pretended to be. “I don’t want to be someone I’m not,” she’d replied. There was no pretense in Jaudon.

  Looking at Rigo and Jaudon together, she realized they had similar builds, short-legged and rugged, and could be brother and sister if their hair and skin tones weren’t different. Jaudon already passed for a guy, of course, but Rigo would need more work to get by as a woman.

  “Rigo,” Jaudon said, “if you want to take that road, more power to you, but I’d miss your sissy ways.”

  “I’d love to know how it is to be normal.”

  “Why in the Sam Hill would you want to be normal?”

  “Doesn’t everyone?”

  Jaudon was unable to tone down her fierce reply. “Not me. I don’t want to be normal if it means I can’t love Berry.”

  “You’ve got it, Jaudo. When I’m a woman, I can marry the man I love. Never in a thousand years will you be able to do the same.”

  A cloud of dust coming off a fallow field caught Jaudon’s eyes. “Look.” She pointed to a number of grayed wooden sheds, some small, others long, with plank loading docks, leaning toward collapse. “See the dozer? Looks like it’s tearing down the old packinghouse buildings.”