Rainbow Gap

by Lee Lynch

  “Probably putting up more housing.” Rigo looked around. “Where are these people coming from?”

  “Up north, I guess.”

  Berry always teared up over the subject. “God bless the developers. They’re filling in the swamps, cutting down the orchards, chasing the birds away. I want to stop it.”

  “It’ll be okay.” Jaudon reached to pat Berry’s shoulder.

  Berry placed a hand over Jaudon’s. “This area also used to be known for its plant nurseries, dairies, lumbering, sawmills, turpentine stills. I wish for those days.”

  “Oh, pooh,” said Rigo. “Life used to be a lot tougher. Today we have air conditioning—well, not you and Jaudon—and insect repellent and decent places to live.”

  Berry said, “I wish they built some of it for the poorer people. I feel bad for the Publix cashiers, the office cleaners, the caregivers, the motel help, the fruit pickers and packers. Most of the buyers are retired white people. There should be a law requiring a certain number of homes be made available for people who do the work.”

  “Does anybody work out here? Are they too poor to drive into Tampa?”

  Jaudon was proud of her birthplace. “We have people making decent money, like anyplace else. They might be Lecoats County employees or railroad workers or teachers, bankers, construction guys, well-to-do farmers. There’s some mansions here too.”

  “No one but the darned real estate agents and Northerners can afford those mansions.”

  “You’re envious, Berry.”

  “No, sir, Rigo. Gran’s place is perfect for me. I just can’t stand to watch the countryside beat all hollow.”

  “Progress can put us in reverse, can’t it, Miss Berry? I’m heading home to Tampa. The city’s built up. Different things to bellyache about.”

  “Drop us on home, buckaroo,” Jaudon said. “I need to memorize some biology for my science requirement.”

  Rigo raised his eyebrows. “Nurse Garland can help you out with that.”

  She saw Berry cast her eyes down, the corners of her lips twitching into a grin.

  “Sorry, darlings. I forget how modest you two are.”

  *

  Jaudon jumped over the car door when they stopped at Pineapple Trail. Jaudon stood gripping Berry’s door while Berry leaned an arm on her hand. They never hugged or kissed in public though her whole being wanted the one last close contact. Instead, they watched the sunset. Lazy-fingered palms were dark against shades of pink and yellow.

  Berry told Rigo to drop her at the start of bumpy Stinky Lane, but he insisted on saving her the walk in the buggy twilight. She gave him a kiss on the cheek for it, and hoped Eddie Dill was out hunting, not here to watch her every move or to inspect Rigo.

  Oh no, she thought at the sight of Eddie, parked in front of Gran’s house, hauling a dead five-foot alligator from the rear of his Scout. Zefer barked and lunged from the end of a stout rope tied to the steps in front of Gran Binyon’s mobile home.

  Her stomach turned, as much at the sight of Eddie Dill as at the poor dead alligator. How would Eddie Dill like it to have his skin turned into a purse?

  Rigo watched the man. “What is that?”

  “That’s a genuine swamp vagrant hobo and my Gran’s boyfriend.” On top of Eddie’s other crimes, he was shaming her in front of Rigo.

  She saw him through Rigo’s eyes: a dense ungroomed gray and white beard tucked inside green bibbed waders, a habitual wide-brimmed hat over his last straggles of hair, and a long-sleeve shirt streaming with mosses and sweat.

  “You know about skunk apes”—Rigo stared—“those smelly apes people claim to see in the swamps?”

  “They’re bigger than him.” She opened the car door and tried to reassure Rigo with a smile.

  Rigo coughed. “Forgive my lack of manners, but he smells of skunk ape.”

  “He smells worse. You’re noticing the mushrooms. Stinkhorns pop up from at least May to October.”

  “How do you stand it?” Rigo inched the Camaro in reverse. “I need to move my car out of here before the stench soaks in.”

  Rigo had once shown them where he lived, in a big white colonnaded house near the water in Tampa. A gardener had been at work. Berry had no doubt he was keeping out offensive fungi.

  Eddie Dill, the gator under one arm, grabbed her with his other hand. “Must be your beau.” He leered.

  “No. He’s my friend.” She pulled away from him, but felt his eyes watch her walk toward the house.

  Then, with no warning and a whoosh of sound, Eddie Dill, the Scout, and the alligator fell into the earth.

  She sprinted to the trailer. “Gran, run! Sinkhole!”

  Her grandmother turned off burners on the stove and grabbed her hand. The cat, Toby, was trying to squeeze under the couch. She let her grandmother go and pulled Toby out by the scruff of the neck, grabbed a croaker sack, stuffed Toby in, and cinched it. “Come on, the house is going down with Eddie.”

  Gran followed her, only stopping when she saw the Scout’s bumper visible in the hole.

  “Eddie,” she called.

  A hand appeared. It was Eddie Dill hauling himself up out of the hole, covered by damp, sandy dirt.

  Gran turned to help him while Berry untied Zefer and tugged her away.

  “You can’t do any good,” Berry yelled. Toby yowled and scratched through the bag, Zefer barked nonstop. “You’ll add weight to the edge of the hole, Gran. He knows best what to do.”

  Was there a rope to throw Eddie? But no, he was a secretive man. Ever since she’d stolen his gun, he kept his equipment and tools padlocked in the shed, the key in his pocket. He never said a word about the gun going missing.

  She guided her grandmother toward Eulalia Road, trying to run. There was no telling how long a sinkhole would turn out to be or how deep. Gran looked around and pulled her to a stop.

  “We can pray for him, Gran.” She laid a hand on Gran’s gray curls. Prayer might neutralize the conviction that her own hateful thinking caused this catastrophe. She never wanted Gran hurt, yet everything Gran owned, and her companion, were about to be lost.

  Gran had escaped in her apron. She used it to dab at her eyes. “I don’t know,” she said. “He’s had this coming for a good long time. A good long time, the way he loved to kill the animals and some people’s spirits.”

  Without rancor, she agreed with Gran. “I imagined the animals or the trees or Mother Nature herself taking him sooner or later.” She was too unsure of herself to tell Gran about believing in the Great Spirit of their ancestors. She squatted to calm Zefer, imagining them all in a spotlight of protection. Nothing but images of jagged-edged colors came to mind.

  They stared into the night which was ripe with mushroom smells, loud with the sound of earth, in clods, falling into the hole swallowing Eddie Dill.

  Eddie’s elbow was on the edge of the hole. Somehow, he held onto the gator under his other arm. The hole grew larger yet. The Scout sank deeper; Eddie’s elbow slid off. The murdered gator came flying up out of the ditch—Eddie was taking no chances on allowing what was his to sink.

  There was a loud creak as Eddie Dill leapt from the half-buried hood of the Scout toward solid land. The Scout sank deeper and more earth fell away when Eddie launched. He’d waited too long: his hands and feet, arms and legs scratched, dug, kicked, and tore as sand and dirt and limestone crumbled beneath his weight.

  Gran watched with both her hands in front of her mouth. Eddie’s fingers grasped at every root, trailing plant, clump of damp sand, anything, but he was losing ground. Mercifully, one of the dismantled lawn mowers he’d planned to work on crashed into the pit, a sharp metal edge hitting square on the back of Eddie’s head. It happened very fast, and she saw blood come through his thin hair, saw the angle of his neck, saw his arms go limp. They watched him slide farther down, oblivious to the sandy soil seeping in his wake into what was becoming an abyss.

  No, she wasn’t asking the Great Spirit to save this man who respected no living
thing, including herself.

  Now there was a new sound, a rumble where the sinkhole spread under the trailer’s cinder block steps. They went next. The house sat, untied, on a foundation of more concrete blocks. As the blocks closest to the sinkhole slipped, the house, with a crunch, buckled at its front door, began to fold in on itself, and leaned forward over the hole.

  Gran watched with a hand over her mouth, as if she wanted to hold in a cry. “He’s taking the house with him.” The earth crumpled under the front cinderblocks. “My home. The house your grandpa left me when he died. My plants! All my beautiful plants.”

  “But this remains your land, Gran.”

  “How can I live on it without Eddie? He brings in pure drinking water and he keeps the generator going. He hauls the propane for heat, the block ice for the swamp cooler. He keeps the place sprayed so we have some peace from the skeeters and roaches. Men have their uses if you can keep them fed and satisfied, child. My eighteen acres. Full of sinkholes and that stinkhorn smell of rotten meat. Even so, there’s not a better piece of land on earth. It’s so alive and thriving. It’ll be me, the wild birds and the gators, the coons, the possums and frogs. I’ll never sell it to the developers. It’ll be yours someday.”

  Berry kept leading them away. Toby was no longer mewing. His furry body panted through the bag and she opened the zipper again to keep him from overheating.

  Gran’s eyes lost their darkness. “You’ll keep it the way it is, won’t you? Promise me you won’t sell it to the developers. In my lifetime I won’t turn out the wild animals for commuter houses or a trailer camp or a gas station. Promise me and I’ll get through this horror.”

  “I love this land, Gran. I won’t let it go.” How else would Ma and Pa find her?

  Gran cried, “The propane. My God, the propane and his truck.”

  They fled to the road, the explosion not far behind.

  Gran was out of breath. “Poor Eddie. He was a bad man in so many ways, but such a horrible death…”

  The smell of it was sickening from the stinkhorns burning. Flames rose skyward.

  Toby in his tote was lifted from her arms. Jaudon was there with Pops, taking Zefer from Gran and urging them toward Rigo’s car. So Rigo hadn’t left after all. He’d alerted the Vickers and brought them.

  She managed to pray it was quickly over for Eddie, and the earth would be kinder to him than he ever was to it.

  Gran, her cheery Gran, turned her face into Berry’s shoulder while Berry held her with a firm arm. Gran said, as she cried, “Despite all his wickedness, he didn’t deserve this.”

  Berry met Jaudon’s eyes over Gran’s head. In the light of flames as tall as the tallest palms, she reflected, with an unforgiving wrath like a demon inside her, Yes, he did.

  Chapter Five

  Of course the Vickers opened their home to Berry and her gran immediately.

  Jaudon, Pops, and Bat, with an army buddy John, who came home with Bat on leave, hauled Gran Binyon’s twenty-foot camper, which survived with outside smoke damage and one melted tire, to Pineapple Trail and set it behind a hammock that sloped up the back of the Vickers’ property with a stand of slash pine for privacy.

  Berry expected the heat of the night and the fire, the sickening satisfaction of Eddie’s death, and the loss of the manufactured home Gran hadn’t been able to insure, would haunt her forever. Jaudon comforted and distracted her overtaxed mind, but Berry had become a more serious and purposeful young woman.

  On the porch early one morning while Bat was still home, Berry tried to be calm, but found herself spitting bullets about more than Eddie himself. “The hellfire and brimstone of his church, Jaudon. The church Gran and I go to, where she met him, what they preach proved true. What else would you call what happened to him if not going to hell? The church says what you and I are doing is a willful transgression, but not what Eddie did in his lifetime. Yet Eddie was plunged into hell. What does God have in store for us?”

  “Do they tell you love is bad?” Jaudon spoke in a hushed voice. Berry was so seldom mad, it was always unsettling. She was intimidated by Berry’s cogent, ladylike way of expressing anger.

  Zefer seldom left Gran’s side—Gran who was so fragile and unsure of herself since the sinkhole. The dog sat leaning against Berry’s calves.

  “I don’t believe that church comprehends love. If they think an action isn’t approved in the Bible, you’re subject to church discipline, but who are they to judge us or anyone?”

  “Aw, heck, Berry. What can they do to you?”

  “It’s pitiful. They counsel you and have these whole big sessions with a lot of people. They can throw you out.”

  “We better find you another church. Why in the world would you go to a church Eddie Dill believed in? A church that’s stingy about love and preaches you can only love the way they say?”

  “It’s Gran’s church too, Jaudon. It’s where they met. And what church is going to say it’s okay to be the way we are? Better to do without. We don’t need a building or the judgment of strangers. Whatever’s out there is for us and loves us all.” Berry spoke with a vehemence Jaudon never held for any church, any religion.

  This was a subject they often talked about. Berry confused her, both complaining about the church and making excuses for it. The Vickers had no time for church, but she often heard Momma call people good Christians like us. She guessed she was a Christian, but without those discouraging regulations.

  Berry played with her ring. “Maybe there is a God and maybe there isn’t and maybe God is a power inside everybody, a soul, maybe to lead us toward wholesomeness and keep us from killing and robbing and doing a lot of other harm.”

  Berry might be changing some parts of what she believed, but she held tight to her faith. She believed God would bring her ma and pa home eventually. Jaudon didn’t understand faith, but if that was what made Berry who she was, Jaudon was all for it. Were people born believing or was it taught? What the heck, if it made them happy.

  “I want to be good,” Berry said, drumming her fists on the seat of the swing. “It’s frustrating—folks get in the way of good in this world.”

  “I wish you would step out of the fight ring and see you’re already a champ,” Jaudon told her, stretching Berry’s arm up in the air as if declaring a winner. “Nothing can take away from the good you do.”

  Moments like this scared Jaudon; she was on the edge of Eddie Dill’s sinkhole, or sin hole. Would Berry’s spiritual needs lead her away? Would she be happier with someone who had faith?

  Zefer got up to greet Bat, who yawned and stretched in the high school football shirt that didn’t reach to his wrists these days.

  “You awake, lazybones?” Jaudon teased.

  He lit a cigarette. “You know, I don’t want my trip home ruined by you ladies fussing over the what and why of a swamp geezer about as useful as a stump full of granddaddy long legs. I’m losing more buddies in ’Nam than I care to count.”

  Jaudon nodded. “I guess we have to put the sinkhole in perspective.”

  “This is why I’m home and not doing R and R in some Asian cesspool. The army can either lose us or give us a break.”

  Berry started to clamp a hand over her mouth. “Of course you don’t want us harping on Eddie’s fate. I’m sorry, Bat.”

  Bat reached into a pocket in his fatigues for his US Army money clip and took out a bunch of twenties. “Why don’t you and Berry’s gran get away for a day? How about going on the boat ride over in Tarpon Springs.”

  “On the Gulf?” Jaudon got jittery about straying far from home, even when they went with Rigo.

  “The boat goes down the channel out toward the Gulf, but not into it. I took a girl there once. We watched a guy dive off the boat for sponges, like they used to when the Greeks first settled that area.”

  Jaudon tapped her foot to a rhythm of her dread. “Tarpon Springs is a long ways from here.”

  “Do Berry and Gran a favor and get out of your rut, Jaud
o. Eat at a restaurant. Go to the beach. Come home late. Have some fun. I’ll watch lazy Zefer sleep. You only live once, girls.”

  Berry’s cheeks dimpled up. “It’s a fine idea, Jaudon,” said Berry. “You work so hard.” She turned to Bat. “Your sister is always ready to cover shifts in other stores if your momma needs her. She works doubles and triples if I don’t stop her. Your momma’s lucky Olive Ponder’s always ready to pitch in when Jaudon’s needed elsewhere.”

  Jaudon remained nervous and delayed the trip as long as possible. Bat wasn’t far off the mark—she grew fractious when her routine was upended, which she liked to limit to home, school, and work. Stepping out of her familiar circle made her jittery.

  “Okay, I’ll take my best girls to the beach,” Jaudon told them.

  Berry leapt from her seat and hugged her, Gran, and Bat.

  Gran owned a pampered red Corvair she swore she’d drive until it fell apart. Saturday the car was filled with a delicate gloom as Jaudon navigated it toward the sponge docks.

  Berry never got to the coast much growing up and she became upbeat at the first sight of a bright blue canal. “It amazes me people can dock their boats outside their homes.”

  “Would you want to be rich enough to have a yacht, pet?” asked Gran.

  Berry considered what to say. “It’s appealing, but I don’t think I’d spend my money on boats, Gran.”

  They passed a plain trailer park filled with discolored vehicles and trash. Someone had a colossal burn pile going which looked unsafe to Jaudon. “You’d buy everyone in that park new Airstreams.”

  “Oh, you,” Berry chided her with cheerful humor. “I’d give them a chance to learn how to build decent homes and I’d lend them money for construction.”

  “She’d throw in land on a bayou too.” Gran patted Jaudon’s shoulder. “You know my granddaughter well.”

  Jaudon said, “And you know what? If we could put up the money, it might be a sound investment.”