American Ghost

by Janis Owens

  He wasn’t as ornamental or amusing as their golden girl, but had his own strengths. He was a man, and polite and smart and obviously in love with Jolie Hoyt—and they were all for that, the old Sisters were, as practical as Lena when it came to poor girls and dead ends and the Men Who Could Get Them Out. They gave the match their full approval and sat back and waited for the inevitable events—either engagement or pregnancy—the former preferable, though the latter not so rare as to cause an earthquake on this end of the swamp.

  But as the dog days of September quietly slipped away, and the October nights grew mild and golden, they began to wonder if they’d misread the signs in this romance. For Sam never made any loverlike advances toward Jolie that they could see: never walked her to church or sent her flowers or sat with her on the porch at night. He seemed content to hang out with her father and spend his days talking to the poor folk on the river, writing out pages and pages of any sort of nonsense those chattering gheechies came up with, something the good Sisters at Bethel (even if they were gheechie themselves) considered a criminal waste of time.

  They soon tired of the mystery, and by mid-October, whenever they ran into Sam at the IGA or the café, they would baldly ask about his intentions toward Jolie, though he proved oddly shy in such matters, would blush to the tip of his forehead and stammer the most unsatisfactory replies.

  It made the old Sisters privately wonder if little ole Jolie, raised in a household of men, simply hadn’t learned how to court—to bat her eyes and twitch that tail and land this particular fish before he got away. To that end, they began inviting them to Sunday dinner as a couple; would feed them like royalty on recipes cut from the pages of the Progressive Farmer, on chuck roasts and field peas and corn bread, all the while dropping glorious asides on the bliss of married life, trying to nudge them along.

  They had a hard time gauging the effectiveness of the strategy, as Jolie had inherited her father’s inscrutability. She didn’t seem to mind their maneuverings, just ate her corn bread and smiled her Mona Lisa smile and pretty much went her own way—which wasn’t difficult as she was on the inside of the joke and knew very well why Sam wasn’t walking her to church every week or making any loverlike moves toward her in public. She also knew why he blushed to the tip of his hairline at the mention of his slow courtship, because he was living a double life, old Sam Lense was. And so was she.

  • • •

  They’d fallen into it easily, almost innocently, on a stifling afternoon in early October when they dropped by Sam’s camper so he could change into his swimsuit for a quick dip in the river, and to pick up a letter that Lena had sent to Jolie via her mother, who’d in turn given it to Sam to pass on. It was the first time Jolie had seen the inside of his little camper—an ancient Gulf Stream borrowed from an uncle that had seen better days, all curled linoleum and stacked boxes.

  Sam was self-conscious about the rust and the shabbiness of the place and kept apologizing about it in a way that Jolie found touching, especially given his open acceptance of the limitations of the parsonage, and Uncle Ott’s old shack. Perhaps she most loved this aspect of his personality—very much akin to the appreciation she’d felt for Lena when she’d joined Bethel and started calling Jolie’s father Big Daddy. Sam never went that far, never became anyone’s pet, but he was genuinely respectful of the Old Man, and polite to the poor people on the river, so accepting that he couldn’t understand it when she thanked him. He just wasn’t raised in Hendrix, didn’t realize how much crap her father took, all the time, because he was old and poor and handicapped and odd-looking, a Holy Roller who talked like a hillbilly from hell.

  Carl and Jolie knew it well and reacted in their own ways, Carl with hell-raising defiance, Jolie with tacit withdrawal and steel-eyed challenge. She’d spent a good part of her youth in careful and constant patrol of her emotional borders, not realizing how exhausting it was till she sat down on the edge of his tiny bed in that camper that afternoon and read Lena’s letter before they left. Even in the close quarters of the camper, he took care to be cautious and modest, changing in the truly minuscule bathroom, and came out to find Jolie sitting there on the edge of his bed with Lena’s letter open on her lap, her face set and bothered.

  “Sure you don’t want to dive in?” he asked, as it was still miserably hot, even in October.

  Jolie just shrugged, for Lena’s letter read like all her other letters from Savannah, full of laughter and chatter and details of her new life, of classes and professors and projects and parties. Jolie had never once been jealous of Lena’s beauty, had never even envied her lighthearted disregard for all the old Rules and Regulations of the Church, at least not till then. Sitting there in the hot little camper, reading about Lena’s new life and her education and the waters of the great world she was drinking of so freely, Jolie was overwhelmed by a terrible sense of loss, hard enough to make her eyes water.

  When she didn’t answer, Sam asked, “Jolie? Are you all right?”

  She just lifted the letter. “I’m fine. Jealous, I guess.”

  “Of what?” he asked with his old curiosity.

  She looked at him sadly. “Of everything, everyone. Everybody on earth who gets to live, but me.”

  It wasn’t the first he’d seen of that caged-bird frustration in her, the passive-aggressive moodiness of the good girl, restrained from life, bound by rules and culture and family bonds. He knew it was part of the bargain, part of her strength, and sat beside her and tried to console her.

  “You live. You go to school. How is Lena doing any better than that?”

  Jolie just shook her head, unable to articulate the frustration of being who she was.

  “Well, what exactly do you want?” he pressed. “To pledge a sorority and date a Kappa Alpha and wear a mum to the Homecoming Game?”

  Jolie didn’t smile at his teasing, just met his eye levelly and answered in a small, honest voice, “No. I want you.”

  Sam ignored the sudden, hard pounding in his chest, told her in a friendly way, “For what? To be your boyfriend? Take you to eat at the café every Friday and pick up the tab?”

  She shook her head. “No,” she whispered. “Just you.”

  He lifted her face and kissed her for the first time, and it was so sweet, it was disorienting, made him forget what they were talking about. He was on to other things, easing her to her back, feeling for her buttons, though she wouldn’t let him, but wiggled away and sat up, murmured, “No. Sam. You know I cain’t.”

  He did indeed know it and didn’t even argue, just lay there a moment, then rubbed his face and came to his feet. “Well, if I’m gonna jump in the water, I need to get moving.”

  They walked down to the pier in the waning October light, and he dove right in, though Jolie wouldn’t join him, afraid of the current, and respectful of the alligators—four-foot ones, only visible by their eyes, which haunted the margin of the murky mud and hydrilla on the shallow end of the bay. Sam hadn’t lived on the river long enough to have any dogs or small animals dragged off and at the end of the dock dove in the deep water that was getting cold in October, but still swimmable. The shock of cold helped him regain a small bit of his brain, enough to try to talk Jolie into joining him, but she refused, just sat there on the end of the dock and watched him swim. Mr. Lucas came by in the golf cart and asked if she’d got the letter from Lena. She told him she had, and he waved and drove away, and Sam got out and walked Jolie back to the camper, holding her hand on the way, Jolie telling him she needed to get home soon. It was almost six; her father would be wanting supper.

  Sam agreed, said he needed to take a shower, that he’d hurry. When they got to the camper, he got his shower kit and a towel off the line and left her sitting there in the twilight on the edge of the bed, wondering why she was so different from the rest of humanity. Wondering how Lena could live such a carefree life, while she, Jolie Hoyt, had to carry the weight of Southern history on her back. She was still thinking it when Sam came back in
his towel and cologne and sat down next to her on the bed and kissed her again, and this time she said to hell with it. Maybe it was the cologne, or that she’d worn a snap-up shirt, the kind with cowboy buttons up the front that made that first move easy, just rip, and it was open to the lace bra, and Sam was half-dressed and that made it quick, too.

  Or maybe it was just youth and loneliness, Jolie starving for the feel of mouth on mouth, skin on skin, for taste and scent and smell, and she’d never had anyone kiss her like that before, much less work her out of a bra, touch her breasts, a sensation like nothing she’d ever before felt, the reality of the heat and the river and the ratty, little camper dissolving around her.

  Sam was the more experienced of the two and actually not quite as lost to orbit (yet). Throughout the slow and sensual undress, the bite and the exploring kisses, the feel of her hair (silky) and her taste (of garlic, from the pizza they’d bought for lunch), he could hear the faint voice of his father, Leonard, calling him dimly, as from a great distance. It was as if Leonard were standing in his front yard in Coral Gables, his hands held to his mouth, shouting, “Sam! This is a serious thing! This is a young girl! What the hell are you thinking?” Sam succeeded in ignoring him till right at the point of departure, when he actually rolled off the bed, told Jolie he was going back to the shower to get dressed—thinking that he could put some distance here, but it was too late, at least for Jolie. His hands and his mouth felt too good—not rushed and impersonal, but light and loving, the kind of nurturing she’d been robbed of, fifteen years too early, when her mother died, and her father took to his shed. Just as she was regaining that magical connection of flesh on flesh, of life and intensity and warm-lipped consolation, he wanted to leave? To take a shower?

  She didn’t think she heard him right and sat up and pushed back her hair, said, “What?”

  “A shower,” he repeated, in about as much of a daze as she was, pointing toward it as if giving directions to a stranger.

  “No,” she said, and when he still didn’t move, she kicked her heels on the covers like a spoiled child. “It’s too late—too late.”

  That was about the end of the debate. She was just too inviting, a study in contrasts, even in bed: white skin, black hair, pink-tipped perfection. The image of his father was erased as he climbed back on the bed and found her mouth, and like many a well-intentioned couple before them, they were soon over the river and through the woods, to grandmother’s house they had gone.

  In a manner of speaking.

  When it was over and they blinked back to the reality of the ratty little camper and the river and the stillness of the late-October afternoon, they didn’t have the luxury of lying there and whispering endearments, but realized with a nasty little jolt that the clock on the table showed six forty-five. Sam jumped off the bed like a jackrabbit and dug through his hamper till he found yet another couple of towels, and they jogged down to the showers (men’s and women’s, respectively) and scrubbed off all evidence of foul play, then dried and redressed and combed their hair and waved at Mr. Lucas when he passed them again in the golf cart. Then Sam raced her home through Hendrix, got her there at five after seven, though her father had been sidetracked by a parishioner at the church, and they found the house dark and empty.

  Sam had time for one more kiss, there in the drive, then gripped Jolie’s shoulders and told her that he loved her and would never leave her, never! Never! And never, under any circumstances, would he ever ask her to iron his pants.

  He said it with a face that was just wildly honest and sure and intent, making Jolie—she of the long-dead mother and a world of abandonment issues—blink at him a moment in silent amazement, then, six weeks after Lena had left, press her face to his neck and finally, finally cry.

  Chapter Six

  Whether they were tears of regret or relief, happiness or impending doom, Jolie didn’t know. She just wiped her face on her shirt, then went inside and made some sort of last-minute change of supper plans that her father never commented on, never noticed. He had no reason for suspicion, as Sam was long gone by the time he came in, and Jolie was cooking in the kitchen in one of her mother’s old aprons, telling him what was on for supper, that he needed to wash his hands.

  So it went, through the long and unseasonably warm autumn, with all the attendant satisfaction of love and lust and lying chest to chest with someone you adore. And the guilt, too, and everything else that went with it: the “When was your last period?” and “I’ll get some condoms” and “You better not buy ’em in Hendrix” and “Do I look like an idiot?” and so on and so forth.

  The duplicity of it all would sometimes assault both of them at odd moments in the day, and for a brief instant it would seem reprehensible, so foreign to their natures that surely this was another couple who spent their afternoons in wide-open, naked bliss in a seedy camper on the river. Surely a straight shooter such as Sam Lense wasn’t cuckolding a harmless old preacher, eating his food and discussing the Ark of the Covenant and screwing his only daughter right under his nose; and it wasn’t Jolie Hoyt, either.

  Not she, who hated Carl’s womanizing; who went to church like clockwork and prayed every day and baked Sister Noble a birthday cake on her eighty-second birthday; who wrote her best friend, Lena, long and chatty letters about her new classes, Fine Arts (which she liked) and Algebra (which she did not). Even with Lena her afternoons with Sam were ignored; denied as a matter of emotional survival, her life falling neatly into two separate worlds: her public life and her private, two separate parts of an uneasy whole.

  The public part was breakfast with her father and Sam driving her to school, stopping to do research at the courthouse or to interview one of the far-flung Creek families. The private began as soon as humanly possible, when they’d hurry back to the camper and indulge in the insane suspension of time that was good, sweet, and loving sex. Sam called them her “afternoon classes”: four hours of humid-autumn languor, spent mostly in bed and mostly naked, the little camper too small to get dressed in before it was time to officially go, and too hot to dress anyway. Between lovemaking and explaining lovemaking (Sam was then, and ever, a great diffuser of information) he would prop himself up on pillows on the tiny bed and exclaim with academic enthusiasm over every aspect of her beauty. He left nothing out, but rejoiced to the heavens in her little feet, her long legs, her green eyes, the moistness of her lady parts, and the absolute Cadillac-quality of her breasts. He boldly proclaimed her the most beautiful woman in Florida.

  “That would be Lena,” she said, though Sam would have none of it.

  “Lena, my ass. I’ve hugged Lena. She’s a two-by-four with long hair. You should be cast in plaster of paris. You should be in a museum,” he declaimed with perfect sincerity, as he was, by then, cold stone in love, and, in the tradition of all great Jewish romantics, anxious to go legit: sign lifelong vows, alert the media.

  Jolie agreed to the engagement, but hesitated to go public so soon. “People will talk,” she warned, with a wariness that, to Sam, defied logic.

  “About what? You mean the Jewish thing?”

  “No,” she insisted. “The us thing. Daddy’s a preacher. He has to be careful about appearances. He almost lost his church because of Carl wild-assing around. I can’t do that to him.”

  “This isn’t wild-assing,” Sam said testily. “This is love,” though Jolie was hardly convinced.

  “Close enough. Just give me a little space here,” she begged. “I’ll talk to him, soon.”

  In the meanwhile, the old Sisters shook their heads over Jolie’s lack of skill in cornering her man, and the calendar flipped to November, and the early tendrils of autumn finally began to arrive, the wild cherry and Virginia creeper turning gold, then crimson red, and the hickories, older and tougher, waiting on the first official freeze before they gave up their summer green.

  Sam had been on the river almost three months and had accumulated a wealth of research; had even forwarded the first draft o
f his official thirty-seven-page study to the museum, along with a voluminous box of miscellaneous notes, tapes, and pedigree charts, attached to the appropriate census. He’d also culled the record for the scant details of Morris’s time in the area and pinpointed the approximate location of the old store—lost to the woods, with not so much as a foundation to mark it.

  He’d not made any headway on finding Morris’s grave, but at least had a mental map of the area for when he returned to the search at UF. He had obviously gone as far as he could go this round and would have pulled up stakes and left immediately if not for Jolie, who told him she loved him twice a day, but continued to drag her feet about taking it to the next level.

  Sam was cut to the quick by her hesitance, forced to revert to sarcasm to convince her. “Well, it’s not me, Jol—it’s my penis. He’s calling the shots these days, refuses to leave without you. It’s so annoying.”

  Jolie didn’t laugh, but advised him with all seriousness, “Well, tell him to hush awhile. I’m moving as fast as I can. And who’ll take care of Daddy if I leave? Carl? A nursing home?”

  “Jol—you’d have already moved to Savannah if things had worked out. He doesn’t want you stuck in Hendrix—and the term is almost over. I’ve got to get the camper back to Miami and file my great Indian study—and, shit, Jol, I don’t want to leave you. Let me talk to him, in private. If he doesn’t bite, I’ll give it a rest and come back after Christmas and try again.”