American Ghost

by Janis Owens

  She didn’t react to it at all, only looked at him with pity. “Yeah? And since when has love done anything for anybody in Hendrix—but make more gheechies, and more shacks, and more raggedy-ass children in the free-lunch line?” She didn’t wait on his answer, just hoisted her book bag to her shoulder. “Thanks for the ride.” Just like that, the door shut; she was gone.

  Chapter Seven

  It was their first (and only) fight, one that kept Sam tossing and turning most of the night, as a fast-moving front dipped down from the Carolinas and collided with the warm Gulf winds, producing thunder and lightning worthy of Zeus. In an hour, the blanket of humidity that tented the river was blown away, replaced with the kind of dry, brisk air he used to lie in bed and dream of back in August. Even then he couldn’t sleep, but lay there in his narrow, little bunk and tried to pinpoint exactly what he’d said that had set Jolie off. He hadn’t been paying that much attention, hadn’t meant to insult the old Sisters, though he was disappointed that their acceptance of him was based on little more than a racial stereotype. Jolie might think it odd and charming, but he knew from experience that such generalizations were shifting sands, that it only took one wrong move by him for them to go from happy acceptance of the Rich Jew to seething contempt for the Shifty Jew, the Cheap Yid—the possibilities were endless.

  The more he thought about it, the madder he got, and not until almost dawn did he finally get to sleep, only to be wakened at first light by a savage pounding on the door, and a rough, unfamiliar voice calling, “Sam? Sam Lense? Boy, git yo ass out here, right now!”

  Some primeval part of his brain must have been expecting such a thing, as he hit the floor running, pulling on pants and searching for a weapon, wondering how close Vic Lucas would be that time of the day.

  Whoever was pounding on the door—and there was more than one from the sound of it—meant business, and with no place to hide he braced himself in the flimsy doorframe, then kicked it open with one mighty blow.

  There was a fast, solid thud and a yelp of pain from someone behind the door, but he didn’t stop to investigate. He bounded out, taking five gazelle leaps toward the road before he saw Lena standing aside, laughing, in jeans and a fuzzy lime-green sweater, Jolie beside her, looking not nearly as amused, also in jeans, and an oversize flannel shirt she’d filched from him the week before. “It’s a joke!” Lena cried, then said to someone behind the door, “Are you all right?”

  The flimsy trailer door swung shut and a good-size young man stood, yelping profanity and clutching his right hand. “Damn, son, you nearly took my hand off.”

  “Lucky he didn’t take your head off,” Jolie observed drily, then introduced them offhandedly, a little distracted, “Sam, this is the Idiot Carl. Carl, Sam.”

  He was larger in person than he’d appeared in his high school pictures, clearly his father’s son in size, six-two, well over two hundred pounds, with the Hoyt eyes, braced with good-natured laugh lines and ruler-straight brows.

  He seemed to bear Sam no ill will for his injured hand, just flexed it a couple of times, then held it out for a shake. “Pleased to meet you,” he said, his smile, when he finally bestowed it, as charming as his sister’s.

  Sam shook hands by rote, still a little shaken, then was enveloped in one of Lena’s tight spider hugs, and her run of piping chatter: “I never got home at all last night—stopped at Jolie’s to help her cook—like, sixty people are coming. I told Big Daddy—you need to divide and conquer next year. People’ll have to eat on the porch. . . .”

  She was clearly excited by Carl’s return, her face high-colored, her eyes as light as a child’s at Christmas. She might have stood there, with Sam in his boxers, and talked till lunch if Jolie hadn’t intervened with a glance at her watch.

  “Lena—baby, you better go get the ice. Make it twenty pounds,” she told them as they departed. “We’ll pick you up in the truck. Ten minutes. Hurry.”

  Sam went inside and sat down on the unmade bed, Jolie following, closing the door behind her and apologizing for her brother. “I’m sorry I’m kin to such an imbecile. If I’d have known he was going to do that, I’d a left him home. And I’m sorry I was so grouchy yesterday. It’s too much, feeding all the Hoyts at one go. It always gets me on edge.” When Sam still didn’t speak, she asked, “Are you all right?”

  He looked at her. “That scared the hell out of me.”

  Jolie tried not to smile, but it was hard; he looked too annoyed, positively pouting. “Well, I told you I was sorry. He’s a big practical joker, my brother. It’s one of his annoying traits. One of many.”

  “And I’m not a rich Jew,” Sam added with that same petulance. “I been thinking about it all night, and it really pisses me off.”

  Jolie tried even harder not to smile. “I never said you were. And I told you it’d make you mad.”

  He lay back on the bed and rubbed his eyes. “Well, how would you like it if my brothers said I was marrying you for your tits?”

  Jolie finally smiled and lay beside him. “I’ll give you fifty dollars if that ain’t exactly what they say, the minute they lay eyes on me. Or think it, anyway.”

  Sam covered his face with his pillow. “Well, I’m not going to anybody else’s house for supper. And I’m not taking any more cheese.”

  She got the pillow away from him and kissed him, long and light. “That’ll teach ’em to mess with old Sam Lense,” she murmured.

  He lost his ill-humor pretty quickly and was trying to roll her into place, but she wiggled away. “No—not now. No time. I need to go by the IGA for Jell-O—and I have to get home and check on the turkey. D’you want to meet the Hoyts smelling like sperm? And they’re coming right back—”

  He obeyed, albeit reluctantly, asking as he dressed, “Well, what’s got into Lena? She’s like a kid in a candy store.”

  “She and Carl are back on.” Jolie perched on the edge of the bed and not looking too happy about the reunion. “She pulled in at midnight; kept me up half the night yammering about it. Claims he popped the question and she said yes.”

  “To marriage?” Sam felt for his shoes. “Isn’t that kind of quick?”

  “They’ve been dating since Lena was fourteen.”

  “That is barbaric,” he muttered offhandedly.

  “That is Hendrix,” Jolie answered drily, as if stating an equal fact.

  • • •

  The house was already full when they got home. The tiny living room, dining room, kitchen, and both porches were cramped with a collection of rickety, mismatched church tables and equally ancient folding chairs, so flimsy that the buffalo-size patriarchs deemed them unfit for use. “Baby, thet thang’ll fold like a pocketknife, I set my fat tail on it,” her uncle James complained when Jolie tried to seat him in the dining room.

  She redirected him to the living room, where her father and three of his brothers ate dinner sitting squashed on the groaning, old sofa, four abreast, using their shelflike bellies to rest their plates. In a tradition as old as the river, the men ate first, with the women serving, and the children sometimes not eating till a third or fourth seating (inspiring the old advice: take a cold potato and wait). The only modern concession to this ancient custom was that female outsiders—girlfriends and miscellaneous pickups—were allowed to eat with their dates, though this was a relatively new twist, and if any of the men needed something not in immediate view—pepper sauce or ice or extra napkins—they had no compunction in sending any available woman to the kitchen to fetch it, even if they didn’t know her name (sweetheart and baby girl would suffice).

  Lena was the only woman in the dining room, though squeezed between the china cabinet and table, and the role of maidservant fell to her, not just for Carl, but every other man in the room. On her fourth trip to the kitchen to refill tea glasses or fetch ice or pepper sauce, Jolie gave her the same advice she’d given her the night before when she’d announced her engagement: “Run for your life.”

  Lena laughed, as
she was in her element, basking in the glow of Carl’s renewed attention in a way that made Jolie want to strangle her. Jolie was equally annoyed at her slightly disheveled fiancé, who for all his bold socialist ways seemed to be fitting like a hand in a glove into the old Hoyt caste system, sitting at Carl and Lena’s table and, from all appearances, having the time of his life, laughing his ass off at all the usual Hoytling banter.

  It began the moment Carl walked in, as he was considered as spoiled as Jolie and was the target of a lot of in-family needling. After a great bear hug of greeting, his cousin Ricky bellowed, “Carl, son, look at you! Ye’re gitting fat as yer daddy.”

  Carl was as used to the dozen as Jolie and hadn’t blinked an eye, but patted his stomach with good-natured resignation, telling him, “Yeah, well, you know the Hoyts, Rick. We git old, we go fat or ugly. And we can sho see which way you went.”

  So it went, all afternoon long, this back-and-forth needling that Jolie was frequently drawn into. She was considered famously spoiled where women’s work was concerned, and whenever she showed her face in the dining room, one or another of her cousins would pause in his teeth-picking to call, “Jolee? Shug? Would you git me some mo’ tea?”

  She answered with flipped birds that they gleefully reported to her father, calling, “Uncle Ray? Yo daughter’s making them obscene gestures behind yo back agin,” all in a tone of teasing hilarity, nothing serious. Uncle Ray had made his bones in Hendrix years ago, and even as a stoop-shouldered, gray-haired old man, he wasn’t anyone you’d care to cross, especially in the matter of his darling Jolee.

  Sam watched it all with great enjoyment, as the Hoyts were good for entertainment value, if nothing else, their fast, high drawls more turnip than julep, their physical presence a lively thing, full of slaps, pokes, and bellows of laughter. As Jolie had warned, they were dressed for the hunt in boots and camo, and full of macho swagger, bragging about bucks and points and tossing off racial invective so casually that it almost seemed like vaudeville. It was as if they were playing the part of the trash-talking redneck as Carl had that morning at the river, in a merry, green-eyed jest. (“You want Cracker? We’ll give you Cracker.”)

  When they were done eating, they finally released the table to the womenfolk and retired to the front porch so they could sip a little dessert whiskey from quietly passed pocket flasks and smoke hand-rolled Bugler cigarettes. Sam cared for neither, but joined them there to listen to their roll of fast, semi-understandable conversation, beginning to wonder if he should relinquish the Muskogee Creek to the titled historians and do his thesis on these, their lesser known, mixed-blood cousins.

  Once they had a little liquor in them, they were happy to talk race, jovially and openly, the younger men trotting out all the old myths of origin, mostly to do with the Black Irish and Black Dutch. The older men weren’t so sanguine about such open disclosure, and Ray’s oldest brother, the wheezing Uncle Earl, denied any aboriginal blood at all.

  Sam listened impassively, arms crossed on his chest, and commented, “Pure white,” in answer.

  He was quoting the oral histories of the Croatan Indians, who self-described in such a way in their fight for separate schools in the early part of the century. He didn’t mean to offend, but got a hard look from the old man and a hoot of laughter from the younger in response, as if he’d said something audaciously clever.

  Before anyone could speak, Brother Hoyt had jumped in to explain to his brothers—all nearly as deaf as Ott—that Sam was going to school at the university, studying the Indians in the Forest.

  The old men reacted with looks of blank astonishment to this odd pronouncement, one of them asking with apparent sincerity if he’d found any.

  “Oh, yeah,” Sam assured him. “Twenty-seven families, all legal and supported, winging their way to the museum as we speak—including the Hoyts, who are Creek through the Ammons line, which is nice, because they were matrilineal—the Creek.”

  They nodded in silent amazement at the strange bit of news and spoke no more of it, as the short autumn afternoon was already losing its brightness, the sun west of the old cemetery across the highway, casting the Spanish moss in long shadow. The young men soon loaded up and returned to the woods for one more run with the dogs before it got dark. The old men were too old for such nonsense and sat in their rockers and ironed out the last-minute details of their annual Thanksgiving trip to the family fish camp, four miles south of the public landing. The weatherman in Panama City was predicting frost before sunrise, but the old diehards still planned to take the boats out, gamely inviting Sam along, promising him catfish and reds, trout to die for, “cooked on a spit, just like the old days.”

  Sam didn’t require much persuasion as the Hoyt Camp was a local legend, so far down the river that it was only accessible by boat. This was the home of all-night poker games and a particularly potent moonshine flavored with blood oranges, called Bounce (because one sip of it would bounce you on your ass). He was game for a firsthand look, thinking he might talk one of them into wading into the woods to the edge of Camp Six, so he could try to locate the exact location of old Morris’s store.

  When he went to the kitchen and told Jolie, she rounded on him with the same sharpness she’d rounded on her cousins. “You are not.”

  Sam might have contracted a small case of testosterone poisoning from his afternoon in the company of the Hoyts, as he snapped back, “I am so. I’ve been here three months, haven’t fished yet. And I’m here to study the Creek.”

  Jolie’s only helper was one of her uncle Earl’s great-granddaughters, a spunky blond eight-year-old named Ashley, who was drying a plate with a dish towel. She looked about as thrilled as Jolie with the Hoyt division of labor and piped up in a quarrelsome voice, “Pawpaw says we’re Cherokee.”

  “Pawpaw’s an idiot,” Sam murmured. Then, to Jolie: “We’ll be back tomorrow, or Saturday. Ott says we need to leave—have to get there before dark.”

  She didn’t seem to have heard him, but absently wiped her hands. “Does Deddy know?”

  Sam rolled his eyes. “I’m twenty-four, Jolie. I don’t have to ask Deddy’s permission to go fishing.”

  She blinked at the mimic, then pinned him with a cold eye. “Well, good. Have fun. I hope you freeze your ass off.”

  Ashley laughed, though Sam set his jaw. “Good. I will,” he said, and left Jolie to the pans, the front-porch screen slapping shut behind him after a moment with a solid thwack.

  Jolie didn’t go after him, just returned to the dishes with her face carefully lowered so Ashley wouldn’t see her tears and run to tell Uncle Ray or her pawpaw that Jolie and Sam had a fight; that Jolie was standing in the kitchen crying. She just thanked Ashley for helping, then sent her away. Jolie was not only tired, but sadder than sad, tears of outrage beginning to run down her cheeks in quiet little rivulets.

  She was careful to wipe them away before anyone saw them, the house empty when Lena wandered in an hour later and found Jolie still working on the last of the dishes, the counters piled high with all manner of plates and pans and turkey utensils. Lena knew she was in trouble the moment she saw her. “My gosh, Jol—you’re still at it? Where’s Sam?”

  “He’s going to the fish camp,” Jolie answered in a small voice, making no more of it, though Lena was enough of an insider to understand the significance of this event and raised her eyebrows in surprise.

  “Does your daddy know?” At Jolie’s brief shake of her head, Lena asked with a mischievous grin, “Want me to run out to the shed and tell ’im?”

  Jolie shook her head and concentrated on the dishes, till Lena detected the tears, which she found alarming, as Jolie never cried, never. Not when she didn’t make National Honor Society (though she had the grade point), not even when her mother died (or so claimed Carl). Lena took Jolie by her shoulders and pulled her away from the sink, told her, “Come on, Jol. What’s he gonna do at the camp tonight with that old pack of geezers? Play poker? Drink beer—or, horror of horro
rs, find one of those ancient old titty magazines in the john?”

  Jolie didn’t smile at the gibe, just wiped her face on the hem of her apron. “I asked him not to go.”

  “Well, he can’t help himself. When men get a pack like this—going fishing, going hunting, playing football—they turn into wolves, all stay together. Let him spend the night on the water, instead of by the water, and he’ll get a little inkling of the price you pay to run with the Hoyt pack. He’ll probably go to the altar Sunday, get saved. Just think how the Sisters will shout—a sinner from the fish camp comes home.”

  Jolie finally smiled at that, and Lena gave her a friendly shake. “Go to bed. I’ll finish up here. You don’t look so hot.”

  “I don’t feel so hot.”

  “Then get some rest. We’ll go to Dothan tomorrow for the big Christmas sale at Belk’s; eat trout amandine with the old folk at Morrison’s. ’K?”

  Jolie was too tired to argue and nodded wordlessly as she untied her apron and handed it over, then thanked Lena and went down the hall to bed, almost bumping into Sam as he came around the corner in a jog. His face was red-tipped from the cold, harassed but conciliatory. “Are you all right? We’re pulling out—but I won’t go if you’re gonna get mad.”

  Jolie was relieved to tears that he’d cared enough to come back. She gripped him in a tight hug, her eyes closed at his chest. “I’m not mad. Just be careful. Be careful. It’s a dangerous place,” she whispered, barely audible. For a moment she stood there, holding him tight, then stepped back and wiped her eyes. “Did you bring your coat? It’ll be freezing on the water.”

  “There’s no time,” he said, backing to the front door, which was open to the screen, the front yard full of brake lights and boat lights, everyone all packed and ready to pull out, apparently waiting for Sam. “I’ll be all right,” he assured her, though Jolie wasn’t so sure.

  “This camp isn’t by the water—it’s on the water,” she tried to explain, but he wouldn’t listen, just called and waved, told her he’d be fine; he’d be home in the morning.