American Ghost

by Janis Owens

  Within the year, his tiny church had swelled to such a size that he rented a local theater, then a local stadium, for his Sunday services, till his own sanctuary was done, a modern monstrosity of glass and metal. Built to seat seven thousand, it was already at overcapacity the day it opened, with plans to build yet another, more elaborate church next door. Carl was a great proponent of the Prosperity Doctrine, which taught that you were blessed according to what you gave. He expected a 10 percent cut of every income of those in his church and mostly got it, his lifestyle leaping from modest to millionaire, seemingly overnight, with all the attendant perks: the McMansion and designer suits; the trips to Steamboat; and the obligatory Rolex—to Carl’s father’s undying amazement, after Lena told him how much it had cost. “You don’t mean it” was his stunned response.

  Jolie thought it little short of heretic, but her barbs and teasing were all in fun, as they were still allies, she and Carl and Lena, bound in part by the mystery of Sam’s shooting, though Sam himself was never mentioned.

  He was dead in Jolie’s mind, gone beyond retrieval, living the high life in the academic enclaves of South Florida, or the newsrooms of Miami, or wherever the hell he had actually come from. Or so she thought, till the week of her father’s birthday, when she took him to the café for a rare night out on the town.

  She was sitting across from him in one of the back booths, trying to convince him that paying $5.99 for all-you-can-eat shrimp wasn’t highway robbery, when a tall, faintly familiar man paused as he passed their booth, then stopped short, seeming to recognize her father.

  “Brother Hoyt?” He smiled, then held out his hand for a shake.

  “Well, Wes Dennis,” her father replied, feeling for his cane and trying to struggle to his feet with his good country manners, to shake the man’s hand.

  Wes was an old friend of Carl’s, another wild-child preacher’s son who’d once been busted for selling marijuana at youth camp. He had become much more presentable in adulthood, in the kind of casual WASP-wear that Hugh favored, chambray and khaki, but not nearly as well ironed. Wes stood there and chatted awhile. Jolie told him about her job, and they discussed Carl’s dazzling new house with appropriate eye-rolling all around—till the waitress was coming down the aisle with their shrimp, when Wes dropped his bombshell without warning. “Well, Jol, guess who’s my new smoking buddy at work?”

  She hadn’t the faintest idea, and at her shrug he grinned a small, insider grin. “Sam Lense,” he said, then paused, waiting for reaction.

  In this, he was disappointed, as Jolie stared at him levelly, wishing her father weren’t there so she could pass along an appropriate message. As it was, she accepted the plate from the waitress and busied herself with her napkin as her father smiled with genuine interest. “Well, I declare,” he breathed. “I ain’t seen him since he got shot. What’s he up to these days? Still out and about, studying the Injuns?”

  “Says he lived in Hendrix,” Wes answered with a ribald lift of an eyebrow at Jolie, “that you two were once an item.”

  She almost answered, Yeah, and I heard you were once a drug dealer.

  But she didn’t want to ruin her father’s birthday, and in a stab at civil retreat, she stood suddenly and said she needed to wash her hands. She left her father to get rid of the idiot, which he did, making short work of it.

  When she returned from the bathroom, Wes was gone, and her father, ever the gentleman, was waiting for her before he started his shrimp.

  “Sorry,” she told him as she sat down, and they held hands and prayed, then began eating. Jolie’s appetite was not what it had been ten minutes before, which didn’t escape her father’s notice.

  He plowed into his shrimp for a silent few minutes, then finally commented mildly, “So ol’ Sam got him a spot at the state. Good for him. I hope he’s happy.”

  “I don’t,” she countered quickly, without thinking, so witheringly honest that her father sat down his fork.

  “What’s got into you?”

  Jolie refused to pursue it. She waved her father away and gave up any pretense of eating, just sat there hunched in her coat, wearily regarding the narrow little restaurant that looked and smelled much as it had that fateful night she’d first laid eyes on Sam. Six years had passed, but she could remember it so clearly: his curious gray eyes when they sat down, checking out the ceiling tile, the jukebox, missing nothing; his face when he lifted his glass and made his toast. (“To the Lower Creek Nation, and Big Mama, one of history’s great survivors. May her grandchildren haunt the swamp till the end of their days, and Old Hickory be her yard boy in the Great Hereafter.”)

  A great line, she thought.

  A great love, briefly.

  She could feel her eyes begin to water and wrestled a napkin from the dispenser. She sat there with it pressed to her eyes while her father ate in silence, not having much to offer by way of comfort. He finished his shrimp, then pushed his plate aside and, for the first and last time, addressed what he had just that moment realized was a great heartbreak in his daughter’s life, a first love gone sadly wrong.

  He was an old man by then and knew he was dying, so he didn’t waste his breath with useless questions, just assured her, “Well, don’t worry it, sister. You leave it to the Lord—He’ll settle it. People think they can treat people bad and get away with it, but nobody gits away with nothing in this ol’ life. Sooner or later the chickens come home to roost.”

  He offered this with confidence, as it was one of his favorite pulpit proclamations, a variation on the doctrine of sowing and reaping that meant that every human act, no matter how well concealed, would eventually bear consequences, as roving chickens always returned to roost at sundown.

  Jolie was not overly comforted by the notion, a lack her father seemed to realize as he offered nothing more, just wiped his hands thoroughly on his napkin, then concluded with a little less Christian forbearance, “Well, I know one thang: I know I wisht I’d a never let thet trifling sum bitch step foot in my house. I know thet.”

  It was a startling reversal—the first time in her life Jolie had ever heard her father use casual profanity. He sounded like a Saturday Night Live sketch on Carl’s pulpit style, so unexpected that she burst out laughing, even through her tears.

  “Well, listen to Old Jesus Hoyt.” She reached across the table and gripped his hand. “You ain’t careful, St. Carl of the Beach’ll quit telling them delightful little stories about you on the television every week. People’ll quit sending him money, and we’ll go back to being po,” she teased, as Carl had got in the habit of frequently quoting his sainted, old Pentecostal father, painting him as wise and wonderful, a sort of backcountry Jesus.

  Ray was relieved to see his daughter’s face clear as she stood and offered him a hand. “Come on, Old Man. I’ll take you to Dairy Queen and buy you a Dilly bar. It may cost as much as a whole dollar, so brace yourself.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Sam Lense had dealt with his loss of Jolie the way that you deal with any unexpected death: denial, then anger, then, finally, resolution. The denial stage pretty much ended the night he heard she had left for Savannah. The anger came and went, for months, till he finally lost hope and gained a little perspective, figured that’s what Jolie had been trying to tell him with her moodiness those last few weeks, her reluctance to set a date. She couldn’t face up to him, tell him it was over. She’d had a hot little fling by the river, but thought better of marriage and had taken the opportunity to opt out and follow the ancient custom of her people and take to the swamp and lie low, wait for the outsiders to take a hint and get the hell out of Dodge.

  Like any grief, the sting from this brutal conclusion eventually faded, over time and with activity. The most lasting casualty was his love of anthropology. He simply lost interest, and no matter how many congratulatory letters Professor Keyes sent him, or how many inquiries he had from Native American researchers interested in discussing his work, he never went back to the commi
ttee, never answered their letters or even picked up his last paycheck. He didn’t pick up a paycheck of any denomination till June, when his mother finally tired of seeing him lounging around the house all day in his underwear and hooked him up with a job with HRS in Child Protection.

  She figured a good dose of cruel reality was just the ticket to launch him out of his self-absorbed apathy, and she was right. For compared to the lives of the clients on his caseload, he’d had a pretty cushy life, old Sam Lense had. He’d loved a woman who hadn’t loved him, had been shot in the back and left for dead, but at least he’d been a participant in his own tragedy, had made his choices and paid the price. His young clients in social services had never had the luxury of choice and sported worse scars than his at age six, with the certainty of more to come.

  In the light of their daily tragedies, he began to feel that maybe life hadn’t dealt him such a bad hand after all, that maybe that thing in West Florida had worked out for the best. On his orthodontist brother’s urging, he took up golf; on his lawyer brother’s urging, he started offshore fishing. He met a girl at a Halloween party named Leanne Gails who was about as far removed from Jolie Hoyt as the sun from the moon. The daughter of an anatomy professor at UW, she didn’t have Jolie’s attractive damage, or her mischief or haunted history, but a Finnish frame, a Nordic practicality, and a raw IQ so competitive that even his orthodontist brother never challenged her at the table or made any blond-shiksa jokes behind her back.

  By the anniversary of his near-death experience, he had a crappy job, but a noble one; a nurse girlfriend who thought the modest bullet hole in his back, and the web of scarring on his chest from the surgery was macho and hard-earned; and a family who were glad he was alive, who never harped at him, but beamed at his every move (even the new girlfriend, who they deemed a little too quick to be serious, but otherwise harmless). All in all, he was pretty set, and when Lea turned up pregnant that January, he wasted no time in marrying her at his brother’s country club. Sam did it up right with his brothers as groomsmen, his father as best man.

  Sam prepared himself for a long and sun-kissed life of South Florida bliss, cried true tears of joy when his son was born that September, and named him Brice for no good reason that Sam could think of. It was Lea’s choice and a little yuppie and wannabe to his ears, but what the hell? He was a beautiful, fat baby, the love of Sam’s life the moment he laid eyes on him, a source of radiant, unending joy, which was just as well, because not long after his birth Sam’s marriage began showing signs of premature strain. When they were dating, Lea had been fine with his job with HRS, but once they were married, she began a campaign to get him to change careers while he was still young enough to swing it, to go into real estate or maybe become an aluminum-siding salesman. She also wasn’t crazy about his family anymore, thought they hovered a little too close and nosy over Brice, and wanted a little distance.

  She talked him into applying for half a dozen different supervisor jobs, and after a few months he succeeded in getting a (slightly) better-paying job as a financial officer in Economic Services in Tallahassee. For about a week they were happy, till the same old rot set in—how he didn’t make enough money and Brice got too many ear infections at the nursery, and Sam never talked to her, and on and on. Sam’s answer was to talk even less and to work longer and longer hours. He was relieved when she broke down and took a supervisor’s job at the state hospital at Three Rivers, which left them more time to do what they did best: love Brice and stay out of each other’s way.

  By then, Jolie Hoyt was but a distant memory, though when he relocated to North Florida, he occasionally ran into people with as thick an accent who volunteered they were natives of the area. Wes Dennis was such a man, a director in Protective Services who liked to brag that he had grown up in Calhoun County and lived to tell about it. Along the time that Sam’s marriage began to fail, Sam took up smoking, not as sport, but as a means of emotional survival. Wes was also a smoker, and they often found themselves in the smokers’ court on break and talked of the usual guy things: football and work and politics. Wes supported a handful of far-left causes with a zeal he claimed was the fruit of an overzealous fundamentalist childhood. He talked like a hillbilly when he wanted to make a point, but wore L.L. Bean and upscale field-wear, Tilley hats and Wallabees without socks.

  Sam never made any connection between Wes and Hendrix at all till sometime within striking distance of his divorce, in 1999 or 2000, when a flash of afternoon rain caught them outside and pinned them under a dripping stoop. While they waited for it to pass, Wes mentioned he was going to Washington County the next day for a district meeting, was stopping in Cleary at a little place called the City Café.

  “They specialize in shrimp—flash-fry it in a light batter, almost like a tempura,” Wes said with that smug sureness of the educated local who managed to look down his nose at nearly everyone: his extended family for being such unenlightened hillbillies; Yankees such as Sam for lacking the soul to appreciate barbecued goat or understand jazz.

  Sam was glad to top him for once and answered with a long draw on a Marlboro he’d bummed off him, “Yeah, I used to eat there, when I lived in Hendrix.”

  Wes’s eyes widened at that, so surprised he nearly sputtered. “You lived in Hendrix? My God, when?”

  Sam had never talked much about the Hendrix Interlude, as he sometimes remembered it, and shrugged to indicate it was a casual thing. “Not long. I was a fieldworker with the museum at UF, doing the grunt work for a grant.”

  “What in God’s name were they studying in Hendrix? Syphilis? Pig futures?”

  “Muskogee Creek. It was when they were trying to organize in West Florida, applying for state recognition.”

  Wes returned to his cigarette, a look of near awe on his face. “Well, you’re a braver man than I. Hendrix—place had a bad name. When we used to go to the beach, my mother used to make us cross the bridge in Blountstown to avoid it. That forest draws a strange citizenry. There used to be a coven of witches down there, and a Klan klavern, too.”

  Sam made a small noise of interest, wondered if he hadn’t inadvertently come in contact with charter members of both organizations, back in ’96. He didn’t offer anything else, though Wes would occasionally bring it up, once asking, “Well, where’d you stay when you lived on the river? One of those ratty old fish camps on the Dead Lakes? Let me tell you—if those walls could talk . . .”

  Wes rolled his eyes to demonstrate that he’d had his share of romps there, with the hot girls of Hendrix, though Sam smoked and shrugged. “No. I stayed at the KOA. But I dated a girl whose family owned a camp. Jolie Hoyt,” he added casually, as if they’d had a happy little college romance, had gone to the movies together, made out on the beach.

  Wes all but choked at the name. “You’re lying,” he coughed, even had to beat his chest a few times to get a breath. When he finally got it, he rasped, “My father—did I ever mention what he was?” Sam shook his head and Wes grinned. “An Assemblies of God preacher.”

  Sam felt a small flicker of sensation in his chest at the unexpected connection, though he managed to sound bored and distant. “Really? You knew the Hoyts?”

  “Oh, yeah, I knew the Hoyts. Me and Carl used to run around when we were young, when I had a car and he didn’t. He was a few years younger than me—my brother Fitch’s age—and one more piece of work, old Carl Hoyt. Mama told me he was back in religion in a big way—preaching down in Destin, or Navarre, one of those new megachurches. She saw him on TV, local cable.”

  Sam didn’t spend a lot of his discretionary time watching local-access Christian programming and shrugged at the news, though Wes laughed even harder. “Now that bunch, the Hoyts.” He grinned. “Now there are stories.”

  Sam only nodded in bare agreement and didn’t ask for details, too involved in his own domestic misery to care too much for any further history on the illustrious Hoyts. But it was clearly the single piece of life history Sam had ever shared with
Wes that interested him.

  Wes referred to them, on and off, for months to come, and in late December interrupted his moaning about the ’Noles’ performance in the play-offs to snap his fingers and say, “Guess who I ran into Saturday, in Cleary? Jolie Hoyt, in the flesh,” he said with that wolfish grin. “She’s working for Hughie Altman—you know the Altmans? Own half the county, the bank? She’s doing some kind of design thing; said Carl was getting rich as Midas, peddling salvation to the masses. I told her I worked with you.”

  Sam was too proud to ask what her reaction had been, and Wes was too much of a sadist to offer it freely, had to tease him. “You know what she said?”

  Sam shook his head, and Wes grinned even wider. “Not a thing. Not a damn thing. She got up and went to the john, was eating with her father, old Brother Hoyt. He looks like hell, walking with a cane. She had to help him out.”

  Sam was forced to ask, “So they’re still in Hendrix?”

  “Oh, yeah. Or at least Brother Hoyt. I don’t know about Jolie.”

  “Is she married?”

  In reply, Wes (whom Sam was beginning to despise) grinned his big, redneck grin. “Not that I noticed. Though her and Altman, they must have some kind of arrangement. He’s forking over plenty of money to set her up in business, must be getting more than a cut of the profits. Ol’ Jol has that ripe, snotty look of a kept woman—and the attitude. God, the attitude.”