by Nancy Rue
I forgot Kade Capelli, Willa Livengood, even Troy Irwin. “What’s wrong?” I said. “Is Desmond okay?”
“I‘m not sure, actually,” she said. “He’s fine physically. He doesn’t even know I’m calling you.”
“Why are you?” I didn’t mean to sound testy, but really, I was coming to the end of today’s rope.
“I thought he was studying for today’s test.”
“He was. We went over the material last night. He knew it all cold.” I didn’t mention that I hadn’t had time to take him on the historical tour we’d talked about. I was already feeling guilty enough and I didn’t even know where the conversation was going.
“Something happened, then, because he got to class late, and he was in one of those places again, like I told you about. Very distracted and anxious. I gave him a minute before I started him on the test, but he just sat there and stared at it all period. When he turned it in, he hadn’t even written his name on the paper.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I. I kept him after class and asked him about it, but all he said was … Here, I wrote it down.” I heard the rustle of paper. “He said, ‘History don’t mean nothin’ anyway. It’s all about now and tomorrow. That’s all.’” The paper crackled again. “Does that mean anything to you?”
“Not at the moment,” I said. “But I’ll talk to him.”
“I hope you can, because, really? I’ve never seen him like this. It’s like he’s completely shut down.”
Right now, that sounded like a decent option.
CHAPTER SIX
God apparently had other plans because I didn’t shut down. My angst and fear were so large and close, I’d have had better luck dodging a team of bouncers down at Scarlett O’Hara’s.
It didn’t seem that Desmond had closed down either. At least that was what he tried to make me believe when I picked him up after school. He was wearing the curled-lip expression of disdain he always put on when I showed up with the van.
“Why we got to ride in this tired ol’ thing?” he said as he climbed in.
“Because I haven’t had a chance to get the si—the backrest fixed on the bike.”
“I don’t need no stinkin’ bar. I know how to hold on.”
“Forget it. I don’t want to have to buy one of those T-shirts.”
“What T-shirts?”
“The ones that say, ‘If you can read this, the kid fell off.’”
Desmond’s eyes went into slits. “They don’t make no T-shirt like that, Big Al.”
“Then I guess you don’t ride with me until I get it fixed.”
“When’s that gonna be?”
It occurred to me to say, When you tell me what’s going on with you. But something about the exaggeration in every mouth twist and eyebrow lift cautioned me to hold back. The Adam’s apple action alone was enough to make me hold my tongue, at least for now. The discussion we had ahead of us seemed like something Chief should be involved in. I pulled out of the school driveway and drummed my fingers on the steering wheel.
“You ain’t gon’ ask me about the history test?” Desmond said.
I almost ran the van over the curb.
“You drive the bike way better’n you drive this,” he said.
“Okay,” I said. “How did the test go?”
“It didn’t.”
“What does that mean?” I felt a little bad pretending I didn’t already know, but if he was going to lie, we might have to have the discussion right here.
“Means I froze up.” He squirmed in the seat belt to face me. “It came on me when I was havin’ lunch, like this ice ball just hit me in the face and froze my brain. I had to go in the bathroom and try to thaw out.”
He waited, eyebrows expectant.
“Very poetic,” I said. “So then what happened?”
“I got to the class late and I thought Miss All-Hair wasn’t gon’ let me take the test, but then she did.”
So far his story matched hers, but for some reason it sounded like a well-constructed alibi. It was probably the relative correctness of the grammar.
“Give me more,” I said.
“I guess I didn’t thaw out enough ’cause when I looked at that paper, my brain cells was like ice cubes in there, you know what I’m sayin’?”
I hadn’t had that exact experience, but I nodded.
“And then all the sudden, the bell was ringin’ and I hadn’t written nothin’ down. I probably flunked it.”
“Uh, probably. And what did Miss O’Hare say?”
He paused for the first time. I could almost hear him flipping through his options like he was about to perform a card trick.
“I tol’ her, I said, ‘Miss All-Hair, history don’t mean nothin’ anyway. It’s all ’bout now and maybe tomorrow. That’s what I care about.’”
It was so close to what Erin quoted to me, I glanced over to see if he, too, had written it down.
“Is that what you really think?” I said.
He didn’t even hesitate. “That’s what I thought right then ’cause I felt like some kinda loser. But now that I had time to melt them ice cubes in there”—he tapped his bushy cap of hair—“I’m thinkin’ I better ask for some extra credit.”
“Or we can ask Miss O’Hare if you can retake the test. Only …”
“Only what?” Desmond scrunched up his eyes. “Aw, Big Al, you ain’t gon’ take away my Harley privilege ’cause I froze up. I couldn’t help that, now.”
“Relax. I wasn’t even thinking that.”
He didn’t relax, not with his knees rocking the way they were. Yeah, that whole story had taken him most of the afternoon to create.
“I’m thinking we need to find out why you froze up,” I said.
“I just did.”
“So what’s to prevent it from happening when you take the test over?”
Everything on him stopped moving. I pulled the van up to the garage and took my time turning off the engine. He still sat motionless.
“I don’t expect you to know the answer to that,” I said. “It’s my job to help you find out. That’s why I’m the mother.”
His eyes finally moved to look out the side window. The Adam’s apple, too, was once again fully operational. He was going to learn to hate that telltale thing.
“I think Miss O’Hare is right,” I said. “She told me that day at the art show that you need to experience some of the history and maybe it’ll stick with you better.”
“How I’m s’posed to do that?” he said to the window.
“Tomorrow, right after school, you and I are going on a personally guided tour of all the old stuff in town.”
He turned just enough to slit his eyes toward me. “We ain’t takin’ one of them trolley things, are we? I heard them guys on them intercoms they got, tryin’ to make jokes. Big Al, they ain’t even funny.”
“Do you seriously think I would subject you to that? I’m your personal tour guide, Clarence. You’ve forgotten that I used to drive a carriage and show people the sights?” I wiggled my eyebrows. “I know the good stuff they don’t tell you in the history books.”
“That good stuff gon’ be on the test?”
He had me there, but his eyes showed enough of the faint glimmer of his infuriating self to make me grin at him.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But at least you won’t be bored.”
“Can we go on the Harley?”
“Are you serious? Desmond, we live right in the middle of all of it. No, we’re not going on the Harley. We’re going to walk.”
He surveyed the windshield for a moment. He was obviously questioning the wisdom of pushing that further because he looked at me and gave a long-suffering sigh.
“I guess thatta be a’ight,” he said.
He got out of the van. As I watched him pull up the garage door that was so old it didn’t have an automatic opener, I knew I’d won that round too easily. Way too easily.
The next morning I was trying once again to cull something, anything, from Isaiah or Jeremiah or Joel—anybody with prophetic credentials—when I got a call from Bonner.
“Have you seen today’s paper?” he said.
The clip in his words made me set my tea down on the bistro table.
“Do I want to?” I said.
“What in the world happened at the 95 yesterday?”
“That made the paper?”
“Front page of the Record.”
“Are we hard up for news around here?”
“You going to tell me what went down, or should I believe what I read?”
“What’s their rendition?”
I could almost see him propping his reading glasses on his nose. “This is what’s under the photo.”
“The photo!”
My voice went so high I sounded like Ms. Willa.
“‘Former heiress Allison Chamberlain leaving the 95 Cordova after an altercation with Troy Irwin, CEO of Chamberlain Enterprises.’” Bonner cleared that hairball he always seemed to have in his throat at times like this. “Didn’t you promise Chief you weren’t going to confront Irwin?”
“I didn’t confront him. He just showed up at the restaurant when I was having lunch with Ms. Willa, which, if you’ll recall, all of you practically forced me to do.”
“She made the news too. Here it is, ‘Mrs. Willa Livengood, widow of the late Quincy Livengood, was treated by paramedics at the scene but refused to be taken to the hospital. Witnesses say she’—and I quote—‘was so upset by the confrontation between Chamberlain and Irwin she was unable to breathe and nearly lost consciousness.’”
“She didn’t ‘nearly lose’ anything,” I said. “Except maybe her lunch. What about Troy Irwin doesn’t make people want to hurl? Bonner, why did you even tell me about this? That article is so skewed, I don’t even know where to start straightening it out.”
“How about here? ‘Chamberlain was accompanied by an African American woman who allegedly threatened Troy Irwin, claiming he assaulted Chamberlain.’”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake!”
“Is any of that true?” Bonner said.
“No.” I put my fingers to my right temple, which was already throbbing. “Okay, Mercedes—”
“You took Mercedes with you?”
“Are you going to let me finish or what?”
“Sorry.”
“Troy put his hand on my shoulder and I told him to let go and he, of course, didn’t, so Mercedes made it a little clearer.”
“How much clearer?”
I told him the story, as much as I could remember it. Right now it was hard to differentiate between the facts and the turmoil taking shape in my chest. I longed for Desmond’s talent for turning every disaster into a stand-up routine.
I managed to come up with, “You said we needed publicity.”
“Not this kind!”
“What do you want me to do about it, Bonner? Tell me and I’ll do it. Maybe.”
There was a short silence, during which I was certain he was rolling up the sleeves of his Oxford shirt.
“I don’t know,” he said finally. “Maybe I’ll write a letter to the editor that sets the story straight.”
“Do you actually think the Record is going to print it? Doesn’t Troy Irwin own it, too?”
“Not officially. Just politically.”
“Then don’t waste your time,” I said. “Let’s just leave this one to God. The more we fiddle with it, the worse we’re going to make it.”
He let out a long sigh that sounded strangely like relief.
“What?” I said.
“I’m just glad to hear you putting this in God’s hands again. I mean, I know you probably always do, but the rest of us like to hear it.”
“How long has it been since I’ve mentioned it?” I said.
The hairball was still giving him trouble. “A couple of weeks? Maybe I’m wrong. It could just be my insecurity.”
“What insecurity?”
He grunted softly. “How much time you got?”
He sounded genuinely wistful. Bonner and I used to spend a lot of time together. Our friendship was actually stronger, more honest now than it was back when he thought of me as dating material. But the opportunities to just share an order of fried shrimp at the Santa Maria and talk about our “stuff” were practically nonexistent, now that our focus was on the Sisters.
I closed the Bible and picked up my tea mug for a sip.
“You’re not wrong,” I said. “I’m not talking about God as much because I don’t think I’m hearing from God as much. Not like I was for a while. I just keep getting this one—I guess you could call it a message.”
“One of your Nudges?” he said.
“No. I mean it’s like a Nudge, but I can feel it inside, too. Sort of like you feel nauseous when you eat bad crab.”
“I’d question whether that was God too.”
He didn’t ask me what the message was, which suddenly made me want to tell him. He was the first person I’d confided in about God’s command that I go buy a Harley, and although he’d been dubious then, here he was, giving me his trust and his time and his ear.
“All I keep hearing is, Allison, wash their feet.” I said. “I know it has to be a metaphor, which is why we’re doing the Feast and all of us are serving instead of asking to be served.”
“So it’s our potential donors’ feet that we’re washing,” he said.
There was so little disbelief in his voice, I would have hugged him if he hadn’t been across town.
“That’s what I’m getting,” I said. “What do you think?”
“I think you better have the buckets ready.”
“It’s not meant to be taken literally.”
“Oh,” Bonner said. “Well, you’re the prophet.”
Yeah. That’s what they kept telling me.
Desmond and I set off on foot down St. George Street after school that day. I had a cheat sheet tucked into the pocket of my denim jacket in case I suffered a memory lapse. Keeping him from sidetracking me into gift shops and eating establishments was going to take my total concentration.
“You gonna make me take notes, Big Al?” he said as he loped beside me across the intersection of St. George and East King.
“You don’t need to take notes. You’re like a sponge.”
“You mean like I’m all the time scrubbin’ things?”
“Um, no, that would definitely not be your MO. I mean you absorb everything you see and hear.” I gave him a sideways look. “Which sometimes serves you well and sometimes doesn’t.”
“Like when I listen in on what you and Mr. Chief sayin’ about me when I ain’t s’posed to be listenin’.”
“Exactly. Matter of fact, today, just pretend you aren’t supposed to be hearing what I’m saying and you’ll be fine.”
“Unh-uh,” Desmond said. “You gon’ be impressed with how good Imma listen to you.”
He was actually true to his word. During his first foray through Castillo de San Marcos, the enormous seventeenth-century Spanish bastion that still guarded Matanzas Bay as if an attack by a band of marauding Englishmen was imminent, Desmond watched my lips as I regaled him with tales of pirates hunting the treasure fleets and of the intrigue of three hundred years of back-to-back colonial wars, in which the fort was never defeated.
But I was more impressed with the way he climbed on the bronze cannons and pressed his ear to the wall to try and hear the screams and fighting in the
coquina, just as the legend had it. He gazed from the always-burning watchtower light to the bay beyond, as if he, too, were watching for his comrades coming from Spain. And he shivered in the dungeon where even after at least a hundred visits, I also felt the death and dread and victory that seemed to ooze from its weeping walls. It was late afternoon and the busloads of school kids had already left for the day, so there was no one to pretend to be cool for. He was finally the child he’d never gotten to be, and I no longer cared whether he passed history or not. This was the test I couldn’t fail.
The Oldest Wooden Schoolhouse near the City Gates on St. George Street was about to close when we got there, but I knew Cricket, the current guide, so she let us slide in, pointing out the button for the self-guided tour. I nixed that. Desmond would have a field day with the robot professor. He actually took one look at the tiny ramshackle bald-cypress-and-cedar room and decided this was far superior to the school he was currently attending.
“I don’t think so, dude,” I said. “They wouldn’t let you chase girls here like you get to do at Muldoon Middle.”
He smiled slyly. “I could chase women anywhere.”
Yeah, I definitely needed to get Chief to have the talk with him. Again.
The sun was sinking beneath the tops of the palm trees when we emerged from the school’s outhouse, clearly Desmond’s favorite part of the school experience, which meant all the other historical sites were closed. I decided to just take him for a stroll down carless St. George Street and fill him in on some of the lesser-known stories along the way. I was just getting into the Dragon of St. George Street when a voice called out,
“Now there’s a lady who looks like she could use a nice aperitif to finish off the day. Don’t you think, Lewis?”
“If ‘aperteeth’ mean food, I am there,” Desmond said, and bolted for the Monk’s Vineyard, where two old guys sat on the front porch sipping the fruits of their own vines.
“It doesn’t mean food,” I said, on Desmond’s heels, since he was already going up the two small steps.
“It can mean food,” said the one who’d been referred to as Lewis. He had a ridiculous mustache that looked like he’d stolen it off the figure of Yosemite Sam in the wax museum on the Plaza. “We serve appetizers now.”