“Stabbed him.” I could feel the blood in my temples. Were we talking about a person in an alternate universe? “But it was self defense …”
“… his daddy got involved,” she explained. “He pulled all kinds of strings, and before any of us knew it, she was carted off to the state hospital. It was a mess.”
Sally got so quiet that, for a second, I was afraid she was finished with her story, so I had to prompt her.
“How’d she get out, then?”
“Out?” She snapped back into the picture. “Oh. Ronn went and got her after a week or so. He was pitiful, said he couldn’t get by without her. Bad as everything was between them all the time, he couldn’t live without her. He wanted her lots more than she did him.”
“You can see why,” I offered.
“Sure,” she agreed. “She started to realizing what was going on. And then your letters started coming.”
“Yeah,” I remembered, “something about how they got held up for a couple of months?”
“Army,” she said, as if it were a curse word.
“I wasn’t in the army, exactly,” I began.
“Anyway,” she went on, “when your letters started to coming, she seemed to calm down a good bit. That’s when I knew the score.”
“The score?”
“That’s when I knew,” Sally said softly, “she was sweet on you.”
I laughed out loud. “Dalliance was never ‘sweet on me’, Sally. That’s not the nature of our relationship.”
“Well,” she said slowly, and I heard the skepticism in her voice, “maybe it ought to be.”
“No, see …” I started.
“… you see, Flap,” she interrupted. “For once, why don’t you?”
14. Attachments
I wanted to pursue that line of thinking worse than I’ve ever wanted to do anything in my life, but your Tao has a way of dealing with desires and attachments. In this case, my Tao produced a heavy thud on the hotel room door.
“Sally, can you hang on? There’s somebody at the door.”
“Okay.” She sounded impatient.
I laid the phone down on the bed and made it to the door. In the hall there was a local cop. His uniform was crisp and spotless. His posture was perfect. His head looked shaved under that hat, and the eyes were a cloudless sky.
“Hi, Officer.” I tried to sound as innocent as possible. You never know what a small-town deputy might think you’ve done. “Come on in. I’m on the phone.”
I took a step back and he walked in, expressionless and silent.
I picked up the phone. “Hey?”
Sally responded. “I heard you say ‘officer’?”
“That’s right,” I confirmed. “Can I call you back?”
“You still want fried chicken? Come on over.”
“I’ll give you a ring back,” I told her, eyeballing the nice policeman.
Before I’d even hung the phone up, the guy began his speech.
“Are you the owner of the vehicle parked on Simpson Place, license number LNN323?”
“Is that my license number?” I reached to the back pocket of my sleep-wrinkled double-pleats and started to fish out my wallet. Wrong move.
The cop put out his right hand, blew out a breath, took a lunge backward, and had his pistol in his left hand, cocked and pointed directly at my face — all in under a second.
“Whoa,” I soothed. “Steady. Just reaching for my wallet to show you some ID and check my insurance card for the license number.”
I moved in the world’s slowest motion, picking my billfold out of its place with one finger and my thumb. I held it out between us like a dead fish.
“I …” he started, trying to compose himself, “I thought you were going for a gun.”
“Don’t have one.” I think I sounded reassuring. “Can I show you the funny picture on my driver’s license now?”
He was still frozen in the basic television-style posture of some law-enforcement stereotypes.
“Are you Tucker?”
“Yes,” I said slowly. “Do we know each other?”
“No.” He seemed very confused. “But we got us a lot of Tuckers around here.”
“Right.” I didn’t move. The young man was obviously tense.
He finally uncocked and replaced his revolver. He reached out, wordless, and took my wallet. He examined several things in it, checked to see how much cash I had, and gave it back to me.
From the wastrel days of my misspent youth I’d had the experience of being busted for vagrancy just because I didn’t carry enough cash. It’s a way some policemen used to have of messing with you if they didn’t like you but didn’t have anything else to arrest you for. So I always kept a crisp twenty in the billfold.
I put it back in my pocket, still moving very slowly.
“Your car is illegally parked, Mr. Tucker. That side of Simpson is no parking. Would you mind moving your vehicle into the lot of the hotel?”
Now, a small town is filled with niceties that you don’t find in your larger metropolitan areas, but a nervous deputy who was understanding enough to find you and ask you to move your car instead of just shoving a ticket under the wiper blade? That strained credulity.
“Yes,” I said with as little irony as I could manage, “I can move my car. And may I say thank you, Officer, for bringing the matter to my attention.”
He stood. He fidgeted. He looked down. “You’re not buying this, are you?”
“Not really,” I admitted. “But it’s not you. It’s the situation.”
“I’m supposed to scare you.” His expression still hadn’t moved beyond the mask of impassivity.
“I’m a little scared,” I suggested. “That gun thing, the pointing the loaded revolver at my head — that was good. Why are you supposed to scare me?”
“I suck at this. Somebody wants you to go back to Atlanta.”
“Already?” I looked around my little room. “I just got here. Ordinarily I have to be in a place for at least twenty-four hours before anybody wants to get rid of me.”
“Your reputation.” That’s all.
“I see.” The officer’s aplomb was beginning to crack, I could tell that. It was my guess that he was doing something he’d been told to do or paid to do — but it was something he clearly didn’t want to do.
“You wouldn’t have any inclination to tell me who wants to scare me, and who’s been impugning my rep, would you?”
He looked for a second like he might do just that — but in the end all he said was, “Move your car.”
“Yes, sir.”
He turned to leave, then hesitated. “I didn’t give you a ticket.”
I waited. I knew there was more.
“I think you could return the favor.”
“I’ll conclude my business here almost immediately. I’m really going to Invisible. Then I’ll go right back to Atlanta. And the whole time I’m here in these parts, I’ll try to look scared.”
“I just meant,” he said, softer, “you could not mention my pulling out my gun. It was stupid.”
“Not if I’d had a gun myself.”
He finally looked me in the eye. “Okay.”
And he was out the door.
I stepped into the hall and called out to his back. “Is this last night or this morning?”
He half turned, kept moving. “What?”
“Is it morning or night? What time is it?”
He shook his head, glanced at his watch. “Six forty-seven in the morning.” He disappeared down the stairs.
I’d fallen asleep in a strange hotel room and slept nearly twelve hours. Is that one of the danger signs of depression — or just a preparation for going home?
*
I took advantage of the free breakfast downstairs. Everything was on a haphazardly arranged buffet table: coffee, juice, scrambled eggs with onions and peppers, farm sausage, country bacon, grits and gravy, biscuits the size of hubcaps, and a fruit medley of indeterminat
e age. I loaded up a plate, sat at a small table by a window looking out on some nice impatiens, and ate quickly.
Then I sauntered outside into the early-morning air and got in my car. I cranked it, sat for a second looking at all the other cars parked along both sides of Simpson — none with tickets — then pulled out onto the main street that ran in front of the Lancaster Hotel, heading a little south, a little west — toward Invisible.
15. Invisible
Twenty minutes later, I was there.
There consisted of a whole lot of kudzu and a little bit of nostalgia. The sky was white-hot, the road was sizzling black, and the pines were thick and motionless. Main Street was totally dead.
Past where the Miss Georgia Dairy Store used to be, I was relieved to see that Sonny’s was still open. It was an all-in-one stop: gas, food, gossip, bait, ammo — run by shade mechanic and amateur psychoanalyst, Sonny Griffin. Sonny was the archetype from which all subsequent “good-old boys” had been fashioned. Except for the fact that Sonny was a woman.
She dressed like a man, kept her hair in a crew cut, rumbled in a low, menacing, snake-killing accent, and had lived with the same woman — Bedilia, who ran the post office — for thirty years. It’s funny — in fact it’s hilarious — that in a little country town like Invisible people will gossip about little things endlessly, but the fact that Sonny was who she was had never once been discussed. By anyone. I don’t think the Reverend Mr. Lee, pastor of the New Hope Baptist Church, where Sonny and Bedilia had gone every Sunday for all their lives, even knew the word lesbian. Sonny and Bedilia were roommates. And they were decent, hard-working members of a dwindling community that had no business questioning two of the few natives who stayed and kept the town alive.
Although the word alive was a questionable one to use for downtown Invisible. Sonny’s was, in fact, the only place open at all. And there was nobody there except Sonny.
I pulled in. Sonny was sitting in a lawn chair out in front, watching me. Her tee shirt said “Sh!” in big red letters, and her black shorts were bigger than a tablecloth.
I got out of the car.
“Hey, Sonny.”
“Hey,” she said warily. She looked me up and down. “Did you used to be Flap Tucker?”
“You remember me?” I couldn’t help the grin.
“Shoot.” She looked away. “Some of these kids, you don’t forget.” Another gruff look. “No matter how hard you try. You and that Dalliance Oglethorpe used to snitch my Necco Wafers.”
“Did not. That was Valerie …”
“… you still up in Atlanta?”
“I am.” I walked around the car and came closer to her. “And it was Valerie Carter who took those Neccos.” I looked down at her. “She did share them with us, though.”
“How is Miss Dally? Still got her nightclubs?”
“I see you keep abreast of things.”
“Okay, enough small talk.” She looked up at me. “What you doing here, Flap?”
“Can’t just be coming home for a visit?”
“Visit what?”
I looked out across the Invisible landscape. The heat waves rising from the asphalt distorted images in wavy, dizzying patterns. The weeds and vines and termites had taken over. Everything was decayed and overgrown. Somewhere off behind the abandoned barbershop, a dog was barking. But even the dog sounded old and played out.
“Look” — I pulled up a short stool that was beside the door and sat next to her — “you know everything. I’ve got a few questions.”
“You drove all the way from Atlanta to sit here and ask me a few questions?” She closed her eyes and shifted in the chair. The chair complained. “I guess it’s something about Dally.”
“Something about Dally? You haven’t seen me in — what? — more than ten years, and you think I’m here to talk about …”
“… just because you ain’t been here in a while,” she interrupted, “don’t mean we don’t know all about you.”
“All about me?”
“Why don’t you get out of that detective business, son? Why don’t you get you some real work? Take ahold of that Dalliance Oglethorpe for once in your life, and don’t let go. That’s what you want to do with your future.”
Well, there it was: the small-town know-it-all version of oracular vision. Or maybe even the poor sap at Delphi was just another small town busybody with an opinion. Either way, it wasn’t what I wanted to hear at that particular moment.
“You don’t have the slightest idea what I’m here for,” I began, trying to keep the edge off my voice, out of respect. “I’ve got trouble, so does Dally, and I’m trying to help.”
She opened her eyes, lizardlike, and gave me the overwhelmingly serene gaze. “You found out about Ronnard Raay, didn’t you?”
Locusts upped the volume a little, if only to emphasize the strangeness of her vision. A small white stiletto cloud sliced the sun. More heat poured out.
“Yes.” When in doubt, say as little as possible. It can give the illusion of knowing more than you do. There is power in silence.
But there’s always someone cleverer than you are.
“You don’t know jack,” she pronounced, and closed her eyes again.
“Sonny,” I sighed, “can we start this conversation over?”
“Okay.”
“Hi, Sonny — it’s me, Flap Tucker, home for a visit.”
She gave a curt jut of the chin. “Hey, Flap.”
“So, how’s everything in the old hometown.”
“Quiet. Hot.” A flicker of the lids. “Still, home is the center of everything in the world.”
“Okay, that's why I’m home.” I sat back. She’d forced me to say something true, almost against my better judgment. “I need a little time at the center of things.”
“I know.”
“Look, Buddha,” I told her, unaware of why I was getting irritated, “it’s my turn to say ‘you don’t know jack.’ You’ve got no idea what’s going on, so don’t play the wise, silent-seer game with me. I’ve got no patience for two-bit ghost-town pseudomystical pronouncements.”
“Okay, then.” She leaned forward and reached into a tub, brought out a freezing Coke in a small bottle, popped the top off with a can opener she wore around her neck, and handed it to me. “How about a Co-Cola?”
I hesitated, but my hand seemed to float involuntarily toward the cold drink. She pulled another out of the ice for herself.
We sat there sipping the beverage that made Atlanta great, watching the blacktop get hotter.
“Dally’s been getting some mail that she doesn’t really need,” I finally said, as if we had been talking all along.
Sonny didn’t move a muscle. “You see that patch of grass over there across the road, in front of the wall?”
I looked. Once that patch of grass had been the garden that decorated a dress shop — in an era when dress shops had been a significant part of small-town commerce. All that remained were two scrawny azaleas and a lot of brown weedy fescue.
“I see it.
“Looks like an empty plot,” she went on, “but just barely underneath the top layer of soil, there’s a whole world: bugs and worms and microscopic whatever. They all march around down there like we don’t even exist.”
“And?” I suspected she was going somewhere.
“Even a dead town like this — it can have its own little world of things going on underneath.”
“Yeah,” I brushed her off, impatient, “I get the metaphor — I was hoping for a little something concrete.”
“There was a guy down here a few weeks ago, some Yankee boy from New Jersey, they say. Got a speeding ticket in Ty Ty.”
Ty Ty was the next town over — around Mysterio and Enigma, Georgia. Invisible did not stand alone in the wan name category.
“Jersey Jakes was down here?”
“If that’s his name.”
“And he was speeding.”
“You remember Denny Martin, the one that was
such a good pass receiver that year we almost went to state?”
“No,” I told her. “I don’t know him. I wasn’t that much of a sports …”
“… anyway.” She waved a lazy, dismissive hand. “He’s a county deputy now. He stopped the Yankee boy — doing better than a hundred. Down Tifton Highway. You know how dangerous that is?”
Tifton Highway was deserted almost all of the time, and farm boys flew their pickups down it in excess of a hundred whenever they traveled it. But I wasn’t thinking about that. I was thinking about the deputy.
“What’s Denny look like?”
“Big blue eyes, shaved head — ain’t gone to fat, yet. Very nice posture.”
“They used to show us a film in elementary school about posture,” I said.
I guess her description could have fit a hundred deputies in Georgia. It didn’t have to be the same one who came to my room and left so suddenly. Still, I couldn’t resist pushing it.
“I think he might have paid me a visit in Tifton this morning.”
“He don’t usually go over that way too much.” She took a healthy slug of Coke. “But you don’t never know what that boy might do. He’s got twins, and he don’t sleep well.” She inclined her head my way. “I think he’s got financial concerns.”
“Anyway, you tell me about this speed-trap thing because?”
“The Yankee boy was down here asking a whole lots of questions just like you. About Miss Dally. About Ronnard Raay. It’s probably just a coincidence.”
I sat back. “How’s Bedilia?”
“Fine.” No expression. “She’s got that sciatic nerve, and it troubles her a whole lot. She goes to church more than she used to over it.”
“Brother Lee still preaching at the Baptist?”
“He is. He’s got less hellfire in him than he used to. His wife passed on, you know.”
“I didn’t.” I hadn’t even known he was married.
“Are we back to small talk?” She leaned forward. “Because if we are, I’m getting a little hot. I feel like going inside in the air-conditioning.”
Dead Easy (A Flap Tucker Mystery Book 5) Page 7