A Gentle Rain (4 page)

"You got it, bro." Whatever he wanted. We always stopped for ice cream after a doctor's visit. A thought hit me: This time next spring, Joey tivon't be here to eat ice cream.

"What's wrong, Benji?"

I stopped the wheelchair. "Aw, I got something in my eye. Gimme a second. I'm rubbin' it out."

Sometimes you get help from unlikely angels. I needed angel-help right then, and it came. Across the parking deck, the back doors popped open on my big-ass red truck. Mac and Lily had spotted us.

Maybe angels don't look like tall, middle-aged cowboys with jowly faces or short, middle-aged housekeepers with a bum left leg, but that's what Mac and Lily looked like. They'd worked for me ten years, and they were like family. They loved Joey, and Joey loved them.

"Now, you're all better, aren't you, Joey! " Lily called, throwing out her arms. She limped our way through a flock of seagulls and pigeons pecking at some suburbanite's thrownn-out french fries. The birds didn't even spook. They recognized kindred spirits.

Lily patted Joey's head and fed him a piece of fresh gum from a supply she kept in the pockets of her blue jean jumper. Lily had one fashion style-blue jean jumpers covered in embroidered daisies. She stored gum for Joey. The oxygen made his mouth dry. The gum helped.

He chewed a wad of gum and grinned. "I'm all better, already! Time for chocolate turtle caramel with peanut butter sprinkles! Let's go, Mac!"

Mac gave a solemn nod. You couldn't get big, gentle, stuttering Mac to talk much in public. What the hell are words good for, anyway? If I'd learned anything from running a ranch staffed with folks like Mac and Lily, it was that walking the walk is a whole lot more important than talking the talk.

I pulled Joey's oxygen tank out of its holder on his wheelchair, Mac scooped Joey out of the wheelchair's seat, then the two of us hoisted him into the truck's front passenger seat. Lily set the tank in the back seat and adjusted its tube so Joey wasn't like a poodle on a short leash. I folded the wheelchair, put it into the truck bed, and shut Joey's door.

Mac maneuvered himself back into the truck alongside Lily, I climbed in the driver's side, and we were ready to head for home.

"Ice cream!" Joey yelled again, grinning and wheezing. I poked a button on the CD player so he could listen to a Harry Potter audio tape for about the millionth time.

We headed back to the ranch. Just like on every other doctor's visit to the big city.

Right.

I steered hard along I-10 west. If you drive towards the sunset on that super highway, about two-thousand miles later you can drink a beer beside the Pacific in California. In the mid-1980s, when I ran to Mexico with Joey, I-10 was like me, just a fresh-faced teenager-four lanes of new pavement racing across the top of the state. Some ofit went through forests so lonely I could smell the lost history in `em.

Now I-10 was just another big road ignored by a world offast-moving strangers. Poke a stick in the ground and another strip shopping center'd take root. They grew like weeds next to the new subdivisions. All the newer highways led to the beaches or Disney World. It was like Old Florida didn't exist, anymore. Everything ran past it.

I wished me and 1-10 could keep going west. Instead I cut south toward the familiar hinterlands ofhome. Palm trees turned into pines. Fancy lawns into broad pastures. Sushi bars into barbecue joints. Billboards started selling tractors and Tony Lama hand-tooled boots instead of skidoo rentals and surfboards. The sticky air of a north Florida spring gushed through the truck's cab. The deep swampy woods took us under wing.

Live oaks, some of them older than the Fourth of July, spread limbs the size of my body over the road. Purple wisteria was blooming. And wild azaleas. Here and there, some white oleanders and pink hibiscus flowered in front of little houses and tornado-bait trailers. And everything smelled like hidden water.

Inland Florida is pockmarked by limestone springs so deep no one knows where they end. Maybe they go all the way through to China. The mystery of water.

Joey's favorite ice cream place, Cold N'Creamy, was in an old strip of shops next to a rusty gas station in the middle of nowhere, about halfway between Jacksonville and the ranch. When we pulled up, we stared at the landscape.

"What happened to all the orange trees?" Joey asked.

Across the road from the Cold N'Creamy, acres of old orange groves had been scraped bare. A sign in the middle of the sand and tree stumps promised a new golf community for active adults by J.T. Jackson Development. Orange Tree Estates. J.T. Jackson, whoever the hell he was, had cut down a grove of orange trees to build a gated subdivision named after oranges. Even by Florida standards, that took some big balls.

Joey's dying. I cant worry about orange trees.

"This is what they call `Progress,"' I said. "Welcome to it."

I aimed the truck toward a handicapped space in front of the Cold N'Creamy. Close enough for Joey to walk. Any time we could leave the wheelchair behind, he was happy. I was two seconds from the parking spot when a silver Jaguar cut me off

Come on. You drive a Jaguar, a convertible Jaguar with the top down, you're showing off already. Don't make it worse by being a jerk.

I whipped the truck into a different space. "Y'all just sit tight. We'll do take-out today. I'll be back in a minute."

"That's not fair," Joey said loudly. "That man parked in our spot. We've got a tag." Joey pulled our handicap tag off the rearview mirror. "A tag." He waved it at me, wheezing. I could feel Lily and Mac looking at me from the back seat. They knew how people can be toward their kind. Mean-spirited, taking advantage. I always spoke up for them and the others at the ranch. It was my job.

"All right, gimme a minute." I wasn't too happy to play Superman that day. Superman could keep Joey alive. I couldn't.

I caught up with Mr. Jaguar as he thumbed a couple of quarters into a Jacksonville Florida Times-Union box under the Cold N'Creamy's faded awning. Big guy, balding, wearin' a year-round tan with a fancy golf shirt, creased khakis, and a diamond-lined watch I could trade for a new barn and have money left over. "Friend," I said, "I sure could use that parking space you just took."

He pulled his paper out of the box before he looked me over. He had eyes like a pit bull. He smiled. "There are lots of other spaces it the lot. Help yourself Friend."

"But see, friend, I got this problem. I've got a brother who can't make a long walk, and you don't."

He chuckled. "Well, friend, here's the thing. I own all this, now." He circled a finger, meaning the shops, the skinned land across the street, the air, the world, me, whatever. "And you don't."

I slid my hands in my front jean's pockets. Best to keep my fists out of this. "Aw, now, you don't want me to lecture you about the law regard n' handicapped parking spaces, do you, friend?"

He laughed. Then he held out the paper. "See this headl ne? Developer Brings Future To Northern Florida. That's me. J.T. Jackson." He slapped the paper on my chest. "There you go. My treat. Read it. You just don't know who I am."

Then he turned and went in the Cold N'Creainy without looking back. His mistake.

I toted the paper to the truck and tossed it on the front seat. I looked at Mac. "That logging chain still in the tool chest?"

He nodded, cocking his big, jowly face at my tone. Lily put her hands to her mouth. Joey's eyes went wide. They knew me too well. I popped the lid on a metal tool chest in the truck's bed and pulled out thirty feel of chain about as thick as my arm. A minute later I had the chain hooked to the Jaguar.

I geared the truck down to low, gunned the engine, and let it have its way. My truck could pull a fully loaded, four-horse gooseneck trailer without a hiccup. Pulling a Jaguar? No sweat.

By the time J.T. Jackson came running out of the Cold N'Creamy with his cone in a wad, I'd dragged his car across the street. It looked pretty cozy under the frazzled shade of the one old orange tree his crew had left there, surrounded by black silt construction fence.

I tossed my chain in the tool box then climbed back in the truck. Trying to look more nonchalant than I felt, I propped an arm out the open window. There are times when a man's got to feel the wind on his elbow.

J. T. Jackson ran up to my elbow yelling a lot of things I wouldn't repeat in front of ladies or long-haul truckers. "Cover your ears, Miss Lily," I said over my shoulder. Lily did. "Joey, don't you pick up any new words." Joey grained. But I could feel Mac's boots shifting behind my seat. Men talking trash i i front of Lily made Mac mad. Me, too.

J.T. Jackson jabbed a hand at the magnetic sign on my truck's door. "Thocco Ranch? Ben Thocco? I won't forget you, you dumb-hick cowboy. You'll be sorry. You don't know who you're dealing with!"

"Friend," I told him. "Your mistake is, you don't know who you're dealing with."

And I drove off.

By the time we got to the ranch, Elton Arnold, the right honorable sheriff of Saginaw County, was sitting on my front porch drinkin' sweet iced tea and scowl ng at Gator, who dozed by the porch steps. Gator was, after all, a five-foot alligator. I put Mac and Lily to work gettin' Joey out of the truck. I could see the three of `em were scared. "Aw, it'll be fine," I promised `em. But I went to the porch alone.

"Elton." A tip of my bare head.

"Bed" A tip of his Stetson.

"Gonna arrest me for towin' a Jaguar?"

"Naw, but next time, walk away. J.T. Jackson donated to my reelection campaign."

"So did I."

"Yeah, but your check was three figures, and his was five."

"Aw, shit. Sorry, Elton."

"I called Glen for help. I knew you wouldn't do it."

Mac's older brother. "I'd rather go to jail."

"Glen's a S.O.B., but he don't want his brother's keeper locked up." Elton snorted. "`Cause then Glen might have to look after Mac himself. So he saved your behind. He made a call and smoothed things over. He's buddies with J.T."

"Like I said, I'd rather do time."

"Ben, you know better'n that. What would your baby brother and this motley bunch of moon-gazin' ranch hands do without you?" Elton finished his tea, stood and looked at me kindly. "Take help wherever you can get it, son. You know what the Bible says: Pride goeth before a fall."

"Yeah, but money cushioneth the land n'."

"Ain't it always so?" The sheriff smiled and clapped a friendly hand on my back on his way past. "You might not be a rich man, but you're a free man. This time. Be happy."

He left me standin' there.

A free man.

Right.

Chapter 2

Kara

Whittenbrook estate, Connecticut

Sedge Trevelyan was the reason my grandfather, Armitage Whittenbrook, never disinherited Dad. Grandfather certainly wanted to. Dad was a tree-hugging hippie long before hippies began hugging trees, and it cost him Grandfather's love. Even as a Yale student in the 1950s Dad organized nascent ecology movements. It was lonely work for a Whittenbrook. Uncle William, cheerful and fun-loving, was the favored younger son. Grandfather Armitage openly despised Dad's efforts at being a "nature lover." He routinely cut off Dad's money and threatened to leave him out of his will.

Sedge, a family lawyer who oversaw Dad's trust fund, quietly circumvented Grandfather's methods and kept some money flowing to Dad's work. Very upper class British and very reserved, Sedge seemed an unlikely advocate for rebellion, unless one knew his personal history. He was a direct descendent of Charles II via one of that randy English king's many seventeenth-century mistresses. Truth be told, Sedge was a full-fledged earl in the British peerage, but he never used the title. Whatever social standing he'd inherited meant nothing to him; by the time he reached prep school he had been cast out as a gay son. Being gay trumped being aristocratic. On his own, he worked his way up in law and business.

To me, Sedge was a surrogate grandfather who handled all problems, large and small. Though he was eighty now, and had turned the details of my family's estate management over to his hand-picked staff, he still advised me. He championed my small causes just as he'd championed Dad's big ones.

Sedge and I sat before the fireplace of the main living room at The Brooks-a cozy, rambling colonial cottage at the heart ofthe Whittenbrook estate. We were surrounded by posh leathers and woods. Logs crackled against the cold of a northeastern March. In the kitchen, Sedge's longtime other, Malcolm, sang a Gilbert and Sullivan verse to Mr. Darcy. Uncle William lived up the lane in Whitten House, the famed Georgian mansion our illustrious forebear, James Innesbree Whittenbrook, had built in 1702.

"Sedge," I whispered, my head in my hands. "I made a fool of myself at the memorial service. I insulted all those people in a moment of uncontrolled spite."

"They'll survive." Sedge swirled cognac in the snifter he held on the knee of his corduroy trousers. "I rather enjoyed Mr. Darcy's brief song. It was indisputably vaudevillian. I was reminded of Benny Hill on the BBC. And Mr. Darcy's parting shot was priceless."