A Gentle Rain (9 page)

I scowled at him. Sedge distracted me with a gentle touch. "You have my private cell phone number, for emergencies."

"Yes." Tears stung my eyes. "I think I can be quite self-sufficient for a few weeks in the wilds of suburban Disney World. But thank you."

"My dear, I can only repeat what I've said already. Do not tell anyone who you are. You have no idea what your birth parents may feel, say, or do. You might do them more harm than good by injecting yourself into their simple lives. And I cannot guarantee anything about the man who employs them. By all accounts he takes good care of his own disabled younger brother, and he has no criminal record. That's all I could learn in a short period of time. Perhaps he's a good person, or perhaps not. If he knew who you are he might try to play on your sympathy."

"I can handle him."

Mr. Darcy settled himself atop the headrest of the hatchback's front passenger seat, flattening his four-foot length to avoid the ceiling. I took my place next to him at the steering wheel. I rolled the driver's window down manually and gazed out at Sedge and Malcolm. The sky above their heads had begun to clear, making an azure backdrop for the hotel's blooming dogwoods and azaleas. Perhaps the South was a lovely Technicolor region, after all. "I'll call."

"Do," Sedge said gruffly. Malcolm, looking verklempt, gave a little wave.

I revved the hatchback's fuel-efficient engine. "We're off," I said to Mr. Darcy. We exited the hotel's curving driveway and turned up Peachtree Street through a gauntlet of high-rises and shopping strips. Nary a peach tree, anywhere.

"What, what?" Mr. Darcy said in a campy British accent, cocking his head. He stared at the passenger-side floor, where a paperback book lay atop my hemp macrame purse. Cross Creek, by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. A famed 1930s memoir of life in the Florida forests. No doubt, he liked the colorful cover of a quaint fish camp beneath moss-draped oaks.

"It's a famous book," I explained. "And Rawlings won a Pulitzer for her novel, The Yearling. Don't read that one, Mr. Darcy, it'll make you cry. She was very observant about inland Florida and its people. You could say she was the Jane Austen of Florida."

"Mon Dieu," Mr. Darcy said.

We headed south.

Ben

The love shack

It was not the kind of thing a man wants to hear a woman say to him in bed. "Sugar?" Paula said gently, rubbing my bare back with one hand. "You've been off your game the past few weeks. Distracted, that's all. Are you sure there's nothing on your mind that's affecting your ... libido?"

My brother was dying, but I hadn't told a soul, yet. And didn't intend to. You start talking about death, you draw death to you. Or to the people you love. I always thought about Mama and Pa.

I raised my left hand with the bandaged forefinger upright. "That new gray mare bites something different on me every week."

Sitting beside me, naked on the rumpled bed, Paula sighed and patted my back some more. A big spring moon was rising outside the cabin's screened door. My love shack was hidden in the ranch's back marshes. Only place I had any privacy.

The moon gleamed on the little fishing lake just beyond the front steps. Spring-fed lake, deep as forever. A couple of college professors from the University of Florida dove down a hundred feet and found the main vent, but who could say how much deeper it went from there? Still waters run deep, they say. In Florida, they run deeper.

Everything's connected in life, in my opinion, just like the water connects the land. We're all heading toward the sea, and the waters can wash us clean.

I wished Paula would just quit talking and enjoy my water scenery. "Sugar," she went on, shaking her head, "I've known you four years and counting. I've seen you show up here some Saturday nights with broken toes, stitches in your head, and bruises the size of pancakes. But nothing's ever stopped you from treating us girls to a good time. This is different. Why don't you drive over to Tallahassee one morning and talk to Dr. Steinberg? I'll get you in without anybody noticing."

Paula managed the front office for a big group of doctors in the state capitol. "Is Steinberg good with chomped fingers?" I asked. "How about stomped feet?"

"He's a shrink, sugar."

I turned and looked down at her in the dark. She was serious. "I'm not crazy. Just bitten."

"You're depressed, Ben. What's wrong?"

I shook my head. Time for a little Thocco magic to change the subject. I slid an arm around her and pulled her close, then put the other hand on her belly. She was soft and snuggly, and I knew just how to stroke the sensitive spot on her Caesarean scar. Paula had three kids, a no-good ex-husband and a full schedule. I rounded her life out with a little fun every fourth Saturday night. We had a perfect man-woman friendship-with-benefits. But now she planted a firm hand on my chest. "You're stalling. Don't try to fake me out. And don't try to fake out the others, either."

I blew out a long breath and let go of her. "Is everybody worried about me?"

"Yes. We're getting a little concerned that maybe you're ready to move on. Maybe you've spotted the future Mrs. Ben Thocco? We'd be happy for you, Ben, but we'd like some warning. You'll be hard to replace, sugar."

My women thought I'd found a potential wife? Hell, I'd given up on even having a regular girlfriend. I didn't have the time, the money or the patience. Pickin's were slim when it came to finding a woman willing to help me run the ranch. I could just picture my ad in the personals:

SCC (Straight Cracker Cowboy) looking for woman willing to work 24/7 on a backwater ranch taking care of livestock, house, garden, land, plus coeds, food and entertainment for seven hired hands who don't drive, cook or understand how to work a TV remote, not to mention a disabled baby brother so sweet he'll break your heart. Must like alligators.

"No wife on the horizon," I grunted to Paula. "What, is everybody comparin' notes?" I shuffled my bare feet on the cabin's plank. floor. A splinter would have felt good, right then.

"We always compare notes. Nothing personal." She punched my shoulder lightly. "That's just the way harems are."

I rubbed a line of tension in my forehead. There are disadvantages to dating four women at once. Not many, but some. Not that you could call my rotating Saturday night appointments with Paula, Suzie, Cathy and Rhonda, "dating." Especially since they knew about each other and not only didn't compete, they'd all gotten to be good friends over the years. "Maybe I'll take a few weeks off and recharge my battery."

"That's a good idea, sugar." She started patting my back again. "We love you, Ben."

There's nothing less sexy than having a naked woman pat your back in sympathy. Even worse when she's representin' a whole group of naked women. "I'll pass the word around," she whispered. "We'll all get back on schedule in a month or two, okay?"

I nodded, defeated. "Better hope the gray mare doesn't bite anything below my belt buckle." I held up my finger. If you think this was hard to bandage . . . "

She laughed and got up to find her clothes. I sat there looking out at the moonlit lake again, wishing I could sink under the shine.

Chapter 5

Kara

I thought of my parents constantly-both pairs-during those two days on the highway to Florida. I touched the gold locket on my chest; I talked out loud to Mother and Dad, hoping they heard me. I asked them questions. Did you secretly want me to know? And I asked them for help. Show me what I'm supposed to learn.

Driving alone on unlulmvnl roads opens the mind like meditation. My mind became a kaleidoscope, capturing images. I turned into the scenery.

I was cotton fields, pine forests, pecan groves, endless pastures, acres of peanuts and other crops. I became tall deer fences and the giant, metal spiders of mobile irrigation systems towering over the land. My skin blossomed into a strangely beautiful carnival of gas stations, truck stops, diners, discount outlet malls, trinket shops, and the occasional massage parlor and nudie bar. I was amazed. The Bible belt openly advertised sin?

I stopped at sunset not far from President Jimmy Carter's hometown-1, Plains. I set up my tent in a public campground on the edge of avast peanut field. The cool spring earth smelled of eternity to me. "There is something profoundly ancient in the scent of dirt and all that it symbolizes," Dad always said.

The land seemed to go on forever, reaching a scarlet and gold sky hemmed at the bottom in the majestic silhouettes of huge oaks and the regimented hardiness of tall, straight pres. I lit a lantern next to my small campfire and read Cross Creek in the soft spring dusk.

Mr. Darcy huddled on my shoulder, tented in a light baby's blanket against the chill. He dozed, his head tucked, making soft chuckling sounds against my ear. I believe macaws talk to the God of Birds in their dreams. I wondered if he had memories of his longlost parents.

Before bedtime that night I took one of my spiral notebooks-I loved to catalogue minute details of people and places-and I wrote my birth parents' names on a page in large script.

Lily Akens. Mac Tolbert.

I balled the notepaper in my hand, laid it at the edge of my campfire, and watched the orange flames consume it. To the native tribes in the Amazon, smoke communicates with the spirit world. I watched my birth parents' names rise in the starry, blue-black Georgia sky. Mother, Dad? Meet my mother and father.

I looked at a satellite map on my laptop computer, amazed that I could connect wirelessly at the edge of a Georgia peanut field. I zoomed in on northern Florida, halfway between the Gulf beaches and their Atlantic counterparts. Forest, forest, forest, forest. Creeks, springs. Rivers. The tiniest roads. Zoom in. A splotch of open pasture surrounded by wilderness. The Thocco Ranch.

A tiny river ran through the heart of it. The Little Hatchawatchee. Much of what's old and venerable in Florida has a Seminole Indian name. The river was surrounded by buildings, barns and work sheds. A cattle ranch in a part of the world most people associate with beaches and oceans. Florida has a long history of ranches and cowboys. Fascinating.

I sat back, gazing at the satellite image. Thocco Ranch. Thocco. Another name of Seminole Indian origins. Interesting. From the Amazon River to the Little Hatchawatchee. From one native culture to another.

Ben Thocco, I hope you are a kind and decent man.

I burned his name on a piece of notepaper, too. Asking the spirits to let me lulow.

Ben

It started out just like any other morning at the ranch, with everybody complaining about my greasy scrambled eggs and a two-foot king snake curled up behind a sack of potatoes in the store room.

"Snake's back," Lula grunted as she went past me with a platter of biscuits I'd singed in the oven. Nothing like the combined smell of burnt bread and Lula's fake designer perfume to put a man off his coffee.

"Take the bacon to the table, please-ma'am," I told Dale. Dale frowned at Lula. She read Bible storybooks-the kind with pictures-and was pretty much convinced Lula was Jezebel.

Dale hustled out of the kitchen carrying a pile of extra-crispy pork in a black iron skillet. I tossed my oven mitt at a tabby cat who was trying to sneak a paw into the margarine tub.

"Out of there, Grub." He just purred at me. I grabbed a hammer and some tacks, pulled a flattened cereal box from the trash can, and went to shore up the walls of a hundred-year-old Cracker farmhouse against king snakes.

Mac walked out of the store room with the snake curled comfortably around his big forearm. Lily limped beside him, admiring the catch. "Red, yellow and black. King snakes are so pretty. Like Halloween candy. The poor baby was just hungry, Ben." Every needy critter was a'poor baby' to Lily. She hadn't named the gray mare, yet. Just kept calling it Poor Baby.

"That king snake's why we haven't seen a single palmetto bug in the store room yet this spring," Miriam called. "I say leave it be. It's cheaper than a can of roach spray." She went back to spearing her greasy eggs. We ate in the kitchen at a ten-foot picnic table built from leftover construction lumber. Seven hands, two aging mermaids, Joey, and yours truly could fit around that makeshift dining spot with room left over. Joey commanded one end in his wheelchair.

He waved one ofhis favorite breakfast treats, a mix-and-bake miniature muffin with real-fake blueberry flavoring. "You didn't burn this one, Benji."

"Yeah, it escaped."

Joey dunked the burned muffins in saw palmetto honey. Everybody else said my muffins tasted like wall plaster with blue specks, but Joey, God bless him, loved `em. Joey chewed and swallowed. "Maybe the snake'd like you to cook him some breakfast, Benji."

"Naw, we don't want to kill him."

I stepped into the storeroom and squatted down, poking the potato bag aside with my hammer. Mac stood in the doorway, stroking the snake's bright-ringed back. "I'll t-turn him loose in the g-garden." He and Lily went out through the back screened porch, her cooing to the snake.

I found a hole the squirrels kept re-chewing in the wall underneath a bottom shelf and tacked the cereal box over it. That should work for, oh, at least a day. I heard Joey talking to Miriam at the table. "I'm extra-tired this morning," he said. "Will you turn my oxygen up for a few minutes?"

"Sure, hon," she said.

He was getting weaker. Day by day, little by little. I squatted on the storeroom floor, my head down, my shoulders hunched. The main attic fan, whumping in the front hall ceiling, caught my thoughts and wouldn't let go. He's dying, it said. He's dying, you're helpless, he's dying. I heard Mac and Lily's loud footsteps hurrying back. I pretended to look for other squirrel holes.

Lily stuck her head in the storeroom. "Ben," she cried. "My poor baby's run away."

I figured she meant the gray mare, not the snake.

Damn. It was going to be that kind of day

Kara

At the state line