A Tree Born Crooked (2 page)

James raised his eyebrows.

“I’m good, Shireen. You take care of yourself.”

“You too. And honey, can you pull the chain on your way out? I got someone coming over in a little while and I don’t need no more good Samaritans dropping by with mail.”

“Sure. Bye.”

“Bye.”

He snapped the chain as he left and the pink neon glow disappeared from the window. James walked slowly back to his trailer, intending to sleep. Instead, he spent the whole night staring up at the water stains on the ceiling and wondering what the hell he was getting himself into.
 

~ ~ ~

James used his knee to steer the wheel of his pickup truck while he crumpled up a greasy A&W hamburger wrapper and tossed it to the passenger-side floorboard. He corrected the wheel and then reached up onto the cracked vinyl dash for a soft pack of Marlboros and a lighter. He lit the cigarette, only halfway watching the road, and inhaled. He rested his hand lightly on the wheel and set his elbow out the open window. Sliding down into the seat, he relaxed and got comfortable. He only had ninety more miles to go and he wanted to enjoy them.
 

The battered 1975 Ford F-250 raced along the subtle curves of Highway 301. Even though James was not in a hurry, he always drove at least ten over the limit. If the sign read 50, his foot automatically pushed the gas to 60. His truck was more beat-up than it should have been for its years. The original color had been baby blue, but by now it was so faded and scratched that it was more of a pale gray. The entire driver’s side panel had been replaced with a rust chewed piece that bordered on having no paint at all. Jealous boyfriends had keyed it down the side more than once, and the tailgate was tenuously held on by bungee cords. Empty tall boys rolled and clattered along the bed whenever it came to a stop, and the inside was no cleaner: slimy beef jerky wrappers, scratched off lottery tickets, and wax paper fast-food cups littered the floorboard. A piece of hard, yellow foam stuck out from a tear in the seam of the maroon bench seat. The whole interior smelled like cigarette butts and dried sweat. It was his baby.
 

James twisted the radio dial as far as it would go in either direction and found only one station that wasn’t mostly static. After an advertisement for “no down payments” at Vick’s Used Cars, a man’s voice came on and told listeners to repent now or forever burn in the sewers of hell. James clicked the radio off. He would wait until he got closer to Starke and try again.
 

James was a man who looked both older and younger than his thirty-six years. His hands, with scarred knuckles and smashed nails from years of working on cars for a living, added a good ten years onto his age. His smile was that of a flustered teenager. It was his eyes that were confusing to most, though. They were gray, sometimes green, sometimes darker, and could go from gentle to malicious in the span of a breath. The crow’s feet, stubble on his cheeks, and unkempt, short brown hair led many to believe that he was worn out, done in, and just didn’t care anymore. It was true; he didn’t care most of the time, but worn out he was certainly not. With a few shots of Beam, and an insult from three stools down, James could have his fists out before the other man even set his glass down. He was a good listener, but a better fighter, and many an unfortunate drunk had mistaken his disheveled appearance for weakness.
 

The early afternoon sun flashed off the green highway sign for Starke and James let off the gas. He had already received more than his fair share of speeding tickets in the innocent little town. If the traffic was slow, a local cop had no problem getting on a car’s tail and waiting for it to drift one mile over the speed limit. Aside from the occasional pot-smoking teenager, there wasn’t much action in Starke and tagging speeders kept the police awake and paid. With one eye always on the rearview mirror, James kept his speed steady and tried the radio again. The evangelical was still preaching about money and brimstone, but after running through the stations again, James found some Willie Nelson and left it alone. He was trying to keep his mind on something other than where he was going, and as soon as his truck cleared the city line he floored it, hoping that it would help. It didn’t.
 

James hadn’t been back to Crystal Springs in a little over three years. He called home every Christmas and April 22nd, his mama’s birthday, but that was about it. The last time he’d been home it was for his cousin Janie’s wedding and he had only stayed the night. Birdie Mae had given him grief for the first few years after he had left home at nineteen, but she had gradually gotten used to it. It just became the way things were; James had left town and everybody else stayed on. Whenever he spoke to her, though, Birdie Mae never missed a chance to get in a dig about how it had done him no good to leave Crystal Springs. According to her, all the folks back home were just having a party all the time and he was missing out on the fun. Everyone was having babies, getting married, getting married to better wives or husbands than the first ones, starting their own businesses, making lots of cash, and being down right successful for Alachua County. And what was James doing? Oh, that’s right. Nothing. This was generally about the time James said that he had to go do something important and hung up the phone.
 

His father had been different, though. Orville never spoke to James when he called. They never had more than a thirty-minute conversation in the front yard when he visited, leaning against the tailgates and kicking the tires of each other’s trucks as they discussed transmissions, exhaust pipes, and spark plugs. When he was a year out of high school, and James told his family that he was packing his bags and driving out to Phoenix East Aviation in Daytona Beach to learn to be a pilot, his daddy had been the only one who told him to go for it. Everyone else was disgusted with him, but the night before James left, Orville took him out to the citrus grove behind their trailer. James was expecting a sermon. He had already gotten an earful from Birdie Mae: he was selfish, shady, and unreliable. He was forsaking the family business and leaving his kinfolk without extra help. He was gallivanting off on the heels of the devil, and could he really be so stupid? Orville didn’t say much, though. He commented on the clear night, on the stars, on the rose beetles eating into the tangerine and grapefruit leaves. He carried a shovel, and when they got to the edge of the property, he pointed to a spot on the moonlit ground and told James to start digging. About two feet down, the metal struck glass and James lifted out a dirty mason jar with a rusted lid. Orville told James to fill the hole in and put the jar in his truck before he went back into the trailer. When James got to Daytona, he hauled the jar out from under the driver’s seat and pried off the lid with a screwdriver. James counted it out to be just shy of a thousand dollars, all in wadded up fives and twenties. That was Orville.
 

The last time James had seen him they had talked about football. Crystal Springs High versus Newberry. The rivalry between the Tigers and Panthers went back to Orville’s time when he had rushed eighty-seven yards to win the last game of the 1951 season. A framed newspaper clipping of a ring of teenage boys holding Orville up on their shoulders occupied a special place behind the cash register on the back wall of the Citrus Shop. The yearly high school contention was one of the few things to celebrate in Crystal Springs and, especially around November, it became a topic of serious discussion and fuel for numerous parking lot fights. Crystal Springs High had come out on top James’ senior year, but not because of him. He had spent the last half of the season on the bench with a torn hamstring. It had been a disappointment for Orville, but he had tried hard not to show it.
 

Still, even if he hadn’t been the best cornerback in his playing days, there was no getting away from being a Tigers fan in his household. James hadn’t known any of the players they were talking about on the last night that he had seen his daddy, though Orville had updated him on each boy’s stats and potential, but it had still been good to just shoot the breeze and laugh. That night, Janie’s front yard had been crowded with relatives and family friends, all getting wasted because the father of Janie’s two little girls had finally given in and married her. Neither of the newlyweds had seemed as excited as the rest of the crowd enjoying the free Pabst Blue Ribbon. Janie had spent most of the evening fighting with her sisters, still in their teal bridesmaid dresses, and the groom had puked up a whole bottle of Rebel Yell before passing out behind the lawnmower shed.

James remembered that Janie’s girls had run circles around himself and Orville, waving sparklers and writing their names in the air with the glowing streams, until the younger one stepped her bare foot into a patch of sandspurs and started howling. Orville had picked the little girl up, swinging her by her armpits, and sat her on the open tailgate of his truck. While James made silly faces at her, Orville had gently pulled the sandspurs out of her tiny foot. Even before Orville was finished, the girl was laughing and squirming to get down and chase her sister. By the time James had picked his PBR back up, Birdie Mae was calling Orville over to the patio grill, screeching something about letting the coals go out and a dozen hot dogs sitting right there, waiting to go on. Orville had winked at his son before tossing his empty beer can into the bed of the truck and heading back to the grill.

James had watched his daddy, yelling back at Birdie Mae, pointing to the plate of dogs and buns, then at a cousin across the yard. Birdie Mae was waving a barbeque fork in his face and then tried to take a swing at his backside with it. Orville grabbed it out of her hand, grinning, and danced away from her. Birdie Mae’s hands were on her hips and she was trying hard not to smile back at him. James watched Orville let her have the fork back and then raise his arm to someone who was getting ready to leave. Orville had glanced for a moment back over at James, leaning alone against the side of the pickup, then had turned and walked away to say goodbye to his friend. James wished that he had come back to talk about football, about the weather, about anything. Somehow, they didn’t get a chance to speak the rest of the night, especially after Orville’s brother Cordie showed up with a jar of shine. When James had left in the morning, Orville was nursing a hangover and couldn’t get out of bed to say goodbye. The last clear memory that James had of his father was of Orville’s hands tenderly cupping the little girl’s foot and drawing the pain away from her.
 

~ ~ ~

James slipped the nozzle into the gas tank and flipped the catch on the pump. He leaned back against the side of his truck and watched the numbers on the gas pump slowly rise. He squinted toward the west, noting that the sun still had a few more hours to go. James looked back at the numbers flashing and set his jaw before reaching into his hip pocket and pulling out his cell phone to dial a number he knew by heart. He ground his teeth and waited. The line rang five times and then a voice, young and bored, answered.
 

“Crystal Springs Citrus Travel Shop.”

James unclenched his jaw.

“Who is this?”

“What’d you mean, who’s this? This is Lila. Who the hell is this?”

“Is that how you always answer the phone?”

The girl on the other end of the line huffed.

“Mister, you better tell me who you are.”

“James.”

There was silence for a moment, as the teenage girl tried to decide if she should know who he was or not. It didn’t take her long.

“Well, what’s that supposed to mean? You some kinda perv? You the guy been sitting in that piece of shit Cadillac ‘cross the street all afternoon? If you are, I swear to God I’m gonna call the cops soon as I hang up, so you’d just better start your engine and get the—”

James cut her off.

“I’m Birdie Mae’s son.”

More silence and thinking. James watched the numbers on the gas pump and waited.

“Well, what’d you want?”

“Birdie there?”

James turned around and kicked the fender of his truck. The right back hubcap was scuffed all around the edges and the tire could use some air. James gripped the edge of the truck bed with his free hand, leaning back and holding himself up.

“No.”

“Where’s she at?”

“Went home early. I’m in charge. She leaves me in charge all the time. I got keys and everything.”

“Good for you.”

James scratched at a flake of gray paint with his thumbnail.
 

“Want me to tell her you called or something?”

“No.”

He peeled off a thin strip of paint and then rubbed at the bare spot beneath with his thumb. There was an awkward silence before the girl responded.
 

“Well, then.”

“Thanks, Lila.”

James flipped the phone down and held it in his palm. He could still call Birdie Mae’s home phone. He flipped the phone open again, then snapped it shut. Screw it. The nozzle clicked off and James pulled it out and hung it back on the gas pump. He got in his truck and drove west.

~ ~ ~

 
Crystal Springs, population six thousand on a good day, hadn’t changed much over the past thirty years. It wasn’t that it was a town stuck in the past; it just didn’t know what to do in the present. The town’s single claim to fame was that Elvis Presley had once spent the weekend there on his way to Orlando. The motel where he had stayed, the Sweet Dreams Lodge, still charged extra for tourists to rent out the room he had slept in, but no one came to Crystal Springs because of Elvis. The town was a place to pass through. On the route from Gainesville to Lake City, college kids and exhausted tourists stopped to get gas, eat a quick meal, and buy some cheap souvenirs. Most didn’t stay through the night.