Bethel's Meadow (34 page)

…

I was sitting in my car as it idled in Sidebottom’s driveway. I honked the horn and waited for him to pop out. A minute later he was walking down the long driveway to meet me, dressed like a damned pimp. I knew he was about to embark on another night of sarging unsuspecting female targets at a local nightclub or bar.

“Tonight’s a big night for me, mi amigo,” he said. We shook hands and he kept talking. “Tonight I become the guru. I’m picking up five hundred bucks a head, five guys total, who will learn from me the art of the pickup.”

“Wally, that’s great,” I said. “But I really don’t want to know about it. I thought you were committed to making your money with Vernon’s company.”

Wally shook his head. He was wearing a wide brimmed white hat of some sort that was adorned with feathers. It made him look like a goddamned duck. And his fingernails were painted hot pink. On his chin he was now sporting a soul patch. His shoes had to be seen to be believed. I really don’t even want to think about them now. He was also wearing eye makeup, for crying out loud.

“I’m making twenty-five hundred dollars tonight,” he said. “I’m done with computers. So it looks like Buckwheat will be without both of us.”

“I swear to God, if you call him Buckwheat one more time, I’m going to—”

He held up his hands and said, “Sorry, okay?” I swear, with that hat he was wearing, I could almost hear him quack. “Look, Smith, I’m glad you came. I have a proposition for you. And you’ll make more money from me than you’ll ever get from Buck—um, Vernon. You’re the best web design guy I know. Well, Vernon’s better, but he turned me down. You see, I need a website for my new business venture. I need—”

“Stop it,” I said. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing and hearing. “I’m not helping you with any of your goddamned sarging, or whatever you call it. I just don’t believe in that shit. I’m not going to be neutral about this anymore. I am going to openly denounce every trick you play on women to get them into bed.”

“Huh?” Wally looked worried. I really wasn’t going to openly say or do anything about his pickup practices. If women were that damn dumb to let it happen to them, whose job was it to protect them from their own gullibility? But I sure as hell didn’t mind scaring him a bit.

“Wally, about that book—the one that’s bound and gilded like a real Bible. You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to the bookstore and order a thousand goddamned copies of it, and then I’m going to distribute it to every lame-brained hussy on Dusty Pond. Maybe it’ll save them an unwanted pregnancy or a morally depraved threesome.”

“You’re bluffing,” he said, self-assured now. He was right—I was bluffing. But I came with a pure heart.

I went to the back of my car and unlocked the trunk. “Wally, please come here.”

His heels clicked and clacked, and the feathers on his stupid pimp hat floated right behind him.

“You going to throw me in there?” he said.

I opened the trunk and pointed inside. “Look.”

“One of your guitars?” he asked. He was close.

“No,” I said as I reached for the black guitar case. I lifted it out and handed it to him. “Inside is a brand new Taylor Big Baby acoustic guitar. It plays like a dream. Inside the case are extra strings, along with some tools and cleaning supplies for proper maintenance. What you do with this instrument is up to you. Just know what my guitar did for me.”

“What was that?” Wally asked.

“It gave purpose and meaning to my life. It kept me from killing myself.”

…

On the road back home, my cell phone buzzed. I didn’t recognize the number but I answered the call anyway.

“Hello,” said a man’s voice. “Am I speaking with Mr. Bethel Smith?”

“You are,” I answered. “What can I do for you?”

“My name is Johnny Johnson. I’m an attorney, Mr. Smith. I would like to come to your house to meet with you. It is in regard to the estate of the late Dr. Samantha Fleming.”

“Sorry, sir, but I’m not family.”

“No, you may not be, Mr. Smith. But, nonetheless, you have inherited from her estate. I wish to meet with you immediately.”

“Inherited what?” I asked. This was getting interesting.

“Mr. Smith, I’d really rather wait until—”

“What did I inherit, kind sir? I must know before you come over. I really hate surprises. I really do.”

“Okay, so be it. Mr. Smith, Samantha Fleming’s life insurance policy has you named as a beneficiary. Because of her untimely passing you are to collect two million dollars.”

39

E
IGHT MONTHS PASSED. It was New Year’s Day.

It was a pleasant, warm, and sunny day in Orlando. Though we were battling hangovers following a night of celebrating with our friends, Glory and I were hard at work relocating boxes and furniture from her apartment to my place. We wanted to finish up by four so we’d have time to get dressed and ready for a night with Wally Sidebottom. While working up a good sweat hauling all of this stuff, I fondly reflected on the events of the past several months.

Glory and I had spent every night together since we’d first made love. And no, it wasn’t out of economic necessity that we were moving in together. It wasn’t a case of: “Well, we spend every night together anyway, so we might as well quit paying two rents and just shack up together.” Money and convenience weren’t the issues—we’d made sure of that. The decision was based solely on our desire to be with one another every day, for the rest of our lives.

We still had a passionate love life. That was the most important thing to me. We reminded each other every day to never take one another for granted. A relationship like the one we were trying to build requires trust, mutual respect, and true love. And, before asking her to move in with me, I made sure she knew that I
was
deeply in love with her.

She then followed my declaration with one of her own: “My dear Bethel, I knew I would fall in love with you the day we met. I’ll never forget the way you looked at me. And yes, I knew that you looked at me all over, and not just in my eyes. But you looked at me with respect. You looked at me with admiration, just as a lover of art would view a painting. It was that day when we first got lost in each other’s eyes that I knew my life had forever changed. It was so scary to feel it, but at that point a part of me knew that our fates would forever be tied together. As you well know, that is not something that can be easily explained. And now I do love you, Bethel Smith. I’ve loved you since the morning you first made love to me. I was yours from that moment on.”

I made damned sure that Glory knew she would forever be my highest priority in life. Even as my days on the job with Vernon’s company had stretched to twelve-hour shifts, when I’d get home, before I went to the bathroom or grabbed a beer from the fridge, I would pick up one of my guitars and play for Glory. In fact, I was now even singing, too. Glory was an accomplished vocalist, and had been since early childhood. She’d begun giving me voice lessons six months ago. She was particularly fond of my rendition of Johnny Cash’s “I Walk The Line.” And I just loved singing it to her. The way it made her smile, the way she believed the lyrics when they came from my lips—that meant the world to me. I had always admired Johnny and his wife June for their dedication to one another—an undying love if there ever was one. I prayed to the good Lord up above that Glory and I could have a love just like that. I would never ask more from Him than that. . . .

Of the two million dollars I had inherited from Samantha Fleming, I directed one-eighth of it to charities and organizations aligned with the needs of homeless children and children with a single parent. My thought in making those donations was that I didn’t want any kid without a father or a mother to end up going through what I had. No, money can’t solve everything, but it often makes for a damn good start in the right direction. To put my money where my mouth was, I had also begun volunteering as a Big Brother with the local chapter in Central Florida. I’d mostly worked on weekends with black and Hispanic children, often bringing Glory to tag along. It was turning out to be quite a rewarding experience, especially since I had begun taking Spanish lessons, which enabled me to communicate more effectively with the Latino children.

I directed $250,000 to the Lupus Research Foundation. I’d once dated a lady afflicted by lupus. Though I hadn’t seen her in almost ten years, I made the donation in her name. I had admired that adorable woman for being one of the gutsiest souls I’d ever known. In my presence she had experienced a couple of lupus attacks that had scared me more than anything I’d ever witnessed. She was a tough, courageous, and brave lady. Though our relationship was rather short-lived, I’d never forgotten her. I’d always felt like she was a soul mate of sorts, a kindred spirit because I had manic depression (though you really can’t compare the two conditions—I’ll take manic depression over lupus any day). I prayed she was still out there, alive and kicking, breaking the hearts of other men just as she had broken mine.

I then chose to allot a few hundred grand toward making someone’s dreams come true. I dedicated myself to building a business for the woman I had fallen deeply in love with. It wasn’t to be a down payment on future love to be received; the money was simply my way of expressing my gratefulness to Glory for having saved my life, as well as my soul. I hadn’t worked out all the details just yet. When I finally got it together, I wanted it to be a surprise.

I redirected about a million dollars back to Samantha’s son, even though he and the attorney representing his trust felt they were in financially good shape with what they already had. I promised Devin that if he ever needed a mentor or just a friend, my door would be open to him. He knew that I’d also lost my mother to suicide. It wasn’t the best way to form a bond, but he took me up on my offer and we talked on the phone almost every day. He also occasionally accompanied me and Glory on the Big Brother weekends.

And speaking of Dr. Samantha Fleming’s son . . .

On an early October Sunday morning, Devin called to inform me that he’d found my manuscript in his mother’s closet the night before. He said that though many of the pages were ruffled and partially ripped, it was mostly intact. Devin gave the manuscript to me a week later after I picked him up for one of our Big Brother outings.

That night, when I opened the black notebook the manuscript was bound in, I was completely blown away by what I saw on those tattered and torn pages. Samantha had marked up the manuscript extensively with helpful suggestions regarding the storyline, the plot, the development of the characters, and my overall style of writing (Glory provided a ton of help as well during the process). And on the final page of the edited manuscript was a short note. It read:

I believe in you, Mr. Smith. Don’t ever let anyone cause you to give up your dream of being a writer. Fuck ‘em.

I found myself weeping for days after reading that note. It turned out I was missing Dr. Samantha Fleming after all.

…

Sidebottom had finally turned away from the dark side of life.

After Glory and I had finished moving her worldly belongings over to my place, we took a thirty-mile trek over to Clermont, Florida, to visit a honky-tonk bar. It was a much different crowd than the kind we normally encountered on Dusty Pond Boulevard. The folks were much more laid back, infinitely more genuine, friendlier, and warmer than the Dusty Pond phonies. They were also very welcoming and kind to strangers like me and Glory. After we got a couple of beers under our belts, we were singing and dancing to the band’s rendition of “Like a Rolling Stone” along with the rest of the locals.

And the song was being performed by none other than . . .

Wally Sidebottom and the Bottom Feeders, the best damned folk and bluegrass band south of the Mason Dixon.

And let me tell you: Wally Sidebottom could flat out tear it up on the guitar. When I gave that guitar to Sidebottom, I knew what I was doing. I was tapping into his family gene pool, so to speak.

Music was indeed in Wally’s blood. During the sixties and seventies his grandmother had been in a traveling folk and bluegrass band up in Kentucky. She had mastered no less than twenty instruments, including drums, bass fiddle, violin, piano, xylophone, and several different woodwind instruments. In later years she was renowned throughout the south for being an outstanding fingerstyle guitarist. She had toured as a solo act for nearly thirty years before actually dying onstage during a legendary performance.

That talent had been passed down to Wally’s father, who was the organist for his Baptist church in Virginia. Mr. Sidebottom was also known to be a hell of a harmonica player.

Wally himself had grown up playing classical guitar, not giving it up until he had left home to flounder for many years before finally obtaining his college degree.

After the song was over, Wally warmed my heart with this speech:

“Thank you, thank you, thank you, folks. Listen up for a quick second. . . . All righty then. I have a couple of close friends in this audience I wish to thank before moving on. First—and I beg the pardon of all the lovely ladies in this dive—in attendance tonight is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever known. Glory Nolan, get your hot ass off that chair and show ‘em what you got. . . . Yeah, let me hear it for the lovely lady. . . . Okay, okay, okay, let’s don’t embarrass the poor thing.