It's Not Like I Knew Her (4 page)

She dared not say more, or even look at Ginger's tear-stained face. Instead she studied the intricate pattern of a cobweb hanging overhead, glittering more brightly in the early morning sunlight than any jar of fireflies might.

Jewel came as far as the property line, threatening to leave without her.

“I gotta go.” Jodie turned away from Ginger, walked off the porch, and got into the bus.

Through a cloud of swirling dust, Jodie looked back in the direction of the tire swing that hung limp from its rope like some dead thing. Ahead of her was the unknown, and in the absence of anything more, she'd need to trust Jewel's dream.

A
fter six months on the road, traveling through south Alabama, Georgia, and north Florida, the band was still playing music's bottom rungs: small juke joints and local county fairs. The crowds were small and Jewel's take, after Troy's tally of shared road expenses and his fees, wasn't enough for three square meals a day for the two of them between gigs. Yet Troy never tired of boasting about doors only he could open.

Whenever the bus passed a school yard filled with kids, Jodie worried that she'd grow up dumb. Maybe she couldn't list the major agricultural products of Brazil, the way she imagined other fifth-graders doing, but she could follow the band's routes on a road map. She read new comics on those stops when a store clerk looked the other way. When there were no new comics, she read the white on red Burma-Shave signs, making up her own slogans. Randy, the band's bass player, bragged that her slogans were good enough to pass as song lyrics. She knew better than to share her made-up stories where she was Wonder Woman fighting crime with her best girlfriend, Glory Gal. Her stories were about a place where big, strong women fought against evil and were loved for their heroics. When she wasn't staring out the window, reading, or making up stories, she slept. It helped to avoid the escalating fighting between Jewel and Troy over the songs Jewel was to sing.

J
odie sat up, startled, her legs cramped. The bus had no heat and she was cold, even beneath the ragged quilt. The band had left Nashville, Georgia, late last night. It was the closest they'd come to Ryman Auditorium and the grand stage of country music.

She hated waking hungry. Her last meal had been a soda and animal crackers. She couldn't remember the last time she'd felt really full.

She watched Randy pump gas and pour three quarts of oil into the engine block. He'd warned Troy plenty of times that the engine needed an oil change, but the boys barely scraped up enough money among them to fill the gas tank. Troy declared that they weren't to bitch. Good money awaited them down the road in Crestwood, Florida.

“Here, kid.” Randy slipped Jodie a Baby Ruth from his jacket pocket and shivered, drawing his skinny neck into his dungaree jacket. “The bastard who said come on down to the Sunshine State where it's summer year-round is a liar.”

“If you ask me, Florida's built on lies.” She took the candy bar, thanked him, and crawled beneath her tarp. She'd swiped the smelly, half-rotten tarp from behind a filling station, and Randy had helped her anchor it over two rows of seats to carve out her own space.

She didn't believe the showy billboards that promised her in Florida she'd see Ross Allen milk rattlesnakes and alligator farms where gators ate roadkill right out of your hand. If that wasn't enough, there were warring Indians taking white scalps, and beautiful mermaids who blew kisses underwater. But these exotic places were always miles ahead in a part of the state that, as far as she knew, didn't exist.

She bit into the Baby Ruth, not caring it was stolen. She and Randy were a better team than Randy alone. While storekeepers watched her, believing only kids stole candy, he filled his pockets with candy and gum they shared.

O
n Christmas Eve the bus rolled on toward Crestwood, Florida. Jodie huddled beneath the tarp, her hands over her ears. But neither that nor the roar of the bus engine could drown out Jewel and Troy's fighting. He claimed Jewel had screwed up the words to his newest song, and maybe she had. Not even Jewel's voice could make music out of what he wrote. Just now he accused her of screwing up the play list, while the band boys were just as likely to mess up as Jewel. The presence of whiskey before, between sets, and after the shows was as common as missing meals.

Back on the row, Jewel's moodiness had come and gone, but what she'd once laughed off, calling cases of the mulligrubs, arrived more frequently and stayed longer. The white powders Troy now gave her for headaches did little more than get her out of bed and onto the stage. She'd grown thinner and worried less and less about how she looked.

Jodie didn't have a name for what she feared was happening to Jewel. She heard it in the sound of Jewel's voice, drifting from the stage with a sadness that didn't match the up-tempo songs Troy insisted she sing. Of late, not even the band boys' incessant clamor that a big-shot record producer was in the joint, a contract awaiting their signature, could lift her spirits.

When they reached Crestwood, a nervous fat man in a fringed Buffalo Bill jacket met them, complaining about their running three hours late, and pointed them to a back entrance. The boys griped that there was nothing to eat before starting to haul band equipment.

Because Troy never tired of yelling that she was to stay the hell out of their way, Jodie gained the freedom to walk wherever she pleased with only her tangled thoughts as company. But tonight she had a bad feeling about Jewel and stayed in the bus. She sat behind the steering wheel and watched as the grassy parking lot filled with junk cars and old pickups. One man came riding a farm tractor.

The band's late arrival meant less time for Jewel before her appearance on stage. It was normal for her, the star of the show, to stay behind the curtained-off section of the bus she shared with Troy until show time. She had only to get herself sober and pretty.

Jodie wasn't surprised to see Randy loping toward the bus, his big hands jammed deep into his pockets. He claimed the cold made his fingers stiff, affecting his playing. Truth was, hot or cold, Randy played as though his fingers were sausages.

Randy stood in the door of the bus and nodded toward the curtain. There had been no sound from Jewel's side of the curtain for some time, and Jodie prayed hard before peering in.

Jewel sat slumped, near-naked, an empty glass in her hand. Jodie shut her eyes against what she saw and snapped the curtain closed.

“Damn, we've gotta get her on her feet. If she can stand then by God she can sing.” Randy leaped up the steps. “She drunk or doped? Mixing that shit's gonna kill her someday.”

“Just drunk.” There had been no money for the white powder. Jodie bit her bottom lip until she felt a bigger pain.

“Jesus, kid, don't go pussy on me. Not now. You've got to get her drunk ass up. Make her presentable. Them people paid money to hear her. She don't sing, we don't eat.”

“It ain't that. Got something in my eye, that's all.”

“Yeah, I know. You've got a fucking right. Her, your mama and all. I'll tell Troy she's on her way. The boys and me will stall. But you've got to hurry.” He jumped from the bus and ran toward the sound of the band.

“Jewel, it's me.”

“Jodie, baby? Go find your mama another bottle.” Jewel turned the empty upside down and shook it. She tried sitting upright, but failed, slumping back onto the makeshift bed.

“You'll want to know tonight's crowd is bigger. Everybody's waiting to hear you sing. And the band sounds … good. Can you hear them?”

“Screw 'em. And screw you if you don't get me that damn bottle.”

“Out cold,” Jodie said to Randy when he returned. It was better that way. She sure didn't need Troy's rant.

Jodie could hear the fat man onstage, pleading that Jewel was too sick to perform and assuring the angry crowd that their ticket stubs were good for the next show. But there was no second chance for the band. They broke down equipment, loaded the bus, and left town. Their first stop the following morning was a pawn shop where Troy hocked a piece of sound equipment. Money enough for a couple of meals and gas to make the next gig.

Jodie felt a new ending coming, and she worried what it would mean for her and the woman she called Jewel, although she didn't think of her mama that way.

O
n a spring morning, ripe with the scent of gardenias, Jodie stood next to Aunt Pearl, her mother's only sister, whom she'd met for the first time last evening. She struggled to make sense of Jewel's rant about her biggest stage yet.

“Playing Jacksonville's everything.” Jewel worked her painted nails up and down the tiny pleats of her lemon yellow skirt. Her red-veined eyes remained dry, as though tears had no part in what she said. Maybe the real divide between Jewel admitting the truth and blindly clinging to wishful thinking was the fine line of headache powders Troy had continued to supply when her will failed and she needed a little something to help her move from behind the curtain and onto the stage.

“Okay, but why can't I go?”

“You know the road's no decent place for a kid. Here, with Pearl, you'll have a normal life. Get back in school. Maybe even start church.”

“I hate school. And I'm not normal. You said so yourself.” She hated Troy. Blamed him for Jewel's choice to leave her behind. “Please, Mama, I promise I'll be nice. He won't even know I'm around.”

Jewel grabbed Jodie's shoulders and squeezed. “Good God, Jodie, I thought you were smarter than that.”

Jodie's silent anger made her dizzy, and she ground her words through her teeth, “I hate him. I want him dead.”

“Jodie, Jodie, he's nothing. I've never cared about him.” Jewel glanced in the direction of the idling bus. “Picture me swishing my fine ass onto that stage.” Jewel's hand now gently cupped the back of Jodie's neck. “Me singing my way straight into a miracle.” She smiled briefly in the way she might at the fading of a pleasant image.

“Yes'um, I know, but who's going to take care of you?”

Jodie clung to Jewel with the same might she'd used when she held to the bridge railing. Biting into the flesh of her forearm wrapped around Jewel's neck, she accepted that her mama had always lived inside her dream, and that the woman she'd loved was already gone.

Troy sounded the bus horn and Jewel pulled free of Jodie's grasp, stepped back, and although her eyes were full of uncertainty, she turned on a quick heel and walked off the porch, her resolve set in the tightness of her thin shoulders.

Standing next to the stranger she was to come to know as Aunt Pearl, Jodie watched as the bus bounced over a slight rise and disappeared in front of a whirling cloud of dust.

Later, her aunt asked how she got such a nasty bruise, a purple-blue oval against her buttermilk skin, and she'd answered, “It's a little something to remember Mama by.”

A
t first the postcards came once a month, the hurriedly scribbled message always the same:
Miss you. See you soon.
Still, Jodie looked forward to the next, and continued to go daily to the mailbox until even a fool would have known better.

A
fter her Saturday morning chores, Jodie made two grape jelly sandwiches and filled a fruit jar with sweet tea. She climbed the giant oak that had become her best friend and hid among its massive branches. Slouched against the tree's rough, dimpled trunk, she pitched bread crusts in an attempt to bait a male cardinal to come closer. She admired the way he flitted about, flirting with his mate, and she attempted to imitate his calls, if not his haughtiness. But the bird only laughed and did what she couldn't do; tired of his stay and flew away.

An approaching car caught her eye, and she stared toward the street. A sheriff's cruiser slowed; the officer stared at the mailbox lettering and drove the cruiser into the yard. A slight man stepped from the cruiser, settled a big-brimmed Stetson atop his head, and studied his image in the side mirror. Jewel would have mocked him as looking like a piss-ant under a collard leaf. The officer squinted into the bright sunlight, and Jodie wondered just what evil he expected to find lurking in the yard. He carried a package clamped beneath his arm.

He walked onto the front stoop directly below Jodie's perch and knocked on the door. He removed his hat and stood, twirling the Stetson like a windmill caught in a storm, until Aunt Pearl opened the door.

“Morning, ma'am. I'm Officer Howard Shuler from Montgomery County.” He cleared his throat. “And, ma'am, if you're Pearl Taylor, you're the very person I was sent to find.”

Although his tone made it sound as though Aunt Pearl had won some kind of prize, dread had begun to drain the sap from Jodie's legs. She leaned as far as she dared to learn his reason for coming. She worried that whatever brought him to Aunt Pearl's door couldn't be good. Jewel had warned that the law never came bearing good news to folks like them. But Jodie thought her aunt was different.

Aunt Pearl's pale face contorted with alarm, and she answered, “Yes, officer, I'm Pearl Taylor.”

“Ma'am, do you … what I mean is, did you have a sister named Jewel Taylor?”

Aunt Pearl clutched her hand to her throat and spoke so softly Jodie couldn't hear. What had the deputy come to say about Jewel? Her grip slipped and she felt she'd fall before she caught herself up.

“In that case, ma'am, I'm sorry, but I bring you bad news.” He cleared his throat a second time. “There was a terrible wreck, first of the month, on the Birmingham highway. A semi loaded with hogs was struck by a made-over school bus. A bunch of them hogs died. But that's not really the worst part.” The officer put a hand to the back of his neck and rubbed as if he might spare himself whatever else he'd come to say.