Jezebel's Blues (17 page)

Lynn settled at one of the desks. “Come sit down for a minute. Whoever it is in that boat isn’t going anywhere.”

Celia hesitated.

“We need to talk,” Lynn insisted, and patted the chair.

“I’m not all that sure I
want
to talk.”

“Yeah, I know. Just like you didn’t want to the other night.” Steadfastly, Lynn pointed to the chair.

Rolling her eyes in defeat, feeling like a recalcitrant child and unable to help herself, Celia sat. “Talk away.”

Lynn took Celia’s hand and leaned over, her dark eyes penetrating and sharp. “Mmm,” she murmured to herself. “I figure you must have hooked up with him during the flood at some point, since I saw you three days before that and you were fine.”

Celia looked away.

“Did he get stranded there?”

With a sigh of defeat, Celia looked at Lynn with a reluctant smile. “You won’t rest until you get the whole story, will you?”

“Now you’re getting the idea.”

“So Texans aren’t just know-it-alls, they’re nosy, too, huh?”

Lynn squeezed her fingers. “You’re in love with him.”

Briefly, Celia closed her eyes. Sarcastically she said, “It was such a wise decision on my part. I knew better—but I can’t seem to help it.”

“Love doesn’t pay much attention to shoulds,” Lynn said quietly. “I can’t tell you your business—but he needs something, that’s for sure.”

“I have serious doubts that he’ll find it in Gideon.”

Lynn pursed her lips, then smiled. “His attitude has been pretty bad for a while now, I’ll grant you that. But I have the advantage of having known him a long time, and I know from having seen what he was and where he came from that he’s one of the original fighters.” She paused, shaking her head. “That uncle of his drank up nearly every damned penny Eric earned—and he worked hard, you understand. Did everything—pumped gas and washed windows and mowed lawns.”

Gently, she stroked Celia’s hand. “Nobody really ever took him seriously, though—they all figured sooner or later he’d end up like the rest of his kin. You didn’t grow up around here—you just can’t know how it is to be white and poor.” She smiled. “Anyway, then Willie Hormel taught him guitar.” She snapped her fingers. “Eric got to where he walked proud, no matter what anybody said.”

Celia frowned and opened her mouth to speak, but Lynn forestalled her with one uplifted palm.

“You want to know why he’s got such a bad attitude and I’m getting to that.”

In spite of herself, Celia felt a brief flicker of amusement. Her father, too, had told stories this way. How many times had she heard her mother sigh in exasperation, “For heaven’s sake, Jacob, just get to the point!”?

“Well, you know that he left when he was about sixteen or so. It had to have been hard for him out there, but he made his mark. He was a big deal when he came home—those songs he wrote and the fact that he’d played with everybody who was anybody in the blues. The folks around here, well, most of them are happy just to have enough to pay the bills and buy a new used car every few years. Your daddy and Eric Putman went out there and got themselves famous.”

Slowly, now, the point of Lynn’s tale was emerging. Celia waited.

“A few years ago, when he came home for Laura’s wedding, there was a girl who followed him wherever he went. She was a lot like him in some ways—she wanted to be somebody, and nobody had ever taken the time to tell her she was. She’d been one of my students, the first year I started teaching.”

“Retta,” Celia said.

“He told you about her?”

“A little. Just the accident.”

“He blames himself for it,” Lynn said with a shake of her head. “But there’s people who just have a violent end written all over them, and Retta was one even back in high school. She drank too much and she gave herself away—“Lynn made a sad noise. “She and Eric were too much alike.”

“What do you mean?”

Lynn bit her lip for a moment, and Celia could see she wasn’t absolutely certain she ought to go on.

“Come on, Lynn,” Celia said. “You’ve gone this far, you may as well go all the way.”

Lynn nodded. “They neither one of them had any sense of who they were, because there’d never been anyone to tell them they were something besides beautiful. Eric found his guitar and something else to hang on to, but Retta never did. I kept thinking he’d be able to help her, but he didn’t love her—not the way she wanted him to. He took her with him because he saw himself. I think, if Retta hadn’t been so dead set on destroying herself, Eric would have probably married her, love or not. But that wasn’t enough for Retta.”

The thought of Eric married to someone else, someone he didn’t love, pierced Celia. She bowed her head, knowing the next part of the story—but she wanted to hear it from Lynn, who’d already given a new slant to everything else.

“When he had the accident, he came home for a little while, just to mend. Retta’s brothers called him a murderer, and there were some folks who were unkind about the life-style they thought musicians indulged in—you know?”

A conversation wafted through Celia’s mind.
Do people still have babies christened? Around here, they sure do. This is the Bible Belt, sister
. “I can imagine,” she said.

“So he lost his guitar, which was all he thought he had, and he came home to the same kind of ugliness he knew when he was a child.” Lynn straightened. “But the worst thing was that he couldn’t save Retta—which in his mind was pretty close to saying he couldn’t save himself, either.”

Celia rubbed her face. “Sometimes I feel like I’m lost in one of my father’s books. Why do all these people believe all these things?”

“You haven’t read enough if you have to ask.”

In surprise, Celia looked up. “You’ve read his books?”

“Of course I have—he’s our hometown hero!” More seriously, she added, “He was a great writer, Celia, but you have to look pretty deep to see what he was trying to say. I don’t think he meant to be obtuse. He just couldn’t look at Gideon head on.”

Celia didn’t want to talk about her father. The man was dead, and Lynn had sought her out and told her this story for a reason. “Why did you tell me all these things?”

“If something happens to Laura—“Lynn shook her head. “He’s gonna need somebody in his corner, Celia. You are that somebody, whether or not either one of you knows it.”

“Do you mother everyone in Gideon this way?”

Lynn smiled. “Pretty close. Will you go give him the message?”

Celia made a sound of annoyance. “Yes. I’ll give it to him.”

“In person.”

“Yes.”

Lynn hugged her. “Thank you.” Without releasing her, Lynn lifted her head. “He really is a man worth knowing. Try to remember how hard things have been for him—don’t give up.”

“I’m not going to talk about this again. Do you understand?”

Lynn chuckled. “I read you loud and clear.”

* * *

The suppertime odor of frying meat filled the air as Celia drove to Eric’s house. Or rather, she corrected herself, his sister’s house. He didn’t have one.

She parked and climbed out of the car as calmly as she could. The front door was open and from within came the sound of voices, laughter, a quick squeal of guitar.

Bitterly Celia thought it hadn’t taken Eric very long to recover from the night. But then, men were like that, weren’t they? Able to engage their bodies without engaging their emotions. Too bad, she thought going up the swept path, women didn’t operate in the same way.

No matter what Lynn said, Celia was still furiously angry with him. And she didn’t care if it was irrational, if she had encouraged him, if it was wrong. Anger was safer than some of the other things she might feel if she let it go.

She knocked on the screen door, bracing herself to deliver her message. Eric appeared, for once wearing his shoes and a shirt—a turquoise T-shirt with New Orleans emblazoned over the front. The color lent his eyes a peculiar intensity.

He frowned, puzzled.” Hi, Celia. Come on in.”

She nearly protested, but he’d pushed open the door and moved aside to give her passage, and there was nothing else to do. Bowing her head to avoid looking at him, she brushed past him.

A thin, dark youth sat on the couch, a guitar in his lap. He greeted her cheerfully. “Hi.”

“Celia,” Eric said, “this is James. He’s a blues guitarist.”

“Hello,” she said, politely, and bit her lip. She didn’t know if she ought to deliver her message in front of this earnest young man or not. But if she asked to speak to Eric privately, he might construe an entirely different meaning from the request. An untenable thought.

“I don’t want to keep you,” she said, her voice brusque. “Lynn asked me to tell you they’ve found Laura’s ex-husband. Or they think they have—no one has identified the body positively yet.”

Every scrap of color drained abruptly from Eric’s face. He sank into an armchair. “He’s dead?”

Celia nodded.

“Where? How’d they find him—I mean, was Laura—”

“He was in a rowboat,” she said. “They didn’t really know why or what he was doing.” She took a breath. “There was no sign of Laura.”

For an instant, he seemed to crumple. Not outwardly. He simply sat in his chair, his hands folded loosely between his knees. Outwardly, Eric looked as sturdy as a live oak, but Celia could see the contraction of muscles, the wince of terror, the bleakness of his horror. Even through her anger, she felt a pluck of sympathy.

She cleared her throat: “I’ll drive you over there,” she said quietly. “You can see for yourself.”

James rose. “I’ll come back another time.”

Distractedly, Eric looked at the youth. “Sorry.”

“That’s all right, man. Family comes first. I understand that.” With a smile, he dipped his head toward Celia. “It was nice to meet you.”

“You, too,” she said.

Even after James ambled out, Eric didn’t move. He just sat there, staring sightlessly at the floor. Celia hesitated, looking around her at the collections of the missing Laura. It was a warm room, with begonias blooming in the windows and a tidy arrangement of books along one wall. The color scheme was a little odd for Celia’s taste, with splashes of red and purple and green against walls of cream. Gold-threaded pillows in the same mix of wild color decorated the couch.

“She must be something else,” Celia commented, smiling. “A little crazy, but sweet.”

Eric didn’t reply. His stillness broke suddenly as he took a long hard breath and bent his head into his hand, pressing a fist against a spot on his forehead. “Lord have mercy,” he whispered roughly, and it was plain the words were as close as he could get to a prayer.

Gently, Celia touched his arm. “Come with me, Eric. You’ll feel better once you see she’s not there.”

“Will I, Celia?”

His midnight eyes glowed with the hollowness of an empty mine shaft. She thought of Lynn’s warning: if his sister died, he’d have nothing left.

“Let’s go,” she said firmly.

T
he drive was utterly silent. Eric hunched next to her in the seat of her economy car like a caged animal, and Celia thought fleetingly that he and her father were both as big as grizzly bears. It was too bad the pair of them had never met. They would have been quite comfortable together.

“Pull off on that little turn there,” he said as they approached a bridge. It was a bigger bridge than many of the others spanning Jezebel’s dozens of creeks and tributaries that ribboned through the landscape. This bridge spanned the river herself at a spot where she ran fast and clear over a tumble of boulders. A rescue van was parked on the shoulder of the road. Celia pulled up behind it.

A cluster of women sobbed as a sheet-draped body was reeled up the embankment. The lights of the rescue van flashed monotonously and as they climbed out of the car, she could hear the muted, intermittent growl of a police scanner.

A fist of memory slugged her body. She flashed on herself standing on the side of a cliff in Italy, seeing below the ruined remains of her father’s car, heard the singing, sympathetic voice of the young man who had been nominated to tell her that her father was dead.

She blinked hard, forcing herself back to the moment by focusing on the trio of weeping women at the side of the road. There was an older woman with cat-eye glasses and a sleeveless cotton shirt over green and pink polyester pants. A double row of pin curls looped around her head.

The two girls, teenagers, were obviously her daughters. They huddled close to their mother, peering toward the river with reddened eyes.

Eric brushed past Celia toward the embankment, his dark face closed tight. As he passed the trio of women, the mother cried out and tore herself from the grasp of her daughters to lunge at him, uttering an almost unearthly sound of rage, deep and guttural. Her straight-armed thrust caught Eric on the shoulder and knocked him sideways. He stumbled under the force, and startled, not quite understanding that he’d been attacked, he reached for the woman as if to steady her.

Celia watched in horror as the woman found her footing and slugged him. Eric staggered and lifted one arm to ward off another blow. The woman, making shrill, animalistic noises, pushed him again and they tumbled down the steep slope, locked in an angry embrace.

The woman flung her fists wildly, pummeling Eric wherever she could reach him. Most blows glanced off his shoulders and arms and chest, but one landed square in his mouth.

“Mama!” the girls cried in unison, and ran after her. “Mama, stop it!”

By the time Celia found the presence of mind to follow, Eric had gained his footing and held the woman in a hard grip against his chest. One of his hands wrapped around both the woman’s wrists as he blotted the blood away from his lip.

He looked utterly disinterested in spite of the obscenities the woman screamed into the evening air: slurs upon Eric, his mother, his sister. The girls grabbed her.

“Get her out of my sight before I kill her,” Eric said in a harsh, low voice.

And still the woman screamed obscenities. Celia paused in front of her as the girls dragged her up the hill. The girls both looked at her with alarm. Celia narrowed her eyes, her fists clenched at her side. “Why don’t you hit someone who can hit you back?”