Jezebel's Blues (3 page)

“Damn,” he said aloud. “I really almost drowned out there.”

“What happened?”

“Tree branch knocked my feet out from under me and I lost my bearings.” He closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the wall. The pounding of the rain overhead filled the room.

Water in his mouth, his nose; his hair tangling in the branch…

He started, realizing he’d almost dozed off with all his earthly goods stuffed soaking wet inside his pack. Blinking, he pulled it over. “You mind if I spread some things out? It’s all soaked and it’ll mildew if I don’t get it dry.”

“Of course not.”

There were jeans and socks and shirts. The underwear gave him a moment’s pause, but the thought of doing without the next day or two made him spread it out along with everything else. A sack of oranges, a sodden box of cookies, several tins of Vienna sausages and a bottle of water followed. “This’ll all come in handy,” he commented.

Celia picked up the soggy cookies. “Too bad. Oreos are my favorite.”

He grinned. “Mine, too. Can’t go anywhere without ’em.”

“Maybe they’ll dry.”

“They’ll taste like catfish now—like the bottom of the river.”

Celia laughed. Her smile was filled with the kind of teeth that had been professionally polished every six months on the button. Pretty, he thought, nudging an empty space in his own mouth with his tongue. Expensive, too. There had been no one to pay for things like dentists for Eric and his sister. At least he’d been able to get hers fixed before she’d started to lose them. There was a conglomeration of other things in the pack—cards and dice for long nights or afternoons stranded in truck stops; scissors and soap; a saturated towel; string and hooks for makeshift fishing. Celia watched him sift through everything without saying anything, but when he pulled out the last item, he heard her make a noise. Not a gasp or a groan, but something in between.

“Something wrong?” he asked, holding the rubber-banded paperback in his hands. He glanced at it, and grinned as the truth came home. “Your dad, right?”

“Right.” There was something less than enthusiastic in her voice. “Please tell me I’m not stuck up here for heaven knows how long with one of his groupies.”

Eric laughed and then licked the spot on his lip when it started to bleed again. “Don’t make me laugh. It hurts.”

“If you regale me with stories about how my dear departed daddy changed the way you looked at things, I’ll tell every joke I’ve ever heard.”

Eric pressed the dishrag she’d given him to the cut. “I promise.” He tossed the book aside with an inward chuckle. Jacob Moon
was
his favorite writer, and for a lot of reasons. Obviously, his daughter had heard all of them before.

She stood up and matter-of-factly spread a blanket over the mattress. “You can sleep now, if you want to. You look beat, and I’m a night owl, anyway.”

Eric admired the rounded contours of her rear end briefly as she smoothed the blanket. His gaze fell with greater hunger to the pillow, however, and he nodded wearily. His mouth and hands hurt, his legs would barely hold him and he had driven so hard to get to Gideon that he’d had no sleep in thirty-six hours. “Much obliged,” he said. As soon as his head sank into the downy recesses of a clean-smelling pillow, his brain spun away.

* * *

Along toward morning, there was a break in the rain. Celia had slept curled against the wall below the window, her head pillowed on the sill, her body wrapped in a blanket.

The cessation of noise was what startled her into wakefulness. No rain pounding overhead, no lightning and thunder flashing and roaring. She blinked, disoriented at first, then remembered the past eight hours. It was impossible to see much outside in the predawn darkness, although a little light pushed at the horizon. Another cloudy day, she thought with a groan.

Eric still slept, and even in the darkness she could see that it was the utterly unconscious sprawl of exhaustion. She crept past him quietly and tiptoed onto the landing just outside the attic door.

A silt-heavy smell of water hit her nostrils, and the air was heavy with moisture. If the sun came out any time soon, Celia thought fuzzily, they were in for scorching weather. She fumbled for the banister and found it, then headed down the stairs for the bathroom.

Beneath her bare feet, the wooden stairs were almost slimy with dampness. A shudder of unease whipped over her spine. A collection of unfamiliar noises began to penetrate the fog of awakening—a splash and trickle, a queer echoing. Below all that was a minute groaning, like the hull of a boat at sea.

She froze for an instant. Then, propelled by horrified curiosity, she continued down the steep flight of stairs, gripping the banister fiercely. Another splash sounded just as her toes hit icy cold water. Celia scrambled backward for an instant.

Alter a moment, she stepped back onto the submerged step, and holding with all her might to the banister with one hand, squatted and reached out with the other hand as far as she could. Water.

What had she expected? That somehow ankle-deep water had pooled on the twelfth step down?

A noise she couldn’t identify sent her scurrying backward up the stairs, her heart pounding in her throat, her mind filled with thoughts of snakes: water moccasins, copperheads, cottonmouths—and whatever other kinds there were. It seemed as if she had learned the names of more evil snakes every day since her arrival in Texas. The noxious creatures were the one blemish on a landscape she otherwise loved.

Inside the attic room, she found an old tin bucket in a corner and carried it out to the landing, closing the door for privacy. For a moment, her nose filled with the river smell and her imagination with the triangular heads of snakes, she wondered if it might be easier to just hope Eric didn’t awaken. Only the thought that he, too, would have to attend to the business of nature decided her. It was better than nothing—and a person couldn’t go forever without using the bathroom, after all.

When she returned to the room, a gray dawn had begun to fill the long room, illuminating aging trunks shoved under the eaves. An old bicycle hung from the rafters and a long oval mirror reflected the wan light. The boxes of supplies were clustered near the door.

In the middle of the wide room was the mattress they had dragged upstairs together, and upon it slept the man who had appeared so suddenly on her doorstep. Eric Putman, she thought, cocking her head. Last night, her impressions had been hurried, a little blurred, and she’d awakened with the feeling that she had dreamed him.

He slept on his back, a hand splayed on his chest, his long, long legs sprawled. He looked, she thought, as though he’d been knocked out in a fight and dragged, unconscious, to sleep it off.

His hair was every bit as black as it had looked the night before, and it was too long, curling around his muscled brown neck with abandon. His jaw was grizzled with black beard, and the painful-looking cut on his mouth made his already full lower lip swell.

My Lord in heaven, Celia thought. Her eyes crept over his thighs in the too-tight jeans that had belonged to her grandfather, slid over his lean hips and his broad-shouldered torso. Not a flaw. Not a single one.

She sighed softly, leaning against the wall, not quite sure whether to be thankful or distraught.

It was then that her gaze caught on his hands. They were as big as the rest of him, and just as lean—the kind of hands that gray-haired piano teachers exclaimed over in children—gracefully shaped and long fingered; strong and beautiful, like the man himself.

But the hands, unlike the man, were flawed. Thin ribbons of pale scar tissue criss-crossed the elegant lines of bone and marred the exquisite line of his fingers. One hand held the other in a loose grip, as if it had been aching while he slept.

A faraway rumble of thunder dragged her attention back to the here and now, and she crossed the room to peer out the window.

At the sight that greeted her, Celia felt another primeval shudder. The river ordinarily looped behind the farmhouse on a sleepy, muddy path to the Gulf. And on the far bank, Celia could see things were pretty much as they always had been—a meadow of thick grass met a stand of heavy trees. In the soft gray dawn, the scene shimmered with rain.

But on the farmhouse side, Jezebel had leapt her boundaries with hedonistic abandon. Thick-looking water swirling with tree branches and debris buried the cultivated lawn around the house. The oak and pecan trees around the house had been swallowed to the juncture of their branches and appeared to float eerily above the water.

And even as she watched, rain began to fall anew, pattering and plopping into the inland sea as if on a gentle springtime mission.

“Quite a sight,” Eric commented behind her. The graveled sound of his voice purred over her spine and she turned with a little shock. The voice, too, had been real, she realized with a touch of wonder.

“It’s terrifying,” Celia said.

He glanced at the sky with eyes blue as summer twilight, then to the waterlogged landscape beyond. He pursed his lips for a minute. “I don’t think she’s quite finished with her little temper tantrum, but I reckon we aren’t gonna drown, either.”

“I started to go downstairs,” Celia commented, crossing her arms over her chest at the memory. “There’s probably three or four feet of water down there. I wonder how it got in so badly.”

“I opened the windows and doors,” he said, and she felt him move away from her. “Otherwise, Jezebel would have just smashed her way in anyway.”

“Oh.” She felt daunted suddenly by all she didn’t know. Gideon had seemed like a safe, dependable refuge from the insanity of her parents’ constant, restless travel. In the space of twelve hours, that refuge had been snatched away.

Some of her dismay must have shown, because a big, heavy hand landed comfortingly on her shoulder. It rested there only an instant, but Celia felt the lack of its strength when Eric took it away. She turned suddenly. “You know, it scared me when you showed up last night,” she said, “but I’m glad I’m not alone in this.”

A slow, lazy smile spread over his dark face. “Careful, sugar.”

Her own mouth quirked in a wry smile. “I have an instinct about these things,” she returned. “I had to.” She stuck her hands into her back pocket and cleared her throat. “I—uh—rigged up a sort of latrine or whatever you want to call it out there on the landing.”

His grin broadened. “Something tells me you would have been just fine by yourself up here.”

“I didn’t mean to imply I needed help,” she said. “Just that it’s easier not to have to face it alone.”

“Okay.” He gathered up a few belongings from the floor and ducked out to the landing. The door clicked closed behind him.

A rumble sounded in her belly and Celia knelt by the boxes of food. She’d kill for a cup of coffee right now. It was such a deeply ingrained part of her morning routine that she didn’t know how she would shake the fuzziness it usually cleared.

The lack of coffee made the rest of the provisions look utterly unappealing. Peanut butter for breakfast? Nope. Vienna sausages? Forget it. Finally she found what she sought: a box of strawberry toaster pastries with sprinkle frosting. She settled on the bed with the box in one hand, an orange in the other and forced herself to stop dreaming of caffeine.

Eric returned in a few minutes. His hair was combed, and he’d changed from her grandfather’s clothes into some of his own—a red flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows and very old jeans, soft as the flannel in his shirt, worn colorless. And obviously, Celia thought with a jolt, they had always been his jeans. They cupped and caressed and clung in ways that might have been indecent if—

The orange she’d been peeling squirted juice in her eye as if in punishment for her lascivious thoughts. Annoyed, she squeezed it closed. Jeans were just jeans, she told herself. It wasn’t as though he’d suddenly appeared in his underwear.

She risked another peek and decided he might as well have.

A can of cola landed with a heavy thud near her ankle. “Where did this come from?” she asked, popping the can open.

“Same place I got everything else.”

“Thank God,” she murmured, and drank greedily. “I can’t think without caffeine.”

“You’d get used to it if you had to.” He stood near the window, staring pensively at the gray beyond. Celia thought it was worry that crossed his features.

“Is something wrong?”

He shrugged. “I hope not.” He drank a long swallow of cola. “My sister’s out there, somewhere. That’s how I got stuck last night. Kept thinking if I could just keep moving, I’d make it to her place.” His jaw hardened for an instant, then he flashed Celia a smile over his shoulder. “Problem is, I’d have had to cross Jezebel, and I don’t think she was in the mood last night.”

“I think you’re right.” Celia offered the box of pastries and Eric settled on the edge of the bed, taking one.

“How’s your lip this morning?” she asked, eyeing the angry cut.

“I’ll live.”

“Can I tell you my jokes yet?”

One side of his mouth lifted. “Not unless you want me to start telling you how your daddy changed my perspective.”

“No, thanks.” Celia put the last of the pastry into her mouth and brushed her palms clean. “I’ve had enough of that to last me for the rest of my life.”

Eric nodded and light danced in his thick black hair, swirling over his crown like the water outside. “I bet it was hard to be Jacob Moon’s daughter.”

“By himself, he would have been okay, but I was also Dahlia Larsen’s daughter.” She rolled her eyes. “Between the two of them, we never went out in public without a camera flashing.”

“With parents like that, you must be pretty talented yourself.”

It was the typical response and Celia was oddly disappointed. “No, afraid not.” She stacked orange peelings in a small pile. “I can write a passable sonnet in three languages, dance tap, ballet and jazz without killing myself and accompany any church choir in the world on piano.”

“Sounds like a lot to me.”

“I had a great education,” she said. “I just don’t have a drop of talent.” She smiled at this admission, attempting to hold off the sympathetic noises people usually made at this point.