Karen G. Berry - Mayhem 01 - Love and Mayhem (14 page)

With the help of a breathless aunt, she planned a Southern wedding to end all weddings. The night before she as set to walk down the aisle of St. Theresa’s church, she got good and drunk and skipped town with the tallest man in Toad Suck, a redheaded auto mechanic named Clyde. She chose him not because he he’d take good care of her, but because he’d take good care of the Cadillac she had inherited from her grandmother.

Their Arkansas exodus was fueled by bottle after bottle of Jack Daniels. Clyde seemed like a perfect example of taciturn and traditional blue collar masculinity as he handled that car. With the wind in her hair and the road dust in her teeth, she tasted freedom, too drunk to understand that her traveling companion was silent because he was a borderline moron.

She was still over the legal blood alcohol limit when she stood in front of a justice of the peace in Las Vegas and said the vows that would change her name to Melveena Strange Groth. When she sobered up and realized that her glorious gesture had backfired, she was trapped in a limbo of pride. She couldn’t go back. Having made such a terrible misstep, she had also lost faith in her ability to go forward. There she was, stuck in her lavender bungalow.

“Clyde,” she said softly and persuasively, careful not to wake him. “Clyyyyde. When I get home, you’ll be gone. Yes, yes you will. You’ll wake up and realize that I’m serious when I tell you I want you to leave. And you’ll pack up your truck and go see Rhondalee about renting a nice little trailer in the Park. One with a satellite dish.”

He grumbled, frowned, and rolled his lanky frame away from her.

When she stepped outside, her neighbor, Wheeler, looked up from a perpetually malfunctioning lawnmower and tipped his cap. With simple-minded awe, he watched her walk. I hope he fixes that mower soon, she thought, imagining how annoyed Clyde would be at the sound. He’d really have to ratchet up the volume on that dreadful television of his.

She shut the door of her grandma’s car, a mauve 59 Caddy convertible with lethal fins. Her other great pleasure in life. She folded her hands on the wheel. For one long moment, her proud head leaned forward as if humbled. Despair was an indulgence. She had a fine appreciation for indulgences, being both Catholic and Southern, but Melveena knew they were best applied sparingly. Time to lift the head, insert the key, fire it up and slide it into gear. Time to leave behind her greatest mistake, if only for a few hours.

She checked her watch. She’d missed church, and probably would for a while, but she could to make it to Minah’s for Coffee Klatch. She should have made that community meeting. It would have been the prudent thing to do.

AS BEFIT THE
circumstances, over in Space 48, the LaCours were wide-awake. Well, all except for Annie Leigh, who had to catch a few winks at one time or another. She slept wound up in her dirtied sheets, dreaming of road kill.

Her grandparents had not slept a wink all night. Tender sat across from Rhondalee. He’d come back into the house with an appetite. He’d announced his hunger. Rhondalee had done nothing but glare at him. He’d known she was angry, then. To refuse to cook for him?

Very angry.

He’d poked through the kitchen cabinets with an air of damaged dignity, then scrambled himself some eggs. She’d watched him take every bite, punctuating each swallow with a question. She asked the same question she’d been asking non-stop since Memphis left.

“Are you going to tell me?”

His voice held nothing but patience. “I told Memphis I’d wait until nine to talk to you about it. So just look at the clock. On the stroke of nine, I’ll tell you. I will, Rhondy.” She’d sat across from him, arms folded, lips compressed, eyes squinted up like BBs. He finally announced, “I’m going to bed.” Rhondalee huffed off to her recliner and found a religious station to occupy her.

He couldn’t sleep. He lay awake, listening to nothing but air, charged and violent. The roar of evil that had built to a pitch last night had mercifully lessened. Today, he listened to the sound of his own desire. It was a torment that robbed him of sleep and dignity and pride, sent him wandering out under the stars, composing song after song after song to a woman who had never done more than wave at him. He closed his eyes and saw her in his wife’s place on that bed, the honeyed banquet of his every carnal desire. He could summon her sound, her skin, her smell, her smile, at any moment.

It was killing him.

Rhondalee was asleep in her recliner when he finally gave up on the idea of sleep and left the bedroom. He stepped out the front door and retrieved the paper from his mailbox with the parade of chickens painted on the side. Next to it was her mailbox, rusted, dented, natural and plain. She touched this every day with her sweet, soft hand. Tender stood for a moment, transfixed by the beauty of that thought.

Of course, he stood there a little too long. Long enough to see Randall Stagg tumble out of the trailer, looking like he’d spent the night being hit over the head with a mallet. “Evening, Tender. Or morning, or whatever it is.”

Tender swallowed. “Hello, son.” Randall stumbled up the street, grinning like a fool.

Music always helped with the pain.

Back in his own bedroom, Tender went through the closet, which was full of Rhondalee’s shoes, why were there so many shoes around here when he himself only had one pair of boots that he could never find anyway? He hauled out two cases, the guitar and the banjo. The banjo was a happy, rollicking instrument, one that rarely suited his frame of mind. He needed to hit high, aching notes of despair. Only the fiddle would hit those, and his brother had taken both fiddles with him when he left over twenty years ago.

He opened the guitar case and sat alone on the bed, tuning and humming, brushing his fingertips on the strings with a touch as gentle and forbidden as a lover’s.

At nine o’clock, he would tell Rhondalee that the Reverend had been murdered. And when she took herself out the door to tell the rest of the world the news, to call it from the rooftops, to squawk and holler and harangue and shriek, the Park’s town crier, he’d be alone with his suffering heart. His house would be quiet, and maybe, just maybe, he would allow himself to cry.

AT A LITTLE
before nine, Memphis drove over to the Clubhouse and parked.

For the past four months, through a financial arrangement with the Rhondalee, the Clubhouse had served as a provisional meeting place for the First Church of the Open Arms. The residents openly despised the Open Armers, who were all from Bone Pile. It wasn’t their barefoot women, their lice-ridden kids, their holy rolling, their youth ministry or their tambourine shaking that put everyone off. It was their parking.

The Open Armers came down from the hills every Sunday, lit with the love of the Lord and a little genetically transmitted leftover uranium from the mines in the hills. They could have parked outside the gates. After all, from the main gate to the Clubhouse, it was only four blocks. But the Open Armers treated Sunday morning like a furiously competitive parking derby. There were ten spaces marked “visitor” in front of the clubhouse. These filled quickly, and the overflow traffic traveled up and down the paved lanes and gravel streets of the Park, rucking up grass and plowing through flower beds, displacing gravel, knocking over garden gnomes, blocking driveways and upsetting tenants.

By seven AM on a Sunday morning, all ten spaces were usually full with a variety of beat-up cars. Cups of coffee from ancient Thermoses, stale doughnuts and fried fruit pies purchased with food-stamps from the baked goods outlet store were passed back and forth amongst the lucky ten families who made it there early. Kind of like a tailgate party, thought Memphis.

Today, except for the one he occupied, all the spaces were empty.

At 9:10, he got out and stretched. He looked up gravel streets and down paved lanes. All he saw were the sleepy faces of the other tenants, come to stand in their front yards and verify the truth of it with their own disbelieving eyes.

Not one primer-painted Ford truck. Not one Buick station wagon with a missing headlight and a wired-shut door.

All was quiet in the Francie June Memorial Trailer Park.

THE COFFEE HAD
worn off. The adrenaline had, too. Memphis sat in his cruiser and radioed the office. “Hiram? I’m 10-76 to Space 13. Call me if or when you hear from either Forensics or the Coroner. Do you copy?” Silence. “Hiram?”

“A 10 what?”

He sighed. “I plan to talk to some people. Will you study those codes today?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Thank you.” Memphis drove the two blocks to Space 13. The aluminum screen door wavered before his eyes, shining and sliding and teasing him with the memory of a lazy stream where he and his brother had fished as very young boys.

He shook his head and knocked.

The door opened on faces that were handsome, cunning, and hard with the infamous Bone Pile contempt for the law. Hiram had taken down the names. He read them out. “Bartholomew MacIver, Hackett McGillicutty, Shadwell MacPherson, Leverton MacAuley, and Keegan MacLean, Angus MacPherson.” Memphis didn’t bother to establish identities. “Where’s Garth?”

“Asleep on the couch,” said one, barely moving his lips. Shadwell McPherson, he thought it was, though it might have taken DNA testing to tell some of these characters apart. He was handsome like a reptile.

Shadwell, he decided, was the de facto spokesperson, and he would direct his questions to him. “Could you tell me if Gator Rollins was with you boys for the entirety of yesterday evening?”

“We’ll have to think on that, Sheriff.”

“Don’t you know?”

“We get mighty forgetful around the law.”

Memphis shook his head. “Well, if you boys plan to throw in your lot with Gator Rollins on that talent show, you’d best be open to the idea of the law watching every single move you make.” He watched the men trade glances as subtle as the movement of a tongue in the mouth of a snake. “Yes, I’m mighty interested in Gator Rollins. I don’t trust that man. He’s what my grandniece calls a Bad José. I track his every coming and going. You let him join you, I can tell you, I’ll see every time you spit, every time you sneeze, every time you shut your door and every time you open it.” He stood there and stared at them all. They were too proud and too mean to drop their eyes, but he knew they’d heard him. “Now, I have another question. You boys are all Open Armers, aren’t you?” He had to wait full twenty seconds for the affirmative nod, but it did come. “Did any of you plan to go to service this morning?”

“Sheriff, we all planned to go. But that man asleep on the couch over there said he’d shoot us if we opened the door.”

“What about the rest of your menfolk? None of them came to church this morning, either.”

“There’s a fiddling festival up in Idaho. Most of the menfolk went to that. Only a few pups left around up there to keep track of the women.”

Well, that was plausible. Bone Pile men traveled en masse to musical events as far away as Canada. And they often won. “When did they leave?”

“Friday morning. They was driving straight through to make it there by Saturday morning.”

“And the women?”