Karen G. Berry - Mayhem 01 - Love and Mayhem (24 page)

She walked back toward the park, stopping at the front door of the Blue Moon to have a peek inside. During the day she could go in and Beau wouldn’t make her leave. But at night, she knew she’d be scooted out like a cat on a broom. She peered into the neon gloom. No Pops, nowhere at all. “Grandma’s gonna be madder’n hell,” she whispered.

She crossed the highway, walked between the lions at the gate, headed over to the east side, where the old woman who didn’t know how to feed herself lived. She hadn’t been able to sneak her much this week, because her grandma was suspicious. Too much food gone, and one too many pillowcases disappearing.

She found her destination; a mountain of cans, shining blue and silver under the almost-full moon. This, she thought, might put me over. But Abner Widdell sat beside his treasure pile, cracking, chugging, tossing. Occasionally, his pink tongue heaved out like a frog’s to lick away the precious foam.

“Hey Abner. Mind if I carry away your empties?”

His eyes swam to focus on her. He chuckled. “What’s in it for me, little girl?”

Annie frowned. “What’s in it for you?”

“Yesh.”

“Well, you won’t have a big-ass pile of empties outside your door, garbaging things up. That’s something in it for you.”

“You can have’em if you show me your tang tang, girlie,” he croaked.

She crossed her arms.

“I’ll give you all these empties and ten dollars just to see your tang tang.” His fat white stomach shook in laughter.

Her eyes glowed red like a raccoon’s. “I don’t know that you could be any more disgusting, Abner Widdell.” She stomped off. Stomping in new boots gave your feet some power, she felt it, an echo in how they hit the earth. And she’d have those empties, she would. She’d tell her Grandma she wanted to beautify the Park. Her grandma liked that word, “beautify,” and she’d give Annie Leigh permission to carry off those empties while Abner snored, passed out, one afternoon this week.

She decided to climb up on the old satellite dish outside the Tyson’s and have a look around. She stashed her sack of empties under their aluminum stairs and threw the granola bars she had hidden in her pocket to the puppies that shifted, not barking when she came near.

She grabbed hold of the posts. It only took her a second, her arms doing most of the work, her boots occasionally scrabbling to keep her progress.

It reminded her of climbing the moon.

The air was even colder up here. She never minded the chill. She looked out over the roofs of the Park, some of them gleaming with white rock, others darkly tarped, tires holding down the plastic. A trailer was like a shoe box, she thought, you could lift off the roof and see the life in each one, then put the lid back on all that misery and put it in a closet.

Closet. She was missing the guitar, tonight. That guitar had been a black misery to her until she learned to play it. After that, the black misery came from not playing it. But tonight was about those empties and the money they’d bring her.

She sat up on the dish like a sentry, watching. She knew that greasy Reverend Heaven had been killed, and she shivered a little, wondering where her grandfather was. But no one would ever kill my grampa, she thought. He’s good. That Reverend was as nasty as Abner Widdell.

She watched Fossetta’s car pull up in her driveway. Fossetta got out, stepping soft in those pink moccasins. She went in first, and a man followed her. A tall, handsome man in a John Deere cap, it looked like. No. That wasn’t Gramps. Annie Leigh closed her eyes. It wasn’t. That tall, muscular man with the cap and the dark boots making his way into Fossetta Sweet’s trailer was not her Gramps.

Because Annie Leigh said so.

Tuesday

ASA STRUG WOKE,
head in hands. He felt the wind’s cry like an eel feels the coursing power of its own electricity. His eyes rolled white in aggravation. “Satan, thou will never make the Top Forty with this discord.”

“Where the heck art Thou, Lord?” Asa felt the pressure of the magazines stacked around him, pages and pages of glossy female flesh, arranged and displayed like a buffet of sin. The only diners were mice that tunneled and nested in the stacks and aisles through which he paced, caged, ready to tear off the roof, to hurl it at sin. Because no matter how much he took into himself, no matter how many nights he walked and bought, his meager checks squandered on this filth, sin survived. Sin lived in the Francie June Memorial Trailer Park, sin lived and grew and claimed and triumphed.

His dirty feet trampled a Gethsemane road into the defilement of the female that carpeted his home. He kicked his door aside and strode out, rocks tearing his bare feet, his ropes of hair standing up in rage and fear. Asa Strug saw it then, glowing in his mind, a tidbit of Scripture.

“Lord, I agree with thee.” He went to work.

He stood with arms spread in the glow of his sign, lit with the cold glow of the fluorescent tubes, the wasting moon, and the words with which he could not argue.

He was glad to be apart from mankind. He didn’t care that people scorned him for his solitary, unwashed existence. He didn’t care that people mocked his reader board ministry, or even worse, ignored it. He didn’t care that someone would soon rearrange the letters of his latest verse into a ribald rebuke that might contain the word ‘nigger.’ No, Asa Strug didn’t care.

He had God on his side, after all.

FOR ONCE, MEMPHIS
had slept the night in his own bed. He woke, not to the alarm, and not to the birds, but to the jangle of the phone. “If I never,” he mumbled, stumbling to his feet, sliding on his stocking feet across the linoleum floor to the kitchen’s wall phone.

His soft ‘hello’ was lost in her screech. “Memphis, I have SOLVED the MURDER!”

His ears, his ears. “Rhondalee, I appreciate…”

“Don’t interrupt me, Memphis! I KNOW who DID it! I’ll tell you in person! This phone might be TAPPED! This is a matter of, of… GRAVE NATIONAL SECURITY!” Then she slammed down the receiver.

What a way to start the day. Memphis had no idea how his brother survived being married. He reminded himself, there but for the Grace of God.

Memphis felt a little guilt over his brother’s life. But Tender had Raven, didn’t he, and that was something, to have a child, to have raised a young woman up. But he shouldn’t have given up playing. If Tender had stayed on the stage with his daughter, maybe she would have enjoyed it more. Maybe she would have stayed on the road as a musician, and not taken up trucking, and never ended up on the road on that night.

But then again, he thought. But then again. Which part of life would you undo, not knowing what other parts would vanish because of it? Life had to be accepted. It was of a piece. Pull out a thread and you ruin the pattern.

He stood for a moment at his open back door and looked out at the thirty acres of undisturbed land behind his house. Raven called it his “rock farm.” He whistled. John Lee pulled himself up and staggered to the door. “Come on, boy, let’s water the crop.” Memphis feared the limp was worse. The old dog could still lift his leg, Memphis was glad to see.

He returned to the sunny kitchen and removed the cover from the finches. They poked their beaks out of the nest, then hopped out. Their sweet tones mingled with the strangely erotic sounds of his Mr. Coffee, a Christmas gift last year from Garth. The coffeemaker moaned so low and then so high, with what sounded like whimpers and groans in between. The noise intrigued and embarrassed him.

John Lee went back to his corner, lay down and thumped his tail. The birds devoted themselves to seed tossing. Memphis stretched and gave his head a thoroughly satisfying scratching. He poured himself a cup of coffee and stood in the sunshine that streamed through his open back door. He didn’t have Jesus in his heart anymore, but on a morning like this, Memphis just had to believe in God.

He set his coffee aside and picked up his fiddle. Memphis played from the chin, high, aching notes that bounced between the hard blue shell of the sky and the bleached-out dust of the horizon. He played a duet with his own echo, and his heart pulled to hear the answering tones of his brother’s silenced song.

His phone rang again. “Why don’t I have it grafted to my blessed
ear?
” he snarled. He set down the fiddle and picked up the phone.

It wasn’t a pleasant conversation. Not only did he have to hear about his brother’s arrest (“for assaulting Gator Rollins? Are you telling me my brother, who as far as I know has not laid a hand on anyone since he left school at age fifteen, has assaulted a man he doesn’t even know?”), but he had to listen to Hiram’s halting, apologetic, and completely inadequate defense as to why he hadn’t called Memphis and let him know that his own brother had been in jail. What was the excuse? “I figgered you was needing some sleep.”

“Hiram, I am ALWAYS needing sleep.”

“Well, Sheriff, what the heck.”

He took a deep breath and cast around internally for some patience. “Well, let me get down there and get him out.”

“Sheriff, he’s done made bail last night.”

Memphis stood up very straight. “He made bail? Who bailed him out, Hiram?” He listened. “Hiram, are you
sure
that’s who it was?” He hung up, bowed his head, and prayed. Dear Lord, let there be some explanation for this that doesn’t end in my brother’s life being torn apart.

Amen.

A BIT LATER,
in his creased uniform pants and shirt, he removed his hat and took a seat at the counter of the Daisy Diner.

“The usual, Memphis?”

“Please, Ranita.” He located and opened his little notebook, and looked down at his notes. He had too many games of Tic-Tac-Toe in there, and not enough leads.

Ding! Order up. It was his eggs, and he forked them in without tasting.

He thought about Gator Rollins. The man is an abomination, he thought. I mean, at least mosquitoes feed frogs and fish and wasps carry pollen and snakes keep the rodent population under control. But what is the point of a thing like Gator Rollins? A dead end, Memphis knew, but he wanted to chase the man into that dead end and have a few kicks at him. Apparently his brother had already done that, however. What on earth could have gotten into Tender to rouse him to violence?

Ding! Order up.

“Ranita?” He spoke softly, and she leaned in, the bliss of her bosom so close to his face. “I need the check.” She gave it to him with a smile.

Ding! Daisy’s hand was awfully heavy on that bell.

Memphis ambled out to his cruiser, taking a ritualistic moment to adjust the mirrors and fine-tune the angle of his hat. A loud rap on his window made him jump a like a kicked dog. Oh Lord, he thought, holding his heart and cranking down the window before she broke it. “Rhondalee? May I help you?”

“Memphis, as I TOLD you, I have SOLVED the MURDER!”

His ears, his ears. “Thank you, Rhondalee. You’ve saved me a great deal of work.”

“Don’t TEASE me, Memphis! I KNOW who DID it! Quentin Romaine.”

Memphis shook his head. “Quentin? Why do you say that, Rhondalee?”

“Well, I was walking back from Sunday morning Coffee Klatch, and I saw him painting his lawn jockey white.”

“And so?”

“So? So? Don’t you UNDERSTAND? He beat the Reverend to death with that thing, and was painting it to cover up the TRACES!”

Memphis sighed. “If Quentin Romaine tried to lift that, he’d have welled up and shot all over the Park like Old Faithful.” They took a moment to mentally consider the visual image.

“Well, maybe he was inspired with rage. People are like that, you know, those old ladies lift up cars and such, Memphis.”

“That’s just on the Lucy Show, Rhondalee. Besides, Quentin had filed a complaint because an Open Armer hit his jockey with a half-ton pickup and marred the paint. I’m sure he was repairing the damage. And both Beau Neely and Raven told me that Quentin was in the bar while the Reverend was meeting his maker.”

Rhondalee looked him deeply in the eye, as if she were trying to hypnotize him. Memphis stared back, transfixed by her earrings, which appeared to be made from a pair of those tree-shaped air fresheners that hang from rear-view windows, all covered with glitter and braid. She noticed his stare and brightened at the attention. “Do you like these?” Rhondalee shook her head and set her earrings to clattering. Memphis caught a whiff of chemical evergreen. “We’re all going to make them at Crafts Circle, this Friday.”