Phantom of Riverside Park (3 page)

Elizabeth had cried all the way from the
Mississippi Delta to South Haven, big fat tears that flattened his
heart like a steamroller, and he’d wondered what sort of fool
notion would make a dried up old prune like him think he could
start over. It didn’t take him long to come up with the answer: the
fool notion was love. Elizabeth was flesh of his flesh, bone of his
bones, blood of his blood, the granddaughter he loved more than
he’d ever loved his own son who’d sired her.

Thomas Jennings would die for her. It was
that simple. Kill for her, too. Or at least try.

When they’d pulled over at the 7-Eleven for
gas, a trucker had yelled, “Hey, old man, ain’t you too old to be
knocking up a pretty little thing like that,” and Thomas flew into
him like a duck on a June bug. Would have whipped him, too, if
Elizabeth hadn’t begged him to stop.

Thomas had bought them cherry ice cream
floats. “As a consolation prize,” he’d told Elizabeth, which didn’t
make a lick of sense to her. But it did make her smile which was
the purpose all along.

“Eat your ice cream, Elizabeth. Everything’s
going to be all right.”

She dried her tears on the sleeve of her
shirt. “You shouldn’t have, Papa.”

He knew what she meant. Thanks to Major Hiram
Jennings he was not one of those rich Delta land barons, but merely
a hard-working farmer who knew how to scratch a living out of his
hundred acres of dirt.

Knew the back end of a mule when he saw one,
too, which was more than most folks could say.

The money from the sale of the farm wouldn’t
last forever, especially since neither one of them had a job and
neither one of them had a prayer of getting one, her with a belly
so big she couldn’t see her toes and him twenty years past the age
when most folks draw retirement.

Even a cherry ice cream float was a luxury
for them, but by cracky, nobody had better tell Thomas Jennings he
couldn’t afford it.

He’d rammed his hat down over his eyes and
coaxed the old truck back to life.

“It’ll be a cold day in the bad place when a
man can’t buy ice cream for his own granddaughter.”

Now he won’t ever have to worry about the
price of ice cream. He can buy twenty-five cones at the same time,
one in every flavor. He can buy the whole store if he wants to.

Thomas sat on the park bench with his head
bent staring down at the check. Folks passing by probably thought
he was napping. Or praying.

Maybe he was doing a little bit of both. He
napped every now and then, even when he hadn’t planned on it, and
he’d prayed so much he had calluses on his knees.

“God, just don’t let this be a joke,” he
prayed.

He smelled Elizabeth coming before he saw
her. His daddy used to tell him the sense of smell was one of the
last to go, and Thomas reckoned that might be true. When

Elizabeth picked him and the boy up at
Riverside Park, she always smelled like sugar.

“It flies like fairy dust at the bakery,” she
always told them.

Won’t she be surprised at who got sprinkled
with fairy dust today?

She scooped up Nicky who was earnestly
digging a hole underneath the oak, received his sandy hug, then sat
beside Thomas and kissed him on the cheek. “Hi, Papa. Was my little
boy good today?”

“He tripped an old lady trying to get to the
other side of the street, then robbed Union Planters Bank.”

This was a game they played, their
who’s
on first
routine Elizabeth called it. Thomas knew what it was:
it was the same thing he’d felt every night when he’d crawled under
the patchwork quilt with Lola Mae, comfort in the familiar.

“Where did he stash the money?”

When Elizabeth laughed she outdid them all
for beauty, all the cover girls and glamour girls and movie stars,
even his favorite Betty Grable. He figured that nearly everybody
who ever heard of her was long dead and gone, except him, of
course, and he’s not fixing to die, not if he has any say so in the
matter.

Lately, though, he’d been lying awake nights
worrying what would happen to Elizabeth and the boy if he up and
died.

Now he won’t have to worry about that
anymore.

“The money’s right here.” He pulled the check
out of his pocket and handed it to her.

Her smile disappeared as fast as Houdini in
one of his magic acts, which Thomas didn’t believe for a New York
minute. No sir, you couldn’t fool him about Houdini.

But you could have knocked him over with a
feather at how anxious his granddaughter looked as she counted all
the zeroes on the check.

“This is a joke. Right, Papa?”

“It’s not a joke, Elizabeth.”

“But it can’t be real. Where did it come
from?”

Thomas Jennings didn’t mind being wrong.
Heck, he guessed he’d been wrong more than any man who ever lived,
and he wasn’t afraid to admit it. But he hated being foolish. And
her questions made him feel foolish. They made him feel old.
Senile. Like he ought to be locked up in one of those fancy jails
they called retirement homes.

He puffed out his chest like a turkey
cock.

“A man brought it to me. I was just sittin’
here mindin’ my own business, and this complete stranger walked up
to me and handed me the check.”

“People don’t do that, Papa. They don’t go
around giving away fortunes, especially not to strangers. And
certainly not without a reason.”

Every speck of color drained out of her face,
and she looked like ghosts were chasing her.

Thomas wished he’d never seen the check. He
wished he’d never laid eyes on the man who delivered it. Anyhow,
what kind of man would wear a suit and a tie to the park in ninety
degree weather? What kind of man handed out fortunes to perfect
strangers, then wouldn’t even tell his own name? Hoodlums maybe.
Powerful hoodlums with motives so bad Thomas broke out in a sweat
just thinking about what they could do.

He was nothing but an old fool. Too old to
take care of Elizabeth and Nicky anymore. Too old to sit in the
park in the hot sun. So old he couldn’t even tell the difference
between charity and blackmail.

“Tear it up,” he said.

He tried to snatch it out of her hands but
she was too quick.

“Just tear the thing up. I never should have
taken it, that’s all.”

He felt the dampness behind his eyes, and he
knew his granddaughter was too smart to mistake it for the rheumy
look of age.

“I’m too old to know what to do anymore.”

He used to use the bandana he dragged out of
his pocket to mop up sweat. He’d come in from plowing the cotton
fields mopping his face with the red bandana, and Lola Mae would be
waiting with a big glass of iced tea with a sprig of fresh mint
floating on top.

If his wife had lived through a bout of
pneumonia, she’d have known better than to take the check. She’d
have sent that slick dude packing with a few well chosen words.
Lady-like ones, too. Lola Mae was always a lady.

“You’re not too old, Papa, and I won’t hear
such talk. I’m not going to sit here and let you act like some old
codger who can’t find his nose on his face. Do you hear me?”

“See. The money’s already set us to
quarrelin’.”

A breeze that shouldn’t have been there on
such a still day snatched the end of the check, and it suddenly
became a living breathing thing rising up between them in the
summer heat, enormous in its power. Angel or beast? Thomas’s head
ached with all the possibilities, and he wished Elizabeth would
take him home and let him lie down on the couch under the ceiling
fan.

Instead she chased the check, catching up
when it landed in a gardenia bush. The cloying scent reminded
Thomas of Lola Mae’s funeral. Though it had been dead of winter,
he’d made sure she had plenty of the flowers she loved.

Now, the breeze set the willow trees
alongside the Mississippi River to swaying, and Thomas had to pull
up his collar to keep his teeth from chattering.

Intuition is God whispering in your
ear,
his daddy used to say.
Always listen
.

“Tear it up and throw it away,
Elizabeth.”

“I can’t, Papa. I can’t bring myself to
destroy a million dollars.”

o0o

His telescope was the finest money could buy
with a lens so powerful he could bring the stars as close as his
own fingertips. But it wasn’t the heavens David wanted to see: it
was the earth, specifically the small patch of earth underneath his
window, the little park where Elizabeth Jennings came day after day
with her family.

He had sensed her coming even before he saw
her. A force like the pull of gravity propelled him from his desk
and sent him to the telescope where a few minor adjustments brought
her so close he could see the blue of her eyes. He adjusted the
focus once more, bringing her face into clear relief so close that
when she tipped her head back and smiled David suddenly felt as if
she’d smiled directly at him.

He jerked back, gut-punched, his heart
pounding as if he’d run up twenty-one flights of stairs. He was
being foolish, of course. Elizabeth Jennings hadn’t smiled at him.
She hadn’t seen him. Couldn’t possibly see him. Thank God.

Unconsciously he ran his hand over the left
side of his face. The tingling started in his jaw and spread upward
and outward toward his cheekbone, then his ear till it became a
roar that drowned out everything but the screams. David could never
forget the screams.

He shoved the telescope aside. He had no
business witnessing the intimate family scene being played out in
the park underneath his window. Prowling his office like something
caged, something too long shut up in prison, David hefted the
celadon Foo dog he’d picked up in China, ran his hands over its
smooth surface, marveled at the craftsmanship.

Samurai swords were crossed over the mahogany
credenza. He’d paid a small fortune for them two years ago in
Japan. In India he’d found the priceless jeweled tiger, its topaz
eyes so realistic that sometimes when David left his desk late at
night he started at the yellow stare as if he’d been found out in
the dark.

They were nothing to him but trinkets,
useless baubles from the only places he dared show his face, exotic
lands far away from people who might know him and reporters who
wanted to expose him. David tried to concentrate on his
possessions, but he felt as if he’d been plugged into an electric
socket.

Even with his back to the window he couldn’t
break the powerful bond that connected him to the little family in
the park. He had a right to see, didn’t he? Didn’t the check give
him the right?

David stalked back to the window and trained
the powerful lens on the Jennings family, finding relief as he
immersed himself in their problems. A better part of him, some
idealistic side he’d left behind years ago, whispered that he had
no business witnessing the family scene below his window; but the
cynical realist he’d become knew that this was his only salvation,
standing high in his penthouse apartment living his life through
the strangers in the park.

Reading their lips, he followed the
conversation of the Jennings.

“My name is on the check, Papa. How did the
man know my name?”

“I didn’t tell him. It was on there when he
handed it to me.”

“Don’t get your hackles up again. I didn’t
accuse you. Did I accuse you?”

Remorse sliced David. In all the years
Elizabeth Jennings and her grandfather had been coming to Riverside
Park, David had never seen them quarrel, never seen them complain,
never seen them do anything except act as if they were living in
the middle of some kind of fairy tale.

David tore himself away from Elizabeth and
turned his attention to the child. The lens brought the boy so
close that for a moment David was disoriented, as if some powerful
magic had brought Nicky into his room, cheeks as soft as the
underbelly of a baby duck, sweat beads in the folds of baby fat
under his chin, twin stars shining out from his dark blue eyes.

“Look at me, Mommy.” The little boy spun
himself in circles, then raced toward Elizabeth with his arms wide
open. She caught him up and offered one leg as a horse. The boy
threw his head back and opened his mouth wide.

David read laughter in every line of the
child’s body. Some long lost part of him strained upward through
the layers of darkness. For a moment he longed to hear the child’s
laughter, longed to sit in the park beside the old man and feel the
sunshine on his face, longed to look into the naked eyes of a
woman.

Nicky dragged his feet in the dirt, slowing
down his makeshift horsey.

“Did you bring me a ‘prise from the baking
shop?”

“I did. Do you want me to tell or do you want
to guess?”

Nicky pondered this question for a second,
then pulled up his red tee shirt and rubbed his little belly.

“My head wants to guess but my tummy wants
you to tell.”

“I brought two jelly-filled doughnuts ...
from Levitt’s.”

Elizabeth glanced at the spry old man she
called Papa and they laughed, sharing a private joke. Loneliness
sat like a stone on David’s chest and for a minute he forgot to
breathe.

Nicky was jumping up and down, clapping.
David envied him, that exuberance and innocence of youth. “One for
me and one for Papa.”

“That’s right.”

“Can I have mine now?”

“Not now. You have to wash your hands first.
You can have it with a big glass of milk when we get home.”

Home. A little four-room shanty in a
neighborhood not fit for hardened criminals, let alone a
twenty-four year old girl trying to take care of her son as well as
her grandfather.

Elizabeth Jennings’ file was in David’s desk.
He knew everything about her, including the size shoe she wore.

In a few minutes she would leave the park
with her family in tow then she’d shed the pink and white uniform
Celine’s Bakery required and don the black slacks and white shirt
she wore for her night job with Quincy’s Cleaning Service. On
Tuesdays and Thursdays she put on faded jeans and clean tee shirt
and headed to the campus of Memphis State University for her night
class, Computer 205.