Riding Shotgun (39 page)

“I think sisters fight more than sisters and brothers.”

Laura interjected, “You and Aunt Grace, uh, well, maybe it’s like competing for territory. Men and women don’t compete for the same territory.”

Cig stared at Laura, the history book artfully opened on her lap. “Have you been watching those goddamned talk shows with their two-bit psychologizing? Pure unadulterated crap.”

“Mom, you’re saying
goddamn
a lot.” Hunter laid his pencil neatly across the top of the yellow paper.

“Oh, I am, am I? Am I living with an incipient member of the Moral Majority?”

“No.” He pressed his lips together.

“You’re kinda emotional.” Laura jumped in where angels feared to tread.

Leave it to your kids to tell you the truth. She sagged against the doorjamb. “Yeah, I guess I am. I don’t know what’s the matter with me but I feel like Pandora’s box.”

“That’s okay—with us. But out there”—Hunter gestured toward the window—“I don’t think people will, uh, cut you a break. Everybody depends on you to stay…” He made a smooth motion with his hand, a horizontal line, which meant “even.”

Cig dumped herself on the end of the bed. “I’m definitely not myself except I’m more myself than I ever was.”

“Huh?” Laura threw her mother a pillow to lean against.

“Don’t you keep a lot inside? You walk around day after day and you don’t say what you’re really thinking or feeling, it’s just, ‘Hi, how are you?’ and ‘See you at Goodling’s Farm at seven thirty next Saturday.’ You know what I mean?” They nodded in unison and she continued. “But I’m thinking all the time. I just shut my trap. On the surface everything’s okay. But nobody really knows who I am or what I think.”

“Maybe they do,” Hunter said somberly.

“Oh God, I’m transparent.” Cig flopped on the pillow.

“Nah.” He waved his hand. “But hey, everybody knows everybody. Habits, favorite colors, you don’t have to say what you’re feeling. Lots of times people do know.”

“Yeah, but lots of times they don’t.” Laura pushed her pillow down at the end of the bed, and lay on her stomach next to her mother, both women propped up on their elbows.

“Is it so important that people know how you feel?”

“Or what you feel, Hunter?” Cig reached over and squeezed his knee. “We’re skimming the surface, and that’s okay until something really goes wrong. Then you don’t know who your friends are.”

“Find out, though.” Hunter swung his chair around and rested his feet on the side of the bed. “Look at the people who helped us out after Dad died and the ones who didn’t do bugjuice.”

“We aren’t their responsibility.”

“Mom, Uncle Will isn’t on food stamps.” The right half of Laura’s mouth lifted in scorn.

“No, but like I said, we aren’t his responsibility.”

Hunter didn’t accept this. “We’re a family, Uncle Will’s part of it. He should pitch in.”

Cig stiffened then forced herself to relax. “Grace helps me but will doesn’t know. So don’t you dare tell. I probably shouldn’t have even told you.” Cig was sorely tempted to tell her children about what her sister had done. They might have understood, but what was to be gained by besmirching their father’s memory and clouding their love for their aunt?—only sympathy for her, and she didn’t need sympathy that badly. Maybe when they were older she’d tell them. No reason to spoil things for them right now. By the time they could handle it, she might well have forgotten. The thought amused her. Alzheimer’s or radiant forgiveness?

“Hey, Mom, about this feeling thing… this mean you’re going to, you know, emote all over the place?”

“I don’t know. I’m going through a sea change.”

“What’s that mean?” He scratched his ear.

“I’m not sure except I’ll be, uh, I’ll be profoundly changed from the inside. Might not show on the outside.”

“Throwing away the television shows on the outside.”

“Laura, quit harping on the goddamned television.” “See, Mom, there you go again. Another goddamn,” Laura chided.

Cig dropped her legs over the side of the bed and bounced up. “You’re right. My conversational ability has hit the skids. I’m going to bed. I suggest you two do the same. Hey, before I forget it, we’ve got to start practicing for the Oak Ridge Fox Hunt Club’s hunter pace.”

“Piece of cake.” Hunter snapped his fingers because it was anything but.

“Okay, lights out. Tomorrow will be a long day.” Cig kissed them both on the cheek. She couldn’t have known how long a day it would be.

Not taking her own advice, Cig sat in bed with the first family Bible. When she was lost in time she had wanted to come back here so badly that the early days were like water balloons filling with grief.

Now here, she missed Fitz, Margaret, and Tom almost as much as she had formerly missed her children.

She remembered when she and Margaret had recited the Twenty-third Psalm together. She drew comfort from that. She turned to the Psalms. When she reached the page for the Twenty-third a thin cut strip of parchment marked the place. It read:

1. Groundnuts
   

2. Land at the Falls
   

3. Drain swamps, pour oil on standing water
   

4. No Africans
   

5. Educate girls
   

6. Breed horses
   

Number six had been added later, the handwriting at an angle.

She sucked in her breath. It sure looked like her handwriting.

“My brother got ten thousand dollars an acre for his land on Garth Road and I’m not budging unless I get ten, too.” Harmon Nestle stuck out his chin, not easy to do since it receded.

Cig smiled. “It’s always nice to make a profit. The only real difference between your tract of land and your brother’s is his lake.” She wondered how many times she had pointed this out.

“Don’t care.”

“Well”—she forced the fatigue and disgust out of her voice because he’d received yet another very good offer on his raw land—“I’ll take this contract back to the buyer and try to be creative.”

“Not having anyone say my brother’s smarter than I am.” Harmon hit the nail on the head.

“No one’s saying anything like that.” Cig lied through her teeth.

He pointed his bony finger at her. “People think I’m stupid, that’s why they offer me less.”

“Harmon, Mr. and Mrs. Fincastle hail from Teaneck, New
Jersey. They don’t even know your brother and they think you own a nice piece of land out there on Route 810.”

“Yankees got more money than this contract shows. You go back home and get me some.” He slyly smiled.

“Yeah, well, Yankees taught me the value of money by keeping it all to themselves.” She agreed with him, which elicited a chuckle from the bilious old man.

“My grandfather fought with your great-great-grandfather. He was just a boy at the end of the war, you know, PopPop Nestle. Said Reckless Deyhle was the bravest man he ever saw. Jumped right over a twelve-pound cannon once, and those Minnesota boys was just firing away. Kinda wish I’d been there.”

She almost said, “Maybe you were.” Instead she gathered up the documents. “You know, Harmon, you missed your calling when you didn’t stay in the army. Daddy used to say that with your military bearing, you would scare the bejesus out of buck privates.”

“Ha!” Harmon recalled his youth. “I ‘member one time in Arnhem…. Oh, Cig, the Jerries was on the other side of that bridge and it was a pretty thing, real old, too, and they were so close I could see their features, real clear. We knew they was gonna blow the bridge the minute we set foot on it and I called out to this little wispy corporal from Tennessee. ‘Get on up there in that house.’ I said, ‘and keep those buggers busy. I’m gonna go under that bridge and find the charge.’ Well, that boy was a sharpshooter. He kept them hopping, a real square dance. Got the charge, too. I can still feel that cold water getting higher and higher and me trying to hang on to the belly of that old bridge. I was too busy to get scared.” He put his hands behind his head.

“Reckless would have been happy with a soldier like you.”

“You think?” His busy eyebrows curled upwards.

“I think.” She stood up and he did, also.

As he walked her to the door, he glanced up at the ceiling. “Denby tears my ass with boredom. Know what I mean? I gotta get the same amount he did. Just once.”

“Harmon, I’ll do what I can.”

Driving down the dusty lane she rolled up the windows of the truck and turned on the radio. The country music station boomed back at her.

“I’ll write the reverse country song,” she said out loud. “I’ll make a goddamned fortune and be out of this mess. The lyrics will be: Got back my car. Got back my dog. Got back my house. Got back my wife.” She laughed then pressed down on the pedal and felt the rumble underneath. Bad as the twentieth century might be, it sure was good to be hauling ass down a country road in a big dually truck.

She could see dust in the opposite direction. A stop sign at the Walnut hill Baptist Church slowed her. She stopped as Binky West rolled to the sign on Harleyetta’s confiscated orange motorcycle. She drove across the road and rolled down her window.

“Hey, Bink.”

“Harleyetta been spilling her guts out to you?” he snarled.

“Said she was making some big changes.”

“I’ll cut her off without a cent!” He turned up the gas, but kept the motorcycle in neutral.

“Now, Binky, give this some time. You two might work something out.”

In a falsetto voice he imitated his wife. “‘You drink too much. You don’t pay enough attention to me but you pay too much attention to’—fill in the blank. ‘You got to have some goal in life.’” He switched back to his voice. “I do have a goal in life. To be rid of that nagging bitch.”

“Ah, come on Binky. You’re wrought up. Don’t be talking like that. She didn’t say anything hateful.”

“You women stick together.” He glared at her because he wanted total agreement.

“It’s not that. I think maybe time apart will help you both.”

“She can drag her fat butt to Siberia and that still won’t be far enough. We’re not getting back together. Ever. And she’s not getting one penny of my money. All she ever wanted anyway.”

“That’s not true.” Cig’s voice hardened.

“She sure spent enough of it.”

“On what? She never blew your money on jewelry or clothing, and hell, she gets up and goes to work everyday and she doesn’t have to do that. She could have just sat around the pool, know what I mean?”

He was so mad he revved his motor then shouted above it with his whiskey breath. “And I’m sucking off my trust fund! I know what you all say behind my back. Binky West couldn’t get arrested. I’m good enough to pay my hunt club dues.”

“Binky, you know, people say you’re a real asshole but I don’t listen to everything I hear. Now cut the crap, calm down and go home.”

“Don’t you tell me what to do. You couldn’t keep your own man in line. Don’t start with me.”

“Adios, Motherfucker.” Furious, she pulled the clutch back into drive and left him in a cloud at the stop sign. She didn’t look back, but she heard him lay rubber as he tore out after her.

Binky roared up alongside the truck. He shook his fist at her then whizzed out in front of her. A sharp turn lay up ahead—a stone wall on the belly of the curve, a ditch on the other side.

Binky hit that curve at sixty miles an hour, the gravel spinning out from the hind tire. The bike swerved to the right. He turned hard left, causing the Harley to plunge into the ditch. The front wheel stuck in the ditch, the bike nosed straight up, and Binky flew like a trapeze artist. With a flop he landed in high grass and thistles.

Cig squealed to a stop, ripped open her door and vaulted the ditch. Binky, wobbling to his feet, fell down.

He got up again, saw the Master of the Hunt, and complained, “Damn mare refused the fence!”

The fact that he was drunk, loose as a goose, probably saved him. Cig put him in the truck and carried him to the hospital. She’d seen too much of that hospital.

The admitting physician found no broken bones but kept Binky overnight to sleep it off.

By the time Cig got home she’d calmed herself enough to walk into the tackroom and call the Fincastles. They were
surprisingly accommodating, but then ten thousand an acre compared to the prices where they lived must have appeared a modest sum. They wanted to talk it over and they’d get back to her. She suggested that they meet Harmon’s price but ask him to hold paper on a small second mortgage, the difference between the two prices.

She hung up the phone as Grace walked into the barn.

“Cig?”

“In the tackroom.”

“Where
is
everybody?”

“The kids must have taken people out on a trail ride. I’m home an hour late because Binky West wrecked Harley’s bike. I took him to the hospital. He’s okay.” She paused. “What are you doing here?”

“Came to see you—and Kodiak.”

“You’ve seen me.”

“You’re acting like a hardboot. What’s the matter?”

“I don’t know where Kodiak is. He’s not
in
his stall.”

“Maybe Laura took him out.” Grace ran her fingers through her hair. “I told her I didn’t know if I’d get out here today.” She paused. “Want me to help you muck stalls? You probably should take it easy.”