Temptation Road (3 page)

“I’m not a movie star,” Rae said, sitting
down on an unopened box of canned sweet corn, “and I can feel the
house calling to me, please tell me about the Mary’s and then point
me in the right direction so I can make an effort to own it because
honestly, I’ve been wishing for something extraordinary to happen
in my life.”

“Well, I’ll tell you about the day those old
ladies disappeared and then you’ll want the Green boys to put the
old house to rights if the Reverend Bertram will let you have it
and that is a big
if!
Go see the preacher first then the
Green boys, they’re relatives of a sort and they can get the Mary’s
place back to good for you. It might take a piece of time but I
wouldn’t trust the job to nobody else.”

“Alright, I know where the church is but
where will I find these green boys and why are they green?”

Miss Bess laughed so hard she slapped her leg
with one hand and covered her mouth with the other, probably to
hide her missing thirsty teeth.

“Awe, you city gals ain’t too quick are you?
Lordy! Green’s their name, Doc Green’s boys, Teddy and Fletcher,
but stay clear of the young smarty-assed one, Quint. That boy is a
wolf in sheep’s clothes, and you can quote me on that. Go on down
the block to that red brick building on the corner, that’s where
they live. Their workshop’s downstairs and bedrooms up. Go scratch
on the door and wait, one of ‘em is bound to be around on a rainy
day like this.”

“What if the brother who can’t talk is the
only one there, will he hear me knock on the door, will I have to
write everything down so he can understand?” Rae asked as she
finally located her umbrella in the bottom of her purse.

“So you already met the pretty brother, huh?
Oh don’t look so surprised, that Fletcher Green is the kind of man
that makes a woman’s blood heat up, even an old fossil like me.
Yes, he can hear just fine and he could talk if he took a notion
to, they say. Nothing wrong with him, he just quit talking when he
was a boy, after the accident that messed up that family. Well,
that’s not for me to gossip about, if you get the Mary’s house and
hire him and his brother Teddy, maybe things will come to light,
but then again, maybe not.”

As Rae walked outside the wind caught her
Burberry umbrella and turned it inside out and she heard Miss Lamar
cackle for all she was worth.

“Careful now, it’s a witching wind!” Bess
called out and Rae could hear her laughing halfway down the
block.

The story was that the Mary’s had disappeared
ten years before. A limousine pulled up to the fanciful Victorian
house one day and loaded the women and their luggage and a cage of
assorted birds. They were a set of four sisters, just the same as
all the generations of Mary’s before them. They stopped in town
just long enough for the eldest sister, Mary March, to roll down
the car window and ask the Reverend Bertram to run get her a cold
bottle of cream soda, then she gave him the deed to the house and
instructions for selling it. They were off to give her a Viking
funeral, she said, she was one hundred and six years old and she
was done with herb gardening and ready for bigger things. She and
her sisters had been born in the mountains but now they wanted the
sea. That’s where they were headed, somewhere hot where no one
would care if hundred year old women lounged naked on the sand.
She’d arranged for the property taxes to be deferred until the next
Mary came to claim the house and she trusted that the good reverend
would know her when she appeared.

“She can catch up the taxes and the place is
hers,” Mary March said simply, “the house, the garden and all that
goes with it.”

Her sisters, Mary Bless, Mary Scott and Mary
Sue, nodded their heads in agreement, then turned their faces
forward as if their eyes were already focused on the sandy paradise
ahead. They had driven away with dust rising off the road behind
the car and when it settled, they were no more than a memory.

*

Reagan was speechless at the stark beauty of
the Goodfellow’s Gospel Church when she stepped inside the small
sanctuary. The wooden exterior of the building was tall and narrow
with plain wood siding painted white and a simple cross rising from
the steeple. Inside, tall four-paned windows lined the side walls.
Every surface, benches, walls, floors, ceiling and pulpit were
crafted from native Longleaf pine that was polished and glowing. On
the far end wall behind the pulpit a stained glass window rose
nearly to the roof and depicted Jesus holding a lamb in his arms,
it made Reagan smile and tugged at her heart. Other than touring
the grand cathedrals of Europe she hadn’t been inside a single
house of worship since she’d lived in Los Angeles. She and her
mother had attended the First Baptist Church every Sunday morning
and Wednesday nights when she was growing up in Texas and the
familiar image of the Savior brought sweet tears to her eyes.

She had come to the church every day over the
last week, only to find the doors locked and a hand written note
taped there saying the reverend was feeling poorly and would return
sooner or later. The office was at the back of the church and
Reagan entered just as the doddering old preacher was leaving for
the day. The reverend Northram Bertram sighed and motioned for her
to have a seat, then he sat wearily behind his desk with his lips
twisting and twitching as he sized her up.

“The Mary’s house, you say? Well, it’s quite
simple child, it can only be handed over to a Mary!” he told her
firmly as if the case were closed then and there.

“Oh, I see… well, actually I don’t. A Mary? I
heard they were sisters, you know, born to the same set of parents,
I suppose. Were they some sort of religious order?” Reagan
asked.

The reverend stopped twitching and leaned
forward, his arms resting on the desk. He was a large man and his
bulk caused the wooden desk to creak in protest. “A Mary is a Mary.
A woman or any person who’s Christian name is Mary. Like I said
it’s very simple, the sisters who owned the house left it entrusted
to the church with adamant instructions to sell it to the new Mary
who would come to claim it.”

“I am that Mary, I believe,” she said,
surprising the reverend and herself, as well.

He leaned back in his chair, considering, and
his mouth worked silently once more.

She reached in her purse and handed him her
California driver’s license.

“Mary-Reagan Hartford?” he asked,
perplexed.

“That’s right. Reagan Hart is my professional
name. I used to be someone else before I was famous, just a normal
girl I guess you’d say.”

He was quiet for a long while then his cloudy
eyes twinkled and his lips turned up in a smile and he said
happily, “my goodness, welcome home Mary-Reagan.”

*

She had been Mary-Reagan way back when,
thirteen years before, in the cotton growing capitol of the South.
She had also been Miss Dewberry Festival and Boll Weevil Queen,
dubious honors at best. Her mother had followed the dusty path she
made as she dragged her suitcase to the Greyhound station and she
sat beside her as Rae waited for the bus.

“Where you headed, Rae?” her mother asked,
stroking Reagan’s hair, her voice was rough from too many bars and
too many men and too many years in Texas.

Rae handed her the bus ticket, afraid to
speak or she might change her mind, might ask if her mother wanted
her to stay.

“New York? Naw, that’s no good for my girl,
cold nights and cold folks. California darlin’, Hollywood. That’s
for you, why they’ll notice you in a minute out there.”

Tears ran down Reagan’s face and her mother
took the scarf from her hair and wiped them away. “Rae, angel, you
know I wish you could stay but there’s nothin’ for you here. What
would you do, work beside me slingin’ booze, get some boy to drive
you to Corpus Christi to junior college? I see the way it is baby,
you’re so pretty and all the boys buzzin’ around includin’ ol’ Hank
when he thinks I’m not lookin’. You’re like a tickin’ bomb in this
little hole in the road and I don’t wanna see you livin’ my life
all over agin.” Her mother exchanged the ticket from New York to
L.A., took a roll of money wrapped with a rubber band from her
purse and pressed it into her daughter’s hand. She kissed her and
said, “Go on, now!” as the bus pulled up. She stood and waved and
blew kisses, and Rae watched from the back window of the bus until
her mother and the cotton fields and that dirt water town were out
of sight.

She got off the bus in downtown Hollywood and
the people wandering and sleeping and living in the bus terminal
and on the streets and alleys were scarier than the den of
rattlesnakes she once stumbled upon back in Texas. She waited
outside for a cab and not a single one ever drove by. Zombie-ish
teenagers and stinking men and old women begged for spare change
and food. A girl with a shaved head screamed that Rae was wearing
her clothes, that she’d better give them back. A man who was
foaming at the mouth implored her to pledge her wretched life to
Jesus while another man wagged his penis at her then peed on his
own foot. She went back inside to use the pay phone but the
receiver was missing.

A police car pulled up out front and she
walked to it and began to cry.

“Cry to the Lord, sister!” shouted the
drooling evangelist.

“Bitch stole me blind! She’s wearing my
clothes, arrest her now! See those tears? She knows she’s a filthy
thieving whore.”

The bald girl was right up in the officer’s
face as he stepped out of the patrol car. A female officer walked
around from the driver’s side and told everyone to step back, to
find shelter for the night or arrests would be made. The small band
of loony’s dispersed, all but Rae. She stood there crying like it
was the end of the world.

The officers looked at each other and the
woman rolled her eyes and shrugged, “Geez, you’re such a push over,
McClure!”

Rae looked up into his eyes and they were so
tender in the middle of all the madness that she just cried harder.
He took her bag, opened the back door of the cruiser and put it and
her inside. They drove through streets that were filthy, past
boarded up buildings and people who slept in cardboard boxes and
raggedy hookers making obvious drug and sex deals, and the patrol
car passed it all by.

They drove onto a freeway and the city began
to look different, lights stretched out in all directions and Rae
could make out dark mountains to the west. Billboards were
plastered with beautiful faces and bodies and the names of movies
and TV shows.

The officer with the wonderful eyes spoke
into a radio, “McClure and Bryant, off duty, ten-ten, over.” He
turned to look at her sitting in the back seat wiping her eyes and
sniffling like a fool. “I’m Officer McClure and this is Officer
Bryant, we’ll get you settled somewhere. Do you know where you’re
going?”

She shook her head and would have cried some
more but she was emptied out and felt hollow inside, she had no
idea where she belonged.

“Hungry?” he asked.

“Oh come on Sean,” his partner sighed.

“Really, Sarah?” he gave her a look and she
said, “Okay, In and Out Burger?”

“Yeah,” he said, “let’s go to the one in
Westwood, we can sit inside, I’m sick of eating in the car.”

Inside the restaurant Rae went to the
restroom, splashed her face with water and pulled her hair into a
ponytail. She looked closer to fifteen than eighteen with her hair
pulled back so maybe the officers wouldn’t toss her out on the mean
streets, maybe they would have pity and take her to an orphanage
since that’s what she felt like.

When she sat down at the table officer Bryant
took one look at her and asked, “How old are you? Are you a
runaway, am I gonna see your face on a milk carton? You have made a
giant mistake, honey. L.A. is not the kind of place for a kid on
her own, not even a girl with an angel’s face.”

Rae reached in her bag and handed over her
driver’s license, the officer studied it and handed it to
McClure.

“So you’re eighteen, barely, if that isn’t a
fake, we’ll check it out. So, Mary-Reagan Hartford from Texas, I
have one thing to say to you, get back on that bus and go
home.”

The radio on her belt squawked just then,
“Bryant, call your kid, you’re needed at home, over.”

She went to a payphone and Rae looked at
Officer McClure who was still studying her license. He looked up
and she wanted to lean across the table and hug him and maybe kiss
him and thank him for having such a soft heart. He was broad
shouldered and muscular with sandy-blonde, closely cropped hair, he
made her think of a prize fighter. He was young, probably twenty
three or twenty four and he was handsome in a rough and ready sort
of way. His eyes and mouth made him sexy as hell and in turn made
Rae dizzy with longing.

“Where will you take me?” those were the
first words she’d spoken.

“Wherever you want to go, do you know anyone?
Is there someone you can stay with until you find a place of your
own?”

“I have some money. I guess I need to look
for a room and maybe a used car. I’m sorry I cried like that, it
was a long trip and I hated to leave my mother, I just graduated
from high school and I needed to get out of my home town. When I
got off the bus it seemed worse than what I’d left behind and I
realized I didn’t have a plan at all, so I kinda lost it. I’m
embarrassed about acting like a big baby and you’re so nice to have
pity on a stupid girl from nowhere Texas.”

“I’m going to have to run your license, make
sure you’re eighteen and that no one’s looking for you. I’ll see
that you’re safe for the night. Maybe you could stay with Bryant
for a few days, I’ll have to ask if she’ll go for that, would you
be comfortable staying with her?”