True Fires (13 page)

Game over.
“Yes, sir. Thank you.”

“Take care, darlin’. My best to your sweet mamma, hear?”

The bastards win
—Lila jabs a finger at Ike’s photographic chest—
again.
Sadly, slowly, she traces the resolute jaw, the handsome cleft chin of Lieutenant General Jasper P. “Jazz” Atkinson.

Oh, Jazz.
The weight she’d felt earlier, behind her eyes, had shifted to the back of her neck, spread across her shoulders and, now, pushed heavily on her chest.

The photo in the newspaper is black-and-white. Her mind fills in the colors: the dark blue sheen, the quiet whisper of worsted wool, the winking gleam of brass and gold, the flare and pop of the reporters’ cameras, the subtle spice of General J. P. Atkinson’s aftershave. “The General” was only one of his characters—the one she’d met first and liked least—sly, controlling, sardonic. “General J. P. Asskisser,” he’d say, clicking his heels sharply, snapping a crisp salute. She preferred “Jasper,” the shy Ames, Iowa, farm boy who’d bring her flowers, bump into furniture, fumble over buttons with a quiet “Beg your pardon, ma’am.” And, above all, she loved “Jazz,” the free-spirited sybarite who’d leap into her bed and announce that, tonight, he was the incomparable Art Tatum and, head to toe, she was his piano.

Oh, Jazz. How did this happen? When? And why?
But, of course, she knew—she KNEW—that it was Jazz who’d promised the divorce from Kitsy, a honeymoon in Paris, a quiet retirement to Virginia. But, when the phone rang—
was
it Ike or his old friend Max Taylor on the other end?
—it was, of course, The General who’d taken the call.

“Oh, Jazz,” she sighs hollowly, out loud, and leans back limp against the chair. This was her private nightmare come true: that The General would never give up his grip, his eager grasping for more and always more power and prestige. And Jazz—

A memory flickers across her closed eyelids, vividly sharp. They were in New York, at a tedious official conference all day, and afterwards, anonymous in their civvies, the cramped jazz club where Tatum was rumored to play. The piano great never showed, but the performing quartet was quite good and, in between sets, the hulking young man, introduced as one of the “new beat poets,” assailed the crowd with his biting, off-the-cuff rhymes. His method was to pick someone out and, after a brief squint, spout his poetic pronouncement. He chose Jazz and, in the dreariest of couplets, declared:

“Pursuers of power make lousy lovers,
Hooked on the high of screwing others, they must,
eventually, fuck themselves!”

Afterwards, seeing that she and Jazz hadn’t joined in the crowd’s embarrassed hoot of laughter, he’d boldly shrugged. “Sigmund Freud, man. Look it up.”

With a spine-long shiver, Lila pushes herself up, out of the chair, and moves toward the silver tray, the cut-crystal decanters on her father’s sideboard. Her arms and legs feel separate, detached, their sole purpose to carry the chill weight, the heavy ballast of her heart’s sinking pain.

She pours hastily, drinks quickly. She feels the whiskey burn a hot path down her throat into her stomach. But it does not, it cannot warm her. She studies the glass, stares into the amber liquid and sees, for a wavering instant, the shifting features of her reflection. Thirty-two and now, more than ever, alone.

I am adrift
—she shudders—
in the sea of my own choosing.
She drops the glass onto the silver tray. It hits with a heavy thud, tilts, overturns, and spills, pale gold gilding sterling, spotting the mahogany sideboard.

On their own, her knees tense then begin to buckle. Her hands grasp and let go of the sideboard. She feels herself, her heavy center, sliding past, leaning against, clinging to the bottom shelf that anchors the walls to the roiling floor, anchors her against the sobbing waves of old, unspeakable sorrow.

28

The trip to Opalakee—with Pap, Uncle Will, Aunt Lu, and baby June squinched up front; Daniel, complaining Minna, lisping SaraFaye, and a silent, thumb-sucking ’Becca bouncing in the back—had not gone well. Daniel never thought it would.

The Opalakee school principal, a tall drink of water with bushy black eyebrows, had scowled over their papers, had even gone so far as to say, “Yes, yes, everything appears to be in order,” but, shaking his head, had informed them, “Superintendent Hawkins, down in Hylandia, has the final say.”

Back at the truck, squinting into the early-afternoon sun, the adults had leaned against the tailgate, studied the principal’s directions to the County Superintendent’s office. Finally, Uncle Will sighed and said, “We come this far, might as well see it through.”

Superintendent Hawkins had kept them waiting outside his office for over two hours. His secretary, nowhere near as friendly as that Miss May at their old school, had
clickettyclacked
away on her typewriter without even offering them a piece of candy or a drink of water from the cooler in the corner.

When he did come out, the Superintendent, a fleshy man sweating heavily in a short-sleeved white shirt and brown string tie, had promised Pap he’d “look into this and get back to you next week.” But he had the lowered chin and rocked-back-on-his-heels stance, Daniel decides, of someone not square with the truth.

On the ride home, the girls curled beside him asleep in the heat, Daniel watches the sky cloud up, cluster, and begin to stream off dark rain in the distance. The storm, heading north, same direction as Pap’s truck, appears to be chasing them out of Tangerine County, back to the cabins that Daniel still refuses to call home.
I hope it ketches us,
Daniel thinks. A good rain might take the lid off whatever it was that had been pressing on him all day, making it hard to breathe. The sky, now as flat and black as a frying pan, sits atop the orange groves that line both sides of the road, as orderly and uninteresting as egg cartons. The eyes of the people, in cars and along the road, seem flat, too, and their unfriendliness rankles him, making him want to shout, “Hey, I’m worth a nod, at the least!”

When they arrive at the clearing, Daniel leaps out of the back of the truck, calling over his shoulder, “I’ll be back ’fore full dark.”

“Sooner ef it rains,” Pap yells back.

Free of the truck, and the adults, heavy in their disappointment, Daniel runs headlong across the field, toward the tree line and that place where he’s certain there’s a footpath.

He finds it easily enough, a sandy trail not much wider than he is, and follows it into the longleaf pines, their fragrant needles fingering his arms and hair. He runs, with no direction or intention other than “away,” away from the flat, flinty eyes of unwelcome, the shaking-no heads, the hands too heavy or too white for waving, so different from his upbringing and experience. Up home . . .

It’s a pure waste of time to compare ever’thing here to there,
he thinks, chest heaving.
Besides—home, as I knowed it, hain’t there
anymore.
Hadn’t Pres’dent Gen’ral Eisenhower’s highway builders bulldozed the old homeplace by now? Wasn’t the chestnut beside the porch long pulled? The patch he’d helped Mam plow and harrow ever’ April he could remember, the spring house hung with hams, the trickly creek with its downy ducklings, its prickly buckberry bushes, its brooding brown-speckled trout—gone, all of it lost to him forever? Covered up with concrete and blacktop, cars rolling over what had been a good and peaceable life, lived with nary a thought that it might not last?

Prodded by the scuffle of wildlife in the underbrush—
skunks, most likely, possums mebbe
—and the rustle and chatter of squirrels in the canopy of live oaks, Daniel runs on, squinching his eyes against the tears, scraping a forearm across the wetness on his cheeks. He stops just short of a batch of hand-shaped footprints, large and small, sharply nailed, a family of raccoons on their way toward water, and looks for the dark arc of a magnolia tree, its broad green leaves, velvety brown underneath, the woodsman’s signal that there’s a spring or river nearby. Magnolias like to get their feet wet, he knew that as well as anybody, and he bounds down the path in search of the smell of wet grass and rotting leaves, the murmur of lapping water. His heart leaps with the thought:
Where there’s water,
there’s fish, and wouldn’t it be fine to find myself a fishing hole?

Running flat-out on the loose sand trail, he trips over a hidden tree root, and, falling into the bushes, finds himself slip-sliding down a dense bank, toward the dark green gleam of deep-woods water.

It takes him a moment to right himself, to let his eyes grow used to the leafy gloom, and make out, a fair piece ahead, the shape of a beached boat, a kind of canoe carved out of a single tree trunk.

It’s his’n, I bet.
Daniel scans the sandy banks. “Hallooo?” he calls, “Sampson? Hallooo?”

The response is instant, the whistle of an almost whippoorwill, good enough to fool a body not born to the woods. Daniel whistles back and, picking his way toward and around the dugout, sees the big man, chest deep, downriver.

Sampson nods at him, eyes twinkling, and holds the finger of his left hand to his lips for silence. His right hand and arm is wrapped, elbow to fingertips, with the bright red scarf that he normally wears around his neck; a corner of the cloth hangs, like a little flag, off his fingertips. Turning, he dives underwater between the widespread knees of a cypress tree.

What’s he up to?
Daniel stands mesmerized on the sandy shore. At first, there’s nothing to see. Then, suddenly, the surface of the water churns like a boiling kettle. Sampson shoots up, laughing, his right hand and forearm disappeared inside the ugliest fish Daniel’s ever seen; his left hand clamped on its large lower jaw. With a snatching twist, Sampson hurls the fish off his arm and onto the sand at Daniel’s feet. Its head, atop a mottled brown body, is huge and flat; long strings of flesh hang off its snout, whiskerlike. Daniel judges its size at thirty pounds,
mebbe more
! And he looks up, in wonder, as Sampson emerges from the river, water running off his back onto the sand.

“Got ’im! Done grabbled Ol’ Goblin out of his haunt hole!” Sampson tells Daniel, gleeful. Then, raising the fish, “Got you, big monster! Done bit off Ol’ Sampson, more’n you could chew!”

“What kinda fish is that?” Daniel asks.

“Ol’ Goblin? Flathead catfish. Too smart to take a hook, too mean t’turn down a fight.”

“What you goin’ to do with ’im?”

“Eat ’im, boy. Plenty for ever’body!”

“You can eat that thing?”

“Oh, yeh!” Sampson shows his picket-fence smile and slips a bit of wire and a knife from his belt. Daniel marvels as the old man runs a round of wire through the flathead’s lower lip, then strings it up and over a nearby tree limb. On the ground underneath, he digs a hole with the heel of his boot. Then, hoisting his knife, he slices the tail just above the lower fin. As the big fish bleeds into the sandy basin below, he fetches two leather pouches from the dugout canoe, and fills them with river water.

The next cut’s a circle just under the side fins, then straight down the belly and the back, on either side. With nimble fingers, he spirals off the skin, top to bottom. Working belly to spine, he slices slabs of meat and stows them in the two waterfilled pouches. “Taste too strong to eat till tomorra,” he says.

Eyeing the huge head hanging off the tree limb, Daniel says, “He’s goblin-lookin’, all right.”

“Meanest ol’ fish there is. Eats up ever’ other fish in sight.”

“How’d you catch ’im then?”

“Grabbled ’im! Put mah fist inside his hole, shook the tip like it was a tongue. And, Ol’ Goblin, he bit like he born to do! Opened his big mouth and gobbled mah arm. ’Cept once I’s inside, I opened mah hand, y’see?” Sampson shows the spread fingers of his huge hand. “Caught ’im from the inside, jacked open his lower jaw, and flung ’im on the bank!”

“What you gonna do with the rest?” Daniel asks as Sampson unhangs the head, kicks sand over the hole below.

“Cathead stew! Mah fav’rite,” he says, dropping the head inside the second pouch. He walks to the dugout, pulls on his shirt, and spreads the red scarf out to dry.

Daniel feels an intruder to the old man’s privacy, suddenly shy.

Sampson looks up. “Good to be in th’ woods again, heh?” Daniel nods, with the odd sensation that, once again, the Ol’ Seminole had read his mind.

“Wonderin’ what took yuh so long,” Sampson says.

“You, uh . . .” The words come out in a rush. “You teach me to fish like that, Indian style?”

“To grabble? Ain’t hard. Start small, heh?” Sampson holds his palms facing each other. “Work your way up?” He spreads them apart to Goblin size.

Daniel’s delighted. He wishes he could start right now. But the old man’s eyeing the sky.

“Dark soon,” he predicts. He scoops up the first pouch, the one without the cathead, and hands it to Daniel. “Tell your auntie, change the water, fry ’em up tomorra, heh?”

“But . . .”

“Way out’s over there . . . less’n you want t’dive through th’ bushes again.” The ancient eyes dance.

Daniel’s sorry to leave. But the Ol’ Seminole’s right. It’ll be dark soon and he promised Pap.

The boy turns but Sampson’s voice calls him back.

“Dan’l?”

“Yes?”

“Woods is woods,” the old man says quietly, then smiles, holds up a huge hand, and waves good-bye. “Find your way back, heh?”

After the rain, the intruder comes slowly, on
quiet feet.

The guards at the gate, lulled into laziness
by the quiet hum of the colony’s internal activity
and the soft, soaking-in silence of the outside
world, are caught completely unawares.

Their first sight, a long slender white snout
accompanied by a clever, clawed paw, is also
their last, as the intruder snatches them and,
head to mouth, sucks the husks of their bodies
dry.

Other guards rush forward in swift reinforcement with the certain knowledge that, at this
range, the intruder cannot be repelled, but merely
fed. Wave after wave of guards present themselves outside the gate, hoping to draw the intruder, who carries her own children upon her
back, away from the now vulnerable nursery
chambers.

The pile and scatter of sucked-dry husks
mounts until, satiated at last, the intruder departs, leaving the rest to celebrate their survival,
and mourn its cost.