No denying the paint could use some refreshing, and a couple of the windows are black-rotted, but Miss Florida has washed many a dish and baked hundreds of pies to save up for this little white house that stands at the edge of Browntown.
“I swear, you two gals have less sense than a penny,” she says, hiking herself up the porch steps. Her younger brothers, Vern and Teddy, are off to the side in ladder-back chairs and well into a game of dominos on a TV tray ’neath the bug light. Keeper’s already curled himself up at their feet, thumping his stump to the top-hat sound that’s riding down the road above one of those blues tunes that get me all choked up whenever I hear their moody sweetness.
Miss Florida does not miss a beat. “Boys, wind that game up now. I need for y’all to take these girls home,” she says, just about pulling her screen door out of its frame. “I’m fixin’ to call Grampa to tell him you’re on your way.”
I say, “For chrissakes, don’t do that,” but she’s already speeding through her sharply decorated parlor. Besides a green brocade sofa, she’s got a rag rug she made herself, and golden lamps she got from a catalog that sit on two matching spool tables. And she must have a pie in the oven because something smells divine. “Please, please, don’t call Grampa,” I say, when we catch up with her. “Clever is knocked up.”
“What?” Miss Florida says, bringing her face close to mine and then jerking it toward Clever’s stomach. For a bit, it’s like an ice storm swept through and froze us all up. Except for Vern and Teddy, who are bickering hotly about something outside the window.
“Knocked up means Clever is goin’ to have a baby,” I try to explain, but before I can, Miss Florida yells, “Mercy,” and collapses into her red watching-television chair with a crashing thrump.
“And Mr. Buster Malloy is dead and after I solve the crime and write my awfully good story for the Gazette,” I say, “Mama will finally be able to rest assured ’cause she’ll see I’m gettin’ more Quite Right and that I can take care of myself and…”
Damn.
Clever and Miss Florida chime in together, “What?”
Hat’s out of the box now, no sense denying. “I said, Mr. Buster Malloy is dead and-”
Miss Florida interrupts with a wave of her hand. “Lord knows, there’s plenty of good folks wish it upon him.” Mr. Buster is known countywide for paying dirt cheap and not supplying near enough shade breaks to the colored men bent over those tobacco plants from sunup to sundown. “But Buster ain’t dead. Talk at the diner is he’s missin’, is all.”
I can tell by the sassy look on her face that Clever doesn’t believe me either. Good by me. According to The Importance of Perception in Meticulous Investigation: Breaking News:One of the most important aspects of solid investigative reporting is the ability of a reporter to keep a story under wraps until he has gathered the proper substantiation of said story.
Miss Florida groans, “Why din’t you tell me you was pregnant? Thought ya just been eatin’ too much barbecue.” She jabs her finger at Clever, who drops onto her knees and lays her head in Miss Florida’s low-valley lap. Everybody in Browntown’s probably running for cover, ’cause when that girl lets loose with her wailing, it cuts through the still of the night like an air-raid siren.
I report, “I don’t know why she didn’t tell you, but I suspect the who is Willard and the what is his highness, Lord Sparky.”
“Willard?” Miss Florida asks with a screwed face. “He that hippie boy livin’ up next to ya for the summer?”
I nod my head the same way she always does, slow and with deepness.
“Who’s this Lord Sparky?” she asks.
“Lord Sparky is what Willard calls his… ah…” I bring my finger down to the front of my shorts, waggle it, hoping she gets the idea.
“Oh, man alive, man alive!” She lifts Clever’s slippery face up in her hands. “He the father?” Clever does not answer right off ’cause she’s heaving pretty bad, so Miss Florida tempers herself some. “Ya should know by now, tears don’ help none.” Drawing a hankie outta the sleeve of her polka-dot house dress, she dabs at Clever’s blotchy cheeks. “That Willard boy… he the baby’s daddy?”
Clever stutters out, “Can’t… can’t… say.”
“Ya can’t say? How many men you done had, for godssakes?” Miss Florida thunders, which gets Clever air-raid sirening again.
“Stand up, girl. Let me see that stomach a yours.” Miss Florida hikes up the flowing skirt past Clever’s underpanties. Goodness. I can still see her ribs, but right in her middle section it looks like she swallowed a world globe. And something real bad has happened to her belly button. It’s sticking out like a doorbell.
“You ’bout eight months?” Miss Florida asks.
Clever whimpers.
“Yer not all that big, but see how that baby’s come down low? It’s gettin’ ready.”
I ask, “Gettin’ ready to do what?”
“To get on out of there and start bein’ more trouble than you can ever imagine,” Miss Florida says. Then the oven bell goes off-oh, that simply delicious smell. Maybe cherry? And with a shake of her head and a few tsks… tsks, Miss Florida braces her dimpled arms against the sides of her chair, pushing up hard on her way into the kitchen, and Clever is left to stew in her juices.
“Why’d ya tell her?” Clever snarls, shoving me down onto the sofa.
“Hush the hell up,” I say, bouncing back up, ready to shove her to kingdom come ’fore I remember her condition. If she wasn’t about to have a baby, I’d shove her back real good. She’s so irritatin’ when she acts like this. I’d much rather spend my time with that bubbly fruit smell than put up with her crab appleness. “I’m goin’ to get me a piece of that pie now. Do NOT get any bright ideas,” I warn her as I head that way. “I expect you to be here when I come back.”
(It wouldn’t be ladylike to repeat what Clever sasses back to me. Suffice it to say, when she gets a bee in her bonnet, her mouth gets mighty waspish.)
Coming into the small kitchen, I can see that Miss Florida is bent over at the waist in front of her old black stove. Her rump being so big, I cannot see past it into the oven.
“What will happen when the baby comes out and will be more trouble than I can ever imagine?” I ask her. “May I have some lemonade?” Uh-oh. That makes me remember Grampa. (If he should wake up and come to check on me out on the porch like he does sometimes, well, I leave it to your imagination what kind of tangled-ass trouble I’ll be in.)
When Miss Florida straightens, she’s got a beaut of a pie in her hand. Browned just right. About the same color as she is. “Hep yourself,” she says, nodding over to the Amana. “That girl is gonna have to give that baby up, is what’s gonna happen. She’s not much more’n a child herself and gots no money. How she gonna buy it food and diapers and such?”
“No, I meant… how will I know when it’s time to take her to the hospital?” I am pouring the lemonade into my favorite jelly jar that’s been mine since I was tiny. “That’s what you’re supposed to do, right?”
Miss Florida stands back, appraises me like she does one of her pies. “You’s been a good friend to that gal all these years, ya know that?”
“Like my mama was to Miss Lydia?” Folks around here still talk about how Addy Murphy and Lydia Malloy were glued together practically from birth. And how if you pinched one of them girls, the other would cry. Miss Lydia was in almost every old picture I have of Mama. Until Grampa cut her out. “And the kind of good friend you are to her now?”
“Just like your mama was to Lydia back then, and I am to her now.” When she isn’t working at the diner washing up or rolling out dough, Miss Florida helps out Miss Lydia, who has pet named her the Tender. Miss Florida has mentioned to me that she’s not sure if that means she’s good with the bees, or that she’s got skill with the growing of things, but that’s not unusual. Because Miss Lydia? She is so, so meaningful in her ways that sometimes we all have to think for days to figure out what she’s really saying to us. Like in some of those Bible stories. Ya know how you got to ponder them some to figure out what the hell the Lord is really trying to tell you? Like when He uses that word smote and you’re not exactly sure what He means by that, but you get a sense that he’s madder than a sprayed roach? Well, same with Miss Lydia.
“Please tell me what happened to Miss Lydia’s boy,” I say, rubbing up and down Miss Florida’s arm.
“Oh, Gib. How many times we got to go over this, ya think?” I guess this is not the first time I have asked her about this subject because she adds, so put out, “Georgie drowned a few years back.”
“How’d that happen? Whenever Clever tells me tales about him, she never fails to mention what a strong and wonderful swimmer he was.” And that he was well known for his practical jokes. Like setting a grocery sack of dog duty on Miss Lilith Montague’s front porch, taking a match to it and yelling, “Fire… Fire!” (Georgie Malloy’s the reason Clever just about laughs her head off every single time she comes across an A &P bag.)
“Let’s not go on ’bout Georgie,” Miss Florida says, wiping her damp hands on the towel attached to her frilly apron. “We got ourselves enough trouble in the here and now. Like how we gonna get ya home. No ways you goin’ back in that boat.”
After I follow Miss Florida back into the parlor, somewhat disappointed she has not offered me a slice of that cherry pie, but nicely revived from the lemonade, Clever is nowhere to be seen. I was afraid of that.
“Now we got another one missin’,” Miss Florida grumbles, sticking her head into her bedroom, where I have taken many a lie-down on her dried-in-the-sun sheets when Grampa got tied up with one thing or another.
“I like the new one a lot.” I have stopped to admire her paintings on velvet that hang off the parlor walls and am pointing to a curly-haired puppy wearing a coonskin hat. Like me, Miss Florida’s an art lover. She’s got two other framed ones of Jesus and the King-Dr. Martin Luther. And Darnelle, there are loads of pictures of the lovely Darnelle, who was Miss Florida’s girl, and the mama of Cooter until she went missing some years ago when she was selling peanuts up roadside. There’s also lots of photos of Cooter doing all sorts of things, like being sloppy in the mud when he was a kid, and swinging off the Geronimo rope down at the lake with his best friend, Georgie Malloy, but mostly he’s playing basketball. Miss Florida and Grampa were so proud when he got a scholarship to college a few years back, but after his knee got jammed up, he had to come home to Cray Ridge and work at the dump. (Even though Grampa has asked Cooter time and time again to come back to cook up at the diner like he used to when he was a boy, he won’t. I perceive Cooter can’t stand the heat in the kitchen. Because he’s gotten rowdy these days, mostly gambling. Grampa does not approve of that sort of thing.)
“What did ya mean when you said now we got another one missin’? Who else is missin’ besides Clever?” I ask.
Miss Florida takes a look-see in her bathroom, pulling her head back out with a shake. “We jus’ done went over this. Buster Malloy is missin’. ’Member?”
“ ’Course I ’member,” I fib.
“Miss Caroool Lever! Come out from wherever it is you is,” Miss Florida shouts with her hands on her hips. “You ain’t too big to feel my hand on your backside.”
All’s quiet ’cept for the tick tick of her Bulova clock and the soul music seeping through the open window.
“Maybe she went out for a breath of fresh air,” I say, heading out to the porch and praying Clever hasn’t deserted me. When she gets mad or caught doing something she shouldn’t (exactly as often as you’d think), she’s bound to cut and run. Everybody knows you can’t catch that Lever girl once she makes up her mind to scoot. The bug light isn’t doing its job, but it’s strong enough that I can see my best friend snoozing on the swing. Vern and Teddy are lippin’ their cigarettes, lettin’ the smoke hang.
Upon seeing Clever, Miss Florida throws her arms up with a wouldn’tcha-know-it look and eases herself down into her rocking chair with a, “My, oh, my. Life sure is unrelentin’, ain’t it? Ya get one problem taken care of and ’fore ya can get an ounce of satisfaction, another one rears its head.” She crooks her finger over to the swing. “I do believe this time that wild child got herself into somethin’ she cain’t outrun.”
I’m afraid she’s right. Picking up my best friend’s tootsies, I set myself down beside her, letting her feet fall back into my lap. How funny that the creak of the rope swing is matching her snores. Vern and Teddy aren’t paying us a bit of mind, too busy slapping down their tiles.
“Now what’s that you were sayin’ before ’bout Buster bein’ missin’?” Miss Florida half wonders.
Buster Malloy. Buster Malloy. The next governor. Oh, my, yes. “I was sayin’ that Mr. Buster is not actually missin’.” (I figure I owe Miss Florida an explanation of sorts based on no other reason than me and Clever agitating the hell out of her on this loveliest of evenings.) “I saw him.”
“Oh, yeah? Where?” she says, happy to pass the time like we do in the kitchen every morning when we form sausage patties.
“He was over at Browntown Beach.”
“Mmm…” Miss Florida’s begun drifting off after her hard day at the diner. Her ankles are swollen almost out of her shoes. “And when was that at?”
I can picture Mr. Buster splayed on the sand. Four holes in his chest. Neck all catawampus. But the details aren’t filled in. “Can’t say as I remember the day exactly.”
“Buster be the first to tell ya he don’t know how to swim,” Miss Florida mutters with a lot of contempt. “So what’d he be doin’ down at the beach?”
“Bein’ dead.”
Hoochie-coochie laughing is coming down the road from Mamie’s Leisure Lounge. Clever and I spy in the window over there whenever we get a chance. There’s a fantastic silver ball hangs from the ceiling that shoots sparkly squares on bodies swaying so close. I would very much like to work up at Mamie’s when I get QR again. You know, temporary-like, until I find my apartment in Cairo.
“Gettin’ late,” Miss Florida says, not bothering to hide her yawn. She’s acting like she didn’t even hear me tell her that Mr. Buster Malloy is not missing but deceased. Maybe she didn’t, and that’s probably for the best, considering she can keep a secret just about as well as Clever can. “Vern, Teddy, finish up now. Ya gotta take Gib home.”
“But what about Clever?” I ask, tugging Miss Florida out of the rocker with both of my hands.
“She’ll be fine here for tonight. Ain’t like she’ll be missed,” she says. “Ya know that.”
I do, and so does everybody else in Cray Ridge, but I’m shocked straight down my spine that Miss Florida says this. Usually colored people do not say mean things about white people to another white person. It is considered untraditional.
Vern pulls up on his trouser knees and says to me, “Don’t get her goin’ on ’bout Janice Lever’s poor motherin’. We be here ’til sunup.”
Then no way in hell am I going to tell Miss Florida that Clever no longer has a home to go to. That her selfish, selfish mama kicked her out. Again. I CANNOT stay here ’til sunup. I got a murder to solve.
“All right then,” I say, glancing back one more time at Clever, thumb in her mouth, looking not much older than the day she came scratching at Top O’ the Mornin’s back door asking for a handout when she was seven. Miss Florida took to Clever right off. Set her up next to the kitchen sink, dabbed at the dirt on her cheeks, and cut her a slice of chiffon pie, which is still Clever’s all-time favorite.
Looking back down at her on that swing, I must have a hesitating look on my face ’cause Miss Florida says kinder, “G’wan, baby. She’ll be fine with me.”
“I know.” I bend to deliver a kiss to Clever’s forehead, and then straighten to give a wrap-around hug to Miss Florida. Vern and Teddy are already waiting on me roadside with Keeper in the bed of the truck. Backing that way, I say to her, “Thank you awfully much for not callin’ Grampa.”
“You ain’t safe here no more, Gib. It ain’t like it used to be,” she says, and I can’t perceive if Miss Florida’s happy about that or not. “I’ll have the boys sneak his boat back ’fore dawn.”
“I got proof, ya know, ’bout Mr. Malloy bein’ dead and if you want…,” I try, thinking that might give her sweet dreams, but that screen door is already closing on her big behind.
Vern and Teddy Smith. I’ve adored them since the day I met them. Besides taking such good care of Miz Tanner’s farm, Teddy, who is the brawn of the outfit, is a help to Miss Lydia out at Land of a Hundred Wonders. She calls him the Caretaker. Teddy is slow on the uptake. Vern is a lot smarter, and does most of the talking for the two of them because his younger brother also has a high C voice that really doesn’t suit him. I’d say I adore Teddy a little more than I adore Vern. There’s just something about him I find so sympathetic.
A singing group calling itself The Temptations is on the truck radio harmonizing about how they wish it would rain and it looks like they might get what they want. Vern is behind the wheel, his arm out the window catching a breeze. I’m smushed between the two of ’em like an ice-cream sandwich.
“Why am I not safe anymore in Browntown, Vern?” I ask.
He looks over at Teddy, who looks back at him. Rakes his fingers down his stalky neck. Vern’s stalling for time, trying to decide what to tell me because I’m NQR. Everybody does that.
“There’s folks in Browntown who is mad at white folk,” Vern says, not removing his eyes off the road.
“Why?”
Teddy is rolling a cigarette by the light of the glove box.
Vern says, “Times a changin’.”
“Hey, that’s a Bob Dylan song,” I say. “Willard loves Bob Dylan.”
“Who’s Bob Dylan? Who’s Willard?” Vern asks.
“Bob Dylan is a popular singer and Willard lives next door to us. He smokes hemp.”
“That a fact?”
“Yes, it is. Did ya know if ya smoke hemp it relaxes ya?” I ask, picturing Willard’s deboned-looking body when he’s done inhaling the stuff. Hemp grows like weeds around here, in the ditches.
“Hemp smokin’ is relaxin’, huh? Maybe we should look into that, Teddy.”
The golden light from the radio bounces off his brother’s teeth as he runs his startling pink tongue across his white rolling paper.
I say, “Miss Florida says people do not like me anymore in Browntown. Why?”
“You’s the wrong color,” Vern says.
“Colored folks are mad at white folks?” Even though I may sound surprised, I’m really not. I can understand them being mad at people who treat them rude. “But I’m a nice white folk.”
When Teddy lights up his cigarette, the glow of the tip warms up his face. He’s got a scar on his chin that matches the lightning bolt that just flashed above the lake.
“Yeah, you’s a nice white folk,” Vern answers. “But some of the coloreds, they’s not lookin’ on the inside of a body no more, they’s only interested in the outside.”
“But then, aren’t those colored folks actin’ just as ignorant as those white folks? Decidin’ if somebody is good or bad because of what shade they are?”
Vern gives me a strong nod of approval. “Ya know, for a girl wit a messed-up brain, ya say some very reasonable things.”
“Appreciate you sayin’ that, Vern. I’ve been working real hard at gettin’ more reasonable.”
“Well, ya can work your brain ’til it’s blistered, but ya ain’t never gonna be able to reason out hate.”
Him saying that breaks my heart, for I’ve found hating doesn’t make you feel too good. Well, maybe it makes you feel good for a little while. Sort of powerful and all, thinking up ways to have at a certain somebody. (Sneaky Tim Ray.) To get back at him for making you feel less right than you already do.
Just as we come upon Buster Malloy’s farm, the rain lets loose. I can’t see his place through the trees, but I know his mansion is made of bricks and has a four-car garage.
Over my head, Vern says to Teddy, “Haskell says nobody’s been paid this week for pickin’. Buster better get hisself back soon or-”
“He won’t be back,” I blurt. “Mr. Buster is dead.”
Next to me on the seat, Teddy Smith stiffens like a Sunday shirt.
For godssakes, Gibby. Why don’t ya just head over to WJOY and have Sweet Talkin’ Stan announce Mr. Buster’s demise to the whole county?
“Buster dead?” Vern says. “No, he ain’t.”
“Would you like to see his body?” pops out before I realize I can’t really do that. That’d blow my plan to kingdom come.
“Where it at?” Vern asks with a lot of suspicion.
“I… I… can’t remember right at this moment but when I do, I will call you on the telephone.”
Vern says, “Ya do that,” crooking his eyebrow up at Teddy, who is still awfully starched.
We’re quiet, listening to the radio and the rain ’til we make the last turn toward home. Pulling up to the cottage, the truck’s headlights spotlight Grampa. Like he’s the star of a magic show, the windshield wipers are making him appear and disappear. He’s perched on a pail, his legs planked out, not even trying to keep his shotgun dry.
Vern says soft, “Ya in for it now, Gibber.”