A Tree Born Crooked (8 page)

The bank manager had been of even less help. The frizzy redhead in a cheap, mauve power suit and matching shoes had been polite, but useless. The account for the Citrus Shop was now in Birdie Mae’s name and James didn’t have access to it. There wasn’t a will and everything had gone straight to Birdie. The manager gave him a plastic smile and informed him that it was all out of her hands. He had to take it up with his mama.
 

James had driven over to the Citrus Shop to do so, but didn’t find Birdie Mae. Lila was sitting behind the counter flipping through a copy of
Ok! Magazine
when he walked in. Now that she could put a face with a name, she seemed a little embarrassed, but was no more helpful than before. Birdie Mae had told Lila she had a stomach bug and wasn’t coming in today. Lila was supposed to tell people not to call her at home and certainly not to drive back there and bring their business to her door. James drove up to Birdie Mae’s trailer anyway, but didn’t get out of his truck. If she was sick, or pretending to be sick, it was no use banging on the front door. There may have been distance between them, but he knew her well enough. She wouldn’t answer. Instead, James had turned around and driven half an hour to Lawtey Lake where he spent the rest of the afternoon pitching rocks into the muddy brown water and watching a whirlpool of vultures circle slowly in the sky, lower and lower, until they finally disappeared below the trees to feast. The sun had been going down and he didn’t know what else to do with himself, so he followed his instincts. He went to the bar.
 

After Hollis left him alone to deal with the other customers, James sat in silence for a while. It was Monday evening and slow, but a few folks he pegged for regulars were slowly trickling in, drinking draft beer and keeping mostly to themselves. He watched part of a replay of a Dolphins game on the small television in the corner of the bar and drank another beer. He watched the game, he watched the clock, he watched the level of beer inside the brown glass of his bottle. He nodded to an emaciated old man with a gray goatee and a raw, bulging Adam’s apple sitting two seats away from him, but they didn’t speak. James had secretly been hoping that Rabbit would show up. He didn’t want to call him, but there was some small part of him that still wanted to buy him that drink and have that talk. Hollis started walking down the bar toward him, but before he could ask for another beer, Hollis leaned in close.

“It may just be my night to presume, but it seems to me that there might be someone in this establishment that you’d want to speak to.”

James sat up straighter and looked toward the door.

“Rabbit come in?”

Hollis nodded in the other direction.
 

“I was thinking more the likes of her.”

James looked down the length of the bar and saw Marlena sitting at the other end, drinking a beer. He watched her for a moment. She was even more beautiful than in the neon shadows of the night before, but not beautiful in the way James usually considered women. More like the way he thought of wide-open skies right before a summer rain. Or long stretches of empty highway at midnight. Or the roar of a jet plane taking off overhead as he lay in the tall airfield grass and held his breath for as long as he could until the plane disappeared into the clouds and he felt that his lungs would burst inside him. That kind of beautiful. Hollis tilted his head slightly at James.

“You want your next beer over there?”

“Suppose maybe I better.”

~ ~ ~

“You don’t remember me from when we were kids, do you?”

It had taken another beer and two shots of Jim Beam before James and Marlena finally started to open up to one another. They had sat within inches of each other, making small talk, remarking on the warm weather, the quiet Monday night crowd, the state of the economy. Really, they just used the words as an excuse to steal glances at one another. Marlena ran her eyes over his scars, the puckered triangle on the back of his right hand and the thin, jagged line drawing down one side of his neck. She noticed the dusky shadows beneath his eyes betraying a weight she could only begin to imagine.
 

When she looked away, which was often, James took in everything he could about her. Her long, dark brown hair, still disheveled, was pulled back to expose a constellation of freckles on her neck and shoulders. The same dappling bridged her nose and the top of her cheeks, and when she smiled, her chapped lips revealed white, uneven teeth. A thin, silver chain of tiny stars rested in the hollow of her throat. Her eyes, hazel flecked with pewter and gold, were a dam holding back a world of hurt. A world of disappointment, of resolve, of a wanderlust unfulfilled. They cradled secrets James knew he would never be privy to, but tempted him nevertheless. He was fascinated.

“No, I remember you now. I didn’t last night. And I’m sorry for that.”

“It’s been a long time.”

James bent a wet cardboard coaster back and forth, trying to tear it in half.

“True. But I do remember you. I went to pick up Adelyn one time and you were sitting out back on a fence rail. On that goat corral they had behind the house. You were wearing a red T-shirt and your hair was short. Really short. Like a boy.”

“That was me. I used to go over to my Uncle Artie’s when I was visiting to feed the goats and chickens. Artie’s not really my uncle, he’s my daddy’s cousin, not brother, but I always called him that. After about ten days of being down here, Daddy and I’d drive each other so crazy I had to go somewhere else.”

“You waved. I remember you waved.”

Marlena picked at the label on her beer bottle.

“You didn’t wave back.”

“I know.”

She shrugged.

“I think that was the last summer I was here as a kid. I didn’t come ‘round much. When Mama and Daddy split, I went to live with Mama up in Lake City. There was bad blood between them and Daddy always thought I must be on her side. He never asked me or nothing, but I could tell, so I just stayed away.”

“But then you came back.”

Johnny Cash started playing from the jukebox behind them. Marlena had told him at the beginning of their conversation that the first thing she did when she began working at The Blue Diamond was to throw out the Internet juke box Waylon had paid too much for and brought in some real records. Marlena sighed, still concentrating on the paper label she was peeling from the outside of her bottle.

“I did. Wasn’t exactly what I had in mind. A few years after I graduated high school, I left Florida and worked at a Stuckey’s up in Macon until I could save up enough to pay my way through Georgia College. Took me a while, but I did it.”

“A college girl, huh? Did you finish?”

“I did. With a bachelor’s in art history.”

“A very profitable degree.”

James tilted his beer bottle toward her before taking a sip. She ignored his sarcasm.

“I focused on architecture and loved it. Thought maybe about moving further north after I graduated. To Charleston, maybe, or somewhere up that way. I thought I could really do something if I could just get it together.”

The earnestness in her voice made James wish he hadn’t made the joke. She wasn’t some floozy trying to get into his pants and his wallet by pretending to be smart about something she had seen on
Oprah
. She was genuine. He quickly pulled his lighter out his pocket and lit her cigarette for her as she put it to her lips. She raised her eyebrows at him and blew a stream of smoke in the opposite direction.

“But then Mama had a stroke and died, and Daddy’s wife took off with everything, so here I am. Trying to rescue Daddy from the mound of debt he’s built for himself and discovering every day that I’m trying to tear down a mountain with a garden hoe.”

“It can’t be all that bad.”

Marlena rested her chin on her hand and the smoke from her cigarette curled up the side of her face and into her hair. James watched the tendril of smoke caress her skin, right where the crow’s feet next to her eyelids crinkled when she smiled.
 

“Sure. There’s always a chance you’ll meet new people.”

James was about to smile and raise his beer in a toast, when he saw the look on her face change suddenly.

“Speaking of new people.”

James followed Marlena’s gaze over his shoulder and swiveled around on his bar stool. He briefly caught Marlena rolling her eyes as he raised his hand in a wave. Rabbit sidled up to James and hammered him on the back a few times.

“Well, hey there, brother. You are just the very man I happen to be looking for.”

Behind him, Delmore slunk into the bar and stood a few feet away from Rabbit, looking around as if sizing up the place he came into nearly every day. James hadn’t laid eyes on his cousin in over fifteen years, not since Delmore had been sent to the state prison in Starke for armed robbery back when James was still in high school. He had been out for a few years and then served another stint at the Gainesville Correctional Institution for buying and selling food stamps. He’d only been a free man again for the past year and a half.
 

Even though James and Delmore were close in age, only a year apart, they never got along as kids. Delmore was an only child and grew up living out on County Road 236 with only his father, Cordie, and a bunch of fighting cocks to take care of. When he was around other boys his age, he always felt like he had something to prove. Family barbecues and holiday celebrations usually merited at least one brawl in the dust between James and Delmore. Unlike James and Rabbit, who fought with love and without reason, the two cousins fought with purpose and without emotion. The fights were usually less about growing up together and more about who was growing up first. Then Delmore proved that he had won it all by holding up a Gas-n-Go, and his prize was seven years eating bad food, getting bad ink, and stamping out license plates for thirty-five cents an hour. James had forgotten about him.

But now he was back and apparently he had become the big brother Rabbit had always wanted. Except, instead of showing him how to catch a pop fly or rebuild an engine, he was teaching Rabbit how to steal copper wire out of air conditioning units, swap it for pills, and then sell the pills to desperate girls at the strip club who were willing to trade fast cash for a quick fix. Rabbit had somehow convinced himself that it was all legitimate, just wasted resources and a profitable market, and had tried to explain it all to James during one of their rare phone conversations. He hadn’t wanted to hear it.
 

Rabbit had also tried to persuade James that Delmore wasn’t really such a bad guy after all. Rabbit said that he had calmed down, grown some sense, and had big ideas lined up. This did little to reassure James. Delmore running around trying to rob convenience stores was one thing; Delmore with brains was something else entirely. Because deep down inside, Delmore had a malicious streak that could not be changed for the world. When he needed to, he could smile, he could sweet talk, he could be as nice as strawberry pie, but James would never trust it. There was a need inside Delmore to hurt something other than himself and a lack of willpower to hold himself back. When it was all said and done, Delmore just didn’t give a shit.
 

He still looked as James remembered him. Tall, but beefy. He was a little fuller in the neck than he had been as a teenager, but he still had the narrow eyes and wide, smashed nose that James could recall hammering his fist into many times. He also still had the large, square-fingered hands that had been the last thing James had seen before blacking out. Rabbit noticed James and Delmore sizing each other up and tried to divert their attention.

“And hello there, Marlena. Got the night off?”

“Hey, Rabbit.”

Marlena flashed a smile that fell somewhere between cynicism and disgust. She ground her cigarette out in the clear glass ashtray and turned around to face them, cocking her head and speaking with a dark vein of sarcasm.
 

“And hi, Delmore. Just can’t stay away, can you?”

Delmore didn’t even attempt to be civil.

“Are you always such a bitch?”

Her mouth tightened, but she didn’t miss a beat.

“Only when I see your smiling face come into my bar every day.”

Rabbit quickly jumped in front of Delmore and put a hand on his chest.

“Whoa, hey now.”

Marlena was enough to deal with; he certainly didn’t need James sitting beside her, ready to throw the first punch.
 

“Now, we’re all friends here. Do we gotta go through this every time? Come on, Marlena. You know Delmore didn’t mean no harm. And he’s having a tough day, a real tough day.”

Marlena drained the rest of her beer in one swallow and pitched the empty bottle over the side of the bar into the trashcan.
 

“I’m sure. It’s a rough life. Out of sympathy, I’ll do you a favor and save you some time. Daddy ain’t here tonight.”

She picked up her cigarettes and rattled her Jeep keys as she slid off the bar stool, her cowboy boots knocking hard against the cement floor.
 

“And I ain’t either.”

For an instant, James felt her fingers on his upper arm, her nails pressing into his skin through the thin cotton of his shirt. Was it an invitation or a warning? James didn’t know. And then she was gone.