Black Magic (2 page)

Andy breathed a sigh of relief. It was always a crap shoot when he arrived. Today he rolled a seven.

Andy still wore the tan uniform of the Citrus Glade Department of Public Works. On his thirtieth birthday this year, he’d shaved his surviving hair down to stubble, a look that brought back a few uncomfortable memories of his recent military service. But the look accentuated his round cheeks; people said it made him look younger. He could live with that.

He walked down the light yellow corridor towards his mother’s room. Each door he passed reminded him how lucky he was. Some of the occupants were on IV drips and lay immobile on beds that looked uncomfortably close to hospital gurneys. A few empty O
₂
canisters lined the hallway, their contents sacrificed to maintain the lives of others. Within one room, a man in urine-soaked pajama bottoms stared at a TV without comprehension. An orderly cleaned the floor while a nurse tried to help the man up to get changed. Compared to most of these patients, his mother was healthy as a newborn.

The sharp impact of a wheelchair footrest against his shin refocused Andy’s attention.

“Watch where you are going, jackass,” the old man in the chair growled. It was Shane Hudson, the eighty-year-old scourge of the Elysian hallways. His face had all the features of a shriveled raisin and his legs had atrophied to little more than candlesticks. But his silver hair was still styled in the pompadour of his prime and his eyes burned with a tiger’s ferocity.

The angled chair pinned Andy against the wall. The old bastard had nailed him on purpose. Andy shook his head.

“Sorry, Mr. Hudson. I need to keep my head in the game.”

“Goddamn right,” Shane said. He fingered the black oak cane he had across his lap. Years ago he could still walk with its help. Now it was just a link to his past. Or an attitude adjuster for a less-than-attentive member of the staff. He spun his chair back a few inches to let Andy pass.

Andy’s mother’s room was a welcome relief from the stark clinical décor of many of the others. The shades were open and bright Florida sunshine streamed in to illuminate a collection of her artwork. Framed watercolors filled the walls. Still-life studies of orchids, landscapes of the Everglades, children flying kites on a sugar-white beach. An unfinished work of butterflies among cattails stood on an easel in the corner.

Dolly Patterson beamed as soon as she saw her son. Andy smiled back in happy recognition. That was her adoring smile he remembered blazing from the bleachers at his baseball games, from the crowd at high school graduation and from the gate at Miami International when he returned from his time in the Army. Even in the shared public space of the retirement community, that smile was a “welcome home”. The comfort it gave him made its frequent absence taste so much more bitter.

Dolly only stood five foot three now. Seventy years had shaved a few inches from her height and now Andy had to look down into her eyes. Her hair was the same shade of auburn she always favored and had a sensible style that stopped just short of her shoulders. A paint-dappled white apron covered her pink sun dress.

“Andy!” She pulled the apron off over her head. “Is it the afternoon already?”

Andy held his breath, afraid she was on the edge of a backward slide into confusion. “Sure is.”

“This day has flown by,” she said. “We spent the morning out in the gardens and you should see the flowers we have going this year. After lunch I went to a ceramics class, you know, to try something new, and well, let’s just say I know why they call it ‘throwing pots’. I had clay in my hair! That inspired me to a bit of painting. I had no idea so much time had gone by.”

Andy exhaled. This was Mom. The real Mom who had more creative energy than the world had time and more enthusiasm than human beings a third her age could muster.

“I had the pleasure of Mr. Hudson’s company on the way in,” he said.

“Nasty old coot,” Dolly said. “Mean when he ran the mill, meaner when they closed it, meanest when his legs deserted him, soon followed by most friends he ever had. You should steer clear of him.”

“If it was a question of steering,” Andy said, “I think he was at fault.”

Dolly hung up her apron.

“Are your ready to go out for an early dinner or can you not bear to miss an Elysian meal?” Andy said.

“I’ve been dying for fresh snapper,” she said.

They left the building and Andy had her wait under the front canopy as he retrieved his car. As he pulled back up, his stomach knotted. His mother’s breezy smile was gone, replaced by a tight grimace. Her eyes darted around the parking lot.

“Oh, please, no,” Andy whispered. “She was doing so great.”

Andy pulled the car up in front of her. She took a fearful step back. She clutched her purse in a panicked, defensive way that made Andy realize how old she really was. He sighed and got out of the car.

“Mom?”

“What are we doing out here, Andy?” she said. “Where are we going?”

He could try to explain it to her, try to make her remember, but that road had been rocky each time he took it and was always a dead end. When she got confused, she got scared, and only the familiar things in her room made her feel safe.

“We’re going inside, Mom. We’re going to sit for a while before you have dinner.”

“Good,” she said with a look of relief. She scooted back in through the door, like a tortoise back into its protective burrow.

He pulled his car back into the same parking spot. He killed the engine and sat in silence. A good day had gone bad. But at least part of it had been a good day. He popped open the car door. Odds were, by the time he got in there she’d have forgotten he was ever there in the first place. But he’d give it a try anyway.

She was his mother.
 

Chapter Five

Felix Arroyo yanked the pull cord on the pole saw. It sputtered to life and settled into a lumpy growl. He released the safety and the cutting chain at the end of the nine-foot pole spun up to speed. He swung the blade far up over his head and aimed it at the shattered branch at the top of the orange tree. The chain churned through the branch and it crashed to the ground. Felix flicked off the saw and tossed it into the back of his pickup. If only a broken branch were his sole problem.

He tipped his battered straw cowboy hat back and wiped the sweat from his dark brow with a rag. He stood in the shade between two rows of navel orange trees in his orchard. His wife, Carlina, came up behind him and slid her arm around his waist.

“Look at you, scowling at the trees,” she scolded. “Like the tiny fruit is their fault.”

Felix plucked a sickly green sphere from the orange tree’s branch. At this point in the year it should have been quadruple the size and bright orange.

“We left the violence and corruption of Mexico to grow our own fruit,” Felix said. “Now frost and rain and citrus chancre conspire against us.”

“We’ve had tough years before,” Carlina said. She was short and plump as an olive. Even in these dark times she exuded her trademark glass-half-full outlook. “We lived on less in Juarez.”

“In Juarez it was just the two of us,” Felix said. He pointed a thumb at the peeling white clapboard farmhouse where their two children, Angela and Ricardo, were. “Now it is four.”

“And God will provide,” Carlina said. “This fruit will bounce back in no time. The Lord can work miracles.”

That’s what it will take,
Felix thought. And he was certain that with the world such as it was, God did not waste miracles on things so small.

“I’m sure He will,” Felix lied.

He gave his wife a hug and they went back to the farmhouse.

The house was just far enough away from CR 12 that the dust passing trucks kicked up settled before it reached the front porch. The house stood on short, concrete-block pillars to let the air flow under the floors and draw off some of the Florida swelter. Two ancient oaks shaded the homestead’s sides. The realtor who sold Felix the property had assumed the new owner would bulldoze the old place and put up something new. But, while a house without air conditioning that still boasted a stained claw-footed bathtub wouldn’t cut it with most people, it was a mansion to a dirt-poor kid from Juarez and his new wife from a Mexico City barrio.
 

The two entered through the back door into the kitchen. The omnipresent smell of cayenne pepper and hot chilies filled the air, though the stove sat cold and empty. A ceiling fan fought a slow, lazy battle against the home’s retained heat.

“Where’s Ricardo?” Felix asked. It was Saturday and the thirteen-year-old should have been out with him in the orchard.

“He was in his room,” Carlina said. “And it’s ‘Ricky’ now, remember?”

Felix shook his head. “So Ricardo, my father’s name, isn’t good enough?”

“Felix,” Carlina cooed. She stroked his shoulder. “He thinks ‘Ricky’ sounds tougher.”

“He thinks it sounds less Mexican.”

“You rebelled at his age,” Carlina said, “and in worse ways.”

Felix went down the hall and pushed his son’s door open. Posters of bands he had never heard of covered the walls. Strange shapes flickered back and forth as the screen saver played on his son’s desktop computer. The boy lay on his bed, eyes closed, earbuds from his smartphone shoved in his ears. Felix was sure the new phones made you stupider, not smarter. Ricky’s shaggy black hair swayed back and forth as his head bobbed to the beat of some unheard tune. He wore a solid black T-shirt and baggy jeans with square holes ripped into the knees.

Felix banged on the door without acknowledgement. He walked in and gave the bedpost a kick. Ricky opened one eye and looked at his father. He extracted one earbud. A raspy version of a rap song eked out.

“Yeah, Dad?”

Felix made a gun with his fingers, pointed at the phone and dropped his thumb. Ricky sighed and hit pause.

“We need to clear brush in the orchard,” he said. “Tomorrow after church.”

Church services were a reference point only for Ricky. He hadn’t joined his parents at services since the spring, after he’d started hanging out with the Outsiders, as they called themselves. Ricky rolled his eyes.

“Yeah, sure. Mañana.” He reset his earbud and tuned out the world.

Felix stifled his frustration and walked out. Somehow his values of hard work, God and family had not penetrated his son. As recently as last year, they had worked together in the grove, harvested oranges with smiles and laughter. But now…

Carlina waited for him in the hallway.

“It’s a phase,” she said. “He’ll grow out of it. His hormones will calm down and reason will return.”

“He needs to be quick about it,” Felix said. “If I’d spoken to my father that way when I was thirteen…”

“You’d have never made it to fourteen,” Carlina said in a sing-song monotone.

Felix gave her an irked look. She took his hand.

“But you aren’t your father. Give him time.”

Felix shook his head and then kissed her cheek.

“I’ll give him until tomorrow, how’s that?”

“A start,” she said.

They walked back out into the grove, hand in hand.

Chapter Six

Mañana
was
mañana
as far as Ricky was concerned. He’d worry about working the grove when he needed to worry about it. He had other things to do
hoy
.

As soon as his father left his room, he checked the message that had arrived on his phone. Two words from Zach. “Scorpion blasting.” Excellent.

Ricky slipped out the front door and hopped on his bike. Halfway down the driveway, his little sister Angela darted out in front of him, hand raised like a traffic cop. Ricky hit the brakes and skidded sideways in the sand.

“Damn, Ange,” he snapped. “You trying to get run over?”

Angela’s big brown eyes went wide and her mouth opened into a silent, mortified O.

“D-word!” she said. She was five and had accumulated a list of words the Sunday school had banned. “Very bad. Where are you going?”

“Zach’s, if it is any of your business, and it isn’t.”

She threw her long black hair over her shoulders and raised her chin in defiance.

“Then you have to pay the toll.”

Ricky knew the going rate in their running game. He pulled out a pack of gum and put one stick in her outstretched palm.

“And one for the cursing,” she said.

“Now you are just a robber,” he said. He put another stick in her hand.

Angela stepped aside and unwrapped the gum. Ricky rolled by her and ruffled her hair.

“Next time you’ll get run over,” he said.

“Mommy will be mad,” she mumbled through a mouthful of gum.

He pedaled out to the highway, away from the decrepit old embarrassment of a house his parents condemned him to inhabit, away from the stupid trees that his father treated better than his children. He rode along the narrow shoulder for a few miles until he got to Poulsen Acres.

When TV was still broadcast exclusively over the air in black and white, Poulsen Acres had been the place to live, a grid of small concrete-block starter homes with vertical-slat windows that closed with a crank and a carport for your Ford Edsel. Poulsen Construction stopped building tiny homes about the same time Ford canned the Edsel, both items eclipsed by models that kept up with the times. The unfinished neighborhood had degenerated into an assembly of shabby rentals. Zach Vreeland’s house was no exception. The carport was so swaybacked no one dared park a car underneath it anymore.