Cicada (18 page)

From upstairs, even through his closed bedroom door, Buckshot heard the smack and lifted his head from the pillow. Even if it hadn’t gotten his attention, the shout that followed from his father certainly would have.

“Damn, Franny!”

Still she said nothing.

“Jesus….” He muttered and stepped back to lean against the counter. Her eyes finally fell on him then. She stared him down as he dared to look at her doggedly, hoping to inspire her pity. There was none. John folded beneath her disdain and turned away to the sink. He ran the cold water, splashing it on his face and making a great fuss over the bright red welt growing across his cheek.

On the floorboards above John, Buckshot’s bare feet slid into the pair of house slippers at the foot of his bed.

Frances rose as well, removing the letter she’d found days before in John’s sock drawer. She’d thought of so many things to say since then, wasted so much of herself over worthless words. But now she was spent, too tired to be bothered with the matter any longer even with it finally at hand. There were no pithy comments to make. She had no need to crumple and throw the letter in his face as she’d considered so often of late while washing his clothes, making his meals, waiting alone in his bed. Instead, she took the pages from her apron, letting her thumb and forefinger run along the sharp crease one last time. She placed the pages lightly on the table with a soft tap of her worn fingernail and walked quietly out of the room.

“Living with ghosts,” John mused to himself. He stared dumbly at the letter on the table ignorant to the fact that it was his long-forgotten suicide note.

Frances thought she hadn’t fallen asleep, but she had, although there was little discernible change in her mental state in either case. Her troubled mind had remained muddied with thoughts of John while she’d laid awake as well as after she’d slipped off into the eddies of a labored slumber. Regardless, she didn’t get a chance to sink away any deeper—perhaps to find a little peace—since the sound of John driving off in his truck pulled her up from those few minutes of escape.

That it wasn’t near dawn, and that John was heading off into the night yet again, wasn’t comprehended immediately. Once it was, however, Frances’s sluggishness was washed away in a surging tide of anger.

“Goddamn him!”

She threw the sweat sticky bed sheet off and stormed to the window to watch the taillights winking their goodbyes as the truck began its disappearing act, dissolving into a wake of ghostly dust and swallowing night. Then its headlights suddenly showed on the distant blacktop as the truck turned there and roared off to the north. Within seconds it was gone.

“That tears it.”

She threw on one of John’s undershirts and went out to the hall closet and began violently yanking free a pair of suitcases buried beneath boxes of Christmas ornaments and old folded quilts. Her head began to swim, caught up in the strong odor of mothballs permeating the otherwise stale air.

“Timothy! Timothy, get up. Get dressed!” she yelled over her shoulder and down the hall to her son’s bedroom door.

In the moment she looked away, one of the larger cardboard boxes slipped from its precarious balancing act above her and came down sharply onto her shoulder.

“Sonuvabitch!” she yelped, and then, “Timothy!”

She threw the fallen box past her into the hall in a crash and tinkle of delicate glass that would never adorn the family tree again.

By the time she’d finally freed the suitcases Frances was short of breath, and the thick sheen of sweat all along her exposed body had captured a gross amount of the swirling dust from the air. On any other occasion she would have done what crossed her mind next and taken a shower to cool off, calm down, and be rid of the filth clinging to her. Not this time. She meant to be gone. In fact, she was angry that she’d stayed on as long as she had.

Fool
, she scolded herself silently as she padded down the hall to wake her son. How he’d not gotten up to see what all the fuss was about struck her just as she swung his door open.

“Buckshot, honey?” she called quietly now, flipping the light switch.

Whatever made her son think stuffing his pillows under his covers would trick her was just as misguided to her as John’s way of thinking.

“They don’t fall too far from the tree, after all, do they?”

Frances stood over Timothy’s empty bed for a moment, ineffectively trying to blow her sweat-matted bangs from her forehead, the hands crossed over her breasts seemingly welded there. She proved they weren’t, however, when she threw them up in surrender and walked back down the hall to her bedroom. On second thought, she’d have that shower. And then, she also decided, the very instant Buckshot snuck back up from wherever mischief had led him, she’d have the two of them all ready to go.

…

And so were John’s thoughts tangled and troubled as well. For the first half of his drive he struggled like a man stacking sandbags against the rising river of his failing marriage. But with every consideration he felt as though he could no longer keep up with the sandbags flying through the air to his waiting arms. Instead they pummeled him in the chest, slapping the air from his lungs, or caught him at the knees, time and again buckling him to the ground. More and more the troubles piled at his feet instead of finding their way onto the wall he meant to build to hold everything in…everything together. Finally, he conceded, the river would win. There was no easy solution, not even a hard solution. As far as he could fathom it, there was no solution at all.

He couldn’t confess his adultery. His wife would most certainly leave him. And not only did he not want that—since he still loved
his Franny
—but she’d most certainly take their son with her, and that would never do. At the same time, he couldn’t continue this deception. It was tearing his wife apart, turning her against him, and wearing him thin until he felt like one of the old burlap sandbags being tossed about, splitting at the seams and worn through; everything inside him slowly leaking away, too ineffective to do the job.

As he put his home behind him—both literally and figuratively—John began to fret over what awaited ahead. He was going at this late hour to see Cicada. He meant to persuade her to change her mind and keep him. Just how he might do that he’d no idea, but somehow he would restore things to how they had been. He knew this was misguided; like the man who steals sandbags from the foundation of the dike to build its walls higher. It was only a matter of course before the whole affair tumbled down around him and the flood waters washed him away. Still, he pressed on.

Even had the hour not been so late, and the night not a weeknight, the road probably still would have been just as deserted. Melby was a small town, after all. And where John was headed—to that lonely corner of the county where those new black families had thought to tuck themselves away from the world—that was a road to nowhere as far as most were concerned, little more than a thin seam of winding, cracked and dilapidated blacktop for the drunken insomniacs to kill time on between slugs from the bottle and fumbling searches back and forth across a mostly barren AM radio landscape. Just another lap on their nightly circuitous pilgrimage to no destination other than oblivion. Occasionally alongside their road a little white wooden cross might spring up, accompanied by batches of flowers and perhaps a few personal items—a hat, a keychain, or worn cowboy boots, or such—meager and temporary testimonials to mark where one of those souls had permanently concluded their journey, or worse, someone else’s.

Cicada was out on the porch, and John was rightly surprised when his headlights found her there. She waved off the blinding intrusion with one hand and partially shielded her eyes with the other. It didn’t help matters that John accidentally sounded the truck’s horn as he fumbled to park, hurrying to kill the headlights, and cut the ignition all at once. It was as though he was a nervous school boy afraid to be caught come calling.

“Shush!” she stage-whispered out from her rocking chair, although there was little chance he could hear her.

Stupidly he held an index finger over his lips and eased out of the truck. He started to close the door behind him but Cicada rushed to stop him.

“No, sir. Nah-uh. Don’t you even think of getting out of that truck.”

“Cicada, we need to talk.”

She could see that he was too troubled to be rid of easily. “Fine. Just get back in there,” she told him. After a quick glance over her shoulder to the house she tiptoed to the passenger’s side to join him in the cab. “Cicada, girl, when you going to learn?”

Sliding into the cab, she scolded, “John Sayre, what in the wide world has gotten into you?”

“Sound like my ol’ Mama,” he said with a grin.

“Oh, Lord Almighty.”

“Listen, I’m sorry. I don’t mean to cause you no trouble,” John said, cutting a thankful glance to the still darkened house, “but, Cicada, c’mon….”

“You know what my uncle told me when I was growing up? Around the time that I started really growing up?”

John shook his head ever so slightly.

“Let me tell you a little story. There used to be this boy, Leroy Baker. Little ol’ quiet Leroy who turned around, and before you knew it, one day he was big ol’ loud and goofy Leroy. And after that, all while I was growing up, that Leroy used to tease me something fierce. You know, nothing too bad, just the way kids do. But thing was, he was just especially fond of singling me out for frogs down my dungarees, chasing me about with stinging nettles, that sort of thing. Then it seemed almost overnight, he had himself another change and he stopped all that foolishness. Mind you, he didn’t stop pestering me…he just started pestering in a different way. Now he was forever wanting a kiss. Or to hold my hand, or carry my books, or come around and chatterbox while I hung the laundry.”

John heaved a little knowing sigh and nodded. Cicada wiped her hand over her brow to clear the sweat collecting there.

“My uncle, he noticed this change in Leroy too. So one day he came outside and told Leroy to skedaddle off his property or he’d fill him with rat shot.”

John laughed at this, and, thinking he followed where this story was headed, turned his eyes on the darkened porch once more before playfully slouching down into the seat as if to hide closer to her.

“Uh-huh, that’s my Uncle Nef. He’s crazy alright, yeah. And so, see I said to him after Leroy ran off, I said, Uncle Nef, why do you want to terrorize that boy that way. Least he’s not bullying me anymore. Know what Nef said? He said, ‘Yeah, and that’s the problem.’ He told me, ‘See here, you’re getting to be a woman soon and that boy he’s getting to be a man right along beside you. And men,’ he said, ‘men are like stray dogs. If you don’t want them coming around, you better not feed them.’ That’s what my Uncle Nef told me. And so, John honey, I’m just not going to feed you any longer. Do you understand?”

Everything about what she’d just said was like a balloon being popped unexpectedly from right behind his ear. The jolt of it startled him and that panic quickly paved the way to anger. He didn’t like one bit of it. He couldn’t believe what she was saying, refused to accept she’d come to feel this way, from the metaphor of him being some desperate dog to her deciding she was so cavalierly casting him off.

“What the hell….” He sat up straight with a jerk and turned with one knee up on the seat to face her.

“John, you’re not a little boy either. You’re a grown man. With a wife. A child.”

“Aw, now see,” he countered, throwing up his hands and shaking his head as though disgusted she had chosen this ground on which to fight; this, his indefensible position.

“And even if I wanted to, I can’t stay on here. There’s nothing for me. My uncles aren’t long for the world. And besides, they got Ben. And Ben, he certainly doesn’t need me either. He’s young right on. Maybe if I go, then maybe that’ll give him the boot in the backside he needs to find him somebody who can really be there for him. Somebody like you already had before I ever came around. And John, and this is the most important part of all, I
want
to go. I didn’t spend all those years fighting, struggling, to get my education, to better myself, just to come live in…
Melby
.”

“Oh, now I see. Too good for us? Can’t lower yourself to be amongst us simple folk…big college girl.”

“Do you hear how you sound, John?” He refused to acknowledge her. “And are you really going to sit there and pretend what my family has here is anything like what yours has? We’re not
amongst
you. You people here don’t want us amongst you. I’m not too good to have the life you have. But you know, and I know, I’ll never have that here. But I’ll be damned if that means I can’t have it somewhere. So yeah, John Sayre, I am better than this place. A damned sight better.”

It didn’t do much for his temper to know that she was right.

“Don’t talk to me like this,” he said, trying anyway. But he was defeated. After a long moment of silence he fell back to slouch with his arms drooping over the steering wheel, just another silhouette among the gloom and shadows of the slanted little shanties and wild wood. His body and thoughts had reached a dead end.

“John, I love you.” The words, perhaps the only words that could have, made him turn on her suddenly with such a passion that she thought perhaps he meant to strike her. Frightened, but sure of herself, she reached out and took his trembling jaw in her palm. He was caught there. “I do,” she said. “And you know that. Just like you know everything else I’m telling you is the truth, too,” she assured.

He choked as her name softly slipped from his lips, “Cicada.”

With that, John deflated and sank into the seat as she took him up in her arms to be sure he didn’t disappear from the world entirely.

Jimbo Henry David Dillard was squinting mole-like as he hung slack-jawed over the steering wheel in his attempt to fathom the gloom in search of his prey. They’d followed John’s truck from some miles back when, unaware, he’d passed them on the road to Cicada’s.