Flesh and Blood (22 page)

Her taut body felt good and vaguely familiar, and the sweat-tinged perfume rising in the heat emanating from her skin smelled of sex, which was funny because the two of us had never had it.

“How have you been?” she asked.

“I’m okay,” I said. “How about you?”

“Me, too,” she said.

“You look great,” I said.

“You, too,” she said.

We grew quiet a moment.

Behind me, I could hear the gate opening, and I turned to see the Restricted Labor Squad, or chain gang, marching out, the cadence of their boots and rattle of their chains sounding like the percussion section of a college band taking the field. Periodically one of the inmates would call out a jailhouse cadence and the others would repeat it: “They say that Florida girls are fine, their kiss as sweet as brandy wine, but that sweet thing’ll never be mine, ’cause all they’ll let me do is time.”

The officers escorting them were dressed in gray fatigues that made them look like military special forces more than correctional officers, the black shotguns propped against their shoulders adding to the effect. The RLS was the result of a political attempt to appease the public’s desire to get tough on crime. However, if the public realized that almost all prison escapes happened when inmates were already outside the fence, they’d probably reconsider their position.

When the RLS had rhythmically shuffled by, I turned back to face Laura.

“You think we could talk sometime?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said, nodding. “Is everything okay?”

She shrugged. “I’m sure it will be after we talk.”

“What is it?”

She hesitated. “I think … . We’ll talk about it when we get together.”

“Laura,” I said, my voice sounding as if I had a right to insist.

“Someone’s harassing me,” she said, “and I don’t know what to do.”

By the time Laura arrived at my trailer in the Prairie Palm II, I had already downed several drinks.

When I opened the door, Seven and Seven in a lowball glass in my hand, her eyes widened momentarily, but then she smiled warmly—perhaps even adoringly.

Her royal blue sleeveless summer dress hung loosely, hiding her hard body and sharp curves. A row of saddle-brown buttons ran the length of the dress, matching her leather thong sandals. Just beneath the top button, a keyhole opening revealed a small cross necklace and the fact that she sunbathed in the nude, for the slightest hint of breasts hiding there were as dark as the rest of her.

“Would you like a drink?” I asked.

She nodded. “I’ll have what you’re having.”

Walking over to the couch, she lowered her shoulder and shrugged off the long strap of her purse, then dropped down beside it.

As I prepared her drink, I considered her again. Why had we given up so soon? What was it about her that made me willing to do that? Seeing how nervous and awkward she was now, I was reminded. At times, she walked in beauty that was truly sublime, but they were seldom, and most often she seemed uncomfortable with herself, like someone experiencing the first long days of sobriety.

Still, she looked so good.

I walked back over to her and handed her what for me would always be unlucky number sevens. She tasted it and tried to smile, but the drink was too strong, too bitter.

“You want something else?” I asked. “Maybe something with fruit in it?”

She shook her head. “This is good,” she said.

The trailer was quiet, seeming more so now than before she arrived. I grabbed a remote off the couch, clicked a few buttons, and a CD of Gram Parsons began to play.

“What’s
that
?”

I dropped down onto the lumpy couch beside her, the slip cover bunching beneath me, and told her.

“Are you drunk?” she asked.

I shook my head. “But you better go ahead and tell me what you need to sooner rather than later.”

“I feel a little silly,” she said, “and embarrassed—especially asking for your help after all this time, but … I just don’t know what else to do.”

I should have reassured her, but I just waited.

“I’m being followed,” she said, “and harassed.”

“You know who’s doing it?”

She nodded. “I think I do, but I haven’t actually seen him. If it’s not him, I have no idea who else it could be.”

“Old boyfriend?”

“Actually, he is,” she said. “He was rebound guy after you broke up with me. It was intense, very sexual, but fun and sweet, too. I thought he might be the one.”

“Very sexual?” I asked.

When Laura and I had dated, she had been a virgin, and though tempted, we had managed to avoid changing that. Until I was certain we had a future, I hadn’t wanted to do anything I’d later feel guilty about. I already had enough of that.

She nodded. “I wanted you to be my first,” she said. “When that didn’t happen … well, I was just ready. And it was amazing. I discovered that I really,
really
like sex.”

“Really?”

“
Really
,” she said. “My mom and sister can take it or leave it, so I figured I’d be the same way, but … wow.”

When we were together, I had assumed that being a thirty-two year-old virgin meant Laura was carrying an entire suitcase— perhaps even a steamer trunk—of sexual hang-ups. I even imagined that she had been molested as a young girl, but we weren’t together long enough for me to find out.

“You really missed out,” she said.

“Obviously,” I said.

“Back when we were seeing each other,” she said, “why didn’t we—I mean, we saw a lot of each other and I just thought we were heading toward that type of intimacy. Why didn’t we?”

“A lot of reasons,” I said.

“I did make it clear to you that I thought I was ready, didn’t I?”

I nodded.

“I seem to remember offering myself to you and you rejecting me,” she said.

“It wasn’t rejection,” I said.

“It was gentle and kind and you did it for me, but it was rejection.”

“It sounds corny, I know, but I was honestly trying to figure out the best way to love you,” I said. “To do what was best for you.”

“Do you think it’s a sin?”

I shook my head. “I’m no Puritan,” I said, “but it certainly solidifies emotional entanglements. I didn’t want you to end up getting hurt.”

“But I did.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “But wouldn’t it have been worse if we had become that intimate?”

She shrugged. “I can’t know, can I?”

“And you never were really specific about your past,” I said.

“Why I was still a virgin in my early thirties,” she said.

I nodded.

“You’re a good man,” she said.

“I’ll drink to that,” I said, holding up my nearly empty glass.

“Seriously,” she said. “And I’m glad to see you loosening up a bit. You put too much pressure on yourself. What you did was sweet, but you can’t go through life avoiding emotional entanglements—and not truly connect with anyone.”

She was right. I certainly needed to be more open, more willing to get down in the sometimes messy pit of personal relationships, but that wasn’t the issue here.

We were silent a long moment, Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris singing a duet in the background.

“How sure are you it’s him?” I asked.

“Who?” she asked. “Taylor? I don’t know who else it could be.”

“What has he done?”

“He’s following me,” she said. “It’s more a feeling than anything, but I know he’s there—not all the time, but a lot. Especially at night. He spray painted the words ‘cunt’ and ‘bitch’ on my car. He calls and hangs up in the middle of the night. And I think he killed my dog. I didn’t suspect him at the time, so I didn’t think anything of it, just buried him, but he was young and healthy. I don’t know. I just think he did it.”

“Did he stay outside?” I asked. “Bark when someone came into the yard?”

She shook her head. “He was an inside dog.”

I nodded, thinking about what she had said.

“What is it?” she asked.

“If he did it,” I said, “it’d be one thing if he was trying to get the dog out of the way so he could come into your yard to watch you, but it’s another if he really had no utilitarian reason to do it.”

“Why?”

“Makes him far more dangerous.”

Jack Jordan’s annual birthday party at Potter’s Landing was the social event of the year in Potter County. He was a popular sheriff and there was free food and booze for as long as there were people to consume it.

Laura, who was sticking very close these days, accompanied me this year. Merrill and I were taking turns following her during the day and she was spending most nights at my place. We had tried on a couple of occasions to have a little chat with Taylor Price, but he was proving elusive.

Nearly a thousand people had crammed into the small landing, which was little more than a boat launch into the Apalachicola River. Dad’s deputies, one of whom was my younger brother, Jake, had set up large halogen lights at the four corners of the landing, and built a large bonfire at the center. On the back of a yellow low boy trailer, a local band was covering country tunes, in front of them, the end of the gravel road had been swept to make a dance floor.

Light from the work lamps pierced the rising smoke from the bonfire and barbeque pits illuminating the undersides of pine, cypress, and magnolia trees casting foggy shadows onto the gray night sky. In the silence between songs, the sweeter songs of crickets could be heard against the rhythm track of the flowing river, the cool currents rising off of it delivered the fragrance of magnolia and gardenia blossoms.

People swarmed around the landing the way bees did in this same location during tupelo season—twenty-five couples or so were on the dance floor, the deputies and their families were preparing food over barbeque pits and portable gas grills, and another couple of hundred sat or stood around the pavilions. The others wandered around lazily as if floating down the river beyond them on innertubes, with a bottle of beer in hand, greeting each other with the warm familiarity of friends who were just a little loaded. All the others sat on their tailgates and in the back of their trucks they had parked in the landing for just such a purpose.

Upon arriving, I was greeted by the friendly citizens of the county who had been known as Dad’s since he was elected sheriff the first time nearly thirty years ago. All the people of my dad’s generation greeted me as, “Jr.” while those from mine called me “JJ.”

When Dad saw us, he motioned us over.

Ordinarily a quiet and reserved man, Jack Jordan became attentive and charming the moment he saw Laura.

“Son, why don’t you go fix this lovely lady a drink, while I introduce her around to everyone?”

“Sure,” I said, as if I didn’t have a drinking problem and needed to avoid the bar.

The people I encountered on my way over to the bar were as eclectic as north Florida itself. Beach people in colorful tropical shorts and shirts with deep tans and sun-bleached blond hair moved among small-town people in faded jeans and t-shirts, many of which sported beer-logos. County officials, like Dad, with khakis and but-ton-down oxfords, kept their distance from the river people in halter tops, Daisy Dukes, and soiled wife beaters.

When I neared the food tables, Jake yelled, “Hide the liquor. The whiskey priest is here.” It got a laugh, but only from Jake’s red-neck buddies who didn’t get the reference any more than he did. He had heard me use the term in a vulnerable moment of reflection on my identification with the weakness of Graham Greene’s character from
The Power and the Glory
. He had used it against me ever since.

“You didn’t bring your nigger, did you?” he added. “We all left ours at home.”

Again, the laughter was only from his friends.

Though openly and unapologetically racist, Jake’s comments were said for my benefit. He knew how much even subtle forms of racism bothered me.

I walked over to him.

“Were you talking to me?” I asked.

“You been drinkin’?” he asked. “Hell, I can smell it on your breath,” he added, his own breath smelling like the beer he was drinking.

“Were you talking about Merrill?”

“If the color fits,” he said.

“Why don’t you and I ride over and ask him if he’s a nigger?” I said.

“He’s not supposed to know it,” he said. “You are. Why does he fight all your fights for you anyway?”

“He doesn’t,” I said, and punched him square on his obnoxious, racist mouth.

The punch was all a punch should be. I had pivoted my hips and slung my shoulders into it. It was hard and it connected well. Jake went down. And didn’t get up.