Phantom of Riverside Park (24 page)

“What do you want?” Fred yelled.

“Is Elizabeth Jennings here?”

The voice was female and unfamiliar. Somebody
from the university, maybe? Elizabeth looked like she’d come from
combat in the War of the Blue Paint. She frantically searched for
something to wipe her hands on.

“What’s it to you?”

Fred’s belligerence was probably scaring the
poor woman to death. Elizabeth abandoned her search for a towel in
favor of making their unexpected guest feel welcome. She went to
the doorway, rumpled clothes, blue paint and all.

“I’m Elizabeth Jennings.” She smiled to show
that she, at least, was harmless. The woman didn’t smile back.

Later, when Elizabeth agonized over every
aspect of the visit, she would recall that tight mouth with a
shudder. She should have known, even then, that it was a bad
sign.

“I’m Helen Parkins of the Department of Human
Services. A complaint has been filed against you. I’ve come to
investigate.”

She fired from a verbal machine gun that shot
Elizabeth straight through the heart. Elizabeth reached out blindly
for support, and if Fred hadn’t caught hold of her arm she’d have
fallen at the feet of the woman who had surely come to destroy
her.

Fred didn’t suffer the same weakness. He
stuck out his chin and shouted, “Who’s complaining?”

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

“What sort of complaints?” Elizabeth asked,
though she already knew. The truth had already cracked her heart
and bled her bones.

To make matters worse Nicky suddenly appeared
looking like a street urchin or a waif from a nineteenth century
orphanage that imposed child labor.

“It’s about your son. Nicky Jennings.”

“No. No.” Elizabeth held her hands up in
front of her face like a blind woman, but Fred got straight into
the woman’s face.

“You can just get your sorry self back into
that fancy car and tell that de-fart-ment of yours that we ain’t
fixing to put up with no government shenanigans.”

Helen turned red from the roots of her
starched yellow hair to the base of her scrawny neck, while
Elizabeth bit the inside of her mouth to keep the room from
spinning. This woman was going to take her child. Now was not the
time to be weak.

She could hear Mae Mae saying,
Always
keep your chin up, Elizabeth, and don’t you ever back down from a
fight in order to protect what’s yours
.

“Uncle Fred, please.” Elizabeth put a
restraining hand on his arm. “Go back to your card game with Papa.
And take Nicky with you. I’ll take care of this.”

She squatted beside her son and cupped his
face even though her hands were blue. What did paint streaks matter
when your entire future was at stake?

“Go with Uncle Fred like a good boy, Nicky.
Mommy will answer all your questions later.”

Thankfully he didn’t argue. As Elizabeth held
the door open she saw the scene through the eyes of her enemy: the
neighborhood a disaster, the house in shambles, one foul-mouthed
old man at the door and the other crusty old codger sitting at the
kitchen table shuffling a deck of cards, gambling no doubt, and the
child exposed to it all. Most of all the child. Though Nicky often
had streaks of washable magic markers across his cheeks or mud on
his shoes and pant legs, he’d never looked more unkempt.

Helen What’s Her Name probably even thought
Elizabeth had coerced him into painting the kitchen, a modern-day
form of child labor.

“Please excuse the mess, Miss ...” The
silence roared like a tornado ripping them all apart, but the
social worker stood with her lips clamped and no notion of
supplying the name Elizabeth was too scared to remember.

“I wonder if you could come back another
time? We’re in the middle of a painting project, plus, Papa has
company, and ... as you can see, this is really not a very good day
for a visit.”

“That’s the point. With advance notice,
everybody can be a star. Even a criminal.”

Helen barged past her and sat down on the
sofa right where Elizabeth knew she would, over the bad spring that
had a nasty habit of poking through at the worst possible times.
And then the woman with the permanent-press frown snapped open her
briefcase and began to record random bits and pieces of the worst
day of Elizabeth’s life.

Still, Elizabeth clung to a thin thread of
hope and a stubborn sense of justice. She was a good mother. Any
fool would see that. Strangers didn’t come up to your house and
take your child away if you were a good mother, did they? After
all, this was America.

In the kitchen Papa and Fred had gone quiet.
Even Nicky was silent. Elizabeth answered the woman’s wicked
questions as softly as possible, hoping her family wouldn’t
hear.

She tried to come across as an intelligent
loving mother who more than made up for the fact that Nicky didn’t
have a father. From the way Helen’s eyebrows kept disappearing into
her starched hair, Elizabeth knew she’d come across another way. An
unflattering way. Maybe even a dangerous way. Dangerous to Nicky.
Dangerous to Papa. Dangerous to all of them.

After Helen had left and Fred said goodbye
and Nicky was tucked into bed with three goodnight stories instead
of two and a prayer so long he made Baptist preachers sound brief,
Elizabeth faced Papa’s questions. In spite of the fact that he’d
taught her the virtue of honesty, she still tried to put on a good
face, more for him than for herself.

There was no use in two people being scared
out of their wits.

“What’d she want to know about Nicky?” Papa
asked.

He looked every one of his ninety years
tonight. The recent illness had taken more of a toll than Elizabeth
had noticed. Or perhaps it was that she’d never looked at him
before as a stranger might, as Helen Parkins surely did: Thomas
Jennings was long past the age of baby sitting. He looked like a
man who might drop dead any time, anywhere, and what would a
four-year-old do then?

“She asked about pre-school, day care, that
sort of thing.”

“Who put her up to it, I wonder?”

Elizabeth was wondering the same thing. With
Taylor dead, the chapter in Tunica was closed. Celine, maybe? She’d
been fit to be tied about having Nicky at the bakery. Plus, she had
a mean streak as wide as a Mack truck.

“I don’t know, Papa. The thing we have to
concentrate on now is making her see what a good family we are. We
have to convince her that Nicky couldn’t be in a better place than
right here with us.”

“Any fool can see that. And I still don’t see
why we have to convince a woman we’ve never laid eyes on about a
doggone thing. I’m with Fred. If she comes nosing around her again
she’s going to get more than she bargained for.”

Elizabeth’s heart sank to her shoes. This was
exactly what she’d feared, and exactly what she had to try and
prevent.

“The world has changed, Papa. Bad things do
happen in good families. Our government tries to be an advocate for
children.”

“Nicky doesn’t need an advocate. He has
us.”

“I know that, and you know that, Papa, but
still, we’re stuck with this investigation whether we like it or
not. It’s up to us to convince her that Nicky is well cared for and
well loved.”

“You mean there’s more to this? She’ll be
coming back?”

“You’ll be going to her office, Papa. You and
Nicky, both. She’ll conduct separate interviews with both of you.”
She leaned forward and squeezed his hands. “We can get through
this, Papa. We have to, for Nicky’s sake.”

For a moment he looked as if he were going to
cry, and then Thomas Jennings proved to her one more time that he
was the rock of the song she’d sung so many years ago while sitting
on his lap in Tunica Baptist Church. The rock of ages. The rock
that not only provided shelter from the storm but succor for every
need.

“You’re doggone tootin’, we will, Elizabeth.
I don’t want you to worry about a thing. The day I can’t convince a
woman what a wonderful man I am is the day I’m laid out in my
Sunday best waiting for that bumpy ride to the cemetery. And that’s
not a ride I’m planning on taking for a long, long time.”

o0o

The Department of Human Services was in on
one of those buildings designed to make you think the government
didn’t spend a lick of your tax money on their offices, but Thomas
was nobody’s fool. That wasn’t cheap carpet on the floor. It was
ugly--a sort of dingy gray that looked like the coats of pigs after
they’d wallowed around in the sty--but it wasn’t cheap.

Neither were all those brass name plates. How
come folks thought they had to have their names engraved on plaques
and sitting on the edge of their fancy desks when all it took was a
minute to tell somebody your name. And it was a lot friendlier,
too.

Nobody was friendly here. They didn’t know
much, either, if you wanted his opinion. He’d asked six people how
to get to Helen Parkins’ office and had been told six different
things. Wasn’t that just like a government-run operation? He and
Fred had discussed the subject many times in the park, and they
were both of the opinion that if you cut out all the government
fat, everybody would be better off. It was about the only thing
they agreed on.

That and Helen Parkins.

“You watch out for her, Thomas,” Fred had
warned him. “She’s out to get you.”

Thomas had known that from the minute Helen
Parkins walked into their house. He was the one who had brought
this disaster down on their heads. He couldn’t give you a clear
reason, but he knew all the same. It had to do with old age and not
paying attention to the soup and waking up one morning when he was
sixty and looking at his worn-out tractor in the barn and his worn
out land and saying to himself, “I’ve worked like a dog all my
life, and this is all I have.”

Still... until that day in the park when a
stranger gave him a million dollar check, he’d thought of himself
as a man blessed, a modern-day Job, not rich in the traditional way
but rich in all the ways that counted. Now he knew better. Thomas
Jennings was a failure. He’d failed Lola Mae and he’d failed
Elizabeth and Nicky.

Wild horses couldn’t have made Lola Mae say
she ever wished for more than a hundred acres of land and a
subsistence living with a man who never could seem to get the dirt
out from under his fingernails. But he used to catch her unawares
sometime. She’d have that far-off, dreamy look in her eyes and
Thomas would know what she was thinking. Lola Mae had wanted to be
a concert pianist. Would have been, too, if it hadn’t been for
him.

“I’m going to get you a baby grand one of
these days, Lola Mae,” he used to tell her. “Just you wait and see.
We’re going to have a bumper crop of cotton this year.”

That bumper crop never came along. Just a hot
dry spell that sucked all the life out of the land or a plague of
boll weevils or so much rain the cotton rotted in the boll.

Same thing with soy beans. You could fight
the elements till you were bone weary and broken, but nature always
won.

All he ever got for Lola Mae was a
second-hand upright with the ivories missing and a middle C that
wouldn’t play. She hadn’t complained, though. She was never one to
complain. Why, to hear her tell it, Thomas had bought her the
finest musical instrument in the Delta, and if anybody dared
mention the middle C, she’d be on them faster than a duck on a June
bug.

Elizabeth was exactly like her. Fierce and
proud and tender.

She would never let on to him that he was the
cause of the complaint, and would fight anybody else who mentioned
such a thing, but he could see that haunted look in her eyes. He
was going to do his dead-level best today to make the government
leave her alone.

She’d wanted to come with him, but he’d said
no
. If he showed up with an escort it would prove once and
for all to Helen Parkins that he didn’t have sense enough to get in
out of the rain by himself, much less take care of a child.

He stopped by the water fountain to get a
drink. He was lost, that much was for sure, and once again he was
going to have to ask somebody how to find the office of the woman
he didn’t want to see.

Thomas wandered down a long hallway trying to
look like somebody who knew where he was going, but he failed
because a big man with a dark shiny face stepped away from a drink
machine and said, “Can I help you?”

“I don’t know. I’m looking for Helen Parkins
but nobody seems to know where she is. Maybe I’m in the wrong
building.”

The man laughed. “You’ve got the right
building. Just the wrong hall. If you’ll turn left you’ll find her
two doors down, on the right.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“No need to call me sir. I’m just the
janitor.”

“They ought to promote you to president. You
know more than anybody in this whole building.”

“You tell ‘em for me.”

Maybe he would. Maybe he’d tell Helen
Parkins, along with a few other things.

“Well, here goes, Lola Mae. I hope you’ve
rounded up a host of angels because I can use all the help I can
get.”

Feeling more confident, he stepped into Helen
Parkins’ office.

“Mr. Jennings, you’re late,” was the first
thing Helen Parkins said to him, and as it turned out later, the
nicest.

She knew about him setting the house on fire,
and it didn’t help one bit that he told her he’d been sick. She
said ninety was too old to raise a child. She said he was an
endangerment
, as if he were some bomb ticking away and set
to go off at any minute and blow Nicky to bits.

“I would never harm a hair on that child’s
head,” he told her. “And I’d whip anybody who tried,” he added, for
good measure.

That was the wrong thing to say--one of the
many wrong things he said--because then she got on her high horse
about violence and what a bad influence it was to raise a child in
an atmosphere of hostility.