Revenge of the Kudzu Debutantes (23 page)

CHAPTER

FOURTEEN

T
REVOR TRIED TO
call Eadie from the Push Hard airport. Her phone rang and rang, but she didn’t pick up. He hung up and stood in front of the long plate-glass windows overlooking the airfield. Gray mountains rose against the dark sky. A plane taxied slowly down the runway, the lights inside the cabin illuminating the passengers who went about their business, unaware that life could change in the blink of an eye, in the time it took an Embraer Turbo Prop to drop five hundred feet. Trevor shook himself like a man coming out of a heavy sleep. “Boys,” he said, turning around to Redmon, Charles, and Leonard, who stood watching him suspiciously. “I have a plane to catch. I’m going home to my wife.”

They stood looking at him, not really comprehending what he was saying. Redmon grinned and leered at a group of college girls who eyed him with disgust.

“But we just got here,” Leonard said, beginning to feel like this was all falling apart. He’d spent years bragging to Redmon about how great these trips were, and now here Trevor was ruining it for everyone.

“She’ll never take you back,” Charles wheezed, trying to get his asthmatic lungs to draw.

“We’ll see about that,” Trevor said.

It was four o’clock in the morning when Trevor landed at Hartsfield in Atlanta. He picked up his car and headed south. Traffic was light. He sped along the highway trying to figure out how he was going to talk to her, how he was going to convince Eadie to take him back if she wouldn’t take his calls. The thought that she might not forgive him made him reckless. He drove like a madman. He had to see her tonight. He had to make her love him again.

Darkness rolled away from his headlights. A harvest moon hung over the trees like a rocket flare. Trevor sped down the lonely highway thinking of Eadie and wondering at the terrible and relentless power of unrequited love.

E
ADIE SLEPT FITFULLY.
She dreamed she was crossing a great river in a small rowboat. She rowed and she rowed but she never got any closer to the far shore. Finally she stopped rowing. She let go and felt herself drift with the current, past throngs of people and grazing sheep and strange trees that grew like mushrooms along the banks of the river. She heard someone calling her name and leaning over the edge of the boat, she looked down into the dark water and saw a city of light filled with tiny fish-people who swam and sang her name. There was a sudden loud noise, an abrupt sound of wood striking metal as the boat scraped against a rock. Eadie woke up.

Trevor was standing in the doorway. He had turned on the hall light so she could see it was him. “Eadie,” he said, stepping into the room with his hands raised in front of him. “Eadie, don’t shoot me. I had to see you. You won’t take my calls and I’m desperate. I can’t go on like this, baby.”

Eadie, still foggy with sleep but feeling a gradual, swelling fury come over her, was, for the first time in her life, speechless. She sat up and picked up a picture frame and flung it at him. It crashed on the wall beside his head, shattering into pieces.

“That’s okay, baby,” he said, advancing slowly. “Get it all out. Say whatever you want to say, do whatever you have to do. I deserve it. Throw whatever you have to throw. Hell,” he said, grinning. “I won’t even duck.”

She picked up a heavy volume of Sylvia Plath’s
Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams
and threw it. It caught him over the left temple. Trevor sagged to his knees like a sack of wet sand, and went down.

T
HE
S
YLVIA
P
LATH
volume did more damage than Trevor had anticipated when he made the courageous decision not to duck. It took seven stitches, administered at the Ithaca County Hospital Emergency Room, to close the gash in his forehead. Eadie drove him over, cursing him the whole time. You had to admire someone who could curse for ten minutes straight without stopping to breathe. It took a steady concentration and a great deal of intelligence to string together long looping sentences using four-letter words without stuttering or stammering or ever missing a beat. Trevor found himself holding his bleeding head and watching Eadie with love and admiration.
That’s my girl,
he thought, wiping away the blood that dripped steadily into his left eye.
That’s my beautiful girl.

They pulled up in front of the emergency room just as the sun was coming up and Eadie went around to the passenger door and opened it. Trevor just sat there looking foolish, a bloody Kleenex stuck to his forehead.

“You’re incredible,” he said.

“Get out of the car, you idiot,” Eadie said. “You’re lucky I don’t keep a gun in the house or you’d have a lot bigger hole in your damn head.”

He followed her in through the sliding doors. She was wearing a short nightgown that barely covered her ass, and no shoes. The effect on the orderlies was immediate. They hurried over to help.

“What are you looking at?” Trevor said, trying to step between his wife and the two young men.

“See if you can stitch up his mouth when you stitch up his forehead,” Eadie said to the orderlies, and without another word, she swung around and headed home.

M
ONDAY EVENING
J
IMMY
Lee took Nita and the children out to the Rebel Yell Go-Cart Track. The children were leaving Tuesday morning to go to the beach with Loretta and Eustis for fall break, and Nita had promised them a special treat before they left. Logan had lived his whole life in the South, and had never been to a go-cart track. When Jimmy Lee heard this, he put his arm around Logan’s shoulders and said, “Son, there are three things a Southern boy should know how to do, and one of them is drive a go-cart.”

“What are the other two?” Logan asked.

“I’ll tell you when you’re older,” Jimmy Lee said, and Logan grinned, and Nita blushed and looked at her feet.

The track was owned by twin brothers, Floyd and Lloyd Pickett. The Picketts were friends of Jimmy Lee’s and they let Logan and Whitney have extra-long runs around the track, it being a slow night and all. Two hours later, Logan was hooked. Right then and there, Dale Earnhardt became his own personal hero. Looking out at the glistening track as the overhead lights came on and “Free Bird” blared from the loudspeaker, Logan made up his mind that one day, come hell or high water, he’d win the Winston Cup or die trying.

After they took the kids to Nita’s parents’ house, Jimmy Lee and Nita drove out to the river and sat in the back of Jimmy Lee’s truck under a red-gold moon drinking Coors long-necks and talking about God and quantum physics and life on other planets. It seemed to Nita that she was another person when she was with him, that the world was opened up to possibility, and she could say anything, however personal or absurd, and he would understand what she was trying to say, and not judge her for it.

He had his arm thrown around her shoulders and she was nestled up close to him to keep warm, and pretty soon one thing led to another, and before long they were stretched out in the bed of the truck. Nita caught her shoulder on something sharp and the stabbing pain brought her abruptly back to her senses. She jumped up and buttoned her shirt and went to sit at the opposite end of the truck, with her back up against the tailgate. Jimmy Lee sat across from her, breathing heavy. He had his shirt off but he didn’t seem cold.

“I can’t,” Nita said, pulling her collar up around her neck. She pushed her hair out of her face and looked at him. He had his head back against the cab but he was watching her. His chest moved up and down with his breathing. “If I do, I’ll be no better than him. I’ll be breaking my marriage vows as easy as he broke his, and that isn’t my way. You know that, Jimmy Lee. If I do this with you now, you’ll remember it later, and you’ll never trust me. You’ll always be wondering, you’ll always be saying to yourself: She cheated on Charles Broadwell, why can’t she cheat on me?”

He shook his head. “I wouldn’t think that, Nita.”

She put her hand up to stop him. “I have to think about my children,” she said. “If he catches me sneaking around with you, if he finds out, I’m scared of what he might do.” This was true. She had been thinking a lot about what Charles would do when he returned home from Montana; she had been imagining his anger over her setting him up with transvestites and selling the Deuce behind his back. Charles Broadwell was not a man to cross, and like all the Broadwells, he was sure to carry a grudge. It sounded so easy when she and Nita and Lavonne had planned all this, but the truth was, even if everything worked out, even if every little piece fell into place the way they hoped and prayed it would, Charles was still likely to find a way to punish her. Even if he didn’t divorce her, he would still find a way to make her miserable. She was sure of that. God help her if Ramsbottom wasn’t able to come up with those photographs. God help her if Charles found out about Jimmy Lee.

He sat up and reached for his shirt. “I can’t stand all this sneaking around. I want to be able to take you places. I want to take you dancing, and out to dinner, and to the movies. I don’t want to always have to hide what I feel.”

She shook her head. “You knew I was married.”

He pulled his shirt over his head. “Why can’t you just tell him you’re leaving him?”

“I don’t know that I am leaving him. I don’t know what I’m going to do.” She put her head in her hands. “When he gets back from Montana, I’ll decide what I have to do. I have to think about my children.”

He pulled his knees up and rested his arms across the top. “This is getting complicated,” he said.

“I never promised it’d be easy,” she said.

He stood up and folded the blanket they had been lying on. “We better go.” He put out his hand to help her rise.

She rose unsteadily to her feet and leaned against him for a moment. “Do you still want me to come over tomorrow morning to help you get ready for the Kudzu Festival?”

He climbed over the side of the truck and put his arms up to help her down. “Aren’t you afraid one of my neighbors will see you?” He put his arms around her and pushed her up against the side of the truck. His breath was warm against her neck.

“It won’t always be like this,” she said, sliding her hands into his back pockets.

“Bring some breakfast when you come,” he said, and kissed her.

CHAPTER

FIFTEEN

I
F
C
HARLES,
L
EONARD,
and Redmon had been more intuitive, if they had been more attentive to the signs and warnings of fate, they might have taken the near-death experience on the Embrauer Turbo Prop and Trevor’s desertion as a warning. They might have noted the fact that their luggage and rifles didn’t arrive, that their gear seemed to have disappeared inexplicably somewhere over the Rockies, and taken this as a bad omen. Instead, they searched for Bentley in the airport bar.

Bentley, who by now had been let in on Ramsbottom’s plan for revenge against the lawyers, was, for once, glad to see them. He sat at the bar nursing a boilermaker and nodded as they came in. He had spent the last several years carting these sorry-ass yahoos through the Montana wilderness and he was not sorry they were finally going to get what was coming to them. He was especially glad that Trevor Boone seemed to have skipped the trip; Bentley had always liked Trevor, and he would not have wanted to see Trevor undergo the dismantling Ramsbottom had planned for the rest.

“They can’t find our luggage,” Charles said by way of greeting to Bentley. “Or our guns.” He had spent the last thirty minutes bullying a reservation clerk, but so far it didn’t seem to have done much good other than to alert security to a possible terrorist threat.

Bentley downed his drink. “That’s too bad,” he said.

They sat at the bar drinking kamikazes. Redmon tried to pick up two girls sitting at a table behind them but one of the girls said, “We don’t party with old guys.”

“What the fuck?” Redmon said, rising unsteadily to his feet. “Who you calling an old guy?”

Bentley set his empty glass down on the bar and stood up. “Let’s go,” he said.

It was cold walking to the Range Rover, and Charles wished he had thought to wear his hunting jacket on the plane instead of packing it away in his suitcase. His sinuses shriveled and throbbed in the cold dry air. Leonard had his arm around Redmon’s shoulders still trying to calm him down after his exchange with the snotty college girls. “Trust me, there’ll be plenty of girls at the Ah! Wilderness Ranch,” Leonard said. “Girls a lot prettier than those two.”

“Goddamn,” Redmon said, rubbing his hands together. “It’s cold enough to freeze the stink off a monkey. How much longer till we get there?”

When they reached the Rover, Charles walked around to the driver’s side but Bentley shook his head and said, “I’ll drive.” He took the keys out of his pocket and pushed past Charles who stood there with his hand out.

“No, I’ll drive,” Charles wheezed.

Bentley swung around to face him. He was smaller than Charles by a couple of inches but he was broader through the shoulders and used to backing down cowboys and pickpockets and other assorted petty criminals. Backing down a lawyer was no big deal. “Boss said I was to do the driving this trip.”

Charles took a deep breath, feeling his throat constrict. If he hadn’t been dealing with asthma he might have noticed the menace in Bentley’s tone, he might have realized the Indian boy was treating him the same way Nita had been treating him ever since the firm party.

“Let’s you and me go back into that bar for one more little bitty drink,” Redmon said, leaning heavily on Leonard’s shoulder.

“Get in the car,” Bentley said.

“Let’s go back in there and given them snotty college girls hell.”

“Get in the car
now,
” Bentley said, and Leonard jumped and opened the door and shoved Redmon inside and climbed in beside him. Charles went around and got into the passenger’s side. They were so stunned at the way Bentley had spoken to them it was miles before anyone thought to say anything. Bentley drove slowly, following the taillights of the car in front of them that glowed and arced through the darkness like twin comets heralding the beginning of some dire and long-awaited prophecy.

Charles, who wasn’t sure now what he had heard Bentley say, shook himself and said, “If you drive this slow we won’t get to the ranch until morning.”

Bentley looked at him. In the backseat, Redmon sang “Lonely Women Make Good Lovers.” “You saying you want me to drive fast?” Bentley asked the hapless Charles.

“I’m saying I’m cold and I’m hungry and I want to get into a warm bed sometime tonight.”

Bentley buckled his seat belt. He checked his rearview mirror. “Whatever you say, Kemosabe,” he said, and clamped his foot down on the accelerator.

T
HEY ROARED UP
to the ranch in a cloud of dust. Ramsbottom had heard them coming and was standing on the porch to greet them. Two small lamps cast their spindly light across the planked porch, patched here and there with new pine boards. Ramsbottom stood at the top of a small flight of steps. Sheba, the old Ridgeback, was with him. She looked up at him and whined deep in her throat as the Rover spun around the drive and came to a sudden stop, its momentum arrested, dust-covered flanks swaying in the lamplight.

A rear door opened and Redmon fell out onto the drive on his hands and knees. He vomited steadily for several minutes. On the other side Charles Broadwell climbed out and stumbled around the back of the Rover, his face pinched and bloodless in the lamplight. Behind him Leonard emerged, clutching his chest.

“Evening,” Ramsbottom said cheerfully, putting on his game face, his “welcome to my home, you skim-milk cowboys,” face.

“He tried to kill us,” Charles wheezed, pointing at Bentley, who had climbed out and was calmly unloading groceries and supplies onto a pushcart. “He left the road.” Charles sounded like he was sucking bbs through a straw. “We went airborne. Twice.”

“You said you wanted to go fast,” Bentley said. “I took a shortcut.”

Charles looked as if someone had punched him in the stomach. He tried, desperately, to draw a breath. “Fire him,” he said to Ramsbottom. “Fire him right now.”

“Now, now, Mr. Broadwell,” Ramsbottom said, coming down the steps with his arms wide. Sheba climbed stiffly down the steps beside him. “There’s no need for all that.” He clapped Charles on the shoulder and pulled him up close. “Bentley was just trying to do what you asked him to do,” he said in a low, soothing voice. “You know old Bentley. You’ve known old Bentley for years. Surely you don’t think old Bentley would do anything to make you mad.”

“Old Bentley tried to kill me.”

“Naw,” Ramsbottom said, like he was trying to coax a smile from a colicky baby. “You know that ain’t true! Bentley would never try to kill one of the guests. That’d be bad for business!” Charles could understand the logic of this. Beneath the old man’s steady voice he was beginning to thaw, was beginning to breathe easier. After all, he
had
asked Bentley to drive faster.

“Well,” he said, smoothing his sweater with his hands. “Well.”

“Right,” Ramsbottom said, and clapping him once again on the shoulder, he let Charles go. “Now, let’s get on up to the house and have a nightcap and then we need to turn in. We’ve got a busy day ahead of us.” He walked over to Redmon who was climbing up the side of the Rover, trying to stand up straight. Ramsbottom stuck out his hand, stepping discreetly over the vomit stain, and said, “You must be Mr. Redmon.”

“Where’s the girls?” Redmon croaked.

“The girls missed their flight in Vegas. They had a late show.”

“These are
Vegas showgirls
?” Redmon said, already feeling better. Leonard grinned and gave him a look that said “See, I told you so.”

Bentley looked at Ramsbottom. Down in the creek pens Sambo, the old toothless circus lion, coughed at the moon. “I guess you could say they were showgirls,” Ramsbottom said, and Bentley made a sound like he had swallowed a golf ball, and pushed past them with the luggage cart.

R
AMSBOTTOM’S PLAN FOR
revenge was simple. Instead of doing anything overtly brutal, they just weren’t going to intervene to make sure things went smoothly for the lawyers. There would be no gourmet food, no penned animals waiting patiently to be loosed and slaughtered, no carefully planned expedition into the mountains. Ramsbottom had lived in Push Hard, Montana, all his life and he knew from experience that nature could be cruel and devious. Mother Nature didn’t like puffed-up hombres who went around thinking they were better than everyone else. The Greeks had a word for it—hubris. Mother Nature had a tendency to curb-stomp anyone foolish enough to enter her wilderness carrying more than their fair share of hubris. All Ramsbottom had to do to get revenge on the clabber-heads was to sit back and let Nature do her work.

The morning after they arrived at the game ranch, Ramsbottom got the hunters up early. Leonard, Charles, and Redmon had sat up late the evening before drinking bourbon, and they were all slightly hungover. They ate buffalo sausage and fried eggs and Texas toast washed down by pots of black coffee. Carlos, the chef Ramsbottom had used for years, had left to open his own restaurant, and Ramsbottom had recently hired William to do the cooking. He came out on the porch wearing a dirty apron and carrying a pot of coffee. He was big and bald and he looked like what he was: an ex-felon from Oklahoma who had done time in McAllester for grand theft auto and assault. So far William’s cooking skills had been somewhat limited, but Ramsbottom believed in giving a man a second chance. William poured coffee and sucked a toothpick but he kept quiet.

Bentley had been up since sunrise getting the pack animals loaded. He came up on the veranda to join the others around eight o’clock.

“When do the girls get here?” Redmon whined, reaching for another piece of toast.

Ramsbottom had promised the wives he wouldn’t let the husbands catch sight of the girls until Thursday evening at the earliest. They needed the week to plan whatever it was they were doing to punish the husbands, and he needed the week to watch Nature whittle the husbands down to his satisfaction. He’d make excuses and string them along until then. “The girls have been delayed,” he said, tapping the edge of his coffee cup with his spoon. “They had another show to do, so they’re probably not even going to get in until Thursday night. But that’s okay, because that’ll give you boys time to get some hunting in before the female entertainment gets here.” He winked at Charles who scowled and looked out at the distant Gallatins. Their luggage had still not arrived and the men were wearing a mishmash of hunting gear, whatever Ramsbottom had been able to dig up for them from the lost and found he had collected over the years. Charles was wearing a khaki army jacket and a furred hat with earflaps. Redmon had on a camouflage jumpsuit and matching stocking cap. Leonard wore a field coat that hung nearly to his knees, a pair of ear warmers, and a baseball cap that read
Gun Control Is Hitting Your Target.

“We’ll get an early start,” Bentley said, brushing the dust off his knees, “and be at Big Nose Pass by noon. We should reach the Boot by five o’clock, with any luck.”

“Good,” Ramsbottom said, rubbing his palms together. “The weather should hold until the middle of the week. You’ll be back before then.”

“We’ll be back long before then,” Charles said, looking from one to the other. “I don’t plan on being caught up above tree line in a snowstorm.”

Ramsbottom laughed as if Charles had said something funny. Bentley grinned and poured himself a cup of coffee. He passed the pot to William, who stood sucking his toothpick and gazing at the blue cloudless sky, his black face inscrutable. Ramsbottom and Bentley looked at each other and giggled like a couple of teenagers. Charles wasn’t sure what they were laughing at, but he found their behavior extremely unprofessional. He looked from one to the other, scowling his displeasure. If the foreboding William hadn’t been standing right behind Ramsbottom’s shoulder he would have berated Ramsbottom for his behavior and the fact that the girls hadn’t shown up as scheduled, but something about the big black man made him nervous. Charles sat there and didn’t say anything at all.

B
Y MIDAFTERNOON THEY
were up in the high country. The sun was warm against their backs, but from time to time a damp wind blew from the north, bringing with it the scent of snow. They followed a trail beside a splashing stream lined with cedar and willow, the sound of their horses’ hooves deadened in the thick carpet of moss and pine needles. The sun could not penetrate the trees in some places and the air here was as cold and prickly as the inside of a freezer chest. Bentley led the way, followed by Leonard, who rode Big Mama and, as the most inexperienced rider, was having trouble keeping the horse on the trail. Redmon followed him, then Charles, and William came up the rear dragging the pack mules, their packsaddles clanging and rattling like ball bearings in a washtub.

About half a mile up the trail, Bentley’s horse picked up a stone and went lame. From that point on, things began to go steadily wrong. The sky, which up to now had been blue and clear, began to darken and fill with gray clouds. A cold wet wind blew in from the northwest. Big Mama tried to dislodge Leonard by running him into a tall pine, trying to scrape him off in the branches and managing to pin his knee while Leonard screamed in pain. Bentley shouted and jumped into the thicket to grab her bridle, and Big Mama rolled her eyes and stamped her feet and shook her skin like an elephant trying to shake a tethered monkey.

Redmon, who seemed oblivious to what was going on around him, said, “Time to drain the snake,” and fell off the side of his horse. He was having trouble breathing in the high altitude and his face was the color of oatmeal. He stumbled off into a stand of wild raspberry and was sick. The mules put their ears back and showed their teeth. Charles scowled at the overcast sky. Redmon came out a few minutes later, wiping his face on the sleeve of his jumpsuit.

“I hope you remembered to pack that tequila, Uncle,” he said to William.

William took a toothpick out of his pocket. “Who you calling ‘uncle,’ motherfucker,” he said.

T
HEY STOPPED FOR
lunch around three o’clock and ate pimento cheese sandwiches washed down by cold beer. The sky had darkened and the wind had picked up, moving through the tall grass and the tops of the trees, and bringing with it the scent of snow. No one said much. Huddled in their odd clothes, their fingers stiff with cold, Charles, Leonard, and Redmon clustered along a fallen log like fungi, watching William as he cleaned up and repacked the basket with the leftover beer.