A Life of Bright Ideas (26 page)

“Wait up!” Winnalee called. I stopped and turned. But Winnalee wasn’t talking to me. She was calling to Craig. I slipped into the Rambler, and Tommy headed inside the store. The vinyl seat felt scorching hot even through my jeans, as I worried about if she’d be late for work and watched Winnalee playing with her hair as she talked to Craig. The breeze was plastering her dress to her naked body, and she didn’t tug at the material even once.

“What did you say to him?” I asked, when Winnalee got back.

“I asked him if he wanted to go out sometime.”

“You’re kidding.”

I cranked the key. “Hell no,” Winnalee said. “It’s a new era, Button. We don’t have to sit on our asses
hoping
a guy will ask us out. We can be the ones asking.”

“What did he say?”

“He said
sure
.”

“Man, Winnalee. How did you even know if he likes you enough to want to take you out? Weren’t you afraid he’d say no, and then you’d have to feel stupid?”

She looked at me like I’d just asked her how she knows she’s a girl. “I suppose you would ask that. You still haven’t figured out that Tommy has a crush on you.”

I squirmed.

She opened her soda pop and took a chug. “You’ve got a broken radar, Button. Which means that this guy you write to could either be madly in love with you, or just be stringing you along. Not like you’d know the difference. And let me guess. You haven’t figured out yet that your dad and Freeda are getting it on, either.”

First the comment about Jesse and my broken radar, and now
this
? I kept my face turned to the side window. “She’s just lending him a hand, Winnalee, that’s all.”

“Yeah, I don’t doubt she’s
lending him a hand
,” she said with a sarcastic laugh.

When we reached the Purple Haze, Winnalee opened the car door and kicked it wider with her boot.

“I pick you up at two, right?”

“I can probably get a lift.”

“No. I’ll pick you up. Two?”

“Two-thirty,” she said.

I drove home slowly, watching the sunset brighten with pinks and lavenders through my dusty windshield, and trying hard not to wonder if Winnalee’s assessment of me with guys was true.

When I got home, I dragged the alarm clock into my sewing room so I wouldn’t have to keep getting up to check the time. I’d have to wait another day or two before Hazel got me the pattern for Cindy’s dresses, but I took out the fabric and pattern I’d picked up when I bought the rainbowy material, and had kept hidden in the sewing room for a night like this.

It must have been near midnight when I saw the two beams of light swing across the yard. When I lived with Dad, there were lots of evenings when someone came to the house while I was alone, and I never got scared. And when I moved into Grandma Mae’s house, I knew I would never suffer a moment’s fear of intruders, not with Aunt Verdella and Uncle Rudy right across the road. But that was before Winnalee started bringing
scary guys home from the Purple Haze—five since Chet. I stayed to the side of the window and peered out through a small gap in the curtain, hoping it wouldn’t be somebody scary.

I sighed with relief when I recognized the outline of Tommy’s truck. That is, until he opened his door and the interior light came on. Brody was with him.

I headed downstairs and yanked the door open. “What are
you
doing here?” I snapped at Brody as he was getting out of the truck. In a million years, I would have never guessed I could use that tone with Brody Bishop, but just the sight of him made me angry, and that made me brave. Brody blinked at me, so I turned to Tommy. “I can’t believe you’d bring him here.”

“Never mind that,” Tommy said. “We were heading out for a beer and saw three squad cars heading down 8. We waited a bit, then followed to see what was going down.”

“Man,” Brody said. “The Purple Haze is lit like the Fourth of July. Pigs squealin’ all over the place. This whole county can’t have more than four cruisers, so they must have pulled in some pigs from other counties. They had the road blocked off and made us turn around.”

My chest tightened. “Why? What happened?”

Brody’s eyeballs lifted. “Duh.”

“A drug bust, no doubt,” Tommy said.

“A drug bust?”

Brody’s eyeballs lifted. “What? You didn’t know Reefer’s a pusher? Everybody and their cousin knows that.”

“I was coming to tell you,” Tommy said, “thinking Winnalee was there. But I see she’s off tonight.”

I shook my head. “Winnalee’s not here. She’s working. I dropped her off myself. Something’s wrong with her van.”

“Man, she’s screwed,” Brody said.

Fear swirled in my stomach. “Can she get in trouble for
just being there as an employee?” I asked Tommy, as if he was supposed to know.

“Depends, I suppose, on what she’s been doing.”

“Yeah, well I can tell you what at least some of the girls there are doin’,” Brody said with a chuckle. “At least the ones he’s been bringing up from Chicago.”

“What?” I asked.

“Christ, how dumb are you? Screwing for money, that’s what.”

“Winnalee wouldn’t do something like that!”

“You don’t think so, huh? She took her shirt off while she was in the cage a couple weeks ago,” Brody tattled. “Reefer’s been encouraging the girls to do that. You know, turning the place into a tittie bar.”

“Shut up, Brody.” I turned to Tommy. “I wonder what the cops will do?”

“Search the place,” Tommy said. “Question Reefer and his slimy son, probably the staff, too. Maybe even the customers.”

“Shit, I’m almost glad your cows got out and we had to go chase them all over hell, or we would have been there, too,” Brody said, thinking only of himself, as usual.

I bit my cheek so hard that I winced. “What should I do?” I asked Tommy.

“Wait around until you hear something. Nothing else you can do.”

I was pacing, wringing my hands, blood on my tongue.

“Man, oh man,” Brody said. “Action in Dauber. About time!” He guffawed, like he was watching a TV sitcom.

Tommy could tell that I wanted to rip Brody in two. “Hey, buddy,” he said. “Why don’t you take my truck back to my place, get your car, and head out?”

“I can hang around,” Brody said. “Thanks to Winnalee, I don’t have any reason to go home.”

“You are such an asshole,” I snarled, surprising myself with the swear. Brody was about to smart-off back at me, but he stopped. Tommy could act like a goofy teenage boy when he was horsing around, but when things got tense or there was trouble, he clicked into man mode and authority engulfed him so that only an idiot wouldn’t back down when he glared at them. “Beat it, Brody. I mean it.”

“Shit,” Tommy said after his truck pulled out. “I should have grabbed my flashlight from the truck before he took off. You got one?”

“What for?” I asked.

“Because we’d better start poking around her van before the fuzz do. Make sure Winnalee doesn’t have any dope stashed for them to find.”

My insides clenched. “You mean they’ll come here and search her van?”

“I don’t know, but I don’t think we should take any chances.”

I hurried into the kitchen, grateful that when I flicked on the flashlight, a ring of light, faint as it was, lit the counter. Tommy took it and I followed him out to Winnalee’s van.

“Jesus!” Tommy said. He tossed a wad of Kleenex, a bunched rubber dangling from it into a semi-crushed box (did she
ever
throw those things out?). I looked away, my eyes painfully stretched, my cheeks hot.

We found a plastic bag under the front seat, crumbs of dried leaves tucked in one corner, and another bag under the passenger’s side with two pills inside. The bag was stained where red food coloring had bled. Tommy took both bags and the Kleenex wad to the burning barrel and lit them on fire, then we sat on the front steps, the light from the porch patting our backs.

“Thanks for helping, Tommy. I know you don’t like Winnalee.”

“It’s not that I don’t like
her
. It’s that I don’t like the things she does. I know she’s messed up, though.” He nodded toward Aunt Verdella and Uncle Rudy’s house. “Freeda’s back, huh?”

“Yes. With Winnalee’s baby.”

“I thought maybe that was just a rumor.”

Tommy stretched out his long legs and crossed them at the ankle, twining his fingers over his stomach. I looked up at the sky, smeared with stars and a bright three-quarter moon.

“So Winnalee isn’t going to raise her kid, Freeda is?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

We sat quiet for a time, then Tommy asked, “Do you ever envy her?”

I blinked at him. “Because she has a baby?”

“No. Because she can let herself do whatever she wants. I envy Brody sometimes for that,” he said. “Even though I’d despise myself if I did the things he did.”

I drew my feet in until my heels bumped up against the steps, and wrapped my arms around my legs. I wasn’t about to tell him that as much as I worried about Winnalee, there
were
times when I wished I had her same freedoms.

“You can bet,” Tommy said, “that if Winnalee or Brody lost a parent and had a brother to raise, or a farm to run, they wouldn’t do it.”

Tommy slapped a mosquito on the back of his neck, then slouched over and pinned his elbows against his knees.

“What would you do if you could do anything?” I asked him.

Tommy shrugged. “Fly commercial planes,” he said. “You?”

“I don’t know. I like to sew, and Dauber feels like home, but maybe I’d like to visit other places.”

“I just want to fly over them,” he said.

Tommy was staring out over the darkened yard, and I was watching him, thinking about how little I knew about him,
really. He had the same girlfriend all through high school, but I couldn’t recall her name. Aunt Verdella thought she was sweet and Ada believed they’d marry someday. But then Mr. Smithy had his accident, and a year after graduation, she left Dauber to go off to school to become a nurse. Nobody talked about her after that.

Tommy settled back against the door and we sat quietly. “Owl,” Tommy said after a hoot broke the silence.

“Button? That you?” I startled, and saw nothing but darkness, even though I knew my eyes were open. I could feel cement cold and hard under my butt, and damp cotton cool against my cheek. I lifted my head from Tommy’s shoulder.
God!

Tommy startled; he had dozed off, too.

I stood up and strained to see across the road. “Aunt Verdella?”

“Winnalee’s on the phone, honey,” she called.

“They always get one call,” Tommy said.

We hurried across the yard. “What am I going to tell Aunt Verdella and Freeda?” I asked, my breath coming in scared huffs.

“Just wait and see what Winnalee has to say.”

Winnalee hardly sounded rattled when I got to the phone, though she was almost whispering. “Can you come get me?”

“Where?” I asked, trying to sound casual, because Aunt Verdella was watching me, her hair standing on end like a toaster cozy rooster.

“At the Purple Haze,” she said. “I’ll explain later. Just hurry. I’ll meet you on the road. Don’t pull in, okay?”

I hung up the phone and tried to look as casual as possible. “Winnalee needs a ride home from work,” I said. “Something’s wrong with her van so I drove her there.”

Aunt Verdella glanced up at the clock. “It’s four in the morning. She works
this
late?”

“Tommy was keeping me company until I had to pick her up at two-thirty, but we dozed off on the steps,” I said. Tommy looked down at his shoes.

Aunt Verdella clicked her tongue against her teeth. “Oh, that poor thing. She waited this long before calling? She probably didn’t want to wake me, then decided she’d better, or she’d never get home.”

“She’s turning you into a liar,” Tommy said as we headed for my place.

“And you’ve always been nosy,” I said, making things between us feel normal again.

Tommy drove because I was too shook up to drive, but we took the Rambler because I was afraid Winnalee wouldn’t recognize his truck in the dark. He started slowing down about a quarter mile short of the Purple Haze, when Winnalee stepped into the road.

She climbed into the backseat, reeking of beer.

I cranked around in my seat. “My God, Winnalee. What happened?”

“We got busted,” she said. “I was on break, so I went out back to take a pee. I wasn’t gonna go in the can when
those
bitches were in there. I was crouched down behind the bushes you puked on when it happened. The back door was open, and I heard the pigs shouting. Girls were screaming. A couple guys ditched out the back door. I just stayed down while those idiots searched the place. It took them forever, too.”

“You must have been so scared,” I said.

“No. I was pissed. That guy who was playing guitar now and then on weeknights? He was right with them—I’ll bet he was undercover the whole time. Anyway, I climbed through
the window in the guys’ john after they hauled Reefer and Chet off to jail.”

I reached back and clamped her knee. “You okay, though?”

“Yeah. My legs are scratched up a little from the brush, but that’s about it. I’m tired as shit, though. Man, I hope those girls who wanted lace on their pants are smart enough to drop them off at the bridal shop, since that’s where I told them you work.”

I blinked, shocked that Winnalee would think of sewing at a time like this.

Tommy peered in the rearview mirror, even though it was too dark to see into the backseat. “You got anything stashed at Button’s?” he asked, no sympathy in his voice.

“Course I don’t. I don’t do that shit in her house anymore, and Button knows it.”

“You sure about that?” Tommy asked. “We found a nickel bag in your van with weed flakes in it, and another with a couple downers, too. That’s about all they’d need.”

“They were uppers, stupid. And they were old.”