American Ghost (14 page)

“Nobody knew. Professor Keyes, Brother Hoyt—not even Jolie.”

His father grunted. “Listen to yourself. You sound like a child. You think those people—that town—you think they have
amnesia
? They killed five people, Sam—they hunted them like rabbits, hanged them like dogs, and they
forgot
?”

Sam considered the notion of a collective guilt so consuming it would merit a bullet in his back. He could appreciate how such a ripe, paranoid delusion might keep his father up nights, but to him, it simply didn't ring true.

“It isn't some shameful, buried secret. The Hendrix Lynching—it's well researched. Historians write books about it.”

“
Historians
do,” his father replied with unwonted sarcasm. “In Hendrix—they never wrote a book. They never
read
a book. They did this”—he nodded at Sam's bandaged chest—“and they didn't blink an eye. You lied to them, Sam,” Len said in his single moment of reproach. “You never should have gone there in a lie. No wonder this girl, she isn't returning your calls. You were a fool, Sam—I say that and I love you. Somebody has to,” he concluded, fishing a handkerchief from his pocket and blowing his nose, the only sign of the great emotion that had his hands shaking, his eyes red-rimmed and swimming.

Sam hadn't the strength to argue. His absolute sureness rested heavily on his shoulders, as constricting as the maze of healing stitches, making it hard to get a deep breath. Len concluded by adding that the deputies had searched the fish camp for footprints, used casings, but the river was into the floodplain, and if there was any evidence, it was on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico.

“And there,” Len predicted portentously, “it will remain. Trust me, Sam—it is done. Finished. You're lucky you got out alive.” Len came
ponderously to his feet, then made his first and only comment of Jolie: that he was glad she was out of Hendrix and getting on with her life. “You follow her lead. Go back to school and finish your degree. Forget them people.”

When Sam tried to argue, Len had overridden him, not by force, but hard good sense. “
Sam
. They already forgot you.”

J
olie Hoyt was neither as close nor as far away as Sam imagined, the trajectory of her life following a path molded by old dysfunction and the twin scourge of Southern daughterhood: obligation and obedience. The obligation was to her father (who deserved it); the obedience was to the Art of Secrecy and Rules of the Double Life—skills she had learned long before she met the likes of Sam Lense, in her hard and solitary childhood there in Hendrix, raised as she was between her father's rock-solid holiness and the town's famed hedonism.

It had produced a bizarre dichotomy of experience, a life of unexplained extremes. One in which she was forbidden to wear makeup or earrings or attend high school dances (all deemed sensual and worldly), yet on two separate occasions had been molested by local garden-variety pedophiles. Both men were casual acquaintances who'd ingratiated themselves to the household for just such a purpose, and since neither incident had gone on too long nor involved actual rape, these small-town, small-time demons had passed through her life undetected and unrepentant. Jolie was left holding the emotional bag with the usual fallout of such victimization: shame and confusion, and a bulwark of self-protection as high and barbed as a prison wall. As she matured into adolescence, she found it easy to take literally the Lord's command to “come out from among them.” No one knew better than she that the wider world had
areas of uncharted darkness, corners of the human experience where, in the words of the mariners of old, there be monsters.

Such was the emotional hall of mirrors that Sam entered when he walked into the parsonage at El Bethel, and such was the emotional whirlwind that came in his wake, in the vulnerability of first love that filled Jolie with equal parts intoxication and terror. She was petrified by the idea of going to Coral Gables and making conversation with the Rich Folk (as she persisted in thinking of them), of transferring to UF and having to pass Algebra there, and all the other butt-kicking math classes—for what if she failed? What if Sam discovered that despite her intellectual aura, her glib tongue and memory for trivia were her only academic strengths, and she was dumb as a post in math, having spent most of her mornings at Chipola huddled with a tutor in the lab, trying to figure out what the hell
x
equaled? And worst and most horrifying of all, what if the magic of the river, which made her look so exotic and alluring, didn't stick in Gainesville, and Sam woke up one morning and realized he'd married a big, dumb country girl? And what if he quit looking at her that way, with that glowing face of love?

God, it tormented her, the doubts and raging fear, made her put him off, week after week, growing edgier as they went, culminating in the flare of ill-temper on the porch the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, which had sunk Jolie into a deep funk. When Sam left that day, she had cried for two hours, till she was finally cried out, so paralyzed that she sat on the porch far into the night, ignoring all the last-minute Thanksgiving chores, too drained to move.

She might have sat there till morning if not for Lena, who blew into town after midnight, bright, collegiate, and determined to jolt Jolie from her nonsensical despair. “You're just hormonal,” Lena concluded, “need to take some Midol or something. You're not preggers, are you?” she asked in a lowered voice, eye on Brother Hoyt's cracked window.

Jolie morosely shook her head, and Lena laughed. “Well, what's the big grief about? I thought Sam was talking marriage—that you were, like, madly in love.”

“I am,” Jolie had answered with that air of inconsolable sorrow, as it was impossible for her to communicate the stark dichotomy of her fragmented life, which made happiness and contentment a risky business, indeed, a hundred times more threatening than mere loneliness and despair.

Lena just laughed, as she was used to Jolie's moodiness, and in high spirits, as she and Carl were once again an item, she confided gleefully. They had secretly been meeting for weekend rendezvous in St. Augustine most of the semester.

“He's really changed, Jol. He's gotten serious with the Lord.”

Jolie wondered where weekends at the beach with an underage girlfriend worked into his conversion, but was hardly in a position to point a finger, and when Carl showed up the next morning, she was glad to see him. It was impossible to be otherwise. Despite their constant snipping, they'd always been close, physically similar enough to be mistaken for fraternal twins, though they were three years apart. They were both tall, with the same dark hair and hazel eyes, and the same barbed humor—but where Jolie was withdrawn, Carl was brimming with good-old-boy confidence, famous for swooping home at odd hours.

He'd come in that morning at four o'clock and, after bumming around the house awhile, had got tired of waiting for someone to wake up. He flung open Jolie's door and jumped up on her bed and bounced around like a kid on a trampoline.

“Jol-lee!” he cried. “I'm tired of waiting for you to git up! I want to hear about yer Jew boy—” The grin was wiped from his face when he realized someone was beside her, indiscernible beneath the cover. “Good God, tell me thet ain't him!” he cried as he leapt to the floor.

Jolie flipped back the cover to reveal Lena's sleeping face. “Didn't you see her car?” Jolie yawned as she got up and hugged him, not taking offense at the
Jew boy,
as it was par for the course with Carl, and not meant to belittle as much as needle the hell out of her. (In high school, she referred to Lena variously as “Lolita” or “yer child bride.”)

Under less stressful circumstances, Jolie would have given it back to him in good measure, but she was too sleepy to bother with it and just yawned her way to the kitchen to check on the turkey that she and Lena had put in the oven before they'd gone to bed two hours earlier.

“How late did you two stay up?” he asked as he joined her in the kitchen. “Lena's out like a light.” Then, before she could answer: “You feel all right? You look kind of peaked.”

Jolie just wrestled the enormous bird from the oven. “I been busting my butt for two days, getting ready for this thing. Somebody around here has to do the work.”

“Well, I made coffee.” He leaned against the counter and looked around the cluttered, outdated old kitchen with a face of dry interest. “So how's the Old Man? Any more fainting?” Brother Hoyt had been having dizzy spells lately and had actually blacked out on his debit a few months before.

“He's okay.” Jolie went about basting the turkey. “Moving slow, but moving. Too old to be putting up with your nonsense—so think on thet, while you're here.”

Carl was used to his sister's lectures and made no reply, just stood at the window and watched the brightening dawn while he drank his coffee. “Well, speaking of nonsense—how the hell did you find yourself a Jew in Hendrix? You got your heart set on a white piano?”

Jolie straightened and stared at him levelly till he relented with a grunt and asked in a milder voice, “So what kind of fellow is he? Am I gone have to go out to the campground and break his damn neck?”

Jolie answered this with yet another flat stare, this one briefer, to show him what she thought of his redneck swagger. “He's been after me to marry him for a month. Talked to Daddy and everything.”

Carl nodded with approval at the news. “Well, I'm proud to hear it. Why don't we go out there and roust him, take him to breakfast in Vernon? We got time. Hell, the sun ain't up.”

Jolie had been feeling wretched all night over Sam's and her idiot fight, and for once she didn't argue, just glanced at the clock as she manhandled
the turkey back in the oven. “Well, maybe. If we can get Lena stirring.”

“Oh, I can get Lena stirring,” Carl said with a wink, and set down his cup, though he paused to ask, “When you gone tell Deddy?”

“Already have,” she told him as she shut the oven door. “He was okay. Kinda sad, but okay—about like he was when we lost Lena.”

“Then what's the problem? You look like hell. You're not in the family way, are you?”

“No. I'm scared.”

“Of leaving?”

“Of everything,” she admitted. “Just tired. And scared. God, Carl—he gets his underwear in a wad when people say
nigger
. What's he gonna do after he meets the Hoyts?”

Carl grinned at that. “Run for his life, if he has good sense.” Then, at the fall of her face, Carl offered, “Oh, hell, Jol—it'll be all right. Me and Lena'll be here, and Daddy'll keep the blowhards in line. You just go out there and try to be happy. Everything else,” he promised, “it'll all fall in line.”

•  •  •

So he'd promised, and so she had believed, against all good sense, as Hendrix wasn't a garden-variety Southern hamlet, but the heart of darkness in such matters. Henry Kite's lynching had cast a long shadow, and as late as 1965, the wooden city-limits sign had openly warned
NIGGER, DON'T LET THE SUN SET ON YOUR ASS IN HENDRIX, FLORIDA
—signed in happy script
YOUR LOCAL KKK.

But these sorts of things were part of the Silence, unacknowledged by the likes of Jolie Hoyt. She just waffled and bided her time, sending out a variety of contradictory messages, till the moment she stood by his gurney in the hallway of the ER in teeth-chattering terror and wondered, with the cool head of clinical shock, what kind of person she was to have sucked him with such fabulous disregard into the sinking gloom of Hendrix.

She couldn't say, just stood there mute, in the numbed violence of disassociation, till an ICU nurse happened upon her and, with little fuss or bother, escorted her to the empty waiting room. Carl was inexplicably gone, and with neither shoes nor a dime to her name, she paced back and forth for hours, through the break of dawn, till midmorning, when a familiar face finally appeared at the door, a deputy sheriff named Jeb Cooke, who'd once been married to a Hendrix cousin.

He was a generation older than Carl and her, grizzled and bear-size and reassuring in his Stetson and leather jacket. He took off the hat when he saw her, not in respect for her as much as her father, who was a rare friend of the Law out in Hendrix. He motioned her to a corner of the hallway, where he presented her with a long, blue legal envelope, explaining that it was a protective notice. “A restraining order,” he clarified at her face of incomprehension.

“For Carl?” she asked, so rattled she could barely speak.

“For
you,
” he said, moving around to corner her, not in intimidation, but to shield her from the curious stares of the waiting patients. “Signed by the judge, hot off the press.”

Jolie ripped open the envelope, but couldn't make head nor tails of the block of close-typed legalese.

“Why me, Jeb? I didn't have nothing to do with it. I was asleep—ask Daddy.”

Jeb just herded her to the exit, his voice lowered as he opened the door. “All I do is serve 'em. You ain't arrested or suspected—just need to keep yer distance till your court date. Till then, no phone calls or sneaking in, or I'll have to cuff you like a regular mug. You understand?”

Such was her shock that Jolie didn't argue with this edict of the Law. She just nodded quickly and followed him into the bite of a seriously cold morning, the approaching front fully upon them, the rim of the sidewalk edged in ice. Carl's truck was waiting at the curb, the exhaust blowing in the cold. Jeb walked her to the passenger side and tapped on the glass for Carl to unlock the passenger door.

Jeb handed her in, then spoke to Carl across the seat, as if in reminder, “Just keep yer distance, old son. The young man's gone make it, but his daddy is sorely pissed.”