He Was Her Man (13 page)

“I’m sure she will, Loydell.”

“Sure.” The old lady laughed. Sam could tell it was an effort. “I bet she’s been shacked up with some young man, now she’s too embarrassed to show her face, missing the party. She’s sitting over in the Pancake House trying to make up a good story.”

“I bet she is,” said Sam. “Or I’ll catch the two of them still in bed back at her house. Now, let me dress and get moving.”

Which is how Sam came to be walking into the Gas ’N Grub at eight
A.M.,
saying to the young man who was standing there, “Hello. Do you happen to know where the older lady who works here might be?”

She was thinking, Jesus, was Loydell right or what? Could she have spent the night with this young hunk? Except the kid was young enough to be Olive’s grandson.

Then, sure enough, the young man in the plain white T-shirt, khakis, and white running shoes reached over and touched Sam’s arm lightly with his fingertips like he wanted to show her that he wasn’t going to hurt her, not now, not ever, and said, “Ma’am, that old lady’s my grandma, I’m Bobby Adair, and she’s who I’m here to visit, and I’m real worried about her. She ought to be here, and I don’t know where she’s got off to. It’s gonna be up to me and Pearl here to find her. That is, the Hot Springs cops don’t lock me up first.”

That was certainly an interesting train of thought. And obviously Pearl was of the same opinion, for when Bobby said the dog’s name, the redbone hound began to shake her head with its long lovely ears and bawl like a baby.

“You can see Pearl’s real upset,” said Bobby. “When I got here, just a little while ago, she was carrying on like this. I got the feeling she’s been doing it for some time. I was just about to see if I could start her tracking Mamaw. Are you a friend of hers?” Then he gave Sam a long look, taking in her white linen jacket, navy-and-white striped T-shirt, jeans, loafers. “No, you don’t look like you’re from around here.”

Bobby Adair himself was an innocent-looking boy of about 25 years, five-ten, clean-featured, with a brown crew cut and clear blue eyes that seemed to look straight through your head, watch the picture show you were running in there. He had a nice tan and a very good build, which made Sam wonder aloud if he’d just come home from someplace like Venice Beach in California. But then, why would he be talking about the Hot Springs Police?

“No, ma’am, I haven’t been to any beach. In fact, I just yesterday afternoon late got out of Cummins, that’s the correctional facility for stone-bad motorscooters down between Pine Bluff and McGehee. Not that I’m that bad, but the reason they sent me there is related to your other question about the Hot Springs Police.”

Working the crime beat, Sam had met more than her share of cons, ex-cons, and pre-cons, but she had to tell him he was the most polite member of any category she’d run up on.

“Well, yes, ma’am, I believe in politeness. Which is why I sent away from prison for a membership and joined the Graciousness Society which is headquartered in Elberton, Georgia. I look forward to their bimonthly newsletter which gives tips on how to make the world a kinder and gentler place. For real. Not just giving lip service to the idea, like some people I might mention. I have my Graciousness Society card right here in my wallet, if you’d like to see it.”

You know, thought Sam, maybe she ought to give up on writing
American Weird.
Because, more and more it seemed, weird wasn’t weird at all. It was the norm, like the dysfunctional family. It’s just that now there was a name for it.

She said, “Could you go back and do the part about the Hot Springs Police Department again? It’s early, and I’m tracking a little slow.”

“Well, they never took kindly to my assaulting Archie Blackshears,” Bobby said in his nice polite voice, like you’d asked him the time and he’d checked his Timex and was pleased as punch to be sharing it with you.

Sam said, “Cops usually don’t take to people assaulting one another.”

“Well, I didn’t hurt him nearly as bad as he had coming to him. But you’re right, even if you just mess somebody up a little, they take it real hard. Especially when he’s one of their own.”

“Archie Blackshears is a cop?”

“Yes, ma’am, he is. And he’s a good cop, I always gave him that. But he’s a bad person. A very bad person.”

Sam nodded, trying to figure out what it was this very polite angelic-looking self-admitted cop-assaulter might mean.

Bobby helped her. “He was very good at doing his job without busting too many heads. I used to see quite a bit of him, he was my girlfriend Cynthia’s daddy.”

“You assaulted your girlfriend’s dad?”

“You’d have to have been there,” Bobby said without an ounce of irony, looking her straight in the eye. His mouth seemed to hold itself in a naturally sweet expression. “You’d have to have seen how he did her when he got to drinking.”

Oh, yes. Having once been a member of that worldwide organization of folks who took leave of their senses behind a few belts, Sam was well aware of the possibilities. Her personal specialties had been mostly self-destructive, but she knew lots of drunks, men especially, who went in for other forms of abuse that involved their tongues, fists, feet, and other people’s more tender regions.

She said, “So you told Archie to stop, and he didn’t?”

“That’s right.”

“But you didn’t shoot him. We’re not talking about a gun here?”

Bobby smiled sweetly. “At the time I didn’t know what it was I’d picked up. I really wasn’t thinking. Cynthia had a broken arm and was bleeding sideways out of her squashed nose. Archie was charging me like a big old bull, so I just grabbed for something. It turned out it was this great big trophy he’d won for target shooting. I think it was that little pistol on the top that knocked the hole in his noggin.”

“You hit him with the trophy in self-defense?”

“Well, the cops, they said he wasn’t armed.”

“And?”

“You know, I never was sure. I mean, the thing happened in such a blur. I was so mad, seeing Cynthia like that, and I’d seen Archie with a gun so many times—I didn’t really think about it. I just hit him.”

“What’d Cynthia say?”

“At the trial she said he wasn’t armed. And other than that, well, she’s never spoke to me again personally. She let it be known she didn’t want anything to do with me.”

It could happen. Thank you very kindly for saving my life, now hit the road. It could have been that way. And then, on the other hand, it could be that
none
of this was true. Sam had known enough cons to know that almost all of them had convenient and colorful imaginations. If he even
was
a con—but it was your rare bird who’d claim to be and wasn’t.

“The way I figure it,” said Bobby, “you do what you’ve got to do. What I had to do then was stop Archie from doing anyone any more harm. What Cynthia had to do, well, I know the whole thing had to be hard for her. And what I have to do right now is figure out why my Grandma Olive’s not here, not in her little house there up the hill, my car she was keeping for me’s gone, and Pearl here’s about to have a fit.”

At that, Pearl started up her bawling again, Owwwrhuuuuu, Owwwrhuuuu, so loud and pitiful Sam had to cover her ears.

“What makes you think she didn’t just go off to run an errand, leaving Pearl to guard the store?” Sam doubted that seriously, but she wanted to know Bobby’s theory.

“With the door open? She’d never do that. And she’d never take my Sunliner either. You know the car I mean—retractable hardtop convertible coupe? This one’s a black-and-gold sixty-one, you saw it it’d make your heart beat faster. She’d take her old Rabbit if she was going somewhere, and it’s still sitting up at her house. Furthermore, the cashbox’s clean. It’s like somebody came in here, snatched her up along with every last red cent. And I found this.” He held up a ring.

Sam reached out and took it from his hand. She said, “I don’t remember her wearing this yesterday. I stopped to buy some gas and had a nice long chat with Olive.”

“It was kicked up in a corner underneath the counter. Tell you the truth, I don’t think this thing looks good.”

Sam had to agree. She stared at the ring, thinking. The diamond looked like a pretty good fake to her, but if someone had robbed Olive, would he know that? Toss it on the floor? Or, in some flurry of activity that she didn’t want to think about, had it just been overlooked? This could be an important piece of evidence. Or it could be nothing. But it was certainly worth hanging on to.

Pearl sniffed the air and howled again. Then she ran to the door and hurled herself against it.

Sam said, “I know what you said about the police, but if you think something’s happened to your grandmother, well, to tell you the truth, the main reason I came by this morning is because she didn’t show up last night at a party we were coincidentally both going to.”

Sam looked around the store, checking for traces of blood, but the place looked squeaky clean. “Anyway, I know you don’t want to go to the police, but don’t you think you ought to report it if you really think something’s happened to her?”

Or maybe you know for sure. Maybe you robbed her and stuffed her in the broom closet. That could have been what happened. What did she know? She certainly didn’t know who this young man was. Not really.

“I
just
got here,” he said as if he could read her mind. “Ten minutes before you. Tell you what, would you like to see my parole papers?”

Before she could answer, Bobby had reached in his back pocket and pulled them out. There was even a photo ID. Yep, that was Bobby Adair, all right. Not that that proved he was Olive’s grandson. Not necessarily. But probably he was.

“And, like I said,
I
go to the police, they’re gonna have me locked up in about five seconds. Probably say
I’m
the one who made my grandma run off. And the terms of my parole, I’m not even supposed to be here. Not supposed to be within fifty miles of Hot Springs or Cynthia or any of her daddy’s cop friends. But I had to come and see Mamaw. She’s the only family I’ve got, her and Pearl. And I thought I’d try to see Cyn.”

With that, Bobby Adair opened the door of the store. Pearl took off like a shot, toenails scratching the pavement, nose low on the ground, high in the air, down in the dirt, headed straight down Highway 70 toward Hot Springs like they were holding a reservation in her name at the Palace Hotel. And before Sam knew it, she had handed Bobby her car keys, and she was riding shotgun down the road after Pearl in her own BMW. She was swept away with the passion of the hunt, her head hanging out the window following Pearl’s bawling as surely as if she and Bobby were running through bogs and bushes behind a grand champion about to chop on a big boss coon.

She and Bobby weren’t saying much. In particular, he hadn’t said a word about her palming and pocketing that fake diamond ring.

12

LOYDELL KNEW IN her bones that something awful had happened to Olive. Not because of some cockamamie voodoo like that stuff that Jinx went on about, those stupid altars she built out of rock crystal. Like crystals were something special; as if you couldn’t go out to a million places around Hot Springs and dig them up yourself. Nope, Loydell didn’t hold with any of that bullshit, that’s what she called it. She’d tried to stop cursing so bad once she’d got sober, but so far, 30 years, she hadn’t been able to.

However, there were lots of advantages to stopping with the booze, other than the obvious ones, like she wasn’t going to die of cirrhosis and she wasn’t falling down drunk all the time. Sobriety had really improved her disposition, and furthermore, she was more in tune with her gut. Though sometimes, she still didn’t want to hear what it was saying. And her gut said this business about Olive was bad. Real bad. So, while she was going to go through the motions of finding Olive, she knew that there really wasn’t any point. Her gut told her that Olive’s spirit had left this earth, had gone on without her. Despite their best-laid plans, Olive had soloed into the Great Beyond.

That’s why she was still sitting at her blue breakfast table in her little yellow house on Exchange with a piece of toast loaded with blackberry preserves halfway to her face. There was no hurry to go out and beat the bushes looking for Olive. She might as well have herself another cup of coffee.

She hadn’t explained all this to that nice woman Sam because she didn’t want her to think she was just another dotty old lady, the kind who didn’t know shit from Shinola.

She sat staring off into space, thinking about Olive and how much she was going to miss her. She felt a tiny twinge of guilt, but just a tiny one, about not caring more about Speed’s disappearance. Well, if she and Jinx hadn’t always been so distant, it’d be easier to care about her fiancé, but given the way things were, it was sort of like when you read in the paper about the troubles of people who lived in some far-off place. It was hard to make them seem concrete.

At that, Loydell remembered her toast, and took another bite. Wasn’t that something, when you started forgetting what you were doing in the middle of a meal?

Why, just the other day, her mind had drifted off halfway through her bath; when she came to, the bubbles were gone, and the water was cold. She’d been thinking about herself and Olive getting dressed for that election night party over in Little Rock. They’d taken turns going to one another’s houses, pulling out all their clothes like they were in high school again. Fixing one another’s hair. Olive had gotten her all up in this purple velvet number that came down to the floor. Loydell had said she was going to trip and break her neck, and Olive had said, So what? And then they’d laughed and laughed.

They’d laughed because who cared about a broken neck when you already had made provisions for your own passing? They didn’t mention it to most people because there weren’t many that had the gumption to think about things like that, which was perfectly ridiculous considering that dying was the one thing that everybody on earth had to do sometime.