Michaela Thompson - Florida Panhandle 01 - Hurricane Season (4 page)

Pearl crossed the room, put the coffee on the nightstand, and sat on the edge of the bed. “Good morning, precious,” she said.

Diana grimaced, moaned, and turned away. Pearl rested her hand on Diana’s hair. “Come on, Miss Di. I brought you a cup of coffee.”

Diana wrinkled her nose and put her hands over her face. Her hands were small, almost child-size, the nails bitten down. She pressed the heels of her palms against her eyes.

Pearl proffered the coffee. After a few moments, Diana removed her hands, squinted, and slid to half-prop herself against the headboard. She took the coffee, sipped, and shuddered. “Ugh,” she said.

“You have a bad time last evening?”

She shuddered again. “None of your business.”

Pearl accepted this in silence. In a few moments, Diana’s face crumpled and tears seeped out of her eyes. “He doesn’t love me, Pearl,” she said.

“Now, Sugar.”

“I swear, he just plain hates me.”

“He don’t hate you.”

“He does.” Diana took a swallow of coffee and turned her wet face to Pearl. “He almost hit me. He had his arm up.”

“Why’d he do it?”

“I said something nasty about his wife.”

“There, you see? He was just upset.”

“He hates me.” Diana’s voice carried less conviction now.

Pearl got up, picked up the clothes from the floor, and started to hang them in the closet. “Where’s your daddy this morning?”

Diana fished a pack of Camels from the nightstand drawer, drew out a cigarette, and lit it. “Who cares? If we’re lucky, maybe he drowned in the swamp.”

“That’s not nice, Miss Di.”

“Well, I don’t know where he is.”

Pearl shook out a black lace half-slip, folded it, and put it in a dresser drawer. Diana took the composition book from the nightstand drawer and ran her hand over the cover. “He liked my last poem, though. The one about ‘The gulls scream in the sky’? He said it was real pretty.”

“Well, it is,” said Pearl.

Diana made a snuffling sound. “I’ve been bad, Pearl,” she said.

“Oh, Sugar.” Pearl crossed to the bed and sat next to Diana. Her voice took on a dreamy tone. “You were about the sweetest little girl I ever did see. And when your mama was taken, Mr. Snapper said to me, ‘Pearl, you got to help me look after that poor motherless—’ ”

“Oh, Pearl!” Diana sobbed. Pearl put her arm around Diana’s shoulders.

“No use getting this way over a man.”

Diana sobbed louder. “The awful things I’ve done. All for him. And he treats me like this!”

“A man will do it. Every time.”

They sat until Diana’s crying lessened. She lay back against the pillows. “I’ll be down to breakfast soon.”

As Pearl put the bacon in the skillet and got out the eggs, she thought about Diana. Diana had turned out to be a wild girl. She had acted up all through high school—drinking, skipping classes, running around with men from the Coast Guard station—and without Snapper’s intervention she wouldn’t have graduated.

Now that she was out of school, she was worse. Pearl heard jokes about her around town, sly remarks about her ways. Pearl’s neighbors in Bacon’s Settlement, who knew everything about St. Elmo’s white population, shook their heads when Pearl tried to defend Diana. To them, Diana was simply no ’count and trashy. Pearl could have told them, but didn’t, telling only her daughter, Marinda, that Diana could also be mean as a snake, would throw her hairbrushes across the room, and scream and curse at Pearl and her daddy.

“What are you studying her for, then?” Marinda asked, her eyes hard.

“You ask me that? You two girls used to play with her doll dishes in Mr. Snapper’s backyard.”

“That don’t give her leave to cuss me out and throw brushes.”

Pearl knew Marinda was right. But the truth was, whenever she saw or heard about Diana getting drunk or making a fool of herself with some man, she didn’t see the Diana of twenty, but an eight-year-old Diana sitting on Snapper’s front steps with her arms wound around her knees on the afternoon they told her her mother had died of cancer. “You must be a grown-up girl now and look after your daddy,” Pearl had heard one of the church ladies say to the motionless child.

“I went to get her then, and she was cold as a fish’s belly. I stood her up and she wet her pants,” Pearl told Marinda.

Marinda picked up her crawling son from the floor and balanced him on her knee.

“The poor child,” Pearl persisted, and Marinda glanced around at the dingy little room where the two women and the baby sat next to the oil stove.

Now Diana was mixed up with a new man who was married. That was Diana’s luck. She had used a lot of men and they’d used her, but the one she was really sweet on had to be married.

Pearl had just poured the eggs into the sizzling pan when Diana appeared. Aside from the redness at the tip of her nose, no trace of her tears remained. She wore red shorts, a halter top, and sandals, and her hair was combed. Her eyes flicked over Pearl as if she barely recognized her, and she flung herself into a chair at the kitchen table without speaking.

She nibbled her breakfast while Pearl, at the sink, got started on the dishes.

After a few minutes, Diana stood up. “I’m not putting up with it any longer,” she said.

Pearl looked over her shoulder. “With what?”

“Any of it. Any of it.”

“Sugar, don’t—”

“I mean it, Pearl. You watch and see.”

She turned and left the house. From the window, Pearl saw her run across the yard to the garage and a minute or two later heard her car start up. She saw a flash of chrome as Diana drove away. Then she turned back to the dishes.

When Diana arrived, Sue Nell Calhoun was sitting in her front porch swing mending a net. Although everyone knew the Calhouns made their living from moonshine, they were supposedly fishermen, owners of one boat that left the dock only often enough to keep up an impression of activity. While Diana picked her way through the sandspurs in the Calhouns’ yard, Sue Nell put down her shuttle and gauge board and watched without getting up.

Sue Nell had long red hair that frizzed in the damp. She wore it pulled to the back of her neck with a rubber band. She was freckled and almost as tall as her husband, Bo. Their resemblance to one another was natural, since they were third cousins. In the Calhoun family, Sue Nell had a reputation for being sharp-tongued and standoffish, and even Old Man Calhoun, the family patriarch, kept clear of her if he could. When Diana, standing at the foot of the steps, shading her eyes, said, “Hello,” Sue Nell just nodded.

Diana swallowed. “I came to tell you that Bo and I are in love,” she said. “We want to be together, but we can’t because he’s afraid to tell you. So I’m telling you.”

Diana waited. She swatted at a mosquito on her arm. When Sue Nell said nothing, she continued. “I’ve been seeing him for six months. We’re in love. I think you should let him go.”

Sue Nell blinked. She took a breath. She said, “You just had to come tell me.”

“Bo wouldn’t do it,” said Diana.

“I reckon he wouldn’t.” Sue Nell’s voice took on acidity. “You didn’t stop to think
why
he wouldn’t, did you? That maybe he wouldn’t because he didn’t want to?”

“He wants to be with me,” said Diana.

“He said that?”

“Lots and lots of times.”

“Why isn’t he with you then?”

“He will be.”

Sue Nell folded her arms. “We’ll see about that.”

Into the silence that lengthened between them came the sound of a motor. Bo Calhoun’s Oldsmobile pulled up under the chinaberry tree in the front yard, and he stepped out of it. When he saw the women, he began to run.

He grabbed Diana’s arm and shook her. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Don’t be so rough,” Diana began.

Sue Nell stood up. “She’s been telling me you two are engaged.”

“Oh my God,” said Bo.

“Why not?” said Diana. “It’s practically what you said. And you wouldn’t tell her, and I need you now.”

“Get out of here,” said Bo. “Just get moving right this minute. Do you hear me?”

Diana stood rubbing her arm, her eyes wide.

“Didn’t you hear me? Get along,” said Bo.

Diana turned blindly and walked across the yard to her car. In a few moments, she was gone.

Bo turned to Sue Nell. “In a lot of ways, she was right,” he said.

Josh winced as he swallowed the bitter, lukewarm coffee and made a mental note never again to reheat the leftovers from the previous evening. It was five-thirty, he’d had only three hours’ sleep, and he’d needed something. Warmed-over coffee wasn’t it. He emptied the tin cup on the ground and hung it on its peg next to the camp stove. His rod and reel was propped against the shed, the bait can beside it. He picked them up and started through the woods.

A slight haze lingered under the pines. Anyone glancing at Josh would have said he was maintaining a relaxed pace, and only a careful observer would note how swiftly he made his way through the undergrowth that caught at his khaki work pants as he passed. He was walking away from the channel, maintaining a course roughly parallel with the coast.

He jumped a ditch barely deep enough to support minnows, crossed a ridge, wiped his brow, and looked around. He was at the edge of a marshy meadow of thigh-high grass divided by turgid streams. Dispersed clumps of pine and palmetto loomed against the horizon like oases in a desert. “Shoot,” Josh whispered. Getting straight across would be impossible. He’d have to go around one way or the other. Moving toward the coast, the ground would get more marshy. Clutching his bait can and rod, he began dodging along the inland edge. Water seeped into his shoes and drenched his pants legs. Now anyone who saw him would know he was in a hurry.

Jumping from clump to clump of marsh grass, half the time landing on spongy wet ground in between, Josh gradually made his way around the meadow. Past it, on high ground again at last and breathing heavily, he moved at a jog-trot through the foliage, making remarkably little noise. Not much farther on, he turned toward the ocean. The waves became more audible, and blue water sparkled through the trees. He reached the last stand of forest before dunes rolled down to an enclosed bay. Gasping, he leaned against a pine, resin fragrant and sticky against his arm.

In an inlet, floating with the calm unreality of a dream, white in the recently risen sun, were two cabin cruisers. Josh squinted, shading his eyes with his forearm. One of the boats, he knew, was Murphy’s. He heard the roar of an engine, and the one that wasn’t Murphy’s began to turn toward the gap in the palmettos that was the mouth of the inlet. Josh’s eyes narrowed further against sun and glare. As the boat turned, he caught a jumble of letters that somehow reconstituted themselves.
Southern Star.
The boat picked up speed and, in a moment, vanished through the gap, leaving its wake to lap the shore and toss Murphy’s boat like a toy in a tub.

Without hesitation, Josh turned back. This time, he gave the meadow a wider berth. The sand caked on his shoes and pants brushed off as they dried. The walk back took twice as long as the trip out.

Josh could smell coffee before he arrived at the camp. When he entered the clearing, Larry, the bristly-haired man, was stirring grits, and the blond, Amos, was sitting on a fallen log, sipping from one of the tin mugs.

“Be damned if it ain’t the fisherman,” called Larry. “Should I heat up the frying pan?”

Josh made a gesture of disgust. Amos eyed him. “You catch anything?”

Josh set down the bait can and leaned his rod and reel against a tree. “They weren’t biting this morning,” he said. “What about a fresh cup of coffee?”

Larry brought it to him, and he sank down on the end of the log and closed his eyes.

Sun-bleached pulverized oyster shells crunched under Lily Trulock’s shoes as she walked down her driveway at eight in the morning. The Trulocks’ house, a weathered frame cottage with a screened porch around three sides, was set at the edge of the woods under a live oak hung with Spanish moss. If you went far enough back in the woods behind the house you came to Brewster’s Slough, a tributary of the Big Cypress River. Brewster’s Slough was thickly grown with tupelo, and on its banks Lily’s husband Aubrey had his apiary, a cluster of white hives in a clearing. He spent most of his days there, wearing his bee veil and puffing at the hives with his smoker, a metal instrument that resembled a watering can.

He had gone off to the apiary this morning without a word. He seemed to care about nothing but those bees. Certainly not the store. Certainly—Lily looked both ways and crossed the road—certainly not his wife.

Worrying about Aubrey was a recent and unaccustomed emotion for Lily. Having reached the age of fifty-five, she had worried about many other things—money, her daughter, Wanda, late deliveries of merchandise, fewer customers as the ferry made fewer runs. She had worried about the war in Europe, the atom bomb, the
Flying Enterprise,
Alger Hiss, the polio epidemic, and Korea. But Aubrey, until his heart attack, was just there, just Aubrey, something to be taken into account the way you’d take the tides into account before going out on the bay. As long as you followed what you knew, there was no problem. Now, there was a problem, and Lily wasn’t sure what to do.

In the mornings before she opened the store, Lily often walked out on the ferry slip. She pretended she wanted to check the weather, but in truth the morning didn’t feel right until she had greeted the bay and the dark line of St. Elmo Island. Whether the water was gray and whitecapping under a curtain of rain, or lazy and green and shining as it was today, the sight gave her a feeling that she was lucky to be standing there looking at it.

Today, however, someone else had reached the ferry slip first. When she caught sight of the tall figure, Lily turned away. She opened the screen door, unlocked the store, and turned the sign from
Closed
to
Open
.

Soon, she would hear the steady engine thrumming that meant the ferry, the
Island Queen,
was on its way. She knew almost to the second how long the interval would be from her first hearing the motor to its arrival at the dock. She also could calculate approximately what she would sell to the arriving passengers. Because summer was all but over, there would be no suntan lotion or picnic provisions. The people coming in would be mostly island residents on their way to work. A couple of Milky Way bars, which she kept in the cooler. Cigarettes. A carton of milk and a package of doughnuts for someone who’d run for the ferry and missed breakfast. A few soft drinks.