The Miracle Strip (8 page)

“I know,” I answered, “but it's the best I can come up with on short notice. I'll do better before I see her ex.”

Fluffy got down off her pillow and trotted across the bed to me. She lowered her head and nudged at my hand, wanting me to pet her. Her nose was cold and wet. When I scratched her behind the ears, she rolled over, wanting me to rub her tummy. I couldn't leave town without getting someone to take care of Fluff, and I couldn't do that without answering a lot of questions. This could take some doing, or else Fluffy was going on a road trip.

Eleven

In order to go on a road trip, one must have a car and be physically able to drive said car. I was stealing 0 for 2 on that count. I spent the better part of the day trying to come up with options and drifting off to sleep. I couldn't help myself. Every time I had to take a pain pill, I became a zombie. If I didn't take something for the pain, then I couldn't think straight. It was a vicious circle.

I woke up from my third nap of the day with a pain pill hangover and an answer to my transportation troubles. Raydean had a car. She didn't drive much anymore, which for Panama City was a blessing. However, she kept the car, an old Plymouth Fury, serviced and ready to go, in case the Flemish took over the town and it became necessary to evacuate. Raydean would see nothing odd or unusual about me asking to borrow it for a few days. She wouldn't ask questions and she wouldn't remember the answers even if I told her.

Bruno, or whoever was now my “attendant,” stood between me and freedom. I could hear voices out in the living room. It might be easier to slip over to Raydean's than try and make arrangements with people in my house. One person would pay attention to me, but two might not watch me so closely.

I eased my way down the hallway, trying to identify my visitors, but the talking had stopped when I'd opened my bedroom door. They had to have been talking about me. That made sense. Just as abruptly, the voices resumed, this time louder, staged for my benefit.

“Anyway,” the female voice said, “I thought she might like this. Be sure you keep it refrigerated. It's got whipped cream and coconut milk in it.”

Marla. What in the hell was she doing bringing me food? We hated each other. What we had was more than a professional rivalry; it was personal. I burst into the living room as Marla was opening the door to leave. She stopped, turning to face me with her best choke-and-die smile pasted in place.

“Sierra,” she cooed, “I was telling Vincent here how concerned we all are down at the club.” Vincent was looking very uncomfortable. “I baked you a cake. Thought you might like something sweet.” Her tone was all Southern honey, but her smile didn't quite touch her eyes. “See you, Vincent. You think over what we talked about, y'hear?”

She was gone, her sharp heels clicking down the steps and across the concrete to her car. A moment later I heard her tiny Miata start up and zoom away toward the trailer park exit. Vincent stood in the middle of the kitchen, his pudgy hands wrapped around the mile-high coconut layer cake. I could tell by looking at it that Marla aimed to kill me by cholesterol poisoning. I'd gain ten pounds just staring at the cake.

“What was that about?” I asked Vincent. He wouldn't look at me. He watched Fluffy trotting into the room, her nose working overtime to figure out who the visitor with the cheap perfume had been.

“She was bringing you a cake.” Vincent wasn't wearing his dark glasses and now I understood why he needed them. His left eye started twitching, a dead giveaway that he was lying.

“You know what I'm talking about,” I said. “What is she wanting you to think about, and why did you two shut up when I came out of the bedroom?” Fluffy growled once in Vincent's direction, then hopped up on the futon, where she could keep her eye on him.

Vincent fumbled nervously with his black silk tie, thinking. He was trying to figure what was gonna be worse, telling me the truth or lying. He took up a few moments by opening the refrigerator door and sliding the cake onto one of the nearly empty shelves next to the gourmet dog food I buy Fluffy.

“She was concerned about you being out for a few weeks,” he rumbled, his back to me.

“Bullshit,” I answered.

“She wanted me to take your name off the front marquee and put hers in larger type.” He sighed. “You know how it is with you two, never a dull moment.” He tried to laugh nervously, but choked.

“For Christ's sake, I'm only gonna be out two weeks and she's acting like I'm history. Hell, if I use body makeup, I'll be back before then, one week tops.”

Vincent was looking at his watch.

“What? You got someplace you need to be?” I asked. Maybe I was going to get some privacy after all.

“What?” Vincent seemed distracted. “Oh, yeah. I gotta get back to the club. Big Ed's supposed to come over for a while, but he's late. I told the girls I wanted to see them before they started their shift, kinda go over the lineup, what with you bein' out and all.”

“Vincent, this is only for a few days, you know?” I was starting to get nervous. After all, until the accident, me and Vincent hadn't been exactly bosom buddies. In our business, if you blink, if you look away for an instant, you're liable to be replaced by some nymphet with 40DDs looking to undercut you by twenty bucks for the opportunity. The Tiffany was not supposed to be that way. We were supposed to go by talent, not physical largesse, but you never knew. Maybe Vincent was talking out of two sides of his mouth.

“Don't worry about Marla, Sierra,” Vincent said, pulling his dark glasses out of his suit coat pocket. “She's just trying to get ahead. You're still top bill and you still got a job. Take whatever time you need.” The glasses were back in place, and if he was twitching, I couldn't tell. Somehow I wasn't reassured.

“Vincent, if you gotta get back, go on ahead. I've gotta run over to Raydean's trailer for a sec anyway.” Vincent wasn't sure, but I pushed it. “Go on,” I said, heading for the door. “I've got Fluffy and I'll be right across the street.”

Vincent took the bait. “You're sure?”

“Absolutely,” I said. The coast was clear and I was gone.

Raydean's trailer was a minefield of booby traps and bird feeders. Raydean, in her saner moments, was an avid bird-watcher. She surrounded her trailer with bright red hummingbird feeders and assorted birdbaths and birdhouses. One had to be careful, however, in admiring her jungle of avian paraphernalia because Raydean had carefully placed trip wires and other handmade alarms throughout her yard. If an unlucky mailman stumbled or erred from the exact path to the door, sirens would sound and Raydean would appear, shotgun in hand.

The whole neighborhood took great pains to avoid going anywhere near Raydean's trailer. Even the worst of the trailer park children weren't bold enough to risk Raydean's sanity. If she hadn't been such a god-awful shot, due to cataracts, it would have been truly dangerous. As it was, it was risky business at the best of times. Only the initiated few—me, Pat, the mailman, and the van driver from the mental-health center's day program—knew the narrow path to Raydean's door.

It involved following the sidewalk exactly to the door, then avoiding the bottom step to her stoop and walking on the left-hand side of the stairs. Once on the top step, you didn't ring the doorbell. Raydean had somehow wired the buzzer so that it gave a nasty shock to the uninitiated. You had to knock on the door, three short raps followed by two, then one. I pitied the poor Flemish.

Raydean shuffled to the door, peered through the tiny diamond-shaped window, and began undoing her system of locks. She opened the door a crack, peered past me, and then stepped back to let me in. In the background, Raydean's parakeets, Dolly and Porter, sang noisily.

“Hey, Sugar,” Raydean rasped, “you get tired of sittin' around with them fat boys? Can't say as I blame you none. That one with the dark glasses, it'd do to keep an eye on him. He looks to be the nervous type.”

Raydean's housedress was a washed-out floral, the pockets stuffed with tissues and a crossword puzzle book. I looked past her into the crowded living room. Raydean was a fan of plastic see-through slipcovers, something I thought had gone out in the sixties. She'd covered her sofa, her armchairs, and even her recliner in plastic. The rest of the room was heavy with the kind of ceramics they probably had you do during art therapy at the mental-health center, little figurines and Christmas trees that plugged in and lit up. Plastic plants hung suspended from macramé holders, drooping with accumulated dust. Time stood still for Raydean. She was lost somewhere in a time warp that encompassed only the sixties and the seventies.

I had to sit down at the Formica-topped table in the kitchen and accept a cup of tepid tea in a Melamite cup that screamed
See Rock City
before I could finally broach the subject of Raydean's aging Plymouth Fury.

“Raydean,” I said, pushing the sticky-sweet tea to one side, “you know I wrecked my Trans Am when I had my accident.” Raydean nodded slowly. “And now I'm stuck without wheels and I'd rent a car, but my insurance don't cover that.”

“It's the global economy what done that, Sugar,” Raydean said, nodding wisely. “Blame that NAFTA crap.” I ignored her and plowed ahead.

“Anyway, I was wondering if maybe I could borrow your car for a day or two.” I didn't look up, afraid that she might jump in with a political comment if I gave her an opening. “See, I'm worried about Denise. She's my friend, and you know how it is when your friends are in trouble, you gotta do what you can to help. I need to see if I can find her.”

Raydean stood up and walked to her front-hall closet. I gripped the edge of the table, ready to run in case I'd said the wrong thing and she was heading for her shotgun. Instead she turned around clutching her purse and staring back at me.

“Well, Sugar, what're you waiting for?” she asked serenely. “Let's get a move on.”

“Oh, Raydean, no. I didn't mean you should trouble yourself. I'll just drive down to Fort Lauderdale and take a look-see. You don't need to come. I know you have things to do. I'll go.”

Raydean didn't seem to be listening. She was pouring food into the parakeets' dish and muttering to herself. She disappeared into the bedroom in the back, leaving me still sitting at the tiny kitchen table. How was I going to get out of this one?

Raydean reappeared, clutching a shopping bag with straw handles.

“Now, Sugar,” she said firmly, “I don't let no one go off in my car without me riding along. I need to be with my support system.” Apparently she meant the car. She walked to the door, held it open, and looked back at me, her eyebrows arched into sideways question marks.

And so it was that at five o'clock Friday afternoon, Raydean, Fluffy, and I set out in Raydean's ancient Plymouth Fury. Destination: Fort Lauderdale. It wasn't the way I'd planned it, but lately nothing seemed to follow my designs. In the meantime, I'd put the pedal to the metal, drift along down I-95, and hope for the best.

Twelve

One winter, when I was about ten, Pop won the raffle down at the Sons of Italy Social Club. You gotta understand, Pop never won nothing in his life. He bought them raffle tickets for the same reasons everybody else did: It was expected. It was for a good cause. People like Pop, they don't win stuff. They gotta most times come by it the hard way.

So when Pop won, he came whooping into the row house around suppertime. I don't think I ever saw him so happy, before or since. I was sitting at the kitchen table doing my homework, while Mom kept an eagle eye on me and cooked the ravioli. My brothers was all doing likewise, only the older two were mainly goofing on each other and trying to get the other one in trouble. When Pop came in like that, early for him, on a frigid November night, and yelling, well, you can see how we thought something was wrong.

We kids all sat there and watched. He picked up Mom and swung her around. You could tell he hadn't done that in a long time, if ever, because she looked so surprised, and maybe even a little fearful. Pop took no notice. He was waving a piece of paper and yelling.

“I won, Evie, I won! We're goin' to Florida for Christmas!”

By the time she had him calmed down enough to show her the papers, we kids were all getting the gist of the idea. We were going to the Land of Oranges. We were going to the place where mythical palm trees swayed and college girls in bikinis posed next to boys with long hair and surfboards. We were going where no snow falls even in the coldest winter.

Mom don't like a fuss. She don't like people knowing what's on the inside, but even she was excited. I could tell, because for the next few weeks until we left for Fort Lauderdale, she hummed and smiled. A couple of times I even caught her and Pop dancing in the kitchen after us kids were supposed to be in bed.

We drove to Fort Lauderdale. Pop, like a maniac, wouldn't hardly let us stop to pee. Mom loaded up the station wagon with her “essentials”—noodles, olive oil, sandwiches on thick Italian bread, salamis and hard cheese—in case they didn't have the “good” stuff in Florida. We thought Florida was almost a foreign country, and my oldest brother, Jimmy, said they might not even speak good English like we did on account of how everyone had moved there from Cuba.

It was romantic and exotic, just the thought of being somewhere totally different from Philadelphia. Florida was going to be all the things Philly wasn't: clean, pulsating with rhythms and music. Philly was like an old black-and-white movie. Florida breathed in Technicolor.

I wasn't disappointed. None of us was disappointed. There's a picture that Pop had a stranger take. It was all of us—Mom, Pop, my four brothers, and me—standing at the Bahia Mar Marina in front of the
Jungle Queen,
the biggest walking goofballs you ever wanna see. Pop, his black socks halfway up his white hairy calves, plaid madras shorts, and a Hawaiian shirt. Mom and me in our huge straw hats and our gigantic sunglasses. My brothers, all with Phillies baseball caps and cutoff blue-jean shorts because they didn't have swimsuits. All of us grinning like idiots. What a picture! And yet we all have a copy of that picture somewhere in our homes, somewhere where we can pull it out and stare at it, remembering that for that one week we, the Lavotinis from nowhere, were golden and nothing could touch us.