American Ghost (13 page)

It was eating him alive, the fear, the loneliness, the not-knowing. It was all enough to keep him strong and determined, at least till he got as far as the Chattahoochee foothills, when his hands began to sweat and his head pound, signaling the beginning of a fever. He fought it for a few miles, but finally had to pull over into a rest station by the river. He took a couple of Percocet and lay down in the front seat, thinking that maybe a nap would help. When he woke up, he was flat on his back in yet another antiseptic-smelling hospital room, his mother sitting in a visitor's chair at his side.

He started apologizing immediately for lying to them, for being such a pain in the ass, but his mother would hear none of it. “Save your strength, Sammy,” she told him as she set aside her magazine and took his hand. “Your father's upset. He'll get over it. He went to the hotel to sleep. A patrolman found you on the interstate, unconscious. You have a little fever, a reset rib; nothing serious.”

Sam didn't argue, lay back and stared at the ceiling, didn't offer another word, till a solution suddenly came to him, so startling that he sat up and looked his mother in the eye and asked for a favor.

One small favor, and he wouldn't go sneaking off again, he wouldn't lie, he'd apologize to his father. He'd pay him back, every cent.

“What?”

Sam was energized by her acknowledgment and asked, “Could you run a line on Jolie—get her home number? I didn't have a phone up there, never got her number, but you don't understand—something must have happened to her. That's why she hasn't called, hasn't come to see me. I'm afraid that whoever did this”—he pressed his chest—“they
could have—I don't know. I don't know what happened to anything—Jolie, or the camper, my clothes. They're still on the river, at the KOA.”

She wasn't sure what had become of Jolie, but his mother could have told him about the camper if she'd been of a mind: his father and brothers had gone up while he was still in intensive care and towed it home. It was sitting in his uncle Dan's backyard this minute, full of Sam's books and papers and (oh, yes) his stash of condoms he must have been using on his good Christian girl, the preacher's daughter (and, oy, what was he thinking? And so forth). But she was a tough cookie, was Aida Lense—the daughter of Jewish Colombian parents, who'd started her career as a social worker in South Brooklyn before moving to Miami in '52, where she had worked her way high up the masthead of the Florida HRS.

She had a reputation as a tough boss, but a fair one, who'd been married to the same man for thirty-seven years and had raised three fine sons in the public schools: an orthodontist, a lawyer, and a dumb ass, the dumb ass being the youngest, who was lying on the bed beside her. He was also (possibly) her favorite, the dreamer who'd drifted around UF for three years before he'd settled on anthropology for his master's, for what reason, his father and she had yet to fathom.

She made no comment on the camper, just told him she'd run a line on his friend, track her down through the state computers, if he, Sam, promised on her eyes that he wouldn't go up there alone anymore. That he'd take his father, his brother, his uncle—would take his mother, if that's the best he could do.

“Not alone,” she insisted. “It's enough, Sam, what's happened. You've lied to your father, returned to that place behind his back. It's enough.”

Sam respected his mother as a woman of her word and agreed, told her where Jolie could be found, with an excitement that energized him. He made his apologies to his father that afternoon sincere and compelling. The drive back to Miami was a much more pleasant affair, the elder Lenses beginning to see a light at the end of this tunnel in their son's return to normalcy.

On Monday morning, his mother took an early break and shut her office door and ran a line on the Hoyts, as promised. The daughter hadn't had much contact with the state, but her father was easy to trace, firmly entrenched in Social Security and, ah, yes—his phone number listed in Hendrix, Florida, a street address, a zip code; everything. She slipped the file in her purse, didn't mention the matter to Len, just left work early that afternoon, and found Sam sitting in his father's easy chair, watching daytime television, still thin and shallow to her eye.

She tossed the folder to his lap when she came in, along with a warning that he “keep it to himself,” then went and changed into a robe and house shoes, as she did every night. When she came back to the living room, he was already on the phone, talking to someone, his face perfectly white, the color of notebook paper.

It was too much for any mother, seeing him that way, and she didn't worry with supper, went outside, and watered her hibiscus, was still there when Len came home from work at five. She kept him outside as long as she could, then went back inside, but couldn't find Sam anywhere—on the phone or in his room. She finally heard the shower in the bathroom, wondered what was up, wondered whether she was in for another long drive upstate.

Aida sent Len to the store for a roast chicken for dinner, then pounded on the door of the bathroom, called, “Sam! Open up,” till he finally appeared in the door, emaciated, red-eyed, clearly in bad shape.

She was wondering if Len hadn't been right all along, if she'd been a foolish woman to reconnect her son to this nightmare, but tried to smile for his sake. “So? What's the news? Are we in for another drive upstate, or is . . . over?”

She didn't know any other way to put it, and he didn't correct her: “Over. I guess.”

He tried to shut the door, but she wasn't going to let him drop it at that. Shot and left for dead? Engaged to some hillbilly, Sam dropped like a hot potato? So she asked, “She's okay? This girl? She's not hurt? You were so worried. . . .”

He looked as if he'd been hit by a truck, but took care to reassure her, “No. She's—okay. Left for college.”

“College,” his mother repeated, nodding sagely. “Good. Good.” Then, when nothing else came to her, she asked, “UF?”

“No.” He prepared to shut the door. “Design school. In Savannah.”

•  •  •

Sam hadn't actually spoken with Jolie that afternoon, but with her father. He'd called their home number, not knowing what to expect, though the Old Man hadn't seemed at all surprised when he identified himself, asking in that booming, hillbilly voice, “Well, how's that back of yourn? Them My-amma doctors fix you up?”

The Old Man's concern seemed genuine, and Sam assured him they had.

“Well, good. Glad to hear you're up and about.”

Sam had been buoyed by his welcome and had gotten quickly to the point. “Is Jolie there? I need to talk to her.”

There was a pause, as if the Old Man were surprised at the question, though he offered easily enough, “Why, naw, son. She ain't here.” Then, before Sam could ask: “She went up to Georger, to school.”

“To Savannah?”

The Old Man agreed, “Yeah. Up on the coast.”

Sam considered asking him if he possibly remembered, way in the back of his mind, a certain conversation in November, when Sam had asked for his daughter's hand in the old-fashioned way, but he couldn't bring himself to do it. He was too proud to baldly ask such a thing, just leaned his forehead against the doorframe and asked if she was living with Lena? In the dorm?

“Naw, son, Lener and Carl, they're gitting married in March—week after her birthday, right here at the house. Dress cost a pretty penny, but you know old Lener—never been one to worry too much with price.”

If possible, this good-natured country chitchat struck Sam as more bizarre than his family's single-minded dismissal. It seemed hardly possible
that the Hoyts were all so merrily going on with their lives without him, as if he'd actually died on the table, there at Jackson Hospital. But he couldn't say a word about it, to accuse or question. “Well, could I have Jolie's number, so I can call her?”

“Naw, son—she don't have no phone. Usually calls me; ever Sareday night.”

The buzzing was beginning to return to Sam's head as he asked, “Well, can I leave her my number? Can you tell her that I need to talk to her—right away?”

“Surely. Hold on. Let me git a pen.”

He was gone so long that Sam thought he'd hung up, but he finally came back to the line. Sam painstakingly gave him his number in Miami. “And tell her to call collect,” he begged, “anytime,” then came to a halt when he realized how pathetic he sounded, like some loser after a hot date, trying to beg some girl into seeing him again. “I was—worried about her,” he added helplessly.

The Old Man was quick to reassure him, “Oh, son, don't worry 'bout Jol. Thet's what she always wanted, to go to school. Some girls don't, some do. Jolie did.”

“Well, good,” Sam said, but his voice sounded hollow, even to his own ears.

He hung up and turned on the shower, trying to buy a little time before his mother launched her full investigation into Jolie's mysterious disappearance. He dreaded it, dreaded having to tell her that, no, Jolie wasn't at the bottom of the Apalachicola, but going to school, just as she always wanted. In his mind's eye, he could see her that first night at the café, her sulky, green-eyed petulance when Lena had explained that Jolie was going to the local community college, where everybody around there went.

“Everybody poor,” Jolie had added, and if he hadn't been such a dumb ass, such a horny, lonely idiot, he'd have backed off right then. He would have smelled the psycho bad attitude, the desperation to get out of Hendrix by any means necessary: plane, train, bus, rich Jew—who
seemed like a catch, at first, but turned out to be not so rich, after all. Just another guy in need of a pair of pressed pants.

•  •  •

When he finally faced his mother, she knew better than to push too hard, but later that night, his father finally broke down and came to Sam's bedroom to talk to him, going about it with stoic reserve, as Leonard Lense was the product of a closemouthed generation, tough and fair and practical.

He opened his conversation with Sam with his usual abruptness, sitting on the end of the bed, arms crossed over his barrel chest, saying bluntly, “So you went back to that place,” speaking of Hendrix as if it were a Land of Golem, of monsters and serpents.

Sam was in no mood to parry, even with the father he loved. He was tired, shot, and too shattered by Jolie's defection to give a shit about defending himself. “I wanted to look around. I could have found his grave. They remembered him—Brother Hoyt did. He called him ‘the German.'”

Len's face didn't so much as flinch at this bit of historical update, but he made a noise of wonder. “You think, Sam, we never looked? Your grandfather saw him shot, before his eyes. It blasted his brains all over him. He was dead before he hit the floor.”

Sam had been spared the part about the brain splatter and wished his father hadn't mentioned it. A month ago, it would have fascinated him. Now it added to the weight of loss, creating an awful sadness, a free fall of helplessness that made sweat break out on his forehead, as if peaking another fever.

But his father had obviously decided it was time to open up, his face distant, lost in thought as he continued, “They put my grandmother on a train—but wanted Papa to stay; offered him lead horse in the lynching party. He turned them down. He was seventeen, Sam. He never spoke of it except he said it was like his mother died that night, too. She lived to be eighty, but she never smiled again.”

Sam remembered his great-grandmother in the faintest of memories, displaced from Florida and set among the concrete of suburban Chicago, where she'd moved after a late remarriage, long before he was born. She had dementia, or Alzheimer's, or some wasting mind disease—or so he'd thought. Maybe it was nothing more than the long hand of violence, the family stain of unresolved grief.

His father noticed the sweat on Sam's brow and finished with his history lesson only to discuss the hunting accident, which maybe hadn't been such an accident, at all. Len didn't think so, and neither did the surgeon.

“How could he tell?” Sam asked, as he had no memory of the day, other than the argument with Jolie.

“Because of the angle of the wound. It wasn't made by a stray shot, a nick from a couple of hundred feet. It was a deliberate single shot from a high-caliber rifle, straight in and out. It was meant to kill. And it almost did.”

Sam blinked at Len in the half-light. “Who would have wanted to deliberately shoot me? One of the Hoyts? Is that what you're thinking?”

“I'm accusing no one,” Len said, though he wouldn't back off, just told Sam what the official investigation had yielded: absolutely nothing.

They'd appointed a lead detective, and deputies from two counties had been put on the case, along with a man from the Fish and Wildlife Commission who investigated such matters. They knew the old men at the camp—old gator poachers for the most part, who'd fillet anything that got on a hook, but were otherwise harmless. They'd plead ignorance of so much as hearing the shot, and the officers believed them, and without much debate, they'd concluded it was indeed a stray shot by the kind of particularly stupid breed of poacher who came out the first week of the season and got so carried away in the hunt he kept chasing far after dark and sobriety would warrant.

To Sam, the ruling sounded more reasonable than otherwise. It certainly went a long way toward explaining why Jolie had begged him not
to go—because it was dangerous down there at night. Too much whiskey. Too many guns. He told his father as much, but Len wasn't buying.

“Sam?” he said, leaning over and speaking to his face. “What are the chances? You go to this microscopic little town looking into a murder—and you get shot yourself? That sound like coincidence to you?”