American Ghost (18 page)

By then, Jolie Hoyt was but a distant memory, though when he relocated to North Florida, he occasionally ran into people with as thick an accent who volunteered they were natives of the area. Wes Dennis was such a man, a director in Protective Services who liked to brag that he had grown up in Calhoun County and lived to tell about it. Along the time that Sam's marriage began to fail, Sam took up smoking, not as sport, but as a means of emotional survival. Wes was also a smoker, and they often found themselves in the smokers' court on break and talked of the usual guy things: football and work and politics. Wes supported a handful of far-left causes with a zeal he claimed was the fruit of an overzealous fundamentalist childhood. He talked like a hillbilly when he wanted to make a point, but wore L.L. Bean and upscale field-wear, Tilley hats and Wallabees without socks.

Sam never made any connection between Wes and Hendrix at all till sometime within striking distance of his divorce, in 1999 or 2000, when a flash of afternoon rain caught them outside and pinned them under a dripping stoop. While they waited for it to pass, Wes mentioned he was going to Washington County the next day for a district meeting, was stopping in Cleary at a little place called the City Café.

“They specialize in shrimp—flash-fry it in a light batter, almost like a tempura,” Wes said with that smug sureness of the educated local who managed to look down his nose at nearly everyone: his extended family for being such unenlightened hillbillies; Yankees such as Sam for lacking the soul to appreciate barbecued goat or understand jazz.

Sam was glad to top him for once and answered with a long draw on a Marlboro he'd bummed off him, “Yeah, I used to eat there, when I lived in Hendrix.”

Wes's eyes widened at that, so surprised he nearly sputtered. “You lived in Hendrix? My God,
when
?”

Sam had never talked much about the Hendrix Interlude, as he sometimes remembered it, and shrugged to indicate it was a casual thing. “Not long. I was a fieldworker with the museum at UF, doing the grunt work for a grant.”

“What in God's name were they studying in
Hendrix
? Syphilis? Pig futures?”

“Muskogee Creek. It was when they were trying to organize in West Florida, applying for state recognition.”

Wes returned to his cigarette, a look of near awe on his face. “Well, you're a braver man than I. Hendrix—place had a bad name. When we used to go to the beach, my mother used to make us cross the bridge in Blountstown to avoid it. That forest draws a strange citizenry. There used to be a coven of witches down there, and a Klan klavern, too.”

Sam made a small noise of interest, wondered if he hadn't inadvertently come in contact with charter members of both organizations, back in '96. He didn't offer anything else, though Wes would occasionally bring it up, once asking, “Well, where'd you stay when you lived on
the river? One of those ratty old fish camps on the Dead Lakes? Let me tell you—if those walls could talk . . .”

Wes rolled his eyes to demonstrate that he'd had his share of romps there, with the hot girls of Hendrix, though Sam smoked and shrugged. “No. I stayed at the KOA. But I dated a girl whose family owned a camp. Jolie
Hoyt,
” he added casually, as if they'd had a happy little college romance, had gone to the movies together, made out on the beach.

Wes all but choked at the name. “You're lying,” he coughed, even had to beat his chest a few times to get a breath. When he finally got it, he rasped, “My father—did I ever mention what he was?” Sam shook his head and Wes grinned. “An Assemblies of God preacher.”

Sam felt a small flicker of sensation in his chest at the unexpected connection, though he managed to sound bored and distant. “Really? You knew the Hoyts?”

“Oh, yeah, I knew the Hoyts. Me and Carl used to run around when we were young, when I had a car and he didn't. He was a few years younger than me—my brother Fitch's age—and one more piece of work, old Carl Hoyt. Mama told me he was back in religion in a big way—preaching down in Destin, or Navarre, one of those new megachurches. She saw him on TV, local cable.”

Sam didn't spend a lot of his discretionary time watching local-access Christian programming and shrugged at the news, though Wes laughed even harder. “Now that bunch, the Hoyts.” He grinned. “Now there are
stories
.”

Sam only nodded in bare agreement and didn't ask for details, too involved in his own domestic misery to care too much for any further history on the illustrious Hoyts. But it was clearly the single piece of life history Sam had ever shared with Wes that interested him.

Wes referred to them, on and off, for months to come, and in late December interrupted his moaning about the 'Noles' performance in the play-offs to snap his fingers and say, “Guess who I ran into Saturday, in Cleary? Jolie Hoyt, in the flesh,” he said with that wolfish grin. “She's working for Hughie Altman—you know the Altmans? Own half
the county, the bank? She's doing some kind of design thing; said Carl was getting rich as Midas, peddling salvation to the masses. I told her I worked with you.”

Sam was too proud to ask what her reaction had been, and Wes was too much of a sadist to offer it freely, had to tease him. “You know what she said?”

Sam shook his head, and Wes grinned even wider. “Not a thing. Not a damn thing. She got up and went to the john, was eating with her father, old Brother Hoyt. He looks like hell, walking with a cane. She had to help him out.”

Sam was forced to ask, “So they're still in Hendrix?”

“Oh, yeah. Or at least Brother Hoyt. I don't know about Jolie.”

“Is she married?”

In reply, Wes (whom Sam was beginning to despise) grinned his big, redneck grin. “Not that I noticed. Though her and Altman, they must have some kind of arrangement. He's forking over plenty of money to set her up in business, must be getting more than a cut of the profits. Ol' Jol has that ripe, snotty look of a kept woman—and the attitude.
God,
the attitude.”

Sam grunted and crushed his own cigarette and vowed to give them up, if for no other reason than so he wouldn't have to hear any more of Wesley's endless news flashes on Carl and the Hoyts. And Lea hated cigarettes anyway. She was always nagging him about smoking around the baby. She didn't give a damn if he developed cancer of the face, but she did worry about the effect of secondhand smoke blowing in from the patio and choking their son. Nag number 1,059 in a marriage that had been reduced to two common goals, raising Brice and raising Brice, and came to its natural end seven months later in the most humiliating fashion, when Lea opted out of a dying relationship in the time-honored fashion by having an affair with a psychiatrist on staff at Three Rivers.

By the time Sam was served the official papers, she'd handed in her notice and packed her share of the dishes and even enrolled Brice in a
prestigious preschool in Flagstaff, all part of a well-organized plan to follow her lover to a new job in Arizona. Though Sam's marriage had never been a walk in the park, and he'd had cause to suspect another man was in the picture for a good many months, Sam was still shattered by the news, not as much by her betrayal as her casual brush-off, her notifying him after the fact. His colleagues and his brothers congratulated him on getting out of a marriage that had never worked, but to Sam, the guilt of the thing was unending.

For months, he wandered around their apartment in a haze of self-accusation, until Brice came home for his first summer visit and, Sam's gnawing fears to the contrary, seemed a bright, well-adjusted kid, excited over his mother's pregnancy, which would give him a much-wanted brother, whose image he'd already seen on a sonogram. Only then did Sam admit that, well, maybe their breakup hadn't been all Lea's fault. Maybe something was lacking in him, Sam Lense, and their debacle of a marriage had been a two-way street. Maybe even connected in some small way to the knowledge he'd never loved his wife one-tenth as much as he had Jolie Hoyt. Wasn't that a joke, as he'd never made an effort to get in touch with her, though she only lived an hour away, down a wide stretch of interstate highway. Aside from Wes's occasional updates, Sam never saw or heard from her, though Carl was easily traced. His glossy, big beach church had mushroomed in three short years, and his weekly sermons were broadcast on one of Tallahassee's cable channels.

Sam was still an anthropologist at heart, and if he happened upon Carl while channel surfing late at night, he'd pause awhile and watch Carl stalk around the pulpit in his $1,000 Hugo Boss suit, a Rolex on one wrist, a thick gold chain on the other. For all his media glitz, his doctrinal roots appeared to be sunk deep in the swamp of Holy Roller Hendrix. In his mix of strict moral code and overflowing emotion and bullying Calvinist sureness, Carl was nothing like his father, not at all shy or vulnerable, but huge and forceful and dynamic, the father figure every poor bastard on earth wished he'd had, someone to set him straight, make it plain. Carl often spoke of his poor, country upbringing
and populated his stories with a cast of colorful family characters: his saintly old papa; his comically kooky wife; his small, highly photogenic daughters, who were named odd, old-English names like Tanner or Taylor or Trent.

Sam noticed Carl never called Hendrix by name, nor did he mention his sister, who was never caught on the camera's frequent pans across the family pew. Lena was there every week, the prototype of the faithful media wife, gazing up with childlike devotion. She bore small resemblance to the carefree teenager who used to zip around the campground half-naked, but had taken on the persona of an old soul—an old Victorian soul, her dresses all lace and fluttery hem, buttoned to the chin.

As Sam sat on his couch in his boxer shorts, crunching numbers and eating leftover Chinese, he wondered what Lena had done with all those tiny bikinis now that she'd become fundamentalist Christian royalty.

He never considered calling her sister-in-law to ask, just watched them idly as he moved up the ranks to financial officer—a position that consumed his bone marrow and made for a lot of hair-pulling when the legislature was in town. He was sitting at his coffee table one night in February, surrounded by all the paraphernalia of last-minute revision—calculators and laptops and fee schedules—when he came across Carl and lingered to watch awhile. He was unloading his usual crock of money-grubbing bullshit (“seed faith,” he called it) when the camera zoomed in for one of its adoring-wife shots and inadvertently captured a sliver of a woman beside her, taller and darker and eminently comfortable tucked into a pew, as if she'd been raised there. She was ignoring the sermon to whisper something aside to Lena, something so hilarious that she lost her churchy frost and slapped a hand to her mouth to muffle a laugh, her eyes as young as a schoolgirl's.

It was Jolie, albeit in profile, her hair ironed to fit a face lit with an air of pretty mischief as she undermined her brother's thundering righteousness with some little insider joke. When she detected the eye of the peering camera, she met the lens squarely, with a raised eyebrow and a
dry, baiting smile that for a split second seemed illogically pointed at Sam, as if she were looking through the wire at him in his living room.

It was over in a blink, the roving camera returning to Carl, who was telling one of his hilarious down-home stories that had his congregation holding their sides with laughter. Sam waited for another glimpse of Jolie, but it didn't come, the show ending as it always did, with Carl sitting in a high-backed leather chair in one of his resplendent suits, humbly asking his blessed viewers to consider opening their lives to the great blessing that would come if they made a pledge to help support him reach souls for the Kingdom.

“Sell a suit, asshole,” Sam muttered, then clicked off the television and sat there a long time, staring at the empty screen and trying to frame an explanation, a sound theory of Jolie Hoyt.

One that would not only explain the two feet of twisted scar on his chest, but her subsequent silence and the whole enchilada of his experience with her, in all its unwieldy paradox—the poverty and the richness; faith and ferocity; welcome and dismissal. Try as he might, he could find no combining thread, though the lack of cohesiveness didn't cut him off at the knees as it once had.

Mostly it just made him curious, and when Wes Dennis dutifully dropped by Sam's office later that month and reported that his mother had called and told him Ray Hoyt had died, Sam offered nothing more than a grunt in reply.

“I'm thinking about going to the funeral,” Wes said, lounging in the doorway. “Wanna tag along? There'll be a big feed, and Jolie'll be there, in all her luscious corruption. May need a shoulder to cry on.” He grinned.

Sam was in the heat of a final budget revision, surrounded by columns of stacked folders and working on four computers at a time. He answered over his reading glasses, “Think I'll pass. But if you talk to her, ask her if she's ironing the boss's pants yet.”

Wes was a fan of overblown male rhetoric and laughed a big cowboy laugh. He was quieter on his return, making little of the funeral except to admit that he'd taken his mother; that it was nice. He was so cagey, so
uncharacteristically monotone, that Sam's radar was tweaked enough to ask if Wes had had the balls to pass along Sam's message.

After all his delight in gossiping about the Hoyts, Wes seemed suddenly a little hesitant in answering, rubbing his neck and confiding, “You know, Bubba, getting in a pissing contest with
any
body in Hendrix is never a good idea. They're a tricky bunch, even the church. They take that inbred thing to a whole other level.”

Wes's hesitancy only piqued Sam's interest more, and after a few days digging, Wes finally broke down and confessed, “I didn't see Jol—place was mobbed—all these people from Carl's church. I had no idea he'd come on so strong. I ran into him when I was going out to the car to pick up Mama. He's big as a house—shining suit and cuffs and gold cuff links—looks like a goddamn New Jersey mob boss in person. It's crazy. We stood there a minute talking old times, and what the hell, I jumped in and told him what you said about Jol. And,
God,
son”—Wes whistled—“he was
pissed
. Thought he was gonna pick me up and shake me like a poodle. I'm sorry, man,” Wes apologized with a humility that made him seem, for the first time, approachably human. “I had no idea. If I was you, I'd keep to the highway when you're over there. A lot of dead bodies end up over there in the swamp.”