American Ghost (2 page)

Oh, he had his shortcomings: he was too old for Jolie, and something less than tall, and talking Jolie into going on a date with a Yankee would be such a pain in the butt. But beggars couldn't be choosers. Truth be told, Jolie had more than a few caveats of her own. She had the essential attributes (that is, the breasts) to attract a man, but her religion was weird, her personal style slouchy, and her xenophobia an ongoing battle. The Hoyts' treatment of strangers was both hostile and secretly superior, as the Hoyts were shiftless, but smart, and they knew it.

Fortunately, Sam Lense looked to be a pretty sharp cookie himself, with the well-fed, horndog look of a man who'd never met a breast he didn't like. Lena was cautiously optimistic that Jolie's sulkiness would prove a minor distraction to such a man; her petulance trumped by her tits, so to speak.

With the craftiness of a master spy, Lena withheld all hint of a fix-up and waited till late in the afternoon of their final Friday-night-go-to-town supper to call Jolie at the parsonage, and in her best fake you're-going-to-kill-me voice, Lena confessed that she had invited someone to come along—a guy from the campground. No, Jolie hadn't met him. His name was Sam and he was from Miami. He'd been there only a week.

Jolie's response was quick and expected. “God help us, Lena—you're not trying to fix me up with another stray from the campground? On our last weekend? Is nothing sacred?”

Lena knew she was busted, but lied with great conviction. “It's not a fix-up. He's just some guy I met, doing some kind of study with the museum, doesn't know a soul. I told him about the shrimp special at the café and he asked to come—and what was I supposed to do? Say
no
?”

“Does he know how old you are?” Jolie inserted curiously, as Lena's being underage had made her the subject of a few local cautionary tales.

“Yes, he knows how old I am,” Lena answered patiently. “I told you, it's not a date. Gosh, Jol, he's just a nice guy—not one of your local plowboys looking for someone to iron their clothes and sweep their trailer. It'll do you good to meet him—give you a taste of the Big World outside of Hendrix.”

There was a prolonged silence on the phone, an almost audible rolling of the eyes, though Lena could detect a thawing. “Come and go to supper with us, and if anything good is playing, we can go to the movies—or not,” she inserted, knowing she'd overstepped. “We'll eat supper and come straight home. I need to finish packing anyway.”

Jolie exhaled a pained breath at the reminder of her abandonment, but in the end relented, if grudgingly. “Okay. But listen, Lena, if you get carried away and invite him to the beach, I swear I'll call Daddy and have him come and get me. I will.”

Lena was never more charming than after a successful seduction.
“Deal,”
she sang, then without pause asked, what was Jolie wearing? What did her hair look like? Did she have on eyeliner?

“I thought he was just some
guy
from the campground. That it wasn't a
date
.”

“It isn't,” Lena assured her. “But go put on some eyeliner, Jol. You look so much better with eyeliner. Just a little brown eyeliner, and lip gloss—the melon one I got you for Easter. Be there in a jiff,” she squeaked, and, before Jolie could answer, was gone.

J
olie was left standing in the hot, still hallway of the old parsonage, phone in hand, more than a little steamed at the turn in the evening's plans, thinking, Wonderful, another evening spent with one of Lena's Brilliant Blind Dates.

The last one—some guy named Greg that Lena had also met at the campground—had turned out to be a distant cousin on Jolie's mother's side.

Jolie had thought he looked strangely familiar all night, and halfway through salad, a bell went off in her head.

“My God,” she breathed, “you're Aint Cynthia's nephew. You got a twin named Phil. Your daddy works at Gulf Power.”

He had been good-natured enough about it, had roared with laughter in acknowledgment that marrying outside the tribe in Hendrix wasn't the easiest thing on earth, if you were a Hoyt.

He'd even tried to kiss her good-night and, at her rebuff, explained, “Hell, it's not like you're my sister or something. We wouldn't have three-headed children.”

Jolie told him, not unkindly, “Son, I'll shoot myself in the head before I'd date a Hoyt.”

“Your loss.” He laughed and, as he climbed into his truck, had called back, with true Hoyt élan: “Gimme a call when you git off that high horse.”

Jolie had put her foot down about any more fix-ups after that, but Lena was a force of nature in her sparrowlike way and wasn't to be denied. With nothing more than a grunt of exasperation, Jolie hung up the phone and went to her bedroom off the front porch (the parsonage was older than the church and had many odd structural details: bedroom door off the porch; semi-attached kitchen). She sat at the dinged and dented old vanity that had once belonged to her mother, working to add a little harlotlike color to her hazel-green eyes.

She went about it with little skill and great melancholy, astoundingly sad the summer was so quickly over: the beach and the bikinis, the lazy afternoons on the dock at the campground, the shopping junkets to the flea market in Dothan. She couldn't imagine what she'd do when Lena was gone and couldn't help but be annoyed that their last supper together had been complicated by a stray from the campground.

For young or old, date or nondate, he was no doubt already firmly under Lena's spell. He would peer at her across the table in a coma of infatuation and laugh at her goofy teenage jokes and trip over his own feet in his hurry to pick up the bill. Jolie had seen it happen too many times before—at school, at church, at Hoyt family reunions, and though she didn't begrudge her friend the attention, she did hate to squander their last weekend on a fool.

When Lena pulled up in the drive and beeped, Jolie ambled out in no great hurry and found her alone in the car.

“Where's the date?” she asked as she got in, hoping he'd no-showed, but Lena told her he was running late, that they'd have to pick him up on the way out of town.

“He had to wait in line for the shower,” Lena explained as she wheeled the little Corona around and headed back to the river. “They had another flood in the bathroom; some idiot probably flushed a pad. Don't be so nasty, and don't take on that snotty Hoyt attitude till you meet him. His name's Sam,” Lena reminded her, “and you don't have to worry about making small talk because he runs his mouth like ninety miles an hour, nonstop.”

“Well, thank God for that,” Jolie answered, with feeling, as she hated trying to make small talk with a stranger.

As they backtracked across Hendrix—a two-minute drive, if that—they discussed their beach plans for the next day: what to bring or not bring; whether to go to St. Andrews or the commercial end of the strip.

“D'you want to borrow a bathing suit?” Lena asked, meaning one of her practically nonexistent Brazilian bikinis.

Jolie was debating, weighing the guilt of deceiving her father against the undeniable joy of turning heads on a beach, when Lena added, “I'll wear the black one if you want to borrow the red. I mean, you look okay in the black, but if I looked like you do in the red one, I'd never take it off. I'd wear it to school, to church. I'd
sleep
in it. You could wear that thing on the beach in Rio de Janeiro and look just like a local—and how many people can say that, Jol?”

This was typical of Lena's generosity, as it was the single area in which Jolie could be said to outshine her, and also a great point of personal embarrassment: that wild Brazilian body on a Bible-quoting holiness girl.

“Let me think about it,” Jolie said.

Lena went back to discussing the beach and the weather in her usual fast chatter, was slowing to turn in the campground when she added, as if in afterthought, “Oh—and listen, Jol—he might ask you about the Indians in the forest.”

Jolie looked at her blankly. “I know absolutely nothing about Indians in the forest.”

“Well, fine. No big deal. I just might have mentioned that you're part Indian, and that's what he's here to study, so he might, you know,
ask.
”

Something in the way Lena said it made Jolie suspicious. “Is that all?”

Lena sent her a nervous little glance. “And—well, he might also ask about your—you know. Religion.”

“Lena!”
Jolie cried, as her faith was still very much a closet religion, one considered comically contemptible in town, a sure sign of swamp-running, green-teeth Hendrix ignorance.

“Well, I'm
sorry,
” Lena declared as she swung into the main road of the KOA. “I don't know why you're so
weird
about it. I told him I went to Bethel, and he didn't
drop dead
or anything.”

Jolie was far from reassured and rubbed her face wearily, seeing the last moments of her golden summer evaporate right before her eyes. “If he asks me to speak in other tongues, I'll get up and leave. God, Lena—why did you even bring it up?”

“Well, I don't know,” she said, expertly weaving around the washouts on the lime rock. “We were just talking about his study—he's writing a paper about Florida Indians—the Creek, and Yuchi—and said he'd noticed they were mostly Pentecostal—which naturally made me think of my good buddy Jolie, and how the Hoyts are part Indian, and, you know, Pentecostal—”

At Jolie's groan, Lena's voice turned pleading. “Oh, come on, Jol, quit being such a pain in the
butt
. You need to get out more. You keep hanging around the house so much, you're going to wind up like your daddy.”

This was enough to silence Jolie, as her father, Raymond Hoyt, had endured a long life and a hard one, marrying late and fathering Jolie on the brink of old age. The loss of his wife to cancer had nearly undone him, and Jolie was known to be his favorite. To her, he was a massively loyal and protective presence, but even she would admit that he was a strange and unusual creature. A rare Christian son of the infamously heathen clan, he'd got saved while pulling a stint in Korea and had returned home determined to convert his brethren. His mission had not been overwhelmingly successful, but he'd kept the faith and, at seventy-three, was still a formidable spiritual leader, who stood six foot three, wore a size-fifty belt, and had a cast in one eye. From the Scots, he'd inherited his height and hazel eyes and hardheaded Calvinist sureness; from the Indians, his girth and stamina and (perhaps) the mystic leanings that had drawn him to the Pentecostal movement in the first place. Since his wife's death, he had largely withdrawn from public life, and though faithful to the needs of his shrinking congregation, his real passion lay in strange and solitary projects he worked on day and night in his workshop
in the backyard (charting the end-time according to the book of Revelation, building a table-size replica of the Tabernacle as described in Deuteronomy, and just lately oil painting).

“It'll be one hour of your life,” Lena concluded as she pulled into the dirt parking lot of the concession stand, where their nondate was waiting by the curb as arranged.

In an effort to appear less Hoyt and inbred and hillbilly, Jolie shook Sam's hand over the seat, not able to see much of him before he climbed in, only getting an impression of big-city restlessness and personality scarcely contained in the small seat of the old Toyota. As Lena had warned, he was indeed a talker and kept up with her machine-gun chatter word for word, not flirting with her as much as teasing her like a big brother in a fast, urban accent Jolie couldn't pinpoint. It wasn't Southern and it wasn't Midwestern; maybe it was just Miami, where he said he was born, though it was hard for Jolie to believe that such a quick-talking exotic shared her birth state.

She kept to herself, listening with a half an ear to their chatter as the long August light played across the sunburnt fields that lined the highway into Cleary, the watermelon fields long plowed-over, the peanuts planted, and the tobacco half cut, half in top flower. The fences were better, the farmhouses sturdier the farther you went, as Cleary was Hendrix's well-to-do relative, civilly speaking. It wasn't half as ancient, but had snagged the honor of county seat in a moment of hot, antebellum debate and in the past century had waxed in prosperity, even as Hendrix had sunk into obscurity. Location had much to do with it: Cleary was well inside the old Plantation Belt and had proximity to that old trifecta of transportation: railroad, river, and the Spanish Trail. The politics of the day had followed the money, and Cleary was always richer, and more typically Southern, than Hendrix, with a thriving patrician class that had produced senators, a hard-luck governor, and a row of fine old houses on Main Street, which had in a more whimsical time been christened Silk Stocking Row.

The City Café was across the street from the courthouse, tucked away
in the corner of a row of brick fronts, a line of customers usually trailing down the sidewalk, though this early in the evening there wasn't a wait. Jolie got out first, and the moment she laid eyes on Sam Lense, in the long summer light, she immediately pinned him as ethnic—either Cuban or Jewish, or maybe Greek. His hair was too dark for him to be strictly white, his complexion as olive as Lena's, though his eyes were lighter, a curious, luminous gray. Light-eyed, they'd call him in Hendrix, and well fed. Not fat, but stocky and solidly built. Except for the light eyes, he could have been one of her thousand cousins.

If he noticed her close scrutiny, he didn't comment on it, all his attention on the dusty slice of downtown around them. He perused it all—the brick walls and hot asphalt and plate windows—with a sort of masculine energy strange to her; not booted and Stetsoned and overtly macho, but open and alight with curiosity, as if he'd been waiting all his life to see downtown Cleary and couldn't believe he was finally here!