American Ghost (31 page)

Hugh looked severely peeved at the impudence of the question, but tried for prudence, lowering his voice to argue, “Jolie. The
Times
or the
Democrat
or the
Herald
has only to get
wind
of this, and it is all you'll hear of in this town, for fifty years. Forever. And is that what you want? To throw away a career and a decade of hard work and have this sordid, horrid little
melodrama
hanging over your head, the rest of your
life
?”

It was the first time Hugh had ever hinted at the burden he carried, of being the son of a man who, like Henry Kite, hadn't been overly concerned about how his freewheeling self-absorption might affect his larger family. Jolie suddenly pitied Hugh, standing there in his truly absurd dressing gown, having to pay for the sins of another day. As she untied the leads from the post, she told him with a reasonableness of her own,
“Hugh.
They'll do it anyway. And who
cares
what they say? What do we have to lose? We're nothing out here. We're
ghosts.
”

Hugh had never been receptive to the charm of metaphor and didn't
smile at the gibe, but only glowered at her from beneath rule-straight brows. “You'll care when the second Tuesday in October comes around and Alvin Tomlin takes back his office and turns this town into a solid concrete parking lot, a prison on one end, a pulp mill the other.”

“Good,”
she said with that chin-out defiance. “Let him
have
it. God, Hugh, it's not the last job on earth. I'll get a job in Tallahassee, or go back to design—”

“Oh, sure,” he snapped. “You can open a nail salon or make fine
silk
arrangements at the drugstore. That's what we've worked for all these years—to give it up, just like that”—he snapped his fingers, his nose now beet red from the cold—“while
off
you go to the
Big City,
and to
hell
with the rest of us.”

Hugh's guilt trips could take the velocity of a tropical storm, and with as much composure as she could muster, Jolie climbed in the boat and called, “I'll be back by three.”

Hugh loomed above, still not letting up, but calling down in a ringing, apocalyptic voice, “It's a shakedown, Jolie, pure and simple. What're they asking? Money?
Reparations?
”

“Two
fangers,
” she answered, “and I don't think you can spare them, Hugh. Neither can
I
.”

“Fine,”
he shouted. “But you're making a
huge
mistake, Jolene. I hope you realize that.”

Jolie was about to yank the pull, but paused at his tone, as it had been a long time since anyone had played the
Jolene
card on her. His cold superiority was offset by a small tremble in his voice that made him seem suddenly very old, and wretchedly vulnerable—Noël Coward, lost in the wilderness. Loyalty was the great blessing (and curse) of the Hoyts, and she regretted her impudent needling.

She just watched him a moment, then offered in a quiet voice, “Give it up, Hugh. He was your father; he wasn't
you
. I'm going to the camp to talk to Uncle Ott. Don't worry, I won't implicate anyone else. I know how to hold my mouth right. I'm a Hoyt.”

This last was a try at humor to lighten the moment, as it was reputed
to be the reason that rich men were said to prefer Hendrix women to their counterparts in town: for their Indian reticence. They knew how to hold their mouths right. They were polite and assenting, never threatened to tell unsuspecting wives or make waves about niggling matters of paternity.

Hugh was schooled enough in local lore to get the jab and roll his eyes in a way that made Jolie smile as she ripped the cord once, twice, then finally hard enough to make the little engine roar to life with a cloud of white exhaust and the sharp, pungent smell of gas.

She didn't wait around for his response, but lifted a hand in farewell, then turned the nose of the little boat downstream, her last thought identical to Sam's when he had faced the same wall of cypress, twelve years earlier:
God,
it was cold on the water.

And,
God,
she'd be glad to get home.

•  •  •

She kept the blanket pulled high on her face, her eyes an inch above the fringe, pouring tears from the whip of the wind. Nothing marked the boundaries of the National Forest to the left or the Hoyt camp, which predated the park by a hundred years, off one of the nameless creeks on the far end of the swamp. It was closer to the beehives and tupelo trees of Wewa than Cleary, the older cabins built in the trackless days before the lumber companies had begun their deforestation—before pulpwood and turpentine, mule skinners and saloons, had become the lifeblood of the local economy. They were Spartan, even by local standards, board-and-batten shacks that had been purloined from local cotton fields and floated downstream, then perched on makeshift floating docks along the fringe of the cypress so that they became waterborne in the rainy season (“
On
the water,” Jolie once explained, “not beside it”).

The bunkhouse was the only permanent structure. A stooped, low-ceilinged old lodge that eventually became the infamous hideaway that Wes Dennis spoke of with such nostalgia, as the Hoyt men quickly discovered
more money was to be found in cards than catfish, moonshining than turpentining. They were too isolated to be easily chivvied out by the Law, and the old fish camp hosted many a wild and freewheeling Saturday night, till the midyears of the century, when the cypress was finally cut and the feds began buying up the land—miles of it, stretching from the river to the coast, including the old lumber-company property and the farms and homesteads abandoned in the Trouble. They called it a National Forest and took their stewardship seriously, sending in conservation and forestry men and filling the books with all manner of curious regulation.

By the time Jolie came along, the camp had become nothing more than a cluster of sagging old cabins, ground zero for the men of the family, who fled there as often as they could, to fish and drink and retell stories of wilder, less fettered days. Every year the river gave the old cabins a tougher beating, so that the young men of the family (Carl among them) annually predicted that this year would be the last, that the current would finally take it and the Hoyt fish camp would end up on the bottom of the Gulf, home to the very catfish it had been built to pursue.

Jolie herself had no opinion on the matter, as she had been raised a churchgirl and was seldom allowed into the male sanctum that was the old camp. She'd only been down there a dozen times her entire life and was beginning to wonder if the river had sure enough taken it when she finally passed a small point of land that marked the edge of the Hoyt property. She cut the motor to idle and maneuvered close enough to grip the low overhang of a bent old water oak, using it to guide herself around a sharp, deep cutoff to the old dock, which was sometimes landlocked, but was now completely on the water, full of wasps and dirt-dauber nests, missing half the slats.

She shouted a halloo, but got nothing in answer except a mighty howl of dogs that rose to a deafening roar as they hurled themselves down the mud path to the dock—a motley assortment of tan and spotted hounds of curious pedigree. Ott preferred hunting hogs to deer, and
these were once mostly cur dogs, but over time a few misplaced beagles and walkers had made their way across the river and added spots and yipping to the pack, which was well fed but unregulated in breeding, a few fat pups always bringing up the rear. Since Ott was the current keeper of the hounds, they were a good-natured crew, more curious than ferocious, their keening wail giving way to wags of welcome when they sniffed a Hoyt.

Jolie made her way onto the listing dock, nearly knocked off her feet by the frisking, wiggling dogs. She couldn't negotiate the slats in heels and yanked them off while she sweet-talked the alpha male in a cartoon doggy-voice: “He's a good-looking old dog, he's a tough ol' dog. Go getchure papa, tell him I'm here.”

The Hoyt hounds were much like their owners—approachable by flattery—and with no more persuasion than that, the dogs followed Jolie as she climbed up the wet path, howling her arrival. Ott heard them long before he saw them and waited on the stoop of the bunkhouse in ancient work pants and a flannel shirt, blinking like a pleased old bear when he saw it was her.

She tried to call a greeting, but couldn't outshout the hounds, till Ott let go a piercing whistle that cut off the yipping in an instant.

“Well, thank God for that,” she said into the sudden silence, then went up the steps and kissed his grizzled cheek. “I wish I could teach that trick to the City Commission,” she shouted in his face, as Ott's hearing hadn't improved in the last twenty years and talking to him was like making conversation in a wind tunnel.

When he cared to, he was adept at lip-reading, and he grinned in reply. “Well, what's a city girl doing on the water this time of the day?”

“Come to see
you,
” she answered in full shout as she followed him into the cluttered great room, which despite its reputation for iniquity was really nothing more than an ill-kept living room, a last resting place for the larger family's cast-off chairs and beat-down sofas.

“Is it safe for you to be out here alone?” she asked as she settled into a corner of an ancient Duncan Phyfe sofa that was pushed close to the
room's sole source of heat—an old gas heater littered with shells from boiled peanuts Ott must have been eating for breakfast.

He fetched a dry blanket and offered her a handful of peanuts before taking a seat in the old La-Z-Boy that had once belonged to her father.

“Well, Obie's boys come out ever once in a while, and Mr. Vic, and the Fish and Game man drops by—a colard feller, named Dais. He picks me up a few thangs from the sto, if I thank to ask.”

“How long you been out here?”

He considered the question a moment. “Fo'th of July. There'bouts.”

Jolie made a face. “Well, good Lord, Uncle Ott. This place ain't fit for permanent habitation. What d'you do with yourself all day? It's too cold to fish, surely.”

He didn't deny it, but admitted with a sheepish grin, “A whole lot of nothing, mostly. How you been, shug? How's the City treating you?”

Jolie could not hurry a family visit, nor did she want to, for the moment. She was glad of the warmth of the stove and the blanket and always happy to see the old boy, whatever the occasion. She tore open the peanuts and caught him up with City business—the cell tower and the pending lawsuit—as Ott had always been a sociable old recluse, fascinated by the insider details of city life.

“Bet a lot of skulduggery goes on with thet sort of thang,” he said of the cell tower. “Lot of greased palms.” That was a typical response from the old folk on the river, who thought that life in the city was full of intrigue, bribes, and big money.

“God, I wish there was,” Jolie said sourly, making the old man laugh, though he believed not a word of it.

She would have liked to have sat there all day chewing the fat, but the clock was ticking. When she was done with the peanuts, she slapped the salt off her hands and jumped right in, asking him bluntly, “Well, listen, Uncle Ott, I got this idiot meeting and need to ask you something. D'you remember a family that used to live around here named Frazier? Colored? Nice people. Had a farm, couple of sons?”

“I knew a Buddy Frazier,” Uncle Ott allowed after a moment. “He worked at Camp, run mules. Married a Hitt.”

“That's
him,
” Jolie said, trying not to sound too eager. “They left after the Trouble, went back to Arkansas. Listen, Uncle Ott, did you ever hear what might have become of his fingers?”

“His
whut
?” The old man cupped his hand behind his ear to hear her better.

“His
fingers,
” she repeated a little louder, and held out her own hand, middle one bent to demonstrate, “middle ones, right hand. Men from the Camp cut 'em off, back in the Trouble, trying to make him talk. His son thinks they might still have 'em.”

Her uncle looked at her blankly, as if still not sure he'd heard her correctly. “Well, I ain't ever heard of such a thang,” he finally said, honestly astounded. “They cut off Buddy Frazier's fangers? On
purpose
?”

H
e was so genuinely amazed that Jolie knew she was on yet another blind track. She sat back and rubbed her neck.

“That's what they tell me,” she said with a quick glance at her watch. Her window of opportunity was rapidly slipping away, and with no other leads before her she asked, “Well, has Carl been down here lately? You know, nosing around? Asking about Henry Kite?”

Her uncle stared in wonder at her open use of the name, though he answered easily enough, “Naw, shug. I ain't seen Carl since—oh, Christmas, I guess. Maybe the Christmas befo that. Stays gone a lot, Lener says.”

That was all the confirmation Jolie needed that her uncle Ott was really not in the loop. If he were, Carl would have been by to interrogate him, just as she was doing now. She chewed her lip thoughtfully a moment, then made one final stab. “Well, is there
any
thing you can think of that'd connect Deddy to Henry Kite, that might have been out in the shed, that somebody would have wanted destroyed?”

The old man blinked at the turn in the conversation and tried to put her off. “Aw, shug, thet Kite bidnis—it was a long time ago.”

Jolie had never been one to bird-dog her old kinsmen when they didn't want to discuss something, but she was too pressed for time to be polite. “I
know,
Uncle Ott. And I'm not here to point any fingers or
put anybody in jail. I need to know if there's
any
thing you can think of that might have ended up out there. They used to say there was a piece of the rope.”