Lake Charles (4 page)

Watching Mrs. Shaw’s son Axel crow-hop off the Special Ed. bus, I chuckled as he raced over and opened the Shaws’ mailbox. It was usually empty, and he pulled a long face. On St. Valentine’s Day, he plucked out a card. Every so often, I stuck a two-dollar bill in the mailbox to his joyful astonishment. My cab truck nuzzled to the white palisade fence, and I crammed the detox pamphlet under the cab seat before I ranged out. Mama Jo penned up a pair of goats out back to graze on the poison ivy, wisteria, and kudzu. My double decker trailer loaded with the bass boats lulled there, too. Her lawn was a brown carpet laid down by the August drought.

She’d thumbtacked a flypaper strip under the porch’s fanlight. I made a mental note to remove the dreamcatcher, a birthday gift from Salem, out of my only window.
Too many dreams leave me too damn buggy
. I saw through the rusty door screen the piano that, all thumbs, I’d never mastered. After that fiasco, she bought me a .410 from Western Auto, and I’d handled it better than trying to ape Ronnie Milsap’s riffs. I rapped on the screen door’s wood partition.

Her reply trumpeted out. “My hands are sticky! The door’s open!”

I stepped inside and let my eyes adjust to fix on Edna’s suitcases next to the piano. Her pillows sat on the sleeper-sofa because our old bedrooms were full junk repositories. After she’d left Cobb, she moved back in with Mama Jo on bat extraction day. I smiled. A fluttery noise had kept her awake, so she cajoled me into poking my head through the attic trapdoor. When I did, my jaw sagged. A plague of dirt-brown, furry bats roosted in the rafters. I netted them in an old sheet to evict and puttied their crevice entry I found. Now something sweet displacing the usual barbecued pork smell lured me on. Her china gleamed in the hutch before I skirted the dining room table and puzzled over the Christmas-wrapped gifts on it. Had she hit a red dot sale at the Piggly Wiggly?

The kitchen’s steam washed into my sight on the rows of Bell canning jars and colanders of blackberries crowding the drain board. My mouth watered for her jam. Smaller colanders of blackberries gleamed on the countertop. Four gas pilots on low, blue flames heated the four pots. Reddish-purple juices, bubbling and slurping, stewed in them. Locals could hand pick up to a gallon of blackberries without a permit. Fuzzy on regulations, she took all she could tote. Before going to work, I drove her to the grassy balds’ trailheads, and we hit the blackberry canes.

Heavyset and tallish, Mama Jo had a bulbous chin, and I’d inherited her yam nose. Her cropped ginger hair shot with gray gleamed from the olive oil she used as a mousse. Some townspeople called her abrasive and blunt, but her tough attitude was necessary for her orderly job. Her steamed up bifocals took dim measure of my inactivity.

“You can grab some cheesecloth and start squeezing. Or else hop on stirring the pots.”

Leery of getting her purple-stained hands, I stirred the four pots on the stovetop. The printery’s inks smudged enough of my skin. Purple also smeared the wood spoon I used.

“Is work going okay?” I asked her.

“There’s no shortage of ill patients. Did you meet with Herzog?”

“It’s all good.”

“Uh-huh. You’d better get on it. Did Dr. Smith pull your wisdom teeth?”

“That’s a bit downstream. Something else bugs me.”

“If it’s anything to do with Cobb Kuzawa, stuff it.”

“Why do you ride Cobb like you do?”

“I don’t ride him. What’s on your mind?”

“Edna is making noises to patch up her rift with him.”

“I already heard it, and he wins my sympathy.”

“Hearing you say that is a shock.” My wood spoon scraped the pot bottom.

“How’d you like it married to her?”

“True. You’ve spoiled her rotten.”

Mama Jo scoffed. “She’s no more spoiled than you are.”

“What did you tell her?”

“Nary a peep.” Mama Jo’s keg chest heaved out a gravelly sigh. “They’ll sort it out. Until then I let her crash here. You’d be a smart lad to avoid those shark-infested waters.”

My nod agreed. “I’ve got my own troubles in spades.”

“But you’ve poked in your big nose, haven’t you?”

“She might go on our fishing trip to Lake Charles.”

“Lake Charles.” Mama Jo’s face wrinkled in chagrin. “Good grief.”

“Cobb’s idea, not mine.”

“Remember tomorrow is an even number day. You better top off your tank.”

“Thanks. I’ve already gassed up.”

“After you kids had nagged me nutty, I ran you up to see the earth dam. That’s the last time I laid eyes on Lake Charles.”

“Pete Rojos told me Salem is Herzog’s secretary.”

“Forget Salem. She’s out of your league.”

“Huh? We dated a little.”

Mama Jo’s wrist swipe left a reddish-purple daub above her eyebrow. “But then she got a Vanderbilt scholarship, but you were too smart and took up smoking and not just Marlboro Reds either.”

“No-no, I quit that bad scene.”

Weighing the truth in my statement, she didn’t respond. I let my eyes zone out on the dark syrup perking in the four pots as an oracle bubbled. All my life folks had noted a fertile imagination made me different. How could I refute them? Whimsical visions and voices staged a running drama in my thoughts. Spooky stuff for sure, but I wasn’t demented. My dreams kept my mental health in the pink.

My memory also had the knack to recount the events clear back to my infanthood. My father, last known to work up north on the Trans-Alaskan Pipeline, had rocked our cradles. He smiled a lot. It was the first smile I remembered seeing. A crescent scar stamped his forehead. Not long afterward, he’d left Mama Jo, Edna, and me high and dry. Edna said she didn’t remember him at all.

Three things were certain in my life: death, taxes and Mama Jo’s one rule to say nothing of Angus Fishback under her roof. I saw her collect and burn all the Polaroids taken of him. Growing up in a fatherless household, I felt estranged from other kids. Summer afternoons I waited at the front gate, half-expecting Angus to cruise up in a yellow-and-black Barracuda. He didn’t. I assembled a miniature Barracuda from a model car kit, a kid’s totem I parked on my bureau top. When she wasn’t hiding my baseball and glove, Edna kept me company, but she always had her sassy girlfriends to humor her. My best friend was Cobb, but Mr. Kuzawa drummed up chores to keep the rascal busy. So the lots of solitude let me to daydream away my youth.

Uncle Ozzie was our family’s champion dreamer. Zany as a box of frogs said the town gossips. I’d one story about him. He’d shriveled to breath and britches. Cancer, said the oncologist. One muggy summer afternoon I prowled down our street on a spine-tingling safari for a five-year-old. I hailed him seated on a plastic milk crate by the grocer. His elfish face in the sun bore a leathery cast. Liberal on the Old Spice failed to mask his dying man’s smells of piss and futility. The glossy, blue backstrap to a .44 arched from his baggy trouser pocket. I gawked at it before his tenor quavered as a brisk wind strums the telephone wires.

“A’right boyo, where’s Mama Jo?”

“She’s fixing the tear the dog ripped in our door screen.”

“Uh-huh. Is she done picking berries?”

“Yes sir. Quite a few are for her jam.”

His thumbnail itched under his gaunt larynx. “You better scoot back to her, boyo.”

“Is it so you can see the haints?” I asked him pointblank.

His lips curved into a wiry smile. “You heard talk, eh? How I’m a lulu. Don’t buy it. Ask Jerry Kuzawa. He vouches for me. I see things most others can’t.”

“If you say it’s true, then I believe you.”

Uncle Ozzie’s face seamed in agony before it ebbed away. The cancer had twisted its dagger blade in his gut. “Don’t trust what you see, boyo, with your eyes open or closed.”

I nodded. “My scary dreams make me wet the bed.”

He tilted his chin, and his eyes showed a burnt orange matte, not the cold, clear blue I’d expected. Then he told me something I’d never forget. “Don’t quail. Ever. You’re bigger than your dreams. Now scoot on home. You worry Mama Jo ragged, boyo. She tells me that all the time.”

“Yes sir.”

“That’s a good boyo.”

Now I watched the blackberry juice slurp in the pots on her stovetop. Edgy to decipher my latest rash of dreams, I’d figured out Ashleigh, the dead girl I’d pushed off me in our motel bed, wished to have her say. How else did the dead speak to us but through our dreams? By my next quickening breath, I heard the supple lilt to her disembodied voice pitching me a new message.

“Brendan, I was murdered. If you’ll bear with me, I’ll play it back, scene by scene.”

“Just as if we’re bridge-building with Legos.”

“As you wish it, but by pooling our resources we’ll unearth the truth, what we both crave to know about the night I died.”

“You must know who your killer is. Quit ribbing me. Just name a name.”

“But I can’t do that without your aid.”

“What if I don’t want to help you?”

“Then it’s welcome to your lifelong rat cage.”

“Brendan, I said Cobb will be the death of you.” I did a double take at the exasperation furrowing Mama Jo’s face. “Did you hear me? What comes over you? You lapse into these trances, grab a blank look, and stare off into limbo. Where does your mind fly? I’d love to know.”

“Oh, stop it. You can see I’m standing right here.”

“Uh-huh. At least you come by it honestly. I remember when your Uncle Ozzie went to see Edgar Cayce—”

“Oh no, not the Edgar Cayce chestnut again.”

“It bears repeating. My brother returned all jazzed how the clairvoyant Cayce had prattled with the angels and saints. He could peer through your ribs and diagnose any ill organs. That’s what Ozzie told me. I shiver to admit it, but you’ve taken his screwball strand of DNA.”

“I know. You’ve told me since I was a kid.”

“I do it for your benefit. He conjured all sorts of strange visions before his pistol accident.”

Pistol accident? It wasn’t likely unless he’d been using the .44’s muzzle for a toothpick. “I can look forward to a long and adventurous life.”

“Don’t sass me. You had better take it seriously. Spiteful souls still gossip on him but never to my face. Thankfully you’re not that far gone.” She paused, then after a sigh she added, “Yet.”