Suitcase City (23 page)

Then one day she approached his table, smiled at him frankly, and said, “What can I do for you, Jimmy?”

“Excuse me?” Teach liked this familiarity, saw it maybe as their next step.

She crossed her arms under her breasts and breathed a sigh. “So, you really don’t know me. You don’t remember?”

Teach squinted at her, trying. Finding nothing of Thalia in his memory, he shook his head. What was he missing?

“I knew
you
when you came in my first day.”

Ah. Teach understood now. He said it with newsreel drama: “You mean you recognized Teach, the Gridiron Great?”

“Naw, not him. I recognized Jimmy the shirttail cracker from up that oyster-shell road in Cedar Key.”

She meant that they came from the same place. She had known him, at least to recognize, to remember, when he was the Jimmy Teach who at twenty-four, football behind him forever, had returned to Cedar Key to tend bar in the sunshine and at night to pilot the shrimper
Delia B
. His second sojourn in Cedar Key had been brief, but Thalia knew him from that time. She had lived in Rosewood and she had sometimes helped her mother clean motel rooms in Cedar Key, and she’d seen him coming and going from the bar he tended. And so it followed that he had seen her too. Seen her the way you see the background of a picture.

After they had been together for a while, images drifted up from the silted channels of Teach’s memory. He pictured Thalia, fifteen-year-old Thalia, dust whitening her bare summer legs, walking the few miles from Rosewood to Cedar Key to buy candy or ice cream, or maybe to talk somebody with a valid ID into buying beer for her and her friends. It was what kids did in the summer because there was nothing else to do if you were too young to work a boat or a kitchen. Searching back through the scrim that was half memory and half imagination, Teach saw her walking that road as a scene from Norman Rockwell, the adolescent girl still innocent, drifting along in the comfort of her own time, the thoughts and desires of a woman forming behind those sleepy brown eyes.
Don’t burn your bare feet on the hot road, girl. Don’t look up at the cars passing full of rich white folks from the university city like you want to be in there with them. Want to go home with them. There’s something good for you at the end of this long, hot walk.
Back then, in that place, it was how things were. Too hot to worry much about the big things. Too poor to have the good things. Too young still for the things in between.

At the club, Teach couldn’t stop watching her. He lingered over lunch and ordered drinks he didn’t need. Then, watching her, he needed the drinks. Somehow knowing they were from the same place made this all right, his watching her, his drinking; made it all right that he drove through the employee parking lot thinking he might see her after a shift. Or promising himself he was driving through that parking lot for no reason at all.

One day he waited for Thalia. Sitting in his Buick a discreet distance from the back door of the kitchen, he read the newspaper and tried to look like anything but what he was, a club member waiting for a waitress. When the waitress appeared, she stopped in the late-afternoon sun to search her purse for her car keys, drew a long breath that said,
Free at last
, and then started her sweet, musical walk to a half-dead Toyota.

Stupidly, Teach had not planned his next move. Should he call her over to his window, get out and approach her, some third thing? He could not make up his mind. She was a block away in the smoking Toyota when he slowed behind her and blinked his lights, glad they were gone from club property. When she saw his face in her rearview mirror, she pulled over. Teach got out and walked to her window, painfully aware of what this would look like should someone he knew drive by or look out from a house here in Country Club Estates.

When he stood at her window, Thalia said, “So, you do remember me?”

“Yes, I do. It just took me awhile.” He didn’t know how she would take this. He knew it wasn’t exactly a compliment.

He rested his hand on the windowsill. She reached out, took his hand, pulled it into the car, held it hard. “So what now, Cracker Jimmy?”

His hand warm in hers, Teach couldn’t think.

She smiled, shook her head slowly. “I was fifteen and you were . . . ?”

“Twenty-four.” His age the year of the
Delia B
.
And I was a smuggler.
A former football player, a failure, and a smuggler.

Still holding his hand, pulling it like she wanted him to climb through that window, she said, “You want to come home with me?”

Teach said, “No, I can’t do that,” knowing that he would do it, some time, if she would let him. He added, “Not today.”

She looked at him now with a teasing reproach. “Better things to do, Jimmy? What you got better than me?”

Now that she was free of the dining room where she spoke like a news anchor, she was telling him,
If you go home with me, not today but someday, you’ll be in my world. Different rules in my world.

After that, and for a while, they went back to the rules, Thalia showing up at his table with burgers or sandwiches and beers and sometimes, on Friday afternoons after he had played nine holes with Walter, double bourbons with tall ice-water chasers. But Teach knew, and she did too, that someday he would go home with her. When their eyes had met that first day, she had made him hers. When her cinnamon skin was a liquid that flowed from her cheeks down her long neck into that stiff white collar to regions undiscovered. When the breath he caught of her perfume was like the air of a new season. When her eyes knew him from the long ago.

One afternoon, after she had placed a sandwich in front of him without resting her hand on his shoulder, he asked how she was doing. Standing with her hands folded in front of her apron, she said, “Well . . .” and let a long pause tell the story of her disappointment.

Teach knew what she wasn’t saying. The work was mind-numbing. There was no future for her here; only more of the same. She was thinking of leaving.

Finally, she said, “There are lots of nice people here, and the money’s all right, but I’m better than this job.” When she said
better
, her chin lifted a defiant inch, as though Teach might dispute the point. She glanced at the hallway leading to the club’s administrative offices. “I been thinking about an office job.”

It was a question, not a statement. The grille was almost empty. A few duffers scattered here and there, sun-stunned and bourbon bent, ready to stagger off to the parking lot. It was safe for Teach to meet her eyes and consider what she was saying to him. He didn’t want to think she was bargaining.
If you help me get out of this apron, help me down that hallway, then I’ll help you.

After a few seconds of silence, Teach knew he’d help her. And he knew he needed a change as badly as she did. He needed to go home with Thalia.

So it happened. The thing between them happened like fate, like it was ordained, inescapable. By a series of steps, phases, small actions, casual motions of eyes and hands, it happened, but these little things didn’t really matter. There could have been other little things, because the big thing had always been as certain as death and taxes. And every time Teach let himself think about this, he imagined himself telling Paige,
It just happened.
The oldest, lamest cheater’s line in the world. And those pale blue eyes of Paige’s going from cool to cold to glacial, and Teach couldn’t even imagine what happened after that. But what he always left out of his imagined confession to his wife was the
just.
There was a world of difference between a thing fated to happen and a thing that
just
happened. Just was accidental, fate was cosmic. Fate was written for you, not by you. And sometimes fate was tragic.

Their first time in her shabby apartment in Suitcase City—a place Teach had foreseen to its smallest detail, a place he knew represented to her a rising from worse places—was everything he hoped and feared it would be. Crossing over from watching, imagining, teasing, to touching, holding, and being inside, changed him forever. When the change happened, it was irrevocable. And from that vantage point of inevitability, he could see, far off in the future, the damage a new Teach might do.

One afternoon when he had stolen two hours from his job and they lay exhausted and sweating, inches separating them in Thalia’s narrow bed, she said, low and dreamy, “You think I knew you back then as a redneck bartender, but I knew other things.
We
knew.”

“We?” Teach muttered from the stupor of their sweet thrashing hours.

“Us black folks,” she said not quite seriously, playing with the words to make herself sound like some voice of history, some radio wave of her people’s consciousness. Teach reminded himself,
She’s not from Cedar Key
. Thalia was from Rosewood, only a few miles from Cedar Key, where twenty-seven people had been massacred in 1923. Rosewood was a thousand miles from Cedar Key.

“What did you folks . . . know?” Teach’s voice was no longer the low murmur of the postcoital dream. It was all his attention. It was his fear.

“You smuggled. We knew that.”

“How?” He didn’t deny it. Why bother at this distance, inches of sweat and miles of history, from this woman he trusted?

“Oh,” she said, stretching, balling her fists like a child and rubbing them into her brown eyes. Turning to rest her head on his shoulder. “We had our ways.”

“No, really. How?” Teach the professional, the former maritime consultant, wanted to know. He had staked his life on his secrets.

Thalia sat up in the bed and leaned over him. “White folks back there, back then, they thought we was completely separate. They wanted it that way. They thought they could do what they wanted to us, to anyone, anything, and they was safe. Well they couldn’t, they can’t. We knew. My uncle’s friend, Edmond Curtis, deacon at our church, he worked for that old blind lady who let you keep your boat behind her house. He started out doing some roofing for her, and pretty soon he was there a lot cause she wanted more from him than roofing. Wanted him to drive her places. Wanted him to come pick her up when she fell down in the night. Get groceries for her. She talked to him. They got to be friends in their way. As much as they could be back then. He prayed for her in church, we all did when he asked for it, and he told my uncle about seeing you coming and going all hours, paying that old lady ten times what it was worth to slip your boat behind her house. You mighta fooled the white folks, but you never can fool the ones who do your dirty work.”

She stopped, her eyes still hard. To him, she had been the background of the picture; to her, the background
was
the picture. The past meant more to her than he, naked beside her in his white skin, could ever know.

“Your uncle’s friend, Edmond, he was taking a risk helping Mrs. Bye, wasn’t he?” Teach said it with a kind of awe. They both knew it was a stupid question.

All Thalia said was, “He lived in Rosewood.”

* * *

Later, back in his own world, the one he shared with Paige and Dean, the one that did not include Thalia except as a waitress, Teach wondered if there was another reason she told him the story of Uncle Edmond and Mrs. Bye, the blind woman he’d thought was as safe for him as a newborn baby. He didn’t think Thalia would ever use what she knew against him, but he knew that in some possible world she could use it. He didn’t like the thought, the feeling of it. Soon after that, he told her that he would help her get a better job.

Teach and Thalia were careful at the club. They didn’t indulge in the small indiscretions and silly swoons of secret lovers. She stopped resting her hand on his shoulder because she could rest it where she wanted to at other times. They were friendly but not familiar. As much as he could, Teach kept himself from watching her while she worked. Every day, he cautioned himself to keep a level head. They used hotels, but never the same one twice. They took afternoon trips to the small towns near Tampa—Dade City, Lakeland, Bartow—but there was never enough time. Thalia wanted more of his time but there was never enough. He wanted more of her body, her mind, her secrets than she could ever give. As time passed, it became more than want. It became love, and it grew so large inside him it hurt. It moved his mind from things he had to do, and finally from things he had to love. When he began to think of a life with Thalia, when his fantasies at night became plans, when he began to think his way through the difficulties of it, and past them to the pleasures of it, Teach knew he was in trouble.

The day Paige put the scarf in his car, Teach knew exactly what had happened. He sat behind the wheel holding the scarf as a man would hold the head of a poisonous snake. He had borrowed Paige’s car because his was in the shop. He had taken Thalia somewhere in it. Paige had found the scarf, had folded it neatly and put it on the seat of his car, had never said a word to him about it. And had never been the same to him again.

The scarf had become a silence, then a screaming silence, then it became a fourth person living with them. Some fetid, buried creature always there, sitting at the dining room table when they ate dinner, waving goodbye to them from the front porch as they both drove off to work, lying between them in bed at night.

And the inches between them in that bed had become miles, uncrossable, and then one day, witnesses said, Paige’s Volvo had wandered out of her lane on the Veteran’s Expressway, and her front wheel had become weirdly entangled with the rear bumper of a dump truck. Her car was flung into a spin across three lanes and she was hit broadside. Her gas tank exploded.

THIRTY

There was a knock at the door. Aimes put down the notebook and looked at Delbert. Delbert stepped out into the hallway, came back with a piece of paper in his hand. Teach looked at the paper the young detective held, then back at Aimes’s hands. He had watched those hands while he’d told them the story of Thalia. He had watched Aimes write in the notebook, remembering how those hands had touched his shoulder that afternoon in the bar, hands that held the power of the state. Hands that took away your tie and shoelaces.