Cutting Loose in Paradise Read online

  “ ’S up, Matthew?” she said. “How’s the new truck?” They chatted, and then he wandered off to fetch our oysters.

  “Damn, this is intense,” Madonna said. She held up her glass and made us toast to keeping our mouths shut. She took life as it came, dissolved difficulty. I rarely saw her ruffled.

  “Rue,” Laura said, a little impatient. “What’s the deal with the lying cop report?”

  I conveyed what I’d discovered at the funeral home. The two stared in shock. A long silence ensued, and the jukebox clicked on and belted out “These old bars are all closed, and it’s four in the morning.” We sipped beer.

  “Oh, my god,” Madonna said under her breath. “Poor Trina. She was murdered?” The two of them glanced at each other and then back at me. Laura was shaking her head. She stood abruptly. Facts were like religion to Laura.

  Unsure how to react to Trina’s neck, she said, “I’m walking over to the office to check this out.”

  “What? Wait! The oysters are on the way!” Madonna said. Leave it to Madonna to stay in the body.

  “It’ll only take a minute,” Laura said, and then she was out the door.

  I turned to Madonna. “I don’t know. Did Trina seem suicidal to you?” Matthew, with his quick smile, brought out the oysters on the half shell, watery and plump. “Never mind,” I added. “We’ll wait till Laura gets back.” It was sacrilege here, but I’d hated oysters since I’d been sick on them as a child. They arrived on a big metal platter, the oysters on half their shells and bedded in the ice. Quartered lemons, horseradish, and tiny cups of red seafood sauce perched on the rims. Madonna rattled a pack of crackers and slid out two saltines.

  She then stabbed a fork into a fat oyster, squeezed lemon on it, set it on a cracker, and took a big bite. I turned away to watch the weather channel overhead. As usual, the weather media was picking up on anything odd. That often meant Florida these days. This time, an expectation of snow in the Sunshine State.

  Madonna was well into her third oyster, chasing it with beer, when Laura came back and slid into her side of the booth and took a long swig of beer.

  “Mmmm, slimy, chewy, salty, babylicious!” Madonna said, mocking my disdain of the slimy, gritty raw shellfish. Then she got serious. “To answer your question about suicide, Trina was kind of preoccupied, you might say.” Laura silently dug into the oysters on her side of the plate.

  “What do you mean?” I took a good long slug of beer.

  “Over the last month or so. Quieter. One day she’d come in to the Hook Wreck at about five to watch the sunset. Always sat by the window looking out on the water, you know? And ordered a scotch and soda. Just one. She didn’t say much. A couple of times, she came in with Randy.”

  “Randy?” Laura and I said in unison. He was the local-boy-done-good, an attorney who’d moved back to the islands after his wife died. We’d dated in high school, but I’d dumped him to go to college a year before he graduated. Rangy, athletic with a now-weathered baby face. He usually wore hiking boots and cargo pants.

  “Robbing the cradle?” Laura said, this time dipping the slimy mollusk into red sauce.

  Madonna shook her head no. “I don’t think so. They’d talk about serious stuff—some church trip one time.”

  “Church trip?” Randy was the preacher’s kid who lived up to the name, getting into trouble and leaving the church for good in his rebellious youth.

  Madonna went on. “And later last month, another time, she brought these pages and pages of reports. Lots of words and graphs. Randy met her there.”

  “Accounting?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Madonna said. “Those two seemed pretty tight. And she seemed kinda withdrawn and focused on the papers. But not, you know, depressed.”

  We turned to Laura to see what the police report had said. Laura stuffed a second oyster into her mouth as she shook her head. “Clear as day, LaRue. The police report? No question. The report is specific—a shot in the heart with a thirty-eight revolver, six-nineteen p.m., found in her office at home. Says Fletch found her. No note, though. Strange . . .” Her eyes wandered off, and she stared at the mako for a minute, then a TV freak snow in Louisiana, headed for southern Alabama. She went on. “Cops usually carry thirty-eights. Smith and Wesson or Colt revolver. I wonder if Cooter was on a drunk and—”

  “No. You know he doesn’t drink on duty,” I said. In a village, town, whatever you wanted to call St. Annes, you were lucky to get a police officer at all. And with half the town in the bars, an alcoholic not drinking while on duty was the right choice. In a village, people would never approve of a drunk cop dealing with drunks. Cooter knew this much.

  “Cooter’s not the sharpest hook in the tackle box, but he knows when not to drink,” Madonna said. “He comes over to the Hook Wreck on duty and stares at the bottles behind me. Always gets coffee.”

  “Are we accusing the local cop?” I said. “I don’t know. I’m just somebody who likes to read and ended up back in my hometown cutting hair. Got two kids to raise. And I need to get home soon. This is so not my—” I pulled long on my beer, then refilled. “I’m not a friggin’ detective.”

  “Shit, LaRue, don’t you know that’s how everybody is?” Madonna ate her last oyster and pushed the plate to Laura. “School’s where you learn a bunch of theories. Life is where you test them out to see how it really goes. A detective is someone who’s nosey and doesn’t believe any hype. And by the way, I called Daisy like you asked me to earlier. She said Taylor’s home now, and they’re making their own dinner.” When I looked up at her, she grinned. “Don’t worry so much.”

  “Okay, I’m gonna call Jackson,” Laura said with resolve.

  “Wait. Wait a minute. Jackson? What Jackson? Who’s that? I’m not sure—” I said.

  “He’s an ex-crime journalist for the Tallahassee Times.” She explained that when he started beating the cops at finding facts, information, somebody in state police hired him. Now he was working for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement as an investigator, usually for big scandals.

  “I can’t pay anybody,” I said.

  “He’ll do it for me,” she said.

  “Is this guy honest?” I said.

  “He’s a babe,” Madonna said, smirking. “He goes on ‘The List.’ ” The List consisted of irresistible guys, cute with a heart, like a George Clooney or Daniel Day Lewis. Intense and funny like a Lawrence Fishburne. Then the real guys we knew, like the now mysterious Randy. Madonna amended her comment. “Well, he’s not the babe Walter was.”

  “Walter’s been off the radar for years,” I said of my former husband.

  “Fair enough,” Madonna said. “I just meant—sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I’m just a cynical divorced woman.” They both moaned and said, “Oh, come on,” pulling me out of that momentary sense of fate and bitterness.

  “Okay for me to arrange a meeting for you two tomorrow? Then you have to promise that I break the story.” Laura, always the media-savvy reporter. It’s not why I loved her, but it was partly why I respected her. She didn’t do emotional, and we needed her for analytical balance.

  “I can’t do tomorrow. I’ve got a funeral and then a big wedding, remember?” I said.

  “How about Saturday?” she pushed, pouring herself the last of the beer.

  The sun had slipped close to the horizon, and the sky would soon turn an orange-red, the color of a fire touching down on a lavender ocean. Headlights shone into the bar from the road. My animal instinct cued me to check on family. I paid my bill and bid good evening to my friends, who didn’t have kids. The part of me that smelled wild ocean aroma wanted to stay all night. The better part of me was glad to have the heavy anchor of home.

  CHAPTER 4

  “WHAT?” Daisy answered the phone. I was headed out the bumpy county road to say hello to my dad before I came back to the apartment in St. Annes.

  “What? What do you mean ‘what’? It’s your mom.” You nev
er know what you’ll say when you become a mother.

  “Duh,” she said. She was hanging out with her older sibling, a sarcastic teen brother. I could hear a TV laugh track in the background.

  “Where are your manners? Have you eaten?”

  “Tay made me a banana and peanut butter,” she said, ignoring the first question. “Where are you?” Now she sounded like a tiny version of me. I choked back a laugh.

  “Going to check your granddad, if you all are doing okay.” There was no answer, just the laugh track of a rerun of “That ’70s Show.” “Hello?”

  “What, Mom?” she said, impatient. She could go from needing me to thinking I was a nuisance in nanoseconds. When would I learn to ride the Ferris wheel of motherhood?

  “Nothing. Tay’s with you, right?” I could picture the fluorescent-like TV flashes of colored light across their faces.

  “Yeah. He says meat’s bad for you. Why do you feed us meat?” she said.

  “Oh, god, is he off on his vegetarian rant again?” I said. I kept it to myself that I’d once practiced vegetarianism. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow. Keep the doors locked. I’ll be home in about an hour, okay?” I hoped my son hadn’t begun to choose the way of the culty environmental terrorists in response to a reactionary state. He was hanging out with the kids with dreads, cheek piercings, chains hanging from their pants. They discussed things like shutting down chicken farms with smeared blood. Friends they knew in Tallahassee had thrown homemade explosives into designer ham shops.

  “Okay, love you, bye,” Daisy said in one breath.

  I hung up as the road got rougher, with tar patches. I called Dad. “I’m stopping by. Just for a minute. I need to get home. And I’ve got a wedding and funeral tomorrow.”

  “That’s my girl,” he chuckled. The connection to his landline was, as always, littered with static.

  I turned off the county road onto the oyster shell drive with the homemade “Panther Pit” sign hung at the fence post. A stone pony sat on each side of the entrance. The shells chinked their music as the car’s wheels rode over them. When the county had built the road, they’d dug out lime rock on the property. This they used to lay the road, which left an ugly pit. But by some good fortune, road construction had hit a spring or the aquifer. The hole filled up with clear water, and now Dad owned the best twenty acres in the swamplands.

  Dad had built the log cabin on the place with his own hands thirty years ago with the help of a plumber and an electrician. At eight, I’d helped out, hauling lumber and feeding nails to the bin after school, selecting the stone ponies. Now and again, we painted the pair. This year, I planned to put a black Santa on the right side pony and a pink Santa on the left. That would keep people thinking. I parked and slammed the car door shut. The wind smelled of night swimming.

  “How’s my baby?” Daddy was outside waiting for me and held out long arms. Tall, bony, and hook-nosed like you see on sculptures of Indians in Mexican museums. I looked like him. I’d come home when my husband died, as much to care for him after his stroke as to crash at home.

  “Fine, Dad.” I hugged him. Dusk. The curved blade of moon reflected in jags through the pond. “You need to come in for a hair trim. Your hair’s circling over your ears. How’s the garden?” I admired his broccoli and carrots, even oranges that he nurtured and covered. I wondered how he kept it all going when the cockamamie weather had us snowing next week.

  He ignored the haircut remark. “You gonna go say hey to your grandma?”

  “Okay,” I said. Grandma Happy always had a lecture and a warning. Dad had moved her from the Rez ten years before when she turned eighty-four. She knew about medicine, well, natural medicine, and she was full of folk superstitions. She believed in the Little People who lived in the trees. Claimed she talked to them. Of course, Dad had told me this Indian lore—that these Little People in the trees could give you knowledge, but they could also cause mischief. It sounded like believing in fairies, which, in truth, appealed to me. Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not there. I gazed up into the pines as I walked to Grandma’s trailer, looking for glimmers in trees.

  “Grandma!” I hollered. She couldn’t hear well. The screen door screeched open. She always made my heart stop—all four feet nine inches of her, a billowy turquoise Seminole skirt, the plaited knee-length hair piled carefully on her head, orange necklaces from her breasts up to her ears.

  “Come in.” She gave me a hug. She wore nine-plus decades of knowledge no one else much cared to hear about. “Now I got to give you a tonic.” She always was abrupt like that. No sweet talk.

  “Grandma, I don’t need one.” She scowled, the only evidence that she heard me. Here we go, another lecture on Indianness. She’d be all night making up a batch of something.

  She beckoned me in and showed me a dark red tea she had going on her stove. The scents of her kitchen unfolded—coffee, chocolate, mint, and holy basil, dust. I had to admit, she knew the natural remedies for bug bites, coughs, and colds. Mostly they came from what you’d call yard weeds. She’d been around before cars, before TV, before movies, air conditioning, cell phones, before the big bombs. I couldn’t fathom what she’d absorbed in her lifetime.

  Indians didn’t have the answer for bad teeth, though. She only had ten left—six on top, four on bottom, only four total in the front. She poured some of the red tea into a thermos and screwed the top on. “I been talking to them,” she said. She meant the Little People. “You got opposites going tomorrow. You be careful.” She wagged her bent brown finger at me, then put the potion in my hand.

  “Dad told you,” I said.

  “A funeral and a wedding. Opposites. You need tonic.”

  I didn’t argue. She was stubborn. “Thanks, Grandma. I have to get home to the kids now.”

  “And take this,” she said. She placed a big gnarly root the size of a tennis ball in my other hand. “Ginger. Ordered it on-line from far away. Shave some off and put it in the kids’ food. Keep their hearts good.” I didn’t ask how she got on-line, and I didn’t want to know where ginger grew that big, so I nodded and thanked her, waving goodbye. “You young ones go too fast,” she shouted in her old voice. She muttered some Seminole profanity on her way back into the house. She’d begun using this profanity more lately. We ignored it. Who’s going to tell an Indian lady going on one hundred years old not to cuss like a redneck war veteran?

  Dad handed me a battered basket filled with a just-picked batch of broccoli. We stood near my car, and the floodlight of his front porch shone down. A bat swooped down and past us.

  “You think that Lutz thing’s for real?” he said, speaking of Trina Lutz’s death.

  “What do you mean?” I said. The last thing he needed was to know and to worry. A hanging black branch swayed in the wind.

  “Can’t see that girl committing suicide.” A whippoorwill called from across the pond. The world had shifted, and evening was giving in to night. It reminded me of growing up on the pond. Crickets, mourning doves, the wind in the treetops. I slipped my arms around his waist.

  What would it have been like to slip an arm around my mother, had she lived? Suddenly, I missed Walter again. Not him, just the company. I hadn’t had time to yearn for her in a long while. “Too many people dying of cancer around here these days,” he said. “Nobody died of cancer thirty years ago.” Cancer? I hadn’t mentioned cancer.

  “Well, Dad, Trina didn’t die of cancer,” I said. “And besides, you know—the bad food we eat, the plastic, the pollution in the water. And those fishermen—they never protect their skin.”

  “All those still births? That’s not normal,” he said. I just let his words call out like the whippoorwill, echoing across the pond.

  “That Fletch.” He shook his head as he spoke of Trina’s husband. “I wouldn’t put nothing past him.” Dad squinted, staring across the pond. “He killed somebody once. They said it was accidental.”

  “Really?” I said. “What happened?” A b
arred owl started up in the woods, the sound echoing across the pond.

  “Don’t remember. But I do know it was a gun involved. Even if it weren’t an accident, he’s protected. All that family covering for each other. Like the mafia or something.”

  The weapon that killed Trina was a razor or a very finely sharpened knife. “Interesting,” I said, then opened the car door, broccoli and tea in the other arm.

  “Dad?” I said. “What’s that got to do with cancer?”

  He shrugged.

  “Don’t be a stranger,” he hollered. “And send those grandkids around here sometime. I need Taylor to help me move chicken wire.” I promised I wouldn’t and that I would and rolled up the car window. This land, the pond, each other. It’s what we had.

  As I rolled back onto the county road and headed back to St. Annes, I thought as always about our fresh water underground. Thus, our clear water on the property. It always made me think about the waterway just below this surface.

  A whole system of underground caves ran just feet below our car wheels, a groundwater system holding water from the metro area down to the Gulf. Like Grandma Happy’s legend of Little People in the trees—you couldn’t see it, but it was there.

  CHAPTER 5

  “HOW DEMORALIZING to live in a terminally quaint village on the confluence of rivers and the Gulf coast of Florida,” Taylor said, swishing his shoulder-length, green-streaked hair. “Especially now, when the national psyche is totally depressed, and we live down the street from the gulf of poison.” My tall bony son could sound like a Gen X film.

  He had walked out of his room when he heard the screen door slam. Long blond hair and thin Indian face, eyes black as a quarter-moon night. Too smart for his own good. I wondered if the more intelligent the person, the more unhappy they could become. I hoped he’d outgrow teen gloom. I was learning to bite my tongue when he complained. He was, after all, seventeen. I hugged him and handed him the few staple groceries.