Strawman's Hammock Read online

  She turned absently to gather a rolling pin under the rank pit of one arm. A rolling pin. A hardwood cylinder fashioned to roll freely between lathed handles. She might have been making biscuits. That thought must have occurred.

  “Gonna make me some hoecakes after,” she declared. “You want some? Be good. Hoecake and mayhaw jelly. Pussome lead back in yo’ pencil.”

  His Spanish was slurred in reply. “(Mother of Jesus, protect me from this crazy woman. Make her hand quick. Heal me.)”

  She inspects him briefly.

  “Same girl?”

  The man nods silent assent to her reproach. And then—

  “(I kill her! I cut her fucking heart! Slit her guts!)”

  Hezikiah offers an uncomprehending smile to that threat. She sees before her a strong man, strong as a bull, barrel chested, thick forearms. A twist of muscle knots along the trapezoids that anchor his neck and shoulders.

  “Better start usin’ some kinda protection,” she counsels. And then she comes to him. Drags with a bare foot a stool before him, a milkstool, its cool, metal plane only slightly lower than the Mexican worker’s exposed crotch.

  “Wont some more whiskey?”

  “Sí,” he nods. “Andele! Andele!”

  She scoops up a jug from the floor with sudden dexterity. Offers it to him. He slurps the hooch down. Her nostrils flare to see his throat constrict with his stomach. He has an erection fully risen now.

  “Ain’t you somethin’?” She murmurs admiration.

  She takes the jug away, reaches for the rolling pin.

  “Next time use some protection,” she offers once more, pulling him hard and flat along the stool’s cool, metal pan.

  “Will this…? Be bad?” he gargles the question in English.

  She smiles. Reaches up to slip her unwashed rainment free. A bony shoulder thrusts from beneath that flimsy shroud. Then the remains of a breast, a dug dried hard and gnarled as a raisin.

  “Take it.”

  Her eyes shine wet and bright.

  “See who lets go first.”

  * * *

  A silver knife on a silver belly opened a black mullet stem to stern. A tall, vital woman cleaned the fish, raking its innards into a slop-sink braced with two-bys on a wide porch. A flight of gulls fluttered white as ashes across the face of a setting sun that settled into the Gulf of Mexico. She was bent at the waist, this woman at work, her bare back rippling sinuously with activity. The chill that surprised folks on the first of November had reverted by week’s end to temperatures fueled by the Gulf of Mexico.

  It was a sultry afternoon, an Indian summer’s day shot with humidity. Her skin caught the setting sun in a sheen of perspiration. Locals speculated too often regarding the etiology of that skin, its remarkable tone and color, rich as it was, a deep milk chocolate. The skin of a Nubian. Her hair was full of body, hard to tame. Black as a crow’s. A short row of metal tines pulled back those wiry strands like a handful of hemp to reveal a proud face. It was a tourist’s gift, the barrette, a comb of copper set in lapis lazuli.

  The mullet went immediately to ice in a tub filled with fish. You wanted mullet to stay sweet, you’d better not let him warm. Laura Anne hefted her aluminum tub onto a wide hip and banged through the steward’s door that led to the kitchen behind. Other restaurateurs would keep the mullet untaken by customers and refrigerate it for two, three more days or longer in an effort to avoid a loss of inventory and profit, but Laura Anne would rather buy sparingly and tell a customer, “Sorry, folks, we’re out,” than to give them a mullet gone stale.

  That kind of integrity, of course, was one of the several things that made folks drive to the coast from Lake City and Tallahasee or further to dine on hardwood plates at Laura Anne’s restaurant.

  The restaurant seated perhaps thirty tables around a central island and bar. A large, naked-beam interior was cooled with paddle fans and ten tons of air conditioning. Diners inside looked onto a wraparound verandah and patio that faced west to the Gulf of Mexico. The place was called, simply, “Ramona’s.” That designation derived from the diner’s first owner. Ramona Walker was a white woman, a staunch friend to Laura Anne and her husband, and also the victim of a brutal homicide. Laura Anne’s husband caught Ramona’s killer. Laura Anne rebuilt Ramona’s restaurant.

  But in her own image.

  The patio beyond the verandah was added, along with a wide, shaded boardwalk that extended out over the water. There were some changes inside, too. African American and Cajun recipes were added to the menu. Grits and crackers and jumbalai went well with seafood and steak. Bacon bits and green onions tasted good in hush puppies. But the biggest change in the restaurant was its personality. Ramona was a flirt, gregarious, voluptuous, and vulgar. Laura Anne was reserved, polite, and refined. Folks wondered how she’d get along with customers used to Ramona’s ready and provocative wit. What would Laura Anne bring that was distinctively hers to this place of community, this family-wide dining-in?

  What she brought was a piano.

  One of the first things Laura Anne hauled to the restaurant was her own, hard-earned instrument. It was a grand piano won just shy of Laura Anne’s twenty-first birthday in a competition sponsored at Emory University. Her formal background was in music education, and after Laura Anne’s family, the piano was still her first love. At first she reserved the instrument exclusively for herself, pausing from labor in the kitchen to simply relax or, occasionally, to entertain customers, opening the Steinway’s sounding board to the Gulf Coast to sounds never heard or imagined by the sunburned locals on Deacon Beach.

  These were erratic, solitary engagements. But then a pair of graduate students from the music department at Florida State came to Ramona’s looking for summer employment. There was the grand piano. Of course they might play, Laura Anne allowed. She had taught piano for years. She knew that this young man and woman would treat her instrument with respect. And so two job-seeking students became the first waiter and waitress to sit at Laura Anne’s coveted Steinway.

  Later that summer three more students came.

  Word got out that there was a place tucked away on a strip of coastline an hour from Tallahassee where you could eat and, with luck, hear a concert at the same time. Performances became numerous, if irregular. Locals were not, in truth, too much impressed with this change in ambiance, though they tolerated it well enough, knowing that Laura Anne loved her music, but for students seeking a summer gig, or for music aficionadoes seeking exotic fare, the combination of seaside food and uncertain concertos proved irresistible.

  Cellists and violinists brought their instruments to play alone or to accompany Laura Anne’s aproned pianists. Chamber music began to compete with country & western for the locals’ attention. There was still no schedule for these performances, of course, which brought an element of randomness or chance that outsiders found charming. The students, at first, simply performed during breaks from work, when the tables were bussed and the customers tended. Sometimes Laura Anne would join in. Only in recent months had something like scheduled performances taken its place on the menu beside mullet and red fish and the catch of the day. The musicians on these occasions did not wear aprons.

  Ramona’s was by now a resting place for professional instrumentalists. Concert pianists, lured by a helping of snapper and hush puppies, would consent after eating to provide an apertif of Rachmaninoff or Debussy. The restaurant once solely known for its excellent cuisine and service began to be lauded as a watering hole for a whole variety of performers, who passed the word, “If you’re ever in Florida…”

  Customers came from miles around to sample the food and to enjoy concertos beside the water. But they came back because of Laura Anne herself, to see the tall, athletic figure, the raven hair caught in its copper comb, the golden skin of a remarkable woman who served swamp cabbage and Mozart with equal alacrity.

  She was—a smile eased Barrett Raines’s tired and preoccupied face—the most beautiful and accomplishe
d wife a man could ever hope to have.

  Bear was waiting just inside the restaurant’s front entrance, a foyer linked to a door salvaged on one of Ramona’s saltwater adventures. WAIT TO BE SEATED—that directive was embossed on a laminated sign wired with Twist-Ems to a copper chain and anchored into a pulpit. Barrett waited patiently. He did not exempt himself from Laura Anne’s discipline. One of the employees was having fun at the piano. Show tunes. Bear thought he recognized something from Chorus Line. In a little less than ten minutes he faced a hostess over the pulpit.

  A young woman. Newcomer.

  “Be one this evening, sir?”

  “I’m hoping two.” What Barrett intended as a humorous rejoinder came out sharp.

  The hostess winced.

  “Would that be a table, sir? Or would you prefer to wait at the bar?”

  “Sorry. Bar’ll be fine. Can you get Laura Anne a message for me?”

  “Ms. Raines is in the kitchen, sir. It might be a while.”

  “No hurry. Just tell her Bear’s here.”

  “‘Bear,’ sir?” She seemed alarmed now.

  “It’s all right,” Barrett reassured the new employee with a smile. “She knows me.”

  * * *

  A few minutes later Laura Anne Raines joined her husband sans apron at a table near the bar.

  “Word has it you’re a little uptight.”

  “Sorry. Didn’t sleep well.”

  “Ah. The wearies?”

  He nodded.

  “Baby. You never liked camping.”

  She kissed him lightly. The spices she used to conjure her kitchen wonders lingered on her skin, in her hair. The smell.

  “Mmmm. Makes a man hungry.”

  “Try the snapper.”

  “Wasn’t thinking on food.”

  “You bad boy.” She nudged her bare foot against the instep of his shoe.

  “When you getting home?” he asked.

  “Oh, Bear, it won’t be ’til late.”

  “Thelma with the boys?”

  “Mmmhmm.”

  Thelma was related to Laura Anne. An aunt by marriage, childless. She had become indispensable. Laura Anne had tried, at first, when Bear was assigned in Tallahassee, to go it alone, juggling the twins and the restaurant by herself. School days she generally tried to take a break from three to five, to pick up the boys, get Ben and Tyndall settled with homework and good habits. But a restaurant, as anyone who’s run one knows, is damn near a day-long job. Laura Anne had to rush every morning to get her ten-year-olds off to school and still make it to “the store” in time to prepare lunch. A dash from work to pick up the boys at three, then back again by four to deal with everything from cranky cooks and irresponsible waitstaff to salesmen from Sysco and Alliant. Not to mention air conditioning, plumbing, linen supply—everything necessary to make things right for the evening diners who were Laura Anne’s bread and butter. It turned out to be a round-the-clock responsibility, which meant that someone had to be on tap to feed, comfort, and when necessary, cajole Ben and Tyndall.

  Barrett would love to have that job. His separation from his family while in Tallahassee drove him into a deep depression. He vowed never to accept that kind of isolation from Laura Anne and his sons again, even if it meant leaving law enforcement. The reason he had requested a transer from FDLE headquarters in Tallahassee to a field office in Suwannee County was so that he could be with his family during the week. Be a husband. Be a father.

  Things had improved. Live Oak was, nominally, closer to Deacon Beach than was Tallahassee. Still—Bear’s hour-long commute got him out of the house before the boys were fully awake, and rarely got him home before seven in the evening. Any arrest, snafu, gripe, or phone call could cancel a commitment to a school play or a ball game. A rare evening alone with Laura Anne. But the biggest problem that remained was how to tend the boys during afternoon and evening hours when both parents were away from home. There was nothing like day care in Deacon Beach.

  Barrett solved the problem. He bought a thirty-foot push-out trailer from a dealer in Valdosta, set that fifth-wheeler up with its own septic tank, phone, and power hookup on the backside of Laura Anne’s perennially productive garden, and gave Thelma the keys. It was a good arrangement. Aunt Thelma, for the first time in her life, had a place of her own. The trailer together with a modest salary compensated Laura Anne’s kin for looking after the boys from three in the afternoon until their parent’s return.

  “Haven’t forgot the party, have you?”

  “No, ma’am,” Barrett shook his head. Ben and Tyndall were counting the days until the celebration of their eleventh birthday. A big day for fifth graders. A day for family and friends. “I got Tyndall a football, and Benjamin the newest Harry Potter.”

  “Barrett. You keep that up, Tyndall won’t be reading at all.”

  “Just kidding, baby. Actually I got ’em both a ball and books. Same book, mind you. I don’t want them fighting.”

  “Wise man,” Laura Anne smiled. And then, more cautiously, “I invited Cory and Corrina. Hope you don’t mind.”

  “No,” Bear replied quickly. He knew he ought not to mind. Cory and Corrina were girls a little over a year apart, both younger than Ben and Tyndall. They were sired, if not fathered, by Barrett’s elder brother. The girls were orphans now, living in Dowling Park—one of the best facilities for that purpose, thank God, in the state.

  Barrett provided part of the cost for the girls’ care. It was not a sufficient emollient for the guilt of declining to raise the children himself, but Barrett knew that Cory and Corrina, through no fault of their own, needed structure and supervision that Barrett and Laura Anne could not provide.

  Or would not, Bear amended silently.

  That’s where the guilt came from.

  “One party won’t make ’em family,” he warned.

  “But leaving Cory and Corrina out, Bear—that would be cruel.”

  “Yes.” He shook his head. “Do I need to get ’em?”

  “Preacher will,” Laura Anne said. “He’s over on visitation that morning. Offered to bring the girls by. I can have Thelma take them back afterwards.”

  Barrett grunted. “Hell of a lot of logistics for a birthday party.”

  She sighed. “It does seem like you have to think ahead for everything.”

  And how much easier things would be, Barrett reflected as Laura Anne ordered snapper and steaks, if I got elected sheriff.

  The sheriff’s office at the county seat in Mayo was twenty-five minutes from Barrett’s Jim Walter home, a straight shot over a single strip of blacktop. Twenty-five minutes to commute. Even with the inevitable emergencies and unexpected interruptions that punctuated a lawman’s life, Barrett’s hours would be more regular as sheriff than they’d ever been in Bear’s law enforcement career. And he would have much more time at home. For the first time in four years he could half-ass count on being there at Tyndall’s Little League games, or at Ben’s piano recitals. Even more, he’d be well and truly back in the county of his childhood years, near to friends.

  And he’d be the boss. County sheriffs were by statute the chief law-enforcement officers in the state of Florida. In theory, the State Attorney General could fire a sitting sheriff, but absent massive proof of incompetence, prejudice, or criminal activity, that would never happen. Barrett, in fact, had no firsthand knowledge of a sheriff ever losing his job other than through election.

  The election, however, was its own downside. Job security was important. It would be hard to sell Laura Anne on the idea of an occupation that depended on the whim of white folks’ votes. A black man had never been elected sheriff in Lafayette County. A black man had never been elected to any office in Lafayette County. That was where Linton Loyd became very important. Barrett was certain he’d need Linton Loyd’s backing to win an election; what bothered him more was that he’d need Linton’s help to stay elected.

  “Got an idea,” he opened.

  “You usually do.”
/>
  “For a job.”

  “So do I,” she surprised him.

  “Come again?” Barrett delayed his own proposition.

  Laura Anne leaned forward. “I got an offer today. Informal. Some folks from Atlanta. They asked if I’d consider selling the restaurant.”

  Barrett sat back in his chair.

  “But—you’re doin’ so good, hon. We’re doin’ so good!”

  “Their opening offer was four hundred thousand dollars, Bear.”

  Four hundred thousand—?

  “… But after taxes, you’d be skinned,” he finally replied. “I mean, it sounds like a lot of money, but we got to plan on living for another twenty, thirty years at least. At least, I hope.”

  She smiled, “I know. I know. Still—you know what my margin of profit is here, Bear? Not profits. Just the margin.”

  “No.”

  “Something like eleven percent,” she replied. “That’s eleven pennies on every dollar earned. We sell Ramona’s for four hundred thousand, I figure we’ll wind up with a little over three hundred thousand cash. You take that money, put it in something sensible, maybe a mutual fund, you can make, what? Thirty thousand a year? Sometimes forty? That’s without a lick of work. And that’s based on their opening offer. They’ll pay more.”

  “How much more?”

  “Doesn’t it make sense to find out?”

  “I s’pose.” A flutter invaded Bear’s stomach.

  Laura Anne leaned forward eagerly. “They’re not just talking about a restaurant, Bear. These are businessmen. They see this whole area, the whole Beach, as a retreat for musicians and music lovers from all over. A community of jazz and classical and pop. Kind of like a Bourbon Street by the sea.”

  “It’s a nice dream.”

  “They ain’t talkin’ dreams.” She resorted to vernacular when roused. “And I think I’m worth a lot more than four hundred thousand dollars!”

  “’Course you are, hon. I didn’t mean that.”

  “Then what did you mean?” she replied sharply.

  Customers glanced in their direction. Barrett lowered his voice.

  “What would you do afterwards?” Barrett said. “I mean, if you gave up the business? While we’re throwing darts at the stock market. What would you want to be doing then?”