The Right Place At the Right Time

I just returned from a very busy few days in Colorado. Much, much happened. I am a member of a press association comprised of folks who write, edit, design and publish online and print magazines. The fact that the organization has 'evangelical' as the lead word in its moniker should not be construed to mean we have a connection with the National Association of Evangelicals. The Evangelical Press Association is a diverse and thoroughly professional group of thinking journalists who do not walk lock-step with any ideology or even each other.

I met many cerebral and artistic people who are genuinely thoughtful and well-rounded journalists. One such person is a published author who is on the board of a writers' conference which has been held in several locations in the southern US for many years. Cutting to the chase because I know I am losing you, she invited me to join the planning committee for the conference to be held in southeastern Tennessee in October. This would also mean that I would teach a workshop at that conference. I plan to write about the process. Stay tuned for those fascinating reads! Ha!

I saw Pike's Peak, which I might say should be renamed Majestic Peak, or Splendiferous Peak or OMG Peak or something that conveys more than an alliterative tribute to some long-dead wanderer. Any Zebulon Pike fans reading, I'm only joking. But it is so much more awesome than the name portends. Another place ol' Zeb discovered was the Royal Gorge, a thousand foot deep hole in the ground that has the world's highest suspension bridge traversing it. We went there on the day after the conference and had a great time. Sometime I'll tell you about falling flat on my face, but I have to screw up my courage to share that humiliating experience.

Chapter Seven

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“There’s no time like the pressure.” Tanjee quoted her grandmother’s made-up maxim as she rolled over and grabbed the steering wheel. She screamed. Her head throbbed and something was definitely wrong with her left arm. She pulled again, this time with only her right hand, and inched herself slowly into a sitting position. The pain and exertion left her gasping for breath. She sat for there a moment. Now, instead of lying in an uncomfortable ball she was crouching in an uncomfortable ball. She felt like a roly-poly bug sitting with its butt immersed in water. The sensation of nasty, cold water seeping into her pants disgusted her. And motivated her to keep moving.

She reached up to grab onto the center console but she couldn’t get the grip she needed. Her legs were beginning to burn from sitting all scrunched-up. Panic was making her angry. She took hold of the steering wheel with one hand and pushed up with the other on the back of her seat. She knew this was going to hurt but she clenched her teeth and heaved herself up. Screaming, pushing with both feet against the driver’s side window, she stood. Her head and shoulders cleared the broken window on the other side. She had never felt such a sense of accomplishment in her life.

Way off in the distance, a sound caught her attention. It was a vehicle approaching. Startled, she illogically yelled, “Hey!” and then muttered, “Stupid,” to herself. Not only would a car never hear her, Tanjee could not even see the road from where she was.  Horn, she thought. I’ll honk the horn. It’s worth a try. She reached with her foot and pressed on the center of the steering wheel. Nothing. She bore down with all her might and the horn gave a short little honk. She listened to see if she still heard the vehicle out there. It sounded closer. She grunted and kicked at the horn again. This time she held out one long, sustained note, a trumpet cry for help.  After about five seconds, her foot slipped and she yelped at the thought that she might fall back into the car. She was able to right herself quickly and get her foot back on the horn. She was afraid to stop to listen for the location of her would-be rescuer. She pressed down even harder. The horn continued to sound for what seemed like a comical eternity.

“Please. Oh please, please, please.” Tanjee finally picked up her foot and listened. Nothing. She realized that the car had passed. Or maybe, she reasoned, it had stopped and someone was making his way to help her right now. Even though she heard no movement in the head-high grass, she encouraged herself. “I’d better blow the horn as a directional signal, just in case.”  She held down the horn again. After a few seconds, she stopped to listen, then resumed. She held down the horn for about thirty seconds and then stopped and listened again, straining. All she heard were bugs buzzing and some type of creature making a low croaking sound. She hoped it wasn’t an alligator.

Tanjee’s ears strained for any remaining remnant, any tattered loose string of a sound wave from that long gone vehicle. 

Tanjee thought about the time she asked her grandmother if the only stories she knew were Gwich’in stories.

“Don’t you know any fairy tales? American fairy tales? Does every story have to have a polar bear or some old hunter in it?” Tanjee was 15 and Grandmother was still telling her native stories like Two Old Women and The Baby Boy Who Went to the Moon. But Tanjee had decided that those old stories and everything about being Athabascan was second rate. She didn’t like the old ways. She wanted to be American. Not Native American.

“Okee, I gotta story for you, T’Alee Ahshi’i. For some reason, when her grandmother used her Gwich’in name it was always with a slightly mocking tone. Tanjee was glad she didn’t use it much. Grandmother more often used one of the thousand nicknames she had for her.

“Yeah.  I gotta good ‘Merican story, Little Crow Bird. You listen, now. You challenge me…you gonna listen.”

Her grandmother started slow and deliberate, in that spooky voice she employed to tell all her stories. Tanjee held out little hope that this story would be any different.

“Once there was a beautiful princess, all alone and very lonely. Three times she thought she had found her Prince Charming, but each one rode away on their sled, uh, I mean their big horse. She knew in her heart that this was not the way it was supposed to be. She was a princess, after all, and all the princesses in the other villages…uh, kingdoms… were very, very, happy. After the third prince rode off on his big horse, the beautiful princess went to the wisest man in the kingdom, to ask how she could be happy.


‘Sir,’ she asked, ‘how can I be happy?’


Sir replied, ‘If you want to be happy, dear Princess, you must drink deeply from the river that flows by the Mountain of Wisdom. Wisdom's waters are free, but you must make the journey to find the river. Oh, and listen to my words, dear Princess. There will be things that happen on your long, long journey. Do not leave the path. Do not give up. Do not get distracted. When you feel yourself being drawn away from your journey, take out the little piece of paper which I have placed in the velvet bag I give you now. Read the words written there, and all will be well. Start your journey as soon as the sun comes up tomorrow.’


The princess left the next day for the Mountain of Wisdom. No sooner had she left the city, than a brightly dressed ‘Merican man with a painted face called to her from the side of the road. You know how she know he was a ‘Merican man? ‘Cause he had red hair. Lots of red, red hair. He called out to the lonely princess:


‘I heard that you were making a long journey, dear Princess. Why go all the way to the Mountain of Wisdom when what you really want is The Land of Happy Happiness? Come with me and I will show you the much easier way to travel to what you seek.’


The Princess dropped everything and ran to follow the red hair man. Forsaken was the velvet bag and its words of wisdom. The little piece of paper fluttered out. On it were these words: ‘Do not run off with the first Bozo you meet.’

She did not live happily ever after.”

Her grandmother looked at her with a satisfied expression.

“See, Muskrat, I know more than Gwich’in stories. And I know more than you think about a lot of things. Like, I know that you make giggly talk with those no good boys from Uptown. You listen to my story. Don’t settle for no Bozos. You gonna grow up and go to college and be somebody important. Marry a hardworking man. He will take you far away from this hell hole. Don’t settle for those losers. You don’t want my life, Muskrat.”

That year, winter was upon them before fall even got going good. Coal oil and wood were in high demand. The early changes had caught them all by surprise. They could all feel the familiar, bleak sadness creeping up on them before they were ready. Tanjee had written a poem about the unexpected, early cold. For some reason incongruous reason, standing with her head and shoulders poking out of her mangled car in a steamy, Florida field, the words of that poem blew through her mind:

It’s a helpless descent

Inescapable;

a familiar melancholy

In Autumn, the

leaves

do not fall

alone

The earth and everything in it

tilts, transitioning,   

forgetting warmth and light,

a hazy dream

Painted woods cackle

in carefree breezes
disrobing; no worry for weather

the messy forest floor, all russet and sienna 

And after,

naked and knobby trees croak out complaints

to the stone-cold silence


day follows day— 

An unrelenting ache

torments the sun-starved mind

with its need for flowers and blue sky 

And yet,

the ptarmigan and hare

anticipate the long, dead winter and

change

Inuit and Athabascan 

both know how to thrive

and sing in a frozen night

It can be done.

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Blaine wished his father had been an organized person. Big Carl had no office and did not trust anyone else to care for his “papers”. The entire house was strewn with “papers” - the remnants of 40 years of researching sermons, writing sermons and preaching sermons. The trail started at the front door and snaked its way through all seven rooms of the little clapboard house: piles of notes, outlines and ideas jotted down in spiral notebooks and on the backs of envelopes, dusty old commentaries, faded magazines. Add to this two or three thousand cassette tapes – at least one audio cassette tape of every sermon Big Carl had ever preached – and Blaine was overwhelmed.

The books and papers and paraphernalia covered every surface. They spilled out of cardboard boxes, overflowed bureau drawers and had infiltrated every out of the way place.  Blaine knew that the particular tape he was looking for was not going to be in a box labeled “Sermons: 1980-1985” It was going to be sandwiched about half-way down a messy stack of papers or in the back of a junk drawer or in a shoe box with the words “Children’s Church” written on the lid in black Sharpie. He had run across that actual shoe box a few years ago when he was looking for his daddy’s spare eyeglasses. In that box was nothing that could be considered useful for Children’s Church. But he did find the glasses there. Oh, well, Blaine thought. Better just suck it up and get to looking.

Big Carl had a reputation as two things: a great preacher and a horrible pack rat. Blaine knew he had to search this house using some sort of system. The monumental task of finding that one cassette tape was boggling his mind. He was convinced that looking through his father’s mess was akin to peering into the bowels of deep space. Blaine took a deep breath and exhaled his favorite Henry V / Star Trek VI quote, “Once more, unto the breach!”

He started with a raggedy cardboard box sitting near the front door. As he rummaged through its contents, he had a fervent wish for a pair of surgical gloves. Thick dust and dead bugs made it obvious that this box had been undisturbed for decades. “Which is exactly where the 30-year old stuff is going to be,” he muttered, while squinting to read the faded cover of an ancient piece of sheet music. No tapes in that box. He rifled through several other similar boxes nearby. No luck.

He moved on to a set of wooden shelves that lined the left side of the room. Each shelf was cluttered with cheap ceramic figurines and a hodge-podge of novelty items. “Gewgaws, knick-knacks, and dusty, tacky bric-a-brac,” Blaine muttered absentmindedly and then brightened. “Hey! That rhymed. Did I make that up?” Suddenly self-conscious that he was talking to himself, he continued searching in silence. Not every item brought back memories. His dad’s hoarding had escalated after Blaine left home. “He was not this bad back then…” Blaine’s voice trailed off as he realized he was talking to himself again. “Who cares?” He called out into the house, loudly, “There’s nobody here but me. Am I afraid I’ll think I’m crazy?” And then even louder, “Get over it, Blaine.”

His stomach gurgled. He looked at his watch: One thirty and he hadn’t eaten since early yesterday. He headed for the kitchen but paused for a moment wondering if it was okay to eat a dead man’s food. “Is there some societal taboo about this sort of thing?” He reasoned that his daddy had only been dead three days, so it was not like this was some abandoned house he just happened upon in the woods. The house still felt “lived in.”  Blaine was very aware that his thinking process was weird.

He went to the kitchen sink and washed his hands. “Clean hands, clean heart,” he recited as he dried them on a decorative towel that said, “God Bless Our Home.” The towel was unused but disgustingly stiff from years of hanging in a kitchen where the preparation of every meal involved the use of hot, spattering oil. He retrieved a box of Raisin Bran from the pantry and cautiously looked it over.  It wasn’t out of date so he moved on to the refrigerator. A quart of milk he found there also had a future expiration date. He smelled it just to be safe. He located a bowl and spoon and sat down at the kitchen table to eat. It made him sad that his father had lived in this mess. Alone. All these years.

Chapter Six

Tanjee knew that time was not on her side. It was not going to get any cooler. The uncomfortable, humid morning would soon ramp up into that hellish afternoon heat that she remembered from yesterday. She was determined to get out of the car before that happened. She heard her phone. She thrashed her head from side to side trying to find it. Panic helped her ignore the pain. She didn’t see the phone anywhere.

“Where is it, where is it?” she screamed to no one. “Oh God, help me!”

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Monday mornings were busy and predictable at the court house. Ms. Mini used Monday to run reports and order supplies. The town folk spent Monday easing into the week so they didn’t usually show up to pester Ms. Mini until Tuesday or Wednesday.  Methodical, systematic; Monday was a comfort to her. The rest of the week there would be people lined up waiting to ask their ignorant questions - some so stupid that she would laugh with the clerks later. “He wanted an easement on Rouse Road…Rouse Road!! Can you imagine?” And they’d laugh the way government workers laugh at the general public.

This particular Monday, she was about to run the J30 dash seven report, so it was 9:30.  Terry was on break and Carlene was on her fourth cup of coffee. Being in the only county in Florida with a negative population growth, Ms. Mini had never needed more than two clerks. And even if both of them were out sick, like that Tuesday nine years ago, it wasn’t a crisis. That day, Ms. Mini just left the back desk and worked the counter. Carlene came in on Wednesday with a red nose and a box of tissues and Ms Mini went back to her desk. No problem. So, on that current, methodically predictable Monday, it was a shock to Carlene and Ms. Mini that twelve people showed up within six or seven minutes of each other.

Hearing the conversations among the twelve, Ms Mini determined that, even stranger than the fact that they all arrived at once was that they were all there for the same reason. Each one needed a permit to replace one or more of the windows at their house. “What went on out there this weekend Mr. Shackelford?  I had heard that there were some windows broken out past Ona, but twelve of you? Were we invaded by the Russians or something? What does the Sheriff say about this?”

“That so and so,” (he actually said the words, “so and so”…Mr. Shackelford never cursed) “wouldn’t know a crime if it jumped up and bit him on the backside. Ella was at the house by herself Saturday night. I was already out at the dairy. She heard them windows break and called me. I told her to call the law. That skinny deputy, uh, you know, Margaret Peeler’s boy, came out and rummaged around for a few minutes. Then he got a call on the radio and had to go real quick like, without even helping her tape up them windows. When I got home I called Sheriff Hanchey and he said that he didn’t know what happened, that maybe sometimes old windows just break. Now what kind of blame fool thing is that to tell somebody what knows better?”

Mrs. Tipton spoke up in a frantic voice. “Yeah, when we realized that twelve of us had been vandalized all about the same time, it scared the bejesus out of me. I haven’t slept since Friday night. And nobody has given us no answers. Do you know anything, Ms. Mini?”

“No. Like I said, I heard that there was some kind of commotion out there Saturday night but I didn’t know…”  Her voice trailed off. She was not used to being out of the loop. She would call Dale Hanchey as soon as Terry got back from break. Right now she needed to help Carlene process permits.

Each person told their story as they came up to the counter. The details were puzzling. Rather than it being a succession of attacks, Ms. Mini figured out that they’d all been hit within two or three minutes of each other. Simultaneous attacks ruled out in her mind that it was one person or even a couple of carloads of rowdy teenagers. Ms. Mini knew that her brain would not rest until she could figure this thing out. She had to find out what the sheriff knew. She decided to pay him a little visit. But first she went back to her desk and scribbled down the details she had just been told.

Not one person had seen a rock or bullet holes or anything to explain what had actually broken the glass. No one had heard a vehicle before or after the windows broke. Mrs. Miller had two windows broken and the Shackelfords had three. Everyone else had only one window broken. As she was writing, Ms. Mini wished that she had asked the folks which windows were broken, which side of the house they were on, to see if there were any similarities. “Surely the sheriff would have that information,” she thought. Just that quick she also thought, “And he’d better not play dumb.” She knew she’d saved his butt too many times for him to hold out on her.

Mark and Connie Yancy had been asleep in the back part of the house. There had been insistent banging at front door until Dave stumbled to it, shirtless, with his hair all messed up. He was surprised, and a little embarrassed, when he saw Shirley Stevens standing there in her Sheriff’s Department uniform. She was a bailiff at the courthouse. She explained that she had been called out because of the number of dispatches they had received that night. She was a duly sworn officer, but had not been on a patrol call since she had spent one night in a squad car during her training. She asked Dave if he had any windows broken that night, he said no, she said thank you, be careful, and was on her way. By this time, Connie was up and asking just what the Sam Hill was going on. Dave relayed what Shirley had told him.

“Did you look around, Dave?” Connie said in that condescending way that always put a knot in his stomach.

“No, I didn’t.” Dave said this like a straight answer was all Connie was after. She let a couple of seconds pass.

“You think maybe we ought to, Dave?” The knot was tightening. He could tell she was irritated.

“I guess so.” Again, without moving.

“Tonight, Dave?”

“Well, yeah.”

Connie sighed that loud, exasperated sigh she used when she wanted to tell Dave he was an idiot without saying it.  She pushed past him and started turning on lights. It wasn’t long before they found the broken window.

“Call the Sheriff’s Department, Dave.” Connie was still using that voice.

Shirley returned to the Yancy house, examined the shattered window and made a report. There was no evidence to explain how the window was broken. Dave and Connie watched her drive away.

Connie looked at Dave.

“Are you going to tape up the window, Dave?”

“I guess so.” Motionless.

Connie sighed and went to get the duct tape.

Alma Sconyers lived alone. She was 93 and still did all her own cooking and housework, mainly because no one else could do it to suit her. Her children had hired a succession of housekeepers, but Alma had nitpicked about everything from how they dressed to how many times they shook out the toilet brush until, one by one, they all quit. Sure, being there alone, she had the occasional grease fire and once in awhile the vacuum cleaner was left running for a day or two, but mostly everything worked out fine.

Her 67 year old son, Tom, had come in to get her permit.

“Mama said for me to find out if the war has started.” He didn’t stop for an answer. “She’s convinced that the end of the world is around the corner, you know. She listens to some preacher from Arkansas on the Christian channel and he says Armageddon’s so close that you better use a credit card to make a donation ‘cause there might not be time for the United States Postal Service to get it to him.” Ms. Mini couldn’t tell if he was trying to be funny or just relaying information. After a beat, he said, deadpan, “I think we’re going to have to cut off her cable.”

He then proceeded to tell them a practically identical story to the one that the others had told. Ms. Mini was baffled. How could there be so many incidents and so little evidence? What could explain 12 windows being broken nearly simultaneously? She wasn’t going to bother calling Dale on the phone. She would walk the two blocks to his office to see him face to face. Man, she thought, I need a cigarette.

It was the ritual she missed. She couldn’t be convinced that it was the nicotine. No, it was definitely the ritual. It was always the same: First, she had to find a spot that was completely quiet and still. She had figured out years ago that she needed it quiet so that she could actually hear the slow, smooth scritch of the long, thin cigarette being pulled from the others. That sound was full of promise. It made her insides vibrate just a little, the anticipation. She knew a complete mood change was about to happen. The dry paper against her mouth, the irritating scraping of metal against metal as the lighter flame sprang to life, and that happy crackle as the paper and tobacco ignited. All of that was just prelude. It preceded the sweet, delicious rush of warm, smoky love that was that first draw. Every subsequent drag was just perfunctory. If she were not so frugal, she wouldn’t have taken more than three drags. Those were the best. She only finished each cigarette to not be wasteful. For thirty years.

 

And then three years ago, she quit. Cold turkey. No patch, no hypnosis, no pathetic fake cigarette. She stopped smoking and put that man out of her life on the same day. Done. No looking back. Well, except every once in awhile. Something would trigger her mind into remembering. Then she missed a cigarette something desperate.

She spent the ten minutes it took to walk to the Sheriff’s office thinking about a cigarette and the 12 houses involved in the strange happenings two nights ago. Most of the houses were standard country clapboard. Some were fifty years old. Some were older. The McKenzie’s house was built before the turn of the century. The 20^th century. Mini smiled. She was keeping her own inner dialogue straight with that last thought. After all, there had been another “turn of the century” in the recent history of that house. “Better watch it, old girl,” she said out loud. “People who argue with themselves get sent to Chattahoochee.”  She didn’t even know where Chattahoochee was or if it indeed had a mental institution. It was a threat she heard locals lob at each other jokingly. A colloquialism. Ms. Mini smiled again.

The squat, cinder block building that housed the Sheriff’s office was a welcome shelter from the morning’s heat. The inside was cool and smelled slightly of mildew. Of course, to Ms. Mini, most of the South smelled slightly of mildew. On her little jaunt to the sheriff’s office, Mini had envisioned officers scurrying about, phones ringing, and the Sheriff up to his eyeballs in charts, maps, APB’s, and mysterious men in dark suits. Surely he would have called in the FBI or some outside agency to get to the bottom of this thing.  The Clark County Sheriff’s Department had more calls that past Saturday night than it had in the three months prior. This was cause for some frenzied activity.

But as she rounded the corner at the end of the narrow hallway and walked into the small reception area, she was shocked to see Wanda Lee alone in the room. It was obvious that Wanda Lee was unoccupied as she hurriedly stuffed the emery board she had been using into her desk drawer. The only sound in the room was the drone of an ancient window unit air conditioner going full blast.

“Well, hey there, Ms. Mini. How’re you?” Wanda Lee drawled out the words with a slow, syrupy sweetness, high pitched and surprised, as if she had not just seen Ms. Mini earlier that morning at the Shop ‘N Go. She was a pleasant enough girl, with a just a handful of failings, in Ms. Mini’s estimation. Some were not even her fault. For instance, she could not help that she was hired for her bra size and big blond hair. Dale Hanchey was a sheriff with no pride.

“Well, hey back, Wanda Lee. Don’t you look nice? That shade of yellow is one of your colors, it really is.” Ms. Mini had learned long ago that in the Clyettville, you must begin each conversation with a compliment. No abrupt questions. It wasn’t their way. With that requirement met, she got down to business. “Is the Sheriff in?”

“Well, he was in and then he went out for a little while. I thought I heard him down the hall just before you came in. Did you see him out there?”

Wanda Lee had an irritating habit of not thinking things through. Ms. Mini fought the urge to be completely sarcastic and say, “Why, yes I did see him, Wanda Lee. I just thought I’d ask you anyway.” Ms. Mini didn’t say that. She lowered her eyes and responded very deliberately, in a tone she reserved for small children and the very elderly,

“Why, no I didn’t Wanda Lee. I guess that’s why I was looking for him in here.”

Ms Mini smiled a huge patronizing smile and waited a moment for it to sink into dear Wanda Lee’s big blond head. Wanda Lee started to giggle.

“Oh, Ms Mini, you’re so funny. I get it.” Giggle. “Duh. Of course you didn’t see him out there or you wouldn’t have asked me if he was in here.” More schoolgirl giggling. “You are so funny. You certainly got me there.”

“Can we page him, maybe? You know, just to see if he’s somewhere close by. I really need to talk to him.”

Wanda Lee was suddenly very serious. “Oh, Ms. Mini, I’m not supposed to page him unless it’s a matter of life or death emergency. Is this a matter of life or death emergency?”

Lord, bless the little nitwit’s heart, Ms. Mini thought to herself. She really does live in a special little nitwit world.

Ms. Mini wanted to say out loud, You know, Wanda Lee, we might soon have an  emergency that is a matter of your life or death, because in about five minutes I am going to put my strong, Western Pennsylvania hands around your little nitwit neck and choke the life out of you. But Ms. Mini didn’t say that, of course. Ms. Mini just smiled and said,

“No, Wanda Lee, it is not a matter of life or death emergency. Will you please tell him to call me when he gets in?”

“Of course, Ms. Mini…you have a wonderful day, now. Bye-bye.”

Ms. Mini just waved weakly and turned to leave. About that time, Terry called from the courthouse on the two-way radio.

“The Sheriff has called five times. He’s out at the Heinmiller place and wants you to meet him there.”

“What in the world does he want with me, Terry? What’s going on out there?”

Terry’s voice took on a conspiratorial tone. “I don’t know, Ms Mini. Maybe he just misses your smiling face,” Terry laughed like she knew something. The rumors about Ms. Mini and Sheriff Hanchey had been circulating for years. Mini just rolled her eyes and said nothing back.

When she got back to the courthouse she grabbed her purse and left immediately for Joe and Sue Heinmillers’ little farm. They lived about five miles the other side of Ona. It would take her 15 minutes to get out there. It took other people 30. Driving was a personal challenge to Ms. Mini. Each trip was a test; with goals to be set and records to be broken. She exchanged the Deep Purple CD in the player for Skynnard and put the pedal to the metal. 

When she got to the Heinmiller place, the Sheriff’s car was parked at the back of the house. Mini pulled her car beside the brown police cruiser and got out. She looked over the property to see if anyone was outside. A few cows dotted a small pasture near the house and beyond that was fifteen acres or so of their cash crop: prickly pear cactus. It was still jarring to see it there. It looked foreign, almost other-worldly. Florida farmland was supposed to be full of orange trees or strawberries or covered in cattle. The hard freezes of the early 90’s had ruined the family’s hundred year old citrus groves. Joe and Sue, and scores of other farmers, had been forced to become creative with the use of their land. An internet search had revealed a niche market for edible cactus. They made a small investment and worked the place mostly by themselves. They sold to restaurants, a couple of Mexican grocery stores and a small processing plant. They weren’t getting rich but it paid the bills.

Ms. Mini stepped to the screen door at the top of the back steps and called into the house, “Joe? Sue? It’s Mini. Is the Sheriff in there?”

Sue came to the door. Muscular and tan, she was dressed appropriately for Florida farm work: a sleeveless cotton shirt and khaki shorts. Her straight, blond hair was pulled back in a haphazard pony tail. Ms. Mini had known Sue all her life. Since she was an Albritton.  Sue had been a popular, hard-working girl in high school and then went off to the University of Florida to study Agricultural Science. She married Joe Heinmiller after graduation and they proceeded to work a farm and have four, stair-step children. Sue was a star softball player in a town where nearly every woman played. She ran a booth for her church at Pioneer Days and managed the winning team every year in the American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life. Sue Heinmiller had grown into a popular, hardworking woman. Ms. Mini liked her immensely.

“He’s around the other side of the house with Joe, Ms Mini,” Sue said, cheerily. “Boy, it’s a hot one, isn’t it? You want something to drink?”

Chapter Five

In Clark County, Florida, Tanjee opened her eyes and tried to process what she was looking at. Above her was something black and twisted and she could see the sky through it. She was lying curled up in an uncomfortable ball. For a moment, she considered that she might be dreaming. Shifting a little caused a bolt of pain to streak through her head and left side. As it started to subside, she mumbled, “Okay, definitely not dreaming,” She groaned. “And laying in something wet.” 

Slowly, she began to recognize the mangled mess above her. It was part of her car. Framing a far-away tableau of mid-morning sky was an asymmetrical opening where the passenger side window used to be.  She racked her brain for any recollection of an accident. Nothing. All of a sudden, a panicked thought formed in her mind. The wetness she felt under her might be blood.  She gingerly reached under herself to investigate. Water. She smelled it to make sure. Stagnant ditch water.

She felt the place where her head hurt the worst. There was a good-sized lump, but, again, no blood. Momentary relief was chased away by a couple of terrifying thoughts that came like a one–two punch: she could not get out of this car and she was not going to be rescued by chance. She knew she couldn’t get out of the car for two reasons. She was hurt and nothing is easy when you’re a big girl. Tanjee had always had what her grandmother called an Athabascan figure. Her short, round body was good for survival in the Arctic but everywhere else it made things difficult. She would not be able to pull herself out of that window opening.

She also feared she wouldn’t be rescued by a chance encounter with a random motorist because she was not hearing any vehicle noises. She had obviously run off the desolate road last night and was now injured and alone. 

Tanjee was scared. She was not equipped to deal with this. She had never been interested in roughing it or survival-type scenarios. She was not the hardy, “forge into the wilderness” type. She should have been. Her ancestors should have bequeathed to her some desire to strike out into the unknown with only a club and a sharp stick. She had heard those kinds of stories all her life. And she knew that the people who told those stories, the people who understood and could do such feats, would always take care of her. But now, there was no one else: no Grandmother, no Daddy, no Chief Billy, to take responsibility for her survival. It was up to her.

She didn’t even know where to start. She worried that she might injure herself further if she moved around too much. What was the alternative? Lay here until she was dehydrated and too weak to move? No, she definitely had to get herself out of this car. Where was her phone? In her dazed state she had overlooked the most obvious way that she could remedy her troubles. She could call for help. If she could find her phone. When she pushed herself up to look around, the world and everything in it started to spin. Another stab of pain went through her head. She eased herself down with a defeated sigh. A mixture of fear and anger overwhelmed her and she began to cry. Into her head popped Grandmother’s voice. “Hey, trahtrayll tsul, you stop that now.”

Tanjee cried even harder. That is exactly what Grandmother would have done—called her a crybaby. There was no crying around Grandmother. If she were in this predicament, she would not have wasted time crying. Grandmother was strong. She never complained about anything. Tanjee hiccupped. What kind of crap was that? Grandmother complained about a million things—just not the typical things. She never complained about the bitter weather or their ramshackle house or how poor they were. But she complained plenty about other stuff. The village council, for one. Daily. Grandmother would go on hour-long harangues about how the elders were always favoring the young, attractive, unwed mothers in their decisions about how to allocate tribal monies.

“Do they give one thought to the old, fat widows who have empty-gut grandchildren dropped like a sack at their unpainted doors? No, they do not. Do they ever think about those poor oonjit fishing around in their faded pocketbooks for a dollar? No, they do not. Those poor, old, fat widows trying to feed their kids’ kids. It’s a shame on our people.”

 Of course, Grandmother was the only old, fat widow caring for grandchildren in the village, but she never mentioned herself. These were phantom, old fat widows, with their phantom grandchildren.

 ----------------------------------------------------------

Three thousand miles away, Mark stopped spinning his pen on his desk and looked the yammering woman directly in the face.  He was desperately trying to remember her name. He hoped she couldn’t tell from his expression that he was several paragraphs behind. He was supposed to be following along in the colorful, informative brochure she had given him.  She was attractive and sufficiently animated in her delivery, but he just could not focus on what she was saying. He was still completely distracted by the nagging feeling that Blaine was in danger.

As soon as Ms. Blah Blah left, Mark picked up the phone and called Blaine. Voicemail. He started randomly pressing buttons. After 12 or 15 beeps, he laughed a fake laugh, a little too heartily, and started talking, loudly, “Hey, Blaine, you’re the Mensa candidate, figure out that text message. Ha! Seriously, Bradda, you’ve been on my mind for hours. I’m going off-grid at one and I was hoping to talk to you before that. Call me back. Hasta.”  As he put the phone down, Mark muttered to himself, “Voicemail. Sheesh. I'm an idiot.”

He had an hour’s drive to his one o’clock appointment, so he jumped up and hurried out of the office. Halfway to the golf course he reached for his phone and realized he had left it on his desk. There was no way he could go back to the church to get it; he was meeting his wealthiest church member. “I’m not making him wait,” Mark thought.  He would just deal with that uneasy feeling he got whenever he was without his phone. It was his connection to everything and everyone. “Crap,” Mark muttered.

“Crap!”  Blaine yelled as he groped for his phone. It had fallen into the floorboard. He had missed a call a few minutes ago and had been trying to get hold of it and drive at the same time. That missed call better be Tanjee, he thought. Saying she was all right, and sorry that she had left without saying goodbye, but she just couldn’t take the Cavalcade of Clyettville Coots any longer,  so she was driving back to Springfield and he was on his own. Or something like that. Yeah, she better apologize. He lunged one more time and knocked the phone further out of his reach. He growled through clenched teeth. Not only was he anxious to give her a piece of his mind for worrying him all night, now the intermittent “missed call” buzzing was just irritating him. He jerked the car from the road and slammed the gear shift into park.

“Come here, you little bugger,” Blaine groaned out the words as he stretched his full body length across the front of the car and into the floorboard. He retrieved the phone. Mark’s name was on the display.

Blaine had left the funeral home feeling disoriented. Staring at Mark’s name on his caller ID only added to his confusion. Mark? Had someone called Mark? Did he know about Big Carl? Over the course of the last couple of days Blaine had picked up the phone to call Mark but had changed his mind each time. He just did not know how to break it to him that Big Carl was dead.

Blaine was having trouble thinking straight. Funeral plans, autopsy reports, Mark, Wahneta, the nightmares, and in the middle of it all his worry for Tanjee kept resurfacing. He felt guilty that he couldn’t tell her the truth, but how could he? There were so many unanswered questions.  If he just had that tape. He was convinced that all the answers were on that tape. A while back, it had dawned on him that the origins of his theory had come from Big Carl himself. Blaine had tried to call him about it numerous times. After several days of no answers and no return phone calls, Blaine threw some clothes into a bag and left for Florida. On the drive down he sent Tanjee frequent text messages. She conveniently failed to inform him that, after the first one, she decided to follow him to Florida. He felt guilty about that, too.

Chapter Four

Los Angeles shifted into morning by merely rotating the cast of characters. The night people stumbled home as the day folks darted between them, rushing to work. The skyline was wrapped in the same nasty, gray housecoat of fetid smog it wore every day. Traffic was an unhealthy clot of every kind of vehicle jockeying for the last open inch of roadway, intermittently coagulating into a total, immobile blockage.  Mark Foster eyed the coffee sitting in his car’s cup holder as he drove down Van Nuys. He always regretted that he had ordered extra hot for the first few minutes. But the truth was, he enjoyed the little game he played with the coffee every morning. That first tentative sip could be so much perfection or it could leave a little reminder on his tongue that patience is a virtue. The numbness that the scalding drink inflicted would whisper to him all day that he had a secret morning ritual.

He kept it secret because it was so cliché. Now that every truck driver in Marin County went to Starbucks, carrying a giant, sleeved, cardboard cup was not the status symbol it had once been. He might as well have been drinking a can of Coke. But he was determined that he would not give those cretins in his Coral Canyon office the satisfaction of knowing that he had not moved on to something new. He had his reputation as a trendsetter to maintain. He would not be thought of as ordinary.  So he drank the hot Cinnamon Dolce Latte cautiously at first and then gulped down the rest as he pulled into the staff parking lot.

They already talked about him enough, in his opinion. For instance: the debate over his love life—it had gone on for years. The fact that he was approaching middle age and had never married was a bewilderment to their miniscule minds. Phone conversations they pretended not to hear, discussions about his lunch appointments, were all scrutinized for signs that he might be involved with some person. There were two camps: those who were absolutely certain he was gay and those just as convinced he was a player.  How did he know this? Someone from each camp would regularly tell on the other one. 


It irritated him that they could be so small-minded. The truth was that while he truly loved and admired women and genuinely enjoyed the company of most men, when it came to sexual attraction, he felt nothing. Nada. No tingling, no craving, no moment when his brain switched into “pursue and conquer” mode. To him, people were just people. Some of each gender were beautiful, some repulsive, some engaging, some dull. 

He sat in the parking lot playing with his keys - the secret, sleeved cup now stuffed under the seat. He had started to feel a peculiar knot in his stomach, like something was wrong, like he needed to call Blaine. He pushed the feeling away. He was late for staff meeting. He quickly made his way through the front offices to the conference room. “Good morning, folks,” he said to the array of people gathered there. “Good morning, Pastor,” three or four of them echoed back.

Chapter Three

Back in Clyettville, Blaine knew he had to shake himself out of the exhausted disbelief that was paralyzing him.  It was dangerous for him to stay in this stupor.  He had to mobilize his energy and get his head back in the game. Tanjee was right. This was a crazy, mixed-up mess. Tanjee… he realized it had been some time since he had seen her.  He remembered her leading him into this room, but that was a while ago. Where had she gotten off to?  He had to go out to Big Carl’s house and look through his papers, but he was definitely not going out there alone.  That old clapboard house was too scary in the dark.  He pushed himself up from the couch and went to look for Tanjee.

The town folk were all there, milling through the various rooms of the old two story house that had been Clyettville’s funeral home for the last 60 years.  When Blaine was in elementary school, the Coker family owned the funeral “parlor” and Mr. and Mrs. Coker and their five children lived upstairs. All five of those kids had a creepy look to them, in Blaine’s opinion. The sons tried to run the business when they grew up but they had married women who didn’t relish the idea of being undertakers’ wives. So, now one Coker boy was selling real estate and the other one drove to Lakeland every day to work in a warehouse.  A national mortuary chain bought the funeral home and turned the upstairs rooms into offices.

The mayor and entire City Council had turned out for Big Carl’s viewing, each with a disinterested spouse in tow.  A sense of propriety is strong in a small southern town and the expression on some faces made it clear that the only reason that some of them were there was so they would not be talked about for not being there.

“How ya holdin’ up, boy?” the mayor bellowed as he grabbed Blaine’s shoulder and gave it a little shake. Buddy Carlton was a caricature of a small town, southern politician.  He must have seen too many episodes of “The Dukes of Hazzard” as a child. Blaine could swear Buddy’s Southern accent had developed much more of a twang since he was elected.

“I’m holding up fine, Buddy.”  Blaine refused to call someone “Mayor” who was the booger eater of the third grade. “Have you seen the woman who came in with me? Short woman. Long black hair.”  The mayor broke into his best campaign smile. “Well, Blaine Roberts, have you finally brought a girl home to meet us?  We were starting to think you were going to carry this wild bachelor thing right into old age.  Men live longer who have a wife. Don’t you know that?” He poked Blaine in the arm.

Blaine fought the impulse to roll his eyes. “No, Buddy, I wasn’t aware of that. And she’s not a ‘girl.’ She’s a colleague who came into town to help me.  She was just here.”

A squeaky voice came from beside the mayor. “Um, I think I saw her leave about an hour ago.”  It was the mayor’s big-haired wife.  Buddy Carlton was such an imposing figure that Blaine had not even noticed that there was a woman standing next to him.

“Left? Out of the building or left, left?  Did you see which way she went?” 

Big Hair spoke again, “She drove away in a little black car. Towards 17.” 

Blaine felt a tiny panic start to tap at the back of his brain.  His thoughts began to race. Tanjee would be completely out of her element.  They had talked a lot about Wahneta, but surely, he thought, she wouldn’t go out there by herself.  Blaine knew, even as he was forming this thought, that it wasn’t true.  She absolutely would go out there by herself if she had the impulse to go.  Blaine hoped she hadn’t. Hoped she’d just gone for a ride to get away from these in-bred rednecks.

That thought made him look up at Buddy. “If you’ll excuse me...” Blaine’s voice trailed off as he reached into his pocket for his phone.

The mayor turned to his wife.  “Let’s go, Monteen.  See you tomorrow, Blaine.”  Mayor Buddy did a half-turn as he walked away.  “You need anything while you’re in town, you just call Ms. Mini, you hear?” Blaine nodded without looking up from his phone.

Minina Light was the mayor’s secretary. Everybody in Clyettville, especially Buddy Carlton, knew that Ms. Mini was the power behind the powerful in town.  She had served 10 administrations, managed five computer conversions and worked through and around the construction of three City Hall buildings. She was the one who confronted swindlers and reporters and corporate types who were up to no good.  She feared no one.

Ms. Mini went through each day like a very efficient Oklahoma tornado. No mayor ever considered replacing her. She could get more done before noon than the rest of them accomplished all month. She had single-handedly covered up more mayoral messes, personal and professional, than the townsfolk wanted to list. And they could list them. In great detail. Even though Ms. Mini took appropriate, masterful steps to undo the effects of the bad decisions, social gaffes and inappropriate dalliances the Mayor was always perpetrating, invariably, word still got around.  And Southern folk like it that way.  They want to know what’s going on, they want to have the inside scoop, they want to feel like there’s no proverbial wool being pulled over their metaphorical eyes.

There is also a belief in the South that it’s a good thing when someone covers up the failings of politicians. Cover-ups are all that stand between Good Southern Folk and total moral decay. You can’t just live life all out in the open. What would we be teaching our children? The communal consensus is this: “We understand that nobody’s perfect so we won’t run you out of town. But, by God, we’re not going to just act like what you did was okay. We are going to talk about you. But only behind your back, of course. Out in public, at the church picnic, Friday night at the football game, we’re all going to act like nobody knows a thing.”  So, yes indeed, there had to be someone responsible for the covering up. And Ms. Mini had been that person for decades. Ms. Mini had skills. Blaine decided that he would give her a call the day after tomorrow. He might need her help. Right now, he needed Tanjee to pick up her phone and answer his call.

Twenty miles from Wahneta, Tanjee’s purse started chirping. She fished out her phone and squinted to see who was calling.  Blaine. Well, it’s about time, she thought. Maybe they would finally have a conversation about the events of the last few days. Maybe she would finally get some answers. She intended to set him straight. She cleared her throat and looked down to press talk.   

Chapter Two

The little town of Wahneta is not mentioned in any vacation brochure. Rural, rusted-out and populated by folks without goals or gumption, towns like Wahneta dot the map in places the interstate highway system forgot. On the other side of Wahneta, is a dilapidated, World War II-era bombing range. Strafed with gullies and craters, the surface of the moon could not be more pock-marked or silent.  The only remaining structure on the barren stretch of land is a tiny, chrome and glass guard shack, standing comically alone.  Cracked, misshapen roads crisscross the landscape, going nowhere. Shocks of weeds poke through pushed up slabs of concrete. The abandoned acres go on for mile after ghostly mile. 

Tanjee had left the funeral home in Clyettville determined to find Wahneta and that bombing range. The chatter on the radio was only exacerbating the anxiety gnawing at the pit of her stomach.  She turned it off and rode through the night in silence.  She figured she was still about 60 miles from Wahneta. How did she end up on this country road, 3,000 miles from home?

She knew the answer. It was because she loved encyclopedias. Funk and Wagnall’s, World Book, Nave’s Topical Science, Encyclopedia Britannica; there were ten different sets in the house she grew up in. Her grandmother bought a new set every summer when the door-to-door salesmen made the rounds. The old woman must have believed that just owning encyclopedias would make Tanjee smart, because she certainly never encouraged her to actually read them. At nine years old Tanjee quite accidentally discovered that those encyclopedias were filled with people and places and information. From then on, she lived in them, devoured them; she read them like other girls read romance novels. Not that most of the girls in her village read at all, but she imagined that in other, not-so-bleak places were girls who read romance novels voraciously. Tanjee loved to imagine what people in other places did.

Years later, Tanjee made another discovery: the internet was just one ridiculously gigantic encyclopedia. She spent hours lost in its brain-nourishing corridors, researching whatever captured her attention:  Korean cooking, Slovak folk songs, the marriage customs in Iryan Jaya—it was all there. And it was on the internet, five years ago, that she ran into Blaine. Yes, encyclopedias were definitely to blame for the mess she was in.

Stirred from her thoughts by the light drizzle falling on her windshield, Tanjee flipped on the wipers. She let out a long, whiny “ewww” as greasy tracks of bug guts smeared across the glass.  All of a sudden, and quite illogically, those bugs reminded her of home. “Stop it,” she said to the homesick tears. She cleared her throat to regain her composure and turned the radio back on.  Strains of Haydn’s “L’incontro improvviso” were barely distinguishable through incredible static.  She attempted to find another classical station, but it quickly became apparent that Spanish and hard-core country music ruled the airwaves in this part of the world. “This is why people have iPods,” she muttered to herself as she snapped off the radio, returning to silence and her thoughts of Blaine.

Five years. It seemed hard to believe. Most of Tanjee’s internet “friendships” had not lasted this long. They usually ended because of what she called the “ick” factor. Something would be said, it could be a totally innocuous remark really, and Tanjee would get a sudden, icky feeling about the person. She knew it was small of her, but the “ick” factor had ended most of her relationships. Somehow, Blaine had avoided it. He and Tanjee had the perfect arrangement for maintaining an online relationship: they had several common interests and each had lots of unstructured time at work. They chatted several times a day. Their most avid common interest was the weather.

For a few years, Tanjee had frequented a site called weathernerds.com. It was populated mostly by amateur weather watchers and the occasional meteorology student. They posted pictures of things like interesting clouds, tornadoes, snow or hail. They gave updates about the weather in their particular area. The discussions were pleasant and low-key. After all, it was just the weather. Nothing confrontational. Until Blaine joined. He asked strange questions and espoused unusual theories. Tanjee often said that their initial conversation was just a taste of Blaine’s smorgasbord of crazy.  Halfway through, it got a little intense.

“Perhaps we could seriously discuss this, luvsclouds79, if you had any understanding of international law. There is a lot to consider. You can’t just schlep advanced technology into an underdeveloped, third-world country and not expect roadblocks.  And that’s not a metaphor. These places are so volatile that their first response will be to put up literal, heavily-armed, ROAD BLOCKS”

Tanjee rolled her eyes and thought, “Just say 'no' to Caps Lock, buddy.”  He continued on, unaware that she was not impressed. “Do you know anything about Tajikistan?” (“No.” she said this out loud to the screen.)  “A tribal chieftain runs each village from a concrete hut, the door of which is a horse blanket.” (“I like horses,” she said, followed by a giggle.)  “His goons point to the parts of any paperwork they don’t understand with the end of a Kalashnikov AKS-74 assault rifle the Russians left behind.” ("Left behind?" The mental image of a Russian’s left butt cheek made her giggle more.) “A project like I’m proposing could start an international incident.” (“Your megalomania could start an international incident.”) She was suddenly self-conscious about talking to herself. “Ok, I know that last remark isn’t funny, but what the heck, I’m talking to myself here.”)

Tanjee typed back, “I thought this was a meteorology site.  Why are you going all ‘conspiracy theory’ about the weather?” 

“Listen, Ms. Information,” Tanjee groaned at his attempt at humor but continued reading. “You don’t get it.  What I’m talking about has the potential to change the world. If we can know with one hundred percent accuracy what each day's weather is going to be, we will have the ability to circumvent its consequences.  That means no more unprepared communities ravaged by hurricanes, tornadoes, monsoons, or typhoons.  No drought, no crop failures, no mud slides, no rivers overrunning their banks.  Can you imagine?  Of course you can’t. The entire history of this planet has been shaped by the vagaries of wind and rain.  Every culture has a version of the same story: that the entire world was once destroyed by what?  Too much rain.  We’ve been at the mercy of weather and its effects throughout our entire human existence. It is no exaggeration to say that this will change the world. You want another ancient story? I’ve got one for you: A world where we can control the weather will be the Garden of Eden.”

Tanjee had felt a little niggling pain start in her temple.  She knew she could not take five more minutes of this.  There were plenty of other people to chat with, folks less bombastic than this guy.

“And less nutty,” Tanjee said out loud, extricating herself from her inner dialogue. The rain was starting to pelt the car a little more intensely.  She wished she had not started out on this escapade alone. She had come to Florida to help Blaine but he was tied up with that other mess now. Big Carl dying was definitely not part of the plan.  “Oh, Blaine. What have you dragged me into?” She exhaled the words wearily. The hypnotic swooshing of her tires on rain-soaked pavement was the only reply as she pressed on through the desolate countryside.