“You know what the most beautiful thing about gruntin’ is?” Cracker Bandit looked into the distance, the one filled with Ace bandages, wart remover, and hemorrhoid creams. Without waiting for them to answer, he said, “Go out there in the forest near Sopchoppy just around daybreak, when all is quiet in the world, and do yourself some gruntin’ and then fall still.” He cast his gaze directly upon Clarissa. “Know what you’ll hear?”
Mesmerized, Clarissa shook her head no.
“Hundreds of worms rising up through the earth, outta the darkness, into the dawn, and then their pearly, pale bodies moving through the reeds, the grasses, the wildflowers.” He paused and smiled at Clarissa, clarion and calm. “Ain’t no wonder Darwin called them the most important critter in the history of the world. Everything depends on them: their rising and falling and aerating and pooping.”
“Wow.” Clarissa had never known that a person could get so worked up over a worm. “I want to go one day.”
Cracker Bandit dropped his professorial-bleeding-into-evangelical facade and said smooth and slick, “Well, I’ll be happy to take you, little lady. You just say when.”
“Stop that, Chester.” Miss Lossie wagged a finger at him. “She is a married woman. For now, anyway.”
“Miss Lossie!”
The two women started laughing. Cracker Bandit shook his head in that way men have when utterly confounded by the opposite sex. He paid Miss Lossie with six crisp one-dollar bills, said, “Thank you, Miss Lossie. A pleasure as always,” tucked his wallet back into his shorts—an action that caused them to edge south again—pulled his shades down over his eyes, and headed for the door, his white fishing boots squeaking as he went. Before disappearing into the sweltering heat, he paused, the sunlight cradling him in a head-to-toe corolla, and said, “April. Next year. You and me, little lady, at the Worm Gruntin’ Festival.”
Clarissa laughed. “Sure thing,” she said. He headed out, and she took a long swig of her RC, embarrassed that she felt flushed from the attention. She was still drinking when Cracker Bandit stuck his head back in the store and asked, “That your Dodge sitting out here?”
She set down the RC. “I know; it needs a good washing. That’s where I’m headed next.”
“I don’t think you’ll be heading anywhere.” He held the door wide and swept one arm to welcome her hither.
“Chester, what on earth!” Miss Lossie said, shuttling Clarissa outside.
The heat hit Clarissa as if it were an entity, solid, angry, evil. It took her breath away. She looked at the truck; nothing registered.
Miss Lossie said, “Lord God, them boys done ice-picked your tires.”
Clarissa’s stomach lurched; she felt the old, familiar acidic tide of panic begin to surge. She walked the circumference of the truck. Each tire was as flat as an old cow’s tit. Freaking, fucking A. And forget four spares; she didn’t own even one. She reached into her jeans pocket for her phone and then stopped: No, I will not call my husband. I told you not to drive that thing! How come you’re so fowking stupid! She could hear his voice, spreading like mustard gas, coating the concave surface of her skull. The brake lights, the mirrors, the fuel gauge, the hazards, the blinkers, the door handle, and now this: four slashed tires. Freaking, fucking A indeed! She felt the muscles that tied her spine to her brain and belly curl and tighten. Her cells had turned into corpuscular vise grips. She kicked the tailgate; its rusted hinge gave way, and the gate fell off, landing by her feet on the oyster-shell drive. A tiny cloud of dust mushroomed.
Miss Lossie said, “Uh-oh.”
Cracker Bandit adjusted his sunglasses and looked away.
Clarissa, not knowing what else to do, gave up. The entire situation with the truck was too absurd for anger or words. She started laughing, laughed so hard that she could not breathe. As she held her sides and doubled over, she wondered if suffocation were an option. Here Lies Clarissa Burden, Who Died from Laughing. And because unhinged laughter is, like yawning, infectious, Miss Lossie and Cracker Bandit began with a few tentative giggles and then roared at full boil.
“Lord God, I have no idea why we’re laughing,” Miss Lossie said between guffaws.
“Me neither!” Cracker Bandit chortled, his voice high and nasally with mirth.
“Because,” Clarissa said, between hitch-kicking inhalations, “it’s not like it was a flipping Ferrari.” She wiped her eyes, and her words bubbled. “I think this piece-of-shit truck is finally done for. I should have just left it at the dump along with the rotten, festering garbage.”
Cracker Bandit kicked one of the tires, his face crinkled with laughter, and said in a nonhelpful manly way, “Yep, I’d say these suckers are good and flat.”
Like a song whose second verse no one could remember, amid the heat, their laughter slowly waned, until the three of them finally stood in silence, sweating, staring at the hobbled truck.
“Pitiful,” Miss Lossie said, breaking the quiet.
“A damn shame.” Cracker Bandit shook his head and closed his eyes, appearing to be all shook up, as if he had a personal relationship with the truck.
Clarissa gazed at the glimmering road, beyond words.
“Let’s go inside out of this heat and call the sheriff,” Miss Lossie said.
“We didn’t actually see the boys do it.” Clarissa picked up the tailgate and tossed it in the bed. It was surprisingly light. Piece of shit, she thought.
“Don’t need to. Those boys been messing up all over the county. Sheriff’s been wanting to nail them for a while.”
Cracker Bandit opened the door. As they shuttled back into the store, the gravity of the situation bore down on Clarissa. “How am I even going to get home?” She knew she could kiss Adams’s reading good-bye. And that her husband was going to have a grand time beating her up over this; it would be her fault, all her fault, because she was irresponsible and selfish and nonthinking. She could hear it now, even the way his Afrikaner vowels curled more thickly over his tongue when he got angry. But of greater concern was, How would she have any independence without wheels of her own? A death trap of a vehicle had been bad enough, but at least she knew if she really needed to get away from her husband and those naked women and his all-consuming disinterest, the truck would get her somewhere, if only to the closest gas station.
“Well,” Miss Lossie said, getting three cold RCs out of the cooler and handing one each to Clarissa and Cracker Bandit, “let’s just think on the bigger picture for a minute.”
“I can take you home,” Cracker Bandit said. “That’s no problem. If you don’t mind riding on the back of my Harley.”
Fear tiptoed up Clarissa’s spine. A one-eyed man on a Harley? She wanted to ask, “Isn’t that like double-dipping into danger?”
“Hold on. I’m thinking.” Miss Lossie held up her hand. She looked at Clarissa. “You got any money?”
“After I pay for lunch, maybe five dollars.”
“I mean in the bank.”
“I’ve got some in savings, but don’t tell anybody.” And then she thought she should explain that her husband spent pretty much every dime she made on antique maps of Africa that he kept in a safety deposit box, oil paints even though he worked in acrylics, limited-edition sneakers, French pornography (sex, she surmised, was a universal language), long-distance phone calls to someone in Europe whose name and gender he refused to reveal, three kilns—two of which he had never used—Tommy Hilfiger button-down shirts, a small batch of single-malt Scotch that he’d purchased from a broker in New York, real estate holdings (using her money, he had begun buying easements in hopes that he could flip them for exorbitant prices to developers), 1970s videocameras (he insisted their poor quality was perfect for his two-minute flicks), and an ever-mounting collection of military paraphernalia (medals awarded to some long-dead South African army general for a battle she could not pronounce was his latest acquisition), so in desperation she had started a secret account. Thus the need to hide her purse; it’s where she ke
pt the bankbook. But why tell them this? They didn’t know her husband. And why the burst of guilt? She flexed her hands; a desire to wring the necks of those ice-pick-wielding juvenile delinquents rippled through her.
Miss Lossie picked up the phone and dialed. “How much you got?”
“How much what?” Clarissa was lost, tied as she was to the fantasy of strangling the four delinquents.
“Money, child, money.”
“I don’t know.” Clarissa looked at Cracker Bandit, who put a sympathetic, long-fingered hand on her shoulder.
“Hello, Eva. This is Lossie Strawder.”
Clarissa pulled away, walked over to the door—acutely aware that his warmth had left an invisible imprint on her skin—and peered out. Actually, she did know; she had eighteen thousand dollars in her secret account. But there was no salvaging that truck. She did not want to buy new tires. She did not want to be stuck with a reclamation project. She wasn’t a grease monkey. Gears and pistons and the proper installation of rearview mirrors were absent from her gene pool. Why not do something proactive? Like burn the damn vehicle. She heard Miss Lossie exchange pleasantries with whoever this Eva was.
“Those Parker boys were up here at the store, acting the fool, and then they ice-picked one of my customer’s cars,” Miss Lossie said.
Clarissa turned around. Cracker Bandit held his palms up to the heavens, which Clarissa interpreted as his way of wringing his hands. “Like I said, I am more than happy to give you a lift home.”
She had to fight an urge to scream something totally rude and obnoxious, such as “Getting home isn’t the issue, asshole, even though I’m the jerk who brought it up!” But, electing prudence over irrationality, she simply ignored him and stared out the door into the blinding sunlight.
Miss Lossie tossed the phone on the counter. “The sheriff will be here in a few minutes,” she said. “Now, back to the real problem.”
“The real problem is,” Clarissa said, feeling the air go out of her just as if the boys had ice-picked her, “as crummy as that truck was, it was the one thing that let me pretend I had options.” She slumped into an overstuffed brown armchair in the corner.
“What do you mean?” Cracker Bandit asked.
“I mean, having a car is important. It’s…” Clarissa paused, watched a moth float over to a Dr Pepper sign. She didn’t dare look at anyone. “Has either of you been to Poor Spot Cemetery?”
“There’s no cemetery out there, child. Hasn’t been for years.”
How could she tell Miss Lossie that wasn’t true? That it held the souls of women and children who’d suffered wrongs never rectified? “A car,” she started again, “is freedom. You know? How do you get away if you don’t have wheels?”
“What kind of credit you got?” Cracker Bandit positioned his sunglasses back on top of his head, and Clarissa—for a split second—mused he had an invisible working pair of eyes up there.
“My credit is just fine.”
“Then why are you driving that piece of junk?” Miss Lossie asked.
“I guess…” Clarissa watched the moth float over to canned goods. “Well, I guess I was waiting for my husband to fix it or get me something new. Even though he is a kept man.” She rolled her eyes. “How pathetic is that?”
Cracker Bandit rubbed his forehead and said, “Little lady, it ain’t pathetic at all. You’re just being a good wife.”
“The hell she is,” Miss Lossie said. “As if you, a man who’s never been married, would know a good wife from a varmint. You and all your card playing makes you blinder than that bad eye does.”
“Let’s not go there.” Cracker Bandit held up a hand, stopping the flow of potentially hurtful words.
Miss Lossie jabbed her head toward Clarissa. “It’s called being a human doormat.”
Cracker Bandit shrugged, as if conceding the point, and then Miss Lossie aimed her wisdom at Clarissa. “Child, it’s your money, your life. You’ve got to take care of you. Nobody else is going to do that.”
“But it’s still the two of us making the decisions.” Clarissa put her head in her hands. “I can’t go off on my own and do anything I want.”
“Clarissa,” Miss Lossie said, “how many times have you told him the truck needed to be fixed?”
Clarissa stared down the shadowy tunnel of the dry goods aisle. “More than I can count. I’ve been asking since we moved here.”
“You asked. He didn’t do squat. Now what do you think you should do?”
Clarissa looked at Miss Lossie, six-time Worm Gruntin’ Queen. She thought about what she’d learned that day about Sopchoppy earthworms. An image of twelve tiny hearts beating side by side in two vertical lines floated through her consciousness, effortlessly, like the moth that was lighting on a box of Borax. Maybe that’s what she needed—the constitution of a Sopchoppy earthworm, wiggling through her own private, subterranean labyrinth, unseen but worthy, propelled by a dozen angel-dancing hearts. If she were an earthworm, she’d have spares: no tires, but spare hearts. She looked at Cracker Bandit and wondered why he didn’t have anything better to do but stand around in a general store. Maybe it was his day off and he was doing exactly as his single, one-and-forever-only heart desired. Oh, to hell with hearts. She erased the earthworm from her mind. What she needed was courage. And a plan. As is sometimes the case with life—especially one in crisis—as soon as the word plan wafted through her brain, a solution—simple and pure—took root. If she verbalized what she suddenly knew, she felt certain there would be no going back. Sitting in that general store, drowning in a torrent of informed despair, mulling over the merits of her still hatching plan, she again considered what life would be like atop the Sears Tower, the earth obscured by cold white clouds.
“What I need to do,” she said, her steady voice having nothing in common with her jitterbug brain, “is… is…” She watched the moth take to the air.
“Say it,” Cracker Bandit said.
“That’s right. Come on.” Miss Lossie and Cracker Bandit trapped her in their mutual gaze.
“What I need to do…” She started over and felt her face and hands go clammy, as if—body part by body part—panic were slowly curdling her. “Is go buy myself a car.”
“Bingo!” Cracker Bandit punched the air with his fist. Clarissa was certain his crack was showing, so she looked away. In her tender state of sexual deprivation, no sight—however base—was immune from catapulting her into arousal.
“Now you’re talking with some good sense.” Miss Lossie nodded her approval. “Good sense!”
Brow creased, grim-lipped, she appeared but did not feel determined. “And I’m not going to care what he thinks about it.”
The moth floated out of dry goods, came within an eighth of an inch of getting tangled in Clarissa’s hair, and then lit on the back of her chair. She did not notice. In her mind, she had made it to the edge. “Do you think that’s a good idea? I mean, really, do you?”
She looked downward, into the clouds, knowing their answers didn’t matter, knowing she had no choice. Before Miss Lossie or Cracker Bandit could respond, she jumped. In her soul, she saw the Sears Tower fall away. The air was brilliant. Brilliant and cold.
After the sheriff took her statement, lectured her over the condition of the truck (“If I’d seen you on the highway in that thing, I’d have been obliged to ticket you, miss”), and had her sign various police-related documents, none of which she paid much attention to because her mind was locked down in a state of free fall, Cracker Bandit perched her on his Harley and drove her to the nearest car lot.
But first, Miss Lossie sent Clarissa into the kitchen with a bar of soap. “Child, you have got to wash some of that stink off before you go out in public.”
Clarissa did as she was told. Using an old kitchen towel, she scrubbed her arms and belly and legs and face and neck and did not stop until her skin bore fewer traces of garbage and grave.
When she returned to the store’s inner sanctum, just as sh
e was about to say, “Well, I guess we should get going,” Cracker Bandit, who was leaning on the counter, much of his left butt cheek exposed, said, “Ma’am, I have a proposition for you.”
She eyed him, steely, wanting to say, “For the love of God, pull up your pants!” But instead she offered a careful, “What?”
“I’ll give you five hundred dollars cash right now for that truck sitting out there on four flat tires.”
“You’re joking, right?” Clarissa scrunched her face, stayed steady by grabbing the counter with one hand, and dismissed the offer as his sorry attempt at humor.
“Nu-uh,” Miss Lossie said. “Chester does not joke. Not at cards, not at life.”
“That’s right. I don’t. At least not where vehicles are concerned.”
Three moles dotted the skin just to the left of his navel: a tiny crescent moon. Her pelvis suddenly crackled with warmth, burnished as it were by the notion of a man’s pigment forming a celestial body. Clarissa damned her libido. “But it’s not worth five hundred.”
“It is to me.”
He was serious; she could tell that by the steady bead he had on her. His blue eye was pretty—the deep blue of a storm-scrubbed sky—and his white eye wasn’t so bad, either, Clarissa decided, well aware that her mind’s wheels weren’t on the track. “I think it’s in both our names, my husband’s and mine.”
“Don’t matter. You can still sell it to me. You don’t need his permission.” Cracker Bandit blinked one time, slowly.
I don’t need his permission? This was becoming the theme du jour, although every time it reared its independent head, she was startled.
“You can just leave it here overnight. Can she just leave it here overnight?” he asked Miss Lossie without taking his eye off Clarissa.
“Of course she can.” Miss Lossie moved a stool to the counter and sat down with an exhausted sigh. “She can leave it here all week for all I care.”
“So, we go buy you a car and tomorrow you meet me back here and we’ll do the paperwork. In the meantime…” He paused, pulled out his wallet—an action that this time had no effect on the precarious position of his shorts—opened it, removed five one-hundred-dollar bills that were so pristine Clarissa wondered if they were real, and placed them in her palm. “So you know I mean it.”