He nodded his head in the direction of a tree that was taller than the house, and Clarissa detected movement in his woolly hair: more ants. “That water oak, there? Needs to come down. It’s rotten on the inside. I can take her down for you. It’s what I do.”
Clarissa looked at the tree. It seemed fine to her. “How do you know?”
He tapped the side of his nose. “I can smell it.” He flashed her that bright smile again and winked. This guy was giving her the heebie-jeebies. “In fact, you got a world of trouble in the tree department. At least half a dozen are close to dead. Water oaks do that, rot from the inside out. And that big feller you got back there, the live oak? That sucker is sick. I don’t know who or what has been gnawing on it, but that’s one embattled tree.” He shook his head, and his certitude, Clarissa decided, made him appear arrogant. She could not have known that he looked that way—all full of himself—when he wasn’t telling the entire truth.
“How do you know about the tree in the back?” Clarissa set the bucket of roses by her feet, just in case she had to run.
“I get around. Walk a lot. And like I said”—he tapped his nose again—“I specialize in putrefaction. I guess you could say it’s a blessing and a curse.” He paused as if he expected her to say something, but she was, in fact, speechless. “The issue is”—he adjusted the coil of rope, draping it over his shoulder, and Clarissa wondered how on earth a one-armed man could climb a tree, much less take one down—“that there water oak will succumb to a hard wind or a heavy rain, and there ain’t no guarantees it will get blowed on your fence instead of your house.”
This was a hard sell. No gleaming smile now; his spooky green eyes darkened, and his narrow face reflected impassive concern.
Clarissa feared, even though she didn’t like the guy, that he was right. “You’ll need to come back and talk to my husband.” Not wanting him to think she was home alone, she added, “He’s here, but he’s busy.”
“Oh, I’ve already talked to him.” The smile was back. “I stopped by yesterday and took a good hard look at just about everything.”
Clarissa literally felt her jaw drop. “Well, then, why are you asking me?” He must have come by when she was at the grocery store, and Iggy hadn’t bothered to tell her.
“I need permission from the lady of the house. That’s what your husband said. Well, sort of. I’ll be by tomorrow to get some of the weight off the big’un in the back, but he wanted me to talk to you about them others. Evidently”—he winked again—“you control the purse strings.”
Clarissa was pissed. “I don’t want you touching that sentinel oak.”
“Lady, it’s too heavy. You gotta shore it up or it’s gonna drop.”
Clarissa didn’t know if the guy knew what he was talking about or not, but she hated being railroaded. “No one touches the tree.”
He shrugged, wrapped his fingers with those long nails around the rope as if he were caressing a lock of his own hair. “Ma’am, sounds like you’re the one who needs to talk to your husband. You have a good day.” And with that, his dazzling smile lighting his sharp-angled face, he walked away in the same direction Carl had gone.
An urge to cuss out the little two-pint, one-armed jackass surged through her, but Clarissa rarely lost her surface cool. Only below, in the deep and strange recesses of her mind, did she kick and holler. She walked to the gate and watched.
He seemed in no hurry. He ambled down the road with good posture, grace even, despite the missing limb.
What Clarissa could not see and did not know was that the precocious angel named Larry Dibble had to force himself not to laugh out loud. He knew he’d gotten her goat and gotten it good.
Between the heat and the tree cutter, Clarissa was just about ready to faint. She looked at the rose bucket. She’d cut fifteen stems before being sidetracked by first the music and then that Dibble fellow, and that would have to do. But before she reached the top step, pail in one hand, shears in another, gloves stuffed in her back pocket, she heard a car engine and looked up to see a red Camaro pulling into her drive. Behind the steering wheel sat a pretty young blonde. Now what? Clarissa stood on the steps and waited for the woman to get out of the car. She was leggy and wore a thin cotton dress that covered only about an inch of thigh. A slim gold bracelet encircled her wrist.
“Can I help you?” Clarissa tried to keep the acid out of her voice.
“Hi!” the woman-child said with what Clarissa deemed was inappropriate enthusiasm. Her voice was squeaky, high-pitched, and Clarissa wondered if this was her real voice or something she had adopted. “Are you Iggy’s housekeeper?”
“Housekeeper?” Clarissa reeled. What on earth was this person thinking? Housekeeper! She hugged the bucket close to her body—a shield. “No, no, I’m not.”
The woman-child giggled. “Well, is he here? I’m modeling for him.”
This, evidently, was a great honor. How much talent did it take to stand around naked? “Yeah, just go around the back. He’s out there.”
“Cool! See ya!” She turned on her thin little sandals and headed to the backyard. “Iggy! Where are you?”
Clarissa barreled into the house. She didn’t have time to be upset; she had roses to trim, a vase to stuff. Housekeeper indeed! As the screen door banged behind her, she caught a glimpse of herself in the pier mirror that faced the base of the stairs. Her face was smudged with dirt. Her hair was coming out of the ponytail. Her T-shirt was torn and filthy. Her arms were scratched and bleeding from the thorns. She looked absolutely mad. The Mad Woman of Hope. Nice title. She’d clean up later.
In the kitchen, she ran water into the sink and tossed in a tray of ice cubes. She transferred the roses, a stem at a time, into the water. She refused to look outside, but she sure could hear them out there, giggling, chatting. “Oh yeah, perfect. Put your arm around her…. Good. Good. Mind if I shoot some video later? The two of you, ya know, sexy play, a little edgy.”
Again the giggling girls and then the insistence by one of them that they move their little party: “I’d love it! But can we do it at my place? I’m just dying to show you my new apartment. You promised me last week you’d come by.”
Clarissa’s gaze drifted over to the wall where her knives, on a magnetic strip, gleamed. Should she kill just him or all three of them? Before she could decide, her mind faded to black and she found herself wading waist-deep in a particular spousal death episode that would normally, in summer, fall, winter, and spring, tear her from whatever swamp-bottomed novel she was trying to write (she’d once abandoned a novel called Breathing Room—a coming-of-age tale with a protagonist who was a budding sculptress who, to everyone’s dismay, gave up her art and joined the Sisters of Mercy—for Dimitri’s Big Day, an inane little number about a five-foot-two Russian spy who meets the love of his life on Match.com, ick). Seated at her cluttered desk in her cluttered studio in front of a computer that droned like a buzz saw when kept on for more than three hours, she, above the hard drive’s din, would find herself rustled from the uninspired sentences that collided and split like a road map composed exclusively of dead ends by the even louder drone of the John Deere riding mower, which was, it seemed to Clarissa, one of her husband’s most prized possessions.
Except today he wasn’t on the mower—he was out in the garden communing with a couple of naked bimbos. So why was she descending into John Deere episode three? Was she getting sicker? Closer to actually killing him?
She didn’t know. All that seemed certain was that other than pursuing—for art purposes only, of course—women who couldn’t seem to keep their clothes on, Iggy divided his time between surfing the Internet and mowing their gentleman’s farm, which lay fifty-seven miles east of Tallahassee (Florida’s capital and, oddly enough, a town riddled with hills and rises). On a normal day, Clarissa would look up from the computer screen and spy him as he headed into the pecan grove. Out of habit, she would hit the save command (was there a limit to the number of blank pages she could s
ave? she really wanted to know) and then watch him grow smaller and smaller until he eventually disappeared into the grove’s shadowed world of leaf mold, wood rot, vermin, and snakes.
But this day was not normal. It was the solstice, and Clarissa was becoming undone, and though she was unaware of this fact, there were spirits afoot. It didn’t take much for her to snap. So she wasn’t in her studio and the computer wasn’t buzzing and the John Deere wasn’t droning. She was simply standing in her kitchen, annoyed, envisioning episode three, blow by delicious blow. She adjusted the TV set in her brain and watched the star of the show putter into the distance on his beloved John Deere. The sound track switched from happy-go-lucky to something out of a Vincent Price horror flick, signaling that violence, capricious or otherwise, was imminent. If there had been a bowl of popcorn handy, Clarissa might have actually enjoyed a fistful as she watched her husband remove his ball cap and swipe sweat off his brow with a forearm glistening with yard grime. She studied his face—how sweat-drenched, hollow-cheeked, and Dutch it appeared. She knew he was desirous of a beer and, therefore, not concentrating on the mechanics, however dull, of safely operating a riding mower. This was a shame, really, because just as with the Civic and eighteen-wheeler episode, all it took for tragedy to strike was one or two seconds of preoccupation.
As her husband fiddled with seating the hat back onto his head (for some reason, this required both hands), the John Deere hit a stump. The impact was of such force that he—having had both hands on his ball cap—went flying as if he were a gigantic rag doll tossed by a petulant and unusually strong child. Airborne, his big face collapsed into a puzzle composed of O’s: the widened eyes, the opened mouth, the nostrils stretched from oblong to round. And then everything—his mouth, his eyes, and for a nanosecond his nostrils—slammed shut as he landed ka-lump! on a snag of fallen branches.
He was unconscious but breathing, and for a moment Clarissa decided he had a chance. But then, in a sick, implausible turn of events, the mower vibrated off of the accident-wreaking stump, kicked itself into forward motion, and headed straight at him. The mower blades were so sharp, so coldhearted in their efficiency, that her husband never had a chance. Nevertheless, Clarissa imagined herself running into the yard, cell phone in hand, dialing 911 even as she performed CPR on his mangled body, even as the John Deere puttered into the distance, coming to rest beneath the soft shade of a dogwood stand, the tattered remains of her husband’s T-shirt trailing like a humongous rattail in the soft gray dirt.
Clarissa reached for a rose, clipped an inch off the end, and shuddered as she thought of the media coverage. News of the freak accident would become fodder for such FOX television hits as At Large with Geraldo Rivera. Stories would be printed in newspapers as far away as Miami: AUTHOR’S SPOUSE KILLED IN TRAGIC MOWING MISHAP. If things got heated enough, consumer advocates nationwide would call for a congressional hearing to look into the safety of all riding mowers, John Deere and otherwise, and the thought of having to get on a plane and fly to D.C. and testify before a panel of well-heeled, oily-palmed politicians terrified the bejesus out of her.
The ringing phone pulled Clarissa out of her grim reverie. She was of no mind to talk to anybody. But being a naturally curious woman, she checked the caller ID. Well, what do you know! Leo Adams. A terrific young writer—published thus far in regional presses, but she felt confident that would change—he’d become friends with Clarissa when he took a workshop she’d taught in Atlanta. She’d been drawn to him immediately. But who wouldn’t be? He was easygoing, funny, smart, and self-effacing, not to mention sexy. And they were, as he’d told her the last time she’d seen him (was it Santa Fe or Portland? she couldn’t remember), simpatico (his word). They were at a hotel bar and had removed themselves from a clot of other writers. He’d slipped what she’d decided was a brotherly arm around her shoulders and said, “You and me, baby, we’re what they call simpatico,” and she had thought, Oh, if you were a little older and I were a whole lot less married.
She grabbed the phone. “Hey. Adams!”
“How’d you know it was me?”
“The miracle of cell phone technology, silly.” She laughed and fiddled with the roses. “What’re you doing?”
“Actually, I just gassed up in Cocoa and I’m heading your way.”
“Really.” She gazed up at her ceiling and watched a housefly walk upside down as if he were Fred Astaire in Royal Wedding. (The fly was happy that she was back and smellier than ever.) “Business? Pleasure?” She hoped she didn’t sound eager. The last thing she wanted was for him to think she was coming on to him. She must have had ten years on the little hunk of burning love and hadn’t heard from him since he’d drunk-dialed her on her birthday three months prior. Her reptilian brain lit up, red and pulsing, and reminded her that she was married to a man who had sixteen years on her.
“I’m doing a reading tonight in Tallahassee. At the library downtown. Can you make it?”
She paused and hated the fact that she suddenly felt so hopeful. There was no way she’d ever have an affair, not ever. And then she heard herself say, “Absolutely. Need a place to crash? We’ve got plenty of room.” She squeezed shut her eyes. Fuck, why did she have to go there—the whole “place to crash” thing—especially so fast?
Clarissa heard Green Day on his car stereo: “He steals the image in her kiss / From her heart’s apocalypse…” “Cutie-pie, I’d love to, but they’re putting me up at some fancy B and B close to the shindig.”
“Oooo, big-time! Who’s the sponsor?” Clarissa walked into the chandelier room, as she liked to call it, sat on her third step, and gazed out her screen door at the sky.
“I dunno, darling. A bunch of well-meaning old ladies, I think.”
“I’m sure you’ll charm them.”
“Yeah. Well. The theme is something about up-and-comers. That would be me.”
“Not for long. You mark my words.” Clarissa was surprised at how airy her voice sounded, especially given the snit she’d been in much of the morning.
“I’m only doing it because I need to get used to standing in front of people and reading my shit. And, well, I thought I might get to see you.”
“Aw. Aren’t you sweet! And everyone thinks you’re such a hard-ass.” She watched a blue jay dart by and wondered why the sound of Adams’s voice made her dangerously happy.
Sounding like a chorus composed of Peggy Lee clones, her ovarian shadow women rose up in unision: “Fever! Fever in the morning…”
Clarissa silently finished it for them: Fever all through the night.
“So, drinks first? Say about six?” She heard a horn honk and then Adams yell, “Jerk, stay in your own lane!”
“Perfect. Just call me when you get in.” She wiggled her toes. They looked great; she’d polished them the night before. Ten sexy beauties. Harlot red—her nickname for Chanel’s deepest red lacquer. She wondered if Iggy would want to go. Did she want him to? Why did she feel as if she were stepping into a matrimonial foul zone?
“Later, baby,” Adams said. “Traffic’s bad.” And he was gone.
She stared at the phone. Wow, he’d called her baby. And darling. And cutie-pie. She knew the terms of endearment were a manifestation of Adams’s machismo and were not personal. Still, she couldn’t help but smile head to toe. Sometimes, she thought, rising to her feet, a girl just needed to feel appreciated.
Brimming with what she thought was undeserved happiness, she stretched her arms over her head, yawned (the heat was making her drowsy), and told herself that she really ought to try to write that day. But then again, without a plot what was she supposed to do? Adams probably never experienced writer’s block. At least not for more than a day or so. He was probably one of those charmed writers—the kind who write Nobel Prize–winning shit wearing blindfolds and earmuffs. A bad-boy poet in a prose writer’s disguise. Who knew? Maybe word anemia was a fatal condition. Here Lies Clarissa Burden, a Good Woman Who Died of Writer’s Block.
She walked across the room to the thermostat and turned on the air. She shut the front door and then paused to wipe off a cobweb that had gathered—an elfin cloud—on the bottom right corner of a nearly four-foot-long shadow box that dominated the entry wall. It housed Iggy’s pride and joy: a rifle. Allegedly, an ancestor in the 1838 Battle of Blood River had used it to great effect. The Boers massacred three thousand Zulu warriors; only three of the white men were slightly wounded. Iggy had special-ordered the shadow box from Pretoria. It was, Clarissa admitted, beautiful, hand-carved from pink ivory wood, one of the world’s rarest woods and native to South Africa. But it was also sacred to Zulus. All of this confused Clarissa: her husband’s disdain for his Afrikaner heritage, his rejection of them having any legal claim to the land, his pride over his family having taken part in the massacre, and his apparent unwillingness to see the cruel irony of displaying a weapon used to kill an indigenous people in the very wood they held sacred.
One night not long after they’d moved in, over a dinner of shrimp pilau and avocado soup, she had tried discussing this with him, including broaching the subject that, according to her research, it was doubtful that this rifle even existed in 1838. But he’d successfully shut her down, accusing her of once again displaying her American stupidity and arrogance. He’d speared a shrimp and, before popping it in his mouth, said, “You are young and stupid, Clarissa. You need to listen to what I tell you.”
Clarissa wiped the bottom lip of the shadow box with her bare hand. It needed dusting. A fly lit on the glass, and she wondered if it was the same one that had pestered her earlier—the little winged Fred Astaire—and if not, where all of them were coming from. The shadow box was positioned on the wall above a C-curve rolltop desk. Curious, Clarissa opened the top right drawer. They were still there: the bullets Iggy had special-ordered for the single-shot rifle. Three years prior, before he’d encased it in glass, he’d shown her how to use it. He’d slipped a bullet into the breechblock, said, “That’s a sound a man can love, eh?” and then he’d done something that rattled Clarissa to this day. He’d aimed the rifle at her, said, “Boom!” and laughed. Clarissa picked up the box, shook it, wondered why he had bullets for a rifle he couldn’t get to, set them back down, closed the drawer, looked at the long-barreled weapon, and thought, I wish to hell he’d never displayed that thing.