A Tree Born Crooked Read online

  Still, even if he hadn’t been the best cornerback in his playing days, there was no getting away from being a Tigers fan in his household. James hadn’t known any of the players they were talking about on the last night that he had seen his daddy, though Orville had updated him on each boy’s stats and potential, but it had still been good to just shoot the breeze and laugh. That night, Janie’s front yard had been crowded with relatives and family friends, all getting wasted because the father of Janie’s two little girls had finally given in and married her. Neither of the newlyweds had seemed as excited as the rest of the crowd enjoying the free Pabst Blue Ribbon. Janie had spent most of the evening fighting with her sisters, still in their teal bridesmaid dresses, and the groom had puked up a whole bottle of Rebel Yell before passing out behind the lawnmower shed.

  James remembered that Janie’s girls had run circles around himself and Orville, waving sparklers and writing their names in the air with the glowing streams, until the younger one stepped her bare foot into a patch of sandspurs and started howling. Orville had picked the little girl up, swinging her by her armpits, and sat her on the open tailgate of his truck. While James made silly faces at her, Orville had gently pulled the sandspurs out of her tiny foot. Even before Orville was finished, the girl was laughing and squirming to get down and chase her sister. By the time James had picked his PBR back up, Birdie Mae was calling Orville over to the patio grill, screeching something about letting the coals go out and a dozen hot dogs sitting right there, waiting to go on. Orville had winked at his son before tossing his empty beer can into the bed of the truck and heading back to the grill.

  James had watched his daddy, yelling back at Birdie Mae, pointing to the plate of dogs and buns, then at a cousin across the yard. Birdie Mae was waving a barbeque fork in his face and then tried to take a swing at his backside with it. Orville grabbed it out of her hand, grinning, and danced away from her. Birdie Mae’s hands were on her hips and she was trying hard not to smile back at him. James watched Orville let her have the fork back and then raise his arm to someone who was getting ready to leave. Orville had glanced for a moment back over at James, leaning alone against the side of the pickup, then had turned and walked away to say goodbye to his friend. James wished that he had come back to talk about football, about the weather, about anything. Somehow, they didn’t get a chance to speak the rest of the night, especially after Orville’s brother Cordie showed up with a jar of shine. When James had left in the morning, Orville was nursing a hangover and couldn’t get out of bed to say goodbye. The last clear memory that James had of his father was of Orville’s hands tenderly cupping the little girl’s foot and drawing the pain away from her.

  ~ ~ ~

  James slipped the nozzle into the gas tank and flipped the catch on the pump. He leaned back against the side of his truck and watched the numbers on the gas pump slowly rise. He squinted toward the west, noting that the sun still had a few more hours to go. James looked back at the numbers flashing and set his jaw before reaching into his hip pocket and pulling out his cell phone to dial a number he knew by heart. He ground his teeth and waited. The line rang five times and then a voice, young and bored, answered.

  “Crystal Springs Citrus Travel Shop.”

  James unclenched his jaw.

  “Who is this?”

  “What’d you mean, who’s this? This is Lila. Who the hell is this?”

  “Is that how you always answer the phone?”

  The girl on the other end of the line huffed.

  “Mister, you better tell me who you are.”

  “James.”

  There was silence for a moment, as the teenage girl tried to decide if she should know who he was or not. It didn’t take her long.

  “Well, what’s that supposed to mean? You some kinda perv? You the guy been sitting in that piece of shit Cadillac ‘cross the street all afternoon? If you are, I swear to God I’m gonna call the cops soon as I hang up, so you’d just better start your engine and get the—”

  James cut her off.

  “I’m Birdie Mae’s son.”

  More silence and thinking. James watched the numbers on the gas pump and waited.

  “Well, what’d you want?”

  “Birdie there?”

  James turned around and kicked the fender of his truck. The right back hubcap was scuffed all around the edges and the tire could use some air. James gripped the edge of the truck bed with his free hand, leaning back and holding himself up.

  “No.”

  “Where’s she at?”

  “Went home early. I’m in charge. She leaves me in charge all the time. I got keys and everything.”

  “Good for you.”

  James scratched at a flake of gray paint with his thumbnail.

  “Want me to tell her you called or something?”

  “No.”

  He peeled off a thin strip of paint and then rubbed at the bare spot beneath with his thumb. There was an awkward silence before the girl responded.

  “Well, then.”

  “Thanks, Lila.”

  James flipped the phone down and held it in his palm. He could still call Birdie Mae’s home phone. He flipped the phone open again, then snapped it shut. Screw it. The nozzle clicked off and James pulled it out and hung it back on the gas pump. He got in his truck and drove west.

  ~ ~ ~

  Crystal Springs, population six thousand on a good day, hadn’t changed much over the past thirty years. It wasn’t that it was a town stuck in the past; it just didn’t know what to do in the present. The town’s single claim to fame was that Elvis Presley had once spent the weekend there on his way to Orlando. The motel where he had stayed, the Sweet Dreams Lodge, still charged extra for tourists to rent out the room he had slept in, but no one came to Crystal Springs because of Elvis. The town was a place to pass through. On the route from Gainesville to Lake City, college kids and exhausted tourists stopped to get gas, eat a quick meal, and buy some cheap souvenirs. Most didn’t stay through the night.

  Occasionally, a pack of University of Florida students would feel like slumming it and come up from Gainesville to raise hell for a few nights. The girls would buy snow globes and plastic key chains at the Citrus Shop, all the while giggling about how tacky everything was. They would try on Panama hats and shriek hysterically, posing and taking pictures of each other with their cell phone cameras. Afterwards, they would hit up the bars and deliberately order shots the bartenders at Dick’s Bar and Grill or The Blue Diamond had never heard of. They drank well vodka, stained pink or blue from whatever the bartenders could scrounge up, and then puked in the restroom sink while a friend held their hair back. The boys put on country accents and tried to get friendly with the locals. They called the men “old-timers” and cracked jokes about hillbillies screwing their daughters. There was always a fight. Some muscle-head in a polo shirt would grab a local boy’s girlfriend and not know how to back down. After the first punch, though, it was usually over. The college kid went down, the girls screamed, and the guy’s buddies protested, but didn’t make a move. That usually ended the night.

  The tourists never went to the bars. They earnestly picked out gifts for each aunt and uncle back in Ohio and posed with goofy grins next to the life-sized wooden alligator outside of the Citrus Shop. They ate grilled cheese sandwiches and well-done burgers at Merv’s Diner and left early to make it to a bigger town by nightfall.

  Only homegrown residents, whose roots went back further than the buildings themselves, inhabited Crystal Springs. James’ family could trace its history back to the terrible freeze of 1889 that had destroyed so many of Alachua County’s tangerine and kumquat groves. Generations of the Hart family had grown up in Crystal Springs as phosphate miners, then citrus pickers, and now citrus sellers. It was a town that people were born in, knowing already that they were going to die in it.

  The sun was slipping behind the trees when James bounced across the railroad tracks and drove into Crystal Springs. In t
he sinking twilight, his eyes began to catch familiar street signs: Jawbone, Evenstar, Whistler. After the stoplight at the County Road 231 intersection, the heart of the town came into view. He drove past the Kwik Mart and across the road from that, the Dixie Stop-n-Shop. He slowed down turning onto Whites Avenue to let two teenagers in camouflage shirts cross the road. They eyed him sullenly and kept their slow pace. The neon light at Johnny’s Pawn and Guns flashed on as he cruised past, and an old man in front of the store nodded at him without recognition. James remembered it all. The convenience store on the corner that he and his buddies had shoplifted from as kids. The only nice restaurant in town, The Red Tree, where he had taken his first real girlfriend out to dinner. Not much had changed in the three years since he’d last come through. Not much had changed since he was a kid. The pizza place had shut down, and the video store was up for lease. A Family Dollar had replaced the Payless shoe store on the corner of 5th and Gibson. That was about it. At the next stoplight, James lit a cigarette. He could see the sign for the Citrus Shop ahead. A large, painted orange smiled broadly and winked an oversized, cartoon eye. The sign invited folks to “Come On In And Get Squeezed!” There wasn’t much past that; the road turned into highway and soon after loomed the exit for Interstate 75.

  The light changed, but James didn’t put his foot on the gas. He smoked his cigarette. A car came up behind him and laid on the horn. James was tempted to wave the car around him, but knew that it all was inevitable anyway. He was back in Crystal Springs. Stopping in the middle of traffic wasn’t going to change that. James drove on and turned left onto the narrow dirt road next to the Citrus Shop. He remembered to slow down after the curve, but his truck still bottomed-out, scraping the underside as always. After a sharp right turn around a scraggly stand of pines, James pulled into the sandy driveway.

  It was dark when James flicked the headlights off. He got out of the truck and closed the door gently behind him. Birdie Mae’s Oldsmobile was parked in front of him and the porch light was on, illuminating the wooden steps built up to the door of the doublewide. James stood with his hands jammed down into his pockets and listened to a hound baying off in the distance. Through the front windows, James could see the kitchen light on and the television flashing in the living room. Aside from the hound, it was quiet. The trailer door opened and the screen door pushed out with a snap.

  “Huh, I was wondering when you was gonna darken my door. Certainly took your sweet time getting here, that’s for sure.”

  “Hi, Mama.”

  James pulled his fists out of his jeans and went inside.

  TWO

  A sitcom family was laughing hysterically at something funny in sitcom-land. James hunted for the remote while Birdie Mae banged around in the kitchen, opening and closing cabinet doors with unnecessary force. James finally found the remote, stuffed between the corduroy La-Z-Boy cushions, and turned the sound down on the television. Birdie Mae yelled over the running sink water as she rinsed out a dirty glass.

  “I was watching that, you know.”

  “Sorry. It was kinda loud.”

  She came out, handed James a glass of something bright yellow poured from a warm two-liter, and sat down on the sagging couch across from him.

  “Well, I gotta hear it, don’t I? It’s a good show. You ever watch it? This guy on there, he does the stupidest things. Just cracks me up. You should watch it.”

  “Maybe. I don’t watch much TV.”

  “Well, it’s good. The show on after is alright. Ain’t as funny, but it’s on, so I usually watch it, too.”

  James didn’t know what to say. Even though the sound was off, Birdie’s eyes kept drifting over to the small television balanced on the edge of the dining room table. He glanced at the screen, figuring he should probably wait for a commercial. He sipped the flat, neon soda, one ice cube shrinking rapidly on the surface, and set the glass down. He stared at Birdie. He thought that she would look different somehow, older, and saddened by grief. Instead, she looked exactly as she had for the last twenty years.

  Birdie Mae was a fat woman. She wasn’t big enough to be called “obese” or any other such ridiculous medical term. But she wasn’t small enough to be just “large” or “big-boned” either. “I’m fat, dammit. What the hell’s wrong with that?” she would yell at the doctors who tried to use polite euphemisms. She had big hands, with small fingernails that made them look bigger. Her eyes were a pretty blue, but always framed with gunky mascara, and when she worked at the store she wore peach eye shadow up to her eyebrows. Her thin lips usually carried the outline of sticky, pink lipstick. She had to constantly reapply it, as it always ended up smeared on her Virginia Slims. Her hair was long and dishwater blond, but James couldn’t remember ever seeing it down. Birdie wore her hair twisted and piled up on top of her head, sprayed into a motionless nest that didn’t even look good back when she first started doing it in the seventies. Birdie Mae had some delusion that she resembled Farrah Fawcett and running out of Aqua Net was cause for a family crisis. On more than one occasion, Birdie had refused to leave the bathroom until someone went out to the drugstore and brought back a can. She wore the clothes from the Citrus Shop that had defects and couldn’t be sold, so she usually stuffed herself into gaudy T-shirts and culottes. The shirt she was wearing today was hot pink with a silhouette of three palm trees. Above all, Birdie Mae thought she looked good and that’s how she carried herself.

  A commercial for life insurance came on and Birdie lost interest. She turned back to James, settling herself on the couch and moving the glass ashtray off the armrest so she could stretch out.

  “So, what took you so long, huh?”

  James leaned forward.

  “Well, for one, I got a postcard instead of a phone call. Want to tell me what that was all about?”

  “I tried calling you. Couldn’t get ahold of nobody. I guess those rat traps you’re always staying in don’t got their telephones connected or something.”

  “I have a cell phone. We’re in the twenty-first century.”

  Birdie Mae wouldn’t make eye contact with James. She stared over his head at an abstract picture made of string art and black velvet hanging on the wall. She had won it one night at Bingo and was very proud of it.

  “I ain’t known where you was staying. Always moving ‘round like you got a fire lit up under your butt. When’re you gonna settle down and marry some girl, huh? All this running ‘round, like to tire a body out.”

  James refused to be distracted.

  “Mama, that’s the point of having a cell phone. It goes with you. It ain’t tied into the wall like you seem to pretend to think. And if you didn’t know where I was staying, how did you have my address?”

  Birdie looked down at her hands. She picked at a cuticle for a second before snapping her head back up.

  “Alright, fine, Mister Smarty Pants. I lost your damn phone number. I think I had it written on a receipt or something, but I couldn’t find it nowheres. Wasn’t like I had all day to clean the house trying to find it, neither. I had other things going on, you know.”

  James pushed himself up out of the armchair and went into the kitchen. Birdie Mae leaned over one arm of the couch, watching him.

  “What’re you doing now?”

  He yanked on the fridge handle, bent down, and leaned against the top of the open door. Half a block of Velveeta in a plastic sandwich baggie occupied the top shelf. Two paper fast-food bags with the tops rolled down and grease leaking out of the bottoms kept company with the butt end of a stick of margarine. There were three different flavors of Jell-O cups to choose from.

  “You don’t have any beer.”

  “You got something to drink.”

  James stood up and glared at Birdie Mae. She was still craning her neck to keep an eye on him and make sure he wasn’t rearranging her refrigerator.

  “There’s some wine coolers in the door there.”

  “How ‘bout liquor?”

  “I said, the
re’s some wine coolers in there.”

  James glanced at the three bottles of Arbor Mist, one lying sideways next to a crusty bottle of mustard. He sighed, closed the door, and went back into the living room. Birdie Mae gave him a smug smile.

  “Ain’t find what you wanted?”

  James sat up slightly and pulled a pack of crushed cigarettes from his back pocket. He smoothed one out, put it between his lips, and looked around for a lighter.

  “There, on top of the TV. Hey, the show’s back on.”

  He reached for the lighter and then switched off the television set. James leaned his elbows on his knees and lit the cigarette. He blew a stream of smoke out of the side of his mouth and handed Birdie the lighter across the coffee table.

  “So, how’d he go?”

  Birdie Mae lit her long, skinny cigarette and set it in the ashtray without smoking it.

  “That’s what you want to ask me? I ain’t seen you in more’n three years and that’s what you ask me?”

  “Mama, I ain’t got time for this shit.”

  “Watch your mouth. You got somewhere important you gotta be?”

  “How did he go?”

  She stared at the darkened television screen for a moment before answering.

  “It weren’t pretty.”

  “Mama.”

  Birdie finally turned to look at James.

  “Orville’d been on oxygen for the past year. You wouldn’t know that though, ‘cause you never come ‘round here, nor take no interest in what goes on, but the doctor put him on it back in June. Had a little tank with wheels that he could drag ‘round. Didn’t stop him none. He was still at the store every day. Still drinking, still carrying on. Still smoking.”