I lay awake in bed for a while, my eyes shut tight. I had so much to do. But all I wanted to do was go back to sleep. The first thing I should do was get up and drive over to the Tassahatchee Mental Institute. See if I could speak to Billie Miller. See if she would—or if she could—tell me anything. I was starting to feel that Billie and I had a lot in common. We were both refugees from the claims of Southern ladyhood. Maybe she would sense that, and maybe she would trust me, and tell me what I needed to know. Once I just wanted to know about Elijah’s life. Now that I knew why he had died, I wanted to know how it was done, and who did it, and how I could prove it. It was pretty wild to hope that Billie would help me, I realized that. And there were a lot of hurdles I had to jump first. Like getting permission to speak to her at all.
I sat up in bed. There was a mirror over the desk across the room from me. As soon as I saw my reflection, I realized I had a problem. If I showed up at the mental hospital looking like that, I would definitely be taken for a patient rather than a visitor.
After a shower with ordinary clear, unscented water flowing from the pipes, and normal motel soap, I felt I’d made some improvement. My clothes were not looking the better for the wear, though. I was going to have to do something about that.
As I paid my check at the diner where I had eaten breakfast, I asked the cashier for directions to the nearest store where I could buy some clothes. She was good-natured and helpful. She’d been patient about giving me change during the meal so I could keep feeding quarters to the little jukebox at the table. My parents would never let me play them when I was a kid, and I still can’t get over the thrill of being able to do it.
After searching through racks of polyester house-dresses and muumuu’s with those ugly ruffles at the bottom (and trying to restrain myself from asking out loud, “People still buy this stuff?”) I found a flowered rayon dress in the junior department. I pulled it over my head and studied myself in the dressing-room mirror. I was trying for the sweet Southern girl look, but was achieving something closer to Courtney Love. I would have said to hell with it and bought some jeans and a t-shirt, but all the jeans were all stone-washed, decorated with cute buttons, or studs or fringe, or lace, or all of the above. All the t-shirts had lace, or maybe a depiction of long-eared white bunnies with pink bows around their necks.
So I paid for the dress and some cheap white pumps, and then changed in the dressing room. In a few more minutes, I was on my way to Tassahatchee. I started out full of bravery, but faltered when I pulled up to the large, imposing building, set far back from the road. From the feeling it inspired in me, it might as well have been a nicely-landscaped prison. So this was where bad girls got sent. This was one of the futures my mother had spent her life trying to protect me from, one of the reasons she had tried so hard to make me toe society’s line.
Once inside the front doors and at the information desk, I asked to see Belinda Miller. I’d grown up with her sister, I said. I was an old friend of the family, home for just a short visit, thought I’d do my Christian duty and visit the sick. I tried batting my eyes at the young man I was speaking to, but from his slightly alarmed expression, I gathered the effect was more demented than femininely appealing.
In spite of that, he seemed helpful enough. He disappeared in a back room, and came back shaking his head. “I’m sorry, Ma’am, Miss Miller died a couple of years back.”
I stood there, shocked. The young man offered me a chair, a glass of water. I wondered dully why I couldn’t have married a nice man like that, someone to take care of me, polite, gentle, solicitous. I could have kept him in thrall to me with my sexual expertise, and lived a quiet life of constant adoration. Then I recovered just a bit, and saw there were thousands of reasons why I couldn’t have married a nice man like that, including the fact that I tried it once and it was a disaster.
I shook my head at him, mumbled my thanks, and turned around to leave. Susan hadn’t even mentioned to me that her sister had died. Susan knew enough about what had happened to avoid talking to me about Billie. Or maybe I was reading too much into this, looking for connections where there were just coincidences. Billie had never been the subject of confidences between Susan and me. So why would I expect her to inform me of her death?
When I reached my car after a long journey across a sun-baked parking lot, and then put out my hand to turn the ignition, I realized that I was crying. I sat there a while, in the stifling hot car by the manicured lawns of the expensive looney bin. I cried for Billie, for all the things I’d never know about her, for her adult life lived almost entirely within those walls.
I knew so little about her. But I had already started to believe she was like me. Wild and passionate and truth-seeking. She had not been as lucky as I had been, for I’d escaped to the wicked city and she had ended up in Tassahatchee. But I think that I’d been hoping that I could save her, somehow, even at this late date. Now it was too late for that unlikely redemption.
I hoped that she’d found passion and sweetness and life in the arms of Elijah Wilson, my lover’s father. I hoped she’d loved the sand underneath her back. I hoped she had thrown her head back laughing, her legs wide apart. I hoped she came and she came and she came. I hoped when she bathed that night, when she stood in her immaculate pink-tiled bathroom in her father’s house, she smiled again at the hot, fishy smell when she pulled off her panties, and then cupped her hand between her thighs, catching the sticky abundance flowing out of her. She’d paid for the freedom of those moments with her life’s imprisonment, and I fervently hoped it had been worth it to her.
I thought about Billie for a while, and then I said to myself, “A good female gumshoe can’t spend her whole day sitting in the parking lot of the crazy house, making myths about a dead woman’s life. No, a girl detective’s work is never done.”
So once more I headed out onto the highway. And this time I knew where I was going and what I was doing. I had some things to settle in Port Mullet. I had been away long enough.
I started seeing the signs for Weeki Wachee, and knew I was a little more than half an hour from Port Mullet. Another thing that hadn’t changed. Live Mermaid Shows, Spring of Live Mermaids. The girls on the billboards were sexy in that homogenized, too-clean, too-healthy way of the ’50s. Weeki Wachee still has the bird shows—a bird sets off a tiny toy cannon, rides a little bicycle, stuff like that. But the main event was still the girls. All those people from all over the country, working hard all year to save their money so they could go to Florida and spend a chunk of cash in Weeki Wachee. Old sunburned guys from Ohio still wanted to have their pictures taken next to a pretty girl in a bathing suit, wearing a fake fish tail.
I just saluted the flags out front as I passed by.
I’d kept a pretty good look in the rear view mirror, and I still hadn’t seen the brown car. No one else seemed to be following me, either. More and more stores and strip malls appeared on both sides of the highway, and more and more busy roads intersected it. Traffic had picked up considerably, and I was forced to restrain my rather wanton ways with the gas pedal. I couldn’t decide whether I was reentering civilization, or not.
I finally pulled up in my parents’ driveway, and it looked strange to me. Weird. Like the lighting had changed or something. When I walked in the back door, my mother was on her way out. “Sunday School teacher’s meeting,” she said cheerfully. “I’ll be back in an hour or so.” She stopped and put her hand on my shoulder. “Why, Baby. You look so sweet. What a nice dress, and the shoes, too! It’s a pleasure to see what an improvement you can make in your appearance when you just put a little effort into it.” Then she was out the door.
My father was sitting at the kitchen table, baseball cap on, eating a tomato sandwich. He had a plate of green onions next to it. “About time you got back, Sister,” he said, without looking up from his plate. “You know, you’re breaking your mother’s heart. She looks forward so to you coming to visit. Then you’re no sooner here than you’re back out on that highway, headed somewhere else.”
I dropped my bag on the kitchen floor and took a seat across the table from my father. “Dad, I need to talk to you about the Klan again. I know it was pretty active around here, and I can’t believe that you didn’t know anything about it.”
Now he did look up. “Just who are you to come in here talking to me like that? What is it you are accusing me of? And why do you come home at all if you’re only going to aggravate us like this?”
I felt that old feeling rising, the one where I realize that part of me still wants desperately to please my daddy, but knows that it’s impossible. But I decided to ignore it. “Daddy, listen to me. There’s something I have to know. It’s at least as important to me as winning the next football game is to you, or shooting the biggest buck next season, or catching the most fish. I’m your daughter, Daddy. Don’t you see that’s where I got it? The drive to do something right if I’m gonna do it at all. I got it from you. And there’s something I’m trying to do. I’ve got to do it right. And I need your help.”
He looked at me, as surprised as if the deer he was aimed at, or the fish he just pulled out of the water, had opened its mouth and spoken to him.
“Why didn’t you say so, Baby Sister? You need my help, well then, I’ll do my best to help you. Why don’t you just tell your old man what all this secrecy, and running around, and foolishness, is all about?”
So I did. I told what I felt I could, as best I could, as quickly as I could. Leaving out the rape attempt and the guys chasing me around in cars. I figured if he knew about that he would feel compelled to get one of his guns out of the cabinet in the living room and go shoot somebody. I didn’t think that would solve anything for me, and I didn’t want my father spending time in jail defending my honor.
“Dad,” I said, looking right at him, “I do need your help. I don’t ask much...” I realized that I’d made a mistake even before he started to interrupt me. I knew what he was going to say. If asking my father to put up with having a daughter like me wasn’t asking a lot, then he didn’t know what the hell was. He’d gladly loan me money, wrestle alligators for me, or shoot any man who dishonored me. But asking him to accept me for what I was, that was just too much.
“Forget that, “ I said quickly. “Let’s start over. I’m a human being and I’m trying to find out the truth about something here. Tell me what you know.”
He sighed, took off his cap and set it on the table beside his plate. “Okay, Baby Sister. I never wanted you to have to listen to things like this. I always tried to protect you from this kind of thing. But here goes. The way I always figured it was, the Klan was for white trash. You know, the lowest guy on the totem pole’s gotta make sure there’s somebody beneath him. I wasn’t ever interested in their dressing up and foolishness. But I heard things, sure. Wasn’t my business to interfere, though. Hell, sometimes it was the guys running the town that ran the Klan.
“When I was growing up, Sister, we had it hard. I know, I can see that look in your eyes, you’ve heard it too many times. I told you the stories when you were a kid, but it didn’t mean any more to you than a fairy story.
“Well, here’s something I never told you before. When I was maybe ten, and I had five younger brothers and sisters, and one of them a tiny baby, too, my daddy up and left. Said he was going to Mississippi to look for work. Hell, even I didn’t believe it. He didn’t work when he had local jobs, that’s why he was always getting fired. That’s why we went hungry most of the time.
“But anyway, he left. Was gone a couple of weeks. Then he showed back up, walking funny, bruises on his face, acting like he felt shamed or something, and that was one feeling I didn’t think he was capable of. Got to talking with my cousins a few weeks later and that’s when I found out what happened. The Klan, they hunted him down and beat the hell out of him. Let him know they wouldn’t put up with him leaving his wife and children for the community to support. Or watch starve, one or the other.
“Folks used to say my family was lower than niggers. One year we moved into a house that coloreds had just moved out of, and I knew then that my daddy didn’t have a scrap of self-respect.
“But I was good at sports, that’s what got me out of there. Got me to college, only one in my family. Got me to marry a fine woman like your mother. And then it turned out that I’m even better at coaching than I was at playing. I look at those boys and I see myself. I think that maybe one of them needs a ticket out of a miserable life, and an athletic scholarship might do it for him. Sometimes I get so frustrated that you and your brothers don’t know how lucky you’ve had it.
“But to get back to the point, I moved here and settled in, and the town folks here were tickled pink about what I did for their athletic program. I tell you, in the beginning the salary wasn’t much. To them, I mean, not to me. To me it was more money than I thought I’d ever see. So, when they saw I was making their boys into something to be proud of, something to make them hold their heads up high when they said they were from Port Mullet, well, they did take care of me.
“I wasn’t any more interested in their Klan than to be polite, you know, when they’d talk about it. I was so grateful for what I’d got, that I didn’t care about pushing down someone lower than me. If you can remember back that far, I didn’t fight integration like a lot of them. In fact, I was for it. There was some talk about putting all the white kids in private Christian schools, like so many towns did. But I pointed out how much better our chances were for a state championship in football if I could get a few of those big black boys on my team. And I was right, wasn’t I?” Here, he stopped and chuckled.“You should of seen some of those crackers! Same ones as hadn’t wanted any colored kids in their schools. We went into the state finals, they were saying, ‘Coach, those niggers on the other side are roughing up our colored boys.’” He laughed again.“Hell, Baby Sister, I saw that colored girl reciting her poetry at the Presidential Inauguration. You see it?”