Heart of Palm (24 page)

Frank crossed the intersection at Seminary Street and turned onto Lincoln, which sliced into South Utina in a straight line and provided the axis for the dozen cross streets that made up the neighborhood. He stopped at a tiny cinder-block-and-stucco house painted two tones of muddy brown. The house was surrounded by a chain-link fence, and at the curb sat a rusted maroon sedan, in which a woman in a head wrap and enormous eyeglasses reclined. She looked up when Frank approached, waved her hand out the window. He parked in front of her car and walked back to greet her.

“Hey, baby,” the woman said, smiling wide. She wore a huge ballooning dress in a dizzyingly colorful print, and her face was slick with perspiration. She reached across the passenger seat and pushed the door open for Frank. He climbed in and sat down, grateful for the wide swath of shade cast over the car by a pair of pecan trees in the yard.

“Hey, An-Needa,” he said. He left the door open, hoping to encourage a cross-breeze. “Do you know you are a vision in those colors?”

An-Needa threw her head back, laughed. She slapped Frank on the shoulder. “Oh, listen to you, Frankie Bravo—what are you doing, flirting with an old mama like me? A grand-mama, don’t you know.”

Frank smiled. He’d known An-Needa Lovett almost half his life, ever since his mother had discovered An-Needa’s pecan pies at a Utina High bake sale and had commissioned her to bake the pies for Uncle Henry’s dessert menu. The Uncle Henry’s gig had led to more business, too, so now An-Needa sold to seven restaurants and a coffee shop in St. Augustine, even one in Jacksonville. Twice a week, rain or shine, Frank drove to Lincoln Street to conduct business in An-Needa’s rusted sedan, where she tended to her customers and let the heat from the morning’s baking dissipate from her small house. Afternoons, Frank could usually find her in her automotive “office,” where she met with her customers and sipped Nestea until the sun dipped behind the treeline and the mosquitoes came out.

“I got your pies in the fridge, baby,” she said. “You go around back the house, on the porch. You know where they are.”

Frank took out his wallet, counted the money for the week’s order. He made sure to miscount, slip an extra twenty into the pile. He put the money into the glove box.

“How’s your mama, Frankie?” she said.

“She’s okay,” Frank said. He paused. “I guess.”

“What you mean, you guess? She is or she ain’t?”

“Oh, she is, An-Needa. She’s the same as ever, you know.”

She looked at him over the tops of her glasses, raised her eyebrows.

“You giving Miss Arla trouble, Frank?”

“No. Me? No, I just—”

“I hope you’re being kind to your mama, Frank. That woman, oh my Jesus, that poor woman. She’s had her troubles, you know.” Frank was well aware of his mother’s troubles. All of Utina was aware of Arla’s troubles. But she could dish them out just as well as she could take them. He was about to point this out to An-Needa, but she was still glaring at him, tapping one long fingernail on the leather cover of her Bible, so he said nothing. At the end of the street, a garbage truck rounded the corner and began a rollicking approach, stopping at every third house or so while a two-man crew bounded off the rails and slung trash into the back of the truck. An-Needa turned forward, sighed.

“Oh, Lord,” she said. “Here comes that wretched man again.”

Inside the garbage truck, the driver’s face, puffy and squinting in the summer sun, shone like a pasty white moon as he bucked the vehicle to a stop a block from An-Needa’s house. He caught sight of An-Needa and Frank sitting in the car, and he waved wildly. He threw the truck into drive again and accelerated too quickly, before one of his men, the shorter one, had jumped back on the rail.

“Fucker!” the man screamed.

The driver of the truck was George Weeden, Mac Weeden’s older brother, who’d been the blue-collar version of his jack-of-all-trades brother for as long as Frank could remember. George had been, through the years, employed around North and South Utina as a flagman, dock custodian, taxi driver, dishwasher, and now garbage truck driver. George slammed on the brakes and shot a bird out the window to the man behind him. The abandoned crewman, dripping with sweat, lurched forward, grabbed the rail, and remounted the back of the truck.

“Wait till I get on the damn truck, jackass!” he shouted at George.

“Good Lord in heaven,” An-Needa said. “Do you hear the language on these animals?”

The truck continued its stop-start progression, now pulling directly abreast of An-Needa’s sedan. Gooch, still in Frank’s truck, stuck his head out the window and barked.

“Bravo!” George yelled. “Frank!”

An-Needa rolled her eyes, looked out the other side of the car.

“Hey, George,” Frank said. He lifted his hand slightly, gave a tiny wave.

“Frank, I wanna talk to you!” George was yelling at the top of his voice, trying to be heard over the gnawing hydraulics of the truck, which were now in the process of compacting the trash in the receptacle behind him. Gooch’s continued barking was drowned out from the noise of the truck, so he looked like he was simply snapping and gulping awkwardly into empty air. George put the truck in park and climbed down from the driver’s seat. The two men on the rails groaned and threw up their hands.

“Weeden!” one said. “Go!”

“Hold on, asshole,” George called back.

“George Weeden, you stop using that devil’s language in front of my house before I get myself out of this car and teach you some manners!” An-Needa said. She leaned over Frank, glared out the passenger window at Weeden. George bent down, leaned into the car. Frank flattened himself against the seat.

“I’m sorry, Ms. Lovett. I’m sorry. You’re right,” George said. He leaned his elbows on the car door and scratched his head. His white hair was cut in a military-style crew that made his head appear completely square. “You are one-hundred-percent, completely right. I don’t know what comes over me. These guys—” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder at his crew. “They bring out the worst in me, I guess, Ms. Lovett.”

A Toyota with a Realtor’s logo on the front license plate approached behind the stopped garbage truck, which was now blocking Lincoln Street, and the driver, a young man in a golf shirt, frowned. The garbage crew, still hanging on the rails of the truck, glared at An-Needa’s car, where George still hung in the passenger window.

“Weeden!” the short man said. “Move the God-damn truck!”

“Oh, my sweet Jesus,” An-Needa said.

The Realtor in the Toyota tooted once. Gooch redoubled his barking.

“George,” Frank said. “Maybe you better move the truck.”

“I will, I will,” George said. “Hang on. Frank, I want to talk to you. I got a business proposition, see, and I want to tell you about it. I got an idea.”

“All right, George. Call me sometime, okay? At the restaurant.”

“What’s the number?” George pulled a pen out of his shirt pocket. “Ms. Lovett, you got a piece of paper?”

An-Needa stared out the window and did not respond. The Realtor behind the truck tooted again, twice this time.

“Christ,” George said.

“Weeden, you cocksucking fat fuck!” the short man yelled. “Move this God-damned truck and let’s finish this shit-fucking shift!”

An-Needa put her hands over her face.

“George, look it up. You gotta move the truck,” Frank said. The driver of the car was now leaning on the horn. “Just come by Uncle Henry’s, George.”

George brightened.

“I’ll do that! Okay, Frank. I’ll do that. I’ll come by. Like maybe later today?”

“Fine, George. Later. I’ll see you then. Go ahead and move the truck, George.”

George gave a salute, straightened up, and sauntered back to the truck. The men on the back glowered. The Realtor in the car behind revved his engine. George climbed back into the driver’s seat and leaned out the window to grin at Frank.

“I’ll see you later, Bravo!” he shouted. He waved happily. Frank nodded. As the garbage truck pulled away, the Realtor in the delayed Toyota pulled up alongside An-Needa’s car.

“Hey, redneck!” the man yelled to Frank. “Way to hold up the fucking garbage truck! Don’t you know some of us have places to go?” He shot them a bird, sped off again. Frank turned to look behind him as the car took a rakish left turn and sped back toward Seminary Street. Gooch barked twice more, then sat down in the truck, panting. After a moment, Frank looked at An-Needa.

“You ever feel like there might be something else out there, An-Needa?” he said. “Something besides Utina?”

She was quiet for a beat, and when she spoke again, her voice caught in a way he’d never heard before.

“Where do we live, Frank? What is happening to this place?”

He was dismayed to find her beautiful brown eyes filling with tears.

“It’s all changing, Frank,” she said. “George Weeden and that lot, they’re bad enough, but you see these new people? You see that Realtor there? It’s all changing. You know, I went to the Lil’ Champ to buy milk and that Tip Breen, he says he’s losing business to the new Walgreens down there by the high school. They’re selling milk, beer, all that stuff. I don’t care for that Tip Breen, Frank, but what’s going to happen to Utina? Why we got people like this coming in here?”

“An-Needa,” he said. “Now come on. You can’t let them get to you.”

“Oh, it’s not them, Frank,” she said. She reached across the car and pulled a Dunkin’ Donuts napkin from the glove box. “It’s me. I’m just an old lady. Don’t pay any attention.” She blew her nose. “Your pies, they’re out back, honey. You go on now.”

He hesitated, and she patted his hand.

“You go on, Frankie. Don’t you worry about an old lady like me. Old ladies, we tough. We survive. You just ask your mama.”

He got out of the car, and as he turned the corner to the back of the house, to approach the porch and the spare refrigerator where she kept her customers’ pies, he heard her begin to sing, a soft sweet song, about Jesus’s bitter pains, and his holy sacred veins, and lifeblood strong and true.

“What do you mean, my brother?” Mac said. Frank had pulled up at Bait/Karaoke on the way back from An-Needa’s, and Mac, waving, had walked over to Frank’s window. Gooch—temporarily relocated to the bed of the truck to accommodate the fourteen fresh pies that were now stacked up on the passenger seat next to Frank in the cab—was in a snit, and Frank worked hard not to catch his eye in the rearview mirror as he talked to Mac.

Bait/Karaoke, so named for the five-foot-by-five-foot backlit sign Mac had installed in the building’s front window to tout his twin service offerings, was directly across Seminary Street from the Lil’ Champ on the eastern bank of the Intracoastal, the business sustained through the years by a steady stream of daytime and nighttime patrons in search of bait to fuel their fishing excursions and karaoke idiocy to fill their social lives. When the karaoke craze peaked and fizzled in the early nineties, Mac let the liquor license go and focused his efforts on the bait business alone, but he neglected to replace the sign, so
BAIT/KARAOKE
remained something of a Utina landmark. Once Utina’s short-lived local newspaper offices, the building featured a brick facade and elegant high ceilings that were completely out of character for Utina’s commercial architecture, most of which consisted of uninspired concrete flats and repurposed strip malls. Mac Weeden had bought the building years ago, and he retained a small office in the back, where he kept up his unpaid and unofficial enterprise as Utina’s one and only unlicensed but highly confidential legal consultant.

“I mean he’s completely insane,” Frank said now. He told Mac about the incident with George and the garbage truck.

“Oh, hell. Is that all you got? Try growing up with him,” Mac said. “Try living in the same house with that gobshite.” But he smiled and shook his head ruefully, and Frank envied him for a moment, because he knew, despite it all, that Mac and George actually
did
enjoy each other’s company, which was more than Frank could say for himself and his one surviving brother.

“Listen, I was just going to call you. Park the truck,” Mac said. “Come inside. I got info.”

“I can’t stay,” Frank said. He gestured at the pies on the seat next to him.

“Just for a minute,” Mac said. “I looked into that Cryder fella, like you asked me. You’ll want to hear this. Pull around back.”

A narrow, alley-like driveway ran down one length of Bait/Karaoke, and Frank drove slowly to maneuver a tight spot between a utility pole and a palm tree. Once through, he pulled the truck to the back of the building, parked, flipped the tailgate down to release Gooch, and walked in through the back door to Mac’s small office. The dog followed stiffly, not looking at Frank, still miffed about being made to ride in the bed of the pickup.

“Oh, quit your bitching,” Frank said to the dog. “It ain’t the end of the world.”

“Come in, come in,” Mac said. He moved quickly around the office, clearing papers from a tattered side chair for Frank to sit down. He had the appearance, always, of nervousness, though Frank knew Mac was not nervous but was rather afflicted with too much energy for one person to reasonably manage. He waited dutifully every day until five o’clock to pop open his first beer, marking the start of a copious nightly consumption of hops and barley on the center stool at Frank’s bar. And though certainly good for business, it was this consumption, Frank thought guiltily, that might have been responsible for at least some of Mac’s curtailed ambition. But Mac would have to save himself—Frank had enough people on his hands to worry about.