Turkey Ranch Road Rage (5 page)

“I can’t right now.” Another pause. “I’ve got the kids tonight.”

Ah, the kids. Jerry’s children are in elementary school, mine are in college. He is in the middle of parenting hell and I’m down to only periodic dips into the fiery flames. It is not a good fit. “That’s okay,” I said, as cheerfully as I could, considering. “I’ll be out at Mother’s tomorrow if you want to drop by sometime after the kids go to school.”

“Tomorrow then, at nine?” he said, sounding a little disappointed himself.

“Sounds great.” Okay, great was pushing it just a tad. Great would be seeing him somewhere other than Kickapoo, Texas, and without my mother or his kids.

“See you then.” His voice rippled through me yet again, but before I could fully enjoy it, he said, “Tell Leroy to call when he gets back.” He was back to his official sheriff voice. “I need to talk to him. Immediately.”

“He’s not in trouble, is he?”

Jerry paused for a few long seconds. “I don’t know, Jolene, is he?”

Not as much as he was going to be, I feared. “As far as I know, everything is just fine.” It wasn’t a lie. Technically, things were basically still as fine as they were before I got here. “Yep, just fine.”

Mr. Sheriff muttered something about “we’ll see,” and after I hung up, I felt neither warm nor tingly anymore—nor at ease. Fine was out of the question. I’d been in town, what, an hour? And in that short time, how many situations with the potential for seriously bad trouble had formulated? A lot, that’s how many.

Right on cue, ground zero for the trouble came bouncing back into the office, looking like she’d just been to a Mary Kay makeover party. I didn’t see a single hair out of place, not to mention a crooked eyebrow or lip line. “Well, Mother, if you’re going for the ‘poor pitiful me’ look, you better go give it another shot.”

“No,” Lucille said, patting her plastered-in-place hair. “I decided to just be me and look my best. I’m going to tell it like it is, and if they don’t like it well, too bad. I’m not backing down and they’re not ruining my life.”

In truth I couldn’t argue with her about not wanting a parade of trailers, complete with TVs, boom boxes, generators and screaming kids out behind the back fence. Whether they were really going to put them on her back doorstep, I didn’t know. But I did know one thing for sure, if they weren’t already, the parks people were going to be real sorry they messed with Lucille Jackson. We all were. I leaned back in Leroy’s chair again and propped my feet on his desk. “Okay, Mother, tell me about SPASI.”

I pilfered a legal pad from Leroy’s desk and took as many notes as I could while Lucille rambled. Only one who has had the misfortune of interviewing Lucille Jackson can truly appreciate the effort involved to keep from hurling yourself through the nearest plate glass window during the task. Nevertheless, I emerged from the soliloquy with a few facts and a plethora of local—and pointless—trivia.

The fact that Agnes’ recently neutered cat had clawed a hole in the window screen and run off the night before the protest didn’t seem like a pertinent detail. Ditto the fact that Merline had bought a new rhinestone-covered denim jacket—that was just plain tacky—at the factory outlet store in Mineral Wells to wear in the picket line because she wanted to look good when the news people came out and filmed the protest, which she did not, look good, that is, according to Lucille.

What I did learn that seemed semi-fact-based was that SPASI was formed over a glass of iced tea and a hamburger at the DQ, thus the limited thought given to the name. It was, however, as Mother pointed out, a good generic name that could be used in the future as there were always stupid ideas that needed stopping. Who could argue with that?

She swore she had nothing at all to do with the AAC people showing up. In fact, the head space cadet seemed kind of worried that the out-of-towners might steal her activist glory. Worse still, apparently, was that Ethel Fossy—AKA that damned Bony Butt who didn’t give a hoot about the town or anybody in it—had lost her ever-lovin’ mind, and not in a way that benefitted Lucille. And just because she was a member of the Church of Christ, it sure didn’t mean that she was the only one going to heaven, because she was not. By God. Bony Butt’s Bible waving and preaching at the AAC people seemed to be a sore spot as well, although it was hard to tell exactly why. There was also a mention of Ethel climbing right into the very hotbed of sin she’d been preaching against, so to speak, but it was hard to follow. What was clear, however, was that the whole thing was just a sorry state of affairs, that’s what it was. (Paraphrasing Lucille is almost as tedious as interviewing her.)

When my mother starts talking, there are so many layers of angst propagated by the details that it’s hard to know where to start. Not starting at all would be the best plan, but that never seemed to work out that well for me.

Bony Butt, as Mother was happy to call her, at least behind her back, was Lucille’s rival in a weird religious/female competition sort of way. Basically, Ethel’d had a thing for Mother’s last boyfriend, the aforementioned now-dead mayor. Take a liberal dose of religious fanaticism, mix with politics, add a boatload of jealously, rampant adultery and multi-level coveting, and make up your own story. It can’t be half as ridiculous as what I lived through the last few times I’ve been in this state. A shudder rippled through me. Surely to God not again.

I don’t know when she quit talking or when I quit writing, but I was staring blankly at the wall when the sheriff’s department back door opened and Leroy came thundering in. “Man, oh man, I’m sorry I took so long,” he said, huffing and puffing. “Couldn’t find the right set of filters, and then the batteries in the flash were bad. Anyway, here it is.”

He patted a large gray padded suitcase-like thing, then opened it up and began assembling the appropriate lenses and flash. This was professional grade gear and I couldn’t help but be impressed. I’d kind of been expecting your basic digital camera, kind of like I owned myself and only halfway knew how to operate. It was not.

Leroy and I have developed a tentative truce of late, and while it was kind of weird, I preferred it to the serious head butting and round robin sniping of previous visits. Trying to keep him from killing me hadn’t been that much fun either. But Leroy really did seem to know his camera business.

“Okay, Miz Jackson,” Leroy said. “Where do you want your picture made?”

“Well, let’s start in the jail cell, the one next to the drunks, with me looking forlorn. Then we can do a couple of portrait types in the office just in case.” She held out her wrists. “Cuff me, Leroy.”

Lovely. I propped my elbows on the desk and buried my face in my hands, which apparently evolved into a nap because the next thing I knew, I was jumping out of my skin—and the chair—hitting my knee on the desk, yelping, and hearing a shrill “Wake up, Jolene,” and not necessarily in that order.

Lucille had her always-ominous black purse over her elbow, a small overnight bag in the other hand and a glint in her eye. “Let’s go. I’d prefer to stay here as a statement to the cause, but since you’ve made such a fuss about me going home tonight, I suppose I don’t have much choice.”

Oh, please. If I hadn’t been busy rubbing the throb from my knee and trying not to appear scraped from the ceiling, I’d have rolled my eyes at her lame attempt to pawn off her mind-change on me. As it was, all I could manage was a disgruntled “fine.”

“Leroy’s going to bring the prints out to the house in the morning for me to look over. We’re also going to take some more shots there. We’ve decided to go for one of those heart-wrenching photo documentary things. That’ll get some attention.”

We could all bet on that. And I wanted no part of it. “Sounds perfect.”

Chapter
Three

Morning dawned entirely too early. Nevertheless I was up watching Lucille ham it up for the camera. Photographer Leroy stood about ten yards away, on the far side of the house, getting a shot that showed the would-be parkland behind Lucille’s house. He had light meters and filters and lenses and, strange as it was to say, he looked like a pro.

Mother Dearest’s behavior, on the other hand, was leaning more toward goofy. She had cleverly, or so she thought, chained herself to the front porch post. I had no intentions of pointing out that no one was trying to drag her off of said porch or park campers on it, although it might have added a touch of real emotion to the pictures as she tried to get herself unchained to whack me for saying so.

I glanced at my watch. “Better finish up. Jerry should be here any minute.”

“Yeah,” Leroy agreed, a little more readily than expected. “He sure asked a lot of questions when he called back last night. I didn’t tell him about any of this though. I’m not on the clock anyway right now.”

Oh, shit, I’d forgotten to tell him to call. “I’m sorry, Leroy. He told me to tell you to call and I forgot.” I had no good excuse, except for my mother and the complete ridiculousness of the bizarre situation I found myself in that seemed to suck out all my brain cells. “I’ll tell him it was my fault when he gets here.”

“It’s okay. I think he kind of understood.”

Why didn’t that make me feel better?

“I need to get going anyway because I’ve got to get these on the computer to see if they need any work before I print. Dad’s working the desk for me until I get back.” He glanced at Lucille, but she turned up her nose, apparently still holding a grudge against Fritz for something. “He’d sure like it if you gave him a call, Miz Jackson. He’s been real down in the mouth since you two had words.”

Lucille lifted her chin even higher and sniffed haughtily. “If you all are through with me, I believe I’ll go make a fresh pot of coffee for Jerry Don.”

After she’d gone inside, I walked over to where Leroy stood, repacking his camera case. “Seriously, Leroy, I hate to butt in, but are you sure you should be doing this? Doesn’t this sort of qualify as one of those pesky conflict of interest issues that a deputy sheriff probably ought to avoid?” At all costs.

“Huh?”

“Taking these kinds of pictures, of someone charged with a crime. Since you’re the one who kind of charged her with the crime, it could be a bit of a conflict.”

“Nah, I’ve done it before. The gallery people think it’s kind of neat that I’m in law enforcement and take photos inside the jail. Think it gives me insight into the human condition. I don’t usually have people in the pictures, but they say you can still feel them there. They really like that.”

Wow. Big words in a big sentence. Scary. And how had it come to this anyway, chatting amicably with Leroy Harper? It was unnatural and unsettling, to say the least. Almost made me wish for the good old days when he breathed fire and looked ready to behead me. That, I understood. I didn’t know what to make of this version of Leroy that sounded halfway coherent at times, and it made me wary.

“Jerry says it’s okay as long as I’m off the clock and don’t take pictures of crime scenes. Besides, Lucille’s already paid her fine and paid to replace the radiator, including labor charges, so it wasn’t like she was really an inmate.”

Was that so? Sheriff Blackmail and I would be discussing many things at length. Jerry Don Parker’s propensity for letting Lucille off the hook for all her crap wasn’t helping anyone, especially me. I didn’t come down here for my health. It never helps my health to come down here. I get headaches, I shake and twitch, and I feel like I’m going to throw up. A lot. And that’s before I’ve even seen my mother. The ludicrousness of this particular situation triggered all the above and was even pushing me toward bitchy, which is shocking, I know. Whatever the case, it was long past the time for some scared straight tactics—for both of them, all of them.

“So, what you’re really saying, Leroy, is that the caption and byline under the picture you want published in the paper would go something like this: ‘Deputy Sheriff Leroy Harper photographs park protester Lucille Jackson pretending to be locked in the Bowman County Jail. Ms. Jackson had been arrested earlier in the day for shooting a county maintenance truck that was mowing grass on the right-of-way near the planned park site. When released by the sheriff’s department, she refused to leave the jail where Harper befriended her. Over a cup of coffee and the evening news, they devised this photo shoot to bring attention to Lucille’s plight and to give new meaning to serve and protect.’ Or something like that.”

He frowned, beads of sweat popping out on his brow. He shifted from foot to foot and scratched his head, all apparently important steps in his thinking process. “That doesn’t sound good at all.”

You think? I just shrugged at him. It was his call.

After a little more mental processing and fidgeting, the latter still being indicative of the former, Deputy Leroy Harper snatched up his camera case and headed toward his truck. “Tell Miz Jackson I’ll get back to her.”

“I’ll do that.”

* * *

As it turned out, there was no need for Leroy to rush off to avoid his boss since Jerry Don Parker did not arrive as arranged at nine-thirty. He also didn’t arrive at ten-thirty, and he did not call either. By the time eleven rolled around, I was not a happy camper, to borrow an unfortunate phrase. By noon, I was vacillating between seriously worried and seriously pissed.

Mother had been on the phone a good part of the morning, making strategy calls to Merline and Agnes, but she assured me that both Jerry and Leroy had her cell phone number. They also had mine. In fact, the entire Bowman County Sheriff’s department had every number available for both of us, and had used them all on a number of occasions. They knew how to reach us.