TWO
Despite the heat, which sent my mind searching for quotes from Milton or Dante as I walked along the shoulder of the road, still this place did not qualify as hell, only a fantastically weird limbo of sprawling vines thick with the largest, most grotesque and barbaric wildflower I had ever seen: circular blossoms wider than my hand, each made of twelve creamy bracts upon which lay wriggly purple tentacle-like petals radiating from an erect and somewhat cruciform yellow center. The Spaniards had called it “passionflower” because it had made them think of the passion of Christ on the cross. Dumbidity only knew why Floridians called the magnificently weird blossom “maypop.” And how ironic, I found, that the down-home place in which I now lived had been named after the most strikingly fantastic wildflower I had ever seen.
Amid the passionflower vines, a giant seashell lay in the sand—although sixty miles inland from the Gulf, still this place was almost as sandy as a beach—but the shell was part of a dead armadillo, really. Wacko things like them lived in my local limbo. Blue-tailed lizards, for instance. Walking fast to get out of the heat, I saw one scuttle away, its tail even more electric in color than the shack I was going to visit. I heard mockingbirds ranting almost loud enough to compete with the sound of Schweitzer’s stubborn barking.
The blue shack lacked much by way of a porch. Its old wooden steps were not painted any peacock color; they were not painted at all. But at least they looked solid. I climbed them to the narrow stoop in front of the door and looked for a doorbell. There wasn’t any. I knocked.
Waited a minute, self-conscious in my shorts—of course I wore shorts; everybody down here wore shorts, but my legs needed to be shaved. Every female down here seemed naturally hairless. And they all, men, women, and children, wore flip-flops. Everywhere. Dressy flip-flops for church, weddings, and funerals. But I couldn’t stand the feel of the things, the thong between my toes. I wore socks and sneakers. Momentarily I wished I could have pulled up my pink socks far enough to cover the hair on my legs. But then, mentally, I shrugged. Who the hell cared how I looked?
Just as I was lifting my hand to tap again, the door opened. A pale teenage boy with long bleached hair in cornrows stood there raising his blond eyebrows at me. Immediately I felt absurd; I might as well have been carrying a placard that said DIVORCED, EMOTIONALLY NEEDY. “Um, hi,” I blurted. “I’m your new neighbor in the pink house, so I came over to meet my neighbors in the blue house. We should get along, huh? Pink and blue?”
God, I was babbling. I blushed. But the kid smiled, a small smile, but its shy generosity, not typically teenage, diverted my attention from his rather extreme hair with its many cornrows and braids to his face. Without a possibility of ever being handsome in a chiseled-chin/cheekbone way, he was a total cutie. Wide, sensitive mouth, short nose, liquid brown calf eyes, soft smooth tawny skin without a blemish.
“What’s going on, Justin?” yelled a male voice from somewhere in the back of the shack.
“Visitor, Uncle Steve,” he yelled back. “Come on in,” he invited, holding the door open for me. Gratefully I stepped into a dim and blessedly cool living room where an air conditioner’s hum competed with babble from Dish TV. As my eyes adjusted to the light, I looked around the room and saw its personality as being a bit anal, with sofa, lounge chair, end tables, and lamps arranged with rectilinear precision and spotlessly clean.
I heard Uncle Steve approaching, but saw him only as a silhouette against window light from the back door, quick and slim.
“Have a seat.” The teenage boy gestured me toward one end of the impeccable sofa. The carpet, too, I saw, was innocent of dirt in any form. Yet nothing looked new, and nobody had decorated. No throw pillows, no color scheme, and nothing worth noticing hanging on the walls. All the essentials were in evidence, yet the place felt oddly incomplete, as if it were a motel room, as if nobody lived here.
And the man hurrying in gave every impression of being exactly that: nobody. Not very tall and not well built, narrow-shouldered and hollow-chested and stooping, he was a gray man, by which I mean more than the color of his goatee and his thin hair pulled back into an aging-hippie ponytail and maybe his pebble eyes set too close together, shrinking into his cork-colored face like a turtle into its shell. Pinched, beak-nosed, and weaselly, he looked like the result of centuries of inbreeding. “Steven Stoat,” he said tonelessly, standing over me as I perched on his sofa but not offering his hand. “And you are?”
“Um, Liana Clymer.” I wasn’t legally, not yet, but I was using my birth name. The cutesy-poo alliteration of my married name, Liana Leppo, had always annoyed me.