Your Cheatin Heart

Chapter Eleven

Don't fish with a skunk, Mama used to say, it'll only raise a stink and you'll come home empty-handed. Mama was right. There I stood, empty-handed and staring after a Grade A skunk. Union Grove! "Ask me what you really want to ask me, Maggie." The words kept circling around in my head like buzzards. If Weathers had his way, I was done for. I just knew it But then, Marshall Weathers didn't know what I was capable of doing. And if I had my way, he wouldn't find out until I was ready.

Know where your enemy keeps his dirty underwear and you'll have won the war, Mama said. It was time to follow the smell. I ran inside Jack's place and called Bonnie down at the Curley-Que.

"Maggie?" she said, all breathless and worried. "Are you all right?"

"No, Bonnie, I'm not," I said, "but I'm sure gonna be! Listen, didn't you go to Smith High School?"

"What?" Bonnie hadn't expected this.

"Smith. Did you go to Smith?"

I was pacing around Jack's living room, staring out the window, unable to sit still.

"Yes, I went to Smith. Graduated in '80. Why?"

"Good," I said, "then you're just the help I need."

"Maggie, I don't see what this has to do with…"

"Did you know a Marshall Weathers?" I demanded.

Bonnie sighed. "Know him? Know him! Just about every girl in the school knew him! Driving a sixty-eight Mustang convertible, football, track, softball, and women! That boy was a hundred miles of fast, bad road. Liked to kill his poor ole mama with worry! You know she goes to my church, don't you?"

I leaned back against the wall facing the window and stared out at the parking lot, a smile edging its way across my face.

"He's come a long way, that ole boy has," Bonnie sighed, "He's a big detective now, down at the… Hey, he isn't the…? Aw, Maggie…"

I could hear the beauty parlor sounds in the background, the whoosh of blow dryers, the chatter of the customers, but above it all I heard a tiny little giggle.

"Maggie, you watch out now, girl! He ain't like Vernell, not at all!"

"Bonnie," I said, "how's about me and you going to church Sunday?"

Bonnie sucked in her breath. "You are a wicked woman!" she said. "I'll meet you there about quarter to eleven."

"Thanks, Bon, I owe you. Big time!"

I hung up the phone and started humming a little. Okay, so he knew more about me than almost anyone, but the tables were turning. Soon I was gonna be sitting in the catbird seat. Union Grove! How in the hell had he found out about that?

It was years ago. We'd sworn ourselves to secrecy. Which one of them had talked? Well, they were weak. A bunch of girls, women now, mothers, bored, with too much time on their hands and too little attention. I could easily see them giving in the face of Weathers's thousand-watt charm. Hell, if I stayed around him too long, I'd give, too. But that was never going to be an option. I'd see to that. I hoped.

Women, girls really, Boone's Farm apple wine, and the feel of a spring night our senior year of high school. That's what was really responsible for Union Grove. We were just young girls, with the sense of power that comes from blossoming bodies and not enough freedom to know a risky situation. And it was all my fault, as usual.

It was before the Digger Bailey fiasco, before I knew how badly the world could wound you. I wasn't scared of nothing, not my alcoholic father, not his wild-assed family, not my teachers, and certainly not boys. That's how come when we heard the senior boys had rolled toilet paper around the statue of Robert E. Lee that stood in front of our high school, we knew we had to show them the proper way to pull a senior prank. I was the organizer.

"That was a pitiful display," I said to my girlfriends the next day. "How juvenile. How immature!" The others were nodding right along. We were all piled up in my VW, down at the end of Shannon Abie's driveway, smoking cigarettes and drinking Boone's Farm apple wine. "They're just little boys. We're women!"

"Yeah," they chorused. "Women!" Evella Lynn threw back her head and uttered a long rebel yell, and the rest of us whooped and tossed our cigarettes out the open windows.

"Let's do something really, really bad. Something that'll let them boys know that we're women!"

Well, the more we drank, the more the idea of besting the boys appealed to us. No idea was too outrageous for us! Finally a plan gelled. We would leave our mark on Union Grove High School, all right!

The next night, Friday, actually early Saturday morning, the six of us met at Evella Lynn's place.

"Evella, you got the paint?"

"Yes, ma'am!" she cried, brandishing a bucket of bright blue latex.

"Darnelle, you got gloves?"

"Check!"

We went through the list, swigging our Boone's Farm at record speed, then heading out in Evella Lynn's brother's pickup, bound for the school. Lacy was the only one who had doubts. She always was the sissy, and as I thought on it now, would be the most likely to have ratted us all out to Weathers. She was just sure we'd be caught.

Evella killed the headlights when we were still a mile from the school, throwing the truck down into second gear and forcing it along almost at a crawl.

"Shush, y'all!" she said. "Listen out!"

We all shut up and listened, little thrills of anxiety gnawing at us all. We heard nothing. Union Grove, home of the Blue and White Lions, stood in the middle of a cow pasture, surrounded by a small football stadium and an Olympic-sized pool that served in the summer as the community swimming hole.

We ran the truck up around back of the school, then up over the curve to the northeast corner of the old brick building, right under the principal's window. Evella killed the engine and handed me a roll of masking tape.

"Knock it out, big girl!" she cried softly.

I taped the window, and then, just like in the I Spy TV show, I knocked the pane out with a gloved fist and pulled the taped pieces out of the frame. No jagged edges. No clinking sounds. No mess. In a few moments the six of us were inside Mr. Slovenick's office, painting away and drinking our sweet summer wine.

We painted his floor, his desk, his chair, his phone, his papers, even his flag, bright Lion blue. We covered the walls and the ceiling and when at last we were finished, we had almost as much paint on ourselves as we did the room.

"I know what let's do," I said. "Let's go swimming! Naked!"

That was our mistake.

We ran old Evella's truck right down to the chain-link fence and used the roof of the cab as our ladder to scale over. We didn't plan how we'd get back out from behind the fence. We didn't consider that the swim team would meet on Saturday. We just knew the pleasure of swimming alone and naked in the school pool. The untouchables.

The water turned bright blue from the paint, just like the pictures you see of the Carribean. The sun began to slowly edge its way up over the southern Virginia hills, and there we were, on top of the world. We were laying out on top of the concrete, drying off, when we heard the car in the distance and knew it was headed for the school. After all, where else would a car be going at six A.M. on a late spring Saturday, down the one road that led only to the high school?

"I told y'all!" Lacy shrieked. "I told you!"

We jumped up, the naked six of us, all running in different directions, all panicked except for Evella, who calmly started to scale the fence, butt naked, her fingers and toes grabbing hold of the mesh as she worked her way up and over the fence. By the time we'd come to our senses enough to start climbing, she'd crawled into the car and cranked the engine. We dropped down into the cab like fat, overripe apples hitting the ground, and in an instant Evella had popped the clutch and was skidding her way across the pasture.

There was only one way out. We were going to pass the car and sure as shooting, we'd be recognized.

"Hide, y'all," Evella screamed. "Lie flat in the bed!"

We squished ourselves flat against the bedliner of the old truck, huddling in one blue-tinged mass of naked girl flesh. Evella was gonna take the fall. She couldn't drive and hunch down under the windshield. So, she went out like Evella.

"It's Dickie!" she screamed back through the cab window. Dickie was the president of Beta Club, the smart kid club, and manager of the swim team. Towel Boy, they called him.

Evella pushed the accelerator to the floor and sat up straight, blue and naked, her big breasts pushed up against the steering wheel. As she passed Dickie, Evella let out a mighty Indian war whoop and kept on going. Evella really wasn't afraid of nothing or nobody.

We hightailed it back to Evella's, borrowed her clothes and took showers, hoping to clean up before the cops came to arrest us. For surely they were hot on our tails. But the cops didn't come that day. Or the next. It wasn't that our crime went unnoticed. It was more the way little Dickie related it to the police and the press.

"Oh, my gawd! Oh, Lord," he moaned to the reporter who wrote up the big front page story, "Union Grove High School Mauled By Blue Man."

"It was the biggest, meanest-looking man I ever did see!"

"Man!" Evella raved after school on Monday. "I ain't no man!" But of course she couldn't say it out loud.

"We were robbed!" I said. "They think a man did it!"

"But what about our clothes, back at the pool?" asked Lacy, who I believe trembled the rest of her senior year.

The clothes were never mentioned. Not in the paper. Not around the school. Nowhere. However, a few years later, the most peculiar thing did happen. Evella married Dickie. Little shrimpy Dickie and big old Evella. The rest of us always wondered if somehow he'd found out, taken our clothes and decided to cover for us, or realized later that the "man" he'd seen was really Evella. We never knew, but rumors circulated as always. Dickie and Evella live in a blue house, drive blue cars, and mostly wear blue clothing. But I'm sure that has nothing to do with the year the Union Grove Blue Man struck.

If Weathers had gotten to the bottom of that story, what other distorted ideas did he have about me? How would I ever convince him that I could be trusted, believed to tell the truth? How could I convince him that I wasn't a murderer? And how would I ever make him believe that someone was coming after me? And maybe not just me. I felt my stomach seize up and a wave of nausea swept over me. What about Sheila? Was she safe? What if the killer had been after us and only happened on Jimmy?

I had to get to my baby. I had to find some answers before we found ourselves in real danger.