A Tree Born Crooked (3 page)

Occasionally, a pack of University of Florida students would feel like slumming it and come up from Gainesville to raise hell for a few nights. The girls would buy snow globes and plastic key chains at the Citrus Shop, all the while giggling about how tacky everything was. They would try on Panama hats and shriek hysterically, posing and taking pictures of each other with their cell phone cameras. Afterwards, they would hit up the bars and deliberately order shots the bartenders at Dick’s Bar and Grill or The Blue Diamond had never heard of. They drank well vodka, stained pink or blue from whatever the bartenders could scrounge up, and then puked in the restroom sink while a friend held their hair back. The boys put on country accents and tried to get friendly with the locals. They called the men “old-timers” and cracked jokes about hillbillies screwing their daughters. There was always a fight. Some muscle-head in a polo shirt would grab a local boy’s girlfriend and not know how to back down. After the first punch, though, it was usually over. The college kid went down, the girls screamed, and the guy’s buddies protested, but didn’t make a move. That usually ended the night.
 

The tourists never went to the bars. They earnestly picked out gifts for each aunt and uncle back in Ohio and posed with goofy grins next to the life-sized wooden alligator outside of the Citrus Shop. They ate grilled cheese sandwiches and well-done burgers at Merv’s Diner and left early to make it to a bigger town by nightfall.
 

Only homegrown residents, whose roots went back further than the buildings themselves, inhabited Crystal Springs. James’ family could trace its history back to the terrible freeze of 1889 that had destroyed so many of Alachua County’s tangerine and kumquat groves. Generations of the Hart family had grown up in Crystal Springs as phosphate miners, then citrus pickers, and now citrus sellers. It was a town that people were born in, knowing already that they were going to die in it.
 

The sun was slipping behind the trees when James bounced across the railroad tracks and drove into Crystal Springs. In the sinking twilight, his eyes began to catch familiar street signs: Jawbone, Evenstar, Whistler. After the stoplight at the County Road 231 intersection, the heart of the town came into view. He drove past the Kwik Mart and across the road from that, the Dixie Stop-n-Shop. He slowed down turning onto Whites Avenue to let two teenagers in camouflage shirts cross the road. They eyed him sullenly and kept their slow pace. The neon light at Johnny’s Pawn and Guns flashed on as he cruised past, and an old man in front of the store nodded at him without recognition. James remembered it all. The convenience store on the corner that he and his buddies had shoplifted from as kids. The only nice restaurant in town, The Red Tree, where he had taken his first real girlfriend out to dinner. Not much had changed in the three years since he’d last come through. Not much had changed since he was a kid. The pizza place had shut down, and the video store was up for lease. A Family Dollar had replaced the Payless shoe store on the corner of 5th and Gibson. That was about it. At the next stoplight, James lit a cigarette. He could see the sign for the Citrus Shop ahead. A large, painted orange smiled broadly and winked an oversized, cartoon eye. The sign invited folks to “Come On In And Get Squeezed!” There wasn’t much past that; the road turned into highway and soon after loomed the exit for Interstate 75.
 

The light changed, but James didn’t put his foot on the gas. He smoked his cigarette. A car came up behind him and laid on the horn. James was tempted to wave the car around him, but knew that it all was inevitable anyway. He was back in Crystal Springs. Stopping in the middle of traffic wasn’t going to change that. James drove on and turned left onto the narrow dirt road next to the Citrus Shop. He remembered to slow down after the curve, but his truck still bottomed-out, scraping the underside as always. After a sharp right turn around a scraggly stand of pines, James pulled into the sandy driveway.
 

It was dark when James flicked the headlights off. He got out of the truck and closed the door gently behind him. Birdie Mae’s Oldsmobile was parked in front of him and the porch light was on, illuminating the wooden steps built up to the door of the doublewide. James stood with his hands jammed down into his pockets and listened to a hound baying off in the distance. Through the front windows, James could see the kitchen light on and the television flashing in the living room. Aside from the hound, it was quiet. The trailer door opened and the screen door pushed out with a snap.

“Huh, I was wondering when you was gonna darken my door. Certainly took your sweet time getting here, that’s for sure.”

“Hi, Mama.”

James pulled his fists out of his jeans and went inside.

TWO

A sitcom family was laughing hysterically at something funny in sitcom-land. James hunted for the remote while Birdie Mae banged around in the kitchen, opening and closing cabinet doors with unnecessary force. James finally found the remote, stuffed between the corduroy La-Z-Boy cushions, and turned the sound down on the television. Birdie Mae yelled over the running sink water as she rinsed out a dirty glass.
 

“I was watching that, you know.”

“Sorry. It was kinda loud.”

She came out, handed James a glass of something bright yellow poured from a warm two-liter, and sat down on the sagging couch across from him.
 

“Well, I gotta hear it, don’t I? It’s a good show. You ever watch it? This guy on there, he does the stupidest things. Just cracks me up. You should watch it.”

“Maybe. I don’t watch much TV.”

“Well, it’s good. The show on after is alright. Ain’t as funny, but it’s on, so I usually watch it, too.”

James didn’t know what to say. Even though the sound was off, Birdie’s eyes kept drifting over to the small television balanced on the edge of the dining room table. He glanced at the screen, figuring he should probably wait for a commercial. He sipped the flat, neon soda, one ice cube shrinking rapidly on the surface, and set the glass down. He stared at Birdie. He thought that she would look different somehow, older, and saddened by grief. Instead, she looked exactly as she had for the last twenty years.

Birdie Mae was a fat woman. She wasn’t big enough to be called “obese” or any other such ridiculous medical term. But she wasn’t small enough to be just “large” or “big-boned” either. “I’m fat, dammit. What the hell’s wrong with that?” she would yell at the doctors who tried to use polite euphemisms. She had big hands, with small fingernails that made them look bigger. Her eyes were a pretty blue, but always framed with gunky mascara, and when she worked at the store she wore peach eye shadow up to her eyebrows. Her thin lips usually carried the outline of sticky, pink lipstick. She had to constantly reapply it, as it always ended up smeared on her Virginia Slims. Her hair was long and dishwater blond, but James couldn’t remember ever seeing it down. Birdie wore her hair twisted and piled up on top of her head, sprayed into a motionless nest that didn’t even look good back when she first started doing it in the seventies. Birdie Mae had some delusion that she resembled Farrah Fawcett and running out of Aqua Net was cause for a family crisis. On more than one occasion, Birdie had refused to leave the bathroom until someone went out to the drugstore and brought back a can. She wore the clothes from the Citrus Shop that had defects and couldn’t be sold, so she usually stuffed herself into gaudy T-shirts and culottes. The shirt she was wearing today was hot pink with a silhouette of three palm trees. Above all, Birdie Mae thought she looked good and that’s how she carried herself.
 

A commercial for life insurance came on and Birdie lost interest. She turned back to James, settling herself on the couch and moving the glass ashtray off the armrest so she could stretch out.
 

“So, what took you so long, huh?”

James leaned forward.
 

“Well, for one, I got a postcard instead of a phone call. Want to tell me what that was all about?”

“I tried calling you. Couldn’t get ahold of nobody. I guess those rat traps you’re always staying in don’t got their telephones connected or something.”

“I have a cell phone. We’re in the twenty-first century.”

Birdie Mae wouldn’t make eye contact with James. She stared over his head at an abstract picture made of string art and black velvet hanging on the wall. She had won it one night at Bingo and was very proud of it.
 

“I ain’t known where you was staying. Always moving ‘round like you got a fire lit up under your butt. When’re you gonna settle down and marry some girl, huh? All this running ‘round, like to tire a body out.”

James refused to be distracted.
 

“Mama, that’s the point of having a cell phone. It goes with you. It ain’t tied into the wall like you seem to pretend to think. And if you didn’t know where I was staying, how did you have my address?”

Birdie looked down at her hands. She picked at a cuticle for a second before snapping her head back up.

“Alright, fine, Mister Smarty Pants. I lost your damn phone number. I think I had it written on a receipt or something, but I couldn’t find it nowheres. Wasn’t like I had all day to clean the house trying to find it, neither. I had other things going on, you know.”

James pushed himself up out of the armchair and went into the kitchen. Birdie Mae leaned over one arm of the couch, watching him.

“What’re you doing now?”

He yanked on the fridge handle, bent down, and leaned against the top of the open door. Half a block of Velveeta in a plastic sandwich baggie occupied the top shelf. Two paper fast-food bags with the tops rolled down and grease leaking out of the bottoms kept company with the butt end of a stick of margarine. There were three different flavors of Jell-O cups to choose from.

“You don’t have any beer.”

“You got something to drink.”

James stood up and glared at Birdie Mae. She was still craning her neck to keep an eye on him and make sure he wasn’t rearranging her refrigerator.

“There’s some wine coolers in the door there.”

“How ‘bout liquor?”

“I said, there’s some wine coolers in there.”

James glanced at the three bottles of Arbor Mist, one lying sideways next to a crusty bottle of mustard. He sighed, closed the door, and went back into the living room. Birdie Mae gave him a smug smile.

“Ain’t find what you wanted?”

James sat up slightly and pulled a pack of crushed cigarettes from his back pocket. He smoothed one out, put it between his lips, and looked around for a lighter.
 

“There, on top of the TV. Hey, the show’s back on.”

He reached for the lighter and then switched off the television set. James leaned his elbows on his knees and lit the cigarette. He blew a stream of smoke out of the side of his mouth and handed Birdie the lighter across the coffee table.

“So, how’d he go?”

Birdie Mae lit her long, skinny cigarette and set it in the ashtray without smoking it.
 

“That’s what you want to ask me? I ain’t seen you in more’n three years and that’s what you ask me?”

“Mama, I ain’t got time for this shit.”

“Watch your mouth. You got somewhere important you gotta be?”

“How did he go?”

She stared at the darkened television screen for a moment before answering.

“It weren’t pretty.”
 

“Mama.”

Birdie finally turned to look at James.
 

“Orville’d been on oxygen for the past year. You wouldn’t know that though, ‘cause you never come ‘round here, nor take no interest in what goes on, but the doctor put him on it back in June. Had a little tank with wheels that he could drag ‘round. Didn’t stop him none. He was still at the store every day. Still drinking, still carrying on. Still smoking.”

She paused and gave James a knowing look. He didn’t understand.
 

“Well, he liked to go sit out in the orchard on evenings. Like he always done. Go out there, sit on that stupid old stump way back near the fence. Far enough away that he could make like he ain’t hear me when I was shouting and needing something. So he’d been drinking, maybe a little too much, and went out there. Just like always. He usually didn’t take that tank out there with him. Said it interfered with his thinking. What in God’s name that means, I don’t got a clue. He just hated that oxygen thing.”

James crossed his leg over his knee and his foot started shaking. He wasn’t aware of it.
 

“Where’s this going?”

“I don’t know if maybe he’s better off now. Sure did hate having to pull that contraption ‘round. That night he weren’t feeling right, I don’t think. He’d been drinking that afternoon at the store, and that’s nothing new, but then he took his oxygen with him out to the orchard. I guess he were having trouble breathing, but he went on out there anyways. Course, I seen him smoke on the oxygen before. Doctor told him it was dangerous, but you know Orville couldn’t go more’n twenty minutes without having him a smoke.”

“Mama. You better tell me what happened right now.”

Birdie Mae crossed her arms, irritated that James couldn’t figure it out on his own.