Bobby must have hung up. The sheriff closed the phone. “That’s a new one.” He lifted Allie gently from the back seat of his patrol car and unlocked the handcuffs, freeing her wrists. “How do you know him?”
Allie rubbed her wrists and opened her mouth, but I answered for her. “That’s a longer story than this one.”
He turned his attention to Allie and held the phone aloft. “Can I reach you at this number?”
Allie smiled. “Yes, sir.”
He handed me the phone but spoke while looking at Jake. “If you’ve been married to him ten years, and he did what you’re saying he did . . . I ’magine he deserved a lot more than just a steak knife through the hand.” He walked off shaking his head and talking to himself. “You can’t technically assault someone who’s legally dead.”
Before Allie climbed into my truck, she took a long look around. Taking in the enormity and prosperity of what had been Jake’s life. If she had words, she didn’t speak them. We drove slowly to the cabin. Jake’s sand castle was about to come crumbling down and those kids were about to lose their mom and dad. Allie had already lost a husband. And for what? Just money. Stuff. It was pathetic, and so was Jake Gibson. Prison would teach him that soon enough.
Allie fell asleep in the truck. When we parked at the cabin, she said, “Think I’ll get some sleep.” I got her settled, but when I spread a second blanket across her legs and toes, she said, “All the times he was gone from me, he was here with this family . . . two kids who had no idea. And there I was back home, hurting, thinking what a lousy wife I am. I was never anything to him other than a payday. What kind of man does that? And why me?”
The next morning I woke her with a breakfast of eggs, toast, jelly, hot coffee. She didn’t eat much, but she appreciated the gesture. Hovering over her coffee, she stared into the coals and said, “You think he’ll go to jail?”
“Just as soon as they sew up the hole in his hand.”
She looked out across the mountains. “I thought about driving it through his heart, but then I remembered he didn’t have one.” She leaned against the sofa and wiped her face with both hands. “I didn’t see this coming. And I have no idea what to do now.” She was quiet several minutes. “Does this mean I’m not married?”
“I think it means you never were. At least . . . not to Jake.”
I poured her a hot cup of coffee and sat opposite her. Just being present without feeling the need to talk or try to fix everything. After breakfast she closed her eyes. “You mind if I rest awhile?”
ALLIE SLEPT THE BETTER part of three days. She’d wake, eat, drink something, sit by the fire, then climb back into bed. At night she slept deeply, fourteen hours at a stretch, her eyes rolling behind her eyelids. I recognized, maybe for the first time, how tired she was. Not just sleepy, but bone-and soul-tired. She’d been holding both ends together so long, trying to recover from betrayals and rejections. Treading water while tied to a cement block.
Rosco and I never ventured far from the cabin. When we did, we left the door open so she’d know we were close. On the third day she woke, rubbed her eyes, and found me looking at her. She said, “How long have I been sleeping?”
“Better part of three days.”
“I could sleep a week.”
“I have a request.”
“Okay.”
“Will you let me show you something? It’s a bit of a drive.”
“What is it?”
“It’s better if I show you.”
26
I packed knowing I wouldn’t be back for a while, and the three of us drove out of the mountains. When we reached Atlanta I turned west on I-20, then took Highway 431 north out of Dothan, Alabama toward Abbeville, where we turned west on Highway 10 and south at the flashing light in Clopton. Rosco had sprawled across the center console, slobbering on Allie’s thigh and expressing his incessant need to be literally in the middle of everything all the time. The cup holder next to me held three of Gabby’s crayons. I remembered watching her gently peel the paper back and sharpen each. Below my tachometer I’d taped a small picture she’d drawn of a stick-figure man next to a stick-figure dog. The picture tugged at me.
When the hard road turned to dirt, we drove a mile to a pecan grove and stopped at a red gate. Somebody had stolen the sign. I unlocked the gate, and we pulled through the pines down a dirt road and up onto a small rise to an open field. Standing in the center of the field was a large metal-roofed building with no walls and a fifty-foot ceiling at its apex. Maybe a square block in size. Buildings like this were originally constructed to house outdoor rodeo venues.
Allie’s eyes had grown large as Oreo cookies. The roof protected most every kind of carnival ride known to man: merry-go-round, bumper cars, go-karts. Those rides too tall to fit inside the building surrounded it. She pointed at my carnival ghost town. “This is yours?”
“Kind of a neat place when it’s all lit up at night. Provided you don’t mind bright flashing lights.”
“How long has it been here?”
“Twenty years or more.”
“How long’s it been like this?”
“What, you mean dilapidated?”
She laughed. “Yes.”
“I locked the gate more than a decade ago and haven’t been back since. I’m kind of surprised it’s still here.”
“Why’d you put it so far out here in the sticks?”
“I didn’t initially build it to draw a crowd. I was just giving my hands something to do while my mind spun itself. One bolt led to another. Before long I had a merry-go-round. Then a shooting range. Baseball toss. Bowling lanes. A dunk tank. Whack-a-mole. Guessing people’s weights. The power meter thing where you see how hard you can swing an ax like Paul Bunyan. Snow cones. Cotton candy. Popcorn. Candied apples. Photo booth. Pony rides. Horse shoe toss. I’d dress up like a clown and take pictures with people.”
Allie laughed. “Did you really dress up like a clown?”
“I wanted an old-fashioned carnival. But what I learned was that when you turn on a light at night, people want to see what you’re doing. Turn on ten or twenty thousand and they really get curious. Add carnival music and . . . Most nights I operated at capacity. We even had amateur rodeo night once a month.”
I led her through the maze of rides toward the only enclosed section of the building, the restaurant. It was nothing fancy. Function over form in every way. Picnic tables with enough seating for about two hundred. A cafeteria-style buffet line. Behind the counter was the kitchen. I wound through the line and back into the industrial-sized, commercial-grade kitchen. A stainless-steel ghost town.
“We used to serve several hundred a night. Sometimes a thousand.” I pointed as I talked. “Fryers. Griddles. Grills. Exhaust fans. Refrigerators. Freezers. Ice makers.” Cobwebs had spread across the corners.
She surveyed the expanse of once-shiny machines. “How many people did you employ?”
“In our heyday about sixty, but that included folks making balloons, people in dunk tanks, pony walkers, folks parking cars . . .”
She walked through the kitchen, her fingers gently rolling through the dust along the tops of doors and handles. “We never had equipment this nice at the Tornado.”
Rosco was sniffing behind a fryer, his tail rhythmically thumping the sides.
“I have a proposition for you.”
She slid her hands into her jeans. “Okay.”
“Let me help you. I’ll stick around, we’ll put the Tornado back the way she was when we were kids. Once it’s up and running, if you want to run it, you can. If not, sell it and make a little money.”
She raised an eyebrow. “You’d do that?”
“If you let me.”
“Why?”
“Because you need a break.” I waved my hands across the kitchen. “Some of it might need a little work to get it going again, but it’s yours if you want it.”
She pushed her hair out of her face and leaned against a griddle. “I ap
preciate the offer, but the Vacuum needs more than a kitchen to get her up and running.”
“Like what?”
“Wood rot repair, to start with. Walls. Floors. The roof is zinc, but it needs a few sheets. The whole thing needs to be replumbed. Rewired. And, yes, it needs a kitchen.”
“What happened to the last one?”
“Sold it to pay the property taxes.” She crossed her arms again. “But all of that work does nothing to pay down the debt.”
“How much do you owe?”
She shrugged. “I try not to think about it.”
“Ballpark.”
“400K plus.”
“Any second mortgages? Unpaid taxes? Anything else?”
“Nope. That’s pretty much it.” She summed it up. “My father used the restaurant as collateral and accumulated debt my mother could never climb out of. I paid that off, made a little money, and then the whole Bobby thing happened. His rehab wasn’t cheap. Now I get sucker-punched by Jake. Truth is, I love everything about that place, but it does not love me.”
“You want to make another go of it?”
She laughed. “Did you not hear anything I just said?”
“I have some money.”
She chuckled. “How much?”
I shrugged. “I told you I was good at the poop business.”
“I’m being serious.”
“I’ve got more than enough to help you get back on your feet.”
“And what if, after all your best intentions and all your hard work, the restaurant tanks and you lose it all?”
“What am I going to do with it?”
“I don’t know. Travel?”
“I’ve done that.”
She did not look convinced.
“Allie, I’m just offering you a chance. A fresh start. If you want it.”
She pointed out toward all the rides. “What about all that stuff?”
“That’s yours too, if you want it.”
“Where will you be in all of this?”
“I’m pretty handy with a wrench.”
“What about your cabin?”
“It’s not going anywhere.”
She let out a deep breath. “Jo-Jo, I’m pretty fragile right now. Starting with my dad, every man I’ve ever trusted has . . . not proven trustworthy. They’ve lied to me, stolen from me . . .”
“I have only lied to you once.”
She nodded. “Once was enough.” She spoke as much to herself as to me. “I’m not sure my heart can survive . . . another.”
“And I won’t steal from you.”
When her eyes found mine, they were looking decades behind us. “You would do all this . . . even after . . . ?”
“After what?”
She looked away. “Everything that’s happened.”
I walked her to the merry-go-round, dusted off two horses frozen in full gallop, and we sat, she leaning her forehead against the brass pole, looking at me. I studied the quiet world around us, frozen in time, just waiting for someone to throw the switch and jump this place back to life again.
“You and me, we’re a lot like this place,” I said.
“What, old and decrepit?”
We laughed. “Maybe that too.” We were growing comfortable around each other. I pointed. “I used to sit over there at night, close my eyes and just listen to the laughter. Watch the smiles on the kids’ faces.”
We climbed off the horses and walked between the booths and rides.
“This was never intended to be this way. It was designed for something else. Something better. But when I killed the power, it froze. Stuck here in time. And what was once alive and warm became dead and cold to the touch. Like me. Or at least parts of me.” I shook my head. “So I locked the gate and drove away.
“Now I’m trying to figure out how not to go back to my cabin and end up like one of these horses.” I looked at Allie. “A long time ago, when you and I knew laughter and love and we were full of hope and dreams, something pulled the plug on us. Ever since, we’ve been stuck in this cold, dusty, frozen place. Just waiting. But for what? I’m sixty-two. I live alone, don’t hear as well as I used to, can’t live without insulin, I have bad dreams, there’s stuff in my life I can’t begin to talk about. I’m not the man I’d hoped to be. But these last few days, I have enjoyed being with you. Seeing your strength and your frailty.”
I grabbed her hand, and we sat on a picnic table staring at the crazy world I’d created and then abandoned. “I’m feeling something I haven’t felt in a long time. There’s a part of me that feels like I don’t deserve it. That if you really knew me, if you could see the pictures I see with my eyes, you’d want nothing to do with me. But if that horse back there could talk, and I walked up and asked him, ‘Mr. Horse, what can I do for you?’ he’d say, ‘Old man, hop on and let me take you for a ride.’” I paused and rubbed my hands together. “There are a thousand reasons not to, but I think we should throw the switch one last time and then listen for the laughter.”
She slid her hand in mine and laid her head on my shoulder. “Life’s not been easy, has it?”
I wrapped my arm around her shoulder. “No. It has not.”
“Make me one promise.”
“Okay.”
“Be truthful with me. Even with the stuff that hurts.”
“Sometimes I don’t have words for the stuff I see, but with the words I do have, I won’t ever lie to you.”
She kissed my cheek. “That’s good enough.”
WE LOCKED THE GATE behind us and pointed the nose to Cape San Blas. Three hours due south. We had just pulled off Highway 231 onto I-10 east when my phone rang. It was my doctor’s office, calling to tell me I’d missed my appointment.
I sent it to voicemail.
A few minutes later my phone rang again. I punched the mute button, again sending it to voicemail. But when it rang a third time, I checked the caller ID. It was a Mississippi area code. I flipped it open. “Hello?”
The accent was thick. “Mr. Jo-Jo?”
“Catalina?”
She was whispering. “Mr. Jo-Jo, I don’t know who to call. We are in a bad way.”
“What happened?”
“Men were waiting for us.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yes.”
“The kids?”
“Scared but good.” She paused. “My brother . . .” I heard someone groaning in the background. “He’s not too good.”
“Where are you?”
“Outside New Orleans.”
“Do you have transportation?”
“No.”
I made an illegal U-turn in the median. “Can you stay safe for a few hours?”
“I think so. We are hiding behind a rest area on the 10 interstate.”
“Do you know the name of the closest town?”
She whispered something to someone next to her, then returned to me. “Gulfport.”
“I’m about five hours from you. Sit tight. How many are you?”
“Me, the kids, my brother, and three other men. My cousins.”
“Are you hungry?”
“Yes.”
“Does your brother need a doctor?”
“He’s in and out of consciousness. I don’t know.”
“Is he bleeding?”
“Not anymore. I stitched him up. But his ribs are badly bruised. He’s having trouble taking a deep breath. And one eye is closed.”
“Sit tight. I’ll call you when I get close.”
“Mr. Jo-Jo?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you.”
27
At nine p.m. we crossed into Gulfport. Allie leaned over and touched my arm. “We should pick up some food. The kids’ll be hungry.”
We pulled into a small twenty-four-hour grocery store and bought groceries and some pain medicine along with some first-aid items, a pillow, a few blankets, and an inflatable pool raft long enough for a man to lie on. At the checkout counter, I said, “Chocolate
. The kids like chocolate.”
Finding the rest area wasn’t difficult. We pulled in and parked, and before I could call Catalina on the phone, she had stepped out of the shadows and was bringing the kids to us. When they saw me, they ran and jumped into my arms. Gabriella was crying. Diego clung to my leg. I carried them both to the truck while Allie helped Catalina.
Manuel was a different story. They’d worked him over pretty good. He was lying on the ground, and three men sat alongside him. One of them was my friend Javier. I knelt and held Manuel’s hand. “Manuel?”
He opened his eye and tried to smile. “El Gato.”
The four of us lifted him. He was a thick, muscled man and he was in a lot of pain. It took all of us to get him to the bed of my truck.
He patted my hand. “Gracias, señor.”
The men climbed into the truck to sit with Manuel. “If you need anything, tap the window.”
I drove back roads and avoided the interstate as much as possible. It took longer, but I figured a 45-mph wind would be gentler than a 75-mph wind. While we drove, the men in back blew up the raft, rolled Manuel onto it and covered him with a blanket. Up front, Catalina relayed the story. They’d made it to a trailer park near Hattiesburg, Mississippi. They’d only been there a few days when a truck arrived in the middle of the night and three men got out. They pulled Manuel out of the trailer and worked him over with baseball bats. Wanting to make an example.