Mariah Danford looked up from using Windex to clean the glass case and said, “We do. I have just the pair for you. You could pass a silver dollar through the hoops.” She went behind the counter and removed two earrings. “Let me put them on for you.” In less than a half minute, she’d attached the earrings to Courtney’s ears. “What do you think?”
“Courtney held the mirror up, capturing more light entering the shop. “They’re beautiful. How much are they?”
Maria glanced at Mambo Eve who closed her eyes and nodded. Mariah said, “It’s my treat. I’ll buy them for you.”
“You don’t have to do that. I can pay for—”
“Shhh … I insist. It’s the least I can do for you … for someone who’s got the heart to do what you’re trying to do.”
Courtney stood in the shade of a Southern live oak and looked up and down Dumaine Street. She wore dark glasses and the African headdress. A black mixed breed dog sauntered across the street, head low, rib bones visible under the mangy fur. There was very little traffic. She walked a half block down from where the red Toyota truck was parked, discreetly glancing at parked cars, looking for occupants. Looking for anyone who might be looking for her.
She crossed the street and walked back toward the truck. A low-rider Chevy Malibu turned the corner onto Dumaine. Courtney could see two men in the car, dark features. The driver’s head was shaved, tats up his neck. The passenger wore his hair in a purple Mohawk, sleeves cut from his black T-shirt, thick silver chain around his neck. Rap music pulsated from the car. The passenger stuck his head out the open window and shouted, “Lookin’ fine, Mama. You want some scratch? Crystal. Best in the city.”
Courtney ignored the man.
“Talkin’ to you, bitch!”
She walked straight ahead, music from an approaching ice cream truck, Turkey in the Straw, crossing with the rap beat. Two teenage boys on skateboards coasted by Courtney. They skated around a man standing on the corner, watching the traffic. Watching the people. He wore dark glasses, ear-bud in one ear, and a baseball cap backwards on his round head.
Courtney was within fifty feet of her Toyota truck. She walked faster, the ice cream truck coming down Dumaine. And then she spotted them. Two men in a van. The van was parked on the side of the street, a parked car in front of it and one behind it. Courtney could see the driver start the engine.
The teens on the skateboards turned around and were heading back in her direction. As they got closer, she smiled at them and said, “You guys look hot. You want some ice cream?”
One teen, silver ring through a nostril, inflamed acne on his cheeks and chin said, “Sure. Sounds good.”
The other teen, a taller boy with dirty blond dreadlocks, grinned. “You buyin’?”
“Yes, I am.” She handed them a ten-dollar bill. “Go back to the corner, there’s a blue van parked between the white car and the black car. Stop the ice cream truck by the parked van and buy your ice cream.”
“No problem,” said the dreadlocked boy.
Each boy used his left foot and leg to build speed on his skateboard, kicking off the pavement, rocketing back toward the van.
Courtney watched them a moment. She could see movement in the van, the men watching her. The moment the teenagers flagged down the ice cream truck, near the front of the van, Courtney bolted and ran for the Toyota. She fumbled with the keys, unlocking the door and sliding in behind the steering wheel. She started the motor, her heart racing. She glanced in the side-view mirror pulling away from the curb.
Her stomach turned. One man had jumped from the van, pointing a pistol at the teens and the ice cream truck driver. Courtney could see that the gunman was shouting, gesturing with the pistol. She zoomed away from the curb, accelerating down Dumaine, passing the bar where the old bluesman strummed his guitar and had a stare on his face that seemed to look a thousand yards away.
73
The setting sun was coating the tree tops in a blood red profile when I left my mother’s home. I pulled to a stop at the end of her long driveway, windows in the Jeep down, and simply stared at the hand-drawn puffin on her mailbox. At that moment, the puffin lit by an enchanted light from a dying sun, the air now cooler, I felt more alive than I had in a long time. The quirky little bird on the box was like a long lost renaissance masterpiece treasure that I’d found. Even in this village of the weird, the Celtic McMansions, doublewides, warehouses, cow pasture lawns, new cars and trucks parked near abandon old cars, I felt like I’d arrived in the Promised Land.
I’d spent the last four hours trying to make up for forty-three years. Four hours of getting to know a mother — my mother, someone I never knew existed. I heard about my family on her side and my father’s side, where they were raised, how they’d met, and how much they’d loved each other. My thoughts moved in a whirlwind of what was, what is, and what might have been.
If the course to your future is shaped by your past, and you discover your past is made from a lie, what does that say about the present, and how will that affect your future?
I thought hard about that. I tried to put it in some kind of perspective, to hold this moment in time up to the light, hoping for clarity, hoping for a better insight into who I was — who I’d become as a man. I thought about genetics. I reflected on the loving upbringing I had from my adoptive parents, but on the outside looking in, from a scientific viewpoint — my life could have been a psychological experiment. My identity and persona under the microscope, a petri dish specimen in the venerable controversy of nature verse nurture.
And then there was my new-found brother, Dillon. Did genetics, a brutal rape of our mother, play a role in him becoming a killer — someone who’d rape and kill a member of his own family? His sister. My sister. Our sister. Was he conceived in evil? Or is the seed of evil planted in all of us, lying dormant in some people under the loam of good, in others sprouting deep roots, luring and hanging in temptation from the tree of life? Can good be short-circuited in anyone’s fuse box by the rising of a black tide under the influence of a dark moon?
My mother raped by a priest inside a church, his offspring spawned to reproduce the cycle. Uncle Dillon. No wonder Courtney was so damn confused, so angry.
What I knew now was my biological father was dead, murdered. My mother is alive, but apparently ill. Courtney Burke was my niece. Dillon Flanagan was my brother. And the daughter who Andrea Logan conceived was still out there somewhere — anonymous. Maybe that was the nugget of hope found in the mix of pebbles and mud at the bottom of a gold pan.
There were two ways to show to the media, and ultimately the voters, that Courtney wasn’t Andrea’s daughter — my daughter. The first was to find Courtney, do the DNA testing. The second was to prove she wasn’t a serial killer, but that would mean finding the person who was the killer. The image of an army of news reporters, satellite trucks, helicopters closing in on my mother’s trailer, in her condition, caused my head to throb above my left eye. I wondered if Detective Grant had made any progress. I picked up one of my disposable mobile phones and started to call him.
Then I spotted the pickup truck.
Same white truck that had moved slowly by me when I was about to drive up my mother’s driveway. Same wide off-road mud tires. The truck was parked under cottonwood and oak trees across the street from my mother’s mailbox. The sun set in the horizon behind the truck, framing a silhouette of a man looking at me through binoculars.
I started to turn right, head for the highway and the first decent motel I could find. But then the cross-roads of time — of forty-three years and the last four hours, added up to that single moment for me to turn left rather than right. The clarity I sought, the meaning I was searching for, immediately started down a brand new path for me. The first destination was that pickup truck and whoever I found behind the wheel.