“Does that do us any good?”
I shook my head.
“For some reason,” Mama said, “I have the feeling that Fennie Verlow doesn’t live in Tallassee.”
“Me neither.”
“Me either, Calley,” Mama corrected me. “Wherever that woman does make her humble abode, she might have a phone, but we don’t have the number, do we?”
“No ma’am.”
“Well then, I suppose if you want to be any good to me at all, you had better go downstairs and find your mama aspirin for her throbbing head.”
“I need some money.”
“Go downstairs and beg for it, darling.”
I just stood there, hornswoggled.
“Might as well get in practice, because from now on, we’ll be begging something from somebody every day of our lives. Today is just begging two dimes for a tin of aspirin from the first kind-looking gentleman you run across in the lobby. Don’t ask a lady, darling, because she’ll give you twenty cents, but afterward she will dig till she finds out exactly whose little girl you are.”
Mama lied. O my did Mama lie. We were not yet paupers. She had not mentioned her jewelry or any of the valuable items she had taken from Ramparts, nor her secret store of cash, very possibly including my silver dollar. And we had the Edsel. She could sell it. I knew what it sold for—an amount that was a fortune indistinguishable from the missing million-dollar ransom to a seven-year-old.
As I closed the door, the telephone rang in our room. That brrrring of the telephone in a hotel room in Elba, Alabama, where no one knew we were, let me breathe again.
It was Fennie, of course: no need to linger to be sure of it.
Mama said, “Hello,” in her sweetest voice—always reserved for strangers.
I ran down the corridor so that I would not hear any more.
Downstairs, I did not beg for twenty cents for Mama’s BC. I went up to the lady at the tiny counter just inside the front door of the hotel. She sold Chiclets, Tiparillos, and the Dothan Eagle.
Wrinkling my brow, making sure my glasses were a little crooked, I said, “My mama has a throbbing headache and she sent me down for some BC but she did not give me any money. She said I could charge it to our room like we did in New Orleans one time—”
The counter lady was a young woman, hardly more than a girl. She might have cooed over an infant but ambulatory children were of little interest to her. Presented with a lump of a girl child of questionable intelligence, she wanted to get rid of me more than she wanted to confirm that I was, in fact, the child of a registered guest. She slipped the BC across her counter as she smiled artificially at someplace over my head.
Mama never asked me where I got the money for the BC. She had other things on her mind. She had to figure out how to leave the Hotel Osceola with the grandeur befitting her station at the same time she skipped on the bill.
“We are going to meet your friend Fennie’s sister in Pensacola Beach,” Mama said. “When I mentioned that you had never seen the Gulf of Mexico or played in white sand, your friend Fennie would not hear the end of it. So, because of you, I suppose we have to leave this place and go to that place.”
Mama was appropriating what Fennie Verlow must have asked, I knew.
“Oh, we can stay here, Mama.”
“No we can’t. If we stay here we will run up a bill. We go to your friend Fennie’s sister’s in Pensacola Beach or else you go back downstairs and start begging a good deal more than twenty cents for a pack of BC tablets.”
“How did Fennie know we were here?”
“She has relatives here in Elba”—so much for no one in Elba knowing us—“or that’s what she said. Maybe one of them works in the hotel kitchen. Or is a chambermaid. Or runs the telephone exchange.”
“Maybe,” I said. “So maybe we could just get in the car and drive off like we were gone to visit somebody and leave everything here and that way nobody knows we have left and Fennie’s relatives can take care of everything when the people downstairs are not looking.”
Mama looked at me with thoughtful amusement.
“I know what happened. I must have been walking alongside the gutter one day and a little baby reached up and grabbed the hem of my skirt and that little baby was you. Because no real daughter of mine would counsel theft and deception.”
“I am sorry, Mama.”
“And you are deeply ashamed too, I hope, as befits a proper young girl.”
“Yes ma’am.”
That’s exactly what we did.
No one stopped us when we drove away from the hotel without baggage or receipt. And the luggage was waiting for us when we arrived at Fennie’s sister’s house.
Twenty-three
THE drive south from Elba to Pensacola is a little less than two hundred miles, though it does not look nearly that far on a map. I had time to wonder why Mama’s first thought had been of Fennie. I watched Mama closely. I listened to everything she said. It was the gas gauge that convinced me that Mama had no idea what was going on, after all.
We left the hotel by the front entrance—to go in any other fashion would have been tantamount (to Mama, at least) to be branded with a P for pauper. On our grand parade through the dinky lobby of the hotel and out to the Edsel, parked in one of the spaces in front of the dining room, Mama indulged in a running verbal debate with herself about whether we really wanted to visit our (imaginary) aunt Tallulah out on the Opp Road. I wished that I had an aunt Tallulah, just to have an aunt of that name. For a wild instant, I wondered if my real aunts, Faith and Hope, lived on the Opp Road, under the name of Tallulah. Faith and Hope Tallulah, secondhand clothes.
No one paid any attention to Mama’s performance.
I knew no one would stop us and that we would get to Pensacola Beach. I expected Fennie’s sister to be like Fennie. I even expected that Fennie herself would be there to greet us.
Mama was still sighing with the effort of the earth-shaking decision when she settled behind the wheel and fiddled the key into the ignition. She looked in the rearview mirror as she backed out and kept checking it. From long experience, she managed to pop in the cigarette lighter and light a cigarette, using both hands, as the ungrand Hotel Osceola shrank in the mirror and fell away behind us. She held the cigarette between two fingers as she blew smoke.
“Look out the back for the sheriff and bend your ear for the cock of a rifle, baby. Because you have to tell your mama when to duck,” she said.
Hanging over the backseat, I pretended to watch for the sheriff. Oddly enough, a sheriff’s car appeared just as we were leaving Elba. I did not draw Mama’s attention to it. The sheriff was not after us. I had seen enough television to know that sheriffs do not shoot just anybody for minor things like speeding or skipping a hotel bill. And if we did get stopped, no mere deputy, let alone a sheriff, would have a chance against Mama. What she had done to those FBI agents, she could do to any mere man. And to the best of my observation at that time, any man was mere.
“We have crossed the border into Florida,” Mama said about an hour later. “You can sit down and rest your eyes, Calley.”
As I sat down, I happened to glance at the gas gauge. I took a second look. It read empty.
I might have mentioned it to Mama. Likely she would say, Well, it’s a good deed of you to point out that little fact to me, and I suppose we should stop at the nearest filling station, but who do you suppose is gone pay for the gas when I ask the nice man to fill up the tank of this gas-hog Edsel your daddy wished on me?
Somehow it would be my fault that the tank was empty. She could pretend that we had no money to refill it.