Bonita Faye Page 19

  Before the reporters came, R.J. knocked at my kitchen door three times before walkin’ on in like he always did. He knew that the evenings were the loneliest for me, the time I missed Harmon the most, so that was mostly when he’d drop by, to drink coffee and have a bite to eat with me. He’d tell me what was going on in the sheriff’s department, and although I didn’t really care, I’d listen and say the right words back. It was his coming by that meant so much to me, not the illegal goings-on in LeFlore County, Oklahoma.

  Today it was hardly noon and there he was. As he walked through the back door, I thought how handsome and strong he looked and how his Indian bloodline stood out more so than usual. Or it coulda been the contrast between him and the pale girl seated at the table.

  “Howdy, R.J. You hungry? Sit down and I’ll fix you a bite. R.J. this is Libby Jenkins. You might of read about her in the paper. Libby, this is my friend R.J. Walker. He’s our best deputy sheriff.”

  “Miz Jenkins.”

  “Deputy Walker.”

  R.J. sat down at the table across from Libby. “I’m glad I caught you here, Miz Jenkins. The sheriff wanted me to ask you a few more questions.”

  “All right,” Libby answered in a low, soft voice.

  “You say your mother saw someone else up on Cavanal Hill? Did she tell you who?”

  Libby looked embarrassed. “She said…my mother said it was a fairy.”

  “Pardon?”

  “A fairy. A fairy came out of the trees and told her not to cry. That her daddy was coming for her. And then the fairy disappeared. She was only four years old, Deputy.”

  “So what do you think she meant by that, Miz Jenkins? A fairy?”

  “I think it means that there was someone up there. The real someone who killed Mrs. Adams’s husband and who comforted my mother as he escaped.”

  R.J. wrote it down and then he surprised me by pulling out Sheriff Hoyle’s old brown spiral Aladdin notebook. As he turned the pages, I noticed that they were still curled at the edges from the steam from the hot coffee I had poured the sheriff right here in this very kitchen forty years ago.

  “We found this notebook in Billy Roy Burnett’s murder file. It was in a box in a storeroom. I think you’ve covered everything in it with Sheriff Stovall ‘cept we were wondering if your mother mentioned the bells.”

  “The bells?”

  “Yes, these notes say Elly Ross reported hearing bells right before the gunshot. Did she mention that to you, Miz Jenkins?”

  I busied myself at the counter, fixing a sandwich for R.J., but I heard Libby answer, “No, Mother never said anything to me about hearing any bells. Were they supposed to be cowbells or church bells? Or what?”

  “I don’t know. It just says ‘bells’ here in these notes. I guess it’s not important.” R.J. put the brown notebook away.

  I’d always known what bells Elly had heard. Right before I shot Billy Roy, he’d laughed out loud and called my name, “Belle, Belle, Belle.” That was right before he’d told me I wouldn’t ever be going to no Paris, France. Right before he told me I’d have to sleep with the Judge the next time. Right before I pulled the trigger.

  Billy Roy’s loud, cruel laughter musta swept through the trees like the ringing of the very object my name sounded like. The words musta rang loud and clear to a four-year-old only a few hundred yards below. If her daddy had heard…had seen anything…we’d never know.

  I served R.J. his roast-beef sandwich. “Do you want milk or iced tea with this, R.J?”

  We gave the interviews together. Me and Elly’s girl.

  “Yes, I was surprised when Libby here showed up in Poteau.”

  “No, I didn’t know anyone else was up there on Cavanal Hill when my first husband was killed.”

  “Yes, I met Harmon Adams during the investigation of the murder. We married almost three years later.”

  “Yes, Harmon was a fine man.”

  Libby didn’t say much to the reporters. I think they were disappointed, but like I said in the beginning, it was just a little murder and the only interest they really had in the story was that the widow of the murdered man had married the investigating officer, a man who turned out to be a hero of eastern Oklahoma.

  When I watched the television coverage later that night, there was more of Harmon and his famous shoot-out in Panama than there was of Libby’s accusations. The TV pictures were good and clear, just like looking into my bathroom mirror: there I sat on my living room couch, an overweight, old country woman dressed in a serviceable plaid housedress, holding on to the hand of a beautiful pale girl who was suddenly shy and afraid of the spotlight.

  Libby was so shook that after they all left, I took her into my guest room and had her lie down. She was already asleep, her fair hair covering the pillow, when I finished covering her with the colorful old afghan that lay at the foot of the bed.

  I called Patsy.

  “It’s all right,” I assured her. “It’s a tempest in a teapot. No one is really serious about this investigation of Billy Roy’s death. It’ll blow over quick, just like it blew in.” What Patsy and I hadn’t ever talked about in forty years, we didn’t talk about that night either.

  I sat down in the rocker in the front room in the gathering darkness of a June twilight. Like R.J. knew, this was the hardest time of the day for me. This was the time when Harmon would come in and yell, “Bonita Faye, where are you?” It had been five years, but every evening I swear I could hear the echo of his call.

  Sometimes I talked to him anyway. I did that night.

  “Harmon, I’m right here. Right here in Poteau, Oklahoma, asitting in this rocker, wondering what in the world is going on. Right here in our little house that I’ve lived in since you know when.” I still couldn’t say “since you died.”

  Forgetting that I’d already told it before I said out loud to Harmon that Michel and Sary and their kids had moved to Paris, France. That Michel had been so worried about Simone after her heart attack that the whole kit-and-caboodle of them now lived on the farm outside Boulogne. Michel had built a fine farm house on the spot where the original garden had stood.

  And did Harmon remember me atelling him about the French workman finding the bones of an unknown man under the garden soil? How they had a fine funeral for that man? How Simone had written that Michel never knew that he was shedding tears for his own father during the service? But, that somehow Michel had been easier with his own life since then?

  I switched on the light next to the rocker. Its rays sent Harmon back into the shadows of the room.

  “You old fool,” I said to myself. Still I whispered one more message to the corner of the room. “Harmon, Elly’s daughter is alying in our guest bedroom. What am I going to do with her?”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  I just couldn’t stay on here, Mrs. Adams. I just couldn’t,” Libby told me the next morning when she’d finally woke from her deep sleep. Her voice was saying “no” but her body wasn’t making any charge at the front door.

  “Sure you can, Libby. Maybe not to find out about your grandfather, but to learn more about the place where your mother was born…where she grew up. Winslow and Fayetteville aren’t that far away. I might be wrong, but I think that will help you through this time.”

  “I don’t know, Mrs. Adams.”

  Poor child. She really didn’t know what came next.

  “Call me ‘Bonita Faye.’ And let’s play it by ear. Stay here again tonight and we’ll talk about it some more tomorrow. I like having company. It gets lonesome here at night.”

  “I guess I will then. My father doesn’t need me. He’s already planning to go to South America to conduct research for his company.”

  “Well, now, Libby, that’s his way of handling your mother’s death. You have to find your own way.”

  I was right.

  The fuss about B
illy Roy’s murder and Steuben Ross’s granddaughter soon died down. Only Miss Dorothy down to the nursing home still wanted to talk about it to me when I made my daily visit to her.

  I might not of felt guilty about Billy Roy, but my cruel joke on Miss Dorothy haunted me all my life.

  Miss Dorothy sat in a chair next to her bed in her private room that I paid for at the first of each month. Her hair was gray now, the home didn’t color hair in their beauty shop, but she was still dressed in a yellow bathrobe. I had tried to bring her other colors, but she would only wear yellow.

  The first time I winced over what I had done to Miss Dorothy was when Harmon and I were visiting from Oklahoma City and she came walkin’ down Main Street in Poteau. After we had chatted and walked on, Harmon said, “Damn, Bonita Faye. That woman gives me the willies. And she’s not that bad looking either. Or wouldn’t be if she didn’t always have that green hair and wear that god-awful yellow.”

  As she got older and was forced to retire from her job, Miss Dorothy just got crazier. Little boys used to size up their manhood by daring one another to walk, not run, past the “witch house,” the small paint-starved cottage where Miss Dorothy lived. She’d come out on her front stoop and shake a broom at them, yelling obscenities while they tried to walk casually by on her cracked sidewalk. When she started coming out naked, is when they sent her to the nursing home.

  Now Miss Dorothy sat in her wheelchair at the home and told me, “Bonita Faye, I think that Ross girl is on to something. I never did think her grandpa killed Billy Roy.” The old woman glanced coyly at me out of the corner of her eyes. “You know Billy Roy and I were ‘special’ friends. You remember how he was partial to my pineapple-up-side-down cake, don’t you?”

  I didn’t have to be arrested to be punished for Billy Roy’s murder. I got a dose every day at two o’clock when I visited Miss Dorothy and she told me all about her love affair with my dead husband.

  Miss Dorothy wasn’t the only one in town who was interested in Libby Jenkins.

  One day’s stayover had led to another and by the time a month had passed, Libby was part of the Poteau social scene. Which wasn’t much.

  Poteau, Oklahoma, was as frozen in time as a dinosaur caught in an Arctic ice storm. Sometimes I thought the town had got stuck in the thirties and sometimes the fifties, but it had never gone much past its conception and it sure wasn’t ready to face the last decade of the century. Don’t get me wrong, that ain’t all bad.

  It was a nice, easy-going town where everybody was some kind of friend or enemy and it was clear which was which. There were no gray areas in Poteau. The people had an opinion on everything and you were either for or against something. You stood for one thing or you didn’t. You were either Baptist or Church of God or you weren’t. There were a handful of blacks in Poteau, but like their opinions, the citizens of the town only white.

  I don’t know where Libby met him. It coulda been at the Pay-and-Take It or maybe at the downtown corner drugstore, but you coulda knocked me over with a feather when one day late in summer, she came bringing home Baron Falkenberry.

  The boy I’d pushed off Michel, the young man I had warned Harmon about, hadn’t turned out any better than I’d first called it way back then. He said he owned a lumber yard, that he ran a creosote plant up near Panama. That he was rich and successful and somebody.

  I knew better.

  Oh, he was good looking in a big, blond, shiny way and he drove Libby home with her packages that first day in his red BMW convertible. That was enough to turn any girl’s head, much less one as vulnerable as Libby Jenkins’s.

  But I knew about Baron Falkenberry. As if being a Falkenberry himself wasn’t bad enough, R.J. had told me about how Baron was being investigated for shady dealings and that maybe all of Baron’s money didn’t come from his business holdings. I knew that he was way older than Libby and that he’d been divorced twice. I remembered that as a teenager Baron had always tried to run with the older crowd and now that he was older, he had taken to hanging out with the younger ones where he played the hero, always paying for the booze and the good times.

  There was even talk of him being involved in one of those Oklahoma murders where the accused always went free if he was a good ol’ boy, or if he knew enough good ol’ boys to help him. Or had enough money to pay his way out of jail time. Juries and justice go by another name in Oklahoma.

  Baron brought in Libby’s package as if it was as heavy as a bale of hay, when it didn’t hold nothin’ but a box of Kleenex, a pint of catsup and a six-pack of Diet Cokes.

  “Bonita Faye, you know Baron Falkenberry, don’t you? He says he knows you. He was so nice to give me a lift home. And, guess what? Baron has invited me to go to Fort Smith tonight with him and some of his friends. Should I go? You know you’re always telling me I ought to get out more.”

  What I thought was that it was a shame that ninny was an outdated word and if I’d called Libby that, she wouldn’t even have known what I meant. Baron Falkenberry and I stared at each other over Libby’s head, frozen grins on our faces and a declaration of open war in our eyes.

  R.J. was disappointed when he learned that Libby was running around with Baron and his crowd. I thought I had detected an interest from him toward the girl, but he was too slow to act on it. And Libby treated him like a big brother who came around every day to tease and make her laugh. But there was more than just Libby that worried R.J. about Falkenberry.

  “There’s this investigation going on that involves him, Bonita Faye. I’m not free to say the details, but you’d better keep Libby away from him.”

  As if I could.

  Libby wasn’t dumb, she just wasn’t smart about men. And at a time when she needed him the most, her father had up and taken off for South America. I didn’t think much of the substitute Libby found for him.

  She went out with Baron every night, staying later and coming home drunker each time. Then one night she didn’t come home at all. She stumbled home right before noon the next day, defensive about her behavior. “I’m a grown woman, Bonita Faye. I know what I’m doing.”

  I didn’t say anything ‘cause I was afraid she’d move out and live with Baron altogether and I wouldn’t get to be of any help to her at all. I don’t know why she stayed on with me, probably ‘cause she didn’t have any place else to be. Her mama was dead and her daddy gone away. Maybe she knew she was better off at my house than full-time at Baron’s.

  I tried to talk to her, help her make plans for the future.

  “Libby, are you going back to school in California this fall?”

  “I don’t know, Bonita Faye.”

  “Well, if you are, you’d better start thinking about registering. It’s less than two months before the semester begins.”

  But I didn’t ever see any signs that she was moving in that direction and the weeks slipped on by.

  The morning she came to breakfast with dark bruises on her arms was too much for me. After we ate and Libby had gone back to bed, I drove up to Patsy’s.

  She had company.

  I don’t like to think that it was the money her kids sent that finally got Patsy accepted in Poteau. I like to think that the town…the church ladies in particular…learned to like Patsy for who she was and what she knew…about the Bible…and about faith…and about being good. Whatever it was, her house was always full of one woman or another atelling her their troubles and asking for advice. She’d come a long way from delivering the ironing to their back doors.

  That day I had to wait for the preacher’s wife to leave before Patsy and I could settle ourselves down in her kitchen in our old comfortable way.

  “Have you lost weight, Bonita Faye?” was the first thing she asked.

  “Maybe. Some. And if I have, it’s worrying over that girl.”

  “Libby? What’s she done now?”

  “It’s still Baron
Falkenberry, Patsy. It’s been almost three months and he’s still hanging around. I don’t know how much more time I’ve got before he steals her away altogether. Libby’s bright enough. What do you think she sees in him? What attracts her to him? She could do better.”

  “I’ve been thinking on it ever since you told me about Baron and Libby, Bonita Faye. You know none of our kids turned out like her…not ever knowing the time of day or where to step to avoid the snakes in the grass. Our kids are all sensible.” Patsy always gave me half credit for raising her children just like I did her with Michel and R.J.

  “Maybe she had it too easy. She didn’t have to come up the hard way like you and me. And, in some ways, even our kids. We always knew our next meal or our next day’s lodging depended on our getting out and scratching for it. Remember those days, Bonita Faye?” Patsy and I both looked around her comfortable, bright kitchen. Even after all these years, our living in houses furnished like catalogue showrooms still startled us.

  “I remember, Patsy. I remember when I didn’t have my own pot to pee in and worse. But, Libby didn’t grow up that way. That’s why I don’t understand how she could take a shine to a lowlife like Baron Falkenberry.”

  “Like most kids her age, Libby had it too easy,” she repeated.

  “I don’t think Elly ever intended her daughter to turn out like this,” I said.

  “No, probably not. But she did. Why don’t you just let Libby go, Bonita Faye? Send her on her way, so she’ll get away from that man.”

  “I can’t. I remember what a safe place Simone and Claude made for me in Paris. I needed that time to grow up. I think Libby needs it, too.”

  “Well, Baron Falkenberry ain’t no Claude.”

  “I know that. Nobody knows that better than me, but I still think I can help her. I owe Elly. and, besides, there’s something strange about Baron. It’s like he’s playing some game with Libby, dragging her down a little bit more every day. And, listen up to this one, I don’t think Libby is really the one the game is all about. Every time he picks her up at the house, it’s like his eyes are saying something private to me. Patsy, I think it’s me he’s after.”