Milicent Le Sueur Read online

  Then I had this dream about her.

  In the dream, I drove the car right up to the curb, and she stopped her knitting and looked up from under her lime-green straw hat and stared at me. It was me.

  Now that would make anyone wake up.

  So I thought. If I were a bag lady, what kind would I be?

  In my waking dream about me, I created a safe world, making it fun to be a bag lady. I designed my bags and packed them with the bare essentials of life. Water and bread, of course. A little greasy cheese. A crossword puzzle book. Two changes of underwear. A toothbrush. A bar of Lever 2000 antibacterial soap.

  Then one day I was in the alley, taking out the trash, and there were these three cans on the ground. Mindful of sharp edges, I picked them up to add to my garbage. All three were Le Sueur pea cans, all shiny and elegant-looking.

  “Are those empty?”

  “Whoop-de-do, you scared me,” I said to the black man who had come upon me in the alley, catching me staring at those cans.

  “If they ain’t empty, will you gimme some?”

  I looked into the cans, one at a time. “Empty,” I announced.

  “Dammit all, I’m so hungry.”

  So I took him on in my house and opened my own can of Le Sueur peas that I had in the tallest cabinet and fed him.

  “Peas is fine, but I’m still hungry,” he said.

  I fixed him steak and eggs and opened a can of cranberry sauce. And a can of corn and a can of corned beef hash. And all the cans I had.

  “A fine mess you’ve made, Mrs. Le Sueur,” he told me when I had emptied the cabinets. “But I thank you for it. I’m full now. I’ll be off, but you will be in my prayers and my thoughts.”

  What a nice thing to say.

  I ran after him down the alley and caught up to him by the climbing red roses. “Where are you going?”

  “Over dem hills and through the valley to Portsmith. Heard tell they have good alleys to eat from. We’ll see if they’re as good as yours. Iffen not, I’ll tell them about your alley. I’m marking it in my mind, see? Red roses and Mrs. Le Sueur.” He ambled on off, singing a song about me. The refrain had to do with bare toes, soft grass, and open gates. The part that stuck with me was “…and God bless Mrs. Le Sueur.”

  At the grocery store, where I restocked my larder with three full grocery baskets, I signed the check, “Mrs. Le Sueur.”

  “Oh, good Lord, whatever am I thinking of?” I asked the cashier when she brought it to my attention.

  “Maybe those three baskets of canned peas, ma’am?”

  Eventually there were those who wanted to have me tested, so I just up and moved to Portsmith. It was just over the hills and through the valley.

  Oh, and the reason it’s spelled Milicent is because that’s how they put it on my first police report.

  FOUR

  When I woke up about three o’clock, my cheeseburger was there in minutes. As I chewed it carefully, trying not to count the bites, I thought, My Lord, I don’t remember the service being that good here.

  Cell number four is in the center of the cellblock. What I like about it is that it’s the one with no walls. Just see-through bars. Betty told me that it’s a holding cell, not a long-term cell, which suits me fine. I’ve been holding on all my life.

  She came and got me, and we wound up back in the office of Police Chief Wade Tate. The sun glinted off one wall, making his old painted beige office look pink again.

  “Sleep clear your head, Millie?” Wade Tate asked me as he got up to let me sit in his wooden chair. He looked plumb tired, so to help him out, I focused on his words, not the number of slats in the blinds reflected on the sunny wall.

  Quickly I told him. “This girl was on my land this morning. Waiting like she was going to meet someone. Actually, I thought she was waiting for a ride. Then this hooded person ran up—like a jogger—and they started to talk. It didn’t seem like an argument to me. Seemed like he knew her. If it was a man. And I am inclined by instinct to think he was. Out of the blue, he picked up a limb from one of my trees and hit her with it. Maybe three times. She went down on the first hit, though.”

  Wade Tate, Betty, and Andy were all jumping around the office. Andy was trying to turn on the tape recorder, Wade Tate was trying to make notes, and Betty was writing on her hand. “Get it down.” Wade Tate yelled. “She won’t remember it again.”

  “Did you know that there are sixteen rays of sunlight on that wall,” I asked, “but only fifteen slats show up?”

  “Hurry,” Betty wailed. “She’s twisting off.”

  Andy jerked the cord of the tape recorder out of the wall as he hurried to close the blinds. The recorder landed on the floor with a bang and the splintering sound plastic makes when it breaks. The sunlight disappeared except for a tiny line of it that escaped from the bottom of the shuttered blinds. We all stared at the one line of light.

  Quietly, Tate Wade said, “Now, Millie, concentrate. You’re doing fine. What happened after he hit her?”

  “He drug her to the curb?” I asked.

  “Do you remember the car at all?”

  “I think so. Can I go now?”

  “Tell us about the car, and you can go, yes,” said Tate Wade.

  “Okay, what do you want to know?”

  “In your own words, Millie. Not what I want. What you saw.”

  I looked away from the bar of light. “Later a car came and hit the girl. That’s all. I’m outta here.”

  “Was it the same person driving? The one who hit her with the limb?” asked Andy. Then he said, “Sorry,” to the chief.

  Tate Wade nodded that it was okay, and Andy asked again, “Millie, was it the same person?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Andy,” said Betty. “Ask her this—was the man gone before the car came?”

  I waited until Andy asked me, and I said, “Yes.”

  “How much time elapsed before the man left and the car came?” Tate Wade wanted to know.

  Really wanting to please him, I answered, “Well, the mockingbirds woke up again and started to sing. And I could almost see to do my crossword puzzle. I had it out when the car came.”

  Betty gently asked, “Milicent, did you go over to the girl?”

  “Why, yes, I did. She was dead, though. Pretty young thing.”

  “We’ve identified the body, Millie. It’s a high school girl from Union High. Angie Woodburn. Know her?”

  “I called her Angel. Yes, I knew it was her that died. Thought how appropriate it was that she was an angel girl.” I wanted to get on out of there, so I told them about the girl. “She always went to school early, cutting across my land. Most mornings she brought me a box of orange juice. Don’t you just love how they put juice in boxes now?”

  Andy agreed with me. “I have one in my lunch box today, Millie.”

  “May I have the little straw when you are through with it? I collect them, you know.”

  “It’s yours. I’ll get it for you before you go.”

  Wade Tate was rubbing his brow with his fingertips. “Millie, I’ve been wondering. Did either the girl or the man see you?”

  “I have no idea. I was snuggled up against the left tree, so maybe they didn’t. It’s getting colder now, and the tree keeps me warm. It’s bigger than the right one.” I could have bit my tongue off with my teeth. Why did I have to go and say about the cold?

  Like a script I could have written, Wade Tate jumped on the weather words like a frog on a june bug. “Which reminds me, Millie. Where are you going to spend this winter?”

  Fortunately, I had been anticipating that question. It’s one he asked me last fall. If I didn’t come up with a good one, he would make arrangements himself. “Actually I have been invited to spend the season with a friend of mine, Tate Wade.”

  “And that woul
d be…who?”

  “Miss Vinnie Ledbetter. I believe you know her—of the Murphy Ledbetters?”

  There was a little gasp of disbelief. “Miss Vinnie? You’re staying with Miss Vinnie?”

  “Correct.”

  Wade Tate ran his index finger along his nose and asked, “Now, you wouldn’t mind if I called Miss Vinnie and asked her about that, would you, Millie?”

  Miss Vinnie wasn’t home, so Tate Wade let me go after making sure I understood I was not to leave town or speak to reporters. And that he would be joining me for breakfast tomorrow morning and, yes, he would pay because I was between the rock and the hard place.

  This is how you get out of police stations with reporters waiting outside. You bend over like you’re an ape in the forest, round your arms, and swing them up and down as you move through the crowd like a crab going sideways. That doesn’t work with all of them, so sometimes you have to say, “Move outta my way. I’m coming through. Move outta my way. I’m coming through.” That takes care of the last of them.

  I was sure that me doing that ape-crab walk would wind up somewhere on the six o’clock news and probably the ten, but it got me away from the police station and a few blocks down the way before I remembered to look up and see who was left to follow me.

  Just two boys on bikes. I growled at them, and they sped off.

  I sat down on the curb to get my bearings.

  Wouldn’t you know I had crawfished myself in the wrong direction?

  Portsmith was built on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River, so all their municipal buildings are still gathered around that defensible point. Which is good. You never know when the Indians will come back. Instead of heading into the heart of the town, I found I had worked my way toward the river. I walked over to the grassy point where the founding plaque is embedded in natural stone and sat down.

  Whew, I was tired.

  It was long after four o’clock, and shadows of a coming evening danced in the breeze off the river. No place for me after dark. I had found that out the hard way.

  This was the very spot that one of those homeless people had come up to me and taken my traveling and get-by money the very first week I was in Portsmith. It was before I had found the rock, and I didn’t have a clue what to do.

  The homeless person had been okay, though. No hits or bruises. So I had given him my money and started walking away from the wind. I had walked until it was dark and wound up over on the north side of Portsmith at a junkyard. There was a junkyard guard dog staked out with a silver chain in the trash-covered dirt yard. I named him Tag.

  I was so tired; I just looked that dog in the eye and said, “Okay, eat me. It will be the last bite you ever have.” And that poor little hound just whimpered and lay right down. As did I, in a red ’90 Nissan without any wheels. Settled down in the backseat and went sound to sleep. If I could have found my alley black man, I would have told him a thing or two about his Portsmith.

  FIVE

  The streets were strangely quiet the night Angela Woodburn died.

  By the time I worked my way toward the Compassionate Friends shelter there was nary a soul stirring in Portsmith. I don’t remember what I did from the time I left the bluff overlooking the river until I got to B Street, where the shelter was located, but I am sure it was interesting.

  I made my way around the corner of the old wood house and, as I expected, found Dick smoking a cigarette on the back steps. An overflowing coffee can filled with burned-out butts was testimony to his dedication to the art of destroying tobacco. I stopped for a minute and painted the scene in my mind.

  A lanky man, Dick was slouched over his cigarette, its glow close to his chest as he protected the fire. A slab of light coming through the screened-in door behind him illuminated the shine of his bald head. A poor sight for a woman to come home to, I thought, but a welcome one to me.

  Softly, so as not to scare him, I said, “Hey, Dick.”

  Nothing much startled Dick, and he just raised his head a bit in acknowledgment and rasped, “Hey, Milicent.”

  Dick was the cook and dishwasher at the shelter, which distinguished him by a smidgen of self-respect from the homeless who ate there. I don’t think he got paid much, but he got to eat what he cooked and had a cot in the storage pantry. He’d been around since I came to Portsmith three years ago. I never asked him how long before that.

  “Hungry?” he asked.

  “Some.”

  “Hang on, I’ll be right back. Saved you a dab.” He got up slowly, unwinding his long legs until they held him up. Then he went on inside to get my plate.

  It was macaroni and cheese, with a green salad doused liberally with Italian dressing. A hard roll sat on the edge of the plate.

  “No meat tonight?” I asked. I wasn’t looking a gift horse in the mouth, but rather making a commentary on the status of the pantry.

  “Nope. End of the month.” He grunted as he folded himself back on the steps while he lit another cigarette. “Meat delivery tomorrow, though.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Yep.”

  We never talked much, Dick and me.

  Mostly.

  Tonight, though, I felt the need.

  “Dick, did you hear about that girl getting killed?”

  “Yep. It was on the news. And so were you. Lord, you looked crazy, woman.”

  “Yeah? Well, that ain’t all bad, you know.”

  I heard a snicker in the dark. “Yep, keep them guessing. So you found that girl?”

  The macaroni was quickly losing its heat so I gulped it in as fast as I could. I stuffed the roll in one of my bags. “I didn’t find her exactly. She just happened to get killed where I was.”

  “At your place?”

  “Yes. Dick, you think that’s reason enough for the police to haul me in?”

  “Good as any,” he replied. “Scared the pee-diddly out of the regulars tonight. I’ve got leftover macaroni to burn. Want some more?”

  I declined. “Police been here then?”

  “Yep. That police car in front scared off ’bout fifteen regulars. They questioned the ones who showed up to eat. Lazy damn cops. Don’t go out looking for suspects. Oh, no. Just mosey on down to the Compassionate Friends. Like shooting fish in a barrel.” Dick didn’t like the police much.

  “Well, it wasn’t a regular who killed that girl. I’d bet my life on it.”

  “You seen it?”

  “I think so. Seems I remember him running right by me. I kinda remember his smell. Didn’t smell like a homeless person.” It had been a long day and the events of the early morning seemed far away.

  “I hope to God, girl, that you told that to the cops.”

  “Oh, I’m sure I did.”

  I never went in the Compassionate Friends. Not after that first time. There were homeless people in there, and I remembered getting robbed by one my first week. After that first time, when I ate there at the insistence of my personal Police Chief, Wade Tate, I just went to the back door and waited. Eventually Dick would come out for a smoke, see me, and bring me a plate.

  “On the news, was it?” I asked again.

  “Yep.”

  “I used to watch television. Guess it’s just the same?”

  “Seems so to me.” He lit a new cigarette from the smoking butt of the old one.

  I wiped the oil of the salad dressing off with the mittens I found in my parka pocket. “I remember when television was invented. We used to have friends over to watch it. I was married to Ricky then, and Fred and Ethel would come over every night at six o’clock to watch the news.”

  “I remember Fred and Ethel,” Dick said.

  “You knew them? Lord, if I had known that, you could of come too.” I handed him my empty plate. “Thanks for supper, Dick. You need me to clean the potties while I’m here?”
r />   “Nope. No customers tonight. Well, not enough to mess anything up. Want to come inside and watch television?”

  “Thank you, no. Guess I’ll go on somewhere. I think Ricky is expecting me home.”

  “Better not go to your place tonight, Milicent,” he cautioned.

  “I didn’t think to do so. I’m off to the junkyard. I’ll give the roll to Tag. I haven’t been there in a while. He’ll be glad to see me.”

  “That old Nissan needs painting, Milicent. Red about faded to silver.”

  I agreed, and then we both agreed that there was nothing to be done about it. “It’s warm, though. Winter’s coming on, Dick.”

  Dick shivered in his sleeveless T-shirt and agreed that winter was coming on. “Hang on, Milicent. I just remembered something.”

  I hung on while he went inside. He came back with a brightly colored wool afghan, which he gave to me. “I think you can keep this hidden at the junkyard. Tag won’t let anyone near your car.”

  “Dick, did this come off your very own bed?” I loved the colors. I couldn’t wait to get to the junkyard and count the squares in the ashy glow of the tall lights that burned all night.

  “Nope. Miss Vinnie Ledbetter brought it by for you. Brought me one too.”

  “No kidding? I’m wintering this year with Miss Vinnie Ledbetter.”

  “She’s a good woman.”

  “I’m counting on that,” I told him as I took the afghan. “Now I have a pillow and a cover.”

  Dick settled back into his smoking position on the steps. “Miss Vinnie gave you that pillow too, Milicent.”

  “Really? I thought it was Ricky.”

  I left him that way, smoking and thinking.

  SIX

  “Whatcha lookin’ at?”

  I stood at the curb at the KFC, yelling at some boys on their bikes when Wade Tate drove up.

  Uh-oh.

  “You boys go play nice now. Have a nice day. Tell your mothers I said hello and all.” I glanced over at Wade Tate’s car to see if he had seen how polite I could be. He just rolled his eyes and parked in the KFC parking lot. While he was locking his car, I stuck my tongue out at the departing bike riders. And crossed my eyes. They gave me the finger as they pedaled away.