The Tennessee Scrambler

"The Tennessee Scrambler"

by Stephen Roger Powers

For Jessica

Tempted and tried is how I'd describe it. It was so funny. On Tuesday afternoon I found the first note nailed to the front door of my little house on Mud Lick Ridge. It was the first really hot day of summer, ninety-six degrees, oppressively humid down in the valley but cooler up on the mountain, and it hadn't rained anywhere in east Tennessee since the beginning of April. Or so I heard from the townspeople.

The note had been written on a piece of a cereal box with a picture of a green elf on it. It read Stay away from Violet in chicken-scratch red pencil handwriting that crisscrossed the elf's face like razor cuts.

I threw the note in the kitchen trash and forgot about it. Normally I wouldn't have been nonchalant about a cryptic warning nailed to my door, but, to tell you the truth, it really didn't alarm me much. I didn't know anyone named Violet. I was new in town and figured nobody knew me well enough either to have a bone to pick with me already. Perhaps whoever left the note thought the previous occupant of my house was still living there.

So I didn't think about the note again until I came home from Francesca's the next night and found another one nailed to the door in the same spot. This one had been written on a folded sheet of legal paper in the same red pencil handwriting. What does it take to get you to listen?

Puzzling. I sat down and rubbed my knee. The cool spot Francesca had put in it when she first touched me there a few weeks ago flipped and fluttered under my skin like a trout skimming just below the surface of a stream. It grew cold sometimes at odd moments like this. But it wasn't unwelcome.

I poured myself a Hendricks & tonic, sliced a lime, and went out front. The fireflies bobbed above the swaying brown grass. The moon was rising through the white oaks. My rocking chair creaked on the wooden porch. The mountain grew dark and full of night sounds. Cicadas and raccoons. Owls and witch ghosts. I checked the deadbolt on the door and went to bed soon after I finished my drink, my knee feeling tight and cold all night long.

A third note showed up on Thursday, when a fire advisory was posted for all of Orion County and the surrounding area. Written on the torn-off back cover of a paperback romance novel, this one read Didn't I tell you to stay away from her?

*

High noon Friday afternoon in Lawton, Tennessee, is always quiet in the summer. The flashing sign at the bank said ninety-eight. All three of the notes were in my back pocket. I walked down the empty street past the post office and the flag hanging limp on the pole. You often hear something spooky must be going on in a sleepy Southern town near the mountains, that there are thrilling secrets lurking everywhere, about to spill out from behind all the church steeples, painted white storefronts, and crumbling depots. But if you could call this mysterious—an old man chewing tobacco and playing checkers by himself while sitting on an upside-down washtub out front of Godfrey's Market—then I guess Lawton is the kind of place you'd want to gossip about.

Anyhow, it was just a hop, skip, and a jump to the sheriff's office and the green water tower on the edge of town. A few miles past that, Mud Lick Ridge towered over the valley, blurry in the haze. It was a strangely shaped mountain, rolling and round on the south end, but with an enormous shale and sandstone outcropping on the north end that looked like a prow with a figurehead hanging over steep rocky cliffs.

An older woman I knew only as Miriam came out of the flower shop and stopped me. She was carrying a bouquet of orange pompon dahlias in a green vase. You might describe her as pleasantly plump, and she wouldn't mind.

"Grand prize in the quilting club raffle is a beauty, Clinton," she said. "Chocolate chip cookie the size of a Volkswagen. Made by Thelma Ogelthorpe." She shook some water off her fingers. "Best try buying ten tickets if you want a chance of winning it. Funny, ain't it? I'd never drive a Volkswagen. Foreign piece of you-know-what. But a cookie the size of a Volkswagen? Made by Thelma?" Miriam closed her eyes and went mmm mmm. Then she touched my arm and said, "How's your mama doing?" Her fingers were still a little wet from the water on the flowers.

My knee tightened and went colder. It felt like a plucked banjo string trembling with a fading note that warbled up and down my leg and went quiet until plucked again. Every now and then, whatever it was, that cold spot from Francesca's fingers made its own slow, tingly music in its own time.

"Fine, considering," I said. "Dad . . . Daddy, didn't really leave her much of anything except the house, and she won't sell that either. But she misses him too much to dwell on what she might do with it."

"Aw," Miriam said. "I still remember when your mama and me was just itty bitty girls. How she used to just love the mountain fairies. She chased after them at night, tried to catch them with her precious little net and a little old jar. But they was too fast for her. Say, you look just like your mama too. Reckon folks here asking if you're kin to her."

"All the time," I said. "Just about every day." I thanked Miriam and continued on my way.

"Don't forget the raffle," I heard her call from behind me. I turned and waved.

Now mama is never one to admit she needs anything. She's stubborn. She wasn't going to leave Evanston and her Tudor-style house overlooking Lake Michigan, no, she wasn't going to move anywhere else just because Dad had died. She was going to stay close to his grave, she said.

I've always believed that signs nudge us and whisper to us how someone we don't see or talk to that often is doing, what they're thinking, what they're up to. The cool spot on my knee, the one Francesca had left, had grown colder just then, on the hot sidewalk talking with Miriam. And Miriam had asked about Mama. Maybe that was my sign I should call her again soon, even though I'd only been in Lawton a little while, not more than a few weeks.

My knee loosened up a bit and the coolness faded as I walked some more.

The grass was lying dead between the sidewalk and the street in dry, dusty clumps, and kudzu hung from a grove of hickory trees next to the drug store & soda fountain where I picked up some beans and cornbread every afternoon at lunchtime. I went in. A bell jangled from a string tied to the door handle.

Only two people were in the dim, cool place today. One, Della Frasier, sat at the end of the counter next to the window, opposite the grill. She looked up and eyed me with suspicion. Her overalls were tucked into her gray wool socks that came up high as her knees. Her Birkenstocks were falling apart. Her brown hair, streaked with silver, was braided into pigtails that came down to her waist. A bar of blue shadow from a telephone pole outside crossed her face. I'd seen her before. She seemed to be in the drug store & soda fountain every time I stopped in. Just about everyone in town was saying this Della Frasier was crazy. She continued eating her cereal, swished the milk around in the bowl, and watched me sideways.

The second woman, Dot, was about the same age as Della, but prettier, with straight silver hair pulled back into a ponytail, smooth napkin-white skin, and eyes so blue they jumped from her face.

"Morning, new guy in town," Dot said, smiling.

One thing you'll notice about Dot is her apron is always clean, even after she's spent an hour grilling hamburgers and bacon popping in grease. The first time I went in there, the day after I'd finished settling into my new office, Dot had looked up from her pot of collard greens and the first thing out of her mouth was if I was kin to my mama. Then she volunteered to show me around Lawton right then and there. She said toodle doo to the last lingering old men from the lunch crowd, took her apron off and threw it over the cash register, and walked out of the place with her arm hooked in mine. She led me back behind the tiny business district, where stately bed & breakfasts with columns in front lined the road and a stream bubbled down through a park with a gazebo. The streets were still, but faces—moons of cotton—peeked through blank windows as we passed houses and then storefronts on our way back through downtown.

Della Frasier dropped her spoon in her bowl. A little milk splashed onto the counter. The cereal box next to the bowl went into her empty denim sack. She got up, swung the sack over her shoulder, threw a neatly folded bill and a handful of coins down, and strode out, giving me a surly look right in the eye. The door swung shut with the little bell tinkling.

"Don't mind her none," Dot said. "She's just a little crazy, is all."

"Brings her own cereal every day, does she?" I said.

Dot nodded and made a yep expression with her eyebrows. "Don't like our kind, I guess. What can I get you?"

"Any red velvet cake left from yesterday?"

Dot grabbed my shoulders and smiled. "Is my name not Violet Dorothy Owen? Damned if I ain't been saving a piece for you."

*

You might call me a wayfaring stranger. Mama always said she named me Clinton Harrell Bloomington after a boy from Mississippi she heard about. Apparently this boy moved north just so he could swim all the way across Lake Michigan. And he did too. By himself. Several times, if Mama's not exaggerating. Funny thing about Mama, she does. And she always starts her stories with It was so funny. That's your cue that she's got something to say and that you're going to listen for while. I'm not sure why that story about the Mississippi boy always stuck with Mama, but the significance of the name weighed me down all my life. It gave me an inkling, maybe just like that boy who left Mississippi, that I'd be going. That that's what I was meant to do, only I'd be going in a different direction than the one the first Clinton Harrell took. Even when I was young I felt guilty about knowing that Chicago just didn't feel like the right place for me, knowing someday I'd leave the old hot dog wagon on the corner, the parks along the lake, the tree-lined avenues, and the big houses and nice lawns of Evanston. The comfort. If there is such a thing.

After lunch I dropped the notes off at the sheriff's office. He wasn't in. His deputy, on the other hand, looked like he had nothing better to do but, well, wait around for something better to do. He was tired and bored, with his feet up on the desk while he picked at his teeth with a toothpick and talked on the phone. His bald spot was burned a bright red.

I waited for the deputy to finish his conversation.

"Went to see Duke Watson this morning and ask him if I could borrow his old bloodhound Mary Beth," the deputy said into the phone. "But Mary Beth got tangled up with a rattler under the porch yesterday afternoon. She sure fought, says Duke Watson, but that rattler bit her in forty places. Now, Duke Watson's known for stretching a tale a bit far, but it sure was a damn sorrowful sight to see that old man crying over his dead dog like that."

Finally the deputy hung up and asked me what I wanted.

"The sheriff," he said, "is over at the fairgrounds, watching them set things up, making sure everything's up to code and all." The deputy's name tag under his badge read Leonard Sneed. He took the three notes from me and filed them away with a short report, saying only "We'll look into this, I reckon," and then he started picking his teeth again as if these kinds of notes popped up all the time in Lawton. Like paper funeral home fans or something.

Anyway, my two afternoon appointments ended early, so Francesca came and met me at the office. I left my car there, and we got in her huge lemon-yellow convertible and headed up Mud Lick Ridge with the top down. What a gorgeous car she had. Oh, those sleek chrome bumpers and that gleaming wax job. The brown vinyl seats were in fine condition still, and the spokes glittered as if they'd just been polished. And the paint job on that old Buick wasn't faded from the Tennessee sun like most of the others I'd seen around town.

The warm wind whistled around us as we sped up the mountain. Francesca liked to drive fast. Whenever her mama or step-dad told her to drive careful—their way of saying goodbye—she always replied No, I want to drive reckless. We sailed around a blind curve, tires squealing.

I've always said (and Mama agreed) that the right woman for me would be the one who didn't flinch or shriek when I drove through hills like those in Tennessee. But it's another story when you're the one riding and someone else is driving. Going around the next hairpin turn, we almost hit head on a rusty old pick-up truck that had crossed the center line and was coming straight for us. But Francesca swerved around it just in time, and I, of course, grabbed for the armrest. The other driver's only reaction was a small wave, just a quick lift of his finger off the steering wheel, really.

Francesca slowed for the next curve, swung out of it, and the speedometer jumped into the seventies again. The trees and bushes lining the road blurred by, along with an outcropping of crumbling shale. Francesca braked once more and eased us around another curve going left. To our right was the guardrail, as well as a breathtaking view of Lawton and the valley far below.

We passed the crushed rock driveway leading up into the woods to my house. Soon we reached the top of the mountain, where Francesca turned off onto a side road. Gravel crunched under the tires. It was cooler and darker on this road through the black oaks, and bugs swarmed in clouds. By then I'd loosened my hold on the armrest. She tucked some of her curly red hair behind her ear.

A three-legged deer bounced across in front of us. Its tail flittered away through the trees.

"Must have got hit," Francesca said.

We came to the abandoned logging camp, climbed out of the car, and sat together on the back bumper. The motor ticked. She put her hand on my knee, and the cool spot she'd planted there when we first met a few weeks ago grew slowly, then shrank a bit, then grew again. It was a pleasant moment of enjoying her lilac perfume, listening to the squirrels, feeling the added warmth of the sun when it occasionally poked its way through the breezy shade.

I have to tell you, in case I haven't already, that Orion County is a dry county. Francesca had to go over the dam to Ainsworth County just for a bottle of white zinfandel. We poured it in plastic cups and ate the strawberry pineapple tarts I'd bought from the bakery after the sheriff's office.

Francesca was in a talkative mood.

"I want to tell you about a road trip I took a long time ago," she said, "when I was seventeen. I ran off with my boyfriend, Roddie. He was twenty. We left in his old Mustang in the middle of the night. That was so silly. His car was loud. It woke everybody up in the neighborhood, including Mama and my step-daddy. They rushed out on the porch in their pajamas, yelling for me to come back before they rented out my room to somebody who was grateful for it. Roddie and I just sped away. It was a humid night, late in July, I think. I imagine we must have left a cloud of blue smoke lingering behind. We were gone a week. We made it as far as Alamogordo, with no destination in mind. We just wanted to go where we went, and Alamogordo was where the car broke down and we had a big fight, and where Roddie brushed his long hair out of his eyes, smoked his Kools one after another, and told me I had too much baggage. I walked to a grocery store down the street from the motel, called my step-daddy in tears but trying not to let on I was crying, with the full moon shining down on me from the big, clear New Mexico sky, and I was too scared to ask him to wire me money for a ticket home."

I listened without saying anything. Occasionally I nodded or touched her hair. The cool spot on my knee felt like a patch of frozen lake covered with fresh snow. The spot was growing colder little by little now, until she finally pulled her hand away and it started to warm just a bit.

Some days I didn't notice this cool spot at all. Other times it would pulse in time to music. But mostly it was just there, but not really. At first I thought maybe it was some kind of nerve problem I'd never studied before, and that it would flare up only every once in a while. But soon I realized my knee usually felt coolest when Francesca put her hand on it, and this coolness would sometimes spread until it went up and down my leg too. Plus there were a few other occasions when it would do that when she wasn't around, like when Miriam asked how Mama was doing. Whatever it was, I didn't worry about it too much because it was kind of pleasing. In a way.

The late afternoon crept on by, and Francesca and I stayed quiet on the bumper a long time. We poured more wine. The sounds of the woods surrounded us.

She started talking again.

"So I spent my summers by Charleston at my daddy's beach house on Isle of Palms. I used to feed the gulls that came and sat on the deck railing. Other kids were always running around in the sand, and playing. I remember one year there was a hurricane coming the last week of August, right before school started. Lines of idling cars stretched forever in front of Daddy's Lincoln. Both lanes of the highway clogged with traffic moving in the same direction, away from the coming storm. Nobody was going into Charleston. And the fumes, oh. I remember the wipers slashing away the few raindrops that were beginning to come down from the sky. And I sat in the front seat, my book closed in my lap, and I watched Daddy. He always sat so still, his eyes locked on the trunk of the car in front of us. His arms were big, almost as big around as scuba tanks, that's how big they were. His anchor tattoo showed through the sleeve of his T-shirt. I loved that tattoo. And you know what? That's the last day I ever spent with my daddy."

We finished the wine and lingered there a while longer after she was done with her story. I tried to imagine what the old logging camp must have been like back when it was still being used, who must have worked there, whatever happened to everyone. And you always have the feeling that something is watching you too when you're in the woods. But there was nothing except the abandoned camp, birds chittering, leaves rustling, brief silence when everything quieted down for a moment. After we got back in the car, Francesca's description of her father's tattoo stayed with me while we drove in the dusk toward my house a little ways back down the mountain.

Then, in the corner of my eye, a flash of purple, followed by a flash of pink. The fireflies were coming out, fireflies of all colors. But they didn't sparkle and then fade, like usual. They stayed bright in dazzling brilliance, in bursts of pink, purple, green, and blue. They spun, darted, wove in and between the bushes, trees, and undergrowth, looped up and down, left trails of fading light behind them.

I'm only going over Jordan, Francesca sang softly to herself, as she liked to do, while we were pulling up my driveway. The scent of mountain laurel and her lilac perfume was strong around us, whippoorwills were calling, and the cool spot on my knee where she liked to touch me still shimmered like a phantom. I'm only going over home . . .

We walked up my porch steps together. A ripped-off paperback cover was nailed to my front door again. Only this time nothing was written on it.

*

Francesca and I made plans to stay at Star Falls Creek and Lake Chickamahonny the next day, Saturday. Her mama and step-dad had an old place up there on the water that we could use for the rest of the weekend.

Lake Chickamahonny has an interesting history. Years and years ago some rich businessman from Atlanta had the idea that it would be nice to make a lake in the middle of the woods near his summer house, so he quickly bought up all the land he could at outrageous prices, bulldozed a bunch of trees and cottages, hollowed out a huge depression where Star Falls Creek ran through with water from the river, let it fill, and then stocked it with rockfish, largemouth bass, and catfish. The lake is now about four and a half acres in size, twenty feet deep in its deepest spot.

Not long after, when they had to move the railroad track on account of the quarry, they built a trestle for the new track over the west end of the lake. Francesca was always telling me she slept best at her mama and step-dad's old place because the trains went by in the night.

Anywhere else it was just too quiet for sleep, she said.

Apparently the Atlanta businessman also left a few old cottages where they were in the lower areas to be flooded instead of bulldozing them. Somewhere on the bottom of the lake they remain exactly as they were abandoned, filled, I suppose, with furniture and other possessions that might have been left behind. I don't think anybody ever tried looking for them, but after Francesca told me this story I often pictured those cottages down there in the murky water among gnarled stumps, flooded up past ceilings and roofs, with sofas and iceboxes and beds and cabinets and dining room tables set with chipped dishes and silverware, visited only by the fish now.

When I was a kid I wanted to be a fisherman. Something about the water always drew me to it. I took a year off between high school and college to work on a crab boat in Alaska. The smell of fresh fish, bilge water, wet salt, and diesel fumes made me retch and hang over the railing constantly those first few days, sore in the chest from endless gagging and dry heaving. I couldn't get used to the smell, and the tough, scraggly skipper always had something to holler about.

Until one day when he was down on deck watching us empty the nets. I'd cut my arm deep on some sharp, rusty wire sticking out from a lantern down below, and it was bleeding and raw in the chilly ocean spray. I wasn't working as fast I should have been, and when the skipper got on my case about it, I simply dropped what I was doing without saying anything back to him and I went down to the galley. He followed me, screaming the whole way for me to get back up top. When I got to the galley door, I turned around, grabbed him by the throat while he was in mid yell, and shoved him against the wall so hard the lantern went out and he sputtered. I was a good head taller than him. His tongue stuck out where he had no teeth. He stank of fish, sweat, and oil. He tried prying my fingers loose from his leathery neck, but I held on to him tight and told him I'd throw him overboard if he said anything more about it.

Just as quickly as I grabbed him I let him go, and he stumbled away down the pitching passageway, looking behind at me, rubbing his neck. I expected him to fire me. But he never said a word about it, and he never bothered me again. I kept working the nets, sometimes asking myself over and over why I'd really snapped at him like that, sometimes thinking of home instead, and the lake and Mama's summer tea with lemons and her constant corrections and words of wisdom and old wives' tales, and of Dad coming home in the evenings from his histology lab with his white coat reeking of formaldehyde, of his perpetual silence and whatever he must have been hiding in that marriage-and-mortgage-weary head of his. I couldn't help being curious.

And it started getting cold early that year when I was on the crab boat. Too cold. But I stuck with it a couple months despite the constant ache in my back, neck, and shoulders, the frozen feeling in my fingers and joints that never seemed to go away, and the endless hours chipping ice off the boat so it wouldn't get top heavy and overturn. I never went back out on a fishing boat like that again, but every now and then I still fancied myself a sailor, if only for the romance of the whole thing.

It smelled smoky outside when Francesca and I drove back down to the valley in the morning mountain fog early Saturday to pick up my car in town. Where there's smoke there's fire, they say. Only down here people say it so it sounds like far. Where there's smoke there's far. And Francesca drove more carefully than yesterday. The fog grew thinner as we made our way further down the winding mountain highway.

"The ground's been so dry lately," Francesca said, "the trees have been bribing the dogs."

"Hotter than a goat's butt in a pepper patch," I said, remembering one of Mama's favorite sayings.

The fog dissipated shortly before the bottom of the mountain. We rolled into town and pulled in the parking lot at my office, where I tried to start my car. But the engine wouldn't turn over. No lights on the dashboard even. I got out and checked under the hood, and, lo and behold, the battery was missing.

"What could have happened to it?" Francesca said. We stood there a minute, staring at the empty spot where the battery had been, at the cables that hung loose now, and then we looked at each other and shrugged.

"Looks like somebody took it," I said.

"Well, we have my car," she said.

I glanced around. It was still early, still cool. No traffic came down the street. The town was empty. The only other car in the parking lot was an ancient and dirty Ford Fairmont over by the Dumpster. The car was missing its hubcaps. Curious, I walked over and peeked in. A clipboard with a yellow legal pad rested on the dashboard. The pages were faded and curled. A crumpled, grease-stained bag from the drive-in was jammed in the ashtray. Old yellow paperbacks, some with covers missing, littered the floor in front of the passenger seat.

"Look," Francesca called from behind me. "There's blood."

Della Frasier jumped up from behind the Fairmont so fast you might have thought she'd been bitten on the heel by a possum.

"You the doctor?" she said. Her voice was high and tinny, almost like a squeak. I'd expected it to be low and sandy. She held a blood-soaked towel to her head, stood hunched over, obviously in pain, one hand holding the towel, one hand in her pocket. She wore the same overalls and wool socks she'd been wearing at the drug store & soda fountain the day before. She seemed fidgety and nervous, like she'd been caught doing something she wasn't supposed to.

"Come on in," I told her, "and I'll have a look at you."

I motioned to Francesca, led Della Frasier to the rear door next to the Dumpster, took out my keys, and unlocked my office. The two of us went down the long dark hallway past the bathroom and refrigerator in the back to my exam room in front. I flipped on the lights. Della Frasier got up on the table, moaning.

"What happened to you," I said.

"I hit my head."

She was even more nervous now, eyes shifting around my exam room, arms shaking, feet swinging back and forth. I took her hand away from the towel, which was completely soaked through bright red. I removed the towel from her head, and bent her down closer to me so I could see. She had a long straight cut in her scalp, deep and still oozing fresh blood through her hair and the blood that had already clotted. The cut ran halfway down the side of her head and ended just above her ear, and the surrounding skin was already swelling fast.

"What did you hit your head on?" I said. "Or did someone hit you?"

"I can't afford to pay you nothing."

"We'll work that out later."

"Except maybe I could give you some chickens or a pail of blueberries."

"We need to get this taken care of."

"You like blueberries?" she said, tilting her head back up again so she could look at me.

A couple of long dark hairs were sprouting from her chin. Her eyes were gray and hard. And she smelled like macaroni & cheese. But she relaxed a little when I told her my mama used to give me bowls of frozen blueberries bought fresh from the farmers market. She'd freeze them and mix them with cream in summertime when the afternoons passed so slowly the lake waves stood still. I'd take my bowl down to the beach just a hundred yards or so from our house, and I'd sit on the sand and eat spoonful after spoonful of those glorious icy berries while the lake gelled under the hot summer sun. A little bit of home, Mama always said.

And I started thinking more about Mama just then, while I was telling Della Frasier about the frozen blueberries and cream, and I realized I'd forgotten to call her the night before like I told myself I would. But maybe it was good that I hadn't called. Mama no doubt would have started talking about how nice the boy who mowed the lawn was, how sweet the old man who brought her her groceries was (maybe he was trying to get fresh with her, she'd also say), and then she'd segue into how nice it would be to have her own son home to do those things for her, just like Mrs. Proudfit's son came over in his new Mercedes every night after work to check on his mother and see if she needed anything. At that point Mama would sigh and ask no one in particular, even though she was speaking to me, what she did to deserve living alone now. But I tried to cut her some slack—it had been only a few weeks, after all—and Mama only needed some time to settle into a new routine.

I remember when Mama first told me I was going to be a doctor. One year, when I was about twelve, Mama took Dad and me to help our neighbor sell his tomatoes and green peppers from his garden at the Evanston farmers market on the Fourth of July. It was so hot that day. The new blacktop on the street bubbled and people walked around sipping lemonade they'd bought by the goat cheese and pesto stand. Dad stood around all morning with his hands in his pockets. Mama was wearing her peacock-feather hat. She cooed and clucked with her friends whenever they ambled by. Our neighbor only sat in a canvas chair with his legs crossed. He scratched his neck and rubbed his whiskers. I made change and handed people their bags.

A little girl with curly blond hair, blue eyes, and sunburned skin toddled past our vegetables, bumped into a Doberman on a leash tied to a maple nearby, and dropped her paper cone of lemonade. She squealed and held her sticky hands out to pet the dog.

The dog, slick as an alewife slipping away after being thrown back in the water, flashed its teeth, chomped her ear, and tore it off. In one swallow the ear was gone, and blood dyed the little girl's blue jumper brown.

She still reached for the dog, unaware of what it had done. Blood oozed down her face like sticky paint, and soaked into her jumper like spilled chocolate milk on a tablecloth. The Doberman gazed at her, then showed its teeth again and snarled.

I watched, stunned in surprise at first. I didn't move. Then Mama's friend Cora Abelman from the herb club, who was buying cider at the next booth, screamed longer and sharper than anyone I ever heard scream before. Her scream kicked my feet in motion and propelled me to the girl. I tripped over a jug of cider Cora Abelman had dropped in her shock, but I lost no time. When I reached the girl and picked her up, she was bawling, yelling, jumping up and down, holding her hand to her ear.

Someone shouted, and the dog barked, leaped, strained against the leash, snapping at the girl and me. I turned so the girl couldn't see the dog, stepped around the maple, set her down on some grass behind a bush.

"Let me look," I remember telling her, trying my best to smile in a reassuring way.

The dog continued barking, the girl kept shrieking, and a crowd of people gathered around us.

"Give me your handkerchief," I said to Cora Abelman. She handed it to me with shaky fingers, and she stood there crying and wiping away tears with her other hand. I took her handkerchief, pressed it to the girl's ear. She was kicking now, and still hollering.

"Yes, that was a mean dog, wasn't it?" I said to her.

A tall, thin man ran up from somewhere, identified himself as a doctor, kneeled next to the girl and took a look at the blood on her face, her shoulder, and her jumper. Then he told someone to call for an ambulance, and he scooped the girl up and ran her across the street to the pharmacy.

Mama insisted on taking a picture of me while I stood there awkwardly and the crowd thinned. In all the excitement, nobody thought to check on the dog or make sure it didn't get away. I broke from Mama, my dad, and our neighbor, and I went back to see if there was a name tag on the collar. But the dog was gone. Its leash was still tied to the maple, with its collar still attached. No tag.

"You look like your mama," Della Frasier said.

"So I've heard," I said. I soaped up and washed my hands. "We're going to clean you up here," I continued, "and then get you stitched up."

"Stitches?" she said, eyes wide, hairs sticking straight out of her chin.

"Probably about forty of them," I said. "You really hurt yourself."

Francesca came into the exam room just as I poured a few drops of sterile water on Della Frasier's wound. Della Frasier flinched and stiffened. She twisted the end of one of her long pigtails around her wrist.

"I need to talk with you," Francesca said, staring at me tightly and ignoring Della Frasier. Generally she wouldn't have interrupted me while I was with a patient, so I gave Della Frasier a clean towel and went out to the hallway to see what she wanted.

"You should see this," was all she said, and she led me back outside to my car. The hood was still propped open. Francesca pointed, and just under the corner and a few inches along the underside of the hood was a smear of fresh blood. Then Francesca pointed at the bumper and headlight, which were splashed with a few small drops of blood too. Even the blacktop was splattered, but the blood blended with it so well it was no wonder we hadn't seen it before. I followed the trail of blood drops across the parking lot with my eyes. They led back toward the dusty Ford Fairmont by the Dumpster. I walked over there, put two and two together, clenched my fists, gritted my teeth, and . . . shook my head and looked up at the sky.

Like Mama always did when us kids got in trouble.

And I thought, Just what did that damn Della Frasier think she was doing?

don't mind her none

What the hell did she want to go steal my car battery for

she's just a little crazy, is all

And I got so mad right then . . .

I saw her back at the lunch counter at the drug store & soda grill, sitting there splashing the milk in her cereal bowl, putting that neatly folded bill and handful of change down, taking her cereal box in her denim sack, running her tongue over her teeth while she swaggered out giving me the evil eye.

you the doctor you like blueberries can't afford to pay you nothing

damned if i ain't been saving a piece for you is my name not violet dorothy owen

I looked in the Ford Fairmont again. There they were, the paperback novels, some with covers missing.

And it all made sense now.

don't like our kind i guess

stitches i could give you some chickens

The hood had come down on her head. That's what happened, all right.

. . . yeah, I got so mad right then I wanted to kill her.

But then I thought of something better.

*

Mama used to take things from my sister and me. That was how she punished us. When Willadeene and I were cleaning out one of Dad's closets the day after his funeral, we found a box full of our old things. Like Willadeene's cowgirl doll from Wall Drug, my battered Superman pop-up book, our Looney Tunes record, an Alcatraz snow globe that Dad had brought home for Willadeene from a convention trip to California, my spinning geisha music box from New York that tinkled "A More Humane Mikado," and many, many more things, like my slingshot, Willadeene's first Valentine's Day card from a boy, my little fifth-grade picture book that had no signatures in it because Mama made me stay home the last week of school when she was in bed with one of her many illnesses, my glass dolphin from a glassworks shop in Atlantic City, and on and on, all the things Willadeene and I had had some attachment to a long time ago.

Together we brought the box to Mama and set it down before her on the breakfast nook table. She was still in her nightgown and slippers, and her hair was wrapped with a green silk scarf. We told her we wanted to know what the box had been doing in Dad's closet, but Mama just stirred her tea without answering and looked tearfully out the window at Lake Michigan rolling its waves toward us like dice.

*

At first it wasn't hard convincing Della Frasier she didn't need any anesthetic for the stitches. Not for a minor cut like that. Only those with life-threatening injuries needed anesthetic, Francesca and I reassured her while we washed our hands. And this was no life-threatening injury. Not by a long shot.

And besides, we both said, it wouldn't hurt at all. Not a bit.

She relaxed, apparently relieved that it wasn't as serious as she'd worried. How lucky she was, she said. But she still wouldn't admit how she'd hurt herself. So we laid her down on her back on the examining room table, and I got started, moving quickly. The first suture only went partway in before Della Frasier recoiled with a loud Ow. Her hand snapped to her head and she glared at me.

At the same time, the cold spot in my knee tingled and intensified.

"Ow ow ow," Della Frasier said again.

I flexed my leg and shifted my weight to my other one. "Now you have to lie still," I said. "We can't have no more of this here crying, or it's bound to get infected."

"Infected?" she said.

"That's right, infected," Francesca said. "And then you'll have to take all kinds of medicines until it gets better."

"Medicines?"

I pulled her hand away from her head, and pricked her again.

"Ow!"

"What did I just tell you?" I said.

My knee felt like it had a frozen acrobat squeeze puppet inside doing back flips and somersaults. "But it hurts," Della Frasier said.

I tried one more time to get that suture in, but Della Frasier rolled away from me and hopped off the exam table, holding her head.

"Stop that," she said. "I want some anesthesia." She sucked in some air, as if trying to hold back sniffles.

"Look here," I said, "I told you you can't have none. Anesthetic is nothing to monkey with. You might have a severe allergic reaction to it. No, I'm pretty sure chances are good you will have a severe reaction. We can't take that chance for such a wee little cut."

Francesca nodded in agreement.

Della Frasier kept glaring at me. She shook her head like a child refusing to come closer.

"Get back up here so we can finish," Francesca said. She patted the creased tissue paper covering the table. "You can go home when we're all done."

"But you said I needed forty stitches," Della Frasier said. "That don't sound like no wee little cut."

Now my cold spot was twisting and turning, as if running down long hallways and doubling back at dead ends. I waited a good fifteen seconds or so before I said anything. I wanted to keep Della Frasier in suspense. She was making my whole office smell like macaroni & cheese.

"Well," I finally said, "maybe you can have just a taste of anesthetic."

Francesca looked at me.

"A taste?" Della Frasier said.

I patted the tissue paper too. I smiled the most reassuring smile I could. I told her maybe I was wrong, maybe she would be okay with just a little taste. It was hard to know for sure if someone would have a negative reaction, I explained, and sometimes it was better to be safe than sorry. That's why I'd said No at first. But she was a strong woman to be able to jump off the table like that with a head injury, I also explained, and so maybe it would be all right to give her just a taste. And just a taste was all she needed to make it not hurt at all. Not a bit.

She cautiously lay down on the exam table again, never taking her eyes off me. "A taste?" she repeated. She had amusement in her eyes now, like she thought she'd won.

"No more than a taste," I said, "or you might could still get a nasty reaction, maybe even an infection, and die." I tried to look suddenly grave. Then I smiled in reassurance once more.

Francesca's eyes met mine again. Might could? she mouthed quietly. Then she rolled her eyes.

"We don't want me to die," Della Frasier said.

"You let me finish this and get you on the mend, and you'll be eating your cereal at the drug store for years and years," I said. "With Violet."

I asked Francesca to hold her down tightly. She wrinkled her nose and hesitated, but complied. And I explained to Della Frasier that the anesthetic was just a tad bitter and might make her flinch. If she moved even the slightest it would slow down the effect.

"Ready?" I said.

Della Frasier jiggled her head up and down quickly.

"Okay," I said. "Where's my car battery?"

"Hmm?" she said, eyes suddenly wide, head jerking toward me.

I jabbed her right in the middle of her cut, in a spot still bleeding fresh. She yelled Ow several more times very fast. She kicked and wriggled and struggled to push Francesca off of her. My knee was tickling at this point, as if being rubbed by a cold stainless steel plate. With all of my weight on my other leg, it wasn't easy keeping my balance.

"What does it take to get you to listen?" I said. And there in Della Frasier's eyes now was a flash of recognition mixed with sudden fear.

I moved quicker than before, and tried to get that first suture in yet one more time.

But Della Frasier screamed and thrashed harder. Francesca let go and backed away.

"Do you want that anesthetic or not?" I said.

"All right, all right," Della Frasier said. She was breathing hard and angry. "Your battery's in my trunk."

"There," I said, satisfied finally. "That wasn't so bad now, was it?"

*

You see, Mama talked a lot about where she grew up, but she never went back again after she moved to Chicago to be with my dad. I'd driven through Lawton with Willadeene once on our way to Florida. We went a hundred miles out of our way just to see this place we'd heard about. We only drove down the main street and through some of the neighborhoods with their brick houses, and then we continued on our way south without looking back. It didn't impress us much at the time.

When Dad was very close to dying, however, it seemed a natural choice for me, the right place to start living for myself, for reasons I still don't really know.

Francesca said later on that she'd never seen Della Frasier so sheepish and embarrassed. After giving the poor old woman some anesthetic for real and sewing up her head, I retrieved my battery from her trunk. She refused my prescription for hydrocodone. Her Fairmont nagged and stalled, nagged and stalled, and then it puffed and clanked, and she drove away with a roar. I reconnected my battery while two boys across the street were shooting off cap guns and twirling sparklers around and around. Except for the caps popping, no sound at all came from the little town under the brutal sun and the net of smokesmell riding in on the breeze from far away. I started up my car. The thirty or so miles north to Francesca's mama and step-dad's little place on Lake Chickamahonny were uneventful. The rest of the day passed slowly and easily, Francesca's lilac perfume fresh and lovely.

Around midnight, after a late dinner of poke salad, roasted corn, and dark chocolate dipped in chardonnay, Francesca and I walked down the path through the woods to the lake. The heat had lessened, the full moon was out, and a bluish gray haze bled through the trees. The smell of smoke was much stronger than before, and had been growing stronger all day. The cool spot on my knee throbbed minutely along to the rhythm of the song Francesca faintly sang while we walked.

Don't sing love songs, you'll wake my mother . . .

Reeds and cattails grew along the water's edge. At the dock, we untied Francesca's antique wooden rowboat and pushed off. Gleaming black letters on the bow proudly proclaimed the boat The Tennessee Scrambler. Francesca sat in back, facing me, and told me the story of the boat's name.

Her daddy had had a houseboat moored on Isle of Palms, not too far from his beach house, she said, and he used the houseboat to host parties on Saturday nights. Even though he kept it moored permanently, and it certainly wasn't a fast boat by any means, he'd named this houseboat The Tennessee Scrambler. Francesca talked about how he invited and welcomed all the out-of-town tourists from up and down the beach, and after the sun went down they came dressed in their tropical finest—the men in linen pants and Hawaiian shirts and the women in sarongs and sandals—and bringing wine and deserts and rum and fruit. Her daddy wanted everyone at these parties to tell their best story or joke, and so they all took turns, their stories getting more and more outrageous and bawdy as daylight approached and one by one the guests either stumbled back to their rented beach houses or passed out drunk. Her daddy called these parties Scramble Nights, she said, because, as he'd put it, he liked the scrambled variety of tales that would no doubt be told.

And so Francesca had named her boat The Tennessee Scrambler too.

I took up the creaky oars and navigated us through a group of partially submerged stumps near the dock, and I rowed us slowly down to the railroad trestle on the far side of the lake, where we anchored underneath the tracks.

We waited for the train. The moon was high above the weeping willows. Mosquitoes hung over the lake. The surface of the shiny water seemed to vibrate as subtly as a tuning fork. The smoke drifting in from afar rolled around us.

Wherever that fire was burning, it was getting closer, I thought. Maybe too close.

Then a whistle blasted and wailed from about a mile away. Soon the train rumbled slowly overhead, and Francesca and I watched its wheels spark in the night, felt the humid, smoky air twist around us as the cars swayed back and forth above. The last car passed about twenty minutes later, and the train clattered away, around the bend past the lake. Gone.

Francesca started the same song again.

All men are fools, so says my mother . . .

We stayed anchored under the railroad bridge a while. Mosquitoes buzzed and cicadas droned. A songbird burbled a melody somewhere nearby. Then it abruptly stopped and wings quickly flapped and grew faint far away.

Beware, beware the silver dagger . . .

Suddenly the lake sparkled like a flat mirrorball, its ripples reflecting fireflies that came zipping out from the reeds and cattails and skimmed above the water and twirled in all directions around us up and over and down and back and forth and up again in rapid spirals, leaving pink, purple, blue, and green scribble trails of lingering light behind, a giant, glowing cross-stitch pattern.

The smoke had grown heavier and denser almost without us noticing it, that's how fast the fire seemed to be coming.

"Clinton, row us back to the middle of the lake," Francesca said with spears of concern in her voice, almost as if reading my mind.

I pulled up the anchor and started rowing. The smoke was wispy and stretched around us like wide, dusty spider webs. My lungs felt as if something inside them was scratching for a way out. I coughed and rubbed my eyes, and so did Francesca. She found an old dirty towel under the seat, ripped it in two, and dipped both pieces into the water. We held them dripping wet over our mouths and noses.

A loud crackling burst forth from somewhere close by, followed by a whooping siren that grew in pitch and volume as it approached. And then there were the flames. They came swift and vengeful. Orange and yellow and blue and green, climbing up the trees, sweeping over the reeds and cattails.

The fireflies stayed near us in the middle of the lake beyond the fire's reach. They flew so fast we saw only their trails spinning circles that enclosed the boat. As the temperature rose from the fire, the cold in my knee plummeted until I could no longer flex my leg. Francesca and I held each other, wet towels on our faces.

And down below us, even farther beyond the reach of the fire, a log cabin still stood. Even though it was submerged it was waiting for its owners to appear out of the woods after a hunt or picnic, stamp up the stairs, cross the threshold, and settle down for the night, home. But all of the windows were empty and black. The light from the fire above reflected in them like garish anemones.

A small round face calmly peeked out from one of the windows, watching and waiting. The face was that of a baby girl. Her eyes were big and blue. Her pursed little lips were a dull pink. Bubbles came out of her mouth. Her fair skin was sunburned. Her hair was curly and blond. It waved in the murky hell-lit water. She turned away from the window, stepped down off the upside-down bushel basket she was standing on to see out, and retreated deeper into the underwater cabin.

The water pressure pricked my ears. My frozen leg was a lead weight. When my lungs felt as if they were about to burst, I pulled Francesca by the hand and kicked and stroked back up toward the surface in the direction of the awful hot light, the smoke, the fireflies, the fire-warped rowboat, the trees wrenching and crying as their branches fell flaming, and the distant moon and stars over everything.

Copyright (c) 2007 Stephen Roger Powers