Beluga Read Free

noises. He made one and climbed on out.
    â€œWhat are you looking for, Miss Pearl?”
    Pearl was a proper Delta belle through and through. She might have been a fading flower and more down at heel than she’d ever imagined she’d get, but she still had that Delta debutante way of talking down to the coloreds. It wasn’t a choice with people like Pearl. It was like being blond or having teeth.
    â€œAw, honey,” she said and laid her tiny white hand on Desmond’s shoulder. “My cat’s run off. Told a friend I’d keep him for her. Don’t know what I’m going to do.”
    That was typical Pearl. She couldn’t keep anything straight in her head anymore. One of Pearl’s friends had passed away. Not a Presbyterian friend but a canasta friend. Pearl had once explained the difference. It had nothing to do with the Lord. Canasta friends, as I understood it, were casual and fair-weather. If one of them got sick or had trouble in her life, she’d just get set aside and somebody else would take her seat. Presbyterian friends were different. You had to pretend to care about them.
    So a canasta friend had passed away, a woman named Ailene. I’d actually been kind of fond of Ailene. She carried a pint of apple brandy in her handbag and was loud and vulgar, chain-smoked Salems, and played cards like a pirate. I could always hear Ailene laughing when Pearl had the game at her house.
    She’d died a couple of weeks back in the beauty shop under the dryer. The girls thought she’d just dropped off to sleep and had a heroically high threshold for heat. Pearl ended up over at Ailene’s house picking through her closets since Ailene didn’t have any children, just second cousins down in Destin. When Pearl and her other canasta friends came away with what they wanted, Ailene’s cat must have sensed that the jig was up and slipped into Pearl’s car.
    I remember the afternoon she came home from Ailene’s because of all the screaming. I was changing my oil in the car shed and came out to check on Pearl. She was sitting in her Buick with the driver’s door open. She was quivering and close to tears.
    â€œYou all right?”
    She shook her head. “Went right across my lap.”
    I looked around. I didn’t see anything. “What?”
    â€œPossum, I think.”
    â€œComing in? Going out?”
    She pointed toward the side yard, more specifically toward a Nuttall oak that her Gil had planted and nursed. It came with a story like most everything around Pearl’s house, and she launched into it automatically. That was the way with Pearl and her stories. Of course, I’d heard about Gil’s Nuttall oak by then. How he’d dug it up down by Yazoo in a spur of the national forest and had brought it home wrapped in a towel and little more than a twig. Then he’d fenced it in to keep the squirrels away, had raised it to a sapling, had very nearly lost it in the ’77 drought. But he’d watered it every night in direct opposition to city ordinance, and there it was—a glorious Nuttall oak right in Pearl’s side yard.
    It was south of glorious, truth be told, because the power company tree trimmer had been through a few years back while Pearl was off in Birmingham. He’d butchered the thing quite thoroughly. Those boys have a talent for that. So it was a glorious Nuttall oak up to where it turned to power line topiary.
    Pearl was carrying on about that tree, the way she seemed obliged to, while I looked for the possum that had run across her lap. I checked under the car. I checked in the backseat where Pearl had laid a pile of Ailene’s Salem-stinking clothes. Then I walked over to Gil’s Nuttall oak and looked up in the stunted canopy. There was a tuxedo cat on a limb up there about the size of a beagle.
    â€œWhere have you been?” I asked Pearl.
    â€œAilene’s.”
    â€œShe have a