True Fires Read Free Page B

just in time to usher her father from this world into the next. And blood being thicker than branch water, DeLuth wound up with the Judge’s gold watch and a small note, in Lila’s broad scrawl, that said,
“Sorry, Kiss Ass.”
    For DeLuth, driving down the Judge’s grove road sets memories flickering like a Movietone newsreel:
    Just there, in the big oak beside the main road, he and Louis built their flight deck out of wood pilfered from the county woodpile—The Dixie Bombers, they were—and, from their secret post on high, hurled rotten, powdery gray grapefruit at the passing traffic. “Bombs awaaay, suckers!” Over there, in the break between the navel trees and the Parson Browns, he and Louis manned the kerosene tanks, choking on fumes, changing off the smudge-pot crews during the endless, bone-chilling night that was the freeze of ’34. By morning, everyone’s face so oily black you could hardly tell the Niggers from the whites. Here, on this very road, flanked by rows planted a perfect ten yards on center, he and Louis practiced the pinpoint-accuracy passing and receiving that took their high-school football team to the ’39 National Championships in Miami. Red Grange—three-time All-American, The Galloping Ghost himself—was there to congratulate them. The Judge, arms around him and Louis, introduced them to everyone as “my two boys.” Grange had hands like hams, pink, big, and firm; his ferocious grip and flaming face came at you like a boar out of the woods. His wave to the Miami stadium—a sort of jabbing salute—was the secret inspiration for DeLuth’s own Fourth of July “parade wave.”
    Up ahead, the big white house, white-columned like the courthouse downtown, presides over its surrounding acreage like the Judge’s bench over the hard-backed chairs of Courtroom Number Two. It was just there in the corner of the porch shaded by the live oak, the Judge and his cronies gathered to anoint him County Citrus Inspector and, later on, their uncontested candidate for High Sheriff.
    From then on, he and Judge Howard Hightower—who courtroom wags called Judge How-High, as in “When I advise you to jump, Counselor, the appropriate response is ‘How high?’ ”—remade this county into their image of Law ’n’ Order. They’d brooked no foolishness, either, not from returning Nigger war veterans, union organizers, ungenerous real-estate developers, or anyone except Big Nick, the local Bolita ringleader who lined their pockets with enough cash to build the herd of blue-ribbon Brahmas that was the envy of the state’s cattlemen.
    Lila’d managed to reel in the Judge’s house and vast grove lands. But the cash money was in the Judge’s handshake shares of the Brahmas and the Bolita that were now all his. Sorry, Miss. DeLuth smiles smugly as he passes the house on his way to the big grove buildings in the back.
Like the ol’ man
always said, smart beats pretty every time.

6
    Floridy,
it seems to Daniel squeezing ’Becca’s cold little hand in the Sheriff’s backseat, watching the green boulders of Miss Lila’s grove trees whiz by,
Floridy’s like a giant-size bald, badly
in need of trees.
Up home, when lightning struck the flat top of a mountain and set fire to everything in sight, when the local wildlife was left to scratch and claw a life out of the burnt black earth under the hungry glare of the hawks and the sun, when worthless ragweed and goldenrod took the place of the berry bushes and the big cedars and the ancient elms for a hundred years or so, you had yourself a bald and ’tweren’t pretty.
    Floridy has no trees to speak of ’cept for a bunch of scrawny pines and the occasional live oak. No mountains to soften the edges between night and day and back again, settle the arguments ’twixt the hard dark dirt and the fretful, changing sky. No dirt even, fragrant with the loam of fallen leaves. Just a whole lot of sand and lakes and prickly palmetto bushes and prissy orange trees.