Only she doesn’t have a housekeeper, and her mama and daddy’s housekeeper is white, and there was rumored to be a man involved.
A man who is not white.
What kind of woman would do such a thing?
The kind of woman who’d badmouth her own soldier husband during wartime, and the president of the United States. That’s what kind of woman.
Something had clicked in Rodney Lee’s brain the night Melody Hunter had said those terrible things. He couldn’t just stand by and let her get away with this.
Knowing she was safely occupied at her parents’ house, he’d driven over to her place, parked on a neighboring block, and snuck through yards feeling like a damned burglar. The back door had been locked, but Travis had lived there alone before the wedding, and Rodney Lee knew he had a key hidden out back. That’s how Mary Jane Foster used to let herself in while Travis was at work, so’s she could have dinner waiting for him.
She sure can cook, Mary Jane. Travis didn’t want leftovers around in case Melody came over unexpectedly and opened the fridge, so he always handed them off to Rodney Lee.
“Too bad Mary Jane’s not the kind of girl you date out in the open,” he’d told Travis over day-old fried Spam and Betty Crocker Scalloped Potatoes. “’Cause if she was, I’d be asking her to come as my guest to your wedding.”
The invitations had been out a few weeks by then. Rodney Lee didn’t have a steady, couldn’t find a willing date, and didn’t want to go alone.
“I oughta smack you good for even saying such a thing,” Travis had said.
“I just meant, she’s a bartender down at the Palace, and a few years older than us and not from a respectable family, is all.”
“I know what you meant about that. But don’t you think it would be a slap in the face to me if you brought my girl to my own wedding?”
“Aw, come on now, I’m just pickin’ with you,” Rodney Lee said hastily. You don’t cross Travis Hunter when he gets that mean gleam in his eye.
His wife sure has, though. Crossed him, that is. In worse ways than unpatriotic talk.
On that February night, he’d found a letter she’d written to Travis and left lying right there on the kitchen counter.
Turned out the things he’d been hearing were true, and then some.
Shaking with fury, he’d searched that house for more evidence. He hadn’t found any, but the letter was incriminating enough. He took it home and wrote a note of his own, explaining the situation to Travis. He’d folded it around Melody’s letter and sealed the whole thing into the envelope she’d already stamped and addressed.
Let her wonder what had happened to it. Let her worry about who might have taken it and knows her dirty little secret.
Her letter had been dated a few days before he’d found it. Maybe she’d have eventually sent it to Travis.
But what if she’d decided to burn it and carry her secret to the grave? If Rodney Lee hadn’t come along, Travis would have gone on fighting for their country and his life with that woman on his mind and in his heart. A man deserves the truth, in case he never comes home—or in case he does.
He figured Travis would be upset, sure, but more angry than anything else. Furious, and who wouldn’t be? He’d married the prettiest girl in town, had given her everything a husband could provide, and how did she repay him?
Rodney Lee skims the letter, then reads it more carefully. Travis doesn’t spell things out, but Rodney Lee knows what he’s getting at. As a knight in the Invisible Empire, Rodney Lee bears a sacred duty to defend patriotism, and to protect womanhood and the sanctity of the American home.
Remember what we pledged when we took the oath. “Bear ye one another’s burdens.” You do what you have to do to make this right, Rodney Lee, just like that time on the Panhandle. I’ll be forever grateful.
The Panhandle . . .
Rodney Lee flashes back to ’65. They were on their way to visit a pal in Tallahassee that night, whole carload of them: Travis, Clive, Buddy, Hank Roberts, who shipped out to Vietnam a few months before Travis had, and Scotty Jackson, back before he was local law enforcement. If he’d been a cop then, none of it would have gone down the way it had.
Good thing he’s a cop now, though, with a solid brain in his head. He’d known just how to handle the situation this morning. The moment he got the call that Melody Hunter had gone missing, he found Rodney Lee and told him to get over there in a hurry.
“Make it look like you’re just driving by,” he’d cautioned. “But you’re gonna want to be around for this.”
Rodney Lee figured Melody had either run off with Cyril LeBlanc, or been harmed by someone who didn’t like what she’d been up to any more than Rodney Lee and the boys do. They’d never lay a hand on Travis’s wife, though. That’s the difference. You don’t harm women; you provide chivalrous protection, even to the ones who stray so far from the fold.
En route to the Panhandle, they’d stopped off for some beers at a roadhouse. There were plenty of loose-looking women hanging around.
“Help Me, Rhonda” was playing on the jukebox as he gravitated over to one who was drinking gin, snapping gum, and smoking a cigarette. Her name happened to be Rhonda, like the song—one heck of a coincidence, he’d said, and she’d laughed. But he thought it was maybe in that “not with you, but at you” way the high school girls used to do with him.
When the song ended, Travis ambled over.
“Hey, Travis, this here’s Rhonda.”
“Sure, she is, and I’m Mr. Tambourine Man.”
The girl returned his sly grin and promptly shifted her interest from Rodney Lee to Travis the way girls always did.
That night at the crowded roadhouse, the war was a dim and distant threat and the boys were carefree, living it up. They pounded a couple of rounds. Travis went to take a leak out back and got into an altercation with some mouthy colored kid working in the kitchen.
“He’s bigger’n me,” he’d reported back to Rodney Lee, “but not bigger than you.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Rodney Lee said, and rolled up his sleeves.
Ten minutes later, they were back on the road to Tallahassee. Rodney Lee had found the kid more meek than mouthy, but he’d dutifully left him face down, trickling blood into the dusty back parking lot.
He hadn’t even considered that he’d killed him till they stopped back into the Roadhouse again on the way home a few days later. “Rhonda” spotted them before they set foot inside.
“The police been around here askin’ if anyone’s seen all y’all or knows who you are,” she warned them. “Unless you want to be questioned about a murder, you best go back to where you come from.”
He’d been shaken up, hearing that. But Travis started laughing as soon as they were back in the car, clapping Rodney Lee on the back.
“Guess she really is ‘Help Me, Rhonda,’ ’cause she sure helped you, you big ol’ outlaw!”
Rodney Lee’s misgivings had transformed into pride, and they’d whooped up and yee-ha’d all the way back to Fernandina.
After that, they all called him Outlaw, the best nickname he’d ever had. A hell of a lot better than Rodney Lee Giant. Travis had come up with that one, too, back on the grade school playground, but he didn’t mean no harm. He was a good guy. Everyone liked him—girls, guys, teachers, parents.