“What are you talking about?”
“Don’t tell me you don’t remember that book you were tellin’ me about, by that Lee fellow.”
It takes her a moment to realize he’s referring to the passage she’d shared with him from To Kill a Mockingbird. Rodney Lee has always struck her as barely literate, yet here he is paraphrasing the quote and recalling the author’s name.
“Harper Lee is a woman.”
“With a man’s name? Lee?”
Ah . . . Lee. No wonder the name stayed with him.
“That can be either a man’s name or a woman’s name.”
“Let’s see, you got me, Lee Marvin, Lee Harvey Oswald . . . all men,” he tells her with a triumphant nod. “So you can see why I’d think that.”
“What Harper Lee said was, ‘people generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for.’”
“That’s what I said.”
“Not quite.”
“You want to nitpick, do you?”
She does not.
“You were talking about Travis’s mother? You saw her?”
“She called me to tell me the baby was born, like I asked her to. Travis and me been friends since we were tiny little kids. His wife havin’ a baby and me not knowin’ would be like . . . well, I wanted to know. And when she said the baby looks just like her daddy, I thought I should come on over and have a look-see for myself. After all, she’s never actually met the man.”
Melody’s heart stops. “I . . . I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh, I’d be willing to wager that you do.” Rodney Lee straightens and starts for the door, then turns back. “You know, for a minute there when I thought you were tryin’ to smother her, I didn’t blame you. I imagine a lot of women would do the same thing in your place.”
White-hot rage sweeps through her.
“That sure would make your troubles disappear in a jiffy. You don’t have much time, see? ’Cause the way I understand it, every day, her skin’s gonna get a little bit blacker, and you’re gonna start to panic, ’cause people will be able to take one look at her and they’ll know. Travis, he’ll be back, and he’ll—”
“Get out.”
He laughs. “I’m goin’. Need me to mail anything on my way?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I know you like to write nice long letters to Travis, but . . . oh, wait. I guess there’s no need to tell him the baby was born, huh? Shame you can’t share the news with her real daddy. I surely don’t approve of what y’all did, but I’m guessin’ he would’a been tickled pink over daddy’s little gal. Well, maybe not pink.” He laughs, a staccato sound that reverberates like a gunshot, and Melody recoils.
A petite blonde wisp of a nurse appears in the doorway behind him, dwarfed by his bulk. “Excuse me, sir! Are you—”
“I was just paying a friendly visit, but I’ll be getting back to work now.” Rodney Lee tips his narrow white cap at her, then at Melody. “Be sure and take good care of that baby now, Mrs. Hunter. You just try and keep her safe, you hear?”
He disappears, and his words echoing like an ominous challenge.
You just try.
Greenwich Village
Yesterday was payday. After cashing his check and paying the most pressing bills, Oran was left with nothing but loose change in his pocket, a knot in his stomach, and a weekend to get his hands on more cash.
“You can’t even support me . . .”
Gypsy’s words propel him to the subway Saturday evening. He rides downtown and gets off at Christopher Street, then walks four blocks to a familiar century-old tavern near the river.
It all began here, at Fergie’s Inn.
The place had never operated as an inn, according to its owner, though it had been a private residence, brothel, and speakeasy before finding its groove as a haunt for the beat generation’s shining literary stars.
Oran had been tending bar here one night in ’51 when Linda walked in. She was wearing a full-skirted pink dress, looking like the Nebraska farmer’s daughter she’d been until she ran off to New York City. She’d come to Fergie’s that night to hear a fellow former Midwesterner read from his novel in progress, but the morphine-addled Billy Burroughs hadn’t shown up.
Linda sat at the bar ordering one sloe gin fizz after another. Oran couldn’t decide whether she was a sore thumb or a breath of fresh air among the beatnik crowd, but they’d had immediate chemistry. She was open to his teachings and recruited other followers.
For a while, they’d all lived in harmonious kinship, Oran’s women working various jobs to keep the household going so he could focus on his sidewalk sermons. But his new family grew restless waiting for the promised apocalypse. One by one, they showed their weaknesses, and he cast them away.
Linda got to stay, not because he cared about her, but because she was pregnant.
Even then, before Gypsy was born, Oran sensed that his child, unlike her mother, unlike the others, would be strong and loyal. She would never betray him.
And now, he has two more children on the way. Tara Sheeran is pregnant, and he’d confirmed that Christina Myers is as well. Soon, Margaret, too, will be carrying his child. His earthly family is blossoming, and he needs to take care of them as they await their eternal paradise.
He steps into a dingy room with a low tin ceiling and scarred plank floors. The place looks exactly the same as it had in Oran’s day, but the poets and writers who’d frequented the place are long gone. At the moment there are only two patrons, middle-aged men hunched over beers.
“Well, there’s a sight my eyes ain’t seen in donkey’s years!” the owner booms, spotting him in the doorway. “If it isn’t my old pal O’Matty!”
Fergus Ferguson’s copper hair has gone gray, but he has the same brogue, same beer belly, same jowly florid face, same Celtic knot tattooed on his forearm.
“Got any Irish blood, do you?” he’d asked Oran before hiring him.
“Sure. Real name’s O’Matthews,” Oran had quipped.
Fergus roared with laughter, and he, along with his patrons, called Oran “O’Matty” from that day on.
Fergus beckons him to the bar and pumps his hand. “How are you, mate? How’s the wife?”
“Haven’t seen her in a while. Guess you haven’t, either?” Oran remembers to ask, as if he doesn’t know better.
“Not in years. You two split up, then?”
“Long time ago.” Oran pulls a couple of coins from his pocket. “Whatever you’ve got on draft.”
Fergus tosses the coins into a cash drawer and fills a mug as Oran looks at the spot where the open mic once stood. He’d watched from behind the bar as other men enthralled rapt audiences with magnetism and profound words, just as he’d always longed to do. But his own dream transformed. What good was being a movie star if you couldn’t experience hero worship firsthand, in the moment?
Oran had come to Fergie’s an aspiring actor and left a preacher and prophet, with a mesmerized Linda as his first disciple.
As Fergus sets the beer in front of him, Oran notices his gold wristwatch. “Fancy. Guess the bar’s doing well, man.”