Fiction SUNSET OVER VERDIGRIS BEND

             SUNSET OVER VERDIGRIS BEND

Sally Baker Kivowitz 

(A Novel of Absolutely Zero Socially Redeeming Value)

CHAPTER ONE

                             
     

    As she turned off the pavement   and onto the gravel road leading up to her grandparents’ house, Libba saw an old red Chevy pickup truck in the driveway.   Getting closer, she recognized Meredith Malloy perched on the side porch swing.   Brian, her youngest, was playing in dirt that had, once, been Gran’s zinnia beds.                
     “Lib!”   Meredith was off the porch and running toward the driveway.  “I have been waiting for ages!  You have got to tell me all about school today.”
    Balancing her books and papers on her hip, Libba inserted the key into the lock of the heavy, oaken door. After an initial resistance, it gave unexpectedly.   She half fell into the front vestibule.  Meredith, with Brian attached to her hip, followed.
    “Here, Meri.  I’ll get a washcloth for Brian.  He must have eaten a quarter acre of dirt.  School?  What about it?  The temperature in my room had to exceed one hundred degrees.  Do you believe the school board?  They’re building a brand spanking new gymnasium and office building but won’t spend a dime to upgrade the air conditioning system at the elementary school. That system must be thirty years old, on the outside.  I swear, I do not know how politicians live with themselves.  They drive to air conditioned offices in air conditioned cars and don’t give a thought as to how little children are supposed to pay attention in the heat. My room felt like the bottom ring of Dante’s Inferno all day long.” 
    As she talked, Libba had made her way through the dining room, dropping books and papers onto the table. In the kitchen, she reached under the sink for a clean washcloth
    “Oh, my goodness! Could you stay off your soap box for once, just once?  You’re home a hot five seconds, and, already, you’re trying to change the entire town. Libba, they need a new sports complex so that the kids in town have a proper place for college scouts to watch them play. Sports translate to scholarships which translate to education.  You know that.   And you can stop with your intellectual references, too.  Dante‘s Inferno?   I am not impressed.”
    “OK, OK.  Point taken, on the sports. But why do the administrators need new offices?  What’s wrong with the old ones?  Also, for the record, there is nothing wrong or elitist about being well read.”
    “Elizabeth Juanita Jeffreys! Right this minute, I don’t give a rip about either the administrators’ offices or Dante.    And to be honest, I don’t really care about the dirt in Brian’s mouth, either.”
      Meredith slapped her head, dislocating the red bandana tied around her short brown hair, and followed Libba into the kitchen.  “It was good clean dirt. Believe me, by the time he’s a teenager the dirt that comes out of his mouth will far outweigh the little bit he put into it as a baby. Just this morning, I threatened to wash Joe, Jr’s mouth out with soap.  I do not know where he gets the vocabulary.  Libba, for crying out loud, please pay attention.”     Meri began to speak slowly, as if to a small, not terribly bright child,   “Tell me about the body that the demolition crew found in the Old Red Building.”
       Libba, who had been more concerned about the dirt in Brian’s mouth now as opposed to that which might or might not come out of it in a few years, stopped running the cloth over his face in mid-swipe.            “Meredith, what on earth are you talking about?”
     “Lord, give me strength!   I am going to go flat out crazy with you!  Do you or do you not have a classroom that looks directly onto the Old Red Building?  Do you or do you not....”
     “Meri, I’ve already admitted that I don’t know what you’re talking about.  Why don’t you start at the beginning, and I’ll try to keep up.”
     “O.K. Here goes.   The workmen discovered a body, a skeleton really, in the basement,”
     “What!  You mean a human being?  Are you serious?”
      “Certainly, I’m serious.  You don’t think I’d get this excited over a dead rattle snake, do you?  Joe was talking to Josh Banks, you know from the police station? I cannot believe you didn’t see anything!”
       “It was too hot, and I was too tired.  On Fridays, teachers are supposed to leave the next week’s lesson plans in the office, and mine weren’t done.  Rather than go by the office and explain to Chuck, I slipped out the kindergarten door.  It was just not worth having that old lecher back me up against the copier so he can cop a feel. But, that’s another story.   Tell me what you know. Oh, and by the way, snakes don't, strictly speaking, have skeletons.  Just to be clear”
    “Oh please shut up.  You are just trying to make me forget how you have let me down.   And anyway, that’s about it.  I was hoping to get filled in by you,” her tone was more than slightly accusatory.   “Josh said the skeleton was pretty old, and they would probably never know for sure who it was or what it was doing there.
     “This is just so, so sad.  I am at home with four children and know more than you do.  Lib, you were right there!”
      Properly reprimanded, Libba attempted to make amends with the offering of one slender tidbit, “I did notice a police car out front, but I thought someone was checking for speeders.  After all, the way those city kids use the county roads for drag strips, somebody should be setting up speed traps.”
     Meri’s rolling eyes let Libba know what her offering was worth.
     “Well, that tears it, then. Since you don’t have any information for me, I have got to get home and start supper.  If Joe brings home any more news, I’ll call you,” Meredith paused, “And you, you could call some of the other teachers. 
     “Or even better!    Why don’t you give Bobby Carmichael a call tonight? He retired from the army a couple of years ago, and he’s the police chief now. He and his wife split up a while ago.  Joe said he came into the store the other day and had your mother cornered by the dairy case for about a half an hour.  He was asking her all about you. He‘d be real glad to hear from you, Libby, and he would know everything about the body.”
      “Meri, go home.  Your mind already left.  In the first place, I haven’t been at this job long enough to know any teachers well enough to call them at home.  Except for Ellen Barnes and Nadine Graham, all of them are new to me.  Ellen and Nadine, of course, have been teaching since God was a pup.  Nadine’s first year was when we were in junior high, wasn’t it?”
    “You know that I don’t remember, and you know that I do not care.” 
    “As for calling Bobby, you can just forget that.  I can imagine that conversation,” Libba reached down and pulled Brian out from under the kitchen table and handed him two pie pans to beat together.  Above the resulting cacophony, she continued, “He, probably, still regards me a commie, pinko women’s libber.”
    “Well, you can’t blame him, really Lib.  I mean, after all, there he was, in the starting lineup for the Orange Bowl.  He had gotten you a plane ticket down to the game.  Then,   you told him you couldn't come. Because you had a paper due?  Come on, now! What was he supposed to think?   You were his best girl, after all, and you refused to take off for that game?   What did you think he was going to do?  He thought you had just lost your mind. 
    “Besides, you have to be honest.  You did go a little cuckoo on the women's libber thing.  Good grief, you even quit shaving your legs.  You have started shaving again, haven’t you?”  Meredith reached down and pulled at Libba’s skirt.
    “Would you leave me alone?  Get your hands off my legs, you insane woman!”    Libba grabbed her skirt away from Meri’s grasp           
    “Yes, of course, I shave my legs.  I still cling, however, to my inalienable and God given right not to shave if I don’t want to do so.  Besides, I quit shaving as a protest against that Iran Contra mess.   Now, that you bring it up, I'm not quite clear why I thought that whether or not Libba Jeffreys shaved her legs mattered to Ollie North and Ronald Reagan, but it made sense at the time.”
     “Not to me, then, and not to me now."
     “Who asked you?  And, besides, it makes as much as sense as breaking up with a girl because she had school work that prevented her from going to the Orange Bowl when Oklahoma played.  Good grief, he acted as though I had taken to dating someone who played for  the University of Pittsburgh.  And, I never liked football anyway, so there.”
    “Oh my Gosh, don't say that too loud.  Someone might hear you.  You may have been living in Pittsburgh, but this is Verdigris Bend, don't forget.”
    “What?  You don't think the football fans are just as nuts in Pittsburgh as they are in Verdigris Bend?  Now, you're the one who's not thinking clearly.  Haven't you ever seen a Steelers' game and looked into the bleachers and seen those guys with half their bodies painted yellow and the other painted black?  And, you know what I have always wondered?  Where, exactly, do they stop painting?   Do you suppose they go all the way down, you known down THERE?”
    “Libba, you are awful, and you are trying to change the subject.”     
     The point was that Bobby's feelings were hurt, and he didn't  understand, any more than any of the rest of us did, quite frankly, why you were all the way up there anyway.” 
    Libba felt her blood start to rise.  After all of these years, why did she care what Bobby Carmichael, or Meri, for that matter, thought, said or did?  Ridiculous!  She firmly put herself in check.
    “Meri, if I had been a boy, no one would have said word one about it. I wanted to see more of the world. Big fat deal. But, no, I was a girl, and the opinion all around town was that I could see everything I had a need to see right here in good old Verdigris Bend.
    “Would you listen to me?  'The World’? Who am I kidding?  I wanted to get out of town for a while, and the only place my parents would let me go was to Pittsburgh, because my Aunt Rose was there.  But, my goodness..  The way people carried on, I should have just gone ahead and taken off for Marrakesh or someplace.  The reaction would have been the same, probably.  And, you know what else?  'Women's libber' is not a dirty word.    I'm proud of my politics......”
    “Come to think of it, I am, also, quite sure, now that my marriage has fallen apart, those very same people are   saying I got what I deserved. Bobby is, quite likely, at the top of that list.”
    “Well, now, you’re starting to whine.  Nobody thinks that, and you know it. ”
    Libba continued, “Hey, I, really, am sorry about not knowing more about today's happenings.  If it helps I will eat lunch in the teachers’ lounge on Monday and try to pick up on some of the school gossip.”
    “Monday?”  Meredith let out a hoot of laughter that caused Brian to look up from where he was pulling the remainder of the pots and pans out of the drawer at the bottom of the stove.  “I have to work down at the store tomorrow.  It’s Sara’s day off.  By tomorrow night, I shall know the entire story.”
    Libba laughed, too.  Even though there were one or two chain supermarkets on the main highway towards Claremore, most of Verdigris Bend’s population still patronized Joe Malloy’s smaller grocery store.  Joe’s grandparents had established the store, his father and mother had taken it over and Joe and Meri ran it now. Time spent on Saturday at the grocery store and Sunday morning in one of the two churches was sufficient to provide anyone with all the information needed to keep up on town gossip. .  No doubt about it. By tomorrow night, Meredith would know the identity of the deceased and what, if any, connection the poor soul had had to Verdigris Bend, Oklahoma. 
    Meredith pulled Brian out from under the kitchen table.   With her baby hanging on to her neck, she headed toward the front vestibule. 
    “And now, I really have got to go.  Mark and Angela will be home, and whenever they’re alone, they fight.”
    “Maybe they fight so much, because Mark is so much like Joe, and Angela is the spitting image of you.”
    “That’s cold, Libba, really cold.  By the way, don’t think you’re hiding anything.  I saw how you reacted when I mentioned Bobby’s name.  You wouldn’t get that mad, girlie, if those feelings were totally dead. 
    “And, besides, just for the record, no matter what you tell people about being over your divorce, how you have no hard feelings and wish Joel all the best, I know better than that, too. You’re still holding onto that anger the way you hold onto every grudge you ever had.  Get up and get over it.   Move on.  You could do a whole lot worse than Bobby Carmichael.”
    “Meri, would you, please, just this once mind your own business? I’m a big girl, and I’m fine, just fine.  I’ll be by the store tomorrow.  Do you have any canning lids left? I want to pick the pears and apples out back in the orchard.   I’ve got Gran’s jars, but I need to buy lids and rings.”
    “I don’t know, ‘Ms. Fine, Just Fine’.    We may be out.  It’s kind of late in the season, but I’ll check when I go in.  If there are any left, I’ll put them behind the counter for you.”
     “Thanks, see you tomorrow.”
       “See ya.”
       Libba stood on the front porch and watched Meri strap Brian into the car seat and hand him a toddler’s cup of water. She continued to watch as the pickup bounced back down the gravel road.
         Meredith Cramer and Joe Malloy had been in love since junior high school. Married right out of high school, they had gone off to Oklahoma State University together, and during their sophomore year, Joe, Jr had been born.  After both had graduated, they came home, and Meredith had found few reasons to leave Verdigris Bend since.  She had made three trips into Tulsa to have her babies at St Francis hospital.  With Brian, however, she had waited so long that she ended up giving birth in her own bedroom.  Joe insisted she had done it on purpose, and Libba was sure that Joe was right.     
    Half-sitting, half-leaning against the porch railing, she watched as the sun set over the hills. As gorgeous as the sunsets had been over those three rivers in Pittsburgh, there was something about a sunset in this particular spot and in this particular town that spoke to the absolute DNA in her cells.   The red bled across the turquoise blue, and then, gradually turned into a deep indigo. With the trees showing black against the sky, the sight had to be one of the most beautiful spectacles on the planet.  As a girl, she had sat beside her grandmother while they would snap beans, husk corn. It had been such a peaceful and loving place to be.     
    She let her mind go back to Meri’s revelation.  Why on earth would there be a body in that ancient building? It had been closed for years.  Libba, herself, could only barely remember it being used as a school.  Shortly before she entered kindergarten, the present school had been built, and the old building had been relegated for use a place to hold play practices and kids’ club meetings.  As an aide in junior high school, she had set up art shows in one of the empty rooms.    Sometime after that, she seemed to remember the place being condemned and boarded up. That must have been when it had happened. A tramp, looking for shelter on a raw winter day had worked loose a boarded up window and slipped in.
    Libba started to shiver, but it wasn’t the thought of some poor old tramp dying alone in a deserted school basement that was causing her discomfort.  It was cold on this porch.   It had been over a hundred degrees this afternoon, and now, it felt like a frost! Welcome home, Libba.   Four seasons in one day.  She stood up and walked back into the house to light the pilot light on the furnace.