Jodi Thomas - Twisted Creek

We changed into our comfortable clothes at a truck stop on the edge of town. I found a county map plastered to the wall and studied it as I braided my hair. A pinpoint dot marked the forgotten lake community where my place was located. The middle of nowhere, I thought.

When I got back to the van, Nana was staring out at the dry, flat land with an acre of topsoil blowing across our hood. She whispered, “You sure there’s a lake in this country?”

“The man inside said it was about thirty miles from here in a little canyon. He said he thinks it’s an old private community made up of mostly rich folks who want to get out of the city.”

Nana stared at the skyline of Lubbock. “I can see why,” she said. “I was through here a few times when I was young. Nice people, as I remember, but you’d have to have roots growing out of your toes to want to live in this wind.”

Before I could leave the city limits, Nana saw a dollar store and yelled, “Stop.”

I pulled into the parking lot without argument. I had long ago given up trying to understand her fascination with stores where everything cost a buck, but twenty-seven dollars lighter we were back in the car with enough snacks to last a week. Nana still had pioneer blood in her. She believed that wherever we traveled, there might not be food and she needed to be prepared.

Almost an hour later, after two wrong turns, we pulled past the broken-down main entrance to Twisted Creek Community. The gate had been propped up by the side of the road so long ago that morning glory vines almost covered it. From the entrance, the road wound down into a canyon, twisting between brown sagebrush and foot-high spikes of faded buffalo grass.

“Walker said the road makes a circle, so it really doesn’t matter much which way we turn at the gate.” I looked for any sign of life. The place reminded me of a forgotten movie set left to decay in the sun and wind. Everything in the canyon seemed to have turned brown with the fall. The monochromatic landscape might have seemed dull to most people, but I found it a grand study in hues. The wonder of a world painted in browns reminded me of the Civil War photographs by George S. Cook. Dark, haunting, beautiful.

Nana watched as views of the water flashed between the weeds. “Look. I see the creek.”

I slowed, noticing a winding, muddy stream of water with reddish-brown banks on either side. At the base of the canyon, the creek pooled into a lake.

“I remember living near a creek when I was a kid.” Nana rolled down her window. “We used to carry our laundry down beside it every Monday morning. My momma would have my two brothers build a fire while my sister and I filled the wash pot with water and lye soap so strong I could smell it in my nose until Wednesday. Then, while we all played in the stream, she’d wash the clothes and hang them on branches to dry.”

I looked for a mailbox with 6112 on it as I asked the same question I’d asked every time I heard this story. “Why didn’t your mother make all you kids help?”

Nana smiled and repeated what she always said. “Your grandmother liked to do laundry.”

I didn’t correct her that the story was about my great-grandmother. I just nodded, knowing she’d confirmed that craziness runs in the women of my family. The men, it appears, just run, for not one of Nana’s stories ever mentioned her father.

My grandfather, Nana’s Henry, had stayed around. If you can call staying around working from dawn till dusk. Every night he’d stomp in and fall asleep as soon as he ate supper. Same routine every day, seven days a week, until a heart attack took him in the middle of a half-plowed field. He would have hated that.

It seemed strange, but the only memory I have of Henry is him in his recliner with his eyes closed. Maybe that’s why he looked so natural at the funeral. Nana always said he was a good man, but I remembered no good or bad about the man. Except maybe how he liked order in his world. He wanted the same seven meals served at the same time and on the same night of the week. Growing up I always knew what day it was by the smell of supper. I never saw him hit Nana, or kiss her. Their life was vanilla.

“I’m glad we had those days by the creek,” Nana said, interrupting my thoughts. Her short gray hair blew in the wind. “With Frank and Charlie dying in the war, they didn’t have much time for fun in this life. We used to laugh so hard when we swam that Momma would make us get out and rest. There’s no better sleeping than lying in damp clothes on a hot day by the creek. I’d feel so relaxed and lazy I wouldn’t even bother to swat at flies buzzing by.”

Nana stretched as if feeling her memory before continuing, “We were always careful though with Poor Flo. I thought she’d grow out of being frail, but she didn’t even live long enough to marry.” Nana leaned back in her seat. “She had the flu back when she was little, and it left scars on her heart.”

I felt sorry for Poor Flo even though I never met her. She’d been dead more than sixty years, and Nana still mourned her. Nana told me once that some memories stick to your soul. I think Flo was like that with my grandmother.

As we moved around the circle of homes and barns huddled close to the water, I noticed how every house looked overgrown with weeds, and all were in need of paint. This may have been where the rich folks lived fifty years ago, but now the neighborhood had fallen on hard times. I saw a few gardens, a few fishing boats, a few signs of life.

We passed a junkyard of broken-down boats and old rusty butane tanks with worthless cars parked in between. The mess made me think of those wild salads at fancy restaurants where it looked like they mowed the alley and washed it up to serve.

Nana patted my knee three times as she always did. Three pats for three words she used to say.

She didn’t say the words now, she didn’t have to.

“I know,” I said as the van rattled across a bridge. “I love you, too.”

September 17, 2006

1100 hours

Twisted Creek

Luke Morgan swore as he stomped through the bush toward Jefferson Platt’s property.

He didn’t have much time. He’d been here two days, talking to residents, checking out the area for trouble, but he had put off going to Platt’s home.

Until now.

Much as he hated to acknowledge it, once he went inside, he’d have to admit the old man was dead.

Jefferson Platt had been a fixture in his life for as long as Luke could remember. Platt had taught him to fish when he’d been five. He had been his grandfather’s friend for forty years and in so doing Jefferson had watched first Luke’s father and then Luke grow up. Jefferson had been Luke’s safe house when a bullet almost ended his career five years ago. The smells of the lake ran as thick in Luke’s blood as his Navajo heritage.

Going into Jefferson Platt’s apartment would be like closing a door, and Luke had closed enough doors in his life lately. This was the one place on the planet Luke thought never changed…and now it had.

He circled near the lake, deciding it would be faster to plow through the muddy bank than try to fight the willows and pines that stood fortress-thick between his land and Platt’s. If he’d had time, he would have gone around to the road and walked over, but he could feel trouble coming as clearly as his Navajo grandfather used to say he felt storms brewing all the way to the edge of creation.

Reaching the lake’s shoreline, Luke stopped a foot before he stepped out in the open and pulled his Glock 9mm from his boot. He wasn’t in the mood to clean lake water out of the weapon again.

Pressing the gun in his vest pocket, he jogged down the shore to a long dock everyone called Jefferson’s Crossing. With a jump, he grabbed the side of the muddy dock and pulled himself up. From here on he would be in easy sight of any fisherman passing, so he walked slow, hoping they’d notice no more than they’d seen the past few days-a drifter circling the lake. With a week’s worth of growth across his face, he was a far cry from the efficient ATF agent who’d left his post in Austin for a leave he’d listed as “personal business.”

Within minutes he had slipped inside the kitchen window and climbed the stairs. Boarded up, the place he’d visited a hundred times seemed unfamiliar. Glancing down, he could barely make out the outline of the old potbellied stove in the center of the wide, empty room or the small safe no one had remembered how to open in so many years it had become simply a stool huddled beside the stove. The mismatched pair stood alone in the room that had been Jefferson’s store.

Luke smiled, remembering one summer when Jefferson had told him that the safe’s combination was someone’s birthday. Luke had spent hours trying every set of numbers he could put together. Jefferson had laughed at him, along with everyone else who wandered in.

Luke turned away, forcing his mind to present problems. He took the last half of the stairs two at a time and wasn’t surprised to find the second floor a mess. Jefferson’s no-doors apartment hadn’t changed since he’d been here years ago. His trained eyes missed little. He’d read the police report and knew Jefferson Platt had died in the water a few feet from the dock, but someone had walked across the dusty floor of his bedroom recently. Maybe someone looking for the same clues.

The sound of a car drew Luke to the window. From behind the curtain’s shadow, he watched as an old blue van with Tennessee tags rattled down the drive. It was time to move, and fast, but he hesitated. The blonde driving held his attention.

When she jumped out of the car, he thought her little more than a kid until she stepped into the sunshine and stared up at the house. Her hair might be in braids and her shorts barely covering her bottom, but her petite body was definitely all grown up.

“Hell,” he mumbled. The new owner had arrived and he was wasting time staring.

Luke smiled as he took another look. It had been a long time since he’d admired a woman without wondering if she had a rap sheet.

Too bad he had to disappear.

The numbers 6112 flashed past on a post just outside Nana’s window. I didn’t slow. Something in the back of my mind said if I acted as if I hadn’t seen the place maybe it wouldn’t be real.

But for once, Nana was paying attention and yelled, “Bingo!”

I backed up and turned into the drive. Forty feet down the gravel road, the left front tire hit a hole, almost knocking us out of our seats, but I managed to keep the van from tipping as we rattled toward the largest of several buildings scattered on the property. My property. At least until Garrison D. Walker figured out he’d made a mistake and found the wrong Allie Daniels.

A hundred feet behind the buildings the lake lapped against dingy sand. Barbed-wire fencing framed the boundaries on the other three sides of the wide lot. The land to the left looked wooded and unclaimed from nature. The acreage to my right appeared too hilly to even get a road through, making my property seem lonely on the space between the road and the water. Cluttered driftwood scattered like bones along the shore and beneath the dock.

Nana leaned forward and stared at the building twinkling in the morning sun. “It’s a store, I think.”

Tin signs advertising everything from Camel cigarettes to Coors beer looked like they held together the front wall. The steep tin roof had two windows, and with the long wooden porch running the length of the front, the building seemed to smile at us. The downstairs windows were boarded up. Broken wicker furniture littered one end of the porch while metal lawn chairs lined up on the other end as if at attention-old and rusty, but too tough to die.

I let the van roll into the shade of the shack and noticed a long, covered walk out back that led to a dock on the water. It looked in better shape than the building so I guessed it must have been added.

“This is it, Nana.” I fought to swallow. “Our new home.” We’d lived in some pretty rough houses on land hardly worth plowing, but none looked as bad as this.

Nana smiled and was out of the van before I could throw it into park. She might be in her eighties, but my grandmother was a ball of energy. By the time I caught up with her, she’d already tried the front door.

I pulled out the keys Walker gave me and on the third attempt we were in. Cold, stale air rushed passed us, fighting for freedom and leaving my skin chilled. My body parts were voting on whether to run or stay when Nana flipped on the lights. Bare bulbs above us flickered, then came on along with ceiling fans.