Rexanne Becnel - Leaving L.a.

I turned off the car and got out, but open-toed sandals aren’t any good for tramping through underbrush. Between snakes, poison ivy and blackberry canes, I was bound to lose the fight.

But instead of frustrating me, that actually helped to calm me down. Some things were beyond my control: the woods, the river. My past. The cruel people in the world.

I climbed onto the roof of my Jeep and sat there cross-legged, staring through the pines and sweet gum and oaks toward the river. It wasn’t my fault Mel Toups had been a mean kid. Maybe he was nicer now, but I doubted it. The point was, he couldn’t hurt me anymore. I wasn’t the scared little girl I used to be. I had power of my own. More important, I knew how to marshal other people’s power. In fact, I bet Mr. Joe Newspaper would just love a juicy story about how Mel and his buddies tried to grab a girl in the woods way back when. Joe might not want to write bad news about his neighbors, but he was a true newshound, and he wouldn’t be able to resist. I could see the headline: Former Oracle Resident Returns To Confront Attempted Rapist.

I smiled grimly at the relentless flow of the river. I might not be able to prove the allegations, but it would sure upset Mel’s wife. Maybe she’d be so repulsed that she’d divorce him. Then he’d lose his job at his mother-in-law’s diner, I speculated. He’d turn into a homeless bum, eating out of the Dumpster behind the place he used to run.

By the time the first drops of rain started to fall I was feeling much better. Nothing had changed and I wasn’t about to fill Joe Reeves in on the ugliness of my childhood. But the mental exercise of getting revenge on Mel Toups had helped.

It had begun to pour by the time I backed Jenny around and picked my way out of the maze of narrow lanes and back roads. Where in the hell was I anyway? It took an old man sitting on his porch with two ancient hound dogs beside him to steer me correctly.

“Thanks!” I waved to him and in ten minutes was back at the farm. Except that I really didn’t want to be in that house, especially not alone. So I ran in, changed into long jeans and tennis shoes and, with Tripod next to me, set off for a walk.

The rain had barely touched the farm, only dampened the fields a little and left the woods drippy. Tripod was in his glory. I couldn’t say the same about myself, but at least I hadn’t thrown up. Up to now morning sickness hadn’t been a serious problem. Instead I was periodically surprised by a sudden wave of nausea. Midday, midnight and anytime in-between.

I rubbed the rounded little mound beneath my belly button. “Temperamental and unpredictable. Is that what I should expect from you?” Given her mother’s temperament—and her father’s—what else could she be?

I followed a path I hadn’t thought about in years. It had hardly changed. A narrow woodland track that wound through the thickest part of our woodlot, down an incline, skirting a lush stand of wood ferns already thigh-high. Must have been a mild winter.

The ground grew soggy, but once past the Black Bog, as Alice and I had dubbed it, the ground rose again. But something was different. It was too bright up ahead.

Then I saw the short, square steeple, and I realized where I was. Alice’s church. The back acreage on the far side of the Black Bog. This was the land she’d sold without my consent.

I stopped at the edge of the trees and stared. The church wasn’t all that much to look at, a metal warehouse-type building with an awkward front tower and a plain cross above it. A clearing had been carved out of the woods in one big square. Trees rimmed the square, the ugly church squatted in the middle and a partially paved parking lot circled the whole thing.

A smaller building stood off to one side, probably some sort of activities center. Several cars were parked nose-in next to it, including Alice’s. I suppose traipsing through the woods was too messy for her little neat-freak, do-gooder soul. She had to get into her eight-cylinder gas-guzzler and drive the half mile around to the road that fronted the church.

I turned away, furious at the ugly blight she’d inflicted on my land. The least they could have done was build a handsome church, something inspiring and comforting.

I turned back for the house, whistling for Tripod, then abruptly took another trail, the one that circled the northern edge of our land. Tripod followed behind me, nose down, pretending he was a hunting dog. He didn’t let me get too far ahead, though. Nervous, I guess.

But I wasn’t. I was remembering so much. Like the half-hearted tree house Alice and I had discovered in a big oak tree. Some other long-ago kids must have started it, but we had finished it, making it our own, dragging up wood, rope and pieces of tin, fixing it up, thinking we could make it impregnable, our own little respite from the madness back at home.

It had been our secret, hers and mine, until Mother had followed us one day. She and her man-of-the-moment had laughed with glee when they’d discovered our hideaway. Then they’d climbed up there and christened it—her term for screwing in a new place. Or in an old place with a new man.

Whatever. The magic had been ruined.

But I’d got even. I’d broken a dozen glass bottles on the tree house floor, and when that hadn’t stopped her from going back, I’d set it on fire.

I don’t know why the whole woods didn’t go up in flames that day. Maybe because it had been raining so much that summer. But the floor of the tree house had burned away, and so had the rope ladder. Most important, Mother never went up in our tree house again. I ruined it for her, just like she’d ruined it for Alice and me.

Is it any wonder I equate sex with power? Every bit of my mother’s power came from sex, but she’d used it indiscriminately. In the end it had ruined her life and probably that of several men. Certainly it had ruined my life and Alice’s.

But I learned from her mistakes. She who commands men with her sex rules the world—if she can keep her cool about her. Cleopatra. Helen of Troy. Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine. Elizabeth I.

One thing I certainly didn’t associate sex with was making love. And I don’t much equate it with pleasure either. I’ve had one or two considerate lovers. But the other boyfriends have always been about themselves and their pleasure.

Not that I really cared. I’ve always thought sex was highly overrated.

Tripod started barking, drawing me back from my sour thoughts. Sex had given me this baby, and that’s all that mattered anymore. So I changed directions to where Tripod stood barking for all he was worth at a big, curled-up water moccasin.

I grabbed my idiot dog by the collar. “I suggest you stick to poodles, if you want to stay alive,” I muttered. For once he listened and followed me down another path that took us to the edge of our property.

Beyond the woods I saw an old white house, plain and ordinary except for the incredible display of flowers that surrounded it. Wow! When I was really young, an old man had lived here. Then he’d done what seemed like the oddest thing. As old as he was, he’d married this really nice, really old woman.

At that precise moment my eyes picked her out. It was her, sitting under a sweet gum tree on a wide, wooden bench painted cardinal-red. Twenty years ago her hair had been turning gray. Now it was completely white.

She was the one who’d taught me how to jitterbug and how to waltz. She’d showed me the samba and the rumba. And the tango.

I started forward with the first genuine smile on my face since I’d arrived in Oracle. She didn’t notice me right away, not until a huge yellow cat spied Tripod and leaped up onto her lap.

I don’t know much about Tripod’s early years, but I know he’s as terrified of cats as he is of big trucks and SUVs. No doubt he’d come up on the short end of a confrontation with a cat or two. At least he hadn’t lost a leg to a cat. But that didn’t change anything. He saw the cat, stopped dead in his tracks, and started to bark furiously—from a safe distance of at least a hundred feet or so.