“You with the electric company?”
“No. I’m not a bill collector and I’m not a repossession man, either.”
“Who you be, then?” she asked. Her voice was still aggressive. Defiant.
“I’m a man with a couple of questions,” he said. Ricky smiled. “And if you have some answers, maybe some money.”
The woman continued to eye him suspiciously, but now with some curiosity as well. “What sort of questions?” she asked.
“Questions about someone who lived here once. A while ago.”
“Don’t know much,” the woman said.
“Family named Tyson,” Ricky said.
The woman nodded. “He be the man got evicted before we move in.”
Ricky took out his wallet and removed a twenty-dollar bill. He held it up and the woman opened the screen door. “You a cop?” she asked. “Some sort of detective?”
“I’m not a policeman,” Ricky said. “But I might be some sort of detective.” He stepped inside the house.
He blinked for a moment, his eyes taking a few seconds to adjust to the darkness. It was stifling in the small entranceway and he followed the woman and the child into the living room. The windows were open in this space, but the built-up heat still made the narrow room seem like a prison cell. There was a chair, a couch, a television, and a red-and-blue playpen, which is where the child was deposited. The walls were empty, save for a picture of the baby, and a single stiffly posed wedding photo of the woman and a young black man in a naval uniform. He would have guessed the ages of the couple as nineteen. Twenty at most. He stole a look at the young woman and thought to himself: nineteen, but aging fast. Ricky looked back at the picture and asked the obvious question: “Is that your husband? Where’s he now?”
“He shipped out,” the woman said. With the anger removed from her voice, it had a lilting sweetness to it. Her accent was unmistakably Southern black, and Ricky guessed deep South. Alabama or Georgia, perhaps Mississippi. Enlisting, he suspected, had been the route out of some rural world, and she’d tagged along, not knowing that she was merely going to replace one sort of harsh poverty for another. “He’s in the Gulf of some Arabia somewhere, on the USS
“What’s your name?”
“Charlene,” she replied. “Now what’s those questions that’s gonna make me some extra money?”
“Things are tight?”
She laughed, as if this was a joke. “You’d best believe it. Navy pay don’t go too far until your rating get up a bit. We already lost the car and be two months slow on the rent. The furniture, we owe on, too. That be the story for just about everyone in this part of town.”
“Landlord threatening you?” Ricky asked. The woman surprisingly shook her head.
“Landlord be some good guy, I don’t know. When I got the money, I send it to a bank account. But a man at the bank, or maybe a lawyer, he called up and told me not to worry, to pay when I could, said he understood things were hard on military sometimes. My man, Reggie, he just an enlisted sailor. Got to work his way up before he make any real money. But landlord be cool, nobody else be. Electric say they gonna shut off, that’s why can’t run the air conditioners or nothing.”
Ricky moved over and sat on the single chair, and Charlene took up a spot on the couch. “Tell me what you know about the Tyson family. They lived here before you moved in?”
“That’s right,” she said. “I don’t know all that much about those folks. All I knows about is the old fella. He was here all alone. Why you interested in that old man?”
Ricky removed his wallet and showed the young woman the fake driver’s license with the name Rick Tyson on it. “He’s a distant relative and he may have come into a small amount of money in a will,” Ricky lied. “I was sent by the family to try to locate him.”
“I don’t know he gonna need any money where he be,” Charlene said.
“Where’s that?”
“Over at the VA nursing home on Midway Road. If he’s still breathing.”
“And his wife?”
“She dead. More ’n a couple of years. She had a weak heart, or so’s I heard.”
“Did you ever meet him?”
Charlene shook her head. “Only story I knows is what I was told by the neighbors.”
“Then tell me that story.”
“Old man and old woman live here by themselves…”
“I was told they had a daughter…”
“I heard that, too, but I heard she died, long time ago.”
“Right. Go on.”
“Living on Social Security checks. Maybe some pension money, I don’t know. But not much. Old woman, she got sick with her heart. Got no insurance, just the Medicare. They suddenly got bills. Old woman, she up and dies, leaving the old man with more bills. No insurance. He just an old, nasty man, got no neighbors like him none too much, no friends, no family anyone knows about. What he got same as me, just bills. People who wants their money. Up one day, comes late with the mortgage on the house, finds out that it ain’t the bank he thinks that owns the note anymore, it be someone who bought the note from the bank. He misses that payment, maybe one more, the sheriff’s deputies come with an eviction notice. They put the old guy out onna street. Next I hear, he’s in the VA. I’m not guessing he’s ever gonna get out of there, neither, except maybe feetfirst.”
Ricky considered what he’d just heard, then asked: “You came in after the eviction?”
“That’s right.” Charlene sighed and shook her head. “This whole block be a whole lot nicer just two years back. Not so much trash and drinking, people fighting. I thought this be a good place to get started, but now ain’t got no place and no money to move. Anyway, I heard the old man’s story from folks across the street. They gone now. Probably all the folks knew that old man be gone now. But it didn’t seem like he had too many friends. Old man had a pit bull, chained up in back where we got our dog now. Our dog, he just bark, make a commotion, like when you come walking up. I let him loose, he likely to kiss your face more than he be like to bite you. Tyson’s pit bull, not like that none. When he was younger, he likes to fight that dog, you know, in those gambling fights. Those places, they got lots of sweaty white men betting money they don’t have, drinking and swearing. That be the part of Florida that ain’t for tourists or the navy folks. It be like Alabama or Mississippi. Redneck Florida. Rednecks and pit bulls.”
“Not a popular choice,” Ricky said.
“There’s plenty kids in the neighborhood. Dog like that a threat to maybe hurt one of them. Maybe some other reasons folks ’round here don’t like him much.”
“What other reasons?”
“I heard stories.”
“What sort of stories?”
“Evil stories, mister. Mean, nasty evil, be all wrong and bad stories. I don’t know they’s the truth, so my mother, my father, they tells me not to go repeating things I don’t know for certain, but maybe you ask around somebody not as God-fearing as me likely to talk to you some. But I don’t know who. No folks left from that time.”
Ricky thought another moment, then asked, “Do you have the name, maybe the address of the guy you pay rent to now?”
Charlene looked a bit surprised, but nodded. “Sure. I make the check out to a lawyer downtown, send it to another guy at the bank. When I got the money.” She took a piece of crayon from the floor, and wrote down a name and address on the back of an envelope from a furniture rental outlet. The envelope was stamped in red with the phrase: second notice. “I hope this helps you out some.”
Ricky pulled two more twenty-dollar bills from his wallet and handed them to the
