Installment 2 - how Lindsey was sent Straight to the Lord (and from there to hell in an Easter basket)

Tar River Lindsey and Sarah went down and found a man in the canoe

The whole Lindsey-the-Lezbo rumor got started on the weekend Vincent went to see her at Atlantic Christian College after leaving an amazingly well-preserved (for twelve years buried) corpse propped on a love-seat in Huhu's cedar closet. Three quarters of a refrain from Brotherhood of Man's Save your Kisses for Me was skipping, skipping, skipping through the half-open first floor window of their dorm room. He rapped several times before he rattled his way through the already damaged and filthy metal Venetian blinds to discover Lindsey and Sarah in a sort of dog-pile formation on one of the twin beds, all four bare feet on a camel-back trunk. They jerked upright when he lifted the arm of the record player. Sarah made a fast break for the shower, halfway asking permission with a nod and a raised eyebrow before grabbing a jar of Queen Helene hair dress that must have been Lindsey's.

"Oh, Chaka Khan; Chaka Khan," giggled Vincent, deflecting his nervousness. "So why y'all dressed up like Miss Kitty and her best girl?"

"From in here. Check out this trunk load of stuff Sarah's grandma brought last week from Pulleytown! Can you even imagine having a whole town names after your family? All this was Sarah's great-grandmother's stuff, when she was married to John Williamson, remember the slave guy that became a legislator?"

"Why would I know that?"

"He was in our history book!"

"Whose? I don't remember him."

Well, we sure learned about him at Cottondale High. I don't know what you people in Five Points learned. History o' NASCAR? He served six terms, for the love o' God! Look at all this cool stuff in here. He musta got rich before he was through."

Lindsey already had the trunk splayed wide open. She rummaged through letters in pale envelopes with faded cursive flowing across the fronts, and metallic photographs of very shiny black faces whose grim expressions like Vincent had seen in other old metallic photographs, convinced him that oral hygiene had not yet made its formal debut in polite society. Removing the top shelf, Lindsey pulled out beribboned laces and taffetas that exhaled a musty combination of lavender and mold.

"This is where we got these outfits, Vincent. Aren't they all gorgeous?" Lindsey's dress was minty colored and had a bustle. A bustle! The top came up around her throat and had a big glass bead sewn on where a man would've had an Adam's apple.

"Y'all look like those girls in Picnic at Hanging Rock."

Lindsey launched a rapid-fire version of her previous day, but the scent of Sarah's great-grandparents wafting from the coffin-like trunk took his mind back to where he'd just come from, and what all he'd been doing there, so he let her ramble, able to insert himself only into bits and pieces of her story between fits of memory.

"You want some Kool-Ade? Sarah made some grape yesterday." He did, so Lindsey got a Tupperware pitcherful from the mini-fridge and rummaged through a bucket of beer mugs, identical to the ones at Pizza Hut, to find the least dirty one. Vincent received the probably stolen glass and drank it down a bit while Lindsey talked at the speed of light.

It had been beautiful, according to Lindsey. Spanish moss dangled over the muddy Tar River, often sweeping long vee-shapes aimed against the current. She fake-whined that they had to take their Norton's Anthology texts along to study for an upcoming midterm, and Vincent understood his friend's back-handed manner of boasting.

She had always loved Romantic poetry, and would have chosen it as a minor if she'd been able to follow her dream of majoring in Marine Archeology at ECU. He'd teased her about it before, reading the Rime of the Ancient Mariner to Jacques Cousteau in the Calypso's minisub. She was trying to tell him more, and he started humming the John Denver Calypso song in a high voice through his little red mustache until she swatted his shoulder and ordered him to shut up.

Lindsey extended the pause in her story with a raised index finger while she swished her skirt, or as Vincent retold it, hustled her bustle, over to the door to gauge her length of safety for the next morsel, "Sarah's brother? That huge Apollo Pulley you met here last November? He seriously announced to us on the boat before he'd let us go ashore? That from here on out, we are hereby on 'notice,' he said, the he is to be addressed by no other name than, get this, Tiger Lilly!"

She fell over laughing into her bed pillow, and Vincent's eyes and nostrils grew three or four sizes before he snorted his laugh of tardy belief.

"Tiger Lilly and his, uh, I guess his consort du jour, the fabulous Dani Daletto, current Miss Drag USA no less, wearing waist-high waders were waiting for us in the shade under Greenville's Iron Bridge, bottles of Mad Dog sticking out their shirts. They climbed in and Tiger Lilly guided the boat through a maze of knobby kneed cypress trees I'm positive were brimming with snakes and alligators, to a hidden landing on the swampy north side of the river, oh, wait, I mean 'le Rive Gauche,' is what that Dani boy kept saying it was called."

"I'm sure the French would be flattered."

"I'm pretty sure the French are never flattered, Vincent. I know I never flatter 'em, anyway."

Vincent's mind wandered from Tiger Lily and Dani, right through le Rive Gauche to French I at Five Points High and Mme. Erlick welcoming them every Tuesday and Thursday, "Bienvenue, mes etudiants," and he was back to the night before. There was something about a visit to the Paddock Club disco with a thirty foot dance floor and a dozen pool tables, an image of Lindsey taking shotgun hits off a joint from a female lumber-jack whose lip was oddly prickly to Lindsey's, and then he was back, joking that it was probably Lindsey's own top lip she'd neglected to shave. She hit him for that, and he was still snickering when Sarah came back in a beach towel and plastic cap. Lindsey segued effortlessly into a middle-of-the-night ride back to Wilson "au plein aire" in the back of a powder blue Ranchero, a million stars overhead , the smell of fresh dirt and chlorophyll in their nostrils, Vincent was back in Benvenue Cemetery while the girls, real and wannabe, were detouring through a roadside cow pasture out from the Voice of America towers near Farmville for some fresh psilocybin mushrooms.

"And that's why we were crashed out here on the bed when you came. We probably hadn't been here more than an hour, and our brains less than that."

In the version Vincent told Motsie and Martin at Mr. McCrary's wake the following Tuesday, the girls had taken a moonlit canoe ride down the river, while in Lindsey's subsequently corrected account, they had gone in a bass boat Saturday morning with a ride waiting for them at the Iron Bridge. In Vincent's version, the girls were reading the poetry aloud to each other, while in Lindsey's they were both cramming for an exam. Both stories had the girls dancing at the Paddock Club, which Vincent knew to be a gay bar, but didn't repeat that, and which Lindsey protested was a popular country music dance hall. Vincent sure made light of Sarah's brother insisting with complete seriousness that everyone address him as Tiger Lilly, and Lindsey didn't refute it, but pronounced Dani's name more like Donny, and din't mention the word "fabulous," much less "Miss Drag USA." About the only part both versions shared was riding back to ACC in the back of a Ranchero, whether snuggled under a canoe, as in Vincent's version, or pulling an uncle's borrowed bass boat along behind, as in Lindsey's.

What Mr. Pearce heard after three or four repetions by some very busy Visitationites, was a gracious plenty, mainly about his daughter going to town, merrily merrily merrily down the stream, romantic poetry, a man in a canoe, and maybe something about hunkering down in the back, whatever that last bit might have meant. He loaded up his bolt action M-1 and sped Pastor Mozingo directly up to Wilson for an impromptu intervention, and then he sent Lindsey to a well-known retreat for homosexuals called Straight to the Lord, right on the New River between Glendale Springs and West Jefferson. The whole problem for Lindsey was that, in contrast to Vincent, no secret about her ever lay still for long before people got ahold and began pulling the facts all out from the middle like salt-water taffy, until they turned it into something way more sinfully delicious and colorful than whatever it had started off being.

Pastor "Little John" Gautier at the retreat saved Lindsey from the frying pan of chatter that lasted from Maundy Thursday that year until right around Christmas, but flipped her right into a pure hell-fire of steamy gossip that passed from lips to lips in every congregation from Ashe County to Cottondale when she showed back up as the heavily laden Blessed Virgin in the A.M.E. church's living nativity. The evil born of that encounter followed Lindsey for the next several decades like a very long thread trailing out of her sock.