The Mulberry Tree

In front of the cabin was dirt, trampled hard by many feet. A few scrawny chickens wandered about, then, as Bailey watched, a couple of dirty children ran out from under the porch and chased each other across the hard-packed ground.

A third child, older and a boy, scrambled out from under the porch, then halted when he saw Bailey’s car. She wondered why they hadn’t heard her drive up, but when she turned off the engine, she heard shouting coming from inside the house.

“Maybe now’s not the right time,” she said aloud. “Maybe I should go back and ask Matt—”

She didn’t say or think anything else because, suddenly, a man appeared on the porch with a shotgun—and he was aiming it at her.

“You want to get the hell off my property?” the man shouted.

“Yes, I do,” Bailey yelled out the window, then grabbed her keys from where she’d tossed them onto the passenger seat. “I’m going now,” she called as she put the key into the ignition—then dropped them on the floor.

There weren’t any curse words vile enough to express her annoyance as she ducked under the dashboard to search for the fallen keys.

But she didn’t find them before the door to her car was thrown open.

“You try to serve me any papers, and I’ll blow your head off,” came the voice outside the open car door.

Bailey came up so fast she banged her head on the dashboard. “I have no papers for you,” she said frantically. “I came to ask some questions.”

Feeling like something out of a gangster film, she held both hands straight up in the air, to the roof of the car. Standing outside the car was a man with a heavily lined face; he looked to be a hundred years old, but his movements were that of a younger man, and he was holding the shotgun aimed directly at her head.

“Questions about what?” he said suspiciously.

“The—” What could she say that she was sure wouldn’t offend him? “About the Golden Six,” she said quickly, then closed her eyes tight in preparation for being shot.

When nothing happened, she opened one eye. He was grinning at her!

“Well, now, so you’ve come to meet me and ask me about the good times.”

“I came to meet—” She was going to say that she’d come to meet the beautiful Rodney Yates, but from the way the man was looking at her, and from what he’d said . . . But this ugly old man couldn’t possibly be . . .

He was watching her, and he’d lowered the shotgun only about an inch.

“You,” Bailey said. “Yes, I came to meet you. You’re Rodney, aren’t you? You look . . . a . . . Well, you look just like all your pictures.” Bailey was sure that a lie of that magnitude was going to get her shot, but instead the man grinned more broadly, reached out, put his arm around her shoulder, and pulled her out of the car. Bailey almost gagged. His breath was foul, and the hand on her shoulder had half-inch-long fingernails with what looked to be years of dirt under them.

She wanted to get back into her car and get away from this awful place and this dirty man as fast as she could.

“You’re sure pretty,” he said, and his hand began to run up and down Bailey’s arm as he pulled her closer. “Hey! Wait a minute. You aren’t here to do to us what that other one did, are you?”

Bailey had to piece that together. “Oh, you mean Congresswoman Spangler.”

“Congress, ha!” Rodney said, then spit a glob on the ground about an inch from Bailey’s foot.

“No, I’m not,” she answered.

He grinned again, exposing teeth that hadn’t been brushed in years. “Then you come on in, and I’ll show you about that old hag, and I’ll tell you what she did.”

They were at the foot of the stairs up to the porch of the cabin now, and the house was dirtier than any place she’d ever seen in her life. How could people live like this? she wondered.

Rodney held her tighter as they went up the stairs, and Bailey could feel her body getting stiffer by the moment. “Here, now, watch that step. It’s a little bit broken, and I’ve been meanin’ to fix it, but I been real busy lately.”

Bailey looked down to see a rotten board that had probably been there since the 1930s, and just managed to step over it. When she nearly lost her balance, Rodney took the opportunity to run his fingertips across the side of her breast. Bailey thought maybe she was going to be sick.

The inside of the cabin was worse than the outside. They stepped into a room furnished with dirty, broken old chairs and a couch with half of its legs missing, making it about four inches higher on one side than the other. “Have a seat,” Rodney said, and there was a leer in his voice. He was motioning to the high end of the couch. If she sat on that end, she’d slide down to the low end, probably where he planned to sit.

“I’ll, uh . . . ” She looked around. There was a small wooden chair to one side. “I better take this one,” she said as she moved it opposite the couch. “Bad back. I need the support.”

“You know what the cure for a bad back is, don’t you?” Rodney said, putting his face near hers, and she had to work to keep from moving away from his foul breath. “You need more exercise. You know what I mean? More of the ol’ . . . ” He made a circle with the finger and thumb on one hand and stuck his index finger of the other hand through the circle.