DIXIANA Preview: The Third Chapter

And now, we meet the lovely wife of our protagonist Roy E. Pettus, Chelsea Colette “Creedence” Rucker-Pettus.

While he flies home to attend to his grandfather, Creedence is left behind on tony Sedge Island to stew in her juices over the unpleasant secret Roy uncovered right before getting the call from Edgewater County. Disclaimer: adult themes and sexual imagery in this post!

Click here and here for the previous chapters. One more to go in this preview roll-out of Dixiana.

3. Creedence

Creedence, crumpled out by the pool on a chaise lounge and watching the sun sink into the marsh like Roy Earl had said he wanted them to do together more often, worried herself to pieces about him flying the plane all upset like he was. Torn in two, like a character in some stupid pop song about a love triangle.

She made him fly away from her. With what she done.

Leaving that computer open.

Like she wanted him to find out.

Oh, no. It kept rushing over her in a hot wave. Making her tremble, head to toe. How keeping the secret about her lover felt like it was making her have stomach cancer. Seed-pods kept falling out of the tall tupelo next to the clay-tiled roof of the faux Spanish Colonial Revival house on the marsh Roy loved so much for its price more than the house itself, with its little entrance palazzo and gurgling fountain, its charm, its woodsy yard of mossy live oaks and the one tupelo, the pool, the gourmet kitchen in which she barely fixed anything beyond the kitty-cat breakfasts and lunches and suppers.

Creedence, thinking about what had gone through her husband’s mind while reading what he had. How Roy must hate her, now.

What a mess—she didn’t want to hurt no one. Just wanted to feel appreciated. It would be fine if it were Roy loving her again. How messed up she was to think she could get his attention by letting another man have her the way she had Estes. Only way to feel less messed up was to have a drink. Calm down. Sort it all out one more time. Fix it.

“But I don’t love him,” had been the last she’d yelled at Roy Earl on the tarmac of the airport. And she didn’t. What he’d read in the messages had been schoolgirl nonsense.

A crush that got out of hand. That’s all.

“And we only did it once,” she added, a blatant fib, but in the moment a necessary attempt to downplay as much as confirm the awful truth. “He—he tricked me into it.”

“Will you give me a freaking break,” spots of color in his cheeks nearly purple with blood pressure. “You lie!”

More lies, to herself: about how she still wanted her lover. Estes made her feel good, before she felt bad. It was fair. To get what she wanted. Roy had wronged her. She could swear that he had. Somehow.

The assertions rang hollow.

Or did they?

How being with Estes, despite his youth and supposed inexperience compared to a man like her husband, had been like out of a girl’s fantasy of how IT could be. Finally. A spark, an explosion; the angle just so and just different enough that some magic place got touched by him, by the way he pulled her legs up and held her calves against his brown shoulders and moved ever so progressively faster. Building up energy and friction in her body. And if he didn’t get her there on the first try, a recovery time like nobody’s business.

But two husbands so far, she pouted, and neither getting her where she needed to go. This twenty-nine-year-old half Indian, half Puerto Rican boy—that’s what Estes was, after all; her boy-toy—made her come like no other. It made little sense. In a way, she reckoned, it felt like what she’d always fantasized the sex would be with her unrequited love Billy Steeple, though with his death that door now long closed, and closed forever.

Still—she’d gotten icky about it all. Had been from the git-go. Knew it was wrong. Deep down.

Done it all anyway.

She never did have good sense.

So in the wake of this disaster, she’d kept Facebook closed tonight sitting home in their fruitshake mansion, as she thought of the house at 626 Albermarle Way, tucked back on the opposite side of the island from the megaresidences along the point. Here, in her neighborhood, lived the merely rich versus the superrich.

Were they all as lonely and bloated with gas as she was tonight? Her stomach, twisting like rotten snakes. Nerves.

She needed a drink.

After fixing herself a tall one, she shuffled back through the outdoor kitchen, its stainless steel tinted golden in the dying light of the late summer’s day, where only a week before he’d grilled marinated prime-cut steaks and roasted ears of white summer corn so sweet you’d have sworn he sugared it. With Roy gone to attend to his ill grandparent, and her left to putter around in this spotless and airless home, Creedence Rucker-Pettus (this time she’d held onto her maiden name as an identity anchor) thought she’d perform her little ritual, a letter to her brother, who ought to be her last link to her childhood family, missing now for over a decade. An all-but unrepentant drunk, he’d come home the last time to bury their mother Eileen, had seemed sober and ready to get on with a healthy second act of his misspent life. But like a good drunk will do to you, Devin piled into the car one Sunday afternoon only to vanish yet again. This time for good.

At first she actually mailed the letters to Devin’s last known address in Colorado, but after Roy hired a private investigator to search for her brother, and the PI had come up empty—said, the Commerce City apartment’s been rented out to someone else, the girlfriend out here got a call saying he was on his way but he never arrived, with all other trails cold as a snowy mountaintop—Creedence quit sending them. Then, stopped writing altogether.

One day, she decided to try again. She missed her brother. Missed the innocence of their childhood together. Creedence, continuing writing the letters on her laptop as a kind of self-directed therapy. She’d read a blog post about journaling, realized she’d already been doing it in the form of the old letters.

It also helped keep Devin alive, she thought. Nobody really knew for sure he was dead. Sure seemed that way, though.

All done so carefully, her letter writing, the way Roy Earl handled his business affairs there in his pristine home office, a glassed-in corner overlooking the lush side-yard rather than the marsh. He kept his expansive, beveled-glass-topped desk with nothing on it save his own Macbook Air. The rest was space, he told her, usable space, because the emptiness inside the container was the source of the energy, one of his little sayings that went over her head.

Empty was empty. It held no power.

Empty had been Devin’s life. And she supposed that it was now over, but the authorities to whom they’d turned, both official and otherwise, had all been quick to write off another alcoholic who’d succumbed somewhere. Alone. Broken. And sad.

Alone. She couldn’t imagine it; she’d never been on her own. Not for a second.

And when Roy had become distant, that’s when Estes happened. Exploded inside her body and her whole life, she now realized, like a bomb.

Roy Earl and Creedence. How they fell in love, back when Devin had been home the last time, and she’d been going through the nasty breakup with Dusty, her first and far more foolish attempt at matrimony. And where it’d all led now. All this success. All this plenty and wealth.

Right. All an empty space for which she had no use, could sense no power—not in the relationship, not at the breakfast or dinner table, nor in the classroom pursuing a degree she’d never finished and now never would, nor in the bedroom. Sometimes. Not often enough.

The second marriage, ruined. How she’d told herself that part didn’t matter much; but how unloved she felt. He’d been so grateful and giving at first. How it had ebbed away.

Hot tears leapt from the sides of her eyes like escapees from the top floor of a burning tenement building, splattering to their meaningless and minuscule deaths on her freckled, pink thighs below her white shorts. Her ankles and shins, dirty from the airfield hanger when she staggered over and braced herself against a greasy barrel of fuel. Gasping for breath, hearing her husband taxi away. She’d fallen against a filthy tool locker, went boo-hoo-hoo until she almost puked on the shoulder of Mr. Nawalinski’s lime-green golf shirt.

But once Roy had taken off, she’s recovered enough to check her phone to see if Estes texted, which he had, which gave her an icy stab of anticipation—like seeing a note from him always did.

GF I want it so bad

girl I cant stand it

u r thottest ever

<3 😛

She assumed he meant ‘the hottest’ and not ‘thottest,’ whatever that could mean. A forty-year-old, she’d learned, had little reason to believe she knew all the slang of the younger gen.

Estes, he had no idea what’d happened. Poor baby.

Roy Earl might go and kill him—but at least her husband left the island.

To attend to sick Uncle Rabbit. Mercy, what timing.

What had she wrought.

She read the text again. Thought about the oral sex. Estes, sometimes going so long on her clitty that it hurt, and she had to push him away.

Using the emoji, awkward, a practice that Roy railed against—emoticons, tweeting, texting, social media, he considered all of it base and childish, unless of course when used to promote business interests. And here, she’d proven him right. The heart. The :P, normally a sign of mild insult or jest, here in the context of Estes and Creedence’s secret love affair, a signal between the two that the other party wished to engage in oral sex.

That stuff, mm-mm-good, but only him on her. She irritated him more each time she demurred on a reciprocal act, but look, it’d never been her thing. Not to be nit-picky and snobby.

As well she resisted a few of the more odd contortions he expected, trying to get her up on her hands and squatting backwards facing the wrong way, which hurt her lower back and knees and made her say, I like it on top of you the right way, it’s the only way I can come; please, sweet loverman, and where do you get these crazy ideas. Or from behind, easiest on her back.

Was she aging? Was that the issue here?

A moment of clarity. Aging? She was still squeezing zits. And figuring out what she wanted—from her husband. From life. All this splendor didn’t seem to be it, for either of them.

Roy. He caused this. His ignoring her. The time to nurture had come for them, an early retirement and freedom, and all he did was open another coffee shop. Get a hobby she couldn’t stand. Unfulfilled, he’d done it all on purpose; but now she’d shown him, boy. Hadn’t she.

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Next time, we meet the last of our major characters, the unusual and compelling Button Sykes. She’s one of my favorites. If a writer can love one of his own characters, this author loves dear Button.