Delvon later explained to me that it was the unseen but no less divine hand of the Great Savior that led him to knock on my door and enter with a key I had long forgotten he had at the precise hour that Jennifer the Stairmaster wizard came to shove me into kingdom come.
That God would send the Georgia Bureau of Investigation into Delvon’s tiny corner of bug-infested backwater Georgia with a search warrant and a herd of trained pot dogs, sending him on the lam straight toward me, might, I thought, technically be a bit outside the established dogma of most churches, but then Delvon wasn’t a member of most churches. He was a deacon at the First Pentecostal Church of the Holy Ghost and the Savior Who Will Return. At any rate, I was glad for the help, and I have thanked God.
Though, technically Delvon’s claim to have been led by God to save my ass would have made better propaganda if Delvon had in fact actually saved my ass.
Instead, all irony aside, it was Johnny Winter, the wiz-spraying ferret, that saved me. What happened was this:
As I knelt, praying, the doorbell rang, and I thought it was Sam, said my “thank you” to God, and hopped up to answer the door. Of course, Jennifer knocked me down with a pretty strong backhand for a skinny girl, though the gun gave her some added weight.
I landed on the terrazzo floor with a painful thunk, and Bearess came over and licked my face.
“Don’t even think about screaming,” Jennifer said, “or I’ll shoot you.”
Well, I was going to be dead either way, so I was thinking I’d roll into Bearess and scream on the theory that Jennifer, being a bad shot, wouldn’t shoot at me if I were near her dog.
But before I had a chance to try that, the lock on the front door made that little clicking noise and the door opened, and there stood Delvon, looking every bit the mad-hatter dope grower on the run. Apparently these last years John the Baptist had been his fashion guru, as my brother actually had sticks and weeds stuck in his long tangled hair.
“Praise the Lord, thank you, Jesus,” he said, and raised his hands in thanksgiving.
I stood up. “Jennifer,” I said, my best manners forward, “this is Delvon, my brother. Delvon, this is my friend Jennifer.”
Delvon stepped forward and offered his hand. “Pleased to meet you,” he said.
“And this is her dog, Bearess,” I added.
Jennifer didn’t accept his offered hand, but Bear-ess accepted the head pat.
“Jennifer is planning on killing me by making me jump off the Skyway Bridge,” I added conversationally. “What brings you to visit?”
“Got GBI and narcs over my place like roaches on the leftovers,” he said, and I watched his eyes flit to the gun, the dog, Jennifer’s face, and back to the gun. Taking it all in. Delvon is cool that way—he studies up on things.
“Delvon grows marijuana and poppies for a living,” I added, smiling at Jennifer.
“We had a bit of a tussle before I got away,” he said. “Hitchhiked to here down the interstate. Rough ride.”
Well, no duh. Who would pick up a wild man with sticks in his hair and torn clothing?
“Come on, both of you,” Jennifer said, pointing the gun. “Now you’re both going to have to jump off the bridge.”
I waited for Delvon to do something. Apparently Delvon was waiting for the Second Coming or a rapture. We all kind of stood around doing nothing.
“I mean it,” Jennifer said, sounding testy. “You don’t march out to my car right now, I’ll shoot you both in the stomach and leave you here. Know what that feels like?”
No, I didn’t, but I could imagine. Still I stood, stuck to my spot on the floor as if I were suddenly a well-rooted oak tree.
Then there was this little scamper noise and a little chitter, chitter, chitter, and in wandered Johnny Winter, the inquisitive ferret.
Nature took its course in rapid succession. Bear-ess saw what to her dog brain must have looked like a rat, or something she was supposed to kill, and she pounced at the ferret, which jumped away, chittering up the side of the new secondhand chair until it had a vantage point on the dog, and it squealed its banshee squeal. Bearess lunged into the chair, closing the vantage point. But Johnny wasn’t down and out yet, not by a long shot. He turned his back, raised his tail, and sprayed.
None of us, especially Bearess, had any notion at all that a ferret has the same built-in defense as your basic, garden-variety skunk. Well, technically, not nearly as strong as a skunk’s, but definitely pungent. Pungent enough that Bearess howled and spun back against Jennifer, knocking her off balance. As Jennifer struggled to stand, Johnny aimed at her, lifted his tail, and repeated the performance. So much for her White Shoulders.
We were all gagging and gulping and backing up, and Bearess, in a hysterical dog pounce, vaulted at Jennifer, as if hoping Jennifer would scoop her up in her arms and make that terrible, terrible smell go away. Instead, Jennifer fell down under the panicked dog’s full-body hurl and dropped the gun.
Delvon, living deep in the woods and more tolerant of wild smells, recovered quickly from the next-best-thing-to-a-skunk drenching. He snatched the gun up before Jennifer could grab it. I was mostly trying not to throw up.
And, yeah, it did cross my mind that this was the second set of furniture that Johnny had killed off in my house, but in light of the overall circumstances I overlooked this.
Jennifer and Bearess sprang to their nimble feet and ran like greyhounds for the door. Delvon and I ran outside, not so much to follow but to breathe fresh air.
Jennifer and Bearess jumped into her car, and she drove away.
After gulping air, Delvon, still holding the gun, said, “Whoa. Praise Jesus, what was that all about?”
“Dev, I’ve got to call the police.”
“No, Lilly Belle—I’m in enough trouble.”
Delvon is the only one allowed to call me Lilly Belle without getting knocked upside the head for it. And he had a point about the police coming anywhere near him. So I said, “Let’s follow her.” Since this was from the same brain that had blithely opened the door to a killer, I wondered a bit about all those youthful indiscretions in the world of mind-altering substances. Maybe there was a tad bit of brain damage there.
But, lacking sense or not, chase her we did. Jennifer had a commanding head start, but my ancient little Honda rallied to the challenge, and, besides, I was pretty certain I knew where Jennifer was going. I remembered her hysterical “I can’t go to jail,” and I wondered if she’d already been there or whether her two stays in mental institutions were close enough to jail to persuade her to seek other alternatives, no matter how rash.
Given the late hour, traffic was light, and we dodged a few cars and stayed steady on the tail of the car we thought was Jennifer’s, racing toward the Sunshine Skyway in the night.
We reached the top span of the bridge in less than half an hour, but Jennifer had enough of a lead on us that she was already out of her car and had climbed over the railing. She had taken off her jeans and stood there, perched on the edge of eternity, in a blouse and a pair of midnight blue bikini panties.
“Jennifer, don’t,” I cried out. I meant it. “I’ll help you. We’ll all help you. We’re a whole law firm of lawyers. We can get you off. They killed your husband. A jury will understand.” Not likely, of course, but a modest lie at such a junction seemed forgivable.
“Jesus will help you if you open your heart,” Delvon tossed in there.
Bearess stood beside Jennifer and whimpered so loudly I could hear her, even at the distance I stood from Jennifer.
“They’ll think I’m crazy. I can’t go back,” Jennifer said.
As Delvon and I shouted for her not to jump, Jennifer peeled off her blouse and arched her back, pointed her toes, and sprang up and out, off the bridge, 192 feet into the dark, hard waters below. Whether she pulled off her clothes because of the indelible smell of Johnny the skunklike ferret or in some final show of glory or rebellion, we’d never know.
But one thing I did know. Jennifer didn’t just jump. She executed what looked to me to be a perfect dive. In the lights off the Skyway, I saw her hands come together, her feet push off, and her thin little body pull itself into the traditional jackknife position for a high dive, before she dropped below the line of lights and my vision into the night below us.
“I’ve got to call nine-one-one,” I said, holding back a sob as Bearess howled into the void.
“Oh, man. Listen, I’m gonna, you know, drift down to the other side and pray for that girl’s soul. You want to look for me, pick me up later?”
“Hang on,” I said, digging in my purse for my cell phone. “I’ll call, then give you a ride to the bottom, and we’ll make plans to get you out of here, safe. Get you some money, good clothes. You can hang at the apple orchard with Farmer Dave. ’Sides, it’ll take ’em a few minutes to get here anyway.”
“We’d better get that dog,” Delvon said, as Bear-ess howled in utter desolation and moved toward the railing.
I saw what was about to happen and dropped the cell phone and threw myself at Bearess, grabbing her tail as she jumped up over the railing. Delvon, right at my back the whole time, grabbed me and held on, even as the raw muscular strength of a full-grown Rottweiler in grief nearly pulled me over the railing with her.
The dog’s howling continued for a long, eerie moment, then ended.
So it was, some twenty-odd years after the first time he’d grabbed me on the remaining span of the original Skyway, that Delvon reached out and saved me in the nick of time, just before I careened off the Skyway in a thwarted attempt to save Bearess, the loyal Rottweiler, as she leaped off the high girders of the great bridge into the waters below after her beloved mistress, Jennifer the mystery woman.
When we were standing straight up again, Delvon took my hand and I cried, hard, heaving sobs. Delvon, my best ever friend, pulled me into his arms and said, “Oh, Lilly Belle. We’d better pray, then you call the cops.”