Under the Cyprus Tree

Saint Patrick’s Day, 2010

“Sister, you look like a tall drink of sweet tea.” Ronnie shrugged off her green jacket and slid onto a barstool across the high-top from Leo. She gave a low whistle. “He let you out in that?”

Leo laughed uncomfortably, tugging at the hem of her tight skirt as if she could stretch the fabric further down her stockinged legs. Her gaze automatically went to Jake, who was about to break in a round of eight balls. On the corner of the pool table were two twenty-dollar bills. Nothing good ever happened when Jake drank and gambled. A shudder ran through her.

“Believe it or not, he insisted I wear this. He said he wanted me to distract his opponents.” A waitress placed a cocktail before Leo, saying the drink was compliments of a mystery admirer. “Now, I think that probably wasn’t such a good idea.” She pushed the umbrellaed glass toward Ronnie, wearily shrugged her shoulders, and took a sip of her Sprite.

From across the room, a run of whistles pierced the saloon’s boisterous chatter, serrated staccato barbs, which created an instant, fearful response in Leo. She knew the signal. Her head snapped up, and she looked in Jake’s direction. His needle-pointed eyes focused on her. With a slight uptick of his nose, Leo knew what she had to do. Jake was calling her to him.

“Be back in a second.” Leo scooted gracefully off her stool, weaving between tables and patrons, toward the cluster of pocketed billiard tables.

Ronnie jumped down and followed. “I’m tagging along.”

Jake, his hair slicked back into a ponytail, thrust his cue in front of Leo. There was a sheen of sweat on his forehead.

“Sugar, I need your lucky touch.” All eyes were on her, and she waited. “Kiss the tip, baby. Run your hands down the length.” Leo did as instructed, and the crowd around the table hooted and whistled. Behind her, a stranger’s calloused hand ran over her backside as Jake successfully banked his last four balls, winning the game. She stood still, not turning to confront the violation, knowing this would somehow be her fault if she acknowledged what had just happened. Enduring those consequences would be worse. Saying something might also cause Jake to “become distracted” to start a losing streak; that too would be her failing. At that moment, pretending nothing transpired was better. Once Jake regained his mojo and had taken two successive games, he dismissed her with a wave of his stick.

“How do you stand that?” Ronnie took a sip of another drink, a chilled flute of champagne, the mystery man had sent to Leo’s table. Her voice was not accusing, not judgmental, only gently inquisitive. “Leo, you are like a trusting golden retriever, loyal to a fault.”

Leo shrugged. She had started the night with guarded hope. They hadn’t spent an evening out in a long time. And usually, those times disintegrated. Why did I think tonight would go differently? Maybe because he’d been playful when they were getting ready. “Don't wear those baggy, ratty old jeans out. I want people to see how sexy you are and know what a hot wife I have.” He rummaged through her drawers and came up with a short skirt she had bought with Ronnie’s encouragement when they were thrift store shopping. “Wear this,” he insisted. He dismissed Leo’s hesitations. “I want to show you off, and I’ll be there to protect you. No one will mess with you.” As they entered the bar together, he gave her a long kiss. “See you around. I’m fixin’ to win us some party money.”

“Earth to Leo,” Ronnie touched her friend’s wrist. “I asked, has he ever hit you?”

“Oh, goodness, no. Jake’s not abusive.” Leo looked startled by the question, but she couldn’t meet Ronnie’s perceptive scrutiny. She looked down instead, intently focused on an empty glass.

“How he’s treating you is a form of abuse, Leo. It’s not healthy, and it’s not right. He may never lay a hand on you, but a life of verbal assault, belittling, and humiliating put-downs is a form of psychological control, a type of abusive behavior. That man could chew up nails and spit out a barbed wire fence, believe me. I’ve seen this kind of thing before. Anger and rage bottle up inside them until they explode out of control, and the person they’ve used as their verbal whipping board becomes their literal punching bag.”

“It’s not that bad,” Leo tried to convince Ronnie. “Really. Most of the time, he leaves me alone. Then I go and do something stupid to set him off.” The expression on Ronnie’s face indicated she wasn’t buying it. “Like yesterday, I went and bought the wrong kind of deli meat to pack in his lunch. Don’t know what I was thinking. I know what he likes. He threw out the sandwiches, came home from work hungry and all pissed. My fault.”

“Stop defending that snake in the grass.” Ronnie sounded exasperated. “For someone as bright as you are, I can see that no amount of talking will change things.” She waited until Leo met her gaze. “Okay, before we change topics, promise me this.” Leo nodded. “If ever, I mean ever, he slaps you, hits you, pushes you down, or even comes close to doing those things, you will leave immediately, and get help. Trust me, that tiger will never change his stripes.”

The waitress put a third drink before Leo. “The mystery donor wants to be revealed. All the drinks are courtesy of the guy sitting at the bar, the one with the white cowboy hat, the handsome one.”

Leo reflexively looked up. The seated man rose and took his hat off, tipping the fedora into the air, a limp white flag resuscitated by the promise of a breeze. Leo didn’t acknowledge his presence; she knew better, even if Jake wasn’t watching. She slid the mug of green beer across the table in front of her friend.

Ronnie giggled, her throaty voice amused. “What are you trying to do? Get a girl drunk?”

Leo laughed, joining her for the first time that night, allowing her guard to fall. How could Leo explain how much this friendship meant? Even after she earned her GED, Leo did not stop going to Ronnie’s before her shift at the convenience store. Sometimes Ronnie and her daughter would be out running errands, and Leo would curl in a chair to read. Or she would wander around the comforting space doing a few tasks to help Ronnie out, wash the dishes, sweep, and pick up scattered objects. But most often, Ronnie and Leo would sit at the table together or on the floor playing with Maya, with cups of coffee, talking.

One sunny afternoon, they had been on a quilt under the bald cypress tree on the stretch of green behind Ronnie’s apartment. Leo gazed upward into the tall, pyramidal-shaped seedling, at feather-like leaves stroking a pale sky. Ronnie was thoughtful, sitting cross-legged and watching her daughter wander around the perimeter. She probed her friend. “Okay, what’s next?” Leo looked at her questioningly. “I mean, Leo Rose Lightfoot, what is your deepest desire? If you could be anything, achieve anything, what would you do?”

No one had ever asked her this before. Leo flipped onto her stomach. Through the cotton and batting, she felt the texture of earth and stone underneath her and opened herself to possibility as she watched Maya toddle toward her. Her chubby thighs were remarkably sturdy, and her sweet smile belied an unflappable disposition. She moved toward Leo with steady expectation. This little life form believed that all before her was worthy, solid, and true.

As Maya stood before Leo, her favorite book of the week, “Fletcher and the Falling Leaves”, in one hand, and a much loved, often washed, and repaired second-hand stuffed puppy dangling by the ear in her other hand, Leo knew with certainty two things. One, that her childhood, though unconventional, had been good. Her constants had never wavered and had weaved a tightly knit foundation, one she could still count on, that still existed, even though she was an adult, living another life. The second flash of insight came with such suddenness she understood the knowledge had always been there, beneath the surface, waiting for recognition. She just needed help accessing the content.

Leo leaped to her feet, swept Maya into her arms, and turned around and around. The child’s laughter spun around her, delicate honeyed cotton candy strands of happiness. And though all was in motion, Leo had never felt more centered.

She explained to Ronnie, almost embarrassed, that her dream future would be to open a no-kill shelter for abandoned dogs and, yes, she supposed, even cats. To nurse them back to health, to help them find safe, sustaining forever homes. And for the animals deemed disposable, unadoptable, she would provide a protected haven, a place where they could live free from cruelty, ensuring their basic needs would be met. Over the following weeks, Ronnie helped Leo devise a long-term plan of how this could happen. She helped Leo with her research, formulating plan A, then contingency plans B and C, because “Just when you are sure of the road in front of you, a bridge will be out.” Ronnie provided support at each juncture. “Baby steps, baby girl, that’s what you gotta do.” And when doubt crept in, when Leo started accepting what Jake told her and wanted to stop believing and stop dreaming, Ronnie refused to allow her to self-sabotage, to conclude her goal wasn’t possible.

“You start by taking the prerequisite classes to get into an accredited veterinary technician program. Then once you are done with that, you move on. A step at a time, nothing overwhelming. You have a lifetime ahead of you, and before you know it, you’ll be a full-fledged veterinarian, or if you find yourself on option C or even D, you’ll be a tech working with a vet with your same vision. You've got this, girl.”

An unfamiliar male voice broke her reverie. “What are you? Stuck up higher than a light pole? Too good to taste the drinks I’ve been buying you?” The white-hatted cowboy, who Ronnie pointed out earlier was not good-looking at all, forcefully put another drink in front of Leo, this time a shot of whiskey. The contents sloshed but didn’t spill.

“No, not at all.” Leo’s voice was hesitant. She looked at him with a forced smile. “It's just that I don’t drink.”

He looked incredulous. “Then why in the hell are you at a bar, wearing almost nothing, egging guys on?”

“Who licked the red off your candy?” Ronnie calmly interjected as if trying to dial the stranger’s aggression down a notch. She smiled at him as she raised the shot to her mouth. “I’ve enjoyed every drink. Thank you very much, generous sir.”

“They weren’t meant for you!” He grabbed the glass out of Ronnie’s hand, this time the golden liquid spilled, and shoved it toward Leo. “Drink! Now! I bought this for you. I've been watching you, and I like what I see. Me-n-you is gonna mix.”

The next thing Leo knew, Jake was jamming a cue stick into the guy’s chest, shoving him back.“Get the fuck off. She’s mine.”

“Oh yeah?” White hat grinned. “Where you been all night, then? She’s been eyeing me, encouraging me, dressed in a skirt so tight you can see her religion. If she’s yours, then you got yourself a whore.”

With that, Jake lifted the cue and brought the stick crashing down on the white hat’s head. The pristine Stetson folded, a trickle of blood following the course of gravity, reached the corner of the man’s mouth. “You mother fuc—” Before he could finish, a handful of liquored-up bodies, itching for unchained anarchy, joined in the altercation.

Alcohol, the great liberator, peeled back the layers of conscious control, a bandage ripped off a festering wound, exposing a seething core. Mean-spirited, chemically unbalanced protoplasm, relishing in the opportunity to harm, erupted. Leo and Ronnie ducked under their high top, back-to-back, their knees hugged to their chests. They remained motionless when all around them chaos exploded. In the commotion, Leo surmised that the forms were no longer sure who they were beating or why. The free-for-all continued. Drinks were thrown. Glass shattered, and chairs smashed against tabletops. Cue sticks became weapons, and one innovative patron stuffed a pool ball in his sock and started swinging the contraption like a club. Minutes later, when the police showed up wading heavy and hard into the fray with batons, tasers, and pepper spray, and someone yelled “COPS,” the patrons acted as if a bomb had detonated. Everyone flew, frantically dispersing in all directions, climbing over each other, tables, and bar tops, running mad with no goal but to get away.

****

“Are you sure you’re going to be okay? You can crash at my place for the rest of the night and sort everything out in the morning.” Ronnie turned off the engine and shut off the truck’s lights.

Leo tried to appear braver than she felt. “It’s all good. He’s probably already passed out.” She paused, then said, “If I’m lucky, he got arrested.” She felt a little guilty wishing that upon Jake, but all she wanted for the rest of this night was a quiet space to curl. After the police appeared, Ronnie and Leo left, unseen, out of the back exit. Leo had driven them back to Ronnie’s place, where she exchanged her snug skirt for a pair of Ronnie's roomy sweatpants. Maya spent the night next door on the neighbor’s couch, so they didn’t have to worry about waking her up. They drank coffee, rehashed the evening, talked, and laughed until Ronnie felt sober enough to drive Leo home.

The door was unlocked. As she gently closed it behind her, Leo let out a low breath. She quietly turned the deadbolt and headed toward the sofa. She would sleep there, and they could work things out in the morning when he woke sober. Her head pounded, a pressuring pulse of tension. She debated going to the bathroom for some aspirin but decided not to. The entrance was too close to Jake.

She bent to grab a fleece blanket off the floor when she heard the words, “You fucking whore.” Shoved from behind, she fell, her head hitting the wall. “Where the hell have you been? And where are your clothes? Whose pants are those?” He grabbed them, pulling them off her thin waist. “Who are you screwing?” His fist slammed into the drywall right above her head, and particles of silica dust rained around her. His breath reeked of whiskey. Leo knew she had made a mistake—the drinking had not stopped at the bar, and he had not passed out.

Leo’s heart pounded as she desperately tried to make herself as small as possible, just like a frightened opossum that encountered an out-of-control predator and was trying to play dead. She felt Jake’s unwashed strands brush her body as he leaned over and furiously punched the floor around her.

“Next time, won’t just be the wall that gets it. You’re just like my momma. Dad walked out on her because she didn’t do anything right. And I left the backbiter because of all her damn rules. Looks like history come back on itself with me marrying you. And that necklace I gave you, news flash—momma didn’t give it to me. I stole the thing from the witch on my way out. What a pathetic wife you are! Ain’t worth a lick. You just don’t understand. Pigs were there, rounding people up like cattle. I managed to escape. Shit, I’m already on probation, you bitch.” This was news to Leo, but she stayed motionless. “That would have been bad! Not going back there, ever! Dammit, Leo, this is all your fault, you slut. If you hadn’t gone out practically naked, none of this woulda happened.” The banging stopped. As if spent, he stood, pulled a fifth from his back pocket, took a long draw, and half-heartedly kicked Leo’s still body.

Leo waited twenty interminable minutes after she was sure he passed out, until his breathing was uniform and slowed, and he hadn’t moved for a long time. Though he might stay this way for hours, he could also wake at any moment. Moving swiftly, with silent stealth, she grabbed her cell and charger, stuffed her backpack with toiletries and clothing essentials, and grabbed the key to unlock her bike. She pushed the bottom of the sweats up over her knees so the fabric wouldn’t get caught in the spokes, making a note to herself that she needed to return them or buy Ronnie a new pair. She hung the evil eye necklace on the doorknob before exiting the apartment where she had lived for the past two years.

Though she did not look back, she could see him still, fetid fumes rising from his form, lying silently in the darkness, lying in wait.