The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady - Elizabeth Stuckey-French [5]
Well, yes, it would matter. People said that living well was the best revenge, but wasn’t it enough, really, in her case, at age seventy-seven, to say simply that living was the best revenge? He dies, she lives. So she’d not only have to do it but get away with it.
It hadn’t rained here in a coon’s age. Motes of dust and pollen swarmed up into her face. She and Buster stood at the top of the driveway watching the old scum overwater his bushes, hating every fiber of his being with every fiber of hers. But what to do? If only she were fifty feet tall! Fifty feet tall, twenty-three years old, dressed in superhero attire—Amazonish costume barely covering her giant bosoms—raging and focused as fifty hurricanes, she’d fly at him and fling his parts all over the flat-assed state of Florida.
Just then he cocked his head, as if he’d picked up the stirrings of a storm. He threw down his garden hose and, without looking in her direction, turned and shambled off behind the yellow house, out of sight. Walking away from her once again.
“Mur-der-er!” she bellowed, and Buster flattened his yellow ears and rolled his eyes up at her. But she wasn’t finished. She yelled again, even louder, “Where’s your fucking bow tie now!” which was not at all what she meant to say. What she meant to say was “Eat leaden death, motherfucker!”
She waited, heart skipping merrily in her chest, but the murderer did not reappear, so eventually she and Buster started back home, unfulfilled, a familiar condition for both of them. Why couldn’t she think straight? Of all the things she could’ve yelled. His bow tie! How inadequate was that? She’d had the beast in her sights!
When she got home, she lay down on her cold pleather couch and closed her eyes and heard Teddy’s voice. “You act just like you drive, Lou. Go, stop. Go, stop. Gas, brake. Gas, brake. I’m getting motion sick.” When he’d said that to her, years ago, he’d been joking, sort of, but he was also speaking the truth. She was still that way—wishy-washy, indecisive—and she hated that about herself.
For a time after that evening, the evening of the bow tie insult, Marylou shifted into low gear, continuing to roam the streets of Canterbury Hills with Buster—Miller’s Ride, Nun’s Priest Place—waiting for either courage or inspiration to strike, enjoying in spite of herself the low humidity as well as the slight breeze that would be gone in a few weeks, not to return, unless there was a storm, until October, according to the Channel 9 weatherman. The late April air had begun to smell like October—smoky, because of nearby forest fires—prescribed burns, according to the Tallahassee Democrat. Hurricane season, according to countless billboards around Tallahassee, was only a month away. “According to,” “according to”—these were her friends now, these public postings.
While walking she met some of her neighbors, including a nice minister’s wife, a chipper blond gal named Paula Coffey who always wore a white sun visor, and they talked about the pollen, which Marylou had never seen the likes of. When she’d come down to Tallahassee in March to look for a house she’d been amazed by the steady stream of brown oak leaves raining from the sky—evidently they shed their leaves in the spring and not the fall—leaves that looked like palmetto bugs swarming all over the ground. But in April the pine trees cast off little brown tubes of pollen that blew everywhere. Everything on her screened porch was coated with green slime. Trails of pollen, like ooze from giant snails, lined streets and driveways. Even though Marylou parked her rented Taurus under the carport she had to hose off the front windshield every time she wanted to drive somewhere.
Paula listened to Marylou complain, and her response was, “Get ready! After the pollen comes the mosquitoes and no-see-ums! It’s always something!”
Paula called on Marylou a few times, once bringing her lasagna and another time a key lime pie. When Paula brought the pie, her daughter Rusty came with