The Education of Giacomo Jones Ch. 04

Glazer had rented the pickup truck for Rance, using a credit card number Ed Martin had provided, from an Enterprise outlet. He had one of Gia's fellow student equipment managers drive the pickup truck to the Holiday Inn Express, leave the key for "Calvita Bertolli" at the hotel front desk and catch a ride back to campus with another student manager.

Rance had gone through the motions of attending his classes, putting fellow students ill at ease with a shabby collection of paparazzi and reporters that trailed him and clustered outside trying to peer into the classroom windows.

As soon as Rance's last class of the day was finished, his security detail hustled him through a cordon of police officers blocking everyone else from the unmarked, black State Police SUV they guarded. Rance got in and it sped away, lights flashing. Anyone who attempted to follow it found police blocking intersections for at least half a mile.

At shortly after 1:30 p.m., the police dropped Rance off at a side door to the Holiday Inn Express where he went inside to suite 212. Gia and Callie Jones were inside, packed and waiting. It was the first time in days he had seen either of them smile, a reflection of the relief they felt at the prospect of getting away from Fulbright, Fallstrom and the nightmare of the past week, at least for a few days. They exited through the same side door, just on the off chance that a random correspondent might be lurking in the lobby, and climbed into the waiting truck.

"I feel like I'm in a big rig - you know, like 'Smokey and the Bandit'," Callie said from her perch riding shotgun with Gia stretched out in the rear seat. "You could haul trees in this thing."

"Yeah, I guess they wanted a vehicle the press would never suspect. They've had my car staked out for days and they'd be trailing us like sharks if we used that," Rance said. "Hey, I kinda like it. Lots of leg room."

"So where's this that we're going? A place on a river in Chattanooga? That's your parents' house?" Callie said.

"No, this is our lake house about an hour northwest of Chattanooga on Watts Bar Lake. It's a TVA reservoir in the woods along the Tennessee River," he said. "The press would be able to look up our address in Chattanooga easily. Nobody's going to find us at the lake house. Very peaceful, secluded and quiet."

"Tennessee. Wow. Who'd have thought. Never been to Tennessee. But that sounds good. My girl needs this," Callie said, glancing back at her daughter who had dozed off without the aid of sleep meds for the first time in days.

"Yes, she does," Rance said as he squinted into the bright western sky. "She surely does."

The sun had already dipped below the hills on the western shore of Watts Bar Lake by the time the Dodge Ram entered gravel driveway that led through about a quarter of a mile of oaks and pines to the comfortable stone lake house and the front lawn that sloped gently down toward a sandy beach and marina on the water. The front light was on and Ed and Lorraine Martin stood on the front of the wrap-around veranda to welcome them.

"Mom, Dad, this is Callie, Gia's mom," Rance said.

Not a word was said. None seemed to suffice. They all knew the pain of the past 144 hours and, though they had not met, were bonded by it. Ed and Lorraine silently embraced Callie together - something of a cathartic group hug - and remained in the embrace as Callie broke down, weeping as the trauma of all that had beset her little girl poured out in the quiet and peace of this lakeside refuge.

Rance stood to one side and watched, mindful that Gia was still asleep in the crew cab of the pickup truck. Part of him didn't want to wake her from her unforced slumber, but it was time for him to take the bags indoors and to eat the supper of grilled lake trout that his parents had prepared on the wood-fired smoker outdoors. He opened the crew cab door and gently nudged Gia.

"Gia... baby... we're here," he whispered. From somewhere in her sleeping consciousness, she made a sound that acknowledged him without waking. He ran his hand over the bare skin of her arm, something that normally stirred her from sleep, but she grunted and turned away, not yet willing to return to the brutal world of wakefulness.

Rance left her alone for a few more minutes as he unloaded his and Gia's luggage from the floorboard of the rear seat and Callie's trunk from the truck bed where it had been secured to the bulkhead with bungee cords. Callie and Gia got the room with two double beds that is normally the province of kids and which Rance and his sister, Renee, had shared on trips to the lake until recent years when age-related privacy concerns made that awkward. Their room opened directly onto a full bathroom. Rance took the guest bedroom with its queen bed while Lorraine and Ed had their customary owner's suite.

Rance came back to the truck after depositing the luggage in the appropriate rooms and found Gia still asleep. This time, he tried something different. He climbed into the crew cab beside her as best he could and kissed her, grazing his lips against hers.

"That's supposed to wake a sleeping princess," he whispered. She made another sleep noise. So he did it again, this time longer and with more determination. "Sleepyhead... we're here safe and sound in Tennessee... time to wake up and let me see those beautiful eyes."

Her lips smacked and her eyes fluttered and slowly opened as her conscious mind slowly came back online. She glanced at the twilight sky and stars peeking occasionally through the tree branches. She smelled the cool lake air slightly tinged with pine. Her eyes finally focused on Rance.

"Where are we? This isn't your parents' house," she said.

"The lake house. We're about an hour northwest of Chattanooga on Watts Bar Reservoir. Your mom is inside with my parents. You've slept so well on the ride that we waited til the last minute to wake you," he said. "The luggage is all inside. Supper's ready. All we need now is you."

"K," she said, still a bit groggy as she tried to negotiate the step down from the high-clearance four-wheel drive pickup. "You might have to help me with this."

As she slid toward the door and stretched her legs to the running board beneath the door, Rance took matters into his own hands. He looped his left arm behind Gia's waist and crooked his right arm behind her knees and lifted her from the seat. She reached her right arm around his neck to steady herself. Rance took a step away from the truck and nudged its door shut with one foot.

Gia looked into his face with a wan smile. "I think I'm OK, so you can put me down now," she said.

"Nah. I like this," he said as a smile spread across his face, perhaps the first in the past week. She looped her other arm around his neck.

"I do love you, Rance Martin. And nothing about this week changes that," she said as she leaned into him and kissed him, his mouth parting to receive hers in the first long, searching kiss they had shared in more than a week. They continued as the front door opened and the floodlights to the front lawn came on. Ed Martin saw them. He smiled, said nothing and walked back inside the open front door.

"Our kids are, um... on their way," he said before either Lorraine or Callie could ask about what was keeping their children from the dinner table.

"Words I love to hear," Lorraine said, pouring a full-bodied Chianti into Callie's glass.

●●●

Gia slept through the night. A deep sleep, untroubled by the raging demons that tormented her when she closed her eyes the past few days. Sleep like this had not been possible since the Wednesday night before the Vanderbilt game after she and Rance had last made love in her Honors College studio, the last time they had been able to share intimate moments before she set out with other managers on the road trip to Vanderbilt and then the hellish toll the release of Gennaro Millientelli loosed on both her family and Rance's since.

She was still asleep at 10 Saturday morning when Rance was finishing breakfast and his father turned the television to ESPN "GameDay" just in time to hear Rece Davis at the outset of the show tease a live report on the "tragic drama that played out at Fulbright University involving a Generals student equipment manager and her boyfriend, the Generals' starting offensive tackle..."

"You want to watch this, son?" Ed Martin, sitting in his recliner, asked his son.

"Absolutely not," he said. "I'm taking Gia fishing soon as she wakes up. I don't even want to watch the game this afternoon. I just can't."

"Understood," his father said, flipping the remote to a home-improvement show. It was one of the few places on the Dish Network grid he could go without possibly running into some bullshit report out of Fallstrom.

Gia woke just before 11. She ate like a starved refugee, wolfing down two stacks of Lorraine Martin's fresh blueberry pancakes, a side of scrambled eggs and sausage and washed it down with orange juice. Afterward, she went upstairs and exchanged her baggy sleep shirt for a pair of jeans, tennis shoes and a long-sleeved t-shirt and joined Rance on the dock where he was lowering the custom bass boat into the water from its protected perch in the boathouse. He gathered two fishing rods, a cane pole, a capture net, some soft drinks and power bars and the bucket of minnows Ed had picked up for him the previous afternoon at Pug's Bait Shop on the county road a couple of miles back. As soon as Gia got seated, Rance cranked the outboard engine and they skimmed across the gentle waves of Watt's Bar Lake to a quiet cove out of the breeze along the west shore of the lake where the bass tend to cluster along the rocks and shade during the midday sun.

Rance killed the engine and used the quiet, electronic trolling motor to position the boat. He baited the lines and handed Gia her reel. She couldn't have handled a missile launcher more tentatively, staring at him with a what-do-I-do-with-this? look on her face.

"New Jersey's a lot of things, but an angler's paradise it's not," she said.

So Rance had her sit in the captain's chair near the bow of the boat, carefully walked up behind her so as not to tip the vessel and toss both of them in the water, and he showed her, step-by-step how to cast her line and then reel it back toward the boat. After about 15 minutes, she had gotten the hang of it.

Gia focused intensely on the fishing, as if to will a fish to bite her hook. Rance thought she was channeling all her mental energy into fishing to force thoughts of Tuesday and Geno Millions out of her consciousness, and he was right. At least partly.

"Rance," she said as she reeled her line back through the murky, green water, "do you think we'll ever be OK? I mean like really... OK? To a place where this thing doesn't follow us everyplace we go and rerun itself every time we close our eyes? Can we get through this and still be... us?"

Normally, Rance would go to his heart and his mind for guidance and examine his own experience and beliefs in an effort to respond honestly, preferably in a comforting way, when Gia asked weighty questions like these. But there was nothing that prepared him for responses dealing with the events of the past week. That wasn't in his playbook.

"I think so. Or at least I hope so," he said. "I got no proof, no data, no background to draw from to present documentary or historical validation for that. It's just me making my best guess based on who we are, the strengths we have and our love for each other. I think that if we're there through all of this with and for each other, I like our chances. But can I guarantee anything? I can't."

Gia frowned and stared at her line inching its way through the water. "Yeah, I know. Me too, Rance."

The hours crept by. Rance caught three bass, two of which he released back into the water and the largest of which he put in the boat's live well. The sun had commenced its autumnal afternoon nose-dive when Gia's line jumped and then jerked wildly, pulling her rod to her right.

"Pull up hard, baby, you got one. That'll set the hook," Rance said.

The nylon eight-pound test line filament was bending the tip of the fiberglass rod toward the glassy surface of the water being roiled by the angry bass flailing and thrashing just beneath it. Gia kept tugging upward and taking in the slack with the reel until at last the beast crested the water and Rance dipped him out of it and into the boat with his net.

"Holy crap, baby, that's' bigger than my first two put together, bigger than the one I kept. It's six pounds if it's an ounce," Rance said as he pulled the hook free of the fish's wide mouth and held it up. "Yep, I'm saying a six-pounder."

He laid the fish horizontally on a ruler etched onto the aluminum gunwale of the boat. From mouth to tailfin, 22 inches. One hell of a day's catch.

"Baby, I can't recall the last time anybody pulled a bass that big out of this lake," Rance said as he lowered the beast into the freshwater live well. "That's a trophy fish."

Gia smiled triumphantly as the orange, late afternoon sun glanced horizontally across her beautiful face, momentarily free of the strain the past few days had placed on her.

"I think that's the right catch for us to call it a day on," he said. "Let's stow our gear and head back home before we lose all our daylight."

By the time the Martin lake house came into view, Rance and Gia could see the fire pit flickering - a circular pyre fashioned of indigenous, brownish stone centered in a circular patio in the lawn just before the grass gives way to the sand of the beach. Their parents were seated on the cushiony lawn furniture around the fire, each with a glass of wine.

"Hey, guys, come over here on the dock and look what Gia hauled in on her first bass fishing trip," Rance said. "Talk about beginner's luck."

Callie Jones gasped when Rance pulled the six-pound bass from the live well and held it high for all to see. "My God, Rance what if that thing bites you. You got your hand in it mouth, fr'godsakes."

"The only thing that mouth threatens is minnows and insects," Ed Martin said.

"That one fish could feed all five of us," Lorraine said.

Gia shook her head. "No. No, I want to let him go. Maybe take a picture to remember him and this day by, but I want him to swim free. I've been around enough killing this week."

After Lorraine and Callie photographed the moment with their phones, Gia's jaw quivered and Rance put his right arm, the one that wasn't holding her prize bass and didn't smell of fish, around Gia and she leaned into him weeping softly. In seconds, Callie and Lorraine were also at her side, and all three broke down.

The women walked Gia past the fire pit and back to the house. Rance stood there with his father. Simultaneously, they shrugged. Rance knelt on the coarse boards of the dock, lowered the squirming bass back into the water, swirled him around a couple of times to get water moving over its gills and turned him loose. It took the dazed fish a second to realize he was free and in a flash, he disappeared into the deep, dark-green water.

"Come have a drink with me, son," Ed Martin said.

Ed had only sipped at his Beaujolais - "Never been big on wine," he told Rance - and he pulled a bottle of Glenfiddich Scotch and two glass tumblers from a cooler he had brought to the fire pit.

He poured about a half-inch of the peaty, light brown liquid into both glasses. "Rocks or neat," he asked his son.

"Ice please," Rance said.

"You know this is going to change your relationship with Gia," Ed said.

"Yeah. It already is. It's hard to pull her mind back from that awful moment and get her to a place of peace," Rance said. "I think we can survive it, but I can't be sure of it."

His father nodded in agreement.

"You ready for that, Rance? If things don't hold together? I mean, you've never been in a relationship this deep, and you're both in your teens - which, by the way, means that Scotch you're holding never happened," Ed said.

"That's something else I guess I will have to find out, like everything else that's sought us out since that night exactly one week ago when she learned that New Jersey had released Geno Millions," Rance said, staring into the fire.

"I want to ask why the hell this had to happen," Rance continued, "why this had to hurt Gia and me, why I am here instead of playing LSU today. Why? I guess there's no answer other than evil is real and there's no way to guarantee that it won't touch any of us."

"Do you think you will play ball again this fall?" Ed asked.

"Something else I don't really know. I don't know if Gia can ever force herself to go back to that campus, much less that apartment in the Honors College. And I couldn't blame her. If that happens, then a lot of things would change. So... I don't have a crystal ball."

A combination of the wood smoke, the 15-year-old Scotch and the darkening sky set in alongside the grueling week and the day spend on the lake to produce a joyless languor in Rance. For the time being, he was content just to keep staring at the orange flames licking the oak logs and reducing them slowly into ash and relish the radiant warmth of it.

Gia, Lorraine and Callie stayed indoors. Rance and Ed sat silently around the fire for another hour until it was time for dinner, just grateful for this moment and for each other being there.

●●●

Monday morning. Gia was in her 10 a.m. science and ethics class and so far had not been accosted by anyone, though she could feel eyes peering at her and whispers from people who recognized her as the girl involved in "that shooting" at the Honors College dorm. She had not been cast in a bad light; indeed most of the fragmentary, error-riddled and sophomoric reporting she had seen in local media portrayed her sympathetically. But such a designation held little comfort for her. It wasn't the place for others to affix a Superwoman logo on her chest and turn her into a simplistic caricature, particularly over a life-bending trauma like this.

Rance had already made it to his 9 a.m. class, Study of 20th Century Western Culture, and was on his way to the football facility to meet with Perry Hemphill for the first time in a week when a cameraman and reporter who had been doing player and coach interviews after the LSU victory recognized Rance and ran over to him.

"Sorry fellas," he said, politely waving them off. "I got nothing for you."

"Rance, is it true you're not playing again this fall?" the reporter asked and thrust the mic toward him.

"As I said, no comment," Rance said as he continued walking.

Where do they get this shit, he wondered. He'd said nothing about what his plans were for the rest of the season and had no such discussions with anyone other than a vague allusion to the uncertainty of the months ahead during his fireside chat with his dad. He didn't know himself what those plans were.

"We're hearing that you're sitting out the season and that you might transfer," the reporter said. Rance felt anger build within him.

"Hearing from who? Not from me or anyone I care about, that's for sure."

"Where were you this past weekend. You were not with the team and nowhere to be found?" the reporter asked.

"Someplace that's none of your business," Rance snapped. With that he walked purposefully into the athletics facility. When the camera crew attempted to follow him, a security officer Coach Hemp had brought in just for that purpose blocked their access, pulled the door shut and locked it.

Perry Hemphill saw Rance in the hallway walking toward his office and gave him a bear hug.

"Rance, brother, I can't imagine what you and Gia have gone through and are still going through, but this team is your family and every member of it has had you on their minds this whole week," he said, still embracing his player.