Is your best friend the kind of person who would do anything for you no matter how crazy, ill timed or poorly advised? Would that person let you move in on a moment’s notice or loan you their last twenty-dollar bill or cosign the note on your car? Would your friend adopt all seven of your cats and never ask for an explanation? Well, I don’t have that kind of friend either but my friend Belinda does. That foolish friend would be me.

The 737 grabbed the pavement at Tulsa International with a thump that echoed the dread in my heart. This was my first trip back in just over three years and the old place looked familiar, but I can’t say that it felt like coming home. I had forgotten how sweet and helpful the natives are until I picked up my baggage and checked out my rental car at the airport.

The first place I headed was out west of town toward Belinda’s old property. I was fairly certain that Belinda would be at Wally’s house this morning and I wasn’t ready to face her just yet because I felt guilty for not coming the first time she called. The dashboard clock said not quite nine and the sun had already sucked most of the humidity out of the morning. The day was shaping up to be a scorcher.

Oklahoma is the birthplace of bad weather for the nation. One hundred and thirteen degrees with, say, eighty-two percent humidity in the summer and sixteen below with fifty mile-per-hour gusts in the winter. Not so much snow, but ice. Killer ice. Only two snowplows in the whole damn state backing you up; and that may be a rumor because I have never actually seen one. Then there is the tornado factor; worldwide Oklahoma spawns the most and the worst tornadoes. Only Pakistan comes close when it comes to producing tornadoes and I don’t know of anyone clamoring to get into Pakistan. When people move to Oklahoma it is not because of the nice weather. You really have to ask yourself if it’s all that worth it to live there. You have to ask yourself. You really should.

I chugged up the hill and parked in the gravel parking lot in front of Charlie and Belinda’s four-car garage. I cracked the windows on the rental Jetta and drew in a breath of hot morning air. The hilltop felt eerily deserted, as neither of them had lived there for quite a while; I knew they’d been trying to sell it for several years and had not had any takers. I wanted to see it first for old time’s sake, before I let Belinda know I was back in town. Charlie had built a recording studio on the back of the garage, but it was just a sketch of an idea, really, because before Charlie got around to ordering the equipment, the marriage and the dream were both over.

Wally always called Bee (Bee for Belinda) and me the sister-cousins, but we thought nothing of it because Wally would do that with people she liked. She would draft you into her family and set a permanent place at her table. As simple as that—if she liked you, you were in. She treated us both as if she had loved us all our lives. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t love Wally. A person couldn’t know Wally without loving her. She was the best teacher of how to love, but we never took her seriously, at least as far as the sistercousin business goes. Wally told us that she was a sister cousin, too, so we thought it was just for fun. Then, she kicks the bucket and Belinda and I are told that there really is genealogy that links both of us to Wally. So, things began to fall into place, to start making a little sense after all these years. You have to figure it was no coincidence when Wally showed up in our lives back in the day, coincidentally in the nick of perfect time to save our skinny little-kid asses. She was all good medicine, Wally was. And as it turns out, she was never less than fair and factual.

Belinda and I had never so much as spoken about being related until she called to tell me that Wally had passed on. Wally’s real name was Wah-Li and this was the first time we’d ever heard of it! She was an angel but just a skosh eccentric, and I mean that in the nicest way possible. No better person ever lived than Wally, and I mean no one. Her butt was probably cleaner than the Queen Mother’s face, I swear. Belinda and I were the only ones who called her Wally, as far as I know. Everyone else called her Mary.

Cicadas harmonized at a blare, singing wee-oh, wee-oh in their weird insect voices from out of the deepest pockets of scrub oak thicket. Their odd intoning of a metallic, alien Doppler song reminded me of an automatic sprinkler gone out-of-synch.

I looked out over the valley. What my friends, the sellers, needed was to find a house hunter with a powerful lust for a view.

The home dominated the top of the highest hill for fifty miles around. The lesser hills to their left and right framed their view of the valley below, a reedy marsh-like area that drained into the Arkansas River. Just before the river stood a Texaco tank farm populated by oil tanks big enough to hold a quarter million barrels of oil apiece. Beyond the tank farm rose the Tulsa skyline; the small collection of tall downtown buildings served as an elegant representation of prosperity as defined in the style of Art Deco.

The view was what the house had going for it, but some people actually do have common sense. Very few parties would even look at a one-bedroom house on fifteen rocky acres that ran in a straight line from one hilltop, down through the valley, and almost to the top of the opposite hill and with soil so poor it wasn’t even fit to raise goats. Neither Belinda nor Charlie knew jack about real estate, or building a house, or hiring a contractor, or financing. It would be easier to make you a list of what they did know for sure, and it boils down to this: they liked the view. Those two were always about vision.

When they visited me in New York while the house was going up, Charlie admitted that he had no idea when he put down his money what undeveloped meant as it pertained to property, but that he never would have guessed in his wildest dreams that his land had no gas lines, no well, no stream, and no city water hook-up. They had electricity installed by chipping in toward the cost of the extra poles it took to carry service to an undeveloped area and they were able to adapt their gas range and oven to propane, but as for water, they were on their own.

Sure, it’s hard to admit your mistakes. They neither one wanted to admit they were wrong. I suppose they either one could have spoken up at any point and asked each other or themselves, “Why are we are going to all this trouble?” But they didn’t.

They neither one wanted to give up on what the property symbolized, which they very much wanted to portray as the roundness of their relationship. I believe that for them, the pond reflected hope for a fresh start in the budding phase of middle age, an impulse admittedly driven by a panic to breed before her time ran out.

So, instead of taking their lesson and a loss, they hung in there for the larger lesson and the greater loss and foolishly hired two fat guys with D-9 Caterpillars to scratch out a pond as their sole source for water.

Once Bee and Charlie moved in and started to live there, the water system proved, shall we say, inadequate, for the amenities of modern life such as a dishwasher or a washer/dryer, or garbage disposal not to mention potable drinking water and flushable indoor toilets. Prospective buyers ran away like their hair was on fire when they found out that the fail-safe backup for the water system was a quarter mile hike straight uphill with a bucket of pond water in each hand.

In summer the biggest draw about the property turned out to be the pond. Once the pond was filled Charlie and Belinda invited everyone they knew and sometimes even fans for picnics and midnight swims. Anyone in the circle knew they could drop in late; we all knew we could meet there after one of Charlie’s gigs for a snack, like a four-foot hero sandwich, a keg, whatever. They had a skinny dip wedding reception down at the pond. To tell you the truth, I felt really good about that marriage for the both of them. The friends of the bride were all very arty, and on the groom’s side they were all about music so I suppose you could describe the whole circle as free-spirited.

By midsummer, though, with all those new ‘friends’ the parties had evolved into nightly orgies involving a few dozen people.

Then, it seemed the whole world was in on it, and more and more the parties were nothing but a bunch of naked drunk people that nobody knew who were showing up every week, snorting coke, doing cannonballs, and trying to fistfight each other. The situation got completely out of hand. Their real friends stopped going. Crimes were committed on private property and neither one of them was willing to go to jail for it. By the end of summer there was precious little either Belinda or Charlie could open their mouths about without the conversation deteriorating into a flame war. After one summer of jealousy and resentment, of manipulations masquerading as concern, and bitter arguments passing for communication, Belinda and Charlie were done. Charlie went on tour with the band and Bee came to New York to stay with me temporarily.

She became his fourth ex-wife and he became her second ex-husband. That’s another thing about Oklahoma; everybody gets married a lot. The Divorces Asked and Divorces Granted columns, published daily in the classified section of the Tulsa World, are often the first information people check in the mornings, right after the front-page headlines but long before Ann Landers and the Jumble.

Now Charlie, he was a use-them-up-and-toss-them-out type of guy. Sing a pretty girl a song then revolve her off the stage. Next! Not a bad man, but not a good husband by any definition.

On the other hand, Bee was a wonderful wife to her first love, David Barnes, and David simply adored Belinda. They lived together for three years before they married and seemed to have everything going for them. In that third year she got pregnant and that was when they decided to tie the knot. She had a miscarriage two weeks before the wedding and I believe that he mourned that loss as much as she did. He promised that they would try for a baby again as soon as she was up to it and they went ahead and married as planned. They went on their honeymoon to Mexico. He had developed a painful lump near his collarbone by the time they got back. He took it to be a parasailing injury and he eventually went to get it checked out.

When the diagnosis came back it was cancer, specifically lymphoma, supposedly a young man’s disease. Not to worry, they said, oncologists dealt with type of thing all the time, mainly with good results. The odds were in his favor, they said.

Nevertheless, David divorced Bee immediately when he was diagnosed, “just in case” he said, because he didn’t want her to be paying his bills for the rest of her life in case he didn’t make it. I don’t know how he knew he wasn’t going to make it, but David knew. He knew.

If David hadn’t gotten lymphoma – if David hadn’t had an ultimately fatal reaction to his chemotherapy – if, if, so many ifs for a person to regret, if David had lived he and Bee would still be blissfully together to this day. I know this in my heart of hearts.

Bee met Charlie during her Girls-Gone-Wild phase of mourning that lasted for more than a year after David passed. Wally and I worried about her while she acted like she was trying to kill herself by drinking and drugging and driving stupid. No one could get through to her. Then Charlie came along and sang to her and somehow this worked to make her dial back her suicidal impulses.

Charlie had three kids already, one each from each his previous marriages and Bee loved getting involved with the kids. Charlie, who didn’t pay child support for any of them, said he was game to have a baby with Belinda, so she cleaned up her act and they made it legal. Then they moved into this damned property and all their good intentions came crashing down like the Hindenburg.

There is no worse time to visit Oklahoma than smack in the middle of the doldrums of August. This early in the day the valley was still distilled in shade, so I decided to stroll down to the pond for old time’s sake.

The original dirt path was graded fine; the ground had been pleasantly soft underfoot when it was newly plowed but now, the gentle s-shape that was intended to wind downhill at a leisurely pace instead plunged precipitously as a coal chute. The well-intentioned walk had been overridden by rutgouging downpours and the erosion and newly exposed rocks made the trek rough going.

I glimpsed a sparkle off the water through the trees and stopped. A rush of feeling forced me out of my city head and called on my country instincts to assess my surroundings while I caught my breath and my bearings. Blackberry canes had matured and spread in my absence. Wally would have made a tubful of blackberry jam if she’d been there.

I can’t think of blackberries unless I think of chiggers. I can’t think of chiggers that I don’t think of ticks. Chiggers and ticks harbor in blackberry patches. You know why? I’ll tell you. Because those sweet, juicy blackberries draw all manner of warm blooded hosts for blood-sucking creatures to feed upon. There aren’t bear around here, but if there were, a bear would scrap with you fang and claw over a berry patch for sure. Mice come, along with all sorts of other small mammals. Snakes love mice so they come. Big animals come, some for fruit and some for the smaller animals. Insects come. Spiders come. Birds.

Wally said that humans have pretty much killed off most of our predators, but we are not off limits to parasites. She said that every creature that partakes in the blackberry food chain brings along its own train of predators and that the only way to keep the chiggers out and the snakes from getting a grip on your flesh is to wear long sleeved shirts, gloves, and tough boots every time and don’t pay any attention to the temperature. Wear hats, too, because ticks will drop off low hanging branches into your hair. You can’t even feel a tick, that’s the creepy part. But you can find all the fresh fruit you can eat, all free for the taking—if you’re willing to pay the price, that is.

The undergrowth seemed thicker than it used to be. I squatted down to see if I could spy a little more of the pond from the halfway point. With my heart quieted down a bit, I could hear frog song resonating from around the edges of pond. The frog’s twangy booming was barely muffled by the barest wisps of night haze still lingering in the shadows. A half dead pin oak, knocked askew by one of the dozers when the pond was gouged out, had survived despite its drowning roots to cast a skimpy fringe of shade over a thick slab of sandstone at the far end where the water was most shallow.

Anchored in the middle of the pond was a six-by-six foot Styrofoam block laced snugly into a corset of Army surplus tarp. Belinda and I had sunbathed buck-naked on that thing when I visited during my summer vacation. In the center of the pond where you couldn’t buy shade if your life depended on it, we got the best tans of our lives. I slapped at a mosquito trying to feed on my neck and remembered the added bonus offered by the float: The farther you are from the shore the farther you are from lurking bugs, pests, and parasites.

I seized upon the intention of taking a nice, cool dip and wasted no more time getting to the bottom of the hill. The best defense against chiggers is water and I didn’t want to take the chance of being infested because every element of your life is affected by the blazing, unrelenting itch caused by a tiny boring insect as it plays out its life cycle under your skin. Like it or not, when you host parasites you are the entrée, and I guarantee—you will not be in the mood for that party.

I saw the curve of the dam ahead and started shucking off my clothes on the run in preparation to dive. The diving platform, poured concrete steps leading up to a flat-topped boulder, stood blocking my view of the spillway. I took a running leap at the steps and flung the last of my clothing to the sky – that’s when the gun went off, a sharp report, then two shots more in quick succession. Bang -- bang, bang!

I dropped where I was behind the diving platform wishing first, that I were not naked and second, that I had not thrown all my clothes out of immediate reach. Then I kicked myself for not wishing for better things, like safety and a sheriff.

I was thinking terrified thoughts of rapists and sadists and murdering perverts, not knowing what was coming next or where it might come from…and I see a pair of tanned, shapely legs. Only Belinda has legs that long. She recognized me before I raised my face, and lucky for me, she had stopped shooting by then. I almost laughed aloud when I saw that she was wearing a Misty t-shirt.

The way she looked standing there with a .22 automatic in one hand and a wine cooler in the other cued me to the fact that I’d soon be doing something I probably shouldn’t be doing before the day was done.

Just so you know, drinking wine coolers in the morning is completely out of character for Misty, and by the way, when I say Misty, I mean Belinda. Belinda’s name is not Misty. She only became Misty when she hooked up with Charlie Harp.

About the time Belinda met Charlie, he came out with this song called “My Misty.” At first he claimed the song was about her, and that he wrote it as a tribute. He shot off his mouth all over town, but now the way the story goes is that he claims: one, he never said it, and two, just because he did say it, it’s still no less a lie.

Penn Jackson, known as PJ the DJ on KTC, the Community College station, gave “My Misty” some pretty heavy airplay because PJ had this huge crush on Belinda at the time and everybody knew about it. This is fact: Charlie was so tickled to get the airtime that he encouraged this infatuation in every way he could. PJ the DJ is the one who named her Misty by spinning “My Misty” at least a half dozen times a day if not every hour making insinuating dedications to her in his slinky baritone. Charlie didn’t like that quite so much. Charlie’s pouting only encouraged PJ. Before too long no one could tell if PJ was actually in love with Belinda or if he just hated Charlie Harp. It didn’t take a genius to see how PJ was playing Charlie. PJ was daring Charlie to complain about getting his song played.

“Nikki, Nikki, Nikki Twig!” Belinda screeched. “ I heard footsteps coming at a run and started cranking off rounds!” Then she gave me a hug and cracked, “Sorry I scared your pants off, babe!”

I hugged her and kissed her then I punched her in the arm.

I said, “It’s a good damn thing I wasn’t wearing skivvies, or I’d be cleaning them out right now.”

We fell to yakking like we hadn’t been apart for more than five minutes.

I said, “Listen, Bee, I need to dive in quick so I can wash off a load of chiggers that I probably picked up in the blackberry patch.”

“Uh-uh,” she warned, shaking her head no. “Come on over to the spillway and I’ll douse you, but we can’t go into the pond any more. The snakes have taken over.”

She took off toward the spillway, picking up my discarded clothes as she went and passing them back to me. “Can’t you smell them?”

I sniffed. Indeed, I could smell snake funk.

“Eeeew,” I commented. “That’s snaky alright. Nothing to worry about though, right? A snake can’t bite underwater anyway,” I said.

“Who told you that?” She started scooping up toy sand pails full of water in quick succession and dumping them over my head.

“Common knowledge,” I shrugged.

“Common knowledge leading to snakebite,” she scoffed as she took my clothes and soaked them full of water. “What kind of sense would it make for Mother Nature to create a water predator that couldn’t strike in the water?”

She hauled my soggy clothes back up onto the bank and took her time wringing them out. Once she draped my things over a nearby rock, she filled her palm with sun block and started applying it to my back. She offered me the tube so I could do the front myself.

“You’ve held up pretty damn good for an old bat,” she teased. Bee is twelve years younger than I. “You’ve been working out, haven’t you?”

“I walk just about everywhere I go. I use small weights for my upper body.”

“Shows,” she commented as she finished rubbing the cream into my shoulders.

A subtle splash across the pond drew our attention. A big cottonmouth bull, fully feeling the testosterone rush that comes on hot and nasty in August, launched himself out of the water and up onto a slab of partially shaded sandstone. He basked in the baking heat and licked the breezes with his forked tongue.

Belinda said, “He’s testing the air, just waiting for the first girl water moccasin to come along. Aren’t you glad you’re not swimming with that?”

Wide across his well-fed middle and tapered on both ends of his four foot length, the snake’s boxy head and shielded eyes described him as a poisonous snake. The white stripe running from under the eye to the corner of the mouth merely confirmed it. Wet, he glistens almost black but dry he might be cast in tarnished silver. He exuded the pure, oily essence of mating season. We could smell him from where we were.

“This is their breeding season, sometimes you can see them out there churning up the whole pond in one big cluster pfff…” she caught herself, “…. in big clusters.” She cleared her throat. “Orgies.”

“Okay,” I shuddered, “Now I am completely creeped out. I don’t feel like sunbathing where that cottonmouth can get to me, either. Are you about ready to go?”

Belinda mocked me with a grin and nodded, “Sure, it’s not so much fun when you can’t go into the water to cool off. I’m so glad you’ve come.”

We quickly pulled on our clothes. Mine were still wet but drying fast when we started the long, slow ascent back up the trail.

“Did you go by Wally’s house first?” she asked.

“No,” I admitted. “I wasn’t ready to face the family so came by here first. I thought I was alone. I didn’t see a car at the top of the hill.”

“Carson dropped me off,” she grinned.

Carson was not old enough to drive the last time I saw him. He belonged to Charlie from his second marriage.

She smiled at my double take. “He just got his driver’s license.”

“That’s kind of scary, “ I said.

“Charlie and I sold the house. The new buyer closes on Monday. He’s a bachelor; he likes the view.”

“Hallelujah!” I declared and did an impromptu little dance.

She gazed out over the pond and gestured to the surrounding hillsides. “Charlie and I -- you know how much we really wanted this…whole…thing…to work. So, now it’s sold and I wanted to come out and look around one last time and try to remember….”

“I’m surprised you can remember anything from those times,” I joked.

She cracked up. “There is that, but when I look at it now, even in retrospect of what idiots we were back then, any fool can see that developing this property was not a workable idea. Never was a possibility! The bullsh--,” she bit back the dirty word that almost slipped out and started over. “All the strife and paperwork, all the bitterness and blame that consumed every waking moment in our lives no matter what else was going on from the very instant we put our names to paper to buy this property…it was never worth it. Completely bound for failure but I couldn’t see it. All the silly crap we called our “issues” that divided our lives into night hell and day hell -- all connected to this property. How could we not have seen that we never had a chance? What a ridiculous person I was back then, Nik.”

“If you were, then I was too,” I said, “but we don’t live like that any more. And I’m proud of your for dialing back on the cursing. Impressive. I’m proud. You may feel ridiculous now because of what you did back then but back then, as I recall, you were actually kind of a trendsetter.”

She laughed and laughed. I love that laugh and have been known to go to great extremes to draw it out. When she finally caught her breath, she made me catch mine.

She said, “How many times did I wish for you to be my big sister when we were kids? How many nights did we wish upon a star for that very thing?

“Lots of them, that’s for sure.”

“Wally said that we really are more than just cousins, and she left us some clues to track down.”

“Such as…?” I couldn’t just take that statement at face value. I admit that I was more than skeptical.

“This is really weird,” she said. “But, John Twig was not your actual father; John was only your step-dad. My mom just made up the name Sam Carpenter. She always told me that Sam ‘took off’ before I was born because he wasn’t ready to be a daddy, supposedly.

“But, Sam was killed in a car wreck on his way home when your mom told him she was in labor,” I objected.

“That was all a lie,” she said. “Just a story to cover up the fact that I was born a bastard.”

“Don’t call yourself a bastard, Belinda Pearl! What did you ever do to deserve a name like that? Were you the one responsible for your own birth? No, no, no! Granted, you were there but you sure as hell didn’t cause it.”

“I know,” she said, and tried to wave me off the topic.

“Well, who was your real father and why didn’t he stick around? Did your mom tell you?”

“No, she didn’t. But, have you ever heard of a man by the name of W. T. Goins?”

“Never.”

“He’s who Wally said was The One who figures in both our lives.”

“I’m not sure I believe that,” I said. “I don’t see my mother backing off on any chance to call me a bastard, especially if it was true.”

She didn’t reply for a long time. Finally, she said, “He was quite a bit younger than your mom. He was only fifteen when you were born.”

“Do you really believe it’s true?” I questioned, because I wasn’t sure what to believe. “How sure are you? ”

“Pretty sure; positive actually. This is not just a fancy of Wally’s. It’s more than what she said and I’ve just begun to scratch the surface. There is proof, proof, and more proof, and if that’s not enough, there is still more proof.”

“Where is he now? Dead or alive?”

“Wally said she didn’t know for sure, but she left me a clue and I think I’ve found a line.”

“Why is it just now coming out?”

“She was waiting for us to ask her. I feel so bad about it now,” she bowed her head to hide a stray tear. “I know she would have told us everything if we’d ever shown any interest.”

“She never was a pushy person,” I recalled.

“Nope, she just opened the door. Everyone was welcome; she made that clear.”

“Poor Wally,” I mourned, “I’m sorry I was so dense. I thought she might be a little….”

“Crazy? Mom always said Wally lived in a fantasy world. Remember when she tried to ground me from Wally?”

“No,” I said. “I remember when she grounded you from the library. I remember when she grounded you from church. Why did she ground you from Wally?”

“This is an exact quote from Mamma,” she said, “I never met another blonde-haired, blue-eyed, white girl who wanted to be a blanket-ass injun more than YOU.”

“Your mom did have a knack for the discouraging word.”

“And she wasn’t above lying, either.”

I knew it hurt her to say that by the way she spit it out.

“Nope,” I agreed, “Quite flexible with the facts, your mom. Do you miss her?”

She smiled. “I wish I did. Does that count?”

“It all counts, Bee, it sure as hell does.”

“Do you ever wonder what would have happened to us if it hadn’t been for Wally?”

“No doubt I’d be divorced from a pedophile welder approximately three times my age.”

“Well, we had each other and we had Wally. I can’t believe she’s gone,” she sighed. “I’ve cried more tears over Wally in the past two days than I’ve cried in the past six years for my mom.”

“Hell,” I said, “I cried more when Pittypat Kittycat died than I did over either one of my parents. Or, should I say over Mom and John? I cried once over my mom and I cried once over Daddy, but the only reason I cried when he died is because I couldn’t get here in time to piss on his grave.”

Bee suddenly threw her arms around me and hugged me tightly to her breast. “That son-of-a-bitc…. that creep was not your father! You are alright now,” she comforted. “You are okay now and so am I and if Wally were here she’d tell us to let it all go and be happy. We love each other and that’s plenty of good reason to be happy, Nikki. Let’s just be happy, okay?”

Her scent was that of a child fresh from the sun. With Bee’s arms around my neck and her tears dampening my shoulder, the whirl of sensations in my memory reminded me of how she captured my heart when she was a tiny little girl and had nowhere else to turn for love and protection. She believed in me when no one else cared whether I lived or died and she never judged me even when I messed up big time.

That is love; that’s real love, and I suddenly realized that neither of us would have known what love was or even how to recognize it if it hadn’t been for Wally.