“You can call me Bob, or Big, if you like.”
No she couldn’t. She said, “I’m different from time to time…”
“How different?”
“Well, like if something’s bothering me, or I don’t feel too good.”
Or like right now. Wanting to get out of here.
In the next moment he was Bob Gibbs again, this farmer-looking guy, his voice quiet, confiding. He said, “But have you ever been so different you became a twelve-year-old colored girl who lived a hundred and thirty-five years ago in Clinch County, Georgia? A slave girl by the name of Wanda Grace?”
Kathy Baker said, “Your wife might need help.”
“One of us does,” the judge said.
3
The first time Bob Gibbs saw his wife she was performing sixteen feet beneath the surface of Weeki Wachee Spring, in a mermaid outfit.
He watched her through the glass wall of the underwater theater. Saw her gold lamé tail undulating, saw her long golden hair moving slow motion, Leanne smiling, showing her perfect teeth in that clear springwater before taking the tip of the air hose in her mouth, making a delicate, feminine gesture of it.
Bob Gibbs, already a judge, saw the purity of this healthy girl suspended in crystal water, air bubbles rising out of her, carrying her breath to the sunlight way above. Young enough to be his daughter, but that didn’t matter. The man inside the judge said, “Oh, my,” lured by a mermaid, taken with the idea of landing her.
He saw her outside after, pink shorts molded to her cute butt, hair still wet, turning wide-eyed and no doubt apprehensive, a man coming up to her in a dark suit and necktie. Introducing himself as a circuit court judge didn’t exactly warm her up, but she did start to relax once he expressed how much he enjoyed the show and began asking her questions.