by April Smith
Not only that, but there were kids behind him, Jo noticed, emerging like faces out of a jungle; a group of boys, maybe three or four, enough to send alarms racing through her body. Nobody would back up Brad Angerhoffer, for two reasons: one, his mom worked at the school, and two, he was a doofus with a stupid name. But somehow he’d assembled an army and become a person she didn’t know.
Jo got to her feet and kicked her chair away, ready to fight. “What did you call me?”
“Everyone knows your parents ain’t married,” he drawled. “That makes you a bastard.”
“What in hell are you talking about?” Jo retorted.
“Commie bastard,” one of the boys put in, to clarify.
“Your mom and dad are just pretending,” Brad Angerhoffer went on. “They’re really Russian spies.”
“You’re an idiot,” Jo snapped, but her heart was pounding. Faces in the background were beginning to blur.
“Does your dad really fly his plane to meet the Russians?” said another boy.
“Sure,” Jo scoffed. “And Martians, too.”
Murmurs of an impending brawl rippled across the adjoining tables. People were standing and turning around, making room for the action about to explode.
“Then what does he have that airstrip for?” taunted Brad Angerhoffer.
“He’s in the state legislature, dummy. Do you even know where the capital of South Dakota is?”
The bell rang. Jo gathered her books.
“Hey, you forgot this.”
One of the boys snatched the remains of the sandwich and mashed Jo’s face with it. Her teammates rallied, yelling and throwing things at the attackers. A carton sailed through the air, leaving a white arc of milk. Everyone could see Jo Kusek standing there, smeared with garbage. The whole school was laughing. She saw Robbie Fletcher coming to her defense, but she was too mortified, she turned and fled, bursting through the double doors of the lunchroom into the hallway and up the stairs to the nurse’s office, which was empty. There was a sink and a paper towel dispenser above. In its metal surface she saw her shamed and reddened face and broke into tears. Turning on the faucets, she sobbed uncontrollably into handfuls of cold water, refusing to say what had happened when the nurse came back.
Jo stayed in the nurse’s office all day, reading Alas, Babylon, a science fiction novel about the end of the world during a nuclear holocaust. The school secretary, Kay Angerhoffer, peeked in at one point, and asked the nurse to come into the hall. It was clear to Jo what was going on: she’d be punished for starting a food fight while Kay Angerhoffer’s son, that piece-of-dirt traitor, would walk away scot-free. But nobody said a word to Jo. When dismissal rang, she was told to go home. She worried about getting on the bus, but nothing bad happened.
The phone started ringing as soon as she walked through the door. She hesitated to pick it up but it was Robbie.
“I’m going to kill Angerhoffer!” he shouted.
“Don’t sweat it,” said Jo, relieved to hear his voice.
“Candy-ass piece of shit!”
“Are you hearing this crap about your parents, too? Like suddenly we’re all Russian spies?”
“No! I don’t have a goddamn clue,” Robbie said.
“Me, either. It’s like from out of nowhere.”
“I’m not telling them. My dad’ll go ape and sue everyone.”
“No, don’t. They already think you and me are bad influences.”
Robbie laughed suggestively. “What they don’t know…”
“Shut up! How am I supposed to go to school?” Jo whimpered.
“Forget about it.”
“Easy for you to say. Everybody hates me now.”
“Come on,” Robbie insisted. “You’re one of the most popular girls.”
“Will you sit with me at lunch?”
“Of course, babe,” Robbie said. “Nobody’s going to touch you.”
That day Lance had a short schedule, and Scotty picked him up from school early so they could train for a rodeo the following weekend. After supper, Jo retreated to the room with the bunk beds they still shared. She was writing an anguished description of the day’s events in her diary when she heard Lance’s spurs clinking along the wooden floor. He’d be dead tired, like he always was coming back from the practice pen, and Jo decided not to tell him about the fight in the lunchroom. But he already knew.
She tried to brush it off. “Just a bunch of stupid boys,” she said.
“Not what I heard. I heard folks are saying rank things about Mom and Dad. Like they ain’t even married? What in hell kind of crazy talk is that?”
“Of course they’re really married,” Jo said with a heavy sigh. “The rumors aren’t true.”
“Then why’s everybody saying it?”
“They’re ignoramuses.”
“Something ain’t right.”
“Will you stop saying ‘ain’t’?!” Jo shouted. “You sound like them!”
He certainly looked like them, in his worn boots, thick jeans, and flannel shirt, a big belt buckle and beat-up hat, everything encrusted in crud. In a flash of sympathy, Jo saw that her brother belonged to this place much more than she. His mind wasn’t lost in imaginary worlds. He didn’t read books for fun, like Jo and her dad. In ways he was more like their mom, of a practical, down-to-earth nature, which, luckily for the two of them, she thought, kept things simple. Lance’s idol wasn’t exactly Sigmund Freud; it was Scotty Roy. He didn’t care to discuss anything deep—all he wanted in life was to stay on the back of a bull for eight seconds.
“Don’t you get scared when you ride?” Jo asked.
“Mainly I’m scared I’m going to screw up,” said Lance.
“Not like you might get hurt for life or maybe killed?”
“I’m ready to die,” her brother said quite simply. “Any time. Scotty says you have to make your peace with it. You have to be that free in order to get on top of a wild animal.”
“If you ask me that’s a bunch of bull, excuse the expression,” Jo said. “Nobody wants to die.”
But Lance had something else on his mind. He held up a noose made of clothesline.
“I hope you didn’t make that,” Jo said, alarmed.
“Found it in my desk.”
He toggled it back and forth. She watched, hypnotized, as Lance twirled the noose around and around on his finger.
“Was it in your desk at homeroom?” Jo asked, thinking that would narrow down who did it.
He shook his head gloomily. He’d thought of that, too. “Uh-uh. Math.”
“What period?”
“Oh, who gives a rat’s ass?” Lance said. “We ain’t never gonna find ’em.”
“We should tell Dad.”
“Oh, sure. That’s a great idea. He’d go straight to the principal and then it’s all over the school and we’re dead. That’s why they hate us in the first place, because of Dad’s almighty causes. He doesn’t care. All he wants is to go to Washington, the rest of us can hang.”
Lance let the noose spin off his hand and fly against the wall.
“It’s not his fault,” Jo said, defending her father. “It’s really because of something Mom did.”
“What’s she got to do with it?”
Jo patted the red wool blanket that covered Lance’s lower bed. “Come ’ere, pookie face,” she said, reaching back to first or second grade.
So they sat side by side, under the protection of the upper bunk, scooched against the wall with their knees pulled up, like overgrown kids in a pretend fort, and Jo told her brother how Aunt Marja had spilled the beans about Mom. It was all because of one little mistake their mother made back in the day, and even though she quit the party a long time ago, people still thought it was some kind of unpatriotic sin you could never get over.
“Nobody ever told me anything about it,” Lance said.
“No reason to, except for this coming up now.”
“So what?”
“So nothing.”
/> Lance stuck a pillow behind his head. Dog-tired, he leaned against the wall. His neck was tight as a screw. The crooked ring finger on his right hand was throbbing where he’d broken it before. Scotty had been unimpressed. “You got nine fingers left,” he’d said. Scotty was big on “the foundations,” teaching Lance to squeeze his knees and turn his feet out at the same time in order to grip the sides of the bull. That afternoon they’d practiced this tortuous position on a barrel until his hips were screaming and then some, but the pain was a small part of the long-term deal he’d signed on for. Glory.
Except the thing about bull riding is it always ends with being tossed. No way around it, even after a championship ride you’re going to end up in the dirt, and that’s where Lance was lying now, filthy and banged up, a couple of raw scratches from today, grime in his hair and under his nails, a twelve-year-old doing his best to hold on, even though the world of Mom and Dad as he knew it was quaking beneath him. Sad, bewildered eyes peered out from the shape of a man in the shadow of his childhood bed.
—
Jo had thought the harassment would stop after the lunchroom thing, but it only got worse. “Accidental” shoves in the hallway. Pulling her hair. Tugging on her clothes. Degrading new nicknames every day: “Jo Blows.” “Jo Stalin.” A heckling swarm would follow her across the yard like a cloud of blowflies, feasting on her wounds. Robbie and his buddies formed a shield around her, but they couldn’t be everywhere and kept getting into fights—none reported so nothing stopped. The principal, Mr. Emry, turned his back, and many teachers did the same so as not to be seen as “sympathizers.”
In the coming weeks, Jo would be constantly afraid. She had bruises. After basketball practice in the locker room one day, she couldn’t find her regular clothes. She asked the other players, but nobody had seen them. She panicked, afraid she’d have to ride the bus in her uniform—the ultimate humiliation—until finally she found her stuff dumped in the trash. When she worked up the nerve to tell the coach, she was told: “Everyone goes through it. Girls can be vicious.” That was the ultimate. Even her teammates had turned.
For Betsy, at first the rebuffs were hard to pin down. Then they became a pattern. A face turned away. A forced smile instead of the customary chatty conversation. Betsy wondered what she’d done to offend the ranch wives, who were usually so easygoing. Was it because she was campaigning for Cal, a stand-up Democrat? Was it her outspokenness at PTA meetings? You never knew. Tiny things could snag people’s ire, like the barbs on the devil’s claw weed, and they’d stick to your shoe for eternity. Even after all this time out west, with kids in the schools and her dedication to a dozen community organizations over the years, she understood that she was still on the outside of certain longtime female circles…But never in a million years would she have thought she’d be labeled the enemy.
It was Thursday and she’d made a run to the A&J market near the turnpike to pick up a dozen of the homemade tamales they had each week, delivered by a Mexican lady, Mrs. Sanchez. A few years ago this barren crossroads had been the center of a farm community, but so many ranches had gone bust that all that remained was a water tank, a bank, and the A&J, whose claim to fame was still their nickel ice cream cones at the take-out window. Upstate the dams were low because of the drought, which made the cost of electricity skyrocket, so the lonely store was kept in the half-dark. Only the freezers and refrigerated sections buzzed with cold white light, and they’d given up on produce except for a few bananas. People were buying just canned goods and necessities.
Jolene had always been an antisocial recluse, but when her husband, Allen, died of complications from diabetes, she was forced to work out front, which did nothing to improve her hospitality. Customers were favoring the new big supermarkets anyway; you could feel the A&J winding down to oblivion. Her mass of coal-black hair had turned yellow white, but she still wore it in a woven crown like her West Virginia grandmama, along with cotton aprons depicting soldiers from the Civil War. On cold mornings she’d pull on one of the lumpy oversized vests she’d knitted for her dead husband, which never fit him anyway.
Jolene Johnston was occupied with checking trays of pig’s feet, kidneys, liver, tripe, strings of hot dogs, and sallow, previously frozen fish fillets next to a stale bucket of macaroni, and therefore refused to acknowledge Betsy Kusek, even though she was the only customer in the store.
“Good morning, Jolene,” Betsy said nicely. “Do you have any tamales?”
“Give me a minute!” she replied irritably.
“Sure thing.”
Jolene turned her back to cut a block of yellow cheese on the machine. She did this very slowly, one slice at a time, before carefully placing a huge pile inside the display.
“I don’t see the tamales,” Betsy said, losing patience.
“That’s right.”
“Usually Mrs. Sanchez brings them on Thursday mornings.”
Jolene didn’t answer.
“Is Mrs. Sanchez okay?”
The woman’s stony expression didn’t change. “I reckon,” she allowed.
“So…do you have any?”
“Why don’t you go back to Moscow?” Jolene shot back.
“What are you talking about?”
“Ever since you got here this place went downhill.”
Betsy was dumbfounded. She’d once nursed this woman back to health, faithfully showing up twice a day to change her stinking bandages.
“This place?” she managed to say. “You mean this flytrap you call a market? And the prices you charge?”
“I’m talking about the wrath of the Lord.”
Betsy’s heart began to race. “Never mind the tamales,” she said, closing her pocketbook.
“Nobody can replace Doc Avery,” Jolene spat between thin, trembling lips. “Everybody knows you killed him!”
She’d gotten it only partly right. The rumors were everywhere. People said that Betsy shot the doctor with his own pistol and made it look like suicide, so that her husband, Calvin Kusek, could run for office and take his place. They said it was part of a conspiracy to penetrate the U.S. government and that Betsy had been trained in Moscow to kill whoever got in the way. If you wanted proof, they said, it was because Betsy Kusek was the one who found the body and then told his wife. Of course, there was no proof to any of it, but that didn’t matter.
“Good-bye,” said Betsy, and headed for the door.
“We are punished because we allowed the devil in our midst!” Jolene shouted after her. “We’ve had no rain, and terrible storms out of season. We’ve had worms and flies, and fruit ripening before its time. You’ve brought the plagues upon us! The times are full of signs and wonders. Dirty Reds! Go back where you came from or face the consequences. We don’t want your kind.”
Livid, Betsy turned back to face her attacker. “I was born in New York City.” She pointed a finger in the woman’s face. “As far as I know it’s still part of the United States, and in a free country, we don’t tolerate hate-mongering and intimidation, so you button it up, or face the consequences when I call the health department on your lousy store.”
Jolene folded her arms, looking smug as a bug in a rug. “Why doesn’t your husband, Mr. Calvin Kusek, salute the American flag?”
“He fought in the air force! Of course he salutes the American flag!”
“He refuses to say the Pledge of Allegiance.”
Betsy was speechless. The woman glared with the burning eyes of the righteous.
Betsy said, “That’s crazy.”
“It’s well known,” she replied, unmoved.
Betsy left. In the car she was shaking so hard she could scarcely keep to the road. When she got home the phone was ringing. It was Stell.
“Hello, Betsy. How are you?”
“I’m having the worst possible day.” There was a pause on the other end. “Stell? What is it?”
“Look,” said her friend, “I wasn’t going to tell you—”
“Tell me!”
“I thought you might be upset—”
“What’s wrong?” Betsy asked, alarmed. Was it her children? Somebody hurt?
“There’s a tape going around—”
“What kind of tape?”
“I don’t know, I swear I haven’t heard it. But people are saying it’s incriminating.”
“About what?”
“About you being…un-American.”
“Is this something on the radio?”
“No, it’s in private hands.”
“Private hands? What does that mean?” Betsy was chilled at the phrase. It sounded like a euphemism for the Gestapo.
“The tape is being passed around in people’s homes. They’re playing it in their living rooms.”
“That’s sickening,” Betsy said quietly.
“I know.”
Phone in hand, Betsy began to pace. “That must be how these lies are spreading. That loony Jolene Johnston at the A&J said right to my face that Cal refuses to say the Pledge of Allegiance!”
She couldn’t repeat the murder accusation; it was just too sick.
“That’s wild,” Stell agreed.
“Cal is such a patriot,” Betsy went on frantically. “If the Pledge of Allegiance didn’t exist, he’d have written it himself. We have to get the tape and find out who’s doing this.”
“The person didn’t actually have it, they only heard about it.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Stell, don’t beat around the bush! The person! Who is it?”
“Hon, really, I don’t know. I heard two gals talking in Becky’s hair salon downtown on Fourth Street. I’ve never seen them before, I have no idea who they were. Be careful,” she said, “your phone may be bugged.”
“That’s ridiculous—” Betsy began, but the line went dead.
22
The Bar C Rodeo was a backyard operation hosted by a family out in Belle Fourche, near the Wyoming border—not on the championship circuit, nothing to get wired up about, but the kind of thing that happened every weekend during the season somewhere on the plains, meant for young riders to hone their skills and, after the sun goes down, for dads to trade stories over hard liquor in the barn.
