Home Sweet Home

by April Smith

  Lance didn’t talk much on the way. Scotty figured he was preparing psychologically, and that was good. The boy’s mood had been up and down, but competition would sharpen his focus. Scotty had hope for his apprentice. Lance had the mental fortitude to block the fear. He didn’t flinch riding Beethoven. Today he’d be on a steer—smaller, less aggressive. If he drew a good animal, he could win.

  They drove in Scotty’s truck a good hour and a half to Route 34 at St. Onge, then fifteen miles out of town to Rural Road E, left on Road L, and left again at the Y, past the family home in a stand of cottonwoods, to a field next to a Quonset hut that had become a parking lot for trailers and pickups. Four light poles stood against a leaden sky stippled with clouds that might mean rain; the air was muggy and grasshoppers abundant in the golden stubble.

  There was a set of metal bleachers, plus some rusty chutes with hard-to-move gates, which Scotty warned would agitate the steers when they were confined there waiting for the buzzer. Walking toward the registration table, they checked out the competition. Peering beneath a small sea of cowboy hats, they were able to pick out familiar faces in Lance’s age group. Younger boys and girls were practicing their roping skills with intense concentration with loose dogs and toddlers underfoot. The rancher’s wife and daughters sold pancakes and bacon on paper plates for a dollar. You got either coffee or Coke. The nasal prairie twang of the announcer’s voice came over the loudspeaker, and everybody gathered at the arena for opening ceremonies, where a ten-year-old cowgirl with flying braids loped through the gates on a tawny mustang, waving an American flag. The setting was humble but the flag was historic.

  “Folks, this is the real, true flag that was proudly carried by our boys of the Thirty-Fourth Infantry Division, the National Guard from South Dakota, during the assault on Anzio beach on March twenty-fifth, 1944. God bless our troops!” the announcer shouted over whistles and cheers. “God bless America!”

  The cowgirl stood in the saddle and galloped around the ring, lifting the flag up high. Hats came off and tears burned in red, wind-scorched eyes. The national anthem played on the tin-can audio system, and before it was over, a great crest of cheers rose from the crowd in anticipation of the competitions ahead, devotion to country as well as to winning braided together in the western soul.

  Lance and Scotty waited through the mutton-busting contest, calf roping, barrel racing, and a pony parade, until the young bull riders’ events were called. By then it was high noon and the sun was pounding like a hammer on an iron peg. Lance went into his pre-ride ritual of putting on his leather chaps and riding glove and working the bar of resin into the bull rope.

  They called his name. There was the heady, unstable, adrenaline-driven pandemonium of the chute. He’d drawn a good young steer, an aggressive tan-and-red mutt named Hullabaloo, who came in butting his head against the boards so his horns caught and he had to be backed out again. Lance got on and gripped the rope in his riding hand, got his hip area down so he was balanced in the safety zone. He squeezed his thighs and turned out his feet. It seemed like a hundred guys were yelling at him at once: rodeo cowboys standing on the chute, making sure the flank rope passed cleanly underneath the steer’s belly; Scotty shouting in his face.

  “He’s gonna drop his head and spin. Watch his nose to see which way! Use your spurs. You need this score!”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “It’s between you and this bull, that’s all it’s about.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “You dominated on Beethoven. You can ride this guy all day. Are you ready?”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Show ’em who’s boss!”

  Lance gave the nod and they let him fly. The chute opened and Hullabaloo came out twisting to the right. Lance stayed with him on the first jump. The rope around his riding hand went taut and tightened. It should have been a sign he had control, but his high-strung nerves received a different message. The rope was a noose. His tormenters at school would unseat him. They were jeering and they wanted him to fail. Fail! Fail! Fail! At the same time Scotty’s voice was in his head, shouting, Keep your body forward. Don’t lean back. When life throws you around, keep your balance! Instead of the concentration that came so easily in practice, the boy’s mind went into a fog. After less than two seconds, Lance slid off-center and hit the ground. The buzzer sounded. No score.

  The steer continued to buck and twist violently. Two bullfighters dressed like clowns chased it back into the pen while Lance got to his feet and jogged out of the ring. Scotty was waiting with a puzzled frown.

  “Hey. You want to explain that?” he asked quietly.

  Lance didn’t answer. Scotty followed through the crowd.

  “You had him. You just let go.”

  Lance kept walking with his head down. “Leave me alone,” he said.

  Scotty grabbed his shoulder. “What is wrong with you?”

  Then he saw that Lance was crying.

  “Are you hurt?”

  Lance shook his head.

  “What are you, a baby? He got you. He won. So what? You got two more rounds on two different steers. Let’s check ’em out right now. The more we know about ’em the better we’re gonna beat ’em.”

  Lance swiped a sleeve across his dirt- and tear-stained cheek. “I don’t want to ride.”

  “Sorry, pal. You’re registered for two more rounds. Cowboy up.”

  Lance shook his head.

  “Everyone gets scared, that’s normal—”

  “No, sir. I’m not scared. I want to go home.”

  “What have I always told you, since you were four years old? What do we call it?” He waited.

  “The beautiful place,” Lance mumbled.

  “Right. The beautiful place. The center of gravity. So you came up against something bigger and stronger than you. What do you do?”

  “Find my balance,” Lance replied in a tortured voice.

  “All right then.”

  Scotty was satisfied. He felt tenderness for the young man and put an arm around his shoulders, but Lance pulled away.

  “Can we just go?” he said.

  His coach frowned. “I never made you for a quitter.”

  “Think what you want.”

  “You can wait in the truck until I’m good and ready,” Scotty told him, tossing the keys. “Have a ball.”

  Scotty took his time. He drank a few beers and watched the junior bull riding competition to the very end. It finished in the semi-dark, since two of the spotlights had shorted out because of bugs. The winner was a show-off who knelt in the dirt and thanked God and tossed his hat to the meager crowd. He walked away to ecstatic hugs from his family and twelve dollars in cash. With Lance’s skill, he could have easily placed in the top three. Scotty let him stew in his juices all the way home, hoping his protégé might see fit to explain his behavior when they pulled into the driveway of the Lucky Clover Ranch.

  “If it’s a girl, you can tell me,” Scotty said. “I won’t say nothing to your folks.”

  “Wish it was.” The boy drew a sleeve across his nose.

  “Well, that’s a relief,” said his coach, lightening up. “A broken heart, I cannot fix.”

  “You can’t fix it,” Lance agreed, opening the door. “Nobody can.”

  “Wait a minute!” Scotty leaned across the seat. “What are you telling me? Is it serious? Somebody sick at home?”

  “Yeah,” said Lance, jumping out. “The whole freaking world.”

  He grabbed his gear and slammed the door. Scotty’s tolerance was gone. He jammed the truck in reverse, backed out hard, and burned rubber when he hit asphalt.

  —

  It was past ten p.m. when Scotty pulled into the Crazy Eights Ranch. The lights were shining in the big windows of the main house and a dozen cars and trucks were parked outside, which could only mean another meeting of the John Birch Society. Scotty sneaked in through the kitchen. It was funny, he thought, how his father, the great individualist who hated the
government and would “fight to the death” to defend personal liberties, was first to join the crowd. The older, weather-beaten white faces in their living room were the same gang that approved of Senator Joe McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade—they’d just moved over to the Birchers. The familiar voices, the coffee urn and potluck dessert table loaded with cobblers and fruit pies, because that was the season, were standard issue. But the message was not.

  The message was sometimes hard to grasp. Thoroughly beat in body and soul from the long, disappointing day, Scotty rummaged through the refrigerator, giving half an ear to the speech he’d heard a dozen times, the one Dutch gave to newcomers, because it always grabbed them, about the secret code on the dollar bill.

  First he’d tell everyone to take a buck out of their wallet, make a joke that this was not a donation but a revelation, and then call their attention to the pyramid with an eye on top on the reverse side of George Washington. The eye was put there on that dollar bill by President Franklin Roosevelt, Dutch would announce to hisses and boos for the New Deal Democrat, as a signal to the other leaders in a top secret society, a conspiracy that went back to 1778, that the time had come for the “New World Order,” or, translated, the Communist takeover of the world. He could prove it by the Latin words inscribed on a scroll near the pyramid, novus ordo seclorum, which nobody understood, but it sent delicious scary shivers down their spines. This clandestine Commie scheme to destroy democracy and the American way of life was what the John Birch Society was fighting against, they were told, a conspiracy that nobody could pin down, but somehow it could kill you.

  Scotty’s attention wavered as he dug into a cold bowl of leftover spaghetti, until Lucille Thurlow, the cook from the Bison Café, came into the kitchen with a pile of used plates, grabbed his wrist, and whispered, “Come on in, you got to listen to this,” and Scotty realized he was hearing a familiar voice talking over the stereo loudspeakers.

  He followed Lucille into the grand living room. His parents were sitting there comfortably along with about twenty other people whom Scotty had known all his life. Nobody spoke. They nodded or just raised a hand to him in silent greeting. Seeing Scotty, the dogs stirred and began to whine.

  “Quiet down,” Dutch told them.

  It seemed his parents were getting smaller every time he saw them, sometimes even on the same day. Now they made two fragile figures beneath the steep pitch of the timbered ceiling, Doris squeezed between three ladies on the butterscotch plaid sofa, and Dutch’s big frame, thinner after the accident, in the brown leather recliner. His father gripped his cane as if he might be called to get up and fix the fire, except there was no fire, the room was dead cold, and everyone there was strangely rapt, as if he’d walked in on some kind of mass hypnosis routine.

  With the dogs settled, Scotty realized other voices were echoing in the vast room, speaking through the stereo system, and that the glittering reels on the Wollensak tape recorder were turning slowly.

  Scotty leaned over and whispered in his father’s ear, “What is this, Pops?”

  “It’s a recording of Betsy Kusek.”

  “Who’s she talking to?”

  “The FBI,” said Dutch.

  Hushed to silence by the crowd, Scotty stood behind his parents and listened. It didn’t seem real. It sounded like something on the radio. But that was Lance’s mom, Betsy Kusek, it was really her, and she was talking to an official-sounding man about why she’d joined the Communist Party.

  “How’d you get this?” Scotty wanted to know.

  “Wolf Harrington,” Dutch replied softly. “Still going strong at ninety-eight. We were over for his birthday. He played it and passed it on,” Dutch explained. “We thought to let the members know—”

  “Stop interrupting!” Doris said impatiently. “I want to hear!”

  —

  There wasn’t much to take. The belt buckles he’d won in competitions. His bull rope, custom made. His competition gear. A couple of suitcases, mostly filled with jeans. He’d told his folks that he was going to the rodeo in Silver Springs, Texas. He didn’t say that he was never coming back, not even to himself, but he’d known it—deep in that place where you know—by how easy it was to pluck out stuff from here and there and throw it in the truck, as if he’d been thinking all this time without thinking about it—how and when he’d finally leave.

  It hurt. The hardest part was forcing himself to say good-bye to the dogs, with their questioning, abandoned looks—they knew exactly what was going on—and the trusting horses. He stopped by every stall and fed each one an apple, offering it from an open hand. Let them remember him that way. And he’d remember their patient eyes and individual goodness. Even the bad-tempered mares, they did their jobs.

  It was barely daylight when Scotty Roy left his parents’ home. The summer morning was in full glory by the time he arrived at Lucky Clover Ranch. Cal came out of the barn wearing overalls, surprised to see the truck idling in his yard. He went over, as Scotty seemed to have no intention of getting out.

  Cal leaned in the open window. “Where are you off to?”

  “Texas.”

  “Got a rodeo?”

  “I’ll find me one.”

  “Come on inside, have some coffee.”

  “Gotta hit the road,” said Scotty.

  He handed over a flat white box. Cal opened it. Inside was a reel of tape.

  “Where did you get this?” asked Cal.

  “Not important.”

  Cal looked at it for some time. Finally he said, “If this is what I think it is, why are you giving it to me?”

  “Because I know it ain’t true,” Scotty replied. “Someone’s out to get you. It’s a plain raw deal.”

  “We heard rumors about something going around,” Cal told him.

  “It’s ugly, but you should hear it.”

  “Thank you, Scotty. I can’t tell you…this means a lot.”

  “Mainly I’m worried about Lance. All of it coming back on him.”

  “What does it have to do with Lance?”

  Scotty told Cal how the boy had quit the ride.

  “He probably won’t tell you, but he is deeply troubled about something. Might have to do with what’s on that tape.”

  Cal could feel his knees go weak and a surge of rage through his body that anyone should be hurting his son.

  “You ought to know—your kid’s got heart,” said Scotty, and put the truck in gear.

  Cal slapped the roof good-bye. “Good luck in Texas.”

  Scotty grinned. “Or wherever is the beautiful place.”

  “Give a shout when you’re back.”

  Cal held the box in both hands like an offering received and watched his friend depart with a wave. It was the last time Scotty would see Cal Kusek alive.

  23

  The law offices of Fletcher and Kusek were situated on the fourth floor of a downtown frontier-style building dating back to 1884. Sometime in the 1930s, it had been wrapped in an art deco stone facing with fluted columns and geometric patterns in an attempt to cover its rough-and-tumble origins with rural notions of sophistication. It was eight o’clock on a weekday night when Betsy found herself staring through the large double-hung window, watching couples headed for the movies and single men drifting in and out of bars along the placid streets of Rapid City. It was possible that she’d never hated anything in her life as much as she hated that view.

  Across the street was the Duhamel Company store, where the Kuseks and Fletchers had first met on a thundery afternoon when the children fought over rides on Champion, the mechanical horse—who was still there, although the price of his hay had gone up to a quarter—and Jo had fallen in love with a pair of red cowboy boots in the window. Betsy, too, had been enchanted by everything western, but now the paltry lights and stern, ruler-straight avenues seemed anything but romantic, rather a reflection, it seemed to her, of the small minds that had conceived them, and the narrow lives that were lived along monotonous blocks of grim
red brick, corridors for the empty wind.

  Betsy had reason to feel sick to her stomach. She was listening to a recording of her own voice, created in stealth and manipulated to say things she’d never said, a clumsy concoction of lies put together by one of those average citizens down there: some ordinary Joe who loved his children and went to church and cast his vote for president. That was the nauseating part—how matter-of-fact the accuser sounded, even warm and folksy. The others also hearing this tape for the first time—Stell, Cal, Fletch, and Verna Bismark—were quietly stunned. They’d gathered in the law office because it was the safest place they could think of. At this hour the rest of the building would be empty. The tape was maybe a minute long but seemed a lifetime:

  interviewer: Feel free to speak in confidence. We want to know if you agree that Communism is not the threat it’s made out to be. There are parts of socialism and Marxism that make a lot of sense.

  betsy: I think what you’ve said is very fair.

  interviewer: How did you find out about the Communist threat?

  betsy: My kids told me.

  interviewer: You can be honest. The real truth is you were acquainted with the Soviet philosophy long before you had children, weren’t you, Mrs. Kusek? And in fact, you were a sworn member of the Communist Party. And secretly changed your name from Coline Ferguson. How do you defend that?

  betsy: People are people.

  interviewer: Sounds like a pretty weak defense to me, but let’s go on. Isn’t it Moscow’s aim to bring down the United States government, starting with our children?

  betsy: Public schools are the place.

  interviewer: You think so? Well, that’s frightening. Luckily, people on the right are fighting Communism wherever it rears its ugly head.

  betsy: In my thinking, the rigid and prejudiced views of the Far Right are more of a threat to our liberties.

  interviewer: You sound very upset with folks who don’t agree with you and your husband.

  betsy: Absolute evil. Despicable enemies.

  interviewer: I see. Thank you for your time, Mrs. Kusek.