by Paula Boyd
“You don’t have a choice.”
“Oh, yes, I do,” I said, the scar tissue in my upper arm twitched and throbbed. “I’m not the woman’s babysitter or her legal guardian.”
“You will be if I get her declared incapable of caring for herself.”
A cold chill swept up my spine. Would he do that? Could he do that? Or, was he just threatening me to get his own way, assuming I wouldn’t know one way or another, which I did not. “You can’t do that.”
“I can. I don’t want to, but I can.”
“Blackmail does not endear you to me, Sheriff Parker.”
“Oh, now, Jolene,” he said, his voice softening to a cajoling rumble, dipping into that tone that makes my brain turn to mush. “Once you get here everything will settle right down. If your mother isn’t stirring up the AAC people, they’ll leave and everything will get back to normal in no time.”
“Fat chance,” I grumbled.
First of all, nothing about Kickapoo, Texas resembled my idea of normal. Ever. Second of all, what sounded mildly eccentric over the phone had a nasty habit of transmuting into wildly deranged when you had to face it in person. And thirdly, but not leastly, my mother was not only in the middle of the current mayhem, she was the ringleader of it.
For not the first time, or the fiftieth time for that matter, I wondered exactly why I’d been born to Lucille Jackson. What grave past-life crime had I committed to warrant this kind of punishment? Some soul-searching theories propose that we choose the circumstances of our birth and parents so as to overcome particular challenges in this lifetime. That these specific circumstances will help us evolve into more enlightened beings. It’s kind of a neat theory until you really think about it. I mean really think about it. I asked for this?
Since there wasn’t a New Age theory yet devised that could explain my mother and make me like it, I was rethinking my stance on the whole Satan-is-out-to-get-you thing when Jerry cleared his throat to remind me he was still on the line. “So when do you think you’ll get here?”
Before I could come up with a clever variation of “when Hell freezes over,” I heard a series of loud pops, like the rat-a-tat-tat of a string of firecrackers. Or bullets. Then, a thundering boom followed by what sounded like one of my favorite four letter expletives sputtering from the usually sterile-mouthed sheriff. “Get down here, Jolene.” Boom. “Now!”
Click.
The phone had gone dead so I tossed the receiver into the cradle, wondering exactly what I’d just heard. A worried sheriff for sure, but what else? Bullets? Bombs?
Not in Kickapoo.
Of course, in Kickapoo.
After running the myriad possibilities through my ever-ready mental visual system, I determined that any slim chance of avoiding a trip to Texas had exploded right along with that loud boom on the other end of the phone. The only remaining question was how to get there. I usually drive. I always drive. I’m about an hour and a half from Denver International, and Kickapoo is two and a half hours from the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport. Add in wait times and car rental time and I can be at the Texas border. So why was I even thinking about flying? And what were the odds that I could get on a plane at my convenience that wouldn’t require me to take out a second mortgage?
Since I had to log on to the Internet anyway to send the article—and assure that Dr Pepper money would be forthcoming—I decided to investigate one of the online ticket getters.
I’ll spare you the lengthy details of the process, but if you’ve never bid for a plane ticket online, do not do so unless you really want to buy the ticket. Who’d have guessed my $168 random roundtrip figure would actually get me a seat on a jet to Dallas at the last minute? Not me, that’s for sure. Thanks to my eager fingers and ever-willing credit card number, I had about five hours to get myself seated and buckled aboard a southbound plane. Translated to real time, I had maybe an hour to get my house in order, throw some clothes in a bag and get out the door.
Yes, I am insane, and it is clearly an inherited trait.
Chapter
Two
Thanks to the friendly skies and a peppy rented Toyota—which cost more than what I’d get for that one lousy article—I arrived at the Bowman County jail a few minutes before ten that night.
The courthouse, where the Sheriff’s Department resides, was dark, but I made my way around to the back. The main door was indeed open, but the secondary door where Jerry let himself in and out was locked, probably always was, now that I thought about it. Still, if I could avoid explaining myself to whoever was manning the front desk, all the better. I knocked, hard, until I saw a figure moving toward the small window. I wasn’t even a little surprised to see Deputy Leroy Harper eyeing me through the square re-enforced glass in the door. I waved and tried to smile.
Leroy pushed open the door, nearly knocking me down. “What in the hell are you doing here?”
I didn’t take offense as he sounded shocked, not homicidal as in previous episodes. Furthermore, I had asked myself that same question so many times that it had kind of lost its impact. “I didn’t have a choice, Leroy. You have my mother. Remember?”
He shooed me inside and slammed the vault-like door behind me. “Well, yeah, Jerry told us you were coming, but I don’t know how you got here this fast.” He paused, propping his hands on his hips, which is no easy feat considering the width of his waistline. “Jerry called you not nine hours ago. You’d had to drive a hunnerd the whole way. That’s speeding, even in Colorado and New Mexico. How many tickets did you get? I’m not fixin’ any tickets. No can do.”
And did I ask such a thing? “No tickets, Leroy,” I said, trying to ward off all the usual thoughts that inflict me at this particular moment in time, meaning the point where I really realize where I am and that I apparently don’t speak the same language as the natives. “I flew in to Dallas and rented a car. I obeyed the speed limit” mostly “and broke no other laws that I am aware of. Where’s my mother?”
“Oh.” He sounded a little disappointed. “Lucille’s in the back office. We were just about to watch the news.”
The jailer and the jailee were watching the news. In the back office. Some big crisis we had here. Glad I’d rushed right down.
We headed down the hallway, homing in on the sound of the ten o’clock news behind door number three. The door was cracked open so I peeked inside to get feel for Lucille’s state of mind—the unrehearsed version. She sat in a chair in front of the television, sipping a cup of coffee, legs crossed, gold glittered slipper swinging, and a not a wrinkle in her purple pantsuit. Clearly, she was neither traumatized nor in need of rescuing. “Well, fancy meeting you here.”
She jerked around in her chair, very nearly spilling her coffee then leaped to her feet. “Jolene!” Yes, she sounded more stricken than thrilled. Imagine that. With her dark and frosty blonde hair (yet another new color) piled high, dangly purple ball earrings, matching acrylic fingernails, gold bangle bracelets and professionally applied cosmetics, she looked quite stunning. And darned nervous. Guilty even.
I smiled. “Surprise!”
She was not amused and frowned to prove it. Setting her Styrofoam coffee cup on the desk, she tried to cover her shock and dismay. “My Lord, Jolene, how on earth did you get here so fast?” She checked her watch, trying—poorly I might add—to pretend interest in my travel abilities. “Jerry Don called you not nine hours ago.”
Apparently, there had been a lot of clock watching going on, my potential arrival time having been precisely calculated. My showing up sooner rather than later was both unexpected and unappreciated by the damsel in supposed distress. I could only guess at what theatrical display she’d had planned for my arrival tomorrow. I had deliberately not called Jerry on my way in, hoping I could surprise him. But not wanting to be overly surprised myself, I’d also wanted to get a feel for what I had to deal with, which was why I’d stopped at the courthouse first. With the shocked—and somewhat guilty—reactions I was receiving from
Lucille and Leroy, I figured I’d done exactly the right thing. I repeated my flight and car arrangements, which seemed to mildly impress her, at least the part about my great concern over her awful, awful situation. I wrapped my arm around her shoulders and gave her a little daughterly squeeze. The hugging thing is not a natural and normal exchange between my mother and me so she was rightfully wary, eyeing me nervously, like she was waiting for the axe to fall. I kept one hand on her shoulder while I said to Leroy, “What do I have to do to get her out of here?”
Leroy glanced at Lucille and shrugged. “Jerry Don says she can go. She just don’t want to.”
Lucille twirled out from under my arm, spun to face me and straightened her shoulders. “Don’t you start with me, Jolene,” she said, waggling a finger for emphasis. “Things went real well today, but I’m not leaving here until I’ve made my point.”
“And what point would that be? What, exactly, went ‘real well’ today, Mother? Was that the attempted murder of the county maintenance truck or the fiasco at the courthouse? What was it that I heard blow up?”
Lucille’s eyes darted to the TV hanging from the ceiling in the corner. She pointed to a chair beneath the TV and suggested I sit there. I didn’t. Neither did she.
Leroy, however, hitched up his pants and settled himself in the chair behind the desk. “’If I hadn’t been watching what they were doing, I’d have thought terrorists were trying to blow up the courthouse. Those cans sounded like bombs when they went off.”
“Cans?”
“Yeah, aerosols. The AAC people had parked an old camper trailer out in front of the courthouse then started painting their animal slogans and things on it. The costumed toads was supposed to act like they was dying then throw firecrackers at the camper. Didn’t go real well though. There was some kind of scuffle and—”
“And the idiots caught the grass on fire,” Lucille snapped, “right beside the pile of spray paint cans. Must have been fumes or something because the flames just shot up and those cans started jumping like popcorn. I’ve never seen such a thing in my life.”
“It sure was something,” Leroy agreed, adding a whistle to his punctuate his amazement. “Them cans was exploding like rainbow hand grenades. Made the most awful mess you ever did see,” he continued, his chins jiggling with the telling. “Paint went splattering all over everything, including the protesters. Nobody really got hurt though, so that was good.”
“It wasn’t good enough for the TV people,” Lucille groused, stomping a golden slipper to emphasize her irritation. “Oh, the local stations came by for a few minutes then played their little ten second clips on the six o’clock news, but that won’t get us noticed in Decatur much less Dallas. We need the big guns out here.” She glanced at the TV again. “They better be showing something again this evening, even one of those little snippets that flashes by like a blink, or I’ll be calling them, that’s what I’ll be doing.”
No sooner had she uttered the words than said snippet popped onto the screen. Larry grabbed the remote and turned up the volume.
The segment was indeed short, and after I saw the actual scene, it didn’t seem like much of an event at all. It looked like there were maybe forty people, including law enforcement, lizard people and Bible wavers. The camera made a quick pan of the naked lizard girl Jerry had eagerly told me about then lingered on the camper for a second longer. All in all, the clip was twelve seconds, tops, with voice-over.
“Now, isn’t that just the most pitiful coverage of a news story that you ever did see?” Lucille stood with her arms crossed, glaring and grumbling at the TV. “If they’d had even a lick of sense they’d have come inside the jail house and asked me about the people trying to steal my home, that’s what. But there was not one word about it. Not one. Pitiful, I tell you, just pitiful.”
I slumped down in the chair beneath the TV and sighed. I had so many questions, but it seemed best to start as much at the beginning as I could—at least the beginning of today’s reason for me being in the Bowman County sheriff’s office. “Speaking of pitiful, exactly what were you thinking when you opened fire on the county maintenance truck?”
Lucille clamped her lips shut and lifted her chin. “I don’t know that it was necessarily my bullet that hit the radiator. They were out there mowing, and it could have just as easily been a rock that flew up and hit it. You know very well that laser sight isn’t worth a darn out in the sun.”
Oh, I’d heard that sorry excuse before, the laser in the sun, not the flying rock. My mother is a crackerjack shot and she doesn’t need a squiggly red dot to get the job done either. Even though it was a question that pretty much answered itself, I asked, “Who else was armed?”
She shrugged and inspected her nearly inch-long purple nails. “Most of us were, I guess.”
Now, this statement was both said and taken with the greatest of seriousness. Carrying a gun in Texas is part of one’s civic duty, right up there with saluting the flag and knowing all the words to “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” I glanced at Leroy. “How many of them were there?”
“Enough, that’s how many,” she said, her voice building in passion and volume. “They’re not going to sneak around and do things behind my back like I don’t know what they’re up to. I’m going to stop that stupid camper city. Some of us care what happens to our homes and we’re doing something about it.”
“Yes, we’re all real clear that you’re doing something about it.” I turned to Leroy. “So, do you have any official membership numbers on this subversive group?”
Leroy shuffled his feet and scratched his head. “The toad people?”
“She means us, Leroy, SPASI,” Lucille said, tipping her nose in the air. “The Smart People Against Stupid Ideas.”
I sorted out the acronym in my head, wondering how long it had taken them to come up with that. “So, Leroy, how big is this group, and who else was arrested besides space cadet number one here?”
Lucille glared and snorted then stomped over to her chair and sat down.
“Oh, just the three of them,” Leroy said, but that was from the morning incident. Nobody was arrested at the rally.”
I wondered why no one got nailed for the courthouse fiasco, but I did not wonder about who he meant by the “three of them.” He meant Mother and her two very best friends in the whole world, to use her words, Merline Campbell and Agnes Riddles. I also wondered about the “friends” terminology since Lucille and Merline were eternally locked in a fashion/coiffure competition that bordered on guerilla warfare. Agnes has tried to mediate, but despite her best efforts the two still managed to one-up each other until Merline sported six pounds of sparkling spangles on her sweatshirt and Lucille had glowing pink hair. I couldn’t decide if uniting them against the park was a good thing or not.
“Miz Campbell and Miz Riddles posted their bonds right away,” Leroy added, hesitantly, glancing between me and the mother ship. “Miz Jackson didn’t want to do that.”
“I told them to go on home,” Lucille said magnanimously, hand to her chest, like she was ready to recite the pledge. “It’s my house and I’m the one that should suffer most for the cause.”
Somehow I didn’t quite equate this with some of your bigger causes, like say women’s rights over their own bodies, equal pay for equal work, or even save the whales. But then I wasn’t the one about to have campers lining up for the dump station in view of my back porch either “How long has this park thing been going on?”
“I’ve seen people prowling around over there for months now,” Lucille said, snatching her cup from the desk. “Out behind my fence, poking around my yard and peeping in my windows. That’s just flat trespassing.” She sipped the coffee and sighed. “I should have kept your dad’s deer rifle, that’s what I should have done. I could have gotten them with that.”
Yes, meaning that she hadn’t gotten them with what she had used. Her handgun is not a long distance weapon, thank God. I sighed and rubbed my eyes again just for the dr
ill. It had yet to change anything, but a moment of melodramatic martyrdom made me feel a little better. “What were they doing behind the house? Staking out camper pads? Counting horny toads? Drilling for oil, what?”
Her head snapped up. “Why’d you say that?”
“Say what?”
“They’re up to no good, that’s what they’re up to.” Lucille set her jaw and her narrowed her eyes darted this way and that. “Right there behind my back fence.”
I know that look and it never bodes well. Never. So, what had triggered it? Camper pads and lizards were not new on the conversational menu, but my offhand comment about drilling for oil was. Suspicion bubbled up like Jed’s Texas tea. “What have you seen back there? Trucks, equipment, what?”
More eye darting and brow furrowing. “Yes, well, there were trucks out there, yes, mostly pickups. They had lots of lights too, and one bigger truck with a shiny silver pole on it. I tried to take pictures but you couldn’t tell anything, I don’t know what they’re doing but they’re up to no good, that’s for sure.”
“Tell me about the truck with the pole.”
“It was making all kinds of racket,” she huffed. “It rattled my walls, that’s what it did. I thought we were having earthquakes.” She reached for her cup again and sipped, but her arm was shaking as she did so. “Just made me so mad I could spit.”
As we all know, Mother does not spit, but she was indeed mad. But why was she that mad? “You know, I hate to say it, but it is Bob Little’s land and he can do whatever he wants on it.”
She slammed the cup down, hopped up and paced. “They can not do anything they want. My property is there too and I have rights. I’m not stupid or senile either like that idiot Gifford Geller seems to think, telling me they were putting in a water well. Why the jackass thought I’d believe that when there’s city water right in front of my house, I don’t know, but I just played dumb and let him think I’d bought his pack of lies. He’s about as worthless a county commissioner as there is.”
