“What’s up, Gramps?” Brian said, finally taking a seat.
“Funny you ask that question, Brian,” Seamus said, raising his bacon fork. “I just got a call from my priest friend in town. Father Walter needs help in accomplishing a corporal work of mercy this morning, and I think I’ve found just the people for the job.”
I knew it, Brian thought, rubbing his tired eyes. All aboard. Next stop, Chore City. He wasn’t sure what the word corporal meant, but work was something he had become infinitely familiar with in the family’s rural exile.
“Now,” Seamus said jovially, “who can tell me what the corporal works of mercy are?”
“Visit imprisoned people like us,” Brian mumbled.
“Very good, Brian. Visit the imprisoned. Anyone else?”
“Um, clothe the naked?” Eddie said, trying to keep a straight, pious face, and failing.
“Yes, Eddie. Clothe the naked. Why did I think you of all people would remember that one? Anyone else?”
“Feed the hungry,” Jane said, eyeing the bacon.
“Bingo, Jane. Feed the hungry. That’s the one Father Walter needs our help with. Father just received a large shipment of donated canned goods and needs help with distribution. We have to go to the rectory and run the supplies over to a remote food bank in a tiny, poor part of the county and dole them out. I thought it would be a nice opportunity for the three of you. I know you’ve been complaining about not getting out.”
“But what about Dad?” Eddie said. “Didn’t he say we have to stay on the farm? No exceptions?”
“I’m in charge, Eddie,” Seamus said, pouring himself a cup of coffee. “People need our help, and we’re going to help them. Evil wins when good men do nothing.”
“We’re not men, though, Gramps. We’re kids,” Brian complained. “And I thought you said we weren’t in trouble.”
Seamus smiled as he lifted a pan off the stove and brought it over.
“Thanks for volunteering to help, Brian,” he said as he piled some bacon onto Brian’s plate.
“There’s a special place in heaven for young saints like yourself.”
CHAPTER 36
THE FOOD BANK WAS in a little town called Sunnyville, a few miles south of Susanville.
Getting out of the van with Seamus, Jane wondered if the town’s name was supposed to be ironic. Because there wasn’t anything sunny about it. It wasn’t even a town, really. Just a collection of ramshackle houses, a barnlike building that looked like a bar of some kind, and a place that sold snowmobiles and dirt bikes.
What it looked like was something from a serial killer movie, she thought. Right down to the creepy, weird sound of an unseen wind chime tinkling as they got out of the station wagon. Even the shedlike building they used for the food bank looked weird, she thought as she grabbed a case of Chef Boyardee. It looked like a caboose.
The caboose of a train that was smart enough to cut out of this godforsaken place a long, long time ago, Jane thought.
They were going up the stairs with the heavy boxes when she saw that there was another collection of buildings, to the rear of the food bank. It was a trailer park. A huge, excessively run-down one. As she watched, there was a sudden roar, and a heavy woman riding a motorcycle shot out from between two of the decrepit structures.
If they got out of this alive, she’d never complain about the farm again, she decided as she dropped off the cans and went back for more.
It took them about half an hour just to get the boxes inside the food bank caboose and unpacked. The food was mostly divided between canned stuff—Campbell’s soups, SpaghettiOs, Del Monte fruit—and dry goods: macaroni and cheese, ramen noodles, hot cocoa. When they were done arranging the shelves, it looked like a grocery store.
A line of people from the trailer park formed quickly. It was obvious they were in bad straits. Whites, blacks, Hispanics. All of them poor. All of them about as desperate as migrant workers out of work got.
Jane and Eddie ran around behind the counter, putting together the orders, while Seamus and Brian worked clipboards, checking IDs of people who were on the church’s food bank giving list.
They were just about all out of food when the gang of trailer-park kids came around. There were about seven of them, ranging in age from eight to thirteen, as desperate-looking as their parents. They wore filthy T-shirts and jeans, filthy sneakers. One of them, a dopey-looking white kid with an Afro puff of curly brown hair, didn’t even have shoes, Jane noticed in horror from behind the counter.
“Hey, you guys like baseball?” the oldest of them, a short Hispanic kid, said with a nice-enough smile. “I’m Guillermo. We got a little field back here, and we were wondering if you guys wanted to play.”
Before they could answer, Guillermo turned to Seamus, showing him the dinged-up aluminum bat he was holding.
“Would that be OK, Father? Could they play some baseball with us?”
“That would be fine, kids. Just don’t go too far. We’ll be leaving soon enough.”
Jane stood behind the counter, frozen. She stared at her grandfather like he was crazy. She didn’t want to play baseball with California’s version of Children of the Corn. She was twelve! And a girl!
“C’mon, now. Jane, Eddie, c’mon out from behind there,” Seamus said. “You’ve been a big help today. You can play for a little while with them while Brian stays here with me to clean up.”
Jane and Eddie looked at each other.
“Yeah, c’mon,” Guillermo said, patting Eddie on the shoulder as they left the food bank. “It’s this way.”
They went behind the food bank caboose, toward a stand of pines and oaks. Behind about twenty yards of trees was their field. It looked comically bad. There was a flat plain of red dirt with a tree for first, a large, dangerous-looking rock for second, and a rusted hunk of metal that might have once been a motor for a refrigerator for third base. The newest-looking object in sight was a tall fence that bordered the outfield, with barbed wire running along the top.
Eddie looked at the fence and then at the circle of poor kids standing around them, staring silently. For the first time, he noticed that none of the kids had a ball. Did they use rocks or something?
“Um, you want to choose sides or what?” Eddie said to Guillermo.
Guillermo laughed.
“No,” he said, shoving Eddie hard in the chest. “I want your money. Cough it up, you little bitch.”
CHAPTER 37
“WHAT?” EDDIE SAID IN amazement. “Wait, you’re joking, right? C’mon, are we going to play, or what?”
Guillermo shoved him again, harder.
“I’m not kidding. Give me your money.”
“Don’t forget his iPhone, G,” said the kid with no shoes. “You know some do-gooder city kid got an iPhone, dawg.”
Guillermo grabbed Eddie roughly by his shirt and poked him hard in the chin with the tip of the grungy metal bat.
Jane started crying then. This wasn’t happening. How could this be happening?
“Give me everything you have, or I’m going to knock the shit out of you,” Guillermo said.
“I knew it!” Brian yelled as he came running from behind the trees off to the right.
Guillermo froze in place as the six-foot-one former Fordham Prep nose tackle grabbed him by his shirt and shoved him, sprawling, onto the ground.
The trailer-park kids scattered immediately into the woods as the kid and his bat went flying. Jane stood there, wide-eyed. She didn’t know what she wanted to do more: wrap her arms around her big brother’s neck or do a cartwheel.
Brian picked up the bat.
“Hey, it’s OK, man. I was just playing around,” Guillermo said, dusting himself off as he finally stood. “Now give me the bat back, OK? I was only kidding.”
Brian hefted the bat.
“This bat?” Brian said. “You want this bat back?”
Brian turned and hurled it as hard as he could. It made a whistling sound as it spun through th
e air like a thrown airplane propeller. After a while, it landed out of sight, in the vegetation on the other side of the barbedwire fence.
“There’s your bat back, punk,” Brian said. “Go fetch.”
“Hey, why’d you do that?” Guillermo said in honest shock.
“I wonder,” Brian said, squinting at him. “You think you can mess with my little brother and sister? You’re lucky I didn’t return the bat upside your head.”
The kid looked at Brian, then at the fence, and suddenly started crying.
“I need the bat back. It belongs to my brother, man. Now he’s going to kill me.”
Brian eyed the kid.
“Then go get it, you little baby.”
“I can’t. Look where you threw it, man. Right into the middle of Cristiano’s patch.”
“So what? It’s a fence and some bushes. Start climbing.”
“Just some bushes? You crazy? Open your eyes. That’s weed, yo! That whole thing is a cash crop of premium weed. Cristiano don’t play. He’s got dogs, man. Rotties in there. Booby traps, too, people say. What goes in there, stays in there.”
“Did you say weed?” Jane asked. “As in marijuana? You can’t grow weed. That’s illegal.”
“Hello? Where the hell are you from? That’s all they grow around here,” Guillermo insisted, wiping tears from his eyes.
“And that makes you what? Cool or something?” Brian said, shaking with anger. This place is America? he thought. He really felt like punching the kid right in his face.
“Eddie, Jane, come on. We’re getting the hell out of here now,” Brian said.
“But what about my bat?” the kid screeched. “My brother, man. He’s going to go crazy!”
Brian turned to the kid and pointed a finger in his face.
“To hell with your bat, and to hell with you, too, you evil little runt. I hope your brother does kill you. He’ll be doing the world a favor.”
As they ran back to the food bank, Brian knew what he’d said wasn’t very Christian, but he was sick of this. These weird hippie families and messed-up poor people. All the drugs everywhere. I mean, they’d come here to help this morning, and Eddie had almost gotten beaten by some juvenile delinquent? How’d that make sense?
Seamus was closing the back door of the station wagon when they got back to the food bank.
“Did you win?” he asked as the kids quickly piled into the car.
“Oh, we won, Gramps,” Eddie said with an innocent smile. “Could we go now?”
“Is everything OK?” Seamus asked, staring at them.
“Fine,” Brian said, nervously looking over his shoulder, back at the trailer park. “Could we get going, though, Gramps? I, uh, really need to use the bathroom.”
“So do I,” said Eddie.
“And me too,” Jane said. “Really bad.”
“OK, then,” Seamus said, trying to turn the old car’s engine over. It wouldn’t catch.
No, Brian thought. Please, God. Please help us.
“Hold your horses, and, um, everything else,” Seamus said as he tried again.
The engine churned and chugged, but again there was nothing.
We’re going to be stranded, Brian thought. Stranded, and then the Lord of the Flies kids would come.
Then it caught. The big old muscle-car engine finally fired up, rumbling happily.
In the backseat, Brian crossed himself as Seamus got their rear in gear, and they finally pulled out.
CHAPTER 38
IT WAS FIVE-THIRTY A.M. when Mary Catherine led the horse out of the barn behind Aaron Cody’s house. It was still dark, and cold enough to see the plumes of the horse’s breath. She turned as a cow mooed forlornly somewhere off in the darkness to her left.
“And a fine good morning to you, too, madam,” she said over her shoulder. “Wonderful weather we’re having, don’tcha think?”
She smiled. When she could squeeze it in, her early-morning ride was by far the best part of her day. It was a moment to be still, a moment to be sane and serene before the kids got up and the chaos began.
“OK, now, Spike. Here we go,” she whispered soothingly as she gently mounted the gray quarter horse. As usual, the four-year-old gelding had been a little skittish about getting saddled, but once they got on the trail, she knew they’d get along fine.
It took the better part of half an hour to get up the range to her favorite spot. Spike knew it by heart by now, slowing by the high ridge’s edge even before she pulled the reins.
“You get me, Spike, don’t you?” she said, patting his scruffy head. “Now if only you were a man, all my dreams would come true.”
She watched in silence as the sun came up over the distant Sierra Nevada. As it did every morning, it literally put a chill down her spine. All that land. All that sky. The holy whistling of the cold wind as light split shadow and spilled down the rutted slopes.
It was the America right out of a children’s book, she thought. Any moment now, down from the mountain, she’d see some cowboys chasing Indians alongside a steam locomotive with a little red caboose.
As she took out the thermos she’d brought, she wondered what the daft, ever-wisecracking boyos in her hometown back in Ireland would say if they could see their skinny Mary Catherine all grown up and drinking her tea high in the saddle out here in the Wild West.
Nothing was the answer to that one, she thought, taking a sip, since every one of those ragamuffins would be struck speechless for once in their miserable lives.
Who was she kidding? She could hardly believe it herself, the way her life was turning out.
When she’d heard about the nanny job in New York City, she’d originally envisioned taking care of some megawealthy power couple’s two children, wheeling them in an expensive stroller through Central Park when she wasn’t taking them to art museums or helping them with their French. The gig she got instead, of course, couldn’t have been further from her expectations. Instead of the power couple, her boss was the NYPD’s busiest detective, and he didn’t have two kids but two kids multiplied by five.
But she’d done it. That was the funny part. By hook or by crook, over the last several years, she’d learned to effectively manage the rambunctious Bennett clan. Not only had she kept them mostly fed (those teens were bottomless pits), cleanly clothed, and educated, but what filled her with the most pride was that she was actually making strides in teaching them to take care of each other and themselves.
Though her work was at times quite painful and sometimes seemed hopeless, she was managing to accomplish the hardest, most important, and most unsung job on the face of the earth—raising a large crop of good human beings.
And just when she was cruising, just when she had achieved the mammoth task of getting down everyone’s schedules and tics in New York City, what happens? A criminal from one of Mike’s cases targets them all for assassination, and they’re ripped from their lives and deposited three thousand miles away, on a California cattle farm.
It was the most recent events that seemed the most impossible. That someone was actually out to kill her and the kids, someone she had never met, had never done anything to—she just couldn’t understand how any human being could actually be that inhuman.
But she knew it was true, of course. It certainly terrified her. Her dreams these days were mostly nightmares where she woke up expecting figures to be standing in the dark beside her bed. It had gotten so bad that she’d taken to loading one of the shotguns and laying it on the floor next to the bed, under a blanket. That helped, at least a little.
She flung the dregs of her tea on the ground and tightened the cap on the thermos. She let out a sigh as she tucked the thermos back into the saddlebag. Sleeping with one eye open, with a shotgun under the bed, she thought, shaking her head. She was out in the Wild West, all right.
As if reading her thoughts, Spike suddenly snorted out a kind of sigh himself.
Mary Catherine laughed as she scratched Spike between his ears.
“C’mon, old friend,” she said. “It’s getting late. I guess it’s time for us poor workhorses to get going. Time to head them off at the pass.”
CHAPTER 39
MARY CATHERINE GOT LOST on her way back to Cody’s farm.
It was her own dumb fault. As she led Spike through a stand of cypress and black oak, she’d spotted a smaller trail off the main one that she thought looked like a shortcut. But it wasn’t. After a while, the path started going up instead of down and turning in the wrong direction, north instead of south.
She was just about to give up on it, about half a mile in, when there was a rustle on her right and a man stepped out onto the trail behind her. Spike, startled, wheeled around, rearing back on his hind legs, almost throwing her.
Mary Catherine managed to calm the horse and get him completely turned around. She sat there, blinking at the figure. He was a scraggly, thin, young white guy in jeans and a plaid shirt with the sleeves cut off. Beneath his khaki bush hat, long brown hair fell to his shoulders.
There was also an olive-colored strap over his arm, and then she saw the black barrel of the rifle sticking up over his back.
Gun! she thought, freaking out. The cartel! They were here! We’ve been found out!
“Can I help you?” the young man said, something sharp in his voice.
Not the cartel? Some maniac, then? Mary Catherine thought, still round eyed and frozen in the saddle. An off-the-reservation militia person?
Then she realized it. Why he seemed angry. She actually clapped a hand to her forehead.
“Oh, no. I rode onto your property, didn’t I?” Mary Catherine said. “I’m so sorry. I’m staying at Aaron Cody’s place, and I went out for a morning ride. I thought this was a shortcut back. I’m such an idiot. I didn’t mean to trespass.”
“Oh, Mr. Cody’s. I see,” the guy said, the tension in his voice immediately gone.
He tipped back his hat and smiled, and Mary Catherine suddenly noticed how young he was. He was just a cute sixteen- or seventeen-year-old kid.
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