by LS Hawker
Or was it the other way around?
“Yeah,” Dekker said.
“Maybe that’s why he went nuts,” Roxanne said.
“Yeah,” Dekker said. “Your mom had an affair with a guy she and your dad worked with. And . . . she got pregnant.”
I held my breath. Dekker continued.
“Your dad wrote that he didn’t know if he could ever forgive her for getting pregnant with another man’s child.”
I could feel Roxanne and Curt’s anxiety like an electromagnetic field.
“He told her if she got an abortion, it would be easier to forgive her. So your dad keeps writing to your mom about how hurt he is that she cheated on him, how she betrayed him and all that, but you can tell he’s still completely in love with her. He finally says he forgives her and he’ll do anything to make it work . . . he’ll even raise the kid as if she’s his own. That kid is you.”
I sat down on the ground hard. Roxanne immediately plopped down next to me, followed by Dekker.
My dad . . . wasn’t my dad. I flashed through a thousand memories of Dad barking at me to get him a sandwich. Dad yelling “Faster, faster, dammit! You can run faster than that, I know you can! You’re goldbricking!” Or sitting motionless as I tried to tell him something and him saying, “I’m not in the mood to talk tonight, Petty.” But in the last five years, he was never, ever in the mood to talk. Dad sitting in his chair, staring blank-eyed at the TV, nonresponsive. Dadnotmydad. My whole, miserable life, spent with . . . this man. Not related to me. Nothing to do with me. Not my father.
Lightning split the sky, close enough to us that the thunder following it shook the ground I sat on.
“Petty, we need to go in,” Curt said. “Lightning.”
It was as if I’d left my body for a time and then reentered it. I didn’t know how long I’d been sitting there. I didn’t know when the sky had gotten so dark, or when the temperature had dropped. The thick, solid charcoal-colored ceiling of clouds was moving closer.
“Petty.” Roxanne stood and held out a hand to me. I took it and let her pull me to my feet and lead me into the house.
“Dekker, there’s a blanket in the hall closet,” Curt said.
Roxanne put me in her dad’s leather chair and sat on the arm. “Oh, sweetie,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
Dekker ran and got the blanket, and put it around me. Curt squatted down in front of me and rubbed my blanket-covered shoulders. “Let’s get you warmed up here. You’re gonna be all right.”
I couldn’t stop shivering. Roxanne slid down the arm, wedged herself into the chair with me and put her arm around me, her head on my head.
Curt brought me a glass of water, which I gratefully drank.
Dekker sat on the couch. “Petty, do you realize what this means?” he said. “Your real dad might still be out there somewhere. He might still be in Denver.”
“And my mom really might still be alive,” I said, and as I did, goose bumps sprang up on my arms, setting me to shivering all over again.
My mom. Marianne. I pictured her and my real dad in a house a lot like this one, warm and cozy with pretty paintings on the walls and a refrigerator full of food.
Curt went into the dining room. I could hear him gathering the letters. “I know Michael Rhones did some crazy, shitty stuff, no question,” he called. “But, I gotta tell you. If Rita had cheated on me and had a baby . . . I kind of feel sorry for the guy, you know?”
I didn’t. Curt hadn’t lived through what I had with this person who wasn’t my father after all. Curt was just a kindhearted man who didn’t know any better, so I let this slide. He walked out of the dining room, rubber-banding the letters back together.
“Wait,” I said. “I want to read them for myself.”
“Later,” he said. “We’ve wasted enough time today. I know you’re shell-shocked, but you gotta get on the road. Run and get your stuff together and I’ll pull the Challenger around to the front of the house.”
“Dad,” Roxanne said. “You never even let me drive the Challenger to the grocery store.” She crossed her arms and pouted.
“Sorry, Rox,” Curt said. “It’s the newest car I have. It’s got GPS and satellite radio, and it’s fast.” He hugged his daughter and kissed the top of her head. “I promise when Dekker brings it back, you can drive it.” He went out the front door.
Roxanne stuck her tongue out at Dekker. “You better not screw that car up,” she said. “I mean it, now.” She pulled me up out of the chair and the blanket fell from my shoulders. “Let’s go get you packed.”
I followed her and Dekker up the stairs and went into Chloe’s room. I opened my suitcase lid, which blocked the bottom half of the cracked-open window. I could still see the tops of trees, which were being whipped by the wind. My cash was in my suitcase but I decided to put it in my front jeans pocket so I’d have it on me.
“I wish you didn’t have to go,” Roxanne said from behind me.
“Me too,” I said.
Before I could react, she wrapped her arms around my waist and pulled me to her, hugging me tight. I hugged her back, and tried to understand how she could so easily express herself and so casually show affection. If this was what having friends was like, I wanted a lot more of it.
“Okay,” she said, letting me go. She looked in my suitcase and gasped. “That’s a lot of guns.”
“Yes,” I said.
I heard Curt pulling the Challenger up out front, rubber tires crushing gravel. I shut the lid of my suitcase, and with a jolt I saw it wasn’t the Challenger. It was a blue-and-white. State police.
“They’re here,” Dekker said from his room. “They’re here.” He ran into the room. “The cops just pulled up. We gotta hide!”
“If they’ve got a warrant, there’s nowhere to hide,” I said. “We have to get out the back door. Now.” I reached for my suitcase.
“You won’t get very far dragging a fucking suitcase full of guns,” Roxanne said.
“I need them,” I said, unzipping it.
She looked out the window. “Go, Dekker,” she said. “Out the back door. Go.”
He ran for the stairs and I heard him racing down them.
“Leave the suitcase,” Roxanne said.
“How are you going to explain this?” I said. “You’ll get in all kinds of—”
“Listen to me,” Roxanne said, taking me by the shoulders. Though she was much smaller than me, she shook me and I stopped fighting. She was right; I had to leave the suitcase. But I was taking the laptop.
“There’s a little door to the attic in the back of my closet,” she said. “I’ll put the suitcase and guns in there. When you come back—and you will—they’ll be waiting here for you. Now go.”
She hugged me briefly, the laptop squeezed between us, spun me around and pushed me toward the door. I ran. When I got to the bottom of the stairs, I caught a glimpse of Curt standing on the front porch talking and gesturing, his back to the door, the cops advancing.
I crouched and ran toward the back door where Dekker waited for me.
“The letters!” I hissed.
“Leave them,” Dekker said.
“But—”
“Let’s go!”
I saw them sitting on the coffee table and darted for them, but I couldn’t get to them before I heard the front doorknob turning and Curt’s voice. I ran for the open back door. Dekker was already outside. I slipped through the sliding glass door sideways as he closed it behind me. We ran for the copse of trees near the road and stopped there. The dark clouds boiled above us, and Dekker breathed noisily beside me.
“Quiet,” I said.
“I can’t help it.”
“Try.”
“I am trying!”
“That’s what you get for smoking, you know,” I said.
>
He gave me a furious look. “Nobody can hear anything we do over this wind. Should we wait here, you think?” Dekker said. “Wait until they’ve gone?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “They’ll search around the property once they’re done with the house.”
“How are we supposed to get out of here?”
I peeked around the tree.
Roxanne came out the back door and said over her shoulder, “Dad, I’m going to wait out here while they search. Come get me when they’re done, okay?” She closed the door behind her. Nonchalantly, she made an away motion with her hands.
I spied a tractor out near the road. “Can you drive that?”
“If it has keys,” Dekker said. “But those things only go about twenty miles an hour.”
“We just need to get a few miles away and then we can hitchhike.”
I looked around the tree again, and Roxanne threw a glance over her shoulder and repeated the shooing motion with her hands.
“Let’s go,” I said, clutching the laptop to my chest. I ran for the tractor, which was about a quarter of a mile away. Multiple forks of lightning sliced the sky into silver ribbons, followed by quick bursts of thunder. The dark clouds were moving fast, and I saw a vast column of heavy rain headed our way.
When I got to the tractor, I went around the far side of it, crouched low and waited for Dekker as the first drops of rain began to fall. It took him another thirty seconds to get there, and I watched, praying no one would come out the back door and see this tall gangly guy running like a scarecrow. He got to the tractor and stopped in front of it, doubled over, his hands on his knees.
The sliding glass door opened. I dove beneath the tractor and yanked Dekker’s feet from under him, knocking him to the ground.
“Don’t move,” I said.
He froze, as much as he could, gasping for air the way he was.
“Okay, now slowly crawl underneath to the other side of the tractor,” I whispered.
He shoved my hands off him and army crawled. We sat up against the large tire, Dekker getting his wind back.
Forked arrows of lightning trisected the sky in every direction almost continuously. Each clout of thunder burst sooner than the one before and tapered off with a threatening growl that crescendoed into the following explosion.
“Don’t ever do that again,” he said.
“I will if I have to,” I said. “They would have seen you.”
“You could have just told me to get down.”
“Can we argue about this later?” I looked around the tire. Curt had joined Roxanne on the deck along with a police officer. “There’s a cop out there with Curt and Roxanne.”
Dekker looked. “Okay. We’ll wait until he goes back inside and then I’ll try to start this thing, because it’s going to make a lot of noise.”
“What difference does it make? It’s farm machinery on a farm.”
“But no farmer would be out in his tractor when it’s raining.”
“Do they know that?”
He made a growling noise. “I wish I’d called in sick yesterday.”
“Me too,” I said. “Then I wouldn’t have to listen to your endless whining.”
“If I had, you’d be on your way to Detroit. Or in jail.”
I peeked around the tire again. Another cop car had pulled up to the house. The cop on the back deck stayed put, even though the rain was getting heavier. Roxanne went in, and Curt beckoned the cop inside the house, but he wasn’t going anywhere.
“More cops,” I said. “We have to go now.”
“No. Not until he goes inside.”
“He’s not going inside!”
Dekker growled again and looked for himself. “Shit.”
He got to his knees and tried the door on the tractor. It opened. He slowly crawled into the cab. “Shit,” he said again. “No keys. And it only has one seat.”
I hoped the rain would prevent the cops from walking the property, or we would have to crawl away from here. I noticed the sky, how it was closer now and moving fast with oddly lace-edged, charcoal clouds spinning end over end.
I slid Dad’s laptop onto the floor of the cab.
“Who gives a shit about the laptop! I told you there are no— Oh.” I heard the jingle of keys. “They were up in the visor.” Dekker exhaled. “Okay, get in here on the floor, although I don’t know how you’re going to fit.”
My shirt was already soaked through from the rain and my hair was dripping. But I crawled in as far as I could, getting tangled in Dekker’s long legs.
“Put them to the side,” I said.
“I have to run the pedals.”
“I’ll do it by hand,” I said. Still, I couldn’t get all the way in. My butt and legs stuck out of the opening. “You’re going to have to hold onto the door.”
He did.
“Okay,” I said. “Start it up.”
“I hope this is a direct injection engine,” Dekker said. “Push down the clutch, the leftmost pedal. Once the motor starts to turn, push on the rightmost pedal. That’s the gas.”
I shoved the left pedal to the floor and held my breath as Dekker stuck the key in the ignition and turned it. The diesel engine came to life as I pushed on the gas pedal and let go of the clutch. The tractor jerked forward and died.
“You can’t let go of the clutch until I tell you,” Dekker said, with more patience than I would have expected. “Let’s try it again.”
We did. I kept the clutch pushed in until he put it in gear. Then I let go too fast and the tractor lurched forward again but kept going.
“The cop’s looking this way,” Dekker said.
“Don’t look at him,” I said. It was so tight and humid inside that tiny space, sweat ran into my eyes and dripped off my nose. It itched like crazy but I couldn’t do anything about it. Not being able to see what was going on was torture, but Dekker narrated for me.
“Okay, I’m heading for the road,” he said. “Oh, no. The cop is walking toward us.”
“Don’t look at him!”
“I’m not. I can see him in my peripheral vision.”
“Drive.”
The sound of the rain on the roof changed from a pleasant piano solo to rocks in a cement mixer. The wind outside shrieked. I felt a creeping dread.
“Holy crap,” Dekker said. “Where are the windshield wipers on this thing? I can’t see a thing.”
“Just go forward.”
“I am!”
My butt and legs, still sticking out the door, were soaked. I heard a plink, and then another.
“Of course,” Dekker said. “Hail.”
The plinks accelerated and soon my back end was being pelted painfully with hailstones. Dekker kept going.
“Can you see the cop?” I said.
“I can’t see anything,” Dekker said grimly. He reached toward the dashboard and switched on the radio. The only sound was the rhythmic buzzing of an emergency broadcast. “Oh, fuck. Fuck.”
“The National Weather Service has issued a tornado warning for Pottawatomie County until four-thirty Central Daylight Time. At three-thirty, National Weather Service Doppler radar indicated a severe thunderstorm capable of producing a tornado. This dangerous storm was located ten miles southeast of Wamego moving northeast at thirty miles per hour. Large hail and damaging thunderstorm winds are expected . . .”
Dekker seized me around the waist, dragged me onto his lap, banging my head on the ceiling, and yanked the door shut with some difficulty. The tractor died and Dekker put on the hand brake.
“It’s right over us,” he said, squeezing the air out of me, his face in my neck. Anxiety set in, but not because of the storm. It was the close contact that was giving me vertigo and tunnel vision.
“I do solemnly swear,” I whispered, “t
o uphold the Constitution of the United States . . .”
I heard a tornado siren in the distance, which the wind outscreamed in volume.
“We have to go back,” Dekker shouted.
“Where’s back?” I said.
“We have to get in Uncle Curt’s shelter.”
All I could see was gray water pouring down the windshield backed by a weird green glow. Thunder sounded all around. Darkness devoured us. The pressure in my ears alternated painfully as the buffeting winds forced the tractor to rock tire to tire. Hail pelting metal sounded like gunfire. Only the continuous lightning broke up the blackness.
“No, no, no, no,” Dekker said, and the terror I felt, the certainty we were about to die painfully, swallowed up my conscious mind and I began screaming.
The air raid siren deepened in pitch until it was no longer a sound but a vibration that could burst eardrums and eyeballs and peel your skin off. The rocking accelerated until it seemed as if the tractor was trying to run away.
Then we rose in the air.
Chapter 18
THE FIRST THING I thought when I woke up staring at the sky, a wedge of brownish light at one end and black angry clouds at the other, was that I wanted a cigarette. I reached up to scratch my nose and came away with a handful of glass slivers and cuts. In fact, my hand was covered with blood.
I was trapped beneath a dead weight pinning my pelvis to the ground. I lifted my head. It was Petty, lying crosswise over me, her face in the mud.
With a jolt of terror-fueled adrenaline, I reached forward and shoved, rolling her across my knees and feet, sending missiles of pain up my legs. She ended up on her back, her face clotted with blood and mud. She gasped a gulp of air and her eyes flew open as she sprang to her feet, looking around wildly.
“Dad?”
“Petty.” I got to my feet just as she charged at me. “Petty, it’s me. Dekker.”
She stopped and bent sideways, clutching her side and groaning. “What happened? I feel like I’ve been hit by a truck.”
“Tornado,” I said. “We gotta get out of here.”
The tornado siren was still blaring in the distance. I turned in a circle and saw that the tornado had moved us a good fifty yards closer to Uncle Curt’s house, which was still standing, thank God. No doubt Uncle Curt and Roxanne had herded all the cops down into the tornado shelter. Their cruisers were still parked, undisturbed, in front of the house.
