Word Gets Around

by Lisa Wingate

  I checked the clock. Dane would be arriving anytime. The phone beeped a low-battery warning, then died, as if to punctuate the thought that there was no point calling home base to see what was happening. So far, I didn’t have any good news to report.

  The truck sputtered again as I rounded the last corner. There in the parking lot, in all its airbrushed glory, was Justin’s vehicle. Even though it was hard to miss, towering over normal cars, I blinked, and blinked again, afraid it would disappear like a mirage. I felt a rush of gratitude, which quickly ebbed, leaving a mixed debris of anger and desire to drag Justin out of the truck and lay a right cross on him. Idiot. Jerk. Moron. Loser …

  Murderous impulses replaced the fluffy benevolence of prayer as I skidded to a halt, trapping Justin’s truck between a lamppost and my vehicle. The PHD truck coughed and sighed, sounding exhausted as I turned off the engine.

  I was out of my ride and climbing up to the cab of the Horse-manmobile before my truck could sputter into silence. Justin barely reacted when I yanked open the passenger side door. He wasn’t doing anything, just sitting there with the prescription bottle and his hand full of little white pills.

  “Stop it!” Leaning across the seat, I smacked his forearm, sending everything skittering through the truck. The bottle collided with the dashboard, and pills rained against the seat and the floor like hailstones. “You idiot! What are you doing?”

  He sat staring at his hand for what felt like an eternity. Maybe he’s already too stoned to know I’m here. … I pictured sitting at the hospital while the doctors forced charcoal down his stomach and pumped it out. You’d think once or twice through that routine would be enough to cure a person.

  “Hey!” he complained in delayed reaction, his head swiveling to take in the potpourri of pills. Leaning toward the gearshift, he picked up the bottle and started putting the pills back in one by one.

  “Leave it.” I snatched the container from his hand and tossed it over my shoulder, sending it clattering into the parking lot. “How much did you take?”

  “I didn’t take … anything.” The standard denial came in a slurry mix of emotion and indignance as he stretched toward the floor. Air escaped his body in a long sigh, and he hung hunched over his legs like an underinflated superhero balloon. “I just want … wanted one to … ” The sentence collapsed, unfinished.

  Grabbing the back of his shirt, I pulled him upright. He was dressed in his horseman clothes, as if at some point he’d intended to actually go through with the day as planned. “How many did you take?” I demanded again, as his head thumped loosely against the back window glass. His eyes popped open, then fell closed. His cheeks were wet with tears and salt, his mouth tight. “Look at me, Justin.” I shook him, trying to see how dilated his pupils were. “Open your eyes and look at me.”

  “I didn’t have … take … any, Nate,” he sobbed. “I didn’t take … I just wanted one to … smooth the edge … off. I flushed the stuff I had at the hotel. I flushed it the other day.” His shoulders rose and lowered, and he seemed like he was falling asleep.

  “You’re not doing this.” Doubling his collar in my fist, I yanked him off the seat with a force that rattled his head back and forth.

  “Get out!” he roared and aimed a sloppy right hook in my direction. “Get away from me!” He followed with a jab I barely had time to deflect.

  “You’re not doing this again. You’re not bailing out on this project,” I said as the punch collided with the steering wheel and the horn blared.

  Through a haze of moisture, Justin gave me a vicious look. “This project was a stupid idea. You should have told me that, Nate. You’re like all the rest of them. You just want something. Everybody wants something. Everybody uses everybody. That’s what Mama says.”

  I wasn’t sure who “Mama” was. His mother, maybe? In all the years I’d known him, he’d never mentioned her. I only knew about her because I’d overheard a social worker talking to Mama Louise when we were young.

  “Mama knows.” He punctuated the words with a rueful laugh. “She knows you’re just a stupid, worthless little … She knows.” He let his head fall against the window again, stared at me from beneath lowered lashes. “She knows how people are.”

  It occurred to me to wonder if Justin was having a complete emotional collapse, a nervous breakdown. I’d seen him close to the edge before. I’d seen him topple over it with the help of booze or pills, but I’d never seen him like this. Sober, yet drunk with emotion, incoherent.

  I leaned over, tried to get him to focus on me. His eyes were glassy and dull. “Come on, Justin. You can’t buy into that stuff. At some point, you’ve got to turn off the voices in your head. You know those people in Daily believe in this project. They believe in The Horseman. They believe in you.” Somehow, in the space of a week, we’d come full circle. Now I was the one begging him not to let the project die.

  “You’re such an … stupid, Nate. They’re just like everybody else. Big town, little town. It’s all the same.”

  “You promised them something.” From the corner of my eye, I caught the time on the digital clock. Dane would be there by now. “The whole town is counting on you. They’re counting on this project.”

  Justin’s head rolled side to side. “Randall’s got a project for me.”

  “Randall’s got garbage for you!” My voice reverberated through the truck. “He’s got junk, and he’ll bury you in it until you can’t get up again. Come on, Justin. This is our chance to do something that matters. Think about all those kids who’ll come to that shelter and get to run around in the grass, and breathe fresh air, and know that life doesn’t have to be bad. Think about the people who’ll see this film and maybe stop to think about what they’re doing to each other. We all get the scars because someone put them there—just like Lucky Strike, right? Just like the horseman. This story means something. It’s the start of something. M. Harrison Dane agreed to look at it, for heaven’s sake. We’ve got to be there to show him what this project can mean.”

  Justin didn’t answer, just sat staring out the window, his eyes reflecting the pharmacy billboard and a passing cloud.

  “It’s time. It’s time to change things.”

  He took in a breath, held it, let it out, his stare still glassy and unfocused. “Amber wants … she said I should go to … to some rehab … some … stupid place to do rehab and pray. I called her on the … with the pay phone. … I asked her to go back to LA with me, and—” he laughed ruefully, shaking his head—“she told me I didn’t need her—I need God … and … and more stupid rehab.”

  Good for Amber. She was smarter than I’d given her credit for. She knew enough to realize that fixing the broken parts of Justin Shay was a job for someone bigger than she was. “I think she’s right,” I said flatly. “After we convince Dane to attach himself to this deal, there’s going to be lag time while we work on the studio, assemble the production team, and finish the script. I think you need to spend that time in rehab. The first step toward getting your life right is getting off the pills.”

  “Pppfff!” He spat. “You sound like her. You gonna pray for me, too? That’s what she said—that they’d all pray for me here.”

  “I think they will.” If Daily prayers weren’t answered, I couldn’t imagine what kind might be. “These people love you, Justin. They care about you. I care about you. I don’t want to see you flush your life down the toilet. I want to see you give this project all you’ve got. I want to see you get in touch with Steph, see about Brody and Bryn. They deserve to know they’ve got a dad out there who cares about them enough to get off the stuff, make a decent life. You can’t keep running out on them like your mom ran out on you. You can’t. You know, and I know, if you keep doing what you’re doing, sooner or later you’ll check out—with the pills, in the car, whatever—and you won’t be here for them at all. Deep down, you know that, or you wouldn’t have left LA to come here in the first place.”

  Justin rolled his
head to the side, turning his face away. Folding his hand into a fist, he tapped his knuckles against the bridge of his nose, slowly, rhythmically, as if he were trying to block out everything else in his head. Finally, he stopped, and I was afraid he’d fallen asleep. Then I decided that might be a good thing. I could stuff him in the passenger seat, head for Daily, and hope a little rest and a forty-mile drive would put him in a better frame of mind.

  He muttered a few words I couldn’t understand, and then, “My truck won’t … It won’t start. I think it’s out of gas.”

  I felt something between a laugh and a sigh of relief, and then the vague realization of an answered prayer, however strange. That’s what you get for praying his truck would break down, doofus. “We can go in mine.” I hope. I hope the PHD mobile’s got enough fuel for a return trip. On the way down, I’d discerned that the truck ran on a propane tank in the bed. I had no way to put fuel in it, nor would I have known how.

  “I left the script back at the hotel.”

  “I brought another one for you.” After the dramatic conversation, it was a surprisingly nondramatic ending. “Let’s go.”

  Nodding, Justin took the key from the ignition, then looked around at the pills. I waited to see if he would grab one or two. He seemed to think about it, then finally just brushed them out of the way and climbed down from the truck, little white pills falling off of him like rain. I met him at the PHD mobile.

  “You came in this?” he asked, eyeing the giant corkscrew suspended over the flatbed.

  “It was all I could get on short notice.”

  “Is it gonna make it back?”

  “I hope so.” Climbing into our ride, I turned the key and the engine wheezed, wheezed, wheezed, then coughed, squealed, and grumbled begrudgingly to life. “Buckle up.” I grabbed the proposal packet from the dash, where it rested on a pile of receipts and some drawings of Justin’s ranch gateway. “This is going to be a wild ride.”

  We returned to Daily in record time, considering that the truck took forever to rev up to third gear and was moody about going into fourth. We didn’t talk. I didn’t want to, and Justin was occupied with the proposal—getting focused, I hoped. I left him alone, kept my complaints about the traffic and the truck to myself, because I had a sense that any little thing could upset the horseman’s tenuous return. I hoped that, when we got to the ranch, he was up to the task. He was going to have to sell Dane on the project, and to do that, he needed to be fully lucid, on top of his game.

  When we rolled through Daily, the place looked strangely deserted. The stores were closed, which probably wasn’t unusual on a Sunday, but even the Daily Café had shut down. The lack of atmosphere on Main Street was disappointing. I wanted Dane to see Daily as it really was. In the treatment, I’d set several scenes in town.

  “Who died?” Justin poked his nose out of the script long enough to look around.

  The horseman, I’m afraid, I thought, but I didn’t say it. A haunting possibility formed in my mind—one in which Dane, upon arriving in Daily and finding The Shay conspicuously absent, had gotten back on the plane and taken off. Now everyone in town was at home, mourning the demise of the film project.

  I left off considering the worst case scenario as we sped through town and took a left before the Buy-n-Bye. The post truck blew smoke rings, the gears grinding and the auger swinging in a squeaky pendulum, ticking away the minutes like a giant clock. I tried to think positively, to believe that Dane, now in Daily for almost an hour, was happily enjoying a tour of the ranch, so enthralled with the ongoing construction and plans for the future foster shelter that he hadn’t even noticed his host was nowhere to be found. Maybe Amber had made it back from her publicity trip and she was crooning a little southern gospel to entertain everyone.

  It was a nice scene, charming to imagine, if hard to believe.

  My knuckles drummed impatiently on the steering wheel as we skidded around corners and chugged up hills, me downshifting repeatedly to make it to the top and Justin shooting me irritated looks because he was trying to study the packet.

  “I think I’m sick,” he complained as we bumped through a low-water crossing, the back and forth motion making the post drill almost turn a three-sixty.

  “Don’t you get sick in here,” I said, as if by threatening him I could prevent it. “I mean it, Shay. You keep it together. We’re almost to the ranch.”

  The little church and Amber’s house whizzed past the window. A couple miles farther, and we’d find out if there was still a chance or if all was lost.

  Justin swiped an arm across his forehead. “Oh, man, I’m gonna hurl. Stop here.”

  “Hold it.” I wondered if he had any concept of the dire nature of our present situation. We were ridiculously late. We had only about two daylight hours left to woo Dane, if he was, by some slim chance, still present and even remotely woo-able.

  What were the odds of that?

  “Stop the car!” Justin demanded, slamming his fist against the door. “I said I don’t feel good.”

  “I don’t care!” One more mile, just one more mile. “Cowboy up, already.” I was surprised to find myself spouting the cowpoke code, but at the moment, I was willing to try anything.

  “You sound like Willie.”

  “Well, Willie’s right.” I shored up the crumbling walls of Fort Hope as the ranch came into view. “And by the way, cut the guy a break. If you had cancer, you might not want to broadcast it to everybody, either.”

  Justin curled his lip. “He should have told me.”

  “Everything’s not about you.” I swung the truck wide into the gateway to keep from downshifting. “Maybe he didn’t do it to you, maybe he just did it. You ever consider that? The man probably has his reasons.”

  “Yeah, whatever,” Justin muttered. “He … ” The sentence faded as he leaned close to the window, squinting against the evening sun. The field near the old house was filled with cars, pickups, horse trailers, farm trucks. There was even a team of mules pulling a hay wagon across the driveway, and people riding on the hay. They were laughing and making gestures in the air, as if they were doing some sort of organized cheer together. … No, not cheering … they were singing … “Old MacDonald.” I rolled down the window, and over the rumble of the engine, I could hear the words.

  “What the … ” Justin and I exchanged bewildered glances as the hay wagon passed on its way toward the gate. There were kids on board, lots of kids, and a few men and women, too. I thought I recognized Dane’s wife among them, perched on a bale of hay, laughing as she bounced a baby on her knee. In the back of the wagon, I caught a glimpse of Amber with a guitar … or at least it looked like Amber. Her face was hidden beneath a pink cowboy hat, so I couldn’t exactly tell.

  “What’s going on?” Justin pointed at the house. On every level, from the roof to the front steps, people were working—sanding, painting, sweeping, nailing, washing windows, repairing shingles. By one of the chicken house foundations out back, a group of men were raising a new wall. I recognized them—Bob from the café, and the countertoppers. Outside the food tent, Pastor Harve and crew were cleaning up the leftovers from a meal. They waved at us as we pulled in. Justin waved back, and the two of us shared an exchange of complete confusion as we got out.

  From the shadows inside the tent, I heard Willie and Frank telling some story about taking horses from a kids’ riding stable in Texas, trucking them to California, and renting them to movie studios for five times the price, back in the days of the big westerns. “Yeah, by gosh, I figured if Girl Scouts could ride ’em, they’d sure enough do for actors!” Willie exclaimed, and laughter drifted into the open air.

  As we stepped inside and my eyes adjusted to the light, I saw M. Harrison Dane, the M. Harrison Dane, in the flesh, along with Willie, Frank, Imagene, Donetta, and Brother Erve from the Baptist church chatting it up at a picnic table made from an old electrical cable spool. The table was covered with paper plates, Styrofoam cups, blueprints, and pie
ces of paper, which I recognized as bits of The Horseman treatment. My blood, sweat, and tears lay mixed with used napkins and spatters of barbecue sauce, like so much trash. Not a good sign.

  Donetta was the first to greet us. “Well hoowww-do!” She stood up and crossed the tent with her arms outstretched and a smile that seemed like it went from fingertip to fingertip. “Y’all come right on in hay-er. We were just finishin’ up some good ol’ Texas pork ribs. You hun-greee?” She hugged Justin, then me, the volume of her voice growing ear-piercing up close. “I was just tellin’ Mr. Dane it was a lucky coincidence he got here on the very day we were havin’ a party to celebrate the foster shelter plans. Isn’t that the luckiest thang?” Widening her eyes at Justin and me, she nodded meaningfully.

  “Sshhhure,” Justin stammered, slowly beginning to bob his head as if it were rubber banded to Donetta’s. “Sure is … good he … came during the … party?” For an actor, he wasn’t very convincing.

  Donetta winked like she had a tic in her eye. “Well, come on over and say hi. I told Mr. Dane you were tied up a bit earlier, but it was fine, because it gave us all time to tour the ranch, look at all the plans for the foster shelter buildin’s, visit and talk about the movie and have some fun with the kids. It’s just fascinatin’—about the movie, I mean, and they’re sure cute—the kids. I’ll tell ye-ew, I don’t believe I ever saw such a cute bunch, and that oldest boy! He just can’t get enough of them horses. Why, he’s down at the barn with Lauren right now. Reckon we ought to go down there and y’all can take a look at Lucky Strike, or do you two boys want to talk here first? We still got Imagene’s gen-u-ine Daily apple pie ready to serve up. You hadn’t lived till you had Imagene’s apple pie. She’s gonna be on Good Mornin’ America with that pie one’a these days.”