All of the Above

by Timothy Scott Bennett

  Cole rubbed an eye with the heel of his hand. “I suppose. I see them down on 100 quite often. But not up here in the hollow. Why? You think they’re looking for you?”

  “Of course.”

  Cole’s knees went weak. “You mean they know you’re around here?” Cole took a seat next to the wood stove and put a hand over his churning stomach.

  Linda smiled. “I doubt it. There hasn’t been enough time. But I would suppose it’s like this all over the country: police and sheriffs on the lookout. Their President is missing, Cole. I would guess most people take that pretty seriously.”

  Cole flushed in anger at the President’s tone. “Yeah. So what’s next? When do we get your leg fixed and when do you tell me what the hell’s going on and when does my life get back to normal again?”

  Linda let her body go slack on the sofa cushion behind her and closed her eyes. A great sigh escaped from her body, like a cloud of bats leaving a cave. “As for what’s going on, Cole,” she said at last, “I’m in trouble and I need your help. As for what’s next, I have no idea at the moment. The leg we fix ourselves as best we can.” She raised her head to look at Cole, her sharp, sad eyes glaring out through prison bars of desperation. “I don’t even know what normal is anymore.”

  Cole started to speak, then clamped his jaw shut tight and sighed through his teeth. “I’m sorry.”

  Linda waved a hand. “Forget about it.” She straightened back up. “Now, I need to see some news. Where’s your TV?”

  “In the rec room.”

  “Which is...?”

  Cole stood and pointed out the kitchen window. “It’s a whole other building. You could see it if the leaves were gone.”

  “Got it. Could you go get the TV and bring it here?”

  Cole nodded.

  “And is that today’s paper?” Linda motioned across the room.

  Cole retrieved the paper from the dining room table, still wrapped in its blue plastic cover, and handed it to the President. He started to leave.

  “Cole?”

  “Yeah?” answered Cole, turning back.

  “I could use some Tylenol or something. My leg hurts. But get the TV first.”

  Embarrassed by his negligence, Cole flushed. It was unlike him, to miss something so obvious. He opened his mouth to apologize but Linda raised a hand, stopping him with a gentle look of acceptance and understanding. Cole sighed and left to get the television.

  Alone, Linda drooped forward and slammed herself repeatedly in the forehead with the heel of her hand.

  2.5

  Cole ran down the stone steps and along the wooded path, past the Forester and out into the driveway. A single, lenticular wisp of cloud hung overhead like a pull in the fabric of the sky. The rec room, a long timber-frame structure that housed the Thomas family’s play room, TV room, work and storage areas, and a swimming pool, sat kitty-corner across the field, hugging the woods. Cole ran the cobbled path that wound through the garden’s raised beds and led directly to the rec room door. He hurried inside, slammed the door behind him, then stood for a moment, breathing in the familiar scent of the room, a combination of pool and pine and pizza rolls. On the wall across the TV room an antique clock, his great-grandfather’s clock, stepped quietly and evenly through the seconds.

  Cole wanted desperately to call his father. He would know what to do. He always knew what to do. Ben Thomas was smart and Ben Thomas was strong and Ben Thomas held up under pressure and Cole needed all of that right now. But calling his father was … complicated. It would come at a cost. And Cole was not sure he was ready to pay the price.

  Perhaps it was almost over. Perhaps the President’s people were on their way to the house right now. Perhaps they were only testing him. Perhaps the President was already gone. Perhaps she had never even been there. Cole looked back towards the house through a small window in the door. There lay the garden before him, the root crops awaiting the frost, the kale still going strong, the chard remains. There was the line of trees that hid the house. It all looked so normal.

  But Cole knew that back in his house sat President Travis with a broken leg, clutching a terrible secret at her core. With a flush of shame at his weakness, Cole walked to the phone hanging on the wall over the pool table and dialed his father’s home number. The phone rang. Again. A buzz and a click sounded in his ear. The answering machine. Hello, came Ben’s abrupt answer, then a long pause, meant to fool the caller into thinking he’d actually answered, and then the beep. Cole hung up without a word and went to unplug the small television sitting on a wooden cart in the corner.

  Walking back to the house, Cole’s heart began to sputter frantically, as though it were choking on a chicken bone. He stopped, hands shaking, and placed the television on the path, afraid he would drop it. The sky to the north lit up brightly, once, then again, then a third time, as if God Himself was trying out the flash on His new camera. The trembling passed and Cole continued on.

  2.6

  Linda Travis aimed the remote and switched off the set. She looked hard at Cole, sitting across from her in a small wicker rocking chair. “So, that tell you anything?”

  Cole scratched his nose, folded the newspaper spread wide on his lap and clutched it to his stomach. “It tells me that they’re lying,” Cole said. He brought his eyes up to meet those of the President. “Or you are.”

  Linda laughed. “Me? You heard them, Cole! You read the story! According to the government and the media, I am now in the hands of a group of skilled and fanatic terrorists. Are you suggesting that these terrorists dropped me off in the boonies and gave me an Oldsmobile?”

  Cole looked down at his feet. “But the Vice President … he—”

  “Albert Singer only knows what he’s been told, Cole! He was in Brazil, for chrissake. How the hell would he know anything?”

  “So it’s all a cover story? How could they do that?”

  Linda took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Her eyes grew dark, then closed. “Things aren’t much like they seem, Cole. Just believe me; they can do it.”

  “Who?”

  Linda looked up at Cole for just a moment, then hung her head and closed her eyes again. She became very still.

  Cole put the paper on the floor. “So you escaped,” he said, gently. “Why? From whom? Why does the President of the United States need to escape from anybody?”

  Linda raised her head to look out of the window behind her. The house was surrounded by trees, a loose weave of dark fall greens and yellows and reds, with fragments of blue sky behind it. She scanned those splotches of morning sky with methodical intent, then turned back, hunching forward, pulling in on herself as though she were cold. “I don’t know what I can tell you,” she began at last. “I don’t know what will help. I don’t…” Her voice trailed away to silence. After a few moments, inhaling and straightening her back as though sloughing off a heavy burden, she looked into Cole’s eyes. “There are people … groups, about which the public, and that includes most of what you would call the government, knows nothing. Some of those groups are involved in highly questionable activities. A few months ago they brought me in. And I have decided not to play their game.” She picked again at the drying blood on her slacks. “They’re like cockroaches, Cole. They only prosper when nobody knows they’re there.” She turned to scan the sky again. “I intend to flush the fuckers out,” she added, her voice stained with anger.

  Cole rose and went to the kitchen, filled a kettle with water and placed it on the stovetop. He returned to his chair. Linda, on the leather sofa that Ruth had recovered, sat in silence, her head to one side as though lost in thought. Her face was ashen, her eyes red. Nodding stiffly as though she had come to some internal decision, she faced Cole. “I’ve put it off long enough. My leg hurts like hell. It’s time to straighten it out and get a splint on it.”

  Cole’s stomach dropped to the floor.

  “You got any whiskey around here?” asked the President, smiling weakly.

>   2.7

  “Oh God! Oh God! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” panted the President as Cole pulled on her leg. She clutched her bare, swollen knee with both hands, trying to keep it from splitting apart. The agony in her knee joint was far more fierce than at the break itself, where the grinding of bone on bone had so overwhelmed her senses that she hardly even noticed it anymore, as if her brain had shut down a breaker before the circuit could blow. The hydrocodone left over from Cole’s root canal wasn’t even beginning to touch the pain.

  Cole went down on one knee, shifted his hands to get a better hold. Linda’s leg, stretched out over the glass-topped coffee table and supported with a neck pillow, slumped just a bit in Cole’s unsteady grip and she gasped again. “Pull, goddammit!” she screamed, throwing back her head, exposing her pale, juddering neck to the sky as if even execution would be better than this.

  Flushing with guilt and confusion, even anger, Cole yanked harder. What the fuck did he know about setting bones? Nothing you couldn’t learn from old westerns, which effectively meant nothing at all. How the hell could he have known he’d have to pull her leg all the fucking way off in order to fix it? He should have run while he had the chance.

  He grunted and dug his fingers into Linda’s calf, trying to peer through her flesh to the bones underneath. He could feel her tibia sliding and grating beneath her trembling skin. Linda moaned like an approaching ambulance, a plaintive, keening, warbling cry that begged for God’s mercy. Cole sucked in a breath and pulled even harder, so hard that he was sure he would tear the President in half. He felt something click softly into place, like the balance knob on an old stereo. Linda’s moans dopplered down as if the ambulance had turned a corner and was now speeding away. She started to sob.

  Sensing that something had fallen into place, Cole allowed Linda’s leg to settle gently onto the pillow. The President drew a deep, calming breath at the movement but did not scream. Cole swiped at the globs of sweat pouring from his forehead and shifted to his other knee to relieve the cramping in his joints. “Did it—?” he asked, unwilling to put the process into words, as if afraid he could jinx it.

  Linda nodded through her tears, closed her eyes.

  Cole sat back on his haunches and studied the President’s leg. It looked straight enough, much straighter than when he’d begun, though some bruising was starting to show. He glanced up to see Linda breathing a bit more easily. That was probably a good sign. Cole scrunched his nose. It would have to do. All that remained was to wrap it all up.

  “You did well,” said the President, her voice a raspy whisper, her eyes still closed. She’d sunk into the sofa as though Mother Earth herself had turned up the gravity to keep Linda still. Driblets of cooling perspiration gathered in eager mobs on her forehead and rappelled down her temples.

  Cole smiled briefly with relief. Hands still shaking, he rose to retrieve the supplies from the dining table, then returned to the sofa. Slowly, taking care not to disturb the gauze-and-tape bandage he’d fashioned for the puncture wound in her thigh, he wrapped her bare right leg with a pair of elastic bindings he’d found in his son’s dresser drawer, threading the fabric through the space between her leg and the glass tabletop, then winding it up and over and around and through again and again. He hoped he’d gauged the bandage’s tension well enough to give the bones some support without cutting off her circulation. He reached for the old leg-brace, left over from Ruth’s knee surgery years ago, and began to work it under Linda’s leg, inadvertently displacing the neck pillow as he did so. Linda barely seemed to notice. When the brace was in place he locked the hinges, pulled the straps and fastened the Velcro tabs as firmly as he could. He tested the hinges with a gentle pull. They seemed to be holding.

  Embarrassed by such intimacy, Cole kept his gaze tightly controlled to the work at hand. “It doesn’t look like much, Mrs. … Linda, but it should work,” he said, his voice low. “That leg isn’t going anywhere. I’ll get you some sweat pants.” He risked a glance up.

  Linda Travis was not going to respond. She’d fallen asleep.

  Quietly, Cole stood and began to clean up. There were drops of blood on the hardwood floor under the sofa and on the edge of one of the cushions, a job for some old rags and a bucket of warm, soapy water. He gathered in one arm the pieces of bloody khaki slacks he’d had to cut away from her leg, and stooped to pick up the scissors from the floor. His shaking hands fumbled the heavy shears. They fell with a clatter on the coffee table glass and bounced to the floor.

  The President jerked up to a sitting position, screaming like a lost soul, her eyes a dark forest of wild terrors. She saw Cole and snapped her jaws shut, slicing the scream in half. The sound of it echoed in the memory of the room. She buried her face in her hands. “Oh, Jesus!”

  Cole knelt at the President’s feet, placed a hesitant hand on her knee. “I’m so sorry, Mrs. President. I didn’t mean to wake you. Are you okay?”

  “How long was I asleep?” Linda’s voice was broken shards.

  Cole shook his head. “Not long. Just a minute. I—”

  Linda grabbed Cole by the wrist, her grip fierce. “Where are my sleeping pills?” she snarled.

  Cole pointed to the green athletic bag by the door. “Aren’t they in your bag?” He rose to get it, hoping that in doing so the President would release his arm. Linda let go, looking with puzzlement at the hand that had held Cole. “You want ‘em?” Cole asked.

  Linda nodded. Cole knelt beside the bag, opened it to search for the pills. Inside was the President’s gun, small and black and heavy, with the words Sig Sauer stamped on the barrel. For a moment Cole had a crazy, cowboy fantasy of taking charge, using the gun to back the President to the wall while he called the sheriff to come and clean up this mess. But he knew immediately that he would do no such thing. He was already too caught up in the situation. He had given his word. And he had no idea how to handle a gun. He found the container: a prescription bottle with a childproof cap, filled with tiny red discs the size of ladybugs. He pulled the pills from the bag and rose to take them to Linda.

  Linda twisted the top and shook two of the tablets out onto her palm. She smiled grimly. “Not this time, Bob,” she said, tossing the pills into her mouth.

  2.8

  “So, it’s just you and the kids, you said. You divorced?” The President smoothed the old gray sweatpants that covered her leg brace.

  “No. She, uh … Ruth died a couple of years ago.”

  “Oh?” The President looked off into the distance, her eyes losing focus, as if she were lost in a daydream. When she spoke again, her voice was soft and moist. “I’m sorry,” she said. “That’s rough.”

  Cole nodded warily, unsure of how much to say. There was too much he did not understand. The door into his privacy was opening even wider. He sat poised on the arm of the loveseat across from the sofa, ready to run. His fingers stretched and squirmed in his lap, as if he were trying to calm a wild bird with his touch.

  “How?” asked the President.

  “She was on NewAir 413.” Cole sighed.

  “Jesus. I remember that one. That must have been horrible.”

  “Yeah. It was.”

  Linda adjusted the sofa pillows for a second, then laid back. She pointed at the windows above her. “Can you get these blinds?”

  Cole stood to work the pulls. The room darkened a bit.

  “Thanks. The pills will take a few minutes.” Linda shifted onto her side. “And your kids? How many?”

  Cole started to freeze up, then caught himself. It was just small talk. The President was just chatting to fill the space. To figure out her situation. And it wasn’t like he was giving away family secrets here. Cole smiled at his own paranoia, hoping to put the President at ease. “There’s Iain, he’s ten. And Emily, eight. And Grace. She’s five.”

  The President closed her eyes and smiled in return. “Grace. I like that. A very gentle name.” Linda waved a hand, indicating the quiet house. “They all at school?”

/>   “Yeah. I was on my way back from dropping them off when you … when the accident happened.”

  “So, will you have to go pick them up?”

  “No. They get a ride from a neighbor in the afternoons. We’ve got a network here, to get the kids to school and back. The buses stopped running years ago. Why?”

  “I need to sleep for a bit, Cole. But I’m thinking it would be best if I was gone before they got home.”

  Cole looked at the floor. “Yeah. You’re probably right.”

  Linda smiled as Cole lifted his eyes to hers. “Gimme an hour or two and then wake me. We’ll figure out my next step then. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Linda touched her forehead lightly, ran a finger along the adhesive bandage that covered the cut above her left eye. She yawned. “So what do you do?” she asked. A shaft of late-morning sun caromed off an end table and found the President’s face, highlighting her tired smile. Her ginger blonde hair, the blood from which had been mostly cleaned away with a damp towel, glowed like candlelight.

  “I work the farm here, take care of the garden and the animals, make cider and cheese, run the kids around to their various activities, stuff like that. In the mornings I usually write.”

  Linda opened an eye. “What do you write?”

  Cole wrinkled his nose. “Oh, lots of stuff. A couple of half-finished novels. Some stories for kids. Essays on my blog. Nothing published yet.”

  Linda yawned again, raising a hand to cover it. “Sorry. Long night.”

  Cole sipped at his tea and made a sour face. It had grown cold. He sat the cup on the wood stove to warm it. “You were up all night?”

  “You got it,” Linda mumbled with a sigh, settling back in.

  “Driving?”

  “Yep.”

  “From where?”

  Linda opened her eyes and rolled onto her elbow, looking at Cole. “You trying to figure this out?”