by Rilla Askew
The boy rummaged in the plastic bag, brought her a Depends, then edged backward toward the hall, fake yawning, patting his mouth. The old man blinked, staring around the room with confused, rheumy eyes.
“Hand me them wipes.”
Dustin handed her the blue plastic tub, yawning broader.
“All right,” she said. “Don’t wake your cousin when you go in.” The boy slipped quickly out the door toward Carl Albert’s bedroom. “No playing that Gameboy under the covers!” Sweet called after him before turning to clean the old man. She’d learned all the tricks from her three-month stint at the Latimer County Nursing Home two years ago—how to roll him, how to plant her feet good to hoist him. The nursing home was exactly where Mr. Bledsoe ought to be, but her husband wouldn’t hear of it. Well, it wasn’t Tee washing the old man’s privates and hauling him up out of the bed and into the chair every morning, now, was it? Sweet had quit that nursing home job because she hated the work, and now here she was. That was sure life, wasn’t it? Whatever you most didn’t want to have to deal with, that’s precisely what came your way. Your own daddy in jail, for instance.
When she got Mr. Bledsoe diapered and dressed and sitting on the side of the bed, she clamped his two arms around her neck, put both her arms around him, braced her shoulders, set her legs. “Come on, Dad,” she said. “Work with me.” The old man grunted as she levered him up from the mattress and over to the wheelchair. Mr. Bledsoe was thin as sticks but he weighed like a log when she had to lift him. She unflipped the chair locks and maneuvered toward the door, but then she heard Terry’s truck rumbling out front, the diesel engine unmistakable; she flipped the locks back down and left Mr. Bledsoe sitting as she hurried toward the front of the house.
Her husband didn’t look at her when he came into the kitchen from the carport. He went to the fridge and stood with the door open drinking 7UP straight from the two-liter bottle, which he knew she hated, but Sweet didn’t comment. Terry’s thick curly hair was a rat’s nest from wind and sweat, and so was his beard, which hadn’t been trimmed since she couldn’t even remember when. There were pouchy bags under her husband’s eyes like two small pale thumbs, and his cheeks were nearly black with dirt, his hands and clothes and boots filthy. He’d tracked dried clay all over her clean kitchen floor. Still she didn’t gripe at him, not even when he went to the front room and flopped into his chair in his grimy workpants and turned on the TV, clicked absently through the channels without stopping, which he also knew she hated, and then clicked it right back off.
“You want me to fix you some eggs?” she said from the archway.
Terry shook his head no, staring at the black screen as if it were on.
“Where was the line break?”
“Wasn’t a break.”
“What then?”
“Explosion.”
“Anybody killed?”
“Only the idiot digging postholes without calling Arkoma.”
“Oh no. That’s terrible. When will people learn? It’s not like there’s no signs posted.”
“He was a Mexican they said. I expect he couldn’t read.”
“Or read English.”
“Or read period.”
“All right,” she said. She waited for him to say more, and when he didn’t, she asked again where it was.
“Down past Honobia.”
“Y’all stop for breakfast?”
He nodded, still staring glassily at the blank screen. “The Hateful Hussy in Talihina.”
“They got cell towers in Talihina,” she said, meaning, You could have called and let me know you hadn’t been blown to pieces, but she didn’t say it with much force. Pick your battles, she thought. Terry clicked the TV back on, turned to the western channel. Her husband had seen every western ever made, most of them dozens of times, but when there was nothing on, that’s the station he tuned to. Either that or the farm channel. He yawned, scratched his cheek beneath the beard. “Hadn’t you better be getting the boys up?” he said.
“In a minute. Listen, you’re going to be here today, aren’t you?”
“Got to be back down there by three.”
“No, Tee! You’ve been at it forty-eight hours straight!”
“Twenty-seven.”
“They can’t ask you to keep going without any rest!”
“Can if I aim to keep my job. Line’s shut down from Nashoba all the way to Battiest. Them people don’t have any heat.”
“It’s not cold.”
“Fixing to be. You get your daddy bailed out?”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Brother Oren was up there yesterday. He says Daddy doesn’t intend to get bailed out.” Her husband looked up, frowning. Sweet said, “Well, I don’t know what the Sam Hill he’s thinking! I need you to stay with Dad while I go to the arraignment. It starts at nine thirty but I might have to . . . oh, Lord. Dad.” She hurried to the bedroom, where the old man was asleep in his chair with his head tilted backward, fortunately, instead of forward; otherwise he would have tumbled out of the chair.
She let him sleep on as she wheeled him toward the front room, where she found Terry snoring in his recliner and Jack Elam rolling his wild eyes in silence on the TV. All right. Let them sleep. She tied the old bathrobe sash around Mr. Bledsoe’s chest to keep him from falling forward, went to check on the boys. In the light from the hall she could see her son snoring on his back with his arms flung over his head and his breathing coarse as a turbine. On the inflatable mattress on the floor Dusty lay curled up with the covers pulled over his head. She couldn’t see any light leaking around the quilt to show he was under there playing Carl Albert’s Gameboy, which was a relief. She wasn’t even sure she’d call him out if she did see it. Sometimes a person just got tired of trying to make them grow up right. Sweet returned to the front room and stretched out on the divan. Terry was home now, it wasn’t yet daylight, she had time to rest her eyes a minute, she told herself, before she had to start getting the boys ready for school.
Grayish light was seeping in the front windows, dull and murky looking, when Carl Albert woke her. “You’ll never guess what Dustin did.”
“What!” Sweet sat up like a shot. “What time is it?” The mantle clock said almost eight thirty. “Oh my word. Terry, honey, wake up and go to bed.” She rubbed her face. “Carl, get your backpack. Y’all hurry up and get ready, you’re going to be late.”
“Come look.”
The quilt was thrown back on the air mattress to show where he’d rolled up a bunch of her son’s T-shirts and briefs and old pajamas in the shape of a sleeping boy.
“He’s gonna get it now, ain’t he?” Carl’s voice was gleeful.
What do I do? Sweet thought. She was still half asleep, rum-dum, she couldn’t think. “Go wake your daddy. Tell him to come here a minute.”
“Dustin’s in big trouble this time, right?”
“Don’t sound so proud. Go on.”
She found the note on the floor where it had fallen when Carl Albert pulled off the quilt. The boy’s hand was small, extraordinarily neat, laid out in tiny block penciled letters on ruled notebook paper:
I’LL BE BACK FOR SUPPER, PLEASE DON’T WORRY. PLEASE. YOURS TRULY DUSTIN LEE ROBERT BROWN
Monday | February 18, 2008 | 8:45 A.M.
State Capitol Building | Oklahoma City
State Representative Monica Moorehouse was feeling very good about things this cloudy blue Monday, the third week of the new legislative session. True, she wasn’t properly prepped for her committee meeting in fifteen minutes, a huge stack of unread House bills clogged her To Read tray, and Kevin had lightened her hair way too platinum on Saturday—she’d have to stay out of sight of the cameras until he could fix it—but the national press had picked up on the raid story, and that was worth everything. She sifted again through the clippings, sorting them according to
prominence. Only two-inch AP articles on the inside pages in the New York Times and the Dallas papers, but they’d made the front page above the fold in the Tulsa World, page three in the Houston Chronicle, and they were the lead screaming headline in the Sunday Oklahoman. She buzzed the front office, told Beverly to hold her calls—“except for my husband, you can put him right through, and also please call Kevin back, tell him he has got to see me this afternoon, I don’t care what’s wrong with his Chihuahua!”—closed the inside door, and unlocked her desk.
From the top drawer she pulled out her Personal Press File. She trusted no one with this, not even Beverly, who’d proven herself to be as loyal a legislative assistant as any lawmaker could hope for, but the press file was Monica’s private domain. One by one she slipped the laminated articles from the folder, laid them out in chronological order across the mahogany desktop. Her favorite was the one of her giving the speech at the Family Values Voters Conference in Denver last summer. The photographer had caught her smiling her most bemused smile, her hands raised in a graceful gesture of bafflement. Her hair was perfect. The caption read: “Oklahoma State Representative Monica Moorehouse wants to know, ‘What’s wrong with those people?’ ” The article below failed to make clear that she had not been referring to illegal aliens per se but to the federal government and its failure to act, forcing lowly state legislators, such as herself, to take matters in their own hands. Well, it was the Denver Post, what could you expect? There’d been several resultant nasty e-mails from out-of-state idiots accusing her of being a racist, et cetera, but the story had played well inside the state, and it was a fabulous picture.
The intercom buzzed. Beverly’s voice was pitched low. “I know you wanted me to hold your calls, but Senator Langley is here. Personally. In the office. He says it’s urgent.”
Monica groaned. Dennis Langley was the opposition state senator whose district overlapped her own, a lanky good ole boy with hound dog eyes, a Will Rogers drawl, and the cunning of a backwoods lawyer. She did not like him, did not trust him, dared not turn him away. “All right, give me a minute.” Quickly she cleared the desk, locked it, grabbed a stack of House bills and scattered them across the leather blotter before buzzing Beverly to send him in. She stood up, stretched forth a languid hand with perfectly lacquered French nails, invited the senator to have a seat. He nodded his thanks but remained standing, so Monica did, too, realizing a half beat too late how it put her at a disadvantage. Far better to lean back in her chair delicately arching her neck to peer up at him until he had the good manners to sit down than to stand behind her desk, merely short. She smiled.
“What can I do for you, Senator?”
“My, my, look at this here.” Langley lifted a framed photograph from her desk. “I don’t believe I ever saw this.” He glanced from the photograph to her and back again. Comparing, she felt sure, the soft mocha of her hair in the picture with the shrieking platinum it was right now. Oh, Kevin was going to fix this, today, if she had to camp out in his veterinarian’s office. Langley cocked his shaggy head at the picture. “You’re sittin’ in some mighty high cotton here.”
“Yes,” she said through her gritted smile. She was not sitting in that photograph, she was standing, flanked by both Oklahoma U.S. senators in the middle of the congressional rotunda. She’d been invited on that Washington trip hardly two weeks into her first term, a sign of just how much the powers that be believed in her future. The frame was sterling silver, an elegant cowboy-hat-and-horseshoe motif; it was one of her most prized possessions, and she had to grip herself to keep from reaching across the desk and snatching it out of Langley’s hands. “So what’s this urgent business of yours, Senator?”
“Urgent? Well, now, I don’t know as I’d call it urgent. Very handsome.” Langley set the frame back on the desk. “Just thought I’d drop by and visit with you a minute this morning.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. My assistant must have misunderstood. Anyway, I’ve got an Agriculture and Rural Development meeting to get to, but maybe we could arrange something for next week?” She thumbed her desk calendar. “How’s Thursday? Say three thirty?” She reached to buzz Beverly to tell her to put it on the schedule, but Dennis Langley’s lazy drawl stopped her.
“That’d be fine, ma’am, but what I wanted to visit with you about, well, it’s sort of relevant here this morning.”
Ugh. She hated being called ma’am. They all talked like that, like they’d just dropped off the potato truck; it was the sort of thing she’d moaned to Charlie about when he moved her down here from Indianapolis eight years ago. Charlie would just wave her off, tell her she had to get used to a few things. Plenty of things she had gotten used to. Being called ma’am was not one of them.
“I expect you know all about that little raid they had in Latimer County Friday evening. Where they nabbed all those Mexicans?” She nodded. Of course. “And you also know they scooped up a couple local men along with them.”
She kept smiling as if to say, I know, isn’t it perfect? Now the whole world was going to see that her law had teeth! Well, not her law, of course; she’d merely coauthored the House version—but her name was on it, wasn’t it? A first-term state representative pushing through a bill of that magnitude, well, she could be forgiven the teensiest bit of pride. From the minute the law had gone into effect last November her office had been flooded with calls, citizens groups, state legislators, town mayors, from Iowa, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, all over the country, all hoping to get similar legislation moving in their own states.
“I heard from the Latimer D.A.’s office this morning.” Langley plucked his creased slacks at the knee, perched himself on a corner of her desk. “Tom Waters is an old friend, me and him go way back. He’s got a few concerns. They’re not real keen on all this publicity, for one thing, and then—”
“Senator Langley, if people are going to hire and harbor illegal aliens, they are no less criminal than the aliens themselves. That’s the whole point of the legislation. Naturally there’s going to be publicity. Taxpayers are tired of their money going to support lawbreakers!”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Oh for God’s sake, shut up with the ma’ams. Irritably she watched Langley trace a finger along the humped back of the Kokopelli paper-clip holder on her desk.
“Latimer’s a small county,” he went on, his voice all lackadaisical. “Naturally they haven’t got a real big budget to cover security and all.”
“Security.”
“Well, this stuff provokes a lot of anger. There’s already been a few threats. And then, too, there’d be reporters to deal with, camera crews, news vans, all that. They’re just not set up for that sort of thing down there.”
“If space is a problem,” she said, “I’m sure we can have the proceedings moved, like they did for the Terry Nichols trial.” Yes, why hadn’t she thought of that before? Move the trial to her home base in McAlester—so much the better! Ah, Terry Nichols, the second Oklahoma City bomber, what an exciting time that had been. The streets blocked off for security. CNN, Fox News, the networks, they’d all been there! At least at the beginning, although the trial had dragged on for months, and they’d drifted away, lost interest, until it was time for the verdict—but then they’d all come swarming back. She’d been on the McAlester City Council then, a great platform, actually—as her husband so endlessly liked to point out.
“Yes, ma’am,” Langley drawled, “we talked about a venue change. He’s not sure that’d exactly satisfy the situation.”
“What situation?”
“Well, apparently, according to Tom Waters, there might have been a few . . . irregularities.”
“Please speak plainly, Senator Langley.” This was another part of the good ole boy act that just irritated the snot out of her—how they’d pussyfoot around a subject and never come right out and say anything. Charlie told her she needed to learn to read metaphor and subtext. But C
harlie could kiss her derriere. He wasn’t the one who had to deal with these people. The senator crooked his head, studied the portraits of the governor and the president smiling down from her office wall. Oh, would he never get on with it? She felt like her cheeks were ready to crack.
“One of these fellows they arrested,” the senator mused, “Bob Brown his name is, well, he’s something of a fixture in the county. I know him a little bit myself, actually. He’s a white fellow, you know, and a Christian. A real religious man. Naturally some folks are going to feel sympathy toward him. And then, of course, I know it, some won’t. The other man’s a Mexican, but he’s a citizen—they already checked that out—and he’s a Pentecostal preacher, so that’s a problem, and his name is Jesús, and that’s another problem, because you know in the newspapers that’s going to look like Jesus, and some folks won’t like that. Well, and then that terrible thing happened in Texas, that’s a real sad story. I know it’s nobody’s fault, but still, it’s not good.”
“What happened in Texas?”
“That girl that died?” He turned to look at her. “No, I guess you don’t know yet. One of the girls they took out of Bob Brown’s barn and bused down to Houston, well, she went into labor somewhere along the line, and I guess she was having trouble and either nobody saw it or nobody understood. Or maybe they thought she was faking. Anyway, both her and the baby died. Now, that didn’t happen here, but she was part of that bunch they rounded up in Latimer County, so, well, it’s a situation.”
“Why are you telling me this? What do you think I can do about it?”
“Just wanted to give you a little friendly heads-up, is all. Waters is thinking he might have to drop the charges against the two Americans.”
“No!” she nearly shouted, but then she caught herself. “I mean, he can’t do that. It’s not his call. Those men were caught red-handed harboring fourteen illegal aliens, not one proper document or word of English among them—that’s a felony in this state. We made it a felony!”
