‘Oh, crap—’
‘Look, little man,’ Drafty said, leaning his muscular chest and shoulders over Undie, beginning to bully a little, ‘that’s one thing for you – you don’t really have anything to lose, do you? But I’m captain of my football team – I’m thinking about a career in sports. So I do have something to lose, and I say we should take the good weed and chill.’
Which they did. But Undie seethed with anger – at Drafty, at the situation. Mad at himself, too, asking himself, Why can’t I get this fixed? And while they made do with the pot that was all they could find to buy, the minor miseries that were being inflicted on them by cold wind and a falling barometer went mostly unnoticed.
Tammy’s mother did pay attention to weather; she worried a lot about her granddaughter’s well-being on ‘that godforsaken farm.’ With the onset of winter, she had begun to listen to every weather report on TV and radio. When she saw the sky darkening on Saturday afternoon, just as the radio had predicted, she persuaded Tammy to stay in town for the weekend.
‘You don’t even have snow tires on your car,’ she said. ‘If you get stuck out there and can’t get to work, you could lose your job.’
‘You worry too much, Ma,’ Tammy said – her old refrain from high school days. She didn’t say it as much as she used to, though. One of Mrs Clay’s biggest worries had been the low grade-point average and slapdash behavior of the boys Tammy chose to date. Now that she was married to Brad Naughton, the hot date her mother had criticized most, she was beginning to wonder, herself, if she might not have played backseat games with somebody a little bit more evolved.
Her mom said she had all the ingredients in the house for a nice Mexican supper, and when Tammy saw the wind blowing dirt down the street, she thought about how drafty the farmhouse was. So she stayed put and they cooked up tacos and beans, and watched a movie on Netflix.
She called Brad once before they ate but got no answer. Probably out feeding the stock, she thought, and then in a mean little afterthought, or maybe out playing with that bunch of low-grade losers he likes so much.
She meant to call again before they started the movie but forgot. The phone rang when the credits were rolling and she heard her mother say, ‘We’re right in the middle of a movie, can she call you in the morning?’ And instead of running and grabbing the phone the way she would have a year ago, she let it go.
By Sunday morning, there was so much snow between them that they didn’t talk about anything but the logistics of how to handle Monday. Tammy could get to work wearing the pants she had on plus a blouse borrowed from her mother. Mrs Clay belonged to a cheerful network of women without men, everybody swapping time, sweaters, baby clothes – cash always in short supply but helping hands and snacks always available. It made Tammy realize how lonely the farm was.
Naughtie hadn’t listened to a weather report Saturday night. After he learned Tammy wouldn’t be coming home, he heated some leftover stew he found in the refrigerator, drank a beer with it and flopped into bed, tired and half stoned. When he woke up Sunday, alone and cold in the bed he usually shared with Tammy, he looked out the window and said, ‘Shit,’ several times.
He could see he had a tough morning ahead of him. He had to get five horses, a dozen calves and a small flock of ewes and their spring lambs into the barn so he could feed them from the loft he’d been using for a playroom all fall. Hungry and thirsty, the animals came in willingly enough, but two colts and all the lambs were newborn this year and didn’t go into stalls readily. He needed help with the sorting-out in the barn, and thought about asking one of his Gamers to come and help. But he knew at once that even if they could get their hands on a vehicle equipped to break trail on his deeply drifted gravel road and driveway, they’d be useless with the animals.
When he finally had all the beasts fed and watered, he started on the job he’d been dreading ever since he got up – getting the John Deere tractor ready to plow the long driveway and a parking space in the yard. He knew how to drive the tractor – he’d used it several times to haul things and had even plowed snow once, under the owner’s supervision. But he wasn’t sure of all the moves for taking off the harrow that was on the tractor now and replacing it with the snowplow blade. His employer had talked him through the moves once but never found time to practice.
He was standing in the machine shed, looking at the bolts that held the toothed harrow onto the frame at the front of the tractor and wondering, for starts, where the man kept his toolbox, when he heard voices. He walked out of the big raised door at the front of the building and found two people standing on snowshoes, looking pleased and comfortable. He was struck by the contrast between their expressions and the way he’d been feeling ever since he woke up.
‘Hi there,’ Naughtie said, looking questioningly at them.
‘Pleased to meet you,’ the young man said. ‘We’re your neighbors.’ They got acquainted that way, standing in the yard, trading names and a few facts. They were Tom and Naomi, a brother and sister, who lived with their parents on the tidy farm a mile nearer town, the one Naughtie’s employer had pointed out to him once, saying, ‘That’s the Baker place. My ambition is to imitate everything they do, and get my place as well organized as theirs is.’
But the broker had admitted it was a distant dream. He ran a small private wealth management practice with several computers and half-a-dozen aides. It allowed him to live in Florida in the winter and Montana in the summer, and was so profitable that he had bought the farm for a tax dodge. It put a little more flex in his expense accounts, but he had bought the place with a minimum down payment and his wife was already beginning to complain that most of his available cash went into paying it off.
The farm never made any money – he couldn’t give it the attention it needed. His clients expected him to be on call day and night, and unless he continued to please them, how would he make the payments?
In contrast to the general feeling of hopelessness that hung around Naughtie and his rent-free home, Tom and Naomi were full of plans and hopeful for the bright future they were planning. Tom was halfway through veterinary school at the university, and intended to set up his practice right there on the family farm as soon as he had his license. Naomi would graduate this year and had already signed a contract to teach fifth grade next year in Kinney, a small bedroom community west of Clark’s Fort.
Their cheerful competence made Brad feel like a dunce, so that instead of his usual bluster he found himself admitting that he wasn’t sure how to install the snowplow on the front of the tractor.
‘Well, how could you know if Mr Bailey never showed you?’ Tom said. ‘What in the world is he thinking, leaving you here without the means to do your job? Hey, I can at least show you – where’s your toolbox?’
He grew quite merry when he learned Brad hadn’t even found a toolbox. Together they searched until they found the implements he needed to get the harrow off and the blade on, and after that they both had fun while Tom gave Brad lessons in plowing snow. While they were at it, Tom got out his own rig and they cleared the road between their two places, since as Tom said, ‘There isn’t but three farmyards being used on this stretch of road, so they leave us till last.’
Naomi left them to it and went home to help her mother start Sunday dinner, then came back on her snowmobile to invite Brad to eat with them. They played a card game after dinner, and when Mrs Baker learned that Brad’s wife was in town taking care of their baby, she insisted on sending a big slice of coffee cake home with him for breakfast.
By morning, the county plow had been through and they all got in different vehicles and went to school. But, overnight, Brad Naughton’s point of view had changed. His poor reading and spelling had been holding him back, he decided as he drove between the heaped-up snowbanks the plow had left. But he could get help with that if he asked, couldn’t he? He had enjoyed the day with his new friends, the harmless jokes with no swearing and the feeling of competence he got from pl
owing the road with Tom. Naomi had started to flirt with him a little at first, he thought, but she’d backed off as soon as she heard he was married, and had been merely pleasant during dinner.
They could be really good friends, though, Brad thought, remembering how warm her brown eyes looked when she laughed at one of his jokes. In the clear, sunny morning he found himself dreaming of being like his new friends – full of ambition, optimistic about the future.
When I was in third grade, he remembered, I was in Little League and Boy Scouts, and Uncle George used to call me his big, handsome go-getter.
But then he got assigned to all those remedial reading classes that he hated so much. He had to repeat fifth grade, fought with his mother and started running with the rougher boys who were always in some kind of trouble. Now he thought about the sunnier self he had left behind and wondered, Could I get back to that?
On the warming road between the snowdrifts, that expression, go-getter, rang inside his head like a distant bell. OK, it was corny, but he used to love it. Sure, the Gamers would sneer if they knew what he was thinking right now. But never mind that. Was he still capable, he wondered, of having one whole day when he did everything right and felt good about himself?
For some time – all right, ever since he’d married Tammy and settled for this stupid life on the run-down farm, which even if it was beneath his contempt was also so far beyond his means that he could only live on it by doing chores … Where was I going with this?
I was going to say that for some time I’ve had the feeling that I must be wearing a disguise. That I really am the go-getter my uncle said I was but somehow I’ve put on the wrong hat and nobody can see who I am now.
Including me.
That was pretty deep and he wasn’t sure he could say it again if he tried, but it left him with a feeling. So at school the next day, instead of going into home room for the first hour, he went to the counselor’s office and asked her for advice about his reading problem. He couldn’t remember the word dyslexic, but she had his records and understood. He used some of the eye-contact technique that had got Tammy into the backseat with him during his first time through senior year, and soon she was taking an interest, lining up mentors and self-help CDs.
After math class, feeling brave, he called the Gamers to the place beneath the stairs and told them they were going to need a new place to play games. ‘I’ve got a family now,’ he told them. ‘I’ve got to get serious.’ It didn’t quite wash since he’d been married for almost ten months, but it was how he really felt today, so he went for it.
There were protests – Undie was particularly furious. He staged a hissy fit right there in the hall – he had discovered rage and enjoyed giving vent to it now. But he was quickly stifled when the hall monitor appeared, and when he tried to revive the argument quietly he saw that Naughtie, over the weekend, had been seduced – Undie’s word – by some evil country couple who must be doing some of that Jesus crap out there among the wheat fields, and were initiating him into their cult. Naughtie had new friends now, had gone back to being Brad and was mumbling about a high school diploma and a bright future.
Tammy stayed at her mother’s house that whole week, because when the weather warmed up the country roads became mud-holes even more impassable than the snow-drifts had been. People still had to get around, so they chained up and churned out, making ruts you could lose a spring calf in.
Between snow and mud, Brad was soon a highly skilled operator of small road-clearing equipment. He began to take an interest in the hours after school – he called his employer on Wednesday and got an OK to call the vet for the two calves he was worried about. The vet came Thursday, diagnosed a mild case of scours, gave them a shot and told Brad he’d call the owner and assure him the calves were OK and their caretaker was doing a good job.
Later that evening, J. Patterson ‘Pat’ Bailey – that was the name on the stockbroker’s card – called and talked to Brad for some time. He had been looking for a responsible man to put in charge of his place and make some of the changes it needed, he said, but it hadn’t occurred to him that Brad might be that person.
‘No offense, kid,’ he said, ‘but until today I didn’t think you cared about much except staying ahead of the sheriff.’
They enjoyed a nice laugh while they sorted out that bad impression, and went on to have a conversation that changed everything. Brad ended up foreman of himself and one part-timer Pat wanted him to hire to help with chores, so Brad could begin to clean the place up and make needed repairs. He got permission to open a couple of accounts in town, at the lumber yard and hardware store, and get a smart phone with a generous time allowance. A cold-eyed appraisal might conclude that he had just agreed to work much harder for a small boost in his wages, a minor improvement on the usual low-paid twenty-four-seven back-breaking job most farm laborers get. But to the nearly illiterate doper Brad had become, it felt like a big step up.
The downside was that the same conversation that inducted Brad Naughton into the adult labor force left the Gamers homeless and leaderless. Under the stairs, the group confronted a bleak future. Is this the end of the gang? they asked each other.
Undie was the first to say, ‘No fucking way. We have a better chance with suppliers if we stick together,’ he argued. He had a growing addiction to the buzz he got from drugs, and hardly any knowledge of how to obtain them, so he needed his gang. He was inching his way toward becoming the leader to replace Naughtie, but he desperately needed better information, more experience, some connections.
He tried getting closer to the friend who had brought him into the Gamers in the first place – Crow-Bait. Billy Cronin was the happiest Gamer – Undie wondered, sometimes, why he was even in the gang, since he seemed so much better adjusted than the others – better dressed and groomed, and always ready to laugh, even before they smoked the pot. The Cronins were the town’s undertaking family – they were prosperous. Reason enough, Undie supposed, to always be in a good mood.
Start with the meeting place, Undie thought. He nudged Crow-Bait’s elbow on the way into math class and asked him softly, ‘Any ideas about a replacement for the loft?’
‘One. I was just going to talk to you about it,’ Crow-Bait said, barely moving his lips as the instructor walked into the room. ‘See you after class, hmm?’
In the hall later, he told Undie what he had in mind: the big warehouse-sized shed his brother Robbie owned, where he and a dozen of his fishing and sailing buddies kept their boats in winter. ‘They keep the warehouse ten degrees above freezing, just warm enough so they don’t have to drain the lines in their boats every fall and go through all that re-charging crap in the spring. But there’s a workroom in one corner with lockers for extra gear and a couple of work tables, and there’s a space heater in there so they can warm it up when they need to do some repair work over the winter.’
‘That sounds nice. And what would we have to do for your brother so he’d let us use that workroom once a week?’ Undie did his best to sound casual, but he was bright-eyed. He already lusted for the boathouse.
‘Just keep him supplied with pot,’ Crow-Bait said, and laughed at Undie’s surprised expression.
‘Robbie’s wife is a wonderful woman,’ Crow-Bait said, looking pious. ‘She does all her own housework, she’s a great cook and pays all the household bills out of her salary. But she’s a bit of a prude. She brings Robbie all the beer he wants from the grocery store but she will not allow him one penny for drugs, which to her means marijuana. Gateway drug, she says. Road to perdition.’
‘Well,’ Undie said, ‘if we all split the cost, that’s pretty cheap rent.’
‘That’s what I think,’ Crow-Bait said. ‘So shall we see if we can still make that deal with Nick?’
‘I’ll do that,’ Undie said. ‘While I’m at it, I’ll chat with him about what other products he sells. Maybe you should find Drafty and Snootie, make sure they’re still on board with us. And now we’ve got room f
or a couple more Gamers, don’t we? Think about who you’d like to bring on board.’
He liked the self-image he was building, making deals and controlling his pleasure. A leader of men. He made the deal with Nick and agreed to a Saturday morning pickup of Nick’s good homegrown pot. But Nick said he wasn’t going to be dealing in anything stronger than his own weed – don’t even think about it.
‘New folks calling the shots,’ he said. ‘You want H or anything stronger like that, unless you want your face changed, you better be talking to Kurtz.’
‘Kurtz,’ Undie said. ‘The big guy that says to call him Winkin?’
‘I hadn’t heard that story,’ Nick said. ‘All I know, he’s a big black guy that’s got a corner on the hard stuff now. So talk to him if you want. It sounds like trouble to me so I’m staying away.’
‘Maybe I will. Drafty won’t go for H but I bet Crow-Bait will. We’ll bring our own shit.’
‘Your what?’
‘Parapher— Needles.’
‘Oh. Good, because I don’t have a clue.’
‘Really?’ Undie raised his eyebrows. ‘Dear me.’ It was the closest he could come to an imitation of his father’s contempt face, and he thought it was pretty good.
He began to feel more confident about his ability to lead. Only two days since Naughtie evicted us from the loft, he told himself, and already I’ve got a better meeting room and a new supplier.
Well, almost. He was sure Kurtz would have product and be glad to sell to him, ‘make him all comfy’ as he used to do, if he could just find him and get it set up. But why wasn’t he around, smiling and cordial, like before?
He went to the smoke shop and a couple of bars, looking for Kurtz. ‘He’s around, pal,’ one pool player told him, ‘but seems like he’s not as jolly as he used to be. Something serious has happened to Kurtz.’
NINETEEN
The sidewalks in Clark’s Fort were death traps on Monday after the storm, some shoveled, some not, and the temp hovered right around freezing. The cleared sections were trickier than the snowy ones, wet wherever the sun hit, icy in the shade. Alice walked to work with her eyes on the path, occasionally muttering, ‘Why didn’t I drive?’ But she liked the ten-block walk, almost the only exercise she got now on the long, busy days that her job had turned into. The hazards underfoot had made all her muscles tense and sore by the time she reached the Guardian, but that was better, she thought, than having no muscles at all.
Burning Meredith Page 17
