Bleeding Kansas

by Sara Paretsky

  Eighteen

  ONE LAST FIGHT

  From schapendairyfarm.com/newsandnotes.html

  Wives, be subject to your husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is head of the wife as Christ is head of the church. Paul wrote this in Ephesians, under the divine inspiration of Jesus Christ, which means those are the words of God, not words you can listen to or not as your mood strikes you. Some of our neighbors who profess Jesus don’t seem to understand this. Their wives run around like crazed animals from a circus, not like sober Christian women. At times like this, we pity the wife but blame the husband for not filling his God-ordained role as head of the household.

  God is not a pacifist! In the Bible, God repeatedly takes lives to spare His Chosen People or to make a point to His Chosen People about how far they’ve strayed from His Word! In Genesis, God kills everyone on earth, except Noah, his family, and the animals, because the Children of Israel have done so much evil in His sight. In Exodus, God kills every Egyptian firstborn to save the Children of Israel, and God continues to use His four dreadful judgments—sword, famine, wild beasts, and pestilence—against the sinful.

  America is under a dreadful scourge right now, thanks to the liberals and their encouragement of sodomy, abortion, and idolatry. Our neighbors seem hell-bent on bringing further wrath down on all our heads. They disrupted the town by pretending that pacifism is a Christian virtue; they danced in front of idols. Maybe it’s their French blood. If it is, we sure don’t need cheese-eating surrender monkeys in the Kaw River Valley!

  Lulu printed the file out at school and brought it home with her. Jim read it through slowly, his anger building again. The cornerstone of his philosophy: you can’t farm in the valley if you’re on bad terms with your neighbors. He worked hard to be a good neighbor, so why was Arnie Schapen determined to make war on him? Did he think he could drive Jim off the land or did he just like fighting, the way Junior and Chip—and Jim’s brother, Doug, for that matter—seemed to like it?

  Lara’s face, usually round and soft with the residue of her baby fat, was pinched, her cheekbones sticking out from anxiety. “They were all laughing and talking about it at lunch, so I went to the computer lab and printed it out. Every time Junior or Milt Riley or his other friends passed me or Chip in the hall, they’d lift their shoulders up and scratch their armpits like they were monkeys.”

  “Monkeys?” Jim was bewildered. “Were they trying to say you and Chip are related to monkeys? I thought the Schapens’ church was against evolution.”

  “No, Dad,” Lara said with exaggerated patience. “Thanks to Mom bragging to the whole world about your ancestor coming from France, everybody knows Grellier is a French name. They were saying we were surrender monkeys.”

  “So Chip felt he had to fight them?” Jim asked.

  “I guess.” Lara hunched a shoulder. “It was in senior English, so I wasn’t there.”

  “Where’s Chip? Didn’t he drive you home?”

  Lara shook her head. “Mr. Meadows made Hector—he’s the guard, you know—escort Chip out of the building. Melanie drove me home.”

  Jim started to say, “You know you’re not allowed to ride with underage drivers,” but bit the words off before they came out. Lara didn’t need any more tension in her life today. Come to think of it, neither did he.

  “Your mother’s okay,” he said instead. “They let her off with a fine. She’s asleep right now, pretty worn-out from a night in jail. Schapen was mad that they didn’t charge her with a felony, so I guess he rushed home and got his ma to put this up on their website. It’s mean, it’s petty, but he only did it because he felt helpless. Can you remember that and try not to fight the Schapen boys yourself?”

  Lulu gave a wobbly smile. “I guess.”

  “You know, Lulu, I’m kind of worn-out myself—what with worrying about your mom, I didn’t sleep much last night. All this anger swirling around is exhausting, too. You want to go into town, get ice cream or a pizza?”

  “Everyone’s staring at us, Dad, staring and talking.”

  “I bet the people at Chill! never heard of Arnie Schapen or Susan Grellier; they’ll give you your hot-fudge sundae without even looking up from the ice-cream bins.”

  “Yeah, okay, I guess,” she muttered: good daughter making a martyr of herself for her desperate father.

  Jim pulled a wry face and went back up to the bedroom to leave a note for Susan. She was awake, roused by the noise Lulu had made shouting through the house for Jim, but not moving. She looked at him dully. When he told her about Chip, she bit her lip and turned her head away from him on the pillow.

  He took her hand again, but inside he felt a hard spot of resentment toward her: Arnie was a loose cannon, but Susan had played a part in starting all this, too. “Suze, can you lay off the anti-war stuff for a while until this school thing and Arnie’s vendetta both calm down? Please?”

  She stiffened, but after a long pause said, “I won’t go on any marches or hand out leaflets until I’ve worked off the fine. I’ll get to work on the sunflower crop tomorrow, but I want to go to K-PAW meetings, Jim. I think that’s fair.”

  It was fair, he supposed, but he wanted her to be generous, to say she’d leave peace work to the university people who had less to lose. He didn’t know how to say that to her, though, so he finally just told her he was taking Lulu into town for ice cream.

  When they got home, Lara was calmer. No one at the ice-cream parlor had shown any signs of knowing the Grelliers had the mark of the beast on them, so she’d been able to enjoy her hot fudge, and even wave at one of her classmates, who came in as she and Jim were getting ready to leave.

  It was close to six when they got back. Blitz had left and Chip hadn’t shown up. Jim tried to call his son, but Chip wasn’t answering his cell phone. Susan had gone back to sleep and left a note asking them not to wake her. Jim challenged Lara to a game of miniature pool. She went to bed around ten, happier, but he stayed up, waiting for his son to come home.

  He dozed off in the kitchen and woke with a start when Chip drove into the yard, his wheels spraying up gravel because he’d taken the turn too fast. Jim’s neck and knees had frozen from sleeping sitting up; it was an effort and an agony to get to his feet. As soon as Chip came in, Jim realized he was drunk.

  “Beer never solved any problems I heard of, except cash flow to the beer companies,” he told his son.

  “Yeah, well, write that up on Arnie’s website for him, tell him the cheese-eating surrender monkey likes beer, not frog wine,” Chip said.

  “How come you let Junior get under your skin like that?” Jim asked.

  “Jesus Christ, Dad, what planet do you live on? Here’s Mom, hanging out with those dykes, letting Arnie arrest her ass because—”

  “Chip, I know you’re angry, and I know you’re drunk, but do not talk to me in that language, and do not use it about your mother. Tell me a simple story about what happened today.”

  Chip flushed and swayed, clutching the refrigerator for support. “It’s her fault for giving me that stupid name. I’ve told her my whole life I hate it, and all she says is I’d like it if you hadn’t encouraged me to hate it. Well, nothing would make me like being called after some stupid Frenchman who was too lazy to do a lick of work on the farm and then got shot because he was off running a school he had no business at in the first place.”

  He raised his voice to a falsetto, mimicking his mother: “Etienne is a noble name, with a noble history in your family—the man who gave up his country to come to Kansas and fight for freedom. Chip! Chip could be a chip on your shoulder or a chip of paint, not a name you can be proud of.”

  Jim couldn’t help smiling at Chip’s mimicry. “It was Grandpa who nicknamed you Chip; he said you were a chip off the old block. I guess that made me proud, so it was what I always called you, not because I didn’t like your Christian name.”

  “Well, I hate it. And without even talking to me, she went and registered me for school in town as
Etienne, so every time I start a new course I have to tell the teacher to call me Chip, and Mottled—Ms. Motley, my English teacher—she won’t. She always calls me Etienne no matter how many times I ask.

  “So today Milt Riley starts yelling ‘Hey, Frenchie’ when I get to English class. And, honest, Dad, I tried to ignore him. But then fucking Junior Schapen says, ‘Frenchie, your ma’s a heroine, ain’t she? Will you sign my copy of the County Herald pretty, pretty please?’

  “And then Riley says, ‘She ain’t a heroine, Schapen. She’s a fucking jailbird!’ And I still didn’t look up, until Junior says, ‘Come on, Frenchie, autograph the paper for me. I never met a real celebrity before.’ And I told him not to call me a Frenchie, because our family was farming in this valley when his people were still humping cows in a shack in Europe!”

  Jim sighed. “You couldn’t just let it go, could you? So what happened—Junior jump you?”

  “No.” Chip’s voice was thick with resentment. “Mottled called out in that nasal voice of hers, ‘Etienne, your discussion is so lively I want you and Milton to come to the front of the room to share it with the class.’ And then fucking Riley says, ‘Eh-ti-yen,’ like making this huge point that my name is French, and he says I have such an interesting family history I should tell it to the class. And then he starts in on Mom, saying she used to be a Commie when she ran that stupid co-op market and now she’s like a member of al-Qaeda, and that’s when I lost it.”

  “I see.” Jim rubbed his head, wishing he could rub one sensible idea into it, but all he felt was wool and numbness. “We’re going to have to think of some way to patch this over until the school year ends.”

  “I’m not going back to school. I’m eighteen. You can’t make me.”

  Jim squinted up at his son in the dim light. Chip wasn’t only bigger than he was, he was angrier. Jim couldn’t possibly make him do anything. “I hate to think a son of mine could be such a coward he couldn’t face the consequences of his own actions.”

  “Think whatever you like. I’m not going back to school.”

  “Then you can start doing a day’s work on the farm.”

  “And be here day in and day out, with Mom getting wackier by the minute and you pretending nothing’s wrong? Thanks but no thanks.”

  “We’re not going to figure it out in the middle of the night,” Jim finally said. “But you have to think about it, son, think about a plan for your life. You can’t spend your nights at the Storm Door getting drunk and your days in bed. And if you give up on your education now, it’ll be that much harder to finish later on.”

  Chip stared at him, the night swallowing up the hot hurt in his face, then swung on his heel and went up the stairs to his room, thumping as loudly as he could in running shoes. The next day, he locked himself in, refusing to talk to anyone in the family.

  On Wednesday, he got up early to drive Lara into school, not talking to Jim or Susan but telling his sister he was looking for a job. He didn’t come home that night, didn’t phone. On Thursday, Jim tried Curly and then Janice, but they both said they hadn’t seen him—although Lulu told him from the way Janice was carrying on at school, she was sure Janice knew what Chip was doing. That made Jim try to talk to Janice again, as well as to her parents, but the Everleighs said they didn’t want their daughter hanging out with a loser like Chip.

  At that, Jim lost his temper. “Good. His mother and I don’t think she’s the right person for him, either. She’s not a help in his life.”

  At the end of the week, when Jim and Susan were frantic enough with worry that they’d reported Chip’s disappearance to Sheriff Drysdale, Blitz, who had his own sources of information, dragged Curly out to the farm and made him talk to Jim.

  Lara watched them from her bedroom. She saw Blitz go into the house, leaving Curly standing in the yard, shivering in his windbreaker. Curly was a small man with a shock of blond hair that grew in a natural Mohawk, so that even at thirty-two he looked like a teenager. Alone in the yard, he looked even younger. Lara saw her father come out of the house with Blitz. The three men went to the barn.

  Lara slipped out of the house through the door to the garage. She hiked across the edge of the wheat field, crossed through the combine shed, and reached the back end of the barn. There were a couple of places where boards had come loose from the concrete foundation slab. She found a gap wide enough to slide through.

  When her head and shoulders were inside, she could hear the murmur of voices but couldn’t make out what they were saying: the men were at the front of the barn, on the other side of the tractor heads and machining equipment. Lara slithered all the way inside.

  The board made a low snapping, singing sound behind her back, but no one noticed—barns are always making noises: the wind whipping around the sides, animals crawling along the rafters. The men hadn’t turned the lights on, and Lara couldn’t really see, but she tiptoed slowly forward, hands out, so she’d touch a piece of equipment before she tripped over it.

  She heard her father smack his hand on something. “Damn it, Curly! When I called you on Thursday, couldn’t you tell I was worried sick? I haven’t slept for five nights. And when the sheriff talked to you, you lied to him! I don’t even know what to say to you. You’ve been working out here for, what, nine years now? How could you betray my trust in you?”

  And then Curly’s voice, thick with misery: “I promised Chip. I’m sorry, Jim, but I couldn’t go back on my word. Do you want me to quit?”

  A long pause, during which Lara held her breath. Don’t fire him, she pleaded in her head. Chip’s disappeared. Don’t get rid of Curly, too. And then her hand came down on a can full of ball bearings and sent them flying around the barn, a cascade of balls that rattled and banged like a giant pinball machine. The lights came up in the barn, and she hugged herself, painfully exposed.

  “Lara! What on earth—?” her father cried out.

  “I’m sorry, Dad,” she wailed. “I wanted to know where Chip was. Did he join the Marines?”

  “Did you know?” Jim yelled. “Are you another one who knew and didn’t tell me?”

  “Don’t, Dad. I don’t know where he went, I only wondered because he used to have those recruiting pamphlets on his dresser. And I told you and Mr. Drysdale that I thought Janice knew what he was doing, but she wouldn’t talk to me. Is that what Chip did? Did he join the Marines? Is he in Iraq?”

  He stared at her for a minute, frightening her with the ferocious look on his face. She didn’t know that he wasn’t staring at her but at himself: how could he be the least knowledgeable person in Douglas County about the people closest to him? He’d never noticed any recruiting pamphlets in Chip’s room, but Lara had seen them. Blitz noticed that Curly was hiding news about Chip; Lara was sure Janice knew. Only he, Jim, had spent the week stumbling around like a blind drunk at the fairgrounds.

  Finally he said, in a dry, small voice, “Lulu, don’t stand there in the dark. Come on over here. And, Curly, I don’t want you to quit. I couldn’t take it if I had to have a stranger around the place right now. Just tell me everything you know.”

  Curly shuffled his feet, his blond rooster’s comb of hair drooping in his eyes. “I don’t know much, Jim, honest, but he stopped by that apartment building out on Sixth Street on Wednesday afternoon—you know, that big complex where I been working for my cousin. He showed me his enlistment papers and said he was on his way to Fort Jackson. That’s in South Carolina. He told me he’d be sleeping in his car to save money until he reports to the base. I give him a few twenties so he could get a motel room along the way. He made me promise not to tell you and Susan, said he’d call you himself when he got there.”

  He glanced at Lara. “He said he’d’ve preferred the Marines, only they make you take a bunch of tests or something first and he wanted to get going fast as he could.”

  “And did he call you or anything along the road?” Jim demanded.

  Curly nodded miserably. “This morning. He called me fro
m South Carolina to tell me he got there safe and sound and he starts his basic training Monday morning. He found hisself a pretty cheap room outside the fort where he’s staying the night. I—I got the name wrote down someplace.”

  He started turning out his pockets, looking for the scrap of paper with Chip’s motel written on it.

  Lara felt a cold knot in her stomach. Chip was going to be a soldier. They’d make him march around in formation when he never even liked to be told to make his bed or do his homework. No more hiding in the Fremantle house, smoking dope with Curly, or going to the Storm Door with his baseball buddies. He’d turn into a stranger, she wouldn’t see him for years and years, and she’d be alone on the farm with Dad and Mom.

  The loneliness terrified her. Mom was hanging out with Gina and the K-PAW people, and even Dad was acting strange, as though space aliens had come to live inside his body and make him walk in a funny, jerky way. What would she do? Who could she talk to?

  Curly finally dug out the number, and Jim took it to the house so he could call Chip. Curly followed him, but Lara stood still next to the big metal planer, her teeth chattering.

  Blitz came over and put his flannel shirt around her. “I know it seems frightening, but maybe it’ll be a good thing for him. Boy doesn’t know what he wants to do with his life. The Army might help him sort that out.”

  Lara clenched her teeth to stop the sound. Blitz was trying to cheer her up, which he’d never done before, so she nodded to show she understood, at least understood the gesture, even if she didn’t understand what he was saying.

  Nineteen

  THE LONG GOOD-BYE

  IN THE MIDDLE OF MAY, the Grelliers drove out to Fort Jackson to watch Chip graduate from basic training. Susan hadn’t wanted to go. She told Jim she couldn’t lend her presence to an activity of which she disapproved so strongly.