Bleeding Kansas

by Sara Paretsky

  When she finished her tale, Jim didn’t know whether he was proud of Lara for her nerve or angry with her for her spying. In the end, all he did was take her hands and bring her over to sit next to him on the couch.

  “Sweetheart, I think we’ll leave your phone in Arnie’s manger and chalk it up as part of the worst year of our lives. They’ll find it sometime when they’re cleaning, but they’ll just think one of the men out there dropped it.”

  “But, Dad, I took pictures with it, a picture of me with the calf. They’ll know it’s mine. And Arnie, he’s a deputy, he can probably trace our phone number on it through some police database.”

  “We’ll have to go over, then, and tell Arnie the truth.”

  “Dad, no! You know how mean he is! He’ll sue you for trespass or me for ruining his calf, or something. He thinks the calf is going to make him rich. Can’t you and Blitz go over and talk to him and Myra about something else, keep them in the house? Then I could crawl back into the pen and get my phone back.”

  “Baby, you know I don’t like you sneaking into places. And now you see one reason why. You need to learn to face up to the consequences of your actions and one of those consequences is telling Arnie the truth. Maybe that will cure you of trying to spy on people.”

  “No, Dad, no!” Her voice rose, trembling near the breaking point.

  He was tired, too tired to try to reason with her or think of any other solution to the problem. “Okay, Lulu, okay. We’ll talk about it more tomorrow; I’m too tired to think right now. And that’s because I’ve been bringing in the corn all day, not because I had two shots of bourbon. Now I have some good news for you: the doctor says your mom can come home on Saturday.”

  “Oh,” she said blankly. “I mean, good, I guess. Is she eating?”

  “Yes, she’s put on six pounds, they said. And she’s taking her medicine, so she’s starting to feel better.”

  Father and daughter stared bleakly at each other, each imagining how much harder their lives would be with Susan back in the house.

  “Which reminds me,” Jim said, as if they’d both spoken the shared thought, “I could really use your help cleaning out the bedroom, Lulu.”

  She opened her mouth to protest, then remembered how much trouble she was in and how much she needed his help. She mumbled something that passed for agreement.

  Jim clasped her to him. “Lulu, we’ll get through all this. I don’t know how, but we will.”

  She clung to him briefly, despite the smell of bourbon, which she found disgusting. For a moment, she forgot all the hurtful words he’d said to her since Chip’s death. For a moment, she felt like little Lara, whose daddy could cure anything that was wrong in her world, from her despair at her mother’s abandoning the co-op market to her hurt feelings when Chip beheaded all her dolls.

  Then she remembered her cell phone and how Jim wouldn’t help her find it. And how Robbie hadn’t waited for her at the crossroads. Even though it was her own fault for being late, he might have cut her some slack. After all, yesterday he seemed to want to be with her. She turned from her father and went to put Chip’s clothes in the dryer.

  There wasn’t any way for Lara to know that Myra Schapen had forced Robbie to wait in the kitchen with her until the men were through in the heifer’s pen, since Robbie refused to go back out to pray with them. The calf’s fear and loneliness made him miserable. Even though it felt like sacrilege, to go against Pastor Nabo and the Jews, Robbie couldn’t believe the heifer was speaking ancient Hebrew. She sounded too much like a frightened, lonely calf to him.

  At six-thirty, hoping to see Lara, he started for the kitchen door. When Nanny demanded to know where he thought he was going, he said to town, to set up his music for Teen Youth Night.

  “You’ll ride in with Pastor Nabo, young man. And if you’re not going to go pray like a Christian man and take your responsibilities seriously, then you can work in here with me like a woman and help me get all these coffee cups cleaned up. I’m not having you disappear on the pastor like you did last night. I’ll be ashamed to hold my head up at the women’s Bible class tomorrow, when Gail Ruesselmann asks me how you could leave poor little Amber in the lurch. Flat tire, indeed. Tonight it’ll be trouble with the carburetor, no doubt!”

  Robbie could only be grateful that Myra hadn’t guessed he’d spent the whole evening right across the road with Lara Grellier—that would really have fried her eggs! She thought he was out doing drugs or getting drunk.

  “But, Nanny, Pastor can’t drive me home after Teen Youth Night!”

  He’d been afraid she’d snarl that he could walk home, but he was startled when she said Junior would pick him up.

  “Junior?” he cried in dismay. “He’s over in Tonganoxie.”

  “He’s coming home. I called to tell him how this calf was speaking Hebrew and about to make us all famous, and he decided he’d best come home and see for himself. His first class isn’t until ten tomorrow. He’ll be able to drive back in the morning. It’ll do you good to spend time with your brother, instead of drinking and carrying on like a sodomite in some Lawrence back alley!”

  “Nanny, I’m a better student than Junior ever was, I work hard at Teen Youth. Why can’t you trust me to get myself to church and back?”

  “I trusted you last night and look where you ended up. And don’t you go comparing yourself with Junior. If you had his abilities, you wouldn’t need to boast about your grades. Pride goeth before destruction, young man, and don’t you forget it! And if you think I’m calling that cup clean just because you ran water over it, think again.”

  While the men were still praying over the calf, Robbie finally found a chance to slip out and walk the quarter mile to the crossroads. There was no sign of Lara. His depression deepened. Why had he ever believed someone as beautiful, as unusual, as Lara Grellier would seriously think of going out with him, especially to a lame event like a church-youth meeting? If he was honest, he’d have to admit he’d just wanted a chance to show off to her how good a musician he was. He’d imagined her eyes shining at him on the way home, telling him how special his music was, so he’d have a chance to sing one of the songs he’d written to her.

  He waited until a quarter of seven, then turned back to the farm, shoulders hunched over, kicking rocks. He got to the yard just as the men were starting to get into their cars and Myra was shouting his name loud enough for God and all the angels to hear it.

  Thirty-Four

  ACTION IN THE HEIFER’S BARN

  JIM HAD GONE to bed as soon as the nine o’clock news finished. Lara went through the motions of her homework while picking at a pizza, but she was too tense to eat, let alone study.

  Now that the weather had turned chilly, the uninsulated sunporch was too cold at night for sleeping and Jim had moved into Chip’s room. Lara listened to her father’s heavy breathing; the bourbon he’d drunk was making him snore. The raw noise was oddly comforting—it made her feel at least she wasn’t alone in the house.

  She tiptoed past Chip’s door to the sunporch, where she had a view of the road, wondering what time Robbie’s youth group ended and when he’d be coming home. She had a half-formed notion of stopping his truck, telling him what had happened, and seeing if he’d retrieve her cell phone. Maybe he’d be so mad at her for coming near his precious calf he’d never speak to her again. And why should that bother her? What did she care if a loser Schapen turned his back on her? She’d be better off. Lonelier off.

  She must have stood at the window for close to an hour, but all she saw were cars and pickups racing down the county road between Highway 10 and Fifteenth Street. A few minutes before eleven, a jeep turned off the county road, heading toward Schapens’. That was Junior’s: Arnie had bought it for him when Junior left for college so he wouldn’t have to ride his motorcycle in bad weather.

  Lara’s stomach tightened. Junior hadn’t been home once since he’d started over at Tonganoxie in August. Arnie must have found her cell phone in
the manger. He’d called Junior. The two of them would come over and arrest her or beat up Dad and burn down the house.

  She thought about waking her father, but she imagined what he’d say: we’ll face Arnie if he comes here, and, meanwhile, think twice the next time you want to pull a stunt like sneaking into the special heifer’s enclosure.

  She’d done it once, she could do it again. She went down to the utility room and took Chip’s fatigues out of the dryer. “Sorry, Chip,” she murmured, “I got your uniform stinko once already today, and now I’m going to do it again. But just in case Arnie hasn’t found my phone yet, I’m going back for it. Remember me, your stupid little sister? Look after me if you’re not too busy playing your harp, okay?”

  Lara giggled with nerves—she couldn’t picture Chip playing a harp. If he was with Jesus and the saints, he’d be so holy she wouldn’t recognize him. But if she got to heaven herself maybe she’d be holy, too. Only, would Jesus even let in someone like her, who messed up in school and got her dad in trouble with the meanest man in the Kaw Valley?

  “Help me get my cell phone back and I promise I’ll scrub all that garbage off the walls in Mom’s bedroom,” she pleaded, not with the Lord—too remote, too busy to bother with Kansas farm girls—but to her brother.

  Lara slipped out through the garage, taking care not to wake her father by banging the door shut. Once she was outside in the cold October night, she felt so frightened she almost turned around. Only the thought of Arnie’s and Myra’s gloating over one more screwup by her family, of what Arnie might do to her if he had found her phone, made Lara move forward.

  She had just reached the county road when she heard Junior’s jeep coming back down the road from Schapens’. She dropped into the ditch, terrified that he was heading into her yard, but he turned south toward Highway 10. She waited until his taillights had turned into little red dots before getting out of the ditch. She dashed across the intersection and into the bushes that Arnie never bothered to cut back.

  The yard lights were on around the Schapen house; two shone near the cow barns. Another was set up near the sheds for the baby calves. Lara could see Robbie’s truck in the same place it had been when she came over in the afternoon. It was parked on the verge so the visitors would have room on the gravel drive. Maybe he’d never gone out at all. Maybe Myra had wormed out the truth about him and Lara and forced him to stay home. The idea brought a little calm to her jumbled thoughts.

  The kitchen light was on, but Lara didn’t risk getting spotted by climbing the oak tree to peer in. If the Schapens all rose at four-thirty or five to do the milking, she couldn’t believe anyone in the family would be up now. However, the Grelliers and the Schapens were so at odds she knew nothing about their habits, the way she did for Mr. Ropes, or used to for old Mrs. Fremantle—Lara had known when Mrs. Fremantle liked to go to bed, what shows she stayed up to watch, what she did when she couldn’t sleep. Same for the Ropeses, after all the sleepovers she had done with Kimberly when they were little. She could believe Myra would stand in the kitchen all night brewing witch’s potions, but maybe she was just staying up because her prize creep grandson Junior had come home.

  Lara sank to the ground and crawled around behind the cow sheds. The cows lowed as she passed, but the sound of their munching, the hard jets of their urine hitting the floor, the soft plops of cow patties dropping, sounded normal and soothing.

  She repeated her maneuver of the afternoon, swinging in a wide arc away from the cow barns so she could come to the heifer’s pen from behind. The lagoon seemed enormous now, its inky water alive with menace. She got to her feet and ran. In the stubble of Arnie’s sorghum, Lara heard the night creatures moving away from her, alarmed by so big a beast in their midst: at this hour, voles, possums, and deer mice owned the fields. An owl swooped past her, hunting, and the scream from the small being it caught made Lara scream herself and drop back to the ground.

  She had studied all these field animals for 4-H projects, had even identified those eaten by owls from the bones in owl pellets. That had been an impersonal science project, but tonight she felt like one of those little animals herself, helpless in front of Myra Schapen’s claws.

  She crawled the rest of the way to the pen, again lying flat, and rolling underneath the outer wall through the depression she’d dug earlier. The heifer danced uneasily in her enclosure when she heard Lara come in, and bleated her nervous “yeh-heh, yeh-heh.”

  “It’s okay, girl, it’s okay,” Lara said, her voice shaking. “It’s just me, the heathen Grellier girl.”

  She crept up to the platform and started digging through the hay in the manger. Standing on the floor, she couldn’t reach all the way to the bottom. Once again, she swung a leg over the enclosure fence. The calf started bucking and running around the small space.

  “Easy, girl, easy.” Lara backed into the manger and stuck her left arm in. “I hope if you found my phone, you left it alone, okay? I don’t want to have to dig through all your poop—”

  She broke off at the sound of voices outside the barn door: Junior and another man. She froze with fear and then dove once more into the manger, wildly covering herself with hay, praying for obliteration. In another instant, the door opened, and the calf started dancing in earnest, crying out at the top of her lungs.

  Junior laughed. “So that’s the Holy Spirit at work. Look at her go—what a gal! We ought to try to ride her.”

  Peeping through a gap in the manger slats, Lara watched as Junior and the man with him tried to corner the calf. The poor animal was already so frightened that she reared up and tried attacking them with her front hooves. “You go, girl!” Lara mouthed encouragement. “Knock him out. Put a hoof through his idiot skull.”

  The calf’s frenzy was getting Junior angry or excited—Lara couldn’t tell which, but he was trying to grab the calf’s head and wrestle her to the ground. He looked as though he’d put on another fifty pounds since he’d gone off to college. Next to him, the calf, who probably weighed five hundred pounds, didn’t seem all that big.

  “Don’t hurt her,” the other man said. “Arnie be very, very mad if she’s hurt.”

  Lara almost cried out—that was Eddie Burton! So Junior had been heading to the Burton place when he passed her on the road. She felt a dizzying wave of relief. They didn’t know about her; they weren’t thinking about her at all.

  “Yo, dude, don’t tell me what I can and can’t do on my own farm.”

  “No, Junior. But Arnie, he come around with his gun, he wants my daddy in jail. You know, if he seed you and me he’d shoot me. I’m scared of Arnie.”

  “Be better if you were scared of me, boy.” Junior’s voice combined a caress and a threat in the same breath.

  Lara’s relief turned to nausea. She remembered the wildness in Junior’s and Eddie’s faces at the midsummer bonfire, and she knew what was going to happen next. Don’t, don’t, don’t, she begged Junior in her head. Stop him, she prayed to Jesus or Chip, or even the calf if she were listening. Lara felt Chip’s fatigues turn wet with her own urine, but that humiliation wasn’t as great as the revulsion that made her whole body shake with shock.

  Junior grabbed Eddie, who laughed excitedly and halfheartedly punched at Junior’s arms until Junior pinned his hands and undid the snaps on Eddie’s jeans. When he pulled down Eddie’s underpants, Lara squeezed her eyes shut, but she couldn’t close her ears to the sounds, Junior grunting, Eddie squeaking, then a loud cry from Junior which made the calf bellow in turn. Junior roared in laughter at that and said the calf was blessing their union.

  “It’s her first holy deed,” he said, and Eddie said oh, yes, the calf was very holy.

  Lara opened her eyes, hoping that she would see them leaving the enclosure. Junior’s naked buttocks, as large as a prize hog at the fair, were almost under her nose. They were pallid, the color of lard, with coarse hairs down his spine like hog bristles. He wasn’t pulling on his pants but getting up on his knees to straddle E
ddie. Lara shut her eyes again. She couldn’t help whimpering aloud, but mercifully the calf was still bellowing and Junior and Eddie were laughing so they didn’t hear her.

  Junior’s laugh stopped abruptly. Lara heard him scrambling upright and then say roughly, “What are you doing in here, twerp?”

  “Dad’s home from patrol.” It was Robbie. “I thought you’d want to know. You don’t have to thank me—he’ll be real proud that you’re admiring his perfect heifer. She is still a heifer, isn’t she?”

  “Knock it off, choirboy, or I’ll break your nose and tell Nanny that I caught you being naughty with the family prize.” He zipped his jeans and yanked Eddie roughly to his feet.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Eddie—he’s not going to do anything to you,” Junior added, because Eddie was shaking too much at the thought of facing Arnie to be able to pull on his clothes.

  A few seconds later, Arnie appeared. “What’s going on out here? Robbie, what are you doing to the—Junior! Well, well, Junior, what brings you home?”

  Lara couldn’t see Arnie’s face, but the change in his voice was profound—anger at Robbie for disturbing the calf turned into something like thick cream at the sight of Junior. Poor Robbie! He saved his brother from being caught by Arnie and instead of thanking him Junior was going to blame him for hurting the calf. It was so wrong she wanted to sit up and denounce Junior.

  “Nanny called me—she told me this calf of yours was performing miracles. I hopped right in my ride to come see for myself. And me and Eddie, we saw her in action, didn’t we, buddy?”

  “What did she do?” Arnie demanded eagerly.

  “Miracle,” Eddie volunteered in a husky gulp. “She made a miracle for me and Junior.”