Bleeding Kansas

by Sara Paretsky

  He left the tractor, with Elaine still in the cart, in the drive while he went inside to say good-night to Gina. If Elaine hadn’t emerged from the cart when he went back out, he’d unhitch it and leave it in the Fremantle yard until tomorrow.

  Gina had taken a shower and was sitting at the kitchen table, nursing a hot drink. Her dark hair was springing up in little ringlets around her face. She had on a severe dressing gown that zipped up to a high collar and covered her down to her toes, but when she moved the lines of her body were unmistakable. Jim squeezed his eyes shut, not wanting to think, not wanting to imagine.

  She got to her feet. “Jim, I can’t begin to thank you properly. I’d be dead if not for you.”

  He managed a smile, swaying slightly in the doorway. “Life in the country, Gina. We help each other if we can.”

  “You’re going to fall over in another second!” she cried. “Why don’t you spend the night here? You can clean up, if you don’t mind smelling like blood—sorry, that’s the way the rusty water smells to me. I’ll make you a drink, and you can crash on the daybed in my study.”

  Jim thought about riding home. It was only five minutes away, but it meant returning to Susan’s angry, inert presence, to his daughter—Lara! How could he have forgotten her, out somewhere with Robbie Schapen?

  He had to get back, he was starting to say, when Lara phoned him. She was frantic because the truck and car were both in the yard but he had disappeared.

  “Lulu, you okay? Gina Haring got herself trapped in the wreck of the old bunkhouse. I’ve just finished digging her out…No, I don’t know what she was doing there…She’s fine, just shaken up…Did you get dinner?…Okay. I may have a drink before I come home, so you get to bed, sweetheart.”

  When he hung up, he collapsed in the other kitchen chair. “I should go home. Susan isn’t in great shape, and I don’t like to leave Lulu alone with her.”

  Gina stood without speaking and steamed a mug of milk for him at her espresso machine, then poured brandy in it. “I have to hide all the alcohol from Elaine, which makes it hard to have a drink when I need one. What did you do with her?”

  “She’s in the cart.” He gulped down the hot, sweet milk. He hadn’t eaten since the pancakes he’d had with Lara at noon; the brandy hit him almost at once, making his eyelids thick but soothing his itching skin. “I’d still like to know what you were doing in that bunkhouse, but not tonight, not when I’m one inch from falling asleep.”

  He finished the drink, but when he stood he realized he wasn’t in any shape to drive the tractor, even the half mile to his farmyard. He let Gina find him a pair of old Mr. Fremantle’s pajamas and a towel.

  If he hadn’t been so very tired and so very filthy, he couldn’t have brought himself to stand under the shower. The glass door and the shower floor were thick with orange scum and rust had dug deep grooves in the metal walls. How had Liz Fremantle lived with this all those years? And how did Gina, so fastidious in her appearance, tolerate it?

  Even so, the physical pleasure of hot water on his dirty head and arms felt so good that he stood there until the water began running cold. When he got out of the bathroom, Gina was sitting on the bottom of the stairs outside the door.

  She stood with an effort. “I’m dead on my feet, too.”

  She led him up the stairs, past the bare laths where the plaster had fallen out, to the back bedroom where she tried to write. “I’m sorry about Susan, Jim. I’ve been a bad friend, but I’ll come over this week to see her, truly I will.”

  He couldn’t muster the strength to answer, just stumbled around her small worktable and fell onto the daybed. He didn’t even ask about Elaine, although his last conscious thought was to wonder if she had passed out in his cart.

  When he woke, the room was dark. He stretched a hand out for the bedside clock and panicked as his fingers closed on air. For a moment, as his hand flailed, he couldn’t think where he was or why his joints ached so. And then he remembered: Gina Haring.

  In the dark room, he felt desire lick up his legs. Get your clothes on, Farmer Jones, get your clothes on and go home where you belong.

  He found the lamp on Gina’s worktable and looked at his watch, which he’d dropped on the floor with his clothes last night. It was five in the morning: his mind said that was time to get up, even after a night of heavy work, even in a strange room. Which was good. He could get home before Lara woke and save himself the embarrassment of trying to explain why he’d been gone all night.

  He stood, trying to stretch the kinks from his tired body. He was supposed to spread fertilizer on his wheat fields today—he hoped he didn’t fall asleep on the tractor. He picked up his clothes from the chair where he’d flung them last night. They were too foul to contemplate wearing again. He instead zipped his jacket over Mr. Fremantle’s pajamas and rolled his jeans into a ball. He’d managed to shove one of his socks all the way under the daybed; his knees protested loudly as he knelt to fish it out.

  As he brushed away the dust bunnies clinging to his sock, he found a small photograph, a yellowing black-and-white shot of a youth with a thin, dark face and a mop of thick hair, almost an Afro. He stared at the picture, puzzled. He thought he recognized the wide, sensitive mouth, but it wasn’t one of the Fremantles.

  He was too tired; he couldn’t put his own name to his own face this morning let alone some thirty-year-old photograph. He laid it on Gina’s worktable. As he bent to pull on his socks, though, the memory came to him: Jim himself as a boy, sitting in front of Grandpa on the big tractor. They were harrowing corn—at least, he had a vivid picture of the bright green stalks. And then Grandpa got angry: “Not in my field, young man.” Grandpa set the brake on the tractor and jumped down. The youth had been angry, but the young woman he was with had laughed at Grandpa in a saucy way. She’d had hair the same color as cornsilk, and it hung down over her like a waterfall.

  It was this man, Jim thought. He was using the cornfield as a place to have sex. At the time, Jim couldn’t make sense of the scene, nor of Grandpa’s anger: “In front of the boy,” he spat at Gram over lunch. “How could they do that in front of the boy?”

  That made Jim think it was wicked to have your clothes off in front of a child, or out of doors, even though Gram said, “Now, Nathan, they couldn’t have known you’d be harrowing there today with Jimmy. They’re bone ignorant about farming. Just don’t tell Myra—she’s trying to get the sheriff to arrest that whole bunkhouse, and throw in Liz Fremantle for good measure.”

  Right after that, someone had killed all the marijuana plants the hippies were growing behind the barn. Jim and Doug had always assumed Myra did that—but what if it had been Grandpa, angry about sex in the cornfield? And then had come the fire in the bunkhouse, which had driven away all the hippies, including this one.

  Jim had never known the name of the boy who died in the fire. Maybe it had even been this one, the one in the picture. The boy probably hadn’t been much older than Chip. And Jim didn’t even know his name!

  He was sitting on the bed, lost in space, holding his socks, when Gina appeared, still wearing her green dressing gown.

  “I thought I’d sleep round the clock, but I kept jumping awake, thinking the ceiling was collapsing on me. I saw the light and figured you couldn’t sleep, either.”

  “I’m always awake around five; my body doesn’t know any better.” He gestured at her worktable. “I found this picture under the bed. I think maybe it was one of the hippies in the bunkhouse.”

  Gina looked at it, but shook her head. “I’ve never seen it—unless—Elaine gave me her college transcript, trying to prove to me she was smart enough to help me write a novel—maybe this picture was with it?”

  She picked up a crumpled document from her worktable and handed it to Jim. The seal of the University of Kansas’s registrar announced it as the “Official Record of Elaine Logan.” In the spring and fall of 1969—the end of her sophomore and beginning of her junior years—Elaine had recei
ved A’s in the Victorian Novel and the Honors English Seminar, B’s in all her other subjects. In the spring of 1970, she’d failed one class and dropped the others. In the fall of 1970, she’d withdrawn.

  “I didn’t know she’d been a student at the university—it’s hard to picture.”

  Gina’s shoulders sagged. “She’s going to drive me into an insane asylum. Some days she’ll quote reams of nineteenth-century poetry: she knows ‘Barbara Frietchie’ by heart, and I’ll hear her declaiming, ‘“Shoot, if you must, this old gray head, / But spare your country’s flag,”’ or, ‘Christ! What are patterns for?’ A minute later, she’ll start talking baby talk, and want to pretend I’m her mother.”

  Jim laughed softly. When Gina said crossly that it wasn’t funny, he apologized. “It’s just life I’m laughing at. I don’t want to go home because Susan won’t talk to me, and you don’t want to be here because Elaine won’t stop talking.”

  Gina made a face. “You can say that again. Elaine says she lived in the bunkhouse when it was a commune. Is that true?”

  Jim shrugged. “That’s what Liz Fremantle said. I guess Elaine left Lawrence after the fire. Whatever she did in between didn’t do her a whole lot of good. A mental hospital, where they kept her in restraints, gave her all those drugs. That’s what I did hear from Curly—Tom Curlingford—who works for me, but I never know if what he reports is true or not.”

  “I don’t think Elaine’s psychotic, just addled,” Gina said.

  “Is that why you were excavating the bunkhouse? To find out if she really lived there or not? I wouldn’t think there’d be any evidence after all this time.” Jim smiled.

  Gina flushed. “You and Susan told me about the boy who was killed in the bunkhouse. Elaine keeps talking about him, too, but she also says her baby died in the fire. Maybe it sounds ghoulish, but I wanted to see.”

  “Excavating for bones?” Jim’s amusement fled. “It does sound ghoulish. Don’t you have anything better to do with your time?”

  Gina stiffened. “I am so tired of every mortal soul in this county sitting in judgment on me. My New York friends warned me that people out here were narrow-minded. I should have listened to them.”

  “We’re no more narrow-minded than city people who sit in judgment on us for thinking differently than they do,” Jim objected.

  Gina smiled brittlely. “Arnie Schapen sicced the fire department on our midsummer fire. He also was pretty crude in the response he organized to our K-PAW march last winter, as you should remember.”

  “I certainly do remember,” Jim said with a spurt of anger. “How can you say we’re narrow-minded after that, after my wife danced around your bonfires, and even got arrested taking part in a group you drew her into? And then—Oh, my God, Gina, is it all a game with you? The fact that my wife turned her energy to the anti-war movement, that my son went to Iraq and was killed. Did that matter to you at all, or were you just playacting, trying to pretend you were some sixties hippie?”

  “It’s not playacting, Jim. My own life is in turmoil. Not on the scale yours is, maybe, but I keep screwing around trying to figure out how to make a living and getting more and more stultified out here by myself. I thought I could write a book about the dead boy in the bunkhouse, that it would be a way of using this time here productively.”

  She came to sit next to him. “The only thing I will apologize for is neglecting Susan, and that’s because I haven’t known what to say to her. It’s cowardice that’s kept me away, not malice, or—or because I think her life is a game. Do you honestly believe I’m responsible for your son’s death? I know your man Blitz does—he treats me as if I were every plague ever visited on the land of Egypt.”

  “Blitz isn’t my man, or anyone else’s,” Jim said irritably. “I don’t hold you responsible for my son’s decisions, but Susan must have told you how hard your anti-war group was on her relationship with him.”

  “Of course, but I only heard it from her side. She felt he was trying to dictate to her what she could do, who her friends should be. I agreed that no man should dictate her political beliefs or actions, especially not her son. No woman, for that matter. Anyway, even if I were a fairy-tale witch and could have foretold the future, seen your son’s death in a crystal ball, how could I have stopped Susan from participating in the anti-war movement or my bonfires?”

  Jim thought of all the fights in the family last winter. No one could have stopped Susan once she had her mind made up, that was true. No one could stop Chip, either, come to that. He had always been more like his mother, more passionate, more intense, than Lulu.

  “Still,” Jim said, “I’d like to know what’s real and what’s fake. The bonfires—were you doing that to see what kind of rise you’d get out of us, checking how narrow-minded we actually are?”

  She sighed. “I’ve been a Wiccan for, oh, since I was in college, but I’ve never lived where I could try some of the rituals on a bigger scale. I met Wiccans in Lawrence, the way everyone meets people who share their beliefs. The bonfires grew out of that. We all were longing to have real bonfires, do the full ceremonials. One of the women had taken part in them in Massachusetts and showed us how to set up the fires.

  “They are meaningful to me, these rituals, as much as church and communion are to a Christian. We will have our Samhain festival at the end of October, when the world celebrates Halloween.” She stared at him as if daring him to condemn her religion.

  “Fine. Burn down the whole property, as long as it doesn’t cross the tracks and get into my cornfield. Are you really trying to write a book about the kids in the bunkhouse?”

  “I don’t know.” She played with one of the gold studs in her ears. “I’ve started reading what I can find about them—there isn’t much. They called themselves the ‘Free State Commune.’ They grew dope, of course. Susan told me how Myra Schapen killed the crop.”

  “We don’t know who did that,” Jim corrected her. “My brother and my wife assume it was Myra, but no one saw her do it.”

  Gina picked up a stack of paper by her laptop. “The Free State ringleader wrote for an old underground newspaper in Lawrence. His name was Dante Sirota—he’s the kid who was killed in the bunkhouse. He was pretty inflammatory about the Vietnam war, and on the collusion of townspeople in violence against Indians and African-Americans in the area. I can imagine how Myra Schapen would have reacted to him. I can’t help wondering if she set the fire in the bunkhouse.”

  “The sheriff concluded at the time that the fire was started accidentally. The kids burned a lot of candles, and the wiring in the bunkhouse was pretty ancient, so—”

  “Naturally the sheriff said that!” Gina cried. “The law-and-order man wouldn’t challenge the local power structure, especially not when the communards were urging the abolition of private property.”

  Jim thought with longing of his fields and the winter wheat. How safe and reliable the land was, not filling your head with romances about dead revolutionaries and great-great-grandmothers and visions—just land that might or might not give you the crop you wanted but wouldn’t pretend to be something it wasn’t.

  “Maybe. Maybe. But I don’t think Myra Schapen set that bunkhouse on fire.” He got to his feet again.

  “But Elaine saw her the night the bunkhouse burned,” Gina argued. “She went over to look at that miracle calf, or whatever the Schapens are so puffed up about, and she recognized Myra Schapen. She told me when she got back here.”

  “It’s true Myra was at the bunkhouse the night of the fire. I saw her myself when my brother, Doug, and I were helping with a bucket brigade. Mr. Schapen—Myra’s husband, who died a few years later—was there, too. But just because Myra wasn’t helping put out the fire doesn’t prove she set it. Why don’t you talk to Hank Drysdale, Gina? He’s the sheriff now, and he’s a decent man. He can look in the files at the county building and tell you what the investigation showed.”

  “Oh, Jim! I bet you were the last guy in your school to
give up on Santa Claus and the tooth fairy, weren’t you?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” He was nettled. “That I’m too naive or too bone ignorant to make reliable judgments about people?”

  “I’m sorry—I wasn’t trying to insult you. You’re such a decent person, Jim, basically, you can’t believe there’s bad in anyone, can you, not even Myra Schapen, let alone a sheriff who’s supposed to uphold law and order?” She put a hand on his sleeve, white hand, long fingers.

  Even annoyed with her, disliking her dogmatic opinions, he couldn’t stop flashes of fantasy. “And what if I can’t? Is that such a bad thing? Myra is a pain in the butt, I’ll give you that any day of the week, even Sunday, but I will not believe she put a torch to a bunkhouse when she knew people were inside of it.”

  He removed her hand from his arm. “I have to go, Gina. I need to get Lulu up, make sure she gets to school, and I have to fertilize twelve hundred acres today.”

  She moved around him to face him in the doorway. “Promise me you won’t say a word to anyone about my looking for those—those bones in the bunkhouse. Please! I can’t stand for people to make fun of me.”

  He smiled faintly. “I don’t believe in minding other people’s business for them. You’ll come see Susan sometime soon?”

  “A trade, you mean. I’ll visit Susan and you’ll keep quiet?”

  She gave him a saucy smile of her own; once again, he saw the young woman in the cornfield and felt a breath of hot July air on his neck. He took Gina’s face between his hands and kissed her, expecting her to back away, slap him, or say something cold and cutting, that she might do it with Susan but not Jim. Instead, she slipped her hands under the top to Mr. Fremantle’s pajamas and ran her fingers up his back. They were as soft as he’d imagined, whispers on his wind-roughened skin. He knew he should draw away, return home to face his responsibilities: daughter, wife, wheat. Instead, he pulled Gina closer, wishing he hadn’t given all of Chip’s Hot Rods to Lara.