A Morning Like This

by Deborah Bedford

  “This isn’t going to work.”

  “Let’s talk.” He reached toward her and touched an arm that had been black and blue when Sophie had first arrived. “One more time. That’s all. Just one more time.”

  Abby had seen this scene so many times, she almost knew what the next words were going to be. It always played out sugar sweet; then, when the men didn’t get what they wanted, they turned angry. Tell him, Sophie. Tell him. Tell him. You aren’t coming home again.

  “Didn’t you like my roses?”

  No, Abby wanted to say. She gave those away.

  “That’s not going to work. Flowers don’t make up for what you do. Mike—” Sophie floundered. The table and all those cupcakes stood in between them and, for the moment, Abby couldn’t tell whether Sophie wanted to run toward this man, or away. A heart and a spirit in her, at war with each other, playing out on her face. “Abby?”

  Abby nodded. “I’m here.”

  Sophie turned to her husband again. “This isn’t fair, you cornering me like this.”

  “Why not? You’re out here for all the rest of the world to see. Why can’t I see you?”

  “You could have made that bread yourself from your mother’s notecard in the recipe box. You didn’t need me to do it.”

  He was standing in everybody’s way. Children elbowed in past him, and he stepped around several of them, pushing them out of his path. It was clear Sophie’s fear hadn’t gone away. Kate and Abby exchanged quarters for peanut brittle, making an obvious barrier between the man with the bread and this small, terrified woman in the booth.

  Mike opened the wrap on his wife’s bread, tore off a hunk, and shoved it into his mouth. “Humph,” he said around the crust. “Good. Real good.”

  Abby said, “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

  “This is a public park.”

  “Yes, but your wife doesn’t want to see you.”

  “Wait.” He grinned suddenly. “Wait, Sophie. I got something.” He set the bread on the table. “I got something you’ll like.” Without any further ado, he trotted away.

  The air of fun and gaiety had left the booth the moment Mike Henderson arrived. Now Sophie, Abby, and Kate sold treats with quiet care, keeping watch over a hundred heads in the crowd.

  “I wish he wouldn’t come back,” Kate said, “but I know he will. I’ve seen this happen about a hundred times before.”

  “Of course he’ll come back,” Sophie said in a pinched voice. “That’s all he ever thinks about these days. Come back. Come back. Come back. And I just wish…I just wish…”

  Abby touched her arm. “If you want the police, I’ve got my cell phone in my purse.”

  “No, don’t do that to him. I don’t want anything to happen to him. Please.”

  Here he came, lugging a heavy wooden crate with wheatgrass sticking out of the corners, his hands jammed through two holes for handles. Every few yards or so across the grass, someone would stop him and peer at the box with a stupefied expression, a glance of inquiry, and a careful hand reached inside. He approached the Community Safety Network booth with long, easy strides, and plopped the box on the ground with obvious pride. Sophie stood on tiptoe to look over.

  “Uh-uh-uh.” He stooped and reached inside where she couldn’t see. “You let me be the one to present you with this little fellow. Hold out your arms.”

  “No. I’m not taking any live thing. You just want me to come home and take care of it.”

  “Well, I figure since the roses didn’t do any good—” When he stood up, he’d lashed his arms around a big ring-necked pheasant. It craned its neck and flapped its wings in Mike Henderson’s big hands, the most beautiful wild bird Abby had ever seen. Its tawny plumage glinted chestnut and purple and green, a corona of colors, in the daylight. Its eyes were round with surprise and wet with shine.

  “How about this for a present? We were out with Ramey’s Retriever, just giving it a run. Dog flushed this thing and we couldn’t believe what we were seeing.”

  “Mike, that’s a pheasant. A wild bird. Something people hunt.”

  Mike Henderson moved on impulse and not on logic. “Not until the fall, people don’t hunt it. Serves all those hunters right who go out mid-week, when I can’t afford to hunt until Saturday. Now I’ve got my own private stock.”

  “Mike, you’re not thinking. You don’t get it. I need a pheasant like I need a hole in the head.”

  The pheasant let out one double-noted crow, kur-rik.

  “Looks like this one got his tail bobbed off. Looks like a coyote taught him a lesson. Bet he won’t get in the way of a coyote again.”

  Abby moved in closer behind Sophie and pulled her cell phone out of her purse like a weapon. “Sophie has come to us for protection from you. If you don’t leave her alone, I’m going to make a domestic disturbance call to the police.”

  “Mike,” Sophie said. “I don’t want that bird.”

  “I’m trying to make you listen, Sophie. I’m trying to make you see how much I love you.”

  “There’s love that wins battles and there’s love that loses them. I’m trying to figure out which one we’ve got.”

  “I said I wouldn’t do it again, if you’d come home. I said I’d go see somebody.”

  “You keep getting it gnarled up like that. You can’t make me do something that hinges on you. You can only figure out what two people’s love is together when you know what two people’s love is, separate.”

  “Sophie, you just need to get back home.”

  The crowd began to push in. “I want to pet that thing, mister. That’s the weirdest bird I’ve ever seen.” “Can I see it?” “Let me!”

  The pheasant, which wasn’t built much for flying anyway, flapped again, hard. With an airy whoosh against Mike’s chest, it burst out of his arms and landed, wings threshing, on the bake-sale table. Dollar bills flew. Chocolate cupcakes with pastel sprinkles scattered in the grass. The bird’s feet made tiny chocolate W’s, evenly spaced, where it dashed for escape across the tablecloth. It took off tottering across the grass, its bare behind tucked under and waddling, its scarlet wattle seesawing back and forth with every step.

  Every child in the town square sprinted in hot pursuit. In the corner of the square, the Teton Twirlers had broken into a fast rendition of “Oh Johnny, Oh!” One fellow, in the midst of a swing with his partner, had to wrench his cowboy boot sideways to keep from stepping on the pheasant and three kids. The pheasant took another flight and Mike jumped in to catch it. It fluttered up and forward like a hovercraft, escaping straight into the peril of a woman’s square-dance costume, snagging itself in her bandana-and-tulle gathered skirt. There it floundered and no one dared disentangle it while it struggled to find the solid ground or sky, either one.

  “Get it out! Get it out!” The woman stamped her Mary Jane shoes, desperately fearful, while an alien living thing rousted among her petticoats. As she tried to flatten it out of her skirt with her hands, the Bar J Wranglers on the flat-bed trailer broke into a rousing fiddle rendition of “Birds of a Feather.”

  “Hey, Henderson,” somebody bellowed from the crowd. “Is that your new dancing partner?”

  The pheasant scurried down the street, rounded a corner into an alleyway, and was gone.

  In frustration, Mike slapped his big hand against his hipbone. When he wheeled back to face everybody, a vein protruded like a scar from his forehead. “Nobody makes a fool out of me.”

  “Mike—”

  “You made a fool out of me, Sophie. Right when I was trying to do something good.”

  Abby wrapped her arm around Sophie’s shoulders and tried to draw her away. “You don’t have to do it,” she said. “Sophie, you don’t have to let him pull you like this.”

  “This is not what I wanted, Mike,” Sophie said, her arms fastened against her chest again while Abby stood beside her. “No matter what parts of that bird are missing, it still needs to be set free.”

  “But
that bird is a gift,” he insisted.

  “You can’t give something as a gift if people don’t want it,” she said. “I want you to leave me alone, Mike. I want you to just go away.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Braden Treasure’s favorite part of July Fourth was the dunking tank that stood on the southeast corner of the square. All sorts of town dignitaries volunteered to take turns taunting customers and getting wet, all the way from the owner of the Mangy Moose restaurant to Mrs. Roehrkasse, a fifth-grade teacher who always traveled with her students to the dinosaur dig near Thermopolis.

  Whenever Braden made his way to the front of the line, the hapless victim in the chair would moan. Being one of the Little League players, even though not its most accurate pitcher, had its distinct advantages. He’d been training all summer long to throw hard and fast and with newfound precision. If only he could hit the target this time, the unfortunate person perched atop the tank would plunge into the icy water below.

  Today Braden would take aim at Ken Hubner, his own baseball coach. “You’d better not hit that, young man!” Ken bellowed, swinging his legs and waving while everyone jeered at him from below. “You just try to douse me! You just try.”

  Braden paid his dollar and was handed three baseballs. He wound up to throw while Wheezer and Jake and Chase cheered him on. But things didn’t feel right. He lowered the ball, lowered his chin, and readjusted the bill of his Elk’s Club cap.

  That girl might come here. That girl who’s my sister.

  Braden reared his elbow back and let fly the first ball. He stepped off to the left on his follow-through, just the way Coach Hubner had taught him not to do. He missed the bull’s-eye target by at least six inches.

  “Ha!” Ken shouted. “You missed me, you missed me, now you gotta kiss me—”

  “Hey, coach,” Braden hollered up at him, teasing. “You’re going down!” He started a wind-up on the second ball.

  That’s why Dad wanted me to put all those posters up. So he could find her.

  The second ball missed, too. It smashed against the backboard and bounced out of sight.

  “Come on, Braden!” Hubner bellowed again. “Throw that last ball like you mean it. I dare you!” The coach grinned and raised his fists high into the air. “Hey, I’m your coach. I know what you can do.”

  Braden adjusted his hat again. He hitched up his elbow, cocked his knee.

  What if Dad finds my sister and he forgets about me?

  The baseball smashed into the bull’s-eye target full bore as spectators cheered. With a clatter, the wooden platform burst open. Splash. Ken Hubner came up blubbering, with his clothes and what was left of his hair plastered to his skin. He spit water. “That’s the way to pitch it in there, Treasure. Right down the pike!”

  But Braden didn’t stay for his coach’s accolades. He was too busy thinking about Samantha Roche.

  Calvin Baxter kept glancing into his rearview mirror, which extended like an arthropod feeler from the side of his truck cab.

  “What is it with all these tourists?” he said. “You’d think somebody would let me into the lane I need.”

  “Honey,” his wife pleaded with him. “Watch the road in front of you. If we can’t get into the turn lane, you’ll go straight ahead and double back. Your pride isn’t worth risking our lives.”

  “I’ve been signaling for two miles.”

  Ahead of them, in the only lane where they could continue, three sawhorses loomed.

  Calvin smacked the steering wheel with an open palm. “Oh, great. Look’s like they’re having a parade or something. No wonder everybody and their brothers are here.”

  “Well, sweetie. It is the Fourth of July.”

  “I’ve got to get over in that other lane.”

  From the minuscule backseat where she’d ridden for five hundred miles, one little girl propped her chin on her father’s shoulder and said, “Daddy?” with the lilt in her voice she always used when she wanted to get her own way. “Aren’t we going to stop someplace in town?”

  “With all these people? You’ve got to be crazy. Our plan was to visit the wilderness, not the corner of Hollywood and Vine.”

  Before Tess Baxter could persuade further, Calvin threw on the brakes to keep from hitting sawhorses. Streams of bumper-to-bumper traffic on either side didn’t allow him to turn either way. Because he couldn’t think of any other avenue to communicate his frustration, he pounded on his horn. A police officer on horseback gestured wildly at them with his hands.

  Calvin said, “That’s it, kids. Enjoy this trip. When we get home to Oregon, we’re going to sell this Jayco. I’m never going to drive like this again.”

  “Well thank heavens for small favors, Calvin. That’s a relief to every one of us.”

  “Daddy, let us get out somewhere. Please!”

  With the officer’s rather reluctant assistance, Calvin Baxter managed to maneuver the huge camper into the left lane. He lumbered them along Cache Street for two blocks or so, following the green road signs to Yellowstone, while everyone with him begged to be let out. At last he gave up and turned into a gas station, jostling the huge rig over a dip in the driveway.

  “Fifteen minutes, that’s all. That’s it; everybody out. I can’t stand it anymore.”

  Out of the fifteen minutes allotted, Tess needed approximately three. She begged the key from her father, saying she’d forgotten her copy of Amber Brown Is Not a Crayon in her bunk.

  “Hey,” she whispered once she got inside. “Sam. Are you ready?”

  “As ready as I’ll ever be.”

  “You’d better do it quick.”

  “Okay.”

  Sam slithered out from her hiding place inside the bunk. Their faces met for the first time in five hundred miles. They gripped each other’s arms, still children, with a child’s plan, but with full-grown hope in their hearts. “I don’t want you to leave,” Tess said. “I want you to stay with us.”

  “If I stay with you, I’ll never find you know who.”

  “I want you to be careful, Sam. Really.”

  For one frightening moment, footsteps crunched on the asphalt beside the door. Tess slammed her friend out of sight behind the thin trailer door. They waited one long excruciating minute, while Sam counted the kerthumps inside her chest.

  “It’s okay.” A hushed whisper. “Nobody’s coming in here.” They gripped each other’s arms again. Tess whispered, “Be careful.” Up front, the truck door slammed. Tess could see her own father checking the road map. “Go,” Tess said. “Get out of here. If you don’t do it now, they’ll see you.”

  David Treasure sat on the back row of the reviewing stand, which was really nothing more than a set of choir risers from Jackson Hole High School lined with a dozen of the Elk’s Club folding chairs. Even if he didn’t still feel such nearness and such reproach from Abby, even if he didn’t feel more helpless now than he’d felt when Susan Roche first met with him, he would be sitting in this exact same stance, with his chin raised and his shoulders set as square and firm as a rampart. He used his own body as a fortress against the world, against what seemed like absurd mirth on this day.

  You know I wanted to save her, Lord. I made the sacrifice, and it’s come to nothing.

  Abby would never have even needed to know.

  He’d always liked July Fourth and the way folks celebrated it here, in his hometown. After the breakfast and the parade would come the music-festival orchestra concert on the middle school lawn, its appreciative, sunburned audience laden with blankets and sunhats and watermelon and picnic coolers. Then tonight, as soon as the sky above Snow King darkened to its perfect, infinite depths of navy blue, without announcement, a torchlight would come alive in the center of the ski run. Thousands on every corner in town would wait with their hopes in their throats. A ghost of a hiss, a small smoke projection into the air and, with a heavy, single sound that echoed from Rendezvous Mountain to Blacktail Butte, the first rocket would explode, red, green, gold
, or blue, a chrysanthemum burst of sparkles that tinted the mountains and the groves of aspen and the faces of everybody watching. The torch on the mountain would glow more and more often. Another boom. Another echo. Occasionally a flurry on the hill while someone put out a small spot of fire.

  And all over town, on every corner, people would applaud or laugh or sigh and wait for more.

  The annual Jackson Fire-In-The-Hole would have begun.

  But for now David was trapped in the celebration, his chest yearning and his nerves tingling with sorrow, head swimming while he baked in his best clothes.

  “Here are your ballots.” A parade official handed him a thick sheathe of papers.

  “Ballots?”

  “For voting on the floats.”

  I should be out looking. I should be out doing something to find Samantha. Not this.

  He glanced west toward the Wort Hotel, where three sheriff’s Jeeps proceeded slowly, their lights flashing, leading off the march.

  How can I be still? How can I just sit here?

  He sat and watched a parade go by, the way he’d sat and watched his life go by. Sat and watched, while God pried everything he held dear out of his fingers.

  He’d fought so hard for so long, to atone for what he’d done. He’d fought so hard for so long, to deserve everything he’d been given.

  He’d fought, and lost. He’d lost more than he’d ever known he had.

  Down the street came the groomed mule team from Grand Targhee National Forest, brown beasts of burden with velvet, off-white muzzles, tied tail to nose with panniers and twisted yellow ropes. Identical forest-service mulepacks jolted with each step. In front of the reviewing stand, the muleteer shouted Yah and snapped a quirt over the lead mule’s hindquarters. The team moved in synchronized formation, their hooves clattering on the pavement, their ears loose and listening for the next command.

  Miss Rodeo Wyoming passed on her black Arabian barrel-racing horse, wearing a rhinestone tiara and a sash with glitter edges. Old Murphy, the red truck with its massive Spud Drive-In papier-mâché potato, rumbled by. A canvas-covered wagon with spoke wooden wheels carried guests from the Heart-Six Dude Ranch while they perched proudly on bales of hay.