“He mostly talked about you.”
“And?”
Norby finished the last bolt and handed the ratchet up to his father.
“That was it, pretty much. Said you’re keeping him from what’s his.”
“Same old story.” Sam went to work on his part.
“What is the story?” Norby stood up, and Sam set the tool on the half-finished platform.
“Well, you know about the land, right?”
Norby nodded.
“So there’s that. He still hasn’t paid me back what he owes. He says he has, but he’s lying or confused, same as ever. Add to that the mineral rights, which nobody ever thought of until this damn horizontal drilling started happening, and now he’s got dollar signs in his eyes.”
Norby set his arms on a crossbar, then his chin on his hands. “How much money are we talking about?”
Sam stretched his arms wide.
“Maybe that’s the thing to do, then.”
Sam looked stung by that, and Norby noticed and scrambled to make it right. “Sorry. I don’t mean to be contradictory. I’m just wondering, you know, from a pragmatic standpoint.”
“That would put the wells almost in town,” Sam said. “After that, it’s all over but the crying. I thank God every day we have those mineral rights so we don’t have to exploit them. Other people aren’t so lucky, you know?”
Norby nodded.
“We’re a haying family. That’s what we’ve been, and that’s what we’ll stay.”
“OK.”
Norby knew he’d wandered into a conversational thicket. He just wanted a way out, and his father, perhaps thinking the same thing, provided it.
“Here, son, help me with this front piece.”
Norby slid the painted plywood section, complete with the Jamboree logo, into place, and Sam bolted it down to the frame. He knew what his father wanted from him. He’d always hoped that Norby would come home and pick up the mantle from him, same as he’d picked it up from Uncle Rick and Big Herschel before him. And Norby had resisted, first out of youthful contrariness and later because he sensed a bigger threat to his freedom to chart his own life as he saw fit. Now, though, he wondered. Maybe pitching in was nothing more than that. He was happy to help.
“Thanks for that,” Sam said. “I’d have been wrestling with that for another half hour if I’d done it alone.” They shook hands at the satisfaction of a job done well.
By eleven, downtown looked like a different place. Norby and his dad had strung up the bunting on both sides of Main Street, had plugged in and tested the sound system, and had made sure the improvised business loop around town was operating properly, keeping the big trucks moving along without sending them crashing into the works.
With the parade lineup still an hour away, Sam said, “I’m going to do something I never do on Jamboree Saturday. I’m going to take a half hour and buy you lunch.”
They settled on Pete’s. Norby found himself amazed at how much he’d been craving finger steaks from home. He got a couple of “Good to see ya, Samuel” greetings, including one from Becky Reedle at the front counter. Sam had started to say, “It’s Norby now,” but Norby reached out and touched his arm and shook his head.
They found a booth in a quiet corner and sank in with a couple of cherry Cokes.
“So it’s not Norby anymore?”
Norby fingered his straw. “I don’t really know how to explain that.”
“I’m not asking you to.” Sam took a draw on his drink, still yielding the floor despite the attempt at alleviating pressure.
Norby looked at the top of his hands, resting on the table. He could see the freckle pattern coming in, a little more pronounced each year as his skin soaked in more sun. He’d probably never have the thick, work-calloused fingers his father had, but he was every bit Sam Kelvig’s match for Scandinavian skin. He could see a fortune lost to sunblock in the years ahead.
He now looked at his father.
“It’s taken me a long time to be—I don’t know if ‘comfortable’ is the right word, because I still struggle with that, so maybe the word is ‘accepting,’ ” he said. “It’s taken me a long time to be accepting of who I am.”
His father leaned forward in the booth. “But you are, is that what you’re saying?”
“Yes. There’s still work to do, but yes.”
“Work?”
“Explaining myself. Talking to you. Making you understand. Being OK with all that.”
Becky showed up with their order, and Sam gave her a grim smile. She took the hint and left.
“I might not. I’m just being honest. What if I never do?” Sam said.
“I—”
“I want to. I want to try, anyway. I’m just a simple guy, though.”
Norby scoffed. He didn’t come all this way for an aw-shucks-I’m-just-a-country-boy shamble. “Dad, you’re not that simple.”
“But—” His father stopped, lifting his eyes in anticipation. Norby swung himself a quarter turn in the booth and followed Sam’s line of sight. There stood Burt Partain, waving spastically.
“Sam, I need to talk to you,” Partain said.
“Well, come on then.”
Norby turned himself back around, deflated, as the beet farmer approached on heavy feet.
“Hey, Samuel, good to see you.” Partain dropped a hand on his shoulder, and Norby squirmed out from under it. “Listen, Sam, the egg roll truck is venting into Lois Staley’s yard and she’s raising all kinds of hell. She says she was promised it wouldn’t. I checked, and Thuy is where she’s supposed to be. Lois says she wants to see you.”
“Now?”
Partain looked at his watch. “Quarter after. Problem’s only going to get worse once the parade starts. I can’t shut her up. She said you promised her.”
Sam shot a look to his son. Norby dismissed him with a wave.
“We’ll finish this later,” Sam said.
Norby nodded. “OK.”
As Sam and Partain hustled out, Becky came by with the check.
“You want a box for that?” she asked, waving a finger between Sam’s mostly uneaten burger and Norby’s untouched finger steaks.
“No.”
“Something wrong with the food?”
He smiled at that. So many possible directions to go. “I don’t think we had a chance to find out, Becky.” He remembered her, sort of. She’d been a sophomore when he was a senior, and a social climber she was. He remembered how much Megan and some of the other senior girls had hated her, as Becky mowed through the guys who should have been theirs alone. He drew a hazy memory of Megan laying out the consequences if he should dabble in those well-known waters, as if that were something he was contemplating (he wasn’t, clearly) and as if such preemptive threats were a healthy way to go about a relationship (not that he and Megan would have known much about that).
Now, he caught Becky looking at his bare ring finger.
“You still single?” she asked.
Yes, but you’re not, he thought. He wasn’t entirely sure of that, actually, but he knew enough. His mother had kept him apprised of the happenings around town, particularly the juicier ones. It didn’t come much more luridly interesting than four kids and three marriages by age twenty-six.
“I am,” he said.
“You going to the party tonight?”
“Probably.”
“Well,” she said, “if you see me, buy a girl a drink, OK?”
DOREEN
She stood over the crumpled form of her boy, her eyes narrowed and focused as they took in the length of him. Doreen Smothers held the neckline of her T-shirt over her nose and mouth to fend off the sour-sweet stench of the urine that stained Omar’s pants and the wafting scent from the congealed river of vomit that ran away from his outstretched right arm and pooled around t
he base of the toilet.
“Wake up. You disgust me.”
Omar rolled to his right, the momentum getting the better of him, and Doreen reached for him, shouting, “No, no, no.”
He now lay flat on his back in his own vomit. His mother, looking him in the eye, spoke muffled words through her shirt.
“You’re going to clean all of this up,” she said. “Right now. I’m so disappointed in you.”
Omar pushed himself off the linoleum, tottering to his feet as clumps of his sick clung to his skin. Doreen, repulsed, made sure she kept eyes on him until he looked away, and then she turned and left.
She’d scolded herself earlier that morning when everything came to light, when she realized that had she obeyed her instincts and waited up for Omar to come home, she could have headed off at least some of this. But he was an adult now, or nearly so, and Doreen had started making peace with giving him some space. A Jamboree Friday night without a hint of supervision had seemed safe enough, and here was where that had gotten them.
Sam’s call—to tell her the store was her duty the next couple of days, as if she didn’t know that already—had set her to thinking. “I guess some kids snared a case of beer from the Sloane,” he’d said in that tossed-off way, like he was relaying the going rate for beet tonnage. “Happens every year, I suppose.”
“I suppose,” she’d agreed, and once the phone was back on the hook, she listened to her gut and went looking for Omar. A bed check yielded nothing, so she’d checked the bathroom. Bingo, as it were.
Now, she strode back down the hall to the closed door of the bathroom, and she pounded it with an open hand.
“I better not find even a speck in there when you’re done,” she said.
“Yeah, OK.”
She hit the door again. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Doreen returned the way she’d come, to the kitchen table to wait for her boy to show his face, to contemplate again just how nullified she felt by this whole mess. In the space of just a few seconds, she’d considered, and discarded, a handful of options. She could call Eldrick Sloane and offer her apologies and Omar’s sweat equity to make things good, but Eldrick would eventually talk, and Omar would get a label he’d never shake, and for that matter, so would she, the single mother who couldn’t contain her child. Same deal with calling the coach. He’d run it out of Omar, but anything that brushed up against her son’s basketball future wasn’t to be trifled with. At last, she alighted on the same answer that was always there: she could take it to Sam. Eventually, that is, but not today, not with everything else on his plate. She sat in her chair and she agitated, and then she gave herself over to the reality of the situation: for the next couple of days, she’d have to carry this alone. She wrapped her hands around her coffee cup and drew it to her lips.
Down the hall, the sound of the shower kicked in.
OMAR
The job done, Omar slipped into the shower and set about shedding the awfulness from his skin. He’d never seen so much puke and piss in all his life, and the idea that he’d come home and upchucked and peed on the floor, in some order or maybe simultaneously, and then lain down in it—confirmed by the contours of his leavings—left him nothing less than astounded at his own stupidity. Why had this held such a mystery for him, his first drunk? It had been about as far removed from exotic as something could be. He drank a beer, hated it, got laughed at by Gabe and the two sophomore girls they’d hooked up with, then drank six more. After that, oblivion. He wasn’t sure how he’d made it home.
He dropped his head back under the water flow and let it spray down his neck and back. He hoped the girls wouldn’t be there tonight. They were fine, as far as girls went. The shorter one, the one more obviously interested in him, had even let him feel up her shirt, and that had been nice enough, but he hadn’t had much time to talk to Gabe. He needed to build some insulation around his coming lie, and he’d decided that regardless of Clarissa’s pleas that he keep things to himself, he needed to tell somebody. Gabe could keep a secret, he was pretty sure.
“Are you almost done?” His mother’s sharp words cut through the door and found him again. Jesus, but she was pissed off about this. This was her third pass, and each time he assured her, yes, he was just getting clean and he’d be out soon.
As far as tonight goes, Omar thought to himself, she may have some things to say. She usually did, and while he tried hard not to disappoint her, he knew the collisions were coming faster. If she had prohibition in mind, he supposed he’d have to give lip service to that. But eventually, she’d be asleep and he’d be out the door, and there wasn’t anything his mother could do about that.
A dozen minutes later, he sat at the kitchen table across from her, steadying himself for the brewing storm.
“What did you drink?” she asked him.
“Beer.”
“Where did you get it?”
“Some kids had it.”
“Word on the street is that it was stolen from the Sloane Hotel.”
Omar knew he should just leave it be, just issue a denial and accept whatever punishment was coming, but he couldn’t. “You already know the word on the street?”
“Don’t get tart with me, young man. The rest of the world has been up much longer than you, I assure you.”
“I don’t know anything about stolen beer.”
She had a bit further to ride on this burst of agitation. “But you just couldn’t wait to drink some, could you?”
“I didn’t like it.”
“Which one? The first can or the twelfth?”
Omar rubbed his eyes. “Don’t be dramatic.”
Next came the hard slap of her hand against the wood, jolting him out of his disaffection. He wrenched up his face. “Don’t you ever, ever presume to lecture me,” she said. “I know you’re a big man and you don’t think you can be bothered with the likes of me anymore, but you will respect me every remaining moment you live in this house. Do you understand?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
At once, the hard lines of her face softened, her voice right along with them. “It’s so unlike you. And you have so much in front of you. I just don’t want to see you make a mistake.”
“I know. I’ll make better choices.” He’d been leaning hard on that phrase of late. It seemed to please her.
Now tears spilled. He tried to smile at her without watching this. It made him uncomfortable, and he couldn’t help but think that on some level she was manipulating him. She could always move him where she wanted with her emotions. We always end up here. Her crying. Every time.
“That’s all I want,” she said. And then she stood and moved toward him, toward the hug that she needed and he needed to endure, and with it the less-than-subtle nod to his paternal heritage that she always found a way to bring up, forcing him into deeper conflict about what it meant and whether he was prepared to accept the underlying logic.
“There are people in this town who are waiting for you to fail,” she said. “Not because of who you are, but because of what you are. You can’t give them that satisfaction, son. You just can’t.”
THE CHIEF
Adair had come to consider cell phones the root cause of many of her troubles. If she wasn’t chasing down some entitled girl—they were almost always entitled, and almost always girls, she contended—who’d run a stop sign while texting, she was confiscating the phone of some oversexed teenage boy who was harvesting titty shots of the sophomore class. (Here, similarly, it was almost always boys and almost always titties.) But this morning, her particular trouble lay in an inability to scare up a phone number she needed, in all likelihood because the person she sought had joined everybody else and ditched the landline for a cell phone. Easier living, harder investigating, Adair thought.
She had a buddy from the academy, Jerry Dickson, who was work
ing in Grand Forks County now, and maybe he could zero in on her target, but Adair hated like hell to call in help from the law on a Hail Mary like this one. Dickson would respect her enough not to push, but he’d want some answers before he did too much digging for her. And answers, Adair had decided, were in short supply.
Adair, sitting on her bed, crossed her bare legs and bore down on the computer. A simple Google search had unearthed the name she was seeking: Martha Swarthbeck. She could see from the background-search website that the age was about right. She clicked on the link for Martha’s name, and right there, it said “Possible relatives: John Henry Swarthbeck.” She half considered ponying up what it would take for the full package—a mishmash of public records—but she hesitated. The whole point of this was to leave as little a trail as possible while she was working out what could be nothing more than paranoia. Every time she even considered what she might say—“Hey, I don’t trust your ex-husband”—she felt a flush of foolishness over the endeavor.
She flipped over to the Facebook tab. She’d gotten a couple of likes for her status update that morning: No rest for the weary at Jamboree. Jim Fuquay was among them. That swelled her up a bit. Good old Jim. Her post on the Grandview Police Department page—Have a safe Day 2, everybody!—lay unmolested after fifty-three minutes.
In the search field, she typed “Martha Swarthbeck” and here it came, Martha Standish Swarthbeck, a profile with one mutual friend. She clicked on it, and the friend in common was Tut Everly. Bingo.
She punched out a message, taking extended pauses between words as she considered how best to shape the message.
Hi . . . You don’t know me, I don’t think, but I’m Adair Underwood, the police chief in Grandview. I was wondering if I could give you a quick call.
Adair waited. Facebook quickly showed her message as seen, but she saw no immediate evidence that a reply was forthcoming. As the seconds morphed into minutes, Adair again felt the surges of silliness welling up inside. It had been remarkable that she’d remembered the name at all, a snippet of recall involving Joe LaMer and some beers they’d shared during her first week on the job. Curious about the town and its power structure, she’d made innocent inquiries about her boss, and LaMer had told her about Martha and her mysterious escape to being perhaps the oldest coed at the University of North Dakota.
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