Kansas Troubles

by Earlene Fowler

  “They’re going to love you,” Gabe said, dropping a kiss on top of my head and picking up his suitcase.

  “I hope you’re right,” I muttered as he walked out. I picked up the photo album we’d looked through the night before. The last formal portrait of his mother, Kathryn Smith Ortiz, was taken two years ago when she retired from forty-one years of schoolteaching. She was tall and broad-shouldered like Gabe and wore a prim, pleated-front grayish dress with pearl buttons and a gauzy lace collar. Under a cloud of lavender-tinged white curls, the somber eyes she’d passed down to her son reprimanded the photographer, probably for his bad posture. Being talkative as a kid and, to quote Dove, born with a mouth as sassy as a squirrel’s, I sent up a quick thanks that she hadn’t been my fifth-grade teacher.

  His twin sisters, fraternal not identical, were six years younger than his forty-three years, and two years older than my thirty-five. Rebecca Ortiz Kolanowski and Angela Ortiz. Becky and Angel. In their latest Christmas card photo, Becky with her husband and children appeared the quintessential Middle American family. Her golden-brown hair, ivory skin, and almost-indigo eyes revealed more of her mother’s Pennsylvania-Dutch background than her father’s Hispanic one. She was pretty in a fresh, milk-commercial kind of way. Her two tow-headed daughters appeared to be about eight and twelve. Her husband, Stan Kolanowski, sported a crew cut so blond it appeared almost transparent, and looked like the safe, dependable insurance broker he was.

  Angel was the image of her nickname, though Gabe said she’d done everything she could to live it down. One telling snapshot placed her next to a sparkling river, a girlish fist playfully threatening the photographer. Sunshine backlit her blond-streaked brown hair and dark almond-shaped eyes challenged the camera with a reckless, earthy expression that had probably caused more than one barroom brawl.

  Gabe appeared in the doorway. “All packed?”

  I zipped up my bag. “Yep. You know, it’s weird having a new family. Worrying like a teenager over what I’m wearing, what stupid things I’ll probably say, whether they’ll like me or not.” It hadn’t occurred to me until after our whirlwind marriage that this man came with family already attached. I hadn’t even met Sam, his eighteen-year-old son yet. Shortly after we were married in late February, Sam dropped out of UC Santa Barbara, withdrew all his savings, and took off with a friend for Hawaii, searching for the perfect wave. Gabe just about burst a blood vessel after getting Sam’s postcard from Kaunakakai. That uneasy meeting still lurked on the horizon.

  “If I can do it, you can do it,” he said, with what I felt was not a great deal of sympathy.

  “Thanks loads.” I didn’t voice the apprehension I felt about Dove meeting my new, apparently steel-spined mother-in-law. I would have preferred to face the Kansas clan on my own, but Dove insisted that unlike some people, she was going to meet Gabe’s family even if she had to hitchhike. That was a direct barb at my dad, who had not traveled further than seventy-five miles from the ranch since I was a teenager. Dove had been nagging him to take a vacation for years, and she’d finally seen her opportunity. And she wasn’t kidding about hitchhiking. As she so picturesquely put it, she’d trust a snaggletoothed redneck in a flatbed Ford before she’d bet her life on a dope-sniffing yuppie flying one of those steel coffins. Leaving the ranch in the care of his trusted foreman, Daddy and Dove and Arnie were driving to Kansas in Daddy’s new Ford pickup, stopping along the way to assuage Dove’s wanderlust by visiting some of America’s finer tourist attractions. They would meet us in Derby in two weeks for the Saturday afternoon wedding reception Becky and Angel had planned.

  An hour later Gabe and I were standing at the ticket counter of the tiny San Celina airport, checking our bags for the American Eagle connection to Los Angeles International Airport.

  “Have a good flight, Ms. Harper, Mr. Ortiz,” the clerk said cheerfully.

  Gabe growled deep in his throat and picked up my leather backpack.

  “Are you going to do that every time someone says my name?” I asked, walking toward our assigned gate.

  “Do what?”

  “Make that noise in your throat. Sounds a lot like a big old bull choking on a hunk of cud.”

  He made the noise again and kept walking. He had taken my decision to keep the Harper name, and not become an official Ortiz, as an insult on three levels—as a man, as a traditional Latino man, and as a conservative Midwestern man. I sort of guessed it was one of those man things. But I was determined to keep my identity. Changing your name at nineteen when your vision is blinded by stars and an overload of hormones is one thing. Though at thirty-five I still had the hormone overload, I didn’t want a new name, not even a hyphenated one. I loved Gabe and didn’t want to put any more obstacles on the rocky road of our marriage, but something in me wouldn’t give in on this no matter how much grumbling and pouting he did.

  By the time we reached LAX, I’d teased him out of his irritable mood. “Tell me about your friends again,” I said when our flight to Kansas was over the Mojave Desert. I unwrapped the snack sandwich that came with a container of yogurt, a cellophane-wrapped brownie, and an apple.

  Pressing his head against the narrow plane seat, Gabe’s face relaxed with memory. “We were inseparable from kindergarten to the summer I turned sixteen and went to California. We had some wild times, those guys and me.”

  “Just how wild?” I took a tentative bite of my dry sandwich, then abandoned it for the brownie.

  “As wild as four teenage guys can get with an old’56 Chevy and three dollars worth of gas. We spent most of our time kicking up gravel outside of town, racing whoever could get their dad’s new car.”

  Shoving my brownie aside, I dug through the side pocket of my backpack and pulled out the last picture Gabe and his three friends had taken together, seven years ago, right after Gabe was divorced. They were leaning against an old barn somewhere. Gabe, wearing a Dodger baseball cap and a white T-shirt, didn’t look a lot different from the way he did now. He smiled at the camera, but his eyes seemed sad.

  “I’ll never keep them all straight,” I said.

  He pointed to a skinny, bearded man with a protruding Adam’s apple and large plastic eyeglasses. “Lawrence Markley. He’s part owner of a country-western nightclub called Prairie City Nights in Wichita. Does pretty well from what I hear. His wife’s name is Janet. I think she works in some kind of craft store in Derby.”

  “Any kids?”

  “A daughter. Grown up by now. Hard to believe.”

  I pointed to the extraordinarily handsome man with dark blond hair punching Lawrence’s shoulder.

  “Rob Harlow. He works in Derby at one of his dad’s feed stores. Jake Harlow owns a chain of them all over Kansas. Harlow’s Feed and Grain. When we were in high school, his dad would leave Rob in charge of the store while he went down the street to the cafe, and Rob would talk one of us into taking care of the customers while he made out with girls behind the hay bales. They just couldn’t leave him alone.”

  “I can see why.” Rob’s grin was polished, his wavy hair stylishly cut—clipped short on the sides, longer in front. His face had lean, clean-cut features, a perfect cleft chin, eyes the unbelievable green of a 7-Up bottle. He was tanned a flawless Marlboro cowboy shade of brown.

  “Remind me not to leave you alone with him around any hay bales.”

  The flight attendant stopped next to my seat and picked up the remains of our meals. I clicked the tray back in place, leaned over, and kissed Gabe, nipping his bottom lip gently. “You don’t have to worry about me, Friday. I tend to go more for the dark and brooding, pistol-packing ethnic types. So, I forgot—does gorgeous Rob have a wife and kids?”

  “No kids. No wife either. At least, not anymore. He just divorced his third one. According to Becky, his latest love is a country-western singer. Or an aspiring one anyway. Sounds pretty odd. Grew up Amish.”

  “You mean she left the Amish to become a singer? That is odd. I wonder if he seduced her from
the fold.”

  “If anyone could do it, Rob could.”

  I looked back down at the picture. “And last but not least, Dewey Champagne.” He wore a white straw cowboy hat pulled low over his oval face, obscuring his eyes. Unsmiling, he leaned back against the gnarled barn wall. He was a good six inches shorter than Gabe’s six feet. “You were in Vietnam together, right? And he’s a cop, too.”

  “Right. He worked for the Wichita Police Department for eight years, then came back home to become, as he likes to say, Derby’s chief of detectives. Actually he’s Derby’s only detective. He says the hardest part of his job is supervising himself.”

  “Married?”

  “Got divorced last year. And apparently he has a thing for singers, too. His latest love is named Cordie June Rodell, and she sings with Rob’s girlfriend. She’s also a good twenty years his junior.”

  “Kids?”

  “Had two. A boy and a girl. The boy should be about twenty-one now. He’s a bull rider.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Chet Champagne.”

  I shrugged. “Doesn’t sound familiar, but I haven’t really been keeping up lately. What about Dewey’s daughter?”

  “There’s a real tragedy. Her name was DeeDee. She was only sixteen when she was thrown off a horse and killed, about a year and a half ago. Dewey and Belinda broke up shortly after that.”

  “How awful for them.”

  “Dewey hasn’t had it easy this last year or so. I hope this new lady friend of his doesn’t take him for a ride.” Gabe opened the book in his lap and frowned at the highlighted pages.

  “Such relaxing summer reading,” I teased.

  “I’m never going to get this done.” He was reading the diary of Søren Kierkegaard, determined to finish the masters thesis in philosophy he’d originally come to quiet, uneventful San Celina to complete. I, and an unexpected rash of murders in San Celina, had kept him from it.

  “I’ll leave you alone, then,” I said and looked out the window. The air was clear for what seemed a hundred miles, and the fields we flew over looked like the clichéd image of a patchwork quilt. To be more accurate, they looked like an orderly Corn and Beans pattern or a strip quilt in shades of rich goldenrod and mustard yellow with an occasional sage-green square thrown in just to keep it interesting. Furrows like quilt stitching decorated the plowed fields in crooked abstract patterns that Gabe said helped keep the soil from being blown away by the strong summer winds. Silvery grain silos gleamed like new dimes in the bright sunlight.

  Much sooner than I preferred, the seat belt sign flashed. The pilot welcomed us to the Wichita Mid-Continent Airport and went through his landing spiel, including a weather report I would hear repeated often during the next two weeks—“Mostly sunny with thunderstorms expected later tonight.” He ended his speech with a hardy hello and a joke about tornados and milk cows, the punchline of which was lost in static.

  From my perspective, Wichita didn’t look at all like the Emerald City but just another skyscraper landscape against a sky that actually did appear bigger and bluer than California’s. Bright green fields as round as archery targets dotted the ground.

  “Why are some fields round?” I asked.

  “A more efficient way of irrigating,” Gabe explained. “It’s done automatically, by a pivot arc. On the ground you can’t really tell the fields are round.”

  The pattern of circles within squares would make a spectacular quilt. “Above Kansas” would be a good name. I mentally pieced it together, attempting to keep my mind off my least favorite part of flying—landing.

  The plane hit the runway with a sharp bounce. “Half an hour until inspection,” I said.

  Gabe took my hand and kissed the soft skin on the underside of my wrist. “They’re going to adore you. Look at the effect you had on me.”

  “Initially?” I said doubtfully. We met when I’d been involved in a murder at the folk art museum, and our relationship at first had been less than friendly to say the least.

  He chuckled. “Well, they’ll learn to love you.”

  We claimed our rented give-me-a-ticket red Camaro and started down the freeway toward Wichita. We passed the huge home store and warehouse of Shepler’s Western Wear, a mail-order house I’d ordered from at least a few hundred times in the last twenty-five years. Eventually we pulled on to a two-lane highway heading south. Train tracks paralleled the road, shaded occasionally by huge, dusky-green cottonwood trees. There was no question we were in wheat country when we sped past old concrete grain silos, billboards advertising Farm Bureau Insurance, and a couple of yellow and black highway signs warning “Mowers ahead.”

  “There are trees,” I said with surprise.

  Gabe laughed. “Of course there are. Mostly cotton-woods, but some pines and box elders, and I don’t know what else. What did you expect?”

  “Things to be flatter, I guess. You know, wheat fields like oceans as far as the eye can see. Amber waves of grain. Corn as high as an elephant’s eye.”

  “You’re more likely to find the corn in Iowa and Nebraska, though we have our share. The flat Kansas you’re thinking of does exist over in the western part of the state, but we do have our oceans of wheat around Wichita.” He tapered his eyes, scanning the passing landscape with a farmer’s measuring gaze. “Things are usually drier this time of year. They had good rains last year, so everything’s stayed green.”

  “Except for no hills, it doesn’t look a lot different from home.”

  He reached over and squeezed my knee affectionately. “We Kansans have stumbled into the twentieth century, Benni, no matter what the media would have you believe. Why, I’ve heard a vicious rumor that they’ve even got cable television in Wichita these days.”

  “Not to mention flush toilets,” I said.

  “No wisecracks. You know we got those in the sixties.” He fiddled with the rearview mirror, then let out a delighted laugh when a police siren screamed behind us.

  “I told you it was only a matter of time,” I said, glancing at the speedometer.

  As usual, Gabe had been driving twenty miles over the speed limit. He always bragged about never getting a speeding ticket. Because he’d carried a police officer’s badge since he was twenty-two, and knowing the brotherhood among cops, I didn’t find that particularly remarkable and told him so. Often.

  We pulled to the side of the highway, and a young officer with tanned Popeye forearms and mirrored aviator sunglasses walked up to Gabe’s open window. “It’s a joke,” Gabe said in a low voice. “Dewey’s behind it.”

  “Driver’s license and registration, please.” The young man’s voice was deep and polite.

  Gabe handed him the information and waited, an amused half-smile on his face. The officer took the papers and walked back to his white and blue patrol car. After a few minutes, he came back and returned them to Gabe. He tore a ticket from his pad and passed it through the open window. “I clocked you at twenty-one miles over the speed limit, sir. This is a real pretty little Camaro, and I know these sporty cars can sometimes get away from you, but try and take it a little slower. We’d like you to enjoy your stay in Kansas without hurting yourself or someone else. Have a nice day.” He flipped his ticket book shut and strode back to his car.

  “This is a real citation,” Gabe sputtered. “That low-down son of a gun.” I leaned over, looked at it, and laughed.

  “It is,” I said gleefully. “I can’t believe it. Your first hour in Kansas, and you already have a criminal record.”

  “It has to be a joke,” Gabe said. He looked in the rearview mirror and grinned. “He’s coming back. Okay, Dewey, you really had me going there.”

  “Excuse me, Chief Ortiz,” the young officer said. “I have a message from Detective Champagne.”

  “Yes?” Gabe prompted, holding out the ticket.

  “He said to tell you that no one keeps their ch—” He glanced over at me and blushed. “Pardon me, ma’am. Uh . . . no one stays a virgin
forever.”

  I giggled. Gabe growled at the officer’s retreating back, then pointed a finger at me. “One more sound out of you, and you walk the rest of the way.”

  I held up my hands in protest. “Hey, this is between you and your buddy. I’m just an innocent passenger.”

  “He’s going to pay for this,” Gabe grumbled. I judiciously turned my head and smiled out the window.

  In the next few minutes, we entered Derby. Gabe pointed to a busy Taco Bell on our left. “That’s where my dad’s garage was. Back then, it was the edge of town. There was nothing but wheat fields and a few houses until Wichita.” He sighed deeply and nodded at the McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Hardee’s, Blockbuster Video, and Braum’s Ice Cream that had mushroomed insidiously near the city limits sign. “I hate seeing this. It’s not the town I grew up in. It could be anyplace now.”

  Once past fast food row, the original Derby, with the muddy Arkansas River bordering the town to the west, had wide, clean streets that showcased many small independent businesses that had withstood the assault of the encroaching corporate food and retail giants. Gabe’s face softened when we drove past the old Derby Cinema tucked into a strip mall called El Paso Village.

  He let out a small grunt of annoyance as we passed the red brick building that housed the Derby Emergency Medical Service and the police department. Atop the square, neat building, an American flag and a blue and gold Kansas state flag whiffled in the brisk breeze.