“Well, that’s mighty nice of you. Do you like it?”
The smile abruptly disappeared from Justin Bishop’s face. He shrugged. “I guess so. It’s work. I’m tryin’ to earn enough money to buy me a copy of Scorpion Clone Blaster Four: Armageddon Fever.”
Mattie patted him on the head. “Son, I don’t have the foggiest notion what you’re talking about.”
“It’s a game, this really cool video game, about these giant scorpion clones from Mars, and you gotta blast ’em before they can sting you and suck your guts out—”
“Boy!” Newt called from the end of the row. “You get that basket on down to Miz Wilbarger and Miz Turner, you hear?”
“Yeah, Granddad, I hear,” Justin called back. “I gotta go,” he said to Phyllis and Mattie, then trotted off carrying the other basket.
“Those video games,” Mattie said with a shudder. “I never heard of such.”
Newt wandered back toward the barn and went inside. His visitor, whomever he’d been, was gone now, Phyllis saw. The pickup had driven off, leaving a slowly settling haze of dust over the dirt road that led from the farmhouse to the highway.
Mattie said, “I need to go visit the little girls’ room. You be all right here by yourself for a little while, Phyllis?”
“Go right ahead,” Phyllis told her. “I’ll be fine.”
That meant she would have to climb up and down the ladder more often, Phyllis thought, but the exercise wouldn’t hurt her. It was a beautiful day, and she got caught up in trying to pick out the best peaches, considering each one carefully before she plucked it off the tree. Her attention strayed to the farmhouse and the barn only occasionally, just enough for her to notice that several more vehicles came and went while she was busy. Probably some of her competition coming to buy peaches from Newt Bishop, she thought. Judging by the way the last one left in such a hurry, peeling out in the gravel in front of the barn, she was eager to get to her stove and start cooking.
Justin Bishop, having delivered the bushel basket to Carolyn and Eve, ran up and down the orchard rows with the boundless energy of the young. Phyllis sometimes wished she still had that much energy, but at the same time she figured if she did, it might kill her. Mattie came back from the farmhouse and started taking the peaches that Phyllis handed down to her, placing them carefully in the wicker basket so they wouldn’t bruise. A couple of jets flew overhead, probably bound for the Joint Reserve Base on the west side of Fort Worth, some twenty miles away. Even higher in the sky, big passenger planes droned along, taking off and landing from the Dallas–Fort Worth airport. Out here in the middle of the orchard, however, it was easy to forget there even were such things as jet planes and video games and cell phones and satellite TV. Out here there was only warm sunshine and leafy trees and the sweet smell of peaches . . .
Somewhere, somebody started screaming.
Phyllis stiffened as she listened. It sounded like Justin screaming, but Phyllis couldn’t tell if he was hurt or scared. At the foot of the ladder, Mattie exclaimed, “Land’s sakes, what’s that?”
Phyllis descended quickly to the ground. “I think it’s coming from the barn.”
She started along the row of trees, breaking into a trot as the screaming continued. Mattie followed, trying to keep up, but Phyllis was younger, taller, and had longer legs. She jogged a couple of times a week, too, in an attempt to stay in decent shape.
As she neared the barn, Phyllis could tell for sure that the screams came from inside the old, cavernous structure. The doors were open, and as she ran inside, going from bright sunshine into shadow, she was blinded for a second as her eyes tried to adjust. “Justin!” she called. “Justin, what’s wrong?”
“Granddad!” the boy cried. “Granddad!”
Phyllis could see a little better now. Justin stood beside a large, heavy thirty-year-old car that was more like a tank than an automobile. Newt Bishop had been driving that big car ever since it was brand-new, at least when he went into town. Like everybody else, he had a pickup for work around the farm.
As Phyllis’s eyesight sharpened even more, she spotted an old-fashioned bumper jack lying on its side at the front of the car. Stepping in that direction, she peered around the vast hood with its upthrust ornament at the prow. Her hand went to her mouth in horror as she saw the overall-clad legs sticking out from under the car.
Newt Bishop was a large man. Almost as wide as he was tall, Phyllis thought again. And as she forced herself to bend over and look under the car, she knew what she was going to see: the same thing that had made Justin scream and now cry in sniffles and ragged sobs. The bulging eyes, wide and glassy. The trickle of blood from the corner of the mouth. The arms fallen loosely to the side when the attempt to hold up the awful weight had failed.
When that big old car had slipped off the jack and fallen, it had crushed the life itself out of Newt Bishop.
Photo by James Reasoner
Livia J. Washburn has been a professional writer for more than twenty years. She received the Private Eye Writers of America Award and the American Mystery Award for her first mystery, Wild Night, written under the name L. J. Washburn, and she was nominated for a Spur Award by the Western Writers of America for a novel written with her husband, James Reasoner. Her short story “Panhandle Freight” was nominated for a Peacemaker Award by the Western Fictioneers. She lives with her husband in a small Texas town, where she is constantly experimenting with new recipes. Her two grown daughters are both teachers in her hometown, and she is very proud of them.
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